A worse horror, at least in an infantryman’s world, followed the HK. These were small vehicles with treads, about the size of an old-fashioned Harley Davidson motorcycle. The US had started the revolution with SWORDS machines. These things—panzer-grenadiers—boasted a tri-barrel 12.7mm heavy machine gun. Paul had seen one several days ago destroy a platoon of US grunts. It had been like watching a meat grinder at work.
As Paul stared out of the low dark cave, he spied the latest GD drone chopper. It hung there in the darkness, illuminated by artillery flashes, looking like a giant wasp with its grotesque shape. In that moment, time seemed to stand still for Paul. It was surreal, eerie and it brought back an old, old memory.
Yeah, he had been in his basement as an eight-year-old, he believed. His dad had been sitting on the sofa with him. They’d watched a cheesy 1980s movie named Terminator. Paul had loved it. He remembered the robotic hunter-killers firing at humans in an old beat-up car. The poor humans had used a .50 caliber against the thing. With a laser, the machine had nailed the humans, exploding the car. Above the battle, there had appeared a flying hunter-killer, stabbing the night with its beam.
The movie had played haunting music. Paul had never forgotten the movie or its grim future. Now, as a grown man of forty-two, thirty-four years later, he was playing out that future in Toronto.
The GD had built hunter-killers, and they were destroying…well, not humanity, just the United States of America.
Paul watched the robots clank past. From time to time, the tri-barrels rotated on the panzer-grenadiers and the tank’s cannon roared.
With his right shoulder, Romo nudged Paul.
Paul swiveled his head. Americans back there fired several Javelins and hammered the robots with machine gun bullets. To Paul’s delight, a Javelin missile struck and exploded one of the Sigrid panzer-grenadiers. In response, the other Sigrids blasted the humans, annihilating them in swift seconds of carnage.
“It’s bad,” Paul said. “But look at that. They nailed one. The GD isn’t invincible.”
Romo seemed to collapse as his chest hit the ground. Troubled, Paul lowered himself beside his friend.
“How long should we wait here?” Romo asked in a quieter voice than normal.
Oh, he’s being cautious. That’s all. “We should go now,” Paul said. “This isn’t going to get any easier later, and if those drones stay on their route, they’ll swing by to check out this area.”
“We’re supposed to be the great secret weapon, huh?” Romo asked.
“I don’t know about that,” Paul said. “But we got to make it harder on them than it’s been so far.”
“Si,” Romo said. “I can agree with that. Did you see what those things did?”
Paul didn’t bother answering. Instead, he slid out of the cave. The robots turned, taking a different route. Paul shook his head in dismay. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in something so one-sided before. Well, maybe Hawaii had been this bad, and they had lost the islands. Clearly, the GD had weathered the feeble American attack and now counterattacked. No doubt the remote controllers had orders to finish the American soldiers tonight.
As Paul crept through the darkness, listening and watching for enemy robots, booby-traps or sensors, a grinding fury built in him.
This wasn’t war: it was butchery. Paul couldn’t remember the author, but he’d never forgotten a sci-fi short story he’d read once. Generals had fought the battle of Armageddon with robotic troops. The flesh and blood soldiers had saved themselves the horror of battling invincible angels. The robots did that. After the battle, heaven opened and a ray of light shined down on the robotic corpses. One by one, the robot troops came back on line. The human generals watched in the distance as the robot troops rose up and ascended into heaven due to their courage, leaving the humans below.
What glory did the GD remote controllers gain from this? Maybe he wouldn’t ask the question if he were the remote controller. Fighting without having to worry about dying seemed like the way to go.
“What glory am I earning crawling like a rat in the rubble?” Paul muttered to himself.
“Did you say something?” Romo asked from behind.
“Do you see anything?”
“Si,” Romo said. “Look to your three o’clock.”
Paul squinted in the darkness. “I don’t see a thing.”
“Do you have your night vision equipment on?” Romo asked.
“No. Do you?”
“Of course,” Romo said.
Paul didn’t bother glancing back to check. It must be safe if they were still alive. He slid his NV goggles into place and switched them on. The night became more visible, and he saw that Romo was right. Ahead, those stanchions—they must be GD sensors.
It took a solid thirty minutes to figure out how and then get around the stanchions. The flashes on the horizon had lessened by then. The American flashes had stopped some time ago. Their artillery must all be dead by now.
“I wonder how many of us are still alive,” Romo said.
Paul didn’t answer. In the darkness, he leaned against rubble, listening. To his right, a cool breeze blew off Lake Ontario. He glanced there. Movement on the water showed GD hovercraft, five machines moving single file west. Paul would have loved to shed his body armor, find a boat and attempt to row across to New York State. He wanted out of Canada. He wanted to go home.
Thinking about home, about Cheri, Paul opened a pocket and drew out a protein bar. He ate the gooey substance, and his body seemed to absorb the nutrients. The wrapper he stuffed back into the pocket.
“Ready?” Paul asked.
“Si,” Romo said.
The two lonely LRSU men crawled through the city streets. At times, they trudged and then went back to slithering through the dead remains of Toronto. They never spotted civilians. The GD robots weren’t too good at making distinctions. Paul saw hordes of the noncombatant dead bloating where they lay. He saw what had been a young girl, still clutching onto her stuffed unicorn, with speckles of crusted blood on the thing. Other sights were gruesome, and it debilitated him for a time.
“This is too much,” Paul finally said.
“The winners write the history, my friend,” Romo said. “This never happened unless the Germans lose. We have to make sure they lose.”
Paul gripped his assault rifle tighter. AI-run Kaiser HKs, flying UAV patrollers—he spat on the ground. He didn’t want to work himself into a rage. That took adrenaline, and that took badly needed energy from his body. Instead, a cold ruthlessness built in him. He tended toward that anyway, but this heightened the feeling. Along with the ruthlessness came the coiling of a steely spring in him that could release at a moment’s notice. Then the passion would kick in, and no one fought better than he did once he kicked it into overdrive.
Hours passed as the two men inched into GD territory. They made it through the forward zone and even into the secondary one where armored soldiers patrolled. For ten minutes, German Shepherds sniffed the ground, but the big dogs went elsewhere. Finally, the two commandos exited the secondary zone and reached the outer edge of Toronto, the northern end. For the first time they heard regular enemy speech, sprechen Sie Deutsch?
Paul checked his watch. Dawn was ninety minutes away. They had been crawling for a solid seven hours. Tiredness pulled at his bones, tugged at his eyelids. He ached all over. His right knee throbbed and his right ankle gave a twinge now and again.
“Hey,” Romo whispered. “Look to your right, at two o’clock.”
Paul eased his head around until he spied it. A soldier, a GD officer by his shoulder tabs, urinated against the side of a building. He could hear the stream of piss hitting bricks. After zipping up, the man hurried to a building. A guard appeared, aiming a rifle at the officer. The officer spoke sharply. The guard opened the door and the officer darted within.
“What do you think?” Romo asked.
Paul scanned the building. It was two stories tall. Then he spotted the a
ntenna array up top. It was the GD design. They’d found a remote-controlling station. By the numbers posted over the door, this was the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Battalion.
A hard smile etched onto Paul’s face. He thought about the Marine general with the eye patch: Len Zelazny. The man could have been a stand-in for the Raiders football logo. General Zelazny had dreamed of this: Recon Marines reaching the momma’s boys and a drone station.
Paul didn’t feel quite the same about that. These were soldiers. They would know how to fight. Thinking they would be cowards was foolish. One didn’t win firefights by underestimating the enemy. Still…the soldiers in there might not be ready to face angry men with guns and knives.
Weariness tried to take over. Paul doubted many of the other elite American teams had reached this far in their sectors. He hoped so, but he had to be realistic.
Muttering some choice profanities, Paul decided to forget about weariness. This was go time.
The two men checked their weapons and readied grenades. Paul dug in a pocket and took out a tiny packet. With his teeth, he ripped it open and dumped two aspirins onto his tongue. He chewed them, the bitter, dusty tablets. He took several sips from his canteen.
“The guard?” Romo said.
“Do you want him?”
“Si. It’s all I can think about.”
“He’s all yours,” Paul said.
The two LRSU men began crawling, and they worked it so they came around from behind. They slid past four sets of jeep tires, and Paul noticed the orange glow of a cigarette ahead. The guard cupped it with his hands, but he stood in the wrong place to hide that from them.
Paul glanced at Romo. The Mexican Apache pulled out a wicked-looking knife. When he saw Paul looking, Romo nodded. Paul took a deep breath, stood up, slung the rifle over his shoulder and began to saunter toward the guard.
It took all of nine seconds. The guard appeared from his hidden location. The cigarette smoldered on the ground there. In German, the guard shouted an order.
Paul ignored the man, even though his stomach tightened painfully.
The guard repeated his words and raised his rifle, aiming at Paul. Stopping, Paul raised his hands and slowly turned toward the man. He noticed a shadow approaching the guard, but Paul’s face stayed rock-steady and betrayed nothing.
The GD soldier asked a harsh question. This soldier had the beginning of a mustache. Just how young was he?
Paul never had a chance to answer the man or his own questions regarding the guard’s age. Reaching from behind in a swift move, one of Romo’s dirty hands clamped over the guard’s mouth. Paul ducked and dropped in case the soldier should fire. Thus, he never saw Romo’s knife slash open the guard’s throat.
There was a brief struggle, a rustle of garments, and then Romo hissed.
Paul was already on his feet, striding toward the door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t care now. The steel spring in him uncoiled, and rage, pent-up fury boiled to the forefront. Such emotions were supposed to have been trained out of him by now. But there was only so much training could accomplish: a man still remained a man.
Paul grinned like a feral pit bull. He opened the door. A guard looked up from a desk, saw the rifle and might have shown surprise. Paul shot him in the mouth. The guard flew backward. Another—an officer—dove for the desk’s relative protection. Paul shot him so the officer twisted and thudded dead onto the floor. A third guard or MP drew a sidearm. With three deafening shots, Paul blew him backward until the man slammed against a wall, the corpse sliding down, leaving a smear of blood.
Paul wanted to roar and gnash his teeth. Instead, he tossed a grenade into a side room where soldiers shouted and a military shotgun made a racking sound. He bet it was where the rest of the guards stayed. The grenade exploded. Someone howled in pain. Coolly, Paul rolled before the entrance and emptied the magazine into the soldiers: four of them.
“Go!” Romo said.
Paul got up and strode one way; Romo went the other. While he moved, Paul slid out his bayonet. With a click, he snapped it onto the end of his barrel. The sight of naked steel often frightened men. That fear could delay their reactions. Paul burst into a large area where officers and enlisted personnel sat before remote-controlling screens, with headsets on and jacks in their ears.
Jackpot, Paul thought to himself. He pulled a pin and hurled a grenade deep into the room. This time he didn’t duck. He had this timed and he had body armor.
The grenade’s motion caused a pudgy lieutenant colonel to pull off his headset, stand and shout a question in German.
Paul pulled the trigger, putting two bullets into the commanding officer of the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Drone Battalion.
The grenade exploded. Surprised operators shouted in agony as they toppled to the floor. Others turned in horror, their faces showing dismay and terror at the sight of Paul.
Kavanagh used the chaos. He used their torpor and the fact that it took precious seconds for them to realize what was going on around them in the real world. Methodically, he began to cut down the enemy, firing into their bodies. A few had guns. One man in his chair fumbled and dropped his weapon. Paul killed him before he could retrieve it.
Three operators managed to get off a single shot each. One bullet missed, gouging the wall behind Paul’s head. Another went between his legs and ricocheted off a swivel chair’s metal roller. The last punched against Paul in the chest. The body armor absorbed the bullet, but the force caused Paul to stagger backward. It felt as if someone had slugged him with a baseball bat. It shook his rhythm.
The GD sergeant who managed the shot lined up his pistol for a second one. The soldier grinned and he had a face full of freckles. He pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun must have jammed. Dismay twisted the sergeant’s face. It gave Paul time to regain his balance and his mental equilibrium. The two of them stared at each other across the short distance.
Paul didn’t know he stared at Sergeant Luger, the drone operator of Sigrid #71. Paul didn’t know Sergeant Luger had seen his friend Hans Kruger crawl under a desk to escape the one-man mayhem.
The GD sergeant cocked back his arm to hurl the pistol at Paul. This wasn’t how the war was supposed to go. Luger had killed and even treaded Americans with ease, not the other way around.
Before the sergeant could complete the motion, Paul shot him in the forehead. It was a perfect hole, with smoke dribbling out of it. The sergeant pitched back and thudded against a desk, flopping onto the floor. He lay in front of his trembling and hidden friend, Hans Kruger.
As the sergeant fell, Paul swiveled around. A GD captain charged him from the left. The captain held a teapot for a weapon, getting ready to swing it. Paul clicked the trigger to no effect. The magazine was out of bullets. The GD captain shouted. Before the teapot struck the side of Paul’s head, he thrust straight and bayoneted the German in the chest.
The blade almost stuck on a rib. Almost—it slid past the blocking bone and speared the heart, entering two ventricles and killing the captain. With his rifle, Paul shoved the dying man onto the floor. Then he tore out the empty magazine and slammed in another. He moved so fast that two GD enlisted personnel watched him as if they were rabbits. Paul put two bullets into each. He used another grenade, lobbing it over knocked-down desks. A German yelled in terror, rose up and attempted to run away. The grenade exploded, lifting him off his feet, dashing his head against a wall.
Paul approached the barrier and found three huddling GD personnel. Two of them were badly bleeding. Those two looked up at him, pleading with their eyes. Paul killed them and the one who refused to look up. He had to kill. This was war. The drone operators must have slain hundreds, possibly thousands of Americans through their robot weapons. Fair was fair, eh, Fritz?
Earlier in his career, all this killing would have left Paul shaking. He kept his poise now. He turned around and scanned the room. Some GD personnel yet lived. A few groaned in agony. Others lay stunned, their eyes staring and glazed
.
He brought the barrel low and shot each of them in the head, ending it.
He approached a different operator. The man swore at him in German and he looked angry. Paul shot him. Paul was angry. The invaders didn’t have any right to be upset or angry with him.
“We didn’t invade you, did we?” Paul asked under his breath. “You came here to steal our land.”
There wasn’t anyone left alive in the area except for one German sliding away from him. Maybe the old Marine general Len Zelazny had known what he had been talking about after all.
Paul blinked slowly as the killing high evaporated. The GD man continued to slide away. The enemy soldier refused to stare at him, but the man seemed intent on living.
“No,” Paul said softly. “You don’t get to get away.” He licked his lips, and suddenly all the energy seemed to pour out of his shoulders. Just like that, he was sick of it. He wasn’t a butcher. He fought in the heat of combat, but coldblooded killing…
He wasn’t quite looking at the man now. Paul knew what needed doing. He just didn’t want to do it.
I have to start searching for the codes and special equipment. But which are the important pieces of equipment anyway?
Paul wondered what had happened to Romo. As he did, the reptilian part of his brain tried to flag his attention. It was time to leave as fast as possible. The GD would send tough infantry soldiers here soon enough. He had to be gone by the time they arrived.
As Paul stirred, his blood brother walked around the corner. The Mexican-Apache had a crazy smile on his face. Something inhuman shone in Romo’s eyes. He was a killer. He was no longer an ordinary mortal and this was his world.
“We have to leave,” Paul told him.
Romo stopped short, and he spied the slider. The enemy soldier attempted to climb to his feet. Without mercy or pity, Romo lifted his assault rifle and shot the man dead.
Invasion: New York (Invasion America) Page 14