Overkill

by Ted Bell

“I do.”

  As they sped even closer, Beau saw the station far, far up ahead. It was another big white concrete block of a building, all lit up like a national monument with a number of floodlights mounted on steel poles atop the walls that surrounded the complex. You could see a lot of people standing on the platform next to the tracks. Far too many for this time of night, so police or military or both.

  As soon as they got within a mile, Beau saw what they were up against. It wasn’t any lowered crossing pole. No! They’d put into place some kind of heavy concrete structures, the kind you see around embassies in Damascus or Tehran, secured to the track rails with heavy steel reinforcements.

  “Changing your mind?” Vasily shouted to Beau above the roar of the train.

  “Fuck no. When I’m in, I am all the way in. Lieutenant? What about you?”

  “We’ve come way too long and too far to stop now, sir. Damn the torpedoes! Let’s roll!”

  Above the black tape patches beneath their noses, the eyes of the two customs and immigration officers were wild with fear. So too, Beau saw through his high-powers, were the frightened eyes of the men and women crowding the platform. The Black Arrow was inside a mile now, and she wasn’t slowing down! The imminent collision would kill them all!

  At a quarter of a mile and closing fast, most of those up on the crowded platform had jumped down onto the railbed or the tracks and were running for their lives. Vasily had completely lost it. Took his hands off the throttle and dropped to the steel floor, covering his eyes and screaming, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

  Beau was hanging on to a steel support brace on the roof, gripping for all he was worth with both hands . . .

  “Brace yourself, Lieutenant!” he shouted. “Grab something secure! We’re going to hit! We’re going to hit . . . NOW!”

  There was a horrific jolt, then a massive grinding and screeching noise as Goliath’s nose impacted the concrete and steel abutments. The men in the cockpit were all thrown forward as the locomotive staggered, slowed . . . and then gradually regained its powerful forward momentum.

  No one up in the cab was hurt save Vasily. His body had been thrown violently forward and his head had slammed into the steel bulkhead. He was instantly knocked unconscious, with a deep laceration to his forehead. Beau, who’d been studying the little fellow’s every move for many long hours across the European continent, assumed control of the speeding locomotive. He looked at his watch. It was midnight. He firewalled the throttles.

  At eighty miles per hour, Hans Blitzen calculated, they would enter the massive rail yards at Switzerland’s largest train station . . . at three in the morning. It would be dead quiet and the massive yards would be virtually empty. That was his experience, at any rate.

  Next stop, Zurich Hauptbahnhof. The beautiful terminal lies at the heart of the city, nestled on the banks of the River Limmat. Residents and tourists crowd together from morning to midnight, taking advantage of the many shops and restaurants. And it’s just a short walk to the town’s bustling Lake Zurich.

  But, at three a.m., it’s another story.

  The Black Arrow had made the trip from the Russian border to the Swiss in record time, arriving a full hour ahead of schedule. As they rolled slowly to a stop on the side-yard tracks farthest from the terminal and least likely to be patrolled by railway security officers, Hans was thrilled to see that his assessment of the yard held true. Not a soul in sight.

  Beau smiled at Hans, thanked him, and picked up his radio. Time to check in with the powers that be.

  “Combat ops,” the voice said.

  “Falcon’s Lair. Combat ops, this is Overkill. Do you read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Colonel. Over.”

  “Good. Black Arrow has just arrived Zurich Hauptbahnhof and we have begun the unloading of T-14 Mini Tiger tanks, troops, and light artillery. What is the status of Falcon’s Lair air squadron? Over.”

  “Certified airworthy. Fuel topped off and all pilots on the line, the first wave idling inside the elevators, awaiting cat shots and launch commands, sir. Over.”

  “Good. I may need air cover en route to the Vegas Strip when the Swiss army catches wind of this. But hold some fighters in reserve and ready to launch initial fighters on my signal . . . over.”

  “Roger that, sir. Over.”

  “My logistician says at the current rate, the flatbed truck and buses will be loaded and en route to the mountains in approximately twenty minutes.”

  “Standing by to launch first-wave aircraft on your signal, sir. Over.”

  At Falcon’s Lair, the mood was tense. Joe Stalingrad and Putin weren’t speaking, and Uncle Joe was clearly worried about the impending hostilities with the Swiss army and air force. To make matters worse, Putin had started drinking early and was stomping around combat ops and the fighter squadrons’ pilot briefing room, screaming at anyone who got anywhere near him.

  All of their hopes were riding on the skill and battle expertise of Colonel Beau Beauregard—a man who had just recently given Joe a laundry list of why it would be sheer stupidity to invade Switzerland. Joe had considered relaying the essence of Beauregard’s dinner comments to Putin, but at the last minute had restrained himself.

  The stress of the last weeks had caused the former Russian president to seemingly come unglued.

  Putin appeared to have believed Joe’s version of the events leading to Hawke’s rescue of his son, but Joe feared the loss of his prized hostage had been a tipping point for Vladimir Putin. Hawke was after him again, and that was never a good thing.

  “You know what, Joe,” Shit Smith had said to him, “we got us a Russian president who makes that damn Kim Jong Un look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I ain’t lyin’ either.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Vlad had gone from mild neurotic insanity to full-blown whack job. President Crazy-Pants, he and Emma called him behind his back.

  And that, my friends, did not bode well for Operation Overkill. Nor the colonel’s imminent looting of the Vegas Strip . . .

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Zurich

  The Vegas Strip, in the Alps south of Zurich, includes a section of sometimes treacherous and precipitously icy road that climbs high into the Alps. The other problem with this road, now facing Beau’s convoy, was that it was the only way in and the only way out. The road dead-ended in a box canyon about a mile past the Golden Nugget, the last vault they would hit.

  The twisting road, over some of the deepest natural crevasses in the Alps, had been built during the construction of the National Redoubt. With construction starting in the late-nineteenth century, the redoubt constituted the beginnings of what later became known in Europe as Fortress Switzerland.

  The National Redoubt encompassed a widely distributed set of fortifications and labyrinthine underground tunnels and warehouses where the infamous “Nazi Gold” had been stored during World War II. All aligned on a general east-west line through the Alps, and centered on three major fortress complexes: St. Maurice, St. Gotthard, and Sargans.

  These fortresses were erected primarily to defend against Alpine crossings between Germany and Italy, and excluded the industrialized and highly populated heart of Switzerland.

  The National Redoubt was planned as a nearly impregnable complex of fortifications that would deny any aggressor passage over or through the Alps. This was done by controlling all the major passes and railway tunnels running north to south through the region. This defensive strategy was intended to deter an invasion altogether by denying Switzerland’s crucial transportation infrastructure to any aggressor.

  In addition to being defensive, the National Redoubt was intended to be a massive underground bank. The redoubt included vast numbers of cavernous vaults and tunnels built during World War II. These were critical as the Swiss hunkered down under threat of the much-vaunted Nazi invasion—Hitler’s Operation Tannenbaum—that never happened.

  The Swiss were saved from devastation primarily because of thei
r brilliant use of the Alps as defensive weapons, and because Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht got unexpectedly bogged down in Russia.

  It was here, in deep underground vaults, that the neutral Swiss government and banking institutions frantically hid the wealth of the nation, not to mention its legions of worldwide banking clients. The Queen of England, for starters, stows a majority of the royal family’s wealth in the vaults linked to the Vegas Strip. Gold—billions and billions of dollars in gold and other precious metals.

  “There is still a lot of gold in them thar hills!” Beau said to Putin one evening over dinner. Said it to the president of Russia, who never, ever got the joke, and said it to Shit Smith, who laughed his ass off.

  Beau had no time for joking now. He was busy as hell, running up and down the length of the Black Arrow and the long line of heavy flatbed trucks waiting for the train to be off-loaded. He was ensuring that the speedy transfer of men, tanks, and artillery to the trucks was going smoothly. For the most part it was. The few rail-yard officials who’d shown any interest had been permanently silenced before they could raise the alarms.

  Beau looked at his watch. His micromanaged plan mandated that he be in the fully loaded lead truck and barreling down dawn-empty streets of the city before five a.m. Since the Hauptbahnhof was located on the shores of the northern tip of Lake Zurich, five minutes from where the trucks were being loaded, Beau figured the whole damn convoy could be out of town and racing south along the lake and headed for the Vegas Strip before the sun came up.

  Or at least that was his plan, anyway. War has a bad habit of getting in the way of even the best-laid plans. If you want to make War laugh, tell it your plans. There were seemingly endless potential catastrophes ahead. The road up to the Vegas Strip, if you could call it that, was probably replete with tunnels that could be mined and bridges that could be rigged with explosives.

  The strategy he had devised with the other two squad leaders was simple and straightforward: the convoy would blow through those tunnels and over those bridges so quickly that the enemy never had the chance to react. The spans over some of the deepest crevasses, with roaring rivers far below, were quite long, and that in itself was troubling . . .

  In the last briefing aboard the Black Arrow, Beau had rewritten the attack plan, keeping tunnels and bridges in mind. Instead of mounting three simultaneous attacks on the Riviera, Caesars Palace, and the Golden Nugget, the entire convoy would race directly to the end of the Strip and the Nugget.

  The force would be overpowering in a shock-and-awe way. Once the Nugget’s vault was breached and the security forces were no longer a threat, the gold would be loaded on the flatbeds no longer carrying tanks and artillery. The trucks would immediately race to the little town of Riga, on the lake, where Joe Stalingrad had rented a falling-down warehouse in the forest.

  And there the offloaded gold would sit as the trucks went back up for more, all that gold waiting to be ferried over to Falcon’s Lair in the larger of the two subs devoted to carrying supplies.

  The unified force would then regroup and descend back down to Caesars Palace, gain entrance, and gold, and finally the Riviera.

  Those two would be tougher with the new plan, he had to admit. Primarily because the joint force would have given up the element of surprise. Joe’s answer to that was to take as much gold out of the Nugget as he possibly could, with an eye to forgoing any subsequent attack on the Riviera or Caesars Palace . . . or both!

  At 4:55 a.m., still scanning the skies for Swiss fighters, but still without having to call in air support from Falcon’s Lair, Beau climbed up into the cab of the lead truck. Taking one last look at the convoy now formed up behind him, he squeezed behind the wheel. “Whoo-ah, it’s showtime!” Beau said to the young commando in the passenger seat. The redheaded kid’s HK assault rifle barrel was resting on the windowsill, switched to full auto. Beau too had an HK that he could fire out the driver’s window with his left hand if need be. Around his neck hung bandoliers of ammunition. In a holster on his hip, his trusty old Colt .45 Peacemaker. Once owned and operated by lawman Wyatt Earp himself. He’d also strapped a Velcro bandolier of four thirty-round mags around his right thigh.

  Beau stole a peek in the rearview, looking back to see if he still had all his little ducks in a row.

  Four other heavily armed commandos were aboard his truck, having taken up positions in the rear at the four corners of the flatbed. Each truck used the same configuration of firepower. They all carried HK MP5s with attached rocket-propelled grenade launchers as well as the frag and stun grenades dangling like grape clusters from the web utility belts.

  “Time to head for the hills, sonny boy!” Beau cried, twisting the key in the ignition.

  These were the moments he lived for. Pitting himself against formidable if not impossible odds for enormous personal gain. This by far the biggest yet.

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  On the Vegas Strip

  The colonel whipped out his old Zippo, lit his battered stogie, took a pull, and expelled a huge blooming plume of blue smoke. Then he cackled, engaged first gear, and mashed the go pedal all the way to the floorboard. The big truck lurched forward and sped down the myriad crushed-rock roads of the outer rail yard, finally rolling out onto a wide boulevard of rain-wet pavement, illuminated by yellowish fluorescent lights and virtually deserted at this early hour.

  Hallelujah!

  He picked up the radio. Time to call Papa Putin and check on his ill-timed descent into madness.

  “Falcon’s Lair combat ops center, this is Overkill, over.”

  “Go ahead, Overkill.”

  “Gimme the president.”

  “Uh . . . hold on a second.”

  “I ain’t got time to hold on, son! I need to speak to him now, goddamn it.”

  “Uh . . . sorry, sir . . . we’re trying to . . . He’s doing a media event and—”

  “A media event? What media event? You mean to tell me he’s on the goddamn television now? What the hell is going on over there?”

  “Not yet on the air, sir. He’s in the Falcon’s Lair media studio. He’s taping a video announcing the invasion of Switzerland and—”

  “You do not announce a fucking invasion that hasn’t even happened yet, for fuck’s sake! Have you people lost your minds?”

  “No, sir, it’s just that the president says he wants to get maximum media mileage out of this thing and—”

  “What? Holy Christ on a jumbotron, what the fuck is he thinking? We’re just launching our first attacks now! And he’s announcing our arrival to get media coverage? You go get him. You pull the plug on this fucking video, you understand me, son? Or your fucking head is going to roll.”

  “Yes, sir. I, uh, let me go see what I can do, sir. Over.”

  “You do that, over. Tell me something. Is Joe Stalingrad in combat ops?”

  “Yes, sir! He just walked in.”

  “Put his ass on the damn phone.”

  “He’s, uh, here he is . . . Sorry, sir . . . It’s Colonel Beauregard for you, sir.”

  “Beau, talk to me,” Joe said. “What’s your status? We’re expecting to be attacked here any moment . . . Radar has picked up a formation of Swiss army helicopters carrying Alpine combat troops and headed in our direction—”

  “What the hell is Putin doing, Joe? He’s announcing the fucking invasion on television? Are you shitting me? I’m en route to the goddamn Vegas Strip and he’s telling the world I’m coming? I mean, I cannot effing believe what I’m hearing out here and—”

  “Calm down, Beau, calm down . . .”

  “Calm down? Seriously, Joe? What the hell do you expect me to—”

  “The cameras aren’t on, Beau.”

  “What?”

  “Not rolling. And I capped the lenses. He’s talking to himself, for crissakes. Fucking lunatic.”

  “Jesus. Okay, okay. Good. I gotta jump, get this buggy convention up the side of this mountain now.”

  “What’s yo
ur situation, Beau?”

  “Overkill convoy is on the move, Joe. Minimal casualties disembarking the train. Had to shoot a couple of yard dogs, that’s all. No opposition at all so far. Leaving the lake now, headed up, approaching the road up to the three Vegas Strip target destinations. Our good luck won’t hold forever, so keep the candles lit on those goddamn fighter jets, Joe. Over.”

  “What’s your priority target, Beau? All still as planned?”

  “Roger that, little buddy. I’m the lead truck in the convoy. Once we get up in the mountains and enter the Strip, we will continue on straight to the entrance at the Golden Nugget and—Hold on, Joe. What the eff? Jesus Christ! Joe, launch airplanes! Now! I repeat, launch all aircraft NOW! I’ve got a single jet fighter—a Swiss army Northrop F-5E Tiger—buzzing me, buzzing the convoy . . . a scout . . . They officially know we’re here, Joe. It’s gonna get hot real fast . . . Wait! Here come two more!”

  “All right. I’m on it.”

  “This is where it starts, pardner. Drop your cocks and grab your socks, ladies, we going balls to the wall now, goodness gracious me! From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli!”

  “Yeah. All that stuff. Good luck, Beau. I’ll deal with Putin. Meanwhile, it’s all on you. Make it happen, goddamn it. And make it home, bring the gold.”

  “Back at ya, Hollywood!”

  The Vegas Strip includes panoramic views down one of the most spectacular high mountain valleys in the Swiss Alps. But unlike the Strip in Nevada, there are no windows to take in the view. There is no neon—no slots, no hookers, no nothing.

  Except gold. Lots and lots of gold.

  And everywhere you look but cannot see are heavily armed men who are there solely to prevent you from stealing it. Burrowed into snow-covered .50-caliber machine-gun nests. Heavily armed sentries at the entrance gates to each of the three primary fortified underground vaults. Invisible sentries posted high up in the rocks, up in the treetops, and inside phony rocks all along the scenic roadway. Sorta surreal, Beau thought, the whole thing. It was like Walt Disney had decided to open a new Swiss Theme Park—and called it “War World.” With Mickey and Goofy firing live ammunition!