Vaughn Heppner: Invasion: New York

John rubbed his eyes as he waited. The backblast from the rocket propellant would likely start a fire in here. That didn’t matter either. No, nothing mattered now but the task. This was it. The German Dominion had insulted the Algonquian people. Retribution was finally at hand.

A helo waited nearby. John could hear the whomp-whomp-whomp of its blades. It was an attack craft. Several hovered above in order to protect the Chancellor. Their presence said, “If you attack Kleist you will die.”

A bleak smile twisted onto John’s lips. He would die. Yes. He would—

The smart phone beeped.

John gripped the RPG handles, bent his head and aimed down at the street. The first car of the motorcade appeared. He waited. The second came into view. Finally, the third and fourth came in quick succession. Usually, Kleist traveled with twelve cars.

The third car—John followed the car. As if the RPG was a shotgun and he hunted crows, he started from behind, swept over the vehicle and pulled the trigger.

The shaped-charge grenade leaped out, and the rocket roared to life. The missile flashed down at the street.

In the empty apartment, the backblast licked fire onto the wall. It ignited and began to crackle with fierce life.

Red Cloud threw the empty launching tube from him. He ignored the fire. Instead, he dragged the heavy machine gun into position.

On the street below an explosion blasted the front hood of the third car. It halted as others swerved and brakes screeched. One came to rest on the left side. Doors opened on the third car, but the new car blocked them from opening much. The car on the other side squealed its tires so smoke billowed. It shot away, allowing the right-side doors to open, which they most certainly did, as men and women boiled outside.

John pulled the trigger, and the 12.7mm machine gun began hosing bullets. He smiled widely. The bullets punched holes into the top of the third car. Kleist was tricky. He might be huddling in there, letting the others act as bait. But in case Kleist wasn’t that cagey, John aimed for the people scrambling out of the car. The heavy bullets tore into them so flesh and blood sprayed. The women weren’t Kleist…unless the Chancellor wore a disguise. Red Cloud shot them all. They tumbled onto the cement, and he kept firing into them, riddling their bodies, making them jerk and twist.

He heard the helo again, but Red Cloud never looked up at it. He didn’t care about it in the slightest. He concentrated on his task, working over the car one more time. He had to make sure that the trade, the bargain, succeeded.

Missiles whooshed nearby in the air.

John looked up now. Two missiles streaked straight at his window.

“I am an Algonquin,” he said. “I have avenged my people.”

The missiles entered the window, the empty room, and exploded, killing John Red Cloud and demolishing much of the fifth floor of Krupp Tower.

Father and son Higgins walked outside the city limits. This was the present location of the 1st Behemoth Regiment. The 2nd had finally begun to take shape, filled by the factory in Detroit.

“They called for you again,” Stan Higgins told his son.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Jake said. “Maybe I should leave.” They’d talked about this plenty of times already.

Stan laughed the way a wolf might. “I don’t care about trouble if it means defending my son. What good is it fighting for your country if the government steals your children? No. If my government wants my service, it had better have some regard for the things I love. If my government hates the things I cherish, then I will no longer fight for them but actively work against the scoundrels. It’s my country I love, not the people in power.”

“You’d better not let any Homeland Security people hear you say that,” Jake said.

Stan’s eyes narrowed. “There may come a time soon when they better start telling me some good things—if they want to keep living.”

Jake took a deep breath. His dad had been angry for some time now. Maybe he shouldn’t have told him the whole story.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jake said. “Sometimes I wonder about the people in power.”

“Just sometimes?” Stan asked. “I wonder about it all the time.” He lightly punched his son on the shoulder. “Let me tell you a truth about people, about men and women. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely .”

“Who said that?” Jake asked.

“A British nobleman, Lord Acton,” Stan said.

“Hmm, I think he might be right.”

“History proves that he is.”

Jake grinned at his dad. “History, huh?”

“That’s right. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Does history show anything like happened with us against the GD?”

Stan became thoughtful.

So did Jake. He had been following the war news closely. Unit after unit of the Expeditionary Force had begun surrendering. The conquest of Montreal had kicked the props out from under the resisting armies. Give it a few more weeks, and General Alan could march up the Saint Lawrence River and take the rest of the rebellious Quebecers. America and Canada had done it, or almost done it. They had knocked one of their opponents off the continent. He wondered if Kleist’s assassination would take the GD all the way out of the war, too.

Jake glanced at this dad. “No historical insights?” he asked.

“I’ve been studying the campaign.”

“I bet,” Jake said with a laugh. That was an understatement. His dad lived for this kind of stuff. It was candy to him.

“What I find interesting were the masses of GD drones, particularly the Sigrids.”

“Not the Kaiser tanks?” asked Jake.

Stan Higgins had that distracted look in his eyes. “The European birthrate just couldn’t compete with the Chinese. The GD doesn’t have enough young people to field truly vast armies. Their answer was the remote-controlled drones, and the Kaisers, too. The number of Sigrids, however, was and is truly staggering.”

Jake waited.

Stan glanced at his son. “It does remind me of a historical parallel.”

“Fire away,” Jake said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Sometimes armies try to win the cheap way,” Stan said. “They search for a weapons system of very narrow application. That usually makes it much more inexpensive. Then they mass produce the new weapon and tell themselves it will change the way men fight wars. The Egyptians of 1973 during the October War had a brand-new thing, Sagger anti-tank missiles. They cost pennies compared to expensive tanks. During the first days of battle, small numbers of Israeli tankers attacked the Egyptians who had crossed the Suez Canal. Egyptian infantrymen with Sagger joystick-controlled, wire-guided missiles slaughtered those few tanks. For a time, everyone thought the day of the tank had ended. Cheap missiles would drive them from the field of battle.”

“They didn’t?” Jake asked.

Stan shook his head. “The missiles worked on a very narrow basis, suited for the actions near the Suez Canal. Once the Israelis used their tanks in a proper manner—with infantry support and heavy machine gun suppressing fire—they swept aside the Sagger teams. In fact, soon they crossed the canal themselves and encircled an entire Egyptian army in Egypt.”

“How’s that like what happened here to us?” Jake asked.

“The GD tried to win on the cheap using a narrowly utilized weapons system,” Stan said.

“The Sigrids are cheap?”

“Cheaper than enlisting flesh and blood soldiers,” Stan said. “Maybe as bad, the Sigrids quickly reached their culminating point of success.”

“Come again?” Jake asked.