Battle for America

by Maloney, Mack;

  Seconds after that, the third plane dropped its deadly barrels onto the MOP Building. Then the fourth plane, flying slightly off the staggered bomb line, unloaded on the Joints Ops Building across Fifth Avenue.

  All the while, the gunners inside the Sherpas were firing down into the MMZ. Their ammo wasn’t typical 50-caliber rounds but highly flammable tracer bullets called XCPs. Concocted from a recipe Dozer had come up with years before, they were at least twice as explosive as the ITZP ammunition the Brozis had used against the ghost plane the night before. If just one or two shells, which were filled with palmitic fluorescent acid, hit something even mildly combustible, it would burst into flames.

  As the streaks of yellow tracer fire poured out of all four of the slow-moving attack planes, giving them the appearance of huge, fire-breathing dragons, their rain of phosphorous shells exacerbated the chaos inside the Russian enclave.

  Where the XCPs were Dozer’s contribution, the fire bombs had been Hunter’s brainstorm. Their contents came from another old recipe—gasoline, sugar, and propylene glycol, the basic ingredient in antifreeze. Some people called them sugar bombs. The gasoline barrel exploded on impact, the fire ignited due to a small battery-operated fuse, the sugar made the flames sticky, and the propylene made them very hard to put out.

  So, the Sherpas were not dropping typical aerial bombs.

  They were dropping homemade napalm.

  Dominique ran to the window in time to see the first string of fire bombs slam into the Army Building.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped, more to herself than Zmeya. “This could be a problem.”

  Zmeya had been talking nonstop to his security people one floor below when the Army Building was hit. The explosions shook Midtown for the second time that night.

  When the next string of bombs hit the Navy HQ just a couple seconds later, debris from one corner of the building flew off as result of the impact. It sailed through the air and slammed into 30 Rock between the fiftieth and fity-first floor, causing an immediate secondary explosion. The seventy-story building was shaking again.

  Zmeya knew instantly that leaving the 30 Rock penthouse by elevator or stairs was no longer an option. He yelled into the phone, “Get all essential people and files and every suitcase radio up to the roof for extraction. Get my helicopter up there immediately.”

  Zmeya’s personal Mi-26 Halo helicopter, one of only a few rotary craft in Russkiy-NYC, was always parked in a lot on Sixth Avenue. It was a large aircraft, able to carry twenty people comfortably but powerful enough to lift sixty. The crew was always on standby and could scramble in less than thirty seconds.

  Still on the phone, Zmeya saw the MOP and Joint Ops buildings get hit. Then the small bomber fleet turned southwest, back toward New Jersey. But just because they didn’t bomb 30 Rock directly this time didn’t mean they weren’t coming back. Plus, the fires down near the fiftieth floor were growing fast.

  “Tell those fools in the helicopter to move it,” he yelled into the mouthpiece, even as he hastily packed some of his personal items after ordering Dominique to do the same. “We’re taking forty people out with us, maximum, and that’s only after the radios and the files have been loaded on.”

  The security officer on the other end asked, “What about the people caught in the higher floors of this building? There’s at least a couple dozen administrative workers trapped on fifty-seven.”

  “Then they should all immediately start fighting the fire on fifty,” Zmeya snapped.

  There was a long pause, and then the security officer said, “And the people on the roofs of the military buildings? Should we attempt to pick them up?”

  Zmeya looked twenty stories down and saw people escaping to the roofs of the three identical military skyscrapers.

  “They, too, will be trapped by the fire,” his security man said. “And they will have no way to fight the flames.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” Zmeya retorted.

  The security man tried one more time. “Will we be sending the helicopter back to aid in rescue efforts?”

  Zmeya just laughed. “Comrade, it will be much too late by that time.”

  But suddenly, Dominique was at his side. She grabbed his arm and dug her fingernails into his skin.

  “You’re leaving people to burn?” she asked incredulously.

  At that moment, the helicopter rose up right in front of them, heading for the roof one level above. “There will be no room,” he told her dismissively.

  She pointed to the people on the roofs of the military buildings; they were already waving desperately at the Mi-26.

  “But aren’t some of those people down there the heart of the Okupatsi?” she asked. “The best that the military has?”

  Zmeya finally hung up the security phone, grabbed his red suitcase, and led her by the arm to the elevator that would take them to the roof.

  “In a little while,” he told her darkly, “those people and whatever the hell they do won’t matter.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fifteen seconds.

  That’s all it took. Forty-eight bombs dropped; forty-eight bombs hit their targets. But the ramifications of what the 7CAV had done over the MMZ this night would last a long time.

  Ten months out of the year, Manhattan’s prevailing winds blew north to south, running parallel to the Hudson right down to the harbor. The proliferation of high-rise buildings actually cut down the wind speed dramatically for most of the year. But during April and May, with the change of season, the wind tended to shift and come out of the west, blowing across Manhattan, with fewer skyscrapers blocking its path.

  Those were the conditions tonight. The westerly wind was gusting up to fifty miles per hour at a thousand feet, spinning the flames from the four burning skyscrapers into a single massive swirl of fire. With temperatures rising above eighteen hundred degrees, the winds started to blow from every point on the compass. The 7CAV had wanted to start a fire, but they wound up creating a firestorm, a tornado of flame, smoke, and debris so powerful it could generate wind of its own.

  This monster began engulfing the MMZ not a minute after the fire bombing. Immediately spreading to a dozen buildings, it began moving east, and out of the MMZ, filling the Manhattan night sky with clouds of superheated air.

  That was why Hunter’s clown plane was melting.

  He first noticed the problem as he trailed the fourth Sherpa in on its bombing run.

  Staying close behind and down to three thousand feet exactly, he’d watched as the string of bombs hit the Russian’s Joint Ops Building. Suddenly, his foot-controlled rudders became hard to move. Then the bottoms of his two enormous tires began to smolder and trail smoke. The strands of duct tape that were holding much of his cockpit together started to shrivel from the heat. Some looked about to snap.

  “Hang in there, Bozo,” Hunter whispered aloud to his plane, trying to stay level in the suddenly hot, high-speed winds. “Just a little longer. …”

  Their bomb loads expended, Hunter escorted the raiders back toward the East River, welcoming the cooler air over the water. While he was not flying the best plane for fighter protection, he did have his M-16 and his .357 Magnum on hand. And the clown plane’s side windows opened fairly wide. It wouldn’t be pretty, but he was prepared to go at it with anyone in the air over New York if they’d threatened the retreating 7CAV Sherpas.

  They overflew the old United Nations Building again then took a wide turn back toward New Jersey. Hunter circled over the East River until he’d lost sight of them. Not only would they have a clear shot home from there, but if he’d planned his next move correctly, he wouldn’t be that far behind them.

  Finally, he turned back toward Manhattan.

  Now came the hard part.

  He put the clown plane into a sharp bank and was soon back inside the fiery wind. Thick black smoke had blan
keted most of Midtown by now, but his objective stood out like a beacon in the blazing fog. Illuminated by the huge, glowing red star.

  Still at three thousand feet, he pointed his nose right at 30 Rock and leaned on the throttles. What he was about to do could take no more than five minutes. In and out and on your way, because he knew from experience that as bad as things were below him at the moment, the initial shock of something like the firebombing would wear off quickly—and then the Russians would start reacting to everything. After that, he wouldn’t be able to count on pure chaos to help him with his plan.

  Approaching from the south, he flipped down his night-vision goggles at two thousand feet out and zeroed in on the NKVD headquarters. Out of focus and beyond ideal range, the goggles nevertheless detected activity on the roof. Bright lights, blinking on and off, large flashes of static electricity, people running about. Meanwhile, a fire was raging out of control down near the fiftieth floor.

  It was hard to say what was going on inside the green blur of artificial light. By the time he could fine-tune his night-vision goggles, the activity on the roof had ceased. All that was left was a cloud of gray smoke swirling above the building that had nothing to do with the fire below.

  That was the only clue he needed. The gray smoke was actually engine exhaust. A helicopter had just taken off from the top of the building and disappeared into the night. He began a hasty visual search for it, even as he continued to charge head-on toward his target. The Russians had very few helicopters in theater of operations; the garbage truck’s food lists indicated a handful at best. Not many copters worked well in crowded urban environments, plus they were all a pain to transport over the sea, being particularly vulnerable to corrosive salt air. Shooting one down would give the Reds one less of what was already a rarity.

  Suddenly, his electronic field of vision was overtaken by the silhouette of an enormous Russian Mi-26 Halo helicopter coming right at him. Two things happened next. He banked hard left, his engine screaming in protest, and avoided a midair collision by seconds. At the same time, he pulled out his massive Magnum handgun and clicked the safety off.

  The hard bank became a 360-degree roll, and a moment later, he was flying parallel to the chopper. It was as big as a midsize airliner and twice as noisy. Painted all black, except for a wide, almost-fluorescent red stripe running diagonally along its fuselage. Hunter pulled back his tiny side window, stuck out his giant pistol, and started blasting away.

  His night-vision goggles allowed him to track his rounds as they spirited across the sky—but none of them came anywhere near the big copter. It had climbed so suddenly, it was like it disappeared. It was great piloting for such a big machine.

  He briefly considered pursuing it; a half dozen well-placed shots from his M-16 might do the trick. But, though tempting, he knew it was always wiser to follow the original mission plan. There were fewer unknowns that way.

  So he banked hard right, pointed himself back at the big red star, and buried his throttle. At a thousand feet out, he put the small plane into a heart-stopping dive. He dropped almost a quarter mile, straight down, in just a few seconds before finally pulling back on the controls.

  The big red star was right in front of him now, shining though the smoke coming from the fiftieth floor. But with one more twist of the stick, he was circling the top of 30 Rock.

  His body began vibrating instantly. The feeling … It had always been more intense in his head than his heart. But this time, it was helmet to toe, and absolutely pounding through his chest. He didn’t remember its being so powerful. Or so thrilling. His intuition had never failed him; he always trusted it to lead him in the right direction.

  I got this, he thought as he banked around the west side of 30 Rock.

  But suddenly, the feeling became so extreme, he could barely keep his shaking hands on the controls. And then, a voice inside told him, Stop here. He yanked back on the controls and went to full throttles. Raising his nose dramatically, he put the clown plane into its magical hovering mode.

  He was right outside one of the penthouse’s enormous east-facing windows; it actually covered the top two floors of the building. To his immediate left was an enormous bedroom.

  That’s when he saw her.

  Lying on a huge bed, her long blond hair bathed in the crimson light of the fires below. She was wearing the exact same outfit as in the infamous Circle War recruitment photo, but she was also positioned in a very unusual way. Legs and arms wide apart, almost as if she was … handcuffed to the bed. Even odder, a figure dressed all in black was lying at her feet. And were those bloodstains on the sheets?

  She suddenly turned toward him. Then she screamed one word: “Help!”

  An instant after that, the clown plane’s nose slammed back down, and he had no choice but to rocket away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It had all happened too quickly.

  Two seconds, maybe three—that’s all the time Hunter had had to absorb the strange scene inside the 30 Rock penthouse bedroom.

  A blonde on the bed, a guy in the room, blood on the sheets, a fire raging twenty stories below—it didn’t add up to a pretty picture. But the feeling was telling him he’d hit pay dirt. In fact, the vibes shaking his body at the moment were stronger than he’d ever felt. She was in handcuffs, very close by—just like last time. And she was crying for help.

  That was more than enough for him.

  He was going in.

  He broke out of his orbit, pushed his throttles to 150 knots, and swung the clown plane five hundred feet out from the top of the smoky building. The superheated air above Midtown was more turbulent than ever. Millions of burning embers were blowing around like little high-speed galaxies, crazily filling the sky. Beautiful, yet terrifying.

  He did a quick loop and lined up his nose with 30 Rock’s roof, this time coming in from the north. At two hundred feet out, he yanked the throttles back to one third power and went to three-quarter flaps. It was like slamming on the brakes in a race car. The whiplash jerked him forward, then threw him back against his tiny seat. It was painful, but he could tell he’d lost at least seventy knots of airspeed in just a few seconds. Still more to go, though.

  The 30 Rock roof loomed right in front of him now, bleeding off the edges of his night-vision displays. But this close, the artificial image was saturated by the big red star’s harsh glow, mixed with waves of billowing smoke from the fire on the fiftieth floor, distorting everything. A perfect storm of vertigo-inducing electronics.

  At a hundred feet out, he began counting down from five. When he reached zero, he cut the engine completely, went to full flaps, and held on.

  He hit the roof an instant later. There was a huge bang and he was thrown around the tiny cockpit once again. But the big clown tires saved his life. This wasn’t like landing on the roof of the Mudtown Holiday Inn. This small patch of concrete and rubber was nearly nine hundred feet in the air with fifty-miles-per-hour crosswinds blowing around atop a burning building and, oh yes, a huge firestorm was raging close by. His landing was so violent that his crash helmet broke through the top of the plane’s tiny canopy.

  But he’d made it.

  The plane rolled for a couple of feet then shook to a halt. Hunter scrambled out, taking his M-16 and ammo bandoliers with him. He reloaded his .357 Magnum and made sure his Bowie knife was sheathed in his boot.

  He hit the zoom function on his night-vision goggles and took a quick look down on Midtown. The four Russian military skyscrapers were practically engulfed in flames now; poor souls vainly waited for rescue on the roof of each. Hundreds of Russian troops were running around on the streets below. Tanks barreled down Sixth Avenue, and a convoy of Brozis hurryied in the opposite direction, both trying to escape the firestorm. Every street within a half mile of the MMZ was mobbed with people, all moving away from the inferno as fast as they could, any way they could. An
enormous traffic jam was in the making. And trying to make its way up very crowded Fifth Avenue from somewhere in Lower Manhattan was a line of extremely dilapidated fire trucks: a dozen former-FDNY pumpers and ladder trucks that someone had scraped together on the quick. Each had its red light flashing; Hunter could even hear their sirens above the din. They were on fool’s errand. Only a large, well-coordinated effort by dozens of fire companies could have made a dent in this hellish scene.

  He and Dozer and the 7CAV had certainly found the Russians’ weakness. Their plan had worked.

  It might have even worked too well. Looking straight down the side of the 30 Rock, Hunter could see close-up the fire that had erupted near the fiftieth floor and was spreading up the southeast side of the building.

  In other words, just to make it more interesting, the building from which he had to perform his one-man rescue now had a major blaze of its own.

  Very fucked-up times, Major Hunter, he said to himself looking out on it all. From Mudtown to Midtown. Things are really looking up. …

  He retrieved his rope from the plane, measured out twenty feet twice, and cut it with his Bowie knife. He attached the three-prong grappling hook to one end and then kicked out a twenty-foot section of the brass fence that ringed the outside edge of the building’s roof. It fell into the flames and smoke below.

  Sticking his head through the hole he’d created, he looked over the side of the building, sizing up the penthouse from this new perspective. But all he could see was glass covering the top two floors reflecting the growing fire below. Suddenly, it all looked the same.

  He thought for a moment, guesstimating the distance between where he’d landed to where he’d seen the bedroom window. He moved ten feet to his right and took in a deep smoky breath.

  This was it. The bedroom where he’d seen her was directly below him; he was certain of it.