The general stood. “Sir, this is a highly experimental project. You shouldn’t pin any hopes on it.”
“Get to the point,” the President said, testily.
A touch of color crept up Alan’s neck. He nodded, and like a schoolboy reciting his lesson, he began to speak. “We send a coded signal to a THOR satellite. The bundle uses attitude jets to orient itself. At the right time, rockets fire to deorbit the satellite. After they burn out, the bundle opens and individual missiles begin to target their victims. These missiles do not have blunt noses, but very sharp ones into order to slice through the atmosphere. In this way, they maintain most of their orbital velocity.”
The President laughed with glee.
They’re meteors, Anna thought to herself. The general is talking about manmade meteors. What an idea.
“Seconds before impact,” Alan said, “terminal guidance systems take over. Each missile strikes at four miles per second. What that means in reality is that a twenty-pound object will hit with the power of a two hundred pound bomb. When working as planned, it would be spectacular, and the attack would be over in five seconds. The project manager believes that the enemy would have no idea what had just occurred.”
“Would there be any telltale signs of an attack?” the President asked.
“Well, yes,” Alan said. “The missiles would leave luminous tails from space that would slowly dissipate.”
“Incredible,” the President said.
“Compared to other weapon systems,” Alan said, “the actual THOR missile is cheap. Launching them into space is another matter.”
“Is it really a missile?” the President asked.
“It’s a slender, dense metal rod,” Alan said. “And that’s it except for guidance systems and some control nubs. That means the missiles contain no explosives to go bad while they’re in space. In addition, on the positive side, there aren’t any firing mechanisms that might fail at the wrong moment. You simply aim and drop.”
“You said kinetic energy,” Anna said. “What are you talking about specifically?”
“Are you familiar with the shaped-charge grenade of an old TOW missile?” the general asked.
“I have an idea, yes,” she said.
“Okay,” Alan said. “When a TOW warhead detonates it produces a jet of metal particles that travel at the same velocity as a THOR missile. The TOW metal particles weigh a fraction of an ounce. Yet it can punch through the armor of most heavy tanks.”
“Not a Behemoth’s armor,” the President said.
“No, not a Behemoth,” Alan agreed. “In any case,” he told Anna, “the smallest THOR missile weighs twenty pounds, not a few ounces, but it travels as fast as the TOW particle jet. That twenty-pound projectile could punch a hole through a battleship and smash another hole at the bottom of the vessel. It could also destroy a Behemoth.”
“Or a Kaiser HK,” the President said thoughtfully.
“I should point out that there are various types of missiles,” Alan said. “They aren’t only meant to use against armored vehicles. One missile is made from depleted uranium. After punching through an ICBM cover, for instance, the metal produces an incendiary blast as the cloud of uranium vapor detonates. There are ways to use other compositions that would produce a shockwave that would flatten soldiers, ships and other targets. It would act as a fuel-air bomb.”
“This is a science-fiction marvel,” Anna said.
The general shook his head. “No. I assure you this is modern technology used in innovative ways. The trick is making a system the enemy can’t take over. That’s one of the biggest sticking points, and I find it utterly frightening.”
“Meaning what?” the President asked.
“If any of our enemies had our codes and radio frequencies,” Alan said, “they could order our own missiles to fall and strike us.”
“That must never happen,” the President said.
“It’s one of the things we’re testing and believe me trying to prefect,” Alan said.
“How many of the experimental satellites do we have in space at the moment?”
“I believe four bundles are presently in orbit, sir.”
“We need more,” the President said, “many more.”
“If they worked as predicted, I totally agree, sir. At the moment, however, we lack the launch facilities to send many more aloft.”
The President began rocking in his chair. He had a far-off look on his face.
After a time, the general glanced questioningly at Anna.
She shrugged. She’d seen the look before. It was a good sign. David was processing.
The general finally sat back down and began leafing through his papers. He licked the tip of his index finger every few seconds to help him. Anna went back to reading her device.
Maybe twenty minutes later, the rocking chair stopped squeaking. Both Anna and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked up.
David eyed them. “I’m giving this priority one.”
“Sir?” Alan asked.
“The THOR Project,” the President said. “From now on it gets full priority ahead of everything else.”
General Alan balked. “But sir, we don’t even know if the missiles work yet. What I’ve just been telling you, it’s all theory. We can’t just dump what works for some pie in the sky project.”
“Hmm,” the President said. “There’s far too much that doesn’t work these days. We need a war-winner and we need it now.”
“I understand that, sir, but—”
“The Behemoth tank gave us part of the answer,” the President said in a rush. “The Jefferson tank is important, too. This might be another answer, maybe the ticket we need to finally beat these aggressors for good.”
“Or it might be a rabbit trail that wastes precious time and resources,” Alan said.
Anna watched David. She hadn’t seen him like this for some time. Normally, the flesh hung on his face and he gave monosyllable replies. Now, the skin seemed to have tightened, especially on his cheeks. There was something more about him than that hangdog look she’d been seeing…well, all of the time, lately. Hope shone in his eyes.
But is he clinging to a false answer like Alan suggests?
“Maybe it is a waste,” the President said. “You might be right, General. But I’ll tell you something. We need a break and we need it now. If this thing doesn’t work…” He shrugged. “I don’t know that it will have put us that much more in the hole than we’re already in to have given the THOR Project priority and it fizzles.”
I know what this is, Anna thought. He can’t let go of how the GD neutrality turned against us. He made the Faustian bargain, and it has bitten us hard. He’s looking for something to negate what he did.
“I’m not sure I can agree with you, Mr. President,” Alan said.
“Would you like my input on this, sir?” Anna asked.
The President tore his gaze from Alan and studied her. He must have seen something positive on her face. “Yes, I would like to hear your opinion.”
“You should do this,” she said. “You should give top priority to the THOR Project.”
“Can you give me a good reason why you believe this?” Alan asked her.
Because it gives David hope. She didn’t know if she could tell the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that. Instead, she said, “We’re going to have to take a risk somewhere in order to win. Why not take the risk here?”
“Calculated risks,” Alan said. “We need to finish the tests before we waste precious rocket resources on these bundles. If the THOR missiles don’t work for whatever reason, those rockets will have been wasted. We need the rockets in order to replenish the number of our medium-range missiles. They were vital in stopping the Chinese this winter. They will likely be vital again to stopping the Germans.”
“I don’t disagree with that,” the President said. “But we do need the THOR missiles. We need something that works spectacularly like the Behemoths tanks did.”
It hurt Anna to hear the note of pleading in the President’s voice. Couldn’t Alan understand that they needed to keep David hopeful? Wouldn’t wasting a few rockets be worth that?
“We badly need allies,” Alan said. “That doesn’t mean we get them. We have to face the facts, sir. The truth of the matter is that a new weapons system always has teething problems. The THOR Project won’t be any different, no matter how much we want it or need it.”
“I realize that,” the President said. He looked away, and something hardened on his face. He turned back to Alan, and any hint of pleading had left his voice. “The THOR Project will get crash priority.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs licked his lips. It was clear he planned to fight or at least to resist the idea further.
“That’s an order,” the President added.
Anna hadn’t heard such firmness in David’s voice for quite some time. It helped her decide about Max Harold. She wasn’t going to tell the President about the Frobisher meeting just yet. This new resolve…the President sounded like his old self. He needed time to strengthen his hope and build on this.
“And what if the THOR Project fails, sir?” Alan asked quietly.
“Then God help us,” the President said, as a haunted look entered his eyes. “Because I don’t know of anyone else who will.”
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Sergeant Hans Kruger of the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Drone Battalion flinched as American artillery landed shells near the GD operational facility.
The crumps outside caused detectable vibration to the building and to the equipment in here. That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen now, or at least not happen for as long as it had been going on.
With the flick of his eyes, Hans checked the chronometer in his set. The shells had been inching toward the “shack”—as they referred to the concrete building—for nearly ten minutes. Where was GD counterbattery fire to silence these impertinent dogs? Command said they had the trapped Americans on the ropes, ready to perform the coup de grace and finish it. The battalion’s single Spaniard would have said it differently: “The Americans were ready for the matador’s sword.”
The barbaric Spaniards actually went to bullfights these days where they killed the animals. It was grotesque. Yet what could one expect from someone from that part of Europe?
Hans sat back in his chair and turned his head sharply. Neck bones popped. He rotated his sore shoulders, attempting to loosen them. It was incredible the number of hours a day Command had been demanding from them, week after week.
He sat with others of the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Drone Battalion. They had set up shop here several days ago, with a set for every operator. Twenty-four personnel hovered over twenty-four blue-glowing sets. Like Hans, each operator wore a headset with microphone, stared into his or her screen and minutely twitched manipulation gloves.
The set was Hans’s station, and he’d divided the screen into four equal quadrants, showing him four different camera angles from his panzer-grenadier Sigrid drone. One showed a flickering streetlight, as if couldn’t decide whether to keep working or not. His vehicle carried a 12.7mm tri-barrel heavy machine gun. The three barrels worked like a Gatling gun, helping to dissipate heat from prolonged fire as they shot in fast rotation. Since the ammunition was 12.7mm, it was slightly larger than a .50 caliber American bullet. That meant in a pinch the Sigrid could use captured US ammunition, but the Americans couldn’t fit a 12.7mm bullet into a .50 caliber machine gun. It was a good idea stolen from the old Soviets of the last century.
The box-shaped, armored vehicle was the size of a two-seat electric car, but had treads instead of wheels and had the one heavy machine gun mount. It was electric powered and therefore of limited endurance. The Sigrid had to come home after every engagement in order to reenergize and so the techs could reload it. Most of the guts held ammo for sustained fire.
Hans ran Sigrid Drone #72. Tonight, his company would join an AI Kaiser HK. They would supply the hunter-killer with backup and take care of any annoying infantrymen who tried to slither near the wonder weapon.
The battalion’s commanding lieutenant colonel stood up, and he blew a whistle. It was an old-fashioned silver whistle of Prussian design. No one else did things like that anymore, but no one cared to tell the lieutenant colonel that.
The commander was short, running to fat and was almost bald, but he wore a crisp uniform and his eyes flashed with authority. Anyone in the 10th who had ever failed in a procedure or brought shame to the battalion knew about his wrath. The lieutenant colonel was intent and he had run enough drills so every operator knew his duty to a nicety. The old man also made sure they switched the encryption codes every three hours. That was the great fear among Drone Command. That somehow the primitive Americans might break the encryptions, gain the right frequencies and take over the automated machinery.
Americans defeat German tech? Hans asked himself. I don’t think so.
“I have just spoken with division,” the lieutenant colonel said. “They have confirmed the rumor. The Americans are mounting a full-scale attack. It seems inconceivable for them to attempt such a thing now, as it is doomed to failure, but…” The lieutenant colonel scanned around the room.
For a moment, Hans felt the man’s stare. He quickly looked down. He’d never had a father, uncle or even a grandfather growing up. There had been no father figure of any type for him. Is that why the battalion commander unnerved him?
“The Americans have animal courage,” the officer was saying. “Luckily for us, they do not have the weapons or the GD mentality to properly employ what they do have. Still, we will take the attack seriously, and we will use it to kill as many enemy soldiers as we can.”
Finally, the lieutenant colonel quit staring at him. Hans took the opportunity to slide long hands out of his manipulation gloves. He put his fingers together and cracked them sharply.
Hans was twenty-five, born and raised in Munich and tall at six-three. He was also as thin as a pole. Hans had aptitude as a drone controller, as he’d spent most of his youth playing video games. For a little while, he’d had one girlfriend. The other times he had spent hard-earned euros at the government brothels. His favorite girls had been Turkish, and that for good reason. In his youth, Turkish gangbangers had caught him several times and given him a good thrashing. He hated Turks because of it. So every time Hans used a Turkish prostitute, he imagined it was one of those boys’ sisters. Later, at night while lying in bed, he’d liked to think about what he’d tell the thugs of his neighborhood. “I used your sister, Kemal. She was good, sucking me off like a pro. She must have done you at home a lot, huh?”
The Turkish bullies would have gone crazy at his words and pulled out their knives. They were into that, and Hans hated knives. A thug had held a blade under his nose once. He’d been sixteen at the time and three other Turks had watched the interplay, laughing at him. It had taken all of his bodily control that night to keep from urinating in fear.
He’d never forgotten the incident or the smell of knife oil. Sometimes, when his Sigrid’s heavy machine gun obliterated Americans, he imagined they were the knife-wielding Turks of his youth.
Bavaria was so much nicer, cleaner and civilized without all those Turks and other foreigners living there. Hans approved of Chancellor Kleist and he wholeheartedly agreed with the slogan and motto of Bavaria for Bavarians and Normandy for Normans. Let the Turks stay in Turkey. It was big enough. If they quit having so many children all the time, maybe the Turks could feed everyone in their country.
Shoving his hands back into the manipulation gloves, Hans knew that he would never have kids. Women used children as a money trap. The courts backed up the women, too. No, no, he’d seen to it that he’d never fall for the money trap. He’d had a vasectomy long ago and he firmly believed in paying for sex instead of trying to build a so-called relationship. It wasn’t that he needed to pay to get the release with a woman, but by paying for sexual services, he could leave
the woman afterward and not have to worry about offending her.
Offended women…Hans shook his head ruefully. Freda had almost trapped him four years ago. She’d gotten pregnant, but he had used all his cunning and sweet talk, promising her the world if she would just get an abortion. They could have children later. She could see that, right.
Hans was still a little ashamed of his behavior that day… But what was a man who loved his free time supposed to do? He’d brought Freda to the clinic, helped her fill out the forms and watched her go through the door to the operating room. He well remembered the door closing behind her. He’d exhaled all the air left in his lungs. Before he could think about it too much, and knowing he would miss Freda—no one could give backrubs like her—he’d turned around and walked out of the clinic.
She’d phoned him afterward, but he’d never answered. Later, Freda had tried to take him to court for abandonment. His lawyer had talked to her lawyer and they had agreed on a one-time lump sum payment. He’d taken a loan because of that lump sum. It was bigger than he would have liked, but the alternative—marriage—he’d paid the money to finish the drama. That was the main reason he’d joined the military. He was still in debt, but working toward paying it off. The other reason for joining was to get enough to eat. Most of the world was hungry these days. He might be as thin as a pole, but he ate more than anyone else in the battalion.
The silver whistle blasted again. The noise startled Hans with its high pitch. It hurt his ears. He hated the thing. The noise climbed higher before abruptly quitting, and the lieutenant colonel shouted, “Keep focused! They are poorly armed and their tactics are antiquated, but these Americans don’t know when to quit.”
Hans silently agreed to that. Therefore, he shoved aside his thought of Freda, shoved aside thoughts of Turkish prostitutes and debt. He focused. He knew how to focus on video games: mastering a Sigrid drone had been fun.
Switching to sound, Hans’s mouth twisted with joy and his eyes shined with delight. The noises came from around Sigrid #72 in the battle zone. The reverberations poured through his headphones and into his ears. As he listened to the booms, the tread squeals and ricocheting bullets, he watched the four screens, with his pupils darting from image to image. Beside the screen was a radar display, giving him a larger game picture about what was going on around his vehicle.
Invasion: New York (Invasion America) Page 11
