by Mack Maloney
“As you know, we spent the entire winter planning for this campaign,” Jones told them. “We agreed that the only way we’ll be able to accomplish our objective is to play it smart. Up to now The Circle has been the one always on the attack. They’re an offensive-minded army. Now, we’ve got to trick them into playing defense, something they don’t do very well.
“But this doesn’t mean we ignore the fundamental strategies of war. It gets back to that perfect football game. If the offense and defense exactly complement each other, no one is going anywhere. We have to wait to build up our forces.”
A silence descended upon the room. Jones knew they were all anxious to take their measure of the Circle Army. But there was one more reason that demanded they move cautiously.
“We have to remember another thing,” Jones continued. “The enemy is holding nearly ten thousand POWs, both military and civilian, inside Football City. We have to consider these people as hostages. We have good reason to believe that if we attacked The Circle now, they would start slaughtering those prisoners. And I won’t allow that to happen …”
Yet the Texan persisted.
“But General,” he said in a thick drawl. “Taking Football City is just one of many things we have to do, if we are going to solve our larger … problem.”
Even the feisty Texan couldn’t bring himself to say it. Yet everyone in the room knew what he was talking about.
“The Problem” was that the Westerners had information that a large invasion force was being put together in Scandinavia by the Soviets. Once assembled, this force—which was made up of terrorist armies and mercenary forces—was to be put on ships and sent to invade the east coast of the American continent, linking up with the weakened Circle Army and cementing the Soviet hold on the eastern half of America. Thus the overall and very ambitious goal of the Western Forces was to gain control of certain key cities and strategic positions in the east, thereby hoping that the invaders-for-hire would reconsider before attempting a landing.
It was a desperate campaign for the Westerners, one that already had all the earmarks of a noble failure. Yet Jones knew that did not deter anyone sitting in the Planning Room.
They are brave Americans, one and all, he thought.
“True, we cannot solve the Big Problem until we deal with a host of smaller ones,” Jones said. “But we also cannot let ourselves become over-anxious. Our overall war plan is risky as it is. We can’t let our impatience hinder it.
“So we will continue our present strategy of siege against Football City. That includes our daily surgical air strikes and our regular shelling. Only when the rest of our reserves come in from the west coast and our further ‘volunteers’ from Free Canada arrive, will we start planning an all-out attack on Football City.”
“And when will that be?” the Texan asked.
“Possibly another month,” Jones answered. “In the meantime we are working on things inside the city. There is a small but effective underground that is helping us. As you all know, we also have a large group of fifth columnists working within the city even now as we speak.”
The big Texan shook his head.
“But what good are these people doing, working inside?” he asked. “You said it yourself, General. The only way is to hit The Circle head-on. Attack ’em. Bomb the living crap out of them. Open up all our big guns, then go in. Invade the city and get it the hell over with …”
Jones tried to stay calm, but he was quickly losing patience with the man.
“I said we have to stay smart,” Jones replied sternly. “And I repeat that we have ten thousand prisoners being held inside that city. Those people will be massacred if we act harshly.”
The Texan was up on his feet. “But by that line of reasoning, they’re going to get killed no matter when we invade, so I say do it now!”
Once again, Jones took a deep breath and fought the temptation to lash out at the man. The Texans were good friends and superior soldiers. He didn’t want to open up a rift with them now.
“My hope is,” the small wiry general said in measured tones, “that by the time the rest of our troops arrive, our efforts inside the city will force the crackpot in charge of the Circle garrison there to see the light. Who knows? He may even pull out of the city altogether …”
“But that’s no better for us,” The Texan shouted. “If we don’t fight them here, we’ll have to fight them somewhere along the way to the east coast.”
That was it—the breaking point for Jones. “Don’t you think I know that?” he angrily shouted back at the man. “But there are brave men of ours risking their lives right now in that city, while we sit back here and discuss the finer points of warfare. They’re doing everything from organizing the underground to directing our air strikes …
“We have to give these men time. Time to reconnoiter and identify strong points we’ll have to destroy when we do invade. Time to come up with an escape route for the POWs when we do attack. These things are important to our larger goal. We just cannot risk being hasty at this very important juncture.”
The Texan fell silent. A murmur went around the room. The majority of those assembled knew that these were tough decisions and that the burden of making them fell entirely on the shoulders of General Dave Jones.
But for his part, Jones just hoped that his fifth columnists were still alive and safe within the city …
CHAPTER 2
THE TWO A-4 SKYHAWKS roared in without warning …
They passed low over the downtown section of Football City, their engines unleashing an unearthly scream, which shook buildings and people alike. The sun had just set and the devil-may-care activity of the city was just starting to warm up. But now the bright lights and music of the gambling casinos and whorehouses were replaced by an immediate blackout and the wail of air raid sirens.
A scattering of anti-aircraft fire followed the A-4s as they pulled up and turned east, away from the heart of downtown. Major Tomm, the man in charge of the Circle’s AA battalion, watched the two jets from the top of the circle headquarters, the former Federal Building just blocks from downtown.
“Goddamn Skyhawks are loaded with ECM,” he cursed to his lieutenant as they watched two SA-7 surface-to-air missiles rise up from the city limits only to careen away from the streaking jets and fall harmlessly into the Mississippi. “It’s like those bastards know where every one of our SAMs is located.”
He would never know just how close he was to the truth …
Tomm put his NightScope spyglasses back up to his eyes and zeroed in on the lead Skyhawk. Underneath its belly he could see a single bomb—a laser-guided AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile. On the front of the airplane was the unmistakable nub of a AAS-35 laser tracking pod, the electronic brains which would direct the Maverick to its target.
As Tomm watched, the first Skyhawk banked, then roared in on a gasoline truck farm down near the river dock works. When the airplane was about a mile away from the target, he saw a puff of smoke spit out from under its fuselage. The Maverick had launched.
“Damn, he’s got a lock on the gas trucks,” he said.
The missile uncannily went through a set of gyrations before finally slamming into the first of six gas trucks parked in a line. All the while AA fire and SAMs were being launched at the attackers, but to utterly no effect.
The gasoline trucks exploded in a frenzy of blue and green flames. Then the second Skyhawk swooped in, and mimicking its flight leader, unleashed another precision-guided Maverick, which impacted on the control house for the truck farm.
“Jesus, another direct hit!” Tomm’s lieutenant cried out in dismay. “How the hell do these guys always hit their targets? I know they’re good, but no one is that fucking good!”
“They are if they’ve got a laser target designator working somewhere in the city,” Tomm said in disgust. He knew the enemy’s Maverick strikes were so accurate because the missile was capable of following a laser beam being bounced off the pr
escribed target. This meant the pilots were getting inside help—someone within Football City, probably atop one of its highest buildings, was shooting the laser beam at the targets, allowing the Mavericks to home in exactly every time. The Circle Army had been searching for the “trigger man” for weeks, but whoever it was, was simply too smart for them and had evaded capture every time.
“Just one more of our problems …” Tomm said to his subordinate as the Skyhawks streaked off to the west and disappeared unscathed over the horizon.
CHAPTER 3
NAVY LIEUTENANT STAN YASTREWSKI—known as “Yaz” to his friends—stopped shoveling just long enough to clean the dirt out of his bleeding hand calluses.
His back was aching and he was filthy from head to toe. His neck was stiff, he was thirsty and the last thing he had had to eat was a small bowl of soup the night before. Now, his hands were bleeding so badly the shovel was sticking to his fingers.
Suddenly, a Circle Army guard came up behind him and poked his ribs with the barrel of his AK-47 assault rifle.
“Get back to work,” the soldier told him gruffly, jabbing him again with the snout of the Soviet-made weapon.
How the hell did I get here? Yaz asked himself for the umpteenth time. In an instant he replayed the series of rather incredible events that took him from a hospital on the Mediterranean island of Malta to digging in the goddamn “Hole” in the middle of Football City. Shit, the last time he had been in the states, this place was called St. Louis.
During the first battles of World War III, Yaz was an officer aboard the U.S. nuclear submarine, USS Albany. The boat went down off Ireland, but many of the hands were able to make it to shore. Eventually, he and some of the survivors got organized and went over to Britain after the war cooled down, finding work as technicians. Later on, they moved to Algiers where they were hired by some British RAF officers to help tow an aircraft carrier across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal in order to thwart an attempt by the infamous world terrorist Viktor to invade the area and revive the World War.
The valiant adventure succeeded in delaying Viktor’s armies at the Suez chokepoint long enough for the European democratic forces, known as the Modern Knights, to engage and destroy most of the enemy force. In the course of the early fighting, the carrier was sunk and Yaz, blown off its deck in an explosion, was later found by friendly forces and eventually taken to Malta where he spent three months recovering from his wounds.
Mixed up in all this was an American fighter pilot named Hawk Hunter. He was well-known, both in America and around the globe, as being the best fighter pilot in the post-war world. He had been convinced by the Brits to coordinate air operations off the carrier and he had led the air battle in the canal until taking off in pursuit of Viktor. While recovering in Malta, Yaz heard that Hunter had caught up with the super-terrorist shortly after the battle in the canal and that the terrorist wound up dead. Exactly what happened to Hunter was unclear. Many people in the Med claimed that he too was killed along with Viktor. Others said Hunter had returned to America, where it was rumored that another great war was brewing between the democratic Western Forces and the Soviet-backed Circle Army of the east.
Those rumors proved correct—much to Yaz’s dismay…
As soon as he recovered from his wounds, Yaz caught a flight from Malta to the near-abandoned airport at Casablanca. From there, he was given a seat on a free-lance Swedish C-130 gunship that was flying to America to look for work. But the gunship was jumped by MiGs near the coast of Cuba, and crash-landed off the beach at Guantanamo Bay. Captured by the communist Cubans, Yaz spent some time in jail and then was sold as a slave laborer to the Circle Army, who now had a tenuous hold on Football City.
It was a long, crazy story, unbelievable to him even though he had lived it. Ever since the end of the Big War, Yaz had dreamed of returning to America. Now that he was here, he longed for the hot, smelly days of Algiers …
Now he was part of a work crew—some 2000 strong—that was digging The Hole. Nearby were the handful of bridges that had all but been destroyed in a massive war between Football City and the Soviet-backed Family Army, out of New Chicago. These spans had suddenly become very important to the Circle troops occupying the city and their engineers were in the process of rebuilding most of them. Some said the Circle wanted the bridges rebuilt in order to reenforce the city against attack from the Western Forces to the west. Others said the Circle needed the bridges intact so as to insure their own escape route out of the city.
As for “The Hole,” no one had yet explained to the prisoners why they were digging it. In fact, it wasn’t a hole at all. It was more like a cave, with a large wooden door at one end. But it had become more than their home—it was their universe. They worked in The Hole during the day and slept there at night. The Circle guards simply locked them in every sunset and opened it up at sunrise for another full day of endless digging. All the while the cave got bigger. But at quite a cost. Many of the POWs were ill and every night a few would die, exhausted from the 16 hours of hard labor. It all seemed so futile, pointless and useless. What was even odder, Yaz had heard that The Circle was making four other POW groups dig similar holes around the city.
The Circle soldier shoved him once again, and Yaz had no choice but to resume digging.
His line of about two hundred slave laborers, chained at the feet, stretched out of the tunnel and up to the huge wooden door. The soldier routinely walked along poking every third or fourth man in the ribs. It was only about nine in the morning, yet Yaz and the others had been at it for three hours already. There had been no breakfast, no water.
Just then Yaz heard a commotion down the line a way. The guard had grabbed one of the laborers by the scruff of his neck and was questioning him intensely.
“Where the hell did you get this?” the soldier shouted at the man, poking him in his stomach with the butt of his AK-47.
“I found it, over there,” the prisoner answered, terrified. “I was just going to use it … to sleep on.”
The object in contention was a simple, uninflated inner tube.
Three more guards showed up. “Show me where you found it,” the soldier ordered the man.
As the rest of the work gang watched, the prisoner was unhooked from his chains and led the guards to a spot off to the side of the huge cavern.
“In there,” the man said, pointing to a hole in the dirt floor. “There’s a bunch of them.”
One of the guards jumped into the cavity and soon was passing up dozens of neatly-folded inner tubes.
The first guard inspected several of the tubes. “Where the hell could these have come from?” he asked.
“Left over from before the war I guess,” one of his companions answered. “But the captain will go apeshit if he knew these scumheads were using them to sleep on.”
The last of the tubes were recovered. “Take them all up to the end of the tunnel and burn them,” the first guard said.
His companions did as told and Yaz went back to his shoveling. Compared to the dirty blanket he now slept on, he thought sleeping on an inflated inner tube would be like heaven …
Several hours passed, when Yaz felt another poke in his ribs.
“You … Go up to the entrance way,” the guard told him. “Help the others carry down the chow.”
“Yah, sir, massah …” Yaz said under his breath as the man unhooked his leg irons. Actually, he was thankful for the opportunity to get away from the monotonous shoveling, even for a short while.
He slowly made his way past the work gang and up to the front end of The Hole. Ten other laborers were waiting there.
“Ah, fresh oxygen …” he whispered as he breathed in his first taste of outside air in two weeks. The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot. A quarter mile away was the Mississippi and even its muddy water looked inviting.
An old Ryder Rent-A-Truck pulled up to the mouth of the tunnel and two men, both of them wearing sunglasses and white coveralls, got out.
They were POW trusties, prisoners allowed to perform more than menial tasks.
“You guys here for the food?” one asked.
Yaz and the others nodded. They went around to the side of the vehicle, opened its folding door to reveal ten pots filled with steaming soup. The drivers climbed up into the truck.
But the pots were hot and they needed help.
“Climb up here and give us a hand,” one of the drivers told Yaz.
He climbed up into the truck and the three of them grabbed the first steaming pot and painfully lowered it to the ground.
“This is ridiculous,” one trusty said. “We need a winch.”
The second and third pots were worse.
Just then Yaz spotted a crowbar at the back of the truck sitting on top of a pile of cardboard boxes.
“Here, use this,” he said, walking to retrieve the tool. But as he did so, he noticed that the top of one of the cardboard boxes was open. He glanced inside.
It was filled with neatly-folded inner tubes …
Suddenly, one of the drivers came up from behind and had his hands around Yaz’s throat.
“That was a big mistake, mister,” the man said. “You just looked somewhere you shouldn’t have …”
Yaz was just about gagging from the man’s stranglehold. The driver spun him around, and for the first time, Yaz got a good look at the other trusty without his sunglasses.
Oddly, the man looked familiar …
“I … know … you,” Yaz was able to say, his words a gurgle.
The man stared at him, as if he’d seen Yaz before, too.
“Let him go,” he told his partner.
