DODGE CITY, KANSAS
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.
“Let me explain it like this,” Stan Higgins said in “Professor” mode. “A specialized machine or weapon often costs less than a broad-based weapon. In the 1870s, the newly invented self-propelled torpedoes were married to fast steamboats as launching platforms. The battleships of the time were very expensive and the measure of a nation’s naval power. The battleships had long-barreled guns of large caliber that could not be depressed low enough to destroy the torpedo boats when they moved at night and came in at close range. At that time, the battleships mainly had armored the decks and superstructures. Below the waterline, they were exposed to the new torpedo.
“Many people then reached the ‘obvious’ conclusion. The day of the battleship had ended as the torpedo boats took over. A man named Jeune Ecole heavily influenced French naval policy in that regard. From 1877 to 1903, the French built 370 torpilleurs.”
Jake must have looked confused.
“That was the French name for the torpedo boats,” Stan said.
“Oh.”
“Now, the torpedo boats were effective against the old-style battleships,” Stan said. “But the very effectiveness caused those boats to reach their culminating point of success quickly.”
“What’s that mean in English?” Jake asked.
Stan grinned. “It means the old school navy people changed the way they built battleships. They put searchlights on the big ships to spot the torpedo boats at night, added smaller caliber, quick-firing guns to kill them and had sealed bilges built below the waterline to lessen the effectiveness of a torpedo’s hit. In harbor, they draped heavy steel nets over the side. They also created a new kind of warship, the ‘torpedo-boat destroyer’ or as it was soon known, a destroyer. In other words, they negated the torpedo boats’ strengths. Because they were such a narrow weapons system, their importance quickly dwindled. That meant those who had built too many torpedo boats at the expense of battleships lost out in the naval competition.”
Jake thought about that. Not for the first time, he wondered how his dad remembered all these arcane military facts.
Stan cleared his throat. “That’s what happened to the Sigrids, by the way. We found a way to jam the signal between the remote-controller and the drone. The small Sigrid became inert, and the cost-effective weapons system thereby because useless in too many instances. That helped us to turn the tide of battle our way.”
“Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” Jake said. He would have liked one of those jammers in the Niagara Peninsula. It had taken many dead Americans to buy their country time to figure out a way to defeat the little bastards.
Theirs boots crunched over gravel as they walked through an old streambed.
“So what happens now?” Jake asked.
“Concerning you?” Stan asked.
“We can start there.”
“Well, you’ve joined the tank corps, the Behemoths. For now anyway, even though the Detention people want you, they don’t have enough authority or firepower to come and get you. I’m still working on taking you officially out of their clutches. Until that happens, you have to lie as low as you can.”
“Okay,” Jake said. He’d been lying
low all right. And he always carried a gun. If the MPs came for him…he planned to shoot it out until he was dead or they were dead. He was never going to let the Detention people get hold of him again.
He noticed his dad eyeing him. “So what happens next in the war?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” Stan said. “That is the question. We’ve knocked out the Germans, or will soon finish them in Quebec. That means we won’t be fighting a two-front war next year. It will be a one-front war between us and the Pan-Asian Alliance.”
“They’re getting ready for it big time,” Jake said.
“I know they are, but so are we.”
“You’re saying it’s a showdown then,” Jake said.
Stan mulled that over. He looked at his son. He was so glad to have him back, to have him alive. He wanted to send him far away so no one could harm him. But his boy had become a man, a soldier, a veteran. His heart burst with pride over him.
“It’s going to be a showdown with the PAA and the South American Federation,” Stan said. “We’re going kick the Chinese out of our country and teach them why it was a bad idea to mess with the United States of America.”
“I want in on that one, Dad.”
“Me too,” said Stan. “This time, we’re going to finish it and mop the floor with their corpses.”
BERLIN, PRUSSIA
A door opened in a dank prison chamber. A naked man with many welts on his body lay cinched to a table. Several women with electric cattle prods readied to shock him and make him scream yet again.
A beefy guard glanced at former General Mansfeld on the torture rack. “They’re letting him go,” the guard told the women.
“What?” the chief torturer asked in a smoker’s raspy voice.
“The interim governor says the political captives are being freed.” Without another word, the beefy guard left, shutting the heavy door behind him.
One by one, the women turned off their cattle prods. The ranking torturer studied Mansfeld. They’d had him several weeks now. He looked awful, a shriveled wreck of a man.
Walther Mansfeld turned his head, and his eyes burned with something approaching madness as he stared at her. He even managed a chuckle.
The chief officer wasn’t sure why, but her spine tingled with an emotion similar to fear. Maybe she should finish this mad dog, just kill him.
Instead, she warned him. “Make sure you do nothing to return to us.”
The threat didn’t seem to penetrate. He stared at her with those strangely burning eyes. This man was no longer completely sane.
“Help him dress,” she told the others. “I’m going to the office to fill out the paperwork.”
She went to the door, looked back at him once more. Should she kill him? No. Why risk her career? Thus, she failed to use the world’s best chance to escape a hellish future.
The End
To the Reader: I hope you’ve enjoyed Invasion: New York. If you would like to see the story continue, I encourage you to write a review. Let me know how you feel and let others know what to expect.
Novels by Vaughn Heppner
INVASION AMERICA SERIES:
Invasion: Alaska
Invasion: California
Invasion: Colorado
Invasion: New York
DOOM STAR SERIES:
Star Soldier
Bio-Weapon
Battle Pod
Cyborg Assault
Planet Wrecker
Star Fortress
OTHER NOVELS:
Accelerated
The Kill
Strontium-90
Visit www.vaughnheppner.com for more information.
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
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