Dux Bellorum (Future History of America Book 3) (70 page)

"That's right, most of the people in there are probably going to panic and make a break for freedom. Doing that," Ted said drawing his finger from the camp west toward Ticonderoga itself, "is going to put them in the line of fire between all the guards shooting out and all of us shooting in."
 
He moved his finger to a new position on the map.
 

"I found a nice secluded spot just over this rise here," he said circling a small knoll next to the tourist parking lot. "Lucy's going to be set up with all of her supplies and plenty of helpers from town right here. When all this goes down, once we clear the fort, she and her squad are going to move in and set up a triage station."

"I don't see any way for this to play out without innocent people getting killed," Brin said sadly. "This is going to be horrible."

Ted grunted. "This Spike character's pretty smart. Nobody ever sees him leave the fort. He's not going to be drawn out. If they close that main gate we're not going to be able to launch a frontal assault."

Erik nodded.
 
"Jeffrey said they leave the gates open during the day and close them at night to block off the people in the Shanty Town. I bet there's more than one who would love to slip inside and shank these bastards in the middle the night. Even the guards have to sleep at some point."

Ted frowned again.
 
"Well, unfortunately, we don't have the numbers or the skill to tackle this place in a night op—which is ideally what we should do. It's just too risky."

"This is our only option," agreed Dan.

"That's leaves the sailboat," said Erik, tapping the dock on the map. "They don't have a regular schedule according to Jeffrey. If it's here, it will be tied up at the dock on the edge of Shanty Town. From what he says, at least one guard is always on board to make sure no one tries to steal it. We know they use this thing to sail across the lake on raids so we have to assume he's probably armed—”

"I'll take care of the boat," said Brin.

Erik stared at her for a moment. "I'm not comfortable with that at all," he said. "What if there's more than one, what if they're
all
armed, what if—”

"I'm not comfortable with you strolling straight into the heart of this place with gun at your back. You're going to be completely surrounded. I might have to deal with one or two."
 
She shrugged.
 
"Maybe none."

"She's got a point," said Ted.

Erik frowned at his wife and then turned his angry stare on Ted. "You're not helping."

"All of us are going to be at risk," added Maggie.

Erik glanced over at Maggie. She looked older than she had just a few days ago. She'd always looked old to him—Erik remembered that silver hair from when he was a kid—but he'd never seen the strength in her before today. She was the walking picture of determination.

"I've seen too much death, too much destruction, too much evil brought to my town at the hands of these animals. It needs to end.
Now
."

"Any questions?" asked Ted. He stared down at the map. "This thing is pretty accurate, so take a good look at the positions and memorize the layout of the interior. You snipers, when you've expended your ammunition work your way down toward the fort and either help with the wounded, or pick up any discarded weapons you find and come in after us. We're going to need all the help we can get."

Erik looked at Ted again as the others poured over the maps quietly discussing strategy.
 

"You sure this will work?"

Ted stared down at the map. "It has to."

Chapter 75

The Walk

E
RIK
FORCED
HIMSELF
TO
ignore the torn, filthy tents and the emaciated people occupying Shanty Town. His eyes wandered over the tops of expedient shelters to the massive stone fortress that dominated the landscape. The Colonel muttered along behind Erik with his pistol loosely bumping his spine, most of the people who inhabited Shanty Town were off doing work for Spike.
 

During the day, they'd either rummage through whatever houses they found nearby or prepared rations and packs for the raiding parties sent out to neighboring communities. The Colonel explained the most lucrative prizes were across the lake—Spike was obsessed with the
nouveau riche
mansions. For the most part, explained the Colonel as they trudged through the filthy, cramped streets—if you could call them that—the people on the Vermont side had vanished.

The Colonel had heard rumors from others that he'd provided shelter and food to during escape attempts that Spike had lost more than a couple raiders to people defending their property.

Erik knew the Colonel was living proof of that—when Spike and his raiders had come and destroyed his own house and killed his parents, he left at least four men behind. The mere thought of what his parents had gone through and the destruction of their house and belongings erased any fear he had about the bold plan to stroll into the fort.
 
He would cut the heart out of Spike's operation.
 

Erik walked calmly, his shoulders squared, his eyes moving as Ted had warned him, always on the lookout for anything suspicious enough to abort the mission.
 
Dirty, sweat-smeared faces stared at him with empty, uninterested eyes.
 
People—walking skeletons, really—dressed in rags of what could've been clothes at one point stared out from inside the darkened interiors of ramshackle huts or ragged tents, snapping in the stiff breeze off the lake.
 

Every step Erik took deeper into Shanty Town made him angrier. He clenched and released his fists over and over again. He'd have given anything to have his sword with him when he met Spike.
 

The closer they came to the gate, the more Erik was shocked no one had yet to raise an alarm. That could be good or bad—if the guards were that sloppy, then the entire attack might go exactly as Ted planned. On the other hand, if the guards were distracted by something going on
inside
the fort, they might be more difficult to bring to the walls and harder to pick off at long range. Or they might just be used to having prisoners arrive—either possibility was bad.
 
Erik needed to make a grand entrance for their plan to work.

The Colonel received a few weak nods and halfhearted greetings as he walked Erik to the gate. Most of the surrounding people looked bored and a few downright hostile. Erik had lost a lot of weight since the collapse—no one had eaten regularly or as well as they had when the power was on—but compared to the poor souls that inhabited Shanty Town, Erik looked like he'd been eating like a king.
 

Thin tendrils of foul-smelling smoke drifted up through the hole in the top of a wooden shack that looked like it belonged in a civil war documentary. The whole thing had been cobbled together with random boards and planks stolen from God knew where.
 
It would never survive an Upstate winter.

Standing at 6'4" with his red hair, Erik was used to sticking out in a crowd.
 
As he looked around him though, this was different.
 
He almost felt like a different species.
 
The filth-covered, emaciated husks that once were called people stared at him or even looked down, refusing to meet his eyes.
 

They're afraid.
 
They've lost hope.

He looked around, desperate to spot the sailboat. It wasn't anywhere to be seen. Part of him relaxed. After all, Brin would have nothing to deal with. The sailboat wasn't there. Spike must have sent one of his raiding parties off across the lake again.
 
He knew Brin would fall back to Lucy's position now and provide security for improvised medical Corps.
 
He closed his eyes in relief.

Another thought occurred to him: if the sailboat wasn't here, then at least one or two of Spike's men were out and about.
 
If the attack went as planned, they'd still have some mopping up to do or they'd never be safe.

The Colonel had already walked him across the parking lot and through the outer edges of Shanty Town, passing underneath one of the five points of the star-shaped fortress before a sentry finally called out.
 

"Fresh meat comin' in!"

As Erik walked, he kept his eyes forward, surreptitiously glancing up at the fort's walls. Just as he suspected, two guards stood above the main gate. Another guard lounged on the southwest corner and watched with a shotgun as he passed. A fourth appeared between the two guarding the gate and the corner guard.
 

Four guards, all armed.
 
Why the hell did I volunteer for this job?

Erik was shocked to find people he'd last seen in his youth wasted away to the point of walking skeletons. He tried to stop more than once to say something as someone recognized him. Every time he did, he felt the barrel of the Colonel's pistol digging into his back. Perhaps even a little more insistent than Erik would've liked, the Colonel urged him forward without pause.
 

Muttered warnings of "don't stop," and "keep moving," followed the prodding. Erik stumbled more than once on the assorted junk and debris people had left on the ground, including the bones of small animals, rags, and chunks of wood.
 

Down a little side alley just before the gate, Erik was shocked to see two bodies face down in the dirt. A cloud of black flies hovered over them, their buzzing loud from more than twenty feet away.
 

One was the body of an old man with stringy white hair, the other was a small child. Erik stared in disbelief that the people moved about with so little regard for the two corpses in their midst.
 
He had stopped to stare and only moved forward when the Colonel dug his pistol in Erik's back.

Erik’s blood ran cold at the sight of the child laying in the dirt, discarded and left to rot. He turned and looked up at the guards above the gate hooting down at him in derision.
 
All the doubt and fear that swirled through his mind during the long walk vanished.
 
He knew then why he'd volunteered.

These men need to die.

Chapter 76

Endgame

C
APTAIN
D
AVIS
WATCHED
THE
back of Admiral Nella's head as the newly promoted Vice Admiral stared at the digital world map inside the Pentagon's war room.
 
The promotion had come as a surprise to everyone—Congress had thought over Nella and Stapleton's plan and evidently approved.

Davis took his eyes off the three silver stars on Nella's epaulets and focused on the floor-to-ceiling screen again.
 
The Pacific theater had been highlighted and enlarged so China nearly filled the entire screen. Several possible targets along the eastern shore of the world's next superpower had been highlighted with slowly rotating red triangles.
 

"Can we confirm the information from General Stapleton yet?" Nella asked over his shoulder without taking his eyes off the screen.

Davis looked at tablet in his hands and scrolled through some hasty reports filed from local strategic commanders on the Pacific coast.
 

"Yes sir, the shipment manifest retrieved from the suspected terrorist killed outside Jacksonville meshes with satellite imagery of ships that left Ningbo and unloaded on the western coast of Mexico.
 
Those were the last images we had before the satellites were taken off-line."
 

Davis scrolled down to the first image in his slideshow. He tapped the screen, sorting through different menus trying to figure out which option would display the image up on the wall for the admiral and the rest of the flag officers. Frustrated, he turned to a lieutenant manning the console next to him.
 

"You have any idea how to get this picture displayed up there?"

"Yes, sir. Just tap this, then here, and here," the young man said handing the tablet back.

"Thank you," Davis said as the blurry, grainy satellite image from one of NASA's weather satellites, retasked during the initial days of the collapse, filled the main screen.

"What are we looking at here, Davis?" the admiral barked.

"That blur there on the left-hand side, sir, that's one of the ships named in the manifest. This was just after they made landfall in Mexico. According to documents the CIA provided—”

"You're welcome!" called out the liaison from Langley in the back of the room.
 

"—the ship was scheduled to unload emergency supplies for the Mexican nationals fleeing the United States."

Nella grunted. "That was a load of bullshit if I ever heard one. So what happened next?"

Davis scrolled down his tablet. He tapped keys in the order the lieutenant had showed him and successfully displayed the next grainy geosynchronous satellite picture.
 

"Sorry for the rough imagery, sirs," Davis said, nodding to the collection of senior officers. "When most of our fleet of military and surveillance satellites went down, the only thing we had left to use was aging weather satellites from the 1980s. In this image, you can see the same ship after two days at sea, station-keeping off the coast of southern California. That white blur at the top of the screen is the smoke from Los Angeles."

"Sneaky bastards were just waiting to link up with their ground forces," commented Gen. Ross.

Davis nodded. "It appears that way, sir. I'd say this is the confirmation you're looking for that clearly demonstrates China launched a preemptive strike against us."

Nella finally turned around, his hands still clasped behind his back. "Gentlemen, there can be no doubt now that China launched a preemptive strike against the United States in an attempt to wrest away control of California. I don't know about you, but in my mind, this constitutes an act of war."