Overlord (47 page)

“There’s no cell phone service here, and now no phone either,” he said to Vickers, who was intent on watching the bartender’s eyes.

“Okay, I think we’re done here. By the way,” he said as he smiled, “these two men will be staying here with you.” He looked around the bar and grill. “To help out. It looks like you could use some assistance. We need to know when these new men from Tilly’s place show up, and we need you to point them out.” He smiled wider and then placed another hundred-dollar bill on the counter. “Sound good?”

The man just nodded once but didn’t reach for the bill.

Vickers winked at the man and then left the bar. The two men in black sat down and then without the same smile as Vickers displayed reached for a dirty and creased menu.

*   *   *

Hiram Vickers wasn’t pleased at the result of his interview. The two members of his Black Team had passed on the information that the rest of the town was deserted. The Texaco station was boarded up, and the hardware store had burned and, from the looks of it, had also fallen into the ground somehow. The ice cream parlor was likewise boarded and so were the rest of the small hovels that passed for houses in this godforsaken part of Arizona. Chato’s Crawl was a ghost town in the strictest sense of the word. He shook his head and walked toward the large Chevy Suburban, then climbed into the front seat.

“What’s the plan, Hiram?” the leader of the Black Team asked from the backseat, making Vickers’s first name sound like it was shit, only pronounced differently.

“The plan is we wait.” He turned his head and looked back at the brown-haired man behind him. “That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it, waiting?”

The man didn’t react to the question until he returned Vickers’s arrogant smile.

“Yes, that’s what we do, we’re patient, Hiram. Very patient.” The smile widened. “Until it’s time to stop being patient.”

Vickers turned back around and told the driver to park inside the garage at the Texaco station. He never realized it was the same location where Colonel Henri Farbeaux once waited with his men a long time before as they planned to enter the underground hell of the animal known as the Talkan—or as Matchstick had called it, the Destroyer.

“Well,” he said, “they’ll eventually show and Chato’s Crawl will be the place it all ends for this Matchstick Man.”

The dark blue Chevy drove straight to the station and vanished around the back, where the men in black would start their vigil and patiently wait for Hiram Vickers’s bargaining chip to come home.

BEIJING, CHINA

General Xiao Jung was a man who was most responsible for bringing their former leader to power. Since the incident at Camp David he had his plans for China’s commitment to Operation Overlord overruled by the new president, Dao Xatzin—a man who had been waiting to take power in the wake of the military’s bold move four years before when they ousted, rather forcibly, the man that stood in the way of China’s cooperation with the rest of the world. The power had not passed to Xatzin, but to the Western-leaning man who had died at Camp David. Now General Jung was at the mercy of the man who ordered China’s withdrawal from the agreements with the West.

As he watched from National People’s Park two miles from the city of Beijing, he knew that this improvised plan had a chance of failing spectacularly. Even with the secret communiqués from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Caulfield, advising the general on the intelligence that the new representative of President Xatzin had failed to pass on to the military. It was risky, but Jung thought if the attack could be coordinated correctly, they had maybe a 10 percent chance of saving Beijing.

In just the sixteen hours Jung had been observing, he had been fed intelligence from his forward units that over two and half million of China’s citizenry had been taken into the processing ship. As far as the air force could tell him the power-replenishing saucers had risen only once from Bohai Bay to regenerate the large saucer’s power shield. The plan would succeed or fail in that area alone. He must stop the processing craft from getting the needed power that prevented his military from regaining the capital. Thus far the new leader had been silent on the plan of attack, offering no guidance—as if he would not take the blame if the plan failed, but would gain the favor of the people if the general succeeded. Frankly thinking, Jung would rather have the politicos screaming at him for action rather than the silence coming from their hidden bunkers along the Yangtze River.

The roundup of Beijing’s citizens had deeply affected his army as they awaited the ground attack to commence. They had watched as screaming and pleading women and children were taken from their homes, streets, and other hiding places and dragged into the processing ship. The general’s mind screamed at him for action against this barbaric enemy that had shown no mercy for his people. The fate that awaited them once inside was one that any human being could not think about for very long before their spirits flagged in this desperate hour.

Jung placed his hands behind his back and looked out toward the sea. His navy was out there, waiting to spring their surprise on the ships hiding in the bay. The navy’s twenty attack submarines would be joined by the
Liaoning,
the first aircraft carrier in the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Its keel was originally laid down as the Admiral Kuznetsov–class multirole carrier
Riga,
for the Soviet navy. She had been purchased and refurbished and made China’s own by the People’s Republic shipyards.

The
Liaoning
waited twenty miles out to sea for any sign of the power-generation saucers that could escape the speedy and dangerous Type 093 Shang-class attack subs. Ten of these fast-attack boats, which looked amazingly like the older Los Angeles–class submarines of the U.S. Navy, would be assisted by five of the old Russian Akula-class boats and five of the Han-class subs as they would attempt to track down the three saucers before they could assist the larger processing craft in the heart of the city. The plan, code-named Operation Wrath, depended upon the navy to do their job and do it well. They were all expendable toward that goal, even General Jung himself.

As he turned and looked at the dark city before him, only the soft glow of the enemy shield cast any light on the dying capital. The surreal illumination was also a fear-inducing factor among the largest attacking force the People’s Republic had ever mounted. Over twenty thousand artillery pieces would be joined by an attack force of over five thousand Type 99A2 main battle tanks. These units would use their full complement of shells and special sabot rounds to weaken the shield and draw the energy-producing saucers from their hiding places. They would be assisted by a thousand long-range missiles fired from the five Shagshu-class missile cruisers a mile offshore. Add five thousand surface-to-surface missiles launched from hidden batteries in the outskirts of the city itself.

Jung looked at the forces poised inside the park and the surrounding suburbs of the capital. Over three million men would rush the shield if and when it went down. They would have orders not only to rescue as many of the citizenry as possible, but to avenge the millions that had already been butchered like cattle inside the cursed processing vehicle.

The general looked at his watch in the soft glow of the distant enemy shield. Two minutes until the air force started their attack runs. Bombers of the 10th People’s Air Wing would strike first with small battlefield nuclear bombs. One-megaton warheads code-named “The People’s Vengeance” would pummel the top of the shield in the hopes of draining the power of the enemy protection and craft and, with luck, maybe even destroy it. This plan was not the general’s but the commanders of the military advisory committee that sat safely beside the new leadership in their deep bunkers along the Yangtze.

“General, it is now 0230 hours. Shall I give the order to the orbiting bombers?” His aide also watched the quiet city two miles distant. He noticed the general had refused to wear the protective clothing provided to higher command officials. Jung would suffer the same fallout fate as his men. The aide silently and almost motionlessly laid his mask and plastic-lined protective gear aside, and waited on the man he and all the soldiers of his command respected beyond measure.

Jung just nodded his head as he faced away from Beijing.

The men could hear the engines of China’s latest miracle of aviation, the H-8 stealth bomber. The bat-winged craft was identical to the American B-2 and was just as deadly. The silence of the night was broken by two million men of the People’s Army taking cover as the loud warning sirens sounded from around the perimeter of the enemy shield.

A second warning sounded in a series of alternating blasts from the mobile communications vans that ringed the city. The general had to be pulled by his staff into the makeshift bunker near his command-and-control hut.

The dark skinned bombers streaked overhead from twenty thousand feet in altitude. Suddenly thick laser beams were projected onto the saucer from hidden places inside the smoldering debris outside Beijing. These laser-targeting guides were being cast by ten volunteers who had family inside the capital. Jung closed his eyes as he thought of the brave men who were sacrificing their lives.

The night became like day as the first one-megaton warhead detonated against the force field. Then three more struck the upper section of shielding. The scene became like an X-ray to those that braved the sight before them. The punishing winds tore through the city and the surrounding forces of the People’s Republic. The men inside the general’s sandbag-reinforced bunker felt the earth shake as three further detonations rocked the capital. Men all around Beijing fell when the impacts happened in rapid succession. The general heard screams of frightened men around him as he prayed to the unjust gods above that the enemy couldn’t withstand such an evil power as man’s nuclear arsenal.

The last of the nuclear smart bombs struck the direct center of the dome even before the heat had begun in earnest from the first three weapons. The cable of the shield cooked and melted but immediately started to regenerate before the heat started to dissipate. The two guarding saucers were immediately knocked down by the pressure wave that forced itself through the powerful shielding around the capital. The first hit the larger processing craft and then slammed into the surrounding buildings, while the second saucer was simultaneously smashed two miles distant from where it had been hovering. Then it impacted the shield, sliding down it like a bird caught in a net. It lay there smoking and melting. From the outside the men who braved a look saw the massive cables of the shield shake and vibrate and they momentarily thought that they would give fully. Instead, the blue glow increased, adding its own light to that of the nuclear detonations.

The night sky around Beijing looked as if the sun had exploded directly overhead. The noise was deafening as the explosive wave struck the surrounding troops. Armored vehicles rocked on their hardened springs and tanks bounced as if they were toys. Several thousand men were incinerated as they tried in vain to see the devastation and they vanished in a blinding wave of heat. The Grays were no better off. Spotters estimated that at least five or six thousand of the creatures had been caught in the open, along with several hundred of their walking automatons. At the same time it was reported that many hundreds of thousands of citizens were also killed from the 10,000° heat caused by the attack.

The general could not wait any longer. He rose from the plywood flooring of the bunker and raced outside, followed quickly by his entire staff. Jung threw up his arm as the heat wave continued to burst into the outskirts of Beijing. He turned his head and felt the hair on his head and arms crisp and fly away into the storm of wind and dirt.

Before the order was given, the three hundred JH-7 Flying Leopard fighter-bombers tore through the maelstrom of fire coming from the electronic shielding of the saucer. Without even the slightest estimation of the damage caused by the nuclear attack, the fighters released their loads of unguided bombs against the burning shield and city beneath. Strike after strike erupted on the smoldering upper dome. Ten thousand bombs fell from the night sky that was no longer dark. The attacking fighter-bombers were outlined by the glowing sky around them as the largest air assault in history continued.

The general raised his field glasses when he thought it was safe enough not to burn his pupils out from the amazing site before him. The city of Beijing was awash in a tremendous light that could never have been imagined and still the bombs fell from the sky.

“Get me intelligence from our forward spotters immediately. Is the shield holding?” he shouted as he tried in vain to penetrate the thick billowing smoke caused by the bomb impacts.

As a hard wind came in from the north, the answer was clear. The blue glow of the enemy protection was still alight with energy. The general saw the saucer that had slammed into the larger vehicle slowly rise from the rubble at its base and then start toward his waiting forces outside the capital. The large saucer was burning in several sections but was still there and still viable as it rocked and then settled once again. The streets had been sweeped clean of Grays, but also sadly many thousands of men, women, and children.

General Jung stilled himself against the failure of the attack and then lowered the glasses. The plan had to move forward through the disappointing failure.

“All commands, open fire!” he said angrily as he looked toward the target of Beijing.

In the next three seconds, twenty thousand artillery shells and five thousand sabot and high explosive tank rounds arched and streaked into the shield wall. It was as if a million fireflies struck the electronic dome at once and then kept alighting to the surface in an unyielding cacophony of sound and never-ending explosions. It was now a battle between the ancient gods of old as they struggled for supremacy.

The Chinese army was unleashing Earth’s version of hell against the invaders of their world.