that, he wiped sweat from his forehead. Why trade a life for a life if killing Kleist no longer mattered to the war, to the GD occupation?
Yet that wasn’t the only question. He had stepped onto the death path. From his understanding, one could not step off such a path. He had committed himself. He had used the power of the death path to reach this place. He had murdered innocent men. To walk away now was blasphemy. The power of the path would recoil upon him and he would die anyway, in dishonor.
Red Cloud became glum. He was a marked man. He had taken the curse of death on himself in order to kill one particular man.
His smart phone beeped.
With a fluid motion, he reached the phone. A text waited for him. It was three words long:
The moment had finally arrived. It caused his head to throb and his eyes to water. He rubbed them until they were clear. Then he read the text again. After he finished, he dropped the phone on the floor. The thing hit and the screen cracked. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. Nothing would ever matter again for him.
A feeling of cold calm swept over Red Cloud. Chancellor Kleist roared through Berlin in a motorcade. This time, Foch had discovered it in time. Kleist feared assassination. Therefore, he took extraordinary precautions to thwart attempts. He had dummy cars and many look-alike targets, and he seldom let anyone know the route he would take.
The Chancellor would be in the third car. Naturally, it was a heavily armored car. It had defenses.
Red Cloud shook his head. Nothing mattered but the execution of the plan. He must concentrate.
He went to the fifth story window and opened it. A cool breeze blew in. He picked up the RPG and readied it. Then he stepped to the window. He did not poke the RPG through the opening. He hung back. He didn’t want security personnel to see him too soon.
John rubbed his eyes as he waited. The backblast from the rocket propellant would likely start a fire in here. That didn’t matter either. No, nothing mattered now but the task. This was it. The German Dominion had insulted the Algonquian people. Retribution was finally at hand.
A helo waited nearby. John could hear the
A bleak smile twisted onto John’s lips. He would die. Yes. He would—
The smart phone beeped.
John gripped the RPG handles, bent his head and aimed down at the street. The first car of the motorcade appeared. He waited. The second came into view. Finally, the third and fourth came in quick succession. Usually, Kleist traveled with twelve cars.
The third car—John followed the car. As if the RPG was a shotgun and he hunted crows, he started from behind, swept over the vehicle and pulled the trigger.
The shaped-charge grenade leaped out, and the rocket roared to life. The missile flashed down at the street.
In the empty apartment, the backblast licked fire onto the wall. It ignited and began to crackle with fierce life.
Red Cloud threw the empty launching tube from him. He ignored the fire. Instead, he dragged the heavy machine gun into position.
On the street below an explosion blasted the front hood of the third car. It halted as others swerved and brakes screeched. One came to rest on the left side. Doors opened on the third car, but the new car blocked them from opening much. The car on the other side squealed its tires so smoke billowed. It shot away, allowing the right-side doors to open, which they most certainly did, as men and women boiled outside.
John pulled the trigger, and the 12.7mm machine gun began hosing bullets. He smiled widely. The bullets punched holes into the top of the third car. Kleist was tricky. He might be huddling in there, letting the others act as bait. But in case Kleist wasn’t that cagey, John aimed for the people scrambling out of the car. The heavy bullets tore into them so flesh and blood sprayed. The women weren’t Kleist…unless the Chancellor wore a disguise. Red Cloud shot them all. They tumbled onto the cement, and he kept firing into them, riddling their bodies, making them jerk and twist.
He heard the helo again, but Red Cloud never looked up at it. He didn’t care about it in the slightest. He concentrated on his task, working over the car one more time. He had to make sure that the trade, the bargain, succeeded.
Missiles whooshed nearby in the air.
John looked up now. Two missiles streaked straight at his window.
“I am an Algonquin,” he said. “I have avenged my people.”
The missiles entered the window, the empty room, and exploded, killing John Red Cloud and demolishing much of the fifth floor of Krupp Tower.
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.
“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
