Paul squeezed his grimy eyelids shut and lay his chest down against clenched fists. He wore body armor. It had dents, rents, dried gore and did little to warm him against the unseasonably chilly weather. The world was freezing to death, in the grip of a new glacial age. Farmlands dwindled everywhere, which was why soldiers from the Old World came to America: to steal food in order to feed their hungry masses back home. Paul didn’t need anything to eat at the moment. Instead, his throat was parched and his tongue felt bloated due to thirst.
“Do you hear that?” Romo shouted in his ear.
Paul opened his eyes, peering at his best friend and fellow LRSU member. Romo lay beside him amid rubble. The man was shorter than Paul and he was darker-skinned, with sharp features, a shaved scalp under his helmet and the eyes of a stone-cold killer. Even up here in Canada, the former hit man for Colonel Valdez of the Mexico Home Army wore an earring with an eagle feather dangling from it. They were an LRSU team: Long Range Surveillance Unit. They belonged to SOCOM, which ran American commandos: SEALs, Delta Force, Recon Marines and many others.
They weren’t doing any long-range reconnaissance today and they hadn’t done any yesterday or the day before that, either. They were trapped in the Toronto Pocket with everyone else.
“Can you hear it?” Romo shouted.
Something in Romo’s voice helped: a lifeline to sanity, to combat normality. Paul cocked his head, and he listened past the booms, the crashes, the screams, the hammering of 12.7mm machine guns and roaring tank cannons. He listened, and he heard the clank of an approaching GD hunter-killer. It was close—practically upon them.
Adrenaline fear pumped through Kavanagh. He shoved off the hard surface and found himself shouting at the top of his lungs. It reminded him of the first time he’d cliff-dived off a forty-foot rock at Knight’s Ferry in northern California as a kid. As he moved fast in a crouch toward an old TOW missile, he recalled that distant memory. It had happened over thirty years ago. He was forty-two now, a tallish Recon Marine with wide shoulders and slim hips.
He had stood way up there on a rock, looking down at the cold water far below. He’d sucked in his gut that day and puffed out his chest, and he had shouted like a madman and leapt off the rock as if he were Superman about to take flight. It had been a rush diving down, with his arms held out and his fingers clenched into fists. He remembered the water slamming his neck, and then he curled in the river.
The fear back then had focused his thoughts. The fear today did the same thing, even though his fear here in Toronto had much greater consequences backing it.
With Romo’s help, Paul heaved the big TOW tube into position onto a hunk of rubble. Why did the Canadians have such ancient battleware like this anyway? It had been old when he’d used it in Alaska back in 2032. He could have used a Javelin missile about now.
With a mental shrug, Paul readied the TOW and swiveled it. The GD Kaiser HK they’d both heard smashed through a corner of an office building. Bricks went flying, dust billowed and the metal monstrosity churned toward them. The thing was squat and shaped like an old WWII Sherman tank. The M4 had been much taller at nine feet. This AI-run panzer was barely seven feet tall but weighed sixty-eight tons compared to the Sherman’s thirty. In WWII, the American workhorse had boasted a crew of five. The Kaiser had none, just its computer intelligence. The Kaiser also bristled with weaponry, including a short-barreled 175mm cannon. It had 25mm autocannons, antipersonnel heavy machine guns, beehive flechette launchers and computer-speeded reflexes.
Paul estimated the distance at eighty meters. As he sighted the tank, he stopped breathing or he couldn’t. Before he pulled the trigger, half a platoon of ragged Canadians boiled up from hiding: from the ground, the nearest building and from behind rubble. They had plenty of small arms, blazing M16s, chugging grenade launchers and an old BAR. Two men clicked Javelin missile launchers. Another team had a recoilless rifle. The taller soldier slapped his kneeling partner on the back shoulder. Others used ancient RPGs, firing shaped-charge grenades from their shoulders. There were puffs of smoke, fiery exhausts and short flight paths. With that much firepower and short distance, and given the assault from the varying positions, it should have worked.
Unfortunately for them, the AI Kaiser HK was something new on the battlefield. Beehive flechette launchers belched tiny metal hooks in the tens of thousands. Every machine gun on the tank fired, each using a dedicated computer targeting “brain” to guide the weapon at swiftly prioritized enemy soldiers. The 25mm autocannons jerked minutely, and proximity-timed shells intercepted the launched Javelin missiles and—
Paul’s reflex caused him to pull his index finger. The TOW tube shook, launched the missile and it ignited several feet away from him. Both Paul and Romo ducked behind the masonry wall. Neither saw the perfectly aimed 25mm shell blow the TOW missile into smithereens. Both felt the blast and heard hot shrapnel crack overhead and gouge against their protective cover.
Renewed fear surged through Paul as if traveling through his blood. Every particle of his body felt it, and he reacted accordingly. He squeezed past Romo, pushing bits of gravel with his chest as he peered around a rat-high corner at the spectacle.
The Kaiser murdered the half-platoon of desperate Canadians. The tank’s heavy armor protected it from bullets and ordinary exploding grenades. The flechettes stopped the RPGs and shredded any exposed Canadian flesh. The autocannons annihilated everything else and the tank’s machine guns tore through body armor. Blood misted. Men made horrible sounds and those who survived the first ten seconds of mayhem turned and ran away. All of the running soldiers fell. The Kaiser shot most of those in the back, killing them. Two lucky soldiers tripped and thus saved their lives…for the several seconds it took the AI to assess and redirect its machine guns.
Paul caught all this in his brief look. Afterward, he pulled back like a turtle, faced Romo, giving his friend a searching stare.
Something unspoken passed between the two LRSU commandos. Paul saw unshaken resolve in Romo’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what his friend saw in his. Paul still felt debilitating fear, the kind that could empty a man’s bowels. He dreaded the Kaiser shredding him to death like that. He found it nauseating how a machine could slaughter men like this. The world he knew turned upside down and around, and it felt as if he was going to vomit and begin shaking uncontrollably and maybe start howling like a lost soul.
Then his Marine training took hold, and there was a spark deep in Paul that refused to shame himself in front of his friend. He also knew that Cheri, his wife, had begged him to make an oath before God to come home alive to her and Mikey. He’d sworn the oath, and he asked God every day to help him keep the vow so he could hold his wife again and help his boy grow up in a free America. There was something else, too: a stubborn sod in him that gave the finger to these German bastards and planned to stuff their arrogance down their throats and make them choke to death on it.
The manly part of him battled the fear in a nearly unconscious war of seconds. The terror of that tank, of the clanking treads, nearing, hammering machine guns and swiveling main turret, attempted to overwhelm him and turn him into a quivering mass.
Paul Kavanagh took a deep breath. The air tasted of gasoline, of burnt cinderblock, blood, burning human flesh that smelled like cooked pork, and gunpowder, waves of gunpowder stench. He drank down that air so it reached the deepest portions of his lungs and expanded his chest. Then he held it, held it, held it and exhaled in a long, slow process.
Why it helped, he didn’t know. Many years ago, a preacher had spoken about it concerning a man under torture. The martyr had said that when the fear bubbled and he debated denying his faith to save himself from further pain, then he would take a long deep breath. Doing that had settled his fear and let him endure another hour. Paul had never forgotten the story, and he realized now it was true.
After his long breath, he felt in charge of himself again. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Romo. He didn’t speak in panic, but in a cold voice that he’d used many times this past year.
“Si!” Romo shouted.
As the Kaiser clattered toward them, Paul crawled away. Romo crawled. They fled the dead zone, slithering over dust, twisted girders, blood, chunks of flesh, concrete and spent casings.
A cold drop of rain plunked onto Paul’s nose. Then he crawled through a large hole in a wall, the structure once a former Bank of Canada. He climbed to his feet, and while clutching his weapon, he sprinted through the eerie shadows. Following him, Romo crunched over wooden debris.
From where they’d been, a fantastic roar sounded and the scream of a 175mm shell smashed through the bank’s wall and exited another. Dust and pebble-sized chunks rained on their helmets and body armor.
“Now the tank’s shooting blind!” Romo shouted.
