his side.
“It’s coming here!” a soldier shouted. The man stood by a basement window, looking out at ground level. He turned to the others and shouted, “Run!”
The men forgot Zelazny this time, including the corporal, as they bolted out of the chamber. Something had them terrified. From his spot at the table, Zelazny blinked and his head pounded with pain. Then the loud and immediate sound of squealing tank treads brought the general around to reality. He looked around and spied weapons scattered about the room. Taking several wobbling lurches, he bent and picked up a Javelin missile. This was the wrong place to fire one, but he was going to die anyway, so he might as well hurt the enemy.
Gritting his teeth—that made his head worse—wrestling the thing upright, Zelazny staggered to the nearest window. This one was just a little higher than his head but showed the ground outside. He was in a Canadian basement.
Thirty feet to the side of his position, he saw a vast shape heading straight toward the building. A second later, the war machine crashed into the wall and explosively blew bricks into the basement. Then the tank stopped, with several feet of its treads and body hanging over open basement space. Zelazny staggered away from the window. Like a dinosaur the tank shoved a little more into the room. Zelazny tried to will the machine to clank forward even more and tumble into the basement. Instead of obeying his will, he saw something detach from the tank and fall. It clanged heavily onto the cement floor. The mine or bomb was metal and shaped like a barrel.
Zelazny dropped to his stomach, covering the Javelin launcher with his body. The barrel exploded, producing a violent concussion followed by roaring, crackling flames. Zelazny lifted and slammed against a basement wall. He grunted painfully. Then fire engulfed him. He shouted in panic, and he rolled and rolled. He put out the flames and he shoved up to his knees. Fires raged around him and an oily smell along with billowing black smoke nearly gagged him. The tank—it was a Leopard IV—began pulling away, and bricks rained down and clanged against its metal hide.
Zelazny worked on automatic, a lost soul in a basement inferno. Maybe he was no longer altogether sane. His face was black and his eyebrows were singed away. He set the Javelin launcher on his shoulder. Missiles such as this normally had a minimum aiming distance in order to protect the operator. These had been modified. He pulled the trigger. The missile hardly had time to pop out of the launcher and fly. It struck the side of the tank and exploded. The concussion blew the general backward, and he grunted as he struck a desk and saw flames sprouting between his legs.
He crawled away and slapped his legs. He had burn holes on his pants. Time spun around, soared and dived down into pain. The oily, billowing smoke filled the top of the basement and poured out of the tank-made hole. He crawled along the bottom and it hurt his chest to suck down air to breathe.
Silently, Zelazny repeated the saying to himself. He had begun his service long ago in Iraq and had fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah. He had dished it out there harder than he’d taken it. Why should he turn pansy now in Toronto?
Finding a gas mask, putting it on, finding the glasses were smudgy and making it harder to see, Zelazny tried to ignore the smoke and fire. He picked up a grenade launcher and staggered to the dead enemy tank. It had been a lucky strike, but he needed some more luck about now. He crawled over rubble as if it were stairs and slid to a position where he could look across the street. The smoke would hide him; he was sure.
Ah, look at that. A rare GD infantryman peered around a building.
Zelazny didn’t know it, but inside the gas mask, he grinned like Death. He readied the grenade launcher and waited. Suddenly, the GD infantryman sprinted for a new position. For these seconds, the soldier exposed himself. Several others followed the man. Zelazny fired two grenades—
A US machine gun poured fire from somewhere, and the GD infantryman died in a hail of bullets that shredded his body armor. Good, good, that was very good. Zelazny whooped with savage lust.
A Sigrid clattered around a corner and into view. Zelazny aimed and emptied the grenade launcher at the thing. The explosions were gratifying, but they had little effect. He released the weapon and slid down the rubble back into the basement. There had to be something around here—
“General!” the corporal shouted from a half-buried door. “You’re alive! Follow me. We have to go.”
Zelazny stood dump struck. “Kill the thing,” he finally muttered in his mask.
“You look terrible, sir. Let’s go. Come on!”
“Weapons,” Zelazny slurred. “We need weapons.”
It seemed impossible the corporal could hear him, but the young man answered. “We have plenty, but we don’t have many men left. Are you coming, sir?”
Zelazny vaguely realized that he was in no condition to make decisions. So he crawled under the smoke to the corporal and climbed to his feet. The young aide gave him a shoulder, and they retreated from the fiery basement.
They had survived another GD engagement in the shrinking pocket with its dwindling number of defenders. It was doubtful they would survive much longer.
Anna Chen felt the grimness of the hour and the importance of the meeting. How quickly things had changed from this winter. It had been the witching hour then, too, but these men had made key decisions that had turned the situation around.
Could they achieve such a miracle once again?
The President sat in his rocking chair, easing it back and forth. She sat behind and to his left, keeping notes. General Tom McGraw had taken a recliner on the opposite location as the President. Director Harold sat on one end of a long sofa, while the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs sat on the other end.
David welcomed the men, and they chitchatted for a few minutes. Soon, the President stopped rocking, and he outlined the reason for the meeting.
“General Zelazny’s command has held out longer than we thought he could in Toronto,” David said. “We still have intermittent contact with them. We know they’ve run out of space and have twice as many wounded as healthy soldiers. There isn’t any evacuation for anyone in Toronto.” The President paused. “It looks now as if the enemy has begun to mask the pocket and go around them. They’ve begin the drive again, moving up masses of tanks, drones and assault troops.”
The President glanced at each of them, even turning to glance at Anna. “If the Expeditionary Force blitzes to Detroit or smashes through Niagara Falls and Buffalo… Obviously, the war will have broken out into a wider and more threatening theater. It’s bad enough now, but given—”
“Mr. President,” Director Harold said. “I think we’ve finally come to our great impasse, the one we’ve all secretly been dreading.”
The President stared at the Director of Homeland Security, and he took his time answering.
Anna knew David didn’t like people interrupting him. But this time it seemed like it was more than that. She’d never told him what Max had said at Frobisher. She had begun to believe it had been a failed ploy on the director’s part…
“Do you mean a massed nuclear strike in Southern Ontario?” David finally asked.
“No, Mr. President,” Max said. “I mean surgical strikes with tactical nuclear weapons. We might even use some of them to create EMP blasts. I believe that would be a good way to shut down the GD drone operations.”
“The enemy antiair, antimissile umbrella is strong,” General Alan said. “It’s what has kept us from resupplying our forces in Toronto other than with token drops. The GD antimissile shield is much better than what even the Chinese had this winter.”
“One big nuclear missile, or several big missiles if that’s what it takes, can silence those with a giant EMP blast,” Max said. He opened up a briefcase and took out a thin folder, showing it to the others. “This is a tactical nuclear war plan and situational study of Southern Ontario. Mr. President, we need to do this and do it now.”
“You mean we should consider the option,” the President said.
Max seemed to gather his resolve as he dragged his tongue across his bottom lip. “I’m sorry, sir. I mean
