Invasion: China (Invasion America) (Volume 5) (42 page)

M
ARINE TRAINING BASE, MONTANA

In the end, Paul Kavanagh decided he’d have to make a little excursion in his powered armor. The security here was intense, and they were a long way from anywhere out here in the sticks.

At chow that night, Paul
ate his meatloaf in silence, with Romo on his right and Sergeant Dan French on his left. Dan was a SEAL. Correction: had been one. Like the rest of them, he was a Marine now—a drop specialist—and part of their squad. Dan kept picking up and twisting the peppershaker, putting more on his meatloaf.

The cafeteria seated
a quarter of them at a time. They’d been making drops from lumbering transports, wearing an approximation of their gear. Another few weeks and they’d been ready for whatever plan the brass hats had thought up.

As Romo made to get up
with his empty tray, Paul cleared his throat. Romo didn’t glance at him. The assassin simply sat back down, pushing his tray toward the middle of the table. No one ate faster than Romo did, but he hated having plates near after he had finished. It wasn’t the strangest of quirks among men who had seen a lot of combat.

Sergeant
Dan looked up, and then he cut into his meatloaf, forking himself more. Soon enough, he muttered something, took his empty tray, and headed for the exit.

“I’m sick of this stuff,” Paul said.

With an easy twist of his head, Romo glanced at him. The dark eyes betrayed nothing, but they had been with each other for several years already. They’d gotten patterns down pat. Paul felt the assassin’s unspoken question.

“There are no girls here,” Romo
finally said. “That is a mistake, as we’re warriors.”

“Soldiers,” Paul said.
“We’re soldiers.”

“
No. We
act
like soldiers. I concede that much, but no more. We fight. We’re killers, you more than anyone else.”

“I’ve heard it said, but I have my doubts
about that.”

“I have no doubts
,” Romo said. “And I see others realizing the same truth. The general, he knows I’m right. That is why he tolerates your lack of respect. You have asked too many questions too many times. You do not obey when they most want you to submit.”

“
It’s a character flaw, I suppose.”

“I agree—
it is a gigantic flaw. Colonel Valdez could smell men like you. You made the colonel faint, your odor of rebelliousness was so powerful.”

Paul remembered Valdez all too well from Denver in ’39. The Mexican colonel had wanted him dead. He recalled their meetings. None of them had gone well.

“I don’t think that bastard ever fainted in his life,” Paul said.

“
Colonel Valdez will rule Mexico someday. You watch.”

That was something that
had surprised Paul, how Valdez had actually convinced the other Mexican generals to revolt against the Chinese. It turned out America had been right to coddle the psychopathic Napoleonic wannabe. Imagine that.

Pinching the end of his spoon with his thumb and forefinger, Paul lifted the scoop and tapped it against his tray.
“I’m taking a little ride tomorrow,” he said casually.

Romo just stared at him.

“I’ve been through Montana a time or two before this. Did some hunting in these parts. There’s a town…oh, I’d say about forty miles from here.”

“Our training range is huge
, vast. The general does not want anyone to know about us.” Romo shook his head. “Security might have moved the townspeople somewhere else.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you know this to be true?”

“No.”

“Then you should not risk angering the general.”

Dropping the spoon,
Paul leaned forward. “Cheri’s lonely. I feel it.” He tapped his heart. “The general isn’t being reasonable—”

“
Amigo, the Marines with the Orion ships are the great secret weapons. The general, the country, cannot take chances of having the enemy discovering them.”

“
No,” Paul said. “At this point, it doesn’t matter.”

“I know
, my friend. You should have stayed in the Recon Marines. They allowed you to do things your own way while out in the field, where you lived like a hermit most of the time. This is too tight an organization for someone like you. As I said, we are warriors. You are a warrior who pretends to be a soldier. Warriors must have women or they become angry. I’m very angry. So I will join you tomorrow evening.”

“We’re indispensable,” Paul said. “Even two weeks ago, and I’d say they’d try to replace us. But not now that our suits work
so well and they’re teaching us to use the flyers.”

“We
are the best, si.”

“
Our guys won’t shoot us down, even though I spotted antimissile batteries a week ago.”

“Where?” asked Romo.
“I have not seen these.”

“Do you remember when the general ordered me to turn back?
What was it, five days ago?”

“Yes. You jumped several miles
in the wrong direction. I remember quite well. You said you’d gotten lost, and I couldn’t believe the general accepted your lie.”

“
You’re right, I did it on purpose. I wanted to get a look, to see if they had any perimeter defenses. Our HUD sensors are good, better than I expected, and I picked up high-energy readings. Comparing it to Chinese weaponry specs we have in our files, I’d say those were tac-lasers.”

“You
are always thinking, amigo. I applaud you.”

“Even if there aren’t any girls in the town
for you to—”

“Hey,” Romo said.

Paul stopped talking.

“I am your blood-brother. I will join you, but do not ask anyone else. They are good men,
and some of them are warriors, too, but they like to obey the general too much. They would turn you in.”

“Yeah,” Paul said.
“I know.”

“I will go.”

“Got it.”

For several seconds, t
hey sat in silence. Finally, Romo said, “Yes.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. “Yes, what?” he asked

“You are welcome.”

A rare grin touched Paul’s
lips. “Thanks—amigo.”

“
De nada
.”

***

Stars blazed overhead as Paul strode in his battlesuit toward the squad’s lifter. Every step left crushed grass and a deep imprint in the soil.

A mile away began a large pine forest. The
squad practiced tonight in a glade near a small lake. Behind him, Romo followed in his powered armor.

The
squad practiced night maneuvers, using sensors to guide them through the dark. The only active weapons system was the fifty-caliber rifle. It was part of his right arm. He aimed it and a targeting computer showed him a dot on his HUD where he’d hit. He could subvocalize, “Fire,” and it would shoot, or he could press a forefinger pad in his glove if he’d activated it for that.

“Sergeant Kavanagh, you are out of position.”
The words crackled in the headphones that were part of the inner helmet.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Paul muttered under his breath.

“My diagnostic is showing me that your comm-equipment is in working order. What’s wrong, Sergeant?”

The trick for this little stunt had been finding and deactivating the kill-switch
in his battlesuit, the one that would let the monitor shut him down. He’d known there would be one, which was why he’d kept searching after a sane man would have quit. At the back of his inner helmet was a fingernail-thin shutdown unit with a little green wire in it—now a cut green wire.

“Ready?” Paul asked.

“Si,” Romo said.

“What are you doing, Sergeant Kavanagh?” the monitor asked.

Paul climbed aboard the open lifter. It had a guardrail around it and an upright control panel in the center. One problem with dropping Marines in the middle of the enemy was extraction after completing the mission. Even if they could maintain the Orion ships in orbit, they didn’t have boosters that could descend, land and climb back out of the gravity well with the Marines again. Whatever the mission ended up being, it would probably be more like Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo.

On 18 April 1942, Colonel Doolittle with sixteen Army B
-25s took off from the carrier
Hornet, even though couldn’t possibly land again on the carriers
. They flew eight hundred miles to bomb the Japanese main island of Honshu, Tokyo and the Emperor’s Palace in particular. Afterward, the B-25s either crashed-landed at sea or barely made it to China. One plane touched down at Vladivostok, where the crew was interned for the duration of the war.

The
Marines’ ticket home would be to reach the American front lines in Manchuria. They’d have to fly there. The lifters would plummet from orbit in special pods, landing near the dropped Marines. The machines had a five hundred mile range, depending how high they tried to go.

“Let’s
do this,” Paul said.

“Sergeant Kavanagh—”
the monitor said.

“Lower the volume of the monitor communication,” Paul told his suit’s computer. Like an obedient servant, it did so. Paul could still hear the man if he concentrated, but it let him ignore the increasingly strident message.

“Do you know how to fly this gizmo?” Romo asked.

“Just done it on the simulator, but how hard can it be?”

Romo grabbed a guardrail with two articulated, strength-augmented gauntlets.

Thirty seconds of trial and error brought the fans online. The lifter vibrated and lurched
off the ground, rising into the air. Their helmets muffled the torturous
shriek
. That was one of the backdrops to the lifters. They were loud.

Paul took them one hundred feet
high. If the thing crashed, they should still be okay from this height. The battlesuits had shock absorbers in the boots and legs, as well as strength amplification. With the armor, they could make thirty-foot leaps like metallic kangaroos with attitude.

“
The monitor sounds angry,” Romo said.

“Yeah, well, the
general should have let me talk to my wife. I asked enough times. Now I’m done making requests.”

“We may have miscalculated their reaction.”

“We’ll see,” Paul said. “Now how about you pipe down so I can concentrate on what I’m doing?”

For the next ten minutes, Paul and Romo zoomed across the Montana countryside. They flashed over the pine forest, heading to
ward a small town to the west.

“Sergeant Kavanagh, this is General
Allenby speaking.”

“D
o you hear that?” Romo asked Paul.

“Raise the monitor volume to regular,” Paul told his suit.

“Kavanagh—”

“I hear you, General,” Paul said.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“The town down the road will have a phone connection. I plan to use it
to talk to my wife.”

“Is this a joke?”
Allenby asked.

“No, sir, I’m
quite serious.”

“You’ll be drummed out of the Marines for this
stunt.”

“Really?” asked Paul. “You’ve gone to all this hassle
to train me, train my suit and now you’ll ground me just before the action?”

“Are you
mentally unbalanced?”

“
You wanted determined soldiers with balls,” Paul said. “So why are you surprised when you get exactly what you want? How many times have I asked to speak to my wife? I’m determined, sir, and I’ve always had more balls than you can imagine.”

“
This is a top secret training center. Our country’s dream of victory rests on you men.”

“What difference does
any of that make to my speaking with my wife?”

“Now you listen to me—”

“Sir, come on,” Paul said. “You said you’ve read my record, you know my profile. You’re supposed to understand how I tick. I’m finished talking. You can see that. At this point, I’m doing.”

“F-22s are on their way. I’m going to order
them to shoot you two down and possibly kill you.”

Paul and Romo exchanged glance
s. A second later, Romo’s faceplate opened. His face showed worry.

“Just a minute, General,” Paul said. He ordered his faceplate open too. The wind howled around them, and a cold chill w
hipped through the opening and down his chest. It felt good.

“I think he’s serious, amigo. We may have stepped
too far over the line this time.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. The general wanted to bluff, did he? The brass hat thought he had balls ordering others into the fray. Maybe Paul had been out of combat too long. Maybe he needed the adrenaline rush
of something like this.