The Apocalypse Troll

" ... once the CP's in place, Lieutenant Frye's heavy weapons platoon and Sergeant Sanderson's antitank squad will set up here," she was saying. "When Grendel realizes we're on top of him, he's going to counterattack, probably with one or more of his combat mechs. So get those Dragons set up early and nail them."

She paused as a hand was raised. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

"If he knows we're coming, Captain, how do we keep him from just flying out on us?" The question was reasonable, but the look in the lieutenant's eyes said he'd heard about the nuclear option, and she met his gaze squarely.

"The fact that we're above him, I hope. He can't be immediately certain what weapons we have, and until he gets clear of his hide, he'll have to move slowly-a sitting duck for heavy weapons. We can hurt him under those conditions, and if Grendel runs true to form for a Troll, he won't risk it. He'll try to clear us off the slope with his mechs first. If they can't, he may come up himself, or he may try to fly out after all. But by the time he reaches that point, we ought to have air support, and then we can really nail him if he moves."

"With what, Captain?" The lieutenant wasn't waffling, Aston thought. He just wanted any suicide missions clearly labeled as such.

"With nukes, if we have to," Ludmilla said, and her level confirmation sent a wave of tension through her listeners, "but if we catch him within forty meters of the ground, we've got a good chance with Dragons or Mavericks. Above that, he can reconfigure his drive field to interdict conventional missiles; below it, he has to rely on active defenses, and over half of them cover his belly and stern, not his topsides." She paused. "Does that answer your questions, Lieutenant Warden?"

"Yes, Ma'am. Thank you."

"All right. Now, while Second Platoon sets up to cover the Dragons here, First Platoon, with Admiral Aston and myself, will move down here-" her pointer traced a line "-to reach the valley floor. We'll have to take out weapon pits here and here, then rush this barracks. From there, we'll have a good field of fire back towards the camp and I should have a clean shot at Grendel when he pokes his nose out. Meanwhile, Major Abernathy will shift his CP down the ridge. He'll move Third and Fourth Platoons, plus Lieutenant Atwater's antitank platoon, this way to cover ..."

Aston watched officers and sergeants scribble notes. It sounded good, he thought. But, then, it always sounded good. The problem was that it never worked out quite the way you'd pla

He ran his own mind over the operation. Sixty-forty in their favor, he thought. Maybe seventy-thirty if everything broke just right. Even if it did, their own casualties might be heavy. If it didn't ...

He hid his own shudder as his mind filled with the image of a nuclear fireball-or far worse-in the heart of the North Carolina mountains.

Jeremiah Willis looked down from the sixth-floor window at the trucks and armored perso

Not that it seemed to be doing much good, he thought grimly, lifting his eyes to the bloodred night sky to the west. He could smell the smoke, even through the air-conditioning.

"We're still holding on Nineteen and Twenty-Three," Brigadier General Evans said, "but they keep filtering past us down the secondary streets. It looks like they're flowing around towards Weaverville Road now, and there's a couple of hundred coming down Six-Ninety-Four, but Captain Taylor's got a rifle platoon and a heavy machine-gun section waiting for them at Merrimon Avenue." The general looked harried, and well he might. He'd started out with a full brigade of Guardsmen, but that impressive troop strength was stretched perilously thin by the city's sheer size, and the dense road net made it even worse.

"What about west Patton Avenue?" Chief Campbell asked. "Can you spare anything there?"

"I don't know." The general ran fingers through his hair, staring at his maps. "We've got a firefight going on out New Leicester Highway right now. What's your situation?"

"We're back almost as far as the post office," Campbell said grimly, "up against two or three hundred bastards with rifles and automatic weapons. I'm losing men, and I didn't have that many to start with. If they push us another six hundred yards, your boys on the highway could be cut off."

"All right," Evans sighed. "Al," he turned to his exec, "shake loose a platoon of APCs and send 'em out to stabilize the position."

"Yes, Sir."

"It's all I can give you, Chief Campbell," Evans said grimly. "The crowd coming up from the south is just as bad. The South Carolina Guard's holding them south of the state line on US 25, but they've just crossed it on I-26, and I can't weaken myself any more south of town."

"I understand, General.

"I'm sorry," Evans said gruffly and turned back to his commo section.

Willis watched the APC crews racing for their vehicles. At least the handful of Guardsmen who'd started shooting at their fellows had been eliminated, he thought coldly. There'd been only a few, but that had been almost too many. Evans had a right to be proud. His "weekend warriors" had almost broken-they'd never expected to face anything like this-but they'd rallied, and now they were fighting doggedly to save his city. Not that it looked like they were going to succeed.

"Jerry." He looked up as Campbell touched his shoulder. "Some son-of-a-bitch just firebombed Saint Joe's," the police chief said, and the mayor closed his eyes, thinking of fire raging through the city's largest hospital. "I've got a report from Bill McCoury, too. He says Biltmore House is on fire."

"Thank you, Hugh," Willis said softly, looking back out into the flame-struck night. "Do your best."

Patuxent River Naval Air Station was a beehive of activity. Pax River NAS was a test center at the southwestern tip of Maryland, home to some of the finest pilots in the Navy and Marine Corps, who spent their time pushing new aircraft and weapon systems to the limit. But the F/A-18 Hornets sitting on the taxi ways now belonged to VFA-432 and VFA-433, CVW-18's attack squadrons, based at NAS Oceana at Virginia Beach while they waited for the carrier Theodore Roosevelt to finish repairs in the Norfolk Navy Yard. Most of the pilots had no clear idea why they'd been staged through Pax River, but Commander Ed Staunton knew. He stood in a hangar door, hiding from the drizzling rain, and sipped a steaming mug of coffee while ordnance types fussed around his Hornet.

Staunton's thoughts were divided. He was an attack pilot by training and inclination, and this was the type of mission he'd spent years preparing to fly. More than that, he knew its target, and he wanted a piece of the bastards who'd wrecked TF-Twenty-Three and destroyed the Kidd. Oh, yes, he wanted a piece of them.

But the weapons on his aircraft's pylons frightened him. He'd never dropped a live one. For that matter, he didn't think anyone, anywhere had ever dropped a live one, and the thought of doing so on American soil, especially knowing there would be US Marines on the ground when he did-if he did-turned his belly into a hollow void around the hot, black coffee.

"Skipper?" He turned his head as his wingman, Lieutenant Jake Frisco, stopped beside him.

"Yes, Jake?"

"Skipper, what the hell is going on?" Frisco's quiet tone clearly didn't buy the cover story, and Staunton wasn't surprised. The lieutenant was a sharp customer, not that it would have required a genius to figure out that what they'd been told so far was a pile of crap. The madness raging in the Carolinas was hardly the sort of situation one handled with two squadrons of Hornets, and Frisco pointed at Staunton's plane, his voice sharpening. "Why are they loading-"