After America

The shattered, faceless female soldier in the hospital offended him more, however.

"Mister President?" Another aide stepped through the door. Their numbers had suddenly metastasized like the dancing brooms in that old Mickey Mouse film.

"Yes?"

"Colonel Ki

"Good," Kip said. "Copy that," Lieutenant Colonel Alois Ki

He walked over to the map of Manhattan that covered half a wall inside 1/7 Cav's latest tactical operations center in the small, ravaged wasteland of the park behind the New York Public Library. Thick columns of smoke poured from the upper floor of the building, and the last time he'd stepped outside his command Bradley, he could even see flames through one or two windows. A small and miserable-looking band of prisoners from that fight were still sitting on the muddy ground in the rain at the rear of the library, being guarded by a squad of resentful militia.

Ki

"Gentlemen," he said. "That was General Murphy at Fort Lewis. The president has authorized us to proceed."

"About goddamn time," the marine growled.

Major Holt, Ki

"Affirmative," Ki

"All the bridges, sir?" Major Holt asked. "Won't we need them to press into Brooklyn and Queens?"

"Rules have changed, Major. We're fighting to win now. That's the extent of our new rules of engagement."

Realization dawned on Holt's face. "Sergeant Cathey, send this fire mission ASAP."

Ki

Governor Schimmel was a New York native, an historian who had been guest lecturing in Japan back in March 2003. From the battlements of Fort Jay he watched the skyline of his city shrouded in dark oily smoke, an ungovernable rage churning in his i

"Governor Schimmel?" one of his officers called over to him. "I just got word from the firebase commander."

"Any news of resupply?"

"Yes, sir," the officer replied. "It is coming now. ETA twenty minutes. But what I wanted to tell you, sir, is that they're going to blow the bridges."

"What?" Schimmel roared, turning on his underling.

Before he could say another word, the 155-mm howitzers barked into the dawn. The metal-on-metal crash of the guns spit their ordnance out toward Long Island. Metal boxes on tank tracks swiveled until they, too, were facing Brooklyn and Queens. Stacks of fresh ammunition for the multiple rocket launch system sat a safe distance away, ready for use.

No, Schimmel thought. Not the bridges. The president had promised him they would not do this. Not to his city.

He jumped a few inches when the first missile shrieked into the sky, ripping at the very fabric of the morning. Others followed immediately, filling the firebase with white acrid smoke.

In the distance he heard the first rumble of thunder as the high-explosive shells began to pound his precious bridges into scrap.

Manhattan was being cut off, and all who stood on it without the say-so of the American people would soon have no choice but to surrender their liberty or their lives. Having gathered another thirty troops along the way, Colonel Alois Ki

"Colonel!" someone shouted from a cluster of troops right at the edge of the fighting. "Have you lost your fucking mind?"

Ki

The soldier ran over to Ki

"Pretty fucking sporty up here, sir," Frankowski said. "If you don't mind my saying."

"I don't," Ki

Frankowski turned and gestured toward Rockefeller Center. "We're hung up on these fucking scrapers. Depression-era shit built with old-fashioned concrete, rebar, and probably more than a few bodies courtesy of the mob. No good estimate on effective combatants, but they've set it up as a strongpoint with good intersecting fields of fire. I think we're go

"I can see that," Ki

"I was until you got here. Colonel Callahan took a shot to the chest. While the medics were working him, he got another one to the melon. Game over. You're it, sir."

"Any contact with higher up?"

"Sporadic," Frankowski said, ducking against a roar of gunship turbines. Ki

"Who have we got on our flanks?"

"Fourth Cav combat team on the Avenue of the Americas; they've worked their way up to Fiftieth Street," Frankowski said. "Fifth Cav is to the east over on… looks like Park Avenue. They're chopped up pretty bad, and I've not had any word from them in the last hour."

Ki

"Fifth Field Artillery is up. They're at Firebase Euler, but the support has been somewhat spotty. These skyscrapers are really fucking with our comms, especially since we lost the retrans unit up in the Chrysler Building," Frankowski said. "You need to know our ammo situation is critical as well. I've had our troops strip the wounded and the dead, our guys and the enemy, but we're still hurtin' for certain."