path to conquest (2 page)

“Whatever you say, Captain.”

They entered the hatchway and climbed up the ladders to the control room. Executive Officer Rollie Jensen stood next to the wheel, his arms folded. “Tad early, Cap’n,” he said in his Texas twang.

Felix managed a soft smile. “Early bird catches the Visitors, Mr. Jensen.”

“Just hope the lizards don’t catch
us,”
said Helmsman Dan Wilson, the stocky black crewman now at the wheel.

Wilson didn’t mind relinquishing his post a few minutes early, and Captain Felix officially relieved Exec Jensen. “Maintain course, Mr. Reinhold.”

The towheaded helmsman placed his hands firmly on the wheel as he checked the large compass in the center of the control panel. “Maintaining, Captain.”

Jensen joined his commanding officer at the bridge windows, which slanted out from bottom to top to give a better view of the flight deck stretching out for four acres around the bridge island. The first glimmers of daybreak were visible off the port stem.

“Can’t stand this damn waitin’,” Jensen murmured, almost to himself.

“Rather fight?” Felix asked softly.

The exec turned. “Naw, Cap’n. Didn’t mean
that,
sir. Just wish we was back in port already.”

“You and me and six thousand other guys on this ship,” Felix said with a reassuring smile. He slipped his baseball cap off and ran a hand through his hair. He wondered why he ever bothered to comb it. He thought momentarily of his wife kidding him about unkempt hair.
"Better than no hair,”
she’d say. God, how he missed her. More than he ever had during his earlier years at sea, more than during the heavy fighting in Vietnam, more than the tense duty off the Arabian Peninsula— so eloquently dubbed “Gonzo Station” by the sailors who’d patrolled the area to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to oil shipping.

And here they were, still worried about goddamned oil. But this was different. Felix had grown up after World War II, and that war had been the last time the United States had felt truly vulnerable in any military sense. The near-fatal blow of Pearl Harbor started things off badly—one of his uncles had been among those killed aboard the battleship
Arizona
—and the overwhelming Nazi war machine had gotten enough of a head start that Germany had appeared unstoppable for the first two years of American fighting in Europe.

A draw in Korea and the debacle of Vietnam had tarnished Uncle Sam more than a bit, but those were scaled-down conflicts. They never cut to the heart of the matter: America
could
defend herself if she really had to. When Felix had commanded the
Nimitz
near the Persian Gulf, he’d known the possibilities that Iran might send suicide planes to attack his task force. But he’d never doubted for an instant that this majestic vessel and her men could fend off any nation or force daring to take them on. In war ga^es, facing hypothetical and equal Soviet adversaries, Felix still believed the crews under his command could win, no matter what the circumstances. The enemy might speak a different language and fight under a foreign flag, but he was still human, and no human battallions could outgun the United States armed forces.
We might not always win,
Felix had thought,
but we’ll always live to fight another day.

The Visitors were not human. Their weapons were not variations of our weapons. And try as he might, Captain Felix couldn’t banish his own uncertainties. He just hoped it didn’t show.

“Hawkeye’s ready to fly, Cap’n,” said Jensen, holding the intercom phone in his hand.

Felix gave himself a mental shake. Daydreaming on the bridge was no way to conceal his doubts. “Okay, Rollie. Cleared for takeoff. Have the other flight crews power up.”

Jensen’s expression clouded. “Sir?”

“I just have this feeling. We’ve turned southwest, closer to Visitor territory. I think if they’re going to hit us, it’s going to be soon.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

As his exec relayed his instruction, Captain Felix started to chuckle. Helmsman Reinhold gave him a sidelong glance. So did several other crewmen on the bridge. Finally, Jensen put the phone back in its cradle.

“Beggin’ the Cap’n’s pardon, but what’s so funny, sir?”

Felix took a breath to regain his composure. “Well, I was just thinking about how much the world needs this oil we’re escorting, and how nice it is that the
Nimitz
is nuclear and we don’t have to worry about such mundane matters as refueling. But then I remembered that our nuclear fuel was supposed to be good for thirteen years and she was launched twelve years ago-”

Jensen nodded. “So we got one year til! the needle points to E.”

“Yeah,” said Felix, “and I just conjured up this image of pulling her into a filling station on Main Street back home and saying to the kid at the pump, ‘Fill ’er up, son.’”

The hangar and flight decks ignited with activity after the call from the bridge. The strategy worked out by Felix and planners from the remnants of the Defense Department had the fastest jets, the F-14 Tomcats, go up first. At their top speed of over 1,400 miles per hour, they could join the F-15s already in the air and fan out to cover great distances. If they met any Visitors approaching, they could engage the enemy far enough away to create a buffer zone around the ships. The slower attack aircraft—the A-7 Corsairs—would then go aloft to fill that buffer.

Some deck crews moved other planes out of the way, making room for the full complement of Tomcats to be lined up at the runways, one of which ran from one end of the ship to the other. The second angled out from the port side.

Watching from the bridge, Felix saw the first Tomcat being readied, rolled to the flight line, and hooked to the catapult shuttle protruding from the deck in its slot, which ran the length of the runway. All around, jet engines fired up, blowing billows of exhaust out over the great ship’s sides. Hot fumes shimmered in the pink light of sunrise. Deck crews wearing heavy “Mickey Mouse” ear-protecting headpieces scurried around and under the Tomcats, the planes’ distinctive doublefinned tails wavering like mirages in the heat from their own (win engines.

In green jerseys and goggles, the men of the holdback crew squirmed under the F-14’s belly and attached a cable tying the craft to the deck until launch time. Ear-splitting noise prevented verbal communication on a carrier’s flight deck. Experienced hands waved signals with the sort of certainty gained from long practice. One man held the cable steady while a second lay on his back directly under the plane to slip the tension bar into place. Their task completed, they scrambled out and away.

In the Tomcat’s cockpit, the pilot applied light thrust to build up tension. Beside the runway, a yellow-clad plane director stood with hands on hips, awaiting signals relayed from the flight controllers atop the superstructure island.

On the bridge, Jensen handed the captain the phone receiver, connecting them to the control room one deck higher in the tower.

“Launch when ready,” Felix ordered.

The F-14’s engines thundered to full power. In five seconds the catapult fired, whipping the Tomcat to a speed of 160 miles an hour in less than three hundred feet. The holdback bar snapped, allowing the jet’s thrust to hurtle the plane toward the deck’s edge and into the air. Afterburners kicked in for maximum speed, and flaming exhaust lit the sky like matched, retreating suns.

The Tomcat rolled and climbed steeply to join the F-15 Eagles flying in a miles-wide escort and recon circle.

From his perch, Felix felt a poetry in the process of sending jets screaming off a carrier, but down on the flight deck, poetry was transcended by urgency. The next F-14 was ready to go, and the next one after that was swinging into place.

When a dozen were up, the Hawkeye radar plane broke its silence:
“Visitor craft approaching, eleven o’clock.”

The terse message gave Captain Felix a chill. There would be combat after all. The call went to all ships and planes—
battle stations!

The Hawkeye crew filled in the details—fifteen Visitor skyfighters approaching at high speed. T\venty-four American fighter planes split into groups designed to cover all angles of defense and attack. The
Nimitz
combat information center confirmed what Felix knew should be happening. The men flying those jets were superbly trained, the best in the service. He could only pray that would be good enough.

On the cruisers, destroyers, and frigates, guided-missile crews waited. They were the last line of defense if the planes couldn’t stop the Visitors.

And in the center of this ring of awesome air and sea fire power, the pair of oil tankers steamed along, their captains all too aware that the fates of their vessels were about to be decided by deadly force.

Lieutenant Commander Ricky Picolo flew the lead F-14. Craning his neck, he peered through the cockpit canopy. He still hadn’t made visual contact with the enemy, but his targeting computer sure had. It had picked six out of the two dozen it had been tracking. They were in his hundred-mile firing range and closing fast.

His dark mustache twitched inside his oxygen mask, the way it always did when he sensed it was time to do the job. “Leader Abel Twelve, ready to engage,” he said, his voice crackling over the speakers of all the planes and ships in the convoy. “And . . . firing!”

Picolo pressed the buttons and the Tomcat’s computers did the rest, sending a fusillade of electronically guided missiles rocketing toward the alien invaders. As the planes around him followed his lead, Picolo hoped they could grab the offensive by pressing the attack before the Visitors could get close to the ships down below.

At Mach two, it doesn’t take long to cover a hundred miles. The jet fighters veered off to avoid getting too near to Visitor lasers, while their air-to-air missiles homed in at three times the speed of sound.

“All right, fellas,” Picolo radioed, “get ready on cannons, time for a little down-and-dirty dogfighting.”

Explosions signaled the arrival of the missiles as five of the fifteen Visitor fighters were hit and destroyed outright. Picolo’s surprise had worked. “Don’t get cocky, boys. Abel Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen, cover me. I’m going right down their throats.”

Given a choice, Nicholas Draper would have preferred leaving the government of the United States right where it had been for two hundred years or so. But the Secretary of State knew the Visitors had given them little choice. Washington, D.C., was simply too close to southern regions where the aliens were able to fight without being affected by the toxic red dust. Though the capital itself
was
under the toxin’s protective veil, President William Brent Morrow and his advisers had been forced to conclude that for safety’s sake, they’d better relocate to New York. It was almost like the Civil War, when the White House was little more than a carriage ride from the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, and within striking distance of Robert E. Lee’s gray-coated troops.

Abe Lincoln had stayed put, but the present-day analogy wasn’t what Draper could call exact. Visitors didn’t attack on horseback.

A dapper Virginian himself, Secretary Draper had learned to accept the rightness of the North’s Civil War victory, but like many southerners, he still harbored a wisp of sympathy for the Johnny Rebs who’d fought and died for Dixieland. He fell back on that vestigial patriotism to explain his vague unease at moving to the heart of Yankee territory
—the home of Yankee Stadium, for crissak.es
—with President Morrow and the rest of what was left of the country’s federal authority.

Nick Draper readily agreed that New York possessed other advantages in time of global war. It was still the center of world communications, for one thing. The three television networks based there had maintained news and entertainment broadcasts, on a somewhat curtailed basis, and the Freedom Network also operated from this most secure of human-held cities in America.

And the United Nations was located here, making this city the de facto capital of the World Liberation Front. Morrow had set up his offices in the UN, overlooking the East River. He and the other officials of his provisional government had taken up residence in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, a few blocks away at Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue.

The diminutive Draper had turned to jogging for exercise and solitude long before the sport became obnoxiously common, and he’d cherished his early morning runs in the rolling hills surrounding his country estate in Virginia. Somehow, lacing on his Nikes had lost something in the translation to Manhattan Island. There were no grassy fields, except in Central Park, and the idea of solitary tranquility was laughable here. New York had retained much of its hurly-burly personality, and the streets were never empty. Garbage trucks still roamed from dumpster to trash can, although at less regular intervals. Cabs and buses still dueled fender to fender and horn to horn, vying like wild animals for the right-of-way on streets cratered with potholes.

And miraculously, people still came out each day to go to their jobs. Visitors or not, this comer of the globe went on with life as usual.

However, it wasn’t life without changes. Its status of secure capital made New York City the eventual goal of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the warmer states where the Visitor forces ravaged at will, undaunted by the red dust fencing them off at the frostline.

On this muggy morning at seven, Nick Draper found himself confronted with part of that new reality as he jogged near Penn Station with Stuart Hart, the youthful acting Secretary of Defense, and Cynthia Sobel, Morrow’s press secretary. Wearing a U.S.A. T-shirt and blue shorts banded with red and white, Draper led his companions south on Seventh Avenue. Traffic was cordoned off inside a four-block radius because of the vast numbers of immigrants spilling up staircases and escalators from the railroad station’s extensive maze of underground arcades and platforms. Police on foot and horseback manned the barricades, keeping people from unauthorized passage out of the terminal zone. Without vehicular traffic to dodge, the trio of anonymous government officials jogged in the street.