Grudge: Operation Highjump Read online

  “Got it.”

  “I should be going, sir,” Jake protested. “I can go get the guy and then come back here. Easy as pie.”

  “It’s not that easy, Lieutenant.” Gabe hoped that Jake would catch the subtle change in his voice. He sure as hell didn’t need an argument with Wilcox. “I need my ass covered by men that I trust. We don’t want some group of Germans—or street thugs for that matter—sneaking up and shooting us in the back. We’re close enough that you could respond quickly if we run into trouble. I need you back here, Jake.”

  “Understood, sir,” the lieutenant grumbled. “When are you leaving?”

  “I told Spartan Six that it’d be within the hour. I want to make it to the edge of the park while there’s still a little bit of light. Then we’ll wait until dark to move into the neighborhood.”

  Gabe waited for any more discussion, when there was none he told the Lieutenant Wilcox and Sergeant Cheng to prepare Paredes’ squad to move out and the rest of the platoon to secure the patrol base.

  *****

  16 July 2025

  Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “Mister President?” Captain deBoer asked, knocking softly. “We have an update from the East Coast.”

  “Dammit, Ashley,” he responded. “I’m going to the bathroom. Can this wait five minutes?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Her footsteps retreated down the hallway a respectful distance. The novelty of being the President of the United States had worn off over the past two weeks. Javier couldn’t even take a dump without someone trying to give him an update about the war.

  Javier sighed and pressed the off button on his phone. To be sure, he wasn’t ungrateful and the Nazi invasion was the single most significant event to happen to the United States since the Civil War, but he just wanted ten minutes to do his business in peace and play solitaire on his phone while he did it.

  “Looks like I won’t extend that winning streak after all,” he grumbled, setting the phone down on the counter beside the toilet so he could clean up.

  When he finished washing his hands, he slipped the towel back onto the hook and stepped out of the bathroom quickly, leaving the light on to keep the ventilation fan engaged.

  “Alright, Ashley. What is so important that you felt you needed to interrupt my precious few minutes of privacy?” Javier asked the blonde military aide standing in the hallway.

  She started to walk toward him, but stopped, allowing him to walk to her and then turned to follow along beside him. “Sorry, sir. There’ve been a few developments out east.”

  He stared at her profile as she walked, willing her to glance his way. When she did, she grimaced. “Of course, sir. You know the update is about back east.”

  The president nodded sarcastically. These military people needed to loosen up. “Let me guess: We won and everyone can go home now?” he offered.

  “Uh, no, sir. The Germans are using drone swarms to bring down our helicopters and regain air superiority.”

  “Huh?” he asked in confusion.

  “You may remember that the Apache gunships were working in tandem with men on the ground using shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to shoot down the German saucer jets…”

  “Yes, I remember,” he stated—although, admittedly, the myriad of different types of tanks, planes, and guns confused the hell out of him. “The Germans are doing what now?”

  “They’re flying a whole bunch of drones together like a swarm of mosquitos. They fly them into our helicopter rotors and turbine intakes to foul up the engines, causing them to crash. Uh, think of it like a bird strike that happens to a plane engine every so often at an airport. It’s the same principle, except the drones are purposefully trying to bring down the helicopter instead of a bird accidentally getting sucked into an engine.”

  He appreciated her using simpler terms that he understood instead of relying on military jargon that so many of them fell back upon when pressed for answers. “I haven’t really heard anyone talking about the enemy using drones before this. Is that a new development or was it just something that hadn’t filtered up to my level?”

  “We believe it’s a new development, sir. They appear to be civilian drones—which would make sense if they’re sustaining themselves from general merchandise stores in the DC area. Plus, there’s a drone manufacturing plant on the Eastern Shore, so they may have access to thousands of them if they found that place.”

  “Why aren’t you shooting them down?”

  “We’re trying, sir,” she replied.

  Javier realized that he still thought of his relationship with the military as ‘them versus us,’ his political party versus the establishment. He couldn’t change an entire lifetime of thinking in a couple of weeks, but it sounded harsh to his own ears.

  “What are we doing?” he asked, accentuating the word slightly.

  “The idea of a drone swarm is not new,” the aide replied. “We’ve been working on countering it for more than a decade, but there is no practical solution. The most reliable and effective method is an electromagnetic countermeasure. We flip a switch on a device and everything with power falls out of the sky.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Not really, sir. It also affects our helicopters. So, it’s perfectly suited for use as a defensive measure around structures or facilities, and has even proven effective as an offensive capability as long our birds aren’t in the air. We can also target specific frequencies and jam those, but that one is a crap shoot and doesn’t work at all if they’re flying set routes by GPS.”

  “So what about blowing them out of the sky?” the president asked. He thought back to the WWII documentaries he’d been watching over the past couple of weeks. “Isn’t that what the Germans did to us with their damn flak guns?”

  She nodded, opening the door to his office and standing aside to let him proceed. He waved at the two secret service agents off in the corner. “Bill. Ted,” he greeted.

  They accepted his comments without response. Once he’d learned that the black-haired one was named Ted Logan, it didn’t matter what his blond partner’s name was. They would forever be Bill and Ted to him.

  He sat at the cheap, office furniture store desk and Ashley continued. “Flak is an effective measure against drone planes due to stability issues, sir. Unfortunately, those aren’t what we’re seeing. Quadcopters are what the bulk of ground forces and civilian hobbyists—and now the Germans—use. They are much easier to control and incredibly durable. As long as the flight control module and the battery is intact, they can fly. A quadcopter can stay airborne on only two engines and having entire sections of the frame blown off doesn’t affect them like you’d think it would.

  “Lasers work much the same way as the air burst munitions—the flak guns,” she amended when she saw his confused look. “They’re effective against plane-type drones, but the lasers slice off pieces and parts of the quadcopter and the damn things keep flying. We’ve tried all sorts of stuff, from aerial nets to crashing our own drones into them. Heck, we’ve even tried using sniper rifles, which have been largely ineffective, minus a few lucky shots during experiments when the quadcopter hovered and didn’t move.”

  “So you’re saying there’s nothing we can do?” Javier asked.

  “Not against drone swarms, sir. Unless we ground our helicopters and then fire up the electronic attack systems, we have to ride this out.”

  “So the military has been working on this for more than a decade and all you’ve—all we’ve come up with is recommendations to weather the storm?”

  “The simple nature of the quadcopter works against us, sir. Like I said, we can certainly knock them out of the sky, but our helicopters and drones can’t be anywhere near the signals because it will affect them too.” She paused and then added, “Of course, this is all information that I learned my senior year at the Academy and what I’ve picked up working in the operations center, sir. I can see if we can fin
d a counter-unmanned aerial systems expert to provide a brief to you.”

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Javier agreed. “Okay, so we can’t reliably shoot down all of their drones. You said the Germans are using it to gain control of the skies?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ashley replied, clearly relieved to venture back into territory that she was prepared to discuss. “So, as noted earlier, the Apache gunships work in conjunction with Stinger missile teams on the ground. Between that combination and high-altitude bombing, we’ve destroyed approximately six hundred and forty of their saucer jets. We estimate that to be more than half of their fleet. Their losses have been so severe that they stopped using the saucers in support of ground movements, choosing instead to engage in long-range missions that result in one or two ships shooting up cities all across the nation.”

  “We’ve had a few of them out here,” the president muttered.

  “Yes, sir. However, now that the drone swarms are knocking out the gunships, their pilots are once again returning to the close air support role, which is hindering our advance to take the land back from them.”

  Javier nodded. He didn’t need the five-minute lesson in tactics and capabilities; he needed an answer. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “We’re rushing soldiers and Stinger missiles to the front, sir. We’re doubling, even tripling, the number of shoulder-fired missile launchers in the maneuver elements. Early estimates from the bean counters are that we’ll likely use double the amount of ammunition than we would have previously.”

  “I don’t care about expense,” President Sanchez replied. “I want those heathens out of our country.”

  The aide’s lips thinned as if she were suppressing a smile.

  “Yeah, I don’t know why I used the word ‘heathens’ either,” he stated with a grin. “Okay, what’s next? The counterattack is stalling; I got that part. What about that defector that knows all their secret plans and whatnot? What’s his status?”

  “Um…” She thumbed through several pages of briefing notes until she found the one she wanted. Javier had almost no faith in the defector and told his staff as much, so it moved farther and farther down the priority list. “It says that he’s stuck in a house in Anacostia because of the street fighting still raging between the Germans and local resistance forces. The commander on the ground in Virginia made the call to send a small unit into the city to retrieve him.”

  “Hmpf,” Javier grunted. “Like that movie about the couple of soldiers who went up against the Nazis to rescue a guy when all of his brothers were killed.”

  “Sort of, sir,” she acknowledged.

  “How long until they can rescue him?”

  “It will depend on the situation on the ground. They should be able to close in on the target house tonight and get out by morning, but that doesn’t account for the Murphy factor.”

  “What can go wrong, will go wrong?” he asked.

  “Exactly, sir. No matter how much you train for an operation, Murphy always sneaks in and throws a wrench in the works.”

  Javier chuckled. The members of the military that he interacted with in the complex were a superstitious bunch overall. The idea that some mythical entity waited around specifically to interfere with military operations was preposterous.

  “Well, I’m sure things will go fine.”

  Captain deBoer took that as her cue to move on to the next topic. “We’ve captured several of the newer types of German weapons, from machine guns to their saucer jets. As you were previously briefed, you know that we have an intact airframe, similar to what they are using. Our scientists and engineers have worked for decades to repair or replicate the propulsion system, but we’ve been largely unsuccessful because the technology was simply too advanced and our ship was too damaged. Now that we have several of the German jets with their propulsion systems intact, we are confident that we can replicate them within a few months.”

  “Good Lord, Ashley!” he groaned. “The Army doesn’t expect this to go on for months, do they?”

  “It’s unknown, sir. We believe that the Germans are cut off from resupply. There have been no new large cargo planes or boats, so it would seem that the soldiers who are here are the ones we need to worry about. We hope to recapture DC by the end of August, but it’s prudent to plan for the long haul.”

  “Your prudent planning just about gave me a heart attack. I haven’t done anything as the president except receive reports about how the war in DC is going. I need to make this country work again. I have a cabinet to appoint— Dammit, I guess I can’t get a cabinet confirmed without a Congress, can I? The United States needs to hold elections, then confirm a cabinet, then we can begin the recovery process. We need to overturn several of the previous administration’s laws and ban weapons of mass destruction so things like this won’t ever happen again. We need to revamp our medical system, which starts with medical malpractice and insurance costs; citizens shouldn’t have to take out loans to pay for life-saving care.”

  Javier stopped and blinked. He hadn’t realized that he’d stood as he talked about setting his administration. “I’m sorry, Ashley,” he said as he sat heavily. “I know you don’t care one bit about my plans for policy reform. None of this is your fault and the only reason you’re even acting as my military aide right now is because you happened to be stationed here when we made this our temporary home.”

  “It’s not a problem, sir,” she replied.

  “I know you’ll deflect negative comments and agree with anything I say. That’s what you’ve been trained to do. I just—”

  “Excuse me, sir. If I may?” Ashley said, holding up her hand.

  “Uh, yeah, go ahead.” He wasn’t used to being interrupted, especially not since he’d been sworn in as the president.

  “Just because I’m polite and respect the office of the President of the United States does not mean I’m some ditz who will smile and nod, no matter what. The Air Force—actually, all of the US military—respects the opinions of our people. We’re not an internet startup, so everyone doesn’t get a vote, but we do allow subordinates to voice their recommendations and then the commander, you in this case, makes a decision based upon those recommendations.

  “You may not have wanted to be the president, sir, but you are. Now that you are, you may want to push your agenda and follow through with years of campaign promises and drastically alter our current form of government…but there won’t be a nation to correct the policies of if we don’t first stop the Nazis.

  “Stopping them doesn’t just mean pushing them back into the sea,” she continued. “We need to annihilate them. The prisoners we’ve taken have been indoctrinated from birth to hate Americans. The Nazi leadership will stop at nothing to destroy our country, so it may not be palatable to you, personally, but we must destroy every last remnant of them—both here on our soil and wherever it is that they came from. Otherwise, they’ll just return in another eighty years and my grandchildren will have to fight them.”

  She stopped talking and Javier considered her words, looking at her in a new light. The woman he’d thought of as simply an aide who followed orders blindly appeared to be anything but.

  “Do you really believe that there’s no negotiating with them?” he asked. “That the answer is annihilation of their women and children?”

  “Yes, sir. They will come back for us,” she asserted. “The prisoners are adamant that if they were given the opportunity, they’d strike out against us—regardless of what happens to them. They consider Americans to be subhuman and savages. Their words, not mine. When asked where they come from, the prisoners recite a litany of names, heroic Nazi soldiers from the past as if that is all they are. They will not surrender.”

  His advisors had briefed Javier on the odd behavior of the few prisoners his forces had captured, most so badly injured that they were incapable of killing themselves. They purported to believe that they were descended directly from a host of World War Two-era Nazi s
oldiers, even that some of their leadership, non-combatant scientists, and engineers were secreted away from Germany toward the end of the war when it became apparent that the Axis powers would lose. Given their supposed ability to cryogenically freeze men, it was feasible…if not completely insane.

  Not a single one of them had given up the location of their base, though. Regardless of the interrogation techniques that were employed before Javier found out about them and put an end to it, the prisoners remained tight-lipped about their home. Even though he had little faith in the information that the defector may have, it was the main reason he’d authorized talks to carry on with the man. Otherwise, he’d have left him to the rebels in DC.

  “Alright, Ashley. You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about. I’m getting tired and I’d like to eat dinner with Becky and the boys before I need to read this report that General Sullivan’s people dropped by today.” He held up a thick binder full of briefing charts and recommendations about funding for the Air Force.

  Even during a catastrophe, the Air Force knew how to take advantage of a situation. Most of the members of congress were dead or missing and the flyboys wanted an increase to their base budget for the following year.

  It was going to be a long night.

  *****

  16 July 2025

  Holloway Office Complex, CIA Black Site Three, Reston, Virginia

  Berndt looked forlornly at the vertical bars of his cell. There were twenty-five bars spaced approximately ten to twelve centimeters apart, making the cell two-and-a-half meters wide. Since the room appeared to be square, he assumed it was the same depth. The only fixtures in the room were the mattress on the floor that wasn’t long enough for his entire body to fit onto, a low sink and the toilet.

  The Luftwaffe pilot didn’t know how long he’d been in the prison. Sleeping wasn’t an effective measure of the passage of time since there was nothing to do except sleep. He didn’t even think his meals were delivered on a regular basis. His best guess, based on bowel movements, was that he’d been in captivity for a week or more.