“No. Do you?”
“Of course,” Romo said.
Paul didn’t bother glancing back to check. It must be safe if they were still alive. He slid his NV goggles into place and switched them on. The night became more visible, and he saw that Romo was right. Ahead, those stanchions—they must be GD sensors.
It took a solid thirty minutes to figure out how and then get around the stanchions. The flashes on the horizon had lessened by then. The American flashes had stopped some time ago. Their artillery must all be dead by now.
“I wonder how many of us are still alive,” Romo said.
Paul didn’t answer. In the darkness, he leaned against rubble, listening. To his right, a cool breeze blew off Lake Ontario. He glanced there. Movement on the water showed GD hovercraft, five machines moving single file west. Paul would have loved to shed his body armor, find a boat and attempt to row across to New York State. He wanted out of Canada. He wanted to go home.
Thinking about home, about Cheri, Paul opened a pocket and drew out a protein bar. He ate the gooey substance, and his body seemed to absorb the nutrients. The wrapper he stuffed back into the pocket.
“Ready?” Paul asked.
“Si,” Romo said.
The two lonely LRSU men crawled through the city streets. At times, they trudged and then went back to slithering through the dead remains of Toronto. They never spotted civilians. The GD robots weren’t too good at making distinctions. Paul saw hordes of the noncombatant dead bloating where they lay. He saw what had been a young girl, still clutching onto her stuffed unicorn, with speckles of crusted blood on the thing. Other sights were gruesome, and it debilitated him for a time.
“This is too much,” Paul finally said.
“The winners write the history, my friend,” Romo said. “This never happened unless the Germans lose. We have to make sure they lose.”
Paul gripped his assault rifle tighter. AI-run Kaiser HKs, flying UAV patrollers—he spat on the ground. He didn’t want to work himself into a rage. That took adrenaline, and that took badly needed energy from his body. Instead, a cold ruthlessness built in him. He tended toward that anyway, but this heightened the feeling. Along with the ruthlessness came the coiling of a steely spring in him that could release at a moment’s notice. Then the passion would kick in, and no one fought better than he did once he kicked it into overdrive.
Hours passed as the two men inched into GD territory. They made it through the forward zone and even into the secondary one where armored soldiers patrolled. For ten minutes, German Shepherds sniffed the ground, but the big dogs went elsewhere. Finally, the two commandos exited the secondary zone and reached the outer edge of Toronto, the northern end. For the first time they heard regular enemy speech, sprechen Sie Deutsch?
Paul checked his watch. Dawn was ninety minutes away. They had been crawling for a solid seven hours. Tiredness pulled at his bones, tugged at his eyelids. He ached all over. His right knee throbbed and his right ankle gave a twinge now and again.
“Hey,” Romo whispered. “Look to your right, at two o’clock.”
Paul eased his head around until he spied it. A soldier, a GD officer by his shoulder tabs, urinated against the side of a building. He could hear the stream of piss hitting bricks. After zipping up, the man hurried to a building. A guard appeared, aiming a rifle at the officer. The officer spoke sharply. The guard opened the door and the officer darted within.
“What do you think?” Romo asked.
Paul scanned the building. It was two stories tall. Then he spotted the antenna array up top. It was the GD design. They’d found a remote-controlling station. By the numbers posted over the door, this was the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Battalion.
A hard smile etched onto Paul’s face. He thought about the Marine general with the eye patch: Len Zelazny. The man could have been a stand-in for the Raiders football logo. General Zelazny had dreamed of this: Recon Marines reaching the momma’s boys and a drone station.
Paul didn’t feel quite the same about that. These were soldiers. They would know how to fight. Thinking they would be cowards was foolish. One didn’t win firefights by underestimating the enemy. Still… the soldiers in there might not be ready to face angry men with guns and knives.
Weariness tried to take over. Paul doubted many of the other elite American teams had reached this far in their sectors. He hoped so, but he had to be realistic.
Muttering some choice profanities, Paul decided to forget about weariness. This was go time.
The two men checked their weapons and readied grenades. Paul dug in a pocket and took out a tiny packet. With his teeth, he ripped it open and dumped two aspirins onto his tongue. He chewed them, the bitter, dusty tablets. He took several sips from his canteen.
“The guard?” Romo said.
“Do you want him?”
“Si. It’s all I can think about.”
“He’s all yours,” Paul said.
The two LRSU men began crawling, and they worked it so they came around from behind. They slid past four sets of jeep tires, and Paul noticed the orange glow of a cigarette ahead. The guard cupped it with his hands, but he stood in the wrong place to hide that from them.
Paul glanced at Romo. The Mexican Apache pulled out a wicked-looking knife. When he saw Paul looking, Romo nodded. Paul took a deep breath, stood up, slung the rifle over his shoulder and began to saunter toward the guard.
It took all of nine seconds. The guard appeared from his hidden location. The cigarette smoldered on the ground there. In German, the guard shouted an order.
Paul ignored the man, even though his stomach tightened painfully.
The guard repeated his words and raised his rifle, aiming at Paul. Stopping, Paul raised his hands and slowly turned toward the man. He noticed a shadow approaching the guard, but Paul’s face stayed rock-steady and betrayed nothing.
The GD soldier asked a harsh question. This soldier had the beginning of a mustache. Just how young was he?
Paul never had a chance to answer the man or his own questions regarding the guard’s age. Reaching from behind in a swift move, one of Romo’s dirty hands clamped over the guard’s mouth. Paul ducked and dropped in case the soldier should fire. Thus, he never saw Romo’s knife slash open the guard’s throat.
There was a brief struggle, a rustle of garments, and then Romo hissed.
Paul was already on his feet, striding toward the door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t care now. The steel spring in him uncoiled, and rage, pent-up fury boiled to the forefront. Such emotions were supposed to have been trained out of him by now. But there was only so much training could accomplish: a man still remained a man.
Paul grinned like a feral pit bull. He opened the door. A guard looked up from a desk, saw the rifle and might have shown surprise. Paul shot him in the mouth. The guard flew backward. Another—an officer—dove for the desk’s relative protection. Paul shot him so the officer twisted and thudded dead onto the floor. A third guard or MP drew a sidearm. With three deafening shots, Paul blew him backward until the man slammed against a wall, the corpse sliding down, leaving a smear of blood.
Paul wanted to roar and gnash his teeth. Instead, he tossed a grenade into a side room where soldiers shouted and a military shotgun made a racking sound. He bet it was where the rest of the guards stayed. The grenade exploded. Someone howled in pain. Coolly, Paul rolled before the entrance and emptied the magazine into the soldiers: four of them.
“Go!” Romo said.
Paul got up and strode one way; Romo went the other. While he moved, Paul slid out his bayonet. With a click, he snapped it onto the end of his barrel. The sight of naked steel often frightened men. That fear could delay their reactions. Paul burst into a large area where officers and enlisted personnel sat before remote-controlling screens, with headsets on and jacks in their ears.