“I appreciate whatever you can do, sir,” Stan said.
“No, no, Colonel,” McGraw said. “Don’t go all formal on me.” The general grabbed Stan by the elbow and steered him away from the waiting plant manager.
“Listen to me. I’ll do what I can for Jake. But you know Army brass doesn’t have a lot of pull with the Militia. They might use your boy as a bargaining chip against us. You know what I mean?”
“I know,” Stan said, and it made his gut ache. What was wrong with those people?
“But I’ll bend some arms,” McGraw said. “You can count on that.”
“I know,” Stan said. And he did. He trusted Tom McGraw.
“You’re good then?”
Stan wasn’t good in the slightest. He hadn’t been good ever since learning about this. But he was Army. He could put his pain in a box and shut the lid so he could concentrate on the matter at hand. He gave the general a sharp nod.
“Good,” McGraw said. “Now how about you help me for a moment.”
“Of course,” Stan said.
“You’ve been keeping abreast of the GD campaign in Southern Ontario?”
“Night and day,” Stan said.
“I knew you would be. Do you have any ideas?”
Stan knew what McGraw meant. Did he have any ideas about how to stop the GD blitzkrieg? Well, the Army and the reformed Canadians had stopped the blitz for a time. It came at the cost of the Toronto Pocket, and too many prized divisions caught in a trap. The Germans would capture those soldiers soon. Nothing American High Command did had been able to break them free. Once the pocket surrendered, the blitz would likely continue. He had an idea how to keep the Germans bottled afterward, but he wasn’t sure the general would like it much.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Stan admitted. “It’s tight country in Southern Ontario. Especially the area squeezed between Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. There’s a lot of city there, too, a lot of built-up area. Unfortunately, the GD has better and more armor and better and more mechanized units than we do.”
“They have plenty of ground-based drones, too,” McGraw said. “That gives them an amazing advantage.”
Stan agreed. “From the repots I’ve read, our armor is outclassed. Facing GD tanks head-on is too costly in our machines, and our helos have taken crippling losses whenever they’ve attacked. We need to keep our older tanks away from theirs. There aren’t any Jeffersons up north, as we have them all locked up in the Midwest. Frankly, the only way I can see right now at stopping them for good is through mass, lots of warm bodies in the way.”
“Armed with plenty of anti-tank weapons?” McGraw asked.
“We need more of that, much more,” Stan said. “But our portable anti-tank weapons aren’t as good as theirs. And those Sigrids combined with the Kaisers, Leopards and laser-armed Sabre fighter-jets—it’s a brutal mix, sir. No. I believe the answer is massed bodies backed by thousands of gun tubes.”
“Artillery, huh,” McGraw said.
“Raining down anti-tank rounds by the ton,” Stan said. “If we can, we have to turn the battle from a high-tech contest to something where we can compete at better odds. We need siege lines, Tom, massed SAMs and tactical antiair lasers so they can’t pull any more of their tank drops against us. That was well done on their part. No. I take that back. It was a brilliant maneuver.”
“They’ve been brilliant, I’ll grant you that,” McGraw said. “They have their own Stan Higgins over there.”
“I don’t know about that, sir, but the GD generals know their business. We have more men or soldiers than the GD does. They have more machines. Too bad we couldn’t fire giant EMP weapons over them and stall the GD machines.”
“Nuclear explosions cause electromagnetic pulses,” McGraw said thoughtfully.
Stan’s shoulders twitched. It made him feel an old injury in his shoulder, pulling at the ancient wound. Is he serious? “Do you really want a nuclear war in Southern Ontario, sir? I was thinking along the line of the Chinese EMP Blue Swan missiles. We could use several dozen of those. They could change the equation for us, and in a hurry.”
“Better to have a nuclear war there than to let the Germans into our country,” McGraw said.
“It can’t be as bad as that,” Stan said.
“It’s worse,” McGraw said. “Do you know there’s talk of moving your Behemoths north to Detroit?”
Stan laughed bleakly. “That’s a bad joke. We only have a handful of running vehicles. You know that.”
“That’s all we’ve ever had with them, old son. Do you think your Behemoths would do more good in—?”
“No!” Stan said.
McGraw scowled. “You didn’t even hear the question.”
“The Behemoths do best at long ranges, sir, very long ranges. Southern Ontario is the wrong place to use them. Besides, the Chinese would learn we pulled out of Oklahoma. Right now, I suspect, the Behemoth reputation is doing more to scare the Chinese than our paltry handful of actual machines. If we pull out of the Midwest Defense…” Stan shook his head. “We would lose the benefit of our reputation. We’re not going to impress the GD with our rep, but only through hard fighting.”
“And if the Germans take Detroit and this plant?” McGraw asked.
Stan blinked slowly. Was it really going to come to that? Were the Germans that good? If they were that good…the entire war could turn around against America.
“The GD making it to Detroit turns it into a different ball game, doesn’t it?” McGraw asked.
“It does,” Stan said.
“No suggestions, Colonel?”
“We can’t afford to lose Detroit,” Stan said. “Well…let me rephrase that. We can’t afford to lose the Behemoth Plant. Before that happens…I’d use those nukes you were talking about.”
“I can quote you on that?” McGraw asked.
“Yes, sir,” Stan said.
McGraw turned away. He sighed after a time. “This is a hell of a war, Stan. We won ourselves a big victory, a spectacular thing that put us in the driver’s seat for a change. Now another wolf comes sniffing at our door. Only it isn’t just any wolf, but the big old Fenris wolf of Norse mythology. Are you familiar with the story?”
“I am, sir.”
“I thought you might be,” McGraw said, facing Stan again.
“During the last battle of the Viking gods—it’s called Ragnarok,” Stan said. “The Fenris wolf eats Odin All-father. If I remember correctly, the wolf swallows the Norse king of the gods whole.”
“It might be time to nuke the wolf,” McGraw said.
“Or use mass against him,” Stan said.
“And where do you expect the US to get this mass? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re stretched everywhere.”
“You can’t guard everywhere,” Stan said. “That’s a truism of battle and of war. Sometimes you have to gamble and weaken yourself at a spot so you can be strong at the critical sector. That’s what we did this winter. If it was me—and it isn’t, I know—I’d strip the southern East Coast for soldiers.”
Thoughtfully, McGraw pursed his lips. “The GD has some potent amphibious forces in Cuba waiting. We’ve learned about them. They’ve been quietly building up their numbers, ships and landing craft.”
“I’ve read those reports too,” Stan said. “I know about them.”
“Then you realize that by stripping the southern East Coast of soldiers we’d be leaving ourselves open. That’s just a short hop from Cuba to there.”
“We would be open there, yes sir. What do we have, something like seven hundred thousand soldiers from southern Mississippi to Florida and to North Carolina. I’m talking about winnowing out four hundred thousand from that. I would think the bulk of the remaining troops would particularly guard Mississippi to Florida.”