Eric L. Harry
Invasion
Prologue
The North American continent is separated from Europe by 3,000 and from Asia by 4,000 miles of open sea. These expanses guarantee it a degree of immunity from external interference enjoyed by no other region of the world.… Two great oceans, a tranquil relationship with Canada, and a containable problem from the states to the south give the United States a sense of basic isolation and security. It is also a country which is almost completely self-reliant; faced with a loss of all external supply, the USA would “come through.”… The oceanic factors retain, even in the nuclear age, the determining importance in the making of American strategy that they have had since the founding of the republic. The seas still protect America from invasion.
How did it ever come to this? thought eighteen-year-old Private Stephanie Roberts as she stared out at the dusty sandbagged roadblock that marked the new boundary carved into America.
Stephie, the youngest infantryman in the squad of nine and one of only two women, climbed aboard the truck. “I don’t trust you,” the hulking Animal said to her. At five-seven and 125 pounds, Stephie and her rifle were security for the lone machine gun attached to her squad. Attached to the machine gun was a 250-pound asshole who sank onto the bench seat beside Stephie. The white, former junior college football lineman was nineteen, but he had an emotional age of six. “I don’t trust split tails,” he whispered with breath that made Stephie wince, “so just stay the hell outa the way of my gun, or I might have to kill you to kill Chinese.” Her squadmates ignored her clash.
“Suits me fine,” Stephie replied. “And you stink.”
It was a hot day. Throngs of refugees crowded the border of the Exclusion Zone two hundred miles north of the Alabama Gulf Coast. Two hundred miles north of her home. On the northern side, where all seemed normal. Laundry hung on clotheslines within a stone’s throw of bunkered guard posts. Stores were open. Towns were busy. People went about their lives. Had it not been for the concealed machine guns, tanks, and missile batteries, the casual eye wouldn’t have detected much change. Even the evacuee relocation center — tents pitched amid motor homes and barbeques — looked like a national park campground in summer.
The mixed team of MPs and state highway patrolmen raised the barrier and waved the dozen-vehicle convoy through. The diesels growled and belched noxious fumes, but Stephie was glad even for that breeze on the sweltering day. Their truck passed the sentries, and Stephie got the distinct impression that they were leaving America.
The sandbagged walls that rose up the road’s shoulders parted, and the pavement began to flash by. They were in disputed territory. The no-man’s-land between two great armies. Barren of life. Still and quiet and empty as if braced for the violence to come.
No maps had been redrawn to show the dashed lines that now defaced the southeastern United States, but the CO had shown everybody in their infantry company maps, stained with blood, that had been captured from Chinese reconnaissance teams. The American teenagers had passed them around in silence while seated on helmets and packs at the end of a week-long field training exercise. They were 110 brand-new infantrymen — only one month removed from the shocking rigors of boot camp, and four months from cocoons of middle-class comfort. All were grimy, sunburned, sweaty, mosquito-bitten, scraped, and bruised. They stank, and exhaustion was evident in their slumped reposes.
But as the maps were handed from soldier to soldier, anger crackled. It burned in squinted eyes. It swelled from rhythmically clenching jaws. It clawed at the swirling greens on the paper with talon-like, murderous grips. The maps had made the circuit by the time the trucks had arrived to return them to their makeshift barracks in a nearby Holiday Inn, but no one rose from the big circle in which they sat. The rides, to Stephie, meant back to a semiprivate room shared with nineteen-year-old Becky Marsh from Oregon, the other woman in Stephie’s squad. It meant showers, air-conditioning, soft beds.
But the bone-weary teenagers refused to leave the field. Lieutenant Ackerman, their platoon leader, feigned annoyance while hiding a grin. Staff Sergeant Kurth, their platoon sergeant, and his noncoms never smiled.
That day, troops led their officers back into the woods. They spent another week digging holes, chopping brush, firing at trees, and assaulting a charred hump of dirt. For the names of the Alabama towns that were shown on the captured enemy maps were already printed in Chinese.
“Lock ’n load,” Sergeant Collins, their squad leader, barked as the trucks picked up speed. The first deployment of their newly formed unit was a combat patrol of America’s exposed Gulf Coast beaches. Metallic clacks of magazines and snaps of breech covers pierced the steady whoosh of the wind of the road. They had cinched up the truck’s canvas sides to get a breeze, and Stephie began to point out the familiar landmarks of her native state. She knew the cracked two-lane highway like the back of her hand. They passed the Stuckeys where Stephie’s stepfather had always stopped for peanut brittle on the way home from football games in Tuscaloosa. She recognized the service station where they had waited one long, hot day for their leaking radiator to be repaired. And there was the stand that her mom had always insisted carried the freshest watermelons of any place on earth. All were now boarded up. Abandoned. Forlorn.
Her squadmates, for their parts, pointed out the road’s new attractions. A billboard with the image of a famous actress, who always played the high school slut in the slasher flicks, pressing her index finger to ruby red lips. The seductive image drew lewd comments and gestures from the boys, who overlooked entirely the point of the message. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” read the legend at the top. Stephie wondered at how bad the actresses’s career must have turned to now be doing public service advertisements.
Concrete bunkers with periscopes and electronics mast-heads — facing south — had been dug out of the banked earth of highway overpasses. Bridges had been marked with orange signs that read, “Warning! Wired for demolition!” In the distance, open farmland — potential landing zones if transport aircraft suicidally flew at their missile defenses — had been pitted with black craters by preregistered artillery. And along the side of the road, ubiquitous triangular markers warned not to stray from the pavement onto shoulders already dotted with land mines. The regularly spaced triangles — black skulls and crossbones on yellow signs — flashed by as the convoy drew ever nearer the dangerous sea.
Every so often, they passed small towns still being stripped by engineers. Tractor trailers were being loaded with everything militarily usefuclass="underline" portable generators, backhoes, transformers, propane tanks. What the engineers couldn’t move, they destroyed. Columns of black smoke rose from all points of the compass. The convoy was stopped periodically by the demolition. Hoots and hollers rose from the parked convoy as charges toppled a metal water tower. Painted on the falling tank’s side was a weathered, “Go Wildcats! Division II Basketball Champs 2001–02.” After the great crash, the agitated male and female infantrymen reenacted the stupendous sight with hand gestures and special effects sounds. All were on their feet, agitated. Excited. Scared out of their fucking skins, Stephie thought with a quiver as if cold on the hot, hot day.
Over the next half hour, the thunderous booms that rolled across the landscape from unseen engineers near and far eventually had the opposite effect of that big steel crash. The noticeable thumps of high explosives on their bodies soon quieted the anxious chatter in the truck. War hadn’t yet come to America, but the thudding jolts that rattled their insides frayed their nerves with portents of death. The teenagers looked inward. Peer pressure demanded it. No one contemplated what loomed ahead out loud, except Becky. Stephie’s roommate spent two weeks at the Holiday Inn imagining doom to all hours of the morning despite Stephie’s pleas for sleep.