they are at killing enemy armor. Your guns may be the margin we need for victory.”
“Yes, sir,” Stan said.
“We have to stop this attack cold. They snookered us, but I bet they didn’t think we’d have our Behemoths in the Rockies. It seemed like a stupid place to put them, but now I’m seeing it was pure genius. General McGraw, out.”
Stan dry swallowed. That was it then. The Chinese must be trying to cut off Denver’s supply route. Everyone had expected Ghosts, not this WWII-style attack with overwhelming mass.
More klaxons wailed as Stan handed the receiver to the operator. The CP captain shouted orders. He was finally receiving the real-time intelligence from the satellite. Someone shouted he spotted Electronic Warfare Anchors in the enemy formation. They must be the planes doing the jamming.
Stan used the phone to begin alerting his Behemoth crews. They needed to start up the tanks and get the force cannons pointed skyward with all systems ready.
Woodenly, Stan moved over behind a CP sergeant’s screen. He knew McGraw was ordering the right thing. Still, this was too soon to let the Chinese know the Behemoths were here. He’d wanted to keep their location a surprise. There were only seventeen of them in the entire United States. Surely, the Chinese must wonder where the super-tanks were hidden.
“Look at that,” the CP captain whispered from where he stood beside Stan.
Stan watched the sergeant’s screen. He saw it, waves of enemy aircraft.
“I’m counting over five hundred drones,” the sergeant said.
Colonel Higgins nodded. This was the right place for using the Behemoths. He just hoped he would not lose them by doing so.
PUEBLO, COLORADO
Blue light filled the large but cramped command compartment in MC ABM #3. Officers and enlisted personnel sat at their stations, checking their screens.
Commander Bao held a receiver to his ear. The Marshal’s orders came through the line firmly and quietly: “Destroy the American satellite.”
Commander Bao of the Mobile Canopy Anti-Ballistic Missile Vehicle #3 hung up the phone. He was a middle-aged man with a stomach ulcer. He kept a bottle of a thick medicine in a compartment under his chair.
The ulcer came because of his insistence on perfection, he believed. His vehicle had the best rating in the military and he planned to keep it that way. Bao knew the crew considered him a martinet, a perfectionist. That was fine with him. All his life his mother had taught him to be the best. He had achieved perfection in every endeavor: in piano playing, in Ping-Pong and in mathematics during his school years. Just as China outperformed every other country, so Bao would outperform the other MC ABM commanders. That included in how he instructed the others. For example, he had never raised his voice with them because that would indicate nervousness.
When one was the best, one had nothing that could make one nervous.
The ulcer now bit him with a twinge of pain. Commander Bao ignored it for the moment as he began to issue orders in a calm voice.
Each of the personnel put on huge headphones with noise cancellation technology. They had to in order to survive the next few minutes.
Bao checked with Tracking and got on the intercom with Power and Fuel. The operators from each told him they were ready. He checked his watch.
“Twenty seconds,” he said. As he said it, he meant neither nineteen seconds nor twenty-one seconds. He demanded perfect precision from everyone, including himself.
The small hand of his high-grade watch ticked away. Precisely twenty seconds later, green lights appeared on his board.
“Are we still tracking?” Bao asked into his microphone. His lips were too close and he heard blowing sounds in his ears.
“Yes, Commander,” the Tracking Officer said.
“Give me power,” Bao said.
In the other two links of the tier-system, chemical rocket fuel pumped into the magnetic-propulsion turbine—MPT. The whine was unbelievable and it quickly rose to a painful volume.
Commander Bao and his team in the laser unit winced or scrunched their faces. Firing the laser never got easier. The compartment shook and rattled Bao’s teeth. He pressed them together. For some unaccountable reason, his mouth had been open. That was a mistake. He noted it and told himself never to make that mistake again.
“Aim the focusing mirrors,” he said. He heard his voice as weak and small in his headphones, but he heard it. That was the amazing thing. Chinese electronics was the best.
Outside the three-trailer MC ABM system, the focusing mirror aimed into space. Inside the command compartment, Tracking followed