March 23 1945, 0700 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters, 20 miles from the Franco-Spanish border
Someone had dumped a load of hot sand behind Eric von Shrakenberg's eyelids. He rubbed at them for a moment before taking another sip of coffee and looking down at the map in front of him, conscious of the eyes on them. Outside his massed artillery thundered across the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains, putting in support for the attack that had begun four hours before. Already more smoke was rising out of the mountain passes to the west as the Draka infantry went in. Eric allowed himself one more moment of silence, then spoke.
"My apologies, y'all. Strategos Thunorssen, please continue."
"Yes, sir." The hatchet-faced commander of his II Corps didn't even look tired, damn it. Young for her rank, with the falconer's-glove emblem of the Janissaries on her sleeve and eyes that had only seemed to get brighter since they jumped off. "My lead elements are about halfway through the mountains right now. Minimal resistance, most of it from company sized units or smaller. They're holding us up in places, but no sign of any counterattacks and no reinforcements." She turned towards Caudell, the Air Force Johnny, with a broad smile. "I think most of their big formations and headquarters got it from your bombers, Group Captain."
"Well they should." Caudell grinned slightly. "Twelve bombs ought to ruin anybody's day. They'll still be wondering which end goes upwards when we reach Madrid." There was a burst of laughter around the table, and even Eric chuckled. His nightmare had been failure of that crucial first step, the Draka armies bled white through the mountains and then smashed by counterattacks if they got through. That worry, it seemed, was over. Thunorssen continued.
"Yes, well. Anyway, we're going through all four passes like a knife through a throat. Main thing delayin' us is getting new assault units to the front when the old ones are expended and the security measures. " She slid her eyes over to the green-tabbed representative of the Security Directorate. "Strategos Vashon, are you sure you can't move more of yo' people up towards the front lines? All the security in the world won't save us if those people somehow find their asses before we're through the mountains." Vashon bristled, and Eric held up his hand. A boss Headhunter wasn't likely to make his Yule card list in this lifetime, but Loki knew the last thing he needed right now were arguments among his command staff.
"That was discussed during the plannin' step, Angelica. If we do get held up in there we're going to need an uninterrupted line of communication to our troops to get our momentum going again. Expendin' the population within ten miles of the line of march is extreme, but we don't have time to be elegant. I'm sure Strategos Vashon will assist as much as possible, and if things get too bad I may release some of our airmobile reserve to speed the job up. But this isn't the time." Thunorssen looked like she'd just bitten into a lemon, and the damned Headhunter looked entirely too smug for Eric's taste. Time to nip this in the bud now.
"Brothers and sisters of the Race." They all looked up at his changed tone. "We-"
March 23, 1945, 0100 Hours
T-17 Hours and Counting
Navy Department Offices, Washington, DC.
"Are we sure this is it?" Captain James Weatherly bit down on his tongue at the question. Normally his response would have been something along the lines of "of course it is, you idiot!", but that wasn't a very politic option when your interrogator was the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, with his cabinet and the chief of your service sitting right next to him. After a moment, he managed a calm tone.
"Yes, Mister President. The Draka opened their attack with twelve fission bombs, aimed at major Euro-Spanish force concentrations and headquarters. General Groves at the Taos Project advises they can have no more than one or two bombs still in their stockpile, and very likely none at all. They've thrown all their chips on the table.
"We haven't been able to get a plane anywhere near the Pyrenees Mountains, but our intercept teams say the radio bands are full of commanders all up and down the range yelling for help. The Snakes seem to be sending at least three separate Corps of Janissaries, which is damn near all we've identified in the area. No Citizen Force units yet, but we think that's only because they haven't scored a breakthrough for them to exploit."
"No?" From his seat next to President Roosevelt, Vice President Truman looked skeptical. "All that firepower and no breakthrough?"
"No, Sir. For there to be a breakthrough you need a line of defense first, and so far the Spanish haven't managed one. If anyone's running the show at more than a regimental level over there, we haven't seen any signs of it. The Janissaries are advancing along all four of the passes they've attacked, and it's not even noon local time over there yet. Best guess is that since things are going so well, the Snakes will wait until they actually have a path through the mountains, then send in the Citizens. We estimate that will happen by local nightfall at the latest." Roosevelt nodded from his wheelchair.
"Admiral King. Your opinion please." Fleet Admiral Ernest King looked across at the wasted form of his Commander in Chief and shrugged.
"Sir, Reprisal and her group have to keep moving towards the Suez Canal at a decent rate, or the Snakes will get suspicious. In another day, she'll be far east enough that some of the primary targets will be marginal at best. I know we contemplated the entire Draka field force on the wrong side of those mountains before MONGOOSE kicked off, but I think tonight will offer the best chance of success. We need a decision now, Sir."
Roosevelt nodded, his drawn face looking around the room. "Gentlemen-"
Seventh Draka Army Field Headquarters
"I'm not here to preach to y'all about the glorious destiny of the Race. My father's already said that if I do that again he'll clap me for breach of copyright." A chuckle around the table- at the joke, and at the idea of an Old Domination stalwart like Karl von Shrakenberg soiling his hands with something so bourgeois as a lawsuit. Eric leaned forward over the table. "I will remind y'all, however, of the long-term picture here. The Yankees and their tame allies have been at peace with the Japanese for a year, which means they been getting' bolder and bolder about supporting our enemies. Which is a move not even a Yankee could miss forever." Another chuckle, a bit graver this time. Good.
"If we miss this chance, we could be left with a modern, industrial state on the Domination's borders. If the Yankees don't make us stop, biology will- we have a good percentage of the Race still under arms, even more of those of childbearin' age and if we don't get to demobilizing soon we are going to be well and truly fucked in about twenty years." Which was rather more of a planning window than most professional soldiers talked about in the middle of operations, but for the Draka everything they did served the ultimate goals of the Dragon Race. "This has got to work, and it's got to work the first time. If we get a case of victory disease, even this late in the game, we can still lose it all. Anybody forget that, I will blow them a new asshole befo' I ship them back to the Police Zone." He drew his eyes between Thunorssen and Vashon. They looked like they'd gotten the message. Good.
"Now. Unless we hit a major snag, I want to be able to send the Citizen Force through in the afternoon and have them laagered on the far side by nightfall. And there had better not be any snags. Clear?" Nods all around the table. "Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race." A ragged chorus, then a rustle of uniforms and paperwork as the Domination's field commanders returned to the business of conquest.
The Navy Department
"We all agreed when we launched Operation MONGOOSE that the Domination of the Draka posed the greatest long-term threat to the United States of any nation today, perhaps any nation ever. This country has not made a habit, to date, of attacking without warning or provocation. We have before us a unique opportunity, however, to deal our enemy a serious blow without the chance of retaliation."
Roosevelt's hands shook and his face was now drawn with pain, but his eyes were still bright and intense as they swept the room. "The decision is mine. The order is mine. The responsibility is mine. But if any of you have objections to launching MONGOOSE now, tonight, then now is the time."
The room went silent. Most of the men in it met their President's gaze. Some dropped their eyes. Some looked away entirely. But not a man said anything. Roosevelt nodded.
"Admiral King."
"Sir." King's voice was perfectly smooth, as though he was merely delivering lines already rehearsed.
"Send our messages to both carrier task forces. This ends tonight."
March 23, 1945, 1700 Hours
T-7 Hours and Counting
Ready Room One, USS Reprisal
Southwest of Sicily
Julius Rosemont settled back into his leather-padded chair and listened to the polyglot of accents as the flight crews of Heavy Attack Squadron One settled in. The long years of the Eurasian War had let tides of refugees sweep over the Western world- Frenchmen and Poles fleeing from the Germans, later Russians fleeing from the Germans and Australians fleeing the Japanese, and still later a mix of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Dutch, and Scandanavians fleeing from a Draka Yoke that would have harnessed them all with equal indifference. When the Navy had begun to form VAH-1 in secret a year ago, they had sought out the best airmen from all those nations, taught them the arts of carrier operations and radar bombing, and reminded them of one truth- no matter who they were, they hated the Draka that had murdered their nations much more than they hated each other.
The trainers back at their Stateside base, out in the deserted Nevada desert near a Godforsaken one-street town named Las Vegas, said it was for secrecy, so no one would wonder where experienced USN aviators were disappearing to, and so that afterwards the world would have struck the blow against the Snakes, not just the U.S. Privately, Rosemont had noted the larger proportion of "foreign" crews assigned to VAH-1 than their sister squadron aboard United States, and figured there was another reason for the policy. The Navy didn't expect to get too many of them back when this party was over.
They were a fearsome bunch, though- eyes with permanent squints from searching the sun for enemies, faces and hands battered by landing accidents, not a few bullet scars. One of the pilots, a tall German named Dortmunder, had the left side of his face cracked and split open from bailing out of a flaming Ju-88 over Vienna. Walker, Rosemont's British-born ECM man, still had a baby face along with a few of the other men, but even they bore lines and a strange stare that looked odd on men who should just be graduating high school or working their first job.
The same genius who named their plane must have been the one who named the squadron, Rosemont thought. The AR-1 was the Revenant, the avenging ghost…and the men who would fly it were the Myrmidons, men who couldn't conceive of an "after the war" and so would continue to fight until an enemy finally caught up with them. Young men who had been fighting since adolescence, men without countries to go home to-
-and old men who cared more about getting revenge on the Draka or atoning for their past than they did about surviving the process. Can't forget those, can we, Rosemont?
Commander Quentin Flannery, the squadron CO, strode to his lectern in the front of the room, near a cloth-covered chalkboard. He was a colorless man with pasty skin that refused to bronze under any sun, light brown hair, and pale grey eyes. Flannery had been in the Navy since the lean years after the Great War, had seen his entire world shattered at Pearl Harbor and then been a cog in the great machine that had broken the Japanese war effort in the battles around the Solomon Sea and New Guinea. His friends were long gone, his family only whispered of, and he would fly Navy Attack until someone sent him on to join them all.
"All right, people." Flannery's voice was crisp, waspish, all business. "The word just came in from Washington. We're going tonight." He dropped the cloth from the blackboard, revealing a map of the Mediterranean and a chalked-in flight schedule. Rosemont leaned forward, his spine turning to water. This was it.
"We'll be hitting eight targets, gentlemen. Together they compose the major supply centers for the Draka Expeditionary Force in Europe…" Flannery's voice trailed off as Rosemont scanned the flight schedule. He'd read up on all that. Part of his research had been the major ports the Draka were using to receive supplies from their homeland. Far and away the most important was Marseilles, which sat practically in the rear of the Draka army rather hundreds of miles across blasted Europe and the Alps. As befitted its importance, Marseilles was heavily defended, and the need to hit targets in Africa and Turkey meant it was also near the end of the Revenant's fuel range.
And there it was on the flight schedule. Warhammer 03, target Marseilles. Crew was Walker, Gunner/ECM Operator, Fujita, Bombardier/Navigator, and Rosemont, Pilot.
It was going to be one of those nights