Red Cloud peered at him through his ballistic glass visor. The Algonquin looked tired, although his eyes seemed harder, more determined than ever. He nodded.

  “Unless you want to help fate and stay out here to die,” Paul said.

  “No. I will fight to live and live to fight.”

  “Sounds good,” Paul said. He himself fought to fulfill a vow and to survive long enough to make things right with his ex. He could see now that he hadn’t tried hard enough with Cheri. He would woo her again. He would…if he could make it home.

  “Ready?” asked Red Cloud.

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  DEAD HORSE, ALASKA

  General Shin Nung swore viciously as another bomber zoomed out of the Arctic sky, launching its missiles. First, a Red Arrow slammed into the American aircraft, causing an explosion in the sky. Then a nearby hovertank exploded, killing it and the nine soldiers riding outside the vehicle.

  That’s when the American artillery began pounding the location. The shots created great flashes of light on the horizon. Those flashes showed where Dead Horse, Alaska was, their key objective. As the shells screamed down, exploding over the tundra, Nung’s command hover shuddered and shell fragments rattled against the vehicle’s armor.

  Nung swore. He was in a foul mood. He had been ever since the deadly TOW2 missiles had struck his force out on the ice. It had been a costly battle, a nasty surprise. Only fifty-one hovertanks had made it past Cross Island and to the North Slope. Every time he thought about those flashing missiles hitting another hovertank—

  Nung struck his armrest again. He had to put that battle behind him and concentrate on here. Technically, they had made it to the oilfields outside of Dead Horse. If Nung had desired, he could have begun blowing the wellheads. What he wanted was Dead Horse, though, the enemy airbase and garrison stationed there. Once he had Dead Horse, the victory would be his.

  If he had air cover, the few America jets couldn’t have rushed down at his vehicles in a near suicidal frenzy. The helicopters couldn’t have shot their Hellfire missiles at his sleds. The hovertanks had destroyed most of airborne attackers, but at a bitter cost. The combined total of enemy assaults had destroyed nearly half of his original attacking vehicles.

  He kept thinking if, if, if…if Commissar Ping this, the High Command that, the nuclear-tipped torpedo….

  He shook his head. War wasn’t a matter of ifs but of dids. He’d made it to the American coast. Now he was going to smash through and take Dead Horse. Then it would be just a matter of waiting for the snowtanks to complete his conquest.

  “Go in by lances!” Nung shouted into the microphone. “Infantry, follow on ski.”

  Dead Horse was on a flat tundra plain surrounded by American bunkers and command posts. The enemy had mortar-teams and artillery inside the town. Nung had speed, tired hover-pilots and cold soldiers. There wasn’t any finesse to the assault.

  The smallest formation among the hovertanks was a lance: three vehicles. Three hovertanks would stop on the cold tundra to provide over-watch fire, tracking, plotting and shooting at anything that moved. A different lance sped to an outcropping, using every fold in the terrain to escape destruction. From the hovertanks slid off Chinese infantry. Some set up mortars and began peppering the Americans.

  Then a shell found Nung’s hover. The scream of twisted metal began it. The vehicle slewed wildly and with a terrific thud crashed against a snow bank. Nung grunted as he slammed against his restraints. Groggily, he looked around. The communications officer was dead, his head a bloody mess. The pilot’s arm was broken as the man sobbed quietly.

  “Sir, sir,” squawked from the radio.

  Nung lifted a mobile com-unit, tucking it under his arm. Then he staggered for the escape hatch. Upon exiting and sliding down the side of the vehicle, he winced as another hovertank howled near. The vehicle came to a stop beside him as it blew snow everywhere. Five riding soldiers slid off.

  It was freezing cold out here, colder than it had been on the ice. It stung Nung’s face and his neck. His teeth began chattering. With an effort of will, as he shoved aside the pain, he shouted, “What are you doing? Don’t stand around me. We’re exposed.”

  He forced himself to move, wading through snow until he got to more solid ice. After establishing control over thirty soldiers, he shouted, “Get down!”

  He had better reflexes than the others did as he heard the whine of shells. The American artillery had zeroed in on the wreckage. Some of the shrapnel sliced a few of the slower soldiers. Their oozing blood looked like a sluggish stain of ink in the darkness. With another effort of will, Nung tore his gaze from the twisting soldiers. He didn’t have time for them now.

  “Advance, keep advancing!” he roared into the communications unit he wore like a backpack.

  With his voice lashing them, the last hovertanks continued their advance. 76mm shells, Chinese mortars, ATGMs and RGPs pounded the base that rose up like an Eskimo’s igloo in the distance. Occasionally a thunderous flash appeared there, another artillery tube firing its hated shells.

  Shin Nung floundered through the snow, shaking off any helping hands. The Chairman had thought him lacking in attacking zeal. They had accused him of cowardice.

  “Attack!” roared Nung, mist pouring from his mouth. It was so cold. “Kill the Americans!”

  The Battle of Dead Horse was another meat-grinder. The Chinese traded blood and vehicles for ground. The hovertanks dwindled in number as they floated over the ice, amazingly swift in this land of cold. In the end, though, the Americans simply lacked enough men, enough shells, bombers and ammo. The Chinese assault carried through into the streets of Dead Horse. The massacre began then, the shivering Chinese too bitter after surviving the Arctic nightmare to grant any mercy.

  The last assault took place as Chinese explosives blew open the way into the Marine command post, a half-buried bunker. In the last room, Captain Bullard fired at point blank range, killing two Chinese soldiers. Then Bullard’s automatic was empty and he drew his bayonet. The Marine captain charged, roaring his challenge. Chinese bullets riddled the body until it thumped onto the bloody floor. The Battle of Dead Horse was over, and the Chinese were victorious.

  -17-

  The Last Push

  STERLING, ALASKA

  The terrible ice age storm that had howled down from the Arctic Circle and halted all movement on the Southern Front was beginning to die a slow death. The insane shrieks no longer whispered in First Rank Lu Po’s ears. He could think again, even though it was dreadfully cold outside the cabin that he and his White Tigers had huddled in during the blizzard.

  Lu opened the front door and stepped outside into a frozen wasteland. Ice and snow encrusted the surrounding pines. A thousands branches lay on the virgin snow or were buried under tons of white. The air burned going down his lungs. Each step was a sharp crunch of his boots on the devilish substance. Lu never wanted to see snow again. Once this campaign was over and he took his discharge, he would live in the South Pacific. He would bake in the sunlight and luxuriate in warmth forever.

  “What are you waiting for?” he told the Commandos emerging from the log cabin. “Don’t you want to be heroes?”

  The White Tigers wore their white combat suits. After a hot morning breakfast, they cradled their weapons.

  “The storm hurt us,” said Lu, “but it will have hurt the partisans even worse.”

  “They’re native to this land and will have known what to do,” Wang said.

  “Maybe. The key is that they’re not elite soldiers like us. If any of them were caught in the open, they’ll be frozen or half-dead by now. It’s time to finish our chore and teach these hardheaded Americans the price of not knowing when they’re beaten. You heard Command. They want every one of them hanged. All the supplies must get through to the front. The final push is about to begin, and we have to make sure our soldiers have enough ammo and fuel to smash through Anchorage.”

  It was a speech, and Lu was more than tired of those. It was time to find and hang these tick-like partisans that were sucking off Chinese strength.

  * * *

  Half a day later, Lu knelt beside a guttered fire. His men had found six frozen bodies nearby. The Americans were stiff like boards. These bastards had been caught in the storm. He could almost pity them. After examining the tracks of the survivors and their direction of travel, he followed until the forward scouts spotted three unburied candy wrappers.

  “Someone was careless,” said Wang. “Usually they bury these.”

  “How many do you think are left in this band?” asked Lu.

  Wang shrugged. “Four to six would be my guess.” He frowned as the tracks disappeared deeper into the woods. “Do we follow the trail?”

  “Of course,” said Lu. “We follow their tracks until we find and kill them.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know, Bill,” said Carlos. “This position is awfully exposed.” They were on a pine-covered hill overlooking Highway One. Their tracks led deeper into the shadowed forest.

  An exhausted Bill Harris couldn’t feel his feet anymore. He knew they were black with advanced frostbite. Gangrene would set in soon unless they were amputated. He didn’t want to go on living without feet. He knew suicide was wrong from God’s perspective. But this wasn’t suicide. He was fighting for his country.

  Bill was tired. His teeth chattered all the time and he wondered if he was beginning to hallucinate. A presence had been with him during the trek here, a light off the corner of his eye. He thought it might have been God, but when he’d turned, nothing had been there. This storm….

  “Bill, you okay?” asked Carlos.

  “Sure,” Bill whispered. His strength was failing. It was so cold, his feet—

  “We’d better think about finding shelter,” Carlos said.

  “No,” whispered Bill, with his eyes feeling as if they were burning up. Feebly, he shook his head. The storm…before the storm he’d seen too many corpses dangling from the pines. Those were American men and women, and children, too. The Chinese hanged everyone.

  When he’d sat huddled under a lean-to during the blizzard, as ice howled around them, he’d remembered crows pecking at the corpses’ eyes. That had done something to him. He’d focused on that during the ice storm and had started a fire with the old hunter’s lighter. The hunter had died….

  “Bill,” said Carlos. “We can’t go on like this.”

  “The corpses,” Bill whispered.

  “You ought to rest.”

  “The corpses,” Bill whispered again. He’d seen more today dangling like frozen icicles. It had filled him with the same anger as when he’d watched the T-66s destroying Stan Higgins’s company of Abrams tanks. That had caused him then to wire grenades to a sticky bomb. He’d charged the Chinese monster. There was something in him that maybe only Stan Higgins knew about. It came upon him after losing game after game. Too much defeat would ignite a fire in him. He couldn’t talk then. He would be too angry, too wound up and driven to win. Then he’d drive for the hoop, making his lay-ups. Then his three-point shots would start swooshing in.

  The anger, the fire, after knowing that he was going to lose his dead feet…it had ignited him seeing those frozen bodies dangling from the pines. He’d been a free man all his life. He didn’t plan to play the slave now to some invader, especially not with amputated feet! There were times you had to fight. It was better to fight on your knees than being a slave. But it was best to fight standing while you still had feet.

  “That’s what I’m going to do today,” Bill whispered.

  “What’s that, Pastor?” asked Carlos.

  “Here,” said Bill, indicating the hill. “Here’s where I’m making my stand.”

  They were on a hill in the shadows of ice-laden pines. Below was the snow-packed Highway One.

  “You take the others and go,” Bill whispered. “Just leave me the M2 and the ammo.”

  Carlos stared at him. “If you’re staying, I’m staying.”

  “Choppers can get us pretty easy if we’re up here,” the youthful pilot said, adding his opinion as he always did.

  “With the M2 Browning….” Bill smiled as he might have after making a winning three-point shot.

  “You don’t think we’re going to make it out alive, do you?” asked Carlos.

  “I don’t know,” said Bill. His eyes felt hot again. It put splotches before his vision. “I’ve seen a lot of corpses hanging from trees. I figure the Chinese are killing off all the real Americans. I don’t know if I want to be around once those people are gone.”

  Carlos nodded thoughtfully. “If we’re going to die, let’s make it worth something, huh?”

  “I’m not committing suicide,” Bill said feverishly. “I’m just sick of seeing those corpses. And my feet—I’m going to hit back as hard as I know how.”

  “What about your feet?” the pilot asked.

  “Nothing,” said Bill. He shouldn’t have said anything about them. It was a mistake.

  “Do you hear that?” asked Carlos, his voice muffled by his scarf.

  Everyone in the small band listened.

  “Those sound like trucks,” the pilot said.

  “Go,” whispered Bill. He crouched by his M2 and used his freezing fingers to fumble at the ammo belt, soon racking a bullet into the firing chamber. He looked up at the others. They had intense frowns, those that had pulled down their scarves. “Go,” he said again. “Save yourselves to fight later.”

  “Look,” said Carlos, pointing.

  They did, including Bill. A snowplow appeared from around a bend. Snow and ice roared from it as it cleared the highway. Behind the snowplow were Chinese Army trucks and ordinary commercial vehicles, including a tanker.

  “They must be running out of trucks,” said Carlos, “if they’ve begun stealing ours.”

  Bill had a crazy idea. He was so desperately cold. He wanted to see a fire, a real blaze. He forgot about his friends as he tried to judge distances to the tanker.

  “What was that?” the pilot asked, turning around toward the pines behind them. Before anyone could answer, assault-rifle fire cut the pilot down. He crumpled onto the snow.

  “Ambush!” cried Carlos. He twisted around and raised his rifle, managing to get off three shots. He shot into the trees they had come out of earlier. Then a well-placed round made a hole in his forehead. He slumped to the cold snow beside the pilot.

  “The Alamo,” whispered Bill. He ignored the gunshots from the pines, his back to the hidden enemy. He concentrated as he sighted upon the shining tanker with its metal storage unit. The tanker was near the front of the convoy line. Then a bullet smashed through his shoulder blade, pitching him onto the M2. For a moment, he lay in shock.

  I’m hit, Bill realized. He’d tossed away the durasteel armor a day before the storm. It had been too heavy to lug around. Now he wished he was still wearing it.

  With a groan, Bill dragged himself upright behind the M2 Browning. He grabbed the V-shaped butterfly trigger, swiveled the heavy machine gun, and sighted the tanker. It was far away. That didn’t matter now—he didn’t have any time left to be fancy. He felt lightheaded, but he felt sure he could make the shot, just like a distant three-pointer in basketball. He pressed both thumbs on the buttons and heard the heavy hammering sound.

  Tracer rounds hosed out in a line. Bill adjusted as he held his body stiffly. Another bullet slammed into him, but he kept his position and only grunted. His incendiary rounds smoked against the tanker’s metal skin. Then the greatest fireball of his life mushroomed up in an orange roar of flame.

  Militia Sergeant Bill Harris’s eyes were shining. Then his head exploded in a rain of blood, brain and skull-bone as a White Tiger dum-dum bullet ended his existence in this world.

  * * *

  Lu Po stared at the dead Americans. Down below, the fuel tanker burned. It had backed-up traffic as explosions still cooked off from other trucks. The snowplow was on its side, the dead driver hanging out of the broken windshield.

  “High Command won’t be pleased with this,” said Wang.

  “Fools,” said Lu. “Why did they put the tanker so near the snowplow?”

  “Maybe they need the fuel up at the front.”

  Lu shrugged. It didn’t matter now.

  “What about these corpses?” Wang asked, pointing with his rifle at the dead Americans.

  “Hang them like the rest and put on the placards,” said Lu. “If we have to kill every one of these Americans before they learn, we’ll do it.”

  Wang shook his head. “They’re like rats. They just keep appearing. Don’t they know when they’re beaten?”

  Lu had no answer for that as he watched the tanker burn.

  ANCHORAGE, ALASKA

  Captain Stan Higgins and Brigadier General Ramos trudged through the snow. They struggled through big drifts to a nearby overpass.

  The blizzard had left a heavy covering of snow, making it a seeming pristine wonderland. To the far north of the city rose the majestic mountains of the Alaska Range. To the immediate north were the military bases. To the immediate east was the Chugach Foothills, part of the Chugach State Park. It was the third-largest park in America and comprised nearly a half-million acres. Cook Inlet lay to the west, while ten miles from the heart of downtown Anchorage to the south was Potter Marsh.

  It was a gray morning, with heavy clouds overhead. The wind whistled, but it didn’t howl or shriek. Bits of snow swirled, but not the whiteout that had brought everything to a standstill for the past few days.

  The airport was on the opposite side of the city as the approaching Chinese. The main arteries leaving Anchorage were also across the city from the front line.

  Stan’s three Abrams were ready, joining the skeletal remains of Ramos’s 1st Stryker Brigade. The attrition of battle had whittled the brigade down to little more than a company of soldiers and machines. The 4th Airborne Brigade was gone, its dead officers, NCOs and soldiers scattered along Highway One, having made the Chinese pay for each mile they advanced. Ramos had done the same along Highway Nine. Few Alaskan National Guardsmen remained, although a higher percentage of Militia had made it back to the city. They had broken more quickly, running away faster. Some had regrouped, bitter about the war and their seeming lack of courage. Those men were determined to halt the Chinese now. Others cowered somewhere in the city, often hating themselves because of their fear.