"On station in seventeen minutes," the navigation officer told Wolf, anticipating his next question.
"Guns secured" came the radio report from the ship's weaponry officer.
"Defensive systems on automatic lock" came the defensive officer's report.
"Will switch to manual on your command."
Wolf finally took his eyes away from the green screen and looked up at Bjordson.
"We'll be in engaging within the half hour," the captain told the intelligence officer. "Better launch the RPV . . ."
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Hunter's entire psyche was vibrating by the time the Harrier lifted off from the Jacksonville Naval Air station.
The adrenaline was pumping through his body like some kind of painkilling drug. His heart was pounding and his brain was locked into its astonishingly computerlike mode.
It was at times like these-the minutes before battle-that Hunter was able to shift his total being into a higher gear.
Movement, thinking, even breathing became simple parts of the whole. The souped-up jumpjet was airborne and streaking eastward, Hunter did not so much steer the airplane as he did merge with it. His thought waves combined with the commands of his onboard computer. The triggers for his gun and weapon-launch systems became mere extensions of his fingers. The unique, variable-thrust engine thumped excitedly in beat with his heart.
He took a long deep gulp of pure oxygen from his mask and closed his eyes just for a moment. The vibrations were now in sync. Heart, mind, soul, and machine were lined up and locked in. He was ready to take on the enemy.
The true revenge for what these Norsemen had done to him-and his peaceful life with Dominique-was about to begin.
He was over the coastline within thirty seconds of takeoff.
Already he could see a trio of Norse attack subs, their white hulls turned dull orange in the setting sun, sitting about a mile offshore from Jacksonville Beach disgorging
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the first wave of troops. A half mile to the south, another trio of subs were doing the same thing, as were another three subs a half mile beyond them.
That the Norse considered this attack as their biggest and most elaborate was apparent right away. Instead of their usual see-through rubber boats, the enemy troops were coming ashore on old-style landing craft-not too far removed from the LCB's and LST's used more than a half century before on the beaches of Normandy. Several other big subs, undoubtably Volk Bats, were surfaced about a quarter mile beyond the troopships, and it was they who were providing the landing crafts from their enormous storage hulls.
Hunter brought the Harrier up forty-five hundred feet and throttled back. Even with all his preparation for this moment-both physical and spiritual-he was still amazed at what he saw. The line of Norse subs-war boats and supply vessels -stretched in both directions for as far as the eye could see.
Hunter had seen the estimates of enemy sub strength -there was thought to be about sixty to seventy of the Krig Bats troop boats in the Atlantic, and just as many of the supply subs. But nothing could have prepared him for this sight of almost two hundred of the gigantic lumbering submarines, lined up perfectly in groups of two's and three's stretching across the horizon like so many orange keys on a
piano.
Each sub was offloading troops into the landing crafts provided by the nearby Volk Bats. Once a landing craft was filled, it would turn right for shore and head at breakneck speed for the white sands of either Atlantic, Neptune or Jacksonville beaches. The scene looked like something out of the original D-Day. Hundreds of white streaks of churned-up foam were left in the path of each landing craft. The difference was the enemy was landing without the benefit of any covering fire.
Hunter's radio was crackling with reports of similar scenes farther down the coast at Vilano Beach, St. Augus-277
tine, Summer Haven, even off of Marineland. Within just a few minutes it became very evident that, as anticipated, a good portion of the East Coast of Florida was under attack.
Hunter turned the Harrier due south and went down to twenty-five hundred feet.
It felt strange for him to overfly such a large number of the enemy without having to worry about AA guns or SAMs. But the Norsemen had none. Their POW's from Montauk had readily admitted it, and the search of Norse battlefield dead so far had proved them correct.
In fact, with the exception of some antitank type rocket launchers and World War II-style flamethrowers, the Norsemen relied only on their assault rifles and their battleaxes. And their numbers and brute strength.
By quickly estimating the number of subs that stretched before him, Hunter calculated that there were as many as forty thousand enemy soldiers about to hit the beach, and that was just in the northeast sector alone. Against them, the United Americans had nearly seventy aircraft-fifty of them being attack planes, the rest providing recon and communications support-three regiments of Florida militia, and a battalion of Football City Special Forces Rangers. Plus the USS New Jersey.
In terms of manpower, the Norse had the UA defenders outnumbered by more than four to one. But it was the technology-the guns, the missiles, and the airplanes-that promised to give the Americans the edge.
Still, someone once said that there is quality in sheer quantity, and this is what ran through Hunter's mind as he screamed over the enemy invasion forces.
And at that moment, the brutal Norsemen seemed like a very formidable foe indeed.
Once he had reached a point just twenty miles north of Daytona Beach, Hunter put the jumpjet into a sharp hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and headed back up north.
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The plan was to let the enemy invasion forces reach the tideline and then strike at them-a strategy borne of necessity and experience. For no matter how good the various UA attack pilots were at their jobs, it was always much easier to hit a target that was on terra firma than one that was bobbing up and down in the water.
Now, as Hunter returned to his original position over Jacksonville, he saw that the first wave of Norse landing crafts was just five hundred yards off the beach. With grim anticipation, he reached down and armed all his weapons.
A pair of cluster-bomb-laden A-7 Strikefighters and a fierce-looking A-4
Skyhawk appeared right on time, and after a few seconds of maneuvering, Hunter had joined them in a finger-four formation. A quick glance once again to his south told him that other jet units were also just now arriving over the invasion beaches and that they, too, were jockeying up into their preattack formations.
High above, a Boeing E-3 AWAC's plane orbited the north beach sector, monitoring enemy communications and relaying information back and forth between the attack pilots, the ground forces, the New Jersey, and Jones's command staff back at Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Hunter's crash helmet headphones played him a veritable symphony of voices reciting call signs positions, speeds and altitude, all backed up by a low undertone of static.
The voices of war, he thought somberly.
He reached up to his breast pocket and gave it the first of three taps for luck. Inside, a small American flag he had carried for years was wrapped around his most precious possession, a faded, dog-eared, but nevertheless startlingly beautiful photograph of Dominique.
He tapped the pocket a second time.
He had tried-and failed-to avoid thinking about the upcoming hostilities in any other terms but personal. He had learned years ago that the secret of going to war was to become completely objective. Pull the trigger and drop the bombs in the most impersonal state of mind one could rally. This way combat performance was not affected by
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inner feelings or conceits. All of that kind of mind clutter had to be dealt with before one strapped on the flight helmet.
But Hunter was different, and so were these circumstances.
A familiar fire of anger and rage was growling in his stomach. The Norsemen had attacked his country and taken Dominique from him. He was now in a position to make them pay for both of the equally heinous crimes.
He tapped his pocket a third time-it couldn't get any more personal than that.
On a given signal, his flight split up into two pairs. Hunter was coupled with the A-7 being flown by a Texan named Zak Carson. They would go in first.
Lining up to the right of Carson's wing, Hunter rechecked his weapons systems.
His wings were nearly drooping with cluster bombs and his Aden gunpods were filled to the max with the heavy-caliber cannon shells. It was a heavy load for the relatively small Harrier, but one push of a button told him that everything was still green.
On another given signal, Hunter and Carson broke off cleanly and banked hard to the left. The maneuver lined them up perfectly with the long stretch of white beach below them.
Their timing couldn't have been better. The first wave of Norse landing crafts were just reaching the wave line, and a few hardy souls had already struggled down the landing ramp and into the shallow, wave-tossed surf.
"Good luck, Hawk," Carson called over to him.
"Ditto," Hunter radioed back.
With that, they both went into a shallow dive, quickly leveling off at no more than a hundred fifty feet.
Hunter took another deep gulp of oxygen and then pulled his gun trigger.
A Norse soldier named Olaf Deiterstrom was the first man of the invasion force to step foot on Jacksonville
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Beach.
The lead soldier in one of the first Norse landing crafts to be launched, Deiterstrom had been literally tossed ashore when his vessel's door flipped open too soon, causing him to fall out of the boat and into the shallow surf.
His clothes soaking wet, his helmet and rifle covered with sand, his blood running rich with myx, Deiterstrom nevertheless picked himself up and screaming at the top of his lungs, ran out of the water toward the gray stone wall that served as the beach's breakwater a hundred yards away.
Other landing crafts were hitting the beach at this moment, but Deiterstrom was near-delirious at the thought that among all the members of his clan, the Helgjs, he was the first one ashore. It was things like this that pleased his clan chieftain to no end, and no doubt, word would get back to the clan elder about how valiant his servant Deiterstrom had been.
Thus, Deiterstrom knew that even if he were killed at any moment, his place hi Valhalla, the heaven of the Norse heroes, was secured.
By the time Deiterstrom reached the beach wall, hundreds of Helgi Norsemen were scrambling off landing crafts and running up from the surf. His reputation as a hero already assured, Deiterstrom decided to pause at the breakwater and wait for the rest of his clan to catch up.
Turning back toward the shoreline, he heard the rising cacophony of sounds that always erupted in the first few minutes of a Norse invasion: the relentless pounding surf; the blood-chilling screams of the Norseman as they ran up from the water; the remarkable tremors running through the sand as thousands of men scrambled for secure footing; the haunting cry of the bugles.
There was also the crackling of gunfire. Many of the Norsemen were firing their rifles, mostly in the air, even though the landing so far had been completely unopposed.
But that was about to change.
Deiterstrom was hastily shaking the sand off his AK-47 assault rifle when he heard a new sound above the racket of
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hard feet on wet sand, above the rifle shots, above the screaming and the baying of horns. This sound was more frightening than all of these combined.
It was a noise that would shake the great Odin himself.
Squinting his eyes to help him see in the fading sunlight, he saw two glints of silver swooping down out of the sky about a mile north of his position. The two objects rapidly became larger and louder, and quickly enough Deiterstrom determined that these were enemy aircraft.
His eyes glued to the fast-approaching jets, it appeared as if their noses were suddenly engulfed in fire. A half second later he saw a long string of small explosions erupt amongst the screaming, running Helgis. Deiterstrom was shocked; the long tongues of flame from the aircraft were ripping into the swarms of charging Norsemen no more than ten feet away from him. Suddenly the air was filled with pieces of bone, guts, blood, and other splattering fluids.
Dozens of his clan were literally being blown apart right in front of his eyes.
"This was not supposed to happen!" Deiterstrom cried out as the two jets streaked by.
One mile down the beach, Herman Keasiceau also heard the jets approaching.
Keasiceau was a rarity in the invading army. He wasn't a Norseman at all; he was a full-blood Romanian. Once a captain in the hated Romania Security Forces, Keasiceau was now a middle-aged mercenary, one of the few "outsiders"
hired by the Norse for the American adventure. His specialty was antitank rockets, specifically how to load them, fuse them and fire them, complicated procedures well beyond the intelligence level of the majority of Norsemen.
Keasiceau had taken part in both the massacre in Nova Scotia and the attack on the Boston fuel tank farm. During a raid against Charleston, South Carolina, Keasiceau had fired three Milan antitank rockets into a church where hun-282
dreds of panic-stricken civilians had taken refuge, instantly turning the all-wood structure into an inferno. He was certain that no one survived.
Now Keasiceau was struggling with several Norsemen to drag their bulky rocket-launching equipment up onto the beach.
Suddenly it seemed as if the dusk sky was exploding with thunder.
Looking to the north, Keasiceau immediately saw the two jets raking the beach with murderous cannon fire. There was no time to think; no time to take cover.
In less than a second, the pair of planes flashed by him, leaving a trail of small violent explosions and dozens of squirming, mutilated bodies in their path.
Instantly Keasiceau's body started shaking. The strafing fire had come very close to killing him-as it was, several men were completely cut in half no more than six feet in front of him. All along, the Norse clan leaders had assured their troops that the Americans would have no air support to speak of during this huge operation. Yet now Keasiceau not only could see another pair of jets bearing down on the invasion beach, he also saw that there were many jets crisscrossing high above the beach. In fact, to his terrified brain it appeared as if the entire sky was suddenly filled with enemy airplanes.