Chapter One

April 1

Three Russian troopships sailed into New York Harbor a few minutes after midnight.

The huge vessels were mammoth cruise liners the Russian Navy had converted into military transports. Each had twenty thousand soldiers on board along with tons of combat gear and equipment.

Painted in ocean-gray camouflage, the ships looked like three sea monsters slowly swimming toward the island of Manhattan. Their decks were lined with DShK machine guns and Katyusha rocket launchers, with 75-millimeter naval cannons placed stern to bow. Anxious weapons crews peered into the murk through their night-vision goggles, ready for anything.

But from Coney Island, past the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, up to Bay Ridge and Red Hook, the waterfront was empty. There was no one for the weapons crews to shoot at, and no one shot at them.

The three giant ships arrived off southern Manhattan at 0030 hours, right on time. They dropped anchor and their troops began unloading.

The Russian invasion of New York City had begun.

Four divisions of fifteen thousand men went ashore in less than thirty minutes, using walkways that extended from the ships’ mid-decks right into Battery Park. Key objectives around the city had to be seized, including power plants, the airports, and all major bridges and tunnels.

Sailing into New York Harbor behind the transport ships and continuing north up the Hudson River was a pair of huge Tapir landing craft named Oleg and Dima. Each was carrying four squadrons of massive T-72 battle tanks, more than eighty in all. The Tapirs docked at Chelsea Piers and disgorged their cargo. The fierce-looking tanks and their crews would serve as the invasion’s shock troops. Moving with a lot of noise and commotion, they raced to dispersal points throughout the city.

Two more Russian ships appeared. One was a large oceangoing barge with two Yak-38 VTOL jet fighters on board. Behind it was the fuel ship Boleska, full of aviation gasoline. Both vessels docked at the old South Street Seaport on the East River where the vertical-lift Yaks immediately took off and began flying over Manhattan.

The thousands of troops, the tanks, the combat aircraft, the thunderstorm of diesel fumes and jet exhaust were all very loud, aggressive, and intimidating. But the Russians had little to fear.

A few weeks before, emissaries of the Russian Army had met with the godfathers of the Red Hand, the five Russian-American crime families that currently controlled New York City. After striking a mutually beneficial deal, the crime families had spread word throughout the city that everyone should stay off the streets the night of April 1.

People were heeding that warning.

New York City was not the place it used to be.

Only about a hundred thousand people lived there now. Hardened by the turmoil that had wracked America since the end of the World War III, they weren’t shocked by the sight of Russian tanks rumbling up Fifth Avenue. In fact, very little of what happened across the continent shocked anyone these days.

The Big War began on Christmas Eve a little more than fifteen years ago. Russia launched a poison gas attack on Western Europe, followed by a massive ground invasion. The United States and NATO responded primarily with airpower, and after intense fighting, the Russians were soundly defeated. But then the traitorous US vice president did two things: He arranged to have the president and his Cabinet assassinated and then he turned off America’s antiballistic missile systems, enabling the Russians to nuke the heartland of the United States. Twenty million Americans died as a result.

With the quisling vice president in charge, the United States was forced to capitulate to a Russian construct called the New Order. America’s military was disarmed, its most modern weapons destroyed, and the country broken up into a mishmash of independent states, economic zones, and free territories. Most of the population fled to either Free Canada or Mexico. For those who’d remained, catastrophes of all sorts suddenly became routine.

Lacking a central government in Washington to keep order, wars big and small flared up between disparate regions. Geographic neighbors suddenly became postwar adversaries. Illinois, Indiana, and most of Michigan were run by Mafia-type families, the Ku Klux Klan ruled much of the South, California was eventually occupied by an Asian mercenary army, and much of the Pacific Northwest fell into the throes of anarchy. The center of the country, which had taken the brunt of the Russian sneak attack, was a nightmarish wasteland of nuclear fallout and long-lasting hallucinogenic gas. Nothing lived there—nothing could. It had been aptly named the Badlands.

Adding to these problems, terrorist groups moved freely across the country and air pirates roamed the skies. Weakened greatly by the war, Russia had not been able to invade the United States right away. Sowing confusion and distrust inside the fractured country turned out to be the next best thing.

Gallant bands of former US military personnel were always trying to put America back together again, though—with varying degrees of success. Much of the Northeast and many regions just west of the Mississippi River had become relatively stable. Nonetheless, fifteen years after the Big War had ended, most of America was still one huge disaster zone.

This didn’t go unnoticed by the slowly resurging military government in Moscow, who, at one point, sent in an entire Mongol army to ransack the continent. But that audacious campaign ultimately ended in disaster for the Kremlin. Other attempts had been made since then, many through Russian proxies, but they’d been halfhearted and poorly planned.

This time, Moscow was serious. In the past two years, a renascent Russia had conquered all of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, plus wide swathes of territory in Southwest Asia. Though technically allies, Moscow’s main rival was the Asian Mercenary Cult, a collection of large, highly mobile armies that dominated China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent and had colonies in many other places, including California.

But the rest of the globe was up for grabs, and Russia wanted it. That’s why the former United States of America was in their sights again.

Moscow had identified every level of power they thought they’d need to occupy New York City for a long time. In addition to its military personnel, a sizable number of engineers, accountants, mechanics, utility and maintenance workers, translators, and even a squad of arborists had made the voyage to America this time.

Past experiences had taught Moscow the best way to conquer fractured America was not the old and unwieldy blunderbuss approach, but by taking one step at a time.

New York was the first step.