Capital Offensive. Don Pendleton

in the Andes, a young recruit trapped with his platoon in a cave by the unexpected avalanche. When the supplies ran out, the soldiers were forced to eat their boots, paperback books, anything possible. But as the slow days passed in an interminable march toward starvation, at last, straws had been drawn, and the killing commenced. At first a man voluntarily took his life, dying so that the others might live. But then it became a contest of the strongest, the meanest, and the true nature of Man had been brutally revealed to the young private in hellish clarity. Men were beasts, merely another form of animal, and would always revert to their base feral nature when it became a matter of survival.

      As the foul memory welled, the general tried to block the taste, vaguely of pork, more like chicken. Acid flooded his gut at the horrid recollection, and he forced away the dark thoughts, denying their very existence. He alone had walked from the cave when a warm rain had finally melted away the blockage of deadly snow. He survived to walk a hundred miles through the barren hills until finding an isolated village and taking refuge near the blazing forge of the local blacksmith. As the teenager lay shivering on the dirty floor, his plan to save the world had been born. It had been crude, simplistic, but over the long years, the youth had become a man, and the plan had also grown in complexity and sophistication until it blossomed into fruition. Those American ICBMs had only been the first step toward salvation.

      “Just too many people,” Calvano whispered, the words thick with hatred.

      The corporal driving the APC paid no attention to the mutterings of his commanding officer. As did the other soldiers riding in the rear. Brand-new FN-2000 assault rifles lay across their laps, the 40 mm grenade launchers slung beneath the barrels loaded with AP rounds and ready to be released at a moment’s notice. They were the chosen elite, the personal guards for the leader of Forge.

      Normally, officers in the Argentine army didn’t have bodyguards, but then the 67th Battalion wasn’t a normal unit, nor was Firebase Alpha. Once the soldiers had been told the truth, they eagerly joined Forge, and now worked for the general, the man who would become the unwanted savior of humanity.

      Turning a corner, the APC nearly clipped a parked taxicab. The snoozing driver came to with a jerk and started to curse and wave a fist. The general knew that there was little chance of his losing a fare from the profanity. There were so many people, but everybody was walking. Cabs were expensive, while God had made feet for free.

      If there really was a God, Calvano noted sourly, which he highly doubted. Enough prayers had been said over the centuries, and there had never been a reply.

      Among the people thronging the sidewalks, Calvano noted drug deals happening, and instinctively reached for the 9 mm Bersa pistol holstered at his side. Then stayed his hand.

      Not yet. But soon, the general noted. However, he marked the face of the traitor for later extermination along with the rest of the vermin and filth.

      In a passing alleyway, Calvano saw a fat prostitute on her knees, servicing a grinning customer in the reeking shadows, garbage strewed on the ground around them. Disgusting. A professional soldier, the general wasn’t a prude, and very much in favor of recreational sex. He had a wife in Rosario and a mistress in Chivilcoy. But only the wife had been allowed to have children. After that, the general had gotten himself a vasectomy. The very minor surgery was virtually unheard of by the macho men of his backward country, and Calvano had been forced to fly to Canada.

      Both of the children had been girls, which was fine with the general. Calvano wasn’t a sexist like so many of his brethren. Argentine culture was an odd mixture of Spanish pride and German rigidity, along with a certain fine madness mixed into the gene pool from the tropical paradise they lived in, and were slowly paving under with concrete and asphalt. But his little girls were fine, safe with their mother in his farm to the north, far, oh so very far away from the coming apocalypse.

      As the limo stopped at an intersection, a starving man in rags appeared and started to wash the prow of the APC with a squeegee dipped into a bucket of soapy water. Normally it would have been done to the glass windshield of a car, but the man diligently washed the armor while smiling with a gap-toothed grin.

      Not just an old cloth, the general noted sourly. This poor man’s job was to clean the dust from passing vehicles. He had found a way to survive. For that he applauded the man’s ingenuity, even though he hated his very existence.

      “Sir, should I…” the driver asked hesitantly, pulling a wad of brightly colored pesos from his shirt pocket.

      “Drive on,” the general commanded brusquely. “Give him nothing.”

      “Yes, sir,” the driver replied, tucking the money away.

      As the light changed, the APC surged forward, leaving the frustrated old man behind shouting obscenities and waving the squeegee in a threatening manner.

      The sight made the general deeply sad. Calvano remembered when Argentina had been a beautiful land. The air and water had been clean, and crimes were few because justice had been swift. But the nation had started crumbling when the fat fool Peron and his wife took control, and was nearly bankrupt when they left. And the Americans had written a musical about the stupid bitch! he thought derisively.

      Now there were homeless people living in cardboard boxes and under bridges. Crime was out of control, and food was becoming almost too expensive to buy. Only gasoline, made right there, was plentiful and cheap. A mixed blessing, as the smog was getting worse every year, even out on the ranch-lands of the wide pampas. And smog brought lung disease, which meant more sick people, more hospitals, more taxes….

      As the APC left the town, the roadway became clear of traffic and the driver dutifully increased speed until the lush green countryside was flashing past the military vehicle. Fresh, clean air came in through the louvered vents, and the soldiers joked about the lack of taste as they breathed in deeply.

      Lost in his own thoughts, the somber general didn’t join in the casual banter. Air pollution, water pollution…humanity was a cancer, eating itself alive, choking on the waste products and wondering what had gone wrong. Numbers didn’t lie. World population was over six billion! India and China each had a billion, and soon so would other nations. In a high-secret report, the general had read about the S2 in Brazil acually rounding up their homeless people and machine-gunning them to death in warehouses late at night to try to curb the runaway poverty. Too many people and not enough jobs.

      But population control wasn’t the answer. New food technologies weren’t the answer. Oh, no. Only the general seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. One man could live in a telephone booth, but not two, and certainly not five, ten…twenty…There were just too many people in the world. Unfettered and out of control. There was only one solution. Radical surgery. Amputation of the surplus population. There were six billion people in the world, so kill five to save one billion. The numbers were harsh and unforgiving, but acceptable. A soldier’s burden.

      Once, long ago, when fighting Communists from Chile trying to invade Argentina, Calvano had stationed a troop of men to hold a bridge at any cost while the rest of his battalion retreated to safety. A hundred men assigned to die so that a thousand could live. On paper it sounds like nothing. But he had looked directly into the faces of those brave men, those soldiers, when he told them to stay and die. And they had done as ordered. They stood the line and did their job, which saved the battalion. How could he do any less?

      In sharp detail, Calvano still remembered the looks in their eyes as comprehension came. The flash of shock, the rage, the fear, and then the grim understanding of what had to be done. They died, or everybody died. It was that simple. There was no third option. The soldiers accepted the responsibility and stood their ground in a small foundry overlooking some nameless bridge. Long afterward, when the stripped bodies of his men had been recovered, Calvano found the last two soldiers lying behind a cold forge where they had made their final stand. There wasn’t a bullet in their guns, and three of the rebels lying dead on the floor had been taken out by hammers. Hammers! Those heroic bastards had fought to the very end, beyond hope, beyond sanity, delaying the enemy at any cost. And it had happened at a forge again. The young major took it as a sign from the Lord God, and that very night Forge was born. Soldiers