Chapter Nineteen

The SWAT officer just stared down at his shaking hands. His face was coated in the grime of battle and Captain Henry could tell that the man was not going to be much use. He grabbed him by his combat webbing and with a mighty heave slid him across the dusty floor over to the other table.

"Present for ya." Captain Henry winked at the Amazon woman who pulled the SWAT officer fully behind the disintegrating table.

"Alright," Captain Henry began, turning to the old man in the suit, "that leaves you."

Captain Henry paused as a RPG round hissed diagonally over the table and back down the hallway, bursting through a window and detonating somewhere outside. The Panzer Kommandos advancing cautiously towards the ballroom shouted with alarm.

"As I was saying…" Captain Henry fired his pistol over the table without looking. "I don't know what you've been saving that machinegun of yours for, but now would be the time to use it."

"It's not a machinegun, it's a multi-array H-E-L gun. High energy-" The old man began to calmly explain but was interrupted by Captain Henry firing another series of shots from his pistol.

"I don't care if it's an H-E-double-hockeysticks gun forged by Old Scratch himself, when I say 'America' you and that thing are coming with me."

"That's not a good idea. This thing needs to be stable and carefully target-"

"AMERICA!" Captain Henry bellowed and then vaulted over the table.

The Conservator and the National Guardsman began to fire in support of his unbelievably idiotic plan. The exposed gun-wielding mob jerked in unison as they recognized a juicy target and let loose at Captain Henry with everything they had. Men, women, and even children opened fired with their surplus assault rifles even as the Princeps dropped them with careful shots to their head or center mass. When she missed she still inflicted a wound, but all too often these wounds were ignored almost as if those in the mob felt no pain.

The air screamed around Captain Henry as he charged towards the stairs, seething and angry with bullets that plucked at his clothing. Against all odds none of the fire was hitting him, at least not meaningfully. A few shots scorched across his skin or grazed bloody furrows in his arms or leg. Captain Henry ignored the burning pain and ran headlong towards the Panzer Kommandos, expending the magazines of both of his fifty caliber pistols in wild fire at the fascist super soldiers. The old man was at his side, wisely shielding himself from the mob with Captain Henry's running body.

Captain Henry did not know or care, but the old man was actually Zeke Caruthers. Zeke Caruthers played for the Packers as a halfback in '68, before volunteering as a Navy S.E.A.L. and running black ops in Vietnam. He was the best of the best, quietly awards a Medal of Honor for pulling an entire SEAL team out of an ambush alive. After two tours and a consulting gig with the CIA, Zeke went on to work with an intelligence think tank on K-Street up until 1985, when he was asked to join the Trilateral Commission. Zeke Caruthers ascended through the ranks of the Trilateral Commission, but unlike his pencil-pushing colleagues he always kept a hand in the day to day affairs of his sect of the New World Order. He and Raylene would have either hated each other or fallen in love if they had ever met.

When the Trilateral security offices in New York had been overrun old Zeke was the only man to escape. He volunteered for the mission to Mexico because the SEAL blood in him told him that he couldn't just sit on his kiester and wait for some hopped up lizards or space bugs to come for him. Raylene had barely glanced at him when selecting people for the operation and he suspected that he was given the job solely because he had managed to get away with the laser array. If carefully set up the HEL gun could wipe out everyone in the room, but this rock head wasn't going to let him do his job right.

As a spray of minigun tracers whickered through the air at him Zeke Caruthers ducked and thought to himself I'll do it right the wrong way. He accelerated, straining his old muscles and bones to their absolute limit. The Panzer Kommando adjusted his aim and fired again, tearing Zeke Caruthers into messy pieces. The HEL gun cradled carefully in his arms danced into the air as the ex-Navy SEAL's torso and arms came apart one bloody chunk at a time. With supernatural dexterity Captain Patrick Henry reached out with one hand, caught the HEL gun, and continued running directly towards the Panzer Kommandos.

He reached the foot of the steps, toppling one of the Panzer Kommandos there with a karate kick to the knee joint of his armored suit. Red hydraulic fluid sprayed out and the man sprawled on his side, flailing ineffectively in an effort to right himself. Another Panzer Kommando aimed a high caliber anti-armor rifle at Captain Henry, swinging the laser dot dead-center onto Captain Henry's chest.

"Ich habe Sie jetzt, amerikanisch!" The Panzer Kommando exulted.

"Go on then, kraut. If you've got the guts." Captain Henry glared at him.

The Panzer Kommando pulled the trigger. The 20mm discarding sabot round shed its jacket inside the barrel of the rifle, spinning out fins that locked into the rifling of the gun and turned the bullet unevenly. It blasted out the side of the anti-armor rifle, the force wrenching the huge gun from the Panzer Kommando's gauntlets.

"That's what you get for relying on shoddy German workmanship." Captain Henry yelled and the punched the Panzer Kommando in the nose.

He followed up with a roundhouse kick that knocked the unconscious man on his back with a loud clanking of metal.

"Made in America!" He shouted, turning his attention back to the staircase.

The remaining Panzer Kommandos were staring calmly at him down the barrels of two dozen different heavy weapons. Their leader, his soup pot helmet painted pure white, took a step towards Captain Henry.

"Ve have you now, vy don't you just give it up?"

A series of complex mathematical calculations of angles and trajectories danced through Captain Henry's brain, all of them wildly incorrect. He felt sure that by bobbing, twisting, and jumping just right he could avoid all of their shots.

The room had fallen silent as the Panzer Kommandos in the hallway burst into the ballroom and leveled their weapons at the Princeps of the Sisterhood and the other two surviving Gamma Strikers.

"You are surrounded." The Panzer Kommando leader explained unnecessarily. "If you give up now ve vill torture you as little as possible."

Captain Henry was just about to launch himself into the air and attempt the spin-jump-twist-jump-jump-lunge maneuver he had devised when he remembered the HEL gun in his hands. Using an old magician's trick he remembered about distraction, Captain Henry slowly lifted one of his hands off the HEL gun and into the air while the other searched for some sort of activation button. He made a fist, rotated his arm, and extended his clenched hand towards the Panzer Kommando leader.

"Hands up, now!" The Panzer Kommando barked warily.

The fingers of Captain Henry's other hand found the recessed activation button. He slowly and deliberately extended his middle finger from his fist.

"Up yours, nazzy."

The HEL gun made a sound like a camera flash charging.

"Scheisse," was the last thing anyone had a chance to say.