path to conquest Read Free Page B

choice. Washington, D.C., was simply too close to southern regions where the aliens were able to fight without being affected by the toxic red dust. Though the capital itself was under the toxin’s protective veil, President William Brent Morrow and his advisers had been forced to conclude that for safety’s sake, they’d better relocate to New York. It was almost like the Civil War, when the White House was little more than a carriage ride from the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, and within striking distance of Robert E. Lee’s gray-coated troops.
    Abe Lincoln had stayed put, but the present-day analogy wasn’t what Draper could call exact. Visitors didn’t attack on horseback.
    A dapper Virginian himself, Secretary Draper had learned to accept the rightness of the North’s Civil War victory, but like many southerners, he still harbored a wisp of sympathy for the Johnny Rebs who’d fought and died for Dixieland. He fell back on that vestigial patriotism to explain his vague unease at moving to the heart of Yankee territory —the home of Yankee Stadium, for crissak.es —with President Morrow and the rest of what was left of the country’s federal authority.
    Nick Draper readily agreed that New York possessed other advantages in time of global war. It was still the center of world communications, for one thing. The three television networks based there had maintained news and entertainment broadcasts, on a somewhat curtailed basis, and the Freedom Network also operated from this most secure of human-held cities in America.
    And the United Nations was located here, making this city the de facto capital of the World Liberation Front. Morrow had set up his offices in the UN, overlooking the East River. He and the other officials of his provisional government had taken up residence in the Grand Hyatt Hotel, a few blocks away at Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue.
    The diminutive Draper had turned to jogging for exercise and solitude long before the sport became obnoxiously common, and he’d cherished his early morning runs in the rolling hills surrounding his country estate in Virginia. Somehow, lacing on his Nikes had lost something in the translation to Manhattan Island. There were no grassy fields, except in Central Park, and the idea of solitary tranquility was laughable here. New York had retained much of its hurly-burly personality, and the streets were never empty. Garbage trucks still roamed from dumpster to trash can, although at less regular intervals. Cabs and buses still dueled fender to fender and horn to horn, vying like wild animals for the right-of-way on streets cratered with potholes.
    And miraculously, people still came out each day to go to their jobs. Visitors or not, this comer of the globe went on with life as usual.
    However, it wasn’t life without changes. Its status of secure capital made New York City the eventual goal of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the warmer states where the Visitor forces ravaged at will, undaunted by the red dust fencing them off at the frostline.
    On this muggy morning at seven, Nick Draper found himself confronted with part of that new reality as he jogged near Penn Station with Stuart Hart, the youthful acting Secretary of Defense, and Cynthia Sobel, Morrow’s press secretary. Wearing a U.S.A. T-shirt and blue shorts banded with red and white, Draper led his companions south on Seventh Avenue. Traffic was cordoned off inside a four-block radius because of the vast numbers of immigrants spilling up staircases and escalators from the railroad station’s extensive maze of underground arcades and platforms. Police on foot and horseback manned the barricades, keeping people from unauthorized passage out of the terminal zone. Without vehicular traffic to dodge, the trio of anonymous government officials jogged in the street.
    As they slowed, Cynthia Sobel abruptly half fell, half sat on the curb. “Shit!” she hissed as she hit the concrete