Battle for America
By Mack Maloney
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About this ebook
Former US Air Force major Hawk Hunter and his band of patriotic ex-military men have fought tirelessly to reunite their fractured nation after the Russian nuclear sneak attack that put a devastating end to World War III. Now, returning from a space odyssey that began with the diversion of a comet headed for Earth, Hunter finds a 60,000-man Russian army occupying New York City, ready to invade the rest of America. Equally alarming are reports claiming that Hawk’s former girlfriend, Dominique, is living with the head of the Russian secret police in a Manhattan penthouse.
Buzzing through the city’s skyscraper canyons in a tiny STOL Highlander and glimpsing the enemy invaders’ massive weaponry for himself, Hawk realizes he’s up against the greatest danger his homeland has ever faced, even with the help of Captain “Bull” Dozer and his team of ex-Marines. But with the woman and the country he loves in dire peril, threatened by a mysterious convoy of Russian superships, the Wingman will apply all his aviation prowess and strategic ingenuity to devise a plan to launch the fiercest, most crucial battle for America yet, no matter the risks.
Filled with fast-paced, furious action and a wide range of aircraft and military hardware that will fascinate techno-thriller fans, Battle for America brings back favorite characters from earlier books in the series and delivers a riveting story that reveals new insight on America’s most enigmatic hero: the Wingman.
Mack Maloney
Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, ChopperOps, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as UFOs in Wartime – What They Didn’t Want You to Know. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files.
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Battle for America - Mack Maloney
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 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.
Chapter Two
Three Russian military commanders were in charge of the invasion. Known collectively as the Komand Sostva, they were army general Leonid Alexei, navy admiral Makita Kartunov and military operations field marshal Dmitry Popov, whom everyone called Marshal MOP. The three men could have been brothers. All were in their late sixties, stubby in stature, with red faces, white hair, and substantial paunches. They always appeared together, always in uniform, each man wearing several pounds of medals on his jacket and a large cap weighed down by heavy gold braid.
The trio of commanders had chosen Rockefeller Center, a large section of midtown Manhattan, to be their base of operations. Cleared of all civilians, it was rechristened the Voennaya Zona Midtowna, or Midtown Military Zone (MMZ). They had selected three nearly identical skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Eighth and Fifty-First Streets to be their combined headquarters. Across the street, a fourth skyscraper served as their Joint Operations center.
But the tallest building inside the MMZ, a seventy-story skyscraper once known as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which towered almost twenty stories above everything else inside the enclave, had been claimed by the NKVD, the newly revived, much-feared Russian secret police. They were a nine-thousand-man brigade comprised of thuggish plainclothes officers, known as the Militsiya, and uniformed policemen, called the Chekskis, nearly all of whom had been recruited from the Zealot Brotherhood of God, a fanatical religious cult native to Russia’s southwest. The NKVD command staff had installed an enormous illuminated red star on the roof of 30 Rock.
One hundred feet tall, it was so bright that, at night, it cast a crimson glow over everything in Midtown. But the giant icon’s purpose went beyond ornamentation: Tons of NKVD communications gear was stuffed inside the star, including one piece that allowed the secret police to listen in on everything being said by the invasion’s three military arms, from the commanders on down, twenty-four hours a day.
At 0800 hours, on April 30, more than four weeks into the Okupatsi, the three officers arrived on the fiftieth floor of the Joint Ops Building, the old Simon & Schuster Building. They were here for their first monthly situation report.
Two dozen staff officers were waiting inside the opulent top-floor meeting room to greet the high commanders. Mineral water, morning wine, and baskets of oranges decorated the room’s huge conference table. A table nearby held kasha, Butterbrod, fried eggs, and tvorog. All the makings for a sumptuous Russian breakfast. The combined aroma reminded them all of home.
The officer in charge of the joint ops meeting room was Colonel Sergei Gagarin. A lean, sharp-looking man of forty whose family came from East Germany, he’d been wounded leading his troops during fighting in Egypt, losing his right eye, and had sported a pirate-style patch ever since. His talent now was as a professional ringmaster, regularly briefing senior Russian military officers on the progress of the Okupatsi without burdening them with too many facts. Gagarin read everything that came into the Joint Ops Building, including all NKVD communiqués. He also sent a nightly report to Moscow.
If God does indeed love a trinity,
Gagarin said to the trio of commanders, referring to a well-known Russian phrase, then three is our lucky number today.
The superior officers smiled at the show of wit. Four is always too many,
General Alexei responded with a toothy grin. And two is never enough.
Gagarin indicated the three TV cameras set up in the conference room. We will film this historic occasion for our friends back in Moscow,
he said. He pointed to the microphones hanging from the ceiling. And they will hear it, too.
With a nod from Gagarin, the cameras were turned on. The morning sun suddenly poured into the room, heightening the excitement in the air.
Flanked by their security squads, brass buttons gleaming from recent polishing, the three commanders settled into three identical chairs at one end of the conference table. Their smiles did not subside. Their troops had performed extremely well so far, which was easy to do when no one was shooting at you. But that was the mission. With no enemy to fight, their job was literally to occupy the city. Secure the gains by any means possible and don’t let them slip away like in the old days.
Colonel Gagarin introduced the army CO, General Alexei, to the cameras. The commanding officer’s report came first.
The city is secure,
he boomed. Street violence has disappeared, thanks to our troops regularly patrolling all five boroughs. The Militsiya have helped clear the streets of potential troublemakers, and I understand the Chekskis are dealing with the homeless problem. The rackets are up and working again, and business improves every day. Our drug operation located at Chelsea Piers is thriving. Boats come in for pickup, boats go out for delivery, and the money is flowing in. Our Red Hand partners are happy. Even with paying us eleven percent of their profits, they’re making more now than ever.
Good for them,
Admiral Kartunov murmured off camera.
It gets even better,
General Alexei went on. "Those people living outside New York City, out in the suburbs? There were several million of them before. But many have now cleared out of the area, obviously as a result of the Okupatsi. From eastern New Jersey to western Long Island, the roads have been clogged day and night as they move away from us. That means lots of empty houses for our own citizens to occupy someday. Plus, it means fewer hooligans we’ll have to deal with in the future."
Gagarin then introduced Admiral Kartunov.
Our reinforcement vessels are arriving from the Motherland every day,
the naval czar began. Both military and supply ships. I can report that eighty-five percent of our force’s material needs for one year have been delivered to us already. The remainder is en route. Only one ship had difficulties making the crossing, and we are still looking for it. But that’s a very small percentage considering the numbers in our fleet. Plus the weather is expected to improve in the North Atlantic soon. That will allow our maritime supply line to move even faster.
Marshal MOP went last.
All of the city’s critical utilities are running again,
he began. "Only Russian flags fly over the city. All the signage in Manhattan has been changed from English to Russian. Although the subway system hasn’t worked since the Big War, our mechanics have got dozens of transit buses and yellow taxis running again. The garbage trucks and street sweepers have been repaired and are back in operation, so the streets are clean. And we hope to get both airports running within three months.
We are finally doing the things we should have done years ago. The time, the effort we spent to bring the Mongols here, flying their horses across the Pacific? And moving all that hay and feed? That was a bad dream, thinking those savages could do our dirty work for us. We were wrong to put stock in them and all those other pretenders. Finally, we are doing it on our own, and it is working. If we can put up with the loss of just one navy ship among many, then all is well.
Gagarin’s staff was so impressed, they broke out in applause. The commanding officers graciously applauded back. They’d done it. New York City was theirs.
The cameras were turned off and several bottles of vodka were brought into the room. The invasion was an unqualified success—and that called for a victory parade. With one quick vote, the Komand Sostva gave the official go-ahead to throw a citywide party. It would be held the following day, May 1, appropriately enough—May Day, Communism’s major holiday.
But one more thing had to be done first.
Just before midnight, five NKVD armored personnel carriers made their way to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The godfathers of the Red Hand waited for them outside one of the few restaurants still open in New York City. The five gangsters had been invited to the round of pre–May Day victory parade parties in Manhattan. The personnel carriers would serve as their limousines.
The NKVD policemen helped the godfathers into the armored cars along with their assorted capos, consiglieri, and brodyagi, and left Brighton Beach to the cheers of drunken friends who’d spilled out of the restaurant and onto the streets.
But instead of heading back to Manhattan, the NKVD drove their guests to the Staten Island landfill, where they shot them all.
Chapter Three
New Jersey
Captain John Bull
Dozer blew on his hands, trying to keep them warm. The night air was chilling him to the bone.
Dead man’s hands, he thought. Cold as a corpse. …
It was twenty minutes past midnight. Dozer was huddled inside a small hut atop a rickety sixty-foot tower in the middle of some very thick woods in New Jersey’s largely uninhabited Pine Barrens. While most of his men were at their new forward base one mile south, two of his troopers were with him, sitting on old metal folding chairs that squeaked on the hut’s uneven floor. A 50-caliber machine gun was mounted nearby. Its barrel was sticking out the hut’s only window, which was covered in loose plastic and duct tape to block the gusting wind.
One of the troopers checked the hut’s coffeepot, which had been brewing for a while.
It’s ready,
he said. The trooper collected three mugs and filled each halfway. Then Dozer took an unlabeled bottle of whiskey from his heavy wool coat and added a generous splash to each steaming cup.
You know I don’t encourage drinking on the job, boys,
he said with a straight face, but sometimes, you’ve just got to get the blood pumping. …
He toasted the two men. "Semper Fi. …"
Grog, grub, and glory,
one trooper responded, raising his mug.
For our brothers,
the other added.
Then Dozer took the first gulp.
Oh, mother of Jesus,
he gasped, coughing and cringing at the same time. The spiked coffee tasted vile. He took another huge swig, though—and then another. Suddenly, the warmth of life was flowing through him again.
Really good stuff,
he said between more coughs. Really …
The two troopers tasted theirs.
Primo,
one declared, though almost gagging.
You mean high octane,
said the other with a cough.
One wall of the hut held an ancient video monitor. Its tiny four-color screen was filled with ghostly images at the moment, its tinny speaker spitting out white noise. Every time the tower swayed, the speaker would crackle with static.
Still drinking his coffee, Dozer slid over to the video console.
Another clear night,
he said, adjusting the monitor’s contrast knob. I wonder what Ivan’s up to. …
The old video monitor was connected to a similarly elderly video camera, which was attached to a tethered helium balloon flying nine hundred feet above the tower. A primitive gyro built of marbles and rubber bands packed inside a soup can kept the camera steady and aiming fifty-three degrees northeast. Right at Russian-occupied New York City.
Every night, Dozer and his men launched the crude surveillance balloon from the tower and recorded footage of Red Gotham, glowing like a perverse Oz just forty miles to the north. The camera had a rudimentary infrared capability and a telescopic lens. On nights like this, they could make out Russian aircraft, ship traffic, and even troops and people moving around the city.
Usually, what they saw made them feel worse than the night before. Tonight was no different.
By raising or lowering the height of the balloon, the camera could zoom in on a half dozen key spots in Manhattan. Tonight, there was lots of truck traffic, lots of banners being hung across major streets, lots of red lights popping on inside Midtown skyscrapers. Some kind of citywide celebration was in the offing.
May Day,
Dozer grumbled now, refilling their cups with the whiskey-coffee mixture. Like these Commies need another excuse to get drunk.
A hulk of a man, right down to the buzz cut, chiseled jaw, and scary forearm tats, Dozer was the commanding officer of a patriotic group known as the Seventh Cavalry.
It was a notoriously inaccurate name: None of its members had ever served in the US Army; they were all ex-marines. Nor were they a cavalry. They were actually a ground attack outfit. Boot leather and truck tires carried them into battle.
The hundred-man unit was the remnants of Dozer’s last official US military command. Hard-nosed survivors of the ground battles of World War III, he’d led them out of devastated Europe and back to America, where they’d stuck together in the chaotic years since. Many anti-American enemies dedicated to keeping the United States fractured and unstable had risen up in that time, including the Mid-Aks, a ruthless treasonous army from the Middle Atlantic States; the Circle, a collection of the worst criminals and terrorists on the continent; and the Fourth Reich—a name that said it all. Religious nuts, gun freaks, drug lords, drug cults, and the Reds themselves, the 7CAV had fought them all, and many others, for one simple reason: They wanted to put the United States back together again. … or die trying.
Just about all of these campaigns to keep America splintered were the work of the Russian superspy Viktor Robotov. Forever lurking in the shadows, Viktor was the anti-Christ for anyone still living in the United States, no matter their religions. In another universe, his name would have been Keyser Söze. Or Dr. Moriarty. Or simply Lucifer. He was in the habit of laying low for months, or even years, spreading rumors of his own demise, only to return to bring a little more misery to an already miserable place before vanishing again. He was the bogeyman for broken America.
The superspy hadn’t been heard from in some time, though. And from the looks of things through the 7CAV’s camera, the Russians had managed to take over New York City without any help from him—thank God.
As bad as things were, at least this new Russian operation didn’t have Robotov’s bloody fingerprints all over it.
When a spy plane belonging to one of the 7CAV’s allies in northern Maine spotted the Russian invasion fleet off the New England coast, heading south, four weeks ago Dozer knew New York City was the obvious destination. It was no secret the Big Apple was being run by Russian gangsters, so why not the Russian Army?
At the time, Dozer thought, Here we go again.
The 7CAV’s main headquarters was in Saratoga, Free State of New York, about two hundred miles north of Manhattan. When some quick aerial intelligence found positive elements about the Pine Barrens, Dozer mobilized his men, his equipment, and twenty civilian technicians.
They had deployed in less than a day.
Since arriving in the Pine Barrens, Dozer had spent most of his nights crammed atop the shaky spy tower.
While his men monitored the aerial camera, he usually sat in the opposite corner, hunched over his ancient radio set. A self-taught electronics whiz, he’d sent out a steady stream of coded messages in the past twenty-eight days, announcing his presence to friends and allies and declaring the 7CAV ready to take on the Russian invaders.
Yet he’d received nothing in reply. His radio set was old, but it wasn’t broken; he had no problem listening to the Russian military’s intercity radio broadcasts coming from forty miles away. But for some reason, no one was answering his calls.
This puzzled him greatly. He’d expected 7CAV would be just one of many fighting units revving up to take on the uninvited Reds. In the past, these combat groups, many run by close friends of his, always flew right to the action, managed to find one another on the radio and then rode into battle together.
But he’d sent out hundreds of messages so far and had not received a peep back.
Russian flags were flying over New York, for Christ’s sake.
Where the hell was everybody?
Chapter Four
The May Day Victory parade kicked off at eight o’clock the next morning.
Forty columns of Okupatsi troops marched past the Fifth Avenue reviewing stand. They looked impressive in their crisp lime-green uniforms. Eyes right, weapons held tight against their chests, their helmets and bayonets gleamed in the early sun.
Follow-on troops carried banners bearing socialist slogans. They were followed by more soldiers carrying huge portraits of Stalin, Lenin, and Marx. All the while, the pair of noisy Yak-38 VTOL fighters circled continuously overhead, red-dye contrails spewing from their exhausts.
Thanks to the joint ops cadre, a bounty of vodka had arrived from Russia earlier that week, twenty-six thousand gallons of it. Carried in huge metal kegs, a substantial portion reached Midtown at the parade’s conclusion. This was when the real celebration began. Thousands of soldiers took advantage of the free alcohol. They drank and sang and danced in the streets. Music blasted from everywhere. Fireworks were lit off.
Out on Eighth Avenue, a handful of T-72 tank crews drunkenly fired their massive 122-millimeter guns into the Hudson River, killing thousands of fish. At high noon, the three dozen Russian ships anchored off Battery Park began blasting their horns and would not stop. The Yak fighter jets returned over Midtown every half hour or so to perform wildly reckless—some said drunken—maneuvers, one trying to outdo the other, to the delight of the boozy crowds below.
This raucous citywide party would last through the night and into the following day.
The Russian success was also celebrated on the top floor of 30 Rock.
Enveloped in security gear, guarded by nearly a hundred Militsiya police, and off-limits even to the three commanders of the Sostva, it was the kvartira v nebe, the apartment in the sky, the lavish penthouse that Commissar Vladimir Zmeya Mikhailovich, chief of NKVD operations in America, called home.
With fifteen rooms, six fireplaces, six bars, and two Jacuzzis, the space included a vast kitchen and dining area and an even larger function room. Lots of polished brass, lots of red oak walls. It was wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows and had a view that seemed to go all the way to California.
By midnight, the penthouse’s ballroom was crowded with senior NKVD officers: one hundred and six of them, all in black dress jackets, Cossack pants, and knee-high Kirza boots.
This was a very exclusive group, the top of the NKVD’s chain of command in America. Still, every officer had to pass three extensive security checks just to get to the front door, including surrendering all firearms.
There were a similar number of high-priced prostitutes in the room. Some had been dragooned into being waitresses and barmaids; others mingled with the crowd. All were blond; all were wearing short tuxedo-like negligee dresses and black heels. They, too, had had to pass rigorous security measures for entry into the penthouse, including spending a week in isolation, under twenty-four-hour NKVD surveillance.
The penthouse itself was guarded by ninety-two Militsiya special-operations police. They were assisted by two dozen Milashki—or Cuties—an all-female NKVD unit who processed IDs, checked fingerprints, and operated body scanners. All had pledged their lives to keep Zmeya safe.
As for the Chekskis, none had ever gotten within twenty floors of this place. The Militsiya considered their NKVD cousins foul and unstable, a view shared by the commissar himself.
A stage had been set up at one end of the big function room. A curtain behind it hid a massive, well-stocked horseshoe bar and, beyond that, windows to the outside world.
While the city went crazy below, no alcohol had been served up here yet, putting everyone on edge, especially the NKVD officers. Although this was the first reception held in Zmeya’s new American apartment in the sky, they’d attended similar functions he’d organized overseas in the last couple of years. They knew how terrifying they could be.
The problem was the boss himself. Zmeya was a masterful tactician, a whiz at intelligence gathering, and as cold and calculating and vicious as they came. He got things done, which is why he was here in New York. The Kremlin adored him.
But Zmeya had issues, one of them being EDS, emotional disregulation syndrome. Antisocial behavior, compulsiveness, hostility, lack of restraint, sexual deviation, he’d displayed all of these symptoms in public at various times. He had medication but took it sparingly.
The commissar also had a second, even more disturbing, condition: He was a bad drunk.
Anything could happen with him after a few cocktails, especially if he hadn’t taken his meds. The horror stories were well known. During one gathering in newly occupied France a year ago, Zmeya drunkenly ordered the hats of two latecomers nailed into their skulls because they didn’t take them off quick enough in his presence.
Zmeya demanded that his lovers beat him before the act, enjoying bloodletting as foreplay. Videotaping his assignations was routine; three-camera shoots were de rigueur. He also loved to watch other people have sex. As part of his massive luggage train, he carried a giant glass terrarium. Twenty feet by twenty, it contained a king-size bed and nothing else. Toward the end of almost every drunken gathering, Zmeya would select a couple of guests—not always of the opposite sex—and force them inside the huge glass room.
They would be ordered to have intercourse or else, while the commissar and selected attendees sat outside and watched. If Zmeya liked the performance, the participants would be rewarded with their lives. If not, and depending on how drunk Zmeya