Tom Clancy's the Division

by Alex Irvine

  “Understood, Mantis. Any update on her location?”

  “One possible sighting in upstate New York west of Syracuse. Not deemed actionable at this point due to the unreliability of the source, but we are following up.”

  “Understood. Same question about what she’s after.”

  “We suspect we know, but that intelligence is unconfirmed. Better for you to learn it from her rather than go into your first interactions with preconceptions.”

  Ike didn’t like that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Understood, Mantis. Anything else?”

  “That’s all, Sentinel. Report again in forty-eight hours.”

  The call ended. Ike took a minute to get over his irritation that Mantis was still deliberately keeping secrets from him. Part of that was standard operational security, but opsec didn’t demand that he do passive intel gathering without having any idea what he was trying to learn. This was a test. He was on the mission that would prove his bona fides to Mantis, and whatever shadowy figures stood behind her.

  Fine, Ike thought. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to prove himself.

  He shrugged his pack onto his shoulders and started walking. If April Kelleher was going through upstate New York, he was ahead of her . . . unless she’d found a faster way to travel. Whatever her speed, from there she would end up in Buffalo, then follow the south shore of Lake Erie. Ike debated angling north to get to the lakeshore faster himself, and trying to track her down along that route. It was a dicey proposition, he thought, since he had no idea how fast she was going.

  The safer bet would be to get to Cleveland as quickly as he could, try to wring some intel out of the local Division and JTF sources—assuming his cover held—and then move on past Toledo to Ann Arbor. He might be able to make contact with her anywhere along the way, but if not, he at least had to be in Ann Arbor a few days ahead of her so he could spread the word that the Division was looking for a certain redheaded woman.

  All of that would change if Mantis or the JTF came through with some better intel, but Ike knew he had to plan as if he had only his eyes and ears and intuition to find her. So this was the best plan he could come up with under the circumstances. Time was of the essence. Therefore speed was of the essence.

  Ike had an idea. He walked across the road to a large warehouse advertising a company that built sheds and other prefab structures. The door was locked, but Ike got in with no problem. He found the office, and in the office he found a phone book. Good thing some people were still old-fashioned enough to want phone books, he thought. Otherwise it would have taken him hours of searching before he was able to find the nearest bike shop . . . which was about five miles north of him, in a town by the name of Lock Haven.

  * * *

  • • •

  One of the requirements of the Division was elite fitness, and Ike had logged thousands of hours on his bike over the last ten years. It was probably still hanging up in his apartment in Greenpoint. He’d done centuries plenty of times, and once a double century in Florida where the terrain was so flat you felt like you could go forever. But this was central Pennsylvania. The road out of Lock Haven rose steadily for the first twenty miles, then turned into a very steep climb for the next five or ten. Ike rested at the crest of the ridge, where there was a scenic turnout. He liked the bike he’d chosen. It was nicer than the one he’d had before Black Friday: light carbon frame, better components, racing tires. And it felt good to be on a bike, even though Ike’s legs were burning at the end of the climb. He was in survival shape now, not distance-cycling shape.

  But that was all right. He would get there.

  He got back on the bike and kept going. By the end of the day, after two more punishing climbs, he was in Clearfield and his ass felt like someone had been hitting it with a hammer. He coasted down the exit ramp into a tangle of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores. One of them had a road atlas on a spinner rack, and from it Ike figured he was about three hundred miles from Toledo. He covered a third of that distance the next day, getting to the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio.

  In the morning he would check in with Mantis again. His watch was still orange. His cover was holding. ISAC had been more or less quiet during most of the past two days, since he was out of operational range of the bigger cities where most Division agents were deployed. Now, though, he was in an urbanized area that stretched from Youngstown and Canton up to Cleveland. Operational chatter from agents in those areas told him that things in the cities of the upper Midwest were a little better than they were in New York, largely because people here had easier access to food. By the time the virus had appeared out here, it was already apparent that big territorial blockades weren’t going to help. New York’s airports, roads, and train stations had done a superb job of spreading the virus before anyone started showing symptoms.

  Even so, the agents in this part of the country seemed to be keeping busy. Ike figured they would notice his presence sooner or later, and he might well get a call to support an op. That would put him in a tough spot. He had direct orders from Mantis not to divert again, but . . .

  Stop, he told himself. Deal with that problem if it comes up. Until then, stick to the mission.

  Which was, in the end, to bring into being a new, stronger America. As Mantis had said, it was going to entail making some hard choices in the beginning, but Ike believed he was going to be a part of something better: a strong guiding hand to lead America out of its plague-stricken darkness and into the new light of the future.

  26

  APRIL

  It ended up taking eight days to make the trip because of a problem with one of the locks south of Rochester. Still, when April stepped off Sonia and Julia’s barge for the last time in Tonawanda, New York, she felt like she’d made a good start to the trip. She still had a long way to go, but she’d covered nearly half the distance in eight days, and Sonia said there might be lakeshore boats that could get her to Michigan faster than the walk by way of Cleveland and Toledo.

  As an added bonus, April had not heard a single gunshot during those eight days. The longer she was away from New York, the more she realized how different things were. She’d mentioned this to Sonia, who cautioned her against thinking that she’d left all her troubles behind in Manhattan. “The canal is pretty calm because people need it to survive,” she said. “But I’ve heard some bad stories about stuff happening in little towns, just like the big cities. Doesn’t take much to peel back the veneer of civilization, you know?”

  April supposed she was right, but it still felt to her like the pressure cooker of Manhattan had created a situation worse than she would find out in the rest of the country. Even so, she took Sonia’s advice to heart. She would have to stay alert.

  “Before you go,” Sonia said, “take this.” She held out a tightly packed plastic bag, about the size of a five-pound bag of flour.

  “What is it?” April took the bag and squeezed it. Whatever was inside, it made little crunching sounds.

  “Tobacco,” Sonia said. “Bring it out only when you need something really bad. It’s more valuable than gold right now. Use it wisely, and don’t tell people you have it. Seriously.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” April said. She tried to hand the bag back. “Really. If anything, I owe you.”

  Sonia waved the offer away. “You added a gun to the trip. Besides, you were good company. Be well, April. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if you ever get back to the Albany area, I’ll take you sailing on the river.”

  She turned away to oversee the unloading of the barge’s remaining cargo, and April put the tobacco in her pack. Time to begin the next stage of the trip, finding her way around the southern shore of Lake Erie. If only she could go through Canada, but everyone she’d talked to had made it clear that was not happening. Canada had its own problems with the Dollar Bug, but they weren’t near
ly as bad as the collapse on the U.S. side of the border. It was practically impossible to get from the United States into Canada either by land or by sea.

  So around Lake Erie it was. Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, then north to Ann Arbor. That was how April envisioned it in the map she carried in her head.

  Unless Sonia was right and there were trading ships going along the lakeshore. To find that out, April started asking around among the dockworkers in Tonawanda’s small port. They pointed her to a group of sailors, who said that there were in fact lake ships, but they didn’t come up to Tonawanda. “Current’s too fast for them to get back to the lake,” one of them said, pointing out at the bright blue Niagara River.

  “Nobody has any access to fuel here, then?” April remembered Blake, and his mysterious sources. Someone must be getting fuel out here, at least once in a while.

  “You can get it,” another sailor said. “But hard to find, and when you do find it, it’s real pricey. Easier to pay someone to haul your stuff up from Buffalo if you want to get it onto the canal.”

  “Where you trying to get to?” a third sailor asked.

  “Michigan, eventually,” April said.

  “Huh.” The sailors considered this. “Thing is,” said the one who’d told her about the price of fuel, “there’s sometimes trouble along the stretch between Buffalo and Erie.” He nodded at April’s gun. “If you know how to use that, though, you can probably get on a boat.”

  “Or,” the first sailor said, “you can hoof it to Erie and save yourself the trouble.”

  “If you don’t run into the Jamestown Aryans along the way,” the third sailor said.

  “What kind of trouble?” April asked.

  “Pirates. There’s thieves on land and thieves on the water.”

  “Okay. So if I go by water, there might be pirates, and if I go by land . . . the Jamestown Aryans?”

  “Yeah, they’re bad news. Pretty much everything between Buffalo and Erie, for ten or twenty miles inland, is all theirs. You’re white, so they probably wouldn’t kill you. But you run into them, you’re liable to end up married,” the first sailor said, using his fingers to put quote marks around the last word.

  “Sounds like I should take my chances on the lake, then,” April said.

  The sailors agreed. “But a woman traveling alone, man, I’d sleep with one eye open and both hands on that gun,” the first one said.

  “I was in Manhattan when the quarantine happened,” April said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Manhattan? Damn. I guess you can. How’d you get out?”

  April considered an honest answer. Oh, I found a reclusive scientist who wrote a book that predicted the Dollar Bug, and he called in a favor with an order of militant monks who showed me how to run the blockade and gave me a piece of priceless art to trade for a ride up to the far end of the Erie Canal.

  But instead, she just said, “That’s a long story. How far is it to the docks in Buffalo?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It turned out to be about ten miles. April made the trip with a caravan of horse-drawn wagons bringing goods from the canal barges to either waiting lake boats or vendors in the marketplace that had sprung up on Buffalo’s waterfront. She sat in the back of a wagon whose sides were still painted with advertisements for hayrides, going straight down Military Road and then the freeway spur that ran along the river. It started to rain, changing the river from bright blue to a steely gray, and by the time they got to the Buffalo waterfront, she was glad she had a good coat.

  When she swung down from the wagon in the middle of the market, she was besieged by people trying to sell her everything from eggs to allergy pills. Kids ran back and forth, carrying vegetables or chickens. She almost ran into a young girl holding a stick with a dozen fish strung on it by their gills. “Fresh-caught walleye,” the girl said with a hopeful smile.

  “I wish,” April said. She’d been eating mostly dried meats and fruit since she left New York. “But I’m traveling.”

  The girl went on, hawking her fish to the rest of the caravan. April went on, too, looking for a boat. Even without the threat of the Jamestown Aryans, walking from Buffalo to Ann Arbor would take her at least ten days. The slowest boat would save a lot of time over that.

  As she passed through the market, April refilled her water bottles and traded an Ace bandage and a container of dental floss for a dozen hard-boiled eggs and a bundle of greenhouse carrots. Added to the venison jerky and cheese she’d picked up at stops along the canal, that would feed her for a good few days.

  Then she got to the marina. Several sailboats and one paddlewheel steamboat were tied up, rocking in the waves kicked up by the rainstorm. She didn’t see anyone on any of their decks, but smoke was coming from the steamboat’s stack. That was interesting. How did they get fuel? Or had they retrofitted the boat so the boiler was fired with wood?

  She walked over to the bottom of the gangplank and called out. “Hello! Anyone home? Permission to come aboard?”

  An old man stuck his head out of the wheelhouse window, his hat falling off to reveal a liver-spotted expanse of scalp fringed with wild white hair. “What? Yeah. Who are you?”

  Rather than shout back over the rain, April walked up the gangplank. She picked up his hat as he was coming out of the wheelhouse and handed it to him. “I’m hoping to get passage,” she said.

  “To where?”

  “Ideally Toledo, but I’ll take what I can get.”

  He got his hat settled on his head again and wiped rain from his face. “You carry that shooter just for show, or can you use it?”

  “I don’t like to, but I can.”

  “I’m going to Cleveland. That suit you?”

  “That suits me fine.”

  “All right, then.” He stuck out his hand and April shook. “Dirk Schuler. You are . . . ?”

  “April Kelleher.”

  “There’s berths down below, April. Drop your pack.” Schuler turned, beckoning her to follow. “But keep the gun handy. We leave in an hour, and the first part of the trip is always the worst.”

  He led her down belowdecks and showed her a bunk. “We got three other crew, and passengers. Should take about nine hours to get to Cleveland, depending on the wind. I’ll even throw in dinner.”

  “Sounds good,” April said. “What did you mean about the first part being the worst?”

  “That’s where we’re most likely to run into the local pirates,” Schuler said, heading back up to the deck.

  April followed. “Yeah, I heard about them. But the sailors up in Tonawanda said they weren’t as bad as the Jamestown Aryans.”

  “Nobody’s as bad as the Jamestown Aryans,” Schuler said. He looked up at the sky. The rain was clearing. “So that ain’t much of a bar to clear.”

  The rest of the crew were coming up the gangplank, carrying satchels stuffed with goods from the market. Behind them came a dozen or so passengers. The stern deck was covered with cargo. “Where’d you find this boat?” April asked.

  “It used to run tourists around on one of the lakes in upstate New York,” Schuler said. “I forget which one. Some guy brought it down the canal right after they got the canal open, maybe in March, and then . . . well, what I said about the first part of the trip being the worst? I was on this boat the first time he fired it up to go over to Cleveland. He didn’t live through the trip. After that it was my boat.”

  As he spoke, he was watching the crew stow their gear and lead the passengers into the cabin. Now he turned to April and his face was dead serious. “I meant what I said about keeping that gun handy.”

  27

  VIOLET

  Three or four days after the kids had met Sebastian at the carousel, Junie led a group of adults on a trip over to the White House to talk to the JTF. They were gone all day, and when they came bac
k, they called a meeting for after dinner. “Everyone,” Junie said.

  “Kids, too?” Mike asked.

  “Kids, too. They need to hear this.”

  Dinner was quieter than usual that evening. Everyone knew something big was going on, but only a few of them knew what it was, and Junie had asked them not to say anything until she’d spoken. It was strange, too, because the food was better than what they’d had the past couple of weeks. The garden had started to produce, and there were fresh green beans along with striped bass, which were running in the rivers. Mike had found a spot to fish down by where the Anacostia River ran into the Potomac. It was far enough away from the center of DC that nobody wanted to fight over it. At least not yet.

  Eventually almost everyone was done except the really slow eaters, and Junie stood. She tapped a spoon against a glass, and the conversations in the room quieted. “I know that’s supposed to be a wedding thing,” she said, “but I couldn’t think of another way to get y’all’s attention. We have a serious thing to decide.”

  Mike stood next to her and added, “Really. Everyone. Listen up. We’re not talking about how to assign chores here. This is . . . well, it might be life or death.”

  That got people’s attention. It sure got Violet’s. She looked around at the other kids. As usual they were all in a group together. Sometimes one of the other kids in the Castle group would join them, if they’d been playing a game or something together that day, but usually those kids stayed with their families. Violet and her friends didn’t have families.

  Well, she thought, Ivan and Amelia had their dad. If he was still alive.

  Junie was talking again. “A few days ago we were approached by one of the organized militia groups here in DC. You’ve all seen them. This one is maybe better than some of the others. They’re not apocalyptic maniacs, at least. But they are what they are. They believe power comes from the barrel of a gun, and they believe their ideas are better because they have more guns. I don’t believe that. I believe that we stand or fall together, and that right and power usually don’t have anything to do with each other.” She paused as someone in the room made a rude noise. Violet couldn’t tell who. Junie looked in the direction of the noise for a long moment before going on. “But that’s philosophy, and this is the real world. The short version is this: They offered us a deal. We join up with them, and they’ll offer us protection against all the other groups fighting to control this city and this country.”