by Peter Nealen
Chapter 36
A plain white panel van pulled up beside the playground at Hayward Elementary in Birmingham at about ten in the morning. While still situated in one of the poorer communities of the city, Hayward had kept its doors open despite the unrest and violence that had wracked other parts of Birmingham off and on for months. There were still teachers watchfully patrolling the playground at recess, though some were more conscientious than others.
Amanda Jackson Jones was one of the more conscientious ones. She spotted the van immediately and felt the hackles on the back of her neck rise. She didn’t know why; she only knew that there was something off about it. A heavier, middle-aged black woman, she was fiercely protective of the kids in her charge, especially since so many of them didn’t get much in the way of parental attention when they went home.
Her fellow teacher, a younger man named Stefan, didn’t notice the van; he was absorbed in his cigarette and his smartphone. When she nudged him and pointed toward the street, he just waved her off. This was his break, as far as he saw it.
Irritated by his indifference, she gave him a tongue-lashing about how dangerous the world was these days and how they were responsible for the little ones, then went striding quickly toward the fence to confront whoever was there and make sure they didn’t mean any harm.
She got within ten yards of the fence before the van’s side door slid open. She got a brief glimpse of two men in ski masks holding crude submachine guns in their gloved hands before they opened fire and cut her down in a hail of 9mm bullets.
The two gunmen proceeded to empty their magazines into the crowd of children on the other side of the fence, reloaded, then continued firing. Screams and wails of pain and horror rose into the morning air over the rattle of the gunfire, while Stefan stood against the red brick school building in shock, his phone still clutched in his hand.
Their second magazines empty, the gunmen pulled the door shut and the van roared away, leaving dozens of little kids bleeding, shattered, and dead on the playground.
Two hours later, video of the massacre was uploaded to multiple social media platforms by anonymous accounts, pledging that this was only the first stage in wiping out the “Negro menace” that was tearing the nation’s cities apart.
Reverend Leo Haddock was tired clear down to his bones. He hadn’t slept properly in weeks, spending hours and hours a day trying, trying to talk some sense into people. He’d been on the radio, he’d been on national TV, and he’d been on every social media outlet known to man, trying to reach people with the message that Jesus Christ loved all men and women, regardless of their skin color, their political party, or their economic situation, and that the rioting and violence and destruction of the last few months was only playing into the Devil’s hands.
“Dear Lord,” he prayed, as he slumped on the couch in his West Virginia home, “when will You turn aside Your wrath?”
As tired as he was, his head snapped up as his whole house shook with the splintering impact of his back door being kicked in. He surged to his feet, as five masked men pushed inside his living room. Two of them had pipes in their hands. A third had a machete.
“Down on yo face, whitey,” the man with the machete said loudly. “Time to send a message to all them other crackers!”
Haddock tried to run toward the front door, to get out of the house, to escape. He was fifty-seven, overweight, and knew he was in no condition to fight five young men in their prime, much less when three of them were carrying weapons. He didn’t own a gun; in fact, he’d never even fired one in his life.
The bigger man with the pipe vaulted the easy chair to cut him off and swung the pipe, hitting Haddock in the temple. The Reverend went over backward, hitting the hardwood floor with a thud.
Mercifully, the blow knocked him cold. He never woke up as the five men beat him to a pulp, crushed his skull, and then the man with the machete hacked him to pieces.
Gruesome photos and video of the killing spread across social networks, along with a lengthy, profane warning to any who would try to foster peace between the black people and the “So-Called White Race.”
The demonstration was peaceful this time, at least for the moment. Officer Chad Berger had resigned himself to the idea that it wasn’t going to stay that way. It was only a matter of time before the first rock or bottle was thrown, and then it was going to be game on.
The cops had been fairly hands-off at first. That had, apparently, only made matters worse. That led to him standing there, shoulder-to-shoulder with his friends, Officers Preston Hildreth and Steve Child, in full riot gear, just waiting for the day to go to hell.
Downtown St. Louis was already a confused madhouse. So far, the crowds weren’t completely intermixed; that would come later, once the violence started. But they had black supremacists, Aztlanistas, anarchists, communists, anarcho-communists, well-meaning liberals, and “anti-fascists” on one side, and a similarly volatile mix of pissed-off law-and-order types, pissed-off professional veterans, Three Percenters, white supremacists, conservatives, anarcho-capitalists, and pissed-off libertarians on the other. And while Chad might sympathize more with a good number of the people on the latter side, he knew that at that point, anyone who was there was really just there for a fight.
Still, he was caught rather off guard by the first gunshot. While there was a lot of yelling going on out on the street, and a couple of people had gotten into shoving matches, there was usually a pattern of escalation to these riots.
It seemed like just about everyone else was similarly surprised. For a split second, everything sort of stopped, the volume dropped, and most of the demonstrators were looking around for the source of the loud bang.
Then a long, roaring burst of automatic weapons fire from the top floor of the nearby thirteen-story apartment building ripped through both crowds.
In seconds, everything was chaos. People were down in the street, either hit by bullets or knocked down and trampled in the panic. More were falling as the gunner played more long bursts up and down the avenue, killing as many people as possible. Even the cops fell back from that deadly hail of high-velocity metal.
By the time SWAT cordoned off the building and painstakingly cleared their way to the top, the gunner was long gone, just leaving an old RPD with the serial numbers scratched off lying on the floor. Subsequent investigation found no fingerprints, either.
The attack was claimed by the Islamic Council of Resistance in the Dar al Harb, an organization that no one had ever heard of before. It was immediately assumed to be a splinter group from ISIS, even though the latter organization had long since ceased to be anything but a minor action group killing at the behest of the Caliphate of the Arabian Peninsula. Whoever had done it, the usual suspects were immediately screaming over every social media network there was about “false flag attacks” and how it was really the work of the government, whether at the behest of the Bilderbergers, the “corporate masters” of the Right, or the Jews.
“Fifty-seven major incidents in the last thirty-six hours and counting,” Renton said tiredly. We were still in Bangor, in the warehouse on the airstrip. Renton, Stahl, and several other major figures in the Cicero Group had come out shortly after we’d secured the freighter. This was our base of operations for the moment.
“This is coordinated,” Chester Remington said. I didn’t like Remington. He was still in his late twenties, with a boyish face and soft hands, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my rifle, and had made a name for himself as a think-tank strategist and commentator on war and strategy, despite having never set foot in a war zone himself. Still, as much as I disliked him, I couldn’t disagree with him.
“The intensity and frequency of attacks suggest that it is,” Stahl said. He looked ancient, like he’d aged another ten years just since I’d last seen him. His shoulders were hunched, and he wasn’t carrying his head as high as he usually did, as if he was carrying a particularly heavy ruck. “I expect that a lot of th
is is the other part of the MGB’s op. These attacks were supposed to spread chaos, then Sokolov’s picked team would hit their targets in the confusion. If Stone and his boys hadn’t taken the Narva, we could be looking at a far, far worse situation right now.
“But,” he continued heavily, “that’s not all of it. It can’t be. Not after everything that’s happened over the last six months to a year. Hell, longer than that. I expect that a good deal of this violence is organic.”
“But the factions are crippled,” Remington pointed out.
Stahl nodded. “And that’s the problem,” he said. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to start a civil war than it is to stop it. Six months of riots, murders, and atrocities…the grudges built just in the last year are going to last for a century.”
Which was about what I’d told Van Williamson in that trailer outside of Cody, what felt like half a lifetime ago. I briefly wondered if the kid was still alive, and if he’d gotten the message. Somehow, I doubted it.
“But with the factions out of the picture,” Tyler said, “then we should be able to go public with this, shouldn’t we? We’ve got the remains of a real, live Spetsnaz unit that we caught trying to get into the country with a full loadout and a comprehensive strategic sabotage and terrorism plan. I mean, let people know that we’re actually under attack from the Russians, and it could throw a wet blanket over all of this. Couldn’t it? People put aside their political differences after 9/11, after all. I mean, sure, it didn’t last, but it happened.”
Most of the Cicero Group people looked uncomfortable. Stahl just looked grim. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Now what?”
A few of the softer-looking people seemed a bit shocked at my language. Stahl and Renton took it in stride. “A special task force was officially formed yesterday,” Renton said, his voice low and dead. “Not to investigate the uptick in violence or the Russians. But to apprehend the shooters who raided the Verdant Mount golf course.”
The words hung there in the air for a long, quiet moment.
“Motherfucker!” Bryan all but screamed. “We cannot catch a single fucking break, can we? ‘The world’s burning down around our ears, but somebody roughed up my drinking buddy just because he was selling out to the fucking Russian MGB, so let’s put all our resources and energy toward that, instead!’”
“That’s about the shape of it, yes,” Stahl said calmly. “But don’t worry, son, it’s not the end of the world. We’ve just got to go to Plan B, that’s all.”
“And just what exactly is ‘Plan B?’” I asked quietly.
“Essentially,” Renton said, “a coup d’etat.”
If it had gotten quiet after he’d announced that the government was coming after us instead of the Russians, the warehouse would have made a tomb sound festive after that. For a long moment, every one of us just stared at him.
“Just like that?” Larry asked, disbelief mixed with more than a touch of anger in his voice. Larry could be pretty libertarian, and I knew that the implications of what Renton had just said were not lost on him. “A handful of us are just going to take over?”
“Not exactly,” Stahl said around his cigar. “It wouldn’t work, for one thing. The bureaucracy’s too big, and even if we had the manpower—which we don’t—we couldn’t just storm into the Capitol, hold it, and make anything better. It would only make this mess worse.
“Now, I know what you’re all thinking,” he continued, raising his voice a little. This wasn’t the retired General speaking anymore. Mars had returned, in all his square-jawed, warrior charisma. “It wasn’t supposed to work this way. We were supposed to deal with the factions, purge the poison, and the machinery of the Republic was going to set things right.
“Well, it’s gone too far for that. It may have already gone too far even before the killing started. The cancer’s metastasized. We got the bigwigs, but you guys of all people know how deep these networks can go. Mexico was only the tip of the iceberg. The rot goes deep, and you boys know as well as I do that the web of money and influence is too tangled to every straighten out. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of people still in the government who would rather look the other way concerning our activities, and go after the Russians. That’s their duty, after all. We only did what we did because they weren’t doing it.
“But it should be pretty fucking obvious that those people still ain’t calling the shots. And the ones who are, are going to keep fucking around, pursuing petty vendettas and trying to prop up their little empires, while the Russians, the Iranians, and every other motherfucker who wants a piece, who wants to see the US fall, burns the entire damned house down around our ears. They will fiddle faster and louder while Rome burns. And they’ll do their damnedest to take us down first, because they know that we—that you—are a threat to their empires. Because you’ve already demonstrated that you won’t stand by and get trampled on for the sake of somebody’s political career or bottom line.
“Make no mistake, gents,” he continued, momentarily taking the cigar out from between his teeth and looking around at all of us, including the softer Cicero Group types. Most of them didn’t look back at him; few of them had been able to meet any of our eyes for long, either. “You boys have done one hell of a job, as hard as it’s been.” He was talking to us, the Cicero Group staff ignored. “There’s more lethality packed into fewer men in this room than in most team rooms in the world. You are the nastiest bunch of hard-bitten, ruthless bastards I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. Those few who know the name ‘Praetorian’ are rightfully afraid of you.
“But that’s why you’re not going to stand a chance. Don’t think that the people who issued these orders are ignorant of what happened back in Wyoming a few months ago. They won’t underestimate you again, and when they come, they’ll come with overwhelming force and the full knowledge and approval of the Federal government, as much of a shadow of what it was that it’s become. They’ll steamroll you because they have no other choice.
“Which brings me to the rest of it. We don’t have any other choice either, not anymore. The machinery of the Republic putting things back together without the factions to interfere was a dream, as much of a dream as any other revolution magically making things better. Too many of the safeguards have been dismantled, along with most of any kind of national consciousness. Neighbors consider each other mortal enemies now, whether because of politics, skin color, or some mutant combination of dumbfuckery that they’ve picked up from propaganda disguised as news and social media. In time, maybe it would work itself out. But you know as well as I do that we don’t have that time. Sokolov’s op might not have been the first, but it damned sure won’t be the last. There will be a Plan B, and a Plan C, and a Plan Z One Hundred and Fifty. They’re not going to leave us alone because this one failed. And that’s just the Russians. We’ve got plenty of enemies out there besides them, too; I don’t have to tell you boys that.
“So, we don’t have any other recourse. We throw the dice, make our Hail Mary pass, and grab for victory, before we go down in defeat. Otherwise we all die, or spend the last days of our miserable lives in black sites as everything we fought and bled for, and everything our brothers died for, goes down in flames.”
I looked around at the rest as he finished speaking, sticking the cigar back between his teeth. Mostly, I only saw expressions that I expected mirrored my own; stony, impassive, but masking a deep-running mix of anger, grief, and exhaustion.
When I looked in Stahl’s eyes, past the mask of Leader of Men, I saw the same expression. He looked old, old and tired. Despite all the fire of his words, he was a deeply weary man, and the knowledge of just what he was asking of us was plain in his eyes.
It didn’t mean I was sold. “You said that we couldn’t just take over by main force,” I said, “which I happen to agree with. What is the plan, then?”
“Call it a ‘Shadow Coup,’” Renton said. “There are still
leaders in Congress who call a lot of the shots. We get to them, ‘convince’ them to cooperate, and go from there. We’ve got a target deck already drawn up.”
I stared at him coldly. “And how long has this target list been ready?” I asked, my voice pitched low and dangerous. “Was this the endgame all along?”
He met my gaze without flinching. Renton knew me well enough to hear the warning tone in my voice. We’d been used and double-crossed before, and by this time, I think he knew all too well how badly such things could go. We’d been battered, bloodied, and lost too many friends. We were strung out, pissed off, and heavily armed. If we found out that all the pain, all the death, all the killing had just been for the sake of another power grab, things were likely to get very…intense. Very quickly.
“It’s been drawn up and evolving ever since it became evident that there was no more containing the situation,” he said flatly. “Remember what I told you a few years ago, on that rooftop in Erbil? This was never the ideal solution. We were trying to keep a lid on things, trying to keep cutting the fuse when one of these reckless, stupid, self-centered assholes lit it. Now it’s too late for that. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that there really are no ideal solutions in this world.”
He had a point. I’d seen too much to believe in happily-ever-after, at least where war and politics are concerned.
But in a very real way, we were all looking at the death of a dream. Alek, Larry, Nick, Mike, and I had started the company with vague ideas of staying in the fight, somehow, and making something of a living in the process, in a world economy where it wasn’t that easy anymore. We’d identified with a lot of the Vietnam vets who’d found themselves out of place back in The World and had gone back to Asia or to Rhodesia to fight communists somewhere else.