All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  “So, what are they doing and how does it have anything to do with me?” April asked.

  “The road traffic for Miami showed a three percent uptick from normal in the outbound lanes, since your announcement. That’s unusual. Flights out of Miami are all booked solid and inbound flights have reduced bookings and no-shows already.

  “International carriers have added two charter flights to Havana today, and private jets have filed more flight plans than usual out of the smaller Dade County airports.

  “Elsewhere, three USNA nuclear subs in port have hatches open and activity. Three wholesale grocers who supply them have trucks backed up and loading before normal business hours. They are getting ready to put out to sea on an emergency basis. There was no public recall so they went to the trouble to notify crew by secure means.

  “One of their carriers that survived the war was in the Atlantic on a course that would have taken it to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. Twenty minutes after your manifesto it turned abruptly north having a sudden urge to visit Greenland. The high latitudes, not under the common orbital passes have been safer from orbital bombardment.

  “All this indicates private assessment that you may indeed take action against something in Miami or elsewhere as threatened,” Chen concluded.

  “They have no clue,” April said, amused. “I said I was going to hurt them economically. What would I hit in Miami, and how are military targets all that disruptive to their economy? No, I’m going to take down the Greenville bridge across the Mississippi.” She examined the clock in the corner of her screen. “Soon.”

  Chen stared at her and thought. “Texas. You are using Texas as a weapon.”

  “Indeed, you understand very quickly. I bet they will too,” April said.

  “I thought maybe you’d put a half dozen rods through the Federal Courthouse when they put him on trial. He’ll be kept in the lockup and tied in by video conference,” Chen said. “That’s just standard procedure now, not just high profile cases.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, depending on how much they irritate me,” April promised.

  “What do you expect them to do in response to taking the bridge down?” Chen asked.

  “To me? Nothing. Since you are watching, you may see them bring more military assets forward to around the 33rd Parallel. I’m guessing they keep less positioned forward there if they figure they can shift assets either way across the river. With the bridge gone they’ll need to duplicate some things on both sides.”

  “So you already have an escalation plan,” Chen said.

  “I’ll just keep working north taking bridges down to Memphis. If they let me get that far without yielding I’m not sure continuing north even past St Louis would make a difference.”

  “So, if Texas decides you have given them an edge do you expect them to advance along the west bank or the east bank?” Chen asked.

  “Neither. They wouldn’t need to advance very far north before they’d have the same problem of not being able to shift forces across the river that weakened the North Americans. If they are made bold it will be in another area, perhaps Oklahoma, because they see less chance of the USNA pushing back at the new eastern border.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Chen said, “but I feel an itch, like we are missing something.”

  “Well, since you volunteered, keep watching them to see what happens,” April said.

  “Oh, I will,” Chen agreed, “and I’ll get a couple more analysts watching satellite images of those border areas for changes in their deployments.”

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  O’Neil’s store had customers. There were two horses tied up to his sign out front. Cal made his usual low pass to inspect the runway. The horses didn’t like that, prancing around, but not so upset they pulled their reins loose or bolted away. As they circled around again a woman hurried down from the store to calm them.

  “Do you have any signal, in case somebody is waiting at the store to rob you or steal the plane when you come in? Vic asked.

  “There is an all-clear signal, but you have no need to know it,” Cal said. “I knew these folks were OK even without that. The horses have rifle scabbards on them, and they left their rifles in them when they went in the store.”

  The landing was smooth. Cal turned the aircraft at the end, pointed back down the grass strip. Vic and Eileen pitched in unloading, unasked. Cal stopped several times and examined the nearby woods, unhappy.

  “Do you see someone? Is there some movement out there?” Vic asked Cal, worried.

  “No, I’m looking at the leaves moving. I planned on staying overnight. There will probably be rain, but the wind here is early according to the weather report I saw back home. I think I better taxi over where there are some tie-down rings and secure the plane for tonight. It should be clearing up by mid-morning and I’ll be out of here.”

  O’Neil’s house was a big old monster with four bedrooms on the second floor. He had plenty of room for the Foys and Cal. They all had a simple quiet supper together. O’Neil was visibly nervous until two young men showed up and he spoke with them outside.

  “That’s my extra security for tonight,” he told them when he came to the table and was much more relaxed. “I have them overnight whenever Cal stays over, but they usually hear the plane and show up earlier than they did today.”

  Vic and Eileen slept easier for knowing they were out there too.

  Chapter 9

  April used the same background for her latest announcement to reinforce her location in people’s minds. Of course, it could be a ploy and most intelligence services wouldn’t assume it true even if the transmission routing seemed valid. She put on a sad face and it wasn’t any problem to do so. It was genuinely depressing and tiresome that nobody in North America had bothered to respond to her. Irwin was still being held prisoner.

  “Hello, North America. I am April Lewis. I’m not going to recap my previous transmission. It’s available archived if you haven’t seen it. You are holding my friend Irwin Hall prisoner in violation of your treaty with Home. I promised I would start inflicting economic harm if he wasn’t released. In an hour the Mississippi Bridge at Greenville will be dropped in the river. I’d really rather not hurt people, even stupid ones, so please clear off the bridge. If you deflect my shots you may cause more damage than letting them arrive on target. If you could not defend against my recent bombardment of Vandenberg, a ballistic missile interceptor base, you certainly aren’t going to successfully defend a rural bridge. If somebody wants to call to warn the Greenville police, they may care more about protecting their locals from harm than the idiots in Vancouver.

  “This is just the start not the end of the matter. If you don’t release Irwin the cost of failing to keep your treaty it is going to get increasingly expensive.”

  It was a half-hour before Chen called. April already had several groups of rods in orbit designated to hit the bridge. She wasn’t planning on using anything heavier.

  “May I speak to you without interfering with your direction of the strike?” Chen asked.

  “It’s all set up, just waiting for the final command,” April assured him. “I’ll put you on a split-screen. Talk away and show me anything you care to,” she invited.

  “I have a rented feed of the border area. I’m putting the general view of a three-hundred kilometer square centered around Greenville on your screen.

  “Both North America and Texas have significant forces covering both sides of the river not far south. There is armor on both sides dug in and able to cover the river with direct fire. The armor has its own short-range air defenses. There is also heavier artillery set back to cover the entire area. What may be of more interest to you is the longer range mobile air and ballistic missile defenses to protect that artillery. There are units near Monticello and Indianola on the North American side,” Chen said, marking those on the map. “There are Texan units east of Monroe on the west side. On the east, th
ere is a much bigger group of forces between Jackson and Yazoo. It seems dedicated to protecting Jackson and has a significant number of troops, more armor held in reserve, and a forward airfield that may become a permanent base. They have cordoned off part of the Jackson airport and National Guard field to the other side of Jackson for supply transport, helicopter, and platform operations. However, they seem to be keeping combat operations in the base they just set up with a much better perimeter.”

  “So the Greenville Bridge is already in range of their artillery,” April said, looking at the map. “They could take it down anytime they wish.”

  “Two precision rounds, at either end of the bridge would do it very nicely. It would only take a couple of minutes to ram them in the breech and send them on their way,” Chen said. “But they drew the line at the thirty-third parallel. That was a political decision and they took the territory with almost no casalities or other costs. Finding out just how far north they could have pushed would have been much more expensive.”

  “Hang on,” April told Chen. She gave the final commands to a half dozen rods.

  “They have six incoming in about twelve minutes. Get some video if it isn’t too much trouble,” April requested.

  “Absolutely, I’m going to record the entire campaign as much as possible. If anybody gets pix from the ground I’ll archive that too,” Chen promised.

  Chen’s map on the wall expanded to show most of Arkansas and a circle showed where her group of rods was incoming from the west. They didn’t actually show since he hadn’t added the infrared overlay.

  “Oh neat, we have somebody streaming video live,” Chen said. The bottom quarter of the screen opened up and showed the bridge a hundred meters or so away down a street. Cop cars with lights flashing and city trucks blocked the road right at the bridge. Barely visible lights showed there was a similar roadblock at the far end of the bridge. Black and white striped barricades with ‘street closed’ signs, held the traffic back at the first cross street from where the video was being streamed.

  It was a little shaky until the person shooting it lowered it and braced himself on the hood of a car that appeared in the bottom of the feed, but it was much steadier.

  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, then the police and a couple of other city workers started running away from the bridge leaving the cars there with lights still flashing. The photographer briefly panned to show the officers reach the stopped traffic behind the barricades and take shelter behind the front cars.

  Turning back to the bridge the streamer tilted the phone to the sky and showed contrails with bright sparks at their tips, climbing into the distance off the right side of the bridge. They climbed away to the southwest at an angle, crossing behind the bridge in the view. They rose in pairs, four times, until there were eight in the air.

  “My guys say the radar they are using indicates those are the older SM-12 land launch variants,” Chen said. “They are still pretty good. They are murder on aircraft and normal ballistic missiles but your rods have nothing vital for them to hit. If they get a close hit and strip the vanes off any of them, they are still coming down pretty close to the bridge. It will just mess up the terminal guidance. How do you have them targeted?”

  “Three on each tower,” April said. “I’ll wait and see if they do the job before I commit more. Rods are cheap but I may need a lot of them before this is over.”

  “You wanted to hurt them economically. They are shooting hundred million dollar missiles at fifty-thousand dollar rods. You don’t even have to hit anything to make that a very bad deal for them,” Chen said.

  The rods coming in from the west were a barely visible group of glowing dots one could mistake for airplane landing lights. Their heat shields were very hot, but only a hundred millimeters across. Coming straight at the observers near the bridge, they gave no impression of great speed at a distance. They drifted back and forth slightly but stayed in a group as their vanes made slight adjustments to keep them on target.

  Far up in the sky, the climbing contrails merged with the glowing dots and fireballs erupted, too far away for the sound to reach the ground. There were two delayed flashes from the missiles that missed and self-destructed. Nothing happened again for an agonizing few seconds, and then a trio of rods arrived at the far tower almost simultaneously. The glowing heat shields were only seen sideways briefly so that they drew a bright line across one’s vision the last couple of hundred meters. They crossed that distance so quickly the eye couldn’t turn fast enough to track it. The concrete tower disappeared in a noisy ripple of flashes and ground shaking thuds, quickly obscured by an expanding cloud of concrete dust. The blink of an eye later the near tower caught a rod high up, shattering the top half before the support cables to the center span had time to fall.

  The attached bridge deck, suddenly unsupported, dropped in the river. Chunks of concrete and pieces of rebar and cable from both towers continued to rain down everywhere long after the bridge deck was gone below the river surface. Even as far back as the barricades, pieces fell large enough to dent the automobiles and shatter windshields.

  A wave from the bridge deck hitting the water sped away down-river.

  Two late-arriving rods nudged off course by missiles hit. One raised a giant plume of water to the left about a kilometer down-river. The other rod arrived tumbling and hit the police cars on the bridge approach. A giant dark plume of dirt and car parts was blown to the right with a bone jarring bang. When it all settled there was an elongated pit in the road and extending east across the shoulder. Of the cars, there wasn’t anything left. If the city trucks behind them survived being struck directly they were now gone, blown in the river.

  The entire deck of the bridge was down and the far tower barely a stub sticking out of the water. The near tower was only trimmed halfway down to where a short section of deck hung off the near side, but the abbreviated tower was bent to the east, crooked.

  “That’s a shame. It’s wasn’t a half bad looking old bridge,” Chen said.

  “I know, I feel like a vandal, but it beats killing people,” April said.

  “Oh, you will eventually. You might as well get used to the idea. If you announce a few more bridges as targets some fool will decide to hold a block party on one,” Chen said.

  * * *

  Vic didn’t try to rush Eileen in the morning, but the way he gathered their things and prepared to leave before breakfast spoke to his desire to get moving. He didn’t gulp down breakfast but neither did he sit back relaxed and have a second cup of coffee.

  Cal was short on chitchat too, and both men thanked Mr. O’Neil quickly and announced their mutual intent to leave almost simultaneously. Eileen already had her few things downstairs by their bags and rifles, ready to go.

  Cal did hold back long enough to give Vic a hand before he went to his plane, steadying the dirt bike from the other side as he eased it down the steps onto the yard. They were on the bike leaving while he was still doing a walk-around preflight. O’Neil was sitting on his steps watching his guests leave. His night watchmen were with him, waiting for Call to take off before they went home.

  The road going back home was familiar now, and Eileen could see from his actions Vic had an impressive memory. He would let off the throttle and coast to be quieter anticipating a home around the next curve. She remembered the route but not in such fine detail.

  They dropped off their tablets and thermometers to John the chicken farmer. That reduced the bulk on the bike and made Eileen a little more comfortable. They saw only one woman weeding her garden and she straightened up and regarded them passing without a friendly wave. It was near mid-day on a long flat straightaway when Vic suddenly braked and pulled to the side of the road so he could make a sweeping turn and go back if he needed to. Eileen looked over his shoulder and saw a figure standing in the road far ahead. It was a good two hundred and fifty meters ahead and the person took off a large brimmed hat and waved it at them.

 
“I’m not going to go forward into an ambush,” Vic said. “It looks like a child to me even at this distance. I won’t be suckered into thinking that means they are no danger and stopping. If he doesn’t start forward to meet us right away I’m going back and take a long route around. We can see well back from both sides of the road here so nobody can advance parallel to the road with him.”

  “How far will a bypass take us out of our way?” Eileen asked.

  “From what I remember there’s a county dirt road that loops the other side of a long ridge. I haven’t been down it, but I’d guess it will add two or three hours to our day if it is as windy as most of those side roads. I’d have to go cautiously and slower.”

  The figure ahead started jogging their way. It was made more obvious by the hat that was not returned to his head but held in one hand, pumping as he ran. Vic made half the turn to go back the other way, stopping sideways in the road, and examined behind them carefully to make sure nobody was coming from that side.

  When he got close, they saw they’d assumed wrong. What they assumed a boy, was actually a young girl. She was about eleven or twelve-years-old and extremely skinny, but definitely feminine, if not visibly so from a distance. Her long hair was tied back with a rag and her clothing not much better than rags too. Her shoes were wrapped in duct tape and her jeans had holes at the knees and by the pockets that were honest wear. Her t-shirt was frayed all along the neck opening and had a variety of random holes. She’d sprinted too hard and looked like she might faint when she tried to speak, leaning over and putting her hands on her knees panting.

  “Catch your breath before you keel over,” Vic said. “We’ll wait a minute for you.” He still looked around making sure the delay wouldn’t endanger them. He turned the motor off not seeing any danger.