by Noah Mann
After a moment Schiavo allowed a small smile.
“We the people...”
“Exactly,” I said. “We started right a couple hundred years ago. There’s nothing saying we can’t do that again. Or even better.”
“You really believe that, Fletch?”
I’d had my doubts about many things since the blight appeared. Doubts about my government, my friends, my place in what the world became. Even in myself. But at every turn, things worked out. Not without some heavy price being paid at times, but somehow, because we’d stayed true to something innate in our nature, we’d prevailed.
Right had triumphed.
“I do,” I told her. “I absolutely do.”
Thirty Four
The choreography had all been worked out in satellite communications with the Rushmore before we’d lifted off from Colby, and it was all playing out as discussed.
“I see the strobe,” Captain Hogan reported.
He was obviously scanning the terrain through night vision goggles, focusing on a strip of smooth shore just south of town. Peering out a side window with the naked eye, I could not see what he was seeing—an infrared beacon flashing where our landing zone had been prepared. But I knew what it meant—we were almost home.
“We never discussed who’s paying for gas?” Major James asked.
“You can bill the admiral,” Schiavo said.
That was the plan. A quick stop on the beach to drop us off, and then the Marines would fly their Osprey to where the Rushmore had positioned itself offshore. They would land, be refueled, rest for a few hours, and then they would fly halfway across the country and return to their base.
Plans, though, were a luxury in the world as it was. We were all reminded of that just after the Osprey made a picture perfect landing and found Sgt. Lorenzen waiting for us, his expression on the grim side of serious.
“Captain,” he said as we exited via the cargo ramp.
“It’s Colonel Schiavo now,” Genesee told him as he and Carter helped Martin onto the sandy beach.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Schiavo asked.
“We received a message from the Rushmore an hour ago,” he said. “Admiral Adamson wants to see you immediately.”
Lorenzen said no more, but it was clear he hadn’t yet told all there was to tell.
“Go on,” Schiavo prompted him.
“The Rushmore offloaded supplies yesterday, colonel,” Lorenzen explained, adapting quickly to Schiavo’s new rank. “Including a lot of weaponry.”
Schiavo absorbed that as Major James came down the ramp, receiving a salute from the Army sergeant who’d greeted us with troubling news.
“Any idea when our gas station will be here?” the Marine officer asked.
“The Rushmore will be on station in an hour,” Lorenzen answered.
Schiavo looked to Major James.
“We’re going to have to hitch a ride out to the ship with you,” she told him, her attention shifting quickly to me.
We...
I nodded at her. We’d made it home, yes, but we weren’t done. Not yet. I was still attached to her at the hip. Mostly.
“Go see Elaine and Hope for a bit,” Schiavo said.
“Gladly,” I said.
* * *
I hitched a ride on the Humvee that had been tasked with taking Genesee and Martin to the hospital. Elaine was waiting just inside the door, alerted by the unmistakable sound of the Osprey a few minutes earlier that we’d arrived.
“That was the longest six hours of my life,” she told me after I’d mounted the steps and looked at her through the screen door.
That’s when word had reached Bandon that we were coming home, likely relayed by the Rushmore after Major James had contacted the ship. Since then there had been radio silence, leaving everyone, including Elaine, to wonder if we would actually survive the trip across half the country, a thing that had once been so routine as to barely warrant any concern.
There was no more ‘routine’, though. Not in this new world.
“I took the first flight I could find,” I told her, smiling.
She pushed the screen door open and I stepped past it, into our living room, like a neighbor might politely enter one’s house. Elaine closed the screen door, then the front door, and came to me, putting her arms around me and laying her head against my chest. But there wasn’t only relief in the embrace.
There was dread.
“Something’s happening,” she said.
The contents of the Rushmore’s delivery had sparked worry among those in town. And in my very own home. Elaine eased back from me and waited for some reply.
“I’ve heard intelligence that the Unified Government forces are on the move in California.”
“Is that what this was all about?” Elaine asked. “The president passing on information to Angela?”
I didn’t answer immediately, because I knew I couldn’t answer truthfully. Or not with the whole truth. I was fully aware that Schiavo would bring Martin into her confidence at some point, but I could not do the same with Elaine. I was not the one who bore the burden that had been given to Schiavo in the guise of responsibility. What I’d been privy to I had to keep to myself.
Elaine, though, read into the silence precisely what I wanted to withhold—that there was more to what had happened. To what had been shared. Much more.
“Are we at war again?” she asked me.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said.
I also didn’t know how long I had with my wife, and our daughter, before I would have to depart again, to do what was necessary to keep them safe. To keep everyone safe.
“Is Hope asleep?”
Elaine nodded.
“We can wake her,” she told me. “You’re reason enough to mess up her sleep schedule.”
“We don’t have to wake her,” I said. “I just want to see her.”
My wife took my hand and led me down the hall. We entered our daughter’s room together and stood over her crib in the dark, watching our little girl sleep.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, as Elaine and I sat in the living room, holding each other on the couch, the time came.
There was no knock on the door. We both looked up and saw Schiavo, standing just past the threshold with the doorknob in one hand.
“Fletch,” Schiavo said, a weary look of déjà vu about her. “It’s time.”
I’d spent ten minutes just staring at my daughter in the dark of her bedroom, and twice that much with my wife, hardly speaking a word. Neither of us knew with any specificity just what it was we might be facing as a town, but something was in the air. Something different. There was a sense of...finality. I didn’t know how to describe it other than that.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Elaine stood before I did and faced Schiavo, her posture almost challenging.
“Just don’t leave me in the dark,” Elaine said. “Please. Not knowing what was going on after he left with Clay was...hell. No matter what it is, I have to know what he’s doing. All right?”
Schiavo didn’t hesitate for a second, nodding to my wife’s request that was verging on begging.
“I’ll tell you myself,” Schiavo promised. “You have my word.”
I kissed Elaine on the cheek and grabbed my gear, leaving her once again. When Schiavo and I were in the Humvee, she glanced to me as she drove us back toward the beach where the Osprey would be waiting.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this, Fletch.”
“I don’t, either.”
She said no more, and neither did I, the short trip to the Osprey made in silence. Once aboard, we kept to ourselves, and as the awkward aircraft rose from the shore and sped low over the ocean, the quiet persisted, as if we were savoring some last bit of peace before a storm blew in.
Thirty Five
“They’re moving,” Admiral Lionel Adamson said once Schiavo and I were alone with him in his quarters. “Heading north.�
�
There was no doubt as to whom he was referring—the Unified Government forces. We’d returned from Ohio by way of Kansas having been told of their position near the border with California. Now, apparently, the march they’d begun toward Bandon had resumed. They were coming to finish what they hadn’t been able to during their previous siege of the town.
“Any estimation of their size?” Schiavo asked.
“Eight hundred to a thousand,” the admiral answered.
The number, which would have hardly elicited worry in the military of the old world, was greeted with stunned silence. Their numbers had swelled since retreating from Bandon, taking on conscripts and volunteers after their conquest of Yuma, and then San Diego, and any other groups of survivors they’d steamrolled in between.
And now they were coming for us once again.
“I know,” the admiral said.
“A thousand?” Schiavo pressed, seeking to truly confirm the size of the force moving north. “Actual fighting troops?”
“Yes,” Adamson said. “Plus vehicles. Including a pair of Abrams tanks.”
“Armor,” I said, speaking the word as if marking the instruments of our defeat. “Even with what was offloaded, we can’t stop that size of a force with armor support.”
“Be thankful they have no air support,” Adamson said. “It appears they shot their wad in that category with the drones they used on you before.”
Schiavo considered the intelligence she’d been given, processing it as a military mind would. Weighing odds. Strategies. Tactics.
“Do you know where they are now?” she asked.
“The SEALs took their boat to observe from offshore,” Adamson said. “They reported upon return that the entire force stopped just short of Pistol River for the night. But you can assume they will be moving again by dawn.”
“Pistol River,” I said, looking to Schiavo. “That’s sixty miles.”
She looked to me now, sensing where I was going with the fact of distance I’d just brought up.
“That has to be a safe distance,” I said.
Adamson took in the exchange between us, clearly not from a place of ignorance.
“It will be zero three hundred in two hours,” the Admiral said. “Your boomer will be listening.”
As the president had told Schiavo, a ballistic missile submarine, or boomer, would monitor a specific frequency at the three o’clock hour each day, both a.m. and p.m. A radio message to it, with a clear target of Pistol River, would bring an end to the Unified Government forces on the west coast, just as it was hoped the president’s forces had done to the enemy in Columbus. We were without confirmation that the latter had happened, but it was more than possible, and equally justified, that a nuclear hell could be unleashed in our part of the world.
“Sixty miles,” Schiavo said, mostly to herself, it seemed. “What if that’s not safe? What if there’s fallout?”
“We don’t have enough to fight them,” I reminded Schiavo.
That wasn’t a disputed fact, I knew. But she looked to the admiral for some chance that the odds might be turned.
“Do you have anyone you can let us have?” she asked. “SEALs, sailors, anyone who can shoot.”
Adamson shook his head slowly, some true regret in the gesture.
“Colonel Schiavo, I have a skeleton crew,” he said. “And with the damage we suffered during our encounter with the Unified Government flotilla on our way from Hawaii, I need every man and woman I’ve got just to keep the Rushmore seaworthy.”
She had no choice but to accept what Adamson was telling her.
“There’s no real option here,” I told Schiavo. “And no time to waste. Every mile closer to Bandon they get, the more chance there is that we’ll be affected by any blast or aftereffects.”
“Aftereffects,” she parroted. “That’s a sanitized term that may not accurately reflect what happens if I do what you want me to do.”
“I don’t want you to do anything,” I said. “But do you see any alternative?”
It seemed to me right then that she began to shake her head, but reconsidered. Her gaze almost snapped to Admiral Adamson.
“Do you have a map of the coast?”
“Yes, colonel, I do.”
* * *
A few minutes later we were in the Rushmore’s combat control center. Where displays had once glowed with trained crewman monitoring each, only a few were lit up, displaying the most basic navigational information for the three sailors tasked with monitoring the stations. On a plotting table attached to one wall, Adamson spread a map, lines of terrain contours snaking across the colored landscape. Rivers coursed toward the Pacific, thin and blue. Towns were mixtures of criss-crossing avenues and bold names identifying each small burg.
Schiavo, though, was looking for something more specific.
“Bridges,” she said, pointing to several that spanned the Rogue River. “They’ll already be past the Pistol River by the time we could mount a defense, but if we move now we can blow these spans over the Rogue.”
“They could still get troops across on boats,” I told her. “They’d have to leave their armor and transport behind. That would slow them down.”
“I’m not interested in slowing them down,” she said. “I’m interested in destroying them. This has to be it. We can’t look to a future where conflict is perpetual. This has to end. They have to be ended.”
She had the power to wipe the Unified Government force off the face of the blighted earth in a small card tucked in her shirt pocket. Instead she was envisioning some other method of defense, or offense, which would crush the Unified Government forces. I wasn’t seeing it.
Neither was Admiral Adamson.
“Colonel, they can just swing further east until they reach another crossing. Or another. You can’t blow every bridge.”
“We won’t need to,” she said, explaining her plan to the admiral and me over the next few minutes.
“There’s a lot of bluff and choreography involved,” Adamson said. “And timing.”
“Timing is key,” she agreed. “Which means I need the Osprey. We have to move assets to multiple locations miles from Bandon. And we have to start now.”
Adamson thought for a moment. He had the authority to keep the Osprey and its crew here, and to engage them in the fight to come. Doing so, however, would put at risk an aircraft which had been assigned to block the Unified Government forces from moving east from the Rockies.
That fight, though, hadn’t materialized, and was only a remote possibility going forward. This fight, here, was going to happen.
“You’ve got it, Colonel Schiavo.”
* * *
Major James never had his few minutes with the admiral to discuss the situation in Kansas. Instead, Schiavo briefed him aboard the Osprey after we’d taken off from the Rushmore with the aircraft’s cabin stripped of the auxiliary fuel cells which had made the cross-country trip possible. In Colby, when we’d first met the Marine officer, he’d looked the part of a worn-out fighter. A man longing for rest and respite from continually waiting for battle.
As it turned out, our estimation of the man had been wrong.
“A real fight,” Major James said, quiet disbelief in his words.
“Yes,” Schiavo confirmed.
The Marine thought for a moment, adjusting the microphone of his headset closer to his mouth, as if he wanted to make sure that what he was about to say was not misinterpreted.
“Colonel, I was trained to fight. It was drilled into me starting in boot camp that a Marine should be prepared to kill anything and anyone it sees. But since the world went to hell, I haven’t seen an enemy worth killing. I’ve stared across prairies and mountains waiting for the war my men and I were told was coming. Waiting has been my assignment, Colonel Schiavo, and I’m tired of waiting. You just tell me where my crew and I can help, and we’ll be there.”
Schiavo smiled at the very lucid representation of what being gung
ho truly meant.
“Thank you, major,” Schiavo said.
Major James stood, heading forward, presumably to brief his pilots. Three Marines. That was the addition to our force. Them and their aircraft. Stowed just aft of us against the fuselage was one more thing they could bring to the coming fight—a minigun. The multi-barreled weapon could spit thousands of 7.62 millimeter rounds per minute from its mount on the cargo ramp. From his reaction, and the limited crew options, I had no doubt which Marine would be operating it, harnessed to a hardpoint on the floor, raining fire from the tail end of the aircraft.
“We’re going to need help, Fletch.”
“Camas Valley,” I said, knowing that Schiavo had to be thinking the same thing. “Your push for an alliance looks like it’s going to pay off.”
She nodded, though there was uncertainty in the gesture.
“They’re just part of the puzzle,” Schiavo said. “Every piece has to fall into place at the right time for all this to work.”
Timing...
Admiral Adamson had noted that critical component of Schiavo’s plan to defeat the Unified Government forces. To wipe them out, once and for all, without using the terrible weapons at her disposal.
“As soon as we land, get someone out to Camas Valley to brief Dalton,” Schiavo told me. “They’ll have to move fast. Have them tell him that we’ll pick them up. We’ll need twelve shooters from him.”
“I’ll get Dave Arndt on it,” I said. “He drives like a maniac.”
The drive to Camas Valley, on good roads with no impediments, would normally take just over an hour. If the ash fall wasn’t any more severe than what Genesee and I had experienced when passing through just days earlier, then the trip, with luck, might be made in two.
“I’m going to need you, Fletch,” Schiavo said.
“I know.”
“Martin will join us,” she said. “Only because...”
“Because he’ll refuse to stay in the hospital to recuperate,” I said, completing the statement of fact for her. “Who else will you want?”
She scanned the Osprey’s cabin. Empty as it was, it was not cavernous by any measure. The forces it could transport were limited.