Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  He had been excited, and only occasionally did his stomach suffer a quick tinge of fear. He was going into combat. All of his training would be put to immediate use. A range of dramatic, if nebulous, opportunities seemed to open up before him.

  But he did not see combat. Instead he remained in the grubby, diseased environs of Kinshasa, sitting behind a bank of intelligence work stations that glowed with multicolored electronic displays and did absolutely nothing to alter the outcome of the campaign.

  But he learned. He learned the emptiness of the things he had been taught in school about war, and, above all, he seemed to learn the depth of his Americanness. Despite his rebelliousness, his parents had managed to imbue him with a residual belief that there must be some magic in his African heritage. Their casual iconography promised an untutored wisdom about life, a deeper, richer humanity, and a natural splendor beyond compromise, beyond the reach of the cold, pale refugees from the Northern Hemisphere.

  Instead, he found plague. And a level of corruption, greed, and immorality that shocked his middle-class soul. He detected no evidence of spiritual grace or moral charity—no single hint of latent racial greatness. He resisted the African reality that confronted him, struggling against the evidence of his senses with an outraged ferocity, unwilling, even now, for his parents to have been so wrong in the dreams that had shaped their lives.

  In the end, he had to recognize that he had more in common with a white private from backwoods Alabama than he had with the Zaireans. Culture, the immersion in television, video, automated games, music, advertising, textbooks, social habits, conveniences, breakfast foods, the triggers to personal embarrassment, the simple differentiation between the good deed and the bad, overpowered any real or imagined racial bonds. Instead of romance, he found squalor. In the end, the Africans did not want his brotherhood. They only wanted his money.

  He wrote to his parents that, while war and disease limited his opportunity to really see the country, sunrise on the big river was very beautiful, and the vegetation was full of color.

  Then, still unable to comprehend how things had gone so wrong for his army, for his country, he loaded back onto another transport plane and went into quarantine in the Azores. By an accident of fate, Runciman's disease passed by his bunk. Things had gotten so bad in the quarantine camp that virtually everyone assumed they would die or at least suffer the corollary effects of the disease. The suicide rate among the waiting men and women soared. At one point, the last bulldozer broke down and details of still-healthy men had to dig burial pits by hand. They ran out of body bags. Then the decision was made to burn the corpses. Then came the order to disinter the earlier victims and burn them too. Terribly afraid, Meredith volunteered for the worst of the details. He told himself it was his duty. As his penance for sitting safely in Kinshasa while his classmates were dying downcountry.

  Even though the smoke from the chemical-laden fires haunted his nostrils, burrowing into his lungs, his temperature never climbed, his bowels never exploded, and his skin never blotched with the special badges of the African campaign. It occurred to him that, perhaps, he was being saved for a special destiny, even though he tried to suppress the notion as unlucky.

  On the island the living talked primarily of one thing— of going home, to a safe, healthy land. But Runciman's disease got off the plane ahead of them, and by the time Meredith stepped off the military transport at Dover, the plague had spread across the United States, just as it was sweeping impartially around the world. The schools and universities closed early on. Then the theaters and restaurants closed. Then the shops that sold nonessentials were shut. But the plague would not be appeased. The disease snaked out from the transportation hubs, uncoiling down the exit ramps of the interstates, tracing secondary routes to their intersections with county roads, then following unmarked lanes to the farms and ranches and mining patches. In the Midwest isolated towns crumpled and died on dusty sidewalks, along rural routes where the fields went wild. But the greatest impact by far was on the cities.

  Public services were swiftly and severely stricken. No prophylactic measures tolerable in a free society seemed to work. Medical masks and gloves were of no greater utility than the beaks and pomanders of medieval plague doctors. The disease gobbled sanitation workers, policemen, transportation workers, repairmen . . . health workers. City residents began to wander the rural areas in their cars, looking for an untouched hamlet where a room might be had, spreading the plague until they ran out of gas, or until they died in a fever by the side of the road. Or until a property owner shot them as they approached. Towns and villages tried to close the roads that led to their limits. But it was no longer possible to live cut off from the rest of the world, when even your bread came from far away. And RD arrived in any case, even when the delivery trucks failed to show up.

  The plague brought out the worst in men. From hucksters pitching expensive miracle cures, to television prophets who damned their contemporaries in terms of the Book of Revelations before demanding money to intercede with God on the viewers' behalf, from street criminals who thought nothing of breaking into the homes of the sick to steal and to murder the already dying, to doctors who refused to treat RD victims, men learned the measure of each other and of themselves. In the backcountry posses took to sealing off the houses of victims with an armed ring of men, then burning the structure to the ground along with all of its inhabitants, living or dead. In better-organized areas, schools and National Guard armories were converted into hospitals—but there was little that could be done beyond the intravenous replacement of lost fluids and simply waiting for the victims to live or die on their own. Then the sterile solutions began to run out, as the demand skyrocketed and the production facilities closed and the distribution network collapsed. Black-market fluid packs killed as many as they saved. Ambulance attendants were gunned down and their vehicles torched as rumors spread that they were a major source of contagion. Among those who recovered, some found that their families or lovers, landlords or neighbors, would not accept them back into the fold, and hobo camps of scarred survivors developed into semipermanent settlements beside the interstate and rail lines, while renegade colonies sprang up in the national parks, where the residents were somewhat less likely to be massacred in a midnight vigilante raid.

  Yet, the will to civilization never disappeared entirely. There were always volunteers, men and women who against all common sense and personal instinct went to work manning the ambulances or lugging the mass-produced chemically lined body bags. Men whose lives had been spent behind desks and computers strained to load the mountains of accumulated garbage in the streets, while others served as police auxiliaries or truck drivers. When the state governors called out the National Guard, the Guard came—not every man or woman who had sworn the oath, but enough to deliver the essential food, to dig the burial pits, to patrol the most lawless of the city streets and country roads. There seemed to be no way to predict who would cower and try to flee, or who would risk his life to serve the common good. Neither religion nor race, nor age or income served to indicate the man or woman of courage. But they were always there, never quite as many as might be wanted, but always more than the logic of self-preservation alone would have allowed.

  The plague hit hardest in the great coastal cities of California. In the boundless sprawl of Los Angeles, the haphazard infrastructure quickly went to pieces, and the desperate efforts of surviving officials and volunteers could not begin to put the situation back together. The gangs permanently embedded in East Los Angeles and in other enclaves of the underclass, whose grip had developed greater strength with each passing year, ruled their territories completely now, even deciding who would have access to the sparse supplies of food. And the plague brought opportunity. The gangs soon reached out, first rampaging through the more prosperous districts of Los Angeles, then embarking on expeditions to ravage small towns, settlements, or individual homes as far away as Utah. Along with their increase in membership
and wealth over the decades, the gangs had also learned increasingly sophisticated methods of presenting themselves to the world. At a time when food suppliers were afraid to enter gang-controlled areas, aware that their loads would be pirated and their drivers beaten or killed—if the plague spared them—gang representatives appeared on public-access radio and television to accuse the government of purposefully spreading Runciman's disease in the ghettos and barrios, and of attempting to starve minority survivors. Even the commercial media made time for the gang stories, anxious to offer something other than reruns and official announcements. The gang members were colorful, provocative . . . entertaining.

  An attempt to move the California National Guard into Los Angeles resulted in the deployment of understrength units with little or no training for such a mission. Assailed whenever they drove or marched down a street, whether to unload canned goods or to pick up the garbage, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would eventually open fire. This time, the media stories focused on the Guard's brutality and on their victims. The reporting proved so inflammatory that violence erupted in other cities across the nation, where the situation previously had been brought under control.

  In Los Angeles, the power system failed and water service became erratic, with the available water contaminated. Bodies lay in the streets. Unable to enter vast areas of Los Angeles County, the thinned ranks of the police and the Guard struggled to protect those neighborhoods where the gangs did not have roots, leading to even more strident charges of racism, both from the now unprotected poor and from reporters who did all of their investigations by telephone, afraid to risk their lives on streets that the plague and the gangs had divided between them. Increasingly, the media relied on gang-supplied video material.

  The Kingman massacre, in which a desert town was largely destroyed as its residents fought it out with far-better-armed gang members, forced the issue onto the President's desk. Against the advice of the most politically adept members of his cabinet, he declared a national state of emergency and ordered the United States Army into Los Angeles County.

  The Army took only volunteers. Many of the men who stepped forward were victims of the disease who had survived and thus had nothing to fear from at least one of the enemies ravaging Los Angeles. As a result, the first units deployed often had the grimmest look of any the United States Army had ever fielded. But there were other volunteers as well, men who were willing to risk everything at the call of duty. Unit commanders were not always certain whether they should be ashamed of how many men refused to go or proud of the majority who quietly signed the release forms and earned their pay. It was an Army whose morale had been shattered by the African debacle— but which still discovered the strength within itself to face a mission that promised to be even more thankless.

  Lieutenant Meredith found himself cradled in a relatively safe job at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, working on computer analysis models that attempted to explain the African debacle, and mourning the dreams of his parents. The worst of the plague seemed to have passed by the local area, and Meredith was slowly overcoming the nightmare of death and disfigurement that had followed him from Kinshasa to the Azores, intensifying even as the regularity of horror numbed the conscious mind. He had always been vain about his looks. Yet he put in the paperwork to join the special task force on duty in California. Terrified whenever he paused to think, he could not explain to his bewildered commander or to himself why he would choose so foolish a course of action. There was no logic in it, no sense. They could not even offer him an intelligence position of the sort for which he had been trained. There were, however, plenty of openings for substitute cavalry and infantry platoon leaders, who seemed to die as soon as they breathed the East Los Angeles air.

  He found himself in charge of a ground cavalry platoon on escort duty east of the Interstate 710-210 line. He received no special training. There was no time. The platoon itself was operating at an average strength of sixty percent, and the troop commander under whom Meredith found himself looked as though he were barely up from his own sickbed, his face and hands gruesomely scarred by Runciman's disease. Although the man was rumored to be one of the few genuine heroes to emerge from the mess in Zaire, it took all of Meredith's selfcontrol to reach out and accept the hand his superior offered in welcome.

  Meredith entered no-man's-land. White residents feared and did not trust him. The Hispanics attacked him with insults whose thrust was unmistakable despite the language barrier, pelting his utility vehicle with dead rodents and excrement. But the worst of his problems came with the black gang members and their hangers-on. Meredith found himself accused of levels of betrayal he had never realized might exist. Shots punctured his carryall and a firebomb barely missed him. Late one night he returned from a dismounted patrol to find a decaying corpse propped behind the steering wheel of his vehicle.

  Thankfully, there was little time for soul-searching. There were always more convoys to be escorted than there were available cavalry platoons, more ambulances to be accompanied, more streets to be patrolled than the most rigorous schedules allowed. And there were soldiers for whom lieutenants needed to care.

  Keeping the soldiers under control was one of the most difficult aspects of the mission. It was hard for young boys not to lose their tempers and respond with the loaded weapons they kept at the ready. Further, the gangs sought to corrupt the soldiers with money, women, and drugs— and not every soldier proved to be a saint. In his first three months in L.A., Meredith found it necessary to relieve one man in every five, including one bone-thin mountain boy overheard bragging that he had come to California to do him a little legal coon-hunting.

  Slowly, the tide appeared to be turning. The plague began to signal an intent to move south for the winter, and the system of food distribution points, medical care, and quarantine sites took hold. There were more volunteers from the public at large now, usually men or women who had survived a bout with RD. The Army had established order in the city during daylight, and the nighttime situation was improving. The media were never censored, but they were required to have a reporter on the scene if they wanted to file a report from the martial law zone, and they were required to publicize the sources of any secondhand news footage they broadcast. The hearsay reports taken by telephone across a continent stopped, and the reporters who were gutsy enough to accompany the Army into the most troubled areas soon began to air and publish stories far less deferential to the gangs. Incidents and even small-scale firefights continued. But there was no doubt about who was winning. The reorganized National Guard even began to assume some of the Regular Army's responsibilities in the county.

  The gangs grew desperate. The number of soldiers lost to snipers or assassination increased, and the gangs threatened to execute volunteer workers. There was a pitched battle when a coalition of gangs attempted to raid the internment camp for gang members that had been established at Fort Irwin, California. Four bloody hours of fighting, with the camp guards forced to defend themselves against external attack and an internal prisoner revolt, resulted in dozens of Army casualties—and hundreds of dead or wounded gang members. A heliborne response force had blocked the escape of the raiding party, and many of the gang members involved in the attack found themselves inside the camp with the prisoners they had intended to rescue. The raiders who attempted to escape fared even worse. Army patrols continued to find corpses in the desert for months.

  Meredith grew confident. He still seemed to lead a charmed life, untouched by bullets or disease, and his training as a Military Intelligence officer proved to be a good background for the challenges his cavalry platoon faced on the streets of Los Angeles. He had even become something of a favorite with his former troop commander, who had been promoted to major and appointed acting commander of the squadron after the car-bombing death of the lieutenant colonel who had been in command. Major Taylor was a hard, taciturn man, who showed his partiality by giving those officers in whom he had the most faith the most challengi
ng assignments. Meredith, who had just pinned on the silver bar of a first lieutenant, received more than his share, and he relished it, quietly growing vain.

  Then the inevitable happened. Unexpectedly. There was nothing special about the feel of the day. Just another food convoy to be escorted into Zone Fourteen. Slow progress through the streets, taking care. Machine gunners standing at the ready in the beds of their carryalls. Watching.

  But there was nothing to watch. Only the slow movements of the city struggling back to life. The novelty of a taco stand that had reopened, and the routine chatter on the operations net. Down streets that seemed asleep, turning into others where rudimentary commerce had resumed. Street punks hurling curses out of habit, bored by it all. Then a gutted street where Meredith could remember spending one very bad night. It had all grown routine.

  Meredith's vehicle was positioned in the middle of the long convoy, where he could best exercise control. He could not even see the problem that had brought the convoy to a halt. The lead vehicles had already turned the corner up ahead.

  "One-one, you need to talk to me," he said into the radio hand mike. "What's going on up there? Over."

  He waited for a response for an annoyingly long time, then he ordered his driver to cut out of the convoy and work up to the head of the column. He could smell burning tires now.

  As soon as he turned the corner he saw the smoldering barricade of junk. A crowd had begun to emerge from the stairwells and alleys, from storefronts and basements. Meredith immediately recognized a gang-sponsored "event" in process.

  Meredith's driver hit the brakes. A body lay sprawled in their path. It was impossible to tell whether it was a plague victim or just some local drunk on bootleg liquor. But the carryall sat at an idle.