“Well I do—time,” retorted the president. “Starvation takes time, time we don’t have. We need Tennessee wrapped up before summer. Before we can move our forces to the Northwest we need to have complete control everywhere east of the Mississippi River.”
“I agree.”
“Then tell this Robert Bullard to light some fires down there! He needs to motivate those foreign troops and get this thing over. Finish it! I want to visit Memphis and Nashville by the time the magnolias are blooming. You can do this for me, can’t you, Sidney? It’s very tricky, this strategy. There are many perils, many risks…”
“Don’t worry, Robert Bullard has a handle on it. We’ll make your schedule.”
Actually, Sidney Krantz wasn’t sure if the starvation strategy would work in time, but he didn’t tell the president that. And he certainly didn’t tell him about the one ace left up his sleeve; this option was a little too radical for Jamal Tambor to hear about. If the foreign mercenaries, freezing temperatures and starvation couldn’t clean out the last rebel pockets in West Tennessee, he had another ally ready to bring to the battle. From old university contacts he had obtained a research vial packed with tiny germs called Yersinia pestis, more commonly known as the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Plague was long endemic among wild rodents in the American Southwest, but at a very low level. A few infected rats could have hitchhiked into the earthquake zone on trucks, and then nature would have taken its tragic course…yes, that was plausible.
Coming on the heels of Cameroon fever and the avian flu, nobody would be too surprised by an outbreak of the Black Death in Tennessee. With the remaining population already compromised by stress, cold, hunger and illness, the plague would rapidly finish them off. Even among a healthy population, the untreated mortality rate was well over 50 percent. Yet because plague was easily treatable with standard antibiotics, it would pose little danger of spreading across the river boundaries of West Tennessee, beyond the quarantine zones and into the rest of the federal states. Once the plague outbreak was publicized, the last stubborn holdouts in West Tennessee would rush to the FEMA relocation centers in order to gain access to the lifesaving antibiotics. Even if a relatively small percentage of the remaining population were infected, blind fear of the plague would drive them into the welcoming arms of the government.
Krantz had done his homework. He had learned that the plague germs needed a local species of immune rodents to serve as a reservoir, in order for them to become a long-term problem in a given region. Once the infected rats and humans died off, the epidemic would wind down. At temperatures above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, fleas infected with Yersinia pestis did not transmit the disease. When they died, the germs died inside them and the cycle was broken. Warm, dry summer weather would finish off the plague outbreak. With no pool of immune rodents to contain the disease until the following autumn, the danger would disappear after one killing season.
Foreign troops operating in the Mid South, with ready access to antibiotics, would be at almost no additional risk. And if any of them did contract the disease and die, well, they were just foreign soldiers anyway. In the end no tears would be shed for dead mercenaries, no matter what the cause of their demise.
Probably, though, it wouldn’t come down to using bubonic plague as a weapon. Sidney Krantz could give starvation, cold and the foreign soldiers a few more weeks to finish the job. But if they were still stuck in this Mid South quagmire next year…then he’d do whatever it took to accomplish the president’s mission on time. People didn’t whisper that he was the president’s Rasputin for no reason.
2
Phil Carson left Seabago for the last time at dawn on the second day after his shipwreck. The occasional bloated bodies of the recently drowned were beginning to stink, and he was glad to depart the catamaran, jumping from the starboard hull over onto rotten timbers and rusted cars. Feral dogs, rats, crows and vultures, already at work on the dead, scurried or flapped away at his approach. The bodies must have been carried in on the surge tide; there were no signs of nearby human habitation. Scattered bones, some partial skeletons still wearing scraps of faded clothing, reminded him that this landscape of death and ruin was not new. In sharp contrast to the death and decay around him, it was a beautiful winter day along the Gulf. The sky was clear blue, streaked with high cirrus; he guessed the morning temperature was in the fifties. A fine day for a walk, he told himself.
His tan pack weighed only about thirty pounds. Almost half of that weight was drinking water contained in various recycled plastic bottles. For now, he was wearing old Reeboks, stained khaki work pants, and a torn green T-shirt. He knew that he would eventually be confronting officials, and his outward appearance was carefully considered. He was unshaven since Brazil, and the gash at his hairline was obviously new, as were his black eyes and other bruises and contusions. He carried the bare minimum, only items that would plausibly be in the possession of a recently shipwrecked mariner.
Climbing up, over and around the jumbled debris with thirty pounds strapped to his back, Phil was grateful for his recent weeks of sailing. The constant exercise involved in sailing had left him strong, agile and fit, especially compared to most men his age. His knees bothered him less now than they had a decade earlier. The constant searching of distant horizons had actually honed his vision. His old blue eyes betrayed him only at close range, when reading fine print or working with tiny parts. Reading glasses were a small but indispensable crutch, a nagging reminder of his age. He had gray hair to be sure, and permanent crow’s-feet and laugh lines on his face, but most of the time he felt no different than he had at age fifty—or at forty, for that matter. Aches and pains were more frequent and longer lasting, but what else could be expected after sixty-four hard-lived years? Only his face betrayed his decades. Sun, wind and weather made him look his years, and with his cut and bruised face, he looked even worse.
By noon, the marshes and creeks had turned into a swampy forest of skinny pine trees. Many of them were snapped or cracked halfway up by previous storms, forcing him to climb over and through the deadfall. Like the marshes, these woods were jammed with trash and debris. Just after 1:00 p.m., he climbed up a final steep bank and found railroad tracks, running east to west. They were unused, if the rust on top of the steel rails was any indication. A hundred feet beyond the tracks was a paved state road. He walked the tracks for an hour until they diverged away from the road, heading back into the marshes to the southwest. This presented him with a choice. After pausing to drink water from one of the plastic bottles in his pack, he quit the elevated berm of the railroad for the asphalt road, and continued west. The two-lane road was covered in many sections by sand and mud left behind by the storm surge. Where its surface was uncovered, he walked on the left side of the cracked asphalt. There was no traffic. Not a single car.
Trees, billboards, utility poles and wires were down across the road, but even two days after the storm nobody was working to clear the obstacles. The scattered houses still standing were roofless and long abandoned. An old cinderblock gas station and an even older roadhouse bar were windowless and empty.
****
“Put it down right there, on this side of the barn.” Robert Bullard liked to sit up front in the empty copilot’s seat. His four-man personal bodyguard detail sat behind him in the chopper’s passenger compartment. The choice of seats was a perquisite of his Senior Executive Service rank. He had never been in the military, but sitting up front, he felt like an Apache or Blackhawk pilot, racing across Western Tennessee. Wearing a headset, he could listen to air traffic control or switch over to other military and law enforcement radio nets.
It was great to be working again, after that fiasco in California had sidelined him for almost two years. Sidelined hell—he had been under virtual house arrest. At least the views had been terrific from his bayside penthouse condominium in downtown San Diego. The important thing was that he had not been indicted. Actually, he considered himself fortunate to
have avoided a stretch in Club Fed. His first month under house arrest, he had expected to be served with an indictment on an hourly basis. Now he understood why he had been kept in the deep freeze, under investigation instead of arrested. When the highest echelons of the federal government needed the most difficult and dirty jobs handled, they needed men like Bob Bullard. Well, he really couldn’t bitch. Even though he had lost his millions in gold back in California, at least he had not been arrested or imprisoned. Now he was just glad to be back in the saddle. After two years of house arrest, he would have accepted a posting to Alaska, just to get out of his condo in San Diego. It was all relative.
“Those are stables, I think,” the pilot answered on the intercom. They both wore headsets over ball caps and sunglasses.
“Yeah, whatever. Put her down.” Bullard pointed to the spot. He was wearing his usual unofficial uniform of khaki pants with a matching khaki windbreaker.
“But we’ll spook the horses if we land there.”
“And do I look like I give a shit? No, I do not. Just put this chopper down where I tell you.” Bullard knew from experience that the Kazaks could spend entire days galloping back and forth on these mile-wide fields. The chopper would run out of fuel long before they finished playing their game of goat polo.
Bullard’s pilot flared out for the landing and brought the machine down. He set the blue-and-white executive helicopter on the grassy field, scattering horses and riders, a few rearing or bolting off at a full gallop. While the rotors were still turning, Bullard stepped down from the helo, accompanied by his bodyguards. They all wore black combat vests and matching ball caps over black uniforms and were armed with compact assault rifles. Alongside another barn was a row of military trucks and a separate line of ASVs, menacing four-wheeled Armored Security Vehicles with little tank turrets on top of their angle-faceted bodies.
The helicopter’s jet turbines were still winding down when the leader of the Kazaks trotted up on his white Arabian. The horse was nervously tossing its head in fear of the chopper, and it was tightly reined in by its rider. Colonel Yerzhan Jibek was also accompanied by his own squad of horse-mounted bodyguards, Kalashnikov rifles slung across their backs. The horses and riders made visible breath plumes in the frosty air. Colonel Jibek was dressed in the earth-brown garrison uniform of the Kazak Battalion, with knee-high leather riding boots. A leather pistol holster with a cover flap and a leather Sam Brown belt matched his boots. He was tall for a Central Asian, at least a six-footer. On horseback, he positively loomed over Bullard and his bodyguards. The man exuded health and confidence. Bullard guessed he was quite a lady-killer, with his thick mustache, high cheekbones and dark eyes. (Not that the local girls had much choice in the matter of romance with the foreign peacekeepers.)
Bullard wasn’t nearly as handsome, but he thought he looked pretty good for his age. Some of the ladies still said he looked like Robert De Niro, and he had been practicing the actor’s mannerisms and facial expressions for so long that they had become second nature. If he had to dye his hair black, so what? You talkin’ to me?
The Kazak leader said, “Ah, General Blair, always with the dramatic appearance.”
Colonel Jibek knew Bob Bullard only by this alias. These Asiatics had no respect for titles other than military ranks, so Bullard adapted. A Kazak colonel would answer only to a general, so Bullard became one, nominally. In Third World hellholes like Kazakhstan, mysterious “generals” who seldom wore uniforms were standard issue. This custom was useful when dealing with the foreign military units, under the auspices of the rural pacification program. He was the director of the program, and he made up his own rules. He had been hired because he got results. Besides, Jibek wasn’t a real colonel either, not in the sense of belonging to a sovereign nation’s military. The Kazak Battalion was really just a mercenary outfit manned by contract soldiers—like most of the foreign units under Bullard’s command. “Kontraktniki,” they called themselves. Their contracts stipulated that battalion leaders were colonels, so there you were.
“By what grace do we thank the appearance of our general?” Colonel Jibek spoke with a vague Limey accent, and his English grammar was always humorously mangled. It was all Bullard could do to keep a straight face. He guessed that Jibek (if that was his real name, and he suspected it was not) had probably learned the language while listening to tapes made by English defectors to the Soviet Union. Back in the Soviet era, their special operations officers were trained to operate behind enemy lines and usually learned a foreign language, so it fit his bio. He was one of only a handful of Kazak officers with any knowledge of English whatsoever. This language insularity was one of the key attributes of the Kazak Battalion, making them particularly well suited for certain missions. That and their casual, ingrained brutality.
“Climb down, Colonel, and let’s go for a walk.”
“But we are not completed of our game.”
“Don’t worry; you can finish after I’m gone. We need to talk.”
“I will bring you horse. We may riding go together. I am for certain that you will enjoy.”
“Not today.” Bob Bullard had not sat on a horse since a county fair pony ride in the third grade, and he did not intend to get on a horse at this point in his life. “We really need to talk, colonel. Now.”
The colonel sighed and dismounted his horse, which was immediately led away by an enlisted Kazak soldier, who then followed behind them just out of earshot. “Would you like something to drink, general? We have made most excellent kumis.”
“Koomis? What the hell is that?”
“Fermented milk of female horse. It is tasting very delicious, and increase manly capability with woman.” The Kazak winked broadly and nudged him with an elbow.
Bullard couldn’t decide if Jibek was pulling his leg. Well, it didn’t matter at this point. Jibek could do all the teasing he wanted. “I’ll pass on it this time. I’m going to make this brief, and then you can get back to tearing that goat to pieces. Colonel, I’m worried about your battalion. They don’t seem to be obeying your orders.”
The Kazak officer shot him a hard look. “Not possible. My soldiers are obeying orders to one hundred percent, or they are shot like dogs.”
“Well, if that’s the case, maybe we have a bigger problem than I thought. Why are all of your men still in Clark County? Fillmore and Radford County are going to hell in a basket, and last week I asked you to conduct punitive raids. Those counties should be empty of all unapproved people by now, but they’re still full of rebel holdouts. I sent target folders and operations plans. So far we haven’t seen anything but…goat polo. Your battalion hasn’t moved, not even a platoon. Even your checkpoints are not manned.”
“Ah, General Blair, winter now is time for my men to enjoy fruits of their work. They are busy on new farms, with new American wives. It’s not simple you know, subduing a rebel province. To win the hearts and brains of the people takes much attention. As for checkpoints, Mexicans of North American Legion are good enough for checkpoint duty. It is not for my battalion to do such low work. My men are all Spetznaz, trained for special operations.”
“Have you even read the target folders I sent you? I made a simple request, and I was ignored. I don’t like being ignored, Colonel.”
“I am not ignoring your wishes, but we are, you might say, in a period of reformation and regrouping here. When we are ready—”
“Your men will never be ready, not if they think they are going to turn into farmers and land owners here in Clark County. I’m telling you Colonel, that’s not how this is going to work. No way in hell.”
“My men were promised land. I was promised land! Land, and citizenship. What are your government’s promises, empty wind?”
“You were never promised land in Tennessee. This county is not the end of your mission tasking, Colonel. We have more important missions for your battalion before you will receive your permanent land titles.”
Jibek made a sweeping gesture with
his riding crop at the hundreds of acres of rolling fields and woods surrounding them. “So this estate, the horses…are not mine to keep, as I was understanding? Pity. I’ve grown, how do you say…rather fond of the place.”
“I’m sure you have, but it’s not going to be yours for much longer. Your battalion has been tasked with population evacuation and relocation operations in Western Tennessee. Once this region is pacified, your battalion will be heading far to the west. The Mexicans will be adequate to hold what you have gained for us in Tennessee, but your mission here has not yet been finished. You need to bring your men back into fighting form. You need to get them back into training for war, not games. You need to get them ready for more operations now, not sometime later.”
“Ah, my dear General Blair, you must understand…that is not Kazak way. Kazak men must see rewards along path. I promise you, we will be ready for more operations in spring. Until then…”
“Listen Colonel: don’t forget who provides the fuel for your trucks and your generators. Don’t forget who provides you with the overhead images and videos that let you know where to find the rebels, and the helicopters that allow you to catch them. I don’t think you understand your position—”
“Nor do you understand my position! I have told you, my battalion will be ready for new operation—in time of spring.”
“That’s not soon enough; we have a schedule of operations to keep. I’ll stop your fuel allotments; I’ll stop your helicopters. And I’ll let the Mexicans have this farm.”
Colonel Jibek stood face to face with Bullard, slapping his riding crop against his leg. “We don’t need your supplies or your helicopters; we are capable of sustaining ourselves. We are not soft like you Americans. My men are hard like steel. They can take whatever they need, or do without. As far as Mexicans taking this farm, well, send them—and let them try.”
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 4