“Hey!” Someone was behind him.
Langer swung around. It was a guard with a M4 aimed at him. There was a burst of fire from the tower and the man’s eyes flicked to the light of the tracers for just a second as Langer drew the .357 from his belt.
The man’s eyes returned to Langer in time to see the barrel of the silver pistol, and they both fired at the same time. The .357 round caught the soldier in the face and he spun backwards and fell in a heap.
Larry pulled himself painfully into the cab and sat. Exhaling, he turned the power switches and hit the button to start the engine. It turned over. With it grumbling roughly, he only then reached down to check the hole in his gut just below his rib cage.
“Damn,” he said and looked around. There was a rag on the passenger seat, not exactly clean, but the best he could do on short notice. He took it and jammed it into the wound. That still left the hole out his back, which he could feel leaking. He pushed back in his seat to put pressure on it. It could wait.
He had work to do.
Turnbull led the remainder of his team at a run toward the two large OD green trailers parked next to the tarmac. Wires and cables ran from them and their roofs had dishes and antennae. Turnbull was almost to the foot of the closest one when the door at the top of the metal stairs opened. It was a hatless sergeant in a People’s Air Force uniform standing there with a Beretta.
Turnbull put a burst into him.
With the other team rushing the second trailer, Turnbull pumped up the stairs and opened the door. There were two more Air Force techs, standing in front of a bank of TV monitors showing Predator footage.
Turnbull emptied his mag then jumped back down to the ground. There was more firing in the trailer next door.
“Crash the drone and then burn the trailer,” he said to one of his troops. The guerrilla pulled a pair of two-liter bottles filled with gasoline from his pack and went up.
Turnbull slammed a fresh magazine home.
“Let’s go,” he said, charging toward the housing units.
The HEMMT picked up speed as it rolled toward the flight line. Various soldiers were running around, most without weapons, confused and disorganized. Most of them dodged the speeding truck, but not all. The heavy truck did not even notice them.
The crew of the fuel truck saw it coming and sprinted away. Langer laughed behind the wheel, slamming the rear end of the fueler with the side of the HEMMT, tearing off a swath of steel. Raw JP-8 fuel poured onto the tarmac.
Langer groaned – the jolt hurt like hell. But then he smiled.
Up ahead was the row of Blackhawks.
Behind him on the tower, the team Turnbull sent up was shooting it out at close quarters with the surviving guards. The second team was now moving to its two targets, the Predator drone hangers and the maintenance crew housing unit.
Turnbull headed to where the pilots slept, firing a burst through the door as he ran. When he got to it, he kicked it open.
No pilots.
The back door was open and he ran across the sleeping quarters to it. Out the door, in the moonlight, he could see shapes sprinting across the field, many shapes – it looked like the maintenance crews had cleared out too. Some of the guerrillas were shooting at them from the other building. Several fell.
Turnbull didn’t bother.
The HEMMT smashed through the tail section of the first Blackhawk, spinning it around so it slammed into the side of the speeding truck as it passed. Glass and steel fragments flew and the truck shook, sending jolts of agony through his gut.
But Langer didn’t care.
He smashed through the second, and the third, and then the fourth. The Blackhawks behind him lay as twisted ruins, but ahead lay four Apaches.
Langer smiled even wider, and hit the gas.
The fueler at the far end of the field was on fire. Turnbull watched as the HEMMT slammed through four Blackhawks and then four Apaches in succession. The Apaches crumpled, one after another, like tinfoil, when the armored truck slammed into them, flying off at wild angles, their tails cracking and their rotors snapping. In the end, eight fearsome aircraft were replaced by eight piles of bent, broken sheet metal.
Turnbull grinned. That was a couple hundred million old US dollars down the commode.
He looked at his watch. Time to load up the spoils and go. He trotted back toward the complex where the others were hard at work.
There was one Predator in the hanger, and it too was a smoldering ruin. Someone had liberated one of the hummers with a .50 caliber machine gun turret and brought it over, then riddled the drone with rounds. The big guns on the HUMVEEs would come in handy; they were coming with them back home. Other guerrillas were gathering the ordnance and ammo that they would be liberating.
“Get those 5-ton trucks over here and load this up,” Turnbull ordered. With no air threat to worry about, he could safely drive back in the enemy’s vehicles. But one that would not be joining them was Langer’s HEMMT. It looked like hell as it wheezed and groaned on its way over to join him.
“Nice job, Larry,” Turnbull said, smiling, when the door opened.
“Yeah, I clipped their wings,” Langer said, rising up and then spilling out of the cab. Turnbull caught him before he hit the pavement. His hand was soaked in something warm that Turnbull knew all too well.
“Shit,” he hissed. “Medic! Medic!”
“You think I look bad,” Langer said. “You should see the other sumbitch.”
The medics gave Langer a couple units of plasma on the ride back and they stuck in a unit of O+ before he even left the ER for surgery at what had been known as Chuck Schumer People’s Health Center. It was known as Reagan Hospital now. People were renaming lots of things after Reagan these days.
Dale met Turnbull in the ER as the gurney with Langer disappeared down the hall.
“How did it go?” Dale asked.
“Good,” said Turnbull. “Not for Larry, but we did it. The aircraft are gone. The crew we didn’t shoot are in the wind. Two other of ours are wounded, and we have a broken ankle from a pothole. Larry’s the worst off.”
“Will he live?”
“Probably, but only because of sheer stubbornness. What’s the situation?”
Dale paused, thinking. “Good,” he said. “I mean, as good as it can be. The Apaches swept through and ripped up some buildings north of town. They didn’t seem to want to waste too much ammo. Otherwise, we’re constructing the obstacles. We’re assigning sectors. We’re getting it done.”
“Do we have enough ammo?”
“Yeah, plenty. These gun nuts laid in enough for World War III and IV, and they’ve dug it all up. Everyone who wants a gun has one, and usually two.”
“We need to make sure they understand how this is going to work.” Turnbull said. “They’re going to want to fight the first enemy they see, and that’s going to get them killed. They have to be smart.”
“They’ll listen to you, Kelly.”
“Then I better get talking to them. But I don’t know how long we have until the bad guys come for us.”
“They’ll call you a traitor, sir,” said the operations officer, pleading. But he knew that once the Colonel had decided on a course of action he was hard to sway.
“They can call me whatever they want,” said Colonel Deloitte. “But if someone doesn’t stop this it’s going to spin completely out of control. And a lot more people are going to die.”
“You can’t talk to the enemy, sir.”
Deloitte surveyed the airfield. His personal security detachment was spread out around him in case any of the insurgents were still lurking nearby.
“Enemy,” he said bitterly. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“All this – it’s no surprise. Not the tactics, not the strategy. I trained most of their senior SOF. I know the guy who did this. I just don’t know who it is yet.”
“They’ll arrest you if you talk to him.�
��
“They’re probably going to arrest me eventually anyway. Racism, sexism, some -ism, some -phobia. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Someone’s got to try and stop this.”
“Can you?” asked the lieutenant colonel.
“I don’t know,” said Colonel Deloitte. “But I can’t stop it if I don’t try, and after this someone has to.”
The runway was strewn with wreckage. The helicopters were smoldering hulks. The drone was a pile of twisted metal and carbon fiber. And the dead still lay where they fell.
“Get those bodies collected,” Deloitte ordered. “I’m going to the commo detachment. If they can listen into cell calls, I’m guessing they can get me a number to call and arrange a meet.”
14.
“Convoy inbound. Three Humvees, five minutes out, over.”
Turnbull gripped the handset as he listened intently, and then paused. It was all proceeding exactly as agreed. But then, he had expected it to. If Deloitte said it, it was happening. His word was good. At least that was true of the old Deloitte he had known a half decade ago in Iraq.
Turnbull keyed his radio mic. “Roger. I’m proceeding. Out.”
“You still think this is a good idea?” Wohl asked. Turnbull handed him the radio.
“We’ll know in a couple minutes,” said Turnbull.
The meet had been set at a remote farm house about five miles west of Route 231, and north of Dogwood Lake. It was as close to neutral ground as there could be, a largely empty space on the map between the two forces.
Deloitte would come in a three hummer convoy, with no air cover and no drones up – not that there was anything left of the 172nd’s attached air assets. If Turnbull was going to betray him, there was not much the colonel would be able to do.
But likewise, Turnbull and his small team, out in the middle of nowhere, had nowhere to hide if a Predator or some Woodrow Wilsons née Apaches, or a whole M1 tank battalion, showed up to party. To the extent their safety did not rely upon each other’s word that their counterpart would have safe passage, it relied upon mutually assured destruction.
“I’m going up to the site alone,” Turnbull told Wohl. They were about 400 meters from the white farmhouse, with it and the whole area under their observation from their position. A half-dozen armed guerrillas were positioned around them in the small knot of hickory trees. Another team was north of the house, covering that approach. Then there were the observers watching the convoy as it came in from the east on the road. Some other spotters watched the main routes from the west in case someone decided to come at them from I-69.
There were not many civilian vehicles of any type on the road anymore. They were alone.
“Yeah, you going by your lonesome is probably better,” said Wohl. “If your army buddy is going to sell you out, then it would just be you we lose.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” said Turnbull. He picked up his M4 and moved out across the overgrown field. It should have been planted and its crops growing by now. But these days there were lots of things that should have been but weren’t.
Deloitte rode in the passenger seat of the center armored Humvee, his ass on the flat olive drab seat cushion and his battle gear secured under the seat belt. He watched the green terrain pass by out the thick glass of the side window. Lots of places to shoot from out there, he noted. If this fight happened, it was going to be a mess.
The vehicles were angular with their bolt-on armor plates. They were also conspicuous in their tan desert livery. The PR claimed it didn’t have money to paint them woodland camo after it inherited them in the Split. That was untrue; the PR just preferred to redistribute its money to favored constituencies rather than fund its military. That spending priority decision was causing considerable consternation in the capital right about now. The regime was realizing that it was wrong in assuming that hordes of barely trained welfare cheats armed with hand-me-down weapons would be enough to keep it in power.
None of the three vehicles’ rooftop .50 caliber machine gun turrets were manned. That was part of the deal. The gunners sat scrunched up below their roof hatches inside the hummers’ cabs, ready to leap up and load their M2s if things went south.
“Stop on the road about 300 meters out,” the colonel shouted over the torrent of decibels the engine was tossing off. His driver, Kevlar helmeted with protective eyewear, nodded.
They kept going west for another minute or so, and then the driver halted. They could see the farmhouse down the road and up a driveway.
The other vehicles, seeing what the command vehicle was doing, herringboned. The front vehicle angled north, the trail vehicle south, ready to cover 360 degrees. The convoy had stopped in the middle of an open field with several hundred meters of fields to the nearest tree. The grass was low, and any guerrillas would have a difficult time approaching unseen.
“Stay inside,” Deloitte ordered. It would be easier to defend if they could exit, but if his personal security detachment was outside, there was more chance the PSD might take a shot at something and set off a firefight. They might as well wait inside their rides and out of the sun.
“If I’m not back in 20 minutes, get out of Dodge,” Deloitte said to his driver. The young specialist nodded. He had gotten the job when the colonel watched him respond to the Command Diversity Officer’s inquiry about his preferred pronouns with, “I have a dick, so it’s ‘he,’ xir.”
Deloitte got out of the hummer and took his helmet off, threw it on his seat and put on his soft cap. Leaving his rifle leaning against the radio console, he shut the door with a soft “thud” and started walking down the black asphalt road toward the rendezvous site.
Turnbull looked out and saw Deloitte from inside the empty house when he was about 100 yards away and coming up the driveway. Turnbull’s men had scouted it out a few nights ago as a possible safe house, and he had decided to use it when the idea of the meeting came up. The owner’s family had farmed the spread for over 100 years. A couple months ago, they simply abandoned it. They sold their livestock on the black market and took off for the red – victims of meddling agricultural regulators who insisted they pay for an “animal psychologist” to ascertain the feelings of their milk cows, and of the latest round of bankrupting reparations taxes meant to compensate strangers for the oppressive acts of others that happened somewhere else a century before any of the payers or payees were even born.
Turnbull left his M4 laying on the living room table. He had his canteen in hand and took a drink, looking out through the window as Deloitte walked up the path to the open front door. He had his battle gear on, and his Beretta was in a thigh holster. He watched, sipping water. It was warm, but he didn’t care.
The brigade commander hit the creaking steps, his battle gear so tight that it didn’t jiggle as he strode up them. Turnbull stepped into the doorway.
“Colonel Deloitte,” Turnbull said.
“Kelly Turnbull. Shit, how long has it been?”
“Five years. Since that night in Baghdad.”
“I figured the spooks had swooped you up when I got orders transferring you to civilian control. What was your cover? Agriculture attaché or something?”
“Not sure. I’ve had a lot of covers.”
“No doubt.”
“It’s good to see you, sir.”
“I wish it were under different circumstances.”
Turnbull waved him off the porch and inside. “Come on in. They left a couch.”
Deloitte came into the house and took off his soft cap, then sat down in the fake leather chair that faced where the TV had been. The big screen was one of the few possessions the occupants took.
Turnbull walked around the coffee table and plopped into the sofa. A small mushroom cloud of dust erupted. Turnbull fanned it out of his face.
“Since you’re all rustic now Kelly, you got some lemonade for me?”
“I don’t think they have lemonade in the PR anymore, sir. I hear it’s racist against limes.”<
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“I live that shit every day, so that’s a lot less funny than you think from where I sit, Captain. So, what’s with the M9? I thought you liked 1911s.”
“I do. I can’t find any replacement ammo. You got any .45 rounds?”
“What, are you nuts? Those are like gold,” Deloitte laughed. Even before the Split, most of the gun and ammo makers had moved into the free red states where the Second Amendment wasn’t the red-headed stepchild of the Constitution. That meant the PR had to buy its ammunition overseas, and it did not import that caliber because there was no civilian ammo market anymore, and because it did not issue the .45 round to its forces. The PR preferred smaller, less powerful calibers that were easier to handle by smaller operators. Plus the .45 round was just too all-American, and it was considered offensive to Native Americans due to its association with cowboys.
“Couldn’t hurt to ask.”
Deloitte’s eyes went to the M4 on the coffee table. Turnbull has tricked it out with a new sight, a fore grip and a green beam designator. “Is that one of my weapons under all those mods?”
“Yeah. Pretty clean when I got it.”
“I let sergeants do sergeants’ business, when I can.”
“So how are your troops?” asked Turnbull.
“Good, most of them. A few duds.”
“Commanders always spend ninety percent of their time on ten percent of the troops.”
“True that. It’s different in a lot of ways in the PRA. We usually don’t salute.”
“Does saluting reinforce patriarchal hegemonies?” asked Turnbull.
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