Standing Before Hell's Gate

by William Alan Webb

  Five minutes later, Hakala walked briskly across the field from his LAV-25 to where his commander stood with arms folded, watching him. When the lieutenant got close enough, Sully made a follow-me gesture and walked into the desert about forty feet. Pre-dawn lit the ground enough so they didn’t step in any holes.

  “What’s the state of readiness of your platoon, Onni?” he said without preamble.

  “I could leave in five minutes if we had to, Captain.”

  “Fuel situation?”

  “Topped off before we hunkered down last night.”

  “I now have two eyewitness reports of an enemy army to our east. I have orders to hold our position, but I need to know what’s coming. As we know all too well, two companies aren’t much against an entire army. So I need you to get out there and find out who they are, where they are, manpower and vehicle totals, and direction of movement. This is critical to my mission orders to hold here at Gallup.”

  Hakala squinted and Sully hoped he understood what he was being told.

  “How far out do you want me to go?”

  “Far enough that we get a good idea of what we’re facing, say, head due east at maximum possible speed to the position called Shangri-La, guided by the two guides we’ve got.”

  “Two?”

  “Another came in a few minutes ago, a young kid on horseback.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I do. But look, do nothing to endanger your command. Take any measures necessary to ensure their safety.”

  “What do I do once I get there?”

  “Await further orders.”

  In the growing light, Sully read concern on the lieutenant’s face. They both knew this was skirting the line of disobeying a direct order, as General Steeple had made it clear they were to take no offensive action against the Sevens.

  Sully wasn’t going to let Hakala ask the question he could see the lieutenant was about to ask. “Go, Onni. Now. Let me worry about everything else.”

  Hakala came to attention and saluted. “Semper Fi, Marty.”

  Sully responded in kind, straightening his back as a show of respect for his loyal subordinate. “Do or die, Onni.”

  #

  Meyer stuck his head out of the command LAV. “Captain Jones on the line, Cap.”

  Sully stepped next to the open ramp and took the handset, then walked a few paces into the desert. “April?”

  “Good morning, Marty. What’s up?”

  He filled her in on the morning’s events, including his decision to send a platoon to investigate the whereabouts of the Sevens’ army. He left out the part about reconnoitering Shangri-La. The less she knew, the better for her.

  “What are my orders?” she said when he finished.

  “Hold in place, prepare for fight or flight. I’m not sure what we’re facing yet.”

  “You want us to dig in?”

  “Yes, as deep as you can while minimizing danger to your people and still maximizing your firepower. There won’t be a stand-or-die order this time.”

  “We didn’t see it coming last time.”

  “True, but if it happens again, I’m overriding it. That’ll give you cover in case of a court-martial.”

  “Marty! You can’t do that. It’ll ruin your career. You could wind up in the stockade, or worse.”

  “Not worse, April. Nothing is worse than seeing your command die all around you for no purpose.”

  “What if there’s a purpose to standing fast?”

  He didn’t answer. “Sully out.”

  #

  Chapter 63

  Do I look like someone who cares what God thinks?

  Elizabeth Báthony

  Near Cuba, New Mexico, west of Shangri-La

  0619 hours, April 30

  “Move, you worthless dogs!” said the woman who put a lie to the Caliphate’s rules about women.

  General Tracy Gollins stood atop one of the last working American military vehicles left in the Sword of the New Prophet, an M2A1 Bradley with the six firing ports for men inside to shoot from. The turreted 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun was still operable, but a low ammunition supply meant it had to be used judiciously. The vehicle still had the faded markings of the Texas Army National Guard.

  Short and heavy set, with black hair flying loose in the breeze, she stood with legs braced wide apart as if daring any of her white-robed troops to challenge her. Early on there had been surly remarks and widespread resentment at being commanded by a woman. That had ended when she’d personally executed a ringleader who’d tried to murder her in her sleep, along with his family, mother, wife, and a two-year-old little girl with dark curls and big eyes. In front of her entire command, she’d shot each one of them in the back of the neck, killing the little girl last.

  People had begged her to spare the child, and Gollins had said, all right, she’d spare her, if someone else volunteered to take her place. No one had. As General Muhdin and the Emir himself had looked on, she’d loaded a 9mm Glock and gone to work. From that day onward, her men no longer grumbled and they obeyed her orders without delay. She could feel their hatred, but she could not have cared less about that. As long as they did what she told them, nothing else mattered.

  The long column of infantry had mostly passed through the relatively flat desert southeast of the Jemez Mountains and approached Highway 126. She’d driven them half the night and was ahead of schedule, only allowing four hours of rest instead of the usual eight. Two men had been lost by stepping into shallow holes, hidden by thin wooden covers, which had both contained rattlesnakes, and two more men who had done the same thing were bitten by the much-feared desert brown spider. One of them died almost immediately, a rare reaction, while the other man walked for nearly eight hours before having to drop out with worsening symptoms. When told of the losses, Gollins only said, “If the fools stepped in holes, they deserved what they got.”

  With the sun up but blocked from their position by the mountains to the east, she increased their pace. Her regiment of one thousand men, known as the Mecca Regiment, used Highway 550 to move north from Albuquerque. Instead of cutting across the desert south of the little town of Cuba, she moved through it. She’d hoped they might find some women or livestock to let the men vent their aggressions, but the place was long since abandoned. So she had her Bradley parked at the intersection with Highway 126 as it turned southeast toward the Jemez Mountains and let the men’s anger focus on her. Rusted-out cars and trucks littered the shoulders and desert on both sides of the highway

  As they trudged past her and turned onto the cracked pavement of Highway 126, a few gave her sidelong glances that betrayed their hatred for her. Others breathed heavily and licked dry lips, their gait deteriorating into more of a shuffle than a walk. Gollins didn’t care. She had to release the pressure somehow before it boiled over into mutiny. Now, united in their hatred for her but unable to do anything about it, they would be refocused on killing their enemies, while ransacking this Shangri-La place would make up for any fatigue they felt now.

  A slender young man named Yusuf took up position in front of her Bradley. He was the muezzin for Mecca Regiment, the man who called adhan, or the call to prayer. They’d already had Fajr before setting off for the day’s march, and now it was time for Muntasaf Alsabah, one of the two additional salat, or prayer times, that followers of the New Prophet adhered to. The term meant mid-morning and preceded the midday prayers, or Dhuhr.

  On the front of the Bradley, a small flat strip behind the glacis plate accommodated a hatch. Gollins knelt there so all the men could see her. One of the teachings of the New Prophet was that spiritual and military leaders could say prayers in place of their men if conditions demanded they do so, leaving it up to the leader as to whether they did. Yusuf’s strong baritone echoed over the desert, cueing the men to begin silently reciting their litany of prayers while Gollins said hers out loud as they streamed east around her. She repeated the words so those around her could hear them clea
rly.

  “Allah is the greatest. I acknowledge there is no deity but Allah. I acknowledge that Mohammad and Nabi Husam Allah are the prophets of god…” The entire sequence of prayers went on for nearly five minutes, after which she started over and repeated them twice more.

  It was at the beginning of the third cycle when the blast wave from a massive explosion knocked her over at the same instant the noise roared in her ears.

  Gollins rolled off the AFV and hit the ground hard, but that side of the Bradley was in the desert, which was marginally softer than the asphalt. She landed on her left hand and shoulder. The arm went numb. Rocks gouged through her heavy denim pants and shirt, tearing the tough fabric and lacerating hands, knees, and shins.

  Men ran in all directions, some toward the blast area and others away from it. None stopped to help her get to her feet, not even her chief lieutenants. Instead, Gollins got to one knee and then used her thick legs to push herself upright. Sweat ran down her horse-shaped face into the folds of her drooping jowls.

  Smoke boiled up from the blackened hulk of an old bread truck thirty yards ahead. Men, and pieces of men, lay scattered about like a butcher’s trimmings in a blast ring around the twisted metal frame. More than a dozen men lay on the pavement without moving and at least that many more groaned and rolled in pain. Others of their uninjured comrades ran to their sides to administer first aid.

  Gollins stumbled toward them, looking worse for wear herself. Dust formed a thick yellow paste as it mixed with sweat on her face and neck. Feeling had begun to return to her left arm, but she still couldn’t move it, so it hung limp, as if broken. Likewise her left wrist had begun to swell.

  “What happened?” she demanded of a man standing on the periphery of the blast area. “Did you see what happened?”

  “I did, Lord General,” said another. “He opened the side door of the truck and then it blew up.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Him.” The man pointed to a heap of mangled metal shards from the truck’s door, blasted fifty feet into the desert on the opposite side of the road. Still attached to the handle were someone’s hand and forearm.

  “Get moving!” she yelled, walking among the milling men and kicking them. “Let the atibabas take care of the wounded. That’s not your job!” Atibaba was a bastardization of the Arabic word for doctors, al’atibba’. “Get up and get moving!”

  The bread truck smoldered at her back as Gollins stood outside the column of gray smoke coming from the ruined vehicle. Her left wrist throbbed and the hand had swollen badly enough that she doubted she could hold the AR-15 slung over her shoulder, so instead she drew the Colt Single Action Army 7.5 inch .357 Magnum from the holster on her hip. Once she’d drawn the huge handgun, she turned and used the heel of her left hand to push back the hammer. Pain raced up her arm from the injured hand, but Gollins kept her expression stern, and silently prayed she didn’t actually have to shoot the gun. She was a terrible shot using two hands. With only one, she doubted she could hit a target ten feet in front of her.

  But her men didn’t know that.

  #

  Chapter 64

  The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy.

  General Jubal Early

  EP1

  1140 hours, April 30

  Their second day in the old blockhouse was no better than the first and maybe worse. Now there was nothing left to discover in their immediate vicinity and therefore nothing to do all day, except stare at empty desert. A prairie falcon had circled high overhead when they’d arrived, but finally flew off to the east.

  Randall flapped his shirt, got up, and scooted the rusty folding chair back out of the sunlight pouring through what had once been a floor-to-ceiling window of blast-proof glass, shards of which still littered the floor. Threads of titanium webbed the glass and he wondered what force had destroyed such a resistant material. “What are you doing?” he yelled to Carlos, who was outside.

  “Trying to see where the wasps are coming from!”

  They’d been chased several times by two-inch-long wasps with blue-black bodies and orange wings.

  “What’re you gonna do if you find the nest?”

  “I don’t know. Burn it?”

  “Like hell… hey, come here a minute. I’ve got something to run by you.”

  “I hope it’s a plan to get out of here,” Carlos said as he came through the doorway. Powdered dust coated the old concrete floor, which he kicked into clouds that left them both sneezing and coughing. “And fuck the details. I don’t care what it is; count me in. Two days in this oven’s enough for me.”

  “Yesterday was enough, huh?”

  “I don’t know how they’ve done it all these years, but now I don’t care. Just get me home.”

  “See what you think of this. When Cole explained those hoverthings… flitters… he said they only had twenty minutes of full power, right?”

  “I think so, yeah. For the single-person ones.”

  “He also said top speed was around sixty, right?”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Hear me out. If top speed is sixty but you can only maintain that for twenty minutes, that’s only a range of twenty miles without recharging.”

  He saw recognition dawn in Carlos’ eyes. “But this post is a thirty-mile round trip to the base.”

  “Yeah, exactly. Now, granted we weren’t doing anywhere near sixty mph.” He pronounced each letter, em pee aitch, and not miles per hour. “But even at reduced speed, that’s an increase of fifty percent in range, not to mention any side trips or detours along the way.”

  “The math doesn’t add up.”

  “No. It doesn’t. So where does that leave us?”

  “Knowing they’ve lied to us and jury-rigged the battery gauges?”

  “That’s all I can think of. But we’re only gonna get one shot at this. If it doesn’t work, they’ll never trust us again.”

  “They’ll have to kill me to stop me, Joe. I mean it. I wanna see Frame.”

  “Just so you know.”

  “I do. So what’s the plan?”

  #

  Near Fenton Lake State Park, New Mexico

  1241 hours, April 30

  As the Mecca Regiment followed Highway 126 east, the land slowly began to change from rolling desert with no trees and long sightlines, to higher hills and dense woods flanking the road. The advancing Sevens split into two columns, one on each side of the highway, and maintained their spacing so as not to present a bigger target.

  Gollins followed in the Bradley. Her stated purpose was to guard the regiment’s sole supply truck, a Chevrolet 6500XD with a rebuilt engine that bypassed the onboard computer and burned regular gasoline. Because of the Frankensteined main engine, a secondary wood-burning engine took up part of the cargo space. That left food and ammunition as the only supplies it hauled, and not enough of either one. The men might have known the truth, that she followed them so she could flee if things got too hot, but none of them were stupid enough to say it out loud while she was in earshot.

  The head of the column was six miles past Cuba when two shots rang out. One man went down with a shattered ankle, while a second buckled when a heavy shell hit the left side of his throat. Gollins heard both shots, followed by a short fusillade of automatic weapons. Her heartbeat quickened and it was hard to keep the joy off her face. It was time to kill!

  Then nothing happened for ten long minutes. She drummed her uninjured fingers on her thigh. Finally an out-of-breath soldier ran up to her to report. Gollins told the driver to move and she stood in his hatch while listening to what the messenger said. When the firing had started, the men had gone into battle formation, leveled suppressing fire on the hill where the shots came from, then advanced on the enemy position. They’d found the position from which they’d fired, but there had been no sign of the shooters; the infidels had vanished.

  He stopped to gulp another brea
th when a dull explosion echoed down the highway.

  “J–…Damn!” she said. She’d almost said Jesus Christ, but caught herself.

  #

  This time the bomb had been centered in the highway itself, using the webbed and cracked asphalt as camouflage. The hole it left was nearly three feet deep, and Gollins stood beside the crater and listened as one of her explosive experts explained the bomb’s construction. The infidels had used black powder packed into a large wooden box. Sharpened stones piled on top of the box had acted as shrapnel, and then the whole thing had been covered with asphalt. It had appeared no different than most of the road’s surface.

  But all of that was fairly straightforward as bombs went. The clever part was the fuse.

  “It was some type of very sensitive impact fuse,” he said. “They are simple to make if you know how, but unless they found pre-Collapse technology that still works, they had to make it.”

  “So if there was one…”

  “There are likely more.”

  #

  Johnny Rainwater watched as Junior and Hap, two of their seven elephants, pulled at one of the revered bur oaks growing near Highway 4. It was the only stand of the rare trees in Shangri-La and the acorns were a local delicacy, being very sweet. Killing it to block the highway had been debated for decades, in case there was ever such an invasion as was now happening. Ultimately it was left to the leader at the time to decide whether to pull it down or not. With tears welling in his eyes, Rainwater ordered it brought down.

  Arms crossed and lost in thought, he didn’t hear Abigail Deak ride up until she reined in her horse ten feet behind him.

  “They’re coming down 126,” she said, still sitting in the saddle. “At least a thousand men. Shouldn’t we send some reinforcements up there?”

  He shook his head while still watching the elephants. “No. The main attack will come up Highway 4, just like we always thought it would. Don’t be surprised if they also attack through Los Alamos. They’re trying to weaken us here, in the south.”