“Neil? Hate me?” Linder scoffed to draw Bednarski out further. “For what reason? We’ve been friends since college. He’s the one who brought me into the Department. I did him a big favor by coming out to Beirut to meet with Eaton. I’ve always been there for him.”
“And he’s never forgiven you for it,” Bednarski snapped. “That’s the way he is, don’t you get it? Neil envies and fears you. No matter how high he may rise in the Department, he lives in fear that someday you, or someone like you, will reveal to the world what an incompetent bungler he is and how he bluffs and cheats to cover up his mistakes. So there you have it. You can believe me or not.”
“I don’t,” Linder lied. “And I don’t blame Neil for what’s happened to me, either. It’s all my own damned fault…”
Though the statement was only half true, Linder had an intuition that, if he were ever to come up against Denniston again, his best shot would be to lull his old college mate into believing that, despite everything, he still considered Denniston a friend.
“Suit yourself,” Bednarski concluded with a shrug. “If you change your mind, talk to Bracken or Holzer. But don’t wait long. Where you’re going, time has a way of getting away from people.”
Linder stood in silence until the guards took him to the door, where he addressed Bednarski for the last time.
“You die first. I’ll die later,” Linder said in a quiet voice before leaving.
S9
A good man must not obey laws too well. Ralph Waldo Emerson
SEPTEMBER, FIVE YEARS EARLIER DURING CIVIL WAR II, CLEVELAND, OHIO
Warren Linder opened his eyes and gazed up at the water-stained ceiling of the vacant office where he had spent the night on a canvas army cot. The last time he had visited the DSS Base in Cleveland, the entire floor had been bustling with DSS operations staff. Today the empty desks were not a good sign, he thought. A lot had happened since he had been sent to Cleveland to infiltrate the West Side militias, but lately little of it had been good. Through a half-open window, Linder heard the thumps of light mortar rounds exploding in the distance and government troops returning fire from fifty-caliber machine guns guarding the airport perimeter.
With limbs stiffened from having slept in an unheated office without a blanket, Linder rose and approached the window. The late September morning was crisp and dry, and the skies over Cleveland Hopkins International Airport were free of clouds as well as aircraft. Tall weeds grew from cracks in the runways and dead grass covered the median strips along the main access roads to the airport. At each entrance stood a security checkpoint manned by National Guard troops and an anti-truck-bomb barrier constructed from sandbags, precast concrete, and gravel-filled Hesco barriers.
In the distance, Linder spotted a wide-bodied civilian cargo aircraft taxiing onto a runway for takeoff. Though the airport remained nominally open to both passenger and cargo traffic, few civilian passenger flights operated now, in part because of Cleveland’s failure to rebound from the nation’s economic collapse and in part because of the sporadic mortar and rocket attacks on runways and towers aimed at disrupting military aviation.
Cleveland Hopkins Airport was now the Unionist government’s primary military stronghold in Cleveland, a self-contained air base and security compound from which the President-for-Life’s military, security, and law enforcement organs ruled northern Ohio. In this context, the remaining commercial passenger flights at Hopkins held a special importance to the Department of State Security, because they offered a plausible cover for undercover officers like Warren Linder and his agents to pass through the gantlet of checkpoints surrounding the airport to reach the DSS’s Cleveland Base, a few buildings away from the passenger terminal.
Linder turned away from the window and directed his attention to a coffee maker on a nearby table, pouring the carafe’s stale dregs into a wastebasket and searching for supplies to brew a fresh pot. In a file drawer, he found a can of generic supermarket coffee and a box of filters, but no sugar. He sniffed the powdered non-dairy creamer; it was rancid. But when he pressed the power button on the appliance, the red light blinked on. Now, if he could only find a sink with running water, he could brew coffee.
As Linder opened the door to the corridor, he found himself face to face with a fresh-looking Neil Denniston carrying a tall lidded cup in each hand.
“Did you sleep well?” Denniston asked offhandedly as he offered Linder one of the cups.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Linder asked with an amused smile.
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help you,” Denniston quipped. “Are you here to see Bednarski, too?”
Linder nodded.
“Well, then, we might as well combine forces.”
“Where are you posted now? Headquarters?” Linder inquired. “Have you read any of my reports lately?”
“All of them,” Denniston acknowledged. “That’s why I flew out here. The Chief thinks your assessment of rebel plans on the West Side is right on the money and he wants to make sure that Bednarski is giving enough weight to it.”
“Nice of you folks to notice,” Linder answered. “But, at this point, my work here is just about finished. If I’m right and we block the rebel offensive I’m expecting, the militias will figure out sooner or later who spilled the beans and come gunning for me. If I’m wrong, and they fail to mount a campaign, it’ll prove the Cleveland militias are the spent force that most people think they are. So, either way, there’s not much point in my sticking around after I see Bednarski one last time.”
Denniston pried the plastic lid off his cup and tossed it aside. He drank deeply of the steaming coffee, then approached the window to scan the horizon. To the southwest was a clear view of the airport’s primary military facility at the I-X Center. The center was built as a bomber aircraft factory during World War II, operated as a tank factory until the 1960s and, after lying vacant for most of the 1970s, saw intermittent use from the 1980s until Civil War II as an exposition hall and indoor amusement park. Rumored to have several levels of nuclear-hardened facilities underground, the two million square foot behemoth was the perfect place from which to rule a city operating under martial law. As Linder and Denniston surveyed the complex, a steady stream of traffic flowed in and out.
“Is this the part of Cleveland where you grew up?” Denniston asked Linder after a long silence.
“No, we lived across town, on the East Side. But I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Parma, not far from here.”
Linder pointed out the window to the southeast.
“The area surrounding the airport is a patchwork quilt of neutral and pro-government neighborhoods,” he explained. “The ones closest to us, and all those to the northeast of here are solidly Unionist. They’ve been home to unionized blue-collar workers since the early 1900s. Now you find government employees, teachers, and technical people there, most of them left-leaning. But drive just a few miles to the northwest or the south, and the majority of locals side with the insurgents. Where I operate, out west in Rocky River, Bay Village, and Westlake, it’s mostly white-collar, with high concentrations of professionals and business owners. Both the western lakefront and the wealthy East Side suburbs, a few miles beyond where I grew up, are where the militias have taken strongest root.”
Linder stopped to drink from the coffee Denniston had given him.
“Wow, this stuff is good! Is that real cream? Where on earth did you find it?”
“The Air Force PX,” Denniston replied with a sly smile. “Rank has its privileges.”
Linder drank deeply and felt the warmth of the invigorating brew.
“So when are we going to see Bednarski?” he asked. “Do we call him or will he call us?”
“I already called upstairs,” Denniston replied. “His aide will ring us back when he’s ready to see us. Meanwhile, why don’t you freshen up? You look like hell.”
“How kind of you to notice,” Linder answered in a weary tone, suddenly a
nnoyed at Denniston’s compulsive one-upmanship. “Stay right there. I’ll find a bathroom and be back in a flash.”
A few minutes after Linder returned, a phone rang across the office and Linder ran to pick up the receiver.
“You have ten minutes,” the voice said.
The DSS Base Chief’s office was located several floors above where Linder and Denniston had been waiting, in a nondescript glass-and-brick administration building overlooking the Berea Freeway. The Chief of Base, Bob Bednarski, had been an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had been seconded to the Ohio National Guard shortly after Civil War II broke out. That war had largely bypassed Cleveland and other major cities on the Great Lakes States, but even while the flames of the secession movement died out, a few pro-rebel pockets and militia strongholds remained. Now Bednarski, as DSS Base Chief, provided intelligence support to the Ohio National Guard and local law enforcement agencies operating against domestic insurgents.
Cleveland, one of the five poorest cities in America, had been in steady decline since the 1940s, with a post-Events population down to less than 300,000 from a peak of nearly a million in the early 1950s, and half a million as recently as 1990. Once the fifth largest American city, it had dropped out of the top fifty by 2020. Entire neighborhoods had been razed when neglect, arson, and abandonment had rendered them uninhabitable. In the remaining slums, only the indigent, the criminal and the insane stayed behind.
A chasm now separated the impoverished inner city from the scattered islands of affluence in the outlying suburbs. In those relatively comfortable enclaves, resistance to the Unionist regime was mounting.
Linder, having been born and raised in Cleveland, was a perfect DSS candidate to infiltrate the Rocky River Militia. Now on his third domestic assignment since joining the DSS the year before, he had been unexpectedly thrown into undercover work against the rebels following the Unionist coup and the outbreak of civil war soon after. Posing as a refugee from a neighborhood along the burnt-out confrontation line separating the city’s blighted urban ghetto from affluent eastern suburbs like Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, Linder had joined the anti-Unionist militia in the closing months of the civil conflict. At that time, government forces across the Midwest were stretched thin from having launched incursions into Canada to capture fleeing rebels, and few troops were left to root out insurgent pockets along Lake Erie’s western shore.
With interstate vehicular traffic rerouted around the city along a ninety-mine stretch between Elyria to the west and Ashtabula to the east, bypassing entirely the I-90 route through downtown Cleveland, Unionist forces saw no compelling reason to patrol the suburban wedge north of I-480 and west of the airport. Sensing government weakness, the militias recruited heavily among local youth and focused on boundary-drawing between pro- and anti-government neighborhoods, expelling loyal Unionists from their midst in a manner akin to the ethnic cleansing practiced in Bosnia, Serbia, and Lebanon decades earlier.
Within the affected areas, the entire civilian population lived in fear of flying checkpoints, nighttime raids, and random massacres. Mutilated corpses of registered Unionist voters and federal employees were found daily along roadsides, in burnt-out buildings and dumped in ravines. Pro-government forces retaliated with death squads of their own and razed entire residential blocks along the confrontation lines. Over time, it became impossible to distinguish the excesses of one side from the other. But the militias thirsted for vengeance, and before long, Linder learned of secret plans for an attack that promised to humiliate Unionist forces and reinvigorate the rebel cause.
Base Chief Bob Bednarski met Linder and Denniston at the elevator and led them past the pair of contract guards and the receptionist into his office, a corner suite with a view to the north and east along the Berea Freeway. In the distance, Linder could see the Terminal Tower rising above the downtown skyline. Unlike the Spartan offices on the floors below, Bednarski’s office was paneled in dark wood and the furniture was several grades above standard government issue.
“Okay, tell me something I don’t already know,” Bednarski began after retreating behind his mammoth desk.
Denniston exchanged a knowing look with Linder and spoke first, being the senior of the two and having flown in directly from Headquarters.
“Over the past few days we’ve been seeing signs that the Cleveland militias intend to mount a coordinated attack somewhere in the downtown area. This is based not only on signals intelligence and overhead photography, but also on agent reports, including those from undercover operators like Officer Linder. What’s unique is that, for the first time, we’re seeing militias on the West Side cooperate on a large scale with their counterparts east of the city. This is significant because, while the West Siders have far more men under arms, the East Siders are better funded, better equipped, and better led.”
Linder suppressed a smile. Denniston’s line of reasoning dovetailed closely with what he had been reporting from Rocky River, but until now Bednarski was having none of it.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bednarski scoffed. “Analysts have been predicting that sort of thing all year. What they’re missing is that, apart from detesting the President, these people have absolutely nothing in common and hate each other’s guts. What kind of sophisticated joint operation do you expect from people who can’t agree on the time of day?”
“What we’re seeing is a radical change in rebel strategy that runs completely counter to conventional wisdom,” Denniston persisted. “What most observers have anticipated from the West Siders are attacks on weapons storage facilities aimed at capturing the heavy weaponry they lack. And from the East Siders, analysts have expected attacks on political targets to show that the insurgency can still challenge government power in a way that matters to ordinary citizens.”
“This is still nothing new,” Bednarski claimed, folding his arms and tilting back in his swivel chair.
“What is new,” Denniston replied, “is that the rebels seem to have recognized the complementarity of their capabilities and goals. The West Siders control their own turf but lack the ability to project power outside their enclave. The East Siders have the capability to mount a large-scale operation that could breathe new life into the insurgency, but the scope of their ambition requires them to enlist additional troops from the West.”
Now Denniston was drawing even more directly from Linder’s field reports. Bednarski cast a skeptical glance toward Linder.
“Okay, then, so what’s the target?” Bednarski demanded. “Obviously, it’s got to be downtown.”
“That much seems clear,” Denniston went on. “We’ve had fragmentary reports pointing to the Federal Building, the new Coast Guard Station, the Federal Reserve Bank, City Hall, the Terminal Tower, the KeyBank Tower, and several other targets. One possible scenario is a multi-pronged attack aimed at occupying four or five major downtown sites to make it appear that the entire city center is in rebel hands.”
This was the thesis of Linder’s very latest report, dispatched only two days before. And now, it seemed, Denniston had come to Cleveland to get Bednarski to take the reporting seriously. Linder felt a warm glow inside and wondered if it showed.
“If they had the troops and the weaponry, that sort of operation might give us a black eye, I suppose,” Bednarski conceded. “But the National Guard doesn’t have nearly enough manpower to defend every high-value target in the city. Even if we enlarged our downtown footprint, the insurgents could still seize the undefended sites and put us all in a pickle. What you’ve given me isn’t nearly enough to go to the Guard Commander and suggest a redeployment. I’d be putting the Department’s credibility at risk.”
“Maybe you’re both right,” Linder broke in, spotting an opening now that Denniston and Bednarski had reached momentary stalemate. “Maybe what we need at this point is a better sense of the enemy’s priorities. To me, the key is that every insurgency runs on money. And downtown is where the money is
.”
Bednarski gave a tentative nod in Linder’s direction.
“Fair point. Insurgents are always low on cash,” he allowed. “One expects a certain number of bank and payroll robberies from them, especially from those on the left. But the militia guys around here are right-wingers. They claim to defend private property and get their funding from the rich. To my knowledge, none of them has even laid a hand on a bank or an armored car.”
Denniston scowled and seemed ready to speak, but Bednarski kept going.
“The Federal Reserve is a whole other kettle of fish, of course,” the chief observed. “Everybody hates ‘em. And with the electrical grid down in so many places and electronic payments disrupted, the Cleveland Fed has been holding unusually large amounts of paper money. But the place is a goddamned fortress.”
“Fortress or not,” Denniston argued, “I think we should put it at the top of the enemy’s likely targets list. The militia leaders must know that our forces would crush them if they attacked the Fed, but let’s not forget that they’re fanatics. Over the past forty years, every insurgency worthy of the name has eventually resorted to suicide attacks. If these local boys have the stomach for it, downtown could get ugly real fast.”
“After living among them, I believe they do have the stomach to take on something big,” Linder noted. “And in the past few weeks, we’ve seen an unusual influx of battle-hardened rebel fighters from the western states and Appalachia, where government forces are mopping up the last pockets of resistance. I’ve met a few of those guys and they’re total dead-enders; when they fight, they get jacked up on a half-dozen drugs and become well nigh indestructible. If you ask me, I think they’d love nothing more than to go down fighting in a modern-day Alamo. And whether or not the rebels make off with the Fed’s money, the publicity would draw millions in donations from wealthy exiles and bring in thousands of new fighters. Given their current weakness, some of them have to believe that a sacrifice play is worth a try.”
Exile Hunter Page 20