After America

by John Birmingham

  “So you would propose to go back into the field?” he said. “Into Germany as a first measure?”

  She nodded. “I had a watching brief on him there for a year. He has a network. Or had one, anyway. The old Doctor Noor outfit …” She paused. “I suppose you can tell me that Doctor No is actually dead, right? The French didn’t fuck that up, too.”

  Dalby smiled.

  “No. That half clip of nine-millimeter hollow-point you emptied into his chest back in Paris well and truly sent him off into the afterlife to enjoy his seventy-six raisins with the blessed Prophet. He, at least, is no longer a bother.”

  “Well, that’s something,” she conceded. “And to answer your question, yes, I think Germany is the place to begin. I’d like to start as soon as possible.”

  “I can drive you down to London when we’re cleaned up here if you wish,” Dalby offered.

  “No,” Caitlin said. “I’d like to see my family before I leave.”

  “You know, kickass superspies aren’t supposed to have leaky breasts. I checked in the manual. It’s like an actual rule or something.”

  Caitlin swaddled Monique in a fresh blanket and placed her on her back in the cot by Bret’s hospital bed.

  “Yeah, that might have been a rule once upon a time, but it was superseded by enlightened affirmative action policy ages ago,” she said. “Any jihadi whack job or hired killer who tries to take unfair advantage of my leaky breasts is so going to get a severe dressing down from the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service. Plus new moms are perfect assassins. They’re supergood at being very quiet, being up late at night, and sneaking around in the dark not stepping on LEGO or shell casings.”

  Bret smiled, but the effort involved was painfully obvious. Her husband was trying to make light of her departure but failing. He had refused any pain relief so as to be clearheaded when she called, and Caitlin knew him well enough to see that he was trying to hide a serious hurting from her. More important, she knew, he had not forgiven himself for the morning, no matter how many times she told him he had nothing for which to seek forgiveness. He was too much of a soldier to let it go, a ranger no less, no matter how much he tried to distance himself from that past.

  He’ll never forgive himself, she realized. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

  A low-watt lamp on the shelf by his bed lit the hospital room. Full night had fallen a few hours ago, and the curtains were drawn. Monique gurgled a few times and fell asleep, snoring ever so quietly and all but breaking Caitlin’s heart. She had fed her one last time. She gently eased herself down on the edge of the bed next to Bret and took his hand, linking her fingers through his, being careful not to dislodge the IV line or hurt any of his injured digits. She was dressed for travel in jeans, a thick woolen shirt, and her favorite black leather coat, whereas he lay in bandages and a thin cotton nightgown with no ass. It felt wrong, just wrong, to be leaving them, but she had to tell herself that she was not abandoning her family, she was protecting them. And that meant going out into the dark to hunt for monsters.

  “That guy Dalby, he’s not bad, is he?” Bret said in a quiet, almost croaky voice. “He told me about the arrangements for the farm and the safe house. We’re gonna be good to go, Caity, so I don’t want you to be worrying about us while you’re working. Don’t be thinking about having to call and check to see if Monique and I are squared away. Just get on with …”

  His soft, battered beautiful face blurred as her tears came. Caitlin leaned forward over him, her tears falling freely onto his cheeks.

  “How do you shut an idiot up?” she whispered. She kissed him hard, and for a brief instant everything faded from concern. Bret and Caitlin were the only two people in the whole world. When she pulled away, she could already feel her heart hardening to the task ahead.

  “I love you both so much.”

  “I love you, too,” he said.

  “And I will be back as soon as I can,” she promised. “I’ll be fine. And we’ll be fine. Everything is gonna be cool.”

  He squeezed her hand and smiled, but she could tell he did not believe her.

  20

  Air Force One, in transit, New York to Kansas City

  “Contact,” the pilot said over the cabin speakers of Air Force One. Through his window Kipper watched the smaller plane, a fighter jet, take on fuel from their escort tanker. He never got tired of watching the in-flight refueling process. It was a marvel of the man-machine interface and testimony to the fact that almost any problem was amenable to rational thought and considered action.

  Almost any problem.

  “Refueling complete,” the pilot of the smaller plane said over the radio. The fighter pulled away from the refueling probe, and a mist of fuel vaporized harmlessly over the fuselage as the pilot rejoined his place in formation against a clear blue sky. Kipper understood, however, that their plane, Air Force One, had no such capability. He had asked about it and argued with Jed for a different aircraft, one of the air force C-17s, but Culver and his staff had fallen on that suggestion like a sack of hammers.

  “The aircraft that is Air Force One needs to be one that upholds the significance and prestige of the president of the United States,” they said.

  What prestige? Kipper often wondered as he boarded “his” plane at some lifeless airfield in the middle of nowhere. On this trip, for instance, they’d transferred from the Marine One chopper to Air Force One at an airbase in upstate New York a couple of hours after escaping the city. A grim, windswept outpost it was, too, manned by a heavily armed company of marines. He shook his head. This really wasn’t how he’d expected to be coming home. Again he thought, What prestige?

  After the brief interlude of the refueling operation, Kip dropped back into the padded leather chair across from his chief of staff and resigned himself to wrestling with a long list of problems for which no elegant solutions presented themselves. As he sat down, he knocked a book off his armrest: David McCullough’s biography of Truman. He’d read over the section on the firing of General Douglas MacArthur for the fourth time that morning once they had cleared the dangerous airspace around Manhattan.

  “I didn’t fire him because it was the easy thing to do,” Truman had said. “I fired him because it was the right thing to do.”

  “So, Blackstone,” Kip sighed.

  “Well, at least we don’t have polling data,” Culver said lightly, but he was tired and stressed, and his eyes failed to light up.

  He was right, though. No one bothered to conduct polls these days. There were too many other things to do: food to grow, equipment to scavenge, salvage and clearance work, a nation to rebuild. Those with the number-crunching skills to run polls were put to better uses, such as trying to ration the food supply to keep the population fed or balance a federal budget floating atop an economy that had shrunk to a minuscule fraction of its former size and devolved in part to subsistence and barter. Running polls came in a very poor second. If the president of the United States needed to know what the people were thinking, he had only to go for a walk around Seattle or call up a talk radio station in Alaska, although he rarely did that because of the very real danger of being ambushed on air by Governor Palin.

  Anyway, he didn’t need a stack of polls to know that Blackstone was dividing the nation, literally and figuratively. How many times had General Franks warned him that if Blackstone secured control of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast, their efforts on the eastern seaboard would be pointless? The true border of the United States would end right about where Kansas City rested in the heart of a dead nation. How many times had Kipper put off confronting this inconvenient truth?

  The problem, as he understood it, was that a good many folks felt Blackstone was doing the right thing down in Texas. Even in Seattle, where he was regarded with equal measures of fear, scorn, and distrust, there had been some grudging support for his move to seize the Panama Canal back from the gang lords who had taken control of it after the Disappear
ance.

  “Defend as far forward as possible,” Mad Jack had argued. It was the sort of stuff that made headlines, or “generated political capital,” as Culver said.

  More unsettling than that, however, had been the foreign support he’d garnered. Eight countries, including Israel, had opened consulates in Fort Hood after Blackstone had secured the canal, and although their consuls were officially accredited to the federal government, it was no secret that the diplomats worked directly with Blackstone’s people, cutting the State Department out of the process. Worse still, they were providing Blackstone with operating capital, technical expertise, and political support in exchange for the right to extract oil, technology, and salvage without the fees imposed by the federal government on the western seaboard.

  Kip stared unhappily out the window at the plains of Ohio. All this and now a pirate war that may or may not be the start of a holy war the like of which had all but torn France asunder a few short years ago. The president had no doubt that Colonel Kinninmore would be turning the city upside down as he attempted to find any evidence that the fighting there was not just an opportunistic attack by a pack of scavengers who’d decided to band together for as long as it took to convince him the city wasn’t worth retaking. But what if he did find evidence of a new threat on the eastern seaboard? Kipper almost wished the plane would never land, because then he wouldn’t have to face the consequences of whatever was coming for him in the next few days.

  Instead he sighed and took in the view, such as it was.

  Patches of black ruin from a city with no name stretched across the horizon below Air Force One. Some of the firestorms had expanded out of the cities and into the surrounding burbs and rural areas, chewing up hundreds of square miles of land in spite of the presence of snow back in March 2003. He could see the steel and concrete stumps of what might have been skyscrapers and highways below. Back in Seattle, in Barney Tench’s office, there was a map of the United States covered with graphics representing such areas. Dead zones, they were called. Yet Kipper could see plants and trees struggling to take dominion where humanity once had reigned supreme.

  He knew that in the unaffected areas of Ohio’s flat, glaciated landscape, nature was coming on with a vengeance. The well-defined borders of thousands of farms gone fallow, the extensive road network, it was all disappearing as Mother Nature wiped away the more fragile traces of human settlement. The ruins and the intact smaller farm towns still loomed large on the vast checkerboard of the land below, but they were utterly lifeless, and he wondered sometimes whether they could be reclaimed before brute creation took over again.

  “D’ you think I made a mistake, letting those diplomats into Texas?” he asked Culver as he stared out the window at the thin sliver of golden light on the western edge of the world.

  Jed seemed a little nonplussed at the unexpected tangent, but he waved off Kipper’s obvious self-doubts.

  “It was a close call, Mister President. Fort Hood is our second biggest population center and Texas is our largest territory in the Wave-affected zone in terms of population. We have a lot of homesteaders down in Texas. And those foreign missions aren’t full embassies, just small offices, Chargé d’ affaires and a couple of honorary consuls—”

  Kip cut him off gently.

  “You’re covering for me, Jed. You didn’t want to accredit any of them as I recall. Said it’d be a big mistake. What’s different now?”

  Culver sized him up, a look Kip had come to recognize. He was about to get a straight shot to the head.

  “The difference is, sir, that they are there now. And if we withdrew recognition of those offices, chances are, their governments would just ignore us and keep them open. It would serve as a demonstration of our weakness. It’s better that we just leave them there for now, conniving with Mad Jack, and deal with them once we’re done with him.”

  A steward, an air force staff sergeant, appeared at Kip’s elbow with a tray of sandwiches and two cups of cocoa.

  “Thank you, son,” Culver said, scooping up two thick wedges of corned beef on rye. Somehow the food scarcity that had trimmed Kipper’s waistline seemed to have missed Jed’s. The man still sported the double chin of someone used to expensive dinners and long lunches. Kipper took one sandwich and his drink, talking around mouthfuls of food.

  “I don’t think Blackstone is really crazy,” he said. “Not like everybody says. I think that whole Mad Jack routine of his is just a smoke screen. Distracts people from his real intent.”

  “And what would his real intent be, Mister President?”

  Kipper drank some of his cocoa before answering.

  “I think he’s just a very old-fashioned guy, Jed. He sees a chance to take the country back to what he thinks of as its roots. And some of that stuff is good, you know. Respect for institutions and authority. Civic duty. The frontier spirit. All that Kennedy stuff about asking what you can do for your country rather than the other way around. It’s no different from what we’ve been talking about since the election.”

  “But?” Culver prodded.

  “But he gets things confused. This business of running off our homesteaders. He’s not. He’s only running off some of them.”

  “The ones with the wrong skin color.”

  “Yes,” said Kipper. “Jack Blackstone looks back on an older, simpler America and likes what he sees. He’s trying to remake it down there, but he’s making a big mistake. He’s confusing people with ideas. He looks at a Mexican, someone like … who was that guy … the first one on the list you showed me …”

  Culver had to juggle his sandwich, coffee, and laptop computer, along with a manila folder, but he eventually dug out the piece of paper he wanted.

  “Uh, Pieraro,” he said. “Miguel Pieraro.”

  “Yeah. He looks at Pieraro, and he sees an alien. A fucking peasant. Someone not of his world because he looks different. He talks different. Hell, yes, he probably thinks differently about some things because of the world he grew up in. But this Pieraro guy, God rest his soul, I didn’t know him, but I do know that he went through our homesteading selection process, which means he is not just some wetback peon with an eye to an easy score. We don’t let just anybody into that scheme, Jed. You know they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to want it and work for it. Really fucking hard. This guy—” He waved his corned beef on rye at the piece of paper Jed was still holding. “—he had to jump through hoops of fucking fire, backward, singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ just to earn the right to sit the tests that weeded him out from all the losers and pretenders looking to work the program for a free ride. This guy, all of those people we choose for homesteading, they’re committed. Their allegiance isn’t in question, nor their skills or suitability. But Blackstone won’t see that. He confuses the idea of America with an old and seriously out of date image of America. They’re two different things. Miguel Pieraro, he died for the idea of America.”

  Culver began a slow hand clap. “And if you would just stop being so fucking reasonable and get off your ass and out on the stump and give that same fucking speech ten times a day, perhaps people might start seriously questioning what is going on down south, if you’ll excuse me, Mister President.”

  Kipper took Culver’s rebuke in good humor. He needed someone like this shifty, misanthropic bastard watching his back.

  “I long ago accepted the fact that you are inexcusable, Jed,” he said. “But useful because of it. That’s why I’m going to leave Mad Jack to you for the moment. I can see this oozing fucking mess in New York is going to be with me night and day. I wasn’t looking for a stand-up fight there. You of all people know that’s not my way. But we’ve had one forced on us, and I do not intend to lose. You have Tommy Franks break out his plans for retaking the city—I know he’s got them in a bottom drawer somewhere—and have him meet me in KC. No, scratch that. There’s no reason to waste his time in transit. Just schedule a vid link to Fort Lewis. I want to go through the options. I
also want the latest from that Colonel Kinnymore—”

  “Kinninmore,” Jed corrected him.

  “Yeah, him, on whether this is a coordinated attack by offshore interests, government or private, whether it is some sort of crazy holy war spin-off from France or the Israeli strike, or whether those fucking pirates have just finally gotten their shit together. Whatever the case, I want options for taking that city.”

  “Well, the options are simple, Mister President,” Culver explained in a somber tone. “You can use men or you can use ordnance. The more men you use, the more of them die. But it does less damage to the infrastructure. The more ordnance we drop, bombs and missiles and so on, the more of our own we save, but much less of the city is left standing. You take that logic to its end point, we just pull out and nuke the place from orbit.”

  “From orbit?” Kip asked, genuinely confused.

  Jed smiled, a real smile this time, if tired. “Sorry, classical reference.”

  Kipper nodded slowly and took a few moments to himself. He wondered idly just how much of New York City he really did need intact. Manhattan, for sure, and the ports. But did he need the entire metropolis? Even with the uptick in immigration and naturalization of refugees from the Indo-Pakistani War and with thousands of Europeans leaving the Old World every month, it would still be years, if not decades, before they could occupy all the infrastructure in just that one city. By then, the ravages of time would require a total rebuild, anyway.

  These thoughts he pondered as the C-40 Clipper continued to hum along, attended by her escorts. F-16s, he remembered; the pilots liked to call them Vipers. Far to the north the moon glinted on a large body of water dusted with low wisps of cloud cover, and he wondered whether that might be the southern extremity of the Great Lakes.

  “Remind me, Jed,” he asked quietly. “Did the military ever actually develop one of those neutron bombs? You know, kills the people but leaves the city standing.”