After America

by John Birmingham

  He watched Culver’s face turned a slightly pasty shade.

  “I don’t know, sir. I suppose I could ask.”

  “You do that,” said the president.

  The escorts topped up their fuel tanks one more time somewhere over Illinois before making the run into Kansas City. The last dim light of day had fallen well below the horizon when Corporal Peckham, the younger of the two brothers on his detail, appeared at Kipper’s side and bent forward to whisper that the city was visible on the horizon.

  “Thanks, son,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and sliding carefully past Jed Culver, who had fallen asleep beneath a drift of briefing papers. Everyone was worn out and ragged, drained by the adrenaline backwash from their experiences in New York. However, Kipper had specifically asked to be informed when KC came within view. After traversing an empty, burned-out wasteland, he wanted to see a living metropolis, all lit up, as they came in on their final approach.

  KC, of course, was not just one city but a cluster of them. Most people, even in the post-Wave world, still confused the city with the state of Kansas. However, the largest part of the city was on the eastern side of the Missouri-Kansas border, straddling the two rivers so named. The resurgence of barge traffic on the rivers was key to the agricultural revitalization of the American Midwest. Together with the network of rail lines that snaked through yards in the West Bottoms and in North Kansas City, the region below was easily the best place to engage as far east as possible.

  Kip made his way into the cabin, telling the air crew to carry on with their jobs as they came to attention.

  “Good evening, Mister President. You here for the view?” Colonel Terri Lowry, the pilot, pointed out of the cockpit toward the lights on the horizon. “You can see the skyline at my one o’clock. We are presently following U.S. Highway 169 on approach to Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. If you look, you can see that the streetlights are all working and we have some vehicle traffic down there.”

  “Thank you,” Kip said. Indeed, he did see a convoy of vehicles crawling along the highway toward the skyscrapers of the city, most of which were still dark. The semi trucks were hauling something in covered flatbeds, most likely grain from the last harvest. From this altitude, he could see the lights of the federal court house and the city hall, where the Midwestern Restoration Authority was headquartered.

  “Can you take me for a spin?” he asked.

  “We can certainly take an orbit of the city, as instructed, Mister President,” Lowry said. “Wheeler Tower, this is Air Force One. We’ll be orbiting the city for a visual inspection. Copy?”

  “Air Force One, this is Wheeler. Traffic pattern is clear. Orbit at your discretion.”

  “Copy that, Wheeler. Air Force One out.” She banked to the west, crossing over the mansions of Briarcliff West and across the upper reaches of the Missouri River. Below, salvage crews were working through the night to restore the ruins of the Fairfax Assembly Plant. A random lighting strike back in the Wave year had ignited a fuel storage farm near the factory, creating a firestorm that had severely damaged the facility in spite of the heavy rain. Kipper recalled that all the plant’s useful items were to be transferred to the Claycomo Ford plant in the Northland, where vehicles and equipment were systematically stripped for usable parts, inventoried, and stockpiled in limestone caverns through the area. If time were not a concern, he would have loved a tour of the facility, but he had other pressing issues.

  To Colonel Lowry’s left, the skyscrapers of Kansas City rotated below Air Force One. The tallest, One Kansas City Place, featured a large gash in the side where a private jet had speared into its flank on the day of the Disappearance. Trains rumbled through the West Bottoms, where large animal pens held herds of feral cattle rounded up from the area. The feral livestock was a godsend to the slowly starving Pacific Northwest, breaking what had been known in the press as the hungry time. Three trains a week made the run between Seattle and Kansas City, connecting a number of small outposts where homesteaders were attempting to bring the land back to life.

  The pilot turned southeast out over the state line for a brief moment before heading due east over the cleared but still relatively vacant I-35. The collapsed column of the Liberty Memorial spilled down the north hillside into Pershing Road. Kipper could see trains and lights passing through Union Station as well as lights within the Crown Center shopping and hotel complex, which served as a barracks for homesteaders settling in the Midwestern restoration areas as well as the local militia forces. This was all good, he thought. It never failed to lift his spirits.

  “Air Force One copies, Wheeler Tower,” Colonel Lowry said, turning the aircraft back to the north. “Mister President, if you could return to your seat, we will be landing shortly.”

  Kipper nodded. “Thank you for the tour, Colonel. It does me good to see what’s going on out here,”

  “Thank you, Mister President.”

  Returning to his seat, he found Jed awake and sorting through his papers again, filing some away and carefully placing others on his tray table, which was weighed down with a glass of bourbon he had procured from somewhere. If he stuck to his usual routine, he would sip his drink and work on the papers until Air Force One touched down and the seat belt signs were turned off.

  “I don’t suppose you need me to tell you,” Culver said, not lifting his gaze from the papers, “that forcing Blackstone into retirement was a mistake.”

  Jed had a habit of picking up conversations hours after they had finished. It was disconcerting until one got used to it. Kip had no trouble dealing with it because his wife did exactly the same thing. Like Culver, she also had a spookily forensic capacity for recall and could throw back in his face incriminating statements he had made weeks, sometimes months, after he had foolishly uttered them.

  Kip shrugged. “Couldn’t leave him in command. Not after Seattle.”

  Jed looked up. “We could have promoted him off to oblivion. That’s what the Romans used to do. If he were a four-star general down in Panama right now, he’d be relatively harmless to everyone but Roberto. A win-win situation there.”

  It was an old argument between them by now, one that Kipper responded to without much thought. “Some of those Romans didn’t stay gone, Jed. Guy called Julius Caesar comes to mind.”

  Jed shook his head. “Well, Blackstone is no Caesar any more than MacArthur was. But neither is he the idiot that folks in Seattle think he is. He wasn’t much of a politician, either, like you,” he added, indicating the Truman biography lying open on Kipper’s seat. Kipper brought his seat upright and looked out the cabin window.

  Air Force One passed over the Missouri River again, this time on the east side of the urban core. The bridges of the city were strung with lights, reminding him of dew-dappled spiderwebs in the moonlit nights of childhood summers. Traffic pressed across the bridges while a salvage barge full of farm equipment made its way to the reconstructed docks on the north side of the river. They would be loaded onto trains and transported to Claycomo for processing. Street lamps flooded the roads with a sickly yellow light on the north side of the Missouri River, where most of the permanent population lived in an area known as Northtown. Futuristic spires and gleaming office buildings filled the dark sky with the brightest light.

  Culver caught a glimpse through Kipper’s window. “That’s the Cerner Campus, home of the Heartland Territorial Government. We’ve just moved in there. If things go according to plan, we should have Heartland admitted as a state before the next election. That could help us.”

  “Cerner? Don’t they do medical technology?” Kipper asked, ignoring the politics.

  Culver nodded. “Yeah, they had a lot of people overseas in 2003. Most of them are back here now in their R&D division, but not with enough numbers to fill the campus. Territorial government took fully serviced office space there in return for tax concessions.”

  Kipper wondered how Jed kept all this stuff in his head.

  “Goo
d morning, Mister President and passengers on board Air Force One,” Colonel Lowry said over the speakers. “We are due to land at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport shortly. Please secure all belongings and prepare for landing. Security detail and crew to arrival stations.”

  “Caesar or not, what’s done—” Kipper turned away from the window and looked squarely at his chief of staff. “—is done. Question now is what’s to be done next. That’s up to you, my friend. Turn your devious mind to it and get back to me with a cunning plan.”

  Jed took a pull on his bourbon.

  “For now,” he said, “I’d suggest doing nothing. But only for now, while we’re distracted in New York. I’ll admit, Mister President, I don’t like the way things have gone bad so quickly there. It smells. I do have some plans for Texas, but you’re right about needing to focus on the piracy issue first. Especially if it turns out we’ve got something worse than pirates in New York.”

  “But if we do nothing about these forced evictions in the Mandate, now that we know what’s happening, it’ll be taken as consent and I’ll be held accountable,” Kipper said.

  Culver shook his head. “I don’t think so, Mister President. Not with the fighting in New York. People will believe you’re biding your time, waiting for an opportunity to settle up,” he said, sipping his bourbon.

  “He hasn’t given me one,” Kipper said.

  Jed pointed at a stack of briefing documents on the unoccupied chair next to the president. “In all of those files, do you have any on your officers? Any officer evaluation reports?”

  Kipper’s face went blank. “No, why? I could get them, I suppose. General Franks would probably ship over whatever I wanted, but what good would they do?”

  “Well, for one thing, they’d tell you what other officers thought of Blackstone. His file is interesting. I’ve studied it deeply. He’s aggressive, almost to the point of folly. He has a mouth he can’t quite control, which is one reason he was at Fort Lewis in command of I Corps in ’03, far away from the main game in the Middle East. He overreaches, especially when in command of a military operation. Sometimes skill and a combination of luck and mistakes by his opponents reward that aggressiveness. And …” Jed finished his drink and smiled wolfishly.

  Kipper smiled. “And sometimes his mistakes catch up with him. Like in Seattle?”

  Jed nodded. “See, you’re learning. We’ll make a president out of you yet.”

  The small windows were full of dawn’s breaking light now as they descended toward the tarmac at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. Culver leaned forward and raised his glass to Kip.

  “When Blackstone makes a mistake,” he said, “I promise you it’ll be a large one. In my judgment, Jack Blackstone is a man who can be led all too easily to foolish and intemperate action, which, by the way, just happens to be one of the many services I provide.”

  21

  New York

  “Man, this is the way to fight pirates,” said Wilson.

  “This is the way to fight everyone,” Milosz said, as he watched sheets of rain drift down past the ninth-floor window of the apartment building on Astor Place. A contrary gust of wind would sometimes blow a few drops in on his face, but compared with the poor bastards doing their fighting down on the streets below, he was warm and dry and relatively safe. This was much more pleasant than flying into a nest of vipers such as the ones they had encountered on Ellis Island.

  He sat on a very comfortable leather armchair that was perched on top of a huge oak desk some distance back from the window, providing him with an elevated view of the street without exposing him too much. Wilson, sitting next to Milosz in another chair they’d hauled up on top of a dining-room table, scanned their field of fire for any more hostiles while the Polish commando resisted the urge for another Winston from his growing stash of New York City plunder. He sucked down a little more of the stale Folgers coffee instead and continued his own scan. The weapon, a fifty-caliber M107 sniper rifle, was heavier than he was used to, but he’d traded up because the M107 was a big serious weapon for big serious work, and he wanted to be able to neutralize any threat short of a T-90. With Wilson’s help he had stabilized it by screwing the base into a wooden file cabinet that they’d also lifted up onto the makeshift firing platform. The whole arrangement gave the impression of two overgrown boys who’d decided to build a fort in their rich uncle’s apartment.

  For the moment, there was no movement at all. Using a thermal sight on his rifle, Milosz was able to watch the body heat leaking out of the eight men he had already killed around the Brinks armored truck they had been using to get around the city. He had put two rounds of armor-piercing incendiary into the engine block to stop the truck before sending another round through the skull of the driver. He and Wilson had picked off the rest, before any of them made it to cover. One of them, he noted with interest, was wearing a scarf of the type sported by the pirate … how would you describe them? Commanders? Captains? That seemed too formal. Whatever his role, the dead man’s body, like the others, had glowed a fierce cherry red when Milosz had shot him, but now they all registered as dim, wistful ghost images in the AN/PAS-13 scope. Soon, with the cold rain draining all the heat from their corpses, the last trace of their lives would vanish, at least to him. The bodies would stay where they’d fallen until it was safe to dispose of them.

  If there was danger in all this, it was that he was so comfortable in the expensive lounger that he might fall asleep. As his eyelids began to droop, he decided on another square of chocolate and a fresh coffee.

  “I am getting drowsy, Wilson. I shall make some more shitty Folgers if you would like.”

  “What I’d like,” said the wiry black man, “is three days in bed with some smoking, cocksuckin’ hottie. The first two days, just to sleep.”

  “Ah, that way lies madness, Wilson, believe me. I had a wife once. Am much better now in city of the dead being shot at by pirate bitches and fools.”

  “Who said anything about a wife?” Wilson asked with real umbrage. It was almost as though Milosz had let slip another nig nog or two. “I’m talking poo-saay, my friend.”

  “Is all the same in end,” said Milosz. “All the women, they hold out promise of this mythical poo-say, but what you get is nagging and frustration and not so much of the penis gobbling. Being shot at is much more exciting, believe me.”

  Wilson eased back from the spotter scope for a moment, looking wistful. “I hear Texas is the place for a man to live these days. Frontier country again. Your money can buy anything there. New toys, booze, real hotties,” he added significantly.

  Milosz squirmed, uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation. “Are you thinking about going there? My brother and his family, they farm in Texas on the federal program. They do not so much like this Blackstone.”

  Wilson pulled back from the scope and shook his head. “Nah, I hear Mad Jack down there, he’s cool with the black man, as long as you served, but he has a god-awful number of redneck cracker assholes gathering to his flag who aren’t. I’m looking further ahead, no matter how shitty the short run may be.”

  Milosz patted Wilson on the back. “Good man. Like your famous Gatsby, no? I, too, believe in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. I read your famous books to understand this country, yes? But orgastic? This word I do not know. Explain, please.”

  “I think it’s a sex thing, maybe,” Wilson said, uncertainly.

  He was not much of a reader as far as Milosz had observed.

  “Oh, well, then. I am going to get some of that stale and unacceptable coffee now,” Milosz said.

  Wilson nodded, taking up the long fifty from Milosz’s grip after he had set his own carbine aside. “Take ten. Get a smoke in while you’re at it. No one will smell your nasty Winstons up here.”

  Milosz eased himself out of the lounger and stretched, cracking the bones in his back into place. He peered down into the streets leading back toward the East
Village, but without the long fifty’s thermal scope, there was not much to be seen. Low clouds blocked any natural light, and the rain had doused many of the fires set burning by the day’s combat. A few buildings were still aflame here and there, but no fighters moved anywhere near them. They stood out too starkly on the darkened stage of an empty city. Gunships and A-10 Warthogs circled continuously, waiting for just such targets of opportunity.

  The Polish commando, so far from his birth home, walked carefully through the apartment, navigating partly by memory, partly by dint of the fact that he and Wilson had pushed most of the furniture up against the walls while they still had daylight. It gave him a clear path back into the kitchen, where he’d set up a little Coleman stove in the sink. He could use it safely back here without fear of the tiny blue flame giving away their position. Milosz brewed two cups of strong coffee and contemplated adding a slug of brandy—the apartment had been furnished with an excellent bar—but it was an idle thought. He had also salvaged a bottle of vodka, which he would enjoy when they came off the line, but for now, he was so sleep-deprived and physically exhausted that a mouthful of alcohol might be the end of him.

  The fighting had not ceased completely with the fall of darkness. Both sides enjoyed the advantage of night vision equipment, and a small battle appeared to be raging in the foul weather some ten or fifteen blocks to the north. But the rain had flooded huge tracts of Lower Manhattan, making tactical movement difficult, if not impossible, and the huge brigade-level encounters of the morning had died down as conditions had deteriorated. At first the Americans had been choppering in, right on top of the pirates—or looters, as Milosz insisted on calling them. To him the word “pirates” sounded a bit too glamorous for the lowest forms of criminal scum, scavengers raking over the junk heap of a dead city. But so many men and helicopters were lost to shoulder-fired rockets that all movement was now either on foot or by armored fighting vehicle, and even they could fall prey to giant bombs hidden at the roadside or in piles of refuse and wreckage. All in all, Milosz was more than happy to sit up here in his well-furnished eyrie, picking off random targets as they presented themselves. A troop of cavalry had his back, securing the lower levels of the building against infiltrators, and the Apaches circling beneath the cloud cover would swoop down on any large group attempting to rush their position. Forward observers even coordinated concentrated bursts of accurate cannon fire from the army and the naval vessels on the East River now. It was such an agreeable setup, all things considered, that it could not possibly last.