“None taken! I’m more offended that you didn’t bring the fifty-cal, Fred!” Wilson roared as he lifted his carbine over the windowsill of the bank at the corner of East 29th Street and Madison to squeeze off a few as Somalis and Yemenis started to pour in around the Wells Fargo truck. Return tracer fire zipped through the air in torrents like deadly horizontal rain, but inaccurately, as if blown everywhere by a squalling wind. Milosz kept his head tucked in so tightly that his neck started to cramp, but straying even an inch too high could mean losing the top of his skull. This was the problem with operating behind enemy lines, he thought: Always it sounds like such a very glamorous sort of adventure until the fucking enemy turns around and realizes you are there.
“Throwing white,” he yelled over the infernal din before pulling the pin on a smoke grenade and tossing it through the shattered windows and into the street outside, aiming for the center of the intersection.
“White smoke at your three o’clock, over,” Tech Sergeant Gardener yelled into her radio headset. There was a brief pause before she yelled again. “Target in platoon strength, one hundred yards south of smoke. Enemy in the open, moving toward us. Over.”
Milosz picked up his M4 carbine again and risked a peek over the solid gray stonework behind which they were sheltering. He got a quick picture of two dozen or more men running and darting from doorways to smashed cars, moving from one scrap of cover to the next, firing and yelling as they came. In among them he spotted a lone man who seemed to be directing traffic, his head swathed in what looked like a red scarf. A single round sizzled past Milosz’s ear and clanged off something metallic behind him. He heard the speeding projectile as a distinctly separate entity inside the storm of battle, a single shot out of the bullet swarm that raged around them. He leveled the muzzle of his M203 on them and fired a forty-millimeter high-explosive grenade into a car across the street where many of the nig nogs were taking cover. A crunching explosion blew chunks of shrapnel and fresh man meat into the street. A quick check. The scarf was nowhere to be seen.
“Cleared hot!” Gardener yelled, before she grabbed Milosz by the shoulder and pulled him down hard. He heard the thudding roar of a swooping gunship a split second before the deafening buzz-saw howl of its minigun turned the street outside into a mess of flying metal, glass, and spent brass casings. A few seconds later rockets whooshed in, detonating with deadly effect in the concrete valley of Madison Avenue. Milosz risked another look and was horrified to see that one of the attackers—the asswit in the red scarf, back from the dead!—had somehow sprinted through the fiery maelstrom and thrown a grenade into Sergeant Veal’s position. The air force machine gunner was blown in half as he tried to throw the grenade back. Gardener screamed, and Milosz shook his head, which rang like a giant gong.
The attacker cocked an arm back to throw another grenade into their hiding place. Before Milosz could get his weapon up to snap off a shot, Technical Sergeant Gardener, firing one-handed while still yelling instructions to the gunship pilots, put half a clip from her M4 into his stomach. Milosz would swear that for just a moment he could see right through the man in the scarf to the burning wreckage of the street behind, where secondary explosions were tossing cars around like throw pillows, melting tires and windshields, and blowing out windows high above the street.
“Fucker!” Gardener yelled as she swapped mags.
“Ha! Take that Captain fucking Crunch,” Wilson shouted half hysterically. “You like that, huh? Sucks to be you now, don’t it, bitch!”
The pirate spun around, ending the weird effect—had it been an illusion?—of being able to see right through the huge, ragged hole in his torso. Milosz and Gardener ducked as the grenade exploded, adding its cracking bass note to the explosive symphony.
“I do not imagine Colonel Kinninmore will be having such a full and frank exchange of views with this motherfucker, eh?” Milosz cried.
“Whoa! Three o’clock!” Wilson yelled, quickly shifting position to one of the big, soaring windows that looked east down 29th Street. “There’s more of them.”
“Cursed be your mother’s anus and your father’s testicles!” Milosz roared in demented anger as he scrambled over to cover the new line of attack. “This is not how we do stealth in Polish special forces, I tell you, Wilson. And yet Poles it is who everyone makes joke about. Is this fair, I ask you? Is this fair?”
He yelled that last while methodically firing single rounds one after the other into six charging pirate asswits. Most of them wore red keffiyehs like the man Gardener had just killed, and as they charged, Milosz distinctly heard the war cry “Allahu akbar!” One came so close that he heard his bullet strike flesh, like the sound of a hand slapping water, and saw a small fizzing cloud of steam puff out from the entry wound. Meanwhile, the thin black ranger was down on one knee, swapping a magazine, while Gardener called in a new close air support mission and covered the burning morass of Madison Avenue lest any more freakishly lucky survivors should emerge from the hot tangle of twisted scaffolding and burning cars.
“Downtown four five, this is Halo two niner, requesting close air. Swing ninety right on last confirmed gun run, white smoke as previous, over,” she said into her headset with a shade less urgency and volume than before.
The crackle and wind roar of the blaze triggered by the last Little Bird attack was loud, but not so loud that it drowned out the cries and shouts of the enemy as they pressed forward again.
“Little Birds are pulling out for resupply,” Gardener said, checking over Veal’s body. The mute sergeant’s right arm had disintegrated in the same grenade blast that had split his torso open. “I’m trying to get some A-10s. They ought to be stacked up between five and eight thousand feet.”
“Goddamn! Hope they don’t leave us open for too long,” spit Wilson. “I’m down to three mags and pistol ammo. What you got, Fred?”
“Two full magazines of carbine ammunition and two rounds for the two-oh-three,” Milosz said, banging another two shots down 29th Street, knocking over a crazy black fellow who appeared to be armed with nothing more than a machete. His carbine jammed as he watched the African climb to his feet.
“American piece of shit,” Milosz shouted, pulling the charging handle in an attempt to clear the jam.
“Roger that. Cleared hot,” said Gardener. “Over. Gentlemen, heads down, please.”
Milosz distinctly heard the whine of turbines echoing around the concrete canyons of the city again before a fantastic river of bright yellow tracer fire deluged the street, sweeping over everything in its path like fiendish sorcery. The machete-wielding fool was scythed apart, bursting open in a splatter of blood mulch as though cleaved from shoulder to hip by a giant’s invisible sword. It happened in an instant, the lethal radiance unstitching his sprinting form in a malign display of rag doll physics before ribboning up the street to disassemble even more of his comrades. A second later the incendiary hammer fist of Hellfire missiles fell upon 29th Street, atomizing the living and the dead alike in a scorching blast that Milosz could feel in the uncomfortable tightening of all his exposed skin. He shut his watering eyes against the heat, ducking well below the solid stone window box. The turbines howled away, powering the A-10 back into the low clouds over Manhattan.
Gardener’s calm voice came from somewhere to the left. “Outstanding work, Downtown four five. Another load of tourists gone to hell.”
Wilson was more emphatic as he whooped it up. “Ha! Not so tough now, are we, motherfuckers? Teach you to disrespect the city ordinances, didn’t we? Welcome to explodapalooza, fools.”
Milosz squinted into the fierce glare of the small, self-contained apocalypse burning merrily away in Madison Avenue, and there, sure enough, he saw more figures moving, advancing carefully through the fiery debris, some of them in the ubiquitous scarves of the tactical commanders he had learned to look out for.
“Goddamn,” Wilson protested. “Don’t these ignorant motherfuckers ever get the message? Gardener, is that
more of them?”
“I do not know that we should be killing these people, Wilson,” Milosz said. “They remind me very much of the bootblack in Horatio Alger story with their sticking-to-it-iveness, yes? Would make excellent citizens now, I am thinking. Perhaps we should discuss possible truce and fast-tracking of naturalization, no? As alternative to being overrun and fast-tracked into early grave?”
“Horatio fucking who? Izzat that fucking nigga in the two-seven always talking about getting out and working salvage in LA?”
“Downtown four five, this is Halo two niner,” Gardener said. “Requesting close air again. Over.”
“Again with the N-word, which we discussed, Wilson,” Milosz said, as he took a pair of binoculars from his battle dress and tried to get a fix on the advancing enemy. “Is this an irregular English noun, perhaps?”
“Downtown four five, please say again, over.”
Milosz replaced the spyglasses and tried to find the man he had just seen through them with the scope of his M4, but it proved impossible in the clutter of the burning street.
“You got it.” Wilson laughed. Milosz had no idea why anyone would laugh in such a situation. “They are worthless jungle niggas to me. But to you they are the proud and worthy descendants of the Zulu warrior race. Or asswits. Asswits works just as well.”
Milosz shook his head in exaggerated dismay.
“Have I mentioned this is crazy fucking country, Wilson?”
“Downtown four five, we have hostiles on the move toward us … how long … goddamn it, no!”
“‘Goddamn no’ is not good,” said Milosz, suddenly paying more attention to the very pissed off air force controller. “What happened to outstanding work, and excellent shooting of the enemy, and please to killing some more?” he asked.
“They got retasked,” she said. “We’re on our own.”
“On my twelve,” Wilson said, without a trace of good humor. He snapped up his carbine and rattled off a brace of single shots. Milosz, too, had switched his weapon to single fire, needing to preserve ammunition. Gardener began fiddling with her radio, adjusting frequencies.
“Air liaison, air liaison, this is Halo two niner, requesting priority patch through to ASOC. Grid reference is …”
“Hey, Alabama,” Wilson called over his shoulder. “Don’t you let those fucking assholes hang us out to dry here. You get a fucking fifty-two to demolish every fucking block around us if you have to, but you keep those nasty fuckers out of our faces here.”
Gardener ignored him and kept at her job.
“Air liaison, air liaison, this is Halo two niner …”
“Wilson, perhaps we need to fall back soon,” Milosz suggested as the first rounds of the next attack began zipping and cracking past his head. It was just a few shots to begin with as the pirate asswits pushed forward through the carnage and destruction laid upon their comrades.
At least they could not know that the Americans’ air cover had been pulled away, presumably to save somebody more important than they, in even deeper shit.
But who is more important than Milosz? he thought wryly. And surely nobody’s shit is deeper than mine right now.
And then, for half a heartbeat, he caught himself out.
For the first time he had thought of himself as American.
“Soon to be dead American,” he muttered. What was next? he wondered. A Stetson cowboy hat and a pair of … what did they call them? Shitkickers for my coffin?
“What’s that, Fred?” Wilson asked, firing twice at some unknown target.
“… ASOC we are requesting air support at grid reference …”
“Nothing,” Milosz shouted. “Just please to keep shooting asswits.”
At three minutes to three in the morning, he ran out of ammo for the carbine and the M203.
“I’m out, too,” he shouted, joining Gardener in drawing his M9 Beretta and aiming two-handed into Madison Avenue, where at least eight of the enemy were popping up to fire at them with assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and in one case some sort of hunting crossbow. That had been good for a laugh until one of the wickedly sharp arrowheads had nearly sliced open Wilson’s jugular.
“I’m out,” the master sergeant declared as the hammer of his M4 clicked on an empty chamber.
“We should really be going now,” Milosz said, raising his voice to be heard over the assault, a sonic storm of gunfire and tribal shrieks, ululations, and the occasional “Allahu akbar” as the growing horde of attackers drew closer. Gardener swung out from behind her cover, holding two pistols that cracked like whips in the hands of a veteran cowboy. She killed four or five men Milosz could see, adding their bodies to the gruesome pile of the dead that had ramped up in front of their position, and then she stopped, ducked, and checked her load.
“That’s it for me, gentlemen. If you don’t mind, I’ll be saving one bullet for the sake of decorum.”
The words were brave, but Milosz could see that the woman speaking them was terrified. The yelling and screaming cycled up outside to something like hysteria, and perhaps it was, an insane mix of fury, terror, bloodlust, and vengefulness all about to burst upon them.
“I’ll save this for when they come in,” Wilson said, holding up the last grenade.
Milosz nodded grimly while scanning the ruined bank foyer for any possible exit. Unfortunately, there was none. They were cut off as the final charge began with an unholy war cry. He had enough time to wonder where it had originated, what benighted jungle swamp or howling desert these particular nig nog asswits hailed from that they should travel so fucking far and die in such numbers just to have at him.
He had four bullets left for his own Beretta and resolved to put each of them into a different man, standing up from where he’d crouched below the scarred ruins of the bank’s high-vaulted windows and assuming a comfortable shooter’s stance, taking careful aim with a two-handed grip. His pistol boomed once, and a charging asswit spun and dropped. He fired again, and the throat of another exploded in red ruin. A third shot smacked into the chest of a massively fat man whose momentum carried him forward so far that Milosz wondered if he had been hit at all. He lifted his aim slightly and shot him in the face, which came apart like a rotten melon, spewing its corruption everywhere.
Bullets struck and whizzed all around as he calmly unsheathed his fighting knife and waited to receive the enemy.
At last they drew close enough for him to marvel at the whiteness of teeth bared like canine fangs, as though they might leap the last ten feet and tear him apart like jackals. And then … a murderous wind blew over them, scything them down, carving through them, raking huge chunks of meat and chips of bone from their dancing bodies. So shocked was he that it took another second before he recognized the dense, ripping sound of a high-capacity machine gun coming from somewhere to the north. And then his knee collapsed under him as Gardener kicked it out from behind and dragged him down below the line of the window.
“What the fuck! Is that the cavalry? The real cavalry?”
The ferocious industrial hammering continued without faltering, and Milosz risked a pop up to see what had become of the assault wave.
It was broken.
A few asswits were fleeing back through the flames and the shattered landscape through which they came, some of them tumbling as short staccato roars from the automatic weapons cut them down.
Milosz looked around, desperate to see who had saved them, incredulous that they had survived. There had to be an explanation.
But all he heard was one loud, mocking American voice.
“No, siree. You do not get these from pettin’ kitty cats. Hooaahh!”
29
London
“The armorer will see you now, ma’am.”
The young gray-suited man pronounced it “marm.”
“Thanks,” she said. The occasional vestiges of Ye Olde England still amused her greatly. Caitlin swallowed the last of her thin, lukewarm instant coffee with a grimace. Tha
t didn’t amuse her at all. It was nothing like the potent brew Bret made back on the farm, but it would have been churlish to refuse it. Such offers were not made lightly, even within the confines of the London Cage, where many of the privations suffered by the wider city were ameliorated by black budgets and secondary funding sources.
“I have a few of the usual suspects to see. I’ll join you in the briefing room,” said Dalby, excusing himself from the scarred Formica table and the trifling remains of a plate of fries—hereabouts known as chips—lying in a puddle of dark brown gravy. Dalby ate his chips with a knife and fork, which Caitlin also filed under Q, for quirk.
They shook hands, the Englishman being a stickler for the formalities. Indeed, the word “stickler” could have been invented just for him. Caitlin picked up her backpack and followed the younger officer out of the staff canteen and into a long corridor lined with closed doors and blacked-out windows. Somewhere nearby a man, or possibly a woman, was crying. Walking behind her escort, she noted that his hair was slightly longer than normal and his chin more heavily stubbled. She wondered if he had just come in from the field—unlikely, given the lowly nature of his duties today—or whether, like everyone else, he was feeling the hardships of the ration system. She was certainly missing the small luxuries of home life at the farm: the fresh eggs and milk, a loaf of bread baked in the wood-fired oven. And Bret and Monique, of course. She couldn’t stop wondering how they were faring and how long it might be before she would see them again. Would the baby even recognize her? On cue, her leaky breasts began aching dully.
“Knock it off, asshole,” she muttered to herself before mommy guilt could run away with her.
“Excuse me, marm?” asked the suit, turning his head as he continued to stride down the hallway.
After America Page 30