After America

by John Birmingham

  She sipped at her tea and regarded him anew. The lines in his body were all tense, and his jawline bulged as he ground his teeth. She tracked the old shop clerk with her peripheral vision as well as two tables of men who had just sat down on the other side of the café. But the reporter had kept his voice down, and the music was loud enough to have covered his little monologue.

  “You ever thought of moving to the States?” she asked. “They’re looking for settlers. Five languages would give you a head start on your hundred points to qualify. Your choice of career could have been better, though. That old goat farmer would probably be thought of as more useful than a reporter.”

  “That old goat farmer would be the death of America,” he replied earnestly before suddenly loosening up.

  “But yes, I have thought about it. Laryssa and I have even discussed it. She is a qualified nurse. She would easily find a placement there. But the fighting in New York. And this fascist Blackstone. I fear we would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

  “Could be,” she conceded.

  The door across the street opened again, and a woman stepped out. She was instantly notable for two reasons. She was dark-skinned but wore modern clothes, and she was alone. No man escorted her.

  She stepped out into the street enveloped by a fierce aura, as though challenging anyone to confront her.

  Caitlin doubted that anybody would.

  Only a fool would cross Fabia Shah.

  The mother of al Banna.

  37

  Kansas City, Missouri

  If opening the Hawthorne Power Plant was the highlight of Kipper’s day trip, visiting the restored North Kansas City Hospital was undoubtedly the lowest point. An unforeseen late-afternoon shower lashed the windows as Kipper made his way down hallways mopped and polished to a high sheen in his honor. The staff, many of them recent migrants and refugees, dipped their heads, watching him in awe as he proceeded to the intensive care unit with Culver in tow, a clutch of colonels and generals flanking him, and white-coated medical staff hurrying to stay in touch.

  A doctor waited outside the ward he was to visit. The thirty-something man in green surgical scrubs looked careworn and tired.

  “Welcome to North Kansas City Hospital, Mister President,” the doctor said, extending his hand. “I’m Alex Leong, director of the facility. Sorry about my appearance. I’ve just come out of surgery a few minutes ago.”

  “I hope it went well,” said Kipper.

  “We’ll see,” Leong answered as they shook hands. Kip marveled at the man’s thin, long fingers, which returned his grip with a truly surprising amount of strength.

  “How are the troops?” he asked somberly.

  “We’ve received two hundred and nineteen wounded from New York over the last forty-eight hours,” Leong said. “We’re finding that their body armor protects them from most fatal wounds to the center mass. Unfortunately, we have seen a spike in traumatic amputations, in some cases multiple amputations.”

  Kipper could feel his face twisting with distaste and consciously forced himself to frown, trying to mask his distress at Leong’s report. He’d learned it freaked people out if he looked like he was getting upset. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked, knowing that Jed Culver would be grinding his teeth at any more ad hoc resource commitments.

  The doctor shook his head. “The army is giving us everything they can spare, but some of the supplies are past their expiration date. Bandages and basic needs are holding out well enough, but we are having trouble with pharmaceuticals and other perishable items.”

  “Jed?”

  “Yes,” Culver sighed. “Top of my to-do list, sir. I’ll contact Senator Clavell and see what can be done.”

  “There is one other problem,” Leong said, gesturing for the presidential party to follow him onto the ward.

  “Tell me, Doctor.”

  “We’re desperately short of blood,” Leong said.

  “What type?” Kipper asked.

  “All types.”

  Kipper turned to his army liaison. “Colonel Ralls, can you get me a hundred people up to the hospital ASAP? I saw a settler train come in this morning. They’d all have their health checks in order. I’m asking for volunteers, so you tell them why we need them. Tell them I need them. Can you handle that?”

  Ralls nodded. “I’m on it, Mister President,” and retreated down the hallway.

  “While we’re waiting for the colonel to find some donors,” Kipper said, rolling up his sleeves, “perhaps we can help.”

  Culver checked his PDA. “Ah, Mister President, we do have a tight schedule.”

  Kipper turned and punched Culver on the shoulder. “Jed, there’s all the time in the world for doing the right thing. Come on, what are you frightened of, needles or something?”

  “No, sir. I’m just afeared for my reputation. If Congress finds out I give blood instead of drinking it, they’ll never take me seriously again.”

  Kipper turned back to the surgeon. “Is that okay, Doctor Leong? I can assure you I don’t have cooties. What about the rest of you ladies and gentlemen? Are we cootie clear?”

  The military officers seemed a little taken aback, but Leong pronounced himself more than willing to take blood with a little brass in it.

  “My patients will love that.” He smiled.

  From the tired, twitchy look of the gesture, it had been a long time since the doctor had last cracked a grin.

  Much to Jed’s obvious annoyance, the donation routine took an unscheduled half hour, which Kipper made up by announcing that they’d eat lunch on the move. He was feeling a little nauseous and dizzy after giving blood and didn’t much feel like a sit-down meal, anyway. A cookie and a glass of juice were about all he could handle. While a couple of orderlies were off trying to rustle up sandwiches for everyone else, Jed suddenly appeared at his side, brandishing a cell phone like a time bomb.

  “For you, Mister President. It’s Colonel Kinninmore. From New York.”

  “I’m sorry, Doc, I really have to take this call in private,” Kipper said, apologizing to Leong. “Is there somewhere …”

  “Of course,” the physician replied. “A room along here became vacant just an hour ago, I’m afraid.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  A few moments later he and Jed were secure behind the door of a suite containing a bed that recently had been stripped of its linen and presumably its occupant.

  “Put him on speaker,” Kip said.

  “Mister President, are you sure about …”

  “Go on, Jed. I doubt anyone could hear us, and even if they could, this hospital is full of soldiers. They know better than you or I what’s happening in New York. Go on.”

  The chief of staff did as he was told but dropped the volume a few notches.

  “Colonel Kinninmore, it’s Jed Culver. I have the president with me. On speakerphone. We’re not in a secure location, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Kipper said, raising his voice to be heard over Jed. “Just tell us what you’ve got, Colonel.”

  Kinninmore’s voice sounded tinny and flat, an artifact of the encrypting system Kipper had made redundant by insisting on using the speakerphone.

  “Mister President, we haven’t obtained any hard human data yet—”

  “You mean you haven’t captured any of our mystery guys, is that right, Colonel?” Jed asked.

  “No, sir,” came the answer, crackling through the airwaves. “We’ve come close once or twice. There are definitely a group of hostiles active in New York, coordinating a disparate group of independent actors, but whenever we’ve come close to capturing one of them, they’ve killed themselves.”

  “What?” Kip said.

  “They killed themselves, Mister President. Sometimes self-detonated a bomb belt–type device, sometimes a grenade. We’ve taken some significant casualties because of that. Once or twice, when that option wasn’t available, they simply put a b
ullet in their own heads. One guy cut his own throat out. Hard core, sir. These guys do not want to be captured.”

  Kipper exchanged a look with Jed. A “what-the-fuck” look, his wife would have called it.

  “So you haven’t caught any alive, Colonel,” he continued. “But the fact you’ve called means you have something more than a bunch of corpses to go on.”

  “Yes, sir. We have managed to lay hands on quite a few of the pirates now. Mostly low-level muscle. And they’re much happier to talk once they get a meal and some drink in them.”

  Kipper was surprised. He’d expected that modern interrogation techniques would run more to water torture and car batteries. He’d reluctantly authorized such extreme measures in the Declared Zones over a year ago, but if Colonel Kinninmore thought a cup of soup and a bread roll would get better results than a rubber hose, Kipper was not going to second-guess him. He was kind of grateful, actually. He really didn’t want to go down in history as the “torture president.”

  “The enemy combatants we have secured,” said Kinninmore, “are all singing from the same sheet. About four months ago this crew arrived in Manhattan from somewhere in North Africa. Maybe Morocco, Algeria. Depends on who you ask. One of the post-Holocaust caliphate states, anyway. They were very well armed, well trained. Real discipline. They cut down a couple of the lesser players without drawing breath, but rather than consolidating and working their way up the food chain, they threw the switch to negotiation. Offered all the remaining gang leaders tribute and territory outside of New York if they combined forces to drive us out of the city. They bought their allies and paid a good price, too, by all reports.”

  It was Jed Culver who spoke this time. “Did you say outside of New York, Colonel? They were offering to carve up turf outside Manhattan?”

  “Not just Manhattan, Mister Culver. All up and down the eastern seaboard.”

  “How?” Kipper asked.

  “Don’t know that yet, Mister President,” came the disembodied reply. “None of our prisoners are what you’d call decision makers. A lot of what they’re telling us is circulating as rumor on the other side. But the rumors all lock in together. They all sound the same. There is an operator out here who’s managed to get these guys working together, most of them, anyway. Apparently, the Eastern European gangs weren’t having any part of it. They’re sitting this out.”

  Kipper leaned in closer, feeling suddenly as if he really should be taking the security of the call more seriously.

  “And the jihadi angle, Colonel. Any word there?”

  Kinninmore’s voice disappeared in a wash of static.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel,” Jed said. “Could you repeat. It’s a bad connection.”

  When Kinninmore came back, Kipper was certain he could hear gunfire and maybe explosions somewhere in the background.

  “Some of the prisoners have confirmed that the newcomers have described themselves as fedayeen. There seems to be about four or five groups of them, identifiable by the different color scarves they wear. Their common language is Arabic, but then, a lot of the North African pirates speak that, too. They’re devout. They don’t miss prayer, but again, some of our pirate captives are no different. The main thing is, Mister President, all of our captives say that these new guys have been acting as leaders or advisers for the pirate gangs during this recent fighting. They are running the battle from the other side. And they’re doing a good job. They’re not punching it out; they’re drawing us in and hitting us with a lot of ambushes and booby traps.”

  “Booby traps?” Kipper said.

  “Yes, sir. That’s the really annoying thing. A lot of our casualties aren’t even coming from stand-up firefights. We smash them flat whenever they try that. Most of my KIAs and my wounded are coming from car bombs and improvised mines. The city is a nightmare for them. I think they presighted a lot of these things well before we got here.”

  “Do we have any idea who’s running this show?” Jed asked. “Any indications a foreign power might be involved?”

  “Nothing concrete, sir. There is a leadership cadre that my prisoners are aware of, but they don’t have names or any kind of actionable information. If we could just grab up one of these scarf-wearing motherfuckers …”

  Kipper could hear the intense frustration in Kinninmore’s voice despite the flattening effect of the encryption software.

  “Excuse me, Mister President, I didn’t …”

  “Don’t sweat it, Colonel,” said Kipper. “I feel the same way. Like we’ve been hit by some bastard from out of nowhere. I’m not going to waste my breath telling you we need to lay hands on one of these characters. I’m sure you’re moving heaven and earth to do so.”

  “Thank you, Mister President. You are correct about that, sir.”

  Kipper stretched his neck, which cracked uncomfortably. The room swam around him, and he reached for the bed head to steady himself. Jed looked worried and tried to lend a hand, but Kipper shook his head and held up the arm from which the medical staff had taken blood. He was just suffering from the aftereffects of losing a pint.

  “Colonel, I have to go now,” Kip said. “I’m about to go visit some of your men and women in the hospital here. I broke off from my visit to talk to you.”

  “Do what you can for them, Mister President,” said Kinninmore. “They’ve done you proud out here.”

  “I’m sure. You stay on it, Colonel. And call me whenever you’ve got anything you think I might want to know.”

  “Yes, sir, Mister President. Mister Culver. Kinninmore out.”

  The connection died, and the phone began protesting the lost signal before Jed shut it down.

  “We’d best get on with the tour,” Kip said. “Can’t keep people waiting.”

  Culver helped him stand up, and Kip had to wonder how the man was coping with his own reaction to having donated blood. It didn’t seem to bother him nearly as much.

  “There’ll be a formal intelligence brief coming through on this within an hour or so,” Culver said. “I’ll get it to you as soon as possible. Get NIA working on it with the Euroweenies. And Echelon Group with the Brits. See if they’ve picked up anything in the chatter.”

  “Okay.”

  They emerged from the room to find their escort group standing off a short distance down the corridor, presumably to give them some privacy. As they returned to the party for the short walk to the recovery ward, the first buses full of blood donors from the settler camp pulled into the car park. Kipper watched through a big picture window as the new Americans spilled out onto the tarmac, chattering and grinning and looking all around. Probably looking for me, he thought.

  “If you’ll follow me, Mister President,” Leong said.

  The recovery ward was hushed as they entered. Here and there a soldier was propped up on pillows, keenly awaiting his arrival. But many of them were unconscious. Feeling like a child in church who has done something wrong but does not know exactly what, Kipper walked down the long line of beds, stopping to talk to those who were awake and responsive. Colonel Ralls was back, standing by with a box of Purple Hearts. The president personally pinned the medal to the pillow of each wounded soldier, whether they were conscious or not, an act he had already performed far too many times over the last three years. He tried to clear his fuzzy head of the conversation with Kinninmore. He wanted to be able to concentrate on meeting these soldiers.

  “Hello, son. I’m James Kipper. What’s your name?” he asked of a redheaded boy whose right arm ended at a bandaged stump just above the elbow.

  “Specialist Neil Tomlinson, sir,” the young man barked back as he attempted to salute, forgetting about his injury. Confusion and embarrassment flooded the boy’s face, and Kipper felt his heart cracking open inside his chest.

  “Don’t you worry about any of that stuff, Tomlinson. You’re officially excused from saluting and marching and all of that crap.”

  “And KP, Mister President?” said the specialist, trying for a
light tone and almost, but not quite, making it. “No more peeling taters for me.”

  Kip forced a smile.

  “No. Suffered that indignity a few times, have you?”

  Tomlinson rolled his eyes in an exaggerated fashion. “More times than I care to remember, Mister President.”

  “Do you mind?” Kip asked, motioning toward the edge of Tomlinson’s cot.

  “No, sir,” he answered, his butt shuffling over a few inches before Kip could stop him.

  The president of the United States sat down on the rumpled blanket and looked to Colonel Ralls, who leaned forward with his box of tricks and retrieved two medals: a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

  “Well, son, the colonel here tells me that you’ve been busy on our account. Not just getting yourself wounded and all but doing extra hero duty with it. According to this citation—”

  Ralls passed him a sheet of paper.

  “—you were part of a platoon that was ambushed by sniper and rocket and machine gun fire at the intersection of Broadway and 26th Street. Says here one of your squad mates was shot and went down in the middle of that intersection and that you ran into the fire to drag him out. Says that’s how you lost your arm, Neil.”

  Kipper read directly from the citation, struggling to keep his voice from breaking.

  “Says here that ‘by his courage, dedication, and willingness to sacrifice for his wounded comrade, Specialist Tomlinson reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Army.’”

  The president lowered the piece of paper and looked directly at Tomlinson, whose eyes were clouded with a mix of emotions he would probably never understand. Kipper found himself feeling even more poorly as he confronted the human consequences of decisions he had made in comfort many thousands of miles away from places like the intersection of Broadway and 26th, where young men like Neil Tomlinson got their limbs blown off.