Later, people would wonder if I had set the lawyer up to be shot, when he made his futile and silly protest. I hadn’t, or at least I hadn’t planned it to the point of having a specific victim in mind. There are people like Grand Admiral Thrawn who can predict events to that degree of precision, but they’re fictional. No one in their right mind would depend on a plan that had so many different factors involved leading away from the desired outcome. I had known that there would be a victim – prisoners were told endlessly about their rights and rarely about their obligations – but I hadn’t known whom. It was hard to muster any sympathy for the lawyer, however. I dislike and distrust lawyers.
“I needed you here,” I said, finally. I wasn't going to cry on Mac’s shoulder now, was I? He understood anyway through the shared understanding of men who’d been in battle, if not together. Civilians got to enjoy their delusions about reality, but a military officer who allowed himself to see what he wanted to see would be dead soon enough. General Percival had taught a lot of lessons to the world. It was a shame that most of them weren't heeded. “How’s it going?”
Mac waved a hand down towards the road. His share of the Posse had been at work for hours and they'd constructed a fairly impressive-looking barrier, composed of everything from standard police roadblocks to cars and even dirt-packed boxes. It would have been more impressive if we’d had a few weeks and the right equipment, but he had already brought up a pair of bulldozers to strengthen the blockade. A pair of signs had been positioned further down the road, warning anyone who came up the road to stop, turn off their car engine, and walk towards the barrier with their hands in the air. Anyone coming closer without following those rules, the second sign warned, would be shot without further warning. Mac had carefully deployed four sharpshooters around the area, with the remainder of the Posse held behind for backup. Snipers are fearsome threats on a battlefield, but they do have limits on how much lead they could pump out. If a mob of desperate citizens raged towards the blockade, the machine guns would have to deal with them.
I smiled. There are basically two ways to run an army. The first way is for the General – yes, I know there are plenty of intermediate ranks, but we’ll keep it simple – to tell a Captain in command of a Company what he wants done. The Captain looks at the target and either demands more troops or gets on with it. The General doesn’t interfere, trusting his subordinate to know what he’s doing, and when the Captain takes the target – or whatever – showers him with praise, reward, and another harder mission. (No successful operation ever goes unpunished.) The second way is for the General to insist on overseeing everything personally, right down to issuing specific orders for each individual PFC, and generally – hah – being a pain in the ass. Every person in high rank, or political office, will insist on having a say. An operation that could have been handled quickly and efficiently by a single Captain, the man on the spot, will rapidly loom larger than Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Now, guess which way is used by the American Government?
That’s right, the second way. There is nothing more dangerous than a senior officer meddling in matters he doesn’t understand. The guy on the spot knows what he’s doing, the capabilities of the units under his command, and the limitations inherent in their position. The guy in an air-conditioned office in Washington only knows what he’s seeing on a map, which often misses out little details like minefields, or enemy snipers, or impassable blockades, or human shields…and yet he insists on a say. You don’t believe me?
Right back during the start of the war in Afghanistan, we had a dead bead on the leader of the Taliban, the worst group of scum bags ever to walk the Earth. We could have killed him with ease. Why didn’t we? Because the question was relayed upwards and upwards through Washington, right through the Generals, the legal departments and everyone who couldn’t make a decision. Killing the enemy leader would be assassination…and we’re not allowed to assassinate people, are we? I have never understood the point of that – if some kindly soul had assassinated Saddam back in 1991, we wouldn’t have had to go to war in Iraq – but Congress and the rest of the Government gets to live in their own world. By the time it was finally decided that we could strike at the bastard, he’d left. A decision that should have taken minutes to make had taken hours…and left the military holding the bag.
I had already decided that I wasn't going to do anything of the sort. I trusted Mac to get on with it without me looking over his shoulder the entire time. I might have had more doubts about leaving a REMF to handle affairs, but I wouldn’t have given such a vital task to a REMF in the first place. If he said it was done, it was done.
“Well done,” I said, finally. Mac grinned openly. Perhaps he’d known what I was thinking. “Have you seen any trouble yet?”
“A pair of people from Ingalls returned a couple of hours ago and we allowed them to enter the town after checking them for contamination,” Mac said. I nodded once. There’s an old military maxim about never giving an order you know won’t be obeyed and I knew that telling the Posse to keep out their own fellow townspeople would be disobeyed. It’s a lot harder to shoot someone you know and like. If I had tried to keep them out it would have torn apart the entire town. “A couple of other cars came up to the barrier and we inspected them, but neither of them had anyone useful in them…”
I should inject a comment here. The definition of ‘useful’ requires some elaboration. There are times – and I didn’t say this – when a lawyer comes in handy and is a desperately required skill. The same could be said for quite a few other occupations. If there hadn’t been a war or a prospect of a war, society might have decided that it didn’t actually need thousands of rough men standing guard to prevent their fellows from being disturbed in their beds. Occupations can be divided into three categories; material production – mining, for example – industry – turning the raw materials into products – and service, which is basically anything else. A lawyer is a service, so is a prostitute, a pizza delivery guy and a reporter. They weren't vital to keeping society functioning, even though rumour has it that some of the stupidest decisions at the Pentagon had come out of nights when they ran out of Coffee.
Take a Political Scientist as an example. In peacetime he or she writes long boring books that no one ever reads – I read one once and I couldn’t make head or tail out of it – and is feted for this skill. In wartime, he or she is completely useless. In a survival situation, he or she has almost no value whatsoever. I wasn't going to allow such a person into Ingalls unless she was an unbelievably hot babe who was willing to serve as a breeder. We were going to need breeders and we weren't going to need boring books on outdated political science. The world had turned upside down.
I discussed the definition of useful with Mac. Basically, we would take in doctors and other medical personnel, soldiers and policemen, builders and generally other people who would be useful. I gave Mac and the others some leeway. We had an expert on some obscure Middle Eastern civilisation turn up with a van full of supplies, believe it or not, which he successfully traded for admittance. He might not have been useful at the time, but he did turn into a pretty good worker in the long term. We also agreed that we would take in small children if they arrived. I wasn't going to order anyone to shoot them.
Another digression here for people who are wondering why I wanted the children. Ingalls, like most small countryside towns – and Ingalls is tiny compared to New York City – tended to have larger families. Why? In Ingalls, and farming communities, children tended to be helping their families from a very early age and earning their keep. The cost of raising a child was offset, slightly, by the benefits a child brought to the family business. (And yes, a farm is a business. More on that later.) That wasn't true of raising a child in the city. There, John and Jill Public would have to make some hard decisions if they found out that Jill was pregnant, such as which of them would give up their job to look after the kid. The end result was effectively inevitable. The city
birth rates started to fall.
And Ingalls was a pretty safe place to have a kid. If more kids arrived, I could place them with families I knew would take them in and bring them up to contribute to the community. In the short term, they were a drain on our resources, but in the long term we were going to need the manpower. If that makes me sound like a calculating bastard, then…well, I guess I am a calculating bastard.
And I really didn’t want to shoot kids.
“Sir,” Sergeant Isaac Chang said, appearing behind us. Isaac wasn’t the only oriental in Ingalls, but there were only a bare handful of them. Ingalls was pretty much WASP territory, although there were a few exceptions like Jackson King. “I have the decontamination process set up now.”
I allowed him to lead us to the building he’d organised. Isaac had been part of the National Guard Company stationed in Ingalls and, at the moment, their effective commanding officer. The war had knocked everything out of kilter. He was trained as an NBC specialist – and so I was delighted to have him – but he wasn't that effective a Sergeant. I’d been better than him while I’d been in the Sandbox.
“Everyone who comes in, no exceptions, gets put through the showers,” he said, firmly. The building had once belonged to a sporting club that had competed nationally. It was old enough not to have separate showers for men and women, seeing as the founders had decided that women wouldn’t want to play such an unladylike sport. They’d gone bust a few years ago and abandoned the building to the tender mercies of a caretaker who had actually done a pretty good job. “They get stripped, washed and then dressed before the Doctor inspects them.”
I exchanged salutes with a pair of his men, dressed in heavy-duty NBC suits rather than more standard uniforms. I felt a moment of pity for them – the dreaded suits had roasted more than a few of us back during the early march into Iraq – but I had to admit that they looked hugely intimidating, even more than the pair of heavily armed soldiers standing by the entrance to the building. The precautions sounded a little extreme, but they were vitally important. Fallout – which is basically radioactive dust – could get onto someone’s clothes…and God help the poor bastard who breathed it in. Anyone who had been near a ground zero would have been exposed. My only consolation was that it was unlikely that we would see anyone who had been that badly exposed in Ingalls. The threat of radiation had been heavily exaggerated by the media before the Final War, but anyone who survived ground zero would probably have a heavy dose of radiation poisoning.
“Good work,” I said, finally. Isaac beamed. He looked rather more like a geek than a soldier and I just knew that he had been having problems because of it. He wasn't, also, a resident of Ingalls. It had to have crossed his mind that he could be thrown out to find his own town, even though he was too important to waste. “What happens afterwards?”
“Once the Doctor has inspected them, we either push them back out or we take them into the town,” Isaac said. “We can inspect their vehicles afterwards and check that they’re not irradiated either, and then bring them into the town as well. The gas alone will be well-worth the effort of bringing them into the secure zone.”
I nodded. We were going to run short of gasoline fairly quickly. Mac would have ensured that the cars he’d used in the blockade had been drained first – it actually is fairly easy to do that using a hand pump, rather than that particularly idiotic cartoon episode where Otto uses a straw to drain a bus’s tank – but we were still short. I smiled, slightly. One of the little surprises we’d encountered in Iraq had been an idiotic insurgent who had forgotten to drain the gas tanks. His cars had blown up nicely.
A whistle blew. “Company’s coming,” someone shouted from the blockade. Mac had placed someone on higher ground where he could see down the road. I would have liked to have had some form of UAV, but sadly they hadn’t been considered fitting equipment for a small town. If I’d had a few weeks to prepare for disaster…I shook the thought aside as wishful thinking and ran down towards Mac’s command post.
“Ed,” Mac said, when I arrived. He was staring towards a set of minivans, driving towards us rather erratically. My first thought was that they were being shot at, but I couldn’t see anyone following them. The last time I had seen anything like that had been an ambushed convoy in Iraq. The ambusher had been ambushed in turn by us and shot to pieces. “Do you want to take the lead?”
“You know what you’re doing,” I said, in reply. This was Mac’s game. He'd done all the hard labour of setting it up. “I won’t take over now.”
He snorted at me and stepped forward, barking orders. The majority of the guards got to their weapons and took up position, while others removed themselves from the scene. They’d be the reserve if we actually were attacked. I wasn’t expecting violence at once, but I knew that it wouldn’t be long before ‘every man for himself’ became the rule of law in the cities. It probably was already. The vans came onwards until they saw the signs and skidded to a halt.
The man who climbed out of the lead van looked terrible. He wore what had once been a several thousand-dollar suit, expertly cut and tailored. It now looked torn and broken, stained with blood. From the way he limped, I could tell that he had been in a fight. He had a gun stuffed into his belt, but I wouldn’t have bet money that he knew how to use it properly. I borrowed a pair of binoculars from one of the guards and scanned the vans carefully. They looked to be holding several entire families…and as if they had shot their way out of town. I could see several bullet holes and smashed windows.
Shit, I thought. This was going to be bad.
“Halt,” Mac bellowed, through a loudspeaker. It made a hugely intimidating noise. “You will remain where you are. Keep your hands in the air. Do not move or you will be shot!”
The man waited as Mac climbed over the blockade and advanced to meet him, weapon in hand. I followed, clutching my own pistol, so that I could hear the discussion. The man looked terrified, but when he saw my uniform, he almost collapsed in relief. I wondered, later, what he would have thought if he had known how many people I had ordered killed earlier in the day.
“You have to let us in, man,” he said, finally. It was hard to sort out information from his babbling, but it seemed that he was a real estate agent, with his family and a few of their friends. I wasn't sure, then or ever, where he’d actually come from. “There’s nothing out there, but chaos.”
“I can’t,” Mac said, calmly. His smile had vanished behind a cold mask. “We barely have enough for ourselves. You will have to go someplace else.”
I tensed slightly. “But my children,” the man protested. “They can’t stand this…”
“I’m sorry,” Mac said, “but we can’t take them in. Leave.”
The man’s hand dropped to his pistol. Mac snatched it out of his hand before he could draw it, something for which I chewed him out later. Fighting over a gun is dangerous. The man cringed, as if he expected to be beaten with his own gun, but Mac merely held it away from him.
“You have to leave,” Mac repeated. “If you don’t, we will open fire.”
After a moment, the man turned and walked back to the vans.
I knew, then, that I was witnessing the death of America.
Chapter Eight
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favour is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - at a depressingly low level.
-Robert A. Heinlein
“All right, settle down,” Mac snapped, a day later. The Town Hall was packed with residents, some angry, some fearful and all concerned. Normally, Town Meetings had only a few dozen visitors, but now it was standing room only. The Mayor and the leading families, including Mac’s, would make the decisions, but now the Mayor was dead and everything was up in the air. “Quiet down so we can get this meeting started.”<
br />
It took quite a bit longer than that, but finally the room was quiet. “The Mayor is dead, as you all know,” Mac said, quietly into the silence. The Mayor had been respected, if not always liked. His suicide came as a blow, not least because he hadn’t been the last person to die at his own hand. “The country is at war. We have to decide what to do. Ed, please take the stand.”
I stood up. I don’t like addressing people in public, not when everyone was desperately looking at me to save their lives and property, but there was no choice. The only other person who knew as much as I did was Mac, or perhaps Isaac Chang, but I couldn’t stand down in their favour. I had accepted the post back when it involved little more than arresting someone who’d had too much to drink and I couldn’t stop now.
“This is what we know,” I said, and ran briefly through what we’d picked up before all communications had been lost. The effects of the EMP pulses had been variable, and quite a few of the tactical radios seemed to be working, but the air was full of static. They barely worked at anything above a local level and if there was someone broadcasting out in the wildness, we never heard them. Not then. “The war may be over, or it may be still going on, but we have to deal with the consequences.”
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 7