by James Tarr
“Unless they wanted to feed us doctored photos.”
“Now there’s a cheery thought.”
“Too iffy, though,” the taciturn man said. “The photo covers the whole city, and unless they knew exactly when we’d download it, and where we were when we did, and where we wanted to go, they wouldn’t know exactly how to fudge it to get any benefit. And if they knew all that they’d just send in armor to surround us.”
“Hmmm. I wish this thing was bigger,” Ed said for the hundredth time, staring at the small screen. “See anything?”
“Not yet. Keep heading in.”
As Ed resumed zooming in on the satellite photo, he commented, “I don’t think whoever set this up is still hands on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think he set up a ghost piggyback program for the bird to download an extra copy of these photos to this site. In fact, they probably don’t come directly to this site, I’m sure they’re routed through all sorts of blind links before they end up there.”
“That makes sense. I forgot, you were in computers, before, weren’t you?”
Ed glanced back at him briefly. “A little bit.” Ed didn’t like talking about his life before the war. Not many of the men did.
“All right, stop there.” Both men studied the picture carefully. “Okay, this is us,” George said, pointing with his finger at a tiny tan rectangle in the center of the screen, the building in which they stood. “What do we got?”
They both squinted at the screen in silence for about a minute. The tip of Ed’s finger traced the streets surrounding their building.
“Okay, nothing rolling, and no roadblocks or checkpoints. Why don’t you zoom in another thirty percent or so and we’ll work the route south.” Ed nodded and did just that. The rest of the squad glanced occasionally at the two men hunched over the small computer screen. The men who’d finished cleaning their weapons and checking their gear sat quietly, waiting. Finally, the squad’s two leaders straightened up. Everyone knew what that meant.
“Quentin?”
Perched on a deep steel shelf bolted to the wall, Quentin had been on watch for the last hour, staring out a clean spot in the grimy north side windows. He turned his head, the sunlight painting his cheek a rich shade of copper. “Nothin’ but the pigeons.”
Everyone then turned their heads toward Bobby, who had the south side windows. He shook his head. “Clear here.” Up on the second floor, Weasel would have called out immediately if he’d seen anything.
“All right.” Ed nodded. He spoke to Mark. “Weasel’s got the best eye. Tell him to stay in place until we pull around front. He can come right out the front door and jump in.” Mark nodded and jogged up the stairs. He was back a few seconds later and gave a thumbs-up.
George straightened. “Okay, anybody who’s not, wake the fuck up. We’re going to be all over each other in that car. I want you loaded, but safeties on. You hear that? Safeties on. Doublecheck ‘em, and watch your muzzles getting in and out. We’re going to be packed like sardines—a stray round won’t just hit one person, you got it?” He got a few dark looks from the seasoned veterans, but nobody said anything. Among other things George had been a firearms instructor before the war, and old habits died hard.
The room echoed with snicks and clicks as everyone checked and doublechecked their weapons and gear. Jason looked around nervously. He felt like he should be doing something, but he didn’t know what. After what had happened the night before, he decided to just wait for them to tell him to do something.
George pointed himself at a wall and practiced snapping his carbine up to his shoulder a few times to get a sight picture. Ed blew dust off the lenses of his carbine’s optical sight and snapped the weapon up to his shoulder a few times. The scope’s reticle, a large ruby red circle around a dot, was powered by light-gathering fiber optics and glowed faintly in the dim shop. In direct sunlight the sun lit up the reticle like it was powered by batteries, but he was glad it wasn’t. Batteries were getting harder and harder to find. Behind it on the weapon’s receiver was the base for the small NV scope Ed had pulled off just after dawn. He took a deep breath and wiped his palms on his thighs one at a time.
“All right,” Ed said finally, scratching his head, staring at their transportation. “Let’s see if we can all fit in and then maybe this piece of crap will actually start.”
The Ford Expedition was thirty years old if it was a day. The general consensus was that its original paint job had been a creamy yellow. It had been painted at least twice since then, poorly, and suffered body damage, major and minor, along with a not inconsiderable amount of rust. It looked like someone with a rich diet and internal hemorrhaging had been sick all over the car, and when they’d first spotted it Bobby immediately dubbed it the Vomit Comet.
All four tires were low on tread and the suspension was pretty much shot. Every window, including both the front and back windshields, had long ago been smashed out. Even in these slim times there were much nicer vehicles to be found, but they just hadn’t had the time. The battered SUV was big enough to hold the squad, if just barely, and wonderfully nondescript. It also held something even harder to find than a working vehicle—gasoline, over a third of a tank. The Ford was old enough that Quentin, who in some former life had spent a few years as a mechanic, had been able to get it up and running without a diagnostic computer.
There was no power, of course, but the blue overhead door could be rolled up by hand. Ed unbolted the pedestrian door beside it, glanced at Quentin, who gave him a thumbs up, and stepped outside.
The air was already heating up in the bright sunlight. It was going to be a scorcher, but the brick and concrete hadn’t yet begun to soak up the heat and the shadows were still cool. Ed looked left and right, but nothing was moving on the short cross-street that dead-ended to the west at a double set of train tracks atop a six-foot gravel-strewn berm. The four-foot-wide alley at the back of the shop was empty but for some broken bottles and the reek of something very dead. He stood there silently, waiting, watching and listening. All he heard were a few birds. He smacked his hand against the overhead door, then walked toward the front of the building, scanning the street, the windows, the few bushes, the carbine’s buttstock tucked into his shoulder, ready.
Ed crouch-walked to the corner, squatted behind a twisted juniper bush, and used his loved and much-abused Meopta binoculars to peer north and south. Above the still concrete the air was just starting to shimmer in the heat. The mirage waves were boiling straight upward, which meant another day without so much as a whisper of wind. To the east a piece of frayed string had been flung across the sky, a contrail so high up they’d heard nothing of the jet’s passage. Military or commercial jet, he wondered. As insane as it seemed, much of the world was going on with business as usual (or attempting to) while the war raged.
Behind him the overhead door rolled up with protesting groans. The Expedition’s exhaust was a low chug as Quentin backed it out. Mark and Early were in the way back, designated tailgunners, staring out the hole where the rear window used to be, kneeling on the tattered brown carpet. George was with Quentin in the front seat, and the two kids, Bobby and Jason, were behind them. Between their packs and rifles, the six men already had the vehicle filled.
As the Ford chugged patiently behind him, Ed checked the street once more with his naked eye, then waved the SUV around the corner. It had barely come to a stop in front of the building before Weasel was out the door. He piled into the front seat. Ed was right behind him and jumped in next to Jason, who looked nervous enough to puke.
Quentin had the car moving even before the doors were closed. The Ford swayed like a pregnant cow under the weight, and accelerated much the same, but the engine never faltered.
George had his carbine aimed forward, over the dash, and scanned the street ahead of them. “Here’s where the fun begins,” he muttered.
CHAPTER SIX
At the moment his office was on the fourt
h floor, and faced south. Every few weeks he moved it inside the building, just in case there were informants among the civilian employees. Well, he knew there were informants and infiltrators, one of his Lieutenants had been found with his throat slit in one of the abandoned office buildings in the Blue Zone just the week before.
An industrious guerilla or two could conceivably get close enough to put a round through the double-paned plate glass window before him, no matter how tight perimeter security supposedly was or how many tanks were parked around the building.
For a base of operations his predecessor had chosen well. The piece of land he’d staked out was hard to beat, at least inside the city, so close to the river. The location provided almost instant access to two expressways and two major surface streets while being somewhat physically isolated.
Truthfully, the environs had had less to do with the late Major General Block’s choice of the site than the buildings themselves. The logic of his choice was hard to dispute; the electric company building, he said, would be the last to lose power and the first to get it back. Ditto the AT&T building. The perimeter included the Federal Building in the southeast corner, and the public safety headquarters (city and state police and fire) in the southwest corner. Most of the surface streets leading into the half mile square area had been blocked off to vehicular and foot traffic with concrete barriers and concertina wire.
It was within the first building that the current base commander moved his office about. The soldiers had dubbed it Echo Base, E for electric, or maybe Edison, and the name had gradually expanded to denote the entire military compound. Supposedly the name was some sort of classic sci-fi reference, but to what he’d never known. It was twenty-four stories tall, the tallest of an interconnected cluster of four buildings that, with their associated parking lots, sat at the north end of the property the military had taken for their own.
On the south side of the buildings were two whole square city blocks of cheerful plazas with fountains and modern art sculptures and decorative landscaping. Or so he’d seen in old photos—once the military claimed the area those two blocks, plus the parking lot of the adjacent Leland hotel, and the park just north of that, the area became parking lots and, eventually, an airfield for his rotary wing aircraft when he no longer had the resources to guarantee the security of his birds at the airport some fifteen miles west. The fountains had been filled in, the grass paved over, the sculptures torn down. In their place was a sea of concrete, with helicopter landing pads on the south and east side of Echo Base. The two hangars for their aircraft sat on the eastern end of the concrete, almost in the dead center of the base. Most of his tanks squatted in the numerous surrounding parking lots, which accounted for nearly half the area inside the perimeter, their main guns facing outward protectively. If only Echo Base was as impregnable as it looked. Echo Base was at the south end of the Blue Zone, the strictly controlled and patrolled strip in the middle of downtown where everyone tried to pretend the war was happening somewhere else, to other people.
There were still a few hardy souls working for the power company in Echo, but most of the building was vacant office space and the Army officers were free to move their offices around. The view from his eighth-floor office had been much better, but that really was too high. If the guerillas launched a major attack on the building the first thing to go (after the windows) would be the power, which meant the elevators. If his aides had to run up and down eight floors in the thick of it, most likely in the dark, he wouldn’t have to worry about the opposition, his own people would kill him. The enlisted troops were billeted in the ground floor of the adjacent office building.
Echo Base was an oddly contoured piece of real estate, roughly the shape of a rectangle, half a mile long by a third wide. Lay the rectangle long side down, chop off the top right corner, turn the rest clockwise a hair, and there was Echo Base. It was bordered on the north and west by sunken multilane expressways, and to the south by a simple four lane surface street. Running through the lower third of the rectangle was an avenue fully seven lanes wide, blocked at both ends by manned gates—those were the only ways in and out of the base. Between Echo and the sunken expressway to the west was a huge casino, now abandoned. The perimeter of the base was a tangle of chain link, razor wire, jersey barriers and dragon teeth, patrolled constantly day and night by men on foot and in vehicles.
The east side was the most vulnerable. There Echo Base ended at a simple surface street, four lanes across, with five and six story buildings perching right on the opposite curb. The 27-story former Federal Building and the similarly-sized AT&T headquarters, both at the southeast corner of the base perimeter, helped block visual access to much of the base. General Block had ordered many of the buildings in the immediate vicinity demolished, but the east was still the direction from which they took most of the harassing sniper fire.
The Federal Building had been profoundly ugly even when new; it looked like a high-rise prison. It had been so badly damaged in the fighting it had been abandoned, and the drastically reduced-in-number federal agents still in the city worked out of the public safety headquarters. The PSH seemed a good spiritual stand-in for the city—it was nearly a ghost town with the police and fire departments present in name only.
In addition to those structures, the power company buildings and the AT&T skyscraper, Echo Base contained the burned-out shell of a small commercial building that had once housed a bar, a former Salvation Army office (now abandoned), a twelve-story apartment building, and a twenty-story hotel called the Leland.
The Leland hotel was at the eastern edge of the Army base’s perimeter, its ground floor wrapped in layer upon layer of concertina wire, inside a quadruple row of dragon’s teeth. The concrete obstacles were designed to stop car bombs and tanks, but did nothing against the bullets which slammed into hotel far too often for comfort even at this late date. Although it had been almost a year since anyone had lobbed a 40mm grenade through a window of the hotel, and years since it had taken an RPG.
The officers, when not on duty, still slept there, but on the west and north sides of the hotel, where the Tangos would have to fling their ordnance a thousand yards or more, across the length of Echo Base, to reach the hotel. Most of the civilian contract employees and city government workers lived up at the north end of the Blue Zone in what was called the New Center area. There was a hotel there, the St. Regis, that had been commandeered by the government not too long into the war, and it was connected to many of the adjacent high-rises by pedestrian walkways above the streets, further enhancing security.
General Block hadn’t been the first casualty in the Leland, but he was the most well-known. He’d died half-asleep, drinking his morning coffee, staring out a south-facing window, cut down by sniper fire from a derelict office building nearly four hundred yards away. The guerillas had known exactly which window to fire into and were gone long before troops could identify the building from where the shot had been fired. A search had turned up a rifle—an old Remington 700 bolt-action in .270 Win, topped with a cheap 3-9X scope—in a room on the fourth floor.
The serial number on the weapon had been run, and it came back registered to a man at an address in one of the small bedroom communities to the south. Two federal firearm agents accompanied a squad of soldiers on a raid of the address…which resulted in two more dead, and four injured, as the guerrillas had boobytrapped the house.
Forensic analysis of General Block’s body and the window in his room revealed bullet impacts from three different rifles, fired so closely together witnesses only heard one gunshot. The technique was an advanced one—the glass might deflect a bullet, or nerves might get the better of one man, and he’d jerk the trigger and send the shot awry, but with three snipers? One of the bullets was bound to find its mark, after the others helped soften up the glass.
It hadn’t been luck, spotting the general standing before that window. One of the hotel employees, a maid, never showed up for work the next mornin
g, so there was no mystery to how they’d known which window to aim for.
Block had been appointed the area commander not long after the local ground war, such as it was, was over. He’d been in charge for seven years, far longer than anyone had expected the war to last, before being assassinated. As for the man who was General Block’s successor, he had a well-appointed room in the hotel that he was using more often lately, but still found himself regularly sleeping in his office, or in one of the rooms nearby. The building seemed to be filled with couches, half of them expensive leather jobs. He was stretched out on a long loveseat, half awake, when Major Cooper came in to wake him.
Major Paul Cooper was his S2, the member on his staff in charge of intelligence, and also his Number 2 man at this command. Cooper was also the elder of the two, and by all rights should have been the one promoted, but he was too much of a professional to say anything critical of the decision. Forty-two years old, he was slender with coal black hair slowly graying at the temples and a ramrod stiff posture. He was brusque and efficient and damn near emotionless no matter what was going on around him.
“Good morning Sir. I see you didn’t make it back to the hotel last night.” Without waiting for a reply the Major strode into the next room, set a stack of papers down on the desk, and opened the horizontal blinds. The thin light of morning lit up Colonel Anthony Parker blinking on the couch.
The colonel kicked off the ugly, thin, Army-issue blanket and sat up stiffly. He slept in an undershirt and jockey shorts but kept his uniform and boots within reach in case the building came under fire during the night. Prior to the war he’d been an avid long distance runner, but that was one luxury he had no time for now. He’d also been a lowly Captain, which showed how much things had changed. His stomach was still flat, his long legs still muscled, but he looked to be in much better shape than he actually was after a decade of coffee, stress, and very little physical activity. He hadn’t worked out in years, and it only in the past few months had started hitting the gym again. Motivation was the key. More than a few grey hairs had begun to sprout from his temples, a most unwelcome sight.