by James Tarr
No one could agree on exactly when widespread civil unrest turned into open warfare, but things had been going downhill for a long while before the sides actually started trading shots, everyone agreed on that. Well, except for the gun nuts resisting the legal confiscation of the military-style firearms they never should have been allowed to own in the first place. They’d been the loudest voices protesting the government and had been very successful, unfortunately, in convincing a lot of otherwise smart people to join the fight. It was always a few loudmouths that got mobs stirred up and started riots.
Before the war, relationships between the cities and suburbs, the coasts and the center of the country, the two political parties, hadn’t been so strained in decades, if not centuries. There’d been a rash of riots in many of the big cities, ostensibly about race or immigration or some other perceived slight, but in Parker’s experience all rioters cared about was causing trouble. And maybe looting some freebies. The conspiracy theories about the government fomenting the riots to justify taking more control were just ridiculous, of course.
Martial law was declared in several cities, government troops deployed, some federal agents and soldiers got missions to search neighborhoods for recently banned weapons, but instead of the violence ending all of a sudden there was a lot of shooting—the government and military versus…well, at first they just seemed to be criminal malcontents. Troublemakers. Anti-government extremists who seemed to be opposed to everything the government wanted to do to restore order. Isolated incidents, at first, but the harder the government tried to tamp them down, temporarily suspending habeas corpus (although that temporary suspension was still in effect) the more resistance flared up, and suddenly they found themselves in a patchwork civil war, although officially, even now nearly a decade later and after mountains of bodies, it was still officially a “police action”, at least as far as the politicians were concerned. Worthless words. His men were still just as dead.
All of the experts had predicted the conflict would be over before it was really begun, the upstart self-titled constitutionalists falling before the combined weight of the armed forces. And, with those first big victories, it had seemed like the conflict would have a short life, and things would go back to normal. The military had the tanks and aircraft, after all, as well as the intelligence structure. Then things went off the rails; sabotage on a wide scale, massive desertions and defections including so much of the Marine Corps it basically ceased to be an effective fighting unit. At least for the government. The government somehow lost control of half its surveillance satellites and had so many other software problems it was obvious they were due to hacking and sabotage. There was sniping and random attacks on an enormous level from “lone wolf” perpetrators as seemingly every idiot with a gun decided to join in. At the early war’s height those lone wolf snipers were killing a thousand police officers and government agents and soldiers a month all across the country. Some of them in front of their families. They were mostly working alone, taking targets of opportunity, and were almost impossible to stop when seemingly everyone had guns. It was insane.
That’s what Parker had been taught in school, before joining the military. The random sweeps done in concert with the martial law declaration worked prior to the start of the war, and afterward…for a short while. Then the raid teams, often federal agents working with military troops, would either get ambushed on the way to seize guns or on the way back, often emptyhanded, because of some sympathizer warning the locals. When he was young Parker had been outraged about it all, and it had been a fight he’d been happy to join in, to defend his country from the lunatic enemy within that was tearing it apart and causing anarchy.
Now he was just tired.
The couch was in a little room off the office he’d temporarily claimed. In addition to the couch the room held a small refrigerator, a tiny bar (long since emptied), and its own bathroom with a shower. The Colonel had no doubts that the executive whose office this had been had spent many an afternoon banging his secretary on the leather couch. Every once in a while he idly wondered where they might be, whether they were still alive. Millions had died, from the war, from starvation, from disease, so many millions that the government had to conceal the true casualty numbers from the people for the sake of morale and unity.
Parker was under no illusions; he knew how lucky he was, in this city, in these thin times, just to have power, much less have it ninety-nine days out of a hundred. Inside he raged at the enemy for causing all this misery and suffering. The running water was a miracle. He took a lukewarm, three-minute shower, then cracked the door and let Major Cooper brief him on the night’s events while he drip dried.
“The resupply ship still has not arrived,” was the first thing out of the Major’s mouth, knowing that was what concerned the Colonel the most.
“And have they provided us with an explanation?” That goddamn ship was going to rust through and sink to the bottom, the rate it was proceeding across the lake and down the river. The trip was less than three hundred miles. They would have sent everything by train, but the guerrillas kept blowing up the tracks in that region.
“No Sir, nothing I would qualify as such. Apparently they had to wait quite a while for a minesweeper to check the area outside their last port of call.”
“A minesweeper. When was the last time we lost a boat to a mine?” It was a rhetorical question, and the Major didn’t bother replying. Nineteen months ago, both men could have answered, but the Navy had strict procedures when it came to waterways it “knew” to be mined. And that hadn’t even been a mine, a terrorist had swum out to the ship in the middle of the night and planted a homemade bomb on the hull. The end result was the same.
His command wasn’t completely cut off, far from it. They received supplies and equipment every day. They came by road and rail and supply planes, from ships heading up and down the river, carried by military transports and those private businessmen who’d decided the money involved was worth the risk. Food, medical supplies, spare parts and, first and foremost, fuel. Not nearly enough fuel, and less every day. However, what he needed the most—besides the diesel and gas, that is—what he sought desperately, was something the private sector could not provide. Armor. Armored vehicles, and men to command them. That was what was on the supply ship. A handful of tanks, not nearly as many as he’d asked for, just a token few, but a few was better than none. Along with the tanks were some support vehicles, three pieces of self-propelled artillery, some IMP armored personnel carriers, half a dozen of the problematic four-wheel-drive Growlers, and ammunition enough to replenish their dwindling supply. It wasn’t that the enemy kept cutting their supply lines, far from it. His own superiors did that. His wasn’t the real war, they told him, just an “occupation”, or a “non-critical holding action”. His wasn’t technically a “peacekeeping” force as the area had yet to see any post-conflict peace, but his goals and mission were the same, so when it came to men and materiel his was the last wish list to be filled. The big shipments of arms and ammo, and men, went to the front, such as it was. The thing was, he knew, most of the fighting in this war had been nowhere near anything that could be called a “front”. The military currently was fond of the term “contested territory”. The only difference between the city he occupied and the theaters most of the military was operating in was the level of opposition.
“There didn’t seem to be much activity at all in the city last night,” Cooper went on. “Hardly any reports of sniper fire or movement, which is a nice change. I do, however, finally have the detailed after-action report of the patrol that got hit late last week, with interviews of the wounded. The AAR is already on your desk.”
“Tell me.” The AAR would tell him the who, the what, and the when, but sometimes they didn’t provide the whole story. He knew he’d lost four men in the attack, with another ten injured. It was the biggest single loss they’d suffered in months. Which meant they’d had a relatively quiet spring and sum
mer. For which, he knew, he should be grateful, but he also knew the lull wouldn’t last.
“An understrength platoon from the 12th, more like three squads, really, twenty-eight men, commanded by Lieutenant Hauser. Mixed armor package, including one Toad, doing a sweep and clear. Force projection as much as anything else, that’s why they had the Toad.” Through the cracked door he saw the Colonel nodding.
That was the only reason they still patrolled this gigantic cesspool of a city, “force projection”. Parker, and Cooper, and probably all of the soldiers in the command would prefer to just stay buttoned up inside their base and let the city eat itself, but IV Corps in all its wisdom had decreed that, despite a critical lack of men and resources (most notably fuel), they had to keep patrolling the area to keep the population in check.
And, in truth, Parker was in charge of more than just the city, he was in charge of the whole region, from Fort Gratiot to the northeast to Lansing to the west, all the way to Monroe in the south. However, it was the city and the suburbs which surrounded it which occupied the lion’s share of his time, attention, and manpower. The city was the rotten center of the decaying piece of fruit they’d all been told to eat with a smile.
“On their way back in, running late because one of their vehicles broke down. They were rolling in four Growlers, doing a sweep, backed up by the Toad and IMP.” Growlers were the Army’s four-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. Great ground clearance, and enough torque to get over or around just about any obstacle, but their passenger compartments were cramped, their diesel engines were loud, and their transmissions were, strangely enough, difficult to maintain. The troops were not fond of them.
“They were hit at a residential intersection. One of the Growlers was not armored, and the armored windows on the other one failed to stop half the incoming. UV deterioration, apparently.” Parker nodded. They’d been seeing a lot of that, but despite numerous requisition requests had yet to receive any new armored window panels for their Growlers. Or run-flat tires. “The tank commander fired a round from the main gun, and the troops cranked off a lot of rounds from their rifles and belt-feds, but they didn’t find any bodies. They had to abandon one of the Growlers, it was shot up pretty good. When a patrol went back for it, it was stripped and torched.”
“Of course. Heavy weapons?”
“Just small arms, rifles and a couple grenades. The lieutenant thinks they were ambushed. Well, of course they were ambushed, but he thinks it was ‘extensively planned’.”
“Hmmmm.” As dry as he was likely to get just standing there, the Colonel pulled on a clean pair of jockeys and opened the door the rest of the way. He shared a look with his subordinate. Both of them knew that if it had been a planned ambush, a lot more than four people would be dead. And the guerrillas really didn’t like going up against the impenetrable Toads, which was why there’d been one with the patrol. A hasty ambush, perhaps, set up by a guerilla squad that’d heard the Growlers coming their way. Luck. “No enemy KIA even with a 120mm main gun firing at them?”
The Major made a face. “The tank commander accidentally had a sabot round loaded instead of HE.”
“Christ. Why the hell? There isn’t any enemy armor within a two hundred miles of this godforsaken trash heap of a city.”
“He knows he was supposed to have an HE round loaded, sir. He screwed up.”
Parker sighed. Christ. More dead men on his conscience. How many did that make? Eleven in the past month alone. What a waste, killed patrolling a city that had been killing itself long before the war ever started. Hell, the city wasn’t dying, it was dead. They were fighting over a corpse.
Major Cooper watched his commander get dressed. Parker was a likeable man, but sorely out of his depth when it came to commanding this many men and machines. He wasn’t stupid, per se, he just didn’t have the experience required. Admittedly, the Army was a little short on experienced officers—hell, make that a lot short. They’d had a dearth of competent officers before the war ever started, what with the massive retirements due to the new socially and culturally sensitive rules imposed on the military by the new administration. After the war more commanders than he wanted to remember had either deserted or ended up like General Block. In Parker’s chain of command the men directly above him, General Maxwell Goetterman and Brigadier General Danvers, had both died in the suburbs just a few miles to the north, Goetterman during the intense but short-lived armor campaign, Danvers four years later from a sniper’s bullet. After General Block’s assassination they hadn’t bothered to assign a new General to this command, or promote Colonel Parker after assigning him to hold the region. Cooper wasn’t sure what that said about the importance of this command, that it no longer rated a General. Nothing good.
Since the initial conflagration they’d held the ground, sure, with their tanks and aircraft and men, but at what cost, and with what result? They’d lost only fourteen tanks during the fierce eight-day battle, surprisingly few. Since then they’d lost twenty-two, a few from sabotage, a few when a Toad rolling through the city or parked in a laager outside the wire with a hatch open was successfully swarmed or hit with a grenade or RPG. The rest were destroyed by improvised weapons such as a combination of hand-dug tank traps and fertilizer bombs. Not to mention all the IMP armored personnel carriers and Growlers that had been destroyed and not replaced. And men. They now only had twelve tanks, only eight of them functional, and his mechanics were having to cannibalize the four for parts to keep those eight running. Parker rarely had them out patrolling the city, ostensibly because they rarely had the fuel to support patrols, but the truth was he was deathly afraid of losing another. His plan seemed to be working, as they hadn’t lost a tank in almost a year. Spare parts were getting so scarce he’d already started cannibalizing his own vehicles, and he barely had the fuel to send them out more than once a week. They sat around the perimeter, main guns facing out, the crews disgruntled, their morale nonexistent. Not that they had much morale to begin with, they were all draftees.
The situation with the aircraft wasn’t any better. They had more tanks than Kestrels, and you couldn’t patrol an entire massive metropolitan area and its environs, much less project force, with only a handful of helicopters. There were no fighter jets stationed at the airport, either, not any more. None. Any that landed were just there to refuel.
The young Colonel had yet to rule the city, much less tame it, no matter what the reports said about who held what ground. It was a festering wound that continued to fester. After two years of command. His predecessor had fared no better. Not that things were going well in the war anywhere, it seemed to have devolved into a war of attrition, but worries like that were above Cooper’s pay grade. He was not, however, ignorant of the fact that while the other side had less armor and vehicles and planes and bombs and drones and satellites…they had far more bodies in the fight. And in a war of attrition, numbers mattered.
After Block’s untimely demise Parker had been picked for the command, the Major was convinced, for no other reason than because, in addition to being politically reliable, everybody liked him. His men liked him, as much as any soldiers liked their commanding officer, and the brass at HQ liked him. Which was fine, as long as he could do the job.
To be fair, they didn’t have enough men and machines to physically command a piece of earth the size of which they’d been charged with “governing” or “pacifying” or any one of a dozen other euphemisms. It just wasn’t possible. The city itself was 140 square miles of destroyed buildings, empty homes, and vacant land being reclaimed by Mother Nature, and the “Zone of Conflict”, the contested surrounding urban and suburban areas, tripled that. Once you added in all the outlying cities and suburbs and rural farmland, Parker was tasked with controlling nearly twenty-five hundred square miles. An area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Forget men and machines, Parker never had the fuel reserves to be able to consistently patrol such a space, so he’d concentrated his efforts on the city and the s
urrounding ‘burbs, which was where most of the trouble occurred anyway.
There were always ways to project force and influence beyond your number…but Parker seemed unable to do anything but respond to the guerillas’ actions. That was a dead-end street—you didn’t win a war by playing defense. He’d said as much to the Colonel, in a polite, non-insubordinate way, but nothing had changed. His predecessor, General Block, had attempted to keep the populace cowed with immediate reprisals against the citizenry whenever there was a guerrilla attack. Parker was no fan of mass jailings, much less the torture or mass executions Block was famous for, and had stopped most of those upon assuming command. Cooper thought that made him appear weak, and had said as much as politely as he could, but Parker was quick to point out the guerrilla attacks had not increased under his “kinder, gentler” hand. They also hadn’t decreased, Cooper was quick to point out.
They still, technically, controlled the city and the surrounding suburbs, but the bragging rights cost them dearly; ten men dead, on average, each and every month, for the past few years. One, two, four at a time, in shitty little actions in a horrific war nobody—well, almost nobody—had seen coming. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been hitting back at the guerrillas just as hard, but he’d seen the numbers. The real numbers, not the ones they gave to the state media. For every guerrilla or suspected guerrilla they’d captured or killed in the past year, they’d lost ten soldiers. That wasn’t just unacceptable, it was unsustainable, and Parker knew it. Everyone knew it. The problem was no one seemed to know how to turn the situation around. And most of the brass didn’t seem to care, about the numbers or the city itself, because the casualty numbers coming out of the region paled in comparison to the real conflict areas.