by James Tarr
At the start of the war federal agents were arresting and interrogating a lot of “collaborators”, trying to uncover the locations of terrorist cells, with very little success. While Parker was no fan of torture, at his S2’s insistence he had finally decided to revisit some of those techniques and do some enhanced interrogations on the few captured guerrillas they had, and their suspected civilian confederates, but so far they hadn’t gotten any actionable intelligence. Cooper knew it was only a matter of time, though.
“I don’t know how you do it, Coop.” The Colonel leaned over the freshly brewed pot of coffee on the bar and breathed deep. Real coffee, every day. The man was a saint.
“You just have to know who to threaten, sir.”
The Colonel raised a hand. “I don’t even want to know,” he said quickly. There was coffee to be had in the city, even a coffee shop up in the Fisher Building at the far end of the Blue Zone, but the cost of the stuff was outrageous. With the hyperinflation even on a Colonel’s salary he balked at the prices. He poured himself a cup, aching for some milk; two percent, skim, breast, even that “environmentally conscious” vegan soymilk found on the Army bases that tasted like ditchwater filtered through dirty underwear.
“Intelligence seems to think the Tangos are up to something.”
“Oh? Why’s that?” He knew the report would be on his desk, and he would read it, but it was always good to hear someone else’s slant on the news. He found a few battered sugar packets and poured them into his cup.
“Heavier than usual signal traffic in the region. Slightly higher casualties to snipers in the past few weeks. Spotters report more movement than usual along the Ditch.”
Most of their casualties were to snipers, and always had been. One shot fired, and they could rarely even determine from where, much less by who. But as for spotters…Parker shook his head. “If we can spot them we should be able to kill them,” he growled, not for the first time. Using soldiers to surveil the likely traffic areas was archaic in this era of drones, but could he get a resupply on those? No. Three years into the war the two CONEX boxes containing nearly all the small drones in the city had been sabotaged, and since then what few drones they’d had left seemed to disappear or get downed faster than they could be replaced. It wasn’t just in the city, there seemed to be a real shortage of them Army-wide, both the bird-sized flitters and the armed UAVs the size of small planes. And he’d learned—forget about getting anything high-tech or cutting edge like MURVs or sentry guns, they couldn’t even get new runflat tires for their Growlers or Spikes. He’d been out of Spikes for a year. Maybe it was that the better gear was all tasked for missions in the “real” war. Or maybe the Army just didn’t have enough in inventory. He could never get a straight answer out of headquarters. He sighed.
“Anything concrete? Did they go to the trouble of actually listening to any of this traffic? Or following the people on the ground, getting eyes on, determining whether or not they’re guerrillas or just residents?” That there were still people who lived in the city outside of the Blue Zone amazed him, but they were there, it was a fact. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them, although the local population was a fraction of what it had been before the war. Over four million, he’d read somewhere, in the greater metropolitan area, before the fighting had started. Those civilians were why they didn’t shoot everybody on sight. Or, at least, his troops weren’t supposed to, they had strict Rules of Engagement, but war was war, and morale was in the toilet due to those damn snipers… He stirred the coffee with a finger.
The Major shook his head. “But you know how undermanned we are. To tell you the truth, so few people have working phones, much less access to functioning cell towers, that I don’t know if ‘increased traffic’ has anything to do with enemy activity or not. It could be some grandmother who finally got a signal after four months, spending three hours crytalking to her daughter and grandbabies.”
Cooper raised his eyebrows and gave his second-in-command a dubious look.
“I’m serious, Sir, I’ve lost faith in our sigint brothers. I think often they’re telling us what they think we want to hear, or to cover themselves in case they missed something. What we need is a satellite intercept, so we can route the phone and radio traffic through some of those supercomputers.”
“I’ve asked. I don’t even know how many sigint birds we’ve still got flying, they won’t answer that question, which let me tell you is troubling. You know how many holes we have in our camera bird coverage as well. Most of the satellites we still have are busy down south and west. And the crypto supercomputers are otherwise occupied, or something.”
The Major shook his head, not hiding his disapproval well. A thought came to mind. “That firefight in sector eleven might be related to what intelligence is telling us, if what they’re telling us is accurate,” he said. “That sector’s been pretty quiet the past few weeks.”
“Was the lieutenant able to provide any numbers on the guerillas? Direction of travel? That might help. You mentioned it was just small arms.”
“Small arms fire, that’s all he knew, coming from the houses lining the road. Couple of grenades thrown their way. The patrol the next morning checked the houses before towing the Growler, but didn’t find so much as a blood trail. The tangos even policed their brass cases.”
The Colonel crumpled up the sugar packets and threw them into a corner. “I’d like to bulldoze this whole fucking city,” he spat.
“They’d just go into the sewers. They did exactly that at the start of the war. General Block had many of them flooded and demo’d, just like the Nazis did in Warsaw during World War II,” Major Cooper observed flatly. Against standing orders, if he remembered correctly, at the time the government was still worried about preserving the city’s infrastructure. Now, outside of the Blue Zone, no one cared about the state of the city, but Parker had neither the bulldozers nor the diesel to make his dream a reality.
“Yeah? Did it work?”
Cooper wanted to shake his head, but instead kept his expression blank. The guerrillas already compared them to the Nazis, but this young Colonel seemed oblivious to any and all of the political nuances. He just followed orders, and believed in the cause, and these days being politically reliable was more important to the brass than experience, skill, or intelligence. “Yes.”
“Well there you go.”
Cooper declined to point out that the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto started out unarmed and had held off the entire might of the Nazi war machine for over two weeks, longer than the entire country of Poland had resisted. The enemies they were fighting were many things, but unarmed wasn’t one of them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Colonel Parker was supposed to be reading the reports stacked on the desk before him, the daily log, the AARs and OARs (After- and Overnight Action Reports), the incident and status reports, the requests and reminders, but he kept drifting off. He’d find himself staring out the window, eyes fixed on some point, some visual reference, the corner of a building, the burned-out hulk of a car inside the perimeter, two of his men standing beside their tank, smoking. On the side of the tank away from the perimeter, he observed, because of the persistent threat of snipers.
There was a constant haze of smoke over the city, from cooking fires and fire fires; even after all these years people still seemed to find entertainment in arson, setting fire to buildings. It was surprising, actually, that there was anything left in the city to burn.
The former Federal Building, across the avenue to the southeast, looked especially decrepit in the morning light. Most of its windows below the twentieth floor or so were empty black sockets, scorched from the fires and explosions. Molotov cocktails, grenades, mortars, tank rounds, artillery, small arms fire; at one time or another during the initial eight day battle it had been pounded by everything. It was a wonder it was still standing.
To the west, across the avenue, was the casino. Between the high-tech parking garages, hotel towers, a
nd the casino building itself the site covered two large blocks. The city had been drab and grey before the war, and the casino’s creamy yellow and burgundy paint job had been quite striking. The partnership that owned it had done everything they could to keep it operating and turning a profit even with a war cranking up. When the power became undependable they brought in huge generators. When the water supply became unreliable they brought in their own filtering systems. It was a gallant effort, and worked for a while, but eventually, when they could no longer find enough diesel for the generators, or food for the kitchen, or employees willing to pass through the checkpoints, or customers willing to brave all that to gamble, and hyperinflation making the cash its customers wagered increasingly less valuable, the casino closed its doors. Hope had finally succumbed to reality. Ironically, the shuttering of their doors made a small number of locals mad. They’d been consistently willing to brave roadblocks and snipers to gamble, and couldn’t believe a little thing like a war should be reason enough for the casino to close its doors.
There was a knock on the open door and he turned his head.
“Sir, General Barnson’s on the line.” Major Cooper glanced past his commanding officer out the window, wondering what he’d been staring at so intently. The windows were all mirrored on the outside, and the tint gave everything a smoky cast.
“Thank you.” He nodded and his S2 left. Parker stared at the phone on the desk, sitting atop what looked like a small stereo receiver. He had a direct land line to IV Corps headquarters that was almost always up, which he much preferred to the satellite uplink radios the troops had to depend on. The satellites weren’t nearly as dependable as they used to be. Or numerous. Fifth column activity, he suspected, but nobody had been able to prove anything. Or maybe they had and he was being kept out of the loop to keep his morale up. Which was a sobering thought.
Parker hit two buttons on the scrambler unit, then picked up the receiver. “Good morning Sir.” There was always about a half-second delay as his voice was scrambled, sent out, and unscrambled at his commander’s end.
“Morning Mr. Parker.” The digital scrambling process made everyone sound as if they were talking with a mouthful of water. Barnson’s voice was slightly blurred and bubbly. “I trust you’re still well?” Major General Barnson was his commanding officer, the man he directly reported to. The two men liked each other, but their friendship had become strained over the last few months.
“As well as can be expected, Sir.”
“Well, Colonel, I hate to be the one to ruin your day, but I have bad news. The resupply ship you’ve been waiting for, the one carrying the armor you’ve been hoping for, has been ordered to turn around.”
“What?”
“Now I know this news doesn’t come at a good time, but rest assured I’m doing all I can to get you properly resupplied.”
Parker was incredulous. “General, Sir, I know I don’t have to remind you just how thin I’m stretched here. You’ve tasked me with controlling an area half the size of Connecticut. I have less than one quarter of the men and equipment that would be necessary to even attempt such a thing. I’m not sure I’d even have enough men to control Manhattan, and that’s an island. I mean no disrespect, Sir, but I’m being set up to fail through no fault of my own.”
“Mr. Parker, we have had this conversation before.”
“Yes sir, that’s why this decision has me so confused. Never mind the equipment, or that we’re having to pull old rifles out of storage because we can’t get basic spare parts for our M5 carbines, which as you know chew through bolts and barrels like they’re candy. You pulled all my fixed-wing air assets last year. I’ve had to pull all of our Kestrels inside our base here, as I don’t have enough men to secure them at the airport, and eight Kestrels, eight, comprise my entire air wing, apart from two unarmed cargo copters which I think are older than you and I put together. I’m barely getting enough fuel to keep birds in the air or patrols outside the wire. I’m losing ten men a month to the guerillas, and another five to desertion…for which I’m getting five replacements. And those five replacements, draftees all, I swear half of them have never touched a rifle before, and if their sergeants give them orders they don’t like they want to file hate crime charges. If the guerrillas had a clue about how thinly stretched we are I’m sure they’d be a lot more aggressive. My men are running double and triple patrols, per your orders, just to give the impression we’ve got bodies to spare, and it’s wearing them down.” It had also depleted his fuel reserves to near zero. He was thinking about reducing the number of men he had providing security at the food distribution centers or on foot patrol in the Blue Zone to give the few productive people still in the city peace of mind. The guerrillas had never attacked the Blue Zone or any of the food distribution points, and he knew why, “hearts and minds”. Except…there’d been a small, quickly put down riot at the northeast food site several days before when they’d unexpectedly run out of water. Without soldiers providing security for the government aid workers, that riot could quickly have gotten out of hand.
In wars, probably every war since the dawn of time, militaries always had to deal with DPs, displaced persons. DPs were ironically one thing Parker didn't really have to trouble himself with. This city seemed to be filled with people who refused to leave even when they should.
“Colonel, I’ve spoken to you about your language before. Our enemy is not to be given any respect they are not due. They are not guerrillas, much less soldiers. You can refer to them as rebels, traitors, or, preferably, terrorists.”
Parker closed his eyes and ran a hand through his short hair. Semantics, he thought. I’m being slowly bled to death and they’re worried about my vocabulary. He didn’t hold it against Barnson; both men knew their conversation was being recorded, and intelligence was always on the lookout for signs of sympathy toward the enemy. A number of high-ranking military officers had simply disappeared, and it was assumed they weren’t appropriately supportive of the government’s endeavors. Thinking correctly was valued just as highly as acting correctly at this late stage in the war. Parker didn’t have sympathy, but he knew his enemy wasn’t evil incarnate. He was fighting ordinary men who for various bad reasons had chosen the wrong side. He wasn’t about to demonize them or make them something they were not. Still, he knew better than to say anything like that aloud.
“I’m sorry, Sir, I was just trying to be accurate as the…terrorists are using guerrilla techniques. But you haven’t addressed my concerns. We’re being nibbled to death here, by a ragtag bunch of amateurs. They don’t have the numbers to actually come at us, try to displace us or seize any objectives, and I don’t see how they can have any hope of victory here, all they do is harass my men and damage their vehicles. If you actually gave me some resources I’d be able to wipe them out in no time.” He barely had the manpower to police the markets which had popped up all over the city to make sure they weren’t selling illegal goods, much less provide security in the Blue Zone and at the three government distribution centers in the city which handed out food and medicine to the civilian populace. Such tasks should have been handled by local law enforcement, but there hadn’t been a police presence in the area for years. The handful of fools in the city council fighting with the Mayor over the carcass of the city barely counted as government.
So many of the housekeeping duties, so to speak, that his troops were forced to perform in the city, should have been handled by members of the local government, especially the police. However, once civil disobedience turned into active resistance, and cops started getting killed for trying to enforce the new common-sense restrictions aimed at curbing violence, they bailed out and left the job to the military. In fact, a sizable percentage of law enforcement officers decided to take up arms opposing their government, a fact which he still, to this day, could not comprehend. If your job is to enforce the law, you didn’t get to pick and choose which laws, and you sure didn’t, or shouldn’t, join the other side
and become criminals. No one got to choose which laws to enforce or obey, especially not those who were tasked with upholding them. They’d taken an oath. But then, so had all the members of the Marine Corps, and after six months of combat with the anti-government forces so many Marine Corps units had defected—with their tanks and planes and guns, he might add—that the few remnants remaining loyal to the government had just been absorbed by the Army.
There was a grumble on the other end of the line. “As you say, they are a ragtag bunch of amateurs, low in number. As such, you should have all the resources you need to take care of such a minor problem. As difficult as I admit fuel is to come by these days they still have zero Toads. Zero IMPs. Zero armor of any sort. Zero aircraft. And yet you seem incapable.”
Parker took a deep breath. “With all due respect, Sir, I just don’t have enough men to properly go after the—the enemy. We can’t attack them en masse, they never move about in groups larger than a dozen men. Usually less than that. Over half of the men we lose are to snipers, and the only way to defend against them is to either not patrol or for my men to stay buttoned up in their vehicles where they couldn’t see a circus parade marching down the street. And we can’t attack the enemy’s bases in or outside the city, because as far as we can determine they don’t have any as such. They don’t use cell phones or traditional radios. For all I know they’re passing paper notes or banging rocks together. Or using smoke signals. We’re not even sure how they’re operating, if there is any civilian infrastructure in the area supporting them we haven’t been able to find it. The city is an overgrown ghost town, which is why those drones I’ve been begging you for would be so valuable. I’ve barely got enough surveillance drones and operators to cover our Blue Zone and the perimeter of the airport, and I don’t dare pull them away from that to assist with patrols. The only option we have is to cordon off large areas and go house to house, but to do that I’d have to pull in all my patrols and roadblock troops just to have enough bodies. But we’ve still done it…with very little to show for it.