by James Tarr
They were standing in the grandiose lobby talking and laughing and sipping at their black gold when Parker’s encrypted military satellite phone rang. He frowned. The phone never rang with good news.
“Sorry, I’ve got to take this,” he told Lydia, digging it out.
“Sure, no problem,” she told him, watching him over her cup as she took a sip.
“Parker.”
“Sir, it’s Chamberlain.”
“Yes Major?” Mike Chamberlain was his S3, in charge of Operations.
“We’ve had an incident I think you should be aware of.”
Parker took a deep breath, glanced at Lydia, and said, “What kind of incident?”
“We had a patrol ambushed on the west side of the city not quite an hour ago. When the QRF arrived on scene, apparently…well, there appears to have been a bomb, or a booby-trap, we’re not quite sure exactly what it was…”
“How bad?” Parker asked, a leaden feeling pulling at him.
“Fourteen KIA, six wounded. At least two missing. And we lost a Growler and an IMP. If there were any EKIA they took them with.”
“Goddammit.”
“Yes sir. We’re still searching the area. Sir, I’m beginning to think this isn’t random. Maybe ARF is making a move. The Kestrel a few days ago, which took out an entire squad of terrorists, but we’re thinking another squad got away. Those two dust-ups just south of the city yesterday, the one patrol taking fire and that truck running the checkpoint for no apparent reason. Whatever the hell happened at that apartment building tower the other night, which might have just been crazies, but maybe not. This ambush. I don’t know if I’m seeing a pattern, but it’s definitely unusually high activity. I’ve started plotting everything that’s happened in the last week on a map, and I’d like you to take a look at it. And the S2.”
“I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes, I’m off base right now.” He looked at Lydia and shrugged apologetically as he disconnected the call. “I’ve got to head out.”
She nodded. “I heard.” In fact, she’d been able to hear most of the other end of the conversation, he always had his phone’s speaker turned up to max volume. Hearing loss from a firefight when he was a Captain, he’d told her. She kissed Parker on the cheek. “Go on, get to work, do Army stuff. I’ll talk to you later.”
He headed toward the front door with his two soldiers, their boots echoing off the marble, and she watched him go, sipping at the coffee.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Early returned not quite two hours later with two squirrels, a pigeon, and the cargo pockets of his trousers stuffed with red-orange daylily blossoms. The men had learned the tender flower petals were very mild, with a faint mushroomy aftertaste.
Early and Weasel built a small fire about a hundred feet from the house they were using as overnight shelter. The fire was between two ramshackle homes very close together, barely six feet separating their burgundy brick walls. The space between the houses was entirely in shadow and cool; it felt like a tunnel. The walls seemed to lean in. Aircraft would need to be directly overhead to even spot the fire or the heat it was giving off. And then they’d only see the silhouettes of two men.
“A wild game dinner after a snack of military munchies?” George said to Ed as the two men pored over the map spread out on the kitchen table. “I’m going to get fat.” Just about everyone in the squad had their own map, but Ed’s was the only sample that had been laminated. Ed snorted.
“What are we, about three miles from the general store?” George put his fingertip on the laminated surface.
“Straight line. If it’s still open for business. And about the same distance to Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous point, but I don’t want to head there. Not yet. We’re not due for days, and I don’t want to draw any unwanted attention to the area. Presuming nothing untoward happens tonight, we can head out in the morning, very slow and careful. Shouldn’t take too long to get to the store.” Ed frowned. “I want everyone spread out when we go. I mean really spread out, fifty foot intervals or more, so that if anyone gets spotted they’ll look like they’re alone, at least at first. I don’t know if they’ll have high altitude drones up or satellites, but we hurt them bad today, and they’re going to want payback.”
“It’s weird,” Jason said to Early, hefting his new rifle. Early had shown him how to disassemble it for cleaning and watched him put it back together. “You just look through the tube, and where the red dot is, that’s where the bullet hits?”
Early nodded. “Provided its zeroed. Lot easier than the iron sights you’ve been using. That’s why everyone’s gun has them.” They were sitting in a downstairs hallway, facing each other, backs against the wet plaster walls.
“Yours doesn’t.”
“My M1A is very old school. But unlike your lever gun it’s a semi-auto, holds twenty rounds and is quick to reload, and hits harder than anything anybody else here is carrying except Quentin’s sawed-off shotgun, and that’s an across-the-street gun at best. Although it’s actually for drones.”
Early stared down at the scarred wood stock of his rifle. He’d been carrying it since the start of the war. He’d owned it for twenty years before the war had ever started. It was long, heavy, and recoiled quite a bit, but he knew it like a part of his body. It had saved his life more times than he could count. And with it he’d taken more lives than he cared to remember. He sighed, and looked up. Jason saw the look on his face and couldn’t read it.
“You okay?” Jason asked.
Early shook his head. “You’re too young, you probably can’t even remember what the country was like before the dang war. How much things had changed ‘fore the war ever started. How bad, how crazy it had gotten. Hell, that’s why the war popped off.” He leaned his head back against the wall and spoke to the ceiling. “Most people jes’ want to be left alone to live their normal, peaceful, boring lives. Even in a war zone. Eat, sleep, work, screw, repeat. Only three percent of the population actually fought in the American Revolution. But, see, the thing is, three percent of a population is jes’ a huge number when you get down to it. Bigger than just about any peacetime army in the world. When push finally came to shootin’ this time around, after so many years of bad and crazy, the guv’mint was shocked at just how many people was willin’ to boogaloo.” He lowered his gaze and stared at the boy. “Cain’t say I was.”
Jason didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his new gun. “It’s ugly.”
“It sure is,” Early agreed. “But it’ll help keep you alive. Remember, though, it won’t go through their armor plates any better than your lever action did. You’ve gotta aim for everything but the plate. Which, when the fur’s flyin’, ain’t so easy to do.” He peered at the boy. “But it ain’t nuthin you haven’t done already. You did a fine job. However, what you’ve got there is an honest-to-God military M4, which means it’s select fire. Hand it here.” Jason did. Early double-checked to make sure the rifle was empty, then turned it so Jason could see the controls. “This is the safety. One click down, like this, and you’re good to go. Semi-auto, one bang per pull of the trigger. Push the selector all the way forward, and you’re in full-auto. Dump that whole thirty-round magazine in two seconds. You don’t want that, you won’t hit anything, and you’ll be out of ammo standin’ there with a stupid look on yer face.”
“Weasel’s MP5 is full auto.”
“And that boy is a tear-ass helluva shot, but even he gets a little trigger happy with his bullet hose sometimes. You, you stay on semi-auto, I’m only showing you the selector so that if you happen to get excited and push the switch too far forward, now you’ll know what you did, and that you need to move the switch back. Got me?”
“Yeah.” Jason still felt like throwing up at the thought of the gunfight. How scared he’d been. All the torn bodies, the blood…but instead he swallowed, and nodded. “I thought we couldn’t use their rifles. That they were a different caliber, and had tracking chips in them.”
There’d been Kestrels in the air most of the night, using their FLIR to scan houses, but the squad was far too experienced to be caught like that. They heard Growlers once, but they were no closer than a quarter mile away.
There was a rotating two-man watch throughout the night, and everyone else got what rest they could in the basement of the house underneath the heat-reflective sheeting. Most everyone was awakened by the dawn, but in a city filled with people who, for the most part, had nowhere to go and nothing to do, men on the move at six a.m. by itself was enough to draw attention. Ed’s plan was to wait until eight a.m. or so and have the squad begin slipping out in ones and twos, spread far apart, rifles held vertically alongside their bodies at first to confuse any airborne cameras. Everyone knew the basic route down to the general store, and if they got separated there was a rendezvous point a little more than halfway there.
However, not long after dawn they began hearing Kestrels. While none of them flew directly over the house, they were close, and appeared to be hunting. An hour after the first Kestrel made itself known they heard a Growler, then several more. The sound of their engines would fade. There would be quiet for fifteen or thirty minutes, sometimes even an hour, then the faint sound of one of their engines would drift back to the house. Then men hunkered in the basement, impatient.
“They still looking for us?” Weasel said incredulously. He checked his watch. Just after one p.m.
“We hurt ‘em bad,” Mark reminded him.
“What else do they have to do?” Quentin grumbled.
“This is why we left so early for such a short trip,” Ed said pointedly to Weasel. “Were you with us when we got stuck in that half-collapsed basement for two days?”
“Yeah.”
“We were standing in six inches of freezing water the whole time. Half of us got hypothermia.” He waved a hand around the dim basement. It stunk of unwashed men, but it was dry and significantly cooler than being outside. “This is like the Ritz Carlton compared to that.”
Not quite three hours later they heard distant gunfire. A lot of it. Semi-auto rifle fire, and answering full auto fire from what sounded like heavy weapons, and explosions, a lot of them. George went up to the second floor and listened for a while, then came back down to the basement.
“Sounds like it’s directly east of us. A mile, maybe more.”
“Another squad of dogsoldiers?” Ed asked him. “That sounded like someone letting loose with a Mark 19.” George just shrugged. There was no way to know. Being compartmentalized meant they rarely knew where any other squad was, much less what they were doing.
“Whoever it is, they’re burning through a lot of ammo,”
“If they’re still shooting. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Tabs were shooting at each other while the lil’ doggies crept away,” Early opined. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. The ARF had observed there were many more young and inexperienced soldiers in the Army than in the ranks of the Irregulars. Which was just fine with them.
The gunfire tapered off to single rounds, then there was a final explosion. Five minutes later a Kestrel roared over their house, heading toward the sound of the firefight, so low and close dust came down off the walls.
“We’re staying the night,” Ed announced, staring up at the ceiling, making a decision. His pronouncement was greeted with a few groans, but that was it. They’d long ago learned the value of discretion. Quentin moved to the small battered table in the basement and began fieldstripping his rifle for cleaning. The squad members, at various times throughout the day, had taken the opportunity to clean and lube their rifles.
Ed sat down beside George and started massaging his aching calves. He couldn’t remember what it was like to have legs and feet that didn’t hurt. Add his back to that list, too.
“I never asked, where’d you get your rifle?” George asked him.
Ed looked down at the rifle, then at George. “Why?”
George frowned, then he got it. “Oh, you’re not a gun guy, are you.”
“All I know about guns is on the job training.”
Unlike a surprisingly large chunk of the dogsoldiers George knew a lot about guns, and he was aware of how things had changed. At the start of the war he’d seen AKs in the hands of more than a few doggies. And ARs chambered in .300 Blackout. Not any more. It wasn’t that the guns wouldn’t run, it was that they couldn’t find any ammo for them. Also, the cheap ARs, the ones which didn’t have pinned gas blocks, generally hadn’t lasted more than a year or two. And, while everyone was running an optic of some sort, usually a battery-powered red dot, a decade of civil war had been quite a ‘survival of the fittest’ petri dish for them. Only the exquisitely tough sights, and those that didn’t chew through batteries quickly, had survived to make it this far.
Another thing that had changed—at the start of the war a lot of the dogsoldier squads had been absolute shitshows. Perhaps only a quarter of the all-volunteer force initially had military experience. Which wasn’t horrible, but many of those who didn’t were also idiots and/or strangers to common sense. The first year of the war had seen a lot of attrition. That was always the case with war, though—combat thinned the ranks, and those left tended to be lucky, or good, or usually a bit of both. Now, after a decade of war, the veterans were solid, and even the new generation of fighters coming into the conflict—like Jason—were tougher than their predecessors. They’d been living with the war, and wartime deprivations, for so long most of them couldn’t remember what life had been like before.
George gestured at the rifle in Ed’s lap, which had been spray-painted a tan camo pattern at one point. Now, years later, half the paint had worn off, but the end result provided just as much of a disruptive pattern. “That’s a Geissele. Doesn’t look nearly as fancy as a lot of things out there, but it’s fancy on the inside, where it counts.”
Ed looked down at the gun. “I’ve had it for years. Took it off a soldier in Cleveland.”
George looked at his squad leader in surprise. “You fought in Cleveland? I thought you were only ever local.”
“I started the war here. After a year or so they asked for volunteers, there was going to be a push in Cleveland. I did three, four months there, just brutal fighting. Then the Tabs brought in shit-tons of armor, Toads and IMPs and everything else, and we had to back out, gave the city over to them. Still pissed about that.” He stared down at the rifle, remembering.
“Did a lot more night ops back then. Actually had batteries for our goggles, and there were so many people still living in the city their drones and FLIR were kinda useless. One night our squad went out on patrol, trying to stir stuff up, make something happen, without much luck. ‘Movement to contact’, I believe the military guys called it. We were heading back to our hidey hole when we hear something. We duck and three pickups go sliding by us, quiet as ghosts. I actually heard their tires on the pavement, not their engines, I think they were electric. Maybe hydrogen. Spooky as hell. They rolled up and stopped a block from where we were pretty sure another squad was hiding out. They bail out of their vehicles and start moving up. They had eight guys, and we were just four, but we hit them from the rear, by surprise. Still, it was close, we lost a guy and all of us were injured. Those guys were good.” He hefted the rifle on his lap. “They were all carrying these, and it was a hell of a lot nicer than my rifle at the time, so I took it. All their gear was top notch.”
George grunted. He knew for a fact the only Army troops who ever carried Geissele rifles into combat were Special Forces, but he wasn’t s
ure if he should tell Ed that. You didn’t need a fancy gun to get into this war, George knew, plenty of people had gone up against the agents of the state using rusty shotguns and Hi-Point pistol caliber carbines. Hell, at the beginning of the war, he’d heard a few local federal agents had been killed by a very talented and motivated individual with a compound bow. Arrows went right through soft body armor designed to stop pistol bullets.
“Then I get back here,” Ed said, shaking his head, “and I find Canadians working the roadblocks and patrolling the city. Canadians.”
“Oh, that ‘International Peacekeeping Force’? That didn’t last long.”
Mark, listening in, chuckled. “I guess they thought nobody would shoot at them. Who doesn’t love Canadians? Man, were they wrong. I almost felt bad for them. They lost a lot of people before they pulled out. Decided it wasn’t their fight.”
“Problem was,” George observed, “they were backing the wrong horse. Because they’re socialists, or at least their government is.”
Ed made a face at the memory, but George was right.
“Canadians are subjects, not citizens, and they’ve bent over and taken it from their government for years,” Weasel’s bitter voice floated out of the gloom, the words spat with venom. “Should have followed our example, fought for their freedom, but instead they’ve spent the last decade sitting on their asses, when they weren’t here helping the Tabs out. So fuck those guys. Fucking socialists. You know the difference between a socialist and a communist? It’s the difference between a whore who spits versus swallows. She’s still a whore, she just has commitment issues. Socialists are communists, and communists aren’t people.”
Ed and George traded a look. If nothing else, Weasel was very consistent.
“All that hate’s gonna burn you up, kid,” George called out to him, a smile on his face.