by James Tarr
“Out taking an afternoon stroll?” Early drawled leisurely, back to leaning against the wall. “It’s a hot one, but the breeze helps a bit.”
She was in a blue and white plaid shirt with large checks over tan slacks, and no visible weapons. The front of the shirt was unbuttoned down to her impressive cleavage and her sleeves rolled up to combat the heat. Her long brown hair was pulled pack and tied with a piece of 550 cord. The woman looked from Early to Sarah and back again.
“She’s too young for you, the two of you’ll never make it work,” the woman announced.
Early glanced at Sarah, who blinked in confusion.
“Maybe I’m jes’ arm candy. One a them trophy husbands,” Early opined. “Only kept around for their glorious body and oversize romantic talents.”
The newcomer snorted. “How would I know whether or not that’s a damned lie, I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to get you naked for years.”
Early nodded. “That you have. Consider me one of your few failed missions.” He jabbed a thumb. “Sarah, Brookelynne, Brookelynne, Sarah.” He studied Brookelynne as the woman walked up to them. “Just out wandering through the city at random?”
Brookelynne looked Sarah up and down, then cocked her head at Early. “Aardvark,” she said.
Early nodded. “Buckaroo. You alone?”
She shook her head. “No, the others are covering the front, waiting for a wave.” She looked between the two of them, then past them down the empty hallway. “It just you?” She sounded disappointed.
“Negatory. Big crowd downstairs, waiting for stragglers. You still running with Sylvester?”
“Hell, I’m running Sylvester, Larry caught a round in the mouth last month.”
“Sorry to hear that. Why don’t you reel them in, we’ve got food and water and baby wipes galore downstairs. Toilet paper, and a place to use it. Then we’ll find out what this shindig is all about.”
“You still haven’t been briefed?”
Early shrugged. “Only wanted to do it once, I suppose.”
“Hmm. Well, this should be fun.” She looked Sarah up and down once again, meeting her gaze, a small smile twitching the corner of her mouth.
“You look…healthy. In from out of town?”
Sarah swallowed. “Um, yeah.”
“Welcome to the D,” Brookelynne said, then headed for the front door. She opened it wide and gave a big wave, then stepped back and closed the door. She waited, nearly hidden from anyone outside watching by the glare off the glass.
“She seems, um, friendly,” Sarah said.
Early snorted. “Brooke is what you’d call a libertarian. She likes everyone. And from what I hear, everything.”
“I think you mean libertine.”
“Well, I never did go to college,” Early admitted, “but in this case I reckon we’re both right.”
Uncle Charlie stood in front of the assembled group. “Gentlemen, ladies, glad to see your smiling faces. I wanted to address all of you before I pulled your squad leaders aside and briefed them on your specific missions. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Michael Morris. I’ve been communicating with you dogsoldiers for over two years now, and I have to say it is an honor to finally meet you in person. I,” he waved a hand at the people he’d brought with him, who were flanking him, “we’ve all heard about the conditions inside this city, but I have to say stories and even the pictures didn’t prepare me for it. It’s worse than Los Angeles, and the fact that you continue to not just live here but fight, and fight well, with, I will admit, far too little direct support from us, is mindboggling.”
“Two years? I’ve been dealing with Uncle Charlie for four years,” someone said.
Morris nodded. He was expecting a few interruptions. He tried to keep his face neutral as he gazed out over the audience. The long-suffering dogsoldiers of this city didn’t look like soldiers, they look like half-starved refugees. Refugees geared up for war. He’d heard a term, once, that seemed appropriate, what was it? Murder hobos, that was it. Most of them, he knew, had no prior military experience, and didn’t seem to even know much less use half the lingo the military favored, but apparently combat and wretched conditions combined to weed out the less skilled and motivated, as most of the dogs he’d seen had decent trigger finger discipline and muzzle awareness. At least as good as regular Army troops. While braving hardships far worse than what was seen in most of the country.
He had to admit, it was the weirdest and most irregular Army he’d ever seen or heard of, probably that the country had seen since the Revolutionary War. Nobody was in a uniform or even camouflage, and everybody was using a different rifle. And, unlike the regular army where usually only officers and Special Forces carried handguns, just about every one of the dogsoldiers was sporting a pistol. It seemed to be a symbol of pride or independence or just a flying middle finger toward the government forces that wanted to disarm them.
“Prior to my consolidating the position, ‘Uncle Charlie’ was several different people in our intelligence unit. Our unit’s job has been to do everything we can to track and coordinate resistance efforts in this region, everything within a couple hundred miles of here. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy on the city, as it’s been a conundrum. The military has been undermanned here for years, and it’s only getting worse. It’s practically a skeleton crew, and from what intel we’ve gathered about their current commander, he’s little better than a placeholder. Ineffectual. In fact, we’ve had several opportunities to take him out and I made the call not to, as whoever replaced him would most likely do a better job. I’ll be brutally honest with you though, the problem has always been getting anybody at headquarters to care about any of this.” He gestured at the men, and beyond them. “You’re stretched just as thin, and there’s fuck-all in this city to fight over. Other than the city itself,” he said quickly, raising a hand, “I know it’s home to you, and the Tabs are fucking it up like they’ve been doing for decades. What I mean is there’s no strategic value to controlling it. It would be a moral victory, maybe, but we’re so far behind the lines it wouldn’t be that much of a PR victory.” He paused. “Now, there are some advantages to being forgotten about. From what I hear, none of the IMPs you’re going up against have remote-controlled roof guns, they’ve got to be operated by hand. And you haven’t had to deal with MURVs.”
“Mobile unmanned reconnaissance vehicles,” one of Morris’ people explained when it was obvious a lot of them had never heard the term. “Basically mini tanks driven by remote, size of small cars, nothing but armor and guns. Hard as hell to destroy. Those things killed a lot of good people.”
Morris nodded at the explanation, then looked out over the crowd. “Things, however, have changed. You’re here because we have a plan. This plan has been in the works for over a year. We’ve been laying the groundwork for it, in the city, since last spring. Work crews, combat engineers I guess you could say, doing recon and then earthworks projects that we’ve kept secret, even from you, until now. People inside the wire, in the Blue Zone, providing us detailed intelligence. We had the rough idea of a plan to shake the military’s hold on this city, but we needed not just the right moment, but the right reason. This, this is that right moment. And we have one hell of a reason. In case you haven’t heard, the two sides are going to be sitting down in a few days.”
There was an outburst of noise—exclamations, questions, excited conversation. It went on until George turned around at the front of the crowd and glared them into silence. Then he turned back around and nodded at the light colonel.
Morris continued. “You’re far enough behind the lines that maybe you’re not getting much news, or at least truth. The truth is we’ve been steadily kicking their asses for two years, pushing them back, grinding them down, but they refuse to see the reality of the situation on the ground.”
“Well, hell, hasn’t that been their whole problem from the get-go?” someone asked. That got a few snorts.
“You’re
not wrong,” Morris said, “but specifically this war has been dragging on far longer than anyone could have ever envisioned. Or wanted. When the war started they assumed they would just walk all over us, as they thought they had all the entire government backing them including the unquestioned loyalty of the military. Turns out that wasn’t the case, but we did take quite a pounding for a couple of years. Since then we’ve been clawing at each other’s throats. We’ve always had the benefit of numbers, whereas they’ve had the gear; more tanks, more drones, you name it.”
“Really? We hadn’t noticed,” someone felt obliged to add, which got a few laughs.
“You mentioned Los Angeles,” Ed said. “We’ve been seriously short on real news for years. What can you tell us of the rest of the country? We’ve heard crazy rumors about California.”
“California was a failed state over $1.5 trillion in debt before the war ever broke out,” Morris told them. “Only tax revenue from the other states were keeping it in business and once the war broke out that federal tax money dried up to nothing. They were flooded with illegal immigrants who weren’t paying any taxes but were being provided social services free of charge, not to mention the sixty-plus thousand homeless people just in the city of Los Angeles. There weren’t many people working, and when the war broke out a significant chunk of those decided to move elsewhere. So the state was left with a whole bunch of people whose lives revolved around government handouts, what we like to call the FSA, the Free Shit Army. When the free shit stopped they lost their collective minds and went on the march.”
Morris looked over the crowd. “Even though there was never any actual combat between the Tabs and the ARF in LA, the riots and civil unrest in both San Francisco and Los Angeles lasted for most of a year. Big chunks went up in flames, and large areas look like this city.”
“And then Mexico moved in?” somebody asked.
“Not Mexico per se,” Morris told them, “but the cartels which are pretty much running the country. Now they run everything in coastal California from Los Angeles south. If this war against the Tabs ever ends we’re then going to have to go over there and clean that mess up before we can be a whole country again.”
Morris took a breath and continued. “As for the rest of the country, for most of the past year the fronts, such as they are, have been very stable. We control a lot more territory than they do, but they’ve consolidated their forces in large cities and urban areas, those areas of the country that have always embraced government overreach as long as they were getting the bread and circuses they were voting for. What’s the phrase, you can vote your way into communism, but you have to shoot your way out? The thinking high up is that the only way we are really going to retake those cities is by going in and rooting them out. It would require the worst kind of door-to-door and block-to-block fighting you can imagine, like what we all saw at the start of the war. Honestly, nobody wants that, it’d be a meatgrinder, a modern Stalingrad. We’d lose huge numbers of people even if we won, so we’re hoping we can convince them their position is untenable. We control almost all the farmland, and have cut off most of their food supplies.”
“A medieval-style siege?” someone said. “How long will that take?” He sounded dubious.
“Too long,” Morris agreed. “China, Russia, every communist or left-leaning country has been donating what resources they can to the Tabs in hopes of getting their claws into this country once the war ends. Food, fuel, ammo, whatever. Because they're assuming we are going to lose. Because with their worldview they cannot envision us winning. We don’t know how many supplies they’re getting, or what their reserves are, but intelligence tells us it’s barely enough, and that’s in addition to getting pushed back in the field. They’re in a bad spot and they know it, which is why they’ve agreed to that sit-down just a few days from now.”
That caused another burst of excited noise from the assembled fighters, with dozens of shouted questions. Morris waved them down.
“The two sides are going to be sitting down across from each other in just a day or two, that’s the information that I was given. And that’s about all the detailed information I was given about that meet, I don’t even know where it is. But, if you haven’t heard, two days ago the ARF liberated a detention center and freed over two thousand people the government had there. Consider that a test run, to see if the Tabs would get so pissed off they’d walk away from the meeting. The meeting has not been cancelled, so we still have our green light for this mission. It showed them we’re still strong. And it shows us how desperate they are.”
“Are they going to surrender?” somebody asked, which got a lot of laughs. Very few of the dogsoldiers there could envision the Tabs surrendering.
“I didn’t think we were anywhere close to them surrendering,” someone else said over the noise of the crowd.
“This will never be over until one side gets defeated,” Morris heard.
Barker was right in front of Morris and growled, “There’s no way to peacefully coexist with a side that for generations has been trying to restrict your freedom, control everything you do, and put you in jail for exercising your God-given rights and daring to question the all-knowing and all-powerful government. The shooting just made this official, we had a cold war in this country between the two sides for decades before that.”
Morris nodded and pointed at the man. “While I will agree that as a general rule all politicians suck, at least the ones on our side know there’s no compromise with the other side. Compromise is what got us into trouble in the first place. As for the ones on the other side…” He gave an expansive shrug. “Most all of them were assassinated in the first few years. A lot of judges, too, back when the powers-that-be were still calling this ‘widespread civil unrest’ instead of the war it was. But there’s always more where they came from. So that’s where you guys come in.” He looked around at all their excited faces. “Officially the two sides are coming together simply for talks, but the Tabs are really hurting, we know it, and they know we know it even though they won’t admit it. There’s very little armor left. We’ve barely got any in the heavy combat areas and we’ve got more than the Tabs. Only reason there’s still tanks in this city is because the CO here is protecting them. And because they barely have enough fuel to run patrols. As for the rest of the country, they keep losing people, they keep losing territory, and us liberating that re-education camp a hundred miles behind their lines is, hopefully, just a taste. The thinking, the hope is that if we can hit them far harder than they expect in places that they don’t think we should even have a presence, we can use it to get them contemplating, maybe even talking about surrender.”
“You mean a ceasefire?”
Morris answered the faceless question. “No, not just a ceasefire, an actual surrender.”
“I just don’t think that will happen as long as any politicians on the other side are sucking air,” Brookelynne said loudly.
“It ain’t the politicians who are pulling the triggers and fighting on the line,” somebody else observed.
“You’re right,” Morris said. “They really don’t want to give up. They’re led by a number of true believers, the same kind of people who got us into this mess in the first place, who didn’t care that socialism and communism had never worked, ever, anywhere, they were sure this time would be different, if they just raised taxes high enough, jailed or executed enough of the right people…” His face grew dark, but he shook off the anger. “We’re hoping we can get some of the people over there, particularly their military leaders, to see the light. We want to show them that they are in a far worse position than they thought. That’s why I’m here. We want to initiate a number of big strikes deep inside enemy lines, in areas that aren’t really contested, or haven’t been since the beginning of the war. Not just this city but in a number of them around the country, places they’ve controlled for years. We want to turn their world upside down.”
“So what’s the objective?”
someone impatiently asked.
“The object is to hit them hard. Hit them so hard that their losses compromise their position in this city, and completely shake their perceptions. A city way behind enemy lines, a city where the war, except for a few snipers and malcontents, is supposed to be over. And this city is far from the only place this is happening. We want to show them that we don’t give a fuck that it’s been ten years, we’ve only begun to fight. When you’re sitting down to a negotiation, you want as much leverage as you can possibly get. You want to negotiate from a position of strength, and if everywhere they thought they were safe is on fire…”
The Lieutenant Colonel moved his gaze around the room and smiled thinly. “Maybe you feel like you haven't been doing your part, that everyone else has been doing the heavy lifting. Maybe you feel that you’ve been abandoned by the ARF, barely getting any support or supplies to support your fight. Maybe you’re running out of hope because nothing in the city seems worth fighting for. All of that ends now.” His voice grew firm. “We have a chance not just to do some serious damage, maybe cripple their forces stationed here, but to use those gains as leverage to force them into considering an armistice or complete surrender.”
“To do that…I’m going to need you to pick a fight that you can’t win,” he told them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Morris had the leaders from the five squads present for the detailed mission briefing—Ed from Theodore, Brookelynne from Sylvester, Barker from Kermit, Chan from Yosemite, and Hannibal from Flintstone. All together the five squads contained thirty-two dogsoldiers, twenty-nine men and three women. Not nearly as many as the LTC would have liked, but you worked with what you had.
The Irregulars were just that in every way, operating behind the lines and, usually, without direct support, but that didn’t mean they were a wholly autonomous unit. ARF Command did what it could to support and administrate them, and Morris, as Uncle Charlie, did his best to get to know not just how many people were in the squads but the men commanding them. Ed, commanding Theodore, had the most seniority of any of the squad leaders, and was a Captain in the ARF, although his rank was a secret known only to a few.