DAY 748 • 9:15 A.M.
“Rook One to King Three, two Indians and two raptors are up and coming your way.”
John clicked his mike twice to acknowledge receipt of the message and did not reply. Fredericks said they didn’t have cockpit cameras, but they obviously did have night vision and undoubtedly radio-tracking gear, as well. Rook One was his new watch station based up along the parkway looking directly down on Asheville, a position the reivers had created over a year earlier, manned now by three watchers from those former enemies, concealed in a bunker that one could pass within five feet of and still miss.
“Sound the siren again!” John shouted, retreating back to his watch position above the hardware store across from the town square. Everyone in the council, now hunkered down in Gaither Hall, had argued he should be up there, but he felt compelled to witness what was about to happen, praying that Fredericks was just going to make a demonstration of force and nothing more. Surely he did not want a full-scale fight and that this was a bluff to overawe. If Fredericks put some troops on the ground from the Black Hawks and made no further moves other than have the Apaches circle for a while, then even at this late date, some kind of common sense would prevail.
“I think I hear them,” Maury announced, leaning out the second-floor window above the hardware store.
“They can haul ass,” John replied, looking off vacantly. “You’ve gone in aboard them, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Even though it scares the crap out of you, it’s a rush every time.”
“It’s why kids are willing to get shot at; everything tied into getting shot at is such a rush, and they figure it won’t be them that get it. I pray to God this is a bluff.”
He could hear them now, as well, coming in fast, the thump of the approaching rotors echoing off the empty streets … louder and louder … and then a flash of light raced past the window.
“Jesus!” John barely had time to cry before the first salvo of rockets slammed into the town hall and fire station. There was a sound like tearing cloth, a rippling chaos of noise, another flash of light, and two more explosions tearing into the town hall complex, the concussion from the blasts shattering the windowpanes over John’s head, showering the room with glass. The first Apache zoomed straight overhead so that John instinctively ducked as it roared over the town square, dodging into a hard bank to the right to avoid the billowing clouds of smoke. There was more gunfire and two more rocket impacts into what was left of the complex, the second helicopter peeling to the right, the two weaving, gaining altitude.
In response, there was a scatter of shots from the ground, nearly anything fired from the ground ineffective, even if it hit. The troops were breaking fire discipline, but it was understandable in their rage at such wanton aggression. These were not the vulnerable Hueys of Vietnam; the Apaches were ground-attack helicopters, the best that John’s nation could produce before the war, designed to take nearly any small-arms fire from the ground and just keep on flying.
The Black Hawks? If they thought they were going to drop troops into the town square again after what the Apaches had done, it was going to be a very short and quick suicide mission, and something within John prayed that Fredericks would not be so stupid as to order his troops into such a mission. The entire perimeter was armed with troops far better trained than what Fredericks could throw at them.
“Better get back from the window, John,” Maury said, pointing to the northeast where the two Apaches had leveled off and were now coming back in. And then, for a chilling instant, John’s eyes were blinded by the distinctive red sparkle of a laser sight. He dived for the floor and scurried to the back of the room. If these choppers were equipped with the facial recognition technology rumored to be in development before the Day, they would have just painted him with that laser, and within seconds, the computer—if indeed such were on board and loaded with his profile and pictures—would have come back with a positive ID, and this building and all in it would be dead. There was no telling what high-tech equipment positioned in the Middle East on the Day had survived to now be used here.
Seconds later, every window in the hardware store shattered from the minigun bursts, and for a few terrifying seconds, John thought his worst fears were true. He crouched down low and was suddenly covered with green sludge from an exploding can of latex paint stored in the room, glass shards covering him. If they had put a rocket into the room, he now realized his folly for being here—he and his friend would be dead.
The two Apaches thundered past. He could hear the shifting of the rotors, the changing tempo as they arced up, breaking left and right and preparing for another strafing run.
“John, I suggest we abandon this place!” Maury shouted. “Once they’re just past us, we break out the back door, head farther down Cherry Street, and hunker down there until this storm has passed.”
John nodded agreement, peering up over the shattered windowsill to watch as the Apaches did another southwest-to-northeast strafing run. The hospital was going up in flames. Fortunately, all had been evacuated along with the precious supplies the evening before, and for the sake of their souls, he hoped the two pilots flying this mission knew that fact, because otherwise they deserved to be damned as three rockets slammed into the extensive array of buildings, and a fourth, going a bit high, took out the post office.
By the time they had passed, John and Maury, dragging the portable two-way radio, had retreated through the back door of a favorite old haunt, the used bookstore. The next strike strafed the length of State Street, incendiary rounds igniting several fires. The second helicopter followed, curving down along Cherry Street, such a beloved lane of their community, shattering windows, and then there was a distant explosion. John assumed they were hitting the empty Ingrams’ market and the warehouse next to it where the L-3 had been stored. During the night, Billy had hurriedly taxied the precious plane along the interstate highway, concealing it within the cavernous remains of one of the buildings in the abandoned conference center at Ridgecrest.
The sound of the Apache rotors receded, and after several minutes, John ventured out onto Cherry Street, heart filled with a cold rage. Cherry Street. What threat did it ever represent? It was the heart of the old tourists’ center, made up of antique shops, several restaurants, art shops, quaint and welcoming to him when he had first come here years earlier with Mary and two small girls. It was the street he had walked on bearing a dozen Beanie Babies for Jennifer’s twelfth birthday on the Day—a remnant of all that his country had once been in a far distant, far more innocent age. Why tear this apart other than for the sake of willful destructiveness, piled on top of all the destructiveness of a nation collapsing, perhaps collapsing even before the Day?
Rather than tears, he felt nothing but cold rage and anger now.
“The Black Hawks!” Maury cried, pointing straight up.
They were indeed up, far up above any hope of ground fire, circling a thousand or more feet over the ever expanding flaming destruction of downtown Black Mountain.
“Observing, just observing for now,” John said. Then he saw one of the two peeling off, heading north and then turning east for the valley of Montreat.
“No, not that.” He sighed, but a moment later, he could hear the distant echo of gunfire and explosions.
“Try the back roads with the Jeep?” John asked his friend.
“I ruined the paint job last night, splashed it with a lot of camo. It’s parked at my house.”
“Let’s go, then,” John said bitterly, and the two set off at a jog up the three blocks up to Maury’s house, which overlooked the park and Lake Tomahawk.
Minutes later, they faced a risky decision. For several hundred yards, there was only one road, devoid of overhead canopy, the final approach to the Montreat stone gate from Black Mountain. Once past the gate, they could dodge up a side road and again be under cover.
There was definitely gunfire coming down from above, and he could hear staccato bursts of fire in return. Smoke was rising up, and his heart raced. Jen’s old home in the once peaceful valley was just a short walk from the campus. Dale had knowledge of exactly where he lived. Had he gone so far as to target it? He had ordered Jen to go to the communal shelters, tucked into the basements of various campus buildings, and Elizabeth was to leave Ben with her and report to her unit. Makala was in the basement hospital in the Assembly Inn, and unless the helicopters were carrying Hellfire missiles, all should be safe there. But then again, if they had Apaches and standard air-to-ground missiles, might they have some of the deadly Hellfires, as well?
“Hang on to your ass!” Maury shouted, and he was half laughing as he shifted into low gear and peeled off the road, dodging through the kids’ summer camp just below the gate, sprinting up torturous dirt roads, and splashing through a mountain rivulet. For the first time, John saw that there was indeed more than one road into Montreat, but one would have to be insane or desperate and in possession of a good four-wheel-drive Jeep or all-terrain vehicle to survive the passage. They dropped down at last onto a paved road, John shouting to just drive past his home. It was still intact, though an old cottage—as the locals called it—was in flames, and John wondered if the incendiaries poured into it had been misaimed and intended for his dwelling instead.
His heart sank as they came down Louisiana Street and saw plumes of smoke rising from the campus, and then they ducked low as a Black Hawk roared overhead, heading back down the valley.
The sound of its rotors receded, but off in the distance and high above, he could hear the other one still circling, indeed like a hawk waiting to pounce.
Strange how memory plays, he realized as the thought came of cartoons he had seen as a kid, where a hawk or other bird would suddenly transform into a World War II plane as it dived—if a bad guy, a Stuka, if a good guy, usually a twin-tailed P-38. Were the Black Hawks now indeed the bad guys? His heart rebelled at the thought. They were the tools of a bastard out of control.
As they turned onto the campus and raced past the small power station, which had been the source of so much hope and inspiration just a few weeks earlier, representing the best of what he believed his country would again be, he saw the roof of Gaither Chapel ablaze.
He cried out in rage as Maury raced them up the hill, swerving into the drive in front of the building. A score of his old students were up on the roof, armed with axes, and crowbars tearing back the shingling, buckets of water laboriously passed up along several ladders. Others stood guard, scanning the sky, weapons of every sort raised. Several observers with binoculars watched the horizon or focused in on the observation helicopter circling high overhead, and John just had an instinctive feeling that Fredericks was high up there, watching, and well out of range of ground fire.
Grace, carbine over her shoulder, ran up to him and saluted, face blackened from obviously having helped to fight the fire.
“Report. First off, any casualties?”
“Three dead, sir.” She started to choke up.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “Focus, Lieutenant. Work with me. Who are they?”
She rattled off a few names, one of them an elderly professor who collapsed inside the chapel when it was hit and started to burn.
“Focus on now, Grace. That’s your job, remember? Focus and go back to it.”
“Sir, the command post down in the basement is still running. They asked for you to report in.”
His admonishment to his young lieutenant of the college troops now reflected back on him. Again that nagging doubt. Was it the concussion of a couple of weeks back, or was he indeed losing his edge? Of course, after being out of touch for at least forty-five minutes, he should get a situation report and plot his next move. This first strike was a softening up; by this time, a ground assault could have rolled over his outpost on the interstate and be heading straight into town.
“Keep at it, Grace. You guys are doing great.” He patted her on the shoulder and then returned her salute before running down to the basement entry, the window shattered.
His communications team was inside, and they looked up at him with relief as he came in. They had adroitly run their wires from a basement window through the trees and anchored them to the roof of the adjoining classroom building. Unless on the ground and staring straight up, no one could spot them—though if they transmitted out for more than a few seconds, an equipped unit could zero in on their location. Without Hellfire missiles, fuel-air explosives, or a large, high explosive, digging them out would be difficult, but it would certainly mean the ultimate destruction of his beloved chapel. Once he had time enough, he would pull this command center out of here and move it to a less precious building, such as the boys’ dorm, a hardy structure of concrete and cinderblocks from the 1960s with zero sentimental attachment for nearly everyone, even those who lived there.
“Any reports from our forward observers?” John asked.
One of his operators—it was Elayne from the post office—looked up after removing one of the two decidedly old-fashioned headphones. “John, forward outpost reports the two Apaches are back down and obviously rearming. No report of any kind of movement along the interstate, Highway 70, or anywhere else. We are getting an incessant signal in the last ten minutes from someone claiming to be Fredericks. He is on our primary frequency and is now at times overriding and jamming it.”
John motioned for the headphones and slipped them on. They felt strange, for after all, a few years earlier, he’d used earbuds, and these were definitely retro from the 1960s or before.
There was static, and then a few seconds later, he heard the voice again, and it was indeed Fredericks.
“Come on, John, that was just the first move. Talk to me before I send them back in again.”
Damn it. What to do? Transmit back for even more than a few seconds, and chances were that Fredericks was indeed overhead, his helicopter equipped with tracking gear, and they would get a rocket down their throats, killing every kid on the roof of the chapel.
And yet he so wanted to reply to see if there was some way to call this madness off—and if not, to tell the bastard to go to hell.
He was being baited, played.
He looked at Elayne, removing the headphones and handing them back to her. “Code word scramble,” he said. It was the signal for the teams on the net to switch to the first backup frequency, using old-fashioned ham radios and handheld units that the Franklin family had protected and stashed away before the Day and, in a surprise gesture, had offered to John just the day before. Elayne announced the one-word signal and then immediately shut down transmission and powered off, as did the others, and they would now be in the dark for the next thirty minutes before powering up again.
If the Apaches were back down to refuel and rearm, they could be back in as little as twenty minutes.
John could now guess what Fredericks was up to. There would be no ground attack for hours, perhaps not even for days. He would not risk his limited assets. He had tasted good blood with his deadly surprise raid on the reivers. He was now taking it up a notch. As long as fuel and ammunition held out, he would just keep sending the Apaches in, believing that it would wear John and those with him down.
If he needed to report back to Bluemont, there would be no casualties on his side, just a nice request for more fuel and ammunition, couched such that it would look like he was doing the most effective of jobs suppressing rebellions with minimum cost to his side—an efficient job that always looked good on paper.
Cursing under his breath, John dashed out of the communications room and onto the front lawn of the chapel. Each breath was painful and his jaw ached, but he needed to focus and ignore the pain.
The students had managed to contain the fires, but they were still tearing back shingles to get at the last of the smoldering blaze. The aged, dried chestnut within burned easily.
The sight of them up on the roof while others stood watchful guard reminded him of the heroic efforts of Londoners during the Blitz, the faded black-and-white images of crews struggling to save their beloved Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Watching them at work, spotters ready to shout a warning to get off the roof, filled him with pride. He looked across the valley to the Assembly Inn, where the hospital was concealed in the basement. To his horror, he saw a couple of Bartlett’s old VW buses racing up to the front of the building, the aging hippie now playing ambulance driver for the casualties in town. Surely the Black Hawk circling above was watching every move.
“Maury, we gotta move now!” John cried.
As he ran to the Jeep parked in front of the building, he looked up. The Black Hawk was still circling. He watched the chopper as he climbed aboard the Jeep, and Maury raced down the road around one of the dorms.
“Pull up to the old gym!” John shouted. “I’m getting out here. You take off the other way, find a place under good concealment to park, and make your way on foot to the Assembly Inn.”
Maury grinned and nodded, and John jumped out of the vehicle. Maury continued on, and John stood for half a minute in plain view, looking straight up at the circling Black Hawk before going into the gym. If the chopper overhead did have advanced tracking capability, he now wanted to be seen going into the abandoned building. The cavernous basketball court was dark, empty, the air within dank and musty. It was a building the college wanted to replace even before the Day, and it had seen no use since. John loitered for five minutes or so and suddenly fought with the terrible urge for a smoke. He wished he had Ernie and his pocketful of cigars with him. He could sure use one now.
He finally slipped out one of the back doors and looked up. The helicopter had shifted a bit back toward Black Mountain. He took a deep, painful breath and ran behind the small dance hall barn. Rather than use the road bridge, he ducked down low and splashed through the tree-covered stream that fed into Lake Susan. He crouched for a minute between several abandoned cars parked on the far side and then sprinted the last few feet into a side entrance of the Assembly Inn.
If Fredericks had a means of tracking him, he had done his best to throw him off.
Once through the door, he was met by chaos. The basement had been converted into a temporary hospital. The Assembly Inn had once been a rather upscale hotel for conferences, and shortly before the Day, it had gone through an extensive remodeling. It had a long history, including housing enemy diplomats in the opening months of the Second World War. There had been little use for it since the Day. Of course, there were no more tourists and conferences, and with such a radical population decline in the year afterward, those who needed housing simply moved into abandoned homes while students remaining on the campus on the far side of Lake Susan had found that old familiar haunts were of the most comfort and stayed there. Those who married moved in together and lived not just with their spouse but beloved friends and even some of the staff who remained, as well. The college had become something of an old-style commune of sorts, led by the moral guidance of President King and Reverend Black while the beautiful Assembly Inn on the far side of the Lake Susan had slipped into disrepair. It had been designated a year earlier as the fallback position of a hospital and refugee center if ever Black Mountain were overrun or destroyed, but little had been done other than board up some windows damaged in an ice storm the previous winter.
But within the last twenty-four hours, it again had a use as Makala organized the transfer of the thirty-eight surviving wounded refugees and several dozen family members of the wounded who had trekked over the mountains in search of help. The town’s precious reserve of gas had been nearly depleted as a result, but no one questioned that. She had even managed to get all their emergency medical supplies out of the hospital and fire station.
Several dozen wounded from the morning’s first attack had been brought in, and again Makala had assumed her role as the “angel of choosing,” marking each incoming case on the forehead with red lipstick, sending some into immediate surgery, the center rigged up in a former classroom illuminated by the morning light streaming in through east-facing windows. Those marked as ones were sent to wait in the rear of the foyer, and the tragic threes were sent into another back office with the minimal comfort of mattresses and slightly moldy sheets dragged down from long-vacant rooms on the upper floor. No Red Cross flag had been set up out front or atop the building. That would only draw Fredericks’s attention.
As John walked down the packed corridor, Makala looked up from her work with a young woman in her late teens, obviously very pregnant but with no sign of injury.
“Sweetheart, you’ve gone into labor,” Makala announced, smiling at her, clutching the frightened woman’s hand. “You’re most likely hours out, and once things settle down, we’ll get you a comfy bed, and I know a granny who was a midwife who will help you. Okay?”
The girl tried to smile, her face soaked with sweat. An elderly couple, perhaps her grandparents, braced her on either side while a young nurse, dressed in camo but wearing a medic’s armband, said she’d lead them to a safe place.
Makala looked up at John, smiled, and then dashed the few feet between them to embrace him tightly. “I’ve been worried sick about you all night.” She sighed. “Thank God you’re safe.”
“How are things here?” John asked.
“Not bad, but not good.” She drew closer. “Actually, when compared to the before times, it’s practically medieval,” she whispered. There was pain in her voice. “The ones I mark as threes? Nearly all could have been saved before this, and John, everyone in this town knows what a three means. They look up at me wide eyed, saying, ‘I’m not a three, am I?’ I lie to nearly all of them. Damn all this.”
She held him tightly, and then he tensed, looking toward the open window. The helicopters were coming back to Montreat.
“Everyone!” John shouted, breaking the hushed whispering—which, even now, everyone felt was the way one should talk in a hospital—his loud, booming voice even startling Makala. “It might get a bit rough in the next few minutes. I need all of you to work with me as a team. Any wounded in the rooms facing Lake Susan, we have to get them out now and into the back rooms away from any windows. Those of you with vehicles, get them the hell out of here. You only got a minute or so to do it. Now move!”
John looked passed Makala and saw the elderly couple helping the young pregnant woman, who was bent double from a contraction and crying out. John ran up, shouldered her family aside, and picked her up. Ignoring the sharp pain in his chest and dashing for the back room, he set her down none too gently.
Makala had taken charge, as well, shouting for people to move as she ran into the surgery center that needed as much lighting as possible and thus had been set up in an east-facing room. John looked out the window and saw one of the Apaches swinging up over Lookout Gap, lining up for a strafing run across the valley, the second one turning behind it.
Surely the son of a bitch had not ordered this!
“Move them now!” Makala shouted. “Move them now!”
Three surgeons were working on wounded set side by side, one of them Doc Wagner, a young assistant by his side handing him instruments as Wagner bent over to pull something out of a boy’s chest, which he had split wide open.
“Doc, go now!” John screamed.
“Not now, I can’t!” Wagner shouted back, still intent on the forceps buried in the boy’s chest.
John looked from him to Makala, who had shoved aside two nurses struggling to stop the bleeding from an old man’s shattered arm and was trying to maneuver his makeshift gurney out of the room. John looked back out the window. The Apaches were skimming down the slope of Lookout Gap, guns blazing, shots ripping across the campus and now slashing the waters of Lake Susan, coming straight toward them.
He tackled Makala, knocking her to the floor and rolling with her up against the outer wall, the window a foot over their heads shattering into a thousand shards. A split second later, Wagner was dead, nearly torn in half from a bursting twenty-millimeter shell that also killed his assistant and the boy they were both trying to save. For a second, the room was a cacophony of exploding twenty-millimeter shells, shattering glass, blood splatters, screams, and hysteria. John’s memory flashed to the videos posted on the Internet showing the work of gunships killing terrorists in the years after 9/11, the comments on the web pages nearly orgasmic with delight, laughter, and jokes. Yeah, they had been enemies who deserved to die, but had all those commentators ever seen people up close as twenty-millimeter shells exploded in their bodies?
Makala was screaming not with fear but horror at the sight, and John buried her head against his chest, holding her tightly, forcing her up against the wall and shielding her with his body. Where were Elizabeth and Ben in all this madness? Elizabeth’s post was on campus. He had caught a glimpse of her as he’d left the communications center, but he had not had time to speak to her. Ben, thank God, was in a shelter in the basement of the girls’ dorm.
He spared a quick glance up over the edge of the windowsill and then instantly ducked back down. The second helicopter was nearly on the tail of the first, which had roared overhead in a sharp banking turn to avoid slamming into the mountains that bordered the northwest slope of the valley. Another volley of fire ripped into the room, but there was nothing left to kill or destroy; all three surgical stations were a shambles. The chopper roared overhead, and John stood up, pulling Malaka to her feet.
“Run!” he screamed. “Get into the back rooms. If they had put a rocket in here, we’d all be dead. Now run, and keep down until they’re gone!”
She looked about wide eyed, and for the first time since they had met long ago, he could see that she had become completely overwhelmed with the horror of it all.
John pushed her into the hallway, which was a sea of chaos. He heard the helicopters coming back, and a few seconds later came that surreal sound almost like yards of cloth being torn, but it was not hitting the Assembly Inn this time. He cracked open an emergency exit to look out and saw the old gym getting torn apart, and this time, two rockets were unleashed into it, blowing off part of the roof, igniting fires within.
He smiled grimly.
So you did see me go in there, he thought with bitterness. He wondered if their supply of rockets was running low, perhaps the last two reserved for a personal strike against him. If so, it had spared those in this building.
The helicopters continued on down the valley after the two strikes, and he slipped out the door, crouching low. A minute later, he heard distant explosions. They were back to ripping Black Mountain apart.
He went back down the corridor and spotted Makala in one of the storage rooms, struggling with a set of forceps to dig into an elderly woman’s arm to close off an artery and clamp it shut. Though the woman was obviously in agony, she was talking calmly to Makala, reassuring Makala that she was doing a wonderful job. Makala clamped the forceps shut, telling the woman to hold on to them with her good hand and that someone would be along shortly to tie the artery off.
In a gesture John thought nothing less than surreal, the elderly woman first reached out with her good hand and gently stroked Makala’s cheek, telling her that she was a beautiful woman whom she would pray for. Makala actually leaned against her for a moment, beginning to sob again. The woman saw John, and he recognized her as an old friend who had worked in the bank and then disappeared into retirement some years earlier.
“John, I hope you are well,” the woman said in a soothing voice. “I think your wife needs a good hug before you go running off again.”
Her tone so startled John that it actually did take him aback. He smiled, thanked her, and put his hands on Makala’s shoulders, turning her around.
“Sweetheart, I have to go now. And you have to do your job. I love you.”
She hugged him tightly, then exhaled deeply, drew in another breath, and stepped back.
It was mostly just acting now, but for the moment, she had regained some control. The shock, the nightmares, the waking up screaming in the middle of the night, that would come afterward, as it did for so many veterans, but for the moment, she could still do what she was trained to do.
“I love you,” he whispered. “Be safe.”
“And you too, John.”
As he turned to go back out into the madness, the old woman looked at him and smiled. “God will watch over the two of you,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on her, John.”
That nearly broke him as he came back to kiss her on the forehead and then went back out into the fight.
He found Maury with his Jeep, tucked into a side road a couple of blocks to the south of the Assembly Inn. As he climbed into the Jeep, he heard more gunfire and looked back to see one of the Black Hawks circling high, undoubtedly to avoid small-arms fire, pouring a long stream of tracers and incendiaries into the campus, igniting numerous small fires.
“All right, let’s try to divert that son of a bitch,” John announced, Maury grinning at him as he reversed the Jeep out of the driveway of a private home.
“Where to?”
“Right down Montreat Road, but get ready to break up a side road.”
“Sure thing.”
They turned out onto the main road in and out of the cove, most of it well covered with trees. Once the gate was in sight, John told Maury to slow down while John stood half up and kept a very close watch overhead. It sounded like the Apaches had finished up their third run over Black Mountain and were most likely heading back to Asheville to rearm. But one of the armed Black Hawks was still up there, and though John wanted to be seen, he definitely did not want to get the last surprise of his life by a Black Hawk suddenly rearing up from behind some trees and unleashing on him and his friend.
The observation Black Hawk remained, slowly circling above Montreat for another half minute while Maury guided the Jeep through the stone gate and continued on the main road into town. The circling helicopter swerved slightly and turned south.
“Okay, get us the hell under some cover!” John shouted, and Maury pulled into the camp just south of the Montreat gate, the forest-canopied hiking paths and bridle trails the perfect place to hide from eyes looking down from above. John prayed they didn’t have infrared, as well, because if so, the hot block of Maury’s engine and exhaust could be their death signature.
A Black Hawk suddenly came swooping in from the east and banked up sharply. It was a tense moment, as if they were probing, trying to flush game, John feeling like a terrified rabbit that knew it must remain absolutely still even though the hunter was but a few feet away. The helicopter then leveled out, continued on a few hundred yards, and hovered for a moment, shooting up an abandoned convenience store farther down the road before continuing on with its search.
Continuing along back lanes, the two pressed back into town. Parking in an alleyway on the north side of State Street, John and Maury slipped across the road and back into John’s first observation post above the hardware store. A fair part of the downtown had been shot apart, a dozen or more buildings aflame. The Posse had never gotten this far, the damage of that battle confined to the east end of the town. It was heartbreaking to see the devastation wrought by two helicopter air strikes. Though shops had been long closed, their owners who were still alive were desperately trying to contain the flames to salvage what little they had left.
His firefighting teams were under the strictest orders not to mobilize out except for fires that threatened shelters and hospitals. Several residents of Cherry Street, seeing John slipping along a back lane and into the rear of the hardware store, called out to him for help. He paused.
“God forgive me, we can’t help you!” he cried. “Any crowd right now will draw fire from those bastards up there!” No one argued further or cursed him as the bringer of this doom, a curse he half felt he really did deserve.
Once back in this reserve position, he took in the sight of the wreckage, the smell of wet, charred wood, and the stoic gaze of the two old radio hams who were monitoring traffic.
“News?”
“Three choppers are back on the ground, according to our observer up on the parkway. They also report it looks like their fuel bladders are running low.”
John nodded at that. They certainly had been profligate these last two days, burning more fuel than he would ever dream of allocating for months of productive labors. With a regular army unit of Apaches going into action from a forward deployment, there would be enough fuel, ammo, and rockets on hand to support several dozen sorties before calling up the chain of command for additional support. In Desert Storm, an entire brigade of airborne—the largest air assault since the Second World War—had gone in with scores of helicopters and set up a forward base inside Iraq with dozens of the new fuel bladders and had torn the hell out of the rear lines of the Republican Guard. It was the first full demonstration of air/ground warfare that had been refined in the long years after Vietnam.
Fredericks was most likely operating on a short leash, and he had to gamble on that one now. A strike against the reivers, with four aircraft or sorties. Upward of a dozen more sorties now against him since early this morning. Surely he was beginning to come up short on fuel and ammunition. Hopefully the air attacks were finished, at least for now.
“Report coming in that a fourth helicopter is coming in to land,” one of the hams announced.
John nodded. “You still have the frequency they are operating on?”
The ham nodded.
“Switch to transmit.”
“John, they’ll track us the same way they tracked that forward recon unit.”
“He’s on the ground or just about down. Now’s the time to send him a message, and then we move this unit down south of the railroad tracks.”
The ham smiled, nodded, and handed John the mike. “Fredericks, do you read me?”
There was a moment of static and then the click of another radio coming online. “Who is this?”
“You know damn well who it is.”
A pause.
“You drag out your response to more than thirty seconds, and I shut down,” John replied sharply.
“You called me,” Fredericks replied.
“Just to tell you this, Fredericks: I’ll not be satisfied now until I see you dead, and I hope your people are listening to me. Your alleged leader has violated the most fundamental laws of humanity, of warfare, and of what our country and Constitution stood for. Refuse to obey his orders, and you’ll be spared. Comply further, and you are as guilty as he is, and in the eyes of the world, you are no longer any part of what America was and will continue to be.”
He clicked the transmission off before Dale could even reply.
“Let them stew on that,” John said coldly. “Wait twenty minutes, then get on the horn and send out the coded message for our unit leaders to meet in the Ingrams’ building at six tonight. It is time for some payback. I’m heading back to the hospital.”
Though there was no indication that another strike was up, Maury maneuvered cautiously until they finally pulled up a block behind the Assembly Inn, and he walked the rest of the way.
He thought he had learned to get used to it; an essential part of his job had become visiting the wounded and dying on a near daily basis after the battle with the Posse and the numerous other skirmishes afterward. He had dealt with bullet wounds to the gut, students facing death with all painkillers depleted, asking him to hold them and pray. He had dealt with far too much, but this was different. The hospital had been deliberately attacked, nearly a hundred within, most of them already wounded and torn apart by the strafing attacks.
Drying blood was splattered against the walls in the corridor. Out behind the Assembly Inn was now an open-air morgue. More than seventy dead from the attack lay side by side, covered with blankets and bloodstained sheets. Families and loved ones were sitting beside bodies, lost in shock, and he recognized many of them, horrified to see a former student holding the lifeless hand of a girl he had married but a month earlier.
All of it filled him with cold, intent calculations as he sat down beside Forrest’s cot, his room a storage closet that was windowless and stifling hot in the late-afternoon heat, the scent of unwashed bodies, blood, and filth hanging strong in the room. John coughed to conceal his gag.
Forrest chuckled weakly. “Guess I stink like shit,” he whispered.
“Well, you ain’t no bouquet of roses, Forrest.”
“How bad is it out there?”
“Bad.” John sighed. “More than a hundred dead here and a couple of hundred wounded downtown. It is devastating.”
“I feel responsible for this,” Forrest said. “You doing what you did for us.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Turn away a bunch of kids?”
“You could have taken the kids and dumped me by the side of the road or turned me over to Fredericks, and all this could have been avoided.” He pointed out to the hallway that was a charnel house.
John shook his head. “We both went through the same training a long time ago, Forrest. Our wars were different, we took prisoners and treated the wounded.”
Forrest chuckled. “Well, at least when CNN was around.” He paused. “But yeah, unless we were dealing with a sniper or some bastard who had killed a lot of innocent people, we still took them in.”
“Handing you over to Fredericks is not what this community is about. And besides, I owed you one. That guy with you, George, tried to take me out, and you were the one who put him down. So what the hell was I supposed to do? But honestly, I didn’t expect this level of retaliation.”
“And now you wish you had done different?”
“Hell no! If that bastard is willing to do this, he would have wound up doing it anyhow at some point, to others if not to us, Things are spinning out of control. I pray it’s not all the way up to Bluemont, but this is not the way to pull this country back together.”
“So why are you here?” Forrest whispered.
“I think you and your people are the experts we need now.”
“Go on.”
John ran his idea past Forrest, who nodded with approval. “You have to act now, tonight,” Forrest replied, “otherwise, tomorrow will be even worse. You have to assume he has at least a few people infiltrated in here who are reporting on everything, and more targets will be pinpointed.” He paused and smiled weakly. “Hate to admit it, John, but in those first minutes when my encampment was hit, I thought it might have been some of your people who called it in. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. Remember an old song—Crosby, Stills & Nash—the line ‘Paranoia strikes deep, into your soul it will creep.’”
“Never heard of them.”
John forced a smile. “Different generation, I guess.”
“Anyhow. Get some of my people in here, John; we’ll go over the plan. They know the way in and will be your point men.”