by Alex Irvine
If he was wrong, and couldn’t find them by dawn, he would head back to the interstate, cut around the JTF base, and be on his way.
The top of Mount Tammany, just to the east, still caught the last light from the west, but beyond it the sky was dark, and on the trail it was nearly full dark. The bluffs dropping to the river were just to the south. Ike guessed north was the way to go.
He went slowly, pausing every twenty steps to listen and scan the surrounding woods for light. The trail rose to follow a ridge, and Ike paused before he crested the ridge. Night breeze rustled in the trees. Something small scampered through the brush to his left.
And up ahead, maybe two hundred yards distant, he heard people laughing.
Bingo, he thought, and got off the trail. He reckoned he’d traveled three miles or so. To his right was a slope down to a creek bed. He could hear the water and smell it.
He reached the top of the ridge and saw a fire ahead. Staying in the trees, he moved forward until he had a good look at the fire and the people around it. Before he started shooting, he wanted to be sure he had the right target.
He was looking at a clearing on the west side of the trail, framed by boulders and beyond them tall trees on a sharp slope back down toward the river. A big bonfire burned in the middle of the clearing, illuminating a cluster of tents—six of them—at the edge of the trail. Ike counted the people grouped around the fire. Thirteen. All white, all male. Several armed.
Ike took a look through a night-vision scope he’d gotten from the JTF officer. The fire was too bright to look at through the scope, but he could get a better idea of what things were like around the perimeter of the camp, beyond the brightest firelight. He saw a lot of small arms, several JTF issue. That marked this group as the killers of the JTF patrol, and therefore in all likelihood current possessors of stolen C-4. By the terms of Directive 51, Ike didn’t have to do any of this. He could have just walked up and killed all of them. But he wasn’t that kind of person. A certain kind of authoritarianism maybe was the best way to get a floundering society stood back up—that was why he was in contact with Mantis and her group—but that didn’t mean Ike Ronson was going to go around killing people in case they were criminals or terrorists.
Hell, if he’d known the operation in Duane Park was going to fall apart like that, he would have made another plan. Maybe another agent had gotten there in time to help those civilians. Ike hoped so.
He’d been having to make too many hard choices lately.
Luckily, the situation in front of him did not present a hard choice. Armed group in possession of stolen arms and probably explosives, with solid intel they were planning a terrorist attack. Ike put the night-vision scope away and let his eyes adjust again. Then he moved through the trees until he was across the trail from the campground. A swampy pond was behind him, lively with spring peepers and various insects.
The way Ike saw it, his best plan was to find a good firing position, introduce himself with a couple of grenades, then put the M4 to work. If some of them got away into the woods, that was probably all right. The important thing was to break the group and recover or destroy the C-4.
Which he had yet to find. It was possible that his grenades might find it, in which case the whole campground would probably go up in smoke. Ike considered this. C-4 was pretty stable. A gunshot wouldn’t set it off, but a frag grenade might if it went off right next to a brick of the explosive. And if the C-4 did go off, and there were other people in the tents, maybe noncombatants . . .
He was a little bit gun-shy because of what had happened that morning in Manhattan. Best to be sure. He got out the night-vision scope again and scanned the edges of the campground. The JTF typically shipped C-4 in steel cases about the size of a carry-on suitcase, and as he scanned, Ike didn’t see anything that matched that profile . . . until one of the people by the fire shifted and a metallic glint shone in between two of the tents, on the side of the campground closest to the trail.
There it was. Four cases. That was more than enough to bring down a bridge. Or erase the campground and everyone in it.
Ike decided to take the careful route. C-4 needed both heat and shock to detonate, so if he didn’t put a grenade right on the cases, the chance of accidental detonation was pretty low. He picked a grenade off his belt and slung it sidearm across the trail so it skipped into the crowd of men on the side away from the semicircle of tents. As it hit the ground, he was already throwing another.
He hit the ground, watching from his belly. The clank of the grenade on a rock drew the attention of the closer men. But before any of them could say anything, it went off. Two seconds later, so did the other.
Ike ducked his head when his internal countdown got to zero, so the explosions didn’t ruin his night vision. When he lifted his head again, he was sighting down the barrel of the M4 and wishing he had something a little more suited to sniper-style work. But he was only fifty yards away.
None of the men around the fire were still standing. Several of them were trying to get to their feet. Two of them were on fire because one of the grenades had blown the bonfire apart and showered them with embers. Ike ignored them. He saw one of them stagger upright and squeezed off a single shot, putting him right back down. Some of them were screaming warnings and orders. Others were just screaming. Ike saw a silhouette. Another one upright and moving. The M4 bucked against his shoulder, and the silhouette pitched over out of his field of view. He heard crashing in the trees, like someone was falling down the wooded slope. Two or three of the would-be terrorists had gotten their guns up and pointed generally in Ike’s direction. They’d figured out where the shots were coming from.
Ike dropped one of them. The others saw the muzzle flash and started blazing away at the spot Ike was already rolling away from. He angled down the slope, but not so far that he ended up in the swamp. Then he got low again and waited for his pursuers to appear at the top of the slope, where they would be nice and backlit by the glow of the fire.
He saw one of them first, and waited until he knew where both of them were. Then, as soon as he had them both in his field of fire, he chewed them up with a long burst.
Moving again, he went back the way he’d come, doubling back to the spot from where he’d first observed the campsite. There were still screams and moans, but Ike didn’t see anyone else able-bodied. He stayed low, crossing the trail and approaching the campsite from behind the tents. He listened at each tent as he passed, pausing when he got to the cases of C-4 to make sure they were undamaged.
From inside the fourth tent he heard a baby crying.
God damn it, Ike thought.
He stepped lightly between that tent and the next, hovering at the edge of the firelight until he was certain there was no threat from any of the wounded. Probably he ought to put them out of their misery, but he decided he would let the JTF worry about that. None of them even saw him. They were either too busy dying or happened to be looking the other way.
The tent was a standard four-person camping dome with zipper doors. One of them was half-open. Ike ducked through it and saw the baby. It was lying on a sleeping bag, crying like . . . well, Ike didn’t have much experience with babies. It didn’t look hurt, so he assumed it was crying like babies cried when grenade explosions and gunshots woke them up. It lay on its back, eyes squeezed shut and toothless mouth wide open. A tiny life, spared by the randomness of shrapnel patterns.
The woman who might have soothed the baby was dead on the sleeping bag, one arm still curled under the baby’s head. Shrapnel had punched through the side of her neck, just under the jaw. From the looks of it, she’d never known what hit her. Ike looked down at her for a long moment, wondering what had brought her to this place. Was she a captive? Had she loved one of the men he had just killed?
It didn’t matter now. Ike’s grenade had killed her. All that mattered was what came next.
&nbs
p; Ike slung his M4 and wished that just for once a mission could be straightforward. Then he got over that moment of self-pity and looked around for a sling or pack or something he could use. Hiking three miles in the dark was no problem, but he’d never tried to do it holding a baby.
* * *
• • •
It was just after midnight when Ike got back to the JTF camp and found the officer exactly where he’d left him, next to the mobile command post. The officer looked up as Ike approached, and his eyes got big when he saw the baby cradled in Ike’s left arm. It had stopped crying somewhere along the trail, maybe from the rocking motion of Ike’s steady walk. Now it was asleep.
“Your C-4 is about three miles up the Appalachian Trail,” Ike said. “Don’t take the branch that goes down by the creek. I was going to detonate it in place, but I figured you might want it.”
“You left it there?” The officer was looking back and forth from the baby to Ike’s face. Confusion and irritation warred on his face.
“It was too heavy to carry,” Ike said. “You don’t have to worry about your terrorists running off with it.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
“Tell you what,” Ike said. “You send a patrol up there right now. Tell them to look for the campfire. It’ll still be burning. They won’t find anyone left to walk off with four cases of C-4.” Minus five one-kilo bricks and a couple of detonators, he did not add. He’d stowed them in his pack. You never knew when you might need a little explosive in the field.
“I’ll do that,” the officer said. He was still looking at the baby.
“Good,” Ike said. “Now, where can I find either a medic or a wet nurse?”
“I have to say, the last thing I expected was to see you coming back with a baby,” the officer said.
“Yeah,” Ike said. He looked down at the baby, sleeping with its mouth open and one tiny fist curled up at the side of its face. “It’s been a day full of surprises.”
23
VIOLET
The weather stayed hot, and the kids were getting stir-crazy from not being able to roam anymore. Saeed and Amelia thought they should see how far they could go before an adult reeled them back in, and Violet decided to go along. The other kids stayed inside, not wanting to make anyone mad at them.
“Where do we go?” Amelia wondered. They were at the edge of the Castle grounds, on the south side.
“For sure not that way,” Saeed said, pointing south. “That’s where the weird chemical thing is.”
“Plus the flood,” Violet added.
“So around to the Mall, then,” Amelia said, and she started walking.
Saeed stopped her. “Wait, no, not that way. Let’s go around the other way. Stay far away from the Capitol.”
Amelia shrugged. “Okay, whatever.”
They walked around the west side of the Castle and up to the Mall. A fire was burning somewhere down in the direction of the baseball stadium. Smoke curled out over the river. “Wonder what that is,” Saeed said.
“Who cares,” Violet said. “As long as it’s not here.”
Then she immediately felt bad, because someone was losing stuff in a fire or maybe dying and it wasn’t right for her to not care. She did care. She just couldn’t always stand how it felt to care.
“I mean, it’s not that I don’t care,” she added. “It’s just that it doesn’t really matter to us what’s burning since we don’t know and we can’t get over there to find out anyway.”
A rumble in the sky drew their attention upward. “Hey, look,” Saeed said. “A jet plane.”
Stunned, they all watched it. None of them could remember seeing another jet since Black Friday, or right after it. Now, almost six months later, it was like seeing a dragon or a UFO.
A streak of smoke shot across the sky as they watched, and fire bloomed from the jet’s side just behind its right wing. It angled sharply left and down, trailing smoke and fire. Behind it, the kids could see pieces of the jet tumbling through the sky, winking in the midday sun.
The jet tried to regain altitude, but one of the engines on the right wing broke off and spun crazily down toward the ground. The jet heeled over and disappeared behind some buildings on the other side of the city. A moment later, a column of smoke began to rise.
“Whoa,” Amelia said. “Did somebody shoot that plane down?”
“I think so,” Violet said. She traced the smoke trail from the missile, but it was so windy that she couldn’t tell where the missile had come from.
“First jet we’ve seen since before Christmas, practically, and someone shoots it down,” Saeed said. He sounded sad, like out of all the violent things they’d seen, that one really mattered. Violet understood. To him, technology was a sign of progress. A jet in the sky meant maybe things would be normal again someday. And then it all went down in flames.
Without really meaning to, they had wandered over to the carousel on the Mall, just in front of the Castle. They could see it from their window, and it was one of the places they tended to hang out when they were on the Mall. Today, it was kind of a test. The carousel was pretty close to the Castle, so maybe none of the adults would make them come back.
Amelia climbed up on the scaly blue “sea horse.” It was her favorite, with a forked tail instead of back legs and a head that someone had told Violet looked like old Chinese drawings of horses. Saeed got up next to her. Why not, Violet thought. She climbed up, too, filling out the row. Her horse was also blue. Saeed’s, in the middle, was white. Both of them looked kind of angry, it seemed to Violet. Maybe the carousel needed music to seem beautiful.
“Did you ever ride this when it worked?” Amelia asked.
Violet had. “A couple of times, yeah.”
“I think we rode it once on a field trip or something,” Saeed said. “Or maybe it was another carousel somewhere else. I don’t really remember for sure.”
“I wonder if somebody could fix it up,” Violet said. “Get it working again. It’d be fun to have it there.”
“It would be even better if there was, like, a party to go with it. We could invite everyone. Maybe they’d all get along better.” Saeed was still glum. Since his comment about space the day before, Violet thought he’d been kind of sad all the time. He said optimistic things, but she was starting to think he didn’t really mean them. Now the jet crashing had made it worse.
“That would be cool,” she said, to be supportive. “Nobody can fight at a carousel.”
They rocked back and forth on the horses, pretending they were moving. Maybe they were a little too old for that, but it made them happy to pretend. “I bet Shelby and Noah and Ivan wish they were out here,” Saeed said. His mood seemed to brighten all of a sudden. “We should go get them.”
“We could,” Violet said, “but Wiley couldn’t come out, could he? Maybe it’s better that they’re hanging out with him.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Saeed kept rocking his horse. Violet leaned forward on hers, resting her chin on top of its head. She’d never ridden a real horse. Maybe someday.
Amelia was looking out over the Mall. “Hey,” she said. “There are people coming.”
Saeed slid off his horse. “We better get out of here.”
Violet and Amelia dropped down to the carousel platform, too. Should they run? The people didn’t look threatening. They had guns, but almost everybody out in the open in DC had a gun. None of these people were pointing their guns at the kids. All of them seemed to have tattoos of the American flag, and they were dressed alike. Not quite in a uniform, but their clothes were all navy blue and khaki, with lots of pockets.
“Come on,” Violet said. They started to walk back around the carousel, away from the group of strangers and toward the Castle. But when they got around the carousel, they saw the group had angled to meet them before they could get back home. “Uh-oh,”
Amelia said. “I’m scared.”
“It’s okay,” Saeed said. “They can see us from the Castle.”
“If they’re looking,” Violet said.
One of the men in the group—they were all men—called out to them. “Hey, kids. Taking a horseback ride?” He smiled at them. It seemed genuine, but Violet was still nervous.
“We were just about to go back to the Castle,” she said, making sure the men knew she and her friends belonged somewhere close.
“Is that right? You live there?”
“Yeah,” Violet said. “We were over at another place, a hotel down by the river, but it flooded.”
“Mmm. Bad season for floods.” The man took another step closer to them. He had his hands in his pockets and his rifle slung over his shoulder. The other men hung back a little, not paying much attention. “Listen, who’s in charge there?”
“Junie and Mike,” Saeed volunteered.
“Okay. What are your names?”
The kids all introduced themselves, and the man nodded. “I’m Sebastian. So tell me about Junie and Mike. They married?”
“No, Junie was kind of the leader of the Castle from the beginning, and Mike was in charge of our group when we came over from the hotel,” Amelia said. “So now they run things together, pretty much.”
Looking at the Castle, Sebastian thought this over for a minute. “Okay. Good to know.” He pushed his sunglasses up on his head and bent forward a little, hands on his knees, so his face was level with theirs. “Listen, you should be careful out here. There are a lot of bad people roaming around DC, and pretty soon we’re going to have to clear them out. It might get . . . well, let’s just say it’s not going to be safe until we get things under control.”
“I thought the JTF was here to do that,” Saeed said.
A couple of the men in the group chuckled. To Violet, it wasn’t a good sound. Sebastian held a hand back toward them and they quieted down. “The JTF is trying,” he said. “But if they can’t handle things, someone else might have to. Then things will be back to normal. Maybe better, who knows?”
