Violent Peace: The War With China: Aftermath of Armageddon

by David Poyer

“Nan. She was in Seattle. I need to find her, Admiral.”

  “Okay, yeah, I get that. My son’s in the Gulf right now. At least I know where he is.” A short pause. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “No sir.”

  “Here’s the situation. We’ve got a summons for you from The Hague.”

  He’d gotten a heads-up on this from Blair, but had hoped it would get overlooked, or die of its own accord. Apparently his luck was running true to form. “The International Criminal Court.”

  “Uh-huh. For what they call war crimes. Related but not limited to your abandonment of that German tanker.”

  “Not abandoned, sir. I had to remove the higher-value unit from the threat vicinity.”

  “Oh, I read your report. And you’re not the only poor son of a bitch in this particular barrel. But the thing is, how do we respond? According to the administration, if we send people to trial, it compromises sovereign immunity. But if we don’t go, the Chinese will refuse to appear too. We’d have to corral them ourselves, then convene some kind of ad hoc military tribunal, without the UN’s blessing. Which the fucking British and Indians are making themselves difficult over.”

  Dan frowned. Somebody had to be held responsible for this war. For the deaths of millions, most of them civilians. Or was Niles saying aggressors like Zhang, and his bloody generals, would get away scot-free? The men who’d sowed first conventional, then nuclear devastation across two continents? He looked around the empty office, and caught the base commander, outside, peering in through the door. He gave the guy a thumbs-up and forced a smile. Said to Niles, “Um … So what’s the decision, sir?”

  “I don’t know! I wanted you to stay in China. Take command of relief efforts in the south. But I got overruled. They’re still trying to decide what to do, but they wanted you in pocket back here in the States.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, what do you think, sir? I’m perfectly happy to go face the music, if it means the Chinese get indicted too. I did the right thing. They didn’t.”

  The heavy voice turned testy, more like the Niles he knew. “Are you even listening? It’s not up to you, Lenson! You just hang loose. Go look for your daughter. But stay in touch, so when they make up their fucking minds we can lay hands on you.”

  And with a couple more “Aye aye, sir”’s on Dan’s part, and a slammed-down phone on Niles’s, the conversation seemed to have reached its end.

  * * *

  McCHORD was a madhouse scramble. It reminded him of Bagram in the first months after 9/11. Trucks, pallet-trains of water and supplies, tent shelters and conexes lining the airfield, National Guard ambulance-modified Oshkoshes rumbling here and there seemingly at random. A dark sky hovered too low for comfort. Lightning flickered, and thunder growled in the distance. He carried his bag toward the terminal as one of the ambulances tore past, nearly running him down. Dan remembered writing the humanitarian relief op order they were probably operating under. He kept trying his phone, but the screen just read NO SIGNAL. Yeah, the airbursts had probably wiped out every cell tower in a hundred-mile radius.

  There wasn’t much to go on. Seattle had been among the hardest-hit population centers in what the Patriot Network was calling C Day. Much like the old Pearl Harbor slogan, now it was “Remember C Day.” Central and north Seattle had essentially been obliterated by megaton-range airbursts. A dud had impacted south of Port Orchard, apparently aimed at the sub base at Kitsap. Neither he nor Blair had been able to get through to Archipelago, where Nan had worked in some kind of biomedical research. Her cell didn’t respond, and the electromagnetic pulse had wiped out landlines throughout western Washington State.

  And that was all he’d been able to find out.

  The line at this service desk was sixteen deep, but eventually he got close enough to ask if there was transportation into the city. A harried-looking sergeant regarded him as if he’d asked for the next bus to Hell. “Sir, ain’t nobody going in there without MOPP gear, a full-face respirator, and a damn good reason.”

  “My daughter worked there. Archipelago Systems.”

  The guy looked away. “Their campus was in the blast zone, sir.”

  Dan took a deep breath. Not what he’d hoped to hear. “Well, what happened to the casualties? Is there anything like a central registry? A database of the wounded? The missing? The … deceased?”

  “Not that I know of, sir. Give us another week, we might have something like that stood up. But not yet. Next?” The sergeant looked past him.

  But Dan didn’t leave, as he was obviously expected to. “Come on, help me out here. Where would you look? If it was your kid out there.”

  The sergeant rubbed his nose. “Um … I’d probably start with the evacuee camps. Federation, Geyser, Dash Point, Penrose. If your daughter came out still walking, she might be there. If she was a casualty, well … you’d want to call the local hospitals. But they’re overwhelmed too, what I understand.” He shook his head and looked past Dan again. “Sorry I can’t help more. Really sorry, sir. Next?”

  Outside, Dan stood undecided for a few minutes, looking up. Thunderheads. Anvils in the sky … it would rain soon … he shivered as a chill wind fluttered a hand-drawn map. It was tacked to a bulletin board with duct tape. It showed Dash Point as the closest of a constellation of evacuee camps scattered to the south and east of the stricken city.

  More trucks rumbled past, headed out the gate. McChord seemed to be the arrival point for emergency supplies, which were then distributed to wherever FEMA had gathered survivors and evacuees.

  No central list at all? Hard to believe. But then again, not all that incredible, if the computers and electrical power and phones were all down. He didn’t envy whoever was in charge of this mess. If anyone was.

  So, the camps the sergeant had listed. Check them? One at a time, hoping to catch her face in the welter of tired, frightened people?

  Taking charge himself crossed his mind for perhaps a quarter second, but he dismissed the thought. He’d run one tsunami relief effort, in the Maldives. That didn’t qualify him to honcho anything this size, with so many federal, military, state, and local authorities to coordinate.

  No. She was his daughter. He was her father.

  That was his sole and primary mission now. To find her.

  Even if she no longer lived, he had to know.

  * * *

  IT was pouring icy rain by the time he caught a ride. First to Millersylvania, in a water truck. The woman driving wore a blue dosimeter badge clipped to her coveralls. She didn’t have much to say, other than that she hadn’t slept for two days and only got one meal in all that time. “It’s fucking hopeless,” she muttered, staring through a rain-splattered windscreen as she noodged the heavily loaded deuce-and-a-half up to forty-five. “Nobody knows how many people there are in these camps. We have to get them moved south before the weather changes. It keeps raining like this, they’ll be drowning in mud.”

  Dan bent forward, squinting at the water sleeting down the windshield. Was it … black? “What about radioactivity? The plume, from the bombing?”

  She shook her head. “You’re looking at the rain? That’s from all the fires. They say the worst stuff mostly blew off to the northeast, but who the fuck knows? We could all be fucking sterile now. Nobody tells you nothing. That’s the worst part. If I believed all the rumors, I’d go nuts. Like, about the rebels.”

  He massaged his forehead. Apparently he’d missed a lot, or more likely, the controlled media hadn’t bothered to cover anything that might sap morale in the war zones. “Uh, rebels?”

  “In the Midwest. They declared independence. You believe that? Not that we’re not all super pissed out here too. Considering how little help we’re getting.”

  * * *

  THE evacuee camp lay inland, fronting a freshwater beach, and it was a sea of blue. The same pale blue plastic fly covers he’d seen at other refugee camps; in Ashaara, in the former Yugoslavia, the Maldives, and a dozen other disaster
areas around the world. The truck groaned to a stop near a rustic pine picnic shelter. Hundreds of people were already lined up waiting, heads lowered against the rain. They wore tattered ponchos or black plastic trash bags with holes torn for head and arms. They held plastic jugs, coolers, pails, and fishing rods. They seemed orderly, or perhaps simply too tired, frightened, hungry, and overwhelmed to be anything but submissive.

  As he swung down out of the cab he wondered briefly what the fishing rods were for, but dismissed it. Much more important to fight his way through the crowd, to where hundreds of scraps of paper, photographs, hand-scrawled notes, were nailed, pinned, stapled, and taped to the wall of the headquarters building, so many they overlapped like leaves, quickly growing sodden in the rain.

  WHERE ARE YOU HOLLY CAPOLLONE WE ARE AT KANASKAT MOM AND DAD

  SAKURA FAMILY MEET JUNE 19 AT NOON AT TOLMIE STATE PARK

  LUKAS—SANDY, WILLIAM, AND FEY HAVE GONE TO STAY WITH AUNT BARB IN EUGENE. POP POP PLEASE CALL US AND LET US KNOW YOU ARE ALRITE

  A ranger at a picnic table was handing out index cards and pencil stubs. Clipped to his lapel was the same type of blue dosimeter badge the water truck driver had worn. Dan stood in line again, hair dripping, rain in his eyes, fighting a growing rage at the disorder and futility all around. He got a card and a pencil at last, and positioned himself against a tree trunk to write.

  Once upon a time, he was old enough to remember, the country had been prepared for a catastrophe like this. There’d been civil defense drills. Shelters. Procedures. Duck and cover. Not that a school desk would have been much protection. But still … when had the country lost the will, or the wisdom, to prepare for the worst? Even as the threat had grown, as weaponry on both sides had assumed fearsome proportions, the government had ignored the basics: protection of the civil population, public health, disease control, infrastructure resiliency. Instead, both sides had wrestled in the mire. Shrill, endless, pointless fights over identity and abortion and guns and tax rates. While underwriting enormous expenditures, on a defense that had largely crumpled when an enemy actually attacked.

  He snarled, pressing the pencil hard into the paper.

  The point snapped off. When he inspected it the small print stamped into the cheerful yellow paint read MADE IN CHINA.

  No, this was futile. Nan would never see this. He balled up the card and threw it into an overflowing trash can and retraced his steps toward the road.

  Then halted, appalled.

  A weeping child huddled beneath a bush. A sign hung around her neck, but it was wet, torn, unreadable. She was perhaps eight, and her hair had been burned away down to the scalp. Her bare arms were erupting with what looked like flash burns. The skin was peeling. Straw-yellow plasma stained her pajama pants.

  He nearly stopped, but his next step forward revealed four more children lying on the ground. Outside a trimly painted outdoor lavatory people were openly relieving themselves, adding to brown piles that stained their broken shoes or bare feet. Dozens of sick lay tossing uneasily on the concrete pad beneath a picnic shelter. A ceaseless drone of groans and weeping and screams floated on the stinking air. A lone woman in a Salvation Army uniform moved among them with a bucket of water and a soup ladle, but there was no sign of any medical attendance.

  And behind him, down a trail from the north, stumbled more wounded. An unending line, like the damned in a medieval painting. The bent figures carried suitcases, backpacks, computers. Their clothing hung in rags, and they shambled as if hypnotized, mouths slack, gazes fixed. They infected the breeze with a stench of rot and burned meat. They passed nearly in silence in the pelting rain, with only faint whimpers and a harsh panting, as if they couldn’t quite catch their breaths. Some stumbled blindly, hands outstretched for the backs of those they followed. Some were completely naked, with bloated arms and faces, contorted and horrible. Raw burns glistened on their cheeks and foreheads and arms. Blood and yellow fluid ran down their arms, mingling with the pouring rain. Which they didn’t seem even to register, except for one gray-haired Asian-looking man, who carefully held a shredded, useless umbrella to shield a short woman with a floral scarf tied tightly over her eyes.

  A middle-aged woman stumbled and fell, sprawling. The red plastic bucket she’d carried tumbled away. The others did not pause. They stepped around her, or on her hands and feet as she groped. No one stopped to help her. At last, moaning, she stirred, rolled over, and laboriously pushed herself up to all fours. She searched anxiously about, patting the ground for the bucket, which had rolled a few feet away, into a patch of dripping weeds. When she found it she reached in to cradle something inside, kissing the limp thing fervently.

  Then she crept on, after the others.

  He stared, not wanting to believe his eyes. It had been days since the attack. Had these victims walked all the way from the city?

  He trotted back to the ranger. “Can’t we do anything for these people? They’re wounded, still coming in. They need food. Water. Shelter. Medical care. Bandages, at least.”

  The ranger’s face closed. “These are the lucky ones.”

  Dan stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “They made it out alive. The Army brings food in the evening. They truck in water. And we’re boiling more, from the lake, on those wood fires over there. But without power, pumps, lighting, internet … it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.”

  “What about medical care? There are children dying here.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” The ranger’s face reddened. He slammed a fist down. “You think we haven’t been trying, is that it?”

  “No, not exactly, it’s just that—”

  “I don’t know who the fuck you are, mister, but we’re doing the best we can. There aren’t any supplies. The worst-off ones come in on the trucks. The medics triage them. The ones who won’t make it, they tell me to make them as comfortable as I can. And that’s it. The ones that’re burned, well … they’re dead already. They took so much radiation in the initial pulse that even if you dress the burns, they die in a few days anyway.” The ranger’s gaze suddenly fastened to the collar of Dan’s khakis. To the stars pinned there … “What are you, anyway? A general? Why don’t you get some of your fucking troops in here? Get us some fucking help!”

  Dan felt sick. “Sorry,” he muttered, and turned away. Suddenly his own loss didn’t seem so great. Or, more accurately, seemed now to be only one fragment of a much greater failure, a mere splinter in a great running sore on the body of the country he’d tried to defend.

  Maybe if he’d done his job better somehow, fought harder, made other choices, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Yeah, that probably wasn’t really true. But it was how he felt. That he should have done more.

  He retraced his steps, and found the little girl who crouched beneath the bushes. He carried a tin cup of water to her, and washed out her burns. Bound them as best he could with clean leaves from the woods and the laces from his shoes. She didn’t cry. Just stared into the distance. Then he sat with her. Until, gradually, she slumped against him. The next time he looked down, her eyes were closed.

  It wasn’t military people who started wars. They only went out to do the fighting, when the politicians failed.

  But they weren’t the only ones who suffered, either.

  * * *

  THE girl died two hours later, never speaking a word. He didn’t even know her name. He sat with her until the end. Then picked her up, gently as he’d once held his own daughter, years before. He carried her behind the picnic shelter, where other bodies had been laid out. Scores. No, hundreds … a few yards away a Ditch Witch was chugging away, scooping out a long trench in the soil by the edge of the woods. He told a black woman in coveralls by the ditch, who made a note on a yellow tablet. There were lots of other notes on that page.

  As dark fell, shooting broke out. A popping of small-arms fire, some distance away. No one seemed to remark on it, nor did they
look disturbed. As if this happened often. The firing went on for some minutes, then gradually died away.

  He left the camp with the ration truck, which took him back to McChord. He couldn’t do anything useful at the camps. Just add to the burden, exacerbate the chaos.

  And he still didn’t have a clue what had happened to his own daughter.

  Which really meant … cold logic here, Lenson … starting at the last place he knew she’d worked, and tracing what had happened there. Discovering how close to the zone of utter destruction she’d been during the attack, and, if she’d survived, where she might have gone from there.

  It was all he could think of to do. And he owed her mother some kind of resolution, at least. Even if the news was bad, even if it was final, he should tell Susan.

  That night he dozed on the floor in the passenger terminal. A restless sleep, disturbed by nearby coughing, loud snoring, muffled sobbing, and more of the distant shots. The waiting area was carpeted by recumbent bodies. The first responders, firefighters, truckers, supply people, guards, Red Cross and other volunteers. He’d seen pictures of Russian train stations during the Revolution, and the subways in London during the Blitz. This looked much the same.

  When dawn came the bodies stirred. He lined up with the others for weak coffee and limp white bread and withered apples. No one asked what he was doing there. Everyone had a job. Except him.

  When he went outside again a fire truck stood idling a hundred yards away, shining wet with streaks of foam, freshly emerged from the decontamination line. Helmeted and suited-up figures were restowing equipment. Respirator masks hung from their belts or around their necks. The dawn sky was still overcast, the wind was still damp, but at least it wasn’t raining.

  Masks … in IndoPac you carried yours with you wherever you went. And his was still in his duffel.

  He found his bag undisturbed in the DV lounge, where he’d dropped it off before heading to Millersylvania. He pulled out his jacket and soft cap. Slung the mask, in its carrier, around his waist. Unpinned his stars and dropped them into a pocket. Then headed out of the terminal, to see whom he could talk into giving him a ride.