Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  Nevertheless, there was also some good news today. The missing engine parts for the Caterpillar earthmover’s transporter truck had arrived. The bodies of the Americans in the ravine were now covered with five or six meters of dirt, and planted over with small fir trees taken from nearby, just as General Blair had demanded. The ravine itself existed no more. It had been erased from the face of the earth. Tonight the last of the American rebels in Radford County were fleeing for their lives as his battalion put their homes to the torch. Once the rebels were moving south, out of Tennessee, they became refugees and were not to be unnecessarily harassed. The point was to drive them out, to depopulate the county, not to cause every rebel to stay and fight to the death. General Blair had been clear on that point, after the misunderstanding that had led to the ravine incident.

  Of course, there would always be isolated excesses; they were unavoidable in the planned chaos accompanying the forced depopulation of a region. People had to be terrorized to an extent; otherwise, they would not take to the roads in flight. Of course, any armed resistance would be met with overwhelming force, and once firing started, it was not so easy to stop. And naturally, his troops could be expected to collect souvenirs and trinkets, perhaps some valuables, before destroying the rebel dwellings. Why let everything go to waste in the flames? They were not being paid, except in promises of land and citizenship; they needed some tangible rewards in the meantime. And if they found some pretty American girls along the way, well, Kazak soldiers were still men, after all! This was the nature of such “pacification” operations, in any country throughout history. The intent was to depopulate a region, and that could not be done by handing out bouquets of flowers, chocolates and calling cards!

  Within a few days, he would be able to report to General Blair that Radford County and the surrounding areas had been fully pacified, speeding up the day that his battalion would be moved to Montana. By all reports, the high mountains and wind-swept plains of Montana and Wyoming were so similar to Kazakhstan that his men would feel that they were at home.

  Like himself, most of his men could never return to Kazakhstan. They were essentially stateless. Most of them had been involved in the Cossack Uprising, attempting to return the Kazak border regions to the Russian Federation. That endeavor, which only two years before had seemed so promising, had been crushed. The Cossacks involved in the uprising, having been encouraged to separate from Kazakhstan, had then not been welcomed as new citizens by Mother Russia. One solution to the impasse, if it could be called that, had come with the recent offer by the United States government to reward so-called “peacekeepers” with citizenship and land. The offer was a gift from heaven for the landless Cossacks, who were a military estate, but not a people. The Cossacks were a union of men joined only by common military tradition, not by land, blood or religion. The original Cossacks had fled to the wide, unpopulated steppes from the Ukraine. They had even taken their name from the Kazaks, which in the Turkic steppes had meant both fugitive and freeman. And so it was again. Once again they were fugitives, searching for a land to call their own.

  Once in their new homeland of Montana—after helping to subdue the rebels there—his homeless Cossacks would each be granted 200-hectare land deeds, almost a thousand American acres. As the victorious leader of the Kazak Battalion, he would receive a land grant fully one hundred times as large, as his own reward for service to the United States government.

  America was truly a land of opportunity.

  Colonel Burgut turned to his executive officer, seated across from him, their knees almost touching. “Major Seribek, we shall move out right away. Only the armored security vehicles. I want to be rolling in two minutes. Make the necessary calls.” Colonel Burgut’s command vehicle always traveled accompanied by at least two other of the heavily armed and turreted ASVs.

  “Where are we going, Colonel?”

  “North, to the last reported position of the missing scout vehicles. What other units are in that area?”

  Major Seribek swung his computer screen around so they both could look at the GPS topographical map displayed there. All of the friendly units were displayed with small icons, part of the American “Blue Force” system for preventing so-called friendly-fire mistakes. “Tiger Company is the closest.”

  “Tell them to return to their trucks and meet us…here.” Colonel Burgut put a stubby finger on a crossroads twelve kilometers to their north.

  ****

  They came to the first paved road, a crumbling asphalt path that was only ten feet wide. Over the intercom, Boone said, “Turn right, Phil.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Speed up to about thirty. The road doesn’t get much worse than it is here.”

  “No problem.”

  “If that’s too fast, slow down until you’re comfortable. Just don’t go off the road if you don’t have to. We don’t want to get stuck like those poor dumb Cossack bastards. And watch out for drainage ditches. These things have pretty crappy visibility down on the sides, and they roll over real easy.” Boone stood up in the turret well, just his shoulders and head protruding through the hatch, which was locked upright behind him. Through the night tube on his combat crewman’s helmet, he could see clearly but with a limited field of view. Every ten seconds a strobe on the back of the ASV blinked its Morse Kilo: dash-dot-dash. He considered the wisdom of leaving it on. A Predator UAV above them would spot the ASV anyway, and the infrared blinker was their friend-or-foe identification and should protect them from a missile strike. On the other hand, if the Kazaks found the other stuck ASV and their dead crewmen, they would quickly understand the situation and would probably change their identifier, or turn them off, leaving the captured vehicle with the only blinking “K” in Radford County. In other words, dead meat with a flashing light attached to draw attention.

  “Doug, find the light panel.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Look for the infrared strobe.”

  “It says ‘Strobe/Signal.’ That one?”

  “Flip it to ‘off’.” Boone waited for the next series of infrared blinks, but they didn’t come. “Okay, it’s off now. Just be ready to turn it back on if I tell you.”

  “Roger that.”

  Boone considered their situation. The network of primary, secondary and dirt roads in the county was printed in his mind. The information on the portable military GPS he was using was hopelessly incorrect or outdated at the rural lane level, giving him an edge over his enemies, who lacked his local knowledge. This road was just wide enough for the ASV. Two approaching cars would have to slow down and move carefully to the steep shoulders in order to pass. This rarely happened; not many cars were driving in this area anymore. Since the earthquakes, there were countless sections of road completely impassible to cars, but the ASV could make it through many of the washouts and small gullies. These breaks in the roads were not reflected on the GPS Jenny had taken from the dead traitor.

  He had raised the barrel of the .50 caliber in front of him. Any low branches or wires across the narrow road would be deflected or broken by the heavy steel barrel instead of slashing his face or neck. Boone had strung many taut wire cables across roads like this, in hopes of taking off the head of a foreign vehicle commander or turret gunner. He never knew if he had been successful in this endeavor.

  The hand-held military GPS unit obtained by Jenny was tucked inside his parka below his neck. It needed to be outside the steel machine to receive its satellite signals. Eight glass-and-steel prism blocks were arrayed around the circumference of the turret. They acted as rectangular periscopes, appearing like normal eye-level windows from within the turret. When he dropped inside the protection of the turret, they would provide his only view of the world outside. To use the night-vision-equipped gun sight, he needed to flip his helmet-mounted NOD up out of the way. To look out the prism windows, he would need to flip it back down. It was a lot simpler to just stand up with his head above the turret hatch, and be able to
look in all directions. At least until the shooting started.

  If they stayed on this paved road, they would make good time and would probably avoid hitting a Kazak checkpoint. The downside was that the narrow road could be easily blocked simply by parking any vehicle between two trees, when the road cut through thick woods. If they used a wider secondary road, they might see danger far enough ahead to turn around or bypass it, but then there was also a greater chance of running into a Kazak patrol or checkpoint. If they went entirely off the pavement and even off the dirt roads, they might wind up stuck in some mucky creek bottom. Roughly stated, those were his three options.

  They were only a few miles from the northern edge of the Kazak area of operations. Boone decided to stay on the narrow, winding paved track for now. To leave Radford County in the ASV, they would have to cross Butler Creek over a two-lane trestle bridge that was sporadically guarded at one or both ends. Or they could risk crossing at a ford, but after all the rain and snowmelt the creeks were high, and these ASVs were not truly amphibious. They didn’t float, and they couldn’t swim. He couldn’t remember the precise maximum depth that ASVs could ford, and if he guessed wrong, they’d be screwed, stuck out in the middle of an icy river.

  Or they could hide the ASV, abandon it and continue on foot in stealth patrolling mode. Boone considered these options, weighed the speed and risk factors, and decided to continue as they were going, for now. It was never far from his mind that a missile could streak down from the sky at any moment, putting an end to all of his risk calculations in a single white-hot millisecond.

  21

  CW4 Rogan dropped into his swivel chair and inserted the memory stick into the USB port on the computer beneath his desk. The monitor’s screensaver showed a Blackhawk helicopter, with both side doors rolled back. In the troop compartment, helmeted soldiers in dusty uniforms and khaki-colored body armor smiled across a hundred feet of open sky. A Middle Eastern city’s ancient and modern skyline was spread out below them. Hugh Rogan was in the pilot’s seat, looking at the camera through the visor of his flight helmet. The picture had obviously been snapped from another helicopter flying beside him.

  The walls of his small office were covered with photographs and plaques from his nearly thirty-year career in Army Aviation. Shelves were full of flight helmets, intricately detailed model helicopters, and other military souvenirs collected on several continents.

  Rogan slid out his computer keyboard and typed a few commands. Sergeant Major Charlie Donelson entered the room with a pair of large unlabeled brown bottles. The pints of home-brewed beer were left on Rogan’s back porch to keep them cold. He passed one bottle to his friend, then pulled a chair over next to the computer and sat down. Donelson held up his bottle and looked through it, using the computer screen for a backlight. “This batch is better than your last one—less crud on the bottom.”

  “That ‘crud’ gives each batch its own unique flavor,” said Rogan.

  “Yeah, unique crud flavor.”

  “I’m sorry we’re out of your store-bought sissy beer. Anyway, it’s a lot stronger than that near-beer they’re serving at the club.” The friends clinked bottles and took swigs.

  The computer switched from the screensaver to a black-and-white aerial view of a small town. It appeared to be routine surveillance video, with time stamps, speed and altitude data, and a targeting curser imprinted over the land below. “What’s that, video shot from a Predator?” asked Donelson.

  “Yeah, a Predator B. It’s new; the date stamp is from just last Saturday. I make the grid coordinates to be southwest Tennessee, maybe northern Mississippi.”

  “Who’s on the horses? What’s going on?”

  “Their strobes are flashing Morse Kilo, so that makes them Kazaks,” said Rogan. The two men watched in silence, sipping their beers. They watched the file of horses trot into a fence-enclosed paved parking area. They watched as a group of civilians was separated into two long lines, and one group was led into a building. They watched the other group being marched the other way, out onto the street and onto school buses. The buses had numbers written on their roofs: R22 and R37.

  They watched school bus R37 drive along a dirt road through woods, to an isolated clearing. The bus was accompanied by an Army truck. The passengers were unloaded and marched to the edge of a gully by soldiers from the truck. They watched as their rifles flared white hot and the standing people tumbled down in a line. What was happening on the video was unmistakable, even without sound or captions.

  “Oh my God,” CW4 Rogan whispered. Bus R37 departed and was replaced by R22, and the scene was reenacted with new victims. Seven times the buses arrived full of people, and departed empty. Seven times the people were lined up and shot down. The video had been edited to shorten the running time, so that the executions seemed to take place immediately one after the other. When it finished, it looped and played again. Both men stared at the screen as it played through a second and a third time. By examining the time stamps on the videos, they determined that each mass execution actually took place about fifteen minutes apart. The total edited running time was only about ten minutes, a “highlights” film of a mass murder that took place over nearly two hours.

  “The guy who passed it to us—you said he works in the old fitness center, controlling UAVs?” asked Donelson.

  “Yeah, that’s where I’ve seen him going in and out. Sometimes I take the same shuttle bus. It goes around by the gym; that’s where he gets on and off.”

  “Hulkster, this is bad. This is the worst. There must have been hundreds of people on that parking lot, before they were put on those buses. They made seven trips, what’s that, fifty or sixty people on each one?”

  “Must be around four hundred dead, maybe more,” said Rogan. “We can freeze the video on each one and get an exact count. When they’re lined up, right before…right before they’re shot.”

  “Man, oh man…what the hell do we do now? I’ve put up with a lot of shit in this man’s Army. I’ve put in my time and kept my mouth shut, maybe too much, but this…this is way over the line. Hugh, my friend, we can’t walk away from this one.”

  “Yeah. We can’t sit on this. We have to do something with it.”

  “But what?” asked Donelson.

  Rogan said, “I don’t know what, but something.”

  “Give it to 60 Minutes?”

  “Stop joking, Charlie. This is serious.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Rogan sighed and scratched his short gray-black hair. “Let’s get the poker gang together and show it to them.”

  Donelson asked, “When? Tonight?”

  “No—tomorrow. It’ll take time to see who’s around and pass the word.”

  “Let’s meet at my house, off base. We don’t have to tell them what it’s about, we’ll just make sure they come.”

  “All of them?” asked CW4 Rogan. “What about Fred? Do you trust him? His outfit is chopped to NORTHCOM, and they’re flying Homeland Security missions. Sometimes he’s flying foreign peacekeepers.”

  “Aw, hell no. Not Fred. Let’s think about this. Let’s think about this real carefully. Let’s make a list. It has to only be men we trust like ten thousand percent.”

  “Senior NCOs and warrants only,” said Donelson, after taking a long drink from his beer. “The young ones are too brainwashed. Some of them, anyway.”

  “Career only. Active duty or retired. Only people we’ve known like forever.”

  “Hey, what about Ira? He’s squirrelly as hell, but he’s got contacts like nobody else I know.”

  “Yeah, Ira Hayes, that crazy bastard.” Rogan smiled, stretching a thin scar at the corner of his mouth. “He’s frikkin’ nuts, but he’s a real patriot, I know that much. Even if he cheats at cards.”

  “That’s not really cheating, what he does.”

  “The hell you say! But he does make me laugh.” Rogan smiled again, and chuckled at some private memory.


  “What about officers?”

  Rogan said, “Regular commissioned officers? You mean besides warrant officers? Field grades? Senior officers? You bring in any of them, and they’ll try to take over. They always do. It’s their nature, they can’t help it.”

  “Not all of them,” replied Donelson, shaking his head. “There’s a few…well, there’s one for sure—Colonel Spencer. I trust him as much as I ever trusted anybody in my life.”

  “You’re just saying that because he saved your life in Somalia, back when you were both Rangers.”

  “Fuckin’ A right, but it’s a lot more than that. And let’s face it: he can open up some doors. He’s got access we’ll never have.”

  “So we’re going outside the poker gang?”

  “I think we have to,” said Donelson. “But we have to keep it small. No more than six or seven.”

  “Let’s make a list.”

  “No more than ten, max.”

  “Charlie, we can’t screw this one up. We have to do this right. I don’t know what we’re going to do with this video, but whatever we do, we have to do it right. And that means we go all the way, no matter what it takes. They’re slaughtering Americans now, and we have to stop it.”

  “You know, this is all about that goddamn Building 1405 program.”

  “Fucking civilians—”

  “Fucking traitors!” Donelson snapped. “Traitors, working with foreign enemies—in America! I’ve put up with a hell of a lot over the last few years, I’ve swallowed some seriously bad shit, but not this. This is too much.”