by Drew Avera
“I have heard Americans say that the United States is an idea rather than a government,” Anton told him. “Can you really kill an idea?”
“You can kill everyone who remembers it.” Sverdlov let the cigarette burn down to his fingers before he flicked it away onto the road’s surface. “There has been a change of plans.”
“What?” Anton blurted. “When? Have you been in contact with the high command?”
“No. The change came before you joined us, but I was instructed not to share it with you until we were closer.”
“I see.” Though he did not. Was it Vasyli? Why would he want to keep Anton in the dark?
“The actual peace conference is going to be moved away from Cheyenne Mountain,” Sverdlov went on. “This is going to be a last-minute condition of General Antonov, one he will not relent on. They will hold the conference in Colorado Springs instead, away from the heart of the military forces at Cheyenne Mountain.” He snorted. “It will be in the complex where they used to have their Air Force Academy, if you are one to appreciate irony.”
Anton felt a chill creeping up his spine that had nothing to do with the cool, mountain air. He knew now why Vasyli had kept this from him, but he let Sverdlov continue.
“We are going to hit the US troops at Cheyenne Mountain while their focus is on Colorado Springs, take out their ability to respond. General Antonov will have his own Spetsnaz team with him to take out the security for the American negotiators. They expect Robert Franklin will be with them. If all goes well, they will take out the security and we will finish off the troops at Cheyenne Mountain in time to come up and support them.”
“And I will be thirty or forty kilometers away from it all, from Robert Franklin,” Anton murmured. “Nowhere near him when the bullets fly.”
Fuck you, Vasyli. Didn’t want me anywhere near General Antonov, did you? You knew just how well that would go, how bad it would make you look. You scheming bastard.
“I’m sorry about this, Anton,” Sverdlov began, but Anton Varlamov waved the apology away.
“No, Piotr, it is not your fault. It is not even Vasyli’s fault. He made the right decision, even I can see that. But it is…” His face twisted in an almost physical pain. “It is a bitter pill.”
Sverdlov rubbed a hand over his face.
“Look, Anton, I like you. You’re a man who can obsess nearly as well as me, which is Goddamned impressive. We’ll see how this thing goes, but if everything runs according to plan and I can afford to cut you loose early to head up the road to Colorado Springs, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks, Piotr.” Anton laughed. “But tell me, my friend, when has anything ever ran according to plan?”
“You’ve got me there,” Sverdlov admitted. “All right, enough lollygagging around, we need to get into position while it’s dark out and we have a long way to go.”
“No offense to you,” Anton said with a moan, moving back into the cockpit, “but after this, I never want to see the inside of one of these damned things again.”
“Shit, I don’t blame you.” Anton could barely hear Sverdlov as the man twisted his legs back around inside the canopy framework. His laughter echoed hollow from in his cockpit. “Christ on a crutch, I may apply for a transfer to the infantry!”
Chapter Nineteen
“You know,” Nate Stout said, leaning against the pitted, rusted metal of the freight car, “St Louis was a shithole before the world went to hell.” He cast a doubtful glance at James Fuller. “Wasn’t there anywhere else your friend Bill could have crossed the Mississippi?”
“Ain’t none of us were alive before the world went to hell, Nathan,” Fuller reminded him. “And Bill don’t ask for no one’s opinion on how to do his job.” He shrugged, his seat shifting back and forth fitfully with the motion of the train. “I’d suppose taking the Midwest route was to avoid the busier routes up north.”
“What was it like back then?” Roach asked him. Her back was against the opposite wall, the bulk of a kneeling Hellfire between them, and she wasn’t sure, at first, if he’d heard the question. “Before the war, I mean.”
He let out a heavy breath and she knew he’d heard her, but didn’t really want to answer and she felt a pang of guilt for making him dredge up memories that weren’t his own and probably caused him pain. He met her eyes and she knew he’d answer because Nate always did the right thing.
“Things weren’t perfect,” he assured her. “The government sucked, or at least that’s what my Prime thought. Everyone was in everyone else’s business and no one could have a civil discussion with anyone they disagreed with about anything without it ending up in shouting and name-calling.” He shrugged. “But everyone had enough to eat, and even though people seemed to be more afraid of getting killed than they ever were before, statistically, it was less likely than it ever had been. I think most people didn’t know how good they had it.”
“I guess they fucking found out,” Hector Ramirez muttered.
Roach wanted to be mad at Ramirez for being callous, but she couldn’t. He hadn’t grown up with any knowledge of what it was like to live in a country that wasn’t at war. Those people were no more real to him than the Knights of the Round Table or the superheroes in the old movies people still watched.
She noticed Svetlana hadn’t even looked up at the conversation. She seemed uninterested in life before the war…or maybe she didn’t want to draw attention to herself because it was her country that had started it.
“Yo, Broke-Ass Mercenary Force, you guys still back there?”
She scowled at the radio hanging from Nate’s belt. Fuller’s friend Bill had thought up the nickname at some point on the trip and had used it every chance he had. Nate rolled this eyes and grabbed at the radio.
“Yeah, we’re here,” he said.
“Tell your pretty little filly it’s time to put on her show.”
Roach tried not to grit her teeth.
“If that pendejo calls me a ‘filly’ one more time,” she said, shaking a finger at James Fuller, “I’m going to rip off his fucking beard and feed it to him. You heard me, FOG.”
Fuller laughed. No one had actually called him Fucking Old Guy for a while, despite Ramirez’s attempt to make that the man’s official call-sign. Fuller had wanted to use his old nickname “Catfish,” but no one called him that, including his ex-wife.
“Roach, if you think you can drive this train without him, you feel free to toss his stinky ass off the side. I sure as hell won’t fight you.”
She grunted noncommittally and started to climb out of the car, then glanced over at Ramirez, who was sitting against the leg of a Hellfire, arms draped over his knees, looking forlorn and bored.
“Hector!” she snapped. “You’re with me.”
“I…what?” The younger man looked up, eyes wide. “But I don’t know what to say to those guys!”
“Like I do?” she reminded him. “Come on, we’re gonna wing it. Just play the confused noob who isn’t sure what’s going on or what he’s job is.”
“Just like you do most of the time,” Jenny cracked. Ramirez reddened as Fuller laughed heartily at the remark.
“Come on,” Roach urged him. “You’ll do fine.”
She smacked the tablet with their forged bills of lading and transit authorization into his hands and motioned for him to follow her.
The train was already slowing down by the time they clambered out onto the top of the car and into the mid-morning sun. The air was thick and even with the wind of the train’s motion, it already felt like a convection oven outside. She paused as she waited for Ramirez to finish climbing out of the car, and took a moment to finally get a good look at St. Louis.
She’d heard of the city, of course, seen stills and video of it in school and on the nets, but she’d never expected to pass through the place. The city itself wasn’t anything much, just your typical downtown cluster, sadly with the also typical charred and blackened chunk of it missing. It hadn’t been a nu
ke this time. She figured they hadn’t been able to smuggle one all the way upriver past the detectors. So, they’d used a fuel air explosion and the damage had been nearly as great, though there’d been no radioactivity. You could see activity here and there, a truck rumbling through what streets were still clear, or someone pedaling a three-wheeled trike with a basket of goods trailing behind.
The Gateway Arch was still there, patched and crumbling in places, but still standing, which seemed like an accomplishment to her, something iconic about her country that hadn’t totally collapsed. But the river was the most prepossessing feature of the place, the broad, flat Mississippi, glowing gold in the morning light with little fishing boats already coming back from their morning’s efforts.
And the railroad bridge over it. With the Army checkpoint on this side of it and the big, fucking gun pointed right at us.
Jesus, that’s a big gun.
She didn’t know what sort of artillery piece it was, though Nate or Fuller could probably have given the military nomenclature, the bore, the rate of fire and the year it was first introduced into the arsenal. All she knew was that the muzzle looked about as big around as her head and she really didn’t want to find out what the hell it shot. Particularly not the hard way.
She hopped from one car to the next, scampering across the roof and hoping Ramirez wouldn’t fall off the side. She heard a grunt behind her and winced, not wanting to look back.
“I’m fine,” Ramirez insisted, his voice pained.
She shook her head and kept moving, not checking on the younger man until she turned to climb down between the last freight car and the locomotive. He seemed basically intact, although there was a rip in the inner part of the left leg of his flight suit that she didn’t remember being there before. She couldn’t see any blood, though, so she assumed he’d be fine.
“’Bout time you got up here, girl!” Bill said, yelling at her through the open door to the locomotive cab. “What’s the kid doing here?”
“We need a distraction,” she told him, keeping her voice even and her fists unclenched only through a supreme effort of will.
“Shit, girl, I thought you were the distraction!”
She eyed him with the same sort of look she gave a Tagan just before she pressed the missile launch trigger.
“Drive the train, run your projectors and keep your fucking mouth shut, cowboy.”
Wild Bill whistled silently and raised his hands briefly in surrender before suddenly remembering he had to use them to slow down the train. Brakes began to squeal progressively louder and with a higher pitch and Roach grabbed at the railing around the rear platform of the locomotive to steady herself. Ramirez bumped into her before doing the same and mumbling an apology, but all her attention was on the checkpoint.
They actually had a barrier across the tracks, something heavy and metal and hinged at the left side, though she couldn’t have sworn it would have stopped a rampaging freight train. If it hadn’t the big gun might have. Or maybe the gun would be first and then the barrier would keep what was left from blocking the bridge before they levered the wreckage off the track.
Troops were visible now, ambling slowly along the platform beside the tracks. They carried carbines but they were all still slung, apparently counting on the cannon and a machine gun nest up on a short tower beside it to handle any trouble. She counted four on foot, besides however many it took to crew the cannon and the machine gun.
Probably two each, minimum.
Closer, only thirty meters away or so, and she could see their faces. Not young, not too young anyway, but none of them ranked higher than an E6, and even he seemed a bit bedraggled and beaten down. The other three were… She squinted until she saw their ranks and picked out a single E5 and a couple of Spec-4s. Spec-4s were good. If they’d all been Spec-4s, the train might not have even had to stop.
“What do you think?” Ramirez asked in a stage whisper. She rolled her eyes and held up a hand to silence him.
The train pulled to a stop, only ten meters from the yawning muzzle of the cannon and bored, flat grey eyes stared up at her from the E6, eyes that screamed “what the hell did I do wrong in my life to be stationed here?”
“Good morning, Sergeant,” she said, forcing cheerfulness into her voice and expression. “How are you boys doing this morning?”
Roach saw the Specialists’ gaze sharpen as they realized she was a woman and a not-unattractive one. Which was, she had to admit, something she hadn’t often thought of and had needed to be convinced was accurate. Vernon had told her she was beautiful over and over back home, in sweaty nights out in the shed on an old mattress, but teenaged boys were horny liars by nature.
Even so, I still kind of miss Vernon. He was sweet, when he wasn’t being such a rotten horndog.
The platoon sergeant was not sweet and did not remind her of Vernon or any of her other teenaged boyfriends back home. In fact, he reminded her more of her older brother when he’d found out what she and Vernon had been doing out in the shed. Vernon had been the star of the high school track team but she’d never seen him run faster than he had that night.
“Yeah, it’s a wonderful fuckin’ morning,” the E6 drawled, his accent from somewhere farther west. “Can I see your fuckin’ bills of lading and travel authorization so we can both get back to enjoying what a beautiful fuckin’ morning it is?”
“Oh, uh, sure thing. Hector?” She motioned for the younger man to come down from the locomotive platform. “Bring the tablet, would you?”
“Right,” Ramirez agreed, more sweat on his forehead than even the humid morning could justify. He pulled the tablet out of his thigh pocket and started down the metal steps but slipped halfway and had to catch himself on the railing.
The tablet flew out of his hand and down into the gap between the locomotive and the platform and onto the tracks, clattering loudly, plastic on metal.
“Goddammit, Hector!” Roach exploded, not having to play-act. “If you broke that fucking tablet, I’ll take the pieces and shove them up your ass, then kick you in the dick until your eyes project the fucking bill of lading onto the Goddamned ground!”
“I’m getting it!” Ramirez squeaked, jumping down to the platform and then squeezing into the gap, dropping to the tracks with a pained wheeze. “It’s okay, I swear!”
Now the E6 was smiling. Roach saw it out of the corner of her eye, but didn’t let the stern, annoyed expression leave her face as she stared Ramirez into greater alacrity.
“I thought I detected a bit of an accent there, ma’am,” the platoon sergeant said, apparently impressed with her invective. “Where you from?”
“Beaumont, Texas,” she told him, trying not to let herself sound any less angry with Ramirez. “And I tell you what, if this boy had worked on my father’s ranch, daddy would have kicked his ass up one fence and down the other. You can’t get good help nowadays, I tell you.”
“I’m from Killeen, myself. My dad ran stock for a ranch there hisself, until a particularly nasty stallion kicked him in the leg so hard it snapped his thigh.” He scowled. “Then I had to join the Army to send money home to take care of him and ma.”
Roach smiled wanly, finally turning to look at him.
“My dad got killed by a bunch of thugs when he went into town to buy feed. We couldn’t keep up our tax payments and the government sold it out from under me and my mom. She couldn’t take it, losing him and then the ranch, and she…” Roach blew out a breath. “She took some pills she’d been saving and never woke up. I left the next day, caught a ride on a freight train east. I been riding the rails with that old asshole,” she jerked a thumb at Bill, “ever since.”
“Well, shit,” the platoon sergeant sighed, “we’re just a pair of sorry motherfuckers, aren’t we?” He extended a hand. “I’m Jimmy.”
His grip was firm and dry and she instantly liked the man.
“Rachel,” she volunteered.
“And I’m Corey!” one of the Spec-4s pip
ed up.
Jimmy speared him with a fierce scowl.
“Shut the fuck up and get back to the barrier, Crawford!”
“Yes, sergeant,” Crawford said meekly, skittering away like a cockroach.
“Got it!” Ramirez cried in triumph, pulling himself back up onto the platform, looking even more dirty and bedraggled than he had before.
Roach had worried their matching flight suits might attract attention, even with all the names and insignia pulled off, but no one gave them a second look. Apparently, out here, you wore whatever you could get your hands on.
Ramirez handed her the tablet and she glared at him when she noticed the cracks spider-webbing its surface.
“It still works, ma’am!” he insisted, pushing his finger into the screen and bringing up the document.
She grabbed it and passed it over to Jimmy, who flipped through the pages with a cursory examination before tossing it back to Ramirez.
“Everything looks okay,” he allowed. “I won’t keep y’all any longer. But you come back through this way, you look me up, okay Rachel?”
“I think I just may do that, Jimmy,” she said, smiling just thin enough to make it seem like she was trying not to. “Y’all have a good day.”
The barrier swung upward with a chug of old and worn motors and the Spec-4 waved Bill through. Roach was still meeting Jimmy’s eyes as the train began to pull out again, holding them until they were fifty meters through the checkpoint and out onto the bridge, still looking his way when his face was just a blur.
“Was all that shit you told him true?” Ramirez asked her, awe in his voice. “About the ranch and your dad and all that? And your mom killing herself?”
“Not a word,” she said, the southern accent disappearing. “I’m from Ohio.” She shrugged. “But I went through mech training with a girl from Beaumont, and that’s what happened to her family.”
