The Generals of October

by John T. Cullen

  “So what’s your plan?” Irma asked. “You’re wounded. You can bag out if you want.”

  The sergeant nodded with a wry grin. “Can’t win for stayin’, can’t win for leavin’. I done made up my mind. I’m gonna pull out with the next little batch o’ boys that’s going. We got hit pretty hard up there, you seen Colonel Myers take it up front real bad. I think you ought to pull outta here with us, Ma’am,” he said, addressing Maxie.

  “That would be impossible. Half these people can’t be moved, much less walk. If we move, they die.”

  The sergeant’s grin evaporated. “Ma’am, what’s you gonna do if them lucifers comes through the rubble at you?’

  “We’re no threat to them. We’ll negotiate. We’ll fix their wounded too.”

  The sergeant rose, shaking his head. He seemed to have inner thoughts that he felt were best kept close to his heart. “Next time I got a holy moment, I’m gonna say a prayer for you ladies.”

  “If you get out,” Irma said, “send back blood. Lots of it. And antibiotics. Tell them we have people who need medevac. Couple dozen MAES units would be in order.”

  “I promise I will, Ma’am.”

  “Good luck,” Maxie said.

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  Maxie watched as the sergeant and a tall black man, very dark-skinned, with long bare muscular arms, gathered a small group about them. There were maybe a dozen, Maxie figured, all with minor wounds, but all with rifles and able to walk. They looked like a painting of partisans in their torn, baggy, and ill-assorted uniforms. A few had helmets; the rest wore a wild assortment of hats, including one or two with Russian-style fur caps with dangling furry earmuffs.

  A light drizzle began to fall. Maxie forgot about the sergeant and his men. She jumped up and organized a group to spread tarps between the fire engine and a school bus. About 25 men actually managed to right one of the busses. They got the lights to work inside, and busily swept glass out the doors.

  Maxie was just helping a woman with a leg wound to hobble toward the newly promised sanctuary of the bus, when shots rang out, then screams, and then there was silence. Someone bellowed with outrage. The lights on the bus went out. Someone ran past Maxie, and she asked: “What’s going on?”

  “Snipers, Ma’am. They just killed the two men cleaning up the bus.”

  Maxie’s heart sank. She let the woman at her side hobble off to a crowded group sheltering under the tarp. As drizzle gathered in her hair and started to run down her face, she thought about crying. But nothing came out. This was far from over, and she couldn’t let herself cry until it was over. “Everybody! Listen up!” she cried in her loudest voice. “Spread the word. Keep a low profile. There are snipers all around us out there. No lights, you understand? Not even a cigarette.” She thought she was being ignored, but then she saw men whispering to each other, gesticulating, looking over the protective vehicles with wide, scared eyes. No lights, she thought; they’d have to operate while one person held a poncho to ward off the drizzle and to keep the glow of their battery lights from attracting more shots. Thank God for the fire engine. She hoped its batteries would sustain her lights until dawn.

  Casualties kept straggling in. Stretcher cases, who were usually far worse, came in intermittently. As she worked on a man with a gaping stomach wound--trying to stop his bleeding and repack his intestines, knowing he would probably die soon--she noticed a very tall black man with glistening skin and long muscular arms. He caught her eye and wandered over dully. “All dead, Ma’am.”

  “The sergeant?” she asked without ceasing to work.

  “All dead. And the Japanese. Slaughtered. It’s sniper alley out there, Ma’am. I’m the only one that got back here.” Tears ran down his face.

  “Go get some coffee, and then come see me. I have work for you,” she said firmly.

  He began to cry even as he answered: “Thank you, Ma’am. Thank you.” He covered his face with his palms and turned away, doubling over. She noticed he had a wound in the side, but was too preoccupied to check on it.

  Thinking of Tom, probably buried in the same pile of bodies somewhere in a lake of muddy water and smashed concrete, she knew why she wasn’t crying. She was saving it all for when they brought her the news. She could handle anything until then, anything!

  A while later, the man with the stomach wound expired. Maxie had stayed with him, and she held his hand until it began to grow cool in the clasp of hers.

  She cleaned out a shallow grazing wound on a man’s forehead and was stitching it up, when she looked up. In the first light of dawn--where had the time gone?-- she looked up because Admiral Stintonburger had called out to her. He was leaning over a patient and held his hands up in their bloodied surgical gloves. When she looked more closely, in slow motion, she saw a bloody wound explode across the middle of his forehead. He collapsed and she cringed inwardly, but kept working. Several people ran to help the doctor, but she could tell from her position that he’d died almost instantly. The young dermatologist threw her scalpel down and began to scream hysterically. In and out, her wailing, like some sort of crazed calliope, until two other young military women embraced her and comforted her. Maxie finished her procedure and left it for a corpsman to clean up and bandage the patient. She walked over and put her arms on the doctor’s shoulders. The doctor was pale, and trembling. Her eyes had a distant, unfocused look. “Doctor.”

  She looked at Maxie. “I’m sorry, I--what?”

  “You’re going to have to pull yourself together. You are now the only remaining medical officer. There is a lot of work to do, and no time to sit around feeling sorry for yourse, do you understand?” She knew it wasn’t self-pity. It was combat stress syndrome--shell shock. The thousand yard stare. Some people got it sooner than others. She would try to get the woman to work as long as possible.

  “Yes.”

  Maxie motioned for the two other women, lightly wounded, one a driver, the other with a Navy commel detachment, to stay with the doctor and keep her together.

  Then someone else motioned for Maxie to come quickly.

  The shot that killed Irma Dagdagan had arrived stealthily, sometime during the night. As a dingy light filtered down through a pearly sky, someone had found her flight-suited body sprawled face down in a muddy puddle. She’d been hit by a high velocity, high caliber slug of some kind, right through the center of her torso. “Oh no,” Maxie said feeling hysteria pressing at the trapdoor, “oh no.” She singsonged, rolling the body over. “Irma, oh no, please no...” Irma had long ago grown cold. Maxie kissed herself on the hand and then touched her fingertips to Irma’s closed eyes. “Put her with the others,” she told the onlookers as she rose blindly and walked back toward the center of the encampment.

  She walked in among the wounded and slumped down with her back to the roof of a fallen bus. Several of the patients touched her, having nothing else to give but their thanks and affection. Then she noticed, next to her, a very handsome young man. He lay on his back, covered by a blanket, and he was looking at her with alert eyes. “You okay, lady?”

  Maxie nodded, wiped something away from her nose. That seemed to make her able to talk again. “Yeah. How are you?”

  The boy looked into the sky. “I can’t move my legs. I was able to move my arms until a little while ago. I have a bullet somewhere near my spine. Am I going to die?”

  “No.”

  “I have a wife. She’s real pretty. We have a baby on the way. I want to see that baby.”

  “You will.” Maxie slid her leg under his neck and gently lifted him toward her, so that his head was supported by her knee, and his back lay in the V of her folded left leg. She put her left arm around him and held him close to her. With her right hand, she reached under the blanket and found his hands. They were dry and chilly. “Can you feel that?”

  He smiled broadly. “I feel something warming my hands.”

  She grinned joyfully. “That’s wonderful. There is hope, you see. Okay, I’
m going to take a little rest for a while. We’ll keep each other warm.”

  “You can have a corner of this blanket.”

  “Thanks, but I’m warmly dressed. What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Yvette.” He spelled it out. “We were thinking if the baby is a girl, we’d call her Yvette Junior. And if it’s a boy, Yves.”

  “Sounds good to me. What’s your name?”

  “Tom.”

  She closed her eyes and felt a dullness, like wet concrete, sliding down her brief glimmer of happiness. “Tom who?”

  “Tom O’Leary. I’m from Bristol, Virginia.”

  “I thought I heard a little Virginia drawl in them thar words, my friend.”

  “You got a good ear, Ma’am. You must be from around there.”

  “I am.”

  “Say, are you still holding my hands?”

  “Yup. Got a firm grip on ‘em, right here.” She pulled tightly on them.

  “I can’t feel them anymore. I wonder if that’s ‘cause you let go.”

  “I’m not letting go of you, Tom O’Leary. We’re in this together.”

  As dawn grew fully around them, there was a long silence as though the world had died and must be resurrected. Someone was rumoring that a cell phone had been found in a ruined civilian automobile. A call for help had been made to a civilian operator in Delaware using a credit card. The phone was being brought to the encampment and given to Maxie. The shooting grew distant, or was that because she was nodding out, her head against Tom O’Leary’s. She could hear rain dripping someplace, but it was almost dry in the lee of the bus.

  Just as she was falling asleep, something terrible tore at her ears and pressed her against the bus. Dully, she opened her eyes and looked around. “What was that?”

  “Wow.” Several men rose and stood pointing toward the northwest. “Damn. Look at that.”

  She still held Tom O’Leary in her lap, and she shifted slightly to change positions. Her leg threatened to go to sleep. “You okay, Tom O’Leary?”

  “I’m fine, Ma’am. You’re keeping me nice and warm. What was that noise?”

  One of the men answered: “Huge explosion over there by the convention center. Maybe them crazy bastards blew themselves up in the hotel.”

  “And the whole friggin’ CON2 with it,” another said.

  “Good riddance,” another said.

  “It’s going to be over soon,” Tom O’Leary told Maxie with utter assurance.

  Chapter 43

  Tory coughed. For a moment she panicked. Her eyes were glued shut and sightless, and she touched them fearfully to see if she’d gone blind. She heard moaning as she sat up. She rubbed her eyes, removing a sludge of blood, oil, and dust. Her ears still rang from the explosions that had rocked through the underground garage. Now, as she and the others slowly picked themselves up battered and with bleeding nostrils, she began to blurrily see again.

  Then Tory heard gunfire. She peered through a wire-guarded window and saw small arms tracer fire coming from the rebels, who seemed to fire into a brightness in the dust.

  Rocky Devereaux jabbered on the phone. His nostrils were clotted with blood, his forehead was bruised, and he had machine oil smeared on one cheek.

  The haze of white dust drifted so thick she could barely see. The blast had moved LXs around like toys, and blue-yellow commandos began to pick themselves up from the garage floor. The indistinct brightness grew. Clouds seemed to drift about.

  People in Tory’s LX shook their heads, wiggled a finger in an ear, tapped a forehead, squinted. The air conditioning seemed to have cut out, and the air was thick. Devereaux shouted: “Mark? You out there?”

  Then--the ground started to shake. Tory felt her teeth rattle. What now? Would she live to see David Gordon again? She clung to a metal shelf with both hands as her body got shaken around like a reed. The vehicle itself started groaning in protest, and loose panels inside vibrated loudly. Objects fell from shelves and crashed to the floor.

  “My God! Look!” someone shouted.

  The dust outside the portholes began to drift clear. Tory saw now what the brightness was: Devereaux’s men on the outside had sapped a 50-foot section of the garage wall, and daylight streamed in through the drifting dust.

  A huge mass hovered somewhere in the mist, and the mist lightened as daylight penetrated through a fine powder of concrete gone aerosol in the explosion. It seemed to be a constellation of glaring round lights.

  A monster shape loomed up, then rolled over the rubble and into the garage, almost too big to fit: an “Ike” MBT-2010 Eisenhower main battle tank with 175 mm. gun, a rack of missiles, a Vulcan III gatling gun capable of firing thousands of rounds per second, two mortar tubes, a flame thrower, and two Winchester rapid-fire armor-piercing cannons. The leviathan’s quad turbo-nitro-diesel engines howled and whined with dinosaur glee. The long barrel had pointed backward as the tank crunched through the broken walls--now the tube swung from back to front; the tank never even faltered. The twin Winchesters rapid-fired, tearing lightly armored rebel LXs like paper. Rebel gunners fell by their weapons. Other commandos scattered, dropping their light arms as they ran. Those who were too stubborn to quit died in the next few dozen seconds.

  Another tank rolled in behind the first.

  And another. The ground shook. The floor of Tory’s LX chattered audibly, and fallen objects bounced around.

  Like primordial giants, the Ikes rocked and rumbled over the mound of wall-debris. Everything shook. The rebellious commandos turned from their intended attack on the Iowans and shot at the tanks. The air filled with fireflies as the Vulcans opened up. The commandos became a bloody soup, washed against the opposite wall in a tangle and mangle of boots, helmets, and bits of yellow and blue cloth. Another Ike rolled in, and another.

  One rebellious officer ran into the open, knelt, and aimed a shoulder-fired rocket. Before he could fire, an Ike’s main gun coughed. The tank rocked gently and kept coming. Where the officer had been was a patch of dusty daylight. The officer and his rocket had been pulverized. There was a hole in the garage floor. From a hole in the ceiling hung a five or six ton palm tree upside down in a dusty glow of lobby daylight. Its thick trunk came to rest standing up on the garage floor, while its car-sized rootball rained fine soil down in a rain-like torrent.

  In all, six MBT’s drove down the line of commando LXs. It was a rout. It was over in a few minutes. Their Winchesters barked. The rebel LXs, and anyone foolish enough to stay in them, became burning junk. Vulcans stammered in smoky bursts. The tanks continued on their foray, and reduced the 3045th’s supplies and vehicles to blazing cinders.

  Devereaux made fists and laughed. “Great day for the Irish! Charlie, roll this contraption out! To the White House! Get General Norcross’s office on the horn!”

  The loyalist LXs wheezed into racketing life and started to move.

  Devereaux stuck the cigar in his mouth. “Okay! Let’s go!” An aide placed four-star pennants to flutter on the fenders of the LX. “On to the White House!”

  Tory felt grateful to be alive. She held on with both hands as the vehicle surged forward. Devereaux said into the phone: “Nice job, Sherwin. I need an escort, how about it?--I’ve got this guest on board, by the name of Mattoon, ever hear of him? He’s anxious to join up with the President.--What’s that?--Three Ikes?--How I love thee. Be sure and have them run with their turrets turned backward or the boys in the White House will think we’re coming at them. And thanks!” As he hung up, Charley handed him another phone, and he spoke briefly with General Norcross.

  “Young lady,” Senator Mattoon told Tory, “I owe you the deepest apology. Believe me, the President and I will have a long chat, and I will mention your name specifically.” He added: “I take it Captain Gordon is your--?”

  “I’m in love with him,” Tory stated. “We’re going to get married.”

  “He’s a very heroic young man.”

  “How is--?”

  “He was al
ive, last I saw. I’m afraid it was touch and go there. You’d better pray.”

  “Thank you.” There must be hope! She held her hands over her face and felt faint as she thought about the possibility of his dying. How could her luck always be so grim? God, what have I done to deserve this? Some voice inside her protested at that thought: Why must I always think the worst? I deserve better!

  Devereaux hung up. “Norcross is with the President. They managed to pull in some reserve units, Marine guards, odds and ends, and they just barely fought off a dickhead attack. Now they’ve got troops rolling in from everywhere, and the situation is still fluid, but I think we’ll get it under control.” He added. “There is one thing that puzzles me deeply. Why did these guys go out on a limb like this? It couldn’t just be that Mason and Montclair have flipped their wigs. There has to be something more.”

  “A foreign power?” Mattoon wondered out loud.

  “I dunno,” Rocky said. “They have to be waiting for tactical and strategic support from someone, somewhere, but who or what?”

  “A nuclear device,” someone suggested. “A secret weapon?”

  “Oh God,” Devereaux said. “Get me Norcross again. I’d better make sure he’s thinking the same as we are.”

  At that moment, they crossed one of Washington’s major traffic circles, Logan Circle, and Tory had simultaneous views down two broad avenues. The noisy, bumpy, smoky LX made it hard to see straight and she held on for dear life, but stared out in fascination. It had rained lightly during the night. The slick streets reflected a cold, pearly morning light. The early sun hid behind quilted clouds charcoal-brushed, in other areas milky white. Distant landmarks--the Capitol Dome, the Washington Monument--poked through surly fog.