by Mack Maloney
“You know, no radios, no TV, no old uniforms, no Stars and Stripes.” Jones’s voice cracked slightly when he mentioned the ban on the American flag. “That’s why we have these stupid pansy color uniforms on, and that’s why that candyass, three-dollar-bill flag is flying over this place.
“But I’ve always liked the Cape, and they let me fly, so here I came. Been here about a year and a half.”
But Hunter was confused. Fly? The last time he’d heard, one of the New Order’s rules—the most important one in his eyes—was that all military aircraft had to be dismantled as part of the demilitarization agreement. But he had heard jets at the base. Then, as if on cue, the sound of a jet taking off filled the office, shaking the coffee pot slightly.
Jones read his mind.
“We have a few planes here, Hawk,” the general said, his smile looking like the cat that ate the canary.
“So I can hear,” Hunter said. “But how’d you get around the demilitarization order?”
The general gave out a loud “Ha!” and waved his hand. “We were lucky, Hawk. And the traitors—our so-called Vice President and the rest of them—were stupid. Their New Order said ‘dismantle all the combat aircraft’ when it should have said ‘destroy all combat aircraft.’ so what do you think the smart people in Europe did? They just started taking the planes apart, cataloging the numbers and packing them away. And who the hell was going to stop them? The UN? The Finns? The Russians? No way. So these enterprising sorts packed all the pieces away, put it on ships and sent the ships everywhere and anywhere, just before the commies moved in.”
“Every war has its profiteers,’ Hunter said.
“You get the idea,” the general said, pouring him another cup of coffee and adding a dash of booze. “Now, don’t get me wrong. A lot of planes were destroyed. I mean, look what happened to us.”
Hunter well remembered the day when the Finnish observers arrived and systematically blew up the squadron’s 12 remaining F-16s.
“Yeah, nice guys, those Finns,” the general said, digressing for a moment. “They live in the armpit country of Europe and spend most of their time sucking up to the Russians.”
Hunter felt a surge of rage flow through him. What a waste of money and technology?
“Anyway,” Jones continued, lighting up a massive cigar. “The New Order boys also screwed up by not including other military aircraft like cargo planes and tankers. Copters. And they didn’t mention anything about de-commissioned aircraft either.”
Hunter’s vision of a flightless world was happily coming to an end.
“You’ve been to Wright-Patterson,” Jones said in a puff of smoke. “You know how many planes were in mothballs there?”
“Hundreds, I would imagine,” Hunter said, adding some hooch to his own coffee. Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio, Hunter knew, was the location of the Air Force’s surplus aircraft storage area. It was like an elephant’s graveyard for old planes; especially the sophisticated ones that had some years behind them but were too damned expensive to send to the scrap heap. So instead of shit-canning them, the Air Force just plugged all the holes, drained the tanks and had them sit out at Wright-Patterson to use in case of an emergency.
“Thousands,” Jones corrected him. “And most of them just needed the screws tightened and the oil changed and they were ready to fly.”
A tinge of panic took a swipe at him. “But, what is Ohio these days? Who’s running things there?”
“No one, which is fine with us,” Jones hauled out a map that was so new, it looked as if the ink still wasn’t dry. It was the first time Hunter had seen the new countries and territories of America. “Ohio is now a Free State. In other words, it’s an open area. No government. At least for the time being. A couple of guys out there realized they were sitting on a bonanza and opened up shop. All these little countries or regions or states—or whatever they are—came running because everyone wanted to start their own air force. It’s an airplane supermarket. We’ve got a couple of guys out there right now, bidding on some planes.”
Hunter instantly wanted to see the place.
“What are you shopping for?” he asked.
“Mostly small stuff, fighters, attack craft. They’ve got everything. A lot of heavy bomber merchandise. B-58s, B-47s, even a couple B-36s.” The general rose and poured himself a third cup of joe and added the mandatory splash of whiskey. “But we can’t fool around with the heavies. We can’t afford them and the runway here won’t take a lot of it. Way too short. And where would we put them?”
“And what would you do with them?”
“Exactly,” Jones replied with satisfaction. “The people running all these little air forces think the bigger the better. Now, I’m sure a lot of them are thinking of converting their B-47 into a cargo plane and, in some cases it will work.
“But you can be sure that some of these clowns are thinking differently. Some of these states are being run by the typical crooked and/or stupid politician who suddenly woke up and found he was a king. Hell, this so-called Vice President—what’s his name again, Benedict Arnold?—appointed half of them. God knows what deals he made before he traded in his stars and bars for a hammer and sickle.
“Well, what happens when someone in the country next door doesn’t want to pay a flyover tax? Or money at the tolls? Or starts fishing in the other guy’s river? How much will it take before one of these pisspots in control gets mad enough and orders his B-36s to go and flatten the other guy’s capital? It’s already happening! They’ve been having a hell of a misunderstanding down near Florida and Alabama. Blowing the shit out of each other. Using gasoline bombs, napalm, terrible stuff.”
“Napalm?” Hunter said, stirring his coffee with a pencil. “You can get napalm these days?”
“Oh yeah,” Jones said, relighting his stogie. “Anyone who wants it can get ’palm from the Mid-Aks.”
“Mid-who?”
“Mid-Aks. The Middle Atlantic Conference States. Everything from Delaware and Pennsylvania down to Georgia. New Jersey doesn’t count. The ’Aks. They’re real dangerous, Hawk. They were sitting on a lot of military hardware when the balloon went up and they must have either hid ninety percent of the shit when the New Order came in, or made a deal to keep it all because they still have a lot of it. I mean these guys are armed to the teeth and then some with tanks, PCs, howitzers. And they have a lot of men in uniform too. Lot of scumbags living down there even before the war. Now, at least, they’re employed.”
He let out a snort and took a healthy swig from his coffee mug.
“We’ll be fighting them here next,” he said, a touch of nervous caution in his voice. “They’re already making noise. They took over several little territories around Kentucky and Tennessee. Just rolled over them. Sherman-to-the-sea type stuff. They have Fort Knox and made themselves rich. Now they want to talk to my bosses about ‘Mutual Defense Treaties’ and all this happy horseshit. It’s a joke! They have a bunch of crooks running the show and they can use a whole army as enforcers. I’d like to kick their asses.”
“How are your … bosses?” Hunter asked.
“Ah, they’re okay,” Jones said. “They were smart enough to know that if you can’t have a big army, you’d better have a good air force. Especially with all the coastline they have to protect. From old New Hampshire, to Boston Harbor, the whole Cape out here, right down to Long Island. They’ll probably get Maine someday, too. Right now, that’s a no-man’s-land.
“They pretty much leave us alone down there. They give me money and I pay everyone and what’s ever left over, I invest in spare parts and start saving for some more airplanes. We fly up to Boston every few days, buzz the city, just to let them know we’re around. The people up there like it. They like to think someone’s watching over them.”
Jones returned to the map again. “We fly out to the Berkshires, go up around Mt. Washington, skirt down around Connecticut. That’s about the range of our patrols. We could fly right over New York
City if we wanted to, but the place is so heavy, you never know what they’ll shoot up at you. You think it was bad when you were there? It’s incredible down there now. Everyone has a gun, a missile, or a tank. And all they do is fight each other for the right to call this block or that apartment house ‘their turf.’ They enjoy it. Every man’s a king and the fighting never stops. And it’s a great cover for what really goes on down there, and I mean all kinds of smuggling. Guns, drugs, women, missiles, explosives, gasoline, booze—you name it. Enough parts to build your own goddamn B-52, if you have the gold or the silver or whatever to pay for it. And I know for a fact the Mid-Aks run most of the guns into New York City and trade them for protection—a free rein in smuggling stuff in and out.”
Hunter’s thoughts suddenly flashed back to Dozer and the heroic 7th Cavalry. Who knows what ever happened to them?
“We’ve seen a little action, mostly pirate ships and stuff,” Jones said, helping himself to his fourth pick-me-up of the morning. “We’ve had some strange doings lately though.”
He drained his mug and stood up.
“Come on,” he said, pulling on his jacket. “I’ll show you what we’re flying these days.”
Hunter thought he’d never ask.
CHAPTER THREE
WALKING OUT INTO THE brisk morning air, Jones began to show Hunter around the base.
The place was more runway than anything else. There were three of them to be exact, two which ran parallel to the ocean nearby, the third intersecting them at a 70-degree angle. The entire base was probably a square mile in size. There were six lonely buildings scattered about—two of them big, quonset-hut style hangars, two others served as housing for the base’s occupants. The flight ops building had the base’s control tower sitting beside it. The sixth building was next door, a catch-all mess hall, which he would soon find out, served as the well-patronized base saloon.
The base was surrounded by a chain link fence and guard towers every 500 yards or so. Soldiers walked the perimeter in pairs. He could see some rudimentary 20mm anti-aircraft gun positions ringing the perimeter, with a few mobile SAM launchers and even a couple of old Hawk anti-aircraft systems thrown in.
But the only aircraft sitting on the flight line was the Piper Cub that Hunter had seen towing the sign a few weeks before.
“I knew you were probably alive,” Jones said matter-of-factly. “And, if you had made it back from Europe, that you were probably hiding out somewhere, waiting for the fall of civilization.”
“I’m still waiting,” Hunter said with a laugh.
“Me, too,” Jones replied. “But I figured you would return to where your roots were. The mountains in New Hampshire seemed like a good bet, although I had that Cub flying all over the state before you spotted it.”
They walked right over one of the runways. Hunter could see that although there were weeds popping up through the asphalt, there were also some tire skid marks, indicating that something besides a Piper Cub had landed there recently. Where were the other planes?
“Don’t ask just yet,” Jones told him, reading his thoughts again.
They walked in silence for a few moments, over the second runway and approached the beach.
“We lost twenty million people, Hawk,” the general said, the bitterness evident in his voice. “When the double-cross went down and that Quisling left a hole in the Star Wars shield, the Russian ICBMs just kept on coming, all of them landing on or around our silos. Talk about overkill! They just about blew the country into two parts. From North Dakota on down, it looks like the moon. Craters as big as cities, forest fires that will take years to burn out. Even some of the rivers are on fire, who knows why.”
“What about radiation?” Hunter asked, sniffing the air for effect. “Nothing seems to be glowing.”
“Most of the bombs that fell were ‘clean,’” Jones said with noticeable relief. “Thank God for that. There is some low-level radiation, not much though. But those bastards also sent over nerve gas, germ bombs, even some hallucinogenic stuff. It’s scattered everywhere. They must have launched everything but the kitchen sink at us, and we didn’t so much as fire a popgun at them.”
“So much for nuclear deterrence,” Hunter said.
“It used to be beautiful country out there, Hawk,” Jones continued. “The Dakotas. Nebraska. Kansas. I was raised out there. I know. Now it looks like another planet. It’s a no-man’s-land out there. I’ve flown over it. It gave me the creeps. It’s downright spooky and it’s going to stay like that for a long time.”
Hunter nodded, then said: “I know it sounds terrible, but twenty million dead isn’t so bad, considering what could have happened if they had nuked our big cities,” Hunter said.
“You’re right,” Jones said, stopping to light his cigar in the brisk, ocean breeze. “But they wanted something left for them to take over. This ‘No Occupation’ section of the treaty is a bunch of yabanza. You know and I know that as soon as those ugly, crude bastards get their hammers and sickles straight, they’ll be over here, eating our food, fishing our rivers, screwing our women. They’ll be able to take the Queen Mary over here, who the hell’s going to stop them?”
Hawk felt the bulge of the folded American flag in his back pocket. “We’ll stop them,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Jones looked at him and laughed, but didn’t say anything for a couple of moments. “You could …” the general said, finally, thinking of Hunter’s expertise in the air. He was widely known as the best fighter pilot ever. “You could probably shoot ’em all down singlehandedly.”
Hunter steered clear of the subject.
“What’s with this ‘New Order’ business,” he asked. “Do people really give a damn?”
“No, not really,” Jones answered. “It’s a case of malignant neglect. That traitor Vice President set himself up as the New Order Commissioner, or some such thing, and then took his entourage of faggots and weirdos and Russians and went to Bermuda or Moscow or someplace to play house. Before he left, he set up a bunch of rules. All of them are designed to stop people from talking, or even thinking, about the old ways.”
“I know it’s ‘illegal’ to fly the Stars and Stripes,” Hunter said. “What else did they come up with?”
“You can’t even say the name of the country—the name before all this shit happened, that is,” Jones said. “Not even the word, America. Now it’s just The Continent. No more national anthem, no more newspapers, TV, radio. They even banned sporting events. But the Texans told them to go screw themselves on that one.”
“And some people choose to follow these rules?”
“Well, yes and no. It’s more like you can avoid a lot of trouble if you just keep your mouth shut.”
“That was true in Germany in the 1930s,” Hunter said.
“I know,” Jones sighed. “But I look at it this way. If I start mouthing off, my bosses get upset. They get upset because they have to deal with the New Order flunkies who are running around in Boston, looking over everyone’s shoulder, collecting their 10-percent tax, off the top. I make too much noise, a New Order clown gets wind of it and tells my bosses to can me. They can my ass, I ain’t got a job, money or a place to hang my helmet. What’s worse, I can’t fly. If I can’t fly, I might as well die. You know that.”
Hunter nodded again. “Me, too.”
“So I play their little game. We’ve got a good thing going here. We can build it into a really good thing. The Northeast Economic Zone is just another word for ‘We’re making money.’ They have good airport facilities in Boston. A lot of traffic goes through there. All the major convoys to the Coast go out of Boston and Montreal. It’s big, big money. Real silver. Real gold. They pay a tax to that jerk-off in Bermuda. He keeps the Russians happy by sucking up to the Politburo. It all evens out. No one wants to jinx it by talk of the old days.”
The general was quiet for a while.
“We’re mercenaries here, Hawk,” he said finally. “We’re not soldiers fight
ing for a flag or a cause. We’re fighting for a paycheck. We’re guarding their investment. They’re getting rich and putting people to work. People work, have food, they stay happy and quiet. Look, I have permission to raise an army here, train ’em, make a special forces unit out of them. The Leaders Council in Boston—they’re my bosses—will give me just about what I need. In return, I protect their asses. I watch over their convoy routes. I make sure there ain’t no pirates in their airspace. But if something big broke out, I mean like a war between the Zone and the ’Aks, I’m gone. And my people are gone too. It ain’t like the old days. It ain’t worth losing your life over.”
Hunter let it all sink in.
“What’s it like in the big cities these days?” he asked as they approached the beach on the other side of the runway. “I mean, I know New York City is like Beirut. But how about LA? Chicago?”
“Well, they’re empty, most of them,” Jones answered. “They figure that more than half—that’s half—the Americans moved out of the country in the past two years. Didn’t want to live here, simple as that. Of the one hundred million that left, most went north to Canada, and some went south to Mexico. There are huge resettlement camps up around Toronto, Quebec, Montreal, places like that. The Canucks were good enough to take our people in. They didn’t get burnt so bad in the rumble. Mexico is another story, from what I hear. Lots of trouble down there. The Mex still remember we kicked their asses back in 1836. Lot of those people have moved back into the ROT.”
“ROT?” Hunter asked.
Jones laughed. “Shouldn’t call it that I guess. ‘Republic of Texas.’ Those crazy bastards finally got their wish. They are their own country now. Got a hell of an army, too, so I hear.”
Hunter wasn’t too surprised to hear the Texans were adapting.
“Shit, you don’t think a little thing like World War III would stop those people, do you?” Jones said. “Let me tell you something: after the armistice was signed, the Texans took about a day and a half off to change the colors on their flag and adjust their college football schedule. Then they went back to work.
