After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  Jed took a pull on his bourbon.

  "For now," he said, "I'd suggest doing nothing. But only for now, while we're distracted in New York. I'll admit, Mister President, I don't like the way things have gone bad so quickly there. It smells. I do have some plans for Texas, but you're right about needing to focus on the piracy issue first. Especially if it turns out we've got something worse than pirates in New York."

  "But if we do nothing about these forced evictions in the Mandate, now that we know what's happening, it'll be taken as consent and I'll be held accountable," Kipper said.

  Culver shook his head. "I don't think so, Mister President. Not with the fighting in New York. People will believe you're biding your time, waiting for an opportunity to settle up," he said, sipping his bourbon.

  "He hasn't given me one," Kipper said.

  Jed pointed at a stack of briefing documents on the unoccupied chair next to the president. "In all of those files, do you have any on your officers? Any officer evaluation reports?"

  Kipper's face went blank. "No, why? I could get them, I suppose. General Franks would probably ship over whatever I wanted, but what good would they do?"

  "Well, for one thing, they'd tell you what other officers thought of Blackstone. His file is interesting. I've studied it deeply. He's aggressive, almost to the point of folly. He has a mouth he can't quite control, which is one reason he was at Fort Lewis in command of I Corps in '03, far away from the main game in the Middle East. He overreaches, especially when in command of a military operation. Sometimes skill and a combination of luck and mistakes by his opponents reward that aggressiveness. And…" Jed finished his drink and smiled wolfishly.

  Kipper smiled. "And sometimes his mistakes catch up with him. Like in Seattle?"

  Jed nodded. "See, you're learning. We'll make a president out of you yet."

  The small windows were full of dawn's breaking light now as they descended toward the tarmac at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. Culver leaned forward and raised his glass to Kip.

  "When Blackstone makes a mistake," he said, "I promise you it'll be a large one. In my judgment, Jack Blackstone is a man who can be led all too easily to foolish and intemperate action, which, by the way, just happens to be one of the many services I provide."

  21

  New York "Man, this is the way to fight pirates," said Wilson.

  "This is the way to fight everyone," Milosz said, as he watched sheets of rain drift down past the ninth-floor window of the apartment building on Astor Place. A contrary gust of wind would sometimes blow a few drops in on his face, but compared with the poor bastards doing their fighting down on the streets below, he was warm and dry and relatively safe. This was much more pleasant than flying into a nest of vipers such as the ones they had encountered on Ellis Island.

  He sat on a very comfortable leather armchair that was perched on top of a huge oak desk some distance back from the window, providing him with an elevated view of the street without exposing him too much. Wilson, sitting next to Milosz in another chair they'd hauled up on top of a dining-room table, scanned their field of fire for any more hostiles while the Polish commando resisted the urge for another Winston from his growing stash of New York City plunder. He sucked down a little more of the stale Folgers coffee instead and continued his own scan. The weapon, a fifty-caliber M107 sniper rifle, was heavier than he was used to, but he'd traded up because the M107 was a big serious weapon for big serious work, and he wanted to be able to neutralize any threat short of a T-90. With Wilson's help he had stabilized it by screwing the base into a wooden file cabinet that they'd also lifted up onto the makeshift firing platform. The whole arrangement gave the impression of two overgrown boys who'd decided to build a fort in their rich uncle's apartment.

  For the moment, there was no movement at all. Using a thermal sight on his rifle, Milosz was able to watch the body heat leaking out of the eight men he had already killed around the Brinks armored truck they had been using to get around the city. He had put two rounds of armor-piercing incendiary into the engine block to stop the truck before sending another round through the skull of the driver. He and Wilson had picked off the rest, before any of them made it to cover. One of them, he noted with interest, was wearing a scarf of the type sported by the pirate… how would you describe them? Commanders? Captains? That seemed too formal. Whatever his role, the dead man's body, like the others, had glowed a fierce cherry red when Milosz had shot him, but now they all registered as dim, wistful ghost images in the AN/PAS-13 scope. Soon, with the cold rain draining all the heat from their corpses, the last trace of their lives would vanish, at least to him. The bodies would stay where they'd fallen until it was safe to dispose of them.

  If there was danger in all this, it was that he was so comfortable in the expensive lounger that he might fall asleep. As his eyelids began to droop, he decided on another square of chocolate and a fresh coffee.

  "I am getting drowsy, Wilson. I shall make some more shitty Folgers if you would like."

  "What I'd like," said the wiry black man, "is three days in bed with some smoking, cocksuckin' hottie. The first two days, just to sleep."

  "Ah, that way lies madness, Wilson, believe me. I had a wife once. Am much better now in city of the dead being shot at by pirate bitches and fools."

  "Who said anything about a wife?" Wilson asked with real umbrage. It was almost as though Milosz had let slip another nig nog or two. "I'm talking poo-saay, my friend."

  "Is all the same in end," said Milosz. "All the women, they hold out promise of this mythical poo-say, but what you get is nagging and frustration and not so much of the penis gobbling. Being shot at is much more exciting, believe me."

  Wilson eased back from the spotter scope for a moment, looking wistful. "I hear Texas is the place for a man to live these days. Frontier country again. Your money can buy anything there. New toys, booze, real hotties," he added significantly.

  Milosz squirmed, uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation. "Are you thinking about going there? My brother and his family, they farm in Texas on the federal program. They do not so much like this Blackstone."

  Wilson pulled back from the scope and shook his head. "Nah, I hear Mad Jack down there, he's cool with the black man, as long as you served, but he has a god-awful number of redneck cracker assholes gathering to his flag who aren't. I'm looking further ahead, no matter how shitty the short run may be."

  Milosz patted Wilson on the back. "Good man. Like your famous Gatsby, no? I, too, believe in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. I read your famous books to understand this country, yes? But orgastic? This word I do not know. Explain, please."

  "I think it's a sex thing, maybe," Wilson said, uncertainly.

  He was not much of a reader as far as Milosz had observed.

  "Oh, well, then. I am going to get some of that stale and unacceptable coffee now," Milosz said.

  Wilson nodded, taking up the long fifty from Milosz's grip after he had set his own carbine aside. "Take ten. Get a smoke in while you're at it. No one will smell your nasty Winstons up here."

  Milosz eased himself out of the lounger and stretched, cracking the bones in his back into place. He peered down into the streets leading back toward the East Village, but without the long fifty's thermal scope, there was not much to be seen. Low clouds blocked any natural light, and the rain had doused many of the fires set burning by the day's combat. A few buildings were still aflame here and there, but no fighters moved anywhere near them. They stood out too starkly on the darkened stage of an empty city. Gunships and A-10 Warthogs circled continuously, waiting for just such targets of opportunity.

  The Polish commando, so far from his birth home, walked carefully through the apartment, navigating partly by memory, partly by dint of the fact that he and Wilson had pushed most of the furniture up against the walls while they still had daylight. It gave him a clear path back into the kitchen, where he'd set up a li
ttle Coleman stove in the sink. He could use it safely back here without fear of the tiny blue flame giving away their position. Milosz brewed two cups of strong coffee and contemplated adding a slug of brandy-the apartment had been furnished with an excellent bar-but it was an idle thought. He had also salvaged a bottle of vodka, which he would enjoy when they came off the line, but for now, he was so sleep-deprived and physically exhausted that a mouthful of alcohol might be the end of him.

  The fighting had not ceased completely with the fall of darkness. Both sides enjoyed the advantage of night vision equipment, and a small battle appeared to be raging in the foul weather some ten or fifteen blocks to the north. But the rain had flooded huge tracts of Lower Manhattan, making tactical movement difficult, if not impossible, and the huge brigade-level encounters of the morning had died down as conditions had deteriorated. At first the Americans had been choppering in, right on top of the pirates-or looters, as Milosz insisted on calling them. To him the word "pirates" sounded a bit too glamorous for the lowest forms of criminal scum, scavengers raking over the junk heap of a dead city. But so many men and helicopters were lost to shoulder-fired rockets that all movement was now either on foot or by armored fighting vehicle, and even they could fall prey to giant bombs hidden at the roadside or in piles of refuse and wreckage. All in all, Milosz was more than happy to sit up here in his well-furnished eyrie, picking off random targets as they presented themselves. A troop of cavalry had his back, securing the lower levels of the building against infiltrators, and the Apaches circling beneath the cloud cover would swoop down on any large group attempting to rush their position. Forward observers even coordinated concentrated bursts of accurate cannon fire from the army and the naval vessels on the East River now. It was such an agreeable setup, all things considered, that it could not possibly last.

  He returned with the coffees and a Mars Bar chopped in two with his Gerber knife, a prize from a game of poker with Wilson two weeks back.

  Happier times.

  The master sergeant leaned forward in his own luxury armchair, pressing his fingers up against the single earpiece of their radio. Milosz, without a headset on, could not hear the exchange.

  "This is Gopher one-three," Wilson said, using the latest in an ever-changing series of call signs. "Go with your traffic."

  Milosz waited for Wilson to finish his conversation.

  "Gopher copies," Wilson said. "Out."

  He took the hot coffee from Milosz and inhaled the chocolate bar all in one go.

  "Sorry, spring break is over. Militia company pushed a little too far forward up on Madison Square, got 'emselves surrounded. The disco lights just started up from that direction. We're moving up with the cav to dig 'em out."

  Milosz took a few moments to savor his half of the Mars Bar and sip the rest of the coffee. His gear was ready to move at moment's notice, and he did not know when they might eat again. The nig nogs were flooding in from…

  Milosz forced himself to back up and rephrase that. He had promised Wilson there would be no more nig nog talk. And anyway, not all the looters were nig nogs. Many were ragheads. Some were beaners. There were even a few outfits from his part of the world, Slavic crews out of Serbia and Russia. The latest intelligence even had a few dozen players from the Chechen mafia working the north end of the island. For some reason, though, the loose coalition of bandits who were actually spoiling for a fight were mostly African or refugees from the Second Holocaust, a grab bag of different Arab nationalities and Iranians. They were flooding into the blocks around Madison Square Park, where Alpha Company of Governor Schimmel's First New York Militia Regiment was cut off and in danger of being overrun.

  "The better part of Alpha has holed up here," said the colonel as he pointed at a strange map surrounded by cups of stale coffee, pencils, rulers, and message printouts on a dusty conference room table. It showed not only the street grid for that part of the city but 3D-like drawings of the buildings. They reminded Milosz of a tourist guide to Rome he had once owned. He had never been there, of course. Sergeants in the Polish Army did not earn that sort of money. But as a staunch Catholic he often dreamed of visiting the Pope in his hometown, even when the blessed John Paul II had passed on to his reward and been replaced by that creepy German, Ratzinger. So he had bought a copy of that guide to Rome, which featured maps just like this one.

  The colonel, whose name tag read KINNINMORE, stabbed his finger down again, pointing to a richly illustrated wedge of parkland.

  "Unfortunately," he continued, raising his voice over a wash of radio chatter that spilled out of a makeshift communications area. The sound of panic filled the room until someone turned the speakers down, reducing the gunfire and shouts to a tolerable level. The colonel resumed his speech. "Unfortunately," he said, "there's a platoon and spare change pinned down out here, in the open. They have good tree cover and have dug themselves in as best they can, but the pirates are pouring it on. They want to wipe out a whole company. We're shielding them with protective fire out of our ships on the river, but they're running low and resupply is dicey at best."

  Again with the pirates, Milosz thought. They really needed a better name for these asswits. There. Asswits. That would do perfectly well. Master Sergeant Wilson could not complain about that that because asswits, in Fryderyck Milosz's long and all too common experience, came in a variety of colors and ethnicities. Whereas the pirates who had first raided New York in the weeks after the Wave rolled back came from one place only, Nigeria, specifically the port of Lagos. They were real, modern-day pirates, too, who until then had made a living seizing and ransoming container ships in the Gulf of Guinea when they didn't simply kill the crew and take the cargo for themselves. The news of the first of their number to strike out across the Atlantic and come home with a hold full of treasures saw most of the port's pirate cohort immediately slip anchor for the New World. Then most of the port's other inhabitants followed them. Then, increasingly, competitors from neighboring countries, from the Caribbean and South America and of course from the benighted wastelands of all those lands destroyed by the Israelis' nuclear strikes.

  As far as Milosz could tell, the original Nigerian pirates weren't even operating here anymore, having been driven off by larger, better-armed and -organized competitors. So it just wasn't correct to call them pirates anymore. Whereas "asswits"-a term he had picked up from a British officer in Iraq-well, asswits very much appealed to him.

  Colonel Kinninmore, however, was sticking with "pirates."

  "The pirates we're looking at here are probably sourced from over a dozen different crews, until recently none of them coordinating very well but all of them pretty well established in the AOR, and with good equipment. Suspiciously good equipment. They have solid Russian AKMs, PKMs, a lot of Chinese Type 56s, and some crew-served stuff, which they've taken off the trucks since we started interdicting them by air. They have some night vision capabilities, a mix of Chinese and Russian gear, which seems to be unevenly distributed. Same with body armor; even got some scavenged NYPD vests thrown in. Their comms gear is very good. Although their radio security is not."

  Milosz stole a glance out the window of the conference room. It was on the fourth floor of a nondescript office building near Union Square, looking out across a little park. All the big boys had been brought to the conference, special operators from all four branches of the U.S. military along with private contract operators from Sandline. One of the Navy SEALs from Ellis Island recognized Milosz and nodded to him.

  Dolphin fucker, Milosz thought, nodding back and taking notice of one of the females in the room, a blond woman who could have been army or air force, it was hard to tell. She stood, popping her bubble gum, next to a very large… African American.

  "Our first priority with this mission is getting those militia boys out of the shit," said Kinninmore. "But there is a secondary consideration, too."

  The assembled men and women appeared to perk up at that.

  "I said before
that the pirates weren't very well coordinated until recently. But you'll all be aware that's changed in this latest round of fighting. Those of you who fought on Ellis will have encountered the guys there with the scarfs. They seemed to be providing tactical-level command. We've seen the same thing here on the big island. You'll also know we haven't yet been able to capture one."

  Milosz remembered the mess one of those crazy fucks had made of Raab and Sievers.

  "As a secondary, and for now I mean secondary, consideration, the National Command Authority would very much like it if we could obtain one of those gentlemen for a full and frank exchange of views on what the fuck they're doing in New York."

  The room filled with grunts and a few curses. Everyone knew of somebody who'd been taken out by one of the exploding bad guys. Milosz peered out into the darkness. From here you could see flashes and snaking flights of tracer fire farther uptown. The open area below was well lit up as Strykers and Humvees poured into the staging post. Two converted M1Abrams tanks fitted with massive plows and Mk19 grenade launchers were grunting and chugging thick clouds of hot exhaust that caused the paint to peel on the abandoned cars. They cleared the intersections of wrecks, piling them up into a makeshift berm in case everything went wrong and the Americans had to retreat to a strongpoint.

  "Anyway, that's where you come in," said Kinninmore, and instantly Milosz switched his full attention back to the briefing. The ads were over, and it was time for the main feature, as Sergeant Wilson would say.

  "I need you to work in behind the enemy, determine their lines of approach, and mark them for interdiction. If, and only if, you can grab one of our mystery men without getting yourself blown to pieces, then you're tasked to do that, too."

  "We getting full air this time, Colonel?" Master Sergeant Wilson asked in a familiar tone, teetering between hope and resignation. "Sounds like we can't count on arty."