After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to the bandanna boy's unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out.

  As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle of the gun on target until her finger completed the pull of the trigger. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the agent's unibrow, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel, dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and… something else. It was a feeling she did not recognize, but it was powerful. No, it was… power itself. She felt her power over the man whom she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling. Sofia forced herself to work the bolt mechanically, spitting out the spent.30-06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having discarded their sledgehammers for their M16s, took cover behind the couch and exchanged fire with those who tried to run back into the Hy Top.

  Sofia tracked two more agents sprinting for the door, dispatching one with a clean torso shot that spun him off his feet and into a dry wall facade with a crash that shook the entire front of the club building. The other man she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire that it disassembled him from the hip to shoulder height.

  She had expected this to be hard, yet she felt nothing but a deep sense of satisfaction as she scanned the windows of the Hy Top for more targets.

  In fact, Sofia was ashamed to admit as she dispatched another road agent firing from a second floor window, it was kind of fun. Miguel kept up the banter as two more women emerged from the dark room. He had seen one of them earlier while scouting the building, but the other was unfamiliar, and he quickly noted that Adam did not recognize her, either. Another captive, then, most likely. She did not have the hardened aspect of the longtime camp whores, appearing every bit as traumatized as the Mormon ladies. Miguel moved into the locked bunkhouse and drew his sawed-off shotgun, keeping the internal door covered while Adam rousted the rest of the women out of there.

  Sure enough, within a minute he heard somebody scrabbling at the lock on the other side, and within seconds the door flew inward and a road agent stood there, still groggy and half naked. He registered the presence of Miguel, and his bleary eyes had just enough time to go wide as they took in the huge, yawning muzzle of the Lupara, before the cowboy pulled the trigger and all but cut him in two. In the stark white flash of the muzzle blast Miguel caught a glimpse of a corridor behind the agent, stacked with boxes. The man's body jackknifed around the molten comet of lead shot and flew backward, slamming into a tower of crates that toppled to the floor with the crashing tinkle of broken glass. Immediately Miguel smelled alcohol.

  "Out now!" he roared, no longer concerned with stealth. He holstered the Lupara, with one chamber still loaded, and pointed his Winchester down the end of the hallway. "Is that all of them, Adam? Are all of your women out?"

  The uproar of the gunfight was now so great, so overwhelming, that he wondered if he had missed the boy's reply, but turning around, he saw he had not. Adam was frantically checking and rechecking his small frightened group of women, shaking his head ever more frantically.

  "No! No!" he cried helplessly.

  "Adam," Pieraro yelled. "How many are missing?"

  "It's Sally, Mister Pieraro. Sally Gray." And the raw anguish in his voice told Miguel that this Sally Gray was not just another captive. She was someone special to the boy.

  Sofia would be disappointed.

  "Take them out the way we came in," he ordered. "Run and do not stop to look back or wait. We shall meet up again at the clearing. Go. Go! I will find your Sally."

  "Sir!" called out the woman he knew as Jenny. "I think she was in the storeroom. One of those men took her there not fifteen minutes ago."

  "Thank you, Jenny. Now go!"

  He waved them off with a fierce gesture and took a moment to compose himself. Battle raged elsewhere in the building, a savage din of staccato weapons fire. Machine guns. Single shots. Men and women crying in fear and outrage. He checked the load on his Winchester. It was still good. He had not yet fired a shot with it. Crossing himself and imploring the help of the Blessed Virgin, he swallowed his fear, which was considerable, and swung into the hallway, covering its length with his rifle. He stepped over the ruptured body of the man he had slain and hastened down the corridor. It was poorly lit, with only a few shafts of lamplight poking in through gaps in the walls to illuminate his way. A door stood locked halfway up, and he considered how best to approach it for all of half a second before kicking it in and jumping out of the way of any return fire. None came, which was a small disappointment. He had been hoping not to have to push farther into the club. Another check of the room confirmed that it was little more than a closet filled with cleaning implements: brooms, mops, buckets, and so on.

  Miguel ducked from the knees as a burst of gunfire suddenly tore through the wooden slats of the wall just ahead of him, allowing more light to spill through.

  His legs quivering from the adrenaline rush, he cautiously edged up to the hole and took a peek. He seemed to be looking into what must have been the main bar area. It was chaos in there, with a small fire burning out of control in one corner where an oil lamp had been smashed or shot to pieces and had spilled its fuel onto the wooden floor, where spilled liquor and bedclothes had quickly caught alight. Bodies lay everywhere, some still, some twitching or trying to drag themselves away from the carnage, But he also counted at least five road agents still standing and able to give a good accounting for themselves. They were all hunkered down at the front of the building, firing out into the street. The shots that punched through the wall in front of him must have come from Aronson's men out there.

  Miguel furrowed his brow as he took in the scene.

  There was no sign of any woman who might be Sally Gray. Jenny had said she was in a storeroom, but there was no such area off this corridor. He could see three camp whores from his vantage point, easily discerned by their sluttish mode of dress. Two were dead, and one was firing a carbine out into the street. Indeed, the agents were putting out such a volume of fire that he had to worry about Aronson and the others. Had they found cover before coming under fire?

  How many were alive?

  Was it even worth continuing the search for Miss Gray? Papa should be out of there by now, Sofia thought. She had given up any pretense of hiding at the edge of the battle, crossing the street a block up from the Hy Top. Rifle fire popped around her, but she did not pay it any mind. The adrenaline was flowing through her, giving her a rush that was far more intense than the flush of deer hunting. She worked around to the back of the Hy Top.

  "Don't shoot me, please!"

  The Mormon girl, about the same age as Sofia, fell down in front of her. She ran up to the young woman and knelt down. Adam caught up with them seconds later, his weapon leveled on Sofia until realization took hold.

  "Holy hell, Sofia! Your father is going to be furious with you," he said.

  "Where is he?" she asked. "He should be out by now."

  "Still in the Hy Top," Adam said, bringing her up to speed.

  "Anything left in that rifle?" she asked, pointing at the M16 Adam carried.

  "Sure," he said. "I've not even fired it yet."

  "Give it to me," she said.

  "I think not," he said, trying to summon up all the dignity his few months of added maturity might lend him-without any luck. "Your father-"

  Adam didn't complete the sentence. She butt swiped him across the face with the flat of her rifle stock. It made a pretty good club.

  "Here." Sofia handed her Remington to the crying woman. "What's your name?"

  "Jenny," she said.

  "I'm not going to kill you. Do you know how to use this?"

  Jenny nodded.

  "Fine," Sofia said, collecting Adam's M16. "Stay here. I'm going after my father." Miguel dismissed the unworthy option of cutting and running without a seco
nd thought. He had promised Adam that he would do his best to rescue the girl, and even if he hadn't, that did not change the fact that she was a good woman-he assumed-being held captive by the worst sort of men. Were it his daughter and another man had turned away from a chance to save her, what would he think of such a worthless cur?

  Not much, after killing him.

  Miguel settled on what he had to do and determined to see it through, no matter what. He took a moment to examine the room again, taking care this time to commit to memory as much detail as he could: the positions of the agents firing into the street and those of the dead and the wounded, the cover he might use, the paths he might take through the chaos. He did not have perfect vision of the room, far from it. But life was not perfect, and God expected his children to be about his business anyway.

  He checked the Winchester one last time as he walked on a few paces to a door that would surely have to give on to the barroom.

  Seven rounds of 30.30 smokeless in the tube.

  He made the sign of the cross.

  Kissed the small locket hanging around his neck.

  Jacked a round into the chamber and stepped into the room.

  Working from left to right, Miguel punched 170 grains of 30.30 deer killer through the back of the first man's neck at 2,227 feet per second. The agent crouched next to him lost the top of his head as he turned slightly to see what had happened to his comrade. Miguel worked the lever action and put his third round into the back of the next man in line, who was taking cover behind a structural beam as he fired out into the street. The woman, the camp whore, who had been firing her carbine blindly over the window ledge reacted with catlike speed and managed to turn toward him, cry out a warning over the clamor and tumult, and even squeeze off a couple of rounds. But they hit the ceiling, bringing down a shower of dust and particleboard before her face exploded when hit by his fourth shot. Blood and gray matter spattered the face of the man next to her.

  "Dixie!" he cried out, turning on Miguel. "Fucker, you ki-"

  Dixie's boyfriend died of a bullet through the heart, and before Miguel could finish the last of them, the final agent, an older man, threw his weapon down and put his hands up.

  "Whoa, pardner, don't shoot me! I fucking surrender!" the graybeard said.

  Miguel covered him with the rifle, advancing cautiously through the room, still hunched over slightly and flinching as fire from the Mormons outside continued to smash into the building. All of his senses were singing; light and sound and the reek of gunpowder and death flooded in as time seemed to stretch out forever-as though he might walk across this room, surrounded by the dead and dying, from this moment until the ending of the world.

  Something was behind him. He whipped out his Lupara.

  A burst of rifle fire cut the shape down before Miguel could pull the trigger. He caught the briefest hint of the agent's head disintegrating in a shower of blood and bone before blessed silence fell and all that remained was the ringing in his ears and the wailing of a woman somewhere in the dark. The man who had been coming at him from a doorway to his left fell facedown onto the floor.

  Sofia stood behind the man, an M16 in her hands.

  "Papa," she said sheepishly.

  31

  Berlin As she'd expected, the BMW was an older model, an X5 from 2002. The Bayerische Motoren Werke hadn't gone under like so many other automakers, but it had shrunk enormously and had not released a new line beyond the 2003 models. Still, this X5 from Berlin Control was a pretty good SUV crossover. A little stiff in the handling for her taste, but powerful and kitted out with the balance of her equipment in a sealed diplomatic box in the back. No Landespolizei patrols would be pulling her over and poking around in her unmentionables.

  Caitlin blinked away the fatigue of a long day's travel. She had risen before dawn in London, and it was coming up on midnight. Six lanes of the A100 ribboned away in front of her, sweeping past the radio tower on her left, lit from below by golden lights. It would have been an almost cheery sight after the drab gray Orwellian tones of London, but she was too tired to care. She was also lonely, an unusual, almost unknown state for her. She'd tried to phone Bret before flying out, but the guard at the safe house had told her that both he and Monique were asleep, and she hadn't wanted to wake either of them. Her breasts felt heavy and ached from not having fed her baby in so many hours, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn't like she could express milk in the field, after all. Soon enough her milk would dry up, anyway. She felt an irrational flicker of resentment at that, as if it was the worst thing Baumer had done. Caitlin flicked the air vents to keep the uncomfortably cold AC blowing into her face, warding off drowsiness.

  She regretted not bringing a couple of CDs. German pop and rock music made her brain hurt. After flitting around the dial for half a minute she found a local news radio station halfway through a quarter-hour update. Her German-language comprehension was good, but she was a little rusty with the spoken word and practiced by repeating the bulletin after the newsreader.

  "Fighting continues in New York, while the British Security Cabinet holds crisis talks with the U.S. Defense minister. NATO ministers meeting in Brussels are expected to release a statement later tonight condemning state-sponsored piracy but urging the Kipper administration to show restraint…"

  Caitlin snorted and rolled her tired eyes.

  "Enough of that shit," she said, trying a few more stations until she lucked onto a talk radio host ranting about an upcoming vote in the Bundestag to recognize sharia law, applied by mandated local communities as binding in certain classes of civil action. The five-minute tirade was enormous fun to bluster along with, and the callers provided her with an eclectic mix of accents and vocal styles to parrot. It was also a reasonable backgrounder on the sort of suburb she was headed into. Neukolln wasn't a closed community like some of the shariatowns in the east of Germany or the remaining Enclosures in London, for that matter, but it was enclosed in all but name. She, a blond American woman, would have no freedom of movement there. She'd need an escort, someone she trusted, but not a local stringer for Echelon. As Dalby had made clear, this op was deniable. There was a good chance it was going to get bloody.

  She yawned and shivered as the X5 hummed past miles of closely packed, low-rise apartment blocks. Unlike London, Berlin had no curfew or travel restrictions, and traffic was noticeably heavier than she'd experienced in the British capital, especially at this time of night. Gas was much cheaper, probably because it wasn't controlled by anything like the Brits' Ministry of Resources. Even so, the city was noticeably quieter than when she'd last been stationed there, working up the brief on al Banna at the start of the decade. The German economy, like Britain's, was much smaller than it had been, and few people had the means to keep a car on the road.

  Another ten minutes took her past Tempelhof Airport, where she could see a few stripped and gutted jetliners in the livery of American Airlines and Delta Airlines parked on the apron to the north of the two runways. Shortly afterward she turned left at Britzer Damm and motored quickly past long rows of shuttered shops. Many of them looked as though they hadn't opened in years. The footpaths and gutters were littered with rubbish and scraps of paper gathered into drifts and whipped up in small eddies by her speeding passage. The streets were darker than she recalled, but then they would be, with every second light turned off by the city authorities. Here and there groups of young men clustered together, some of them watching her with sullen expressions as she drove past. Immediately after crossing the rail line at the Hermannstrasse station, she turned left into Emser Strasse and drove for two blocks past whitewashed four-and five-story apartment buildings. Away from the main strip, with its scattering of mean little bars and greasy spoons around which tribes of young men would gather, Emser Strasse was quiet. Many cars were parked neatly by the curb, but even in the dark Caitlin could tell most of them had not been driven in a long time. They were dusty, and more often than not rotting banks o
f leaf matter were piled up against deflated tires. The GPS module beeped triumphantly.

  She was there.

  A new, unusued phone came out of her leather jacket, and she keyed in the number taken from Bret's diary back at the farm. A man answered in a voice fogged with sleep.

  "Hello? Sayad al Mirsaad."

  "Hey, Sadie. It's Caitlin Monroe. Bret Melton's wife. We met at the wedding. I know he was always threatening to visit you, buddy, but I'm afraid you're shit outta luck. It's just me." The apartment was small: two bedrooms and a single living area that contained a kitchen, dining nook, and sitting room. Mirsaad, the journalist who had rescued her wounded husband from the epic clusterfuck of Iraq, lived there now with his wife and four children, who were all mercifully asleep. His wife, Laryssa, a German national, was standing in the door, clutching a bright pink dressing gown across her chest when Caitlin stepped out of the third-floor elevator door. She was not giving off happy vibes. Her husband looked exhausted, and peering behind Laryssa into the cramped confines of the flat, Caitlin understood why. All the paraphernalia of a newborn was there to see: changing table, bassinet, baby bottles on the kitchen counter. Caitlin regretted calling them without first checking, but she hadn't wanted to let anyone know where she was headed. When it came to Baumer, she had learned the hard way in France to work on her own.

  "I'm sorry, Missus Mirsaad, I really am, but I just flew into Berlin and I needed to get in contact with Sadie."

  "You could not have waited until morning?" Laryssa asked. It sounded more like a demand than a question.

  "Look, I'm sorry about that. Really. I understand. I have my own little one at home. About the same age by the look of things."

  She gestured over the woman's shoulder to indicate all the equipment she'd briefly seen.

  "We know about little Monique," Mirsaad said in a more conciliatory tone. "Bret sent us photos by e-mail. But what are you doing here, Caitlin?You surely cannot be working. Not with the baby so young."