After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  Kinninmore grinned. "No, but I lost my sense of humor around Forty-second Street."

  The soldier ran over to Kinninmore, mindful of the tracer fire hosing down the intersection. Captain Frankowski didn't bother to salute his commanding officer. No one needed a sniper to know that he was around.

  "Pretty fucking sporty up here, sir," Frankowski said. "If you don't mind my saying."

  "I don't," Kinninmore replied. "Status?"

  Frankowski turned and gestured toward Rockefeller Center. "We're hung up on these fucking scrapers. Depression-era shit built with old-fashioned concrete, rebar, and probably more than a few bodies courtesy of the mob. No good estimate on effective combatants, but they've set it up as a strongpoint with good intersecting fields of fire. I think we're gonna find almost all of them in there, Colonel. It's a great defensive position."

  "I can see that," Kinninmore said. "Don't fret, son. We have them exactly where we want them. Who's the on-scene commander?"

  "I was until you got here. Colonel Callahan took a shot to the chest. While the medics were working him, he got another one to the melon. Game over. You're it, sir."

  "Any contact with higher up?"

  "Sporadic," Frankowski said, ducking against a roar of gunship turbines. Kinninmore saw the black burst of explosives against one of the larger skyscrapers, which had been defaced by so many such strikes that it looked like an ancient ruin.

  "Who have we got on our flanks?"

  "Fourth Cav combat team on the Avenue of the Americas; they've worked their way up to Fiftieth Street," Frankowski said. "Fifth Cav is to the east over on… looks like Park Avenue. They're chopped up pretty bad, and I've not had any word from them in the last hour."

  Kinninmore pulled a map from his cargo pocket and unfolded it. "Any support fire available?"

  "Fifth Field Artillery is up. They're at Firebase Euler, but the support has been somewhat spotty. These skyscrapers are really fucking with our comms, especially since we lost the retrans unit up in the Chrysler Building," Frankowski said. "You need to know our ammo situation is critical as well. I've had our troops strip the wounded and the dead, our guys and the enemy, but we're still hurtin' for certain."

  Kinninmore got the map out and started making notes, placing units where Frankowski described them. He pointed at Madison Avenue. "Fifth Cav got anyone on this?"

  Frankowski shook his head. "Not near as I can tell."

  "Get me a commo dog over here who knows his shit. Anyone. I don't care who they are or what branch."

  "I'm on it," Frankowski said.

  Kinninmore tossed his map onto the ground and pointed to his scratch collection of trigger pullers. "All of you with me. We're moving fast, and we're killing anyone who gets in our way."

  "Where are we going, Colonel?" one of the marines shouted.

  "Over to Madison," he shouted back. "It ain't Iwo, but it'll have to do. Let's move out!" Kinninmore ducked behind an overturned trash truck, and gathered a few of his team members around him. The rest of the scratch team engaged the vehicles, not waiting for a dramatic command or any heroics from their commander. Looking back the way they had come, the colonel could see a thin, scrawny figure running down the sidewalk toward him, a radio antenna prominent on his back. Two other men flanked him, watching for fire from above. There were snipers everywhere.

  "Over here!" Kinninmore shouted. He tapped the female military police trooper next to him. "Hold this position, Sergeant. No matter what."

  "I've got it!"

  Kinninmore ran toward the commo dog and shoved him through a doorway. One of the two rangers escorting him actually bulled Kinninmore out of the way.

  "Watch where you going, ignorant shithead," he shouted in a thick Polish accent. "We have had enough of being pushed around today."

  "Anybody teach you to use cover, son?" Kinninmore shouted back. "What's your name? Do I know you?"

  A tuft of blond hair poked out from under the first soldier's Kevlar helmet. "It ain't son, sir. It's Sergeant Bonnie Gardener. USAF TAC. Someone said you needed a rainmaker. Well, I'm it."

  52

  New York Motherhood was making her soft. There was no way, in her salad days, she would have bothered helping out a couple of losers like these two. She didn't need them to get the documents back to G2. She could've dialed up a chopper to swoop in and grab them any time she wanted. But as the three of them hunkered down against the blast of the rotor wash from the descending Blackhawk, Caitlin told herself she was just acting rationally. Their lives might not mean much to her, but they weren't hers to throw away, either. Not nowadays.

  These two might be a pair of idiots, but they weren't bad people, just inept smugglers. And they hadn't been lying about rescuing a special forces team a day earlier. There were a couple of rangers and a forward air controller who were drawing breath today because Balwyn and Ross had put themselves in harm's way on their behalf. They hadn't had to do that, the same way she didn't have to do this.

  The chopper came down quickly, much more quickly than she was used to when working with the military, but the chances of getting an RPG up the ass increased exponentially the longer a pilot hovered around squeezing his johnson and taking in the view. The smugglers had taken themselves off a few yards away and were clutching all the documents they'd gathered up downstairs in a couple of packages like they were carrying newborn babies and feared they'd be snatched away and blown over the edge of the roof. It was a long way down to the street. Caitlin couldn't fault them for that. Those documents were probably going to keep them out of a federal prison if they could find themselves a good lawyer and cut a plea bargain for running the zone. Assuming, of course, they didn't just disappear in the old-fashioned way inconvenient people used to disappear. This guy Cesky they were talking about, he was a big name back west. A heavy hitter plugged deep into the administration. Nothing they had to say about him was going to make anybody very happy. In fact, the more Caitlin thought about it, the better off they would be jumping out of this chopper at the other end and running as hard as they could for the horizon.

  Oh, well, not her fucking problem.

  She turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut as the Blackhawk landed and blew a stinging cloud of dust and grit up from the roof. When she looked up again, the chick was there-Jules, she called herself, even though she was entitled, as in genuinely entitled, to be known as Lady Julianne.

  "Look," Jules yelled out. "We got off to a bad start, but I just wanted to say thanks for everything. If you hadn't taken out Cesky's guys… well, you know. Thanks. And for this, too," she shouted, jerking a thumb back over her shoulder at the helicopter.

  Caitlin nodded and waved her on board, but she wasn't really paying attention. She had been working out how she was going to get herself into the ruins of the Saks department store on Fifth Avenue, where she was almost certain Baumer was holed up. But she stopped worrying about that when she saw the man who hopped out of the chopper and hurried across to her, bent over and squinting against the storm of dust.

  It was Wales. Her old controller. Wales Larrison, a deputy director now, coordinating all the Echelon branches from the new headquarters in Vancouver. Her heart swelled at the sight of him, the closest thing she had to a father in what was left of the world, but she winced, too. Wales wouldn't fly into New York just to wish her good luck. Like her, he was smiling, but sadly, as he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a fierce, protective hug.

  "I'm sorry, Caitlin," he said. "Not this time."

  "No, Wales. No. You can't!"

  Her cry was so pitiful, so heartfelt, and so loud that the Balwyn woman hesitated with one foot raised to hop into the cabin of the chopper. A cavalry trooper brandishing a shotgun pulled her up, anyway.

  "I'm this close, Wales. Just give me an hour and I'll put my fucking hand inside his chest and squeeze off his heart. An hour, Wales, that's all I'm asking."

  He shook his head unhappily.

  "Not this time, I'm afraid. They se
nt me to make sure you got on the chopper. President Kipper sent me. Rang me himself and told me to get my ass over here to make sure you got out. I barely made it."

  "But Wales," she cried in anguish. "My family. You know what he tried to do to my family. I have to finish this. I'm the only one who can do this and be sure."

  Wales took her by the arm and began to lead her across the roof to the helicopter. They both knew she was more than capable of resisting him.

  "You don't have time, Caitlin. There's a storm front coming in from the west. They've moved everything forward ahead of it. Air cav is assaulting into Central Park right now. As soon as they're down, air force is going to hammer the city flat. Or at least that part you want to head into. You don't have an hour, Caitlin. They are in the air now. Bombed up and inbound."

  He was right. She could see the leading edge of the air assault coming in over his shoulder. Small black dots for now but growing larger every second, resolving themselves into an airborne armada of UH-60s and their gunship flankers. There looked to be about a dozen in the first wave and another two waves stacked up behind them, probably formed up in one of the new, stripped-down regimental combat teams the army was testing. Say, four hundred men on the ground within a quarter of an hour.

  Wales almost had her into the cabin when she finally dug her heels in. She could see the smugglers and the cavalry troopers in the helicopter staring at her as though she were mad. But she didn't care.

  "Wales, if we let him get away this time, he will be back in our faces worse than ever. You know that. He will come back at me. I know it's not personal, but it is. If that makes any fucking sense. You have to let me go. You have to let me get him."

  "I can't, Caitlin," he said, looking older and more worn down than she had ever seen him before. "I'm not just following orders. I'm here because I don't want you to die. My daughter died four years ago. And my wife. And my brother and his wife and their kids. Everybody I cared for in the world is gone. Everybody but you. You have your own family now, Caitlin. I understand what that means. I understand the madness and the fear of it, because you are my family. You are all I have left. You are my daughter now, and I can't let you go."

  She felt her throat closing up tight and her eyes beginning to water. She turned away so that nobody in the helicopter could see her. Wales Larrison stepped up around in front of her and raised her chin with his forefinger.

  "He won't win, Caitlin," he said, projecting his voice through the thudding of the rotor blades. "He won't even get close. And I can give you my personal guarantee that he will never get within a thousand miles of Bret or Monique again. Ever."

  "Why? How? Are we going to surround them with traps and razor wire?"

  "No, Caitlin," he answered, gently steering her back toward the cabin. "Because he's going to die sometime today, or he's going to die in the very near future when you put your hand inside him and squeeze the life out of his heart. But not today."

  She was numb. Numb and exhausted and somewhere out over the edge of things where she might be free-falling or floating or possibly even drifting away from the world.

  Caitlin climbed into the chopper and sat in the front of the cabin, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Wales strapped himself into the seat beside her and placed one arm around her shoulders. That was all it took. She fell apart and started crying, covering her face with her hands as the chopper lifted off from the roof. "I believe 'I told you so' would be appropriate at this point, Miss Jules."

  The roar of the helicopter's takeoff was loud enough that Julianne could have pretended not to have heard the Rhino, but she was past caring anymore.

  "About Cesky and Rubin, you mean?" she said. "You never told me anything about that other than your plans for spending the money."

  "No," he insisted as they left the roof of the office building on East 60th Street behind. "I meant that." He pointed out of the cabin behind her, over toward Central Park. Jules had to lean forward to see past the door gunner who was covering their ignominious exit from New York. She had no idea what was going on with Wonder Woman and the old guy up front. She looked like she'd dropped her entire bundle in the last two minutes.

  The sky over Central Park was swarming with helicopters just like theirs, Blackhawks full of troops. Sleeker, deadlier-looking gunships weaved through the congested air traffic, protecting the airborne assault, just as the Rhino had predicted. Unlike him, she was not a military enthusiast, and she had no idea how many men were involved or what it meant beyond a dramatic escalation of the war that was tearing the city apart block by block.

  "What is that?" the Rhino bellowed over the racket. "One hundred first Airborne?"

  One of the soldiers riding shotgun in the cabin-literally riding shotgun, Jules thought as she took in his armament-nodded. "The Screaming fucking Eagles, man," he shouted back. "Playtime is over."

  As the helicopters stacked up one behind the other in a sort of layered effect to begin landing their troops, two of the waspish-looking gunships peeled off and began to pour a storm of machine gun and rocket fire down onto an unseen target over on that side of the city. And then Jules's chopper banked around and swung out toward the East River, taking them away from the action, the worst of the danger, and off toward the unknown. She had a package of papers tucked away inside a ballistic vest the flight crew had given her. She hoped they would go some way toward securing her immediate future, even though she had no idea what was in them, just that they had guaranteed her passage out of the trap Henry Cesky had set for her.

  Jules ground her teeth and bit back on a throat full of bile when she thought of him. Her father had long ago advised her against investing in any scheme that had vengeance at its heart. But Cesky had invested heavily in his plan to settle up with her for leaving him and his family behind in Acapulco. What side of the equation did that leave her on now? Was she the vengeance seeker or the one upon whom vengeance was to be visited?

  She had no idea.

  53

  Texas Administrative Division Miguel could not shake the creeping fear that wanted to run wild as they mustered the cattle out of the little valley. But at least it was a sensible fear, not like the preternatural dread that had stolen over him back in Leona. This was merely a rational fear of being caught by the road agents he had observed the previous day. The vaquero had no illusions about how such an encounter would go. Oh, they would give a good accounting of themselves for sure, possibly taking down one or two agents for each of their own who fell. But in the end, they would be overwhelmed. Of that there could be no doubt. And then Sofia, if she lived, would be their prey.

  And so, in the hours before dawn, they snuck away from Pineywoods Lake. With the agents so far to the west, there was no need for any elaborate displays of subterfuge. Still, he could not help keeping his voice down as he spoke to the other riders and called out to the dogs as they orbited the edge of the herd. Protesting cows, the muffled crunch of thousands of hooves on soft ground, a few whip cracks and whistles, his daughter riding high in the saddle next to him-it was all so familiar yet so alien in this empty landscape.

  The coming sunrise had not yet burned off the early-morning fog as they began to move north, heading for the Johnson National Grasslands up near the border with Oklahoma. Miguel's head felt thick and fuzzy with the lack of sleep and the four or five glasses of red wine he had shared with Miss Jessup last night. After finishing the first "corked" bottle, she had produced another and pronounced it perfect. A chilled cerveza would have been perfect for Miguel, but he had to admit that the red wine did go down without too many protests.

  "Hungover, cowboy?"

  He turned to find that the very woman had ridden up behind him, catching him woolgathering and unaware. She was not a natural in the saddle. Indeed, the gelding struggled a little with its inexperienced passenger. But the strange "manbivalent" woman with the cheeky sense of humor and the warm laugh rode easily enough at this sedate pace. Most folks did nowadays, at least in the c
ountryside.

  "Good morning, Miss Jessup. And no, I am not so used to drinking as I once was," he admitted, tipping his hat to her.

  "None of us are, Miguel," she replied.

  "Oh, Papa was never much of a drinker," said his daughter, teasing, as he she rode over. "Not much of a drinker or a rider or shooter, really."

  He showed her the back of his hand, but he was only playing, of course, and glad that Sofia's mood had lifted enough for her to be able to joke at his expense. Miss Jessup's face he could not see in the gloom, but he sensed that she was smiling, too, if a little sadly.

  "It used to be nothing for me to finish a couple of bottles on my own," she said. "Occupational hazard. You know, I've dropped five sizes since the Wave came. Only put one back on last year, and I like to think that was muscle mass as opposed to table muscle."

  "Table muscle?"

  "Fat," Trudi said flatly. "Lard."

  "Ah," he replied, turning his attention back to the cattle.

  The herd was a heaving, dusty river, flowing north now, away from danger. He took in the scent of morning glories and honeydews that mingled with the stink of the beasts. A hint of rain in the air, perhaps. He wasn't sure of the weather, and there was no way to check. Most of the AM band Texas radio stations had fallen behind them, and the stations outside Texas concentrated on the weather in Seattle or Kansas City, which didn't help their situation one bit. Batteries to power the one radio they had were precious in any case, and no one was in the mood to listen to the gibberish coming out of Fort Hood or Governor Blackstone.

  Miguel relaxed in the saddle and released a pent-up breath he hadn't even noticed he was holding. The morning sun started to peek through the chilly fog, ready to burn the thin sheath of frost off the land. With every minute that passed he felt better about leaving, about adding so many miles and weeks to their trip.

  "Penny for your thoughts?" Miss Jessup asked.