by Ralph Peters
Meredith calculated. If the choppers were busy with a higher priority mission, it would take a wheeled response… two to three minutes for the reaction force to mount up… at least a twenty-minute drive… it was going to be a long half hour.
In the distance, Meredith could see Sergeant Rosario's beefy chest rise above the crowd. The NCO was standing on the passenger seat of the roofless vehicle, trying to talk the mob down.
"I'm dismounting," Meredith told his driver. "Listen to the radio." He turned to the machine gunner and rifleman in the bed of the carryall. "Keep your eyes open, guys. And don't do anything stupid."
He slipped out of the vehicle and began to trot forward along the stalled line of trucks, hand on his pistol holster, more to keep it from flapping than out of any intent to draw his weapon. Restraint had pulled him through more bad situations than he could count. If you could put up with the taunts and the little humiliations, you could survive. The gangs usually did not want to take on any Army element in direct combat.
He could see that Sergeant Rosario held no weapon in his hands either. The technique was to appear confident but not overly threatening. It took good nerves. He tried to remember which of the privates were manning Rosario's vehicle today. He hoped that they could just control themselves. Panic would make a mess of everything.
Walters was driving, he remembered. And Walters was all right. He'd sit tight. And Jankowski was on the machine gun. Who was the other one? Meredith could not recall. The replacements came so fast. Few vehicle crews and fire teams could maintain personnel integrity for very long.
His heart pounded. The civilians huddled in the doorways or grouped on the sidewalk watched him coldly. This was definitely Indian country, and none of these people were likely to be the sort who did volunteer work for the Red Cross.
Faces sullen. Touched with death. Scars from RD, scars from fights. No way to tell who was armed in the crowd.
Meredith slowed to a walk. He did not want to appear nervous. And he was close enough to hear the voices now.
"You fucking spic," a black man in a small leather cap taunted Rosario, shouting loudly enough for the crowd to hear. "You got no business here. You don't need to come around here with no guns. All that food you got, all that shit belongs to the people. "
The crowd agreed. Noisily. Rosario tried to respond, calling out something about the food being on its way to the people, but his voice sounded unsure. Rosario was a good NCO, but Meredith could sense the wavering in his big torso now. Meredith began to feel the specialness of this crowd, this street, this air. He could not begin to put it into words, but a charged, fateful feeling quickened his skin.
Rosario made a mistake. In a desperate, peevish voice, the NCO yelled at the crowd:
"You're all breaking the law!"
Several of the men in the crowd began to laugh, and their laughter excited the laughter of others.
A lone voice called, "Fuck you," and, with no further warning, the sound of an automatic weapon, the yanking of a giant zipper, changed the laws of time and space.
Still on the edge of the crowd, Meredith's eyes telescoped in on Rosario. He could see the amazed look on the sergeant's face as the man felt the abrupt changes in his body. The automatic weapon was small in caliber, and Rosario stood upright for a long moment, bullish, unable to believe what was happening. The sound of the weapon came again. This time the sergeant toppled backward, disappearing behind the heads and shoulders of the crowd.
Weapons sounded up and down the canyon of the street. The crowd scattered. Meredith automatically took cover behind a dumpster at the mouth of an alley, pistol ready.
He could distinguish the clear sounds of Army weaponry amid the free-for-all. But he himself could identify no target at which to fire. Only running civilians, none with weapon in hand. Two boys raced down the alley, almost running into Meredith. But they were only interested in escape.
He decided to risk a look around the corner of his metal shield. The crew of Rosario's vehicle would be in a fight for their lives. If they had not already been killed.
The crowd between Meredith and the lead carryall had largely dissolved. Perhaps a dozen people lay on the ground, either wounded or simply frightened, forearms protecting their heads. Beyond them, a civilian with a machine pistol stood on the hood of Rosario's vehicle, emptying his weapon into the bodies of its occupants.
Meredith dropped to his knees and steadied his pistol with both hands before firing. Still, he missed twice before his third bullet caught its target. The gunman collapsed backward, falling headfirst to the street.
A round ricocheted off the dumpster, loud as a cathedral bell. Meredith looked around. There was plenty of firing. But there were no targets.
He huddled close to the dumpster, scanning. A woman ran from behind a truck where she had been trapped by the gunfire. She raced blindly toward Meredith. Then she stopped, standing upright. Staring.
"Get down" Meredith shouted.
But she continued to stare at him. Then she bolted. In the opposite direction. Afraid of the man in the uniform. The residents here lived in a different world. She made it halfway across the street when she seemed to trip, spilling forward.
But there was nothing to trip over, and her blouse began to soak red as she lay motionless.
Meredith thought he had spotted the killer. He fired into a window frame. But the shadow was gone.
Several of the civilians who had thrown themselves to the ground tried to crawl to safety, going slowly, in small stretches, trying not to attract attention. But the air was sodden with bullets. Meredith understood. Even though autopsies might not find Army bullets in innocent bodies, the deaths would be laid at the Army's feet. The gang was interested only in running up the casualty figures, regardless of who the casualties might be.
Perhaps a minute had passed since the first bullets bit into Rosario's chest. Now Meredith heard the distinct sound of machine gun fire.
He looked around. And he jumped to his feet, waving his arms, running.
"No," he screamed. "No. Stop it. Stop."
His carryall was working its way forward, sweeping the area with its machine gun. Coming to his rescue.
"Cease fire."
There could be no clear target for a machine gun. More civilians would die.
The machine gun continued to kick in recoil as the vehicle pulled up to the lieutenant.
"You all right, sir?" the driver shouted.
"Stop it," Meredith screamed. "Cease fire."
But, as Meredith spoke, the machine gunner seemed to jump off of the carryall, as though the lieutenant had given him a ridiculous fright. A second later the boy lay openeyed on the street, bleeding.
"Pull in between the trucks," Meredith ordered. He threw himself down beside the fallen machine gunner. "Hendricks, Hendricks, can you hear me?" He felt for the pulse in the boy's neck. But there was none. And the open eyes did not move.
Meredith scrambled toward his vehicle, firing wildly into the distance. There was still no enemy to be seen.
His pistol went empty, and he hurled himself over the back fender of the carryall, squeezing down between the machine gun mount and the radios. The driver and the rifleman had already dismounted and were firing from the far side of the vehicle, sandwiched between oversized delivery trucks. Shooting at phantoms.
Meredith grabbed the mike. "All Tango stations, all Tango stations. Drill five, drill five. Watch for snipers. "
The drill would bring his other platoon vehicles up along the convoy, working both sides and establishing overwatch positions so that the trail squad could dismount and rescue as many of the truck drivers as possible.
The sound of weaponry continued to ring wildly along the street, accompanied by the breaking of glass and the complaint of metal struck by bullets.
Meredith flipped to the ops net. "One-four, One-four — action, action. Multiple friendly casualties at last named location. We've got sonsofbitches shooting us up from all the bui
ldings."
The squadron net came to life. "Battle stations, battle stations." Meredith recognized Major Taylor's voice. It was a reassuring sound. There was no panic in that voice. It was absolutely in command, practiced and economical. Surely, things would be all right now.
A spray of automatic weapons fire ripped across the front of the carryall. At the edge of Meredith's field of vision, the driver suddenly threw his arms up into the air, as if trying to catch the bullets as they went by. Then the boy crumpled out in the open, torso sprawled in front of the vehicle.
Meredith launched himself over the side of the vehicle and lay flat in the street. He jammed a fresh clip into his pistol. His knee hurt badly, although he had no idea what he had done to it. He looked around for the rifleman.
The boy sat huddled under the mud flaps of a delivery truck, pressed against the big wheels, weeping. Meredith scrambled over to him and grabbed the boy by his field jacket. "Get out of here. Head back toward the other squads. Stay on the far side of the vehicles. Go."
The boy stared at Meredith in utter incomprehension, as though the lieutenant had begun speaking in a foreign language.
Meredith did not know what to do. No one had prepared him for this. Even at the worst of times in his earlier experience, he had been able to maintain control of the situation. But now nothing that he did seemed to make a difference. He low-crawled forward around the carryall, to where his driver lay. The man was dead. Punctured by a gratuitous number of rounds, as though one of the snipers had been using him for target practice. Meredith tried to drag the torso back behind the vehicle. But the action only brought a welter of bullets in response. Meredith threw himself back into the tiny safety zone behind the carryall and between the trucks.
He caught an infuriating mental glimpse of himself. Trapped. Cowering. While street punks made a fool of him. In his anger, he raised himself and fired several rounds in the approximate direction from which the last wave of bullets had come. But the action only made him feel more foolish and impotent.
When he looked around, the rifleman who had been weeping under the truck was gone. In the right direction, Meredith hoped. He already had enough of his men on his conscience.
The quality of his anger changed. The bluster disappeared, and he felt very cold. His fear, too, seemed to change, turning almost into a positive force, into an energy that could be directed by a strong will.
Without making a conscious decision, he began to maneuver. Forward. Working up the far side of the trucks, from tire to tire.
At the first truck cab, he reached up and yanked at the door.
Locked.
"For God's sake, get out of there. Come on," Meredith yelled.
A muffled voice from within the cab told Meredith very graphically what he could do with himself.
Meredith ran for the next truck. He could hear the sound of his own men firing to his rear now, coming up in support, making the drill work.
A flash of colored clothing. Weapon. Weapon. A boy with a machine pistol. His destination was the same as Meredith's — the cab of the truck. There was an instant's startled pause as the enemies took stock of each other.
Meredith saw his enemy with superb clarity, in unforgettable detail. A red, green, and black knitted beret. Flash jacket and jewelry. Dark satin pants. And a short, angular weapon, its muzzle climbing toward a target. Vivid, living, complex, intelligent eyes.
Meredith fired first. By an instant. He hit his target this time, and he kept on firing as the boy went down. His enemy's fire buried itself in a pair of tires, ripping them up, exploding them. The boy fell awkwardly, hitting the ground in a position that looked more painful than the gunshots could have been. Unsure of himself, Meredith huddled by a fender, breathing like an excited animal.
The huge, unmistakable sound of helicopters swelled over the broken city. The closer sound of his men working their way forward, seizing control of the street, began to dominate the scene. He could even hear them shouting now, calling out orders, employing the urban combat drills whose repetitive practice they so hated.
The firing and hubbub of voices from the front of the column dropped off distinctly. The gang members were going to ground.
Pistol extended before him, Meredith began to step toward the twisted, restless figure of the boy he had just shot. His opponent's automatic weapon lay safely out of reach now, but Meredith's trigger finger had molded to his pistol. He could not seem to get enough breath, and he felt his nostrils flaring.
He guessed the boy's age at somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. It was hard to tell through the grimacing that twisted the boy's features.
As Meredith approached, his opponent seemed to calm. The skin around his eyes relaxed slightly, and he stared up at the tall man in uniform who had just shattered the order of his body. At first Meredith did not think that the eyes were fully sentient. But they slowly focused. On the winner in the two-man contest.
The boy glared up into Meredith's face, breathing pink spittle. Then he narrowed his focus, locking his eyes on Meredith's own, holding them prisoner even as his chest heaved and his limbs seized up, then failed.
"Tool," he said to Meredith, in a voice of undamaged clarity. "You… think you're a big man…" His lips curled in disgust. "You're… nothing but a fucking tool."
Meredith lowered his pistol, ashamed of his fear, watching as the boy's chain-covered chest dueled with gravity. There were no words. Only the hard physical reality of asphalt, concrete, steel, broken glass.
Flesh and blood.
The boy's chest filled massively, as though he were readying himself to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Then the air escaped, accompanied by a sound more animal than human. The lungs did not fill up again.
"Medic," Meredith screamed. "Medic."
The final tally was six soldiers dead and three wounded, five civilians dead and a dozen wounded, and four identifiable gang members killed in the firefight. The Army cordon-and-sweep operation rounded up another fourteen suspected gang members in building-to-building searches — a task the soldiers hated not only because of the danger of an ambush but also because they were as likely to discover rotting corpses as fugitives from the law. Few of the supposed gang members would survive. They would all go to the internment camp at Fort Irwin, to await a hearing. But the judicial calendar was hopelessly backlogged, and waves of disease broke over the crowded camp, preempting the rule of law.
That night Meredith went to see Major Taylor. The acting commander was never very hard to find. When he was not out on a mission, he literally lived in his office. Behind the desk, beside the national and unit flags, stood an old Army cot, with a sleeping bag rolled up tightly at one end. The closest the room came to disorder was the ever-present stack of books on the floor beside the cot. Whenever he had to see the commander, Meredith's eyes habitually went to the litter of books, curious as to what this hard, unusual man might read.
Meredith knocked on the door more briskly than usual, and at the command to enter, he marched firmly forward, relishing the ache in his banged-up knee, and stopped three paces in front of Taylor's desk. He came to attention, saluted, and said:
"Sir, First Lieutenant Meredith requests permission to speak with the squadron commander."
Taylor looked up from the computer over which he had been laboring, surprised at the formality of tone. For a few seconds, his eyes considered the artificially erect young man in front of his desk. Then he spoke, in a disappointingly casual tone:
"Relax for a minute, Merry. Let me work my way out of this program."
With no further acknowledgment of Meredith's presence, of the lieutenant's swollen intensity, Taylor turned back to his screen and keyboard.
Meredith moved to a solemn parade-rest position. But the stiffness of it only made him feel absurd now. He soon softened into a routine at-ease posture, eyes wandering.
He felt angry that Taylor had not automatically intuited the seriousness of his intent, that the commander h
ad not paid him the proper attention.
Taylor's desk was unusually cluttered today. Meredith noticed that a stack of mail remained to be opened. The squadron S-3 had been evacuated, sick with RD, and the executive officer's position had gone unfilled for months. Meredith felt, in passing, that he might not have a right to take up any more of Taylor's time. As it was, the man slept little, and even the scars on his face could not hide the chronic black circles the major wore.
But the lieutenant was determined to have his moment. He had launched himself from hours of meditation, finally decisive. And he intended to stick to his decision.
Taylor fiddled with the computer for an unbearably long time. Meredith felt his shoulders decline as his posture deteriorated even further. He realized that he was very, very tired.
His eyes roamed, settling on the stack of books Taylor had gathered by his cot. Meredith was eternally amused by the changing titles. The only constants were the Spanish grammars and dictionaries. Tonight, Meredith could make out the titles of a work on urban planning, a text on the Black Death in Europe, Huckleberry Finn, the short novels of Joseph Conrad, and the latest copy of Military Review. Meredith was just trying to make out the title of a halfhidden book, when Taylor startled him.
"All right, Merry, what's up?" Taylor glanced back toward the computer. "You know, it must have all been a lot easier back in the old Army when all they had were typewriters. Then there was physical limit on how much nonsense the system could expect out of you."
Meredith stood before the man who seemed so much older than the few years separating them. And he found it very difficult to bring himself to speech, to articulate the decisive words he had so carefully prepared.
"This looks serious," Taylor said, and the lieutenant could not be sure whether or not there was a flavor of mockery in the voice.
"Sir, I request to be relieved and reassigned to conventional duties."
Taylor looked up at the younger man, eyes hunting over his face. It was always difficult for Meredith to read Taylor's expression under that badly mottled skin. He felt perspiration breaking out on his forehead and in the small of his back. The major was taking an unreasonably, an unconscionably long time in responding. Meredith had expected shock… perhaps anger, perhaps disappointment. But this silent consideration was as unexpected as it was intolerable.
