“It is now my pleasure to introduce you to the new interim Governor of our fine city, John Buckley.”
The camera slowly panned over to a second podium. This one had the seal of the city on it. It had also, Arthur guessed, once had both the US flag and the state seal on it. Those were now missing, but the wood was obviously damaged where they’d been removed.
The gaunt man in the white cassock smiled at the camera.
“As Mr. Hotel has told you, I am John Buckley, and I now lead this city,” he said calmly. “I speak for our new friends, the servants of the Herald. As you may have guessed, the Herald and his servants are not of this world. They are creatures of another place and another time, come to help us get through a dark time of suffering and hatred.
“Bringing peace to a land as divided and torn as ours takes time and effort. It also takes understanding, understanding that you must extend to our new friends as they try to help.”
Buckley smiled.
“We have all known that our great country is broken, flailing sadly through the years as we fail again and again to address her flaws. The Herald has come to show us the path.
“I speak for the Herald, as his governor, as his priest, as his voice. He has shown me the light, and it is my task to share that light with the world.
“We are your friends and we are here to help. For now, the attacks on the Herald’s servants have forced us to declare a full twenty-four-hour curfew. All roads and businesses are closed. Remain in your homes and you will be safe.”
He smiled thinly.
“Others will fear the Herald’s wisdom and strike at our great city with force and violence. If you remain in your homes, we will protect you, but we cannot guarantee your safety if you challenge the curfew.
“You will hear from me again soon as we begin to establish our new order, our new plans to make America great!”
The screen cut to blackness.
“Every radio and TV station just went to black or dead air,” the technician reported. “If I’m reading the encoding right, though, that was a recording that’s going to keep repeating.
“Sir, request permission to put a bullet through that smarmy asshole’s face before this is over,” Bantam asked, staring at the screen.
“I suspect you’re going to need to get in line, Colonel.”
General Pierce arrived in the SOCOM command center with all of the grace and subtlety of a raging stampede. He was a big man in his mid-fifties, with jet-black hair and the muscles of someone who spent as much time in the gym in the office—and his entire staff swept in with him.
“We’ll be taking over,” he told Arthur’s team. “No offense, but my people know what I need. Turn over the systems and move outside—this is now a Fifth Army secured facility.”
Arthur still hadn’t slept, which was probably why he was slow off the mark. He rose to his feet, glaring at the other General.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“That would be excuse me, sir,” Pierce noted, “unless SOCOM has gone even further downhill than I thought since being tasked to deal with this nonsense.”
“Excuse me, sir, then,” Arthur hissed. “This is all SOCOM gear. You can’t simply walk in and take over our systems.”
“We’re fighting the same enemy, aren’t we?” the Army General said bluntly. “I have four divisions arriving every day—with lead elements arriving in about an hour. My men don’t have the time to set up a new command center, especially not when there’s already one in place.
“The United States has been invaded, General Purcell. I don’t have time for SOCOM’s hurt feelings. Do you understand me?”
Pierce wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t right, either, but he wasn’t wrong.
“All right, people,” Arthur barked. “Secure your systems, wipe SOCOM-specific data, and set up guest profiles for the Army geeks.” He turned a level look on Pierce. “Your people aren’t cleared for our data,” he said. “We’ll play nice, General, but I’m not handing over SOCOM’s files.”
Not least because some of the Sigma Force files would make it very clear very quickly that the US had known about the supernatural prior to the New York Incident—and Arthur had plenty of evidence that Army cyber-geeks would sell that to the media.
“Fair enough,” Pierce allowed. “Your office, General Purcell? I need you to brief me.”
Arthur nodded, glancing around to be sure his people were obeying his orders, and then led the other General into the soundproofed room he was using as a confidential communication center. He wasn’t spending enough time out of the main center to call it an office.
“If you countermand my orders in front of my people again, I will see you busted all the way down to private; do I make myself clear?” Pierce snapped as soon as the door closed.
Arthur deliberately turned his back on Pierce and counted to ten before responding, turning back to the Army General with a forced smile on his face.
“I don’t report to you, Pierce,” he noted. “I report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You have no authority to commandeer my equipment or my personnel. I am allowing this because you’re right: we are facing the same enemy.
“But if you try to run roughshod over my men, you will very rapidly discover the limits of my willingness to cooperate,” he concluded.
“We have a job to do, Purcell,” Pierce replied. “Get in my way again, and you will discover how little that ‘separate chain of command’ protects you.”
Arthur forced the smile to remain on his face.
“We do have a job to do,” he agreed. “I suggest we look at doing it. What’s the plan, General Pierce?”
The Army General clearly considered keeping Arthur out of the loop for several seconds before growling and nodding.
“Like I said, we have roughly four divisions arriving a day for the next three days,” he explained. “Air Force has promised continual overhead: they’re starting sweeps today to keep the air clear over Portland. They’re going to try and take down that dragon.”
Pierce shook his head.
“I can’t believe we’re factoring a dragon into our calculations,” he said flatly.
“It gets worse,” Arthur told him. “Our enemy’s main forces are, for all intents and purpose, immune to regular bullets. Explosives still have some effect, but regular small arms and squad-level support weaponry will be completely useless.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Pierce noted. “I don’t care what a bullet’s made of; it’s the impact that hurts.”
“Accept it,” Arthur told him. “Even a fifty-cal round will simply bounce off even the grunt-level demons. And the guys leading their units are even tougher—and so are their support units.
“They don’t have much in terms of vehicles or heavy weapons. Just bigger or more powerful demons,” he continued. “These bastards already demonstrated to the Air Force that we can’t underestimate what that means.”
“Demons,” Pierce echoed. “I do not believe, General, in an enemy that can defeat the United States Army in a head-on engagement.”
“Believe in it,” Arthur snapped. “There is no human enemy that could do so, but this isn’t a human enemy we’re facing. It takes silver or high explosives to hurt these bastards, and once you get into the higher-tier demons, even explosives aren’t going to cut it for long.”
“So, what, we just give up?” the Army man demanded. “If this is defeatism, General, I will see you broken.”
“If you take your divisions into Portland right now, with their current equipment load-outs, you will be leading a quarter-million men to their deaths,” Arthur reminded him. “Do you really want to go into history as that man, General Pierce?”
The room was silent.
“So, do you have a solution?” Pierce finally asked.
“We have fifteen brigade combat loads on their way here,” the SOCOM officer told him. “Five armored brigades, ten mechanized infantry. Full load-outs of silver-tipped ammunition and silver-
laced explosives.
“They’ll be at our staging points by noon. If we can have logistics teams waiting for them, we can reequip the first fifteen brigades in twenty-four hours.”
“How, exactly, do we have fifteen brigades’s worth of anti-supernatural ammunition?” Pierce asked.
“That’s classified need-to-know,” Arthur told him with satisfaction. “And you don’t. You just need to know it’s on its way.”
Pierce looked like he was about to explode but swallowed it in the end with a firm nod.
“Noon, you said?” he finally growled.
“Some is here already; most of the rest is embarked on transport planes,” Arthur explained. “We’ll have all of the gear here by noon.”
“Have your people fill in my G-4 team on the details,” the Army officer ordered. “We’ll get the first brigades reequipped ASAP.” He paused.
“Fifteen brigades. Any ETA on more supplies?”
Arthur shook his head.
“Nothing good,” he admitted. “There may be some additional stockpiles we can access—I’ve got people trying to make contact with the Elfin, for example—but they won’t necessarily be compatible with our gear, and they definitely won’t be organized in brigade load-outs.”
“And we can’t manufacture new ammunition that quickly,” Pierce concluded. The Army General stepped over to the window of the office—Arthur had commandeered a currently empty small office building for his operations.
“No,” Arthur agreed. “We might be able to scrape together small-arms ammunition for another brigade or two, given a few days, but that’s all we’ll have in any practical time frame.”
“Why the hell wasn’t this factored into our planning?” the other General demanded. “If I’m only going to have fifteen brigades capable of fighting the enemy, why am I being sent four times that many men?”
“Optics,” the SOCOM man said bluntly. “The President and the military need to be seen to be acting, even while they’re trying to cover up what’s happening.”
The two men shared the eternal silent curse of soldiers—politicians!
“We’ll see how the Air Force fares,” Pierce said carefully. “But I do have some small faith in our flyboys. They’ll clear the skies.
“In which case I see no reason not to advance on Portland as soon as I have those fifteen brigades reequipped,” he concluded grimly. “I need to talk to the people on the ground, too. It’s going to fall to the Marines and Guard in the metro area to contain this until we have our strike force. They need to know their limitations.”
“They’ve been briefed,” Arthur admitted. “We made sure of that.”
“Can they even contain the bastards?” the other man asked.
“I don’t know.”
36
“The National Guard needs better cybersecurity,” Charles sniffed over his link to the conference room. “It took me all of three minutes to break through their firewalls and pull all of the tactical feeds for the units surrounding Portland.”
David leaned back in his chair, eyeing the screen with the dragon on it.
“Don’t you have the backdoors for the Echelon surveillance programs?” he asked the dragon.
The ex-ONSET officers in the room currently holding the Black Echelon team leaders and their second-in-commands chuckled. Everyone else looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“Yes,” the dragon confirmed. “Your point?”
“Why did it take you three whole minutes?” O’Brien asked. “Those backdoors are supposed to be instant-access; there weren’t intended to be human ears involved unless the keywords got flagged.”
Charles coughed.
“I had to backdoor into the Echelon program,” he admitted. “Those accesses aren’t actually directly usable; the sequencing isn’t set up for keyboard input. I had to re-access the Echelon servers and go in through there.”
“Is Echelon even still online?” David asked.
“No, but the servers are still active,” the dragon told them. “They’re sitting in a basement somewhere, adding uselessly to the FBI’s power bill.”
Echelon had been linked into every official communication channel in the country. It had no access to civilian transmission beyond public radio and TV, but if you called 911 or were on a police radio, the Echelon program had been listening for keywords that suggested supernatural activity.
“What are we getting out of the Guard?” Riley asked.
The main screen in the room lit up with a map of the Portland metropolitan area.
“There’s about a division of the Maine National Guard officially in existence in the area,” Charles noted. “Listening in on their coms, most of those units are about double or triple their official strength. About half of the extras are National Guardsmen who were never officially called up, and the rest are civilian volunteers with guns.”
“That’s never a good sign,” O’Brien said quietly. “If the Guard is taking anyone who shows up with a weapon…”
“They’re desperate,” Riley concluded. “And they know damned well regular guns aren’t going to do more than slow the demons down.”
“And they’re trying anyway,” Gabriel said quietly, the Keeper Guardian sounding sad. “Brave men and women. Is it even worth it?”
“We managed to confirm that the munitions load-outs at the Campus have been moved north,” O’Brien told everyone. “The entire damn country knows the Army, Navy and Air Force are moving now. Once the anti-supernatural munitions and the troops to use them are in the same place, the military actually has a chance at seriously hammering these guys.
“Until then, though, there’s nothing in place that can stop them.” The werewolf shivered. “The Guard and the Marines coming in from the ships know damn well they can’t stop these guys. They’re evaccing civilians and buying time.”
“With their lives,” Gabriel noted. “Like I said. Brave men and women.”
“I don’t know how long the Army will take to be ready,” Riley admitted. “My contacts say the Air Force is starting sweeps for aerial superiority and bringing up ground attack aircraft. An A-10 doesn’t need silver ammunition to rip demons to shreds—their miniguns have enough force to take down even a toad demon and depleted uranium is almost as effective as silver.
“But they’re trying to achieve aerial superiority against an enemy that doesn’t need airbases or fuel supplies,” the Elfin Lord continued grimly. “The Herald and his people seem to know our abilities far too well.
“I suspect the Air Force isn’t going to find anyone to shoot down.”
“What about the Herald?” David asked. “Do we have any intel on his location?” He paused, considering his visions. “What about Fitzpatrick Stadium?”
“I’m dropping the bug in receptive ears,” Riley replied. “From what I’ve heard, they’re bringing in AWACS planes for high-level surveillance, and the plan is to hit select targets this evening with F-22 ground attacks.
“If my comments reach the right ears, Fitzpatrick is going to be at the top of the list. The owners aren’t going to like it, but if the place is being used as the Herald’s personal court, the Air Force is going to level the place.”
“It won’t kill him,” O’Brien noted. “But I suspect that having that much fire drop around his ears should be at least a little disconcerting.”
“This is Scythe Leader. We’re just dragging our coats up here and ain’t nobody paying attention to us.”
The Air Force officer—no one in Black Echelon even knew his name—echoed through the room they were using as a command post.
“We’re circling like buzzards,” he continued to drawl, “but we haven’t seen anything in the air.”
“Understood, Scythe Leader,” another voice replied. “One more sweep and come back to the barn. We’re collating your camera information, and if our shadowy friends want to let us hang around in their skies, they’re going to regret it.”
“Wilco, base.”
Icons swirled across the big screen. There were fewer blue icons for Guard and Marine positions than there had been this morning, and David couldn’t help but feel sick knowing what that meant…and yet.
On the one hand, those missing icons meant somewhere six and ten thousand Guardsmen and volunteers were dead or captured.
On the other, the last count put it at over three hundred thousand civilians had been evacuated behind that slowly disintegrating barricade of brave men. Over sixty percent of the metropolitan area’s population had been evacuated, leaving the urban area clear for the battle that was almost certainly going to take place in the coming days.
The evacuation had also opened other options for the military forces moving up. Charles and the rest of Black Echelon’s cyber-information team had added new green icons across the south of the screen, marked with unit numbers labeling them as artillery batteries.
The red icons marking the demons’ forward formations were easily twenty kilometers farther out from the portal than they’d started the day, but they’d ground to a halt now. The Guard formations were now in contact with the Army artillery behind them, and the last few assaults had ground to a halt in a hail of high explosive.
Most demons could survive being blown into itty bitty pieces, but reassembling themselves was a time-consuming process. Inevitably, the Herald would bring up mid-court demons and toad demons and similar monstrosities, creatures that could shrug off even artillery fire.
But he hadn’t yet, and the swarms of shadow demons they were using as a first wave were not that tough.
“Oh, my,” Charles’s voice cut into the room. “I see what they’re using Scythe’s camera information for.”
“Would you care to share, Charles?” Riley asked.
“Does the 509th Operations Group ring bells for anybody?” the dragon asked.
It didn’t for David, but the sharp inhalations from several people in the room suggested it did.
“Stealth bombers,” O’Brien said quietly. “Nuke-carriers.”
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