Colony, page 30
“Won’t be long now,” Lacey promised.
“How we know the other guys where they supposed t’ be?” JoJo demanded.
“We’re here, ain’t we? So they’re there.”
“You hope.”
The first chime of the bell’s noontime gong boomed out like the voice of God. For an instant the three youths froze. Lacey felt his mouth go dry.
Swallowing hard, he croaked, “Le’s go!”
He led them out of the truck, jumping onto the pavement hard enough to shock his sneaker-shod feet. Without a backward glance he raced up the front steps of the Armory. He could hear Fade and JoJo clanking along behind him, ammo belts and grenades jouncing as they ran.
Take the front gate. That was their mission, their first objective.
The gate was a high iron grill. Beyond it, in dim shadow, was the entrance to the Armory building. No one stood at the gate. From all outward appearances, the Armory was empty and unguarded. But Lacey knew better. They might be asleep in there, but they were inside. Lots of National Guardsmen, on long-term duty as backup for the New York Police Department.
The gate was padlocked. Lacey skidded to a halt a few meters in front of it and fired a burst from his assault rifle. Inside the stonework arch the roar was deafening. Ricochets and chips of metal flew everywhere. Lacey felt something sting his cheek. But the chain parted and clattered to the ground. They pushed the gate inward on its rusty, creaking hinges.
“C’mon!”
Fade was through the gate first and he heaved a grenade at the inner door, a solid steel slab set into the stone facade. The concussion knocked all three of them to the ground, but as Lacey looked up he saw the door was sagging open. Turning, he saw a dozen more lean black kids racing toward them from across the avenue. Each of them had an assault rifle in his hands.
“Tol’ you they was there!” Lacey yelled to JoJo.
They dashed inside the blown-open door and found themselves in a little entryway. A wooden partition had been set up on one side. A fat guy in Army khaki was down on all fours on the other side of the partition. Musta been knocked groggy by th’ blast, Lacey thought.
Fade rounded the partition and squirted a burst at the Guardsman, point-blank. The bullets lifted him off the floor and slammed him against the stone wall, a bloody mess.
The other kids were pouring in now and running up the stairs to the barracks area where the Guardsmen slept. Lacey heard shots from up there and the muffled crump of a grenade.
Remembering the floor plan of the Armory that had been drilled into him, Lacey headed down the main corridor toward the right and kicked open the door to the Motor Pool garage. Once it had been an auditorium, and the neighborhood kids had played basketball in there, years earlier. Even before that it had housed a free tennis clinic for schoolkids. Now it held four rows of armored cars and trucks.
“Get th’ side door,” Lacey commanded.
JoJo sprinted off toward the big garage doors. Another team of kids waited on the street beyond it. They had no guns, there just weren’t enough to go around, but they could drive the vehicles once they got inside.
A burst of machine-gun fire knocked JoJo off his feet. His body went skidding along the cement floor, suddenly slick with blood.
“Muthafucker!” Fade screamed at the Guardsman who had popped up from inside one of the armored cars.
Fade fired at him but the bullets whined harmlessly off the armor plate that protected the gunner, striking sparks as they hit. The gunner swung his twin-barreled machine guns around toward Fade, who ducked behind a truck as the heavy slugs started tearing up the concrete floor and slamming into the truck itself.
Lacey doubled over and half-ran, half-crawled between two rows of vehicles, moving off to one side of the armored car. When he got close enough he yanked a grenade off the belt slung around his thin shoulder and tossed it, just like sinking a basketball from midcourt.
The deadly black egg arched up and into the open hatch where the gunner was firing. Lacey could even see the startled look on his white face as the grenade clunked down on his feet. Then a shattering roar and a boiling billow of smoke.
Fade was trying to slap a new clip into his rifle, blubbering incoherently as he fumbled with it, his face streaming tears.
“Th’ door!” Lacey yelled, heading back the way they had come in. “Get the fuckin’ door!”
“JoJo...”
“Never mind! He’s dead, man! Get th’ door!”
Fade tottered off as Lacey planted himself at the corridor that led back to the main entrance. If the other guys were forced back downstairs by the Guardsmen up there, his job was to hold the garage until the drivers could get all the trucks and armored cars out.
Wasn't supposed to be no white-ass in those armored cars, Lacey raged to himself. Sonofabitch musta been some kinda freak, workin’ when he supposed to be upstairs.
In his command headquarters in the basement of the Plaza, Leo followed the progress of his battle through a double row of seventy-two picturephones. Operators bent over each viewscreen, relaying orders or jotting down situation reports as they came in. Leo paced up and down the aisle between the phones, grabbing handsets to talk to his lieutenants whenever he thought it was needed.
It was going much better than he had hoped. The City had been caught completely asleep. All but two of the National Guard Armories were in their hands. Most of the police precinct stations had been taken or demolished. The Mayor’s residence had been captured and then burned to the ground when the guerrillas realized that the Mayor and his wife were not there. No one knew where they were.
The complex of City buildings downtown was a tougher nut. Police headquarters was a fortress and the cops were fighting back. Somebody had been bright enough to send out radio calls for help. But, watching the phone screens intently, Leo saw that all the bridges and tunnels connecting Manhattan with the rest of the city were either blocked or held by his troops.
Okay, he thought. We can hold Manhattan for a couple days. 'Til the food runs out. Then we split, let the Regular Army come in. Gonna be hell to pay when they do. Anybody with a black face is gonna get smeared. But they won't have much to come back to, that's for sure.
He paced down the aisle, head swiveling to see all the picture screens. Scenes from hell were playing on each of them.
The Forty-Second Street Library was roaring with flames, fifty-foot-high sheets of fire flaring up from the shattered roof, smoke billowing black and thick. Somebody had blown the head off one of the stone lions in front of the Fifth Avenue entrance. The statue lay there headless, blackened, surrounded by a sea of stone fragments.
Crowds of stunned, panicked people ran through the streets, screaming, scrabbling, looking for a place of safety. There were none. Guerrillas shot it out with policemen and the National Guard on the sidewalks, in the streets, across the pathetic browning hillocks of Central Park. Black youths kicked in windows, burned buses, smashed furniture and threw it out of apartment house windows.
The World Government offices at the old UN Plaza were already gutted and smoking. Somebody had clobbered the place with Molotov cocktails.
In one or two spots blacks were shooting at other blacks. The street gangs that Leo had welded together into a single strike force were already coming apart, old grudges flaring into violence as the expected resistance from the white-asses crumbled much earlier than they had thought it would. They're gonna be unstoppable tonight, Leo thought. Wouldn’t want to be a white broad tonight. From their hotel window, David and Bahjat watched the brief flurry of fighting that broke out on Fifth Avenue. A lone police cruiser, its siren screaming, had careened up the avenue, chased by four other cars. It swerved out of control, jumped the curb, and smashed into the corner of a store building. Two police officers staggered out of the wreck as the other cars pulled up onto the sidewalk around them. Nearly a dozen youths popped out of the cars. One threw something into the smashed police cruiser and it burst into flames. Both the policemen were knocked down by the blast, their clothing suddenly afire. The others formed a circle around them and watched them burn.
Bahjat put her hands over her ears. David pulled her close to him. Still she could hear the screams. And David could not take his eyes away from the scene.
I am not going to cry and I am not going to run, Karen Bradford told herself as she cradled her carbine and crouched behind the steel railing.
Indistinguishable from the other National Guard troopers in her olive drab fatigues and plastic helmet, Karen felt every nerve in her body winding up tight.
Waiting is the worst part, she told herself. They warned up about that in training. The waiting is worse than anything else.
Ten meters in front of her Joey DiNardo squatted, hunched over, peering out from under his helmet down along the length of the bridge.
He turned and grinned at her over his shoulder. “How ya doin’, Blondie?”
“I’m okay. You just watch what you’re supposed to watch,” Karen snapped.
There were four women in the squad. Weekend soldiers. National Guard. They weren’t even supposed to be working on the holidays. But the call came early in the afternoon and by two P.M. they were in uniform, in the trucks, and getting briefed by the sergeant about how the shit had hit the fan.
“We’re holdin’ Queens and fightin’ for Brooklyn,” the sarge told them. “Looks like they got Manhattan to themselves.”
An on-duty unit had counterattacked and taken the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge away from the black rebels. Karen’s unit was assigned to hold the bridge, because the Guardsmen who had taken it were too decimated from the bloody battle to hang on without help.
“Nobody moves over the bridge in either direction,” the sergeant ordered, “unless it’s Army or National Guard.”
So now they crouched and waited tensely. Karen wished she had something more than a carbine with a single clip of thirty rounds in it. Max and Gerry had the heavy machine gun. The sergeant kept the grenades in their locked crates inside the truck. I’ll tell ya when we need ’em, he had growled. Ain’t none o’ you fuckups gonna blow up the Queensboro Bridge ’less I tell ya to.
Nothing was happening. They had heard a few shots earlier in the afternoon, seen some smoke. But now as Karen slid tiredly down and planted her slim rump on the cold cement paving, she could hear or see nothing unusual.
Except that the city was absolutely still. No cars on the bridge. The cablecar to Roosevelt Island wasn’t moving from its terminal down on the street. No subway trains rumbling across the bridge. No traffic in the streets, not even pedestrians.
It was as if the city were empty. Row after row of massive, silent buildings, their windows staring out blindly. Like a big fairy castle that stretched on for miles.
Karen was staring down at the water of the East River, almost hypnotized into dozing by its endless steady flow, when DiNardo said, “They’re up on the top level!”
“Keep it down,” the sergeant snapped.
“But I can hear ’em up there! Somebody’s drivin’ a car up there! I can hear it!”
“There’s a couple of squads on the upper level,” the sergeant said. “You just worry about this level, shitface. Do your job and keep your mouth shut.”
DiNardo shook his head unhappily.
An armored car came trundling up the access ramp onto the bridge’s main roadway.
“That’s what it was,” Karen said. “That’s what you heard.” She grinned at DiNardo with relief.
It was a big, blocky, armored personnel carrier, with a turret-mounted set of twin machine guns up on the top. The driver’s cab was armored all around, with only slits or electro-optical periscopes for him to see through. A big white five-pointed star was painted on top of the hood against the sandy-brown body paint.
The armored carrier pulled to a stop in front of the squad’s parked truck. Karen could hear its brakes grind and the muffled whine of its turbine engine spin down into silence.
The sergeant got to his feet and walked over to the armored car. “What the fuck is goin’ on? We been here...”
The blast from the twin machine guns cut him in half. Blood and flesh spattered Karen’s face. She heard somebody screaming—herself—and every weapon in the squad went off.
Karen saw the twin machine guns slowly swing past her as bullets whined and zipped off the turret’s armor. For an instant she was staring into their two hollow eyes. Then they swung past her and opened up on the truck. It exploded into flames.
Men were leaping out of the back of the armored car. Not soldiers, not Guards, but kids. Black kids. Firing automatic rifles and assault guns.
Joey DiNardo snapped back from the railing, a bloody punched-in hole where his face should have been. A grenade went off somewhere and Karen could hear the heavy machine gun behind her firing in rapid, jerky bursts. Sparks glanced off the armored car, but some of the black kids were flung off their feet like boneless dolls.
She couldn’t see for the smoke and the tears. Her ears rang numbly. Her gun was empty; she realized she’d been holding the trigger down for some seconds, but nothing was happening. Ducking low, keeping the railing between herself and the twanging, buzzing bullets, she crawled back toward Max and Gerry.
Who were dead. The machine gun was a twisted wreck. Suddenly Karen realized the noise had stopped. She looked over her shoulder and a handful of wide-eyed kids were staring at her, smoking guns in their hands.
One of them snicked the bolt of his rifle back.
“Wait a min,” said the skinny, pimply kid next to him. He was lighter than the others, Puerto Rican, maybe.
He stepped up to Karen and used the muzzle of his assault rifle to lift the helmet off her head. It clattered to the blood-streaked pavement and her yellow hair caught the sunlight.
“I tol’ you she was a chick.” He grinned.
Karen went for the knife in her boot, but they grabbed her, pinned her arms painfully back, and ripped the shirt off her in one swift, fierce, terrifying surge. She didn’t start screaming until they spread her legs and slashed the pants from her hips.
Kiril Malekoff strode along the covered ramp way that connected the fortieth level of the European wing of the World Government headquarters towers with the fortieth level of the African wing. Outside, beyond the heavily tinted glass that arched over the ramp way, the brazen Sicilian sun bleached the city and hills bone-white. But inside the climate-controlled building the temperature was always crisply cool, the humidity efficiently low.
Malekoff paid no attention to temperature or humidity as he barged past startled secretaries and scurrying aides. But when he burst into Kowie Boweto’s inner office, he suddenly felt oppressively hot and uncomfortable.
“How can you work in this swampy atmosphere?” he demanded, slamming the heavy wooden door shut behind him.
Boweto looked up from the viewscreen on his desk, where a startled secretary was trying to tell him that Malekoff was heading his way.
“How can you enjoy sub-freezing temperatures?” he countered. “And snow?”
“We do not enjoy them; we endure them.” Malekoff plopped his lanky frame into a chair in front of Boweto’s wide, impeccably clean mahogany desk.
Boweto leaned back in his zebra-skinned swivel chair. His broad, heavy-boned face showed neither annoyance nor surprise. “You are upset. The uprisings in America?”
“Of course! What else?”
“It’s Williams’ problem, not ours... not yet,” Boweto said. “I believe the American Government has asked the Canadian Army for help.”
“What about the Mexicans?”
Boweto shook his head. “The Yankees are afraid that their brown-skinned neighbors to the South would side with the rebels against the whites. No Mexicans. In fact, a large portion of the American Army has been rushed to reinforce their border with Mexico.”
“While their cities burn to the ground! God!”
Shrugging, Boweto said, “Think of it as a unique experiment in urban redevelopment.”
“How can you be so calm about it! What if this is the beginning of a worldwide PRU movement? What if such rebellions break out in Europe? Or Africa?”
“Surely you’re not afraid that Soviet citizens will openly rebel against their government?” Boweto asked, smiling slightly.
Malekoff’s shaggy red brows contracted. “It isn’t totally beyond possibility. But it’s Eastern Europe... Germany... suppose it breaks out there? It could start here, for God’s sake—right here in Messina! This is all directed by the PRU against the World Government, you realize. Against us!”
“I know,” Boweto said.
“And De Paolo sits on his bed, more dead than alive.”
“Has anyone told him about this crisis?”
“I doubt it,” Malekoff said gloomily. “They are all afraid of killing him.”
“But if we must take action... if the crisis spreads beyond North America...”
“We’ll be paralyzed. The Director must approve all inter-regional actions.”
“We could appoint an Acting Director,” Boweto said, poker-faced.
Malekoff threw his hands up. “Even that would have to be approved by the Director! We are hamstrung!”
Boweto said nothing for a long moment. Malekoff, fidgeting, rummaged through his pockets until he found a silver cigarette case and lighter.
“I didn’t know you partook of the vice.”
“Only in private,” Malekoff said, puffing a long, light brown cigarette to life. He blew out a cloud of smoke. “And under extreme stress.”
Boweto nodded sympathetically. “We shall have to tell him, no matter how great a shock it is to him.”
“His staff won’t let anyone near him,” Malekoff said.
“We will have to force his staff to give way. The government of the world cannot remain hamstrung, as you put it, because of one sick old man.”
“It will kill him, you know,” Malekoff said.
Boweto shrugged.
Malekoff puffed furiously on his cigarette.
“Let me handle it,” Boweto said at last.
