Fail State, page 14
part #2 of End of Days Series
Content for the moment with his survey, Rick took a step away from the edge of the plateau. He inhaled deeply, slowly. He listened and waited. He had never been to this place before, but it was as though he had never left. The Canaan Valley. Iraq. Afghanistan. It was all the same to him. Jihadis, bandits. Whatever. He would kill them all to protect his own. He was about to step off, to resume his track through the woods, when he heard a metallic clink, a sound so unnatural and out of place that his senses at once narrowed from a wide band scan into a tight beam, concentrated on the source of the disturbance.
He was so long waiting that he had just begin to wonder if the strange acoustics of the Canaan’s vast rocky bowl might have transmitted the sound from miles away, or from his own camp in some weird recursive loop, when the crack of a single gunshot, followed by a burst of crackling fire collapsed all those possibilities into one dread reality.
Danger was close.
For an instant he was pulled into two directions; toward the threat, which he now perceived lying some distance to the northeast, a mile or so further along the ridge-line, or back toward the camp and the three souls he had sworn himself to protect. Four, if you counted Nomi. And he did.
Rick did not move immediately. He gave himself another minute to gather what observations he could. More shots. And cries of fear, followed by shouts of anger and warning. The cries were too distant to make out individual voices or words, but not so cryptic that he could not tell immediately that a number of men moved in pursuit of one or two women. Muzzle flashes, hidden between folds in the upland terrain, revealed themselves as bright, unmistakeable beacons when the shooters at last climbed free of the natural trench line and fired into the air.
He saw that clearly. Saw too that four men, or four shooters at the very least, hurried to capture or recapture whatever quarry they sought. They were firing to arrest headlong escape, not to destroy the escapees.
Freed of the imperative to immediately defend the camp or to directly engage this unknown enemy, Rick Boreham allowed himself the luxury of another half-minute’s surveillance. He counted two shotguns in the armoury of the hunting party, and two rifled long arms. He saw no return fire from their prey. He calculated that if the shooters did not catch up with the women they were chasing, the whole company would overrun his own campsite in fifteen to twenty minutes.
That decided the issue for him.
Rick Boreham made his choice and experienced it as a moment of free-fall, of weightlessness. Like launching from the door of a C-130.
He moved towards the guns.
18
(Interlude)
Lieutenant-Colonel Petrov sat atop his armored beast and waited. He chewed upon a tasteless pork-patty from his ration pack and listened to the command net on his tanker’s headset. The leather stank of his dried and stale sweat.
The net was silent. Andrei Pavlovich Petrov could hear his jaws work at the meat; he struggled to swallow, his mouth was so dry. He took a swig from his canteen and washed the protein lump down into the acidic mess of his stomach. He had the worst heartburn; no amount of charcoal or Gastal seemed to help.
He sighed and took another drink. He would have dearly loved a shot of vodka from his flask, just to take the edge off, but he didn’t dare. Not yet.
Andrei and his T-14 tank, Number 623, were at the very spear point of the army that had passed seemingly without notice, and at great speed through Belarus. His command, a battalion of the 1st Guards Tank Army, waited in a forest of birch trees close by the highway that led to Bialystok, in Poland.
Bialystok, he thought. He rubbed his eyes and pinched his nose. He took another swig. Gavno, he thought. Shit. The world had gone crazy. Everything was shit. Everything. His hurried departure from his family. The frantic mobilization of his command. The loading and unloading of his equipment and men. His arrival in Belarus, which was a complete shock, rivalled only by the orders he had received via courier only a short while ago.
He burped and regretted it immediately. Bile stung the back of his mouth, and he nearly puked. Instead Andrei made a face, raised himself up in the hull, moved his boom mic, and spat. The spittle didn’t make it to the ground, it splashed against the tank’s reactive armor.
“Blyat!”
Colonel Petrov’s driver spoke up. “You said something, sir?”
Andrei shook his head. “No, just clearing my throat.”
“Yes, sir.”
Andrei tapped his hand on the thick steel of his hatch as his intercom fell silent once more. He could smell the violated earth and chewed up vegetation. Diesel fumes. The sweet smell of munitions. Live munitions, of course. His tank carried the full forty-five rounds of 125mm, along with other, lesser, killers. The forest was crawling with his tanks, and he wondered for how long this had been planned.
“This” being the invasion of Eastern Poland, of course. This fucking madness, Andrei thought. It would kill them all.
A week or so ago, he could not have been sitting by the highway to Bialystok like this, of that he was sure. It would have been suicide. American satellites would have seen him; drones would have been hummed invisibly overhead. Heavy blocking forces would have moved into position and a steel rain would fall.
But not now. Not since the world’s eyes had been put out. Now armies could once more move in darkness, and his army had.
From what little he knew for certain, the Yankees were fucked. They would not be coming, and the few that were here were blinded, distracted, and utterly bereft of support. They would be easy meat, or so his superiors said. He grunted to himself. His superiors of course, were a thousand miles away. They were almost certainly enjoying a chilled vodka as they contemplated what was about to happen.
But here and there, icy cold vodka, or warm, spit heavy canteen water, both Andrei and his superiors would soon find out how the Poles would fight this time. It was not 1939 come again. The wretched little mazuriks would not charge his T 14 on horseback. It would be with Javelin and Hellfire missiles and their own Leopard tanks - ironically supplied by the damned Germans.
Andrei stared at the trees. It didn’t matter to him. His duty was clear. But still, he had to pee. He was just about to lever himself out of the tank and piss off the deck when the command freq crackled.
Andrei’s heart-rate shot up and he held his breath.
“All Black Cat Elements, this is Falcon.”
Falcon was the commander of the Tank Army. This was like hearing the voice of God.
“Execute Pechka. I say again, execute Pechka. Forward for the Rodina and for our great President! Falcon out.”
Andrei waited a hair. His radio crackled once more.
“Blue, this is Raven.” Andrei was Blue, and his regimental commander was calling.
“Go ahead, Raven.”
“Blue, move immediately to Phase Line One, assault objective Bravo Three upon command.”
“Moving, Raven.”
“Good luck to you, Blue. Raven out.”
Andrei heard a sound like freight trains speeding past as he buttoned up inside Tank 623. Artillery, he thought. Lots of it. The Red Army had always prided themselves upon the professionalism and deadliness of their fires. And so fucking what, Andrei thought before he keyed his mic, if we are no longer officially called the Red Army? He was proud to be a soldier of Russia, no matter what.
He pushed the transmit button and spoke with his soldiers in a level, businesslike tone.
“Third Battalion, this is Blue with a combat alert. Be advised, we move immediately to Phase Line One in attack order, as briefed.” He paused. “Commanders report your status in sequence.”
One by one, his company commanders called in. His battalion was ready. It was time. There would be no turning back.
Even nestled deep within Tank 623, Andrei could still hear the deafening roar of artillery, the red King of Battle. He looked through his vision blocks; the lovely thin birches would be crushed by his machine. He felt a brief pang of sorrow for the ruination of this forest, for the devastation he would leave in his wake. Nichevo, he thought, it couldn’t be helped.
He pushed the mic.
“Move out, Third Battalion.”
The army of the Rodina rolled west.
Wietse considered his friend Jelle. They were both junior policemen, and they had been told to control traffic and keep an eye out for looting along the road to Silvolde. Someone was niet goed in de hoofd, crazy, thought Wietse. This was a job for a dozen or more, with full support.
Jelle spoke. “OK, just please, indulge me. Tell me again who we are supposed to stop, and for what reason?” Jelle regarded the scene strung out along the road, and shook his head. Wietse put his hand on his chin, then he covered his eyes for a moment. He rubbed at his eyelids. He was already tired.
One little provincial road, the Ulftseweg, was jammed full of cars, pedestrians, and bicycles. There was a wreck somewhere on the N317, the main provincial highway, and Wietse imagined that this traffic had attempted a detour.
“I don’t know,” Wietse said.
As he answered his friend, he controlled his annoyance, but really he wanted to tear out his hair. No one knew quite what to do, and no one could communicate. Cell phones? Junk. Radios? Crypto didn’t work, and something was jamming them. Television? All the digital signals were scrambled all across Holland. He wanted to jump up and down.
Everything electronic was kapot, broken. Useless.
This morning his Sergeant had told the pair to take some motorcycles and head out to a position a little south of the village. The mission seemed simple enough. Since this, this… war, incident, whatever, had started, no-one had enjoyed a moment’s rest. None. The simplest tasks weren’t simple anymore. Control traffic, he thought. Prevent looting.
Wietse watched as an elderly woman plucked a cabbage from the field right before them, she was one of dozens busy stripping the immature crops. What were they to do? Shoot the hungry old folk? Everyone knew that Albert Heijn’s food distribution network wasn’t working. What hadn’t made it to the news, but Wietse knew, was that GPS was down, utterly shot, and government logistics and command was haphazard at best.
He spat. Verdomme! He didn’t know who had thoroughly destroyed the NATO and civilian cyber infrastructure, and he guessed it didn’t matter. No doubt NATO had retaliated. Although he wondered whether a country as primitive as Russia would be much inconvenienced by anything short of an old fashioned invasion.
And who would be so foolish as to try that at the end of summer? Even with all of the global warming?
God, he thought, it was like one of his Great-Grandma’s tales of the infamous Starvation Winter of 1944-45. Except this time there were a lot more people and a lot fewer farms. It would happen much faster this time.
Wieste sucked in air through his teeth. Disaster.
A red-faced man with a shovel approached the pair.
“Policemen! Thank God!”
Jelle turned to politely address him. “May I help you, sir?”
“Yes!” The man gestured at the field. “You can start by chasing those people from my fields! And arrest the thieves. They are taking everything!”
“Perhaps we should shoot them?” Wietse deadpanned.
It was cheeky and would probably see him reprimanded, but he’d had enough.
The farmer threw up his hands; his face was nearly purple. “Yes! I don’t know! Something!” He started to repeat himself. “They are taking everything!” He leaned his shovel up against a fruit tree, wiped tears from his eyes, and wrung his hands. “Can’t you help? Please?”
Wietse looked around, there were hundreds of people moving about, dozens in this field alone. Everyone looked intent on their own personal mission. He heard both German and Dutch spoken. Of course there would be Germans, he thought. Not far from the border, and the Ruhr Valley was home to millions.
Millions of mouths, and they all needed to be fed.
He didn’t doubt that some of them were here, in this field.
He felt the weight of the pistol on his belt. it felt like a lead brick. He supposed this poor man was right; he had to do something. He looked at Jelle. They had a job to do.
“What do you think, Jelle?”
“It’s like bringing water to the sea.”
“Yeah.” A woman hurried by with an armload of cabbages. Wietse furrowed his brows. One, he could understand. Maybe even two. But an entire armload? Maybe she was selling them, he thought. He shot out his hand and seized the woman; she tried to pull away and her cabbages fell. Some people saw the commotion and rushed over to claim the fallen produce.
Jelle called out. “Stay back!”
The people ignored him, someone pushed at the young police officer, then snapped and hit him. Jelle tripped and fell. Wietse struggled with the woman. She kicked him in the shin and grabbed for a cabbage. Someone tugged at his service pistol.
Enough was enough.
Wietse kicked the woman in the gut and delivered a vicious downward blow on the hand that tugged on his pistol. The woman folded like a cheap umbrella, the would-be pistol snatcher grunted and attempted to run. The young police officer drew his weapon and aimed it at his assailant’s center of mass.
“Halt!”
The man kept running. Wietse cursed and eased off on the trigger. The man was going to get away. But he couldn’t just shoot someone in the back. This was a civilised country and he was responsible for keeping it so.
His partner called out. “Shoot this fucker!”
Wietse looked down. Jelle was wrestling with a large man, and he was losing. The fellow looked as if he slung armloads of bricks for a living, he was trying to beat Jelle’s head against the fruit tree.
Wietse hesitated for a split second. Was deadly force necessary?
If he didn’t act, it seemed Jelle was dead. He raised his weapon, but he couldn’t get a clear shot. His bullet would go through the man into Jelle. His eye caught the farmer’s shovel, still resting against the tree.
He put his pistol back in its holster and grabbed the spade. The construction worker was on top of Jelle… Wietse brought the shovel down flat on the back of his head. With prejudice.
It made a curious bong-thump sound.
The attacker fell lifeless to the ground.
Jelle wheezed.
Wietse panted.
After a moment, he reached down and helped his friend up. Jelle’s nose was bleeding.
The farmer was gone; more pickers had come. They paid no mind to the unconscious man or the police officers.
After a moment, Jelle spoke. He sounded as if his mouth was full of cotton.
“I’m not dying for cabbage.”
Wietse nodded.
“You speak the truth.”
19
Stronghold
As they motored up river to Sacramento, Jodi sat out with Max on what she thought of as the fishing deck. It was at the back of the boat, where Ellie and Karl had fought off the pirates. There were half a dozen little swivel chairs out there. Really nice ones with padded cushions in hand-stitched leather. Now that they were on the move again, now that they seemed to have a plan, it was lovely to sit out in the sun and the breeze with her little boy, watching the countryside slip by. It was mostly countryside out here. She knew they were heading towards a big city. Just as she knew that San Francisco was less than an hour's drive away in the opposite direction. But you wouldn't know it out here on the water. It was so quiet.
It was also good to get away from the lake and what had happened there.
On both banks of the river, deep green fields marched away in regimented formation. Jodi had no idea what sort of crops the farmers had planted in those fields and she thought it was crazy that people were going hungry, even starving to death and killing each other for food, when there was so much of it in the ground so close by. Ellie's boss piloted the big boat up river at little better than a walking pace. Ellie said it was because they didn't have charts and Damo didn't know how deep the water was. He didn't want to run up on a sandbank or something.
"Mom, are there going to be more pirates?" Max asked. "Will Ellie and Karl have to shoot them, too?"
"I don't know, babes," Jodi said, and quickly regretted it. She should have just said, ‘No’. She didn't want to worry her little boy. But Max did not seem worried at all. If anything, he seemed to be the only one on the boat who was enjoying himself. He had a colouring book and a box of crayolas from somewhere and he was concentrating fiercely on filling in a castle. His brow furrowed, the tip of his tongue poking out through his lips, it was almost as though he’d forgotten the morning. Jodi was momentarily seized by a fear that he actually might have, that Max may have been so traumatised by the attack and the violence needed to repulse it that he had somehow blacked out the entire event.
But of course he hadn't. He’d just asked her if there would be any more pirates. She forced herself to take a couple of slow, deep breaths. The kid was coping with all of this a lot better than she was. He’d been coping with it since they picked him up from his father's place, and Karl had shot Chad's roommate dead. Gunned him down right in front of Max, right out in the street.
The things her child had seen.
Jodi shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun. The yacht was slowly sweeping around a long bend in the river. She wasn't even sure which river. There were so many of them here. And they all had different names. The Delta was a sprawling patchwork of farmland, wilderness, strange straight-arrow canals cut through remnant forest and open field, and occasionally, worryingly, small villages and isolated real estate developments. They came around a tight hairpin bend at one point and Damo had almost rammed into another yacht tied to the end of a pier in front of what looked like a golf course. Or a real estate development meant to look like a golf course. There were long rows of townhouses, all of them identical, all of them buttoned up tight. Their lawns were brown and patchy. Here and there a broken window stood out starkly, and a sports car lay half-in the river and half-out. As though someone had driven it there on purpose, maybe drunk or something
