One Year After

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

This is BBC News. It is 3:00 a.m., Greenwich War Time.

It was announced today by the American federal government based in Bluemont, Virginia, that a single neutron bomb was detonated over Chicago. The extent of physical damage to that already largely destroyed city is unknown, and there are no reports of casualties. The administration spokesperson stated that after the murder of several hundred prisoners taken from an ANR battalion sent there to suppress lawlessness and other depravations by the alleged leader of the city, who calls himself Samuel the Great, there was no choice left to the government other than to employ a tactical nuclear weapon.

There has been global condemnation. A spokesperson for the People’s Republic of China forcefully declared that the Chinese presence on the West Coast of the United States is for humanitarian reasons only, and it sees the use of a neutron bomb against one’s own people as a direct threat to China. The spokesperson in Beijing further declared that any use of such weapons in proximity to Chinese personnel within the continental United States will be construed as an attack upon all of China and result in a full retaliation. The Mexican government appealed to the Chinese government for support if such a weapon is used anywhere within, and I quote, “the former states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico,” end quote.

A message now for our friends in Ottawa and Montreal: “By the waters of Babylon.” I repeat, “By the waters of Babylon.”

A general town meeting had been called for down in the park the day after the meeting at the chapel, a meeting that John had not attended. It was one aspect of his former duties of which he was definitely glad to be relieved. No more meetings!

He had come to dread them even as a junior officer, and though he truly loved his job as a professor, he dreaded just as much the interminably long faculty meetings and other committee meetings. An old mentor of his had wisely told him long ago that the more trivial the issue, the more it would be fought out in a meeting.

Makala, still part of the town council, had attended, along with Elizabeth, while John actually luxuriated in pulling down a copy of William Manchester’s masterful biography of Winston Churchill, The Wilderness Years. The choice was a comforting one for guidance, and he had enjoyed the nearly four hours of solitude. For the first time since the beginning of spring planting, he had been able to relax. Jen had tiptoed out quietly several times, asking if he wanted some tea or a salad from the first greens of spring, though the salad was heavy with the pungent scent of ramps, and for the sake of politeness, he had accepted, picking at the salad while Jen settled into a chair to catch the early evening warmth and dozed off.

He looked at her lovingly. Makala was not her daughter; Mary, his first wife, had been her only child. In a way, Ben and Elizabeth were her only real blood kin in this world now, but even as Makala had come into the family, she had embraced the “intruder” with a warm, loving heart, the same way she had once embraced an uncouth New Jersey Yankee as her son-in-law.

John could sense that she did not have much longer with them.

She had always lived as a graceful, elegant Southern woman from something of a different age of genteel society. She was a bit of a paradox in that she had run the family business, the local Ford agency, with a hard-nosed, brilliant edge, and as for the culture she’d lived in long ago, she was proud to say that as a young woman, she and her husband had helped finance a bus from Asheville to participate in the famed March on Washington back in 1963. Their business had been boycotted, falling nearly to half of what it had been the year before, and when recounting it to John years later, she laughed that those who had boycotted her then were the loudest to proclaim they had supported her all along not long afterward.

So she was drifting away, dozing in the sunlight, radiating such a sense of calmness that John finally set the book down on the floor by his side and drifted off into dreamless sleep, as well.

“John?”

He half opened his eyes, saw Makala looking down at him, and smiled as she leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. He yawned and half sat up.

“The meeting.” She chuckled. “Glad you weren’t there.”

“Why?”

“You were called everything from a traitor worse than Benedict Arnold to a hero.”

“I don’t care about that. What about the decision regarding the draftees?”

She smiled. “Six. Exactly six are reporting for duty.”

“What?”

“Six, John.”

“You sound happy about it,” he gasped. “Do they realize what they are going up against?”

“Maury Hurt and Danny, both veterans, laid it out clear enough. Danny, as you know, was drafted for service back during Vietnam. He said that back then he hated the damn hippie draft dodgers, but after all he learned afterwards about the filthy politics behind that war, he wished he had dodged it, as well. Maury, who was in Desert Storm, spoke about the difference between a professional army in peace time—like we had even when fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the day we were hit—and a draftee army. He closed saying he would refuse to be drafted into this ANR. They really helped to tip the scale.”

“What about reaction to that BBC broadcast during the night?”

“That really threw things into turmoil,” Makala replied. “Some said that if this Samuel character is anything like the Posse leader, then nuking him was too humane. Others see it as you do—a step back to the very brink. Most, though, were focused on the fate of that lost battalion of ANR troops.”

John’s feet were on the cold flagstone floor of the sunroom. Jen was still fast asleep. He could hear Elizabeth out in the kitchen, and she and Ben chattered away to each other in the language of mothers with their toddlers; the two understood every word exchanged, while the rest of the world just listened, smiled, and didn’t understand a single word of the happy gibberish. He motioned for the door leading out to the garden, and Makala followed.

“Do they clearly understand what it means? In two days, failing to report, they will all be declared deserters and face execution.” He sighed and sat down on the bench next to Jennifer’s grave, lowering his head and covering his face with his hands.

“I never thought it would come to this. Fredericks will not sit back and let this go unchallenged. He’s a climber, and he doesn’t give a damn who gets in his way. I saw too many like him in the Pentagon and elsewhere, especially in the last couple of years of service. Friends of mine like Bob Scales were becoming a bit of a rare breed who would not hesitate to put their careers on the line if they felt the order was morally wrong.

“I suspect Fredericks will report my refusal back to Bluemont, and they’ll seek to make an example of me. But as for all the others? How does he report that over a hundred have already told him to go to hell? That means failure, and in his game, especially if it is public and not hushed up, that means he loses his job and gets shunted off to one side. He’ll force the issue before they find out, and from four hundred miles away, he can write the after-action report any way he wants, especially if there is no one to report differently.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’ll attack.”

“Attack us with those black-uniformed goons? How many does he have at most? A hundred, maybe? They wouldn’t last an hour against what we have.”

“You know that means casualties on our side,” John replied quickly, and she looked at him and then nodded.

“Yes,” she whispered. “But I have to say the lesser of two evils. From all that you said about this ANR, if those kids go off, how many do you think will be back by Christmas as they promise? Or—let’s get realistic—how many will still be alive five years from now?”

He lifted his face from his hands. “A suggestion, Makala.”

“A suggestion? They voted for you to return as military commander during the current ‘crisis,’ as it was declared.”

“I think it best I not accept. They vote me in, I accept it, the entire town is then culpable in the eyes of Fredericks.”

“That’s what Norm Schiach said—remember, he was a lawyer once with the army, so he is up with these kinds of issues. Nevertheless, he then voted for you to resume command of military operations if Dale makes an offensive move against us. But anyhow, what is your suggestion?”

“Clear the hospital, whether you think they can be moved or not. We always looked at the old Assembly Inn up here as a fallback position as a hospital if forced into a last stand and we lost control of Black Mountain. At least Montreat is highly defendable.”

“Why?”

“Fredericks knows where the hospital is now. He has air assets. If they pull a raid on us as they did with the reivers, I want the downtown area evacuated beforehand. He lost face with not taking Burnett; I think that is where he’ll try to take us first—a night raid to snatch Burnett. Catch us by surprise and make it a show of force. He’ll argue he is not going directly against us but against a former enemy we are harboring. That divides public opinion in the town the following morning if he successfully drags Burnett and some others off. He then turns around and says the issue is settled, all is forgiven, so why fight any further. Yeah, there’ll be some casualties on our side even with that, but then he blames it on me being such a recalcitrant bastard and suggests the rest come into line as long as I give myself up for leading everyone astray.”

He paused, looking off.

“Crafty bastard,” Makala said, sitting down by John’s side. “But Maury, Ed, and others are on the same page with you regarding that. We’re already evacuating the hospital.”

He smiled. Of course they would see it clearly, acting already.

“The suggestion was made by some that you go into Asheville and make one more try.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“You’ll be hanging from the courthouse steps ten minutes after you arrive.”

He did not reply.

“Are you honestly thinking of turning yourself in?” she cried.

“It’s crossed my mind. Strike a deal even now to reduce the draft. Once in Bluemont, see who is there—maybe some friends I knew before the war. I want to believe my old friend Bob Scales got out of D.C. alive and is out there somewhere. Even now, if I could serve with him in the regular army, I’d do so. If that was the case, I could make a difference.”

“Like hell you will. He’ll string you up in front of the courthouse as an object lesson and then break whatever agreement you made the next day. You even think of going into that city ever again while that pompous ass is in charge and I’ll have Ed lock you up. In fact, it was made clear that if you try to go to Asheville, your friends will arrest you.”

He could not reply. They were putting their lives on the line for him, and it made him decidedly uncomfortable. He sighed, shaking his head. “May I suggest, my dear, you get moving on getting the hospital cleared? It’ll take a lot of work, and we don’t have much time. I really should have suggested it earlier. I’m not officially accepting the offer to take command again, but maybe if Ed and a few others came by this evening, along with Kevin Malady and the other company commanders, we could share a few ideas.”

The attack did come in precisely as John had predicted; the two Black Hawks swept in at just after three in the morning. The watch post John had suggested be pushed forward and concealed within spitting distance of the mall, which had been converted into Asheville’s helipad, had warned of the liftoff ten minutes earlier.

The two helicopters touched down, seconds apart—one in the parking lot in front of the town hall, dropping its troops and then lifting off, and the second coming in thirty seconds later with a second squad. The second chopper remained on the ground, rotors turning at idle, while the other circled. Half of the first squad stormed into the town hall, weapons raised. A number of shots were fired, and at that same instant, the phone receiver John was holding, his link to the Swannanoa road barrier, went dead.

“They shot out our phone, damn it!” John snapped.

The second squad to land spread out in a skirmish line and raced toward the hospital… and found it and the town hall empty.

John, with Maury Hurt and a couple of the members of his first company mobilized down from the college, sat concealed in an abandoned apartment above the old hardware store, which looked straight out at the hospital and town hall. At least for the moment, they tried not to laugh, though the fact that some shots were fired as the assault team stormed into the town hall told him that their orders did carry deadly intent.

The assault unit that had charged into the hospital with weapons raised came out, and even in the dark, he could sense their confusion by the way they moved. He prayed that it ended this way, that confused and cursing, they’d get aboard their chopper, lift off, and the second one that was circling would pick up the rest, and they’d be gone. Maury had argued against John’s plan, saying that if ever there was a time to capture one or maybe both of the Black Hawks, it was now. He did balk, however, at John’s repeated query about whether he was ready to gun down the troops that had landed and whether he realized that even before they could snatch it and move it, chances were the Apaches would be on top of them in retaliation.

He wanted a message sent back to Fredericks, not the first shots of a full-scale war unless Fredericks ordered it first.

The troops headed back to their helicopter. No one in the town had night-vision goggles, but in the shadows cast by an early morning waning moon, he could see that the men were confused by the results, and several stopped alongside the small public bathroom in the town square to talk.

“Come on. Get back aboard and get the hell out,” John whispered.

It was far tenser and more dangerous at this moment than the men who had come in realized. He had pulled everyone out of the town hall; it was too obvious that they might hit that first to try to take prisoners, but in the perimeter around the town hall and hospital across the street, he had over a hundred troops concealed, and they were trained killers. Survivors of the fight with the Posse and close to a score of small-scale skirmishes since—several of them with the reivers—they had stood many a cold, lonely night’s watch at the hidden locations guarding the approaches into their valley. Their weapons varied from hunting rifles to what before the war were rather illegal automatics, a number of the weapons taken from the Posse dead. He had an RPG that had been captured from the Posse; a second RPG, a homemade affair, he entrusted to his best small unit, a group of Afghan and Iraqi vets.

Their orders were strict: no one was to fire unless directly fired upon or he popped off two green flares—green because they were the only two left in the entire supply of the town. But he knew from many bitter experiences and history itself that orders were one thing, but the tension of a moment like this another. A weapon accidentally discharged by either side… someone undisciplined or even drunk and pissed off… anything could happen when you put this many armed men and women with ever deepening antipathy in close range of each other.

The rotor of the copter on the ground began speeding up, the always distinct thumping echoing across the open plaza. The troops loaded in, and it lifted off. Even as it cleared the parking lot, the second chopper came back in from the west, flared, and settled down, troops loading in. As they left the town hall, there was more gunfire, and just as the last man loaded in, the door gunner unleashed a sustained volley into the building. Then the chopper lifted off into the darkness and was gone.

John breathed a sigh of relief and then sat back to wait. A standard ruse was for an enemy to come back into the same place fifteen minutes or so later. They undoubtedly had night vision, and he did not. He would not relax until his forward scout reported that all four aircraft were back on the ground, a report that did not come back for nearly a half hour. With the telephone switchboard in the town hall apparently shot out, it was a long wait until he heard a moped puttering into the town plaza, its driver circling several times, obviously a bit confused as to where to go, until John finally leaned out the window and shouted for the driver to come over. He then received the report from the courier that all four choppers were back at their base.

He shouted for an all clear. Kevin Malady stepped into the town square and repeatedly blew a whistle. Only a few appeared out of hiding; the rest remained concealed as ordered. A paranoia John had developed while waiting for this move was that maybe Asheville had more air assets than he knew about. More could be concealed on the far side of town or even called in from Johnson City or Greenville. Bureaucracies being as they were, he knew it would take a lot of wheeling and dealing to borrow more assets, but he was not going to bet anyone’s life on that. He had passed the word that they had to assume that the sky above was now unfriendly and indeed watching.

He stepped out of the hardware store, looking up and feeling a bit naked. The first indicators of dawn were approaching as he walked up to Kevin, nodded, and shook his hand.

“Good job,” he said, and then he headed for the town hall. It was Kevin who shouted for him to stop and to not open the door, and John inwardly cursed himself. They just might be capable of setting a claymore or IED on the way out, and Kevin shouted for a couple of his Afghan vets to come and check things out first. It was a long, tense fifteen minutes, the sky to the east shifting from blackness to a wash of indigo and deep gold before the two came out and said the building was cleared, but they were grim faced, angry.

John went in and stopped at the town’s small telephone exchange.

“Son of a bitch.” The switchboard had been blown apart, at least a couple of magazine loads poured into it. They had shut down most of the town’s communications with this one wanton act of destruction, and John suddenly felt that the clock of their progress had been pushed backward.

His office had been ransacked, filing cabinets torn open, papers missing. Almost amusingly, they had taken the long-defunct computer, which had rested on a side table gathering dust.

On his shot-up desk was a manila envelope labeled “For John Matherson.”

John went to pick it up, but one of his vets called for him to wait and then cautiously pushed the envelope with the muzzle of his M16 and flipped it over, finally opening it up himself before handing it to John.

What a pathetic world we are indeed slipping back into, John thought, to again bring back these types of concerns. It was too dark to read the note within, and not wanting to turn on a flashlight, he just held the envelope as he walked through the rest of the building.

Fortunately, they had taken the radio equipment set up by ham radio operators from equipment that had survived the Day and moved it to a secondary headquarters, which would now operate out of the basement of Gaither Hall until this crisis was resolved. Basing on the campus was inconvenient for many, but it had the tactical advantage of being in a narrow cove, with plenty of tree canopy for concealment.

John had left his far-too-easily identifiable Edsel in the garage of the house, and there it would stay henceforth, and he stood outside the hardware store waiting for a lift from one of Bartlett’s recycled Volkswagen vans, which had become something of the community’s bus service. Bartlett, being Bartlett, did feel it to be a bit weird that the vans were adorned with 1960s-style peace signs. It was all just too ironic at times.

John stepped back into the hardware store where he felt it was safe to turn on a flashlight and read the note sent from Fredericks.

He crumpled the note up and was about to toss it. There were a few things in his life that were hot buttons, and to be called a cog was one of them. It had been shouted at him repeatedly by an overly eager DI when going through boot camp, the sergeant taking delight in being able to harass ROTC trainees whom, months later, he’d have to salute for the rest of his life. It was a term constantly used by an officious XO of his division while stationed in Germany in the waning days of the Cold War. It was a term that was lifeless, stating they were all just simply part of some massive, Moloch-like machinery—the state, the company, the organization grinding relentlessly onward, and one either became a cog in that machine or was ground under it.

John stuffed the letter into his pocket and looked at Maury and Kevin. “Full mobilization. Our landline communications are down, but we’ve lived with that before and must again for now. We’ve never drilled properly for it before, but we have discussed what to do if facing an attack from the air. I’m expecting a full-out air-and-ground assault this morning.”

He handed the note to his two friends to read.

“Son of a bitch, calling us cogs. I hate that,” Maury replied.

“I want the entire downtown area evacuated immediately; get that siren going. Noncombatants are to be moved to designated shelters as planned and troops deployed in anticipation of an attack, as well.”

In the months after the Posse attack, John had spent many a night developing contingency plans for a variety of scenarios, from the annoying border raids—which, at times, could turn deadly as several had with the reivers—up to taking shelter if a full-scale thermonuclear war was unleashed. They had given some thought to an aggressor who had managed to snatch a couple of aircraft or choppers. If the Posse had come at them armed with but one Apache, fully loaded, and done a proper air recon first of his deployment, it would have gone very badly for the town.

Never, though, had they thought along this line that they just might be facing not raiders or some gang but their own government, which he prayed was only one rogue administrator with a power complex.

The next eight hours would tell if this was a bluff or not.

Maury and Kevin both saluted and turned to run off, John instinctively returning the salute. Like it or not, formally accept it or not, he was again in command.

His retirement of little more than a day was over, and though in so many ways he hated it, there was, deep down, a certain thrill to it all, as well. He felt in control of his fate again. He absently rubbed his jaw. The tooth still hurt, but there was no time to worry about that now.