Plague War

8

The intelligence agent following Ulinov carried an open †ip phone down alongside his body like a knife, allowing the two of them to be tracked every step of the way through the congested streets of downtown Leadville.

Nikola Ulinov was a big man, but he constantly let himself be delayed as people shifted and ebbed around the sandbagged gun emplacements. For one thing, it made it very dif‚cult to tail him. He’d already spotted a second agent struggling to remain unseen despite his stop-and-go pace.

Ulinov stood at a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters. The Americans would have said six-two in their quick slang. He normally had the edge in any crowd. The former cosmonaut was large for a graduate of the Russian Federal Space Agency, thick in the shoulders and chest. His limp only made him more imposing. Most people angled away from him without thinking, but he was in no hurry. It had been two days since he’d had an excuse to cross the city and he was taking notes.

He was a weapon. That was the basic truth of it, and that was how he felt, not hateful but full of purpose. A weapon does not hate. It only serves. His ammunition was merely what he stole from them with his eyes and ears — and yet day by day he became more dangerous.

He kept his face down like most of the civilians, hunched into his coat. Each time his gaze †ickered up, he was afraid he would give himself away. Every step he took sideways or back to avoid the other men and women was more than an act. He walked among them as if he was wearing a bomb and it seemed impossible that no one could sense what was different in him, his thoughts, his poise. He was the enemy.

Perhaps that would change. He hoped for it. Nearly from the beginning, his people and the Americans had established an alliance, although that partnership had consisted of little more than words transmitted from one side of the world to the other. The Americans were too engrossed in their own survival, and by the end of the second winter, all that remained of Russia were a few million refugees with no real wealth or power. Until now.

On the face of it, that was why Ulinov had been brought down from the space station, as a proven and highly visible representative for his shattered government, bilingual, trained in diplomacy, experienced at working with and even commanding Americans. But he needed to be more. His people were desperate for any advantage.

He hadn’t found it. As far as Ulinov could tell, Leadville’s strength was growing. Not by much. They had their own problems, yet even a slight improvement went drastically against the global trend. He had witnessed this ‚rsthand aboard the ISS, looking down on the planet as survivors everywhere fell silent.

You don’t realize your luck, he thought, and found himself glancing up too long. He made eye contact with a sunburnt young Army corporal standing at the edge of the sidewalk in full battle rattle — helmet, parka, gloves, and submachine gun. The boy’s expression tightened and Ulinov worried what had shown in his own eyes. Envy? Anger?

Ulinov didn’t dare look back. It was important that the two intelligence agents didn’t think he was aware of them, and yet his bitterness stayed with him like a shout.

You don’t realize. You have so much.

The new U.S. capital sat at 10,150 feet on a bit of †at ground cradled among towering white peaks. There had never been many trees at this elevation — absolutely none, now, all burned for fuel during the ‚rst winter — and Leadville was a collection of old brick and modern concrete. Anchoring main street were two heritage museums and a well-preserved opera theater built in 1870.

Even in the twenty-‚rst century, the wide boulevard still had the shape of the American frontier, designed to accommodate wagons and horses. Before the plague, this town had been home to less than four thousand people, but all of the historical buildings and breakfast cafes had been turned into command centers for civil, federal, and military staffs.

It was a foothold. Hotels, of‚ces, and private homes had been packed with survivors, even the gas stations and the laundromat. Prefab warehouses and tents ‚lled many of the side streets, rooftops, and parking lots. It was enough.

If he closed his eyes, the crowd almost reminded him of Kiev and Moscow and Paris, boot heels on pavement, the rustle of people wisking against each other. And yet the pace was wrong, as were the human sounds. No one ran because they were late for work or a show or lunch. No one laughed or shouted.

Ulinov came up against the back of a man who was engrossed with his cell phone, turned to face the brick wall of a bank. The man did not speak. He only texted, working his thumb on the phone’s touch pad. Ulinov slipped by and immediately saw another woman tapping into her cupped hands, the bridge of her nose chapped and pink much like the young soldier’s face. At this altitude, daylight seethed with ultraviolet, and there was no longer any sunscreen to be had at any price.

The important thing was the phones. The government staffers, soldiers, doctors, machinists, electricians, and other critical personnel were all linked together by a local array of cellular towers and wireless Internet built during the plague year, and yet Ulinov had never heard anyone speaking into them in more than a hush. They were afraid of in‚ltrators. Their war was against their own people, and how could they be sure who was on their side when the enemy looked like them and talked like them?

In many ways it was as if winter still held Leadville beneath eight feet of snow and subzero temperatures. These people were still waiting. They were frozen. Even with the ‚ghting, too many of them didn’t have enough to do, and every mouth to feed was a strain. Everyone worried that they were expendable.

For the most part, Ulinov had only seen what the government wanted him to see in the eighteen days since he’d evacuated the ISS. There had been a parade. He had received superb medical care and extra rations. But the pretense was gone.

Leadville was a fortress, walled in by layer upon layer of garrisons, armored units, outposts, and scouts — and like a muscle, it was †exing. The sky had reverberated for days as they launched air sorties, the roar of jets and support craft lifting away from the mountains. Ulinov had trouble keeping a sure count. He couldn’t always be outside or move to a window. The USAF also seemed to be simply repositioning their planes, clearing out the crowded little airport on the south side of town, landing many nearby on the highways to the north instead, and some of the short †ights overhead were only small civilian craft or fat commercial planes.

Leadville was also reequipping special ground units, ‚lling the main thoroughfare with missile carriers and Abraham tanks, cracking the surface of the road beneath these lumbering machines. Ulinov had counted at least six motorized units in each of the four blocks he’d covered so far, and he glimpsed roughly the same number on the street ahead. Motorized cannon. Squat APCs for the soldiers who would support the artillery. Yesterday the streets had rumbled early in the day and again at night, the vehicles moving in and out to be followed by another group this morning. A second wave.

How many more? he wondered, and bumped into a soldier cutting across the sidewalk to the door of a shop. A captain, he realized. “Excuse me,” Ulinov said, being careful with his enunciation. He had the proper identi‚cation, but he didn’t want to be stopped for something as simple as his accent. He was already going to be late.

The captain barely glanced at him, though, before moving inside. Black spray paint covered the old shop name. CAV4. The graf‚ti was everywhere and Ulinov tried to remember it all. FBI F2. ODA S/S. Everything went into his reports, and to him it looked as if Leadville was doing much more than reinforcing what was already a powerful base. He believed they were mounting an attack. But where?

There were rumors, of course; the obvious air war; stories of nanotech weapons and stories that Ruth turned traitor with another new device; word that James Hollister had been executed and that many others were in jail or under house arrest.

Ulinov knew it would only be a very short time now before he was caught out himself.

* * * *

In a small room in an old hotel — a small, private room with electricity and a computer and two phones — Ulinov met with Senator Kendricks and General Schraeder. His tension worked in their favor, yet there was no concealing it. Still, he tried.

Kendricks clearly enjoyed the moment, surveying Ulinov’s face as they exchanged mundane greetings. “Good morning, Commander. Have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink? A Coke?” He produced a red can from his desk.

Ulinov knew the unopened soda was worth ‚fty dollars on the street, and Kendricks liked to do little favors. He nodded. “Yes. Please.”

“And how’s that leg of yours?”

“I am improving. Your doctors are excellent.” Ulinov had been on the †ight deck of the space shuttle Endeavour when it crash-landed on the highway outside of town, taking shrapnel through the windshield and killing their pilot.

“Good,” Kendricks said. “Good. Glad to hear it.”

Ulinov was patient, accepting the Coke and then lifting it like a salute. “Thank you.”

Kendricks nodded his head and his broad cowboy hat in a slow, serious movement. The white Stetson was his signature mark and he also dressed himself in string ties on plain blue work shirts. He was clean-shaven. Ulinov suspected the man had worn a suit in Washington, but Colorado was his home territory and most of the survivors in town were local or at least from the surrounding West. A good part of the military had also been based in this state.

Ulinov didn’t think there had been any elections, nor did he suspect there would be, but it must be easier, playing the caricature. People wanted the traditional to steady themselves against so much loss and suffering. In his mid-‚fties, ‚t and strong, Lawrence N. Kendricks made a good father ‚gure.

General Schraeder might have tried to model himself in the same image, learning from the senator. He kept his dark hair longer than the cliché military man, softening the stern image of his Air Force uniform, ribbons, and insignia. The extra length also partially hid the strip of gauze on his ear, where Ulinov guessed that a precancerous melanoma had been removed.

Schraeder lacked the ego that gave Kendricks his unshakeable con‚dence, however. Maybe it was only that Schraeder had witnessed more destruction and failure up close. He was usually as tense as Ulinov, and today it showed. The general was stiff and quiet. He was a henchman.

But don’t ignore him, Ulinov thought, drinking from his sugary, ‚zzing Coke. The two of you have more in common, and Schraeder may actually want to help if the senator lets him.

Since the ‚rst days of the plague, Kendricks had never been farther than eight slots from the pinnacle of the American government. A helicopter accident had killed the president in the evacuations out of the East Coast, the vice president assuming that role himself, and in the chaos the Speaker of the House ended up in Montana, which soon went over to the rebels.

The end of the world had been good to Kendricks. And if there was a coup attempt that was put down in recent days, the senator appeared to have come out of it even more perfectly positioned. Kendricks and Schraeder already held two of the seven prized seats on the president’s council, and Ulinov suspected the top leadership had recently been pared down to four or ‚ve. In his prior meetings he’d sat down with the whole group, but two days ago that had changed.

Kendricks was adept and opportunistic, extremely sharp beneath the show of being a lazy cowboy. The man is a bear, Ulinov thought, afraid of nothing and always hungry.

How can I use that against him?

“Well, it looks like it’s as bad as we were thinking,” Kendricks said at last, rapping his knuckles on his desk and then gesturing with the same hand at Schraeder. “We can’t afford to give you any planes right now.”

“It is dif‚cult,” Ulinov agreed blamelessly.

“Still, there’s no question that it’s in our own best interest to help your folks way over there,” Kendricks continued, folding his hands. “It’s just a matter of how many planes we can dedicate to the job. How many and when.”

Ulinov only nodded this time, struggling with his resentment. Does he want me to beg?

He’d known this was coming. Two days ago Kendricks had given every signal that their deal would change, calling Ulinov in to lecture him on the problems presented by the rebel uprising… and yet the American civil war was a tri†e compared to what Ulinov’s people were facing.

Their motherland had been abandoned almost completely. The tallest peaks in the Urals fell short of even two thousand meters. Otherwise Russia possessed only a handful of icy mountains very close to the Chinese and Mongolian borders, plus a few small safe zones in deepest Siberia and along the Bering Sea. From the ‚rst reports out of California to the time that the machine plague swept into Europe, the Russians had barely a month to relocate their entire nation even as dozens of other countries claimed and then fought for elevation.

By accident, humankind had begun global warming in time to do themselves a lot of good. There was evidence that the trend was at least partly natural, easily blamed on volcanic activity and a pendulum-like cycle from warmer eras to ice ages and back again — but eighty years into the greatest population boom the world had ever seen, endless gigatons of smoke and exhaust had tipped the balance in the atmosphere.

It was the upper reaches of the planet that began to show the effects ‚rst. There were still cold spikes, but by the late 1990s the evidence was too conspicuous to disbelieve. Snowfall became rain. Frozen ground relaxed and thawed. There were also more landslides and †oods, but the acceleration of greenhouse gases had made every difference between life and death in the plague year. The warming created more useable ground for survivors even if it was just a few meters at a time.

All of Europe clashed in the Alps. China and India rose over the central Himalayas like human tides. There were also safe zones within Iran, and Russia had economic and political ties there, but the Iranians detonated fourteen dirty bombs along their borders to beat back their Arab neighbors. The wind was wrong. Fallout left too much of the Iranian high ground contaminated, not at lethal levels but deadly in the long run.

The Russians †ed to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan and to the Caucasus, a sheer jag of rock thrust up between the Caspian and Black Seas. They were outnumbered in both places by refugee hordes from across the Middle East, but at the same time, they were correct in believing they would outgun their enemies. It didn’t last. Air superiority meant nothing without reliable maintenance, fuel, and ordnance. Their tanks and their artillery also wore down. On some fronts the pitiless land war was already being fought with rocks and knives, and the Muslims’ numbers quickly gave them the advantage.

Negotiations with the Americans had begun months ago, still in the heart of winter. Everyone was aware of what the spring thaw would bring — new ‚ghting, new horror — and the Russians were both distributed badly and surrounded everywhere. Let the Afghanis, Chechens, Turks, Kurds, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iraqis battle among themselves. The Russians had bargained their way out, offering their veteran armies to India in exchange for a sliver of real estate in the Himalayas as a buffer against the Chinese.

That would be a brutal ‚ght itself, of course, but with only one front instead of twenty. Their hope was to establish a stalemate, a cold war with entrenched borders. But to get there, they needed many more planes and fuel.

The United States had been spared as always by its geographical isolation and, ironically, by the fact that the plague broke loose in California and spread across North America ‚rst. They only had themselves and the Canadians to save as the rest of the world stayed back. Other countries waited and hoped, and then it was too late. Even close allies like the British, with no high ground of their own, had been forced to airlift themselves into the crowded war in the Alps after the nanotech was suddenly everywhere.

There were a few other somewhat calm zones. In fact, most of the South Pole was safe. Antarctica had endless ranges and plateaus above ten thousand feet. The freezing weather also came with low pressure fronts, leaving vast, high stretches of ice that were often free of the plague. But it was just ice. There was nothing to sustain anyone there.

Greenland took in some of the Norweigans and the Finns and their militaries, establishing a separate peace. The survivors out of Australia joined with New Zealand, and Japan still held a few peaks at the heart of their island.

Elsewhere the ‚ghting was mixed and savage. In Micronesia, millions of people fought for a handful of island peaks. The entire population of Africa tried to shove up onto Mt. Kilimanjaro and the very few other high points on the continent even as the Israelis airlifted south into Ethiopia and burned clear several peaks for their own.

Ulinov often wondered if the Russians should have planned to run farther themselves, but it was hard. They’d wanted to stay close to their cities, their industrial base, their military stockpiles — and they were not without experience in ‚ghting on Muslim land. He knew they were using their few remaining jets and helicopters to scavenge beneath the barrier, desperate for weapons and food.

The weight of it was like hundreds of years pressing down on him, millions of lives, the history of an entire nation. His people had been pushed to the last extreme. Their existence itself was at risk. There were still more than ‚fteen million of them alive, but unless the ‚ghting saw a dramatic turnaround, they would be lost, utterly gone except perhaps for a small collection of slaves and a few scattered souls like himself, bred out in a generation. And here he sat in his plush chair with a Coke.

“What we need is everybody on the same page,” Kendricks said, making an open gesture with one small hand. “We need to work together if we’re ever going to get things straight again. Right now it’s up to India to make the right choice. We’ve told ’em that.”

“And what did they say?”

“Well, they’re playing hardball. They think they’re doing enough by giving you people some land, and that’s a good deal for you. Sure it is. Them, too. But what about us?” Kendricks tipped his head forward, bringing the peak of his hat down in an aggressive posture. “What do we get for all those pilots and planes and the guns we’ll bring over? Maybe even some food. Why are we sending our boys all around the world when we’ve got a whole stack of problems of our own?”

“The nanotech,” Ulinov said, like a good pupil.

“Exactly. That’s it exactly.” Kendricks smiled. “India’s got some good folks and they’ve got a lab full of gear or two. But they’re exposed. The Chinese could ruin what they’re doing at any time, and they’re way behind what we’re doing here anyway.”

“So you consolidate their labs with yours.”

“Yes. It’s too hard to do everything on the radio and there’s no way we’re going to keep †ying planes back and forth. It’s just smart. It’s win-win.”

“Then you are making progress with R—” He didn’t want to say Ruth’s work. “With the nanotech.”

“Yes. I think I can tell you we’re getting close to something that’ll protect us all — us and our allies. I mean below the barrier. We can change the whole planet.”

“A weapon?” Ulinov looked at Schraeder, but the general’s expression betrayed nothing.

Kendricks frowned before making his face smile again. “People have been talking, I guess,” he said. “I know you’re in the radio room a lot.”

Did he expect names? Someone to punish? Ulinov would give him that, if he wanted. “A new plague is what they say.” Ulinov shrugged. “Talk on the street. Everywhere. They say it’s a new plague that works above ten thousand feet, but controlled, like a gas.”

Kendricks just shook his head.

“They say it goes away and the land is good,” Ulinov said, shifting cautiously in his chair. He did not want to play his next card…to take this gamble…but it felt good to show strength. “We know it exists,” he said. “We know you used it on the White River.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We still control a few satellites,” Ulinov said. When he imagined them, it was always with pride and hurt — his countrymen in dirt holes and ice caves, using laptops and a ragtag collection of transmitters to control impossibly complex machines beyond the sky, machines that were now beyond their ability to replace. “We have high-gain video of the assault,” he said. “We have analysis of how the nanotech…how it consumes.” The Americans called their weapon the snow†ake, perhaps because of the way it reacted to living tissue, swirling and clotting. “We know its dispersal rate. The heat it gives off. We have even been able to determine its shape.”

“The assault was necessary,” Schraeder said.

“Yes.” Ulinov would not argue that. “But we wonder if the Chinese also had a satellite in position. There has been some speculation if they could use that information to advance their own nanotech.”

The rest didn’t need to be said out loud, the array of threats within those words, not if Kendricks understood that the Russians could choose not to protect India after all. Kendricks had to realize that the Russians still had the option of making a very different deal to save themselves, trading their muscle for real estate as shock troops against India instead of for it. They could sell their satellite videos to the Chinese as a good part of that bargain.

Ulinov knew this proposal had already been made. Envoys had gone not only to the Indian Himalayas but also to the southern range to bow before the Chinese premier.

Kendricks responded easily. “I’ve got my doubts that anyone could learn much from a few pictures,” he said with a shrug. “Either way, that’s just all the more reason for India to help us out. Our side’s got to keep the upper hand if everyone doesn’t want their babies to grow up talking Chinese.”

“Before we ‚ght them we want the snow†ake,” Ulinov said, and he smiled at the small shock in their eyes. Orbital analysis was one thing. That he also knew the name of the nano weapon revealed a much deeper level of espionage, and that he would be so bold about it should indicate something even more worrisome to them: a willingness to ‚ght.

Kendricks remained cagey. He scowled at Ulinov, but his voice was steady. So were his eyes. Nothing would shake the man. “Well, the problem there is we’re having a hard time manufacturing enough of the nanotech,” Kendricks said. “That’s another reason we need India’s gear.”

Ulinov nodded slowly, bitterly, measuring his own position and knowing that it was weak. But his orders were clear. “We want the snow†ake,” he said.