Wild Cards has been optioned by SYFy/Universal as well...http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/game-of-thrones-george-rr-martin-wild-cards-254382
Upcoming AH books
- Thread starter JSmith
- Start date
Wild Cards has been optioned by SYFy/Universal as well...http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/game-of-thrones-george-rr-martin-wild-cards-254382
Apparently Ian Dale and Duncan Brack have a third political AH book out called
Prime Minister Boris: and other things that never happened"
from the publishers web site
http://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/Prime Minister Boris/
This book imagines such tantalising political questions and scenarios as what if Lloyd George had joined Kitchener on that fateful boat to Russia in
1917? What if Nixon had beaten JFK in 1960? What if Margaret Thatcher had won the 1990 leadership election? What if Arnold Schwarzenegger had been
able to run for President? What if Pope Benedict had been assassinated during his visit to the UK in 2010? What if Gordon Brown had called an election in October 2007? And, of course, What if Boris Johnson were to become Prime Minister in 2016?
Prime Minister Boris: and other things that never happened"
from the publishers web site
http://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/Prime Minister Boris/
This book imagines such tantalising political questions and scenarios as what if Lloyd George had joined Kitchener on that fateful boat to Russia in
1917? What if Nixon had beaten JFK in 1960? What if Margaret Thatcher had won the 1990 leadership election? What if Arnold Schwarzenegger had been
able to run for President? What if Pope Benedict had been assassinated during his visit to the UK in 2010? What if Gordon Brown had called an election in October 2007? And, of course, What if Boris Johnson were to become Prime Minister in 2016?
JSmith
Banned
Only on Kindle 
http://www.amazon.com/Castros-Bomb-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322077833&sr=1-1
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Set in 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro and his army use weapons left behind by the Russians to seize the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay and then plan missile strikes against the U.S. From the corridors of power -- with John F. Kennedy trying desperately to retain his leadership and keep the war from escalating -- to soldiers and civilians both American and Cuban, this high-voltage novel follows the bloody fighting and struggles on the ground while never losing sight of how war can transform people and set in motion some highly unexpected consequences. Winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel, bestselling author William R. Forstchen wrote, "Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down."
“Robert Conroy is truly one of the top players in the field when it comes to imaginative well written tales. Be ready for some sleepless nights when you argue with yourself "I'll just read one more chapter," because Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down.”
- William R. Forstchen, author of NYTimes bestseller ONE SECOND AFTER
http://www.amazon.com/Castros-Bomb-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322077833&sr=1-1
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Set in 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro and his army use weapons left behind by the Russians to seize the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay and then plan missile strikes against the U.S. From the corridors of power -- with John F. Kennedy trying desperately to retain his leadership and keep the war from escalating -- to soldiers and civilians both American and Cuban, this high-voltage novel follows the bloody fighting and struggles on the ground while never losing sight of how war can transform people and set in motion some highly unexpected consequences. Winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel, bestselling author William R. Forstchen wrote, "Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down."
“Robert Conroy is truly one of the top players in the field when it comes to imaginative well written tales. Be ready for some sleepless nights when you argue with yourself "I'll just read one more chapter," because Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down.”
- William R. Forstchen, author of NYTimes bestseller ONE SECOND AFTER
Last edited:
JSmith
Banned
This one to
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-the-Line-ebook/dp/B005CR7PNQ/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Share your own customer images
Crossing the Line [Kindle Edition]
Peter Pauzé
Peter Pauzé (Author)
› Visit Amazon's Peter Pauzé Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
(Author)
4.2 Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Crossing the Line is a cold war espionage thriller—with a twist. The novel takes place in a world where the South won the Civil War and two nations now share the American continent: the USA and the CSA.
It’s been a hundred years since the end of the Civil War—what the Confederates call the War of Independence—and US Federal Intelligence agent Northrup McLean has little patience for those of his countrymen who still whine about reunifying North and South. That includes the petulant and mysterious government scientist he’s been assigned to escort across the Line, into the CSA, for a secret rendezvous—a rendezvous that very quickly goes very sour. With the meeting ambushed, the scientist killed, his own cover blown, and the brutal Ministry of State Servitude hot on his trail, McLean has no choice but to join forces with the brave but reckless Thaddeus Lynch, an Engineer for the modern Underground Railroad. McLean soon learns that Lynch and his Railroad colleagues have more ambitious plans for their far-reaching organization than their time-honored mission of helping runaway state servants cross the Line, plans that somehow intersect with the dead scientist’s secret mission and point to conspiracy at the highest levels of both governments. With the unexpected assistance of brilliant FIA analyst Ansley Mason, a beautiful refugee Southern belle from his past, McLean sets out to expose a violent international plot that could easily turn the American cold war into a very hot world war.
From the Author
Some other things you might want to know about Crossing the Line, and some thoughts about alternate history stories.
Crossing the Line is 111,203 words long.
Which means, if it were an ink and paper hardback book it would be about 400 pages.
In other words, it's a full-length novel.
It is not a Civil War novel, although it is obviously predicated on the notion that the American Civil War was the point of departure (POD in alternate history speak) for an altered history. The entire novel takes place in the mid to late 20th century, the bulk of it in the year 1967.
The novel neither bashes the South nor commends the Confederacy, and it has no particular historical, political, or ideological agenda, at least none of which I'm consciously aware. The purpose of the book is neither to say "Oh my God, wouldn't it have been horrible if the South had won," nor to say "Oh my God, wouldn't it have been wonderful if the South had won," but simply to say "Hmmm....wouldn't it have been interesting if the South had won." How would the world and culture of the 20th century be different? How would they be the same? Like it or not. And for the record, I wouldn't rather live in the world postulated in Crossing the Line. But I do find it fascinating.
Not to give too much away, but the novel operates on the assumption (which many historians share) that slavery was not a viable economic institution in the industrial age and that it wouldn't have lasted long no matter what the outcome of the Civil War. In the novel, raced-based slavery has long since been abolished, replaced by a massive penal labor system which is supervised by the notorious Ministry of State Servitude, an equal opportunity incarcerator. Sort of a cross between a national chain gang and the KGB.
Crossing the Line is both "fun" alternate history and "real" alternate history. While I took pains to make the alternate historical events both plausible and fascinating, there is one way in which I knowingly created a world that couldn't possibly exist: I had some fun with famous people. In this alternate 1967 Jack Kennedy is president of the USA, young Jimmy Carter is president of the CSA, Joseph McCarthy teaches political science at Marquette University, and Benjamin Goodman is conductor of the Chicago Symphony...to mention but a few. None of these folks are major characters (or even appear) in the story, they are merely part of the cultural environment in which the story takes place. For the most part they are either unimportant or unknown to the story's main characters. I shouldn't have done it, I know, but I couldn't resist. After all, exploring what might have become of famous people is one of the guilty pleasures of "fun" alternate history.
But, of course, all that "Hitler became a commercial artist" stuff, while fun, is historical nonsense. If the South had really succeeded in seceding and the Confederacy still existed in 1967, JFK and Jimmy Carter and Joe McCarthy and Benny Goodman...and you and I and everyone we know...would not exist. Okay, well it's possible that some of you, if you live in some part of the world that's been entirely unaffected by what has happen in America for the past 130 years, would exist. But 99% of us would not.
Think about it. You're not only not inevitable, you're not even statistically probable. You only exist because a specific spermatozoa of the 700 million your father ejaculated happened to win the race and fertilized the one specific egg your mother's fallopian tubes happen to have ready and waiting the night (morning? afternoon?) you were conceived. And the same goes for JFK, Benny Goodman and me. So maybe your great-great-grandparents were alive during the Civil War era, and maybe they still got together even though the South won. Then what? If a two degree drop in the ambient temperature or a slight shift in the viscosity of the bed sheets could prevent the conception of the DNA-specific humans who became your great-grandparents, certainly a change as significant as the dissolution of the USA would be enough to do so. And it is even more unlikely that your grandparents or parents would have been conceived, let alone you. The fragile web of circumstances that led to your conception never would have happened. So, while playing the "what would have become of JFK" game is great fun, the fact is if the South had won the Civil War these past three generations of humans (with perhaps a very few exceptions) would not exist. Three generations of strangers would exist in our place because all our quantum webs would have been made impossible by such a massive alteration in history.
The good news is, with Crossing the Line you can have your cake and eat it too. While I have some nudge-nudge, wink-wink fun (mostly between chapters) exploring what became of some folks who are famous in our history, all of the main characters in the story are entirely fictional, products of their history, a history that was decisively altered by the South's victory.
I've tried to create an exciting and intriguing story, well told, with protagonists who are admirable without being super heroes and antagonists who are criminally malicious without being cartoon demons. There's plenty of espionage skullduggery and action, a little romance, a little fun, and lots of alternate history brain candy. I hope it's your cup of tea and you enjoy reading it as much I as enjoyed writing it.
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-the-Line-ebook/dp/B005CR7PNQ/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Share your own customer images
Crossing the Line [Kindle Edition]
Peter Pauzé
Peter Pauzé (Author)
› Visit Amazon's Peter Pauzé Page
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author? Learn about Author Central
(Author)
4.2 Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Crossing the Line is a cold war espionage thriller—with a twist. The novel takes place in a world where the South won the Civil War and two nations now share the American continent: the USA and the CSA.
It’s been a hundred years since the end of the Civil War—what the Confederates call the War of Independence—and US Federal Intelligence agent Northrup McLean has little patience for those of his countrymen who still whine about reunifying North and South. That includes the petulant and mysterious government scientist he’s been assigned to escort across the Line, into the CSA, for a secret rendezvous—a rendezvous that very quickly goes very sour. With the meeting ambushed, the scientist killed, his own cover blown, and the brutal Ministry of State Servitude hot on his trail, McLean has no choice but to join forces with the brave but reckless Thaddeus Lynch, an Engineer for the modern Underground Railroad. McLean soon learns that Lynch and his Railroad colleagues have more ambitious plans for their far-reaching organization than their time-honored mission of helping runaway state servants cross the Line, plans that somehow intersect with the dead scientist’s secret mission and point to conspiracy at the highest levels of both governments. With the unexpected assistance of brilliant FIA analyst Ansley Mason, a beautiful refugee Southern belle from his past, McLean sets out to expose a violent international plot that could easily turn the American cold war into a very hot world war.
From the Author
Some other things you might want to know about Crossing the Line, and some thoughts about alternate history stories.
Crossing the Line is 111,203 words long.
Which means, if it were an ink and paper hardback book it would be about 400 pages.
In other words, it's a full-length novel.
It is not a Civil War novel, although it is obviously predicated on the notion that the American Civil War was the point of departure (POD in alternate history speak) for an altered history. The entire novel takes place in the mid to late 20th century, the bulk of it in the year 1967.
The novel neither bashes the South nor commends the Confederacy, and it has no particular historical, political, or ideological agenda, at least none of which I'm consciously aware. The purpose of the book is neither to say "Oh my God, wouldn't it have been horrible if the South had won," nor to say "Oh my God, wouldn't it have been wonderful if the South had won," but simply to say "Hmmm....wouldn't it have been interesting if the South had won." How would the world and culture of the 20th century be different? How would they be the same? Like it or not. And for the record, I wouldn't rather live in the world postulated in Crossing the Line. But I do find it fascinating.
Not to give too much away, but the novel operates on the assumption (which many historians share) that slavery was not a viable economic institution in the industrial age and that it wouldn't have lasted long no matter what the outcome of the Civil War. In the novel, raced-based slavery has long since been abolished, replaced by a massive penal labor system which is supervised by the notorious Ministry of State Servitude, an equal opportunity incarcerator. Sort of a cross between a national chain gang and the KGB.
Crossing the Line is both "fun" alternate history and "real" alternate history. While I took pains to make the alternate historical events both plausible and fascinating, there is one way in which I knowingly created a world that couldn't possibly exist: I had some fun with famous people. In this alternate 1967 Jack Kennedy is president of the USA, young Jimmy Carter is president of the CSA, Joseph McCarthy teaches political science at Marquette University, and Benjamin Goodman is conductor of the Chicago Symphony...to mention but a few. None of these folks are major characters (or even appear) in the story, they are merely part of the cultural environment in which the story takes place. For the most part they are either unimportant or unknown to the story's main characters. I shouldn't have done it, I know, but I couldn't resist. After all, exploring what might have become of famous people is one of the guilty pleasures of "fun" alternate history.
But, of course, all that "Hitler became a commercial artist" stuff, while fun, is historical nonsense. If the South had really succeeded in seceding and the Confederacy still existed in 1967, JFK and Jimmy Carter and Joe McCarthy and Benny Goodman...and you and I and everyone we know...would not exist. Okay, well it's possible that some of you, if you live in some part of the world that's been entirely unaffected by what has happen in America for the past 130 years, would exist. But 99% of us would not.
Think about it. You're not only not inevitable, you're not even statistically probable. You only exist because a specific spermatozoa of the 700 million your father ejaculated happened to win the race and fertilized the one specific egg your mother's fallopian tubes happen to have ready and waiting the night (morning? afternoon?) you were conceived. And the same goes for JFK, Benny Goodman and me. So maybe your great-great-grandparents were alive during the Civil War era, and maybe they still got together even though the South won. Then what? If a two degree drop in the ambient temperature or a slight shift in the viscosity of the bed sheets could prevent the conception of the DNA-specific humans who became your great-grandparents, certainly a change as significant as the dissolution of the USA would be enough to do so. And it is even more unlikely that your grandparents or parents would have been conceived, let alone you. The fragile web of circumstances that led to your conception never would have happened. So, while playing the "what would have become of JFK" game is great fun, the fact is if the South had won the Civil War these past three generations of humans (with perhaps a very few exceptions) would not exist. Three generations of strangers would exist in our place because all our quantum webs would have been made impossible by such a massive alteration in history.
The good news is, with Crossing the Line you can have your cake and eat it too. While I have some nudge-nudge, wink-wink fun (mostly between chapters) exploring what became of some folks who are famous in our history, all of the main characters in the story are entirely fictional, products of their history, a history that was decisively altered by the South's victory.
I've tried to create an exciting and intriguing story, well told, with protagonists who are admirable without being super heroes and antagonists who are criminally malicious without being cartoon demons. There's plenty of espionage skullduggery and action, a little romance, a little fun, and lots of alternate history brain candy. I hope it's your cup of tea and you enjoy reading it as much I as enjoyed writing it.
Last edited:
JSmith
Banned
Another http://www.amazon.com/Neue-Europa-ebook/dp/B004MYFSCU/ref=pd_sim_kinc_4?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Neue Europa
The new dark age.
It is the year 1949. Across the continent of Europe, a new dark age has come. From Britain to the Russian steppes, the swastika reigns supreme. The extermination camps stain the skies with ash, while in the schools the children learn the litanies of a new world order.
It is the new dark age. It is the age of Neue Europa.
The remnants of the Free World have gathered. European exiles, Free Russian and Commonwealth stand beside the USA as America strives to turn the tide.
Democracy against fascism. Light against dark. Mankind’s last, most desperate crusade.
The year is 1949 -
And World War Three has finally begun.
http://www.amazon.com/Neue-Europa-ebook/dp/B004MYFSCU/ref=pd_sim_kinc_4?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Neue Europa
The new dark age.
It is the year 1949. Across the continent of Europe, a new dark age has come. From Britain to the Russian steppes, the swastika reigns supreme. The extermination camps stain the skies with ash, while in the schools the children learn the litanies of a new world order.
It is the new dark age. It is the age of Neue Europa.
The remnants of the Free World have gathered. European exiles, Free Russian and Commonwealth stand beside the USA as America strives to turn the tide.
Democracy against fascism. Light against dark. Mankind’s last, most desperate crusade.
The year is 1949 -
And World War Three has finally begun.
JSmith
Banned
http://www.amazon.com/Angels-of-Vengeance-ebook/dp/B005DB6N2U
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Without Warning (Book 1 of the 'Without Warning' series):
''Brilliant, nail-biting, thoughtful, and excruciatingly pertinent to our times.'' --James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author
''Delivers all the action and techno-detail that any Clancy fan could wish for.'' --Robert Buettner, bestselling author of Orphanage
Product Description
When an inexplicable wave of energy slammed into North America, millions died. In the rest of the world, wars erupted, borders vanished, and the powerful lost their grip on power. Against this backdrop, with a conflicted U.S. president struggling to make momentous decisions in Seattle and a madman fomenting rebellion in Texas, three women are fighting their own battles—for survival, justice, and revenge.
Special agent Caitlin Monroe moves stealthily through a South American jungle. Her target: a former French official now held prisoner by a ruthless despot. To free the prisoner, Caitlin will kill anyone who gets in her way. And then she will get the truth about how a master terrorist escaped a secret detention center in French Guadeloupe to strike a fatal blow in New York City.
Sofia Peiraro is a teenage girl who witnessed firsthand the murder and mayhem of Texas under the rule of General Mad Jack Blackstone. Sofia might have tried to build a life with her father in the struggling remnants of Kansas City—if a vicious murder hadn’t set her on another course altogether: back to Texas, even to Blackstone himself.
Julianne Balwyn is a British-born aristocrat turned smuggler. Shopping in the most fashionable neighborhood of Darwin, Australia—now a fantastic neo-urban frontier—Jules has a pistol holstered in the small of her lovely back. She is playing the most dangerous game of all: waiting for the person who is hunting her to show his face—so she can kill him first.
Three women in three corners of a world plunged into electrifying chaos. Nation-states struggling for their survival. Immigrants struggling for new lives. John Birmingham’s astounding new novel—the conclusion to the series begun in Without Warning and After America—is an intense adventure that races from the halls of power to shattered streets to gleaming new cities, as humanity struggles to grasp its better angels—and purge its worst demons.
http://www.cheeseburgergothic.com/
US cover.
Posted on December 10, 2011 by johnbirmingham
Cos you can never destroy New York too many times.
JSmith
Banned
Sample
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/su...-john-birmingham/story-e6frf92f-1226170804842
Angels of Vengeance, by John Birmingham
CAITLIN fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle boots. She scanned the tree line for any hint of enemy presence without expecting to find it. If they were going to be fired on, chances were she'd have seen the tracers arcing in while she was dangling, all but defenceless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signalled to Staff Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night.
A flick of the wrist revealed the time: 01.26 hours.
She had four hours of movement before she would have to lay up for the day. It wouldn't take her all the way to her objective, but she planned to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose.
The Echelon field agent moved quickly away from the drop zone, heading north by north-east, following the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush wrapped itself around her, slowing her down as soon as she'd passed under the first tree canopy. Night-vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous roots and vines, of fat, nodding leaves, thick snarls of creeper, of rot and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing over the top of older, worn-out vegetation was strong, almost cloying. Clusters of such flora dotted the grassland steppe behind her during this, the height of the South American summer. It combined the worst of all possible worlds: a main course of humidity with a side platter of wide-open kill zones, topped off with jungle-like collections of trees, brush and other plant life.
Caitlin was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle. She'd spent a good year and a half tracking two targets through the old-growth forests of Sumatra and Aceh, long before the Disappearance, while posing as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms.
But the problem now was more than one of terrain all in all, this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point of cover and pushed further inside the forest.
Two hundred yards in, she came to a small stream, a couple of feet across and easily forded. The stream led most of the distance to her objective, covered by varying degrees of thick vegetation: it was the best bet for a concealed approach in the dark. It was also probably the most obvious ... She pushed that thought away. Nothing could be done about it. Traipsing through open grassland in full gear was a sure way to get a third eye drilled into her forehead.
Hundreds of bugs scuttled away as she laid her HK-417 against the rock. A giant centipede reared up as if to strike. Caitlin swiftly killed the insect with one slash of a spring-loaded wrist blade, flicking the two halves away with gloved fingers. The last thing she needed was to call in an extraction because of a bug sting.
Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered 2 1/2 kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down on to the sandy creek bank from the small, grassy bend on which she'd been resting.
She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon's senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over.
A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat - teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.
She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.
Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.
Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was "the target". Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.
The barrel of Caitlin's 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore.
After 40 minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs ... She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here.
Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream.
Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aussie John Birmingham is the author of the popular memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand and the thrillers Without Warning and After America.
Edited extract from Angels of Vengeance, by John Birmingham, Macmillan, RRP $32.99. Buy the book at the special Sunday Herald Sun reader price including delivery anywhere in Australia. Visit heraldsun.com.au/shop or post a cheque or money order to: Book Offers, PO Box 14730, Melbourne, Vic, 8001.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/su...-john-birmingham/story-e6frf92f-1226170804842
Angels of Vengeance, by John Birmingham
CAITLIN fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle boots. She scanned the tree line for any hint of enemy presence without expecting to find it. If they were going to be fired on, chances were she'd have seen the tracers arcing in while she was dangling, all but defenceless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signalled to Staff Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night.
A flick of the wrist revealed the time: 01.26 hours.
She had four hours of movement before she would have to lay up for the day. It wouldn't take her all the way to her objective, but she planned to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose.
The Echelon field agent moved quickly away from the drop zone, heading north by north-east, following the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush wrapped itself around her, slowing her down as soon as she'd passed under the first tree canopy. Night-vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous roots and vines, of fat, nodding leaves, thick snarls of creeper, of rot and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing over the top of older, worn-out vegetation was strong, almost cloying. Clusters of such flora dotted the grassland steppe behind her during this, the height of the South American summer. It combined the worst of all possible worlds: a main course of humidity with a side platter of wide-open kill zones, topped off with jungle-like collections of trees, brush and other plant life.
Caitlin was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle. She'd spent a good year and a half tracking two targets through the old-growth forests of Sumatra and Aceh, long before the Disappearance, while posing as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms.
But the problem now was more than one of terrain all in all, this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point of cover and pushed further inside the forest.
Two hundred yards in, she came to a small stream, a couple of feet across and easily forded. The stream led most of the distance to her objective, covered by varying degrees of thick vegetation: it was the best bet for a concealed approach in the dark. It was also probably the most obvious ... She pushed that thought away. Nothing could be done about it. Traipsing through open grassland in full gear was a sure way to get a third eye drilled into her forehead.
Hundreds of bugs scuttled away as she laid her HK-417 against the rock. A giant centipede reared up as if to strike. Caitlin swiftly killed the insect with one slash of a spring-loaded wrist blade, flicking the two halves away with gloved fingers. The last thing she needed was to call in an extraction because of a bug sting.
Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered 2 1/2 kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down on to the sandy creek bank from the small, grassy bend on which she'd been resting.
She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon's senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over.
A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat - teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.
She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.
Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.
Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was "the target". Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.
The barrel of Caitlin's 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore.
After 40 minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs ... She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here.
Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream.
Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aussie John Birmingham is the author of the popular memoir He Died with a Felafel in His Hand and the thrillers Without Warning and After America.
Edited extract from Angels of Vengeance, by John Birmingham, Macmillan, RRP $32.99. Buy the book at the special Sunday Herald Sun reader price including delivery anywhere in Australia. Visit heraldsun.com.au/shop or post a cheque or money order to: Book Offers, PO Box 14730, Melbourne, Vic, 8001.
Sean Mulligan
Banned
Only on Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/Castros-Bomb-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322077833&sr=1-1
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Set in 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro and his army use weapons left behind by the Russians to seize the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay and then plan missile strikes against the U.S. From the corridors of power -- with John F. Kennedy trying desperately to retain his leadership and keep the war from escalating -- to soldiers and civilians both American and Cuban, this high-voltage novel follows the bloody fighting and struggles on the ground while never losing sight of how war can transform people and set in motion some highly unexpected consequences. Winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel, bestselling author William R. Forstchen wrote, "Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down."
“Robert Conroy is truly one of the top players in the field when it comes to imaginative well written tales. Be ready for some sleepless nights when you argue with yourself "I'll just read one more chapter," because Conroy's work is the type of book you simply can't put down.”
- William R. Forstchen, author of NYTimes bestseller ONE SECOND AFTER
This makes no sense. Conroy has become a complete hack. Does the author meant that the Russians left behind nuclear weapons in Cuba? Did they forget them?
Castro isn't a madman. Their is no chance that he would try anything like this after the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew something like that would have no chance of success. Castro would have gotten no support from the Soviet Union and the U.S. would have wiped Cuba off the map.
Agree
Castro would not be stupid enough to try and attack the US. That would be like somebody sticking their head in a bee's nest after running away from one bee. It would be committing suicide.
Castro would not be stupid enough to try and attack the US. That would be like somebody sticking their head in a bee's nest after running away from one bee. It would be committing suicide.
Considering Forstchen is a hack, it makes total sense for him to endorse another hack. Implausible and ridiculous, but my main question is: what exactly is Castro's arsenal, and where along the timeline does the book take place? Is there a snappy epilogue? Will there be war? Or a reset button and things stay the same, but for the differences to a few lives of some historical figures?This makes no sense. Conroy has become a complete hack. Does the author meant that the Russians left behind nuclear weapons in Cuba? Did they forget them?
JSmith
Banned
Number 14 in the Ring of Fire series
http://www.amazon.com/1636-Kremlin-Games-Ring-Fire/dp/1451637764/ref=reg_hu-rd_add_1_dp
1636: The Kremlin Games (Ring of Fire) [Hardcover]
Eric Flint (Author), Gorg Huff (Author), Paula Goodlett (Author)
Like 1325033392 false 1 2 2 1 (2)
List Price:$25.00Price:$16.33 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details Deal Price: You Save:$8.67 (35%) Pre-order Price Guarantee. Learn more.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
This title will be released on June 5, 2012.
Pre-order now!
Book Description
Series: Ring of Fire | Publication Date: June 5, 2012
#14 in the multiply bestselling Ring of Fire Series. After carving a place for itself among the struggling powers of 17th century Western Europe, the out-of-time modern town of Grantville, West Virginia must fight for its life in a war-torn Europe just emerging from medieval skullduggery.
1636. Grantville has bounced back and established its new mission and identity, but it seems some have been left behind—people like Bernie Zeppi, courageous in the battle, but unable to figure out what to do with himself in a world that’s utterly changed. Then Russian emissary Vladimir Gorchacov arrives in Grantville and hires Bernie to journey to Moscow and bring the future to a Russia mired in slavish serfdom and byzantine imperial plots. Bernie jumps at the chance. He figures it to be an easy gig, complete with high pay and hot-and-cold running women.
But one thing Bernie hasn’t counted on is the chance to find his purpose in Mother Russia, from fighting the needless death of children from typhoid to building the first dirigible in Russian history. And then there’s love. Just as Bernie realizes his feeling for a certain Russian noblewoman may have gone way beyond respect, he finds them both enmeshed in the deadly politics of Kremlin power struggles.
War with Poland is afoot and Russia itself is about to get a revolution from within–three centuries early. Bernie Zeppi, former Grantville auto mechanic, is going to have the chance to prove he’s not the loser he believed himself to be. For now Bernie’s task is to save the woman he loves and the country he has come to call his own from collapse into a new Dark Age. About Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire series:
http://www.amazon.com/1636-Kremlin-Games-Ring-Fire/dp/1451637764/ref=reg_hu-rd_add_1_dp
1636: The Kremlin Games (Ring of Fire) [Hardcover]
Eric Flint (Author), Gorg Huff (Author), Paula Goodlett (Author)
Like 1325033392 false 1 2 2 1 (2)
List Price:$25.00Price:$16.33 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details Deal Price: You Save:$8.67 (35%) Pre-order Price Guarantee. Learn more.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
This title will be released on June 5, 2012.
Pre-order now!
Book Description
Series: Ring of Fire | Publication Date: June 5, 2012
#14 in the multiply bestselling Ring of Fire Series. After carving a place for itself among the struggling powers of 17th century Western Europe, the out-of-time modern town of Grantville, West Virginia must fight for its life in a war-torn Europe just emerging from medieval skullduggery.
1636. Grantville has bounced back and established its new mission and identity, but it seems some have been left behind—people like Bernie Zeppi, courageous in the battle, but unable to figure out what to do with himself in a world that’s utterly changed. Then Russian emissary Vladimir Gorchacov arrives in Grantville and hires Bernie to journey to Moscow and bring the future to a Russia mired in slavish serfdom and byzantine imperial plots. Bernie jumps at the chance. He figures it to be an easy gig, complete with high pay and hot-and-cold running women.
But one thing Bernie hasn’t counted on is the chance to find his purpose in Mother Russia, from fighting the needless death of children from typhoid to building the first dirigible in Russian history. And then there’s love. Just as Bernie realizes his feeling for a certain Russian noblewoman may have gone way beyond respect, he finds them both enmeshed in the deadly politics of Kremlin power struggles.
War with Poland is afoot and Russia itself is about to get a revolution from within–three centuries early. Bernie Zeppi, former Grantville auto mechanic, is going to have the chance to prove he’s not the loser he believed himself to be. For now Bernie’s task is to save the woman he loves and the country he has come to call his own from collapse into a new Dark Age. About Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire series:
JSmith
Banned
At least 2 more in the The War That Came Early series http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=turtwarcam#4
Turtledove, Harry. Hitler's War. Ballantine/Del Rey 2009.
Turtledove, Harry. West and East. Ballantine/Del Rey 2010.
Turtledove, Harry. The Big Switch. Ballantine/Del Rey 2011.
Turtledove, Harry. The War that Came Early
Divergence: 1938 CE
What if: World War II broke out a year earlier, over Czechoslovakia rather than Poland.
Series note: Series including Hitler's War, West and East, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming Coup d'Etat and Two Fronts. A sixth volume, as yet unannounced, is also expected.
Turtledove, Harry. Hitler's War [vt The War that Came Early: Hitler's War]
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: First volume of The War that Came Early.
Comments: Was apparently briefly called Appeasement by its UK publisher prior to publication.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2009 (0345491823BUY), 2010 (0345491831BUY); and Hodder & Stoughton 2009 (0340921811), 2010 (034092182X).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: West and East
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Second volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2010 (034549184XBUY), 2011 (0345491858BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: The Big Switch
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Third volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2011 (0345491866BUY), 2012 (0345491874BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Fourth volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Not yet published; expected from Ballantine/Del Rey on July 30, 2012 (0345524659BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: Two Fronts
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Fifth volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Not yet published; expected from Ballantine/Del Rey in late summer 2013.
Turtledove, Harry. Hitler's War. Ballantine/Del Rey 2009.
Turtledove, Harry. West and East. Ballantine/Del Rey 2010.
Turtledove, Harry. The Big Switch. Ballantine/Del Rey 2011.
Turtledove, Harry. The War that Came Early
Divergence: 1938 CE
What if: World War II broke out a year earlier, over Czechoslovakia rather than Poland.
Series note: Series including Hitler's War, West and East, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming Coup d'Etat and Two Fronts. A sixth volume, as yet unannounced, is also expected.
Turtledove, Harry. Hitler's War [vt The War that Came Early: Hitler's War]
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: First volume of The War that Came Early.
Comments: Was apparently briefly called Appeasement by its UK publisher prior to publication.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2009 (0345491823BUY), 2010 (0345491831BUY); and Hodder & Stoughton 2009 (0340921811), 2010 (034092182X).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: West and East
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Second volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2010 (034549184XBUY), 2011 (0345491858BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: The Big Switch
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Third volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Ballantine/Del Rey 2011 (0345491866BUY), 2012 (0345491874BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Fourth volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Not yet published; expected from Ballantine/Del Rey on July 30, 2012 (0345524659BUY).
Turtledove, Harry. The War That Came Early: Two Fronts
Divergence: 1938 CE
Series note: Fifth volume of The War that Came Early.
Published: Not yet published; expected from Ballantine/Del Rey in late summer 2013.
Reading IQ84 on my Nook.Damn its good.Bad news-1084 pages!Get it!Good news-Neue Europa is on Nook.The Confederate novel is not -yet.Birmingham's book is due in april.Number 3, Hi!Is the Wild cards going to be a mini series or TV?BTW I got from library an audio of Wild Cards book-#2.
Last edited:
JSmith
Banned
http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Vengeance-Without-Warning-ebook/dp/B005DB6N2U#reader_B005DB6N2U
Angels of Vengeance (Without Warning)(Kindle Edition)
by John Birmingham
(2)
Kindle Edition $12.99 Deliver To
Register a new Kindle
Jed Culver, President Kipper’s sword and shield, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. Can he serve the President by defying him?
Mad Jack Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas. To some he is slowly but surely destroying the United States. To others, he is an American saviour.
Their time has come.
In New York, Caitlin Monroe’s one shot at vengeance may lie buried beneath the rubble of the city. Is her nemesis still alive somewhere?
Unknown killers hunt Lady Julianne Balwyn in the anarchic, violent freeport of Darwin. Can she survive long enough to save her friends?
Sofia Pieraro is all alone in the empty heart of a haunted land, revenge her only reason to keep moving.
After many years the long trail of the dead will bring them all together.
The final battle for America and the new world will not be fought with armies, but in the quiet and the dark, by individuals, driven towards vengeance and annihilation.
CHARACTER LIST
URUGUAY, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse: squad leader, 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, US Army
Caitlin Monroe: Echelon senior field agent
Ramón Lupérico: former prison governor on Guadeloupe, Leeward Islands
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON AND VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
James Kipper: forty-fourth President of the United States
Jed Culver: White House Chief of Staff
Barney Tench: Secretary, Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement
Paul McAuley: Secretary, Department of the Treasury
Sarah Humboldt: Secretary, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Admiral James Ritchie: National Security Advisor
Barbara Kipper: America’s First Lady
Henry Cesky: CEO, Cesky Enterprises
Wales Larrison: Echelon deputy director and US liaison to Echelon Secretariat
SYDNEY AND DARWIN
Lady Julianne Balwyn: erstwhile smuggler and reluctant fugitive
Rhino A. Ross: part-time fishing boat operator
Narayan Shah: CEO, Shah Security
Piers Downing: lawyer to Mr Shah
Paras Birendra: operations manager, Shah Security
Nick Pappas: security consultant, former Australian Army SAS operative
Norman Parmenter: contract killer
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Miguel Pieraro: stockyard foreman
Maive Aronson: community college teacher
Sofia Pieraro: high school student, part-time hospital worker
Cindy French: interstate truck driver
Dave Bowman: interstate truck driver
Special Agent Dan Colvin: FBI inter-agency liaison, Kansas City field office
TEMPLE AND FORT HOOD, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
General Tusk Musso (retd): the US President’s special representative in Texas
Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz: squad leader, US Army Rangers
Tyrone McCutcheon: aide to Governor Blackstone
Corporal Amy Summers: junior NCO, US Army Rangers
General Jackson Blackstone (retd): Governor of Texas
Bilal Baumer (aka al Banna; the Emir): fugitive terrorist leader
ANGUS AND WILTSHIRE
Bret Melton: gentleman farmer and full-time parent
Francis Dalby: Echelon UK field supervisor
1
FORMER URUGUAYAN–ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse, of the United States Army’s much diminished 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, scanned the northern banks of the river delta as the Black Hawk pounded up the narrowing channel over dark, choppy waters. Through her night-vision goggles, the slightly fuzzy green imagery of heavily wooded banks was blurred even further by the shuddering of the helicopter as it roared along above the wave tops. A solid nor’easter was blowing directly up the mouth of the river, adding an extra thirty knots to their airspeed, but demanding extreme levels of concentration from Captain Tim Lindell and his co-pilot as they guided the chopper through hostile, if poorly guarded airspace. Far behind them, no one paid their improvised helicopter carrier much mind – a battered and rusty container vessel salvaged from Mexico. Royse didn’t like to ponder on what would have happened if the vessel had been detected by the South American Federation Navy.
Hey, probably not much to worry about, she consoled herself. It’s just a paper navy, at best, with most of their top ships laid up in docks rusting away.
A bit like the US Navy nowadays, she thought, with grim humour.
Lindell had not spoken for five minutes, which still made him a hell of a lot chattier than their passenger. The spook. Michelle knew the woman had to be a spook, because in spite of the faded, summer-weight BDUs she wore, the kit they had loaded for her was all high-spec, exotic stuff. The sort of gear the military simply couldn’t afford nowadays. No way the army or SOCOM was running this operation. They were just providing a bus service for some ghost recon superwoman who’d drifted down from far above the upper reaches of the tier-one food chain.
Michelle snuck a sideways glance at the passenger. The woman wasn’t unfriendly, not like some of the ego monsters she had met while shuttling T1 operators around. But she was entirely self-contained; she spoke only when necessary and had a way of discouraging questions without actually asking you to mind your own business. She stood maybe an inch taller than Michelle, but even in her BDUs, body armour, webbing and equipment, she seemed . . . well, not slighter – perhaps more wiry. There was a tightly wound intensity about this spook that made being in her presence distinctly uncomfortable. Impossible to guess her age, under all that kit, but Michelle thought maybe early to mid thirties. The woman’s physique looked totally ripped, but her eyes were old beneath a stray lock of dirty blonde hair.
Royse looked away quickly as their mystery passenger shifted position. She was happy enough to attend to her duties while Jane Bond here sat in a furious still-life study of cold, impacted rage.
For the moment, those duties mostly involved scanning the shoreline north of the river. Nothing appeared to move out there, on what had once been the Uruguayan side of the border. Not now, though. Now it was all part of la Federación. A few bright emerald pinpricks of light burned in a cluster about ten miles inland, but the shoreline was dark. The Black Hawk banked gently a few degrees to the north-east, taking them over land for the first time. Michelle craned around to peer over her shoulder into the cabin, which glowed like a child’s idea of a fairy cave in her night-vision goggles. Far ahead of them, she could make out a faint dome of opalescent light on the very horizon, marking the location of the Federation Navy’s fleet base.
She would have sneered at the vanity of the pompous title ‘fleet base’, were it not for the fact that their own aircraft was held together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, bailing wire, and promises. And that most of the US military bases she’d flown out of in the close-to-five years since March 2003 had all suffered from the same air of neglect and making do. Salvaged gear, left exposed to the elements or in compromised warehouses and storage depots, only took you so far.
Yep, two paper tigers staring each other down in a burning barn – that’s the world of tomorrow. What a fucking joke.
‘Five minutes to insertion.’
Captain Lindell’s voice barely registered in her earphones over the roar of the engine and the deep, thrumming bass note of the chopper blades. It was as though the tension had strangled his voice down to a clenched murmur. Royse held up her hand with all five fingers splayed and nodded at the spook. She was already preparing herself, but nodded back anyway. Michelle had watched the woman take inventory of her load before they lifted off from the container ship, three hundred miles off the coast. She watched her repeat the performance now that they were almost at their destination.
A minute later, obviously having reassured herself she had not forgotten her passport, wallet or Gerber Mark II fighting knife, the woman closed her eyes and let her head loll back until her helmet touched the bulkhead behind her. It was the first human gesture, the first intimation of weakness, or fear, or exhaustion that Michelle had seen her make, and as quickly as it came, it passed. Her head snapped back up. Her eyes blinked once.
‘Two minutes out.’
The woman chambered a round in her HK-417, a metallic kerrchung that never failed to lay a cold finger at the base of Royse’s spine. The 5.56 mm HK-416s she had seen here and there, but the 417, with the heavier 7.62 mm round, had been a rumour until tonight. The spook’s brand-new Heckler & Koch was another sign that she wasn’t your standard-issue self-loving, spec-ops asshole, whispering, ‘For I am the baddest motherfucker in the Valley.’ No piece-of-shit M16 or M4 for this chick.
Fuck it, she figured. Another day, another dollar.
Michelle readied herself at the door, training the electric M134 minigun over the treetops, which rippled beneath her feet at a hundred and forty knots. Her knees bent to compensate for the sudden twisting, diving flight path as Lindell began to track the nap of the earth, heading for a small clearing marked on their maps as Objective Underwood.
‘Thirty seconds.’
The Black Hawk pivoted, seeming to turn on a dime, as if Lindell were trying to throw them both out the rear hatch by way of momentum. The woman braced herself against the bulkhead, holding tight to a grab bar over her right shoulder. Royse sank deeper into a squat, until her knees were bent almost at right angles. Then the inertia bled away swiftly as they came to hover over a patch of field between two clusters of trees. Michelle checked the ground beneath them and reported that the aircraft was clear. She signalled to the woman to step forward and hook up.
The spook needed no help attaching herself to the fast-rope apparatus. Royse had one second to look into her eyes before she stepped out and dropped away into the night. The woman did not look scared, but there was something haunting her eyes. Something in the back of the deep, clenched lines which made her face appear unusually long and drawn in the low-light amplification of the NVGs.
One brief nod.
A thumbs-up gesture, and she was gone, dropping down into the darkness.
Caitlin fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle boots. She scanned the tree line for any hint of enemy presence without expecting to find it. If they were going to be fired on, chances were she’d have seen the tracers arcing in while she was dangling, all but defenceless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signalled to Staff Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night.
A flick of the wrist revealed the time: 0126 hours.
She had four hours of movement before she would have to lay up for the day. It wouldn’t take her all the way to her objective but she planned to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose.
The Echelon field agent moved quickly away from the drop zone, heading north by north-east, following the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush wrapped itself around her, slowing her down as soon as she’d passed under the first tree canopy. Night-vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous roots and vines, of fat, nodding leaves, thick snarls of creeper, of rot and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing over the top of older, worn-out vegetation was strong, almost cloying. Clusters of such flora dotted the grassland steppe behind her during this, the height of the South American summer. It combined the worst of all possible worlds: a main course of humidity with a side platter of wide-open kill zones, topped off with jungle-like collections of trees, brush and other plant life.
Caitlin was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle. She’d spent a good year and a half tracking two targets through the old-growth forests of Sumatra and Aceh, long before the Disappearance, while posing as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms.
But the problem now was more than one of terrain – all in all, this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point of cover and pushed further inside the forest.
Two hundred yards in, she came to a small stream, a couple of feet across and easily forded. Shallow water gurgled down a slight but noticeable slope, where Caitlin spied a small animal drinking upstream from her, a squat, barrel-shaped grazer of some sort. It sniffed the air cautiously a moment after she’d spotted it, but returned to drinking when no obvious threat came charging out of the night. A couple of boulders, huge moss-covered menhirs, formed a natural fort. She decided to lay up there for a minute.
The stream led most of the distance to her objective, covered by varying degrees of thick vegetation: it was the best bet for a concealed approach in the dark. It was also probably the most obvious . . . She pushed that thought away. Nothing could be done about it. Traipsing through open grassland in full gear was a sure way to get a third eye drilled into her forehead.
Hundreds of bugs scuttled away as she laid her HK-417 against the rock. A giant centipede reared up as if to strike. Caitlin swiftly killed the insect with one slash of a spring-loaded wrist blade, flicking the two halves away with gloved fingers. The last thing she needed was to call in an extraction because of a bug sting.
She let her senses expand out into the surrounding landscape, listening for human speech, or footfall, the clink and rattle of poorly secured equipment; sniffing the air just as the animal had done, tasting it for the scent of man, or the last meal he’d eaten, or the soap he had washed with, or not, as might be. When she was certain no immediate danger existed, she relaxed fractionally. Or rather, she redirected her energy to her first lay-up procedure.
Again she inventoried her equipment. Nobody wants to be the guy who turned up at the beach without his towel, or the state-sponsored killer who forgot her ninja throwing stars . . . Okay, she conceded, I don’t have ninja throwing stars. But it would be totally badass if I did.
Caitlin flipped up the monocular night sight on her PVS-14s to check the digital map velcroed to her left arm. As was so often the case nowadays, Echelon resources didn’t stretch to a live overwatch link. No one had that – not even the Russian SVR had the resources for live overwatch anymore. She was on her own, which was not entirely a bad thing. Nobody was recording her every move for an embarrassing moment with the media further on down the road. Nobody was barking at her through a headset, telling her to do shit that made no sense. She had good data, though, and with that and her experience, there wasn’t much else Caitlin really needed.
The little stream beside which she’d laid up ran through the centre of the dimly illuminated screen. Her own position was marked with a blue dot. She hoped to follow the stream up-slope for at least three klicks before it began to veer away from her intended destination, one of Roberto’s many detention facilities, this one tucked away in an old police station about ten kilometres inland. The best intelligence they had, placed her target there. Wales had called it a ‘memory hole’: a dark place where the regime stuffed away its mistakes, embarrassments and occasional secrets. Caitlin wondered if they understood the nature of the secret they had stashed down here in the back forty of the former Uruguayan Republic.
She picked up the 417, resettled her pack a little more comfortably, and took a mouthful of chilled Gatorade from the camel-back bladder woven into it. The brush reappeared in eldritch green as she snapped the PVS-14 back down over her dominant eye. The potbellied beast (was it a tapir – was that what they were called?) scuttled into the undergrowth as she began to move.
You’re a long way south, Caitlin thought of the tapir. Maybe it had got loose from a zoo or something.
Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered two-and-a-half kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down onto the sandy creek bank from the small grassy bend on which she’d been resting.
She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon’s senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over. A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat – teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.
It didn’t matter to her that this part of the country, thinly populated before the Disappearance, was even more sparsely peopled now. She had been trained to assume the worst, to prepare for ill chance and disaster as a certainty. There were no large townships within thirty kilometres, and the terrain between here and the objective was undoubtedly deserted. La colapso had emptied it, and Roberto Morales’ regime kept it that way. But still, she would move forward as though snares blocked her path at every turn.
She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.
Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.
Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was ‘the target’. Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.
The barrel of Caitlin’s 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore. As the environment adapted to her presence, it also disguised her advance, enfolding her in the shrill, creaking chirrup of a billion insects, the shriek of bats and nocturnal birds of prey, the rustle of larger animals moving through the undergrowth, and once, as she ducked under the limb of a half-fallen tree, the dry hiss of a viper slithering languidly along.
Caitlin dropped a hand to the knife at her hip and, with one fluid motion, threw it at the snake, spearing it to the branch. While it was fixed in place, she crushed the skull with a swift stroke of the Heckler & Koch’s butt stock. Pythons didn’t worry her, but vipers were incredibly foul-tempered. Best not to take chances.
After forty minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs . . . She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here. Her eyes took in the noticeable brightening of the world in her goggles under a thinner canopy, as a strengthening breeze opened a hole in the silver-grey cloud cover to let moon and star light spill through.
But nothing human.
Still she waited. The slight delay gave her an opportunity to measure her endurance against the task at hand. She ignored the humidity, which lay on the landscape like a wet woollen blanket, making breathing difficult and leaving her with a clammy sweat on the back of her thighs. No one in their right mind would’ve been out in this, Caitlin realised – but it was a thought that neither eroded her attention to detail nor made her lower her guard, even marginally.
Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream. Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.
Screaming.
The screaming began sometime before dawn as a feeble, plaintive wailing, a trembling warble of utter hopelessness. Caitlin recognised the exhausted protests of a man who thought he was close to the limit of what he might endure. She knew from personal experience that he was wrong. In the hands of a capable torturer, you could endure far beyond the point where you’d first thought you wanted to die to escape the pain and humiliation.
The humiliation of torture was the surprise for most people. They expected the pain, at least intellectually – although, unless they’d been trained for it, the shock was still enough to send most over the edge very quickly. The humiliation and shame, however, clung to them for years after the pain had subsided. And that was the jangling note she recognised in the screaming: the shame of someone who’d already broken and given up whatever they had, to no avail. The torture had continued.
It was no concern of hers, save from a tactical viewpoint. She didn’t want her target, Ramón Lupérico, checking out before she’d had a chance to interrogate him.
She exhaled slowly, took a sip from her camel-back, and peeled the wrapping from a mocha-flavoured protein bar. Breakfast of champions.
The detention facility – a grand name for an adobe hut at a straggling, muddy crossing of the two main local roads – was a single-storey, off-white building fronted by a slumping, shaded porch. A high stone wall ran around a compound at the rear. From her position on a small hill two hundred metres back into the woods, overlooking the site, Caitlin couldn’t see the prisoners’ enclosure, but she’d studied the satellite images closely at the pre-op briefing. A well appeared to provide drinking water, and a beaten-down path marked the circuit the inmates were allowed to walk during their exercise each day.
Assuming they were allowed any, of course. She’d half expected to see wooden poles driven into the earth for the traditional blindfold and last cigarette, complete with bloodstains from the coup de grace, but there were none. The guards most likely executed their victims in the cells and ordered any surviving captives to clean out the mess.
The wailing spiralled up through the old familiar stages.
Horror.
Denial.
Rejection.
Pleading.
Shock.
Then the abject surrender.
All in less than two minutes.
There was no way of knowing if the screamer was Lupérico. A quick recon of the former police station confirmed the position of two guards outside: only half dressed in uniform, sipping some sort of drink – probably coffee – under the portico. She thought she could even smell the brew.
Hard to get good coffee these days . . . She made a note to snag a bag of beans if the opportunity availed itself. Black tea with milk and sugar at four in the afternoon with a fistful of cucumber sandwiches just didn’t cut it. She was sure the guys on her extraction chopper wouldn’t object to a little extra cargo.
So, two men outside, at least four inside. Possibly six. Plus the three prisoners that intel said were inside, only one of whom was of interest to her.
All of Caitlin’s training, all of her experience, everything told her to wait this out, to lay up until nightfall, then strike under the cover of darkness. But she had reason to ignore the training and experience. Somewhere down there was Ramón Lupérico, the man who had released Baumer from imprisonment in Guadeloupe. A prisoner now himself, it was a righteous certainty he could tell her how al Banna had effected that release from his custody, possibly even how he then came to control the pirate gangs and jihadist militia that had infested Manhattan back in April ’07.
She did not fool herself that Lupérico would know how or why Baumer had chosen to reach out and lay his malign touch on her family, but that hardly mattered. She was here because Echelon had tasked her with securing whatever information she could extract from the target. The coincidence of her personal and professional interests created an impetus towards immediate action.
The South American Federation was little better than a mafia state, but it was the only reliable authority south of the Panama Canal Zone. It would no sooner collaborate with Seattle than its self-proclaimed President for Life, Roberto Morales, would present himself in The Hague to answer the many charges of crimes against humanity that now stood against his name. In the anarchic, violent world that arose in the wake of the Disappearance, such diplomatic impasses proved less frustrating than they had once been. The states that survived tended to be those that acted to secure their interests directly, expediently and swiftly. It was a perfectly complete return to Hobbes’s state of nature, and Caitlin Monroe, a survivor and a killer, was an instrument of that universe.
She crouched down, motionless and unseen in her hiding spot on the small rise overlooking the crossroads, and resolved to give herself one hour to gather as much intelligence about the situation on the ground here as she could. And then she would act.
2
NORTH KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
‘Drinking coffee? Perhaps the least of your sins, woman! But Elohim punishes all, and you have given him –’
Whatever the man had intended to say was choked off as Miguel Pieraro’s fingers closed around his throat. With one thrust of an arm, the former vaquero threw Maive Aronson’s tormentor from the stoop. A thin, wiry man, with the severe intensity of a fanatic sustained almost entirely by his beliefs, the Mormon witness flew backward on a slight angle – luckily for him. His bony ass landed on the soft turf bordering the hard concrete path that wound from East 23rd Street up to the front door of Maive’s small home.
‘Oomph!’
The impact punched all the air out of him and rolled him onto the grass in a tangle of muddied elbows and knees. Miguel moved quickly to drive a boot into his guts, intending to kick him a considerable distance back towards the pavement from where he had come to torment the poor widow.
‘Miguel, no,’ she said in a sharp voice. ‘You’ll hurt him.’
‘Yes, I shall,’ he replied. But Maive had him by the arm, digging her fingernails into his bicep, pulling him back towards her.
She seemed unsure of what to do with the cup of coffee she’d been drinking when the witness knocked on the front door. Miguel hoped she might throw it over him now, scalding the crazy bastard, but that was not her way. Once the Mexican had made it clear that he was not about to launch himself at this fool, Maive carefully balanced the cup on the wooden rail running around the small, decorative porch. She left Miguel on the top step, clenching and unclenching his fists, as she hurried down to help the man to his feet and out of the gate.
The Mormon doorknocker shrugged her off, cursing her sinfulness, her muddy lawn, her coffee and her offer of help. He scowled briefly at Pieraro and looked as though he might like to curse him too, but the prospect of more rough handling saw him scurrying down the path and out onto the street.
A light rain was starting to fall, beading icily on Miguel’s face. The cowboy watched him make his way towards North Kansas City High School, just a block down the road. Once the man had disappeared around the corner, he relaxed a little, although the high school did remind him of another difficult matter, prompting his temper to flare again.
Sofia.
It took him another deep breath of cold morning air to douse the fire in his breast.
Maive stood with her back to Miguel, watching the Mormon go. Her shoulders began to hitch and he could hear her fighting for breath as the tears came. He wanted to place a hand on her shoulder, merely so that she might feel the reassurance of human contact. But it would not be right. Not with both of them still mourning. Instead he clasped his hands together and stood on the ridiculously small front porch waiting for her to regain her composure. He felt hemmed in here, and awkward, as though he might knock something over at any moment. The lack of space was made worse by a wheelchair ramp that Maive obviously did not need. It had probably been fitted for the benefit of the previous occupants. There was barely room for the two of them to stand in the drizzle and wind. He could see fog condensing on the window behind the screen door, a sign of the warmth awaiting them inside.
The day had dawned bitterly cold, although ‘dawn’ was a poor way to describe the wet, freezing, almost funereal grey shroud that seemed to blanket Kansas City in the morning at this time of year. Dawn here did not feel like the start of something new and vital; more like a case of the night having simply exhausted its darkness and passed.
Miguel was dressed for the damp chill that pressed against him like a blade. He’d arrived not long before the Mormon caller. It was almost as if the man had been waiting, watching. He was most unlike the Saints he and Sofia had travelled with through Texas. Altogether more . . . what was the word? Biblical – that wasn’t right, and yet it seemed right.
With his sunken, staring eyes and haggard demeanour, the man looked like some sort of disturbed prophet from the Old Testament. He had been hounding Maive Aronson for the better part of a week now, wearing her down. Miguel was furious when he’d found out just yesterday, and had reacted with intemperate rage at the first opportunity. That is, a minute earlier, when he’d first laid eyes and hands on the parásito.
There were more of these Mormons in town every week, as they made their way to Kansas City to reclaim lost land and property. Maive told him the community in KC had been second only to Salt Lake City for her people. That was a pity, he thought, very quietly. Not all of her fellow worshippers that he’d encountered of late seemed to have the same, good common sense of Cooper and Maive Aronson, William D’Age, Ben Randall and the others. So many were like the fool he had just ejected from her stoop. Touched by fervent madness.
Gooseflesh stood out on Maive’s unprotected arms while she sobbed and hugged herself in front of the little house the government had let her move into.
‘Maive, you should come inside now,’ said Miguel. ‘It is too cold to be standing out here. Forget that crazy man. Come inside and have your coffee, warm up.’
She hugged herself a little tighter and bobbed her head up and down a few times before spinning around; her chin tucked down into her chest so she wouldn’t have to look Miguel in the eye as she hurried past him. She forgot the cup she’d perched on the handrail. He retrieved it for her, not surprised that the coffee had lost most of its heat in the brief minute they had been outside. Kansas City was like that, a place of . . . what was the word again? Fickle? Yes, fickle extremes. Like a difficult woman, it was only predictable in the way that you knew things would get worse.
He was certain he hated this city. Surely Seattle had to be a better place, even with the rain, but the resettlement authorities rarely let anyone move there from the frontier lands.
Miguel followed her through the door, careful not to crowd the widow, giving her enough space and time to compose herself. Eight months after losing her husband and most of her friends in that flash flood on the Johnson Grasslands of northern Texas, she was still subject to unpredictable mood swings and periods of terrible sadness. There were days where she seemed to be healing, but it didn’t take much to set her back. Still, he did not judge. His own wounds and losses remained open and raw.
The home provided by the settlement authorities was an old bungalow, with dark wooden floors, plaster ceilings, and some fine carpentry that Miguel admired very much. Window seats, book shelving, a particularly impressive-looking mantelpiece above a fireplace in the living room, all spoke of a home that had been built by craftsmen who cared that their work would outlive them by many years, possibly centuries. It was not a large house by American standards – only three bedrooms, and two of them quite small, obviously meant for children – but it was very comfortable and well insulated. Miguel did not concern himself with the fate of its previous occupants. They had obviously Disappeared.
He’d wondered initially whether the very simple furnishings and effects such as linen and cutlery had belonged to those same unfortunate people, but then he discovered upon being placed in his own residence that such things were drawn from one of the city resource stores scattered throughout the reclaimed areas. All one had to do was present a copy of their housing assignment and they would be allowed to wander through and select the basics. There were even food vouchers for those who agreed to scour the unclaimed areas for useable materials on behalf of the city, and for a week or so, Miguel and Sofia had worked on that detail until they found better employment. He didn’t miss that job at all. It was just one step above shovelling up the remains, sometimes dried, sometimes still thickly gelatinous, of the Disappeared.
People, it turned out, did not like to be surrounded by the leavings of the dead whose homes they had taken. Although, when he thought about it, the clean sheets and towels and simple items of clothing provided by the federales had almost certainly come from dead people as well, even if they were simply the owners of department stores whose stocks had been salvaged.
‘Thank you, Miguel,’ said Maive, so quietly that he had to strain to hear her as he followed her into the kitchen at the rear of the house.
‘It is okay,’ he replied. ‘It is lucky I had come around, I think.’
The kitchen was warm and smelled of wood smoke from an old-fashioned stove. It was too dangerous to operate the gas lines, and electricity supply could be sporadic. Wood stoves replaced electric in many homes. If there was one thing Kansas City was blessed with, it was wood. A city in the forest.
Maive had been baking. A tray of muffins sat cooling on a scarred wooden table, resting atop a folded tea towel. She gestured for him to sit down while she splashed some water on her face, drying off with an apron hanging from the handle of the kitchen cupboard. Miguel considered the cup of lukewarm coffee he still held in his hands: the beans were carefully rationed and very expensive, and he didn’t like the idea of it going to waste. All the same, he poured out the dregs, rinsed the cup and set it in the drainer.
‘I’m sorry . . . my manners,’ she said. ‘Please sit down, and let me pour you a hot drink. I could do with one myself.’
‘So you will not be attending to the advice of your friend, about the sinful coffee?’
Maive answered that with a sour grimace. ‘He’s no friend of mine. He only turned up here after I registered with the tabernacle. They’ve had trouble with him too. Harassing people, new arrivals mostly. I suspect he has a mental illness.’
She poured him a mug of coffee, offered cream and sugar, both of which he declined. After retrieving her own cup from the sink, Maive poured herself a full measure, took a sip to taste, and topped it up with another slug, as if to make a point.
‘Cooper never was one for superstitions,’ she said, struggling somewhat. ‘His faith was . . . practical. My husband just wanted to help people. That was his idea of how to live your life the right way. I’m sorry . . .’ Her face suddenly folded into contrary panes of anguish as grief threatened to get the better of her again.
‘You have nothing to apologise for, Maive,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘I, on the other hand, should not be so quick with my fists. This is your home. I am sorry if I was too rough with him. Do you mind? These look very good . . .’ He indicated the tray of muffins, trying to change the subject.
‘Not at all,’ she sniffed. ‘I baked them for you and Sofia.’
He teased one of the golden-brown treats from the tray. She had topped them with crumble and brown sugar, creating a hard, sweet crust that he very much enjoyed. It was all Miguel could do to resist dunking the muffin top into his coffee. His beloved Mariela used to scold him for such poor manners, and he couldn’t imagine Maive Aronson would approve of it either.
‘I am afraid Sofia is not very happy with me at the moment, Maive. The school has suspended her for fighting again and I have grounded her.’ He really wasn’t very happy with her either. He had been called during his shift at the stockyards in the West Bottoms to deal with it, which meant losing a day’s pay while he took the city bus to the high school at Northtown.
Throwing caution to the wind, he broke off a large chunk of crusty muffin top and dunked it quickly into his coffee. The glazed crumble retained its crunch while the cakey centre soaked up the warm liquid, becoming almost liquid-soft itself. Maive did not approve, but she seemed more concerned about Sofia.
‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Miguel. I thought she was past the acting-out phase.’
He put more food in his mouth, chewed and swallowed mechanically, before taking another sip of coffee. All to give him time to think. It was difficult. He knew how his daughter felt, just how much pain she was in every day. But he also knew she could not allow that suffering to take over her life, and she could not take it out on other people. And yet . . .
There was a part of Miguel Pieraro that remained fiercely proud of his daughter and her refusal to bow under the heavy burden fate had laid upon her. Witness to the murder of their family in east Texas; survivor of a journey that took the lives of so many others, Cooper Aronson among them, of course. And a fighter, an avenger indeed. One who had saved his life during the gunfight at Crockett, when they’d rescued Maive and her five female companions from the depredations of the road agents. Sofia had grown up beyond her years on the trail. And he could not deny that, in many ways, although young, she was now a formidable woman in her own right.
‘I do not know what to do, Maive,’ he admitted finally. ‘Honestly, some days it seems beyond me without the help my wife.’
Mentioning Mariela aloud was enough to tighten the band of grief that seemed to sit permanently around his chest. He felt his throat closing on a lump that had not been there a few seconds ago. Another sip of coffee and a deep breath were what he needed to regain the reins on his feelings. Maive, who had no children of her own, but who had mothered and, yes, loved his daughter and the other youngsters on the long exodus from Texas, reached across the table and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. Unlike him, she seemed to have no compunction about reaching out and touching people.
‘You are a good father, Miguel. You would give up your life for her. She knows that. And you will not let her give up on her own. She knows that too.’ The Mormon woman smiled, but not happily. ‘That’s why she knows she can test you, and push you, and drive you mad.’
He stood up to rinse out his coffee cup, determined to avoid the temptation of another sugary treat. Since they had come off the trail, he had put on a few too many pounds.
‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘I must punish her because the school requires it. I understand that. I have been a boss of the vaquero – I understand the need to maintain your rule. And yet, I do not think she was wrong. I understand why she was fighting. She was insulted. Our family was insulted. By some dog, some . . . boy, at the school. The son of a man who is too important to upset.’
A few lonesome flakes of sleet, grey and wet, smeared themselves against the kitchen window over the sink as Miguel washed out the cup. None of the trees retained more than a couple of brown leaves, and their branches resembled the withered hands of dead men reaching up from the grave.
‘But does this boy get punished?’ he went on. ‘Oh no. I am the parent who is called in to explain himself. Sofia is the one upon whom correction must fall. While this smirking little puta . . .’ He paused. ‘Again, I am sorry.’
He found Maive Aronson shaking her head when he turned away from the bleak view out of the window. ‘That poor child has been through so much, Miguel. I suppose that’s what makes her such an attractive target to some. All of that pain, out on display.’
‘If that is so, they are foolish,’ replied Miguel. ‘Great pain she has in abundance, but great strength with it. As this foolish boy discovered while he spat his broken teeth out on the ground.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Maive, although she did not seem particularly disapproving. ‘So she’s at home now, studying, I suppose?’
‘Studying, yes,’ he answered. ‘Or sulking.’
‘Well, that is a pity. But it is important that you’re seen to do the right thing, even if you disagree with it.’
She began clearing up the table. Using the tea towel under the cooling muffin tray to brush up the crumbs. Pouring the remains of her drink, more than half again, down the sink after the dregs of Miguel’s.
‘Will you still want to go to the mid-week markets this morning?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘We will need groceries before the weekend.’
It was also true that he looked forward to spending time with Maive, particularly since Trudi Jessup had transferred back to Seattle with her government job. Apart from Maive and Sofia, he knew nobody in Kansas City. Adam, the teenager who had impressed him so much, was now with relatives in Canada. Miguel missed him more than he might have imagined. He had come to regard the boy almost as a son over the long months on the trail. And a friend, if a young one.
He had no friends here, save for Maive, of course. The men he worked with at the railway cattle yards were mostly Indians, and he found them difficult to get on with. They spoke English, true, but sometimes it seemed like they spoke a very different version of the language. Even the Americans had trouble with them from time to time. Mostly he did his job there and came home. It was only a temporary position, at any rate; a place the government had put him so that he’d be available for interviews by investigators, agents and the small army of men and women who seemed to want to know everything about his time in Texas. Even if they never did anything about what had happened there.
‘I should get my bag, then,’ said Maive. ‘Shall we walk or drive? The weather isn’t that nice, but the radio said it probably wouldn’t get much worse either.’
‘We shall walk, I think,’ Miguel decided, mindful of the fact that the federales were cutting back on the paltry gas ration again, as well as increasing the price to twenty new dollars a gallon. Maive’s salvaged Jeep Wrangler was not the most fuel-efficient vehicle, in any case. ‘I shall carry your groceries for you,’ he added gallantly.
‘Thank you, Miguel. You’re a very good friend.’
3
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
‘I don’t think you should go to Texas, Mr President. The precedents aren’t good.’
James Kipper made a show of furrowing his brow and mashing up his lips. Culver had learned to think of this as his I’m-not-happy face. It was getting an Olympic-standard workout this morning. The White House Chief of Staff absorbed his boss’s displeasure with the unflappable air of a man who knew he was right. Because he was. Jed Culver was always right.
‘I think the longer I stay out of Texas, Jed,’ Kipper protested, ‘the more it looks like I’m too frightened to show my face down there. He hasn’t seceded, despite all his Republic of Texas bullshit. We’re all still living in the same country. And I really think it’s time I went down there. After all, with the election coming up . . .’ The President left the statement hanging there, dropping his chin and regarding Culver with an expression that said: Ha! What d’you think of them apples, fella?
They were alone and the Chief of Staff actually allowed himself a small snicker of amusement. Kip was at his funniest when he was trying to play politics. It just didn’t suit the man at all.
‘The last thing we need before the election, Mr President, is Mad Jack Blackstone kicking your ass from one end of his snaggletooth republic to the other.’ That’s what I think o’ them apples, fella.
He could see the boss looked even more put out than before – a common occurrence whenever Culver had reason to remind him of his naïveté. That happened less frequently these days, especially after New York. But for a politician, even one press-ganged into high office, Kip could still be maddeningly childlike in the way he viewed the world. Jed felt the need to explain. They still had a few minutes before the cabinet members arrived for the morning meeting.
‘Right now, sir, Blackstone is looking for any excuse to paint you as a weak, soft-hearted fool. And he’s very carefully picking his fights to make himself look like the Great White Hope, quite literally. There are so many things we need from him right now that if you fly down to Fort Hood, you’ll have no choice but to lay our demands on the table and he’ll have no qualms about laughing in your face. He won’t even be cruel about it. He’ll do it in such a way as to make it obvious that you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t possibly be trusted to run the country, you’re a lovely man, but soft and weak, and the sooner we get rid of you the better.’
Kipper narrowed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and frowning at Culver over the top of them. The first real frost of the winter lay hard against the windows of Dearborn House, sheathed in Christmas decorations just that morning. Outside the big picture window that framed Kipper at his desk, dirty grey clouds scudded slowly across the sky, obscuring the upper floors of Seattle’s taller buildings. The President seemed to lose himself for moment, staring at a picture of his daughter, Suzie, in a small silver frame on his desk. He sighed.
‘Why am I here, Jed?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr President?’
‘No, really. Why am I here? I just wonder some days, that’s all. There’s so much that needs doing to rebuild this country. We all know what’s needed. You, me, Blackstone, Congress, Sarah Palin, Sandra Harvey – Abe, the guy down the market who sells me my sausages. We all know what needs to be done. So why the hell can’t we just get on and do it? Why can’t I do my job? Pass my budget, get my tax law through, the migration bill, the energy bill – any of it? At every single step of the way, I got somebody telling me what I can’t do. Even though we all agree what has to be done . . .’
He swivelled his chair around to stare out the window. His mood was as bleak as the weather.
‘I’m just wondering what the point is,’ Kip added resignedly. ‘That’s all.’
He’d been like this since the Battle of New York. Or rather, since he returned to the Big Apple a couple of weeks after the last of the diehards were killed or run off. It was as though James Kipper had decided to assume responsibility for every death, for every piece of rubble. It didn’t matter how many times Jed, Barbara or anybody else told him he had done what needed doing, that he had seen off an unexpected but deadly serious threat to the republic, and shown the world that an America laid low would still not countenance the designs of any foe upon her land or her sovereignty.
Kip had been the most reluctant of warrior kings, and having seen the cost of taking up sword and shield to expel the so-called Emir and his pirate allies from Manhattan, he seemed to have lost the stomach for any kind of fight. He was a tinkerer, a builder, an engineer; not a destroyer. Even his impacted rage at the attacks on settlers in the Texas Federal Mandate had abated as those attacks tapered off. He was a problem-solver by nature, and once a problem went away, his interest shifted elsewhere.
Culver, who had been comfortably reclined in a dark leather club chair that had become known as ‘his’ whenever he was in the Oval Office, put aside the folder of papers he’d been holding and heaved himself up to his feet. A one-time college wrestler, he’d always been a big guy, and he found the constant round of state dinners and cocktail parties in the new national capital ruinous to his waistline. Kipper was a lean and hungry-looking wraith in comparison. Jed grunted as he stood up. He was really going to have to start that walking routine his doctor and Marilyn, his wife, were forever hassling him about.
‘You’re here because you’re here, Kip,’ he said.
That got his attention. Jed almost never called him by his nickname. The President turned away from the window with its melancholy view of leafless trees and a slate-grey sky.
‘Somebody has to do this job,’ the former Louisiana attorney continued, ‘and it’s better done by a good man like you than an asshole like Blackstone or a feral, crazy eco-nazi like Sandra fucking Harvey. It’s not much fun, but someone’s gotta do it. So man up, buddy. You’re the guy.’
The President smiled as if conceding a pawn in a long game of chess. ‘Suppose you’re right,’ he admitted. ‘Nobody held a gun to my head and told me to do this. Although, you know, I think Barbara might have. She really surprised me back then.’
She had. Culver well remembered Kipper’s shock upon discovering that his wife had been quietly working with the resistance to the then General Blackstone’s martial law regime, imposed upon the Pacific Northwest in the panic and chaos of spring 2003. She hadn’t surprised Culver, however. As soon as he’d met Barbara Kipper he’d judged her capable of reaching hard conclusions and acting upon them in a way that her husband wasn’t. Not immediately, anyway. Kip was just too trusting of people. He wanted to think the best of them and it often stayed his hand when he needed to do his worst.
‘Guess we better bring them on in, if they’re ready,’ said the President.
He started to straighten up his tie before thinking otherwise and loosening it further instead. A fire blazed and crackled in the small hearth, adding its warmth to the under-floor heating. As always, Kipper had discarded his jacket as soon as he sat down that morning. He worked with his sleeves rolled up, citing the Kennedy precedent if anyone questioned him. ‘Anyone’ usually being his wife, and occasionally his Chief of Staff. If they didn’t keep a close watch on him, he’d turn up to work in jeans, boots and one of his old hiking shirts.
Jed buzzed Kipper’s secretary, Ronnie, to check whether the Cabinet group were ready yet, and when she answered yes, told her to send them in. Barney Tench was first through the door, still licking his fingers from the small tray of pastries set out for visitors in the anteroom, and looking only marginally guilty. Like Barbara, Kip’s old pal Tench had thrown in his lot with the resistance; but unlike her, he had suffered for it. Blackstone had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of sedition. That had been enough to convince Kipper, then a mere city engineer working closely with Blackstone, that the man had to go.
It was tempting to imagine they’d all moved on such a long way from those first horrible days. Barney would seem to be living proof of that, thought Jed. Instead of being arrested and possibly hung or shot under martial law, Tench was now the chief of Kipper’s national reconstruction efforts, a job that brought him into regular contact with Blackstone, who’d gone on to become the Governor of Texas. But they hadn’t moved on that far, had they? Because Blackstone was still a gigantic pain in the ass, still the most dangerous man in America, at least to Jed’s way of thinking. But to a lot of other people, he was a hero.
Kipper and Barney greeted each other as old friends and co-conspirators, with smiles and handshakes devoid of any pro forma posturing. For one brief moment they really were just a couple of old college buds who didn’t get to see each other nearly enough. Not outside of the crushing demands of their respective jobs, anyway. Tench was frequently away from Seattle, either supervising some project out in the boonies, or overseas wrangling aid and redevelopment funds out of the small coterie of allied nations willing and able to lend a hand.
Behind him entered the Treasury Secretary, Paul McAuley, followed by the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Humboldt, and the country’s newly minted National Security Advisor, Admiral James Ritchie. Jed was happy to have the old salt on board. Were it not for Ritchie, the chances were pretty good that Jed himself wouldn’t be standing here. They’d met in Honolulu during the first hours after the Wave had swept across the continental US, when Culver had understood the importance of attaching himself to what was left of the nation’s power structure. He believed that Ritchie’s leadership had been one of the main reasons the remnant population of America hadn’t turned on each other in a snarling tangle of fear and madness. He lobbied Kip hard to rescue the man from the backwater he’d been lost in for the last couple of years, securing the military’s stock of WMDs; important work, for sure, but not the best use of Ritchie’s talents.
‘Admiral, good to see you,’ said Culver. ‘Pull up a pew, and let’s get started, shall we. The President’s not one for standing on ceremony.’
‘So I’ve learned,’ replied Ritchie, who still insisted on the formalities. A little like Jed, in fact.
As everyone distributed themselves around the room, Kipper’s secretary wheeled in a trolley bearing coffee pots and plates of cookies.
‘Thanks, Ronnie,’ said Kip.
In a nod to his constant reading of presidential history, Kip referred to the informal working group as his ‘Garage Cabinet’, riffing off Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. They met in this form once a month. If Kip could’ve pulled it off, they would have met in greasy Levi’s in a garage with a fully stocked beer fridge. His Chief of Staff, ever the crusher of dreams, killed that one off but allowed the name to stand. Andrew Jackson might have had Culver shot for such a thing, whereas Kip merely sighed and agreed. A sign of the times.
Full Cabinet meetings were scheduled as frequently, but Jed programmed them to run two weeks out from the small meetings. It meant he had to endure constant grumbling from the other Cabinet secretaries, who felt themselves locked out of the more important decision-making group, but bottom line, this was a much more efficient arrangement. They had everybody at the table – in this case a coffee table – whom Jed thought necessary to deal with the most pressing problems and rolling crises.
When everybody had found their places, settled themselves into chairs, and in most cases poured themselves a coffee and grabbed a cookie – peanut butter and chocolate chip, a specialty of the First Lady – Chief of Staff Culver got the meeting under way.
‘Thanks, everyone. It’s not much fun travelling through this weather, I know. And I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in work. You’ll have seen on your agenda papers that we have just a couple of things to get through today, but it’d be good to shake these out before we take them to the Cabinet in a fortnight. The President’s not looking to lock down a caucus position today. But we’ve been kicking some of these issues around for a couple of months now, and the time is coming to deal with them so we can move on to our next end-of-the-world crisis. Mr President?’
‘Thanks, Jed,’ said Kipper, examining his fingernails. The presidency had not entirely removed the calluses or the stains of engineering work from his hands. He had a single sheet of paper with the meeting agenda sitting in front of him, held down by a mug of coffee and covered in crumbs from one of his wife’s cookies. ‘What Jed said . . . Miserable weather, and it’s only getting worse. Gonna be a snowed-in Christmas, I reckon.’
Kipper brushed the crumbs away, folded his arms to hide his hands, and leaned forward over the large teak desk, looking like a student worrying over a term paper.
‘So, let’s get it done. Two items today are related, I think. The budget deficit and Texas. So I think we should deal with the other item first – the prisoners from New York.’
Jed could see Paul McAuley consciously subdivide his attention, the Treasury man listening closely enough to be able to follow any discussion about the captured enemy aliens in Manhattan, while leaving most of his thoughts swirling madly around the Gordian knot of the budget deficit. Sarah Humboldt, naturally, sat forward, putting aside her coffee and fetching a sheaf of documents from the tote bag she had carried into the room with her. The National Security Advisor nodded slowly, but his expression remained masked.
‘Jed tells me we have just under four-and-a-half thousand people in detention on the East Coast,’ the President continued. ‘Most of them women and children, relatives of the jihadists who fought for that asshole Baumer.’
‘I believe his formal title is “the Emir”,’ deadpanned Barney Tench.
‘Okay, that asshole the Emir . . . Anyway, we have thousands of displaced people, and about three hundred of his former soldiers, or fighters, or whatever you want to call them.’
‘“Assholes” works for me,’ said Tench.
Because of Kipper’s almost pathological informality, anybody in the room could probably get away with talking like that. But only Barney, his oldest living friend, felt comfortable enough to do so. The President answered his interruption with a lopsided grin, before carrying on.
‘Question is, as it’s always been, what are we going to do with them? I don’t want to force repatriations on women and kids, when we’d be sending most of them back to a radiated wasteland. Thank you, Israel. On the other hand, having tried to take something by force, these people shouldn’t be rewarded by being given what they tried to take. In this case, the right to settle. So, suggestions?’
Jed had one, but it involved putting them all on a garbage scow and towing it out into the mid Atlantic at the height of hurricane season. Perhaps if he’d been working for Mad Jack Blackstone he’d have put it forward, but having tried a few times in this forum, he knew it wouldn’t float. So to speak. Instead, he picked a few pieces of lint from the cuffs of his trousers.
Angels of Vengeance (Without Warning)(Kindle Edition)by John Birmingham
(2)Kindle Edition $12.99 Deliver To
Register a new Kindle
Jed Culver, President Kipper’s sword and shield, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. Can he serve the President by defying him?
Mad Jack Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas. To some he is slowly but surely destroying the United States. To others, he is an American saviour.
Their time has come.
In New York, Caitlin Monroe’s one shot at vengeance may lie buried beneath the rubble of the city. Is her nemesis still alive somewhere?
Unknown killers hunt Lady Julianne Balwyn in the anarchic, violent freeport of Darwin. Can she survive long enough to save her friends?
Sofia Pieraro is all alone in the empty heart of a haunted land, revenge her only reason to keep moving.
After many years the long trail of the dead will bring them all together.
The final battle for America and the new world will not be fought with armies, but in the quiet and the dark, by individuals, driven towards vengeance and annihilation.
For Jane.
‘Beside every great man . . .’
Well, I’m not that great, but she is, and she’s always there beside me.
‘Beside every great man . . .’
Well, I’m not that great, but she is, and she’s always there beside me.
CHARACTER LIST
URUGUAY, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse: squad leader, 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, US Army
Caitlin Monroe: Echelon senior field agent
Ramón Lupérico: former prison governor on Guadeloupe, Leeward Islands
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON AND VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
James Kipper: forty-fourth President of the United States
Jed Culver: White House Chief of Staff
Barney Tench: Secretary, Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement
Paul McAuley: Secretary, Department of the Treasury
Sarah Humboldt: Secretary, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Admiral James Ritchie: National Security Advisor
Barbara Kipper: America’s First Lady
Henry Cesky: CEO, Cesky Enterprises
Wales Larrison: Echelon deputy director and US liaison to Echelon Secretariat
SYDNEY AND DARWIN
Lady Julianne Balwyn: erstwhile smuggler and reluctant fugitive
Rhino A. Ross: part-time fishing boat operator
Narayan Shah: CEO, Shah Security
Piers Downing: lawyer to Mr Shah
Paras Birendra: operations manager, Shah Security
Nick Pappas: security consultant, former Australian Army SAS operative
Norman Parmenter: contract killer
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Miguel Pieraro: stockyard foreman
Maive Aronson: community college teacher
Sofia Pieraro: high school student, part-time hospital worker
Cindy French: interstate truck driver
Dave Bowman: interstate truck driver
Special Agent Dan Colvin: FBI inter-agency liaison, Kansas City field office
TEMPLE AND FORT HOOD, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
General Tusk Musso (retd): the US President’s special representative in Texas
Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz: squad leader, US Army Rangers
Tyrone McCutcheon: aide to Governor Blackstone
Corporal Amy Summers: junior NCO, US Army Rangers
General Jackson Blackstone (retd): Governor of Texas
Bilal Baumer (aka al Banna; the Emir): fugitive terrorist leader
ANGUS AND WILTSHIRE
Bret Melton: gentleman farmer and full-time parent
Francis Dalby: Echelon UK field supervisor
1
FORMER URUGUAYAN–ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse, of the United States Army’s much diminished 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, scanned the northern banks of the river delta as the Black Hawk pounded up the narrowing channel over dark, choppy waters. Through her night-vision goggles, the slightly fuzzy green imagery of heavily wooded banks was blurred even further by the shuddering of the helicopter as it roared along above the wave tops. A solid nor’easter was blowing directly up the mouth of the river, adding an extra thirty knots to their airspeed, but demanding extreme levels of concentration from Captain Tim Lindell and his co-pilot as they guided the chopper through hostile, if poorly guarded airspace. Far behind them, no one paid their improvised helicopter carrier much mind – a battered and rusty container vessel salvaged from Mexico. Royse didn’t like to ponder on what would have happened if the vessel had been detected by the South American Federation Navy.
Hey, probably not much to worry about, she consoled herself. It’s just a paper navy, at best, with most of their top ships laid up in docks rusting away.
A bit like the US Navy nowadays, she thought, with grim humour.
Lindell had not spoken for five minutes, which still made him a hell of a lot chattier than their passenger. The spook. Michelle knew the woman had to be a spook, because in spite of the faded, summer-weight BDUs she wore, the kit they had loaded for her was all high-spec, exotic stuff. The sort of gear the military simply couldn’t afford nowadays. No way the army or SOCOM was running this operation. They were just providing a bus service for some ghost recon superwoman who’d drifted down from far above the upper reaches of the tier-one food chain.
Michelle snuck a sideways glance at the passenger. The woman wasn’t unfriendly, not like some of the ego monsters she had met while shuttling T1 operators around. But she was entirely self-contained; she spoke only when necessary and had a way of discouraging questions without actually asking you to mind your own business. She stood maybe an inch taller than Michelle, but even in her BDUs, body armour, webbing and equipment, she seemed . . . well, not slighter – perhaps more wiry. There was a tightly wound intensity about this spook that made being in her presence distinctly uncomfortable. Impossible to guess her age, under all that kit, but Michelle thought maybe early to mid thirties. The woman’s physique looked totally ripped, but her eyes were old beneath a stray lock of dirty blonde hair.
Royse looked away quickly as their mystery passenger shifted position. She was happy enough to attend to her duties while Jane Bond here sat in a furious still-life study of cold, impacted rage.
For the moment, those duties mostly involved scanning the shoreline north of the river. Nothing appeared to move out there, on what had once been the Uruguayan side of the border. Not now, though. Now it was all part of la Federación. A few bright emerald pinpricks of light burned in a cluster about ten miles inland, but the shoreline was dark. The Black Hawk banked gently a few degrees to the north-east, taking them over land for the first time. Michelle craned around to peer over her shoulder into the cabin, which glowed like a child’s idea of a fairy cave in her night-vision goggles. Far ahead of them, she could make out a faint dome of opalescent light on the very horizon, marking the location of the Federation Navy’s fleet base.
She would have sneered at the vanity of the pompous title ‘fleet base’, were it not for the fact that their own aircraft was held together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, bailing wire, and promises. And that most of the US military bases she’d flown out of in the close-to-five years since March 2003 had all suffered from the same air of neglect and making do. Salvaged gear, left exposed to the elements or in compromised warehouses and storage depots, only took you so far.
Yep, two paper tigers staring each other down in a burning barn – that’s the world of tomorrow. What a fucking joke.
‘Five minutes to insertion.’
Captain Lindell’s voice barely registered in her earphones over the roar of the engine and the deep, thrumming bass note of the chopper blades. It was as though the tension had strangled his voice down to a clenched murmur. Royse held up her hand with all five fingers splayed and nodded at the spook. She was already preparing herself, but nodded back anyway. Michelle had watched the woman take inventory of her load before they lifted off from the container ship, three hundred miles off the coast. She watched her repeat the performance now that they were almost at their destination.
A minute later, obviously having reassured herself she had not forgotten her passport, wallet or Gerber Mark II fighting knife, the woman closed her eyes and let her head loll back until her helmet touched the bulkhead behind her. It was the first human gesture, the first intimation of weakness, or fear, or exhaustion that Michelle had seen her make, and as quickly as it came, it passed. Her head snapped back up. Her eyes blinked once.
‘Two minutes out.’
The woman chambered a round in her HK-417, a metallic kerrchung that never failed to lay a cold finger at the base of Royse’s spine. The 5.56 mm HK-416s she had seen here and there, but the 417, with the heavier 7.62 mm round, had been a rumour until tonight. The spook’s brand-new Heckler & Koch was another sign that she wasn’t your standard-issue self-loving, spec-ops asshole, whispering, ‘For I am the baddest motherfucker in the Valley.’ No piece-of-shit M16 or M4 for this chick.
Fuck it, she figured. Another day, another dollar.
Michelle readied herself at the door, training the electric M134 minigun over the treetops, which rippled beneath her feet at a hundred and forty knots. Her knees bent to compensate for the sudden twisting, diving flight path as Lindell began to track the nap of the earth, heading for a small clearing marked on their maps as Objective Underwood.
‘Thirty seconds.’
The Black Hawk pivoted, seeming to turn on a dime, as if Lindell were trying to throw them both out the rear hatch by way of momentum. The woman braced herself against the bulkhead, holding tight to a grab bar over her right shoulder. Royse sank deeper into a squat, until her knees were bent almost at right angles. Then the inertia bled away swiftly as they came to hover over a patch of field between two clusters of trees. Michelle checked the ground beneath them and reported that the aircraft was clear. She signalled to the woman to step forward and hook up.
The spook needed no help attaching herself to the fast-rope apparatus. Royse had one second to look into her eyes before she stepped out and dropped away into the night. The woman did not look scared, but there was something haunting her eyes. Something in the back of the deep, clenched lines which made her face appear unusually long and drawn in the low-light amplification of the NVGs.
One brief nod.
A thumbs-up gesture, and she was gone, dropping down into the darkness.
*
Caitlin fast-roped down to the clearing floor, which squelched under the tread of her canvas-sided jungle boots. She scanned the tree line for any hint of enemy presence without expecting to find it. If they were going to be fired on, chances were she’d have seen the tracers arcing in while she was dangling, all but defenceless, in midair. Releasing the rope, she signalled to Staff Sergeant Royse that she was clear and hurried off to find cover as the chopper increased power and clawed up into the humid night.
A flick of the wrist revealed the time: 0126 hours.
She had four hours of movement before she would have to lay up for the day. It wouldn’t take her all the way to her objective but she planned to be well within observation range by the time the sun rose.
The Echelon field agent moved quickly away from the drop zone, heading north by north-east, following the track programmed into her mil-grade Navman GPS unit. The brush wrapped itself around her, slowing her down as soon as she’d passed under the first tree canopy. Night-vision goggles resolved the environment into a flat, eerily phosphorescent landscape of sinuous roots and vines, of fat, nodding leaves, thick snarls of creeper, of rot and genesis. The smell of decay and of new life growing over the top of older, worn-out vegetation was strong, almost cloying. Clusters of such flora dotted the grassland steppe behind her during this, the height of the South American summer. It combined the worst of all possible worlds: a main course of humidity with a side platter of wide-open kill zones, topped off with jungle-like collections of trees, brush and other plant life.
Caitlin was familiar with the fecund crush of the jungle. She’d spent a good year and a half tracking two targets through the old-growth forests of Sumatra and Aceh, long before the Disappearance, while posing as a Peace Corps volunteer helping to build schools. She knew the jungle. They had come to terms.
But the problem now was more than one of terrain – all in all, this was a tactical nightmare. She proceeded to the nearest point of cover and pushed further inside the forest.
Two hundred yards in, she came to a small stream, a couple of feet across and easily forded. Shallow water gurgled down a slight but noticeable slope, where Caitlin spied a small animal drinking upstream from her, a squat, barrel-shaped grazer of some sort. It sniffed the air cautiously a moment after she’d spotted it, but returned to drinking when no obvious threat came charging out of the night. A couple of boulders, huge moss-covered menhirs, formed a natural fort. She decided to lay up there for a minute.
The stream led most of the distance to her objective, covered by varying degrees of thick vegetation: it was the best bet for a concealed approach in the dark. It was also probably the most obvious . . . She pushed that thought away. Nothing could be done about it. Traipsing through open grassland in full gear was a sure way to get a third eye drilled into her forehead.
Hundreds of bugs scuttled away as she laid her HK-417 against the rock. A giant centipede reared up as if to strike. Caitlin swiftly killed the insect with one slash of a spring-loaded wrist blade, flicking the two halves away with gloved fingers. The last thing she needed was to call in an extraction because of a bug sting.
She let her senses expand out into the surrounding landscape, listening for human speech, or footfall, the clink and rattle of poorly secured equipment; sniffing the air just as the animal had done, tasting it for the scent of man, or the last meal he’d eaten, or the soap he had washed with, or not, as might be. When she was certain no immediate danger existed, she relaxed fractionally. Or rather, she redirected her energy to her first lay-up procedure.
Again she inventoried her equipment. Nobody wants to be the guy who turned up at the beach without his towel, or the state-sponsored killer who forgot her ninja throwing stars . . . Okay, she conceded, I don’t have ninja throwing stars. But it would be totally badass if I did.
Caitlin flipped up the monocular night sight on her PVS-14s to check the digital map velcroed to her left arm. As was so often the case nowadays, Echelon resources didn’t stretch to a live overwatch link. No one had that – not even the Russian SVR had the resources for live overwatch anymore. She was on her own, which was not entirely a bad thing. Nobody was recording her every move for an embarrassing moment with the media further on down the road. Nobody was barking at her through a headset, telling her to do shit that made no sense. She had good data, though, and with that and her experience, there wasn’t much else Caitlin really needed.
The little stream beside which she’d laid up ran through the centre of the dimly illuminated screen. Her own position was marked with a blue dot. She hoped to follow the stream up-slope for at least three klicks before it began to veer away from her intended destination, one of Roberto’s many detention facilities, this one tucked away in an old police station about ten kilometres inland. The best intelligence they had, placed her target there. Wales had called it a ‘memory hole’: a dark place where the regime stuffed away its mistakes, embarrassments and occasional secrets. Caitlin wondered if they understood the nature of the secret they had stashed down here in the back forty of the former Uruguayan Republic.
She picked up the 417, resettled her pack a little more comfortably, and took a mouthful of chilled Gatorade from the camel-back bladder woven into it. The brush reappeared in eldritch green as she snapped the PVS-14 back down over her dominant eye. The potbellied beast (was it a tapir – was that what they were called?) scuttled into the undergrowth as she began to move.
You’re a long way south, Caitlin thought of the tapir. Maybe it had got loose from a zoo or something.
Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered two-and-a-half kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down onto the sandy creek bank from the small grassy bend on which she’d been resting.
She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon’s senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over. A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat – teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.
It didn’t matter to her that this part of the country, thinly populated before the Disappearance, was even more sparsely peopled now. She had been trained to assume the worst, to prepare for ill chance and disaster as a certainty. There were no large townships within thirty kilometres, and the terrain between here and the objective was undoubtedly deserted. La colapso had emptied it, and Roberto Morales’ regime kept it that way. But still, she would move forward as though snares blocked her path at every turn.
She advanced in a creeping crouch, her knees bent, her thigh muscles and core strength tested by the weight of her equipment and the unnatural movement. Her body had recovered well from pregnancy and childbirth, however, and from the rigours of hunting and fighting in the huge, open mausoleum of New York last spring. Three months back home with Bret and Monique had helped with that. Three months in which she regained her strength, and bound it tightly with new layers of resolution, and a fierce will to lay her hands on the man she blamed for nearly destroying her family.
Bilal Hans Baumer. Al Banna.
Or whatever he was calling himself these days. In Manhattan he had been known as the Emir. Now he was ‘the target’. Her target. As he had been for a year before the old world had fallen.
The barrel of Caitlin’s 417 swept back and forth in a tight arc as she moved up the creek like some nightmare black arachnid. The burbling splash of the stream covered the sound of her boots. She took care to step where the flow of water would quickly erase any sign of her passage. Mosquitoes hovered around her in a cloud, drawn by the opportunity to feed, but thwarted at the last moment by the odourless insect repellent she wore. As the environment adapted to her presence, it also disguised her advance, enfolding her in the shrill, creaking chirrup of a billion insects, the shriek of bats and nocturnal birds of prey, the rustle of larger animals moving through the undergrowth, and once, as she ducked under the limb of a half-fallen tree, the dry hiss of a viper slithering languidly along.
Caitlin dropped a hand to the knife at her hip and, with one fluid motion, threw it at the snake, spearing it to the branch. While it was fixed in place, she crushed the skull with a swift stroke of the Heckler & Koch’s butt stock. Pythons didn’t worry her, but vipers were incredibly foul-tempered. Best not to take chances.
After forty minutes the Navman on her forearm began to vibrate ever so slightly, warning her that the stream was about to veer away from her intended heading. She slowed to a stop and took her time absorbing the signs . . . She listened for the slightest fluctuation in the wall of sound thrown up by the insects in her immediate vicinity, the splash of water across the creek-bed, slightly rockier here. Her eyes took in the noticeable brightening of the world in her goggles under a thinner canopy, as a strengthening breeze opened a hole in the silver-grey cloud cover to let moon and star light spill through.
But nothing human.
Still she waited. The slight delay gave her an opportunity to measure her endurance against the task at hand. She ignored the humidity, which lay on the landscape like a wet woollen blanket, making breathing difficult and leaving her with a clammy sweat on the back of her thighs. No one in their right mind would’ve been out in this, Caitlin realised – but it was a thought that neither eroded her attention to detail nor made her lower her guard, even marginally.
Satisfied she remained alone, the Echelon agent moved off, carefully climbing the northern bank of the stream. Old mineral survey maps had indicated that the soil was thinner here and the vegetation less dense. It was still thick enough to slow her progress. With no natural track for her to follow, she was forced to push and occasionally hack her way through, while trying to keep all noise to a minimum. As much as she could, she traded caution for speed, keen to make as much ground as possible on her objective before the sun climbed over the horizon.
*
Screaming.
The screaming began sometime before dawn as a feeble, plaintive wailing, a trembling warble of utter hopelessness. Caitlin recognised the exhausted protests of a man who thought he was close to the limit of what he might endure. She knew from personal experience that he was wrong. In the hands of a capable torturer, you could endure far beyond the point where you’d first thought you wanted to die to escape the pain and humiliation.
The humiliation of torture was the surprise for most people. They expected the pain, at least intellectually – although, unless they’d been trained for it, the shock was still enough to send most over the edge very quickly. The humiliation and shame, however, clung to them for years after the pain had subsided. And that was the jangling note she recognised in the screaming: the shame of someone who’d already broken and given up whatever they had, to no avail. The torture had continued.
It was no concern of hers, save from a tactical viewpoint. She didn’t want her target, Ramón Lupérico, checking out before she’d had a chance to interrogate him.
She exhaled slowly, took a sip from her camel-back, and peeled the wrapping from a mocha-flavoured protein bar. Breakfast of champions.
The detention facility – a grand name for an adobe hut at a straggling, muddy crossing of the two main local roads – was a single-storey, off-white building fronted by a slumping, shaded porch. A high stone wall ran around a compound at the rear. From her position on a small hill two hundred metres back into the woods, overlooking the site, Caitlin couldn’t see the prisoners’ enclosure, but she’d studied the satellite images closely at the pre-op briefing. A well appeared to provide drinking water, and a beaten-down path marked the circuit the inmates were allowed to walk during their exercise each day.
Assuming they were allowed any, of course. She’d half expected to see wooden poles driven into the earth for the traditional blindfold and last cigarette, complete with bloodstains from the coup de grace, but there were none. The guards most likely executed their victims in the cells and ordered any surviving captives to clean out the mess.
The wailing spiralled up through the old familiar stages.
Horror.
Denial.
Rejection.
Pleading.
Shock.
Then the abject surrender.
All in less than two minutes.
There was no way of knowing if the screamer was Lupérico. A quick recon of the former police station confirmed the position of two guards outside: only half dressed in uniform, sipping some sort of drink – probably coffee – under the portico. She thought she could even smell the brew.
Hard to get good coffee these days . . . She made a note to snag a bag of beans if the opportunity availed itself. Black tea with milk and sugar at four in the afternoon with a fistful of cucumber sandwiches just didn’t cut it. She was sure the guys on her extraction chopper wouldn’t object to a little extra cargo.
So, two men outside, at least four inside. Possibly six. Plus the three prisoners that intel said were inside, only one of whom was of interest to her.
All of Caitlin’s training, all of her experience, everything told her to wait this out, to lay up until nightfall, then strike under the cover of darkness. But she had reason to ignore the training and experience. Somewhere down there was Ramón Lupérico, the man who had released Baumer from imprisonment in Guadeloupe. A prisoner now himself, it was a righteous certainty he could tell her how al Banna had effected that release from his custody, possibly even how he then came to control the pirate gangs and jihadist militia that had infested Manhattan back in April ’07.
She did not fool herself that Lupérico would know how or why Baumer had chosen to reach out and lay his malign touch on her family, but that hardly mattered. She was here because Echelon had tasked her with securing whatever information she could extract from the target. The coincidence of her personal and professional interests created an impetus towards immediate action.
The South American Federation was little better than a mafia state, but it was the only reliable authority south of the Panama Canal Zone. It would no sooner collaborate with Seattle than its self-proclaimed President for Life, Roberto Morales, would present himself in The Hague to answer the many charges of crimes against humanity that now stood against his name. In the anarchic, violent world that arose in the wake of the Disappearance, such diplomatic impasses proved less frustrating than they had once been. The states that survived tended to be those that acted to secure their interests directly, expediently and swiftly. It was a perfectly complete return to Hobbes’s state of nature, and Caitlin Monroe, a survivor and a killer, was an instrument of that universe.
She crouched down, motionless and unseen in her hiding spot on the small rise overlooking the crossroads, and resolved to give herself one hour to gather as much intelligence about the situation on the ground here as she could. And then she would act.
2
NORTH KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
‘Drinking coffee? Perhaps the least of your sins, woman! But Elohim punishes all, and you have given him –’
Whatever the man had intended to say was choked off as Miguel Pieraro’s fingers closed around his throat. With one thrust of an arm, the former vaquero threw Maive Aronson’s tormentor from the stoop. A thin, wiry man, with the severe intensity of a fanatic sustained almost entirely by his beliefs, the Mormon witness flew backward on a slight angle – luckily for him. His bony ass landed on the soft turf bordering the hard concrete path that wound from East 23rd Street up to the front door of Maive’s small home.
‘Oomph!’
The impact punched all the air out of him and rolled him onto the grass in a tangle of muddied elbows and knees. Miguel moved quickly to drive a boot into his guts, intending to kick him a considerable distance back towards the pavement from where he had come to torment the poor widow.
‘Miguel, no,’ she said in a sharp voice. ‘You’ll hurt him.’
‘Yes, I shall,’ he replied. But Maive had him by the arm, digging her fingernails into his bicep, pulling him back towards her.
She seemed unsure of what to do with the cup of coffee she’d been drinking when the witness knocked on the front door. Miguel hoped she might throw it over him now, scalding the crazy bastard, but that was not her way. Once the Mexican had made it clear that he was not about to launch himself at this fool, Maive carefully balanced the cup on the wooden rail running around the small, decorative porch. She left Miguel on the top step, clenching and unclenching his fists, as she hurried down to help the man to his feet and out of the gate.
The Mormon doorknocker shrugged her off, cursing her sinfulness, her muddy lawn, her coffee and her offer of help. He scowled briefly at Pieraro and looked as though he might like to curse him too, but the prospect of more rough handling saw him scurrying down the path and out onto the street.
A light rain was starting to fall, beading icily on Miguel’s face. The cowboy watched him make his way towards North Kansas City High School, just a block down the road. Once the man had disappeared around the corner, he relaxed a little, although the high school did remind him of another difficult matter, prompting his temper to flare again.
Sofia.
It took him another deep breath of cold morning air to douse the fire in his breast.
Maive stood with her back to Miguel, watching the Mormon go. Her shoulders began to hitch and he could hear her fighting for breath as the tears came. He wanted to place a hand on her shoulder, merely so that she might feel the reassurance of human contact. But it would not be right. Not with both of them still mourning. Instead he clasped his hands together and stood on the ridiculously small front porch waiting for her to regain her composure. He felt hemmed in here, and awkward, as though he might knock something over at any moment. The lack of space was made worse by a wheelchair ramp that Maive obviously did not need. It had probably been fitted for the benefit of the previous occupants. There was barely room for the two of them to stand in the drizzle and wind. He could see fog condensing on the window behind the screen door, a sign of the warmth awaiting them inside.
The day had dawned bitterly cold, although ‘dawn’ was a poor way to describe the wet, freezing, almost funereal grey shroud that seemed to blanket Kansas City in the morning at this time of year. Dawn here did not feel like the start of something new and vital; more like a case of the night having simply exhausted its darkness and passed.
Miguel was dressed for the damp chill that pressed against him like a blade. He’d arrived not long before the Mormon caller. It was almost as if the man had been waiting, watching. He was most unlike the Saints he and Sofia had travelled with through Texas. Altogether more . . . what was the word? Biblical – that wasn’t right, and yet it seemed right.
With his sunken, staring eyes and haggard demeanour, the man looked like some sort of disturbed prophet from the Old Testament. He had been hounding Maive Aronson for the better part of a week now, wearing her down. Miguel was furious when he’d found out just yesterday, and had reacted with intemperate rage at the first opportunity. That is, a minute earlier, when he’d first laid eyes and hands on the parásito.
There were more of these Mormons in town every week, as they made their way to Kansas City to reclaim lost land and property. Maive told him the community in KC had been second only to Salt Lake City for her people. That was a pity, he thought, very quietly. Not all of her fellow worshippers that he’d encountered of late seemed to have the same, good common sense of Cooper and Maive Aronson, William D’Age, Ben Randall and the others. So many were like the fool he had just ejected from her stoop. Touched by fervent madness.
Gooseflesh stood out on Maive’s unprotected arms while she sobbed and hugged herself in front of the little house the government had let her move into.
‘Maive, you should come inside now,’ said Miguel. ‘It is too cold to be standing out here. Forget that crazy man. Come inside and have your coffee, warm up.’
She hugged herself a little tighter and bobbed her head up and down a few times before spinning around; her chin tucked down into her chest so she wouldn’t have to look Miguel in the eye as she hurried past him. She forgot the cup she’d perched on the handrail. He retrieved it for her, not surprised that the coffee had lost most of its heat in the brief minute they had been outside. Kansas City was like that, a place of . . . what was the word again? Fickle? Yes, fickle extremes. Like a difficult woman, it was only predictable in the way that you knew things would get worse.
He was certain he hated this city. Surely Seattle had to be a better place, even with the rain, but the resettlement authorities rarely let anyone move there from the frontier lands.
Miguel followed her through the door, careful not to crowd the widow, giving her enough space and time to compose herself. Eight months after losing her husband and most of her friends in that flash flood on the Johnson Grasslands of northern Texas, she was still subject to unpredictable mood swings and periods of terrible sadness. There were days where she seemed to be healing, but it didn’t take much to set her back. Still, he did not judge. His own wounds and losses remained open and raw.
The home provided by the settlement authorities was an old bungalow, with dark wooden floors, plaster ceilings, and some fine carpentry that Miguel admired very much. Window seats, book shelving, a particularly impressive-looking mantelpiece above a fireplace in the living room, all spoke of a home that had been built by craftsmen who cared that their work would outlive them by many years, possibly centuries. It was not a large house by American standards – only three bedrooms, and two of them quite small, obviously meant for children – but it was very comfortable and well insulated. Miguel did not concern himself with the fate of its previous occupants. They had obviously Disappeared.
He’d wondered initially whether the very simple furnishings and effects such as linen and cutlery had belonged to those same unfortunate people, but then he discovered upon being placed in his own residence that such things were drawn from one of the city resource stores scattered throughout the reclaimed areas. All one had to do was present a copy of their housing assignment and they would be allowed to wander through and select the basics. There were even food vouchers for those who agreed to scour the unclaimed areas for useable materials on behalf of the city, and for a week or so, Miguel and Sofia had worked on that detail until they found better employment. He didn’t miss that job at all. It was just one step above shovelling up the remains, sometimes dried, sometimes still thickly gelatinous, of the Disappeared.
People, it turned out, did not like to be surrounded by the leavings of the dead whose homes they had taken. Although, when he thought about it, the clean sheets and towels and simple items of clothing provided by the federales had almost certainly come from dead people as well, even if they were simply the owners of department stores whose stocks had been salvaged.
‘Thank you, Miguel,’ said Maive, so quietly that he had to strain to hear her as he followed her into the kitchen at the rear of the house.
‘It is okay,’ he replied. ‘It is lucky I had come around, I think.’
The kitchen was warm and smelled of wood smoke from an old-fashioned stove. It was too dangerous to operate the gas lines, and electricity supply could be sporadic. Wood stoves replaced electric in many homes. If there was one thing Kansas City was blessed with, it was wood. A city in the forest.
Maive had been baking. A tray of muffins sat cooling on a scarred wooden table, resting atop a folded tea towel. She gestured for him to sit down while she splashed some water on her face, drying off with an apron hanging from the handle of the kitchen cupboard. Miguel considered the cup of lukewarm coffee he still held in his hands: the beans were carefully rationed and very expensive, and he didn’t like the idea of it going to waste. All the same, he poured out the dregs, rinsed the cup and set it in the drainer.
‘I’m sorry . . . my manners,’ she said. ‘Please sit down, and let me pour you a hot drink. I could do with one myself.’
‘So you will not be attending to the advice of your friend, about the sinful coffee?’
Maive answered that with a sour grimace. ‘He’s no friend of mine. He only turned up here after I registered with the tabernacle. They’ve had trouble with him too. Harassing people, new arrivals mostly. I suspect he has a mental illness.’
She poured him a mug of coffee, offered cream and sugar, both of which he declined. After retrieving her own cup from the sink, Maive poured herself a full measure, took a sip to taste, and topped it up with another slug, as if to make a point.
‘Cooper never was one for superstitions,’ she said, struggling somewhat. ‘His faith was . . . practical. My husband just wanted to help people. That was his idea of how to live your life the right way. I’m sorry . . .’ Her face suddenly folded into contrary panes of anguish as grief threatened to get the better of her again.
‘You have nothing to apologise for, Maive,’ he said in a gentle voice. ‘I, on the other hand, should not be so quick with my fists. This is your home. I am sorry if I was too rough with him. Do you mind? These look very good . . .’ He indicated the tray of muffins, trying to change the subject.
‘Not at all,’ she sniffed. ‘I baked them for you and Sofia.’
He teased one of the golden-brown treats from the tray. She had topped them with crumble and brown sugar, creating a hard, sweet crust that he very much enjoyed. It was all Miguel could do to resist dunking the muffin top into his coffee. His beloved Mariela used to scold him for such poor manners, and he couldn’t imagine Maive Aronson would approve of it either.
‘I am afraid Sofia is not very happy with me at the moment, Maive. The school has suspended her for fighting again and I have grounded her.’ He really wasn’t very happy with her either. He had been called during his shift at the stockyards in the West Bottoms to deal with it, which meant losing a day’s pay while he took the city bus to the high school at Northtown.
Throwing caution to the wind, he broke off a large chunk of crusty muffin top and dunked it quickly into his coffee. The glazed crumble retained its crunch while the cakey centre soaked up the warm liquid, becoming almost liquid-soft itself. Maive did not approve, but she seemed more concerned about Sofia.
‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that, Miguel. I thought she was past the acting-out phase.’
He put more food in his mouth, chewed and swallowed mechanically, before taking another sip of coffee. All to give him time to think. It was difficult. He knew how his daughter felt, just how much pain she was in every day. But he also knew she could not allow that suffering to take over her life, and she could not take it out on other people. And yet . . .
There was a part of Miguel Pieraro that remained fiercely proud of his daughter and her refusal to bow under the heavy burden fate had laid upon her. Witness to the murder of their family in east Texas; survivor of a journey that took the lives of so many others, Cooper Aronson among them, of course. And a fighter, an avenger indeed. One who had saved his life during the gunfight at Crockett, when they’d rescued Maive and her five female companions from the depredations of the road agents. Sofia had grown up beyond her years on the trail. And he could not deny that, in many ways, although young, she was now a formidable woman in her own right.
‘I do not know what to do, Maive,’ he admitted finally. ‘Honestly, some days it seems beyond me without the help my wife.’
Mentioning Mariela aloud was enough to tighten the band of grief that seemed to sit permanently around his chest. He felt his throat closing on a lump that had not been there a few seconds ago. Another sip of coffee and a deep breath were what he needed to regain the reins on his feelings. Maive, who had no children of her own, but who had mothered and, yes, loved his daughter and the other youngsters on the long exodus from Texas, reached across the table and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. Unlike him, she seemed to have no compunction about reaching out and touching people.
‘You are a good father, Miguel. You would give up your life for her. She knows that. And you will not let her give up on her own. She knows that too.’ The Mormon woman smiled, but not happily. ‘That’s why she knows she can test you, and push you, and drive you mad.’
He stood up to rinse out his coffee cup, determined to avoid the temptation of another sugary treat. Since they had come off the trail, he had put on a few too many pounds.
‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘I must punish her because the school requires it. I understand that. I have been a boss of the vaquero – I understand the need to maintain your rule. And yet, I do not think she was wrong. I understand why she was fighting. She was insulted. Our family was insulted. By some dog, some . . . boy, at the school. The son of a man who is too important to upset.’
A few lonesome flakes of sleet, grey and wet, smeared themselves against the kitchen window over the sink as Miguel washed out the cup. None of the trees retained more than a couple of brown leaves, and their branches resembled the withered hands of dead men reaching up from the grave.
‘But does this boy get punished?’ he went on. ‘Oh no. I am the parent who is called in to explain himself. Sofia is the one upon whom correction must fall. While this smirking little puta . . .’ He paused. ‘Again, I am sorry.’
He found Maive Aronson shaking her head when he turned away from the bleak view out of the window. ‘That poor child has been through so much, Miguel. I suppose that’s what makes her such an attractive target to some. All of that pain, out on display.’
‘If that is so, they are foolish,’ replied Miguel. ‘Great pain she has in abundance, but great strength with it. As this foolish boy discovered while he spat his broken teeth out on the ground.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Maive, although she did not seem particularly disapproving. ‘So she’s at home now, studying, I suppose?’
‘Studying, yes,’ he answered. ‘Or sulking.’
‘Well, that is a pity. But it is important that you’re seen to do the right thing, even if you disagree with it.’
She began clearing up the table. Using the tea towel under the cooling muffin tray to brush up the crumbs. Pouring the remains of her drink, more than half again, down the sink after the dregs of Miguel’s.
‘Will you still want to go to the mid-week markets this morning?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘We will need groceries before the weekend.’
It was also true that he looked forward to spending time with Maive, particularly since Trudi Jessup had transferred back to Seattle with her government job. Apart from Maive and Sofia, he knew nobody in Kansas City. Adam, the teenager who had impressed him so much, was now with relatives in Canada. Miguel missed him more than he might have imagined. He had come to regard the boy almost as a son over the long months on the trail. And a friend, if a young one.
He had no friends here, save for Maive, of course. The men he worked with at the railway cattle yards were mostly Indians, and he found them difficult to get on with. They spoke English, true, but sometimes it seemed like they spoke a very different version of the language. Even the Americans had trouble with them from time to time. Mostly he did his job there and came home. It was only a temporary position, at any rate; a place the government had put him so that he’d be available for interviews by investigators, agents and the small army of men and women who seemed to want to know everything about his time in Texas. Even if they never did anything about what had happened there.
‘I should get my bag, then,’ said Maive. ‘Shall we walk or drive? The weather isn’t that nice, but the radio said it probably wouldn’t get much worse either.’
‘We shall walk, I think,’ Miguel decided, mindful of the fact that the federales were cutting back on the paltry gas ration again, as well as increasing the price to twenty new dollars a gallon. Maive’s salvaged Jeep Wrangler was not the most fuel-efficient vehicle, in any case. ‘I shall carry your groceries for you,’ he added gallantly.
‘Thank you, Miguel. You’re a very good friend.’
3
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
‘I don’t think you should go to Texas, Mr President. The precedents aren’t good.’
James Kipper made a show of furrowing his brow and mashing up his lips. Culver had learned to think of this as his I’m-not-happy face. It was getting an Olympic-standard workout this morning. The White House Chief of Staff absorbed his boss’s displeasure with the unflappable air of a man who knew he was right. Because he was. Jed Culver was always right.
‘I think the longer I stay out of Texas, Jed,’ Kipper protested, ‘the more it looks like I’m too frightened to show my face down there. He hasn’t seceded, despite all his Republic of Texas bullshit. We’re all still living in the same country. And I really think it’s time I went down there. After all, with the election coming up . . .’ The President left the statement hanging there, dropping his chin and regarding Culver with an expression that said: Ha! What d’you think of them apples, fella?
They were alone and the Chief of Staff actually allowed himself a small snicker of amusement. Kip was at his funniest when he was trying to play politics. It just didn’t suit the man at all.
‘The last thing we need before the election, Mr President, is Mad Jack Blackstone kicking your ass from one end of his snaggletooth republic to the other.’ That’s what I think o’ them apples, fella.
He could see the boss looked even more put out than before – a common occurrence whenever Culver had reason to remind him of his naïveté. That happened less frequently these days, especially after New York. But for a politician, even one press-ganged into high office, Kip could still be maddeningly childlike in the way he viewed the world. Jed felt the need to explain. They still had a few minutes before the cabinet members arrived for the morning meeting.
‘Right now, sir, Blackstone is looking for any excuse to paint you as a weak, soft-hearted fool. And he’s very carefully picking his fights to make himself look like the Great White Hope, quite literally. There are so many things we need from him right now that if you fly down to Fort Hood, you’ll have no choice but to lay our demands on the table and he’ll have no qualms about laughing in your face. He won’t even be cruel about it. He’ll do it in such a way as to make it obvious that you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can’t possibly be trusted to run the country, you’re a lovely man, but soft and weak, and the sooner we get rid of you the better.’
Kipper narrowed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and frowning at Culver over the top of them. The first real frost of the winter lay hard against the windows of Dearborn House, sheathed in Christmas decorations just that morning. Outside the big picture window that framed Kipper at his desk, dirty grey clouds scudded slowly across the sky, obscuring the upper floors of Seattle’s taller buildings. The President seemed to lose himself for moment, staring at a picture of his daughter, Suzie, in a small silver frame on his desk. He sighed.
‘Why am I here, Jed?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr President?’
‘No, really. Why am I here? I just wonder some days, that’s all. There’s so much that needs doing to rebuild this country. We all know what’s needed. You, me, Blackstone, Congress, Sarah Palin, Sandra Harvey – Abe, the guy down the market who sells me my sausages. We all know what needs to be done. So why the hell can’t we just get on and do it? Why can’t I do my job? Pass my budget, get my tax law through, the migration bill, the energy bill – any of it? At every single step of the way, I got somebody telling me what I can’t do. Even though we all agree what has to be done . . .’
He swivelled his chair around to stare out the window. His mood was as bleak as the weather.
‘I’m just wondering what the point is,’ Kip added resignedly. ‘That’s all.’
He’d been like this since the Battle of New York. Or rather, since he returned to the Big Apple a couple of weeks after the last of the diehards were killed or run off. It was as though James Kipper had decided to assume responsibility for every death, for every piece of rubble. It didn’t matter how many times Jed, Barbara or anybody else told him he had done what needed doing, that he had seen off an unexpected but deadly serious threat to the republic, and shown the world that an America laid low would still not countenance the designs of any foe upon her land or her sovereignty.
Kip had been the most reluctant of warrior kings, and having seen the cost of taking up sword and shield to expel the so-called Emir and his pirate allies from Manhattan, he seemed to have lost the stomach for any kind of fight. He was a tinkerer, a builder, an engineer; not a destroyer. Even his impacted rage at the attacks on settlers in the Texas Federal Mandate had abated as those attacks tapered off. He was a problem-solver by nature, and once a problem went away, his interest shifted elsewhere.
Culver, who had been comfortably reclined in a dark leather club chair that had become known as ‘his’ whenever he was in the Oval Office, put aside the folder of papers he’d been holding and heaved himself up to his feet. A one-time college wrestler, he’d always been a big guy, and he found the constant round of state dinners and cocktail parties in the new national capital ruinous to his waistline. Kipper was a lean and hungry-looking wraith in comparison. Jed grunted as he stood up. He was really going to have to start that walking routine his doctor and Marilyn, his wife, were forever hassling him about.
‘You’re here because you’re here, Kip,’ he said.
That got his attention. Jed almost never called him by his nickname. The President turned away from the window with its melancholy view of leafless trees and a slate-grey sky.
‘Somebody has to do this job,’ the former Louisiana attorney continued, ‘and it’s better done by a good man like you than an asshole like Blackstone or a feral, crazy eco-nazi like Sandra fucking Harvey. It’s not much fun, but someone’s gotta do it. So man up, buddy. You’re the guy.’
The President smiled as if conceding a pawn in a long game of chess. ‘Suppose you’re right,’ he admitted. ‘Nobody held a gun to my head and told me to do this. Although, you know, I think Barbara might have. She really surprised me back then.’
She had. Culver well remembered Kipper’s shock upon discovering that his wife had been quietly working with the resistance to the then General Blackstone’s martial law regime, imposed upon the Pacific Northwest in the panic and chaos of spring 2003. She hadn’t surprised Culver, however. As soon as he’d met Barbara Kipper he’d judged her capable of reaching hard conclusions and acting upon them in a way that her husband wasn’t. Not immediately, anyway. Kip was just too trusting of people. He wanted to think the best of them and it often stayed his hand when he needed to do his worst.
‘Guess we better bring them on in, if they’re ready,’ said the President.
He started to straighten up his tie before thinking otherwise and loosening it further instead. A fire blazed and crackled in the small hearth, adding its warmth to the under-floor heating. As always, Kipper had discarded his jacket as soon as he sat down that morning. He worked with his sleeves rolled up, citing the Kennedy precedent if anyone questioned him. ‘Anyone’ usually being his wife, and occasionally his Chief of Staff. If they didn’t keep a close watch on him, he’d turn up to work in jeans, boots and one of his old hiking shirts.
Jed buzzed Kipper’s secretary, Ronnie, to check whether the Cabinet group were ready yet, and when she answered yes, told her to send them in. Barney Tench was first through the door, still licking his fingers from the small tray of pastries set out for visitors in the anteroom, and looking only marginally guilty. Like Barbara, Kip’s old pal Tench had thrown in his lot with the resistance; but unlike her, he had suffered for it. Blackstone had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of sedition. That had been enough to convince Kipper, then a mere city engineer working closely with Blackstone, that the man had to go.
It was tempting to imagine they’d all moved on such a long way from those first horrible days. Barney would seem to be living proof of that, thought Jed. Instead of being arrested and possibly hung or shot under martial law, Tench was now the chief of Kipper’s national reconstruction efforts, a job that brought him into regular contact with Blackstone, who’d gone on to become the Governor of Texas. But they hadn’t moved on that far, had they? Because Blackstone was still a gigantic pain in the ass, still the most dangerous man in America, at least to Jed’s way of thinking. But to a lot of other people, he was a hero.
Kipper and Barney greeted each other as old friends and co-conspirators, with smiles and handshakes devoid of any pro forma posturing. For one brief moment they really were just a couple of old college buds who didn’t get to see each other nearly enough. Not outside of the crushing demands of their respective jobs, anyway. Tench was frequently away from Seattle, either supervising some project out in the boonies, or overseas wrangling aid and redevelopment funds out of the small coterie of allied nations willing and able to lend a hand.
Behind him entered the Treasury Secretary, Paul McAuley, followed by the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Humboldt, and the country’s newly minted National Security Advisor, Admiral James Ritchie. Jed was happy to have the old salt on board. Were it not for Ritchie, the chances were pretty good that Jed himself wouldn’t be standing here. They’d met in Honolulu during the first hours after the Wave had swept across the continental US, when Culver had understood the importance of attaching himself to what was left of the nation’s power structure. He believed that Ritchie’s leadership had been one of the main reasons the remnant population of America hadn’t turned on each other in a snarling tangle of fear and madness. He lobbied Kip hard to rescue the man from the backwater he’d been lost in for the last couple of years, securing the military’s stock of WMDs; important work, for sure, but not the best use of Ritchie’s talents.
‘Admiral, good to see you,’ said Culver. ‘Pull up a pew, and let’s get started, shall we. The President’s not one for standing on ceremony.’
‘So I’ve learned,’ replied Ritchie, who still insisted on the formalities. A little like Jed, in fact.
As everyone distributed themselves around the room, Kipper’s secretary wheeled in a trolley bearing coffee pots and plates of cookies.
‘Thanks, Ronnie,’ said Kip.
In a nod to his constant reading of presidential history, Kip referred to the informal working group as his ‘Garage Cabinet’, riffing off Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. They met in this form once a month. If Kip could’ve pulled it off, they would have met in greasy Levi’s in a garage with a fully stocked beer fridge. His Chief of Staff, ever the crusher of dreams, killed that one off but allowed the name to stand. Andrew Jackson might have had Culver shot for such a thing, whereas Kip merely sighed and agreed. A sign of the times.
Full Cabinet meetings were scheduled as frequently, but Jed programmed them to run two weeks out from the small meetings. It meant he had to endure constant grumbling from the other Cabinet secretaries, who felt themselves locked out of the more important decision-making group, but bottom line, this was a much more efficient arrangement. They had everybody at the table – in this case a coffee table – whom Jed thought necessary to deal with the most pressing problems and rolling crises.
When everybody had found their places, settled themselves into chairs, and in most cases poured themselves a coffee and grabbed a cookie – peanut butter and chocolate chip, a specialty of the First Lady – Chief of Staff Culver got the meeting under way.
‘Thanks, everyone. It’s not much fun travelling through this weather, I know. And I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in work. You’ll have seen on your agenda papers that we have just a couple of things to get through today, but it’d be good to shake these out before we take them to the Cabinet in a fortnight. The President’s not looking to lock down a caucus position today. But we’ve been kicking some of these issues around for a couple of months now, and the time is coming to deal with them so we can move on to our next end-of-the-world crisis. Mr President?’
‘Thanks, Jed,’ said Kipper, examining his fingernails. The presidency had not entirely removed the calluses or the stains of engineering work from his hands. He had a single sheet of paper with the meeting agenda sitting in front of him, held down by a mug of coffee and covered in crumbs from one of his wife’s cookies. ‘What Jed said . . . Miserable weather, and it’s only getting worse. Gonna be a snowed-in Christmas, I reckon.’
Kipper brushed the crumbs away, folded his arms to hide his hands, and leaned forward over the large teak desk, looking like a student worrying over a term paper.
‘So, let’s get it done. Two items today are related, I think. The budget deficit and Texas. So I think we should deal with the other item first – the prisoners from New York.’
Jed could see Paul McAuley consciously subdivide his attention, the Treasury man listening closely enough to be able to follow any discussion about the captured enemy aliens in Manhattan, while leaving most of his thoughts swirling madly around the Gordian knot of the budget deficit. Sarah Humboldt, naturally, sat forward, putting aside her coffee and fetching a sheaf of documents from the tote bag she had carried into the room with her. The National Security Advisor nodded slowly, but his expression remained masked.
‘Jed tells me we have just under four-and-a-half thousand people in detention on the East Coast,’ the President continued. ‘Most of them women and children, relatives of the jihadists who fought for that asshole Baumer.’
‘I believe his formal title is “the Emir”,’ deadpanned Barney Tench.
‘Okay, that asshole the Emir . . . Anyway, we have thousands of displaced people, and about three hundred of his former soldiers, or fighters, or whatever you want to call them.’
‘“Assholes” works for me,’ said Tench.
Because of Kipper’s almost pathological informality, anybody in the room could probably get away with talking like that. But only Barney, his oldest living friend, felt comfortable enough to do so. The President answered his interruption with a lopsided grin, before carrying on.
‘Question is, as it’s always been, what are we going to do with them? I don’t want to force repatriations on women and kids, when we’d be sending most of them back to a radiated wasteland. Thank you, Israel. On the other hand, having tried to take something by force, these people shouldn’t be rewarded by being given what they tried to take. In this case, the right to settle. So, suggestions?’
Jed had one, but it involved putting them all on a garbage scow and towing it out into the mid Atlantic at the height of hurricane season. Perhaps if he’d been working for Mad Jack Blackstone he’d have put it forward, but having tried a few times in this forum, he knew it wouldn’t float. So to speak. Instead, he picked a few pieces of lint from the cuffs of his trousers.
Last edited:
JSmith
Banned
Ok so its out already but not for too long
http://www.amazon.com/Mirage-Novel-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330478237&sr=1-1
: 28.8px; }.sitb-font-size-7{ font-size: 32.4px; }
http://www.amazon.com/Mirage-Novel-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330478237&sr=1-1
: 28.8px; }.sitb-font-size-7{ font-size: 32.4px; }
THE MIRAGE
Matt Ruff
FOR
MY PARENTS
When God wants to punish you,
He grants your wish.
—AMERICAN PROVERB
Contents
11/9
This is the day the world changes.
It’s 21 Shaban, year 1422 after the Hijra. Or as the international trade calendar would have it: November 9, 2001. Sunrise in Baghdad is at 6:25, and as the first rays strike the Tigris and Euphrates twin towers, an old man stands in the main dining room of the Windows on the World restaurant, gazing out at the city.
The morning commute is well under way, cars streaming in along the expressways from Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, and Karbala. Across the Tigris, the 6:30 Basra Limited loops around the old World’s Fair grounds and runs briefly parallel to the Sadr City El before both trains plunge underground into the central station. There’s traffic on the river, too: passenger and cargo barges, water taxis, the racing shells of the Baghdad U rowing team, the hydrofoil ferry from Kut.
Looking down at it all, the old man feels a sense of vertigo that has nothing to do with fear of heights. He tells himself it’s the motion, the city’s ceaseless motion, which the rush hour only amplifies.
The old man grew up in Yemen. His family owned a bakery, and he and his brothers all worked there. It was hard work, long hours, but every day, five times a day, everything stopped, employees and customers alike stepping out to go to mosque, leaving only a Christian behind to mind the ovens. It wasn’t just the town’s businesses that shut down: A witness viewing that landscape from above would have seen the roads empty too, even long-distance travelers pulling over to pray.
Baghdad, city of the future, doesn’t pull over for anything. Here when the old man steps out of the kitchen for dawn prayer, it’s not just Christians who stay behind working. Here attendance at mosque varies, as if it were the world’s schedule, not God’s, that needed to be accommodated. Here the traffic flows round the clock, pausing only for accidents and gridlock. Little wonder that the sight of it disorients him, producing the flutter in his chest and inner ear that says This is not the place you were made for.
Or so he tells himself. But really, what else could it be?
Someone calls his name from the kitchen. It’s time to get back to work. There’s another round of pastries to get out before breakfast service starts at seven, and then he needs to begin prepping for lunch.
A helicopter buzzes past the windows, and the sun continues to rise, revealing a sky streaked by contrails. The heavens are in motion, too.
7:15 a.m. In a broadcast studio just blocks from the towers, Baghdad’s mayor, Anmar al Maysani, is appearing on the Jazeera & Friends morning talk show. Today’s topic is the skyrocketing murder rate: 463 people have been killed in Baghdad since January, and the year’s final tally is expected to top five hundred. It’s the worst violence the city has seen since the mob wars of the early ’90s.
The mayor has some explaining to do. After being introduced as a “noted feminist,” she’s braced to spend the allotted time discussing whether some jobs aren’t better left to men after all, and is surprised when the host’s first question is about another subject entirely.
“Madam Mayor, there are many who believe that the increase in lawlessness we are seeing is an inevitable consequence of the secularization of society, and that what’s needed is a new Awakening, a rejection of modernity and a return to traditional religious values. What do you say to this?”
“Well,” the mayor replies, “the first thing I would say is that God is great, and nothing is more important than the struggle to live righteously. If citizens are inspired to rededicate themselves to that struggle, that’s the best news that could come out of this unfortunate situation. But I don’t agree with the connection you’re trying to draw between so-called secularization and lawlessness. If you look closely at the statistics, you’ll find that the increase in murders is being driven by a rise in organized crime activity. When men turn to violence in their pursuit of illegal profits, the problem isn’t that they’ve failed to submit to God; the problem is that they’re gangsters.”
A dry cough from the show’s other guest, the publisher of the Baghdad Post, gets the host’s attention. “Mr. Aziz? You have a comment?”
“I’m just a poor Christian,” Tariq Aziz says, “and I wouldn’t dream of lecturing my Muslim brothers and sisters on the struggle to be righteous, but if men are choosing to become gangsters, that would seem to me a clear sign that they are not submitting to God . . .”
“Madam Mayor? Your response?”
“If Tariq Aziz feels he’s a poor Christian, I won’t argue with him,” the mayor says. “Perhaps it would benefit Mr. Aziz to contemplate a line from the Psalms of David: ‘I will not have an evildoer for a friend.’ There are several verses from chapter 63 of Holy Quran that I might also recommend to him . . .”
“I’d recommend the mayor review the laws against slander,” Aziz shoots back.
“I’m only too happy to focus on the law,” the mayor says. “It’s through law and order that we’ll solve this problem, God willing.”
“But that raises another issue, doesn’t it?” says the host. “For several years now, you’ve been the public face of the law in this city. And yet things have gotten worse.”
“Recently they have, but—”
“Yes, recently, even as you’ve been given greater authority by the city council. Some people might say that’s a sign you’ve been given too much authority, that you’re not up to the responsibilities of your office. Some might go farther, and say that God has placed a natural limit on how much responsibility any woman can handle, and that you’ve tried to exceed that limit, with predictable results. Madam Mayor . . . Your thoughts?”
7:59. Down by the river, it’s time for another round in the War on Drugs: A young boat pilot, having just tied up to a pier under the July 14th Bridge, finds himself surrounded, not by the smugglers he was expecting, but by uniformed agents of Halal Enforcement.
The lead agent is a big man named Samir with a bodybuilder’s physique. “Before you lie to me,” he says, wagging a warning finger in the youth’s face, “I want you to think about something. We know your name is Khalil Noufan. We knew you were coming here, and we know what your cargo is. We know you have an uncle Ziad who’s up to his ears in gambling debts. We know all that, so ask yourself: What else do we know?”
The boy blinks slowly, his expression suggesting he’ll never win any science prizes. When he speaks, it’s as if he’s reading off a cue card: “I’m transporting fruit.”
“Right.” Another agent has boarded the boat and is prodding a pile of boxes whose labeling indicates they contain bananas. Hearing a telltale clink, he jokes: “It must have been very cold out on the water this morning.” He tears open a box at the top of the pile and extracts a glass container. “Look at that, frozen in the shape of a wine bottle. What are the odds?”
The boat pilot blinks a bit faster and switches to his fallback story: “It’s for the Jews. To use in the main synagogue.”
Samir laughs. “You hear that, Isaac?” he says to the agent in the boat. “Your grand rabbi’s smuggling Sabbath wine again.”
“Ah, I hate it when he does that.”
Samir turns his attention back to the boy: “Why would Jews smuggle wine when they can import it legally?”
“To, to save on the taxes . . .”
“What, they’re going to risk jail for a few riyals?”
“They’re Jews!”
All of the agents laugh at this. On the boat, Isaac breaks the seal on the “wine” bottle and extracts the cork. He sniffs, then sips, the contents.
“Well?” Samir says.
“A fine Scottish vintage.” Isaac takes a more substantial swallow from the bottle. “Around eighty proof, I’d say.”
“ ‘Proof?’ ” The boat pilot is beyond his prepared script now. “What’s ‘proof’?”
“Hard liquor, asshole,” Samir tells him. “That’s a class-A felony charge. Multiple felony charges, if we decide to count each box as a separate shipment. How many boxes, Isaac?”
“At least forty. And it looks like there are two dozen bottles per box, so if you really want to be a hard-ass you could count them double.”
Samir whistles. “Eighty felony charges . . . And that’s with a mandatory five-year sentence per charge. I know you’re probably no good at math, but do you understand how fucked that makes you?”
“No! It’s wine! They told me—”
“ ‘They’ who? Hey!” Samir grabs him by the chin. “Look at me. Who hired you?”
“No one . . . The Jews.”
“The Jews!” Samir snorts in disgust. Still gripping the boy’s chin, he leans in close: “Eighty felony charges. That’s as good as a life sentence, you get that?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Oh, that’s good, start crying. That’ll really help, where you’re going . . .” Leaning in even closer, as if for a kiss, his voice dropping to a seductive whisper: “You have beautiful eyes, you know that? The other prisoners at Abu Ghraib—I bet they’ll love those eyes . . .”
8:23. At Baghdad International Airport, a pair of ABI agents have set up a surveillance post on the roof of the air traffic control tower. The object of their interest is a palatial estate to the east, located on an island in the middle of an artificial lake. A causeway lined with other, lesser mansions links the island to the lakeshore, and the control tower offers an excellent vantage for recording the license plates of vehicles on the causeway.
While the male agent, Rafi, peers through a camera-equipped telescope at the estate, the woman, Amal, chats with an airport manager who’s followed them up here. Ostensibly the conversation is about a baggage-theft ring the manager claims to have knowledge of, but Amal suspects what he’s really after is her phone number.
“. . . Persians with forged work visas,” the manager is saying. “They sneak across the border through the marshlands and pay the local riffraff to provide them with fake papers.”
“Persians.” Amal grasps the subtext readily enough. The manager’s southern accent and dialect mark him as a native of the Gulf peninsula, and because Amal and Rafi are federal agents, he has apparently concluded that they are at least honorary Riyadhis—and Sunnis. As opposed to the no-good Persians and Iraqi marshlanders, who are Shia. “You know, we’re pretty familiar with the local riffraff,” she says, gesturing towards the lake estate, “and I have to tell you, he’s not so fond of Persians. Or the people of the marshes.”
“Ah, that’s not the riffraff I’m talking about. He’s a wicked man, it’s true, but the criminals you should be investigating are the ones in city hall.”
Amal feigns astonishment. “You’re saying the Baghdad mayor’s office is corrupt?”
“Are you kidding? That incompetent woman comes from the same swamp that the Persians are always sneaking through, so what does that tell you?” The manager pauses, momentarily entranced as the breeze stirs a loose strand of Amal’s hair. “You know,” he continues, “you look a bit like her.”
“Well, that’s flattering!”
The manager smiles. “I said she was corrupt and incompetent, not ugly! And of course you’re much younger than she is.”
“Yes,” Amal says. “Young enough to be her daughter, in fact.” Behind her she hears a sound that she at first takes to be Rafi snickering, but it’s actually the camera shutter. “Something happening?”
“One of the sons is on the move,” Rafi says. “Uday, I think.”
Amal takes a look. A yellow sports car has just exited the front gate of the estate and is racing down the causeway. “That’s Uday all right. Qusay drives the red one.” She turns back to the manager, who’s still smiling in a way that makes her wish she’d worn a bigger headscarf. “Anyway . . .”
“Please.” The manager stops her. “I can see you’re busy. Perhaps . . . we could talk more later?”
Amal has to make an effort not to roll her eyes. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me your card, and I’ll see if—”
He’s already reaching for his wallet. But before he can fumble out a business card, his cell phone rings. “Yes . . . ?” As he listens to the caller, his smile fades.
“What is it?” Amal asks, after he hangs up. His face gone grave, he ignores the question, reaching past Amal to tug at Rafi’s sleeve.
“Excuse me . . .”
“What?” says Rafi, annoyed.
“I’m afraid there’s a problem.”
“Yes, we know. Give Amal your card, like she said, and we’ll—”
“No,” the manager says. “This is something else. Something serious. An Arabian Airlines flight out of Kuwait City has been—”
His phone rings again. More bad news.
“What’s going on?” says Amal. “Has the plane been hijacked?”
No response. It’s like she’s suddenly invisible. The manager stares at Rafi, but Rafi stares right back, waiting for the guy to answer Amal’s question.
“Two,” he finally says. “Two planes . . . At least two.”
8:41. Another Halal agent, a thin, wiry man with a mustache, arrives at the riverbank. The agents already on scene have opened up additional bottles of “evidence,” and the gathering now seems less like an arrest and more like a party, with everyone except the handcuffed guest of honor in a festive mood.
“Hey, Mustafa!” Samir calls to the new arrival. “About time you got here!”
“What do we have?”
“Another Jewish wine-smuggling conspiracy.” Samir laughs and offers him an open bottle, but Mustafa waves it away.
“What is it really? More Scotch whiskey?”
“A mixed assortment. Whiskey mostly, looks like, but also some vodka, and some horrible cherry concoction.”
“This one tastes like coffee!” Isaac calls from the boat.
“I’m hoping for a nice arak, myself,” Samir says.
“Just the thing, with Ramadan coming up,” says Mustafa, his tone more than his words causing Samir to raise an eyebrow. Mustafa nods at the weeping boat pilot. “This is our smuggler?”
“Yes,” Samir says, still reacting to the Ramadan comment. “A real hard case, as you can see.”
“I suppose you didn’t wait to see if anyone would show up to meet him.”
“Why bother? If we know about this shipment, you can bet Saddam knows we know. The real shipment’s probably being unloaded upriver somewhere while we’re busy with this decoy.”
“Busy.” Mustafa shakes his head. “You’d better hope no one with a camera catches you being ‘busy’ with that bottle.”
“What’s gotten into you this morning, Mustafa? Why are you late?”
“My car wouldn’t start.”
“And for that you’re being an asshole? You’ve been fighting with the wives again, haven’t you? Which one, Noor?”
Mustafa points to the dusty hatchback he drove to the pier. “Does that look like something I’d borrow from Noor?”
“Ah,” Samir says. “Fadwa then. That’s a shame. Still, no need to take it out on me.”
“Let’s just knock this off before the Post does an exposé on corruption at Halal.”
“Fine, fine,” Samir says. “All right everybody, let’s start wrapping things up—”
The other agents, clustered by the boat, are all staring at something in the sky to the south. Even the boat pilot has stopped crying and raised his head to look.
“What . . . ,” Samir says, turning. “Huh. He’s awfully low . . .”
Mustafa is the last to look around. He catches only the briefest glimpse of the jet before it passes overhead, engines screaming. The impact is hidden from view by the structure of the bridge; they’ll watch it later, of course, replayed endlessly on television, but in the moment it’s only a loud boom, followed by the screams of people who can see it.
Then for just a second there is silence, a pocket of stillness during which some instinct makes Mustafa look not towards the hidden tower but at the car that brought him here. “Fadwa,” he says, and a shockwave passes beneath his feet, leaving a different world in its wake.
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
United Arab States
This page is currently protected from editing to deal with repeated acts of vandalism. To suggest changes, please contact an administrator.
The United Arab States is a federal constitutional republic made up of 22 states, one federal district, two religious districts, and several territories. Situated largely in the Eastern Hemisphere, it occupies the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, most of Mesopotamia, North Africa, and Northeast Africa, and numerous islands in the surrounding waters. It shares land borders with Turkey, Kurdistan, Persia, and various African nations.
At over 14 million square kilometers and with more than 360 million people, the United Arab States is the world’s second largest country by total area and third largest by population . . .
HISTORY
Birth of a nation
The UAS was born from the ashes of the Arab League, a loose federation of Middle Eastern states that broke away from the Ottoman Empire near the end of the 19th century. Having successfully—if tentatively—declared independence from the Empire, the members of the League fell almost immediately to fighting amongst themselves along clan and sectarian lines. The bloody civil war continued until an attempt at reconquest by the Ottomans caused the League to once again unite against a common foe. Supported by a newly independent Egypt and the armies of the House of Saud, the League routed the Ottoman invasion force.
Following the armistice, the victors gathered in Egypt to discuss their future. In what became known as the miracle of Alexandria, the various parties managed to set aside their differences and agree on a plan to form a new and more lasting union, “One nation under God.”
At its founding the UAS consisted of thirteen states—Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, the Emirates, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen—and the religious district of Mecca-Medina. The nation’s capital was initially at Cairo, but within a few years, during the presidency of Abd al Aziz ibn Saud, it was moved to Riyadh.
Early growth
The new nation’s geographic location made it a nexus of international trade, and despite an ongoing feud between Egypt and the federal government over control of the Suez Canal, the economy grew rapidly. The discovery of major petroleum reserves in the 1910s added further to the economic boom. While Christian Europe tore itself apart in war, the UAS embarked on an ambitious project of industrialization . . .
The world at war
Towards the end of the 1930s, war broke out again in Europe and Asia. The UAS attempted to remain neutral, but German and Italian threats against the Muslims of North Africa, and Japanese aggression in Malaya and Indonesia, made this impossible . . . In 1941 the UAS unleashed its military might against the Axis . . . By 1943, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania had all been liberated, and joined the union . . . In July 1944 a newly armed and trained Maghrebi invasion force stormed the beaches of southern France while allied Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Kurdish forces captured Rome and the Russian Orthodox Army launched its own series of offensives against the German eastern front . . . In the Southeast Asian Theater, Arab and Indian marines liberated the last of the Indonesian archipelago and struck north into the Philippines . . . In August 1945, after a third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo, Japan surrendered, ending the war . . . In December 1946, Adolf Hitler was beheaded at Nuremberg . . .
1948: Israel, the Orthodox Union, and the beginning of the Cold Crusade . . . President Nasser and the Arab Unity Party . . . “One small step for a Muslim . . .” The Islamic Awakening and the war in Afghanistan . . . “Black Arabs”: Somalia and Sudan join the Union . . . The Mexican Gulf War . . .
11/9 and the War on Terror
On November 9, 2001, Christian fundamentalists hijacked four commercial passenger jetliners. They crashed two of them into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in downtown Baghdad, Iraq, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry headquarters in the federal district of Riyadh. The fourth plane, which is believed to have been bound for either the Presidential Palace in Riyadh or, possibly, Mecca (see Controversies and Myths of 11/9), crashed in Arabia’s Empty Quarter after its passengers attempted to retake control from the hijackers.
Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the World Christian Alliance, a North American white supremacist group based in the Rocky Mountain Independent Territories. In retaliation, UAS airborne troops captured the city of Denver, and UAS Special Forces backed by strike aircraft launched raids against Alliance strongholds in the surrounding countryside. Thousands of Alliance troops were captured or killed, but the Alliance leadership remained at large.
Even as the fighting in the Rockies continued, President Bandar used his 2002 State of the Union address to announce a broader War on Terror that would include preemptive attacks against “regimes that aid, harbor, or sponsor terrorists.” The president made special mention of America, the United Kingdom, and North Korea, branding them “an Axis of Evil” whose attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction would no longer be tolerated . . .
In March of 2003, Coalition forces launched a successful invasion of America . . . A provisional government was established in the so-called “Green Zone” in Washington, D.C. . . . Hopes for a quick transition to a stable democracy were dashed by outbreaks of violence between rival American factions and by the rise of an anti-Arab insurgency . . . In 2006, with Coalition casualties mounting and no end to the war in sight, the National Party of God suffered heavy losses during the midterm Congressional elections. Candidates closely affiliated with the House of Saud fared especially poorly . . .
Now, with the Arab Unity Party once again in control of both Congress and the executive branch, there is hope that the War in America will soon be over. But even as the first troops return home, there are rumors of new terror threats against the Arab homeland, and fears that Arabia’s most challenging days still lie ahead . . .
The crusader was staying on the eleventh floor of the Rasheed Hotel. He’d arrived in Baghdad in the early afternoon and registered under the name John Huss. Among his possessions was a five-kilogram box of plastic explosives stolen from the army base at Kufah.
Arab Homeland Security knew all about him, or thought they did. His real name was James Travis. A citizen of Texas, he was in the UAS on a student visa that had expired nine months ago. During his last year of medical school, he had fallen in with a band of Protestant fanatics and was now working as their courier. Tomorrow he would meet with the leader of a sleeper cell to deliver the explosives.
AHS headquarters in Riyadh wanted to capture the whole cell, so rather than arrest Travis immediately, a plan had been hatched to disarm him. An agent dressed as a hotel maid waited down the hall from Travis’s room with a dummy munitions box filled with harmless clay. When Travis went to get dinner, the agent would swap out the real plastique and plant tracking devices in Travis’s other luggage.
It was a decent plan, but it did require Travis to leave the room, something that, as of 7 p.m., he showed no sign of doing. As the clock crept towards eight, one of the men staking out the lobby grew bored and began making prank radio calls to the eleventh-floor maid station.
“Amal, room 1169 needs fresh towels.”
“Very funny, Samir.”
“Amal, the gentleman in 1124 would like his pillows fluffed.”
“Very funny, Samir.”
“Amal—”
“Very funny, Samir.”
Silence for a bit. At quarter to eight, Mustafa asked: “Do we know if he’s awake?”
A member of the surveillance team watching the hotel room from across the street clicked in: “He’s still got the window shades drawn, but it looks like the lights are on.”
“His television’s on, too,” added Amal. “I can hear it from here.”
“You know what would be great?” Samir said. “If we had a working camera and microphone inside the room.”
“Very funny, Samir”—this time from the surveillance man. “I told you twice already, the equipment worked fine when we were testing it.”
“Do you want me to knock on the door?” Amal asked. “I could tell him the other guests are complaining about the TV noise.”
“No,” said Mustafa, “I just want him to get hungry. Abdullah? Anything?”
Abdullah was monitoring the hotel switchboard. “He hasn’t tried to call room service. No other landline calls in or out either, and e-comm unit says he hasn’t used a cell phone . . . What if he’s too nervous to eat?”
“A nervous terrorist, that’s just what we need.”
“Maybe his conscience is bothering him,” Samir suggested. “What kind of Christian did you say he was, Mustafa?”
“Methodist.”
“Are those the ones who handle snakes?”
“Hey,” Amal said. “The TV just switched off . . . He’s coming out.”
“All right, everyone check in,” said Mustafa. They were supposed to respond in sequence, but excited by the prospect of something finally happening, everyone spoke at once, and a confusion of voices filled the radio channel.
“He just stepped on the elevator,” Amal announced as the babble subsided. “I’m inside the room . . . Oh, damn it.”
“Amal?”
“Damn it, damn it, damn it . . .” Breathless now, as if she were running: “He’s not a courier.”
On the ground floor, Samir and three other agents made a dash for the elevator bank, arriving just in time to see the descending car pass the lobby without stopping. All the other cars were engaged on upper floors; Samir pounded the down button uselessly, then barked a warning into his radio as he and his companions scrambled to find the stairs.
The crusader, unaware of the flurry of activity above him, stepped out into the quiet of the hotel’s underground parking garage. Although it was a hot summer night, he wore a heavy, oversized sport jacket and kept his left hand tucked inside it.
As he walked across the garage, he recited under his breath: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . .”
A spark from the shadows to his right brought him up short. A thin man with a mustache, cigarette dangling from his lips, stood beside a black van, trying to coax a flame from an ancient brass lighter. The man looked up at the crusader staring at him. “My friend,” he said, “can you help me?”
The crusader didn’t answer. The man took a step towards him, gesturing with the cigarette: “Please, sir. Can I have a light?” He repeated this entreaty in Hebrew and French, and then, when the crusader still didn’t respond, in fractured English. At last the crusader’s left hand came out from inside his jacket. As the crusader reached into his front pants pocket, the man with the mustache took another step forward and punched him in the throat.
The crusader ended up belly-down on the ground, his left hand still trapped in his pocket, his right arm flung up and out, fingers splayed against the concrete. His assailant straddled him, pointing a gun at his sideways-turned head as he gasped for air.
“Easy, Mr. Travis,” Mustafa said, his English dramatically improved. “The only person you can kill now is yourself, and Jesus won’t reward you for that.”
The crusader finally caught his breath, but instead of relaxing he tensed, his face turning an even darker shade of red.
“Don’t . . . ” Mustafa warned, then hesitated, smelling something. Smoke? With a cry the crusader reared up underneath him. Mustafa pulled the trigger but the gun misfired, and then he was bucked off. He scrambled up into a crouch, but the crusader was up too, something shiny and bright appearing in his hand; as Mustafa wielded the gun like a brick, the crusader leaned in and drew a line along the side of Mustafa’s neck. The pain was sharp, simultaneously searing and cold, and Mustafa’s collarbone was suddenly wet. He dropped his gun and clapped both hands to the wound.
He swooned, falling onto his back. The crusader stood over him, arms raised, a wire trailing from his left hand into his jacket. Nearby voices were shouting orders—“Stop! Drop it!”—but the crusader began his recitation again, his own voice rising to drown them out: “And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy Christian and apostolic Church, I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the—”
Two shots rang out, and something ugly happened to the back of the crusader’s head. Mustafa, his field of vision starting to narrow, watched fascinated as the dead man swayed a moment more on his feet, left thumb twitching spasmodically.
“God willing,” Mustafa whispered. Travis’s knees buckled and his corpse fell forward. The world grew dim but did not disappear, and then a woman in a maid’s uniform was leaning over Mustafa with a still-smoking pistol in her hand. She called his name.
The next Mustafa knew he was in a hospital bed, shading his eyes against the light from a window whose curtains had just been thrust open. A dark figure stood at the bed’s foot, and in the moment before his vision adjusted Mustafa had the fleeting thought that it might be Satan. Of course that was foolish. Satan doesn’t stand in the light; Satan comes from behind and whispers in your ear.
The figure spoke: “Have you been watching Al Jazeera?”
Not Satan, no. Just Mustafa’s boss. “Hello, Farouk,” he said, his voice a dry whisper. He raised a hand to his neck and felt a thick bandage covering the place where he’d been cut.
“The reason I ask,” Farouk continued, “is that Jazeera’s newscasters have picked up this habit, lately, of referring to our crusader friends as ‘homicide bombers.’ ” He shook his head. “Homicide bombers . . . What does that even mean? A man builds a bomb, of course he wants to kill someone. It’s the suicide part that makes them special.”
A water pitcher and two glasses sat on the bedside table. Mustafa took his time pouring himself a drink. “I thought I could take him alive,” he said finally.
“You say that as if it were a sane idea.”
“I had him on the ground with a gun to his head, Farouk. He should have surrendered.”
“Yes, that’s what a rational criminal would have done.” Farouk fished a small object from his suit jacket. “Here,” he said, offering it to Mustafa. “A souvenir.”
Mustafa turned the slender bit of polished steel over in his hands several times before recognizing it as a lighter.
“Taken from his pocket,” Farouk said.
“How did you know—”
“That you’d asked him for a light? I know all things. I gather the idea was to get his hand away from the bomb trigger. That would have been genuinely smart, if you’d followed up by shooting him in the face.”
Mustafa found the igniter button, and a focused jet of blue flame hissed from the side of the lighter. “He tried to set the explosive on fire?”
“No, himself. The autopsy found burns on his inner thigh and genitals.” Mustafa glanced up sharply at this, and Farouk shrugged. “Maybe he was fighting the temptation to surrender. Maybe he just wanted a burst of adrenaline. The point is, you were trying to reason with a man who’d sooner burn off his dick than be taken alive . . . Tell me this isn’t about Fadwa.”
“Farouk . . .”
“Because I know all things, I know the official declaration finally came through last month. In light of that, I could overlook a certain amount of idiocy. But a death wish is out of bounds.”
“I’m not trying to get myself killed because of Fadwa, Farouk.”
“No? What is it about then, the other wife?”
“You called Noor.”
“Of course I called Noor. Do you know what she said when I told her you were in the hospital?”
“She asked if I was dying. When you said no, she told you to call her back if that changed.”
“That’s it almost word for word. What kind of woman talks that way about her husband?”
“You said it yourself: the other wife.”
Farouk shook his head again. “The more I learn about plural marriage, the more I thank God for making me a Christian.”
Mustafa smiled gamely at the jest, but the reminder that Farouk belonged to the suspect class concerned him: “Is Riyadh giving you a hard time about the mission?”
“They’d like to,” Farouk said. “Unfortunately it was their bad information that screwed things up. The outcome was as good as could be expected, considering. Of course my report glossed over a few details.”
“If you need someone to blame—”
“What I need is the rest of that terror cell. And no more nonsense.” He sighed. “It appears you were right about Amal, at least.”
Amal, a recent transfer to Homeland Security, was the newest member of their team. As a politician’s daughter, she came with two strikes against her, and Farouk had only accepted her under protest. He’d wanted to keep her out of the field, but Mustafa, after reviewing her personnel file, had argued that she deserved a chance.
“How is she?” Mustafa asked. Because he’d seen her records, he knew she’d never killed a man before.
“Quite pleased with herself,” Farouk said. “As she should be. Two head shots from fifteen meters is impressive.” He studied Mustafa’s expression as he said this and didn’t like what he saw. “You’d rather she’d just wounded him? Shot the detonator out of his hand, maybe, like on TV?”
“I’m happy to be alive.”
“You’re lucky to be alive. For that matter so is Amal. Fifteen meters is still well within the lethal radius of a suicide vest. And in case you were too busy bleeding to notice, there were four other agents within blast range as well.”