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Angels of Vengeance (Without Warning)(Kindle Edition)
by
John Birmingham
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2)
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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.
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.