A state of disobedience (33 page)

"And then we bring the families in for . . . ummm . . . 'protective custody'?" Rottemeyer grinned.

"Yeah," said Carroll slowly. "Yeah . . . 'protective custody' . . . that's the ticket."

Carroll stopped for a moment before continuing. When he did continue it was with a hesitation unusual in someone of such forceful character. "There's one other thing I think we need to do, Willi."

Rottemeyer raised an eyebrow.

"I checked with CIA. They can provide any required number of Predator Remote Piloted Aircraft."

"So?"

"The Air Force won't play." He turned an inquisitorial eye toward McCreavy who shrugged in agreement.

"So I think we need to bomb that cunt Seguin out of the equation."

"That's going to cost us . . ." began the President.

"Damn the cost," shouted Carroll. "Madame President we are fighting for our political
lives
here."

Regardless of cost, Sawyers read for approximately the fortieth time. Reduce the Western Currency Facility before mid-day tomorrow, regardless of cost. 

Sawyers heard and felt the tremendous roar of one of the guns he had commandeered to reduce the WCF. The flash from the big gun's muzzle lit the landscape, forming it briefly into surreal shadows. Another flash and roar followed almost instantaneously as the shell impacted on a new section of exterior wall.

Oh, well, thought Sawyers, resignedly. It could be worse. After all, we've got a minimum of half a dozen practicable breaches in each of three exterior walls; two more in the fourth. And I can be certain now that all their exterior claymores are either gone or at least deranged or disconnected. Since we pounded the roof it's likely as not there won't be any more mines there either. So there'll be no repeat of the goddamned fiasco we had the first day we arrived . . . my fault, my fault, all my fault. 

Once we break inside though . . . that is going to be pretty horrible. 
 

"It's pretty awful up there, ain't it, Top . . . I mean Sergeant Major?"

Pendergast, just returned to relative safety from a mind-numbing tour of the ruins the big guns had made of much of the edifice could only nod his head dumbly at first. It was
bad
away from the safer, inner perimeter, no doubt about it.

After a moment Pendergast gasped out, "Fontaine, go tell the major that Captain Davis's been hit. Well . . . shit . . . tell him he's dead . . . I mean really fucking dead. Tell him I put Royce in charge of that sector." Pendergast trembled slightly with the vivid memory of a man ripped into two pieces and screaming his lungs out—begging, pleading—for someone, anyone, to kill him and put him out of his agony.

Though Pendergast didn't mention that part; could not, in fact. The memory of his own rifle's muzzle pressed against Davis' head . . . the squeeze of the trigger . . . the flash that burned even through his closed eyes . . . no, that he could not mention, nor even quite bring himself to think about . . . 

"Sergeant Major? Sergeant Major, wake up."

Pendergast's eyes opened immediately from the rough shoving. It took him several moments to place the voice. "Major Williams? Sorry, sir, I just . . ."

"Never mind. You needed the sleep. But sleep time is over. The guards say there's movement outside, a lot of it. All the walls."

"Figure they're coming?"

"Yes . . . BMNT comes in about forty minutes. I figure they'll hit us simultaneously from every direction."

Pendergast forced a smile with a confidence he did not truly feel. "We'll hold 'em, sir, never worry."

Tripp really could not quite believe his good luck, if it was luck. Still, against his own expectation here he was, he and his battalion, sheltered under cover in a small town south of the city.

Though the people were friendly and cooperative, Tripp had had the phone lines and cellular repeater tower knocked down just in case. Now, with a small party dressed in civilian clothes forward to recon the state house and the routes leading towards it, the battalion—minus a small local security element, himself, the company commanders and the staff—caught up on rest. Even those still awake had had some chance to eat; Tripp vaguely remembered reading an Israeli study that said troops recently rested, fed and watered were much more effective than those without that consideration. Not that it would have mattered what any study said; to Tripp it just seemed plain common sense.

DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED

BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. You watched the entire battle on television, Alvin?
A. No, sir. I didn't see when it started, wasn't even awake yet. Though the TV did give some flashbacks. But I did see everything that went on from about ten o'clock that morning until late that afternoon. That took a lot of beer, like I said.
The beer was maybe a mistake because I starting cheering when they showed some of the killed and wounded being brought out on stretchers. Some folks in the bar weren't too happy about that and I shut right up.

Didn't stop me from smiling a whole lot, though.

"Think of it as an opportunity," Major Williams had suggested, once the artillery pounding had begun. "Sure, they will make some holes in the walls. Likely they'll get some of us, too. But see, we will know where those holes are . . . and we'll be able to prepare a very warm reception for anyone trying to come through one."

And so it had been. Working like beavers whenever there was a lull in the incoming fire, sometimes even when there was not, the defenders of the WCF had shifted firing positions, moving entire bunkers to take advantage of the routes in that they now knew the PGSS must use.

Unseen in one such midnight-dark bunker, Fontaine forced a smile to his face. He had perhaps hoped that the smile would give him confidence, even help him to slow his rapidly beating heart. It did not; his heart continued to pound in his chest, breath coming short and hard.

This was worse, far worse, than the first day's action had been. Then, following Pendergast around and simply doing what he was told, the young enlisted man had barely had time to think; he could only react. Now, with weeks of pondering and fretting behind him—weeks of tension, days of frightful bombardment and hours of chest-pounding fear . . . the boy was simply terrified half out of his wits.

He heard the scraping of something metallic on the concrete floor behind his bunker. A friend, he was sure; there had been no break in as of yet.

"Fontaine, that you?"

"Yes, Top . . . I mean, Sergeant Major. Me and Silva on the machine gun."

Pendergast noticed the strain in the boy's voice. "You okay, boys?"

"I'll be fine, Sergeant Major. It's just the waiting . . ." Silva grunted agreement.

"Not much waiting to go. They're massing all around."

"I know. Sometimes you can hear the diesels," answered Fontaine. "They're close. . . ."

Under the dim red overhead light, Sawyers crouched in the back of one of the LAVs, looking over the sketch of the objective, looking for flaws in his plan. Occasionally, the light of one of the radios mounted forward, behind the driver, would illuminate his face with an orange glow.

Four times had the radio's light flashed as his assault columns reported having taken up their positions. Now Sawyers heard the fifth, expected, transmission.

The transmission warbling, broken; the "fifth column"—two companies of PGSS aboard Army helicopters—reported, "five minutes out."

Sawyers keyed his own micophone, "Black this is Black Six. Five minutes."

A chorus of "Rogers" made the radio light flicker like a strobe.

It had just become light enough for the pilots to dispense with their night vision goggles. Warrant Officer Harrington announced, "Co-pilot's ship," then released his stick as he felt the other warrant take over. He could have simply left the goggles attached to his helmet, flipping them up and out of the way. But he'd never liked the weight of the things so he opened the plastic case, removed the goggles and placed them in the case.

He looked around and behind him at the thirteen PGSS "agents" littering his passenger area. His eyes rested momentarily on the two thick, coiled ropes on the floor to either side of the helicopter.
I have a big surprise for you boys,
he thought, darkly. "Pilot's ship."

"Here they cooommme!" shouted the man, Smithfield, bearing the antitank weapon up near the hole in the wall.

Fontaine's heart began to pound even harder than before. Even so, he gripped his rifle, steadying it on the sandbags of the bunker and taking a general aim at the seven-foot-wide hole blown in the wall that was his firing sector, his and the machine gunner's.

"You ready, Silva?" he asked.

As if to punctuate and agree in one, Fontaine heard a machine-gun bolt slam home.

"Be careful you don't hit the antitank man up by the hole," Fontaine cautioned.

"No sweat, Fontaine. We done worked it out. Smitty's going to fire one round, two if he can get away with it . . . and ain't
that
going to ring our chimes, back here? . . . then crawl left and back to us while I cover. No problem."

" 'Ring our chimes'? You sure Smitty worked out the backblast problem?"

"Oh yeah . . . we got just enough ventilation . . . just enough to live through it, that is."

The roaring diesels of the PGSS suddenly grew louder. Fontaine heard, distinctly, "Backblast area clear!"

Then it seemed like the world blew up.

It was overkill, really. The rocket Smithfield was using was an AT-4. Brutally, even impractically, heavy for a one-man weapon, it had been designed to defeat heavy armor, armor much heavier than any LAV boasted.

Thus, within less than a second after Smithfield had fired, the warhead had reached its target. The cone shape began to deform on striking, crushing a piezo-electric crystal within. This created a momentary surge of electricity that raced down to the warhead detonator. This exploded, causing the rest of the explosive in the warhead to likewise detonate.

That explosive was also shaped into a cone, but in a mirror of the ballistic cone to the front, this cone was recessed. Most of the explosion was, in effect, lost in every direction. Yet a portion was not. In the hollow cone hot gasses collected. These were held and focused by the surrounding explosion. The collected gasses then formed a plasma jet, moving at phenomenal speeds . . . straight towards and right through the armor of the PGSS LAV.

If the defenders of the facility had been partially and momentarily stunned by the serious backblast emanating from the AT-4, the recipients of that fire were more than stunned. One unfortunate, the one right in the path of the shaped charge's blast, felt only a momentary flash of agonized burning before the hot gasses forced into his body caused his torso to literally explode.

Being covered with bits of flesh and slime was the least of the occupants' problems, however. The sudden overpressure, pressure which could not escape the sealed armored vehicle, burst the eardrums of every man trapped inside. Most were knocked out, outright. Several took serious interior damage to vital organs from the concussive blast.

And then the vehicle began to burn. . . . 

"The bitch is burning!" shouted an exultant Smithfield as he began to prep his second AT-4 for firing. "Hah, hah . . . look at it. . . ."

The burst of machine gun fire coming from another of the approaching LAVs brought the soldier's celebration up very short.

"Oh fuck . . . oh, fuck," whispered the sergeant, looking down at red ruin and spurting blood. Drilled through a thousand repetitions for operation of the antitank weapon, the man's hands continued to go through the motions even as his life leaked away. But the hands moved so slowly . . . so slowly.

Smithfield looked up to seek a new target. He did not need to look very far or very hard as the bulk of a LAV loomed above, a scant 15 feet from the hole.

What the fuck? I'm dead anyway.
He raised the weapon, took a hasty aim and . . . 

"My God!" exclaimed Silva as Smith's inert body came to rest a few feet to his right where the force of the blast had blown it. One glance was enough to confirm; Smithfield was very dead, his blasted and shot-up body actually smoking. A faint glow outside the smoke-filled hole in the wall suggested very strongly that Smith's final shot had been as true as his first.

Silva poked a finger in one ear, rooted around briefly, then settled back onto his machine gun and began to hammer out a staccato concert for the benefit of the PGSS men just beginning to ooze through the hole.

Harrington eased back on his stick as the helicopter arrived over one corner of the WCF's roof. He took a quick glance below, then turned to his crew chief with a nod.

The crew chief on one side and the door gunner on the other tossed the thick coiled cables out of the troop doors. The cables' free ends descended rapidly to the roof below. Above, great black nylon loops affixed to pipelike projections jutting from either side held the ropes in easy reach of the PGSS men. The crew chief, mirrored by the door gunner, took positive control of the PGSS troopers, easing them to where they could easily grasp the ropes. Those men grasped the ropes, looking straight ahead into the distance.

At the command, "Go!" one man to either side began the slide downward.

Ahead, in the pilot's seat, Harrington eased his stick ever so slightly to port. The helicopter responded, sliding to the left unnoticed.

Below, the first pair of descenders touched down without incident about fourteen feet from the edge of the roof. The second pair were closer to that edge, much closer.