Foreign Enemies and Traitors (45 page)

“General Blair, you must understand, is not possible to examine into fire.  Even now house burns, and we have no machines for such work.”

Bullard could see his point.  Looking for human remains in that mountain of smoldering debris would be useless.  “Okay, Colonel, let’s discuss yesterday’s operation.  Your mission was to remove the remaining population from the southern part of Radford County.  How would you evaluate your progress so far?”

“Well, first day of operation was big success.  Very big success.  We shall conclude operation through next two or maybe three days.  Problem is now not to having liaison officer.  That makes big problem for radio communication with headquarters of Fort Campbell.  Other problem is ammunition.  Kazak armored vehicles are having almost no 40 millimeter linked ammunition.  Last week was sent not correct ammunition, was sent 40 millimeter for American rifle grenade launcher.  We are needing correct 40 millimeter linked grenade ammunition for armored vehicles.”

Bullard ignored these last requests.  The M117 Guardian armored security vehicles also had a .50 caliber heavy machine gun on their turrets—that was enough firepower for running roughshod over a few barely armed rebels.  Supplying them with any 40mm grenades was a mistake; that level of destructive ordnance was clearly beyond their role as volunteer “military police.”  Anyway, he wasn’t concerned about what the Kazaks wanted; that wasn’t why he had flown down here.  “Where are the people from Mannville now, Colonel?”  He already knew where they were, he had watched the operation via video feed from a Predator UAV, but he wanted to study the Kazak while he answered.  He wanted to test Burgut’s ability to withstand any problematic questioning in the future.  Two Kazak commanders dying in rapid succession might make it difficult to find the next replacement, but there was no doubt that Burgut would have an accident when the time was right.  Until then he needed to be able to keep his mouth shut tight.

Colonel Burgut answered nonchalantly, “They are…not far from here.”

“Really?  I would like to go there now, and see them for myself.”

“General Blair, there is not need to see them.”

“But I insist.  We can fly there in my helicopter, right now.  We’ll be back in half an hour.  Let’s go, Colonel.”  Bullard whispered to Jeff, his assistant.  As planned, his bodyguards physically blocked Burgut’s two staff officers as their commander was shepherded toward the aircraft.  Bullard had read the situation correctly, surmising that the new Kazak leader would not want to cause a face-losing scene by resisting his entreaties to go for a ride on the executive helicopter. 

Only the Kazak and Bob Bullard climbed aboard the chopper for the short trip; the pilot had remained in his seat.  For this hop, the two men sat in the plush rear passenger seats.  His pilot had also come up from the ATF, “Agents That Fly,” and Bullard trusted him as much as he trusted any man.  Which was not much, but hopefully, enough.  Because the pilot was about to see what had happened in a gully outside the small town of Mannville. 

Once they were aloft, Bob Bullard envisioned a freak aviation accident taking place a month or two in the future.  Perhaps when the same pilot was flying Colonel Burgut to a rural pacification program meeting at Fort Campbell.  It could easily be explained as a “lucky shot” from a rebel .50 caliber sniper rifle, fired from the ground.  The famous “golden BB” was always a threat to helicopters flying too low over rebel territory.  If Burgut and the pilot both went down in flames, that would be taking two birds with one stone.  It would not be the first time Bullard had planted a small bomb to solve a problem.  Sometimes the old ways were the best.

****

Boone was suspended in a semi-trance,
sitting on his root-chair with his back against a wall of frozen mud.  He was still more or less dry in his gore-tex parka and trousers, but not warm by any stretch.  The snow had turned to sleet and then to rain by the time it was light enough to see.  For more than two decades, he had spent nights like this, hovering between dreams and memories, cataloging his life’s joys and regrets, ticking down the slowly dragging minutes and hours until the earth’s turning would bring another day.  Most of the snow was dissolving before his eyes, and water was beginning to trickle down the erosion channels under his feet.  When daylight finally came he carefully stood, turning very slowly, scanning above him for any watchers.

                He had put his night goggles away for the day, but it was still too early to take decent photographs.  The ravine was in deep shadow.  He stood at the bottom of the massacre site, looking uphill.  He would have to climb a final slippery wall of mud and ice to get right among the bodies.  As the snow had begun to disappear, the extent of the massacre was becoming clear.  There were hundreds of dead in the ravine.  The count would never be more than guesswork until the bodies could be removed one by one.  It was impossible to know how many were buried in layers beneath the ones he could see.

                The victims were killed in whatever clothes they had been wearing when they were captured.  The men were on top.  They had their hands bound behind their backs with black nylon flex-cuffs.  They must have been brought to the ravine last.  He could see well enough to begin to collect some wallets for identification purposes, if these had not been removed before the victims had been shot.  He would have to move bodies to search for any of the new ID badges or old driver’s licenses or credit cards.  Radford County was an “unpacified” region, and for the most part the people had never submitted to wearing the ID badges.

Boone was climbing among the bodies at the lower end of the killing site when he heard the diesel engine and recognized the sound of Army five-ton trucks.  These heavy-duty all-wheel-drive monsters would have no problem negotiating the slippery dirt roads he had walked while following Jenny’s GPS track.  It enraged him to think that somewhere, American Quislings helped to maintain these U.S. Army trucks, and then turned them over to the foreign occupiers.  Turned them over for use on operations like this massacre.  Many Americans would accept any kind of paying employment during this economic depression.  No doubt, if questioned they would deny any knowledge of what their trucks were being used for.  They would pretend to have clean hands.  Many, Boone knew, were active duty soldiers putting in a few more years toward their pensions.  Sometimes he hated them more than he hated the foreign enemies.  But then, he didn’t have a family to feed.

The trucks were not far off, less than a mile away and getting closer.  Most likely they were back on the asphalt two-lane road that led to Shiloh and then down into Mississippi.  If they were carrying platoons of soldiers on a return trip to the massacre site, he might be trapped in this place, hemmed in on both sides by icy mud walls.  The trucks might even follow the route he had taken, and if so, they might see his tracks.  A few hours had passed since he had walked that path, and the snow had turned to rain since then.  Instead of his prints being filled in with new snow, the rain could actually wash through his compressed tracks, leaving a perfect trail for the enemy to follow.

One of the two truck engines stopped.  He guessed that the motors belonged to five-ton, six-wheel-drive Medium Tactical Vehicles.  These military trucks could be relieving sentries at a checkpoint, or dropping off a patrol.  Five minutes later the noisy diesel started up again, and gradually the engine sounds diminished until he could no longer hear either truck.  He had to assume that more troops had been dropped off, and not far away.  Perhaps a full platoon of Cossack mercenaries. 

                                       
         14

The short flight took only five minutes.
  The countryside was pleasantly rolling, with dozens of fingerlike streams dividing woods, pastures and farmland.  There was still some snow on the ground, melting under steady rain.  Smoke curled from a few chimneys.  Cows and horses continued their difficult grazing, ignoring the helicopter.  They were not far from the Shiloh battlefield, on the Tennessee River.  To Bob Bullard, it almost looked like one of those Currier and Ives dinner plates showing a New England scene from long ago.  The blue and white Eurocopter set down in the clearing above the ravine, where the buses had brought their passengers for a one-way trip.  Bullard had seen it already, from 15,000 feet up, bounced back from the Predator’s cameras.  The helicopter’s downdraft blasted wet snow in all directions until the rotors stopped. 

Bullard hopped down lightly, walked directly to the edge of the dropoff, and looked over into the gully.  Most of the bottom was still in dark shadow, and not much of the snow had melted down there.  The bodies were half-covered in a white mantle, revealing a random landscape of arms, colorfully dressed torsos and some shattered faces and heads.  The bodies had rolled and fallen down the steep slope, and accumulated in heaps at the bottom.  There must have been hundreds of them, in a continuous mass that was at least fifteen feet across, running more than thirty yards along the bottom of the gully.  The snow had fallen after the massacre, so the scene was still partly masked from direct observation.  He imagined that from high altitude, it might appear to be a trash dump.

Sidney Krantz, the president’s special adviser and liaison for the rural pacification program, had said that Jamal Tambor wanted results, and he wanted them fast.  The president wanted Western Tennessee completely pacified or completely empty, one or the other.  Mannville was the central node of resistance in Radford County, and with it depopulated, insurgency in the rest of the region would crumble.  Well, there was no faster way to depopulate a rural county, Bullard had to admit.  The results below him in the ravine spoke for themselves.  Striking at the town on market day was the logical way to accomplish the mission. 

He had assumed that Special Agent Zuberovsky was going to have some of the residents forcibly relocated to the FEMA camp in Jackson, Tennessee, and the rest scattered and harassed into leaving the county…but not murdered wholesale.  Of course, for obvious reasons, these types of instructions were never put into writing or transmitted electronically, so there was always a risk of miscommunication. 

Raiding the illegal black market had been Martin Zuberovsky’s overt mission, and with it put out of business, the dead-enders in Radford County would have been forced to come to the government relocation centers for food.  That had been one of the basic plans that had worked quite well over the last few months, if not quite as quickly as President Tambor desired.  Zuberovsky and the Kazaks had clearly taken his order to wipe out resistance in Radford County as rapidly as possible much too literally and had far exceeded his orders.  Well, what was done was done.  He couldn’t personally control every detail of every operation in every unpacified county in Tennessee.  But the bodies remained…hundreds of bodies.  They were a problem.

The Kazak commander stood beside him, a look of disgust on his round Eurasian face.

“Colonel Burgut, you do understand that your battalion was never instructed to do this…thing we see here.”

“But General Blair, your liaison officer, it was of his instruction.  He said that it was of your order to smash the market and destroy the rebels—”

“No, that’s wrong!  All wrong.  He was not given those orders.  It was a mistake—
his
mistake.  This is America, dammit—not Chechnya or Kosovo!”

“But General Blair, you told us we must finish job, and permanently remove all peoples from County of Radford.  Permanently.  Major Zinovsky said to me that—”

“But not this way.  Not this way!”  Bullard gritted his teeth and stared down over the edge.  “Well, what’s done is done.  It’s finished.  It can’t be changed.  But Colonel, there is a problem: these bodies.  Why haven’t they been covered?  The snow is already melting; soon they will be completely visible.  I don’t understand why they were not covered.  What was your plan for covering them, and why was it not completed?”

“Before operation, we located earthmover at business near Mannville town.  Was big part of plan.  Caterpillar; very good machine, number one earthmover.  It is already on special lorry—on truck-trailer.  We had plan to cover bodies yesterday, but Kazak driver could not start this special truck to bring Caterpillar to here location.  Yes, we had very good plan for complete operation.  Horses and trucks for Kazak soldiers, two autobus for transport of peoples, Caterpillar earthmover, everything to as needed.  A very good logistic.  But important parts are removed from truck engine, needed for to bring earthmover to here location.  Was impossible to know this problem before operation.  Impossible.”

“Well, you need to get the job finished, and get them covered up.  Bury them deep, very deep, and plant grass and trees on top.  Move some small pine trees like those over there.  This place must disappear.”

“We are finding necessary parts for engine of big trailer truck.  After, we will bring Caterpillar and push earth over this…small valley.”  Colonel Burgut extended his arms forward level with his shoulders, and made a smoothing gesture with his hands.  “When job is finished, small valley will be flat, and peoples will be many meters under earth.”

“Good.  And when will this happen, Colonel?”

“Perhaps tomorrow.  Perhaps next day after.  We must locate parts for truck engine, for bringing earthmover.”  Colonel Burgut gave a foolish smile and pointed his finger down, indicating the dead below them.  “Owner of business of earthmover and special truck, he is perhaps down there now, with other dead peoples.  Now he cannot help us in finding important engine parts for earthmover truck.  We must have to discover missing engine parts in Jackson, Tennessee, if possible.”