The Reaper Plague (18 page)

He could see a glint of sunlight at the
barrier and could make out figures manning it. “Furth, tell
everyone to lay their weapons on that barrier.”
Go ahead, shoot
at me, cabrons. Give me an excuse.

Disappointingly the townies did not fire, and
he had a mission to complete, so he signaled the trucks to drive
on. The MRAP lurched and he put the binoculars away, hunkering down
inside the hatch, using the periscope in case of snipers.
Maybe
they’ll fire as we get closer. Por favor?

Vargas noticed the current stretch of road
was empty of vehicles, apparently cleared by bulldozer; the cars
and trucks were all off in the ditches and the lanes of pavement
invited them to speed up and make some time.
Smart,
he
thought.
Encourage travelers to go by, wherever they were
headed. Damn. They won’t give me a reason.
He thought about
telling them to open fire, make up some excuse later, but he
decided against it.
Not time to make a move yet.

As they passed Golansville and hummed
southward at speeds approaching fifteen or twenty miles per hour –
hallelujah!
– his RTO came over the intercom headset. “Sir,
you’d better hear this.”

A far-off chattering of small arms surged,
then the deeper hammering of a .50 caliber heavy machine gun joined
it from nearby. Rick let go of Jill’s hand to poke his head out of
the room. Medical personnel and support staff ran hither and
thither, yelling and pulling on battle gear. “What’s going on?” His
questions went unanswered.

“
Rick,” yelled Jill, “get
your gear and your weapon and take your post.”

“
Hell, no, I’m not leaving
you!”

“
Rick, you have to get your
armor and your weapon. You have to take your place or someone will
be without support! Just hand me my stuff, if they get this far
we’re screwed anyway.”

Angrily he shoved her PW10 and web gear at
her. “I’m no soldier! I’d just get in the way out there.”

She grabbed his sleeve, shook it hard. “Look,
those doctors and lawyers aren’t fighters either. Go where you’re
assigned and do what they tell you, and don’t be afraid to shoot.
It’s Needleshock. But whoever is attacking has lethal weapons, so
get your Kevlar on and keep the enemy out of this building. That’s
how to keep me safe.”

Agony in his eyes, he kissed her one more
time then ran from the room.

Jill gritted her teeth and dragged herself
upward in the bed, using the headboard. Pain shot through her lower
back, and her thighs tingled above the numbness near her knees. She
slapped at her legs, but it was useless. It felt like they were
asleep but they weren’t waking up. That bullet was lodged in there
good and deep.

She locked and loaded her weapon, set her
magazines within easy reach. Planned her actions if someone did try
to get in the room. Sipped some water. Loosened her knife in its
sheath. Looked at the IV but decided to leave it where it was. The
more nutrient solution she had in her, the better.

Heavier explosions manifested, each coming
closer. It sounded like some form of antitank weapon. Then a boom
and a crash, and she cursed under her breath, then muttered a
prayer for forgiveness.
Tanks! Who the hell is attacking us with
tanks? We don’t have the equipment to deal with armored vehicles
for long. I hope we can get some air support in here fast.

She shrugged into her web gear, switched on
her radio. The command net was full of sound and fury, all bad
news. It sounded like at least four tanks, eight or ten light
armored vehicles and over a thousand troops were attacking from the
north.
Fredericksburg. We got overconfident. They’re paranoid
and they saw us as a threat. My fault. I walked up and told them we
were here. I thought they’d respond to a little patriotic
flag-waving and it might cost us our lives.

Lord, a little help right now would be
welcome.

***

Thank God they’re using the tanks as a
platoon rather than as infantry support
, Swede thought.
If
they’d split them up and kept infantry deployed around each of
them, backed up with those Strykers we could never mousetrap them
like this.

“
Stand by,” he said over
the Recon squad’s net. Invisible in their Ghillie suits, the team
waited in ambush in a sunken clump of trees, knee-deep in boggy
ground. Gunderson’s men had snatched up all the antitank weapons
they could carry and sprinted out here just in time.

The tank platoon, four older M1A1 Abrams with
the insignia of the Virginia Army National Guard’s 11th Infantry
Brigade Combat Team (Stonewall Jackson) painted on them, advanced
slowly in tight diamond formation toward the clubhouse and the
tents pitched near it. Too tight. Two hundred yards range to the
Civil Affairs tents and the clubhouse was point-blank for their
heavy main guns. Swede surmised that whoever was commanding the
tank platoon was either stupid, overconfident, or under orders to
ensure the infantry felt supported.
They should have stood off
at a thousand yards and shot the hell out of us.
He hoped it
would be their undoing.

The tanks did nearly the stupidest thing,
which was the best thing from the Recon team’s point of view.

The very best thing would have been to split
and go around the copse of trees. Next best was to skirt it
closely, with no supporting infantry to clear the nearby terrain,
and fortunately that’s what they did.

The sixty-five-ton vehicles clanked forward
at a crawl, firing their main guns slowly, deliberately. Walls
shattered and fires burned. The Recon team endured one final
concussion wave from a 105mm cannon at less than fifty yards, then
Swede yelled “Ready One.” This gave the three men with the antitank
rockets time to come to their kneeling, firing positions.

“
Fire!”

Three Armorshock rockets flashed out too fast
to see, a ripple of explosions as the booster charges and the
heavier blasts of the warheads blended into a cacophony of
point-blank slamming hell. Subdued flame blossomed at the left rear
of the three nearest tanks, the most vulnerable spot, and an
enormous discharge of eye-searing blue lightning accompanied the
impact. Cyan sparks crawled across the turrets, shorting out
systems, burning out servo motors and fusing traverse mechanisms.
The discharges also set off all of the defensive smoke grenades in
each tank’s fixed launcher set. A moment later the scene
disappeared in overlapping circles of thick artificial fog, with a
strange clear space in the middle.

All three tanks had lost their engines and
main power. They squatted on their broken treads, apparently
lifeless.
Better than I expected with these experimentals.
Like most veterans, he hated brand-new weapons technology.
Now
it’s time to pay the piper.
Swede saw the last tank slew toward
them to present its glacis and lower its main gun toward the group
of trees where they sheltered.

“
Down!” he yelled and the
team hugged the earth like a lover.

His lover bucked, a bronco throwing him
skyward mixed with pieces of tree and chunks of mud. He fell broken
onto his side, slamming his head into his shoulder and outstretched
left arm. The grinding of splintered bones stabbed his ribcage. It
hurt to breathe.

Swede reached up with his good arm to key his
radio. “This is Gunderson. I’m down,” he gasped. “Anyone still up,
engage that last heavy. Remember your final option.”
And it’s
about time for mine,
he thought, reaching. The hard plastic
case in his cargo pocket was undamaged, and he painfully dragged it
out to pull off the top with his teeth. “Oh well,” he said aloud.
“Better than dying.”

He jammed the Eden Plague injector into his
thigh.

His RTO switched his channels and chaos
filled Vargas’ earphones. It sounded like the Battalion net but
several people were chattering, stepping on each other without
discipline so he couldn’t make it out. The best he could tell they
were in the midst of some kind of firefight. He snapped, “Furth,
leave me on that channel and tell the convoy to halt, close-in
deployment, no dismount, stay sharp. Tell the other RTOs to monitor
the other company pushes, Guard freq, the Navy, everyone you can
think of. Use runners to coordinate if you have to. I want
everyone’s ears on signals and I want to know what’s going on,
now
.”

The convoy quickly halted and soon Vargas had
his answers. He looked at his section leaders gathered around, then
focused on the young, confident-looking civilian he’d been charged
with escorting. He summarized what they had found out. “Sir,
Battalion just got hit. Tanks and armored fighting vehicles, maybe
a thousand infantry, they can’t tell. They’re getting overrun. It
would take at least eight hours, six at best, to get back and help
them. There’s no point in that. We have to go on with our mission.
If they can fight them off, or some of them can withdraw, the best
thing we can do for them is to get Richmond on our side.”

He didn’t ask the civilian’s opinion, but
waited for it anyway. Men like this one always had to put their two
cents in. What was worse, rumors said he held an Army Reserve
Major’s commission and was the son of a well-known General. People
like that always meddled.

Vargas waited for the stupid to flow.

Instead, the man just nodded. “Thank you,
Major. I agree. Carry on.”

“
My pleasure, sir.”
Will
wonders never cease. Don’t let on, Denny. Yes sir, three bags full,
sir.
Vargas turned aside. “Furth, try to get through to the
Navy, maybe they can send Battalion some air support, they might
have lost their long-range transmitter. And keep the RTOs listening
on their alternate channels. The rest of you, give everyone ten
minutes to stretch and whiz, standard security.”

Back up on top of the tall armored truck,
Vargas scanned the surroundings while sucking down a precious
red-box Marlboro. He should have thought to try to loot a few
cartons along the way, but he hadn’t wanted to waste time. Now he
wished they had been delayed six hours, so they could have rushed
back to help, play the Cavalry arriving in the nick of time.

That would have been glorious, and maybe the
Envoy could have died bravely and heroically. Too bad.

The convoy chugged southward not yet halfway
to their destination. Vargas had hoped to make the journey in one
day, but at this rate it might be sundown before they reached the
outskirts of Richmond – and that was without Murphy’s intervention.
No one had challenged them yet. No one had as much as taken a
potshot at them, but he expected something eventually. Perhaps it
would come at Ashland, the first decent-sized town on the route.
Perhaps at Hanover Airport.

They passed the dozenth brown sign directing
travelers to yet another Civil War battlefield. Once again he
thought of the irony. They were walking – all right, driving – in
the bloody footsteps of Lee’s and Grant’s armies.

***

Inside the command vehicle, the Special Envoy
sat, his back braced against the padded wall of the troop space,
thinking. He ran his hand over his smooth face, through his thick
hair.
I could pass for twenty-five now. Absolutely amazing. And
what do I get for it? Promotion – if you can call it that – from
commanding armies to being carted around like a piece of meat
without even an aide. And masquerading as my own dead son, to
boot.

He snorted to himself.
Now I don’t even
have the gravitas of my years. And what if Governor Allaine doesn’t
believe me when I tell him who I am? Would I believe me? Everything
depends on the residual loyalty of a man who was a Unionist party
member. Hopefully a reluctant one. Will he remember and rejoin the
real, constitutional United States of America? Will he cling to the
now-defunct United Governments, may it rot in hell? Or will he
simply think himself a bigger and more successful warlord, King of
Richmond with some neofeudal vision of Virginia? I have to get him
cooperating, vaccinating his people.

Travis Tyler, General, United States Army
(Retired), mused and dozed to the jouncing and rocking of the MRAP.
Infantrymen learn to sleep anywhere. He found he hadn’t forgotten
how.

Jill’s ears rang and the building shook,
raining ceiling tiles, shards of glass and pieces of light fixture
onto her. She rolled out of bed and slid underneath, the IV ripping
painfully out of her arm. Right now the threat of the second storey
coming down on top of her was greater than that of enemy fire. She
was just about to slide out from under the bed when a stronger
shock and a blast of debris swept the room. Two inner walls
collapsed, and pieces of the ceiling and floor above rained down.
The outer wall leaned drunkenly, sunlight pouring in.

She heard weapons fire, frantic and close.
Screams and cries of triumph mingled with the smells of blood and
the stink of death, smoke and cordite.
We’re being overrun
.
She racked her brain for a way out, pleaded with God for a miracle
that would fix her broken spine and free her legs to move.
Christine said God always answers prayer but don’t sit around on
your ass and wait for Him. Good advice in my book.

She looked around, then upward to the hole in
the ceiling. Maybe… She slung her PW10, pulled on her gloves and
started climbing. Five hundred pull-ups a day paid off.

Up a slanted wooden beam she dragged herself,
slithering along its inclined plane like a snake to emerge into the
room above. It was some kind of office, disused and dusty. Bracing
herself awkwardly she shoved the desk over to the window so she
could climb up on it using only her upper body strength. Lying on
the flat surface, she knocked the jagged remnants of the window
glass out and took stock.