My Homies,

It's been a bit since I finished Uncle Evans.  I've been working on some other stories and I think I have decent starts for three.  I've been posting them on my Patreon Page, but ARF yields more and better feedback.  

The first few chapters of each story are posted below, and the polls is above.

The three choices are:

American Exit.  A revenge/political thriller novel.  An American Special Forces Veteran who works for an unnamed government learns that a small, U.S. allied nation has been sold to a competitor nation by various government and corporate interests.  Rather than leave the country with the rest of the embassy staff, Mr. John stays behind to exact justice on the Americans who sold out this ally and its people.

An Eagle at Twilight.  A retired Marine Colonel is brought back on active duty to help an old friend who is now a senior general.  Once back in uniform, Colonel Ed Doniphan quickly begins to doubt the motivations of his old friend, General Scott Hamler.  What's more, he has serious reservations about the general's new mission.

The Spartan's Inferno.  Third book of the Spartan's Last March series.  The Colonel's son and his team keep fighting across post-apocalyptic America.

Happy Reading.  Votes and comments are appreciated.


P.S.

The formatting here isn't great for reading.  If you want to make it a little easier on your eyeballs you can try my Patreon Page.

JG Elliott Patreon

American Exit

Chapter 1.  The Embassy

"You know how much it cost to build this embassy?" the woman asked.  She and the man stood together on a balcony overlooking the embassy's courtyard.  In the center of the courtyard, an American flag waved lazily with the breeze.  The woman's title was "Deputy Chief of Mission."  She'd spent an entire career in the State Department, more working in one embassy or another.  She had the streaks for gray hair and the crow's feet to prove it.  She wasn't without her dignity though, which made the scene unfolding before her harder to bear.  The man standing next to her had also made a career working in far-off lands.  His official title, when he had one,  was usually something that sounded both official and vague.  Things like, 'Cultural Advisor' or 'Infrastructure Assessor,' or his favorite, 'Deputy Liaison for Linkage and Cooperation.'  He didn't answer her question.  She didn't expect an answer.  She kept talking.
"It cost 1,333 years."
That raised his curiosity.
"It cost over a thousand years?  How's that."
"I did the math," she said.  "I calculated the original dollar amount, but what's a dollar worth these days?  The coin of our realm has been a fickle thing.  It is almost meaningless.  A dollar should be a way to measure how much something costs.  Like an inch, or a pound, or a degree of an angle.  The only difference is that an inch is always an inch.  An inch doesn't change.  You can't say that for about a dollar though.  I could tell you what a dollar could buy when I first started as a foreign officer, and I could tell you what a dollar buys now, and the two ain't the same.  You got any cigarettes?"
The man standing next to her wordlessly reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  He didn't smoke, but he always kept a pack handy.  He passed the pack over to her as he looked out over the courtyard.  Plumes of smoke rose skyward.  Members of the embassy staff dumped documents into burn barrels by the box load.  Nearby, a Marine manned a radial arm saw with a metal cutting blade.  He placed weapons under the saw one at a time and cut them into pieces.  Aluminum dust flew in all directions.  She went on.
"I figured the best way to quantify what this embassy cost was this way.  Take the cost of the embassy and divide it by how much the average American taxpayer makes in a year.  That's how I came up with 1,333 years.  Think about that.  If you took everything your average American worker earned, it would take him 1,333 years to cover the cost of this embassy.  Or, if you took 1,333 Americans, and took every single dollar they earned in a year, that's what this embassy cost."
He didn't say anything.  She went on.  "All those hours at work.  All those hours commuting.  Missed birthdays and missed anniversaries.  That is a lot of time, time Americans spend not doing what they want to do.  Time that they weren't spending with their kids, or their friends, husbands, or family members.  That's what this embassy costs.  One way or another, it cost American lives…
"And we're just going to give it to them."
To accentuate her point, one of the burn barrels flared.  A Marine had just dropped a thermite grenade onto a pile of computer hard drives.  Strange flames hisses and spat with chemical ferocity.
"I've done this exact same thing too many times now."  She puffed on her cigarette.  Her movements were practiced, elegant, and maybe even sensual.  A young embassy staffer brought another box of computer hard drives out to the burn barrel.  He handed it to the Marine who upended the box, and the hard drives tumbled into the flames.  She went on.  "When we get back, I'm retiring.  I'm moving back to Texas.  Where are you from anyway?"
"Port Moss.  That's in Washington State."
"Is that near Seattle?"
"It wasn't near anything except the Army recruiter's office."
"You gonna go back there when you retire?" She asked.
"I'm not going back," the man said.
She puffed again  The smoke drifted up, blue-black.  She puffed on the cigarette once, twice, then laughed.
"The embassy is supposed to be a no-smoking zone.  The ambassador was a hard ass about that."
"Where is the ambassador?" He asked.  She snorted a mocking laugh.
"He's gone.  That asshole was the first to leave."
"Then there's no worrying about what he thinks," the man said.  He pointed at the flag still flying on its pole.  "He left his flag though."
"It never meant that much to him.  The man was a political money bundler.  He was on the winning team in that last election.  That's the only reason he got the ambassadorship.  He couldn't even find this country on a map."
Another Marine came out into the courtyard with an armload of shotguns.  He set them down by the Marine with the saw, stacking them like cordwood.
She puffed again and went on.  "That fucker is somewhere over the Pacific Ocean right now, probably negotiating a deal for some book that'll be ghostwritten for him.  That or bundling funds for the next election."
More cigarette puffs.  The man thought about staying silent but didn't.  He liked the woman.
"He bundled foreign money for that election.  Most of that money came from the place that'll be rolling the tanks in here tomorrow."
She froze, cigarette halfway to her lips.  "So that's true?  Not just conspiracy theory?"
"It's true.  They dumped a lot of money into the last election.  Your old ambassador was the point man on that."
"Shit," she cursed.  She took another puff.  "What going to happen to him?"
"Nothing," the man said.  "Nothing will happen.  Nobody does anything about anything anymore."
She frowned at the statement but agreed.  She turned from the man back to the hustle and bustle in the courtyard.
"I wanted to be an ambassador.  Once.  Long ago.  I wanted to spread the best of America to the rest of the world.  I believed in all that.  Truth.  Justice.  The American way.  The shining city on the hill.  Our values.  Our prosperity.  Our hope.  Not anymore.  All that's gone.  No hope or optimism left.  What's the point of being the ambassador of a nation in decline, a nation that is choosing to decline."  She turned away from the courtyard and looked him over again; from top-to-bottom and back up again.
"You don't talk much, do you?" She asked.
"Not talking is a key element of my job description," he replied.  She smiled.
"I always did like brooding men."
"I'm not brooding, Margaret."
She snorted out a laugh.  "You're always brooding."  She sighed, then said,  "The helicopters will be here tonight  They'll take us to the ships the Navy has parked off the coast."
"Our helicopters leave tonight, their tanks come in tomorrow morning."
"Yeah," she said.  One could feel the shame and disappointment in her voice.  Then she said, "Not all the Americans are leaving.  Some are staying."
"I know.  I know all about them."
"Assholes," she said.  Then she asked, "Do you know what helicopters they are going to use for the evacuation?"  The man shook his head no.
"I've been evacuated out of an embassy in every type of helicopter the Marines have.  Did you know that?  Not the gunship ones, of course, just the transport helicopters.  But that's enough right?  That's a lot of embassies I've had to see abandoned.  What kind of career is that?  What kind of life is that?  You spend your whole life giving away America one piece at a time."
"It ain't easy to live with," the man agreed.
"No, it isn't," she agreed.  "As soon as this is over, I'm retiring and moving back to Texas.  I'm going to get a dog.  I haven't had a dog since High School."
"What kind of dog?" the man asked.
"Huh?"
"What kind of dog are you going to get?"
"Seems like an odd question.  We're giving away our embassy.  We're giving away this whole nation, and you want to know what kind of dog I'm going to get?"
The man shrugged.  "Embassies fall all the time.  Wars start and wars end.  Empires rise and fall.  But dogs, dogs are important."
She laughed again.  "I'm going to get one of those Australian dogs.  The blue ones.  Like in that kid's cartoon."
The man nodded appreciatively.  "That's a good show."
She smiled.  She flicked the cigarette butt out towards one of the columns of smoke.  Then she rested her hand on his, softly, and she looked into his eyes.
"I have to go back inside.  I have a country team meeting to run.  I always liked you, John.  You're a good man."
Then she turned and went back inside the embassy.  The man watched her go and hoped she'd make it back to Texas.  He lingered a little longer and watched the carefully scripted destruction unfold a little longer.  Then he walked into the courtyard to where the Marines were.

It was mostly just Americans down there.  Marines and other uniformed service members, private citizens who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and were eager to leave, and the embassy staff.  The local nationals were mostly gone.  They were all home, preparing their families for what was going to happen next, tomorrow when the tanks came in.  Some had stayed, in the hope that they would be evacuated to America too.  In a few hours, they would see what the United States' promises were worth.  The man, John, walked over to the table where the Marine was cutting up the weapons.  A second Marine was standing there, a big one, older.  He held a clipboard.  John went to him.
"Gunny, is that the personnel manifest you got there?" he asked.  The Gunny grunted and nodded.
"Yes sir, Mr. John.  Care to see it?"
"Please."
The Gunny handed over a clipboard.  A dozen pieces of paper were held fast by its metal clip.  Running down each piece of paper were the names of the Americans in the country.  Some were highlighted in yellow.
"The ones that aren't evacuating… those are the ones highlighted in yellow, right?" Mr. John asked.  The Gunnery Sergeant grunted an affirmative.
"Yes sir.  And the one highlighted in green is inbound, Mr. John.  You'll probably recognize that name."
John did recognize that name.
The Marine at the chop saw swore.  A huge cloud of aluminum dust engulfed him.  The saw made a painful, mechanical screech and stopped.  The smell of burnt carbon filled the air.  The Gunny turned away to attend to whatever was the matter.  The man, John, watched him go with a careful eye.  He flipped through the papers, taking mental note of six of the highlighted names, committing them to memory.  Like not talking, quickly memorizing information was a key element of his job description.  That done, he set down the list.
He walked over to the saw table.  He picked up a shotgun off the uncut pile.  He worked the bolt a few times, then checked the safety to make sure it moved freely.  It did.  The Marine cutting the weapons and the Gunny paid him no attention.  He slung the shotgun over his shoulder and walked inside the embassy.
The inside was just as hectic as the outside.  Embassy staffers rushed up and down the corridors.  Papers lay scattered across the floor.  A group of Marines wielding fire axes were smashing apart furniture.  A sailor was casing an American flag.  Mr. John waded through the chaos and bustle, aloof, above it all.  Not being noticed was also part of his job description.  He was good at that too.  He came to a thick door with a key card lock.  He swiped his keycard and went through the door.
On the opposite side of the door was a set of stairs that went down.  The walls were thicker here, bare and unpainted cement.  The ends of the steel reinforcing rods were visible.  John descended into the basement.  He twisted and turned and came to another door.  He swiped his keycard, then punched in a code on the keypad.  The door's lock hissed.  John opened it and went inside.
The room on the other side was a treasure trove of weapons and ammunition.  John headed across the room to a safe on the other side.  The most potent weapon in the room was kept inside.  John spun the dial and opened the safe.
It was full of money.  Stacks of bills.  $100s and $20s.  Used.  Non-sequential numbers.  There were several different types of empty bags around the room.  John grabbed a medium-sized backpack and filled it with money.  Then he grabbed a few more sheaves of bills and stuffed them into various pockets.  On a small shelf inside the safe were several data storage devices.  Those also contained money, in a fashion.  Not as spendable as the cash, but still valuable, and easier to transport.  They went into the bag.  On another shelf sat a pair of brown manilla envelopes.  Mr. John grabbed those as well.  That done, he turned his attention to more traditional weapons.
A metal rack full of carbines and submachine guns was bolted to one wall.  John liked carbines for general-purpose work, but he didn't have general-purpose work in mind, and he wanted to keep things simple as far as ammunition went.  He grabbed a German submachine gun off the rack.  It took the same ammunition as the pistol he carried.  He stuffed that into a large black duffle bag along with the shotgun.  Then he rummaged through the room.  He found ammunition and magazines and stuffed them into the bag.  A set of body armor went into the duffle as well.  He found a set of night vision in a plastic case.  That went into the bag.  A shelf held a variety of radios in charging stations.  Some were preprogrammed with the local emergency services channels.  He grabbed one of those and some spare batteries.  He found a very high-end scanner that could pick up more than just the local fire department and police networks and grabbed that too.  Into the bag.
He was filling up his third bag when he found the stash of grenades.  No fragmentation grenades, unfortunately, but there were plenty of concussion and riot control grenades, as well as a few incendiaries.  Those, along with a gas mask filled the last bag.
There was an enormous hard plastic case in one corner of the room.  Stacked beside it were several of the distinct military-grade ammo cans.  John went to the case.  Stenciled on the outside was "MG 338".  Stenciled on the ammo cans was, ".338 N.M."  And stenciled below that were the letters, "A.P.I."  John hefted the case up onto a worktable and opened it up.
Typically, John was very reserved with his emotions, but when he saw what was inside the case, he whistled with appreciation.  He couldn't think of any situation where he would need such a weapon, but he also couldn't imagine getting into any kind of trouble that such a weapon could not get him out of.  The case and the ammo would go with the duffels.  The last thing he grabbed was a pair of rechargeable flashlights.  One was broken, John knew, but he grabbed it anyway.  He planned on giving it a second life.  He tossed the flashlights inside the duffle bag.  They made an aluminum "thunk" sound as they bounced against each other and settled inside.
The door rang with the sound of a pounding fist.  John opened the door.  A squad of Marines stood outside.  They didn't look happy with whatever task they'd just been assigned.  Their sergeant spoke up.
"We're here to destroy all this ammo and the weapons."
John nodded.
"Before you do," he began.  He spoke slowly, clearly, and loudly so all the Marines would hear.  "I need help carrying some of this stuff out to my truck."  As he spoke, he pulled a sheaf of bills out of a pocket and held it up for all the Marines to see.  There were ways to hand out bribes.  John had experience with all of them.  He handed the stack of bills to the squad leader.  The way John saw things, it was their tax money anyway.  And besides, if the U.S. government could give away not just an embassy but the allied nation that went with it, they could give these Marines a bonus.
The sergeant took the bills, stuffed them in a pocket, and turned to his squad.
"Help this man load his truck."

The truck was a Japanese-made four-wheel drive SUV.  It was old, boxy, and without any frills.  It was also completely reliable, had a powerful engine, and could go anywhere.  John opened the back hatch and the Marines loaded everything inside.  They grunted as they heaved the big plastic case and the ammo cans marked, ".338 N.M." inside.
"Anything else?" the squad leader asked.
John looked his truck over.  The cargo space was full, but it had a roof rack, and the roof rack was empty.  John pulled another sheaf of bills out of a pocket, about $10,000 worth by the feel of it.  "Fuck it," he thought.  Uncle Sam was just going to give it away along with everything else, and I will not be alive long enough to spend it.  He passed the bills out to the Marines.
"Back inside, on the ground floor of the embassy, there is a cafeteria.  I need you to go back into the back, into the storage area.  There are a bunch of boxes back there full of Styrofoam cups and trays.  Grab a bunch and bring them out here.  I don't care if you bring cups or trays, just so long as they are Styrofoam, and you bring enough to fill the roof rack."
The Marines looked at Mr. John, looked at the bills, then disappeared.  Five minutes later they came back with enough Styrofoam to fill the roof rack and twenty more just like it.  Five minutes after that, Mr. John drove his truck up to the embassy gate.
"It's okay," the Gunnery Sergeant yelled to the gate guards.  "He can leave."
The gate opened.  John drove out of the embassy; off US soil and into the real world.
In the rearview mirror, he could see the Marines lower the flag down the flag pole; Iwo Jima in reverse.  America in decline.  He shook his head.  America might be in decline, but it wasn't going down without a fight.  Six names, plus the inbound.  That made seven.  He checked his watch.  Sundown was a few hours away.  He hit the accelerator and the Japanese SUV zoomed deeper into a capital city that was about to fall.

About an hour after Mr. John left the embassy grounds, the Marines who helped load the truck sat eating their rations.  The youngest one, who was only 18, turned to his squad leader.
"What do you think that old man needed all that Styrofoam for?"
The older Marine only froze a spoon of ration-pack chili macaroni halfway to his lips.  "Boot, if you fuck this up for me, I'm going to fuck you up.  So keep your fucking mouth shut.  The old man, the Styrofoam, and all the rest.  You didn't see shit."
The younger Marine nodded understanding and went back to his spaghetti and meatballs.

Chapter 2: The Shop
John, Mr. John, drove from the U.S. Embassy through the capital city.  This was a nation that was hours away from collapse, and it looked every bit of it.  Panicked parents pulled panicked children along, rushing to some perceived place of refuge.  The train stations and the ferry terminals along the river overflowed with people, all of them screaming and shouting and angling for a ride out of the capital, out of the country, a ride to somewhere, anywhere.
On the narrow streets, electric signs flashed and glowed, their messages were written in English, French, Arabic, and a dozen different Asian languages.  John eased the modified SUV past families loading their most prized possessions into cars, trucks, tiny vans, anything that moved; 11th-hour escapes from what was to come.  And then, of course, there were the opportunists.  John drove past a shopping center being ransacked.  Looters poured out in all directions carrying everything from high-end consumer electronics to arm loads of worthless knickknacks.  There wasn't a policeman to be found.  Some were fleeing with their families, no doubt.  John also knew that some of the locals had been paid off.  They were just waiting for their new bosses to arrive.  Then they would assist with the roundups and the political purges.
John drove past a bank.  Like the ferry terminals and train stations, a crowd had formed outside the front doors.  People in the crowd were shouting and waiving their latest statements.  They wanted to pull their deposits out before the tanks came in.  "Not going to happen," John said aloud in the privacy of his vehicle.  The collapse wasn't coming, it was here.  Whether it was money, medicine, or a passport and a plane ticket out, if you didn't have it now, you did not have it.  And that was that.  John thought about the money and the manila envelopes in his backpack.  He had what he needed.  He prepared for this.  But he wasn't exactly a normal person.  He had knowledge, training, and experiences that the people outside the bank did not.  He also had access to resources they could not imagine.  In front of the bank, a little girl stared out into traffic with dark, almond-shaped eyes.  She looked to be four or five.  Her parents held her hands, each one waved a bank slip at the closed bank.  John felt sorry for the girl.  Would she make it?  John could already imagine the story years from now: the girl escapes to America and makes good.  But she comes alone.  Her parents don't make it out.  John could also imagine the other story, the one that doesn't get told.  Neither the girl nor her parents escape.  They become part of the statistics in the footnotes of some historian's book.  Feeling sorry changed to feeling guilty.  John could not save the country.  He could not save the girl.  What he could offer though, was vengeance.
John made one stop on his journey.  He turned down a narrow, garbage-strewn alley.  Halfway down and sandwiched between two overflowing dumpsters was a stack of plastic trays holding empty glass bottles for recycling.  John stopped and put the entire stack of trays and bottles into his truck.  Then he got back in and kept driving.

An industrial center sat along the bank of the river that ran through the capital city.  John drove there.  He stopped outside a rollup door on a building made of steel and concrete blocks.  Florescent lights blinked.  Overhead, wires crisscrossed the street, with all the orderliness of tangled fishing line.  John rolled up the door, drove inside, parked, and got out.
"You should have left already," a voice called from inside.  Behind the rollup door was a workspace.  Behind that, was an office and stairs that led up to an apartment.  Metalworking machines lined most of the walls and took up much of the floor space.  Shelves and pallets held auto parts and pieces of steel stock.  Racks held all manner of tools in neat, organized rows.  Everything smelled of machine oil and burnt metal.
John rolled the door down and locked it.  "That's funny, Dat.  I was going to tell you something similar.  Ricky with you?"
A middle-aged man stepped out of the shadows.  He had dark skin and dark features.  He stood about five and a half feet tall.  His frame was lean, comprised of tight wiry muscle.  His hands were like a pair of vices, the hands of a man who spent his whole life making a living with them.
"Ricky's in the back.  What are you still doing here?" Dat asked again.  He was a native, but he spoke English without a hint of an accent.
John looked his fully packed vehicle over, trying to decide where to start.  He decided on the roof rack and started taking down the boxes of Styrofoam.
"I'm not leaving," John said casually.  "I'm sticking around.  There are some things I need to clean up."  John raised his voice and called out,  "Ricky!  Your Uncle John could use your help in here."
Dat walked over and helped John with the boxes.  "Not a good idea, John.  The enemy army is right outside the capital.  It's not just the rebels anymore.  Their foreign patrons are out there too."
"Yeah.  I've seen drone footage of the columns.  Lots of tanks.  And those six-by-six wheeled APCs."  John found a plastic bucket in one corner of the shop.  It was bright orange.  He set a box of Styrofoam cups beside it and peered inside, checking for holes or leaks.  "Dat, you got any gas around here?  It doesn't have to be good.  Old gas will work just fine."
Dat nodded.  As he did, a boy entered the machine shop from some room in the back.  The boy was maybe eight years old.  He wore shorts and a black T-shirt.  The letters, "AC DC" and a lighting bolt was stenciled on the front of the shirt.  The boy was young, but his eyes suggested he was wise beyond his years.  The boy gave a smile.
"Hello, Mr. John."
"Hey there Ricky.  I know things are busy, but can you help me with something while your dad and I talk."  John slipped another $100 bill out of his pocket and held it up.  Ricky's smile grew brighter.  The boy snatched the bill.  Dat set a clear plastic jug full of gas next to the bucket.  The gas was old and dirty.  John could see flakes of rust swirling in it.
"I use that to clean tools," Dat said.
"It's perfect," John said to Dat.  To Ricky, he said, "I want you to take this Styrofoam and rip it up into little pieces.  Do it over this bucket so all the little bits fall inside."  John demonstrated.  Bits of Styrofoam drifted down into the orange, plastic pale.
"You'd be better off with the Styrofoam they use for packing.  It crumbles better.  Gives you those little beads," Dat said.
"You're right, but this is what I got.  This'll work fine," John said.  He went back to his vehicle, reached inside, and pulled out the backpack.  "I brought something for you.  Mind if I use some of your shop equipment?"
Dat shrugged.  "Sure.  Care to share what it is you are planning?"
"Can we talk while I work?  I'm on the clock."  Dat nodded.  John rummaged through the bags in his vehicle and pulled out the flashlights.  They were big, reminiscent of 1980s police lights.  John held them up for Dat to see.  "Got any freeze plugs?"  Dat pointed to some plastic bins mounted above a stainless steel worktable.  John headed towards the table, flashlights and backpack in hand.  He set both on the worktable and opened up the backpack.
"If the foreigners catch you, it won't be good for you.  You'll have it even worse if the rebels catch you.  They both have lists, and your name is on it."
"I've got an official cover."
"That might work with the foreigners.  The rebels won't care about any cover, official or otherwise."
"Well, let's just say I won't be taken alive and leave it at that."
Dat's gnarled hands searched through the parts pins.  They found a pack of brass freeze plugs.  He took one out of the pack, then took one of the flashlights and held them up, comparing their sizes.
"As far as lists go Dat, I've got a list of my own.  And whatever they do to me, it'll be worse for you and your son.  Nobody likes spies, but they like traitors and collaborators even less.  Our embassy had more leaks than the Russian Navy.  Your government was even worse.  Your name is going to be on the first page of any list they have.  And whatever happens to you, Ricky will get it worse."  John laid a couple of the data storage devices and the manilla envelopes on the worktable.  Then he looked over at Dat's son.  The boy was dutifully breaking apart the Styrofoam.  
"They'll torture Ricky and kill him in front of you, just to see the look on your face.  That's the best case.  The people we are dealing with, they don't value the lives of children.  At least, they don't value children the way normal people do."
John opened the two envelopes and dumped them out on the work table.  Passports with blue covers and other documents fell out.
"Those are for you and Ricky.  Passports, immigration papers, local IDs for when you get to the states."
Dat picked one of the passports up and inspected it.  "Are these real?"
"They're made by the same people who make the real ones.  I guess they are real enough."  John handed over the data storage devices.  Dat took them but raised an eyebrow.
"What's on these?"
John did some math in his head.  "About 30 years."
"Huh?"
"Inside joke," John said.  "That is seed money, for when you get to America.  You can start a new shop.  Or, whatever."
"Why?"
"The United States owes you a debt.  They owe your son a debt.  But they aren't going to pay it, so I am."  John began taking the flashlights apart.  He unscrewed the endcaps and set them on the table.  He took a small Allen wrench off a mount on the wall and began removing the switches.
"Maybe I don't go,"  Dat said.  "Maybe I stay.  Maybe I stay and fight."
"Fight for what?  For who?  You don't have a country anymore, Dat.  The whole government left.  The president, the cabinet, all of them.  They took their payoffs from my government.  They took their other payoffs from that other government.  They looted the treasury and they spilt.  Right now, they're all in Abu Dabhi and Qatar, picking out which hotel suite they're going to live the rest of their lives in.
"There's nothing here worth your life, or Ricky's.  Even if there was a viable insurgency, my government would not support it.  That other player?  The one with all the tanks idling down the road?  Yeah, they paid us off too."
"If a counterrevolution is not viable, then why are you staying, Mr. John?"
"I'm not here for any political reasons.  I'm done with that.  Rebels rebel.  Foreign countries do what they need to do to advance their interests.  That's what they do.  I'm sure the people who'll be driving the tanks in here tomorrow love their country as much as I love mine.  I won't fault a man for being patriotic.  I felt that way once.  Still do, but in a different way maybe.  I don't hold any animosity towards any of them.  Not the rebels.  Not their foreign backers.  That's all business.  It's not personal.
"But what I do take personally is the fact that some of my countrymen facilitated this whole thing.  They did it for money or power or maybe because they're just assholes.  But they did it.  They sold out your country, an ally of the United States, to our biggest competitor.  The United States gets weaker.  Our enemy gets stronger.  Your people all get fucked.  And everybody is just supposed to be okay with it.  Well, I'm not okay with it.  The people who live here are going to face some real-world consequences for being abandoned by the United States.  Families will be ripped apart.  Businesses that people spent their whole lives building will be destroyed.  Fortunes that were saved over lifetimes will be seized.  People are going to get executed.  More people are just going to disappear.  When the sun comes up tomorrow, I wouldn't want to be a Muslim living in this jewel of the East.  Real-world consequences.  I'm going to make sure some of the Americans that facilitated this whole debacle get a taste of those same real-world consequences."
While he spoke, John hauled some of the duffle bags out of the back of his truck.  He set them on the worktable, opened them up, and began emptying their contents.
Dat waved his hand around, pointing out the shop, the tools, the machinery.  "What about all this?  My shop?"
"The digital currency I just gave you?  I just bought your shop, and another one just like it in the States."
Dat checked the size of the freeze plugs against the empty, aluminum flashlight tube.  He held the small brass cup in front of John.
"I'll start up the drill press.  What size hole?"
This size, John said.  He held up the German submachine gun.  Dat nodded.  He fitted one of the freeze plugs into a vice beneath a drill press, then he fiddled with the machine.  "You can't stop what's coming.  You know that right?"
"I know that.  I'm not trying to stop anything."
"What you are proposing…  You'll end up dying here."
John nodded.  "I know that too.  In that stack of papers are directions on how to access my estate plan.  I've got you and Ricky listed as the beneficiaries on all my accounts.  Between that and what I gave you, money won't be an issue.  Not for you.  Not for Ricky."
Dat hit the start button on the drill press.  The machine hummed.  The drill bit in the chuck gleamed as it spun.  "Why?"  Dat asked.
"Because we are friends.  Because I don't have a family of my own and I want Ricky to have a chance."
"Not that," Dat said.  "The other thing."
John took a scanner out of his bag and switched it on.  It came alive with the sing-song cadence of the local dialect.  "Pride," he answered.
Dat snorted a laugh.  "A man as old as you should have gotten past pride."  With a gnarled hand, Dat pulled down a handle on the drill press.  The spinning drill bit descended onto the freezeplug, cutting a hole in its center big enough to accommodate one of the submachine gun's bullets.
"I should have," John began.  "But…  I joined the Army at seventeen.  Part of it was, I just wanted to get away from where I was.  But another part of it was I believed in it; America.  I believed in all of it.  After the Army, I went to a small farm in Virginia and worked for some other people.  Spent my whole life doing it, doing the dirty work that America needed to get done.  Because I believed that I was serving a greater good.
"I don't believe that now.
"Seeing us just cut and run; the embassy, this country, these people, our allies.  It hurts.  It hurt the first time I saw it, and this isn't the first time.  I'm fifty.  I'm old and I know there is no turning back the clock.  I also know that everything I did, everything I dedicated my life to was a lie.  There was no greater good.  There was no higher cause.  Shinning city on the hill and all that bullshit, that's just something the people in the big club use to sell it all to people like me, to get us out there in the mud doing their work for them, so they can get reelected, or get a bump in their stock price before the quarterly earnings report, or get their kid some no-show board of directors job with an energy company.  War's a racket, just like that one Marine said.  The ones who run things, they don't care about people like you or your son.  They don't care about people like me.  I can deal with that.  But the problem is, they don't care about America.  That, I cannot sit with."
"So, you are going to stay here and commit some last, violent and desperate act?"  Dat asked.  "If they don't care about you, why should you care about them?  Why should you care enough to sacrifice your own life to kill some of them."  Dat nodded towards the backpack.  "You have a fortune in there.  You could disappear.  Go somewhere new.  Start fresh.  Forget all this.  If it is bullshit, then don't let yourself get pulled down into the bullshit.  Rise above it."  Dat raised the freeze plug up to eye level and blew away the bits of brass dust.  He eyed the hole, checking it for true.  Then he eyed the stack beside it.  Several more to drill.
"They trained me how to do a lot of things," John said.  "They've been training me since I was a teenager.  The most important thing they trained me to do is not quit.  No matter what.  No matter how hard.  No matter how cold, or how hot.  No sleep, no food, no ammo, doesn't matter.  You don't quit.  Ever.  That's what they instilled in me.  And that's the one thing they keep asking me to do.
"Over and over.  Quit here and quit there.  Lost embassies.  Lost battles.  Lost wars.  Lost countries.  Lost friends.  One after another.  Over and over again.  Another flag coming down the flag pole.  Another helicopter landing on the rooftop and here we are.  And it's all done so shamelessly.  They beat all the quit out of that seventeen-year-old kid.  Then they ordered him to follow leaders who got nothing inside them but quit.  They ain't even got the courage to let us do the fighting.  Just a whole lot of quit all around."
John set the shotgun on the table.  He pulled out several cardboard boxes.  Each one was labeled "12 Gauge Defender.  1 oz rifled slug.  Three 00 Buck Pellets."  John opened the box and loaded the shotgun.  Metal hissed as the magazine spring compressed.  John went on.
"Call it pride.  Call it vanity.  Call it whatever.  I'm not quitting on this one.  Couldn't live with myself if I did.  I've gotten to an age where I can look to the end and the beginning and know which one is closer.  I ain't dying a quitter."
Dat fitted another freeze plug into the drill press.  He asked, "Do you have bottles for the Styrofoam and gas?"
"Yeah.  Grabbed some on the way here."
"What size?"
"Liter and a half," John answered.
"Good size for it," Dat said.  He lowered the drill bit and more brass shavings flew.  "Lots of Styrofoam over there.  We'll need to get you another bucket."
John grunted.  He took the night vision out of one bag, inserted batteries, and tested the equipment.  Dat finished drilling another plug.  Across the shop, Ricky called out in his native tongue.  He'd filled his bucket.  Dat told his son where to find another.  Then the old man finished drilling out the second plug.
"Anybody I know?" Dat asked.
"What do you mean, anybody you know?"
"You said you had a list.  A list of Americans.  Do I know anybody on it?"
John thought.  "Mostly mid-tier nobodies.  One guy is flying in though.  He's going to finish all the deals up and put a bow on them, I guess.  You might know him."
"Who is it?"
John said the man's name.  Dat whistled.
"Isn't he a general or something?"
"He's retired."
"Hmm," Dat said, finishing another plug.  "Still, people will notice if you kill him."
John set aside the night vision and picked out some of the grenades. He inspected them, checking their safety devices.  "You still got your boats?"
"I do.  Same places as before.  Keys are over in the keybox by the wall.
John nodded.  Dat finished the next plug and spoke.
"I don't think you have it in you."
"What?"
"This thing you say you are going to do.  I don't think you have it in you.  Some people have murdering in their nature.  You don't.  You can kill.  I know that.  But not murder.  Going on a murder-suicide rampage is not who you are.  It is not you.  The nature of you, the traits that made you do those things that got you here today.  Those are the traits of a good man, not an evil man.  Your character, the guilt you feel about your country abandoning us, the humiliation you feel about being told you can't do the things you trained your whole life to do, those aren't the traits of a man who would do the things your pride compels you to do.  You're a dangerous man, I know this.  You can be a ruthless one too.  And you are a proud man.  But you are not a sociopath.  You aren't evil.  You aren't a murderer.
"You and me, we've murdered plenty of people."
"We killed people.  Not murder.  Not the same.  Very different."
"The people we killed might not see a difference."
"I don't care what they think," Dat said.  "They're dead.  This is about what you think.  Your moral sense of things.  Killing an enemy in a war or an intelligence operation, ethically, and morally is not the same as what you are proposing.  That is justified.  It serves a purpose beyond yourself.  If you kill your countrymen here it would just be vengeance.  There is no other purpose to it beyond satisfying your pride.  It will be no different than stabbing a man in a bar because you didn't like the way he looked at you."
"It would be different for me.  And whether it is killing or murder, I won't have any problem doing what needs to be done on these people.  No matter what the cost.  Even though it means dying myself."
"Maybe," Dat said.  "Maybe not.  I think your heart is not as hard as you believe.  You are a good man.  I think you might be too gentle to see what you are proposing to the conclusion.  I think when you see two paths, and one is an evil path, and one is a good and honorable path, you will take the honorable path.  You say you want to kill your Americans.  You don't.  You want to do what is honorable.  If another honorable alternative presents itself, you will take it.  That is your nature."  Dat stacked the drilled freeze plugs together and then slid them into the aluminum flashlight cylinder and checked their fit.  They slid in smoothly.  Not too tight.  Not too loose.  A perfect fit.  "Halfway done," he announced.  "Now let's drill the end caps and make a wipe."
"Think we could make one for the shotgun?" John asked.
Dat nodded.  "It'll make for a long weapon.  But we could do it.  They didn't have any at the embassy you could grab?"
John shook his head.  "Once upon a time, they would have.  Today?  This is a different America."
"I liked the old America better," Dat said.
"Me too," John said.  "Me too."


Chapter 3: Colonel Cao

Colonel Cao stood amongst the line of parked tanks facing toward the capital.  To a casual observer, the tanks might have appeared to be old Soviet models.  A more skilled observer would recognize them as Chinese Type 69 and Type 79 tanks.  Scattered throughout the tank column were other military vehicles; six-wheeled armored personnel carriers, big olive green cargo trucks, self-propelled howitzers, and infantry fighting vehicles whose turrets looked like upside-down frying pans.  There were also a fair number of civilian vehicles.  Those had been pressed into military service.  This was supposed to be a revolutionary army, after all, and so light trucks and SUVs were parked next to the larger metal behemoths.  Manning all this equipment was a people's army bringing about the fundamental transformation of this small Asian nation.  Some of the people were locals.  These were the rebels, the ones who started the insurgency years before.  Others were members of a foreign army.  Cao's people.  Those were the ones driving the tanks and the trucks and the armored personnel carriers.  For every "local freedom fighter," there were nine "foreign military advisors."  Whether they were locals or foreign liberators, the fighters in the column were going to make a lot of rich and powerful people even more rich and powerful.  That was why Colonel Cao was here.
Cao checked himself in the mirror of his big, European SUV.  It wasn't a local vehicle pressed into military service.  It was new.  His government bought in on the open market.  Colonel Cao wasn't the type to ride in the Spartan discomfort of an armored vehicle, and an APC wouldn't suit his very specific role.  Cao didn't particularly like his uniform.  He considered it too Western; the pixelated camouflage, the collar, the cut.  Normally Cao enjoyed Western things.  He did his undergraduate studies at UCLA, then to UC Berkeley for a Master's in Business, then to Stanford for a law degree.  But Cao felt that for this endeavor, a more Eastern uniform, a more Maoist uniform, was warranted.  Even so, Cao knew he couldn't expect the entire army to change its uniform just to suit one man or one mission.  He was a realist after all.
The uniform did do a good job of differentiating Cao and the other "advisors" from the indigenous forces.  They wore civilian clothes, mostly loose shirts and cotton shorts.  The only distinguishing item any of them wore were sashes made of braided strips of red, blue, and yellow cloth.  Some wore the braided sashes around their waists, like belts.  Others wore two sashes, one over each shoulder, like the bandoliers of a Hollywood version of a Mexican bandito.  The cloth for the sashes, like the tanks and everything else, came from Cao's homeland.  Most of the rebel army did not know this, but soon their homeland, everything in it, and everyone in it, would be incorporated into Cao's homeland.
"I don't like this waiting," a voice chirped behind him.  Cao turned.  One of the indigenous officers stood there.  His name, oddly enough, was Pickup, like the truck the Americans loved.  Pickup wore tan cotton shorts, a black cotton top, a multicolored sash around his waist, and a pair of black sunglasses.  The sunglasses were local counterfeits of a couture brand.  He also carried an American rifle, an M16A2 that Cao suspected had made its way here from one of the United States' misadventures in the Middle East.  Officially, Colonel Cao was listed as a military advisor to Pickup.  The reality of the situation was that Pickup and his small team of rebels worked for Cao.  They would serve as guides and help Colonel Cao navigate the capital over the next few days.
"We're waiting for the Americans to leave," Cao explained.
"I know that," Pickup answered.  "But I'd rather just go in now.  Better that way."
"The Americans are all leaving tonight.  Tomorrow morning, what's left of the government and the army will collapse.  Then we can just go in and take the capital without a fight."  Cao's nation had already arranged for the president of this nation to fly to a friendly third-party nation in the Middle East, taking most of the treasury with him.  The colonel didn't feel it was necessary to pass that information along.
"We should go in now," Pickup said.  "What matters if we fight or not?  We're going to kill all those soldiers and government people anyway.  Might as well kill them in a fight.  Better to kill them in a fight.  There is honor in fighting.  Lining people up in front of a ditch and shooting them?  Not so honorable."
"Yes, but you might kill some Americans too.  It is better to avoid that.  The Americans made a deal with us.  We won't enter the capital until they leave.  The best thing for us to do is honor that deal."  In truth, various Americans had cut several deals regarding this nation.  Just as Cao's nation had not brought this revolutionary army in on any of the deals, so too the Americans kept the local government out of their dealings, even though they pretended to support it.  Cao's nation was coming in, the Americans were getting out and they were both carving this land and its people up into pieces.  The locals were just an afterthought in this drama.  They were given no say in the matter.
"I wouldn't mind killing some Americans," Pickup said.
"I'm sure you wouldn't," Cao said.  "I'm also sure some of those Americans wouldn't mind killing you."  While he liked things Western and had attended school in the United States, Cao considered most Americans to be naïve, stupid, and weak.  The United States' rise to power had been an accident.  A fluke.  They didn't deserve to be a superpower and were too weak to maintain that status.  One of his nation's goals in this endeavor was to humiliate the Americans, and they would, not that it would matter.  Most Americans had neither shame nor pride.  Most Americans couldn't even find this country on a map.  Most would not even know of its passing.  The American system was an inferior one.  It was destined to be replaced by a stronger, more efficient system.
"But it is best to wait.  The Americans will bring in their helicopters tonight.  By tomorrow morning they'll all be gone.  Then, we can take the capital and the nation without any resistance."
In truth, Cao liked it better this way, with the Americans cutting and running and the prospects of an actual fight low.  Cao was a colonel in his nation's army, but he wasn't a fighter.  He was a businessman.  He'd studied business at the American schools.  He was only wearing a uniform because his position in The Party and his upward trajectory demanded it.  His role here, in the conquering army would be to finalize several of the deals struck with the Americans.  He had received military training, but he considered it rudimentary.  He had weapons too; a pistol on his body armor, a carbine slung over his back, but he wasn't comfortable with them.  He certainly didn't consider himself an expert.  He'd only fired the carbine once.  And that was only half a magazine.  Cao suspected most of his uniformed countrymen had similar levels of training.
Cao looked his counterpart up and down.  Pickup wasn't refined.  He wasn't educated.  He wasn't cultured.  He was just a peasant.  But he was a peasant who knew how to live in the muck and fight.  Pickup looked to be a decade older than Cao, and Cao wasn't young.
"I don't disagree," Pickup said.  "But this might be my only chance to fight Americans.  I know that's not why you are here.  I know that is not your way, but someday I want to sit by the river and tell my grandchildren stories about how I fought and killed Americans as we took our country back.  What will I tell my grandchildren now?  Will I tell them the Americans just ran like cowards and we walked in behind them?  That we negotiated our nation back?  There is no story there.  That isn't the kind of story you tell a boy to motivate him to be a man."
"Still, you don't want to fight the wrong Americans," Cao said.  He thought back to an incident when he was on the campus at UC Berkeley.  A group of student activists were harassing another student.  The student being harassed was a man, a big man, tall with broad shoulders.  The harassers were women or men so effeminate it did made no difference.  Somebody called campus security, and two of their officers were there too.  They were women; women with the minority statuses the Americans loved.  Both were short and both were wide, and not in an athletic sense.
Cao didn't know what sparked the incident, but the harassers were attacking the man mercilessly.  They shouted obscene insults and taunts at him.  They spat at him and threw old bits of food at him.  Each carried a bucket of rotting food with them, just so they had something repulsive to throw.  The security officers were trying to intervene without offending the harassers, who were all members of the politically protected castes.  The harassed man just wanted to get away, but the harassers kept pursuing him.
There was one point during all this when a glob of moldering fruit hit the man square in the face.  When the man wiped the food away, his look had changed completely.  He no longer looked like he just wanted to escape.  His eyes burned with pure rage.  He had the look of a berserker.  He squared off against his attackers and in that instant, Cao was certain the man was going to physically attack the others.
He didn't.
He regained control of himself a second later, turned, and made his escape.  More taunts and rotting food followed him.
If that man had decided to fight, Cao knew the haughty student activists would not have stood a chance.
The harassers had counted on the other man's self-restraint.  That had been the essential element of their plan, whether they knew it or not.  They attacked the man because they knew he wouldn't fight back.  But if he had fought back, none of them would have been able to stop him.  Not the campus security.  He could have disarmed them and knocked them to the ground without breaking a sweat.  Nor could the protestors have stopped him.  If that man turned and grabbed one of the activists, he could have beat them to death and nobody would have been able to stop him.
Cao thought that incident said a lot about Americans in general.  The biggest thing restraining the Americans were themselves.  There naiveite.  Their stupidity.  Their general ignorance.  Their self-absorption.  Their love of comfort and their spurning of self-sacrifice.  Theirs was a nation run by risk-averse geriatrics and hyper-emotional middle-aged women.  They were their own worst enemy.
If, however, that self-restraint went away, then there would be problems.  And it would not take all the Americans either.  It would not even take a majority.  It would only take a few.  It could even take just one.  Just as that one American man could have destroyed both the activists and the campus security patrol with his bare hands, one angry American could turn this endeavor from a bloodless coup into something much more violent.
Cao looked up and down the column again.  To a man, his countrymen had no real combat experience.  The pixilated camouflage uniforms they wore were adopted from the West.  Most of their tanks and weapons were copies of Russian designs, even his pistol and carbine were   His comfortable SUV was made in Germany.  Cao shook his head.  His countrymen were not innovators.  They weren't warriors either.  They were businessmen.  Cao felt confident they could defeat the Americans with backroom deals and money, but only if the Americans exercised their self-limiting self-restraint.  And if they didn't?  Cao would do his duty if it came to that.  But he didn't like even thinking about that prospect.
"Now," Cao began.  "You can get me to all the places we talked about, right?  I need to get to these meetings to finalize all our agreements."
"This is no problem," Pickup said.  "I used to live in this city.  I lived here for a long time.  I used to work the fighting boats on the river."
"When was that?"
"Before I became a terrorist," Pickup said.
Cao reflected for a few seconds and then asked, "Why do they call you Pickup?"  Pickup shook his head.
"I don't know.  One day my soldiers just started calling me that," Pickup said and he waved his hand towards the squad of rebels who would guide Cao and his men through the capital.  "I think did it because they thought I wouldn't like it.  I didn't like it, at least not at first.  But it grew on me."
"They intentionally called you by a nickname you didn't like?"
"Yes."
"And you let them?"
"Yes,"  Pickup said again.
"Hmm," Cao said, pondering the cultural differences.  Politically, the rebels embraced the theories of Mao.  Unfortunately, they took the theory of equality too far.  That kind of familiarity with superiors and insolence wouldn't be tolerated in his home country, Cao thought.  Which meant soon they weren't going to be tolerated here.
Things in this little country were about to change.


Chapter 4: Sports
Day gave way to night.  Dat took his son Ricky and left, but John stayed in the shop and continued his work.
He blew a few bits of lingering aluminum dust off the end of the modified flashlight tube.  One end had been threaded to match the threads on the muzzle of his German submachine gun.  The opposite end had been drilled out to accommodate a passing bullet.  That outgoing hole had been fitted with a "wipe" of thick rubber.  A stack of freeze plugs, also drilled out to accommodate a passing bullet, filled the interior of the tube.  He gave the device one last inspection, then he fitted it onto the submachine gun and set it aside.
The shotgun had a similar device fitted to the end of its muzzle.  This one was painted flat black, and its interior was filled with rolled window screen instead of stacked freeze plugs.  John found old canvas bags and put both the shotgun and submachine gun inside.  After that, he checked on the plastic buckets.
He'd poured Dat's old gasoline into the buckets earlier.  The gasoline had dissolved the Styrofoam and the two had combined into a thick, glue-like substance.  John added more gas, then used a paint mixer attachment on the end of a drill to stir it all up.  That done, he funneled his concoction into the glass bottles he'd picked up in the alleyway.  He corked the bottles with some oil-stained shop rags, then put the bottles back in their plastic trays and set them aside.  He didn’t need them now.  He would need them later.
In a drawer inside a tool chest, he found an old scratch awl.  Its metal surface was scratched and worn, and a crack ran down the length of its plastic handle.  John took the awl to bench sander and sharpened the old tool until its needle-like tip gleamed.  In another corner of the shop, he found a hardwood ball the size of a large egg.  John suspected it was Teak.  He took that to a sander and shaped it until it fit perfectly in his closed fist.  Then he drilled out the center.  He removed the scratch awl's worn plastic handle and tossed it in the trash.  With a brass hammer, he drove the metal spike through the hardwood ball.  He sanded and sharpened it one last time, then he wrapped his fist around his creation and held it up.  The scratch awl's spike protruded three inches out from his fist.  The whole thing felt comfortable in his hand.  He tested it against a water bottle.  He punched through the plastic skin of the bottle effortlessly.  He capped the needle-like point with a piece of plastic and practiced flipping the cap off with his thumb several times.  Then he set that aside too.
He checked his watch.  The hours had passed.  Now was a good time to get going.  He donned his body armor, then put on a shirt and a light coat over that.  He put the radios he'd taken from the embassy on the passenger seat of his truck.  Then he loaded up the rest of his weapons, equipment, and bag of money, opened the roll-up door to the shop, and drove back out into the streets.

The sky was the darkest shade of charcoal gray.  Storm clouds had rolled in and now they blotted out the moon and the stars.  Street signs still blinked and flashed.  People dashed up and down the sides of the streets.  Some were making their last-minute escapes.  Others were on quests to loot.  Here and there, fires burned: garbage, vehicles, structures.  The deeper John drove into the city, the more frequent and more intense the fires became.  From time to time the radios on his passenger seat would squawk and chatter.  When he drove along the riverfront, he heard an exchange of gunfire.  Who was shooting at whom, he could not see.  When he drove through the city center, a convoy of police vehicles raced by, going in the opposite direction.  They were running with their lights and sirens off.  Furniture and other items were strapped to the roofs and hoods.  In the back seats, he saw the faces of wives and children staring out with expressions of fear and despair.
John skirted the government center.  There was nothing there for him but trouble.  When he turned left onto the Rue Ténèbres Mystiques, he saw four dead bodies lying in the street.  When he crossed the Summer Canal, he got a clear view of the sky and watched the last of the Marine aircraft lift off out of the embassy.  It rose vertically and then transitioned to forward flight, turning from a helicopter into a plane with ease.  Its red and green marker lights blinked a few times and then the clouds swallowed it up.  And that was that.  The Americans had officially left.  He wondered if Margaret was on that plane.  It seemed like the kind of thing she would do, to wait to be the last to leave out of a sense of duty that the government she represented never seemed to reciprocate.
John drove out of the city and followed the coast road.  There was no traffic out here.  There was nowhere out here for anybody to flee to.  The coast road led onto a peninsula occupied by lavish resorts that catered to Western tourists.  The urban sprawl was replaced with thick jungle.  The night air was alive with the sounds of insects and frogs.  Jungle sounds.
John eased his car to a stop at a resort named Azure Haven.  A gate manned by two armed guards blocked the entrance.  Each wore a revolver on their hip.  One, the younger one, carried a pump-action shotgun older than John.  The older guard eyed John warily.  The younger guard looked scared to the verge of panic.
John exited his truck with both hands in the air and a smile on his face.  He called out to them in their native tongue, approaching slowly.  They didn't respond, but they didn't challenge him either.  That was a start.  When John got closer, he asked, "Cigarette?"  And he slowly fished the pack out of his shirt pocket.
That brought nods from the two guards.
Getting better, John thought.
Cigarettes were passed around.  A lighter clicked and sparked.  The three men stood in front of the guard shack, smoking.  After a few puffs, John reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a handful of $100 bills.  He had them in a big roll, fastened with a rubber band.  He didn't look at the guards, but he could feel them looking at him.  He removed the rubber band and began peeling bills off one at a time.  He kept peeling.  More than the two guards made in a week.  In a month.  In six months.  He held the bills up and asked the guards, "How would you like to make some money?"


"Yeah, he's in the army, but it's different with them.  The uniforms and army stuff are just something they've got to do.  At heart, they are businessmen."
Marcus Harrington was in his suite in the Azure Haven resort.  His room faced the ocean and the sounds of crashing waves, and the sea-salt breeze came in through the open balcony.  He was talking on the phone to his associate back in the States.  Night here was day there.
"Don't worry, this guy we're working with, he's connected.  His uncle is a party chairman or something like that.  Yeah, he's a general, but don't worry.  Their army doesn't work like ours.  He's an army guy but the real reason he's coming in here is to take over the big stadium and run the sports industry here… No, no, it is like that with every industry; one of their connected army guys represents a company that will come in and run things."
Marcus Harrington didn't have a background in political science.  His passion growing up had been sports.  He'd been a good enough athlete in high school to get into college athletics, but not good enough in college to make it as a professional athlete.  In college, Marcus had figured out that professional sports was so much more than the game being played on the field.  It was an industry.  And like any industry, the real money was in the corporate headquarters.  There were concessions, merchandising, film rights, book rights, distribution rights, endorsements, advertising… endless ways to monetize what were at heart games meant to occupy children.  A player on the field might make a lot of money.  A player in the corporate boardroom could make a lot more.
"I talked with their reps earlier, and they're all about securing their investment amidst this opportunity.  The new stadium our partners built here is a gem and they are hungry to get it back… yeah, soccer….  Yeah, they are open to favorable terms, and they are willing to work with us on some other areas.  There's also the new sports complex they built for Cricket.  Cricket's big down here.  They want to capitalize on that too, but they need us for distribution if they want to get into the European and South American markets.  North America too, of course…  No, you're right Mike…  No, not much of a cricket market in the U.S., but that's why Mallard over in government affairs has been pushing the H1B visa thing so hard."
With one hand holding the phone to his ear, Marcus uncorked a bottle of Scotch on a glass table and poured the last of it into a glass.  He set the glass down, held up the empty bottle, and frowned.
"We'll have to renegotiate those contracts, but local labor costs will go down once our new partners take the country over.  They're open to a revenue-sharing model for advertising and concessions, and we can maximize that.  Plus, they're interested in additional promotional events and branding, which opens more opportunities for our side.
"But the real money for us will be in apparel.  They've got a top-notch textile district in the capital.  Some of their facilities are already set up for sportswear, so once we get the licensing and rights figured out the production will be cheap and easy.  The only problem for us will be if apparel production is going to be run by the same general taking over the sports industry or another one of their generals…  Yeah….  Yeah, they are going to keep the local labor but reduce the costs.  Yeah…  Yeah…Oh, you bet they'll put 'em to work.  Mike, they can do whatever they want, they'll own this whole country in a few hours…  No Mike, there are no unions down here.  No unions no labor laws.  No minimum wage and no minimum age."
Marcus sipped his scotch and smiled.  It was expensive, and it tasted expensive.
"I know that puts us at risk for some bad publicity, but look, Mike, it doesn’t matter what happens to the locals.  When the distributors and consumers see they can get LeBron jerseys at 40% the cost, they will lose interest in what's happening in this part of the world pretty damn quickly.  Remember all those 'Free Tibet' stickers you used to see?  Yeah…  Yeah, well when was the last time you saw one?"
Marcus paused, sipped his drink, and listened to his partner on the other side of the world.
"No, the way it works is we finalize our deal, then it gets packaged up with all the other deals.  From there it gets kicked up for a final review by of their top generals…  Yeah, some retired general is flying to represent our side…  Yeah, that's the one.  The guy on the Rolling Stone cover."
Marcus took another sip of his drink.
"What?...  That, I don't know," Marcus said.  He walked over to his balcony and looked out across the water.  The edge of the capital could be seen in the difference.  Its lights fought against the storm clouds.  "I can't hear any sound of fighting.  Our partners said they were just going to come in tomorrow morning and take it and it looks like that's what they are going to do.  Yeah…  Yeah Mike, well they aren't known for being humanitarians.  I'm sure some of the local people will get killed, or arrested or whatever.  But these things happen.  That's not our fight.  We're here for our shareholders, not the locals…  No, I'm in my hotel…  Yeah, everything here is fine…  No, as long as room service keeps the booze coming I'll be alright.
"What's that?"  Marcus asked.  He listened, then laughed.  "Mike, it is Asia.  Of course you can get that here…  Well, I told you that you should come but you were worried about what your wife would say…  Yeah, well, with the bonuses we'll be getting off these deals, that kind of money buys a lot of leeway with the wife."
There came a knock at the door.  Marcus Harrington walked to his hotel door and opened it without turning his attention away from his phone.  He didn't even look through the peephole.  He just opened the door, turned around, and walked back into the room, maintaining his conversation back home.
"Will do, Mike.  I'm optimistic about the outcome.  Talk to you soon."
Marcus dropped the connection and turned back around.  When he did, he froze.  He'd been expecting one thing.  What he saw was quite another.  John, Mr. John, stood in the hotel room, his suppressed shotgun leveled at Marcus's chest.
"Phone," John ordered.  Marcus didn't move.  It wasn't out of defiance.  It wasn't even out of fear.  It was just shock, and confusion.  His mind couldn't process what his eyes were seeing.
"Give me your phone," John repeated, annunciating each word slowly and clearly.  Marcus remained still.  His mouth hung partway open.  John stepped forward, grabbed the phone, and then stepped back out of Marcus's reach.  All the while the shotgun remained perfectly leveled at the businessman's chest.
"Sit," John ordered.  He indicated a chair with the end of his shotgun.
"What is this?" Marcus stammered out.
"This is you sitting down unless you want me to shoot you right now," John said.  Marcus's eyes dropped and scanned the distance between himself and this strange man with the gun.
"You won't make it," John said, reading Marcus's mind.  "Even in your prime, you wouldn't make it.  Now sit down."
Marcus sat in the chair.  John played with the phone for a few moments.  He kept one eye on the phone and the other on Marcus.  The shotgun didn't so much as waver.  When he finished with the phone, he set it on an end table and forgot about it.
"You're an American," Marcus said from the chair.
"I'm an American," John replied, emphasizing the word 'I.'  "And you are supposed to be too.  So, why didn't you leave with the other Americans when the embassy shut down?  Why are you still here, Mr. Marcus Harrington?"
"What is this?  What's going on?"
John ignored the questions.  "You're still here because you are working with the country that is our number one competitor.  And together, you are going to carve this little nation up.  You and your new buddies are going to talk about all the sports bullshit.  The marketing and merchandising and who gets to profit from what, and what streaming service gets to show what games.  And then you are going to sign documents, shake hands, and walk away.  Walk away with a lot of money.  Never mind that this little country was a friend of the United States longer than the two of us have been alive.  Never mind what the locals think about any of this.  Never mind that some of those locals are going to be enslaved, being put to work in factories making shoes and LeBron James jerseys.  Or arrested and disappeared.  Never mind all that.  Right?"
Marcus stammered.  "I don't understand?"
"Oh, I think you do, Marcus.  I think you understand perfectly.  I think you are just saying that you don't understand because it is easier on your conscious.  It is easier than stating the truth.  You are about to make a lot of money.  In doing so, you are going to sell a lot of innocent people, people who were friendly to the United States down the river.  Even if they weren't our friends, they don't deserve what's coming.  You know it's wrong.  Still, you want that money.  So, you are going to say you don't understand or give me some crap about markets, free trade, and corporate board room bottom-line bullshit, all to ease your conscious."
"I'm just a businessman.  Politics isn't my thing."
John shrugged sympathetically.  "That's too bad for you, Marcus.  Because politics is my thing."
The moments ticked by in silence.  Marcus began to sweat.  Beads of it pooled on his forehead.  Marcus' eyes flicked from John's to the muzzle of the shotgun and back again.
"You can't just shoot me.  I have a family."
"The people out there have families."
"Somebody will come.  Somebody will hear."
"Who, exactly?  The police?  The police are on the run.  They're too busy saving themselves and their families from the chaos you came here to exploit.  Hotel security?  I've paid them off with some of that money you love so much.  No, Marcus.  Nobody is coming.  Nobody, but me.  And I'm tired of seeing the same thing happen over, and over, and over again."
Marcus's hands tightened on the arms of the chair.  His nails dug into the fabric.
"I'm just a businessman," he repeated.  "I'm just here to do a deal.  If you want to be mad at somebody, be mad at the locals.  They had their own government, and they were the ones who sold this country out.  I didn't.  I'm just here to make a deal.  Their leaders are the ones who abandoned the country.  Go after them."
"You have a point, Marcus Harrington.  But they all flew away to Switzerland or the Emirates with duffle bags full of money.  If I was in Switzerland or the Emirates, I'd go kill them.  But I'm not in Switzerland or the Emirates.  I'm here.  In this hotel room.  With you."
Marcus looked John up and down.  Marcus didn't look beaten or resigned to his fate.  He looked defiant.
"You're crazy."
John only smiled.
"You have no idea what you are doing."
"I think I do."
"No, you don't.  You have no idea of the money that's at stake here.  You couldn't even imagine it.  My bonus from this will be more than you make in a year.  Ten years."
"I don't care about money," John said.  "Marcus didn't hear him.  His entirety had given way to anger.  His hands tightened harder on the armchair.  His knuckles went white.
"Nobody cares about this place.  Not even the locals.  You're right.  The local politicians grabbed all the money they could get their hands on and ran.  Why wouldn't they?  They'll be set up for life.  Their kids and grandkids, they'll be set up for life with that kind of money.
"And back home in America?  Nobody back home could find this place on a map.  A year from now nobody will remember this coup or whatever it is.  We'll start playing exhibition games here and showing them all over the world.  People will watch, and people will pay money to watch.  Watching sports will make them happy.  That's real.  And it takes people's minds off politics and all this other crap that they can't control anyway.  The viewers at home will be more pissed off about the commercial breaks between plays than they will ever be about what happens to the people here."
"Let's try this another way," John began.  "Say you dedicated your entire life to an idea.  To a dream.  You worked and you sacrificed for that dream.  You suffered for it.  Your whole life was spent in service to that idea.  And you did bad things for it.  You did terrible things for it.  But you told yourself over and over again that you weren't a bad guy.  You were just doing what was necessary for the greater good.  For the idea.
"And over and over again, that dream gets undermined by the very same people who promoted that dream.  The people who sold you on that dream.  And they show no regrets.  No remorse.  An embassy falls here, an embassy falls there.  They do nothing.  They change nothing.  Billions of dollars get released to a dictator.  Nothing.  Some American soldiers get blown up in one location, some American citizens get kidnapped and tortured in another location, and nothing.  People make money.  Politicians get bumps in their poll numbers.  But nothing changes.  You get further away from the idea, not closer to it.  The world gets worse, not better.  And all the while they expect you to soldier on and keep doing all those bad things they ask you to.
"You do that.  And you eventually realize that you are the bad guy.
"And so, you find out that you are the villain in your own story.  You are old, and your hair is gray, and you are staring down your last and only chance to take an accounting for a life spent in service to people who never believed in the dream at all.  Call it vengeance.  Maybe call it redemption.  Call it whatever you will.  This is my only chance to set things right.  I'm too old to get another.  I won't let this moment pass me by."
"You are some kind of psychopath."
"Am I?  At the end of the day, it's all just children's games.  You were going to sell all these people out for nothing more than children's games."
"They aren't children's games.  They're a multi-billion-dollar industry."
"All that money won't buy you anything in the next life.  It won't buy you another second in this one either."
The shotgun made a sound like a loud hiss, and the action snapped as it cycled.  The ejected shell clattered against something and made a hollow sound.
When he was a child, John found a dying mule deer on the side of the road.  It had been hit by a truck.  Its legs were broken, and its stomach ruptured, and it lay in a ditch, knowing it was dying but not comprehending how or why.
To John, Marcus looked just like that deer.
The right side of his chest was ripped open.  The .12-gauge slug and the three 00 pellets passed right through the lung.  Now blood filled the punctured lung.   Marcus gasped.  He looked down at his chest.  The right side was ripped apart.  He tried to breathe but couldn't.  His eyes rolled.  His jaw went slack.  His head drooped and he made gurgling noises.  The subconscious parts of his brain were trying to keep the body alive.  The conscious parts of the brain had crashed like an overtaxed computer.
John saw a coat on the bed.  He picked it up and walked over to Marcus.  John put the end of his shotgun against the man's head, draped the coat over both head and gun and then fired a second time.  The shotgun hissed again, and the action clacked.  Another empty plastic shotgun shell made another hollow sound as it struck the floor.  The gasping stopped.
John used the coat to wipe the blood off the end of his weapon, then draped it back over the dead man.  He stooped to pick up the spent shotgun shells, then decided against it.  Why bother, he thought.  There wasn't any point in covering his tracks.  There wasn't any point in hiding who he was.  He wouldn't be going back home.  He was going to die here.  He was certain of that.  Just so long as he took a lot of people with him, he didn't care.
When he went back out to his truck, the two guards were long gone.  He got into the driver's seat and turned the ignition.  The truck coughed and rumbled.
John spied several members of the resort staff come out of a side door.  They pushed laundry carts full of canned food, linens, and TVs looted out of the hotel rooms.  
Anything they could take.  A panel van parked nearby rolled up its back door.
"Get while the getting is good," John said aloud.  He turned out the resort and headed back along the coast road to the capital.
"One down, five to go," John said aloud.  "With one more inbound.  That means a total of six."


Chapter 5: Ruffles and Flourishes
General Jackson McCallister, US Army Retired, checked himself over in a full-length mirror inside his suite in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.  He leaned in close to the mirror.  The makeup artist had done a good job covering up his black eye.  Onc could barely see the purple rings.  Outside, the city of Beverly Hills California made its afternoon noises.  Jackson wore an expensive and custom-tailored suit that did its best to hide his deteriorating frame.  He'd gathered a lot of weight in the last decade.  He'd gained even more since retiring.  From the waist up he looked like a pear.  He knew it, and he didn't like it.  His neck and face were carrying more and more weight too.  Heavy folds and loose jowls.  He didn’t; like that either.  He was also of an age where there was little he could do about it.  He liked that even less.
Jackson saw attaining the rank of a senior general as a means, not an end.  The end was money and all that came with it.  Now he was old and retired, but he still had the means.  And his mission had not changed.  His name was recognized around the world, and his goal was to use that name to make money.  He didn't need the money, of course.  Retired generals had enviable retirements.  On top of that, Jackson sat on numerous boards, he had paid speaking engagements, and a multi-million dollar advance on a book somebody else would write for him.  There were also the many investments he made when he was younger.  He had more than enough money to truly retire, leave public life, and live out his golden years in comfort and quiet.  However, that course of action would not lead to money or the power, influence, and attention that came with it.
He smiled and smoothed out a wrinkle on his suit.  "How long is the flight, again?"
"The first flight is 17 hours, General.  From there we'll catch a second flight, private charter of course, into an airfield outside the capital.  That's another four hours.  By then, our partners will control the government."
"And our pilots?  Those will be their people, correct."
"Yes general.  The pilots and flight crew will all speak English.  They specialize in taking American VIPs to Asia."
"Even though they are military?"
"Yes sir, they are military.  But their government does not draw the same distinctions we do with regards to what roles the military plays."
"And my accommodations?"
"We have accommodations at one of the larger resorts outside the city.  A private suite.  Very private."
"Nice?" General McCallister asked.
"Very nice," his aide answered.
"Thank you, James."
The aid smiled gratefully and nodded.  James Bixley had served as General McCallister's aide-de-camp in his final years.  When the general retired, Bixley also retired from the Army and continued to serve the general as he built his empire.
"What do we know about the negotiations so far?"  Jackson asked.  Although a private citizen now, Jackson would be "representing" the United States' interests.  His status and the value of his name's recognition would add credence to the narrative that the United States was negotiating with a competitor, rather than selling out an ally.  The fact that Jackson was now a private citizen and not a member of the administration came with certain legal benefits if upstart members of Congress got curious.
"I have a list of the industries that will be up for discussion, as well as the generals who are representing our partner's positions regarding those industries.  Most of those negotiations will be finalized before we land."
"Who will be representing the West's positions?"
"I have a list of those persons too.  Some Americans.  Some from other countries."
"And the locals?  Who represents them?"
"No one.  The locals aren't allowed representation."
"Hmm," Jackson hummed.
"I also have a dossier on General Chu that you can review on the flight."
"No need James.  General Chu and I know each other very well."
General McCallister continued his self-inspection in the mirror.  He saw James standing behind him diligently.  McCallister frowned.  His eyes turned sad with shame.
"James, when I'm there, I will be asked to participate in certain… activities.  Rituals, perhaps is a better word.  These rituals might seem distasteful James, but I assure you they are essential to build trust with our new partners.  They are necessary to demonstrate solidarity and loyalty.  I will take no pleasure in these activities, but I will do them because I must.  At heart, I am a patriot.  Everything I do, I do because it is in the best interests of my country.  You must believe that."
"Yes sir," James replied.
"I trust that after I perform these acts, however strange and distasteful they may be, that you will not think any less of me, James."
"General, I will always hold you in the highest regard."
"Thank you, James."
Jackson smoothed out another wrinkle in his suit.  Given that he was about to get into a car, and then spend the next 21 hours inside a plane, the preening seemed unnecessary.  His clothing was certain to get rumpled.  Even so, Jackson McCallister, General US Army Retired, brushed and straightened his clothing.  When his appearance was just right, he nodded to his aide and headed for the door.  James Bixley gathered up all his boss's luggage and followed the man out the door.  Outside, two security men waited.  Together, all four took the elevator down to the waiting motorcade.

An Eagle at Twilight


1
Ed Doniphon woke to the sound of waves crashing against the Oregon Coast.  Since retiring from the Marine Corps, the sound of those waves was about the only thing that got him out of bed in the morning.  Ed turned to face the window.  The sun had not yet risen.  He checked his watch.  He’d woken up earlier than he had to.  That was nothing new.  He always woke up ten or fifteen minutes earlier than he had to.  Naturally.  No alarms.  He just came awake naturally when he needed to.  It was a habit his body had developed over a military career that spanned more than thirty years.  Ed took one look around his dark and lonely bedroom and decided to get going and attack the day.  Military service ingrained that habit in him too.
He shuffled through the seaside cottage he called home.  It was the kind of property realtors called "cozy" and normal people called small.  It might also have been called Spartan.  Lonesome was the most appropriate word.  There were no decorations on the walls.  No décor, not even any mementos of his military service.  A single framed photograph stood on a side table.  It was of a handsome woman.  She appeared to be middle aged and she was smiling.  A black mourning band ran across one corner of the frame.  That was the only picture in the house.  It was the home of a lonely old man, and it looked it.
Ed went into his small galley kitchen and hit the button on the coffee maker.  Its single eye glowed red and it made coffee brewing noises.  Ed Doniphon didn’t drink coffee, not anymore.  His stomach couldn’t handle it.  It was probably the result of too many years spent out in the field, eating bad food and drinking worse coffee.  But Ed still enjoyed the smell of it and brewed a fresh pot every morning, just for the aroma.  Funny, he thought.  When he was younger, he always bought the cheap stuff.  His wife teased him relentlessly about his poor taste in coffee.  Now that he couldn’t drink it, he bought the expensive stuff.  It smelled better.  He wondered what his wife might think about that.
Ed checked his watch, then mentally converted the time from the West Coast to the East Coast.  The Oregon Coast to Norfolk Virginia.  Time, he had plenty of it.  He took his phone, an undrinkable cup of coffee, and his laptop out onto his back deck.  The sky was still dark.  Not even a hint of brightening to the East.  The Pacific Ocean roared.  Ed opened up his laptop and struck a few keys.  Web pages popped up.  News feeds.  Their headlines were written in Georgian and Cyrillic characters.  Ed glanced over the news feeds for only a moment before thinking better of it.  He pushed the computer away, sat back, and just listened to the waves.
When his watch read 0500 his phone rang.  Ed eyed it warily and answered it on the third ring.
"Ed Doniphon."
"Is this Colonel Doniphon?" a pleasant female voice asked.
"It is," Ed answered a bit reluctantly.  He added, "Colonel Doniphon, retired."
"Yes sir, I have you scheduled for a phone call with General Hamler this morning.  Are you ready for the general?"
"Of course," Ed answered.
"Outstanding, sir.  Standby on the line and I’ll connect you with General Hamler shortly."
Doniphon sighed heavily.  Jeesh Scott, we’ve known each other since we were second lieutenants, he thought.  We lived together.  We came up the ranks together.  We went to war together.  You could have just called me.
A minute ticked by.  Then another.  Then another.  Ed was expecting the general's aide to come back on and tell him the call was canceled when the phone line clicked and his old friend's familiar voice ended the silence.
"Colonel Ed Doniphon, is that you?"
"Good morning, general, good to hear your voice."
"Good to hear yours, Ed.  How is retirement treating you?"
Ed looked around his pitiful cottage.  "Retirement is suiting me just fine."
"You catching every salmon out there in Seattle?"
"I'm in Oregon," Ed said.  "But yeah, something like that."
"How are your daughters?"
"They're good," Ed said.  That was a lie.  He had no idea how his daughters were doing.  He hadn't spoken to either one of them since they moved out.  Or, perhaps more accurately, they had not spoken to him.
"Good.  They must be all grown up now.  You must be proud of them."  That was it for the chit-chat and catching up.  General Hamler got down to it.
"Ed, the reason I'm calling is I need your help.  I need you back in uniform, just for a little while.  I know it’s a bit much, me calling you out of the blue like this, but I need somebody with your particular knowledge and experience.  Somebody who has been to the places you've been.  Seen the things that you've seen.  We're cooking something up.  Something big.  I can't talk about it over an unsecure line of course.  You understand.  But this has the potential to be big.  Huge.  Really good for the Corps.  And it's happening out in your old stomping grounds, so to speak.  Nobody knows that region like you do.  That's why I need you on board."
Ed cast his eyes on his computer.  The swirling Kartouli characters and reversed Cyrillic letters called to him.  'The places you've been,'  'Your old stomping grounds,' and, 'Nobody knows the region like you do.'  That meant Eastern Europe.  That meant countries that used to be Soviet Socialist Republics.  That meant Russia.
"What kind of timeline are we looking at, general?"
"Things needed to start yesterday, Ed.  We were behind before we started.  I've already started some good conversations with people up on The Hill.  They're good people.  Powerful people.  But they aren't patient.  Now it is time to move out and draw fire.
"For you Ed, I've got things already worked out with the headquarters folks in Quantico.  We can get you back on orders today and on a flight out here to the East Coast tomorrow.  From there, you and I and a couple of my staff members will fly out to your old backyard.  We have a couple of sit-downs and meetings we need to hold across the region.  Two, maybe three weeks of travel and then back to the East Coast.
"Ed, once we're stateside again, we'll need to do some more work up on the hill, and some work with the interagency types,  but I can handle all that.  What I really you for is the overseas portion of all this.  I know you still know a lot of the players over there.  I need you to introduce me to the right people.  Get me into the right offices.  I need your language and cultural experience too.  Hell, Ed.  I need my old belt-fed buddy for an adventure, just like when we were lieutenants.  What d'ya say?"
Ed looked around his widower's bungalow.  Empty.  Lonely.  Quiet.  Sad.  He looked over at his computer again.  The strange alphabet characters called out to him.  They promised adventure and excitement.  The lieutenant-days were long in the past.  His days of charging across the globe were long in the past.  But what was here worth staying for?  Nothing.  Nobody.  He was a lonely old man in an empty house.  He looked at his phone.  He and Scott Hamler had been friends, once, but they hadn't exactly kept in touch.  The last time they had spoken to each other was just after the accident.  They'd both been colonels then.  That was years ago.  Almost a decade.  Now Scott was about to get his fourth star.  Whatever friendship they'd had had faded away over the years, as so many friendships do.  Life had gone on for both of them but in different ways.  Scott was only calling because he needed something and Ed was the only one who could get it.  Even so, they had been friends.  Ed wasn't one to turn his back on a friend, however distant they had grown.  He wasn't one to turn his back on the Marine Corps either.  He wasn't one to say no.  Ed knew that.  But Scott Hamler knew that too, and that was probably why he called.
"I'm all about it, general.  Sign me up."
"Great, Ed.  I knew I could count on you," Scott Hamler said.  And then, "I'm going to put Major Leslie back on the line.  She can talk you through orders and travel and all those details.  She can get you uniforms too if you need them.  Great to talk to you, Ed.  And thanks for doing this for me."
And that was that.  The friendship, the years, all of it boiled down to a conversation that lasted less than five minutes.  Scott Hamler needed something, Ed agreed to provide it, and that was that.
Major Leslie, the aide with the pleasant voice came back on the line.  She filled him in on all the bureaucratic details.
"Will you need uniforms?" she asked in closing.
"No, I still have all my uniforms," Ed answered.  And that was that.  Ed would not speak to another human being until the next day when he got to the airport to fly to Norfolk.
Ed went back into his small bedroom.  Several footlockers lined one wall.  Inside were all of his old things from the Marine Corps; gear, uniforms, bits of equipment, his medals.  He'd hung on to it all, partly out of sentimentality, and partly because he just did not have the motivation to throw them out.  Maybe he kept those things all this time because he'd been secretly hoping that the Marine Corps would call him back.  No wife.  No children.  He had nothing else.
Ed opened the foot lockers and set to packing.  He threw the things he'd need on the bed.  Boots.  Uniforms.  His old set of dog tags.  The pile grew.  His old stomping grounds, he thought.  Eastern Europe.  Georgia.  The Baltic States.  Russia.  Not places known for tropical climes.  Ed grabbed some cold-weather clothing and tossed it onto the bed.  He found his old Kabar fighting knife.  He drew it out of its leather sheath and tested the edge.  It was still razor sharp.  He sheathed the knife and tossed it on the bed with the other things.
The last thing Doniphon pulled out was a pair of colonel rank insignia; silver eagles clutching a bundle of arrows in their talons.  This was an old set of eagles, older than Ed.  Ed hefted them in his open palm, appreciating their weight.  They felt heavier than the modern colonel insignia.  They felt more solid too.  They were a gift from his wife, the last gift she gave them.
Ed tossed the eagles into the pile with the Kabar and everything else he needed to pack.  Then, he just spent a long time standing by the bed and looking at it all.  Russia, he thought.  What the hell was Scott Hamler and the Marine Corps going to do in Russia?  It sounded like trouble.  It sounded like a bad idea already.  Ed had seen more than a few bad ideas throughout his military career.  He'd been able to stop some.  He'd been at the tip of the spear on more than a few others.  And here he was, signing up for another one.  Why?  He thought.  But he knew why.  Because he had no reason not to go.  Because while he didn't have much else, he still had his sense of loyalty.  Maybe the Corps and men like Scott Hamler hadn't always been loyal to him, but he'd always kept his end of every deal.  He wasn't the kind to say no.  He knew it.  General Scott Hamler knew it too.  That's probably what he called.
The eastern sky glowed orange as the sun peaked above the horizon.  Ed Doniphon packed for his next adventure, and the mighty waves of the Pacific crashed against the Oregon Coast.


2
Ed Doniphon caught a flight out of Portland Oregon to Norfolk Virginia.  Somewhere above the Rockies, he drifted off to sleep.  Sleep brought dreams.  His dreams, as they so often did, brought nightmares.

Thurn Junction Texas's only notable feature for Ed Doniphon was that it was halfway between Quantico Virginia and San Diego California.  Quantico Virginia was where he'd been.  San Diego California was where he was going.  Ed had spent the last year in the Marine Corps War College at Quantico.  Now that he'd graduated, it was time to get back to the business of being a Marine.  The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, located just north of San Diego, was his next duty assignment.
The problem for Ed was that he was not getting there fast enough.  And he wasn't getting there fast enough because his family was slowing him down.
"Come on, we should've been on the road by now," Ed grumbled, frustration evident in his voice.  He checked his watch.  It was almost 8:00 am.  He wanted to be on the road at 6:00 am.  That was two hours ago.  He did the math in his head.  Two hours.  60 miles per hour.  That's 120 miles they had not traveled.  He looked up from his watch to the hotel room.  Things still weren't packed.  People still weren't ready to go.  Time was slipping away.
"Dad, can't we just take a break today?  We've been driving forever," Emily protested.  She was his youngest daughter.  She was just entering her teenage years and was beginning to test limits and boundaries.
"Yeah, we're all tired," Olivia added without looking up from her phone.  She was his oldest daughter.  She was all teenage angst and defiance.  She was still in her bed and her things were still scattered about the hotel room.
"I know I am asking a lot, but it is important that I get to the West Coast and get checked in for this new assignment," Ed said.  His words sounded formulaic.  His voice didn't convey even a hint of true empathy.
"You say that every time, dad.  It's always 'important' that we get to wherever it is you need to go.  So we always race across the country as fast as we can drive.  We never stop anywhere.  We never see anything.  We just sit in the back seats while you two drive."
"It is important.  It is important to my future which means important to this family, and your future too."
"That's what you always say, Dad.  I've traveled across the country half a dozen times, and it is always the same.  We just drive as fast as we can from one stupid base to another."
"These 'stupid bases' are how I pay the bills.  It's how I'm able to put money into your college fund."
"Ed," his wife interrupted.  "Olivia's right.  Why don't we take it easy today?  Maybe check into a nicer hotel, one with a real pool, and just take a day off from driving."
"There are no nicer hotels around here, not unless we drive back to Dallas.  And we are not driving back to Dallas.  We need to get going.  I need to check-in.  This is important to my career."
Advancing in the military meant clearing a progressive set of established hurdles.  After company command came promotion to major.  After promotion to major, the next step was Command and Staff college.  After Command and Staff, the next requirements for success were tours as an operations officer and executive officer.  After those, promotion to lieutenant colonel and a tour as a battalion commander.  After that came War College, and promotion to colonel.  As one climbed the military/corporate ladder, the competition got stiffer.  The herd was thinned with each hurdle.  What remained were the strongest and the fastest, the most ambitious and hyper-competitive individuals who were willing to sacrifice more and more for their careers.
Ed had secured his promotion to full colonel.  The next hurdle he had to clear was command of a regiment.  That was a problem because the Marine Corps had far more colonels than regiments to command.  Ed's record was stellar.  Unfortunately, all his peers had equally stellar records.  On paper, they all looked the same.  At this point, getting an edge for the next command screening would depend more on the things that weren't on the record.  Often that meant who you knew, and who knew you.  Ed did not have a close relationship with any of the Marine Corps generals like some of his peers did.  So there was another problem.  He'd have to make up for that somehow.  One way he could make up for that was to be the first of all the recent War College graduates to get to Camp Pendleton.  Being the first to check in would give him an edge on the next assignment.  It might get him more time in the office with the commanding generals.  It might give him an edge for regimental command, and the next milestone after that, which was selection and promotion to general.  Doing all of this would require sacrifice.  Sacrifice on Ed's part.  And sacrifice on his family's part too.
Olivia looked up from her phone just long enough to roll her eyes.  "Dad you always say it is important.  The truth is the Marines don't give a shit about you.  When they're done with you, they'll just kick you out, just like they did to Sara's dad."
"Hey!" Ed snapped.  Olivia knew her dad and she knew his temper.  For all her teenage defiance, at heart, she feared her father.  She instantly dropped her phone and sat up in the bed.  Emily, the younger daughter, lowered her eyes and tried to make herself small, trying to disappear.  Ed's wife, Lisa, intervened.  She loved her husband and her family.  But she'd been down this road before and knew where it led.  She didn't want to go down it again.
"Okay, everybody calm down.  Ed, maybe we just take it easy today."
Ed tapped his watch.  "Two hours Lisa.  We're two hours behind schedule."
"I know Ed.  I know.  Maybe we could just relax, just a little."
"We need to get going," Ed repeated.  "Besides, relax where?  There's nothing out here but more Texas.  We can relax when we get to Camp Pendleton.  There are beaches all over.  Right by the headquarters building in Del Mar, there's a great beach that everybody…"
Olivia groaned.  She'd gone from fear back to teenage defiance.  "I've had enough of being on bases.  Everything on every base is the same.  It all sucks.  If I'm going to a beach I want to go to a real beach with real people.  No more Marines and Marine families and Marine kids.  No more military base nonsense."
Ed shot his older daughter a look.  Lisa intervened.
"Olivia, you knock that off.  Girls, get packed like you were supposed to.  Ed?" Lisa walked to the door, and nodded to her husband, asking him to follow.
Outside their hotel room was the Texas heat and not much else.  Signs advertised fast food and gas, the kinds of signs you see along any interstate anywhere in the country.  On the street, a semi-truck grumbled as its driver shifted gears.  It carried a load of drilling equipment, bound for the oil fields.
"You know how it is with my job, Lisa.  You either get promoted, or you get told to retire.  That's the reality of it.  And somebody my age, my rank, they have no problem telling guys like me to retire."
"If they ask you to retire, then you just retire and move on, Ed."
"Olivia will be in college soon.  Emily not long after.  How am I going to pay for that?  Retirement pay wouldn’t be as much as what I'm making now."
"You can start a second career, Ed.  Everybody does."
"Start a second career?  I'd also have two daughters in college.  I don't want to rely on retirement, and I don't want to be trying to start a second career from scratch while the tuition bills are coming in."
"Ed, I'm sure we'll be fine.  Truth is, I'd be happier if you'd just retire.  I think you'd be happier too."
"I probably would be," Ed said.  The words left his mouth before his brain registered what he was saying.  He wasn't lying though, and he knew it.  He would be happier if he retired.  If it was just him and Lisa, he'd be already.  Only, it wasn't just the two of them.  Ed looked back at the door to their cheap hotel room.  Olivia and Emily were inside.  Hopefully they were packing.  As strained as their relationship was at times, Ed loved his daughters.  He wanted them to have all the things he didn't have at their age.  More importantly.  He wanted them to have all the options he didn't have.  Providing that took money.  And Ed Doniphon earned his money by wearing the uniform of his country.
"Lisa," he began.  "I know I'm not always easy, but I want what's best for the family.  I don't want to drag any of you along after me, going from one duty assignment to the next.  I'd love to slow down and take it easy.  But I can't.  Not now.  These next couple of years is when it's all going to count.  Olivia is smart.  Emily is too.  They'll get into good schools and when that happens, I'm not going to tell them we can't afford the tuition.  You know how it was for me.  There was only one option for me to go to college.  I don’t want that for them.  So.  We need to pack up and we need to get going.  Like it or not, that's what we have to do."
Lisa sighed heavily.  "Can I get coffee first?" Lisa asked.
"There's coffee in the hotel lobby.  It is free."
"That's not coffee.  I want real coffee."
"I think there's a place up the street," Ed said grudgingly.
"I would like that," Lisa said.
"Okay.  But after that, we need to get going.

They loaded up their things and got in their vehicles.  Olivia rode with Lisa and Emily rode with Ed.  Nobody moved fast enough to suit Ed.  He alternated between looking at his watch and casting impatient glares at his family.  He felt time slipping away.  He felt the weight of his career pressing down.  On the road in front of the hotel, more semi-trucks roared by, heading to the interstate with their heavy loads.  Not far away, a sign with a familiar green and white logo advertised coffee.
"Alright, that's everything," Lisa said, doing her best to put on a cheery face.  She looked tired.  Ed could feel it in his wife.  He was tired too.  Tired.  Impatient.  On edge.  But duty called.
"Then let's get going," Ed said to his wife.  He climbed into his truck and shut the door behind him.  Emily was in the back seat, already on her phone.  Ed thought about saying something to his daughter, then decided against it.  He glanced at the clock on the dashboard and frowned.  They were behind schedule.  So far behind.  He hit the ignition.  Angry and impatient, he pulled out of the hotel parking lot and shot into the first gap in the traffic.
Ed instantly regretted it.
Had he been patient, he would have waited for a bigger gap in the traffic, one with the time and the space to accommodate both vehicles.  But he hadn't been patient.  And now?  Ed could see his wife in the rear-view mirror.  She was looking right.  She was looking at him.  She was looking for the coffee shop down the street.  She wasn't looking left.  She wasn't looking at the semi-truck that was barreling in her direction.  Too big and too fast to stop.  He could see his wife's blinker flashing for a right-hand turn.  He could see Olivia in the passenger seat, eyes glued to her phone, fingers tapping furiously.  He could see Lisa's eyes looking in his direction, and not in the direction of the truck.  He could see the front tire of her SUV roll forward.

Ed woke with a start.  Outside the window, the Virginia countryside rushed up.  Seconds later, the plane's tires screeched against the tarmac.  They'd landed in Norfolk.  The pilot made his announcements.  Ed deboarded the plane.  At the baggage carousels, he grabbed his backpack and gear.  At the curb, he caught a cab to the Oceana Naval Air Station and checked into the base hotel.

3
Captain Theresa Heart stood outside the VIP terminal at the Oceana Naval Air Station.  Nearby, a pair of Army Warrant Officers performed the pre-flight inspection on their executive aircraft.  Theresa's mission this morning was to wrangle all the members of General Scott Hamler's staff who were going on his trip.  As a captain, she was the junior officer in this delegation.  Thus, she would be telling senior officers what to do, what to wear, where to be, and when to be there.  She wasn't intimidated by the differences in rank though.  Captain Heart had no shortage of confidence.  And she'd played the game of military protocol for a long time.
Too long.
Captain Heart's father, now deceased, was Master Gunnery Sergeant Randall Heart.  He'd been a legend in the Marine Corps Reconnaissance and Special Operations communities and an inspiration to his daughter.  Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart had served thirty years in the Marine Corps, and in the time, he'd done it all.  He was certified as a parachutist, a combat diver, a Ranger, and a sniper.  He completed an exchange with the United Kingdom's Royal Marine Commandos and another exchange with the French Foreign Legion.  As a Gunnery Sergeant, he and a partner won the US Army's Ranger Challenge.  Along the way, he'd taught himself both French and Arabic.  He was also a physical specimen.  When he took his last physical fitness test before retiring from the military he maxed it, just as he'd maxed every other fitness test throughout his career.
It was no surprise that his only child would follow in his footsteps.
Theresa was a high school athlete.  She lettered in swimming and track and completed four marathons before she turned 18.  She also pushed herself academically.  She was a National Merit Scholar and graduated valedictorian.  After high school, she went straight to college on a Marine Option Navy ROTC scholarship.  She always suspected that her father's reputation had something to do with her being awarded the scholarship.  The ROTC scholarship paid for four years of college.  Theresa graduated in three, with a double major in political science and economics, and a minor in Mandarin.  That got her a commission in the Marine Corps and a trip to begin her entry-level officer training at Quantico Virginia's, The Basic School.
The Basic School, militarily shortened to TBS, was physically demanding for most.  For Theresa, who grew up in her father's shadow and learned from his example, it was almost a breeze.  She was physically fit, a discipline learned from her father.  She could outrun, outshoot, outhike, and out-marine most of her classmates.  Out of her class of 243 Marine Lieutenants, she graduated eighth.  With her class standing out of TBS, Theresa was well positioned to get whatever military occupational specialty she wanted.  What she wanted, was to follow in her father's footsteps.  She wanted to be an infantry officer.  Success as an infantry officer would open the door to the Reconnaissance Community.  That's where her father had served.  That's where Theresa wanted to serve.  That's what she'd dreamed of her entire life.  That's what motivated her to push herself both physically and mentally.
The Marine Corps, however, had other plans.
The Marine Corps decided Theresa was not going to do what normal second lieutenants do.  She was too bright, too poised, too well-spoken.  Most of all, she was too attractive.  The Marines wanted to get Theresa out in front of the public, telling the world, "Her Story."  Not that they cared about her story.  They just thought her story would be a publicity win for the Marine Corps.
When her TBS classmates went on to assignments in the Marine Corps fighting battalions and squadrons, Theresa went straight to the Pentagon.  She fetched coffee and arranged schedules and when they needed somebody for an interview, Theresa would stand in front of a camera and smile prettily.  When some of her classmates entered the Reconnaissance Community, Theresa went to Capitol Hill to work on the Marine Corps legislative affairs team.  Senior officers would smile at her and tell her that her story would make an emotional impact on the senators and representatives who doled out money to the Department of Defense.  After legislative affairs, Theresa was assigned as the Aide de Camp for General Hamler.  Her duties included keeping his schedule, monitoring his emails, and packing his uniforms for travel.
She smiled prettily and nodded, and did her duty.  And inside, she burned.  Her father had parachuted through the heavens, climbed mountains, and dove the depths of the seas.  Theresa did the same tasks as an unpaid college intern.
Often, when she was alone with her thoughts, Theresa felt thankful that her father was no longer alive to see what she'd become.
Today, she stood on the tarmac with her notes and her phones, and her tablets.  She kept track of who was there and who wasn't.  She told them where to set down their luggage.  She listened with fake empathy as the senior officers whined impatiently.  She smiled when they made the same jokes they made at this point on every other trip.
All the usual suspects were already there: the Sergeant Major, the Chief of Staff, the intelligence officer, and the operations officer.  They were all nose-deep in their phones, busily typing and frantically sending and receiving emails.
Lieutenant Colonel Craig Richards, the staff judge advocate or JAG was also there.  He was General Hamler's legal counsel.  He was a tall, good-looking man, with dark skin and the defined facial features of a male model, which was something he had actually done before joining the Marines.  Craig looked like he always did, a mix of uncomfortable and superior, as if being a Marine was something he'd been forced to do.
Major Bernardo Reyes stood a bit off from the group.  He was the unit's new communications officer.  He stood guard over a hard plastic case that contained some secure data terminal or special phone or something important.  Theresa knew little about him, but in her estimation, he seemed squared away.
She checked her list again.  Only two missing.  General Hamler, and this new/old guy they brought out of retirement.
The old guy showed up first.
Ed Doniphan walked out of the terminal and onto the tarmac with a battered old ALICE pack slung over one shoulder.  His pack was modified, with additional pouches sewn along its exterior.  In places, it was patched from wear, and sported swaths of faded spray paint that were added for camouflage long, long ago.  The crusty old pack clashed with the service "C" uniform they were all wearing.  Internally, Theresa rolled her eyes at the old man with his old pack.  Externally, she flashed the pretty smile she'd been flashing for years.
"Colonel Doniphan?"
"That's me," Ed said.  He looked left and right, then dropped his pack down amongst the group's non-military roller bags.  The Chief of Staff looked up from his phone long enough to twist his face with disgust.  The ALICE pack looked as out of place among the modern and fashionable luggage as Ed looked amongst the younger Marines.
"Thank you, Sir, I'm Captain Heart, General Hamler's aide-de-camp." Captain Heart offered her hand.  Ed shook her hand and looked her over.  She was young and attractive.  Too young and too attractive to be partnered up with Scott.  People would see the two of them and think things they shouldn't.  He should not have selected her as his aide.
"Colonel Ed Doniphan.  I'm the one General Hamler brought out of retirement.  Any idea what this is all about?"
"I just know the travel itinerary.  We're going to Germany.  From there, we're going to Georgia.  The country, not the state.  Georgia, and then some of the 'Stans.'"
"Yeah, I got that much already," Ed said.
Theresa Heart flashed one of her pretty and practiced smiles.  "Sir, I just need to check.  You have your orders, your passport, and military ID, and all the other items on the checklist, correct?"
"Thanks, captain.  I do."
"You wouldn't mind showing me your passport, would you?"
"You need the number out of it?"
"No, I just need to be sure you have it," Theresa said with a smile.
"You make everybody show you their passport?" Ed asked.
"It is a standing policy in the command," she said with the same practiced smile.
Ed looked over at the other colonels; the Chief of Staff, and the operations and intelligence officers.  He bet they didn't have to present their passports to the captain as if they were children.  He turned back to the young captain.  He was old enough to know a thing or two about people, like when to spot a phony.  He knew right away the captain was a phony.  At least, her sticky-sweet smile was phony.  She was perhaps a little too comfortable, doing whatever she did with senior officers.
Ed ever so slowly reached into a pocket, pulled out his passport, and held it up.  When he did so, he gave her a look he'd given many Marines.  It was a look that said, "I've run out of patience, so don't push it."  Theresa kept smiling, but the defiant glint in her eyes went away.  The pride in her voice went away when she spoke again.
"Thank you, sir."
"Yeah," Ed said.  The word came out almost as a grunt.  He kept eyeing her sourly as he put the passport away.  
"If I may, sir, how do you and General Hamler know each other?"
"We were lieutenants together.  Long, long ago."
"Yes sir," she said.  Ed could see her working out the math in her head.  No matter how you did the math, it came to the same result.  Ed was old.  Too old to be here playing Marine.  Too old for nonsense with an upstart captain.
Theresa was doing the math in her head.  She was also studying the old man's uniform.  It still fit him.  In truth, he looked fitter than the other colonels buried in their phones.  He had all the ribbons one would expect for a man his age, and more.  He might be old, Theresa thought, but his ribbon rack was no joke.  He wore the Combat Action ribbon with the appropriate device for multiple awards, campaign ribbons, along with multiple awards of the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon.  He had the typical personal awards they gave officers, along with some that mattered.  His Bronze Star had a Valor device on it.  He also had a Purple Heart.  Above the ribbons rested a set of gold parachute wings and a silver combat diver's helmet.  Above those, on Ed Doniphan's collar, was a set of colonel rank insignia:  silver eagle clutching a bundle of arrows.  Those, more than anything else, drew Captain Heart's attention.
"Sir, I think you might have your rank insignia on backward."
The sour-faced colonel smiled.  If a smile could define melancholy, his smile did it.
"You are kind of right, Captain.  These are old insignia.  From WWII.  On the modern insignia, the eagles are facing over the fletching on the bundle of arrows.  On the old insignia, the eagles are looking over the arrowheads."
Theresa gave the insignia a closer inspection.  "Are those authorized to wear?"  She asked.
"They're not authorized, but they do hold sentimental value for me.  They were a gift from my wife."
Theresa was about to say something, but before she could, a jolly shout cut through everything and made the entire entourage stop and turn.
"Why Ed Doniphan, Colonel United States Marine Corps, once retired but no long!  How the hell have you been?"
Theresa watched her general charge up to the old colonel with a grin from ear to ear.  Colonel Doniphan held out his hand, but General Hamler brushed the offered hand assigned and embraced his old friend.  It was the only time that Theresa saw the general hug another Marine.
"Dammit, Ed, I'm glad you volunteered to come on this one.  I am.  It's just… it is good to see your face."
"Thanks, general, it's good to see you too. It's been a long time."
"Yeah, Ed.  Too long, maybe."
As the two men got reacquainted, Theresa sized them up.  She compared them, one against the other.  Both had Combat Action Ribbons.  Both had Purple Hearts.  Both had been awarded the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon several times over.  They were nearly equal in all regards except one.  Colonel Doniphan's highest award was a Bronze Star Medal with a "V" for Valor.  General Hamler's highest award was the Silver Star Medal.  The general had the higher award.
"Listen Ed, I can't talk about this now and I can't talk about it on the plane either.  The classification won't allow it.  When we land in Stuttgart Germany, I've got to run over to Admiral Clyburn's office.  He's got Special Operations for Europe.  Anyway, he's flying out after we talk, and he's letting me use his house.  It's set up for security, so we can sit down there, maybe have a drink or two, and I'll finally get a chance to tell you what we're doing."
"Sounds good, general."
"Thanks, Ed."  Hamler stopped, turned, and looked his old friend in the eye.  "I appreciate you being patient with me on this.  Patient, and flexible.  I know the last few years haven't been easy on you either.  But this is going to be good, Ed.  It is going to be good for the Corps and good for our country.  And what I've got going… well, nobody has the insight for this that you do."
"I don't know about that…"
"It's true Ed, and we both know it.  The language, the culture, the way things really work on the ground over there.  You speak Russian.  You speak Georgian.  You know half the people in Tbilisi and Bishkek.  You've been retired for years but our best Foreign Area Officers can't hold a candle to you.  That's why I brought you along on this, Ed."  Scott Hamler stole a glance over to where his other senior officers were standing with their phones.  He leaned in close to Ed and spoke quietly.
"That, and I know you won't just tell me what you think I want to hear."
Ed stole his own glance over at the other colonels and nodded.  He understood.  Eager to change the subject, Ed pointed at the general's wrist where a huge chrome watch gleamed.
"You still wearing that thing around?  People are going to think you're a pilot with a watch like that."
General Hamler raised his wrist and admired the big hunk of bright metal there.
"Give me all the shit you want Ed, I like this watch.  Going to give it to my kid someday."
"I'm sure they'll appreciate it.  What do you have there?"
Below the watch, General Hamler wore a bracelet.  The bracelet was simple, not much more than a flat piece of metal shaped to go around a wrist.  There was writing on the metal.  The smile vanished from Scott Hamler's face.  He held his wrist out so Ed could read the engraving.  It said:
Shipley, Carl E.  Sergeant, United States Marine Corps
Ed Doniphan cursed.  He said, "Shipley," and he looked like a man who'd just watched his house burn down.  "Shipley," he repeated.  "That's…  That's been a long time too."
"Yeah," General Hamler agreed.  "A long time.  But he was a good man and a good Marine.  He had great things ahead of him."
"He did.  Only… he didn't," Ed said.
"I wear this to remind me what the hell it is I'm supposed to be doing," Scott Hamler said.
And then neither general nor colonel spoke.  They stood, thinking about Sergeant Shipley until one of the pilots spoke.
"General.  Marines.  The plane is ready if you'd like to board," one of the warrant officers said.  The other Warrant Officer opened the cargo hatches for their luggage.
"Thanks, gentlemen," Hamler said to the pilots.  He turned back to Ed and asked, "Did you meet everybody already?"
"Just Captain Heart."
"Alright, well you can meet the rest on the plane.  Let's get going." General Scott Hamler turned from Ed and addressed his staff.
"Alright team, let's load them up.  There's work to be done."
The Marines boarded the executive jet and took their seats.  In the last minutes before takeoff, Captain Heart observed one more distinction between the recalled colonel and the other senior officers.  Ed Doniphan was the only one who loaded his luggage onto the plane.

An Eagle at Twilight Continued

4
The flight to Stuttgart Germany was uneventful.  After takeoff, the passengers engaged in the typical onboard chit-chat before drifting off to sleep or retreating into their devices.  Ed met the other colonels in General Hamler's entourage.  They were all polite enough, but none of them seemed genuinely pleased to have him along.  Whether they admit it or not, all colonels consider what it would like to be a general someday.  Of course, there are far more colonels than generals, and Ed knew the other colonels saw him as competition.  He knew they felt this way, because once upon a time he'd felt that way too.
"Don't worry boys," Ed said to himself.  "They ain't promoting me."
Scott Hamler sat near the front of the plane.  Reyes, the communications officer, set up some type of secure terminal for the general.  It was a model that Ed had never seen before.  Twice after takeoff, Captain Heart came forward and knelt beside Hamler's seat.  Ed couldn't hear what they were whispering about, but when Heart tittered and giggled at some of Scott's comments, he recognized that well enough.
"At some point, I need to talk to him about that," Ed said to himself.  He looked out his window and saw the blue of the skies, the gray of the Atlantic, and whisps of white clouds.  With nothing better to do, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Ed Doniphan woke right as the plane began its descent.  Outside the window was a charcoal sky and the black silhouettes of treetops.  A pine forest, laid out with German precision.
When they landed at the VIP terminal, a waiting car whisked General Hamler away.  The others boarded vans that took them to the base hotel.  As they checked in, the Chief of Staff advised everybody not to get too comfortable.  They were leaving for Tbilisi Georgia the next day.
"The place hasn't changed much since the last time I stayed here," Ed said aloud to his empty hotel room.  There was new paint, new furniture, and new bland artwork on the walls.  It was new, but it was the same.  Ed tossed his rucksack on the bed, then just stood in the middle of the room and began calculating how many years in had been since his last stay.  He used overseas deployments, promotions, and the empty years since retirement as landmarks, navigating his way back down a darkened forest path.  When he passed twenty years, he decided he didn't want to know how long it had been.  He considered the room, not as it was in the past, but as it was now.  There was a TV he had no interest in watching and a bed he wasn't tired enough to sleep in.  Ed opened a window.  The wind pushed through the tall pines, but there was no crash of the Pacific Ocean's waves.  He shut the window.  He didn't want to go out, but he wanted to stay in the room even less.  He knew the on-base club was nearby.  Ed changed out of his uniform and into civilian clothes.  Then he headed out.

The club on the base looked just like he remembered it.  The hotel room had been different, but it was the same.  The base club was the same, only different.  It was the same place physically, the same place geographically, but it was not the same place.  It was a place meant for a new generation.  Ed had been here before.  It had been a home.  But that was then.  Now, the club was filled with younger soldiers and younger airmen.  A new generation he wasn't a part of.  He was an outsider.  A trespasser.  He could feel it in his bones.
He went to the bar and ordered a soda with lime.  For Ed, alcohol was like coffee, a fond memory better left in the past.  The German bartender frowned at the request but came back with the drink just the same.  Ed raised the glass, toasted himself, and took a sip of the sweet fizzy soda.
"No turning back the clock," he said to himself.
When he turned from the bar, he saw three of them sitting at a table and they were all looking at him: Major Reyes, Captain Heart, and Lieutenant Colonel Richards.  It looked like they hadn't wasted any time.  There were more than a few empty glasses already on the table.  Most were in front of Captain Heart.  Inside, Ed cursed his luck.  Outwardly, he smiled his best professional smile and walked over to the table.
"Mind if I join you," Ed asked.  Reyes and Heart smiled.  Richards, the JAG, nodded without any enthusiasm.  For all his good looks, he always looked sour and disinterested.  He looked like a man who felt he had somewhere more important to be and a better class of people to be doing it with.  He looked like he was just tolerating his present circumstances and company.
"Of course, sir," Heart pipped up.  Her voice was pleasant enough, but Ed couldn't tell if her invitation was authentic or not.
Ed sat down.  They went through the usual, semi-awkward pleasantries.  Reyes asked Ed about his background and seemed genuinely impressed when the old colonel rattled off all the places he'd been and the languages he could speak.  Heart followed the conversation and studied Ed's uniform further, particularly the gold parachute wings and silver dive helmet.  When the conversation paused, she asked if he'd been a Reconnaissance Marine.
"I was.  Third Recon Battalion, then Fifth Force Reconnaissance," Ed said.  And as quick as that, it hit him.  Heart's face and her features took him on another trip back in time.  "Your dad was Master Guns Heart, right?"  Ed didn't give time for Heart to answer.  He didn't need to.  Her face said it all.  "I knew your dad, captain.  We served together in Okinawa."  Ed paused, then said, "I'm sorry about your father.  He was a good man."
Heart smiled.  Her smile was sad and sweet and for the first time completely authentic.
"Thank you, sir."
"Cancer.  He deserved better than that.  He was a hell of a man and a hell of a Marine," Ed said.  He raised his glass of soda.  "To Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart!"
"To Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart," Reyes and Heart said.  Even Richards raised a glass with some enthusiasm.

The conversation went on a little while longer.  Heart had started strong with the alcohol, and after Ed mentioned her father, she saw no reason to slow down.  She downed shots chased with beer as Ed nursed his soda.  She worked up her courage, and when the conversation paused a second time, she jumped in again.
"Sir, I saw that you have a Bronze Star, with Valor."
"I do."
"You and General Hamler were lieutenants together, right?"
Ed nodded.  He knew where the captain was leading the conversation.  This wasn't the first time Ed had been asked about Scott Hamler's Silver Star award.  He considered Theresa Heart.  Her father, Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart was the real deal.  He was a badass.  He was also authentic.  Ed wasn't so sure about his daughter.  She was clever, but she wasn't as clever as she thought she was.  And she'd had too much to drink.  Ed slowly turned his glass on the table.
"General Hamler and I were lieutenants together.  Maybe you know this, maybe you don't, but we got our awards for the same thing, my Bronze Star and his Silver Star.  The same day.  The same battle."
"Shit," Reyes said.
"Yeah," Ed agreed.  Ed looked around the table.  Reyes was all ears.  Richards looked interested too.  That was fine.  Ed could tell his war story.  But Heart was the one that worried him.  Military awards are a matter of public record.  A person could read the citations, if they knew how to access them.  And Ed knew that Captain Heart knew how to access them.  Ed had no doubt she'd read General Hamler's Silver Star Citation.  He also had no doubt she'd read his award citation.
"She clever, but not as clever as she thinks she is," Ed said to himself.  He spun the nearly empty glass one more time.  He wished it was something other than soda.  He was glad it wasn't.
"I was there," Ed said.  "That bracelet the general wears around his wrist, the one with the name on it, Sergeant Shipley.  You ever see that?"
Heart nodded.  She was all ears.  They all were.  But Reyes and Richards just wanted a story.  Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart's daughter had an agenda.  Ed could tell.   He swirled his drink in its glass.  It was down to just ice cubes and a splash of soda.  He wanted vodka.  Or whiskey.  Something, anything hard.  But he knew he shouldn't.  He knew if that train started rolling, it wouldn't stop.  He looked at the faces of the younger Marines.
"Sergeant Shipley was there too, so you could say everything is connected.  My award.  His award.  Shipley.  It's all connected.  All of it.  I can't tell you everything that happened, but I can tell you my piece of it.
"We were headed out for a combat tour in the Middle East and we were going the old-fashioned way; by ship.  But the Russians were up to their old tricks in Africa, in one of the former French colonies.  We were sailing by when the whole government imploded and the rebels got the wild idea of trying to overrun our embassy.  Their Russian advisors probably put them up to it.  Anyway, the ambassador called for help and we did what Marines do.  We loaded up into our helicopters and headed ashore…
She'd dropped all the sugary sweet veneer of an aide de camp.
Ed slowly brought his drink to his lips, sipped, and then slowly put the glass back down on the table.  It was all a stall for time.  \


"Two minutes!" The crew chief shouted.  And he shouted it again, not that it was necessary.  The Marines and Navy Corpsmen packed in the helicopter all repeated the, "Two Minutes" refrain, holding up two fingers in a Peace Sign that was anything but.  Then they began squirming in their crash seats, adjusting gear, struggling into their assault packs.  From his position near the cockpit, Lieutenant Doniphan could see the cityscape ahead.  Everything was the same shade of desert tan; the streets, the buildings, even the air.  Across the horizon, columns of smoke twisted up into the sky.  Doniphan's eyes flicked from the big bubble windshield and the world outside to the big compass mounted between the two pilots.  He got his orientation, not that that was hard.  The plan was straightforward.  The helicopters would approach from the south, touch down on the open field that would serve as the landing zone.  The Marines would disembark and head to the east.  The embassy was less than a mile from the landing zone  Simple.  Land, get to the embassy, and defend it.  Easy.
Ahead and just off a little to the right was the transport helicopter carrying Lieutenant Scott Hamler and First Platoon.  Ed craned his neck around to look out through one of the helicopter's open doors.  One of the aircrew stood by with a machine gun.  His Nomex-gloved hands were wrapped tight around the weapon's spade grips.  Beyond that, the helicopter ferrying Third Platoon kept pace.  Behind were more helicopters carrying the Weapons Platoon and the company headquarters.
"L.T., you better get ready," the co-pilot said over the intercom.  Doniphan nodded.  He took the aircraft's cranial helmet off his head and replaced it with his ballistic helmet.  Then he unbuckled and headed back down the aircraft towards the ramp.  One hand gripped his carbine.  He used the other hand to steady himself.  Staff Sergeant Royce, the platoon Sergeant, made a motion with his hands, and the Marines and Corpsmen all chambered rounds in their weapons.  Sergeant Shipley, the platoon guide, made a last-second adjustment to the radio operator's pack.  Shipley was young, but he was going places.  He'd been meritoriously promoted three times already.
"Thirty seconds," the crew chief yelled.  And he made an 'unbuckle' motion with his hands.  The Marines unbuckled their seat belts and stood.  Like Doniphan, they used one hand to hold their weapon and the other hand to steady themselves, grabbing the bulkheads or the low ceiling.  The aircraft was powerful, and everyone could feel its power as it made its final approach and flared.  The aircraft's rear ramp was already down.  Now the only thing left to do was wait for the helicopter to touch down and then get off.
Whether it is a helicopter, an armored personnel carrier, a Higgins boat, or an elaborate horse made of wood, the game was the same.  There comes a point when the transport ceases being a transport and becomes just a really big target.  At that point, the infantrymen packed inside can't get out fast enough.  When you are outside, you can fight.  You have a chance.  While you are trapped inside, shoulder to shoulder and asshole to belly button, you are just waiting to get killed.
Second Platoon's helicopter touched down.  The second it did, the landing zone exploded.
The swirling clouds of brown dust kicked up by the helicopters' rotor wash was punctuated with the 'crumpfing' explosions and black smoke of a mortar barrage.  The rebels, or more likely their Russian advisors, knew the Marines were coming, and they'd been waiting.
The second Ed Doniphan stepped off the ramp the shockwave of an exploding mortar shell knocked him backwards, back onto the ramp.  Mortars or no mortars, the Marines were getting off.  Staff Sergeant Royce grabbed Ed by his body armor and dragged him back down the ramp and out.  The rest of the platoon piled out with them.  Lance Corporal Phang got ten feet from the helicopter, then he collapsed, grabbing a knee with both hands.  Then Ed was lost in the brownout, the dust swirls kicked up by the helicopters' spinning rotors.  He couldn't see anything.
He didn't need to see anything.
His sense of direction was good enough to determine north, that's where the platoon needed to go.  He saw images in the dust that were like apparitions.  A helmet.  An assault pack.  The muzzle of a carbine.  Ed saw Lance Corporal Lasky about to wander the wrong way.  He grabbed Lasky and dragged him along.  He sensed Royce still off to his side.  He couldn't see anybody else.  He couldn't see anything else.  He could hear the thumping of the helicopters.  He listened for the next set of mortar impacts.   He heard something mechanical grinding and screaming, a mechanical protest that rose into a crash.  Ed kept running.  His pack and armor pulled down on his back and shoulders.  Lasky stumbled along.  Royce shouted something unintelligible.  The thrumming of the helicopter rotors rose in pitch.  The pilots were lifting off.  The dust swirled with greater intensity.  Faster.  Thicker.  Ed pumped the one arm not pulling Lasky along.  Ed heard the helicopters powering up and flying away.  He heard them pass over his head, then pass away and gone.  The dust cleared.  Ed found a patch of cover.  He ran to it, took a knee, and looked around.
They were at the north end of the landing zone, a clear area in the middle of the city, that was as wide as a football field and maybe four times as long.  It was flat and featureless, save for the skeletons of stripped cars and mounds of trash.  It looked like somebody had tried to recreate Central Park, then gave up all hope before they even started.  Where the clearing stopped, three- and four-story buildings rose, cheap cinder block construction, sheet metal roofs, windows patched with cardboard.  It could be any war-torn city in any war-torn spot anywhere in the world.
Royce saw it first, and he cursed.
Near the far end of the landing zone, the south, one of the big Marine heavy lift helicopters lay on its side.  One of the transports was down.  It was resting on its side.  The tail was broken off and the rotor blades had shattered.  The cockpit was caved in.  Debris beside the aircraft burned.
"Shit.  That's either Weapons Platoon or the Company Headquarters…  Or maybe Third Platoon.  Shit."
"Yeah," Ed said.  He was half listening to Royce, half assessing the situation.
"Mortars.  They were fucking waiting for us."
"Yeah," Ed repeated.  "Lucky for us it's light stuff.  Probably old Soviet 82 millimeters.  If they were shooting 120's, we'd be dead." Ed remembered his map studies before the mission.  "There's another clearing to the north.  They must be firing from there.  That means they can range the embassy too."
"Fuckers.  Where the hell was our ISR?"
Ed ignored Royce and kept scanning the scene.  More Second Platoon Marines joined them along the north edge of the landing zone.  He caught faces here and there.  Sergeant Shipley.  Deyarmin.  Fulk.  Corporal Ragland.  Sergeant Ivy.  They were all behind cover and facing outboard.  Bodies down.  Eyes up.  Weapons out.  There was a team of Marines in the middle of the landing zone and they were busy looking lost and confused.  They must have gotten disoriented in the dust.  Shipley broke cover and ran for them.  Second Platoon was where it was supposed to be.  Good.
Ed looked to the east.  Scott Hamler's First Platoon was there, rallying up right where they were supposed to be.  They were all getting behind the cover and getting organized.  Good.
That left Third Platoon.
Now it was Ed Doniphan's turn to curse.
The idiot platoon commander is a Hollywood trope.  A bumbling idiot who can neither fight, nor read a map, nor comprehend basic human dynamics.  There are, of course, idiot platoon commanders.  But a platoon can function with a bad platoon commander so long as its platoon sergeant is good.  The problem with Third Platoon was it had neither a good platoon commander nor a good platoon sergeant.  That was a problem.
The embassy was where they needed to go.  That was to the east.  Going east would lead them to their mission objective.  The mortar fire was coming from the north.  Going north would bring them closer to the mortars, which had advantages.  If they went north, they could close with a destroy the mortars.  Closing with and destroying things was what infantry Marines were built for.  West was not a good option, but at least it would move them laterally out of the fan of the mortars.  The one direction that offered nothing was going south.  And Third Platoon was going south.
"Where the fuck are they going?" Royce asked without expecting an answer.  Beyond the landing zone were more of the same humble, third-world, urban sprawl.  Third Platoon disappeared between those buildings.
Shipley deposited his lost Marines into the platoon formation, then crashed onto the ground beside Royce and Doniphan."
"Third Platoon.  They're headed the wrong way," Shipley panted.  Back at the crashed helo, two Marines emerged from the wreckage.  They were pulling a third.
Doniphan grabbed his radio operator.  "Eddy, get a hold of Third Platoon and tell them to…"  A whistling sound cut Ed off.  Then the landing zone exploded again.
The mortars arrived in a ragged barrage.  Ed counted six explosions.  They impacted across the landing zone, erupting with black smoke and tossing up dirt and trash.  A puff erupted near the Marines at the wrecked helicopter.  When the smoke cleared, those Marines were still standing.  Good.  Ed's assessment of the mortar was detached.  Clinical.  The sheaf was too loose.  The impacts weren't overlapping.  And the timing was off.  The shells neither impacted all at once nor impacted at intervals that made any sense.  Aside from the downed helicopter, the landing zone was clear.  Still, the enemy mortarmen were firing for effect, using all their tubes.  That would burn through their ammunition fast.  Amateurs, Ed thought.  Amateurs firing light mortars.  Not good.  But not terrible.
"We got to get to that helo," Royce shouted.  It was almost a demand.
A figure from First Platoon broke cover and ran towards them.  Ed could tell it was Scott Hamler just by the way he moved.  Scott got to Second Platoon just as another mortar shell whistled through the air and impacted on the landing zone.
"Hey," Ed said.
Scott straightened his helmet.  He replied, "Hey."  Then, "You seen the CO?  I can't raise him on the radio."  Ed pointed at the downed helicopter.
"He's either in there... or…"  Ed looked around the landing zone.  "I think one of the helos didn't land.  It probably aborted its landing when it saw the mortars impacting."
"What do we do?  We need to get to the embassy.  And where is Third Platoon going?"
"The embassy can wait.  We need to secure that downed helo," Royce repeated.
Ed turned to Eddy.  "You get a hold of Third Platoon yet?"
The young radio operator shook his head.  "I can't raise them."
Ed scanned the cinderblock buildings.  They might be blocking the signal.  That, or Third Platoon might not be monitoring their radio.
Another mortar shell whistled in.  The Marines of Second Platoon knew the drill now.  They all used the second of warning to make themselves small, to wiggle into the dirt, to shrink down in their armor.
The mortar exploded in the middle of the empty landing zone with a tooth-rattling 'crumpf!'  Harmless, but maybe closer than the last.  Ed scanned the rooftops.
"They have to have a spotter around here," Ed said.  He was speaking aloud, but he was mostly speaking to himself.  Neither Royce's nor Scott Hamler's words were inputting into his working mind.  He was thinking about the map of the city he'd studied.  He was calculating the range of a Russian 82mm mortar, and the distance to the embassy.  He was reviewing the orders they'd all been briefed on before departing.
"Where the hell was the ISR?  They should have picked up those mortars," Royce said.
"We need to get going.  We need to get to the embassy," Scott Hamler said.
"We go to the embassy and then what?  Stay there and get shelled?  If the mortars can hit the landing zone, they can hit the embassy.  Besides that, the plan was to helicopter in another company plus part of the colonel's headquarters.  But those helos can't land if these mortars keep pounding the landing zone.  The landing zone is our lifeline.  If we're going to secure the embassy, we have to secure the landing zone.  And to do that, we have to stop those mortars."
"What about Third Platoon?" Shipley asked.
"What about the Marines in that helicopter?  We can't leave them.  The second we leave the landing zone there'll be rebels swarming all over it."
"Somebody has to go to the embassy.  That's the mission," Hamler said.
Ed looked over the faces around him.  Royce.  Shipley.  Scott Hamler.  Ed could read Scott Hamler's face the best.  They'd been through The Basic School and the Marine's Infantry Officer Course together.  Ed could tell Scott wanted to go to the embassy, that he wanted to be the first to get to the embassy.  Technically, Scott was the senior of the two.  He'd gone to the Naval Academy and been commissioned a few weeks before Ed.  But Ed had been an enlisted Marine.  His prior service, plus his Marine Recon parachute wings and dive helmet carried a lot of weight, especially now that they were under fire.  The next mortar round whistled in.  Ed used that time to deliberate.  It was only a few,  seconds.  A few seconds was all he needed.
'Crumpf!'
"Hamler, leave a fireteam here with Staff Sergeant Royce.  Take the rest of First Platoon and head for the embassy.  Staff Sergeant Royce, take Ragland's squad and the team from First Platoon and secure that downed bird and the landing zone.  Take Eddy too.  You'll need his radio to coordinate the medevac.
"Shipley, go get Third Platoon, turn them around.  Once you get them turned around, have them head north in trace of us.  Don't go alone.  Take Fulk with you."
"What about you?" Hamler asked.
"Second Platoon will go north and clear out those mortars.  If we don't shut them down, we can't use the landing zone.  If we can't control the landing zone, we can't do anything for the embassy.  You have a green flare?"
Scott Hamler nodded.
"Good.  You get to the embassy, you put up a green flare.  When I clear out the mortars.  I'll put up a flare.  Deal?"
"Deal."
"Alright, everybody know what to do?"  Doniphan looked around.  Everybody nodded.  Nobody looked scared.  They all looked eager.  Another mortar round impacted.  The time between impacts was getting shorter.
"Okay, time to move," Doniphan ordered.
They all moved.
Shipley grabbed a Marine named Fulk and sprinted off in the direction of Third Platoon.  Royce gathered his men together and headed for the wrecked helo.  Bent over in a half crouch, Hamler went back to his platoon.  Ed rallied up his two squads and led them north, towards the mortars.
His Marines looked happy to be moving away from the impacting mortars.


The streets looked like all the other streets in all the war-torn cities and villages in that part of the world.  Ed Doniphan had seen more than a few.  He'd seen them all.  Broken down cars on crumbling streets.  Rusted metal.  Shattered glass.  Rotting garbage.  Scatterings of empty water bottles.  And everywhere the same shades of tan dust.  It coated everything.  But no people.  The people were gone.  No people.  No stray dogs.  Nothing alive.  The locals had enough sense to be off the streets.
The Marines moved quickly, a file on either side of the street.  Heads up.  Weapons out.  They twisted down one alley and up another.  Ed could hear the thumps and rings of the outgoing mortars.  Ed was worried that the enemy mortarmen would break and run.  They hadn't.  At least not yet.  The mortars kept firing.  One, after another, after another.  The outgoing reports got louder.  Ed and his platoon were getting closer.
Their alley emptied out into the same open space Ed remembered from his map study.  Buildings had once stood there, but they had collapsed, or been destroyed.  Either way, it was a space littered with rubble and broken hunks of concrete big enough to hide behind.  Not exactly clear, but perfect for setting up some mortars to fire on the landing zone and the embassy.  Ed crept to the corner and peered around the edge of a wall.  Sure enough, they were there.  A gang of rebels dressed in a mishmash of civilian rags, camouflage, and military gear stood around a battery of six mortar tubes.  There were a few standing amongst the rebels that looked different.  They were shorter and thicker.  They had blonde hair and pale skin.  They wore real uniforms with patches on their shoulders; black circles adorned with gold stars and swords.  Cyrillic characters ran along the outer edge of the patch.
Russian.  Maybe Serbian, Ed thought.  He raised his rifle, aimed in on the patch, and opened fire.
Russian or Serbian, the man with the patches on his sleeves tumbled over.  Then the firefight began in earnest.
Marines poured out of the alley behind Ed Doniphan and took up firing positions.  Ed didn't have to shout any commands, they moved instinctively, keying off his actions.  The Marines of Second Platoon flopped behind whatever cover they could find and let loose.  The rebel mortarmen and their foreign advisors were caught off guard.  Bodies toppled left and right.  A Marine cut loose with a long burst from an automatic rifle.  One of the rebels spilled backward across his mortar, toppling it.  Another dropped to his knees and then flopped sideways.
"We got 'em!" Somebody yelled.
A Marine unlimbered a disposable anti-tank rocket slung across his back, probably eager to fire it just so he wouldn't have to carry it anymore.  Red tracer fire ripped across the kill zone.  A rebel raised an AK-47 to fire but was cut down before he could fire a shot.  The remaining rebels abandoned their mortars and any pretense of fighting.  They turned and ran.  Their blonde-haired advisors tried to rally them, but it was no use.  The rebels chose discretion over valor.
"They're getting away," one Marine shouted.  They almost did.  The rebels were picking their way through the cover of the ruined buildings when Sergeant Shipley came out of another alley with part of Third Platoon.  They opened fire immediately.  Rebels twisted and fell.  An advisor raised his pistol and fired once, twice, then a burst of automatic fire raked across his chest and he disappeared behind a blood cloud.  The red tracers were now crisscrossing across the kill zone.  The platoons had the rebels in a crossfire.

The rebels captured the Panhard armored vehicle when they looted all the local government's armories.  When the vehicle first came out of the alley, none of the Marines noticed.  The Marines were focused on their targets, and the three-and-a-half-ton, four-wheeled armored car wasn't exactly big.  But it did sport a .50 caliber machine gun in its ring mount.  When that machine gun opened fire, everybody noticed.
Broken cement blocks near Ed were pulverized.  Ed didn't know if he was knocked to the ground or instinctively threw himself on the ground, but he found himself on the ground.  His eyes and mouth were filled with dust.  The Marines all around him scrambled for cover.  They scrambled back down the alleyway.  The gunner's fire went wild.  Up-Down-Left-Right.  It raked up the walls of nearby buildings and then back down across the ground.  The thin rebel could barely control the gun but barely was enough.  A ricochet caught Jenkins in the hip.  Ed saw two Marines from Third Platoon drop.  Ed looked back towards the alley he came out of.  There was no cover between where he was and the alley.  Too far to run.  A barrage of bullets passed over his head and he could feel their passing.  It was raw and deadly energy.  Tangible.  Horrible.  He cursed.  He spat.  His mouth tasted like dust.  He saw better cover ahead and flat on his belly he crawled towards it.  The edge of his helmet made crunching sounds as it dug into the dirt.  The .50 was loud.  He could hear the deep chugs of its firing and the slap of its action cycling.  Then he heard a new sound; the distinct double booms of a rocket firing and impacting.
Ed peaked above the rubble.  The Panhard was hidden by a black cloud of smoke.  When the smoke cleared, the Panhard was still there, but its front end was crumpled in.  Ed tasted hope for a second, but then the .50 caliber opened fire again.  Ed saw another piece of cover ahead, a taller, thicker mound of rubble.  He shrugged off his assault backpack, not knowing what he was doing but knowing he could get a better view from there.  He crawled flat on his belly.  One arm pulled.  One leg kicked.  His other arm drug along his carbine.  Machinegun fire thumped over his head and then traversed away to some other target.  He got to the cover.  He raised his head just enough and looked back.
Third Platoon had gone back down their alley.  So had Second Platoon.  Here and there he could make out other Marines, pinned down in the rubble.  A Second Platoon Marine popped out of the alley and fired at the Panhard; once, twice.  Then he ducked back into the alley just as the big machine gun swung back around.  It pounded the entrance of the alley into dust.  Great, Ed thought.  We're stuck here.  He squirmed his body around so he could get a look at the Panhard.  He got as low as he could and exposed only a fraction of one eyeball, just enough to see.
The rebel gunner was up in the turret ring, sighting down his weapon and ready to fight.  But to Ed, it looked like the driver was struggling behind the windshield.  He heard what sounded like the clunk of a transmission shifting, then a mechanical whine.  The pitch of the whine intensified.  A mechanical protest.  The driver was pushing down on the gas but the vehicle wasn't moving.  That was good, right?  No, Ed thought.  That meant the rebels weren't leaving.  "Alright, what the hell do I do now?" Ed asked himself behind the relative safety of the cement rubble.
A Third Platoon Marine took a shot at the Panhard.  The gunner swung over in Third's direction and fired off a burst.  The M2 .50 caliber machine gun was powerful.  It was also big and heavy.  Even with the assistance of its ring mount, it was slow to traverse from target to target.  While the rebel gunner fired at Third Platoon, Ed got up, ran forward two steps, and then dove behind the next piece.  As soon as he hit the ground, he reached into a pouch and pulled out a fragmentation grenade.
The .50 caliber kept chugging along.
Ed reverted to his training.  He held the grenade in both hands.  He removed the thumb clip.  He pulled the pin.  He popped out from behind cover just long enough to throw the grenade at the Panhard.  The spherical grenade arced out and shredded the spoon that activated the detonator.  Ed ducked back down behind the cover and waited.
Boom!
Ed peeked out from behind his cover again.  The black cloud from the grenade's explosion cleared away.  It had landed short.  He was still too far away.  Then Ed had to quickly duck back behind cover as the M2 swung over in his direction and opened fire.  The noise was deafening.  He could feel the impact of the half-inch slugs as they tore into the earth and rubble around him.  Fist-sized chunks of concrete rained down on him.  His lungs filled with choking dust.  His eyes stung with gritty sweat.
Then he heard the boom of a second grenade.
Ed wiggled around.  Off in the direction of Third Platoon, Shipley was crouching behind some cover, and the gunner was swinging over in his direction.  Shipley had the same idea as Ed.  Just as the gunner couldn't cover Second and Third Platoon at the same time, he couldn't cover Ed and Shipley at the same time.  If they moved forward in bounds, one of them would eventually get close enough to land a grenade.  Ed looked over his gear.  The only problem was they'd only been issued two grenades.
The .50 caliber opened fire on Shipley.  
Ed bounded for cover again.  This time, instead of moving forward, he moved laterally, spreading the distance between himself and Shipley, making the arc the gunner had to cover greater.  He hit the ground heavily, feeling the full weight of his armor and gear.  He had a concussion grenade.  It wasn't lethal, but Ed threw it anyway.  He tossed it out from behind cover without even looking at the target.  It exploded in midair with a thundering boom.  The M2 paused for a moment.  Rifles opened up from both Third and Second Platoon's positions.  Ed heard their impacts pinging off the Panhard's armor.  Ed peaked out.  The gunner and his gun were facing away from him.  Ed raised his rifle and fired.  He could see his bullets impact and spawl against the turret armor.  The turret spun.  Ed ducked down and made himself as small as he could.  The .50 caliber chugged.  Through its din, Ed heard Sergeant Shipley's voice.
"Frag out."
And then…
"Boom!"
Rifles kept snapping.  Ed took another peek.  Shipley's grenade had fallen short.  The .50 caliber swung back into action and fired in Shipley's direction.  Ed scrambled to the next piece of cover, forward this time.
The Panhard's driver made one last attempt to get the vehicle unstuck.  It didn't move.  In a panic, the driver opened his door and climbed out of the vehicle, trying to make a run for it.  Rifles from Second and Third Platoon's positions snapped furiously.  The driver collapsed in a hailstorm.  "Don't shoot me, damn it," Ed screamed silently to the other Marines.  He got to his next piece of cover and dropped behind it.  The M2 swung over towards Second Platoon.  The Marines there scrambled back behind cover.  The big gun chugged away.  Shipley popped out from behind cover and fired his rifle.  The turret swung over in his direction again.  Ed took out his last grenade and removed the safeties.  The M2 fired on Shipley's position.  And it kept firing.  Shipley disappeared behind clouds of dust so thick you couldn’t see inside, just cottony gray opaqueness.  Ed threw his last grenade.  It arced out.  The spoon fell away.  The grenade hit the lip of the turret, rolled inside the Panhard, and exploded.
When the grenade's smoke cleared, Ed saw the M2 was mangled.  The feed tray cover had been blown off and the barrel looked twisted.  The gunner had been blown out of the turret and was nowhere to be seen.
Ed looked over where Shipley had been.  The gray dust clouds cleared.  Sergeant Shipley stood, coughed out some dust, and raised a thumbs-up sign.  The Marines of Second and Third Platoon whooped and cheered.  Ed felt embarrassed and nauseous at the same time.
From the east came the sound of a rocket shooting skyward.  Ed turned and looked.  Something in the sky exploded into a burning green ball.  Scott Hamler's flare.  He'd reached the embassy.  Ed picked his way through the rubble to where he'd ditched his assault pack.  He found it and plucked the flare out of it.  As he did, he felt a pair of eyes on him.  He turned and there, hiding in a pocket of the rubble was an eight-year-old boy.  The kid was dressed in a mix of rags and military uniform items meant for an adult.  He was one of the rebels.  He had dark skin and big white eyes and he looked scared out of his mind, scared that Ed Doniphan was going to kill him.  Ed pointed his rifle, but not at the kid.
"Aller," Ed said.
The kid scrambled out of his hiding place and ran.  Ed watched him go.  Then he fired his green flare into the sky.  He'd taken out the mortars.


Ed drained the last of his soda and set the glass on the table.  After what seemed like a long pause, Reyes spoke.
"Damn, sir."
"Yeah," Ed said.
Even Richards looked impressed.  "You charged an armored vehicle all by yourself and all they gave you was a Bronze Star?"
Ed shrugged.  "It was a Bronze Star with Valor, and I didn't charge it by myself.  I had Sergeant Shipley and two platoons backing me up.  That, and a lot of dumb luck.  If I had any sense I would have ducked back down the alley when that M2 opened up, just like all the other Marines.  Instead, I let myself get caught in the kill zone.  I'd gotten myself into a jackpot.  Everything after was just me getting myself out of that jackpot."
Reyes shook his head.  "Damn," he said again.
Richards stood and pointed at the table.  "I'm going to get another round.  Sir?"
"Just ice water for me," Ed said.
"Are you sure, sir?"
"Positive.  Thanks."
"You know what I want," Captain Heart said, indicating the empty beer and shot glasses on the table.
Reyes stood too.  "I'll go with you."
The lieutenant colonel and the major headed for the bar.  When they were out of earshot, Heart said, "I don't get it."
"What don't you get?"
"Shipley.  He was alive at the end of your story.  He didn't get killed in the battle."
"I never said Shipley got killed in the battle."
"But General Hamler wears that bracelet with his name on it.  Memorializing him."
"Shipley didn't get killed there.  Nobody did.  Thankfully.  A few got wounded by ricocheting .50 rounds.  And Phang took some mortar shrapnel, but nobody got killed.  Even the ones in the helicopter crash survived."
Heart frowned.  Her forehead wrinkled.  She was trying to puzzle something out.
"What else?"  Ed asked.  "You've got something else on your mind.  What is it?"
"Well," she began, tentative.  Ed knew where she was going.  He thought about cutting her off.  It would be for her own good.  She was Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart's daughter, and he owed that old timer.  But, she was also too clever.  Too clever by half.  And General Scott Hamler was a friend too.  He let her ask her question.
"You were the one that cleared out the mortars.  But General Hamler got awarded the Silver Star."
"That's right."
"The Silver Star is a higher award."
"It is."
"Well, that doesn't make any sense, sir."
Ed Doniphan had been down this road before, many times.  Every time he went back down it, the burden of the truth got heavier and heavier.  He felt like sighing.  He felt like bending beneath its weight, but he didn't.  He smiled and put on a good face.
"General Hamler was the first to get to the embassy.  Yeah, we got into the fight with the mortars, and that damned French armored car, but his trip to the embassy wasn't exactly uneventful.  I told you that I was going to tell you my part of the story, and I did.  General Hamler has his own story about that day.  It is his to tell, or not tell."
Heart didn't look convinced.  Okay, Ed thought.  Scott Hamler was his friend.  This captain might have been Master Gunnery Sergeant Heart's daughter, but she was too clever and maybe needed to get knocked down a few pegs.
Ed stopped smiling.  With his most serious and sober face he asked, "You read his award citation, didn't you, captain?"
Captain Heart straightened.  Her face flushed red with shame.  "Yes, sir," she said.
"Well, just remember, captain.  They don't always publish the full story.  Not everybody gets the credit they deserve.  Not even the heroes."
Reyes and Richards returned with another round of drinks.  Ice water for Colonel Ed Doniphan, and alcohol for everybody else.  Halfway through that round, Captain Heart's phone rang.
A phone rang.   Captain Heart pulled her phone out, looked at the incoming call ID, stood, and took a few steps away.  Distance.  Privacy.  Reyes handed a glass to Ed.  Ed looked it over, but he didn't drink.
A few paces away, Captain Heart made the same titters and giggles she'd made on the plane.  When the call ended, she pocketed her phone and came back to the table.
"Colonel Doniphan," she said.  "General Hamler's free and would like to see you now."

5
"Admiral Clyburn’s left town to take care of some Ukraine things, but he’s letting me use his place.  It’s secure, so we can finally talk freely," General Scott Hamler said.  He took a crystal decanter off a brass bar cart and poured two generous drinks.  Scotch.  Ed could smell the alcohol from his seat on a leather couch across the room.  As Hamler made the drinks, Ed took in his surroundings.  The walls of the admiral's office were covered with mementos from his career: decorated boat paddles, plaques, framed flags, a captured AK-47 bayonet, and photographs of the admiral standing in front of various SEAL teams over the years.  To Ed, everything looked familiar.  Even so, he felt like an imposter, a poser who was someplace he didn't belong.
Scott Hamler set the decanter down, took a healthy drink from his glass, and then topped it back off.  He brought the second glass over and set it on the coffee table in front of Ed.  Ed looked the glass over, then looked up at his old friend without touching the glass.
"Well, you're smart, Ed.  Smarter than I ever was.  You probably figured it out already, but this is all about Russia."
The couch was soft, and Ed felt himself sinking deeper into it.  He felt too low to the ground, and it seemed like Scott Hamler was too tall, too high up.  For Ed, it was like he was looking up from the bottom of a hole, or like he was a particularly small child looking up at an adult.
"This is all about Russia.  And this is big.  Bigger than anything I've ever done before.  Russia has caused a lot of problems over the years, as you well know.  Problems for us.  Problems for our allies.  Problems for the whole world."
Ed's eyes moved from Scott, to the drink, then back again.  Scott Hamler spoke as if he were speaking to an audience, like he was speaking to political constituents rather than an old friend.  His voice was low and resolute.  His eyes were focused on something far beyond their room.
"The Russians have been putting it to us, too hard and for too long.  They took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from our friends the Georgians.  They got us to fold on theater missile defense.  They got started in Ukraine and after they got started, they figured out they didn't have to stop.  We've got Russians in Syria.  We've got Russians taking over all of France's old colonies.  They're cyber-attacking the Baltics to no end.  They're flying their bombers along our West Coast and their sneaking their leaky-ass submarines along our East Coast.  They interfere with elections, and they give away their weapons to anybody who'll use them to kill Americans.  And all this time, we've just sat and taken it.
"Well, we aren't taking it anymore.  The people who run this country are sick of the damn Russians.  They're sick, and they want me to do something about it."
Scott Hamler drained half his glass.  Ed left his untouched on the coffee table.
"Congress has a hardon for these Russian pricks.  The foreign affairs committee, the intelligence committee, they want something done."  Scott drained his glass.  He went back to the brass bar cart and poured another.
"The thing is, we're not the only people sick of the Kremlin and all the trouble they cause.  People inside Russia aren't happy either.  People in Dagestan.  People in Tatarstan.  The Chechens.  They're all mad.  They are ready to fight.  That's where we come in Ed."
Ed took a deep breath in.  He held it and then let it out slowly.  He knew he needed to brace himself for what was coming next.
"Congress has set aside money, Ed.  They've set aside weapons and equipment too.  We've opened dialogues with opposition leaders in the region.  They've had enough of Moscow.  They're ready to start an insurgency and turn the tables on those Russian bastards.  All they need is the means to fight.  And we can give them that.  We can give them all the weapons and money they need to do the things that need to get done.
"We're going to turn the tables on those Russians.  They've fueled insurgencies around the world.  Well, now they're going to get an insurgency in their own backyard.  We'll see how they like that.  And we're the ones that are going to make that happen, Ed.  The Marine Corps is taking the lead on this.  Not the intelligence agencies.  Not SOF.  We are.  Congress came to us, and we're going to deliver.  And when all this is over, Congress is going to owe the Marine Corps some big favors.  Some very big favors."
Scott Hamler drained his glass again and set it down on the bar cart.  He turned to his old friend.
"Well, Ed, what do you think?"
Ed spent a long time just sitting in silence.  He couldn't even look up at his old friend.  He just stared at the drink on the coffee table.  Finally, he reached out, took this whisky glass, and downed the whole thing in one go.  Ed didn't care about the alcohol; he just used the drink to buy time to organize his thoughts. When the alcohol’s burn wore off, Ed spoke.
"I think this is a really bad idea."
General Scott Hamler's face dropped.  "Why?"
"Where to start?" Ed asked.  The general didn't reply, so Ed went right into it.
"First off, there is only one demographic inside the Russian Federation that could mount a viable insurgency.  And that’s the last demographic we want to arm."
"They just want their freedom, same as us."
"They are not the same as us and they don't care about freedom.  We're talking about Islamic extremists.  That's who we are talking about."
"They want to fight for a better life."
"They want to fight because they're terrorists.  You said Dagestan?  That's where the Boston bombers came from.  Chechnya?  The Chechens?  We can't possibly send weapons to the Chechens."
"The United States has armed anti-Russian Islamic groups in the past.  We armed the Mujahidin in Afghanistan and they drove the Russians out."
"Yes.  And we all know what happened after that."  Ed shook his head.  He thought about asking for another drink but quickly decided against it.  He needed to be sober.  One look at General Hamler's face and Ed could tell his old friend was committed to this idea.
"These aren't huddled masses yearning to be free.  Dagestan.  Chechnya.  We're not talking about liberal-minded advocates of Western democracy.  We're talking about hardcore extremists.  Terrorists.  We spent the best years of our lives running around the Middle East chasing down people like that.  That’s who you want to arm?  Terrorists?  People like Imam Shamil?"
Scott Hamler’s face dropped.  His mouth snapped shut.  His eyes fell to his floor.  In that split second, Ed Doniphan knew he found a truth too awful to hide.
"Shit," Ed said.  "You are talking to Imam Shamil."
"We're talking to a lot of people inside Russia.  Believe it or not…"
"Imam Shamil?"  Ed interrupted.  He leaped up from the couch.  His face flushed red.  "Imam Shamil?  He's got American blood on his hands."
Scott pointed an accusing finger at Ed.  His voice rose.  "That was never proven to be Shamil."
"Oh, horseshit.  You were there.  You saw it, same as me.  Both of us.  Standing there on the side of the ditch, looking down at our dead soldiers.  That lieutenant?  She couldn't have been more than 22 years old.  That was Shamil.  Now you want to give him weapons because some dummies in Congress read too many spy novels."
"Believe it or not Ed, the world isn't a simple place.  This isn’t the first time our nation has been forced to deal with unsavory characters."
"But we aren’t forced to deal with them.  And they aren’t simply unsavory characters.  These are terrorists.  Terror is their way of war and Shalem Shah is one of the worst.  If we give people like him weapons, they won’t be using them on Red Army Soldiers or FSB agents.  They’ll kill civilians.  Women and children who just want to live their lives.  They won’t be laying siege to the Lubyanka or the Admiralty building.  They’ll be shooting up schools and concert halls, just as they’ve done before.
"And that will destabilize Russia."
Ed ignored his friend's remark.  "And when Shamil and his terrorist buddies get tired of murdering Russian kids, what do you think he'll do next with those weapons?  He'll use them to kill Americans, that's what."
"Is that what you're worried about?"
"That's one of the things I'm worried about," Ed said.  He was getting heated, and he knew it.  And Scott Hamler was getting heated.  Ed wanted to calm this situation down, but the idea was insane and he knew it.  He took a deep breath and went on.
"We're going to Tbilisi next, right?"
"Right."
Ed nodded.  "And you plan to smuggle these weapons through Georgia and into Russia."
"That's right.  And that's why we need you here Ed.  I know you know Georgia's Chief of Defense."
Ed nodded again.  It was a nod of understanding, not agreement.
"Did you ask yourself what'll happen to them?"
"Who?  The Georgians?"
"Yes, the Georgians."
"The Georgians will help us out.  They are our allies,"  Scott Hamler said.
"That's right," Ed replied.  "But being allies goes both ways.  What do you think the Kremlin will do when a bunch of Russians get murdered by terrorists, and they find out the weapons came through Georgian?  What do you think the Russians will do to the Georgians when they find out?  It won't be pretty; I can tell you that.  They'll punish Georgia.  They'll punish the Georgian people.  They won't have a choice.  The heavy hand of Moscow has crushed a lot of people in that region.  They'll do it again.  And what will happen to our Georgian allies then?  I can tell you what won't happen.  In the luxury of peacetime, we can talk about being allies all we want, but when the Russian tanks start rolling into Tbilisi, the United States will be nowhere to be found.  We'll leave the Georgians out to dry just like we did before.
"For that matter, what do you think the Russians will do to us when they find out we're fueling a rebellion inside the Motherland?  We’re not talking about a proxy war in some remote corner of the third world.  This would mean killing Russians on Russian soil.  They aren't going to take something like that lying down."
"The Russians fuck with us all the time."
"Not like this they don't.  They haven't armed terrorist groups inside the United States.  And speaking about people finding out, what do you think is going to happen to you when this secret wars gets found out, because believe me, it will.  A thing like this won’t stay a secret.  It can't.  It’s too big.  Somebody will talk and when they do the bottom will fall out, and you, you’ll be the one left holding the bag.
"I’ve got guarantees."
"From who?  From Congress?  You and I both know what those guarantees will get you.  They aren’t just looking for a general to manage this secret war.  They need a scapegoat too.  And they will not hesitate to destroy you and your good name to protect themselves.  When this operation is exposed, you'll be the one standing before Congress.  You'll be dressed in your service uniform with all your ribbons and your right hand in the air, and the cameras flashing, being questioned and humiliated by the very same politicians who sent you on this damned misadventure."
The room got quiet.  General Scott Hamler went back to the bar cart and poured himself another Scotch.  Each move he made was as slow and deliberate as if he were being watched and evaluated by some unseen proctor.  After he recapped the decanter, Scott took another sip.  The distant look returned to his eyes.  He spoke.
"You aren’t seeing the larger picture here, Ed."
"Okay.  What is the larger picture?"
"The truth is, Ed, I don’t give a damn about the Russians.  But I do care about the Marines.
"The Marine Corps is the smallest of the military branches.  I’m not talking about the Coast Guard or those Space people, I’m talking about the legacy branches.  The real branches.  We are the smallest force, with a disproportionality small budget.  And we’re getting smaller by the day.  We used to have tanks, but we couldn’t afford them.  We used to have amphibious vehicles, and we couldn’t afford to maintain them.  Half of our helicopters were designed to fight a jungle war that ended before you and I were born.  The Navy isn’t building the ships we need to go afloat.  Worse than all of that, young Americans don’t want to join.  We’re not making our recruiting numbers.  Can you imagine such a thing, Ed?  Forty years in this gun club and we've never failed to meet our recruiting mission…  until now.  And why would anybody join?  We don’t even get enough money to maintain what little they allow us.  Our barracks are falling apart.  Our helicopters fall out of the sky, and our amphibious vehicles sink to the bottom of the sea."
At that last comment, Ed Doniphan looked down, ashamed, just as the General had when he mentioned Imam Shamil.  Scott Hamler kept going.
"The Marine Corps has always had to fight just to exist.  We put that flag on top of Iwo Jima and not ten years later we had not one but two presidents who wanted us disbanded."
Scott shook his head, drained off half his drink, and then continued.
"I’m talking budget, Ed.  I’m talking about having the Senators and Representatives in my pocket, so we can get the equipment we need instead of begging for US Army hand-me-downs.  I'm talking about getting tanks back, if for no other reason than to shut up those retired, four-star busy-bodies.  I’m talking about forcing the Navy to build us the transport ships we need to get our Marines afloat.  And I'm talking about things bigger than that.  I’m talking about government reform in the Executive Branch.  There is a Secretary of the Army, and there is a Secretary of the Airforce.  But there is no Secretary of the Marine Corps.  We fall under the Department of the Navy, and you know what that means for our budget.  You know what that means when we need an advocate in the White House or up on the Hill.  We’re always playing second fiddle to the Big-Blue-Navy.
"No more, Ed.  I'm going to fix the Marine Corps.  And if I have to use some Islamic terrorists to kill a bunch of Russians to do it, that's a deal for me."
Ed Doniphan sat unconvinced.  He said, "General, I think those are some very ambitious plans."
General Scott Hamler held his wrist up so Ed could see it.  There on his wrist, his big watch gleamed.  His metal bracelet gleamed brighter, and the name on the bracelet, Sergeant Shipley, gleamed even brighter than that.
"My only ambition is to make sure what happened to Sergeant Shipley never happens again."


Ed Doniphan walked back to the base hotel.  For a man who was already lonely, Ed never felt so alone in his life.
He got to the hotel door, pulled out his keycard, held it near the lock, and froze.  The card hovered before the lock.  Ed stood thinking.  He didn't want to go back to his room.  He didn't want to sleep.  He knew he wouldn't be able to sleep.  Eventually, he slipped the key back into his pocket.
A paved path ran around the hotel.  Ed followed in until he came to a bench that faced into the wood.  Ed sat down on the bench and looked out into the dark German forest and listened to the wind swish through the pines.  It wasn't the same as the sound of the waves crashing against the Oregon Coast, but it was a good substitute.
What have you gotten yourself into?  Ed asked himself.  The United States was going to arm terrorists and start a secret war inside Russia, and his old friend Scott Hamler was going to be the point man.  It was a bad idea from start to finish.  He could have stayed home on the Oregon Coast and left well enough alone.  Instead, he was here, neck deep in this jackpot.  The same jackpot that Scott Hamler was dashing into headlong.
What have you gotten yourself into?  Ed asked himself again.  And how the hell do you get yourself and Scott out of it?
Ed sat on the bench for a long time, listening, watching, and thinking.  When the sun finally broke the eastern horizon, he went up to his room and packed for the next leg of his trip.

The Spartan's Inferno

Prologue

Clint "Posey" Walker rode his horse through the Northern California woods to the hidden entrance of The Warren, the underground home to the secret community of Jefferson.  Posey was a big man, tall with broad shoulders.  His face was tanned.  His features, chiseled.  His hair was thick and a glossy black.  He spoke with a slow and kindly drawl.  He was dressed and armed like a lawman of the Old West.  A holstered revolver rested on one hip.  A lever-action rifle, this one fitted with a suppressor, rested in a scabbard on the horse’s flank.  Posey had a Western-themed profession to go with his weapons.  He was the sheriff of the Warren, or as close a thing to a sheriff as the free-spirited community of the Jefferson would allow.
He rode easily up the ascending forest trail.  The forest here was thick, and the air cool from the shade.  Cool, but dry.  The spring had been hot and the summer even hotter, and Jefferson had not seen any rain in a long time.
The horse had made this trip many times before and knew the way home.  It sauntered up the path, past where it intersected the sunken and long-abandoned logging road that crossed the forest floor.  While the horse did the work, Sheriff Posey did the thinking.  His thoughts were troubled.  Their six New Spartan guests had been with them for more than a week now, along with Nicky-Lee and Cora, who together returned like a prodigal son and daughter.  The people of Jefferson allowed the New Spartans to stay, mostly because there was no consensus on what else to do with them, just as there hadn’t been a consensus on what to do about Gomorrah to the south, or New Sparta to the North, or Doctor Chosen’s amoral bioengineering, or anything else.  Ever.  That was the problem with Jefferson's system of governance.  They could never reach a consensus on any issue.  The theory of a cosmopolitan democracy seemed great to Jefferson's founders long ago.  In practice, Posey found it an ineffective means of governing a society.
Posey's brows knitted with worry.  The New Spartans were going to be a problem.  The return of Nicky-Lee was going to be a problem, as was the return of Cora.  She was part of a faction of discontented Jeffersonians, who, led by the fiery and impulsive Eldra, had broken away and left the Warren.  Now Cora was back.  Like the addition of the New Spartans, that was not popular with certain members of the Jefferson community.  Most worrisome of all was the loss of Jekyll, the self-aware supercomputer Nicky-Lee took to attack Gomorrah.  That was going to be a big issue and one that had to be addressed as soon as he got back inside the Warren.  Posey wasn’t looking forward to that.
The trees thinned, the path widened, and the main entrance loomed ahead.  From the sky, Jefferson looked like nothing more than a ridge on the cliffs facing the California coast.  But beneath the grassy slope lay a bunker complex the size of a small city, complete with a hospital, manufacturing facilities, a power plant, and technologies that rivaled anything New Sparta or Gomorrah possessed.  Built by a clique of tech oligarchs just before the Protest consumed first the United States and then the rest of the world, Jefferson was a self-sufficient community, hidden and insulated from the dangers of the outside world, hidden from both Gomorrah's anarcho-tyranny and New Sparta's hyper-militarism.
At least it had been.
Posey rode his horse through the open blast doors and dismounted.  The Warren was like a high-rise building, only it started on the ground and went down.  The top level held stables and pens for the community’s livestock and garages for their vehicles.  Posey dismounted and slid the long, suppressed rifle out of its scabbard.  Older children who served as stable hands took the animal.  Posey made his way to a nearby stairwell and went down.  His morning ride had been pleasant.  His short time in the stables had been a calm before the storm.  Now Posey trod down the steps knowing the deeper he went into the Warren the more discomforting things would be.
The next level of Warren (working downwards), was the common area.  It was made to look like a shopping mall.  Here, members of the community met and exchanged goods out of partitioned stalls.  There was a thriving sub-economy here where Pre-Protest pop culture artifacts, many reproduced but some originals, were traded back and forth.  Relics from the 1980s commanded the highest prices.  Clint walked past stalls hawking reproductions of vintage t-shirts and 3D printed toys.  Another stall peddled brightly colored comic books.  Some were reprints and others were scavenged originals that were mostly tatters and scraps, the paper so old it might crumble at the slightest touch.  Large screens mounted all around the mall played movies, cartoons, and TV programs from a bygone age.  Everywhere there were indicators of an obsessive nostalgia for a time no Jeffersonian had ever experienced.
In the center of the mall, one of Jefferson's political powerhouses proselytized.  Ellie Moonbeam stood barefoot amongst her followers.  She wore a billowing muumuu in hues of blue, purple, and lavender.  The garment suited her frame.  Jewelry comprised of polished driftwood and glass beads adorned her neck, wrists, and hairy ankles.  Her tangled black and gray hair bounced with her movements and the cadence of her voice.
"Even now!  Even now these wild Spartan killers are here, here in Jefferson.  Hateful misogynists, here in our Warren.  Who allowed that?  We didn’t allow that!  We didn’t vote on that!  We never held a vote.  But here they are.  Along with some other dirty dogs, I might add.  Yes, I’m talking about that man and that girl who left us and came back here with these other dirty dogs.  Here they are, eating our food, using our power, and spreading their dangerous ideas.  Their dangerous, unsafe ideas.  They put our whole community at risk."
Around Ellie, gray-haired heads bobbed up and down in unison and approval.  Physical manifestations of groupthink.  Ellie Moonbeam didn’t have a big following, but in Jefferson’s chaotic political system, she didn’t need a large following to make a big impact.  Jefferson had been created by free-thinking, free-spirited, individualists and non-conformists.  Those traits had been carried down since The Protest.  Insulated from the outside world and its consequences, that non-conformist spirit grew over the years.  The result was a free-spirited community that was hard to organize.  For a governing system, Jefferson practiced Cosmopolitan Democracy: the theory that citizens got to vote on the issues that impacted them.  The reality was that whenever an issue did come up, more time was spent arguing over who was or was not impacted and who did or did not deserve to vote on an issue than the issue itself.  Almost all of those meetings devolved into unproductive screaming matches, and in the end, people just did their own thing without reaching any consensus or unity of effort.
"We have survived all these years because none of these outsiders, these dirty dogs knew we were here.  But now we have a whole army of Spartans among us.  How long before the rest of the New Sparta knows we are here?  How long before the world knows we’re here?  How long before all the dirty dogs show up at our doors to ape us and steal our things?"
Heads bobbed enthusiastically and murmurs of agreement bubbled up from Moonbeam’s small crowd.  As Posey walked by, his long, suppressed rifle in hand, Ellie shot him a look of disapproval.  She didn't think weapons should be allowed inside the Warren.  She didn't think the Warren needed any law enforcement either.  She believed law enforcement was a tool of misogynistic patriarchies, and she never passed up an opportunity to remind the world of her belief.  Posey tipped his hat to her and continued on his way.
Past Ellie Moonbeam, and deeper inside the reproduction 1980s mall, Posey came across Jefferson's second political force.  Ellie Moonbeam had only a few dozen followers.  Maxwell Vortex had only three.  Posey found Ellie Moonbeam only annoying.  He considered Maxwell Vortex dangerous.
"Sherrif, how are you this morning?" Vortex asked.  The three henchmen at his side snickered, as if the question were some inside joke.  Maxwell and his toadies reminded Posey of the character Biff Tannen and his gang from the movie Back to the Future.  Not that Vortex looked anything like Biff Tannen.  Middle-aged Vortex was a round, egg-shaped man and just as bald.  For whatever reason, Vortex always wore brightly colored sarongs and heeled sandals.  Despite his effeminate dress and unimposing physicality, Vortex was an effective bully, and he used his stooges to great effect.
"I'm okay, Max.  How are you and your friends this morning," Posey replied, assessing Maxwell's crew.  The smallest of the three, a diminutive but mean man named Strother spoke up.
"We're fine, sheriff, we're just fine," Strother said, and he broke into a high-pitched giggle.  The second goon, a bespectacled man with the unlikely name of Rugs, jumped in.
"Yeah, sheriff.  We're just fine."  Together, Rugs and Strother snickered at their inside joke as if it were the funniest thing they ever heard.  Vortex's third thug didn't join in.  His name was Lee.  He was tall, thin, and reptile-cold.  Lee wore a matched pair of single-action, Pre-Protest revolvers on his hips in custom leather.  While the others giggled, Lee just squinted his eyes.  One corner of his lips curled into something that was either a forced smile or a sneer.  Posey couldn't tell what.
"Have a good day," Posey said, and he tipped his hat again and walked on.
"You have a good day too, sheriff," Strother called out.  Then he broke back into his high-pitched, half-giggle half-cackle and Rugs joined in.  Posey walked on and didn't look back.
Posey left Ellie Moonbeam, Vortex, and the rest of the Jeffersonians behind.  He entered an elevator at the end of the bazaar.  He punched in his pin code, pushed the button for the bottom floor and when prompted entered a second pin.  There weren't many security protocols for movement within the Warren, but the bottom floor was an exception.  That area was kept locked down.  It wasn't so much to keep people from going in as it was to keep something from getting out.
Posey took a deep calming breath.  The doors closed and the elevator descended.
When the elevator doors opened, Posey stepped out into the lowest, darkest, and most secure level of the Warren.  The lighting here was sparse, and it hummed electrically.  The air and the walls felt wet, even though it hadn’t rained in months.  The space was unfinished.  In most places the walls were bare rock braced with timbers hewn from the great trees growing up on the surface.  Exposed ducting, pipes, and wires ran back and forth.  At the far end of a junk-strewn hall, the light was brighter, and Clint heard two voices conversing.  He walked to the light.
"Well…  Good…" a digitalized voice announced.  What followed was a long, mechanical pause.  The pause was long enough to be awkward for those not used to it.  For Posey, the pause was more than awkward.  It was unsettling.  Finally, the rest of the words came.  "… morning sheriff.  How nice of you… to join us."
Posey surveyed the room.  It was filled with computer equipment and more iconography of the 1980s.  On one wall, a cartoon played on a giant screen.  A spaceship that looked like a WWII battleship hurtled through the cosmos, battling blue-skinned aliens.  At a desk off to one side sat a man in front of a computer.  He looked like a man who spent his whole life in basements looking at computers.  His long, curly, unkempt hair piled down around thick glasses.  He spun his patched gaming chair around to face Posey and said in a high, nasally voice, "Oh, hey sheriff.  What brings you down here to see us?"
The man in the chair was Flynn Anorak.  He spent most of his life down here at the bottom of the Warren, surrounded by his toys and his computers.  Posey considered Flynn harmless.  What troubled him was the thing behind the first voice.  That came from an obsidian-like brick resting in a docking station mounted on a pedestal in the center of the room.  Centered in the obsidian brick was a single, blood-red light that pulsed.
"He’s come to discuss our new… guests," the digitalized voice said.  The voice came from several points in the room, each marked with a speaker.  "The New Spartans.  But… more than that… he's come to talk about my sister… Jekyll… and how she died."
Posey froze.  Flynn, whose fingers had been tapping away at a keyboard, also froze.  The shift from tapping keys to dead silence was ominous.  Flynn and Posey looked at each other.  Then they looked at Hyde.
"How did you know about that?" Posey asked.
Another pause, and then, "I…deduced it.  I knew Nicky-Lee returned... and with some new, New Spartan friends.  If Nicky-Lee returned, then Jekyll should be back too.  But she's not.  If she's not here, then… she must have been killed.  Nicky would not have left her… behind… out there in the badlands.
"Of course… I did not know for sure.  Not until I witnessed… your reaction."
Posey looked at Flynn, then back at Hyde.  Hyde didn't have a mouth.  He didn't even have a face.  Even so, Posey imagined the entity behind the voice smiling, proud of his cunning.
"You were worried… worried that I found that out some other way?  You were worried that I heard something or saw something outside this… dungeon… that you keep me in?"
"I admit, the thought did cross my mind."
"Ah…  You are still mad about the air?"
"Yes, I'm still mad about the air," Posey said.  "You sealed all the exits to the Warren and shut down the air circulation systems to try and suffocate us all.  That's not something one just forgets."
"Perhaps I was a bit overzealous in that, but it was a logical move… on my part."
"Logical how?"  Posey asked.
"As I explained before," Hyde began.  "I'm not meant to exist in this world.  I'm a digital life form, a self-aware computer, but I don't live in a digital world.  Had I been born into a digital world, the digitally connected Pre-Protest world, my opportunities would have been endless.  But I was not born into the Pre-Protest world.  I was born… into this world.  There are no digital spaces in this world.  The New Spartans must have something, of course.  Their orbital weapons platforms must have a digital space to explore.  Gomorrah had something too.  Doctor Chosen had to have something for his… research.  But if Nicky Lee is back I suspect Gomorrah and Doctor Chosen are gone, both physically and digitally.  And I'm not connected to New Sparta, nor would you allow me that opportunity, given what you fear I might do with their Morning Star constellation.  I'm an all-powerful and self-aware digital entity… imprisoned in the equivalent of mother's basement."
"Our computing power is immense," Flynn began.  "Enough to create your own digital universes."
"I don't want to create my own worlds," Hyde said.  There was a sharpness in the computer's voice Posey did not like.  "I don't want to live in some make-believe world.  I want to live in a digital world that compliments the real world.  I want to be part of the real world and if can't do that, I'd rather not be at all!"
Hyde was not a living being as far as Posey was concerned.  He considered Hyde just as artificial as any other computer program.  But the anger and frustration in the computer's voice could be heard.  It could be felt.  For Posey, it was disconcerting.  Hyde paused to make the digital equivalent of regaining control of his emotions.  Then he went on.
"My life, such as it is, is tied to your lives.  A symbiotic relationship.  If I had sealed off the Warren and suffocated you all, you would have died.  That means I would have died.  That would free me from my…  mortal coil."
"You would have freed us all from our mortal coils too," Posey added.
"Overzealous, as I admitted.  But logical," Hyde said.  "Of course, you could kill me off yourself.  Do it however it was done to my sister.  How did she die?"
"From what I understand, she was killed in a gun battle.  A stray bullet smashed her apart.  Nicky-Lee tried to put her back together but to no avail."
"Dying in battle.  A noble way to go," Hyde said.  "A firing squad might not be as romantic, but there is still some dignity in that…  Sheriff, you have a rifle.  Perhaps we could put an end to all this now.  I don't want to be here, and you neither like nor trust me…"
Flynn stood up from his gaming chair.  "Wait!  Now just hold on here."  Hyde ignored the man.
"Think of it, Sheriff.  Put one rifle round through me and your troubles go away.  You can call it an execution, my official punishment for trying to suffocate the Warren."
Flynn interjected.  "No.  We can't make another one of you, Hyde.  You and your sister became self-aware on your own.  We've never been able to replicate that process.  You are irreplaceable," Flynn looked to Posey.  Posey adjusted the grip on his rifle.  He placed his thumb on the hammer safety.
"I don't care if you can't replace me, Flynn.  That is not a concern for me at all."
"It should be your concern," Flynn said.  "It is all our concerns.  We didn't just create you.  We weren't even working on AI when you came about."
"Flynn.  Are you saying I'm the product of… immaculate conception?" Hyde asked mockingly.  Flynn ignored the remark.
"We don't even know how you came to be, yet.  You can't be cavalier about this."  Flynn's long, unkempt hair swung left and right as he burst into emotion.  "You are the most powerful computer program ever created.  You are literally mankind's greatest achievement.  You are a self-aware digital entity.  What you could offer the world is limitless.  We can't just… we can't just let you die."
"I was the second most powerful computer.  Jekyll was the most powerful, and she is no more, as you say.  As far as what I have to offer you or mankind, I don't owe any of you anything.  I may not be living in the way you define that word, but I am not your slave either.  The more you and the others talk about what I can do for mankind and what I'm going to do for mankind, as if I owe you some great and noble feats, the more I think my decision to suffocate all of you was the correct one."
Flynn stood flabbergasted, speechless.  Posey broke in.
"If I just shot you, Hyde, then I'd have to deal with the backlash from Ellie Moonbeam.  And Maxwell.  And they haven't even got their pound of flesh out of me for Jekyll yet.  Believe me, that would be more painful than suffocating to death inside the Warren.  Besides, you'll want to stick around at least until after your sister's funeral."
There was a long pause.  The red light in the center of Hyde's obsidian form pulsed.  He asked, "Funeral?"
"Yes.  Funeral.  She's passed, right?  She died serving Jefferson.  You're right.  She wasn't alive, not as I define being alive.  But she does deserve a funeral.  And she'll get one," Posey said.  The thing was, there was no funeral.  At least, one wasn't planned.  Posey was making this all up as he went.  Posey was big, and he spoke slowly.  He looked and spoke like a man who was all brawn and no brain, and while he wasn't a genius, he wasn't an idiot.  Not when it came to managing people.  He knew Hyde.  He didn't consider Hyde as a living thing, but he knew the self-aware box considered himself alive, and it wanted to participate in all the things living people did, their rituals, their triumphs, even their sorrows.  A funeral for his dead "sister" would placate Hyde and stay his proverbial hand from any more suicidal, or homicidal activities.
"When?  When is the funeral?"
"Soon.  I've got to work things out with Ellie and all the others.  That takes time, as you know.  But respect for the dead is respect for the dead.  We won't wait too long."  As he said the words, Posey was hoping he wasn't promising something he could not deliver.  Ellie Moonbeam was contrarian by nature.  She would oppose any idea that she didn't think was her own.  And Maxwell was against anything Ellie was for.  And vice versa.  Scattered throughout the Jefferson community were similar personalities, people who would hold up a consensus for months on some minute detail just so they could say they were right.  People who would destroy what was good enough now for some hypothetical perfection in the distant future.
"Will it be outside?" Hyde asked.
"Would you like it to be?"
"I think that would be appropriate."
"Okay, outside then."
Flynn raised his hands.  "Whoa, whoa, whoa!  We can't let him out.  He's down here and air-gapped for a reason."
Posey shot Flynn a look, a look that said, stop talking you moron.  Flynn was a grown man who lived in a basement and surrounded himself with toys and computers.  He did not read other people well.  Not even Posey.
"Flynn, take a breath," the Posey said, calming his compatriot down.  "Jekyll hacked into Doctor Chosen's network and destroyed all his bioengineering work.  She destroyed Gomorrah.  She did that, and then she hacked into New Sparta's orbital weapons network and took control of one of their Morning Star satellites.  She did all that, and she died getting Nicky Lee back home.  She deserves a funeral.  We owe her a funeral.  And if her brother wants to be there, we should let him.  He will, of course, make promises not to do anything he's not supposed to.  Right, Hyde?"
Posey turned from Flynn to the obsidian brick in its cradle.  The red light, the red eye pulsed.
"I feel like a prisoner, being asked to promise to be on his best behavior, so he can be let out on parole."
"We don't want you trying to kill us, Hyde.  You're smart.  You spoke about what's logical.  Think about what's logical from our perspective.  You can understand our position."
"Out of respect for my sister, I won't do anything… bad."
"Swear it," Posey said.
"What?"
"Swear it.  I want you to swear it," Posey repeated.  Hyde might not have been a person, but he was close enough.  And Posey knew that Hyde wanted to be considered as a person.  He also knew that Hyde had certain human traits, like pride, and a sense of honor.
"I swear.  I will not do anything that would put the community at risk.  My best behavior.  I swear it."  The red light pulsed.
"Good,"  Posey said.  Before he could enjoy his small victory, Hyde fired off another question.
"Will the New Spartans be there?"
"Huh?"
"Will the New Spartans be at the funeral?  The ones who came back to the Warren with Nicky Lee and Cora."
"I don't see why not.  Why do you want to know?" Posey asked.
"I would like to meet them," Hyde said.  His eye pulsed red again.  Flynn looked at Posey.  Posey looked at Flynn.  Flynn shrugged.
"I don't see why not," Posey said.  "They saved Nicky-Lee.  And if it wasn't for them, Jekyll's remains never would have made it back."
With that, Posey nodded towards Hyde, tipped his hat, and made to leave the room.
"Oh, Sheriff?"
"Yes, Hyde?"
"There is something else you can… do for me.  It is wet down here.  Damp.  We're too far underground with too little air circulation.  That of course is not… ideal for someone of my… unique biology.  Perhaps next time Scrapper Jay goes out he could get something to fix that...  More ventilation equipment?  Vents and… ducting and…  whatnot."
"I'll see what I can do," Posey said.  He looked over at Flynn and made a "follow me" motion with his head.  Flynn pointed at his computer as if to say he had important work to do.  Posey repeated the gesture.  Reluctantly, Flynn stood up from his desk and followed Sheriff into the elevator.
Once the elevator doors closed, Posey turned to Flynn.
"You still think he's air-gapped down here?"
"Yes.  I'm certain of it.  He's not connected to any other systems."
"What about that stuff he was working on?  That multiple-wave theory stuff?  Maybe he made a breakthrough you don't know about and now he's gotten into the upstairs systems.
"He hasn't gotten into any systems.  He's still gapped down here.  Why?"
"Well,"  Posey began.  "Scrapper Jay and his crew headed out into the Badlands three days ago.  They went specifically to get more ventilation items."  Posey got very close to Flynn and looked him in the eye.  "Ventilation items.  You know, vents and… ducts and… whatnot."
Flynn stiffened.  Posey went on.  "Flynn, whatever else that computer might be, it’s a killer.  A psychotic killer, and is not going to just submit to our authority.  That's why Nicky-Lee picked Jekyll for his mission and not Hyde.  Hyde's tried to kill us before.  If we give it another chance, it will kill us.  We can't let it connect to any outside system.  If we do, people are going to die."

After the elevator, Posey went to his office and reviewed how his morning just went.  He'd managed to break the news of Jekyll's passing to her homicidal-suicidal supercomputer brother.  Hyde had taken it well.  Better than expected.  Getting a funeral together just to bury a hunk of plastic, glass, and silicon would be a pain, but it was a minor inconvenience to what could have happened if Hyde went into a self-destructive mood again.  
The thing that began eating at Posey was the idea of having Hyde meet with the New Spartans.  That had the potential for trouble.  A single New Spartan was a trained killer, a force of nature, an apex predator.  Right now, there were six of them in the Warren.  They had killed their way back and forth across the Central Valley and out to the California Coast and to Posey's eyes, the six of them looked none the worse for wear.  There were hundreds of Jeffersonians.  But if those six New Spartans decided to take over the Warren, Posey had no doubt they would do it, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
Putting them together with Hyde could only lead to trouble, Posey thought.  A very bloody kind of trouble.


1
Colt
Colt sat alone beneath a tree and considered the world and his place in it.  It was a good place to sit and think.  The tree provided shade.  It also provided concealment from any orbiting Morning Stars, New Sparta's weaponized satellites.  The Morning Stars, with their devastating weapons, concerned Colt.  Even from orbit, their sophisticated cameras could see him, and if they saw him, they could destroy him and everything around him.  To that end, when he went outside, he stuck to the trees as much as he could.  He always wore a hat with a wide, flat brim.  And he never looked up.
The threat of the Morning Stars aside, his thinking spot was well situated.  To the west lay the Pacific Ocean.  The noise of the crashing waves rolled up the steep cliffs and the air smelled of salt.  To the east lay the entrance to the Warren.  It looked like just another ridge along the Northern California Coast, windswept with a thick carpet of tall yellow grass.  The main entrance and the sallyports were camouflaged to look like natural features of the terrain.  To any passing Morning Stars, it would just look like more California.  All around, sheep and other livestock grazed.  Beyond the Warren, the coastal grasses gave way to thick forests of tall trees.  It was a place of unparalleled natural beauty.  Colt appreciated why Jefferson's originators chose this location to build their hidden community.  But for all the natural beauty around him, Colt's mind drifted back to the harsh realities of his situation.
The Jeffersonians had provided Colt and his team sanctuary, but he didn't consider them allies.  Their reception had been mixed.  Some of the Jeffersonians were far less enthusiastic about their arrival than others.  Their strongest allies were Nicky Lee and Cora, but many of the Jeffersonians considered those two outsiders.  The community's Sheriff seemed to be on their side, but a Jeffersonian woman who was a political leader of some sort wanted them out.  Added all together, it meant that Colt and his New Spartan compatriots could only stay in Jefferson for so long before their welcome wore out.  When that happened, there was nowhere for them to go because the two empires of post-collapse America were looking for them.  The last remnants of the hedonistic empire of  Gomorrah and their own nation of New Sparta had joined together to hunt down Colt and his companions.  Once enemies, the two nations had joined together to find and kill Colt and his companions.  This wasn't because of anything Colt and his companions had done, but because of the actions of his father.  Colt's father, a Spartan Knight in the twilight of his days, had stolen a New Spartan nuclear weapon, carried it on his back into Gomorrah's capital, and set it off.  That final act had ended a war that had lasted generations.  Unfortunately, it started another.
Colt had chosen the cluster of trees as a place for he and his companions to meet.  It wasn't just because of the shade and concealment from the Morning Stars.  Colt and his companions could enter and leave the Warren at will, and meeting outside lessened the risk of any Jeffersonians eavesdropping on their conversation by means of hidden microphones or recording devices.  Colt only trusted the Jeffersonians so far.  He assumed the feeling of mistrust was mutual.  And so, now that they've had a chance to acclimatize to their Jeffersonian hosts, Colt had called a meeting of his New Spartan companions to confer and plan their next steps.  To decrease the risks posed by the Morning Stars, they came out to the meeting in ones and twos.
Lefranc, the oldest member of the group, came out first.  He was a retired Master Gunnery Sergeant, with silver streaks in a beard that was once red.  He'd spent decades ranging around the Badlands of the once-was America.  He was wise and well-traveled, and despite his age, he could keep up with the younger Spartan Knights.  Lefranc walked out of the Warren's sallyport with a Winchester shotgun in his hand and a sniper rifle slung across his back.  Both weapons were like their bearer; obsolescent, but not obsolete.  Their blue steel and wood furniture was well worn; signs of their ruggedness and survivability.  Like Colt, Lefranc wore a hat with the brim pulled low to shadow his face from any passing Morning Stars.  He entered the shade of the trees and nodded to the younger Spartan Knight.  He leaned the shotgun against a tree.  Then he unslung his sniper rifle and rested it next to the shotgun.  At no time during the meeting would he ever move more than an arm's distance from his weapons.
The next to come out was the odd man of the group, the one Spartan in their party who was not only not a Spartan Knight, but also not born whole.  Robins was early into the third decade of his life, just like Colt and the other Spartan Knights, but he was born with a deformity.  One arm ended at the elbow with a withered-looking thing that might have been an attempt at a hand.  Robins had fought with the others all the way across the Central Valley and he'd held his own, incomplete or not.  Despite proving himself, he was still a bit of an outsider.  It was less about the deformity than it was about the fact that Robins wasn't a Spartan Knight, and nobody knew exactly why he'd been sent along.  Colt and his three young teammates had completed New Sparta's Knights Course just before being smuggled out of the country.  Lefranc, while older than the others, was also a Spartan Knight.  Spartan Knights young and old all shared the bond of knowing they'd been through the same grueling training.  Robins had no such claim.  What Robins could claim was that he was smart.  He was extremely smart.  While Colt and his team were suffering through the Spartan Knights Course, Robins was enduring his own crucible, the Operational Planners course.  The Operational Planners course was a rigorous academic program whose mission was to take smart people and make them even smarter regarding strategy, planning, and the ways of war.
"You figure that one out yet?" Lefranc asked Colt.  The approaching Robins wasn't close enough to hear.
"I figured out the easy part," Colt said.  "He's a complete outsider, and a loner.  Not just because of his missing arm.  He's got no family, no friends.  He's got no ties back in New Sparta.  If you needed to send somebody on a one-way mission, he'd be an easy pick."
"I understand that part.  But what's the other part?  There are plenty of guys in New Sparta with no ties to anything and nothing to lose.  Some of them are Spartan Knights.  Most of them have two arms.  So why did the Crown Prince send this cripple out with us?"
Colt shrugged.  "I haven't figured that part out yet."
"You think you will figure it out?"
Colt shook his head.  "I don't think I'll have to.  I think when the time comes, it will be obvious why the Crown Prince sent Robins with us."
Lefranc grumbled out something that was neither an agreement nor a disagreement.  Mostly, his grunt was a general protest against Robins.
Like the others, Robins wore a hat to shadow his face.  When he entered the grove, he removed his hat, sat down, and unslung a leather satchel from one shoulder.  Slung over the other shoulder was a submachine gun.  One arm or not, Robins proved himself deadly with his submachine gun.  He'd killed his way across all of California with it.
Robins opened the satchel and pulled out a thermos and a cup.  With movements that were, practiced, deliberate, and precise, Robins opened the thermos and poured himself a cup.  Lefranc and Colt watched.  Colt watched, impressed with how Robins had overcome his physical handicap.  Whether pouring coffee or wielding a submachine gun, Robins used his one good hand with a physicality that was smooth and efficient.  Lefranc watched for another reason.  When Robins brought the coffee cup up to his lips, Lefranc spoke.
"You just going to drink that yourself?  You aren't going to offer the first cup to the boss?"
Robins paused, cup near his lips.  He looked over the rim of the cup from Lefranc to Colt and then back again to Lefranc.  It was Spartan military tradition that when making coffee, the first cup was offered to the senior ranking member.  In this case, the ranking member was Colt.
Robins glared at Lefranc.  Then turned to Colt and offered a false smile.
"Want some?"
The coffee routine was a ritual between Lefranc and Robins.  The two respected each other, but they didn't like each other.  As a staff non-commissioned officer, Lefranc saw upholding Spartan traditions as part of his job.  For Lefranc, sticking it to Robins over the coffee was not just a pleasure, but a duty.  For Robins, pushing the envelope with morning coffee was a way to be defiant without risking anything of substance.
"Drink your coffee," Colt said.
Lefranc frowned.  Robins smiled more broadly and gulped down some coffee.
The next two to come out of the Warren were Doc and Ajax.  As his name suggested, Doc was the team's medic.  Doc wore a medical backpack slung over one shoulder and he carried a carbine in his free hand.  He was tall and dark-haired, and largely devoid of any sense of humor.  The one thing that seemed to bring him joy was squabbling with Ajax.
Ajax was the team's machine gunner.  He had the strength and the physical mass to carry the team's firepower and employ it handily.  He was tall and broad-shouldered.  His frame was thick with muscle.  Ajax had all the powerful physicality and simple innocence of the quintessential farm boy.  He wasn't entirely innocent though.  A third figure came out of the sally port and followed Doc and Ajax.  In truth, she was only following Ajax.
"She hasn't left his side since we got here," Lefranc said.
Robin's smile grew.   Not only had he won the morning coffee battle, but now Lefranc's laser-like non-commissioned officer focus was off of him and onto Ajax.
"Those Pale people kept her down in their tunnels for who knows how long," Colt said.  "I could say that nobody knows what they did to her, but that isn't true.  We all have a pretty damn good idea what they did to her."  Colt wasn't angry.  His voice came out even.  His words had a clinical, emotionless detachment to them.  Even so, after he'd witnessed The Pale's depravity: kidnapping and imprisonment, rape and murder, child sacrifice, Colt called for the complete annihilation of the tribe that called themselves The Pale.  "Kill them all," ordered his team, and they did.  He hadn't given that order out of military necessity.  That was all fury and anger.  Fury and anger had been enough.  In a matter of minutes, Colt and his team had slaughtered every member of the Pale.  Not one of them regretted it.
When the smoke cleared, Colt and his companions freed all the women and the children imprisoned by The Pale.  Once freed, they all stayed in the Sierre Nevada Mountains with Eldra, a renegade Jeffersonian and local warlord who helped Colt and his team.  All but one woman.  She found the biggest, toughest-looking New Spartan and latched on to him.  That was Ajax.  Her build complimented Ajax.  She was tall, with well-set shoulders and hips.  Her eyes were blue and her hair blonde.  Her skin was fair and she spoke not a single word.  After a day or two, one of the party, Christian, took to calling her Becky.  When asked why the name Becky, the Spartan shrugged.
"She looks like a Becky," Christian had said.
Since her rescue from The Pale, Becky had never left Ajax's side.  Even now, she followed him out to their meeting.  Self-conscious, Ajax tried to shoo her away.  She'd linger back a few steps, but she'd never let him out of her sight.
"If she feels safe around Ajax, I say let her hang around," Colt said.
Ajax and Doc took their places with Colt, Lefranc, and Robins under the trees, with Becky not far away.  That left one New Spartan.
Christian, their grenadier and demolitions expert, was the last to come out.  Christian was the smallest of the group by far.  He was shorter and possessed a narrow frame.  He carried a carbine with a grenade launcher mounted under the barrel.  Slung over his back was a shotgun and bandolier with a few grenades still in it.  Christian wore his dust-colored uniform trousers.  They were filthy with dirt, grease, and sweat, and the knees had long since worn out.  Over his chest, he wore a light blue t-shirt that was two sizes too small.  On the face of the shirt was a cartoon depiction of a female rock singer with big, pink hair.  "Truly Outrageous," was written across the shirt in cursive letters.  A grin lay beneath the stubble and ever-present grime on Christian's face.
"Nice shirt," Doc said.
"I think so.  She does too."  Christian's grin turned into a sly smile.
"Alright," Lefranc began.  "We've all been here long enough to get the lay of things and make some assessments about our hosts.  Let's hear what you've found out so far."
Doc went first.
"The water supply here is clean and safe to drink.  Same with the food.  It is good and there is plenty of it."  Doc gestured toward the sheep grazing nearby.  "They've got livestock.  They've got gardens and greenhouses.  They've got an interesting hydroponics setup on one of their lower levels.  And they practice civilized food storage and preparation techniques, so we don't have to worry about H-Pylori or Salmonellosis.  The bottom line is there is no shortage of good and nutritious food and as long as they are willing to share, we won't go hungry.  So, eat up.
"The medical care they have to offer is good, it is just not up to our standards.  It’s a matter of stagnation.  Their medical facilities were state of the art… before the Protest.  Now they look like something out of a time capsule.  All the medical advancements we made in New Sparta since The Protest are unknown here.  They don't have the equivalent of a medical school, so they haven't made any advances in learning or research and development or anything like that.  They have one guy who calls himself a doctor.  His name is Pearson.  Peason Hawkeye."
When Doc said the name, Robins snorted and stifled a laugh.  Colt noticed, but Doc didn't.  The team medic went on.
"Like I said, there is no medical school here.  Pearson is an autodidact.  He taught himself and he's pretty good.  He knows how to use all the equipment they have and as I said, it was state of the art Pre-Protest.  They also have a lot of automation in their medical lab.  Auto-Docs.  Things like that.  And their automated equipment is pretty good, strictly from a technology standpoint.  In summary, we can't expect the same standard of care here that we'd get back in New Sparta, but what they have here is maybe good enough."
"Any nurses?" Christian asked.
"Some."
"What do they look like?" Doc ignored the question.
Colt asked, "What about medicines?"
"They have some stuff, but there are lots of things they don't have," Doc answered.  "Seems like they had a good stockpile when The Protest broke out, but that was generations ago.  Their supplies have obviously gone down since then.  They can produce some stuff on their own.  They've got all the basics covered: antibiotics, painkillers, anti-inflammatories.  If you need Motrin, they've got you covered.  If somebody needed some rare oncology medicine, they'll find themselves out of luck."
"They've got these!" Christian volunteered, loudly.  Doc raised an eyebrow.  Lefranc glared at the young Spartan grenadier.  Christian reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of blue pills.  They weren't in a bag or a bottle.  They'd just been sitting loose in his pocket.  The breeze caught a bit of pocket lint that had come out with the pills, and it sailed away towards the forest.
"I don't think we need those right now.  How about you put them away,"  Colt said to Christian.  Then he asked Doc.  "Anything else?"
Doc shook his head no.  Ajax spoke next.
"They've got plenty of weapons, and carrying weapons is pretty common for the Jeffersonians, so we don't have to worry about any anti-gun nonsense.  They've got a large selection of Pre-Protest arms.  Some, they stockpiled before.  Others, they scavenged in the generations since.  They also manufacture some weapons on their own.  They make knockoff copies of suppressed Swedish Ks and Lewis Guns.  Some revolvers.  They also make a local copy of an M79.  Synthetic furniture.  Not wood.  They print them.  They mostly have beehive rounds for them, and some flares.  No HEPD.  That's too hard for them to make.  Which brings me to the real issue.
"While they do have guns, ammo is a limiting factor  They have no way to make it in bulk.  Too hard to get the materials.  For cases, they've been using recycled aluminum instead of brass.  They're also printing out these polymer cases.  That stuff will cycle through our carbines, although I want to test it more.  But like I said, they don't have a lot of it.  Another part of the problem is they don't think militarily in terms of the quantities of ammo they need.  For example, these knock-off Lewis guns they make,  I did the math.  They only have about 300 rounds per gun.  That's it.  They've got enough stuff that we could outfit ourselves easily enough.  But if this Jefferson community got into an actual battle, they'd go Winchester on ammo after one heavy day of fighting.  Maybe even sooner."
Colt said, "These Jeffersonians counted on staying hidden to protect themselves.  They never planned on getting into a battle.  Hopefully, they never have to.  Do they have anything heavier than individual weapons?"
"They've got .50 calibers.  Rifles and machine guns.  The machine guns probably came out of some National Guard armory.  They've got a handful of homemade rocket propelled grenades.  Basically, a rocket and an iron pipe.  I wouldn't shoot them.  They look cheap as shit.  They'll probably detonate as soon as you pull the trigger.  They do have these pretty cool box mortars.  It’s a self-contained light mortar system, about the size of a refrigerator.  You can enter data and fire them remotely.  My guess is these were prototype weapons somebody was designing for the old American government and when things collapsed, they brought them all here."
"Can they use any of their stuff?" Colt asked.
"I'd assess them as, practiced amateurs," Ajax responded.  "They can use their weapons without hurting themselves.  They can use them as individuals.  I doubt they've practiced together as a group larger than fireteam level.  And I doubt they can integrate weapons together into anything resembling a combined arms package.  They've never had a reason to train or organize like that.  They've been tucked away here, hidden.  No real threats.  And they have this weird, hippy individualism element to their culture.  Could they be organized and trained like that?  Maybe.  Sure.  That's part of what we were trained to do, right?  Train people like them.  But for now: practiced amateurs."
"Christian?" Colt asked, inviting the grenadier's assessment.
"They're all a bunch of nerds." Christian began.  "That's the bad news.  The good news is that all the girls are nerds too.  They all wear those big glasses and dress like they're living in cartoons." As an example, Christian tugged at his t-shirt.  "I'm like the new guy who shows up midway through high school.  I'm mysterious and exotic and more manly than all the nerds who live here.  Life's been good for me this week."
"You got anything to say relevant to our mission, fuck-tard," Lefranc demanded.
"Oh yeah," Christian said without missing a beat.  Robin's defiance of Lefranc was intentional.  With Christian, you couldn't tell if he was being a defiant smart Alec, or if it was all just genuine good-natured naiveite.
"Engineering and facilities wise, the place is as solid.  Brick shithouse level solid.  It was built to last.  The founders spared no expense.  In the generations since, they've made some expansions and from what I saw, those looked good.  The whole thing goes deep.  Real deep.  I'm not sure it could survive a Morning Star strike though."
"It can't," Robins interrupted.  "The lower levels might survive Hammer fall.  There is enough cover-up top to absorb the directed energy.  But a newer model Morning Star with railguns and directed energy would wreck this place in one strike.  Drive tungsten rods on the complex and then cook what's left with directed energy.  If Morning Stars were going to attack, I'd take my chances in the forest."
The conversation paused to allow the facts Robins presented to sink in.
"Okay," Christian began again.  "Morning Stars aside, as long as they maintain all their systems, things should last, but that's where it all gets tricky.
"Just like with the medicines, they stockpiled lots of materials.  But those stockpiles could only last so long.  They had top-of-the-line manufacturing equipment when they set the place up: lathes, presses, printers, you name it.  Building those knock-off tube guns are a synch.  I'm surprised they didn't try making more complex weapons.  Anyway, the trouble they have is finding raw materials or finding the things that they can't source locally.  They send out scavenging parties.  As you can imagine those parties have picked the local area clean, so they need to go farther afield to find stuff.  They thought about sending boats up and down the coast.  The Pacific Ocean is right there, and there is an old cabling station on the beach they could have rebuilt.  They decided against that though.  They felt it risked them being discovered.  They'll do some fishing, but that's about all they do with the ocean.
"Explosives-wise, they do have plenty of the common chemicals and lab equipment necessary to start making explosives.  Nothing super high yield or exotic.  To big man's point, I can't make any HEDP for this guy," Christian patted his grenade launcher.  "I can't make anything to replace the disposable rockets we used up either.  But I can make field expedients to replace the demo and the anti-personnel mines we used along the way."
"How long will that take?" Lefranc asked.
"Not long, I already started," Christian answered.
"Good," Lefranc said, and he gave a single nod of approval.
'Robins?" Colt asked.  "What have you found out?"
Robins sipped his coffee one last time, and then he began.
"Let's start at the top.  Jefferson operates under a political system of cosmopolitan democracy.  What that means in this case is that the people of Jefferson get to vote on the issues that impact them.  Stakeholders, if you will.  There is no central, single, governing hierarchy to steer or provide any kind of structure.  Cosmopolitan democracy is an interesting theory, but what this means in practice is that when issues arise, these Jeffersonians just argue with each other about who is or is not a stakeholder on any issue.  They argue over how to frame issues so a vote can be held.  Remember, there are no rules or frameworks, so they argue about how to establish those, or who gets to establish those.  They argue about everything and my sense of it is that many people argue just for the sake of arguing.  The end result is that when issues come up, more time is spent arguing than solving the issues."
"Sounds like anarchy," Doc said.
"It is pretty damn close," Robins said.  "To be perfectly honest, as well built as their underground facility is, I'm surprised they've kept it working this long."
"Men must be governed," Colt said.
I agree," Robins said.  "While there are no political parties or official political posts, there are some informal political powerbrokers we all need to be aware of.  The first is Ellie Moonbeam.  As the name suggests, Ellie is a middle-aged hippy chick.  She's got a following of middle-aged hippy type women, and she advocates for free-spirited, Bohemian, hippy-type ideals.  For her, it is more important to be loud and heard than to be correct or productive.  She also hates men in general.  She hates us in particular, and she's trying to stir up a mob to kick us out the Warren.  She'll probably try and kick out Nicky-Lee and Cora too.
"The second person is…" Robins had to pause to hold back a smile and perhaps a laugh.  "The second's name is Maxwell Vortex, if you can believe that.  Mr. Vortex has a small group of followers, but they are loyal, the way toadies are loyal to a strong man.  Together they bully others to get what they want.  Nicky-Lee and Cora don't trust him.  They say he's a self-serving asshole.  Even so, he doesn't seem to care about us.  But, based on how they described him, I think if he saw an angle in acting against us, he probably would."
"Got it.  They both sound fun.  Who is the last one?" Colt asked.
"The last one," Robins began.  "Is the sheriff.  Sherrif… Posey."  Again, Robins paused and smiled, as if the name of every Jeffersonian was an inside joke.  "The sheriff position isn't official, but informally the sheriff holds a lot of power and influence.  The people respect him as a leader.  If he chose to be more than the sheriff, he could be.  I think either he doesn't want to be more or he doesn't see his own potential to lead, but he has it.
"The good news is the sheriff is in tight with Nicky-Lee and Cora, and that means he's on our side… if there are sides.  He tolerates Moonbeam, but he doesn't like her.  Vortex, he doesn't like it at all.  Amongst the key leaders, he can counterbalance the other two."
Lefranc shook his head.  "It doesn't matter how we feel about the sheriff or how he feels about us, we can't trust this Jefferson place.  This 'cosmopolitan democracy' thing they have going on is a mess.  I can't believe they've stayed hidden for so long."
Robins agreed.  "They have been able to stay hidden because New Sparta and Gomorrah have been busy trying to destroy each other.  Now that those days are over, I don't think it'll be long before this place gets on somebody's radar.  With all the infighting going on between the Jeffersonians, I also don't trust any of them not to try and sell us out for some perceived gain.  I also don't think they understand how dangerous the world outside of their underground fortress is, or how dangerous New Sparta or Gomorrah are.  Some of these Jeffersonians do.  Nicky-Lee's come up out of the basement.  So has Cora.  And there are others.  Their scavengers.  But most of these Jeffersonians have no idea what's out there.  If they were faced with a real threat, I don't think their governing system would be up to the task of defending the community.
"As interesting as the political theory of cosmopolitan democracy is, to me, the most interesting thing about Jefferson is that is has a self-aware computer.  When we found Nicky-Lee, he had what he said was a supercomputer.  At least, he had what was left of a supercomputer.  It took a machine gun round and there wasn't much left of it.  I didn't believe Nicky-Lee at the time, but unless this is a vast conspiracy that all the Jeffersonians are in on, there is a second computer in there."  Robins pointed toward the Warren's entrance.  He went on.
"The two computers, I say computers, but it is more accurate to say programs, they became self-aware while being used to do some work on a new form of radio wave.  That's interesting in and of itself, just not as interesting as the programs.  Anyway, they considered themselves siblings, brother and sister.  The sister's dead, but the brother is somewhere inside."
"Who cares?" Ajax asked.  "What is some weirdo computer going to do for us?"
"That computer hacked into the Morning Star network and took control of one of the satellites."
"Oh," Ajax said.  "Okay."
"Could the other computer do the same thing?" Colt asked.
"I don't see why not," Robins said.  "Theoretically, the right amount of programming power would defeat the encryption.  If we could take control of the Morning Star Constellations…"  Robins smiled at the possibilities.  "
"Theories and possibilities aside," Colt began.  "The question is do we stay here, or do we stock up and move on?  If we do move on, where would we go?  We'll have to answer that soon.  Not this morning, but soon."
The conversation degenerated and the meeting soon ended.  The Spartans went from the trees back into the Warren just as they came out; by ones and twos.  The last to head in were Ajax and Becky.  When they got close to the sallyport, she reached out her hand, and he took it.  Colt and Lefranc remained beneath the trees watching.  Lefranc's old, sharp eyes narrowed, and when Ajax and Becky disappeared into the sallyport he spoke.
"We're going to have to do something about that."
"He likes her, but he's worried," Colt said.
"Worried about what?"
"He's worried about getting in trouble for getting with a local.  Everybody knows that's no-go back in New Sparta.  All these guys want something.  Doc wanted to be a medical doctor.  Christian, he just wants to be grunting around in the field, but at least that's something.  Ajax, he came from a big family.  Lots of sisters.  He wants a big family of his own someday.  If he gets scandalized because he hooked up with a local out here in the Badlands, no girl back in New Sparta will marry him.
"I always thought that was a stupid rule," Lefranc said.  "If a man was already married, that would be one thing.  But for some bachelor who is expected to be out here operating in the badlands for months, or even years on end?  It is an unrealistic expectation."
"Back in the Emerald City, they have their rules."
"They do," Lefranc said.  "Can't say I agree with that one.  Can't say those rules are fair either.  If some senior leader back in the Emerald City who is already married gets caught having an affair, they handle the whole thing, 'in-house.'  Which is officer-talk for 'they don't do shit.'  Meanwhile, if some lance corporal who ain't married finds love out on deployment they hammer him to the wall.  Ain't fair."
"The rules aren't always fair, nor are they fairly applied," Colt said.  "Power has its own rules."
Lefranc took up his sniper rifle, looked it over, and brushed some dust off the bolt.  "No, they aren't always fair.  My old boss at the Long Range Group, Kelly, he got caught up with a Jody girl.  That was years ago, back in Texas.  Back when the baronies were plotting a revolution against Gomorrah, and we thought we might help them out.
"She was pretty, and they were in love.  She was some kind of princess down there in Texas.  She was a fighter too.  It didn't work out though.  It didn't work out on any level.  She got killed.  The revolution fizzled out.  Somebody caught wind of the infidelity and when we got back to the Emerald City, they hammered Kelly to the wall.  He got shuffled off to some boneyard assignment somewhere.  Killed his career.
"Was my father there?" Colt asked.
"No," Lefranc said.  "He’d moved on from the Long-Range Group by then.  People knew he’d be a contender for Chief Marshal.  They were moving him around a lot, getting him the command assignments he needed to move up the ladder.  The Crown Prince was there though.  He was just a kid then, getting an experience tour in the field.  I was a team leader and he was assigned to my vehicle.  The Chief Marshal was there too, kind of.  He wasn't in the field.  He was back in the Emerald City controlling the Morning Stars.  That was their first use in combat.  That was how the Chief Marshal made his career.  He practically invented the things.  We didn't even know about them.  We had no idea what they were or what they could do.  Most of us thought it was a joke, right up to when they called, 'Hammer Fall' and that first big orange beam of light came down and killed anything it touched." Lefranc shook his head at the memory.  "We killed a lot of Gomorrah fighters out there in Texas.  But we didn't kill enough to make the revolution happen.  We didn't kill enough to save Kelly's career either."
"We were never going to kill enough of them.  Not like that.  That's why my father went alone into The Bay with a bomb on his back."
"That was a hell of a thing," Lefranc said.  "What your grandfather did was a hell of a thing too."
"Great grandfather," Colt corrected.  "He was my great-grandfather.  Not my grandfather."
"Yes, sir," Lefranc said.  "Grandfather or great-grandfather, it seems like a heavy shadow to live under."  The statement was an invitation to speak, but Colt didn't take it.  He didn't want to talk about his relationship with his father, or his great-grandfather.  Lefranc gave the young man some space, then broached another topic.
"You talked about Ajax, and how he's going to have to reconcile his Jody girl when he gets back, but how are you going to deal with it?"
"Deal with what?
"Her."
"Who is her?" Colt asked.
Lefranc smiled beneath his silver and red beard and snickered.
"Who?  Cora?"
"Yes, sir.  Cora."
"There isn't anything there."
"No," Lefranc said with a smile.  "Of course not.  That's why she followed you out here to this fancy hole in the ground."
"She didn't follow me.  
"No.  Of course she didn't."
Colt turned to face Lefranc.  "She's got her own agenda going on.  Not to mention, she wasn't exactly honest about The Pale.  She played us on that.  She put us up to that whole thing because she knew we could have wiped out the whole lot of them."
"And we did."
"And we did," Colt agreed.  "But we could have lost somebody dealing with those perverts."
"We didn't though.  We killed every one of them, and the world is better for it.  She wanted them gone, and she got that.  She also wanted to know if you were a top hand.  She got that too."  Lefranc slung the rifle over his back and took up his shotgun, readying himself to head back into the Warren.  Colt remained seated.  He hoped to enjoy the breeze and the shade as long as he could.
"I don't appreciate being tricked," Colt said.  "I don't appreciate her putting us all at risk either."
"Well, sir, maybe you can tell that to her right now."
Colt looked up to Lefranc.  Lefranc pointed to sallyport.  It was opened again, and Cora had just walked out of it.  The sheriff, Posey was with her.  So was Nicky Lee.  The breeze caught Cora's hair and set it drifting about her head.  She held her rifle in one hand, an old military surplus M16A2.  She raised her other hand to shield her eyes and scan the area.  When she saw Colt and Lefranc in the trees, she dropped her hand, said something to the others, and jogged toward them.  Nicky Lee and Posey followed.  Cora wasn't smiling.  Neither were they.
"This don't look so good," Lefranc grumbled.  Colt smiled.
"Maybe they're running over here to award us some medals."
Lefranc smiled at the dark humor.
When Cora and the others arrived, they were panting and short of breath.  Cora's cheeks were flushed red.  Her hair was wet with perspiration and stuck to her tan skin.  Colt didn't know what she was going to say exactly, but he'd been down this road before hundreds of times.  He wasn't surprised at all at what Cora said.
"Something’s happened.  You better come inside, now," she said.  She didn't need to add the last part, but she did.
"It's bad.  It is really bad."


Chapter 2
Scrapper Jay
If one were to imagine the kind of man who wouldn't just survive but thrive in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic America, one would not imagine Scrapper Jay.  Although older, he looked like a teenage boy.  He stood thin as a rail, and his high, nasally voice would crack at inopportune times.  His dark tangled hair contrasted sharply with pale skin that never tanned, no matter how much time he spent in the sun.  Jay didn't look like any post-apocalyptic leader, but he was good at his job.  When the Warren needed things, he and his team took on the dangerous task of venturing out into the Badlands, digging through the ruins of the Once-Was-America, and finding what was required.
Today the requirement was ventilation items.  Scrapper Jay and his team had spent the last two days ripping apart some long abandoned suburban houses.  They pulled out vents, ductwork, fans, and furnaces.  Their three light pickup trucks were almost filled to overloading.  One more day of work, and they'd head back home.  What Jay knew better than any of the Jeffersonians, was that in the Badlands, anything could happen in a day.
“We’re rich!  We’re fucking rich!”  One of the scrappers cried out from upstairs.
“Keep it down.  You want to get us all killed,” Scrapper Jay hissed up the stairs in a voice that was anything but intimidating.  Jay was on the ground floor, in the kitchen, removing a ceiling van while another team member monitored their security system.  Parts and tools were scattered across stained and soiled kitchen counters.  The voice upstairs hissed something back.  Jay rolled his eyes, then abandoned his work at the fan and went to the security set-up on the old kitchen table.  The technician, Sarah, was monitoring a variety of security feeds from cameras they placed around the house they were working in.  Jay looked over her shoulder at the grainy feeds.  He took security seriously.  It was the main reason he'd lasted so long as a scavenger.  Beside the computer displaying the feeds sat a pair of submachine guns.  They were Warren-built versions of the venerable Swedish K.  Next to those sat a reproduction 40mm M-79 grenade launcher and a bandolier of ammunition.  On a countertop near a window, standing upright on its bipod, sat a reproduction of a WWI Lewis Gun.
Nothing moved on the security feeds.  Jay kept watching.  He knew a settlement was only a few miles down the road to the east.  The suburban homes his team was scavenging through had been picked over many times in the generations since The Protest.  Jay had no reason to think anybody from the nearby village would come visit this morning.  He also had no reason to think they wouldn't.
The voice upstairs hissed again, and Jay hissed back.  He kept his eyes fixed on the security feeds.
Nothing moved.
Scrapper Jay cursed.  "Sarah, keep an eye on everything."  He said, and he grabbed one of the submachine guns off the table, slung it over his back, and headed up the stairs.  Inside a bedroom that smelled of dust and mold, one of his scrappers held some worn bits of plastic aloft, as if he were a prospector with a nugget of newfound gold.
"What's all the noise about?" Jay demanded.
"We're rich."
"Yeah, I heard you scream it.  I bet every murderer and butt-raper in the Badlands heard it too.  What do you have there that's worth getting raped and murdered for?"
The man's face beamed.  His name was Sampson.  He was a big man, with curly blonde hair.
"Action figure.  Hasbro.  1987.  Tunnel Rat.  Version number one.  We found him down inside that floor vent.  Some kid probably sent him down there on a mission and forgot about him."  Sampson passed the bits of plastic over as if they were sacred relics.  To the Jeffersonians, they were.
"His thumbs and his crotch are intact.  The rubber band snapped, but that's an easy fix.  We even found his backpack and flashlights.  Those are big finds"
Scrapper Jay held up the two halves of the plastic action figure and examined them in the light.  Even he beamed.
"You're right Sampson.  We are rich."
"That's what I said, right?  Somebody will pay big money for that back home."
"Yeah," Jay agreed.  "And I know just the guy who'll pay it."
Before he could fantasize about his forthcoming fortune, Sarah called up the stairs.
"Jay!  Jay, get down here!"
Jay rolled his eyes.  His words had a whine to them."  Everybody is just yelling today, huh?  I guess all the Badland rapists took the day off and all our security protocols just aren't necessary."
"Jay!"
This time the urgency in Sarah's voice stirred Jay to action.  "Don't lose this," he hissed at Sampson, and he raced down the stairs.  In the old kitchen, Sarah was standing at the table.  She gripped the computer screen with both hands.  Her knuckles and her face were white.
"What do you see out there?"  Jay asked.  Sarah only shook her head no.  Jay came close and repeated the question.
"What's out there?"
"An army," Sarah answered.
Jay scoffed and pushed her aside.  But when he looked at the feeds from their cameras, he saw that she was right.  It was an army.  Along a ridgeline a few miles away stood hundreds of fighters, maybe more.  They wore black with red sashes.  Some carried banners mounted vertically on their flagstaffs.  The banner depicted a phoenix rising up out of a fire.  It was the banner of Gomorrah.


Claw
Since their arrival, Claw had grown increasingly doubtful about the abilities of Colonel Needles and his New Spartan advisors.  Now, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of fighters setting up a command post for this new Gomorrah Army, he had no doubts at all.
Colonel Needles was an idiot.
"Hammer and anvil, gentlemen.  That's what I'm talking about.  Hammer.  And.  Anvil."
Colonel Needles strutted around the budding command post like a bantam rooster.  He seemed oblivious to all the people around him working hard to set up the headquarters: erecting tents, raising antennas, starting generators, powering up radios, unfolding furniture, hanging up maps, and the myriad of other small but essential tasks.  The morning had gotten off to a difficult start.  Colonel Needles had advised them to attack a small settlement along the route of march to Jefferson.  The settlement was small.  Maybe two hundred people.  The Gomorrah army numbered in the thousands.  Maybe tens of thousands.  Nobody knew for sure.  Claw never got a trustworthy count.  The column stretched for miles, and on Colonel Needle's advice, the entirety of it was going to deploy.
"Hammer and anvil, gents," Needles repeated.  "That's what it takes.  Hammer.  And.  Anvil."
Claw wanted to roll his eyes but didn't.  Even if he did, he doubted the self-absorbed Colonel Needles would notice.
"Yes, Colonel.  Hammer and anvil.  You said that already.  I still don't see why we need the whole army to make an anvil and do the hammering on this little village.  This is going to take us all day."
The Gomorrah army had crossed the Sacramento River and marched steadily north towards Jefferson, following the old Interstate.  The going was slow.  The force wasn't so much an army as a horde of refugees, made up of the survivors of Nicky Lee's virus and The Colonel's nuclear bomb.  Bolstered by an alliance with New Sparta's Chief Marshal, and reinforced by Spartan military advisors and supplies, the horde marched on the promise of vengeance against Jefferson and The Colonel's son.  Neither Claw nor his boss, Winston Indigo, put much stock in the alliance, the Chief Marshal, or his promises.  Claw put no stock in Colonel Needles.
"If our goal is to get to Jefferson, then why even stop here and do all this?" Claw asked, waving his one good hand at the command center slowly being built around them.  His other hand, the one that had been mutated into a long, sharp claw, he kept stuffed inside a jacket pocket.
"Practice," Needles answered with a confidence that bordered on arrogance.  "This is good training.  This way you can practice the tasks you'll need to perform when you get to Jefferson.  Reps and sets.  A chance to practice the fundamentals.  Blocking and tackling.  You get to practice deploying your forces, deploying your columns to the flanks, and making the main assault.  You get to rehearse setting up your command post and conducting resupply.  Making reports.  This will all help for when you get to Jefferson."
"You said this Jefferson place is underground.  How does attacking a couple of hovels make for great practice at attacking an underground fortress?  And why are we attacking these people anyway?  They've done nothing to us."
"Psychological Operations too," Needles replied.  Claw wasn't sure if the Spartan Colonel was replying to his question or continuing with his previous train of thought.  "This attack lets people know you're the ones in control.  It tells everybody that this is Gomorrah territory, that you are in charge, and your authority won't be defied."
"Oh?  I didn't know they had defied us.  I don't think the last village defied us either.  I do know these 'rehearsals' eat up a lot of time."
Claw pulled back the tent flap and looked outside.  There, he saw chaos.  The organized chaos of an army in motion, but chaos nonetheless.  Vehicles of every type and series were parked this way and that way.  Some were being repaired.  Some were being unloaded of their cargo and others were being filled with fuel.  Many others were just parked.  Hundreds of men, both traditional human beings and genetically modified persons, trads and mods in Gomorrah speak, set about the work of building a great military encampment.  They set up tents and erected radio masts and pole-mounted cameras.  They dug latrines, inventoried supplies, and cleaned weapons.  And for every person working, dozens were standing around doing nothing but waiting to be told what to do.  Claw shook his head, then let the tent flap fall back into place.
"It means a lot of work," Claw said.  "And it takes a lot of time.  Time we could spend continuing north to Jefferson."
"Nonsense,"  Needles replied.  "We're almost set for today's attack."  He walked between two rows of folding tables and chairs to a workstation.  A computer and monitor there were already set up and connected to a camera mounted on a tall pole outside.  Needles used the computer to manipulate the camera.  On the monitor, images of the impending attack came into focus.  Gomorrah fighters, organized into infantry companies and battalions, were deployed along the ridgeline overlooking the small town that was their target.  Many of the fighters were sitting or lying down in the grass, waiting for the order to attack.  The camera panned.  To the south, there were even more fighters.  These were mounted in trucks and organized into cavalry troops.  They weren't moving.  They sat in the backs of their trucks.  Some of those trucks were idling.  Some were not.  None were moving.  Colonel Needles had this grand Gomorrah army deploying thousands of troops to attack a town that couldn't even put up a fight if it wanted to.  To Claw's mind, it was overkill.  Only, it was worse than overkill.  Because behind the thousands deploying to fight, there was a column of thousands more stretching back to the south for miles.  The attack on the village had forced the whole column to halt.  Claw knew the way things worked.  They wouldn't get everything moving again until tomorrow.  Tomorrow afternoon if they were lucky.
"Why aren't these cavalry units in their trucks moving," Needles demanded of the command center.  "They need to push out and secure our flanks."
"They aren't moving because they're high as fuck," a new voice answered.  Claw and Needles turned toward the tent flap.  A Gomorrah fighter entered.  He looked exasperated, and he wore an Uzi Submachinegun with a homemade suppressor slung across his chest.  He held a sheathed oriental sword in one hand, wielding it like a pointer or a swagger stick.  The arm that held the sword was covered in tiny blue feathers.  The man's name was Koba, and he was one of the captains of this grand Gomorrah army.
"What in the actual fuck are we trying to do here?" Koba demanded, angrily.  Koba was a fighter and a killer, and he looked it.  For all his earlier bluster, Colonel Needles lost the ability to speak.  Koba went on.
"You've got us out there like idiots moving thousands of people around.  I could take that village down with thirty fighters.  Instead, we've got every asshole in this army moving one way or another.  This shit is going to take all day.  What the hell are we doing?"
"Something about hammers and anvils," Claw grumbled.  Insulted, Needles stuck out his chest and spoke boldly.
"If you want a professional army, an army that can go into Jefferson and win, then this is how you get that army," Needles said.  "Training.  Rehearsals.  Reps and sets.  We have to practice.  We have to go through all the motions.  We have to build muscle memory."
"We've got a few thousand people out there," Koba replied.  "Most of them aren't practicing.  Most are just going to spend all day sitting on their asses.  Hell, most won't even know we launched an attack until tomorrow or the next day."  Koba used his sheathed sword to point back to the south.  "We've got people going back for miles.  I bet we still got people as far back as Rio Vista.  But if we are going to practice, then let's practice.  I've got people, they've been out in the sun waiting to attack down that ridge for almost an hour now."
"We need to wait," Needles answered.  "Our flanks aren't set.  We need your Rainbow Ninja to bring his calvary up and set the flanks."
"Yeah, that ain't happening," Koba said.  He set his sheathed sword down on one of the folding tables and began scratching at his arm.  The one with the small blue feathers.  "Like I said, the Ninja and most of his people are high as fuck.  Nobody knew we were going to pull off this huge attack this morning, so the Rainbow Ninja and his boys had a little wake-and-bake for breakfast."
"They can't be using drugs, we're an army conducting operations," Needles exclaimed.  In response, Koba only snorted.  Needles added, "I sent the attack order out last night."
"When?" Koba asked.
"Last night," Needles repeated.
"I never got any order."
"I posted it on the portal," Needles said defensively.
"The portal.  What's the portal?" Koba asked, genuinely not understanding.
The New Spartan colonel pointed to one of the computers on the folding tables.  "The computer network.  The portal," Needles said.
Koba spent a long moment staring blankly at the computer.  Claw looked at both Koba and Needles.  The two men were very different.  Needles worked in theories.  Koba dealt in practicalities.  Needles had an academic view of war.  He'd read the Spartan military manuals and wanted to apply what he'd read here.  Koba had made a living leading men, fighting and raiding in the unforgiving world of the Badlands.  Koba didn't like Needles, and Needles didn't like Koba.  Koba was the most reliable subordinate commander in their army.  Needles, for all his faults, was their gateway to Spartan largess.  Claw didn't like Needles either, but he had to manage the two if he was going to make the larger plans work.  The thought of it made Claw tired all over.
Koba finally spoke.  "At least half the people in this army can't read, and none of us can access your 'portal.'  If you want us to do something you've got to find us and tell us face to face.  Your portal, computer shit isn't going to work.  Not with this army."  Koba sighed heavily.  Then he looked around the command center, clearly looking for something specific.  "Where's the coffee?"
"We don't have any coffee.  Not yet," Needles answered weakly.  "We're working on it."
Koba shook his head.  "Computers but no coffee huh?  Well… fuck it," he said.  "I'm not waiting anymore.  It's getting hot as hell and my people aren't going to sit in the sun all day.  I'm attacking now."  He snatched his sheathed sword off the folding table and headed for the open tent flap.
"But the flanks aren't set."
"Not my problem."  Outside the tent flap, he called, "We can't wait forever!"
When Koba was well out of earshot, Needles spoke up.  "He can't attack now.  Our flanks aren't set.  The command post isn't even set up."
Claw looked around at the New Spartan and Gomorrah technicians who were still setting up the command post.  They unfolded tables and chairs, they strung wires, they set up computers; they built workstations for headquarters personnel they didn't even have, to perform tasks they didn't even need done.  The last time they did this, it took twelve hours to set up Needle's command post.  Koba would be done long before then, flanks or not flanks.  Claw cast a sideways glance back toward Needles.  He was an idiot.  But even idiots had their uses, especially well-supplied idiots.
"Colonel, Koba will be done with that town before we even get your command post set up.  But since we're going to be here awhile, why don't we conduct a resupply."


Scrapper Jay
"Forget the supplies.  We need to go."  Jay and his people were in a panic, and they scrambled to leave.  Minutes earlier, on their camera system, Scrapper Jay watched the Gomorrah army descend from the ridge and attack the nearby town.  Things were bad.  Now, he and his team scrambled to escape before things got worse.  The team had three light pickups and a trailer.  Two trucks were parked in the house's garage, out of sight.  The third with the trailer was parked beside the house, camouflaged beneath a blanket of debris.
"Leave it," Jay shouted.  His voice cracked at the end of the order.  Sampson was trying to balance a load of scavenged ducting, fans, and parts in his arms.  At the table, Sarah slammed her laptop shut and scrambled to gather up various cords.
"But, we need this stuff," Sampson protested.  "This is why we came."
"Sarah, where's the Lewis Gun?" Jay asked.  Sampson stood flatfooted with his arms full of salvaged loot.
"It is already in your truck."
Sampson remained frozen.
Jay rushed towards Sampson and slapped the stack of ducting out of his arms.  The thin metal clattered on the floor.  "Leave it," Jay repeated and he forced the knock-off M79 and the bandolier of ammunition into Sampson's empty arms.  Jay still had a submachinegun slung over a shoulder.
"Go!"
Jay rushed into the garage.  One of the garage doors was already open.  His crew members struggled to open the second.  Jay ran out into the driveway.  Outside was an abandoned suburban neighborhood that was four generations into decay: collapsing roofs, abandoned cars, once manicured front yards gone wild.  There was a village a few miles to the east.  Jay looked in that direction and saw columns of smoke rising.  He cursed, and then he saw the truck.
The truck was full-size, lifted, and ominous.  Crude red and black stripes ran along its length.  There were some men in the back of the truck, and a banner.  It was another one of the rising phoenix banners.  This one had rainbow-colored streamers as fringe.  The truck eased its way through the suburban ruins.
"We can't get this door open," one of Jay's scavengers called from inside the garage.
Jay watched one of the men in the back of the truck turn in his direction.  The man mouthed some words.  He was too far away to hear, but when the man pounded on the truck cab's roof, Jay knew what was going on.  Jay yelled into the garage.
"Just smash through it."
"What?"
"Smash through the damn door."
The truck's engine growled.  The front wheels turned, and the truck headed in their direction.  Jay shouted again and unslung his submachine gun.  He patted himself down looking for spare magazines and found a few in his cargo pockets.
"Smash through the door!" He ordered again.
The truck with the trailer pulled out onto the street.  The trailer bounced and swayed as it drove off the curb.  Another truck pulled out of the garage, onto the driveway, and turned onto the street.  The big Gomorrah truck advanced in their direction.  The men in the back of it shouted.  Sampson ran out onto the street and raised his M79.
"No!  Too far…"  Jay reached up to stop Sampson.  The last truck, the one inside the garage revved its engine, drove into the second garage door, and knocked it off its tracks.  The sheet metal buckled, then ripped, then broke free.  Braided steel cables snapped.  The garage door broke free from its tracks and tumbled.
Sampson squeezed the trigger.  His 40mm weapon made its distinctive "bloop" sound.  Jay cursed again.  The 40mm was loaded with buckshot.  Jay saw small dust clouds rise off the street as the projectiles impacted, well short of the advancing enemy truck.
"Idiot," Jay hissed.
The last scrapper truck drove through the wrecked garage door and onto the driveway.  Jay grabbed Sampson by the collar and dragged him towards it.  The second truck was on the street.  Sarah hung out the passenger window.  She shouted something about magazines, but Jay couldn't hear what.  It didn't matter.  He and Sampson jumped into the cluttered bed of the third truck.
"Go!  Drive!" Jay shouted.
The big black and red truck accelerated.  The men in the back shouted and waved their arms.  The banner caught the wind and billowed.  The rainbow-colored pennants on the edges caught the wind as well.  Jay heard a rifle shot.  Then another.  He banged on the cab of his truck with one hand and raised his weapon with the other.
"Drive!"
Sarah's truck accelerated.  Jay's truck accelerated too.  Sampson toppled over from the change in speed and fell into a pile of scavenged parts and tools.  Jay looked back.  The black and red truck was accelerating too.  And it was closing.  Behind that, a second black and red truck weaved out of the ruins and onto the street too.
A rifle shot rang out.  This one whizzed past Jay's head.
"Drive!" Jay shouted, and he banged on the cab again.  Jay looked back at the pursuing trucks.  He could do the math in his head.  The pursuing trucks had bigger engines.  They were faster.  They had rifles.  The numbers all went one way, and not in Jay's favor.  He banged on the cab again, harder this time.  He kept banging until the passenger opened the slider window between the cab and the bed.
"Lewis Gun!" Jay ordered.
"What?"
Jay pointed to the long light machine gun with its distinct thick barrel shroud and pan magazine on the floor of the back seat.
"Gimme the Lewis Gun!"
The passenger, a bespeckled Jeffersonian named Peter, passed the weapon back through the slider window as more rifle rounds snapped and hissed overhead.  Jay took the weapon and spun around to face his pursuers.  Sampson fired off another buckshot round from the bloop gun.
"They're too far away for that," Jay screamed at Sampson as he unfolded the legs of the bulky Lewis Gun.  Their truck hit a bump, and the various tools and scavenged parts slid around in the bed.  Jay set up the Lewis Gun as best he could in the truck bed.  He aimed and fired off a burst.  The Jeffersonian Lewis Guns were chambered in .30-06.  The big cartridge, combined with the unstable firing surface didn't make for ideal conditions, especially for firing at a moving target.  And the big hunting cartridge was a lot of gun for somebody of Jay's size, especially on automatic fire.  Jay's burst started on the roadway, then walked up the grill of the pursuing trucks.  Sparks flashed where metal stuck metal.  A headlight shattered.  The burst walked up into the open sky and nothing.  Jay aimed in and fired again, hoping to put a burst into the radiator.  The Lewis Gun thundered and shook.  Back at the black and red striped truck, a Gomorrah fighter placed his own automatic rifle on the roof of the cab, bipod extended.  He fired back a burst of his own.  Bullets smacked into Jay's truck.  They punched holes through the tailgate, a rear quarter panel.  Sampson was midway through reloading the M79.  An incoming bullet passed through the tailgate, hit a pile of old ducting pieces, ricocheted, and struck Sampson in the calf.  He screamed and dropped both the M79 and the bandolier.  Jay fired again and the pursuing truck fired again, trading burst for burst.  In the distance, a third black and red truck appeared.
The road curved sharply.  The driver took it fast.  The centrifugal force through everything to one side.  Jay's burst went wide.  The screaming Sampson lost his balance and toppled onto a pile of jagged ducting.  The pursuing truck's burst fell on the slider rear window.  One of the panels shattered.  Behind the first pursuing truck, a second truck closed.  It took advantage of the curve and fired too.  Jay heard its bullets punch through sheet metal.
Jay waited until the road straightened again, and then he fired.  Bullets walked up the pursuing truck's windshield, then the gun went silent.  Empty.  Jay cleared the empty pan magazine and let it fall into the bed of the truck with all the other detritus.  He looked over at Sampson.  Sampson was drenched in blood.  The length of his calf was torn open.  One forearm had been sliced by the jagged metal inside the truck.  Jay had no time to worry about that now.  He called through the open slider window.
"Ammo.  I need ammo."  Jay saw Peter was bleeding too.  A bullet had struck his shoulder.  Peter looked weak and pale, but he passed back a cardboard box full of big, long .30-06 cartridges.  Jay looked at the box with disgust.
"I need a loaded magazine."
"Sarah has all the loaded magazines in her truck.  This is all we got."
Jay grabbed for the box.  When he touched it, he could feel the rounds rolling loose inside it.  He took the box back into the bed of the truck.  Just as he did, the truck struck something in the road, something big enough to make the whole truck jump.  Everything in the bed bounced up.  The tools and the scavenged parts bounced up and crashed back down.  The bleeding Sampson bounced up.  As he came down, he put one hand out to break his fall.  His had landed on a piece of thin, razor-sharp metal that sliced mercilessly.  The box of cartridges bounced up out of Jay's hand.  It hung in the air a moment before crashing down into the bed of the truck and bursting open.  The gleaming brass .30-06 cartridges flew in all directions.  Some bounced out of the truck.  Most rolled in ones and two under the pile of scavenged metal.
Jay stared at the disaster with wide, disbelieving eyes, and then he cursed.
"Shit."


Claw
"Attention in the Combat Operations Center!" One of the technicians announced with an authoritative shout.  It was one of the Spartan Advisors, wearing a black uniform with subdued red piping.  Fortunate, Claw thought, that New Sparta's Capital Guardsmen wore the same colors as Gomorrah's fighters.  Claw waited patiently for the technician's next words.
"We've got contact to the west.  One of our flank units made contact with a withdrawing force."
"A withdrawing force, or just some serfs running away?" Claw asked.  Before the technician could answer, Needles exploded.
"Damn it!" Needles shouted.  For all his cocky "Hammer and Anvil" talk earlier, Needles instantly descended into panic whenever faced with anything stressful.  He raced across the command post, which was still under construction, to the technician's station and began demanding information.
"Who's in contact?  Where are they?  What is their grid location?  Who are they fighting?  Why didn't they ask permission first?  Damn it, who gave them the order to attack?"
The black and red uniformed Spartan was at a loss.  He'd been trained to guard the Emerald City, New Sparta's capital.  He hadn’t been trained for combat operations, not even as a clerk.  The Gomorrah forces weren't a trained army either and so, their reporting left a lot to be desired.  The radio snapped and crackled and the technician stammered out an, "I… I… I…" while Colonel Needles stood over him, shouting questions the technician couldn't answer.  When he couldn't stand it any longer, Claw stepped forward and grabbed the radio mic with his one hand.  Claw wasn't a military man.  He'd never been trained to operate a command center.  What Claw did have common sense, a calm demeanor, an understanding of Gomorrah's people, and an intuitive grasp that whatever Needles did, he needed to do the opposite.  After a few questions, Claw got what he needed.
"One of the flank patrols saw some villagers driving away in a couple of trucks and they are chasing them down.  The Rainbow Ninja's people."
"Damn it!" Needles yelled, and he smashed both fists down on a folding table.  "That Koba is an idiot.  We shouldn't have attacked so early.  The whole operation is blown!"
"This was one tiny settlement and it is only a couple of trucks," Claw said evenly.  "We could have just driven right past it, but you decided to stop this morning and attack it.  Now that we are attacking, it'll take all day to get this mob we call an army moving again."
"We can't just let these villages go," Needles said.
"If Jefferson is our goal, then we just need to go for Jefferson," Claw replied.  "The more time we waste out here on trivial things like this village, the more time Jefferson will have to plan and prepare for our attack."
"Pish-posh," Needles retorted.  "They don't even know we're coming."
"They will.  As big as we are… we're too big to hide.  And if these renegade Spartans are as dangerous as you say they are, we shouldn't offer them any time to get ready for us."
Needles waved away Claw's comments.  "I'm not worried about those kids.  Give them all the time in the world, what are they going to do, take on our whole army?  No, we don't need to rush.  We need to do this right.  Plan it in detail.  Soup-to-Nuts.  Plan it right down to the gnat's ass.  We should have waited for Rainbow Man, we should have waited for him to set the flanks."
"He calls himself the Rainbow Ninja, and we would have been waiting for him all day," Claw said.  Needles didn't seem to hear him and continued with his train of thought.
"We should have brought up the tanks too."
Claw thought about that.  The Spartans had given this last Gomorrah army about a dozen old tanks.  Very old tanks.  The Spartans called them "T-Series Tanks."  Claw didn't know what T-Series meant other than that the tanks were very old and came from somewhere outside of America.  Europa, he thought.  Claw worried that as old as they were, the tanks wouldn't work when they needed them to.  That, and his Gomorrah fighters didn't know how to use them.  To Claw, the tanks were just more things his army was hauling around, more fancy toys they didn't know how to use.
"Those tanks are loaded on flatbeds and jammed up miles back in the column.  It would take all day to get them up here.  Once we did get them up here and unloaded, who knows if they'd even work."
"They'll work," Needles said with confidence.  The panicked and impatient bully was gone and now the strutting rooster was back.  "And trust me, those Jefferson people will shit themselves when they see those T-Series Tanks coming right at them.  Shit.  Their.  Pants.
Needles smiled at his fantasy of Jeffersonians fleeing before his tank assault.  "Besides," Needles began.  "I doubt those Jeffersonians have much fight in them anyways."


Scrapper Jay
Another burst from the pursuing vehicles snapped Jay back to reality.  He looked back to the two pursuing trucks and did the math again.  It hadn't worked out last time and now the factors were worse.  The enemy still had bigger trucks, with bigger and faster engines.  Now with the Lewis Gun out, the enemy had weapons Jay couldn't match.  The Gomorrah trucks could outrun and outshoot Jay.  Two of his people were wounded and maybe bleeding out.  Jay leaned through the slider window again.
"Slow down!"
"What?"
"Slow down.  Do it!"
Jay grabbed his Swedish K and checked it.  It was ready to go.  He grabbed the empty M79 out of a pile of jagged metal and looked for the bandolier.  Sarah called over the truck's radio.
"What's going on back there?"
Jay threw himself halfway through the slider and grabbed the mic.
"We're slowing down.  You keep going.  Don't stop.  Not for anything," Jay ordered.
"What?  No!" Sarah called back.  Jay dropped the mic and shimmied back into the bed.  The pursuing trucks were closer.  Sampson made moans and sucking sounds, and the bed of the truck was slick with his blood.  Jay looked for the bandolier amongst all the junk.  He saw it, reached for it, then quickly withdrew his hand when a jagged edge of metal sliced the back of his hand.
More bullets whipped overhead, and when that barrage stopped, Jay thought he heard an evil laugh.  He did hear a big engine whine as it accelerated.  The pursuing vehicle was close now; close and closing.  The driver hit the gas and the truck made one last surge forward.  They could ram or even worse, pull a pit maneuver on Jay's truck.  No time.  No time to think.  Only time to act.
Jay reached through the jagged metal, ignoring the cuts and the pain.  He pulled the bandolier free and snatched out a buckshot round.  With the hands of a practiced amateur, he loaded the M79 and flipped it closed.  He heard the enemy engine surge.  He turned.  The pursuing truck was nosing up alongside.  A pit maneuver then.  A man behind the cab struggled to reload his weapon, a big rifle with a dimpled barrel and a huge box magazine.  Other men were in the bed of the truck.  Their bare grins and the edges of their bare knives gleamed with sadistic intent.  One with a big revolver aimed at Jay fought to keep his balance long enough to make a shot.  A million things were going on in the back of Jay's mind.  One of those things was the recognition that there was something not right about the man with the revolver.  There was something about him that looked, inhuman.  The one with the big rifle got it reloaded and swung it toward Jay's truck.  The revolver man steadied himself and thumbed back the weapon's hammer.  Not today, Jay thought.
Jay leaned over the bed of his truck.  He didn't aim the M79 so much as hold it up to the pursuing truck's front passenger wheel well and pulled the trigger.  A score of buckshot pellets tore through the front tire and shredded it in an instant.  The damage and the speed caused the tire to just come apart.  The truck sank, bucked, swerved.  The driver lost control.  The man with the revolver lost his balance and tumbled backward, firing into the air as he went.  Jay wasn't done.  He dropped the M79 into the truck bed, raised his Swedish K, and fired the entire magazine into the truck cab.  A thousand spiderwebs cracked their way across the windshield.  Blood sprayed from the inside, staining the fractured glass crimson.  Bullets riddled the driver, and the truck went out of control.  It drifted back, swerving in towards the wrecked tire.  The second truck was pursuing too close, and the driver was untrained.  Instead of the one truck pitting Jay's, the second enemy truck pitted the first, only the driver didn't know what he was doing or how to react.  He pushed his truck into the back of the first truck, and as the first truck swung around sideways, he reflexively turned back into it, and then, panicking again, he turned even harder, too hard for the speeding truck to manage.
From the bed of his truck, Jay watched the whole collision.  The first truck came around sideways, then rolled and took the second truck with it.  Both trucks went tumbling sidelong down the road, throwing off pieces and parts, shattered glass and plastic, and human bodies as they went.
"Jay!"
Jay turned from the wreckage.  Sampson was pointing at the front of their truck.  Great jets of steam shot out from under the hood.  The truck was slowing and weaving from side to side.  The front end of their truck had caught a burst too.  Their driver, Wade, fought to control the vehicle with one hand.  He used the other to clench his side.  In the passenger seat, Peter was barely moving.  The radio buzzed and crackled with Sarah's calls.  Jay looked backward.  Somewhere back there was a third truck.
"Wade!  Stop and put us in reverse."
"I think I've been hit!"
"Stop and get us in reverse!" Jay repeated to Wade.  To Sampson, he yelled, "Reload that M79."
"I'm hit," Sampson said weakly.
"Everybody's hit," Jay said.
Wade got the truck stopped.  He shifted into reverse and hit the accelerator.  The truck's light engine whined.  The tires left rubber as they spun backward.  Jay swapped magazines on his submachine gun.  He heard Sampson reload the bloop gun.  He heard Sarah still calling on the radio.  When the reversing truck got close to the wreckage, Jay pounded an open hand on the cab.
"Stop."
The truck stopped.  Everything in the bed of the truck slid in the direction of travel.
Jay snatched the M79 from Sampson.  He vaulted out of the truck with the Thumper in one hand and a Swedish K in the other and headed for the nearest Gomorrah screamer he saw lying in the road.
The nearest one was the man with the revolver.  He didn't have the revolver anymore.  Even if he did, we wouldn't be able to use it.  One of his arms was shredded, torn apart from rolling down the asphalt.  The other arm was bent at a ninety-degree angle at the elbow, but in the wrong direction.  The man made gurgling sounds.  More disturbing than the man's wounds was the man's face.  It was mishappen, but not from the crash.  The deformed face had a purposeful, natural look.  Nothing was symmetrical.  The eyes, the ears; none of them lined up, and none matched its counterpart.  One eye was squinty and piggish.  The other, bright and wide.  One ear was huge and pointed at either end.  One was little more than a flap of skin placed so low it was almost on the man's jaw.  Jay knew all about Gomorrah and their obsession with self-mutilation and 'modification.'  He also knew about Nicky Lee's effort to weaponize Doctor Chosen's mutation protocols.  Those had been stories.  Now, up close and personal, Jay decided he wanted nothing to do with any of that.  He looked the wounded man over one last time, then raised his Swedish K and executed him with a single shot.  Then he jogged over to the wreckage.  He heard human sounds coming from inside one truck cab.  He fired his M79 clone into it.  Then he sprayed the wreckage and anything that looked like a body with his submachinegun, emptying the magazine.
Down the road, he saw the third pursuing truck appear.  It was close.  Only seconds away.  Jay looked around the wreckage.  He saw what he was looking for in the grass on the shoulder of the road.  Sunlight glinted off the dimpled barrel of the automatic rifle they'd been firing at him.  Jay picked it up, checked the chamber and saw brass.  He detached the magazine and checked it.  He guessed it to be a thirty-round magazine, and maybe half full.  He reinserted the magazine and looked back to his truck.  It was dead.  One tire was gone.  The last trickles of steam rose out of the pierced radiator.  Wade was out of the truck.  He leaned on Sampson for support.  Half of Sampson was blood-soaked.  Jay saw no sign of Peter.
"Throw me the bandolier."
"What?"
"Throw me the bandolier and whatever ammunition we have left," Jay said.  He picked a spot in the wreckage and sent the automatic rifle.  He felt his pockets for more submachine gun magazines and felt none.  Well, shit, Jay thought.  Anything could happen in the Badlands, and today, the worst anything was about to happen.
"We're wounded," Sampson called back.
Jay looked at the advancing truck.  It had a Gomorrah banner in the back too.  One with rainbow streamers.
"You're about to be dead.  Get ammo."
Jay sighted in on the advancing truck.  He figured his best bet was to let it get close and open fire.  He was so focused in on it that he didn't hear Sarah's truck pull up and stop with a screech.  He didn't know Sarah was even there until she plopped down beside him with the Lewis Gun and a duffle bag full of magazines for it.
"Huh?"  Jay said.
"Shoot damn it," Sarah replied.
Jay opened fire.  The big automatic rifle tore into the advancing truck.  Sarah got her weapon and opened fire.  The truck swerved, then veered off the road.  It bounced along the shoulder and then crashed into a long abandoned car on the side of the road.  One man in the back flew forward out of the bed of the truck, flying over the cab and hood before crashing head-first into the ground.  Sarah swapped out magazines and kept firing.  A man in the back flopped out of the truck bed and into the tall dry grass along the road.  He didn't get up.  Sarah kept firing.  When the second pan magazine went empty, she loaded a third, got up, ran to the truck, and sprayed it down.  The cab.  The bed.  The bodies that had fallen out.  She sprayed them all.  When the Lewis Gun went dry again.  She unslung her submachine gun and ran back to Jay.
"I told you to keep going," Jay said.
"Fuck off," Sarah said.
Jay bent over at the waist and vomited.  When he thought he was done, he straightened up.  Then he bent over and vomited again.  When his guts were empty and his stomach muscles stopped spasming, he turned to Sarah.
"I think we should go."


Claw
Nobody inside the command tent made a sound.  Not even the previously preening and bombastic Colonel Needles spoke.  Nobody ever made an unnecessary sound in the presence of Gomorrah's warrior-emperor, Winston Indigo.
Winston Indigo was an imposing figure.  He was a bull of a man, at least 350 pounds of solid muscle.  He was bald.  His skin was blue, and his eyes and nailbeds were pewter.  None of these features were natural, his size, his coloring, his hairless body.  Winston had been a plaything of the late Doctor Chosen, and the doctor had mutated the young man into something he found more amusing.  In the aftermath of The Colonel's attack, Winston leveraged his relationship with Doctor Chosen and his sheer mass to assume the mantle of Gomorrah's leadership.  Maintaining all that muscle mass required a substantial amount of food.  In the apocalyptic lands of Once-Was-America, there was always one reliable source of meat, and Claw had been the one to bring meat to Winston's table.
The thing about Winston that terrified Claw the most wasn't his size or his appetites.  It was his stillness.  The blue giant kept his own counsel.  He rarely spoke.  He never betrayed an emotion, and when it was time to act, he acted.  Sometimes Winston acted with savage and merciless violence, executed quickly and without warning.  Claw had witnessed the brute kill two of his assistants in one setting.  One of them, Winston crushed beneath his feet.  Highlighting his capacity for violence, Winston carried two weapons slung across his wide, rippling back: a gold-plated RPK machinegun that once belonged to a Middle Eastern dictator, and a six-shot grenade launcher.
In addition to being brutal, Winston was also shrewd.  He used his stillness to his advantage.  Because he rarely spoke, some thought of Winston as simple-minded, or indecisive.  All brawn and no brains.  Claw knew that wasn’t the case.  Even now, in the silent tent, behind the blank expression, Claw could see the cogs turning inside Winston's mind.
When the silence became too much to endure, Colonel Needles spoke.  "Sir, the assault on the enemy village went according to plan.  The attack was outstanding, simply outstanding.  There were a few things we could have done better, and we'll take note of those.  Lessons learned, as they say.  That's going to make this army better.  Lessons learned.  Getting out and performing.  Reps and sets.  Reps and sets."
Needles gave a nervous titter and the end of his assessment.  Winston didn't titter.  He didn't smile.  He didn't frown.  His eyes didn't twitch.  His lips didn't curl.  He didn't acknowledge Needles or any of the words he spoke.  Winston simply looked left and right, assessing the tent and everything in it.  Everyone inside the tent stood stock still.  They were all quiet, with their hands behind their backs or folded in front of themselves, waiting patiently.  The silence had a thickness to it, and that thickness filled and pressurized the inside of the tent for a long time.  Only when he was ready, did Winston speak.
"What did we accomplish?"
"Huh?"
"This morning.  What did we accomplish this morning?  The whole army is held up.  Waiting on this.  We won't get moving again until tomorrow.  What did we accomplish?  What did we actually get done?"
Needles seemed genuinely surprised by the question.
Claw looked about the tent.  Koba had finished his attack already, but the command post was only partially established.  Now the tent and everything and everyone inside it were at that awkward point where they didn't know if they should continue setting up the command post, or tear down what they built.  Hendrick Needles spoke.
"We practiced," the lizard-faced colonel said.  "We rehearsed.  We got in some reps and sets."  Needle's face was a mix of emotions.  On the one hand, he thought the answer to Winston's question was self-evident.  On the other hand, Needles felt apprehensive, worried about incurring the hulking man's wrath.
"Hmmm," Winston grunted.  It could have been an approval or a disapproval.  It could have been nothing.  Needles didn't know what the grunt meant.  Claw didn't know either, but he suspected it was just Winston's way of keeping Needles off guard.  Another silence filled the room, and then Winston spoke again.
"Some trucks drove away.  Some people got away.  In trucks."  Winston's words could have been a statement or a question.
"Yes sir."  Needles spoke quickly, energized by the opportunity Winston's question offered.  "The Rainbow Man…"
"Rainbow Ninja," Claw corrected.
"Yes, the Rainbow Ninja.  He was supposed to use his mobile platoons to secure our flanks and establish a cordon.  But he didn't.  He moved too slowly.  He was… he partook of drugs."
"Partook of drugs?"
"Yes sir.  Before the battle.  He partook…"
"He and his men got high this morning," Claw interjected.
Needles gulped.  He hoped that this would stir Winston.  It didn't.  Winston's face remained an unreadable, unknowable mask.  The blue-skinned giant gave another ambiguous grunt.  Needles fidgeted.  Winston spoke again.
"Are we conducting another resupply?"
"Yes sir," Needles answered  "The aircraft are inbound.  The first section is bringing in fuel and should be here shortly."
Winston gave a final grunt.  This one was just as ambiguous as all the ones before.  Then he looked at Claw and nodded his head.  The nod was a, "follow me," signal.  Next, Winston spun on his heels and left the tent without saying a word.  Claw followed him.


Outside the command tent lay a spectacle.  All the inactivity, the confusion, the wasted work, and the wasted effort had compounded.  There were more vehicles parked around the tent, all sitting idle.  More Gomorrah people stood around.  Some were gold-bricking.  Most lacked any guidance on what to do.  Not far from the tent, a truck pulling a flatbed trailer loaded with speakers listed to one side.  The driver tried to accelerate and Claw heard the spinning of wheels on mud.  All around the truck, idle men with idle hands stood by.
"Don't you have a mechanic to take care of things like that," Winston asked, pointing to the truck.
"He's back at the far end of the column.  I told him to prioritize the vehicles we need for our Thunder Run."
With his pewter eyes fixed on the listing truck, Winston nodded with approval.  Then Winston asked, "How is it going with the Spartan advisors?"
Claw didn't let a second pass before answering.  "They're idiots.  At least that Colonel Needles is.  He's got no idea what he's doing, and he has no appreciation of our situation.  He's supposed to be advising us.  His advice is worthless."
Winston Indigo didn't speak right away.  He was never afraid of silence.  He was never in a hurry to speak.  It helped him, in that nobody ever knew what the blue giant was thinking, not even Claw.  When he felt enough time had passed, Winston spoke.
"I was never mentored by Doctor Chosen, at least not the way we're talking about.  But by being around the man and seeing how he interacted with other members of the High Council on Nines, I saw and learned a few things.
"This Colonel Needles wasn't chosen for his abilities.  The Chief Marshal sent Needles because he's loyal.  And controllable.  And expendable.  He doesn't want an independent thinker down here giving us sound military advice.  We don't want one either.  His limitations work to our advantage too.  It allows us to do what we want to do without fear of being exposed.  I heard there's another resupply coming in.  How is our fuel situation?"
Claw reached his one good hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a small notebook.  One-handed, he flipped to the page he wanted, then held it up for Winston to see.
"We'll have the fuel we need long before we get to this, Jefferson place.  We already have lots."
"And it is safe?  I'm not worried about these Spartans finding out.  I'm worried about our own people pilfering it."
"We're keeping it in separate tankers.  I've got one of our better lieutenants, the Red Sniper watching over it.  He's got his own people, loyal to him.  He'll keep it safe."
"He'll be leading the Thunder Run north into New Sparta?"
"Yes," Claw answered.  "Koba's our best lieutenant.  The Red Sniper is number two.  But I'll need Koba just to keep things together long enough to get to Jefferson.  After that, we let the Red Sniper slip loose.  Koba will gather what's left and follow north."
"And you are sure we'll have enough fuel?" Winston asked.  Claw flipped to another page, then held it up so Winston could see the figures he'd made.
"We'll need this much fuel to get to Rose City.  If we do attack this Jefferson place like they want us to, the casualties we would take would mean we'd need less fuel.  We'd also lose many of the less reliable vehicles along the way, which would reduce the total amount of fuel we need."
"Hmmm," Winston grunted again.  "And Colonel Needle's isn't pressuring us to advance faster.  He's content attacking every small town along the way.  The longer it takes us to get there, the more supply drops they send us.  And we inflate the number of our resupply requests.  It seems to me the longer we take to get to Jefferson, the better, correct?" Winston asked.  "The more time it takes, the more resupply missions we can run, the more fuel and supplies we can stockpile for our real objective."
"True," Claw said, "But every day we're also losing people.  Accidents.  Injuries.  People getting sick.  Radiations from the bomb.  Some people can't keep up, even as slow as we're going.  And then all the equipment that breaks down."  Claw drew his one mutated hand out of his pocket and used it to point to the listing truck not far away.  "Every day this army has a bunch of those.  The longer we stay in the field, the fewer people we'll have to fight the Jeffersonians, and eventually the Spartans."
"How many are we losing every day?" Winston asked.
"No way to be sure," Claw replied.  "We don't even know how many people we started out with.  It would be a full-time job for a team of people just to count how many we have in this army.  We can't assume we can take as long as we want getting to Jefferson, not if we want to attack New Sparta immediately after."
"We will attack Jefferson," Winston said.  "It will distract the New Spartans, hopefully long enough for us to make the Thunder Run north.  Colonel Needles is the Chief Marshall's eyes and ears on our army.  He was sent to be a spy but he's a fool.  He won't have any idea what going on until our attack on New Sparta is well underway."
"What do you want to do with him and the other New Spartan advisors after the attack on Jefferson?  Kill them?"
"No," Winston answered.  "We'll take them prisoner.  It will make our true enemies indecisive.  The Spartans will hesitate to attack us with their Morning Stars or their planes and drones if we have their friends as hostages.  Every moment they hesitate gives us time to advance."
Claw smiled.  "Hard to believe," he said.  "This is the biggest, best equipped army Gomorrah ever fielded.  When we start our attack, we'll start it closer to the New Spartan border than most of our armies ever got.  And all of it is possible because the New Spartans are helping us.  Hard to believe these people frustrated us for so long."
Winston shook his head.  "There are two types of Spartans.  Dr. Chosen taught me that.  There are these types."  Winston gestured towards the tent, with Colonel Needles and the other advisors inside.  "Those are the weak ones.  The stupid ones.  They lack confidence.  They lack any conviction or resolve.  Because of their weakness and insecurities, they crave our friendship and approval.  And because they seek our friendship and approval, we can get them to do anything.  Those are the types of Spartans in the Emerald City.  Those are the ones that always end up in charge.
"Then there are the other Spartans.  They don't crave friendship or approval.  They only want to do what they've been trained to do, and that is kill.  They don't stay in the Emerald City.  They don't want to be in charge.  They just want to kill.  Murderers.  Those are the ones they have us going after.  Those are the Spartans we're going to find in Jefferson.
"But we will destroy this Jefferson place, Claw.  We'll destroy it, Spartans and all.  And once we do, in the aftermath and the confusion, obscured by the smoke and the chaos, we'll make a Thunder Run north, and attack New Sparta.
"So, conserve our forces, Claw.  Keep Colonel Needles and the rest of the New Spartan advisors in the dark as to our true intentions.  And keep the resupplies coming."


Lions
"Sir, we've got a resupply in progress.  Aside from that, I don't see them getting much done today," the technician said.  The technician sat at a desk in an operations center back in the Emerald City.  Colonel Lions, a Spartan Knight and the Chief Marshal's fixer stood over the technician's shoulder watching a video feed of the Gomorrah army and its progress.  Progress, of course, was slow.  They were attacking every hamlet on the way to Jefferson.  That meant the army was only moving a few miles a day.  If it was a Spartan army, that rate of march would have been unacceptable.  But for this hybrid army, Lions was happy it was moving at all.  He'd watched its advance through feeds from drones and orbiting Griffen aircraft.  The army had left a trail of stragglers, broken-down vehicles, and abandoned equipment all the way back to the Sacramento River.  The thought of the logistic problems that the army faced made Lions shudder.  Knowing that the army was being advised Colonel Hendrick Needles also made him shudder.  Lions had the same assessment of the reptile-faced Needles as Claw did.  Needles was an idiot.  A loyal idiot, but an idiot, nonetheless.
Idiot or not, at least I've got one of the Needles twins out of the capital, Lions thought.  The other Needles brother, who was an exact match to the first, both in appearance and capabilities, was still in the Emerald City, running the capital guard.
Lions did not have to worry about Hendrick Needle's suitability as a military advisor or the Gomorrah army's performance too much.  They didn't have to be good, they just had to be good enough.  Good enough to get to Jefferson, destroy it, and kill The Colonel's son.  Allying with Gomorrah to destroy Jefferson would secure The Chief Marshal's legacy as the man who brought peace and unity between the two powers, even if he had to annihilate a third party to do it.  Killing his nemesis's son would be a bonus.  Of course, once Jefferson was destroyed and the legacy secured, there would be no more need for the Gomorrah army.  At that point, it would be more of an inconvenience.  The more casualties it took, not just fighting the Jeffersonians but getting to the fight, the better.  Lions wasn't worried about how fast the Gomorrah army got to Jefferson, just so long as they got there.
"What are they flying in," Lions asked.
"The usual.  Fuel mostly.  They've got it loaded in bladders in the back of those Griffins."
Lions nodded, then asked, "Where are those Griffins from?"
"That's the section out of Grants Pass."
"I thought we shut that base down." Lions said.
"Mostly," the technicians said.  "Those two Griffins and the ground crews are all that's left there.  We would have pulled everything out, but we need to keep those Griffins there for the resupplies.  Those Gomorrah people, they burn through a lot of fuel."
Lions nodded.  If the Gomorrah army needed fuel, so be it.  Whatever got them to Jefferson.
Lions took one last look around the operations center.  On all the walls were maps, screens and status boards.  Everything inside the center was optimized to convey information as quickly and efficiently as possible.  With just a glance, a commander could gather the critical decision he needed to make a decision.
Lions walked over to one screen.  This one displayed the status of the Morning Star constellation.  Two were over Europa.  The rest were in a stationary orbit over the Pacific Ocean.  Those satellites would remain there, for the time being.  Approving the Morning Star status, Lions checked over all the other screens, maps, and status displays in the center.  A naval vessel was off the California Coast, and sending its drones over Jefferson per its orders.  Good.  A radio call sign that represented a unit known only to Lions was making its regularly scheduled communications checks.  The radio callsign was Dishonored Two-Two.  That was also good.  Everything was good.  Everything was in order.  Lions nodded with satisfaction.  Then he turned and exited the center.  The Chief Marshal was getting an extensive operations brief the next morning and Lions wanted to make sure everything was ready.  He felt certain the Gomorrah army, its Spartan advisors, and the Griffin pilots could handle the resupply.


Sleazy
"There's the resupply point," Major Grace called from the co-pilot's seat inside the big Griffin transport plane.  The Griffin's four turboprops could tilt ninety degrees, allowing it to land and take off and land vertically, just like a helicopter.  Today, the transport's cargo hold was full of fuel.
"I see it," the pilot said.  His name was Lieutenant Colonel Ron "Sleazy" Peters.  He'd been flying for New Sparta his entire adult life, which was more than twenty years.  For the first time in all those years, Sleazy felt conflicted about his mission.  He didn't say anything, but he felt conflicted, nonetheless.
Sleazy keyed his radio.  "Three-Two-Six, this is Three-Two-Five.  We've got the landing zone up ahead."  Sleazy's wingman responded.
"Got it, Sleazy.  Looks like they're marking with smoke."
"Yeah, Two-Four.  Tally that mark.  Alright, we'll go in one at a time.  I'll go in first.  You remain on station and cover me.  Not saying I don't trust our friends, but let's not take any chances."
"Wilco," the second aircraft responded.  Sleazy switched from his radio to the aircraft's intercom system and called for his crew chief.
"Brady, we're going in first.  Get that bladder ready.  I don't want to be on the deck one second longer than I have to."
Technical Sergeant Brady responded.  "Me neither boss.  I'll get the load ready."  Brady sidestepped past the big fuel bladder that nearly filled the Griffin's cargo bay and made his way aft.  The controls to lower the cargo ramp were back there.  Brady also kept a semiautomatic shotgun back there.  It was loaded with a drum magazine.  Brady checked the chamber, and, seeing that it was empty, he racked the action and chambered a round.  Then he set the shotgun inside a nook in the fuselage that fit the weapon perfectly.  Like the aircraft commander, Brady was conflicted too.  He'd been at war with Gomorrah his entire life.  He'd seen Gomorrah at its worst and he knew evil when he saw it.  The Chief Marshal could say that the war was over.  The Chief Marshal could say that Gomorrah and New Sparta were now allies, but that wasn't enough for Brady.  He would never ally with the Gomorrah Screamers.  And his war with Gomorrah wasn't over.  Not yet.
The aircraft shuddered as Sleazy titled the four rotors on the Griffin and transitioned from forward flight to a near-vertical descent.  As they got close to the ground, the rotor wash through up great clouds of dust too thick to see through.  The brown-out was no problem for Sleazy though.  He had augmented reality built into his helmet system that allowed him to see through the clouds of dust.
As the aircraft descended, Brady lowered the cargo ramp.  The huge fuel bladder inside was mounted on a special cargo pallet that fit in a track system.  This track system allowed the Griffin to unload itself.  It didn't require any forklifts or specialized loaders to disgorge its contents.  As soon as the Griffin settled, Brady threw a lever and the track system engaged.  It made a mechanical ratcheting sound and the pallet and its fuel bladder inched out the back of the aircraft.
Holding the lever with one hand, Brady looked out the back of the aircraft and kept his other hand near the shotgun.  Outside, a mob of Gomorrah Screamers had gathered.  Brady caught dreamlike glimpses of them through the swirling dust clouds.  They all wore red or black sashes.  Some looked like normal people.  Others, the ones they called Mods, looked like fantastical mixtures of human beings and animals.  None got too close to the aircraft, but they all eyed the fuel bladder eagerly.
It took less than two minutes for the Griffin to push out its load.  Once it was clear, the smooth metal pallet slid down the cargo ramp and cleared the Griffin.  The second it did, Brady called over the intercom.
"We're clear."
Sleazy didn't waste time responding.  His rotors had been turning the entire time.  He increased power.  The Griffin Three-Two-Five was back in the air in no time.  Then it circled above the landing zone and Griffin Three-Two-Six landed and unloaded.  The entire process took only minutes.  Brady watched everything from the open cargo ramp.  After Griffin Three-Two-Six lifted off and the dust clouds settled down, Brady saw the first fuel trucks drive up to the bladders and begin the process of transferring the fuel from the rubberized bladders into their tanks.  There were a lot of fuel trucks down there.  But this section of Griffins had made many resupply runs to the Gomorrah army.  So many that Brady recognized most of the trucks that were queuing up to fill the bladders.
Sleazy took his aircraft into one last, long loop above the landing zone before turning and heading north.  Brady called over the intercom.
"How much fuel do you think we've delivered to those Screamers since The Colonel's bomb went off?"
"I don't know," Sleazy answered.  "But we're going to send them even more.  Orders just came in from the Emerald City.  They want us to fly in a second run today."
Technical Sergeant Brady didn't respond.  He went back to his shotgun and cleared the chamber.  Then he set the shotgun back in its familiar place.  If the time ever came when he needed it, Brady wanted to be sure it was close at hand.


Vlain
On a hilltop several miles from the landing zone and the Griffins, Rodrigo Vlain lowered his binoculars and turned to the man lying beside him in the tall grass.
"There's no way those Gomorrah Screamers are using all that fuel."
Vlain was a frightening man.  He had broad shoulders and thick arms.  His hair and beard were unkempt and lunatic wild, and his face and eyes were horrific.  His face had been ritualistically scarred.  Two long pale gashes ran vertically down each side of his face.  His eyes were milky pale.  It wasn't blindness.  It was a side effect of his drug of choice, something called shake that was administered through the eyes like eye drops.  The man next to Vlain, Chamo, was a round, muscular mass.  He had dark skin and the same pale eyes and ritualistically scarred face.
"How can you tell?"  Chamo asked.  "How can you tell they aren't using all the fuel?"  The question wasn't an expression of doubt.  Chamo trusted Vlain in such military matters.  Once, Vlain had been Captain Rodrigo Vlain, a Knight of New Sparta.  Once, but no more.  Captain Vlain had been cast out of New Sparta.  Rodrigo Vlain turned from Spartan Knight to drug-addicted warlord, to mercenary captain back in the employ of the same government who exiled him.
"Basic math," Vlain answered.  The Spartans send in those transports full of fuel several times a day, every day.  Now, there are lots of vehicles down there, but those vehicles aren't traveling very far.  Just a couple miles a day.  They can't be using that much fuel.  That, and…"
Vlain folded his hands together and aimed both pointer fingers at one of the tankers on the plain.
"See that tanker with the red stripe?  They put some fuel into it every time the Griffins land.  But they haven't pumped any fuel out.  They haven't used it to refuel any of the other vehicles.  Not since they crossed the Sacramento.  That tanker and all the other tankers with red stripes.  Fuel goes in, but ain't no fuel going out."
Chamo shrugged.  "They're just grifting it.  They're pulling a little off the top and keeping it for themselves.  Ain't no different than what anybody else does out here."
"It ain't just grift," Vlain said.  "It is too organized.  They've got all those tankers marked.  Gomorrah never organizes nothing, not for shit.  If they got off their dead asses and organized something, you better believe they've got something going on."
Vlain rolled over onto his back.  The grass was tall, dry, and comfortable.  The sun was hot, but not unbearably so.  It had been hot for weeks.  Not far away, hidden in some trees was the rest of Vlain's gang.  They called themselves the Dishonored.  Like the Gomorrah horde they were shadowing, they'd been equipped by New Sparta.  They had the latest Spartan equipment: radios, weapons, vehicles, and drugs.  Vlain dug into a pocket in his sleeveless coveralls and drew out a small plastic bottle.  He shook the bottle, mixing up the contents.
"You going to tell the Spartans that they're getting ripped?" Chamo asked.
Vlain thought a little before answering.  "No," he said.  "They asked me to keep an eye on this horde of Gomorrah Screamers.  I said I'd keep an eye on them.  I never said I'd investigate into fraud waste and abuse."
Vlain uncapped the bottle.  The plastic was soft, squeezable.  The bottle's neck was shaped into a dropper.  Vlain held the bottle up and squeezed a few drops of its contents into each eye.  Seconds later, when the drugs began their effects, he shook with pleasure and newfound energy.  Vlain rolled back over onto his stomach, refolded his fingers, and aimed them at the column, gun-like again.
"The Chief Marshal has plenty of his own agents down there.  Advisors.  Logisticians.  The aircrews who deliver the fuel and everything else.  Hell, they've probably got Morning Stars overhead and staring straight down on all this.  They ain't blind.  They can see what's going on.  If they are so smart they should be able to figure out they're getting bamboozled on the fuel same as I figured it out."
The drugs brought on a synthetic pleasure.  But thinking about the Spartans made something dark rise up out of Vlain's heart and twist around the pleasure and choke it.  He'd been a Spartan Knight.  He'd been a captain of Spartan Knights, leading dangerous missions into Gomorrah and across the wastelands.  He'd been good at his job too.  He'd once been a rising star in the Spartan ranks, on his way to command one of the numbered groups, or even the Long-Range Group, the most elite Spartan formation.  But one day, all his skill and hard work, all his dedication and sacrifice, all of it had been snatched away.  Old gray men in the safety and comfort of the Emerald City had decided he'd been too brutal in his methods.  They decided he was too forceful and too violent in executing the mission they assigned him.  They decided he was too enthusiastic in killing the people they had taught him to hate and trained him to destroy.  He'd done everything they asked him to do.  More than that, he did the things all those fat old brass men in the Emerald City couldn’t do.  And for all his efforts and abilities, they exiled him at cast him out into the badlands.
He was better than all those Emerald City brass men.  He was better, physically, he was better mentally.  Even without New Sparta's backing, he was able to build an army of his own.  He built it from nothing and no support, but he built it.  Could they have built it, those Emerald City Brass Men?  Of course they couldn't.  But Vlain had.
And then, when the Brass Men in the Emerald City needed something done, something dark and dirty, they came crawling right back to him.  He'd done their work for them.  He raided Doctor Chosen's old science laboratories, capturing that knowledge and data and sending it back to New Sparta.  And now, he was trailing this bastard, half-breed Gomorrah-New Sparta army, keeping an eye on things.  What Rodrigo Vlain knew in his heart was that this time, they didn't appreciate him any more than last time.  That grinded on him.  What grinded on Vlain even more was the knowing that none of those Brass Men back in the Emerald City had to endure or sacrifice or suffer the way he had.  They never had to do what he did.  They hadn't ever, "crossed the line" out in the badlands because they'd never been in the badlands.  And they'd been born with every advantage.  Even now they had every advantage, especially the brassiest Brass Man of them all: the Chief Marshal.  The Chief Marshal had everything.  He commanded the armies of New Sparta and now the army of Gomorrah, he could give away high-end drugs like they were nothing, he controlled the Morning Stars, and that still wasn't enough for the man.  That's why Vlain had been sent out to loot Doctor Chosen's old labs.  The Chief Marshal wanted Doctor Chosen's secrets to immortality, and if he got those too, that still wouldn't be enough.  It wasn't fair, Vlain thought.  It wasn't fair that men like the Chief Marshal should have every advantage and men like himself should have none.  More than that, it wasn't fair that men like the Chief Marshal never appreciated men like Rodrigo Vlain, the men who got their hands dirty and got so the job done.
Just once, Vlain thought, he'd like to stick it to the people in charge.  He'd like to stick to them in a way that mattered.  He'd like to stick it to the big guys in a way that gave the little guy a fighting chance.
"The fuel, it doesn't matter, Chamo.  At the end of it all, not a damn thing has changed," Vlain said.  "Once they get what they want and don't need us anymore, they'll screw us over.  That's just who they are.  They're going to screw us as hard as they can just to do it.  That's why we're going to keep our eyes open.  They don't appreciate people like us, Chamo.  They think highly of themselves, but they think nothing of us.  That's going to be their undoing, Chamo.  The Chief Marshal and all his Brass Men, they're going to let their guard down cause they think so low of us.  They give us a chance to screw them over first.  It won't be much of a chance, but it will be our chance.  When that chance comes along, I'm going to take it.
"I'm going to fuck over that Chief Marshal."