Devin shook his head.
“We can talk. They don’t care.”
“Guess I’m out of practice.”
“Where I was they let you talk. Musta hatched about twenty escape plots a day—formed a hundred resistance groups for when we got out. You do stuff like that? You know, to pass the time?”
Devin studied the man a moment, then turned and walked away. He approached his group and a prisoner eased past him.
“That guy—he’s a plant,” the prisoner whispered. “Thanks.”
The newcomer looked at Devin with beseeching eyes. “I heard they nuked Seattle—you hear that?” Devin shrugged. He didn’t trust this man, either, Soon the line was moving faster.
The dirt road twisted through the hills north of Milford, the forbidden area out by the Special Services Unit camp. The SSU was one of those paramilitary, quasi-police organizations that created terror by its very vagueness. Among the citizenry, no one quite knew what the SSU did or even who its members were. It was a hodge-podge—so rumor had it—of Russians, for whom life in the military itself held more appeal than any true patriotism or ideal. In some tellings, the SSU was terribly brutal; in other versions of the story, it was simply ineffectual if not benign, a sort of Mdden national guard that was at the ready but almost never called to action. In reality, the SSU operated like the organization in Poland that it was based upon—an overseer group, assigned to the countryside, which never intermingled with the local population.
Either way, the SSU turf was off limits to civilians— which was exactly why Justin Milford, in his leather and his goggles, could not resist going there. He rode his Harley down the middle of the road until he reached the best vantage point he could find. Then he swerved his motorcycle into the woods, glided past the trees, and came to a stop alongside another cycle parked by an old shed.
His friend Puncher, a big, tough farm boy with red hair, a square jaw, and a sweet lopsided grin, was inside the shed, using a pair of binoculars to study the snow-covered fields in front of them. Justin knelt beside him and heard the rumble of engines in the distance.
“How long they been out?” Justin asked.
“Ten minutes,” Puncher said. “It’s a tactical unit.”
“Company strength?”
“Platoon.”
“Lemme see,” Justin said, seizing the field glasses.
He observed two black attack helicopters, hovering like giant malignant insects, fire rockets at some distant target. A moment later five black tanks lumbered into view and they too opened fire. A burst of flame shot fifty feet into the air.
“The same drill as last time,” Puncher said.
“The bastards are efficient,” Justin muttered.
More helicopters shot into view, firing their rockets; a Sine of personnel carriers came down the road by the river, and soldiers leaped out of them, firing automatic weapons and flinging grenades.
“Hey, look at that!” Puncher cried. “What the hell are they doing?”
Justin took the binoculars. Off in the distance a fire had started, a long, thin line of flame and crackling debris, as if a huge string of firecrackers had gone off. The acrid smell of phosphorus stung their nostrils.
“A Viper,” Justin declared. “The sons of bitches are testing a Viper.”
“A what?” Puncher asked.
“It’s called a Super Viper—you know, as in snake. It’s a hose, packed with explosives, two hundred meters long. It clears a mine field. A rocket shoots the hose across the field, they set it off, and it clears a path twenty feet wide, for two hundred meters.”
“Jesus, who’s got mines?” Puncher asked.
Justin shrugged. “Maybe some of our people. Or maybe they’re testing it for somewhere else in the world.”
Before the flames from the Viper had died down, the exercise abruptly ended. The soldiers returned to their vehicles and within minutes the fields were empty and silent again, with only a fast-rising plume of thick black smoke to testify to the SSU’s violent assault.
“Time?” Justin asked.
“Twenty-eight minutes, from barracks to withdrawal.”
Justin shook his head in wonder.
“Of course, nobody was shooting back.”
“Someday,” Justin said.
Puncher stood up. “Jesus, I wonder. I mean, are we just playing games?”
“Hell no,” Justin said. “We know things they don’t know we know. Someday we’ll hit the bastards.”
“You goin’ to the Cavern tonight?”
“Maybe,” Justin said. “Don’t know if Jackie can get away.”
“She’s a princess. Pick up somebody there.”
“You’re really primitive, Puncher. Maybe you’d feel more at home on the other side.”
Peter cornered Dr. Alan Drummond on the courthouse square, before the city council meeting. The chief of staff at Milford County Hospital was fiftyish, a husky black man with graying hair and a kind of delicate and battered humanity about him. Although an exile, he was a necessary commodity—a doctor—to the Milford community.
“Got a moment, doctor?”
“Always, Peter, for you.”
“Ward told me about the man who died at your hospital last night. It sounded like those new Triage guidelines killed him.”
“Drinking lighter fluid killed him. But the guidelines didn’t help any. The rule was clear. I wasn’t supposed to do a thing for him. A matter of priorities.”
“What about your Hippocratic Oath?”
“You’ want me to disobey the guidelines? That’s essentially the same as disobeying the National Advisory Committee.”
“If a life is hanging in the balance, I want you to ignore them if you have to.”
“Will you put that in writing, Peter?”
“No.”
A wry smile crossed Alan Drummond’s face. “That’s smart of you. Back in Philadelphia, I put something in writing once. Cost me a two-hundred-thousand-a-year practice. I wasn’t political—just doing the decent thing. Some other people didn’t quite see it that way, and now I’m in Nebraska. Nothing against your home state, Peter, but if we’re talking about circles of hell, I’ve fallen far enough, thank you very much. Far enough so that I’m keenly aware of how much farther they might have pulled me down—if the idea of minority doctors didn’t fit in quite so neatly with their propaganda. So now I think about politics and guidelines, jump when the advisory committees say jump, and worry about informers on my staff. And yet, dammit, I hate for people to die in my county if there’s a chance of saving them.”
“My advice is pick your shots, Peter. You can’t save everybody.”
The two men went into the council chambers. The city council met weekly in a large conference room that featured portraits of Lincoln and Lenin on the far wall. Their session did nothing to lighten Peter’s spirits. Someone reported that the local VFW chapter was refusing to march in the Lincoln Day parade if the SSU troops participated. There was a lot of talk about biack-market skimming of already scarce consumer goods and about whether the county could meet its production quota. Some people wanted to blame everything on the Exiles, wanted to turn the SSU loose on them. Before long, Alan Drummond was embroiled in an impassioned defense of those who had fallen much farther than himself.
“You don’t understand the first thing about it,” he raged. “They didn’t ask to be sent here. Some of them have been here for years—three years now. They aren’t farmers but they’re trying to make a living on those pathetic little plots of land they gave them. But when they come into town, they’re treated like outcasts, like dirt. Dammit, they’re Americans!”
“Don’t get riled up, Alan,” said one of the council members, a red-faced hardware merchant. “I just wish ail the exiles were people who wanted to work and make a place for themselves.”
“That sounds too damn much like what bigots used to say about blacks,” Alan Drummond said bitterly. “You don’t understand what these people are up against.”