“Cut it,” Hannibal said.
“What?”
“Cut it!” he growled, and the image of Ed disappeared into static as he was in mid-sentence.
Hannibal nodded to George. “Okay, they’ve cut it,” George said, as Ed continued talking. “How long do you want to give it?”
Ed glanced at his watch. “Thirty seconds should sell it.”
Hannibal bent down until his head was between the two men seated at the control panel. “Do I need to reiterate what ‘cut it’ means?” he asked quietly.
“No,” the nervous producer said, “it’s just, I wasn’t expecting you to… never mind. We’re good.”
“You guys ready for the sing along?” Ed said. The set lights were bright and the cameras and the people behind them were just faint shapes to him.
“Yeah, we’re good,” George said.
“Then let’s count it down.”
George looked at Hannibal, who nodded and said, “Okay, I’m going to count down again. Let’s start from five, and when I fucking say ‘cut it’, cut it. Five,” he said loudly, “four, three, two…” He pointed at George, who pointed at Ed.
Ed rose half out of his seat, looked off-camera in a different direction, waited half a second, then demanded angrily, “Are we back? What happened?” He glanced at the cameras, then back to the side.
George pointed at the two dogsoldiers with him and they started shouting angrily in the background as Ed said, “Lock down what’s causing that. You said you knew what you were doing, how their system worked.”
“Cut it,” Hannibal said quietly.
“I’ve got—” Ed was saying when the feed cut to static again.
“And we’re good,” Hannibal said, stepping halfway out of the booth.
“How was that?” Ed asked, stepping out from behind the desk. “Think that sold it?”
“You’re a regular Robert DeNiro,” George assured him drily.
“Is he that guy who played the same character in eighty-seven different movies and then went crazy?” Hannibal said. He looked at Ed. “I totally bought you as a clueless idiot.”
Ed made a face. “Thanks, I think.” He pointed. “Now let’s get all these people out of here. It’s gonna get spicy real quick.” He grabbed the M1A and held it out. “Early, your howitzer.”
“I’ma try and do a thing, first,” George said, striding into the broadcast booth. On the control panel in front of one of the men was a phone, presumably his. George grabbed it and began thumbing through it. The man opened his mouth but then thought better of complaining.
After about thirty seconds of quick finger work on the touch screen George smiled and nodded. Then, from his vest, he produced a radio he’d taken off a soldier downstairs. He pointed to the input jacks. “Can you plug your phone into this radio, get it to play the music directly?”
“Umm…” The man was about to ask why, but decided not to. He peered at the radio. “Yeah. I just need…” He dug around in a nearby drawer and after a second pulled out a cable. George set the radio down and gestured at the man. He only needed a few seconds.
“So if I hit Play, that’s going out over the channel? Do I need to keep holding down the transmit button?”
“Not when you’re running an aux feed like this,” the broadcast engineer said. “Once you hit Play, provided no one else is actually broadcasting on the channel, the song will go out.”
“Cool,” George said. He tapped the arrow-shaped Play icon, then chose ‘Repeat’. The phone’s battery charge was at 67%, so it should last for a good long time. He made sure the volume was at max.
“What are you doing?” Ed asked, walking up.
“Serenading the Tabs,” George said with a smile. “Go on, get out of here,” he told the two broadcast engineers. “You don’t want to be anywhere near here.” The two men traded a look, and the phone’s owner looked at it wistfully, but they headed out without another word.
Ed leaned over the control panel and looked at the phone. “‘When the Levee Breaks’?” he asked.
“Always loved that song,” George agreed. He twisted his head to the side, and his neck popped loudly. “Let’s go stack some bodies. Everybody bailing from this position, get the fuck out, double-time. And fill your canteens real quick if you can. They’ve got running water here, remember? We’ll see you when we see you. Suicide Squad, form up on me!”
Mark shot him a dark look. “That’s not funny.”
George shrugged. “It is what it is. How long do you think it’ll take the Tab cavalry to arrive?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Staff Sergeant Wayne Dietz was the ranking NCO in the assault force, and the commander of KICKASS, one of the two Toads roaring north up Cass Avenue in the middle of the platoon, heading toward the TV station under siege by the terrorists. Ahead and behind him were four IMPs and fourteen Growlers, most of them up-armored. With the two Toads that was twenty vehicles and upwards of ninety men, the biggest assault force he’d seen in years, and nearly half of the immediately available fighting force on the base. Colonel Parker had finally, finally, let go of their leash. It pissed him off that so many of the Growlers didn’t have any armor at all, but the up-armored ones kept blowing their trannies, and there were no replacement armored windows available..
Dietz flipped the channel to talk to just his crew. “Slow down Richards, I don’t want you running over any of our own guys.” All of his guys were excited, and scared. They’d been stationed in the city for months or years, depending, and taken incoming fire on their infrequent patrols, perhaps lit up a few rebels when they were dumb enough to stand and fight, but this looked to be the best chance for serious combat most of them had ever seen. Richards, his driver, was somewhat new, only having been in the city six months. He was replacing Dietz’ previous driver Kirby who’d killed himself. Just about all the soldiers around him were draftees, but Kirby had hated the city, hated the Army, and hated himself. Dietz was just glad Kirby hadn’t taken anybody with him when he’d decided to check out.
His gunner, Kirkland, had been on the crew for eight months, replacing Jensen who had just disappeared one day. Dietz suspected Jensen had deserted, but he hadn’t left a note, and was never captured or found dead as far as he knew, so that was just a guess. Jensen hadn’t been happy and had been very vocal about his unhappiness, but very few of the draftee soldiers were actually happy. The city was a shithole, and what made it worse was the boredom—they were a tank crew, but they were always so short of fuel and ammo, and the CO so terrified of losing another tank (not that that was likely to happen), that they rarely left the base more than once a week to patrol.
Shit, eight months as gunner and Kirkland had only ever fired training rounds out of the main gun prior to the dust up several weeks earlier where he’d banged a round at fleeing guerrillas. He or the green loader, Wilson, had somehow accidentally loaded a depleted uranium sabot round instead of HE, so rather than racking up some easy kills on the guerrilla dismounts all they’d done was scare that crap out of them. Dietz was still pissed about that. He’d made his crew run laps until they’d thrown up and then run some more. Then he’d run them through drills until they hated him even more than usual.
None of them had ex-wives, they had no idea what real hate was like.
At least he didn’t have to deal with elective gender pronouns anymore. Dietz snorted at the memory of that debacle.
For the first year or two of the war (depending on when you believed it started) the Army was kicking the enemy’s ass. Then things started to go… not so good, to put it mildly, and the government reinstituted the draft. They were, of course, only drafting men. The problem with that? The law was, at the time, you could be whatever gender you wanted, and overnight a huge chunk of the draft-age males in the country (some said it was as high as twenty-five or even fifty percent) declared they were now “female”. Almost as quickly the government decreed that your gender was determined by the reproductive organs you had at birth—ovaries meant you were female, and testes meant you were male, and they ignored the outrage and screams of “genderqueer hate”, “transphobia”, “intersex denial”, and everything else. The Army had been a shitshow for a year or two after that, but what army filled with fresh draftees wasn’t?