Major Paul Cooper was his S2, the member on his staff in charge of intelligence, and also his Number 2 man at this command. Cooper was also the elder of the two, and by all rights should have been the one promoted, but he was too much of a professional to say anything critical of the decision. Forty-two years old, he was slender with coal black hair slowly graying at the temples and a ramrod stiff posture. He was brusque and efficient and damn near emotionless no matter what was going on around him.
“Good morning Sir. I see you didn’t make it back to the hotel last night.” Without waiting for a reply the Major strode into the next room, set a stack of papers down on the desk, and opened the horizontal blinds. The thin light of morning lit up Colonel Anthony Parker blinking on the couch.
The colonel kicked off the ugly, thin, Army-issue blanket and sat up stiffly. He slept in an undershirt and jockey shorts but kept his uniform and boots within reach in case the building came under fire during the night. Prior to the war he’d been an avid long distance runner, but that was one luxury he had no time for now. He’d also been a lowly Captain, which showed how much things had changed. His stomach was still flat, his long legs still muscled, but he looked to be in much better shape than he actually was after a decade of coffee, stress, and very little physical activity. He hadn’t worked out in years, and it only in the past few months had started hitting the gym again. Motivation was the key. More than a few grey hairs had begun to sprout from his temples, a most unwelcome sight.
No one could agree on exactly when widespread civil unrest turned into open warfare, but things had been going downhill for a long while before the sides actually started trading shots, everyone agreed on that. Well, except for the gun nuts resisting the legal confiscation of the military-style firearms they never should have been allowed to own in the first place. They’d been the loudest voices protesting the government and had been very successful, unfortunately, in convincing a lot of otherwise smart people to join the fight. It was always a few loudmouths that got mobs stirred up and started riots.
Before the war, relationships between the cities and suburbs, the coasts and the center of the country, the two political parties, hadn’t been so strained in decades, if not centuries. There’d been a rash of riots in many of the big cities, ostensibly about race or immigration or some other perceived slight, but in Parker’s experience all rioters cared about was causing trouble. And maybe looting some freebies. The conspiracy theories about the government fomenting the riots to justify taking more control were just ridiculous, of course.
Martial law was declared in several cities, government troops deployed, some federal agents and soldiers got missions to search neighborhoods for recently banned weapons, but instead of the violence ending all of a sudden there was a lot of shooting—the government and military versus… well, at first they just seemed to be criminal malcontents. Troublemakers. Anti-government extremists who seemed to be opposed to everything the government wanted to do to restore order. Isolated incidents, at first, but the harder the government tried to tamp them down, temporarily suspending habeas corpus (although that temporary suspension was still in effect) the more resistance flared up, and suddenly they found themselves in a patchwork civil war, although officially, even now nearly a decade later and after mountains of bodies, it was still officially a “police action”, at least as far as the politicians were concerned. Worthless words. His men were still just as dead.
All of the experts had predicted the conflict would be over before it was really begun, the upstart self-titled constitutionalists falling before the combined weight of the armed forces. And, with those first big victories, it had seemed like the conflict would have a short life, and things would go back to normal. The military had the tanks and aircraft, after all, as well as the intelligence structure. Then things went off the rails; sabotage on a wide scale, massive desertions and defections including so much of the Marine Corps it basically ceased to be an effective fighting unit. At least for the government. The government somehow lost control of half its surveillance satellites and had so many other software problems it was obvious they were due to hacking and sabotage. There was sniping and random attacks on an enormous level from “lone wolf” perpetrators as seemingly every idiot with a gun decided to join in. At the early war’s height those lone wolf snipers were killing a thousand police officers and government agents and soldiers a month all across the country. Some of them in front of their families. They were mostly working alone, taking targets of opportunity, and were almost impossible to stop when seemingly everyone had guns. It was insane.
That’s what Parker had been taught in school, before joining the military. The random sweeps done in concert with the martial law declaration worked prior to the start of the war, and afterward… for a short while. Then the raid teams, often federal agents working with military troops, would either get ambushed on the way to seize guns or on the way back, often emptyhanded, because of some sympathizer warning the locals. When he was young Parker had been outraged about it all, and it had been a fight he’d been happy to join in, to defend his country from the lunatic enemy within that was tearing it apart and causing anarchy.
Now he was just tired.
The couch was in a little room off the office he’d temporarily claimed. In addition to the couch the room held a small refrigerator, a tiny bar (long since emptied), and its own bathroom with a shower. The Colonel had no doubts that the executive whose office this had been had spent many an afternoon banging his secretary on the leather couch. Every once in a while he idly wondered where they might be, whether they were still alive. Millions had died, from the war, from starvation, from disease, so many millions that the government had to conceal the true casualty numbers from the people for the sake of morale and unity.
Parker was under no illusions; he knew how lucky he was, in this city, in these thin times, just to have power, much less have it ninety-nine days out of a hundred. Inside he raged at the enemy for causing all this misery and suffering. The running water was a miracle. He took a lukewarm, three-minute shower, then cracked the door and let Major Cooper brief him on the night’s events while he drip dried.
“The resupply ship still has not arrived,” was the first thing out of the Major’s mouth, knowing that was what concerned the Colonel the most.
“And have they provided us with an explanation?” That goddamn ship was going to rust through and sink to the bottom, the rate it was proceeding across the lake and down the river. The trip was less than three hundred miles. They would have sent everything by train, but the guerrillas kept blowing up the tracks in that region.
“No Sir, nothing I would qualify as such. Apparently they had to wait quite a while for a minesweeper to check the area outside their last port of call.”
“A minesweeper. When was the last time we lost a boat to a mine?” It was a rhetorical question, and the Major didn’t bother replying. Nineteen months ago, both men could have answered, but the Navy had strict procedures when it came to waterways it “knew” to be mined. And that hadn’t even been a mine, a terrorist had swum out to the ship in the middle of the night and planted a homemade bomb on the hull. The end result was the same.
His command wasn’t completely cut off, far from it. They received supplies and equipment every day. They came by road and rail and supply planes, from ships heading up and down the river, carried by military transports and those private businessmen who’d decided the money involved was worth the risk. Food, medical supplies, spare parts and, first and foremost, fuel. Not nearly enough fuel, and less every day. However, what he needed the most—besides the diesel and gas, that is—what he sought desperately, was something the private sector could not provide. Armor. Armored vehicles, and men to command them. That was what was on the supply ship. A handful of tanks, not nearly as many as he’d asked for, just a token few, but a few was better than none. Along with the tanks were some support vehicles, three pieces of self-propelled artillery, some IMP armored personnel carriers, half a dozen of the problematic four-wheel-drive Growlers, and ammunition enough to replenish their dwindling supply. It wasn’t that the enemy kept cutting their supply lines, far from it. His own superiors did that. His wasn’t the real war, they told him, just an “occupation”, or a “non-critical holding action”. His wasn’t technically a “peacekeeping” force as the area had yet to see any post-conflict peace, but his goals and mission were the same, so when it came to men and materiel his was the last wish list to be filled. The big shipments of arms and ammo, and men, went to the front, such as it was. The thing was, he knew, most of the fighting in this war had been nowhere near anything that could be called a “front”. The military currently was fond of the term “contested territory”. The only difference between the city he occupied and the theaters most of the military was operating in was the level of opposition.