Barnson breathed in his ear for a bit. “Speaking of setbacks, I’m getting whispers that diplomacy may be rearing its ugly head again.”
“What do you mean, Sir?”
“I mean I’m hearing rumors of a sitdown between the two sides. A ‘conference’, they’re calling it. And when I reached out to my political contacts they did not get back to me, which seems to me to be a clear indication that there might be something to these rumors.”
“They’re… ARF isn’t surrendering, are they?”
Barnson snorted. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
Parker felt cold. ARF enjoying a few simple successes on the battlefield wouldn’t be enough to get both sides sitting down at a conference table. If such a conference was indeed happening, it most likely meant the Army was getting its ass seriously kicked. And had been for a while. And had apparently been concealing the fact, even from its own officers. He was stunned. “There haven’t been even talks of peace talks in… years.”
“No there have not. I don’t like the timing of this one bit. You just make sure you’ve got a lid on your kingdom over there. We’ve got enough headaches.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
From the abandoned machine shop they headed south on the two-lane surface street. The pitted blacktop was mostly clear of debris, and Quentin accelerated steadily. The men watched the low buildings on either side slide past the muzzles of their rifles. This small industrial area had always been a safe haven for them, but they knew better than to think that meant they could relax their guard.
The rifle barrels sticking out of all the SUV’s empty window frames made the vehicle look like some sort of giant, mutated, stinging insect. The threat of drones was everpresent, but they were willing to risk the visible weapons for the ambush-repelling instant firepower it afforded them. If they were inside the city limits that would be another story, but up in the suburbs simply driving along in a vehicle wasn’t enough to immediately earn unwanted attention by the military.
The speed at which the SUV lumbered along, however, was nothing like a quick and darting stinging insect. Even if the old Ford had been up for a high-speed slalom, never mind its soupy shocks and bald tires, Quentin knew better. There were telephone poles across roads, abandoned, burned cars, sinkholes, debris everywhere, even the occasional bomb crater (although officially that had never happened). You never knew what was around the next corner, because it was never the same. Even on straightaways they chugged along at a stately thirty miles an hour—fast enough to cover ground quickly, but not so fast they’d run right into a roadblock or the odd Army improvised checkpoint without time to react.
Random roadblocks were just another of the hazards they faced; not only did the army like them, but gangs had discovered their merits as well. Armed with whatever weapons they could find the bandits would block a street with cars and dumpsters and rob whoever came along. As the army had an unofficial and technically illegal policy of destroying without warning any unauthorized moving vehicle inside the city limits outside the approved travel corridors the gangs preferred to prowl the bordering suburbs. They took whatever they wanted, or needed—food, water, guns, gasoline—and killed anybody who offered resistance. The gangs tried to avoid preying on anybody too well armed, and stayed out of the way of both the army and the guerillas, but nevertheless there were occasional surprises. The only boring day was yesterday.
George blinked against the wind blowing over the Ford’s dented hood. He had 20/15 vision, and his eyes continually scanned the street through the ballistic glasses he’d donned; the buildings on the left, windows, alleys and doorways, the buildings on the right, looking for any silhouette of a head, a shoulder, movement, the muzzle of a rifle belonging to a new army recruit overeager for the ambush. The streets were dangerous, every one a potential death trap, but his main focus of attention was the sky. Infantry was a problem they knew how to handle; the only way to deal with aircraft when you didn’t have any missiles was to see them before they saw you and get the hell out of sight. Luckily they were so distant from the front, and so few in numbers, that the Army no longer flew armed drones above the city. The drones were too few in number, the missiles too valuable, to waste on small groups of guerrillas performing “harassing actions” far from the real war. Or so they’d guessed, nobody had reported seeing an armed drone, or drone missile strike, in years. Still, they kept their drone jammer active. It did nothing against the large craft, but it would disrupt the navigation and audio/visual feed of the small bird- and insect-sized drones the military used.
George didn’t like the street leading through the industrial park; it was too open. No tree cover, no avenues of escape for almost half a mile to the south. The rest of the squad thought of him as unflappable, a rock, but until they got some overhead cover—and it would be a ways out, almost two miles, before their route provided them with some measure of security from the eyes in the sky—he would be a nervous wreck, even if he did hide it well.
Jason found himself more than a little unnerved at the situation he found himself in. He’d wanted to join the fight, pick a side in the war, sure, but now he found himself packed into a piece of junk car with heavily armed men he didn’t know and who didn’t know him, heading straight into an infamous city that was the stuff of nightmares. The fact that it was a war zone was just one of the dangerous aspects of the urban cadaver they were heading into.
It was surreal. It was terrifying. It was awesome.
Looking around the vehicle, he suddenly noticed the string of birds tied to the outside of Weasel’s pack. Were those pigeons? “Where’d you get those?”
Weasel glanced back to see what Jason was talking about, then went back to scanning out the windows. “I went fishing.”
“What?”
“So many decades of being tame city birds, they can’t get rid of the mentality. You start throwing out bread, or corn, they show up and start eating without a thought to predators. You put a fishhook in a kernel of corn or a wadded-up piece of bread, as soon as they gobble it down you give a yank to set the hook and pull ‘em in. By the time you’ve got the hook out the rest of them have forgotten the squawking and have returned and are pecking around again. So you rebait the hook and throw it back out. You can get a whole flock one at a time. I’ve never seen animals so dumb. Hell of a lot easier to bag than squirrels.”
“Socialism works the same, no matter the species,” Mark said, loud enough to be heard over the wind and engine noise. His belt-fed SAW was pointed out the rear window frame.
“What?”
“Mice die in mouse traps because they don’t understand why the cheese is free. Same thing with those pigeons. And all the fuckers out there,” he gestured beyond the vehicle, “who kept voting for more free shit in exchange for less freedom. When the mouse trap finally snaps, when the fishing hook sinks into your mouth, when the boot is on your neck… you suddenly realize the free shit wasn’t free.”
“Mouths closed, eyes open,” George growled.
Everyone was sweating as Quentin drove southbound. The golf course’s low clubhouse appeared to their left, then the course itself, bordered by more of the same rusty chain link. A small weed-choked parking lot and more grape vines were next, but beyond the scorched, abandoned clubhouse were two majestic weeping willows, silvery in the sunlight, a reminder that things had not always been as they were.
The street dipped and ended at a T-intersection, the traffic signal lights still up but dark. The dip meant the ground rose on either side of the road, limiting their visibility. Quentin slowed to a crawl and eased out into the intersection. To the left the street entered a residential area, the same neighborhood where Colleen lived but further to the south. Tall trees, oaks and elms, shadowed the asphalt. Before the war it would have been called a “charming bedroom community” in a middle-class suburb. No one still in the area thought in those terms any more, cities and neighborhoods were deemed more or less dangerous based on how likely you were to be ambushed or killed travelling through them. The only problem was… even if the chances of that were very low, very low was still greater than zero.