“All right. We’ll come out.”
The prisoners were zip-tied in the parking lot, about 30 of them including a couple wounded PSF officers. The insurgents searched each one, relieving them of wallets, phones, weapons, armor – everything but the clothes on their backs. They looked miserable.
Kunstler sat and glared; Turnbull ensured his restraints were good and tight. Sergeant Greely sat nearby; they found him cowering in the broom closet. Now Turnbull was focused on giving instructions to the insurgents salvaging the captured spoils. A repurposed municipal bus idled by the street, waiting.
A couple medics wheeled out a stretcher with Ted Cannon. He looked like he had gone ten rounds with the San Antonio 49ers’ offensive line.
“Wait,” Cannon said as they pushed him past where Kunstler sat zip-tied on the pavement. Kunstler looked up, contemptuous. Turnbull, giving directions not far away, noticed the death stare.
“Hey,” Cannon said. “I didn’t tell you shit. But I knew shit.” He smiled and laughed, painfully.
“Next time,” said Kunstler. Turnbull walked over and kicked him in the kidney, and Kunstler glared.
“Next time we cross paths,” Cannon said, “I’m killing you.” The medics wheeled him away.
“You are lucky I gave my word, Inspector,” Turnbull said.
“Someday you will be gone back to your racist red homeland, and I’ll be back here cleaning out this right wing filth,” Kunstler said, smiling.
“Make that very lucky I gave my word,” Turnbull said. He picked up the PBI agent roughly by his zip-tie binding, ensuring he stretched the arms at as unpleasant an angle as he could without hearing a snap, and lifted the man to his feet. Kunstler glared even more intensely.
“You pray, right red stater?” Kunstler said through clenched teeth. “You all believe in your magical sky king and pray, don’t you? Well, you better pray our positions are never reversed because—”
The Beretta was out of Turnbull’s thigh holster and pressed up against Kunstler’s forehead.
“If you flap your talk hole just one more time, you’re finding out if there’s life after death,” Turnbull said. Behind Kunstler, two insurgents stepped out of the potential splatter cone.
“Nothing to say? No more penetrating theological insights?” Turnbull asked.
The gun didn’t move, not a quiver or a shake, as it pushed on the detective’s forehead. Kunstler stood, still and silent, growing pale.
“I didn’t think so,” Turnbull said, a bit disappointed. “Now get your sorry ass on the bus. You’re going home.”
12.
Colonel Deloitte’s finger ran across the map in his main command post outside Bloomington. His battle captain, the officer who was the central collection point for the information coming into the command post (being old school, Deloitte still habitually referred to it as a “TOC,” or “tactical operations center,” though the nomenclature had changed), stood behind him watching. His S3, the lieutenant colonel operations officer with a high and tight haircut, stood there as well, cradling a notepad.
Behind them, the map NCO observed the officer huddle. It was his map. The staff sergeant made the changes and adjustments to it; no one else touched it. Even the commander did not touch the map to change it. So the sergeant kept his wary eye on the officers to make sure they didn’t mess with his work. Deloitte was experienced enough that it never occurred to him to do so, but every once in a while some lieutenant with a marker would start heading towards the map and need to be driven away. The staff sergeant was all over that.
“Have you figured out what the order means yet?” Deloitte said to the S3. “Because I’m still baffled.”
XX Corps, the higher headquarters for Midwestern combat units had sent down the order to Deloitte’s 172nd Brigade an hour ago and they were trying to make sense of it. Back in the old US Army, something so unclear and confused would have never gotten out the door, and there would have been a face-to-face orders briefing by the division commander for the subordinate units to make sure everyone was synched.
But the divisions were gone now – cutting out that traditional layer of command and control was a cost-cutting move to free up money to be spent on people who oppression kept from supporting themselves somehow – and the corps commander up in Chicago did not seem to want to engage in actual commanding. She had been selected with great fanfare to take charge of the massive XX Corps and “smash the camouflage ceiling.” After an undistinguished career in logistics, and after her first order brief a year ago had been a humiliating fiasco – for one thing, she did not understand her corps order of battle and was surprised to learn the corps had some tanks – she stopped engaging in any activity where she might have to display any tactical knowledge. After that, she just hunkered down in the Windy City, attending parties in her medal-bedecked Class A uniform and sending out long missives about the need to combat the real enemy, patriarchy.
“It looks like there’s a declaration of martial law in the south Indiana region, and we’re supposed to be prepared to move our forces in to establish order,” said the operations officer. “It doesn’t say when. Until then, it seems to say we have to keep our ground forces north of Route 150, which runs east-west north of Jasper at Loogootee. But then we are also supposed to fight insurgents south of there, somehow. I don’t get it either, sir.”
“Corps doesn’t want us sending the ground battalions south yet because the reds will see the movement and they might react,” Deloitte said. “But it still wants us to make the problem go away. What’s the order say about air assets?”
The operations officer reviewed the three pages of the printed order again. “Nothing about air,” he said, annoyed. A comprehensive order would have mentioned air operations in detail.
“If there’s nothing saying we can’t use air, then we can use it. And I’m going to push the envelope and say we can insert recon teams,” directed the colonel. He stared at the map. It was all red except for a strip a few miles in along the border, which was the Ohio River in this sector. There were several military outposts there, mostly observation positions and radar sites monitoring the red forces. But between there and Bloomington, it was scarlet.
“The interstates,” Deloitte said, tapping the map. “That’s how they influence the fight now that they’ve taken Jasper. That’s how they stop us from deploying quickly. And that’s how they make it known everywhere that we are losing even with the media blackout.”
“The PSF already cut off the food, fuel and other deliveries into the red areas,” said the ops officer. “Whatever is on the interstates is passing through the area, not stopping.”
“Most of it is agricultural products moving to the east coast cities from the farm states,” Deloitte said. “Food. They can detour north, but that disrupts everything. If the food stops coming, the cities explode.”
“And there’s no hiding what’s happening,” said the operations officer.
“What else?” asked Deloitte.
The operations officer reviewed some notes, then looked up. “There’s also a lot here, about two of the three pages, about stomping out phallocentrism in the military command structure.”
“Tell Major Little I need a detailed memo on how we can most gender-inclusively execute our anti-phallocentrism mission. That should keep the little shit out of my hair for a while. In the meantime, start planning for combat ops. I want to initiate air ops ASAP.
“I-69 north-south and I-64 east-west are the two main arteries through this region,” Turnbull said, the AAA map laid out over a desk in the bank branch they were using as a headquarters. The original idea was to use the PSF station as the headquarters, but Turnbull nixed it.