“Shit,” he hissed. “Medic! Medic!”
“You think I look bad,” Langer said. “You should see the other sumbitch.”
The medics gave Langer a couple units of plasma on the ride back and they stuck in a unit of O+ before he even left the ER for surgery at what had been known as Chuck Schumer People’s Health Center. It was known as Reagan Hospital now. People were renaming lots of things after Reagan these days.
Dale met Turnbull in the ER as the gurney with Langer disappeared down the hall.
“How did it go?” Dale asked.
“Good,” said Turnbull. “Not for Larry, but we did it. The aircraft are gone. The crew we didn’t shoot are in the wind. Two other of ours are wounded, and we have a broken ankle from a pothole. Larry’s the worst off.”
“Will he live?”
“Probably, but only because of sheer stubbornness. What’s the situation?”
Dale paused, thinking. “Good,” he said. “I mean, as good as it can be. The Apaches swept through and ripped up some buildings north of town. They didn’t seem to want to waste too much ammo. Otherwise, we’re constructing the obstacles. We’re assigning sectors. We’re getting it done.”
“Do we have enough ammo?”
“Yeah, plenty. These gun nuts laid in enough for World War III and IV, and they’ve dug it all up. Everyone who wants a gun has one, and usually two.”
“We need to make sure they understand how this is going to work.” Turnbull said. “They’re going to want to fight the first enemy they see, and that’s going to get them killed. They have to be smart.”
“They’ll listen to you, Kelly.”
“Then I better get talking to them. But I don’t know how long we have until the bad guys come for us.”
“They’ll call you a traitor, sir,” said the operations officer, pleading. But he knew that once the Colonel had decided on a course of action he was hard to sway.
“They can call me whatever they want,” said Colonel Deloitte. “But if someone doesn’t stop this it’s going to spin completely out of control. And a lot more people are going to die.”
“You can’t talk to the enemy, sir.”
Deloitte surveyed the airfield. His personal security detachment was spread out around him in case any of the insurgents were still lurking nearby.
“Enemy,” he said bitterly. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“All this – it’s no surprise. Not the tactics, not the strategy. I trained most of their senior SOF. I know the guy who did this. I just don’t know who it is yet.”
“They’ll arrest you if you talk to him.”
“They’re probably going to arrest me eventually anyway. Racism, sexism, some -ism, some -phobia. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Someone’s got to try and stop this.”
“Can you?” asked the lieutenant colonel.
“I don’t know,” said Colonel Deloitte. “But I can’t stop it if I don’t try, and after this someone has to.”
The runway was strewn with wreckage. The helicopters were smoldering hulks. The drone was a pile of twisted metal and carbon fiber. And the dead still lay where they fell.
“Get those bodies collected,” Deloitte ordered. “I’m going to the commo detachment. If they can listen into cell calls, I’m guessing they can get me a number to call and arrange a meet.”
14.
“Convoy inbound. Three Humvees, five minutes out, over.”
Turnbull gripped the handset as he listened intently, and then paused. It was all proceeding exactly as agreed. But then, he had expected it to. If Deloitte said it, it was happening. His word was good. At least that was true of the old Deloitte he had known a half decade ago in Iraq.
Turnbull keyed his radio mic. “Roger. I’m proceeding. Out.”
“You still think this is a good idea?” Wohl asked. Turnbull handed him the radio.
“We’ll know in a couple minutes,” said Turnbull.
The meet had been set at a remote farm house about five miles west of Route 231, and north of Dogwood Lake. It was as close to neutral ground as there could be, a largely empty space on the map between the two forces.
Deloitte would come in a three hummer convoy, with no air cover and no drones up – not that there was anything left of the 172nd’s attached air assets. If Turnbull was going to betray him, there was not much the colonel would be able to do.
But likewise, Turnbull and his small team, out in the middle of nowhere, had nowhere to hide if a Predator or some Woodrow Wilsons née Apaches, or a whole M1 tank battalion, showed up to party. To the extent their safety did not rely upon each other’s word that their counterpart would have safe passage, it relied upon mutually assured destruction.
“I’m going up to the site alone,” Turnbull told Wohl. They were about 400 meters from the white farmhouse, with it and the whole area under their observation from their position. A half-dozen armed guerrillas were positioned around them in the small knot of hickory trees. Another team was north of the house, covering that approach. Then there were the observers watching the convoy as it came in from the east on the road. Some other spotters watched the main routes from the west in case someone decided to come at them from I-69.
There were not many civilian vehicles of any type on the road anymore. They were alone.
“Yeah, you going by your lonesome is probably better,” said Wohl. “If your army buddy is going to sell you out, then it would just be you we lose.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” said Turnbull. He picked up his M4 and moved out across the overgrown field. It should have been planted and its crops growing by now. But these days there were lots of things that should have been but weren’t.
Deloitte rode in the passenger seat of the center armored Humvee, his ass on the flat olive drab seat cushion and his battle gear secured under the seat belt. He watched the green terrain pass by out the thick glass of the side window. Lots of places to shoot from out there, he noted. If this fight happened, it was going to be a mess.
The vehicles were angular with their bolt-on armor plates. They were also conspicuous in their tan desert livery. The PR claimed it didn’t have money to paint them woodland camo after it inherited them in the Split. That was untrue; the PR just preferred to redistribute its money to favored constituencies rather than fund its military. That spending priority decision was causing considerable consternation in the capital right about now. The regime was realizing that it was wrong in assuming that hordes of barely trained welfare cheats armed with hand-me-down weapons would be enough to keep it in power.
None of the three vehicles’ rooftop .50 caliber machine gun turrets were manned. That was part of the deal. The gunners sat scrunched up below their roof hatches inside the hummers’ cabs, ready to leap up and load their M2s if things went south.
“Stop on the road about 300 meters out,” the colonel shouted over the torrent of decibels the engine was tossing off. His driver, Kevlar helmeted with protective eyewear, nodded.
They kept going west for another minute or so, and then the driver halted. They could see the farmhouse down the road and up a driveway.
The other vehicles, seeing what the command vehicle was doing, herringboned. The front vehicle angled north, the trail vehicle south, ready to cover 360 degrees. The convoy had stopped in the middle of an open field with several hundred meters of fields to the nearest tree. The grass was low, and any guerrillas would have a difficult time approaching unseen.
“Stay inside,” Deloitte ordered. It would be easier to defend if they could exit, but if his personal security detachment was outside, there was more chance the PSD might take a shot at something and set off a firefight. They might as well wait inside their rides and out of the sun.