“Oh, I see. Summarily executed. Is that what we are, Dale?”
“You did it too, John!” Dale shouted, standing up so that the guards who had been waiting nervously up by the truck gazed at them intently. “The Posse, you give them a trial? So who in the hell are you to tell me what I can and cannot do now? I have an authorization signed by the secretary of National Reunification and countersigned by the president, and my job is to bring this district back in line to a level-one status. Burnett and his kind are finished. So either you join my team, John, or you know what I’ll have to do.”
John remained seated but was no longer playacting a friendly smile. “Fine, then, you’ve made yourself clear. But, Dale, you need a little bit more training on extracting your ass from a potentially fatal misstep. You are no longer in the halls of the White House or wherever you served, whomever you were assigned to. This is not some public relations job where you bullshit a stupid press corps and when the questioning gets too tough, you say time is up. You got twelve armed personnel fifty feet away, and though I think most of them are ridiculous, I don’t want them hurt. But believe me, there’s at least a hundred or more who are armed watching every move you and your troopers make, and they are ready to react. I want this to end peacefully, Dale, and you’d better want the same. First lesson of command, Dale: your troops come first, but if you are required to spend their lives, you’d better have a damn good reason for it and be the first one to go, as well. You willing to die today and have all your people killed in a vain attempt to get Burnett?”
“Why are you defending him like this, damn it? He’d have killed you without blinking twice a few weeks ago, and chances are, you’d have done the same if you’d had him in your sights when he was leading a raid into your territory.”
“There used to be an old code of warfare, Dale. Hard to believe, a code, actual rules for warfare. Not the bullshit rules of engagement that tangled us so insanely in the Middle East and cost the lives of many a good kid we sent out. I mean the rules as they existed back fifty, seventy years ago.”
“And is the history professor going to educate me?”
“You are damn straight I am, Dale, and in your exalted position, you should know them.”
He sighed, shook his head, and motioned for Dale to sit back down, but Dale remained standing.
“An enemy on the field of action, it is kill or be killed, and that was Burnett and me just several weeks past. But then the next rule comes in, and in a more civilized age, most nations actually signed treaties that they would obey this. A wounded soldier no longer in action was out of the fight. He was not to be fired on. If captured, he was to receive the same medical treatment as one of your own. Some thought it was a paradox—try to kill him, then patch him up. But some saw it as at least trying to be civilized in the madness of war, to lessen its horrors, and I for one believed in it. I remember seeing a video on the computer, shortly before the Day, of one of our medics being hit by a sniper, wounded but still able to do his job. Minutes later, a couple of our troops dragged in the sniper who had hit the medic, and you know what he did?”
“Oh, let me guess,” Dale retorted sarcastically. “He patched him up.”
John nodded, and he felt a lump in his throat at the memory of that, of the pride he felt in the training of the medic and of all the troops he once served with. Had the last two years brutalized everyone to the point that the chopper pilots simply now fired on anything that moved? The thought was deeply disturbing.
“Burnett is my prisoner, and I gave him my word that he and those he brought in with him would be properly treated. He came to me for help after what you did to him. My community took him and those with him into our care without any conditions. To try to move him will kill him, most likely even before you can hang him. So the answer is not only can I not let him go, I refuse to let him go. I’ll talk with you later about the charges against him and the others. Even if the charges are true, the gunning down of civilians who had nothing to do with the attack… in my world, we used to call that a war crime, Dale.”
There was no response.
“Do I make myself clear, Mr. Fredericks? I see it as a war crime, I will report it as such, and if there is to be any trial someday of Forrest Burnett, a wounded veteran, formerly of the 101st Airborne, it will take place here in this jurisdiction and not Asheville, where I believe he will not receive a fair hearing.”
“So you are going against my authority, then.”
“I can’t decide what you think.”
“I thought I could trust you and work with you, Matherson. You had a chance for a job on a national level and could have made a difference there.”
John did not reply.
“And if I come back with an order for you to report to Bluemont?”
“Dale, is that for your convenience, to get me out of the way as a troublesome thorn, to get shunted off into some paperwork cubbyhole? Has it even been the real thing since the first day you offered it?”
“You calling me a liar?”
“No, Dale, just asking a question any man has a right to ask.”
There was no response.
“Dale, in about one minute, we end this one of two ways. You and your tin soldiers try to storm the hospital—and I promise you, you and they will not make it, though if there is shooting to be done, you will have to fire the first shot—or we make a show of it for the hundreds who are watching us that you and your men cannot even see, make a big show of shaking hands, and you get back in that Humvee and go back to Asheville. You do that, and I’ll look deeper into the charges against Burnett’s group and keep you informed of what I find as a face-saving compromise for you.”
Dale looked back at the roof of the fire station where the rest of John’s unit had squatted back down behind concealment, though Grace remained standing, M4 casually cradled in her arms.
John did feel a flash of sadness at the sight of her thus. She was a kid; this should be her senior year. In fact, graduation should have been taking place just about now. Instead, she was a hardened professional, veteran of the fight with the Posse and a dozen other smaller actions afterward. She had even dropped one of Burnett’s group last winter when they were raiding for food, and she showed zero remorse about the girl she had killed who was nearly the same age as she. Yet again, such moments made John think of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Man He Killed.” “I made the mistake of trusting you, John, when I came here.”
“No you didn’t, Dale. You thought you could bull your way through when anyone with real combat experience would never have walked into my kill zone.”
“I’ll remember that if there is a next time,” Dale said while actually smiling, and his tone sent a chill through John.
Dale stood back up and actually put on the skilled bureaucrat’s show of smiling and extending his hand, though when he clasped John’s, there was no warmth in his handshake. “I expect you in my office in three days to report for duty,” Dale said, again with that officious smile.
“What?” Now John was off guard for the moment.
“Forgot to add that in.” Dale reached into the other pocket in his blazer.
“I’d advise you to do that real slowly,” John whispered. “Some watching might think it’s not just a piece a paper, and maybe, just maybe, you actually know how to carry a gun rather than a pen and paper.”
Now there was a look of hatred, and John smiled.
Dale drew out a second envelope, held it up for a few seconds so anyone watching could see it clearly, and then made a formal gesture of handing it to John.