“This is bad,” Carlos said.
“This is murder,” Martinez said. Good God.”
“Those are rebels,” Carlos said. “But who are they?”
“It’s a mix,” Martinez said. “I saw some Texas flags. I think units out of Texas linked up with some of the Colorado National Guard. They’re pounding the hell out of whatever is in front of them.”
“I’d like to find the commander and rip his nuts off,” Carlos said. “Treason. Evil, that’s what this is.”
“Too late for that,” Martinez said. “This goes beyond some renegade general. We’re looking at something that’s been in the works for a while. Somebody was planning this. They were ready for it. From the politicians on down to the brass.”
“All these infantry guys, though,” Henry said. “I don’t get it. They aren’t a part of some grand conspiracy.”
“Of course not,” Martinez said. “They are loyal to their squad first, then their platoon. If their squad is going to fight, most of these men are going to stand by their brothers.”
“I wouldn’t,” Henry said.
“But you would. You did.”
“What’s that mean, Sarn’t Major?”
“Look at us. We’re not part of the regular army. So we’re not marching along with the rest. But here we are, holed up in Colorado in the suck together. What’s left of our unit. The last squad. And we’ve got blood on our hands, like it or not. We’ve been part of whatever this is. We didn’t know it, but we were.”
A deep boom rolled over the valley.
“You’d have shot a cop, Wilkins.”
“Well—”
“You would have. We both know it. You’d have done it to protect your brothers. I would, and so would Carlos. That’s how it is.”
Henry knew Martinez was right, although he was not comfortable about it. He was ready to die for his fellow teammates, and willing to kill for them as well. It was the emotional glue which made combat possible, the thing that made men charge into a hail of lead and fall on grenades. The idea that you knew the guy on your left was willing to die for you. This brotherhood was more powerful than fear, more deadly than rage. Dangerous in the way of a weapon which is neither good nor evil but can be used for either.
In the real world, or a normal one, Henry would never think about harming a civilian, let alone a police officer. The lines were blurred now. Combat could happen at any moment, and issues of right and wrong could be subverted by the loyalty to the pack. Morality was not something that mattered when rounds were buzzing around and there were split-second decisions to make.
As Henry thought about what Martinez said, he was simultaneously chilled and sad. That brotherhood was being used against the very men who formed it. Men trained to kill, conditioned to be ferociously loyal at the squad level, had been unleashed on the country. Men like him, who would kill as a reflex.
The politicians and extremists who had been calling for a coup for years had no real idea what it meant. Henry did. He was looking at the reality, listening to the sound of bombs falling on American soil. He had seen a family incinerated in front of him. He’d had an HK aimed at a local sheriff. One second away from committing outright murder.
In this fight, there were no good sides; there was just the hope that he could protect his family and his brothers and make it home. Civilians were dying by the thousands. Men in uniform were killing each other and the country itself was broken. Henry had never voted for a Democrat, but he paid little attention to politics in general. He wished that both sides had found a way to work together. He knew Carlos and Martinez were registered Democrats. First and foremost, they were Americans.
And there was Operation Snowshoe. He hadn’t murdered a sleeping child, hadn’t pulled the trigger. He’d been there, shooting and killing, a weapon perhaps, though not a mindless one. A rifle does not mourn, the knife does not remember, a bullet cannot grieve. Steel has no soul, and the dead do not dream. Henry had nightmares.
The Wolves skirted the battlefield, sticking to the wooded hills. They steered clear of vacation homes and pockets of civilization. From a distance, Henry looked upon the devastation.
An entire town had been obliterated. Houses were not houses anymore, but toothpicks on streets littered with charred husbands, fathers, and mothers and children. Henry could see the difference through his scope, and it shattered him in a way he would not have believed possible. He had seen children bleeding in Afghanistan, along with American medics braving gunfire to save those kids. What he saw now went beyond anything he had prepared himself to see.
There were swing sets and church towers smashed and lying crooked, and houses that were not houses anymore but were tombs. All of it black and consumed by fire and death, and Henry hated it.
Henry Wilkins was not the kind of man to hate. It came unnaturally. He felt it now, as if it were under pressure, bottled up and fierce. He needed to unleash it. He yearned to bleed off the violence in him in the way of a man that punches a brick wall even though he knows he will break his hand. Sometimes he waits and thinks about what he’s going to do, and sometimes he doesn’t.
The wind shifted and brought smoke and the smell of burning meat and diesel fuel. There were destroyed military vehicles littered throughout the town’s streets. It looked like a small loyalist force had attempted to make a stand against overwhelming firepower.
On the south side of the town, at the edge of the devastation, a brick school blazed. Henry looked through binoculars and saw a knot of people milling about in the parking lot. He could see mothers on their knees in the snow. The smoke was black and malevolent and Henry thought he could hear the wailing of bereaved parents, even though he knew it was impossible.
“Sarn’t Major,” Henry said.
“I know,” Martinez replied. “I see it. We’ll head that way. Shit.”
“We’d better hope the drones are gone,” Carlos said. “They’ll smoke us.”
“We gotta try to help,” Martinez said. “Damn.”
Henry followed Carlos through deep snow, moving down hills through second-growth forest. The air was still, and there was no sign of any aircraft circling.
It was a hard mile, and Henry was sweating despite the cold by the time they arrived at the parking lot. A fire truck manned by a few firemen had pulled up while the Wolves crossed through the woods. A few firefighters manned a tanker truck, spraying the blaze from a hundred feet away. People were shouting and crying.
“How can we help?” Martinez asked one of the firemen. The man was leaning against the truck, his face blackened by soot and smoke. He looked exhausted.
“Nothing to be done,” the man said. “There’s people trapped inside but we can’t get to them.”
“Why not?”
“They were in the center of the school, in the gym. The fire’s too intense. We tried. I lost a man.” The fireman gestured with his head. There was a pair of boots sticking out from underneath a blanket. “Smoke,” he said.
“Have you got a ladder truck?”
“Had one. The bastards hit the firehouse with a bomb. We’re just volunteers. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Henry looked up at the school. The building was two stories, and what he assumed was the gymnasium was taller.
“We tried going in from every entrance. There’s no way.”
“Ropes,” Martinez said. “Do you have anything we can use to scale the building? We can go in through a window.”
“Yeah,” the fireman said. “But the roof itself is on fire. Look for yourself. There’s smoke coming up through it. That means it’s not only hot, but also that it could collapse any second.”