Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (33 page)

The machete was not primarily a weapon. She had grabbed it to cut a path through the thickets of scrub and wild grass that strangled most of the city. But in a pinch the honed edge could be useful against man or beast. She gave the blade a polish, but nothing more. She was not an obsessive. For Sofia, guns and knives were simply tools. Having grown up on a farm, she’d been taught to think of them that way, and nothing had changed her opinion in the intervening years. Not even the hard necessity of having had to kill men with a firearm. They remained tools; implements for taking life.

Because she wasn’t obsessed with guns, there was much about the other weapon in front of her that she didn’t know – its name for instance. She was sure that something as particular as this would’ve had a special name. She recognised the gun, an assault rifle, as a variation of the kind she had seen some road agents and individual bandits carry at various times. An AK-47, they were known as, although this one looked like a much nastier and improved version of the old wood-and-stamped-metal machine gun preferred by peasant armies the world over. It may have come from China or somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps even Pakistan before the recent war there. She neither knew nor cared. What had drawn her to this weapon the moment she saw it was its reputation for reliable lethality.

During the long trek north in the spring, she had often listened to the men discussing their firearms. Adam, too, had been an invaluable teacher in this regard. Like many teenage boys, he was fascinated by guns and had studied them in much greater detail than she would ever have bothered to. Something he used to say that seemed to amuse him greatly had impressed itself upon her memory.

‘AK-47. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room . . .’

By the time she got to Texas she was entirely someone else. Colonel Katherine Murdoch, United States Air Force – ‘Kate’ to her friends, of whom she had none in Fort Hood. Colvin had almost caught her off guard at the hotel in KC, exhausted as she was, but the flight south allowed Caitlin the chance to properly assume the role and persona of her cover. The travel requisition that got her on the C-130 flight from KC to Robert Gray Army Airfield, south-west of Fort Hood, put her on the passenger manifest in her ‘jacket’. To the flight crew, she was a USAF officer, seconded to the White House Chief of Staff in an advisory role. As she was to the feds and Texas state authorities. As she had been to Colvin and everyone she met in KC. There was only one man down here who knew she wasn’t some sort of military liaison officer for Jed Culver, and he surprised her by turning up personally to collect her from the airport.

General Tusk Musso, United States Marine Corps (retired), the President’s ‘special representative’ in Texas, was Seattle’s ambassador in all but name. He was waiting for Caitlin at baggage collection, which for federal officers in the Hood meant a large, unventilated tin shed at the northern end of the airfield. The day was cool and overcast, but she couldn’t help wondering what this place would be like in high summer. Unbearable, probably.

‘They know how to make you feel special from the get-go down here, don’t they, sir?’ she said as Musso shook her hand.

He smiled. Shaven headed, slab shouldered, clad in Hugo Boss khakis and a windbreaker, he managed to maintain a military bearing even in civilian garb. ‘Colonel Murdoch, nice to meet you,’ he replied. ‘And yes, Southern hospitality is not what it used to be.’

The general took her large suitcase and wheeled it out of the shed.

‘Did you ever see that old British movie
Khartoum
?’ he asked as they walked out to his forest-green camouflaged, soft-top Hummer. ‘That was a damn fine movie. But some days I feel like Charlton Heston, waiting for the barbarians to swarm through the gates and stick a spear in my ass.’

Caitlin vaguely remembered the film. It had been a favourite of her dad’s, an air force man himself, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen the Murdoch jacket as her cover. She grew up on USAF bases and the culture was as familiar to her as family. She also vaguely knew of Musso, even before reading his bio in the mission brief. The former Marine Corps lawyer had gained some notoriety as the senior officer at Guantanamo Bay back on Wave Day, which, with the disappearance of everyone north of where he stood, made him the senior man in all of Northern Command. He’d quickly struck up an alliance of convenience with a Cuban military officer, who was later ‘eaten’ by the Wave when he strayed too close, but not before the two of them had sent back some of the first close-up images and reports on conditions at the event horizon.

Musso had a second shot at fame a few weeks later, when he led the defence of Guantanamo, and of a few thousand refugees who’d fled there, against an opportunistic attack by the then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. His bio claimed the Corps ‘let him go’ during the great downsizing of the next few years, but Culver had taken her aside in Seattle to explain otherwise. Musso had been ass fucked after ‘losing’ Guantanamo. He owed his role here to Culver’s patronage.

The general, who towered over her and retained a fighter’s physique, tossed Caitlin’s bag in the back of his Humvee as if they were empty. She hopped into the passenger seat with a thud, its grey-green seat pad being almost nonexistent. Musso joined her up front and immediately flipped the starter switch over, waiting for the dashboard light to go out. Once it had, he pulled the switch, firing up the vehicle. With the drop of the parking brake, the man universally known as Tusk put the automatic into drive and rolled out.

‘Not too shabby for a ride that sat in the open for two years. Hope you don’t mind a detour,’ he said. ‘There’s checkpoints all though Killeen and Fort Hood. Looking for infiltrators.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘But mostly, I think, looking to piss me off. I get stopped and searched at every single one. I ask you – Colonel, do I
look
like one of Roberto’s scrawny ass little spies?’

‘No, sir,’ she replied with a grin, feeling better about this part of the mission already. ‘No, you do not.’

‘So, we’ll skirt around Killeen if you don’t mind, swing south of the lake and head back to the expressway just before we hit Salado. It hasn’t been cleared yet. Nor has most of Temple, where I’m holed up, but it’ll do.’

The names brought up a flickering montage of imagery from Caitlin’s briefing set. Musso had just described the southern limits of her so-called area of operation.

The day remained cool and grey as they motored away from the airfield, but mild compared to the deep freeze of the Midwest that she had recently left behind. She was glad of the leather jacket, though. It prevented the chill of the cab from getting through to her. Hummers weren’t the most comfortable of chariots.

‘I’d run the heater, but it isn’t working,’ Musso said. ‘Probably never will work again. I can’t seem to get parts, even though Blackstone is sitting on a mountain of them.’

‘Should I take that as an indication of your working relationship with the Governor, sir?’ she asked. The fact that the general here was headquartered a fair way east at Temple, and not in Fort Hood itself, made the question redundant, but it was worth getting his take.

‘Governor Blackstone has an open-door policy,’ explained Musso, having to speak loudly because of the engine’s roar. ‘When he needs something from us, his door is wide open. When he’s got what he wants, the door is still open – but only so’s he can slam it on my ass as I leave.’

The former Marine seemed inexplicably amused by what had to be a fairly fraught situation. But then, given his record in Gitmo, Tusk Musso was probably entitled to regard his latest posting as a milk run.

‘What’s he going to want out of me? Or rather, out of Colonel Murdoch?’ asked Caitlin as they sped away down the well-maintained blacktop of Clear Creek Road.

Regimented lines of shake’n’bake housing slipped by on Musso’s left, while the terrain outside of her own zipper-shut plastic window was wilder, more unkempt. All scrubby thornbush, trees and what looked like waist-high grass, broken up here and there by patches of sand and dirt. If it weren’t for the difference in temperature, this part of east-central Texas could easily have been mistaken for some of the wasteland around Kansas City. The orderly presentation of dormitory suburbs spoke well of the effort that had gone into reclamation down here. There was certainly no way of telling that Killeen had lain empty for so long until midway through ’05 when the newly elected Governor Blackstone turned his energies towards Reconstruction. But the bleak wastes on the right-hand side of the road emphasised what a small, insignificant impact the return of humankind had really made to this part of Texas.

‘What will he want? From you, Colonel Murdoch?’ said Musso. A purely rhetorical question. ‘He’ll want what he’s been after for months now; a reassurance the President won’t leave him with his nuts swinging in the breeze if and when Roberto decides to come against him with full power, instead of sniping at the margins. He’s worked himself into quite a fucking tizz over this. It’s why he’s agreed to see you, as Jed Culver’s advance man. Or woman, sorry.’

Caitlin smiled. ‘Well, as you know, I’m not really a military genius,’ she admitted. ‘But Kipper would hardly be likely to let that happen, would he? Letting Roberto roll in here, I mean.’

Musso gave the impression of studying her question seriously as they turned southbound onto SH-195, a four-lane state highway that cut through long stretches of countryside gone back to brute creation. The road itself was clear, yet cracks could be seen in the tarmac, through which native grass and other plant life conspired to undo what humanity had wrought. Tusk worked the wheel around a scattering of potholes large enough to swallow the front tyres.

‘One of my drivers got caught in one of those last week and cracked the front axle,’ he said of the obstacle. ‘I had the truck towed back for spare parts, since I’ll probably never get it fixed.’

‘No working heater in that one either?’

‘Nope,’ the general replied. ‘That was missing before we got our hands on it, along with the roof and the doors.’

She saw more evidence of the Disappearance now, as they moved away from Governor Blackstone’s administrative heartland. The blackened hulks of car wrecks that had been pushed off the blacktop and left to rust among the weeds just off from the hard shoulder, or shoved into the brush-clotted median. A tangled pile of metal she recognised as a downed plane, blocking a side road about a hundred yards in from the intersection. Dense stands of scrub and trees growing right down to the roadside in some places, obscuring all but the rooflines of a few isolated buildings left to rot and collapse. She could barely see a northbound Hemmt as the eight-wheeler sped by on the opposite side of the highway.

‘Now, as for the South American Federation,’ said Musso, getting back on topic, ‘I don’t know what the President will do. You were in New York, you saw how hard-pressed we were up there. Blackstone could’ve made it much easier for us if he’d just released a couple of TDF battalions into the fight. But he didn’t. Said he was already overcommitted – securing the Panama Canal, dealing with his own pirate issues down in the Caribbean, the bandits on the frontier, and the southern flank against the Federation. All the best legal advice says the federal–state accords back him up. He wasn’t obliged to release one grunt to the battle in New York. But it left a sour taste in the mouth when he didn’t, whether all those other things were true or not, don’t you think?’

Caitlin didn’t answer immediately. Fact was, if she hadn’t had a personal investment in what had occurred in New York City, she would never have gone there. It would’ve been hypocritical therefore for her to judge Blackstone for having stayed out of it.

Or would it? she wondered. Her choices were personal. His were political. And arguably he had a responsibility that went well beyond his individual inclinations. A quarter of the post-Wave population of the United States was clustered around Mad Jack’s holdings in the Texas Administrative Division. One could argue that he had a duty, first and foremost, to see that they were protected.

Caitlin was glad of this opportunity to be free of the need to maintain her cover. It spoke well of Musso, she thought, that he’d given up his Sunday afternoon to come out and collect her. He could have sent a driver, or just left her to make her own way. In Caitlin’s experience, a lot of ambassadors – and that’s what he was, in all but name – didn’t much care to have undeclared agents spooking about on their turf, yet he seemed not at all concerned. He drove south for about ten klicks before turning off at the 2484 junction, where the ruins of Red’s BBQ were returning to the dust. The land out here seemed used up, leached of any real fecundity, and overrun by noxious weeds and creepers. Caitlin doubted whether she could’ve penetrated more than a few feet into the growth without a machete; and even then, she’d have been hacking and slashing away with all her might to advance very slowly through the thornbushes and wait-a-while vines. In places, the road was almost completely overgrown and it was only her driver’s familiarity with the track that kept them on the crumbling tarmac. The Hummer jumped around as it fought for traction, clambering over giant tree roots and the occasional monster vine that had snuck out over the road.

‘Was this trip really necessary?’ she asked, only half joking.

‘As inconvenient as it might be, Colonel, this route’s still better than waiting at a roadblock for an hour while they check my credentials, believe me.’

‘Seriously? It’s that bad?’ Caitlin noticed her voice was warbling with the violence of their passage.

‘Depends on whether he’s sending a message on any given day,’ said Musso, as he steered them off the old road surface and around a fallen tree.

Scorch marks blackened the blasted stump where it had been felled by lightning, around which the vegetation had been burnt to a cinder for about fifty yards. On the far side, however, the path opened up again.

‘If I manage to get on Mad Jack’s grade-A shit list, or if Seattle does something that aggravates his indigestion, he’s not above placing checkpoints at every intersection between Fort Hood and Temple. He’s really been on our asses of late. I think it’s his idea of turning up the heat on Seattle because they won’t take him seriously about Morales. It can turn a half-hour’s drive into a day-long adventure.’

‘Must play hell with his own people, no?’ she suggested.

‘The spot checks are random,’ replied Tusk Musso. ‘But they always seem to randomly select vehicles with federal plates and tags. So I send a couple of Hemmts through here every few days, just to bash down the scrub and keep a way open. It’s a rat run, a long way out of my way, but it means we have an alternative route to the airfield.’

The windshield began to spot with drizzle as they finally swung off the southern heading and began to track gradually back to the north, taking them past an old sand-mining operation. A petrol tanker had left the road and driven straight into a tailings dam, presumably on the morning of the Disappearance. Caitlin could tell at a glance that Blackstone had made no effort to restart the operation of the mine. She wondered what would happen to Musso’s rat run when he did. Would there be checkpoints every couple of hundred yards along here as well?

‘You’re not rocking my world, sir. I need to gain the trust of these people, but it doesn’t sound like they’re going to let me get to first base.’

Musso flicked on the wipers as the rain thickened up. Past the old sand mine, the forest on either side of the road grew so dense again that she couldn’t see more than a few yards into it. Every now and then, however, Caitlin spotted the remnants of driveways, completely overgrown, but not as thickly as the scrub around them, or glimpsed slumping buildings otherwise hidden by vegetation.