Into the Guns (2 page)

In addition to his military gear, Sparks was carrying a Sony pocket radio. He turned the set on and fiddled with the controls until he found a station that was still on the air. All of them listened intently as a field reporter described the way things looked from the top of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill. “. . . The top half of the space needle was sheared off . . . The wreckage fell toward the east—and is spread all over the place. Two of the buildings in the South Lake Union business complex were severely damaged, and one of them is on fire. The elevated section of I-5 can be seen through the smoke. It looks like a large section of it collapsed. Cars are scattered on the hillside and north–south traffic is blocked. Oh, no!
Another
section collapsed!”

“Turn it off,” Mac said. “I can only take so much of that.”

No one disagreed. Kho wiped her eyes. “My God, Lieutenant . . . When will it stop?”

Mac didn't know. And as the day progressed, it became increasingly obvious that no one else did either. By the time the sun set, it was completely hidden by a globe-spanning blanket of particulate matter. And, because the power was out, the only lights to be seen were those that belonged to a scattering of people with generators and the military. Sporadic gunfire began shortly thereafter. “What the hell are they shooting at?” Brown wondered out loud as he munched on a candy bar.

“Each other,” Mac replied. “The people with generators shouldn't turn them on. Lights will attract trouble.”

“What about
our
lights?” Brown inquired.

“Same thing,” Mac told him. “It's only a matter of time.”

That was the beginning of a long, nerve-wracking night. Gunfire was heard, fires could be seen in the distance, and by the time there was enough light to see by, a large crowd had gathered in front of the traffic control point. Some people had been driven out of their homes by looters. Others had been forced to abandon their cars on I-5 and were looking for a safe place to stay. But General Rawlings knew there were tens of thousands of such individuals out there—and a very real limit on how many refugees JBLM could safely handle. So he had chosen to dispatch medical teams, plus food and water, rather than let them enter the base.

But as two days morphed into three, the pressure was starting to build. As the amount of crime in the surrounding areas continued to increase, people wanted to enter the base for safety's sake. And Mac couldn't blame them.

A tall, thin MP had taken up a position in front of the barricades and was clutching a bullhorn. “Do not approach the barricade unless you are a member of the military and have ID to prove it!” the MP declared. “Please stay back.”

A woman with two children approached him. Mac couldn't hear what was said, but could see the look of anguish on her face and saw the MP point. The woman was sobbing as she led her children back into the seething crowd. It was heartbreaking.

Macintyre heard a buzzing sound and turned in time to see a civilian helicopter appear from the south. It was flying low in order to escape the worst of the airborne grit and seemed to be following I-5 north. As an aid to navigation? In order to assess conditions on the freeway? Either possibility would make sense.

As the helo passed in front of her, Mac heard sporadic gunfire and realized that civilians on the freeway were firing on the aircraft!
Why?
Maybe they wanted to punish someone for the situation they found themselves in even if that didn't make sense. Would her troops think the refugees were firing at
them
? Mac feared that the answer could be yes. “This is Archer-One actual,” she said via the platoon net. “Hold your fire.” They did, and the helicopter continued on its way, apparently undamaged.

The crowd in front of them continued to swell as more and more people left the freeway searching for assistance. Or had the crowd morphed into a mob? That was the way it appeared as a self-appointed leader elbowed his way up to the front of the assemblage and began to chant. “Let us in! Let us in! Let us in!”

The MP with the bullhorn tried to respond, but the mob shouted him down. Mac was about to notify Captain Driscoll when he appeared at her side. “Fire warning shots if they start to push through the barricade. If that doesn't work, shoot their leaders.”

Mac was about to reply when a bullet blew the top of Driscoll's skull off. Blood and brain tissue sprayed sideways, and as Doc hurried to respond, the rest of them hit the dirt.

All sorts of thoughts flitted through Mac's mind. Had the sniper been waiting for an officer senior to her? Should she have ordered the platoon to dig in? Why wasn't Driscoll wearing his helmet? Private Hadley's voice cut through the muddle. “I have the bastard, Lieutenant . . . Just say the word.”

Hadley was the platoon's marksman. “Smoke him,” Mac ordered, and heard the Remington 700 fire a fraction of a second later. “Got him,” the sniper said. “Over.”

“Confirmed,” his spotter echoed. “He was on the overpass at one o'clock. You can see the hole in the crowd. Over.”

Mac looked, and sure enough, she could see a steadily expanding gap in the crowd of people who lined the rail. Unfortunately, there was no time in which to give the matter further thought as
another
voice came over the radio. “Brown here . . . Look west . . . Something
big
is coming our way. It's a front loader, and the bucket is raised to shield the driver.”

Mac had to stand in order to see what Brown saw but was careful to use one-two for cover. A pair of binoculars brought everything in close. The machine wasn't big—it was HUGE! Stolen from a construction site? Probably. It looked as though criminals were trying to use the refugees as cannon fodder.

The loader was flanked by columns of motorcycles. The plan was obvious. Some sort of gang was planning to drive the machine through the TCP and head for the main gate. Once inside the base, they would go looking for heavy weapons. The kind they could use to take what they wanted. Judging from appearances, it looked as if the outriders hoped to flank the Strykers and get in behind them.

Did the man or woman in charge have some military training? Mac figured the answer was yes. She spoke into her mike. “Archer-One-Seven . . . Once the loader is fifty feet from the barricades, fire a burst of .50 cal over it. Archer-One-Four . . . If that plan doesn't work, put two rockets on the bastard. Stryker commanders are to engage the motorcycles if they attempt to flank us or charge the barricades. Over.” Mac heard half a dozen clicks by way of a response.

People screamed and ran every which way as the loader and its escorts cleared the underpass and began to increase speed. The MP was still manning his post, his .9mm pistol raised, firing round after round at the charging machine. It was a gesture, but a brave one, and Mac was relieved when the soldier dived for the ground.

The sound of thunder was heard as the motorcycle riders revved their engines and spread out. Each man or woman had a passenger—and each passenger was armed. Mac heard the ping, ping, ping of bullets hitting one-two's armor as they opened fire.

Then the loader smashed through the barricades and someone
on Brown's squad fired a rocket at it. The missile struck the bucket and blew it away. The second rocket sped through the resulting gap and hit the cab. Mac saw a flash of light and heard the resulting boom as the machine jerked to a halt.

That didn't slow the bikers though . . . They kept coming. And that was when the remotely operated machine guns mounted on her Strykers began to chug. The subsequent battle lasted for less than thirty seconds. Once it was over, motorcycles and riders lay in a bloody sprawl out in front of the platoon's position. It was the first time Mac had been in combat. But rather than a sense of satisfaction—she felt sick to her stomach as she turned to Munroe. “Tell the captain what happened . . . I'm going forward to give Doc a hand.”

Munroe stared at her. “Captain Driscoll is dead, Lieutenant . . . You're in command.”

That was when Mac remembered the way Driscoll had been killed and turned to look at the body. The sight came as a shock. In command? It made sense since she was the company's XO (executive officer.)
But I don't want to be in command,
Mac thought to herself.
Hell, I don't want to be in the army.

Yet you joined,
the other her put in.
Not right away, like Dad wanted you to, but after goofing off for two years. Why was that anyway? To please the old bastard? To compete with your sister? Or because you couldn't think of an alternative?

Mac forced herself to focus. The rest of Archer Company . . . Where was it? What had the other platoons been ordered to do? She spent the next half hour making the rounds.

Like the first platoon, the other two were positioned to prevent people from entering the base. But that wasn't all. Foot soldiers were patrolling the perimeter while the MPs searched for infiltrators, a number of whom had been placed under arrest. All of which
made it impossible for the army to go out and help surrounding communities.

And that, according to a rumor Mac had heard, was the focus of a ninety-minute meeting between General Rawlings and a representative from the governor's office. A woman who, by all accounts, believed that
all
of JBLM's four-thousand-plus military personnel should be patrolling neighborhoods as far north as Seattle. But Rawlings called bullshit on that by pointing out that if the base were overrun, any work the troops managed to accomplish would be negated.

That was the way things stood as darkness fell, and orders came down for Archer Company's platoons to remain where they were. Mac ordered everyone to dig defensive fighting positions and stand four-hour watches. She was with the second platoon, eating an MRE, when Driscoll's replacement arrived. His name was Nick Hollister and he'd been taken off a desk job to lead Archer Company. Mac didn't have much respect for staff officers, but Hollister could talk the talk and clearly knew one end of a Stryker from the other.

Mac decided to take comfort from that as she completed the handover and hitched a ride to the spot where the first platoon was dug in. The power grid was down, but the spill of light from one-two's cargo compartment was sufficient to see by. Evans was there to greet Mac and provide a sitrep. “Everything's quiet,” he assured her. “Everything except for some occasional sniper fire. But that's no big deal compared to what's happening on the other side of the freeway.”

Mac turned to look west. No stars were visible because of the heavy cloud cover. But Mac could see the orange-red glow of what had to be a large blaze, and hear the intermittent pop, pop, pop of small-arms fire. No sirens though . . . Not a single one. After three days of chaos, the local police and fire departments had been neutralized.

Maybe the bad guys couldn't take JBLM. Not yet anyway . . . But they were free to rob, rape, and murder defenseless citizens. Some anyway. Although, with more than 300 million guns in the United States, others had the means to fight back.

That was the beginning of a long and mostly sleepless night. When dawn arrived, there was no sunrise as such. Just a gradual increase in the cold gray light that filtered down through thick layers of cloud. The air felt colder than it should have in May—and Mac wished she was wearing cold-weather gear. But that was in the BOQ with the rest of her belongings. So all she could do was clasp a hot mug of coffee with both hands and snuggle up to the heat that was radiating off one-two. That's what Mac was doing when a Humvee arrived and Captain Hollister got out. He had sandy-colored hair, a roundish face, and a spray of freckles across his nose. The same nose on which a pair of black-rimmed birth control glasses (BCG) rested.

Maybe Hollister was a PowerPoint Ranger, and maybe he wasn't. But he sure as hell
looked
like one. “Good morning,” Hollister said, never mind the fact that it clearly wasn't. “Please ask the people who aren't on duty to gather around. Reliable information is still hard to come by, but I'll share what I have and ask you to brief the rest of the platoon later.”

Mac was eager to hear the news no matter how iffy it might be—and knew the people in her platoon felt the same way. They were worried about their families and friends, some to the point where they were barely functional.

The soldiers came together on the east side of a Stryker, where they would be safe from snipers. “Okay,” Hollister said as he consulted a printout. “Here's what the Intel people have been able to pull together. An object, widely believed to be one of at least a dozen meteorites, exploded over the San Juan Islands at
approximately 1300 hours three days ago. The blast, plus the resulting shock wave, killed thousands of people. Earthquakes triggered by subsequent impacts caused additional deaths. Around the same time, a tsunami surged south through Puget Sound and laid waste to low-lying coastal areas. The Bremerton Naval Base and the Port of Seattle were destroyed.”

That produced a chorus of groans. Hollister kept his eyes on the piece of paper. Because he was focused on the briefing? Or because it was difficult to maintain his composure? Mac suspected the latter. “The tidal wave surged south,” Hollister continued. “And when it entered the Tacoma Narrows, the wall of water was a hundred feet high. The westbound span of the Narrows Bridge collapsed and dumped dozens of cars into the water. That means the channel is blocked, which will prevent ships from entering or leaving the port of Olympia until the Corps of Engineers can clear it.”

Hollister looked up at that point. His expression was grave. “We still don't have a lot of information about the national or international situation other than what the colonel provided earlier. Once it comes in, I'll pass it along. In the meantime, we will continue to perform our duties.

“Unfortunately, Sea-Tac Airport was damaged by a quake—and very few planes are flying because of the particulate matter in the air. In fact, so much of the local infrastructure has been damaged that we have orders to escort thousands of civilians over Snoqualmie Pass to Yakima. A fleet of approximately forty buses is being assembled in Tacoma, and the convoy will depart at 0900 tomorrow morning. This platoon will take the point—and be responsible for scouting ahead.