The Living Will Envy The Dead (9 page)

“Yes, sir,” Brent said.  “We’ll keep an eye on things here.”

I nodded.  I hated to cut and run, but I was going to be needed back at Ingalls.  By my most optimistic calculations it might be days before refugees arrived, but I doubted that it would be anything like as rosy.  I had to know what Mac was doing…

As it happened, I wasn't even remotely prepared for what was to come.

...More and more people joined the painful exodus. Sad, weary women, their children stumbling and streaked with tears, their men bitter and angry, the rich rubbing shoulders with beggars and outcasts. Dogs snarled and whined, the horses' bits were covered with foam... and here and there were wounded soldiers, as helpless as the rest.

-Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds

“You should have taken me with you,” Mac said, when I reached the first blockade and filled him in on what had happened at the prison.  “You shouldn’t have had to take that on your own shoulders.”

I shrugged, not quite trusting myself to speak.  I’d wondered, even though I had known that it was unlikely, if enough of the government had survived to rebuild society quickly.  If that had been the case, and alas it wasn't, the people who massacred the prisoners would have been charged with mass murder, regardless of how justified their actions had been at the time.  Where there is a shadow of doubt, there’s a lawyer struggling to turn it into a weapon against the defendant…and I didn’t want to put Mac through that, or anyone else.  I had seen it happen before in Iraq.  The people on the ground were endlessly second-guessed by politicians, the media, and retired military officers.  It drove some of them to distraction.

If there was to be blame for the entire prison episode, I had decided, let it rest entirely on me.

Later, people would wonder if I had set the lawyer up to be shot, when he made his futile and silly protest.  I hadn’t, or at least I hadn’t planned it to the point of having a specific victim in mind.  There are people like Grand Admiral Thrawn who can predict events to that degree of precision, but they’re fictional.  No one in their right mind would depend on a plan that had so many different factors involved leading away from the desired outcome.  I had known that there would be a victim – prisoners were told endlessly about their rights and rarely about their obligations – but I hadn’t known whom.  It was hard to muster any sympathy for the lawyer, however.  I dislike and distrust lawyers.

“I needed you here,” I said, finally.  I wasn't going to cry on Mac’s shoulder now, was I?  He understood anyway through the shared understanding of men who’d been in battle, if not together.  Civilians got to enjoy their delusions about reality, but a military officer who allowed himself to see what he wanted to see would be dead soon enough.  General Percival had taught a lot of lessons to the world.  It was a shame that most of them weren't heeded.  “How’s it going?”

Mac waved a hand down towards the road.  His share of the Posse had been at work for hours and they'd constructed a fairly impressive-looking barrier, composed of everything from standard police roadblocks to cars and even dirt-packed boxes.  It would have been more impressive if we’d had a few weeks and the right equipment, but he had already brought up a pair of bulldozers to strengthen the blockade.  A pair of signs had been positioned further down the road, warning anyone who came up the road to stop, turn off their car engine, and walk towards the barrier with their hands in the air.  Anyone coming closer without following those rules, the second sign warned, would be shot without further warning.  Mac had carefully deployed four sharpshooters around the area, with the remainder of the Posse held behind for backup.  Snipers are fearsome threats on a battlefield, but they do have limits on how much lead they could pump out.  If a mob of desperate citizens raged towards the blockade, the machine guns would have to deal with them.

I smiled.  There are basically two ways to run an army.  The first way is for the General – yes, I
know
there are plenty of intermediate ranks, but we’ll keep it simple – to tell a Captain in command of a Company what he wants done.  The Captain looks at the target and either demands more troops or gets on with it.  The General doesn’t interfere, trusting his subordinate to know what he’s doing, and when the Captain takes the target – or whatever – showers him with praise, reward, and another harder mission.  (No successful operation ever goes unpunished.)  The second way is for the General to insist on overseeing everything personally, right down to issuing specific orders for each individual PFC, and generally – hah – being a pain in the ass.  Every person in high rank, or political office, will insist on having a say.  An operation that could have been handled quickly and efficiently by a single Captain, the man on the spot, will rapidly loom larger than Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Now, guess which way is used by the American Government?

That’s right, the
second
way.  There is nothing more dangerous than a senior officer meddling in matters he doesn’t understand.  The guy on the spot knows what he’s doing, the capabilities of the units under his command, and the limitations inherent in their position.  The guy in an air-conditioned office in Washington only knows what he’s seeing on a map, which often misses out little details like minefields, or enemy snipers, or impassable blockades, or human shields…and yet he insists on a say.  You don’t believe me?

Right back during the start of the war in Afghanistan, we had a dead bead on the leader of the Taliban, the worst group of scum bags ever to walk the Earth.  We could have killed him with ease.  Why didn’t we?  Because the question was relayed upwards and upwards through Washington, right through the Generals, the legal departments and everyone who couldn’t make a decision.  Killing the enemy leader would be assassination…and we’re not allowed to assassinate people, are we?  I have never understood the point of that – if some kindly soul had assassinated Saddam back in 1991, we wouldn’t have had to go to war in Iraq – but Congress and the rest of the Government gets to live in their own world.  By the time it was finally decided that we could strike at the bastard, he’d left.  A decision that should have taken minutes to make had taken hours…and left the military holding the bag. 

I had already decided that I wasn't going to do anything of the sort.  I trusted Mac to get on with it without me looking over his shoulder the entire time.  I might have had more doubts about leaving a REMF to handle affairs, but I wouldn’t have given such a vital task to a REMF in the first place.  If he said it was done, it was done.

“Well done,” I said, finally.  Mac grinned openly.  Perhaps he’d known what I was thinking.  “Have you seen any trouble yet?”

“A pair of people from Ingalls returned a couple of hours ago and we allowed them to enter the town after checking them for contamination,” Mac said.  I nodded once.  There’s an old military maxim about never giving an order you know won’t be obeyed and I knew that telling the Posse to keep out their own fellow townspeople would be disobeyed.  It’s a
lot
harder to shoot someone you know and like.  If I had tried to keep them out it would have torn apart the entire town.  “A couple of other cars came up to the barrier and we inspected them, but neither of them had anyone useful in them…”

I should inject a comment here.  The definition of ‘useful’ requires some elaboration.  There are times – and I didn’t say this – when a lawyer comes in handy and is a desperately required skill.  The same could be said for quite a few other occupations.  If there hadn’t been a war or a prospect of a war, society might have decided that it didn’t actually
need
thousands of rough men standing guard to prevent their fellows from being disturbed in their beds.  Occupations can be divided into three categories; material production – mining, for example – industry – turning the raw materials into products – and service, which is basically anything else.  A lawyer is a service, so is a prostitute, a pizza delivery guy and a reporter.  They weren't
vital
to keeping society functioning, even though rumour has it that some of the stupidest decisions at the Pentagon had come out of nights when they ran out of Coffee. 

Take a Political Scientist as an example.  In peacetime he or she writes long boring books that no one ever reads – I read one once and I couldn’t make head or tail out of it – and is feted for this skill.  In wartime, he or she is completely useless.  In a survival situation, he or she has almost no value whatsoever.  I wasn't going to allow such a person into Ingalls unless she was an unbelievably hot babe who was willing to serve as a breeder.  We were going to need breeders and we weren't going to need boring books on outdated political science.  The world had turned upside down.

I discussed the definition of useful with Mac.  Basically, we would take in doctors and other medical personnel, soldiers and policemen, builders and generally other people who would be useful.  I gave Mac and the others some leeway.  We had an expert on some obscure Middle Eastern civilisation turn up with a van full of supplies, believe it or not, which he successfully traded for admittance.  He might not have been useful at the time, but he did turn into a pretty good worker in the long term.  We also agreed that we would take in small children if they arrived.  I wasn't going to order anyone to shoot them.

Another digression here for people who are wondering why I wanted the children.  Ingalls, like most small countryside towns – and Ingalls is tiny compared to New York City – tended to have larger families.  Why?  In Ingalls, and farming communities, children tended to be helping their families from a very early age and earning their keep.  The cost of raising a child was offset, slightly, by the benefits a child brought to the family business.  (And yes, a farm is a business.  More on that later.)  That wasn't true of raising a child in the city.  There, John and Jill Public would have to make some hard decisions if they found out that Jill was pregnant, such as which of them would give up their job to look after the kid.  The end result was effectively inevitable.  The city birth rates started to fall.

And Ingalls was a pretty safe place to have a kid.  If more kids arrived, I could place them with families I
knew
would take them in and bring them up to contribute to the community.  In the short term, they were a drain on our resources, but in the long term we were going to need the manpower.  If that makes me sound like a calculating bastard, then…well, I guess I am a calculating bastard.

And I really didn’t want to shoot kids.

“Sir,” Sergeant Isaac Chang said, appearing behind us.  Isaac wasn’t the only oriental in Ingalls, but there were only a bare handful of them.  Ingalls was pretty much WASP territory, although there were a few exceptions like Jackson King.  “I have the decontamination process set up now.”

I allowed him to lead us to the building he’d organised.  Isaac had been part of the National Guard Company stationed in Ingalls and, at the moment, their effective commanding officer.  The war had knocked everything out of kilter.  He was trained as an NBC specialist – and so I was delighted to have him – but he wasn't that effective a Sergeant.  I’d been better than him while I’d been in the Sandbox.

“Everyone who comes in, no exceptions, gets put through the showers,” he said, firmly.  The building had once belonged to a sporting club that had competed nationally.  It was old enough not to have separate showers for men and women, seeing as the founders had decided that women wouldn’t want to play such an unladylike sport.  They’d gone bust a few years ago and abandoned the building to the tender mercies of a caretaker who had actually done a pretty good job.  “They get stripped, washed and then dressed before the Doctor inspects them.”

I exchanged salutes with a pair of his men, dressed in heavy-duty NBC suits rather than more standard uniforms.  I felt a moment of pity for them – the dreaded suits had roasted more than a few of us back during the early march into Iraq – but I had to admit that they looked hugely intimidating, even more than the pair of heavily armed soldiers standing by the entrance to the building.  The precautions sounded a little extreme, but they were vitally important.  Fallout – which is basically radioactive dust – could get onto someone’s clothes…and God help the poor bastard who breathed it in.  Anyone who had been near a ground zero would have been exposed.  My only consolation was that it was unlikely that we would see anyone who had been that badly exposed in Ingalls.  The threat of radiation had been heavily exaggerated by the media before the Final War, but anyone who survived ground zero would probably have a heavy dose of radiation poisoning.

“Good work,” I said, finally.  Isaac beamed.  He looked rather more like a geek than a soldier and I just knew that he had been having problems because of it.  He wasn't, also, a resident of Ingalls.  It had to have crossed his mind that he could be thrown out to find his own town, even though he was too important to waste.  “What happens afterwards?”