After America (67 page)

“No,” she said. “You can stay right where you are for the moment. And you, lady, what’s your name and backstory? Judging by your accent, I’m guessing some kind of desperado from
Tatler
magazine.”

“Oh, please,” said Jules. “Don’t make me roll my eyes. My family were murdering Frenchies at Agincourt under their own heraldic banners when most of those arriviste try-hards were still gathering dog turds at tuppence a ton for the local fucking tannery.”

The woman grinned at that, just the ghost of a smile.

“So you’d be smugglers, zone runners, something like that?” she said.

“Something like that,” Jules admitted. “But not so that we’d have any reason for bragging about it. I’m afraid, well, it’s a little embarrassing …”

The Rhino spoke up again, relieving Jules of the need.

“We were hired, or so we thought, by a man called Rubin, a businessman back in Seattle, who told us he had papers here in New York that would prove a claim he had to an oil field off California. He hired us to retrieve the papers.”

“Go on,” said the woman.

“Well, of course it was all bullshit, wasn’t it?” said Jules, picking up the story. “There was no Rubin, probably no papers. For all I know there may be no bloody oil field. The whole thing was a setup by a man called Cesky. I did him a bad turn in Acapulco just after the Wave, and I suppose this was his way of repaying the favor. So thanks very much for the helping hand. Very glad not to be murdered right now. But my colleague and I should probably be on our way.”

“Okay,” their captor said. “You can get up and move out of the line of fire from that stairwell if you want. Don’t bother with the P90s. And you still haven’t told me what you know about the men who were here before you.”

Jules climbed slowly and painfully up off her knees. They creaked and ached terribly, and her shoulder was throbbing something awful. She was dizzy from blood loss and needed to patch up that flesh wound. She really just wanted to sink into a hot bath with a stiff gin and forget about this entire fucking disaster.

“The reason we haven’t told you anything is that we don’t know anything,” she said. “We took shelter in here, in this building, after we were fired on outside. End of story. If the men you’re looking for—I assume you’re looking for them—had still been here, I imagine we’d already be dead.”

The woman continued to cover them with her carbine, but she was losing interest. The documents the Rhino had discovered were beginning to take more of her attention. Not that Jules had any ideas about trying to make a grab for her gun or escape. Everything about this woman suggested practiced lethality: her minimal movements, her conservation of energy, the impression she gave of being aware of everything around her whether it was the focus of her attention or not. Jules had known any number of ruthless people long before family misfortune had tipped her into the smuggling game. And then afterward, of course. But no one she had ever encountered had emanated such a chilling aura of clear and present danger. She had no doubt that were she foolish enough to try anything, her brains would be running down the wall before her body hit the floor.

“If you want my opinion, ma’am,” said the Rhino, “what you have here is an intelligence bonanza.”

“No,” she said. “What I have here is a cold trail and two fucking chancers I couldn’t trust as far as I could throw them, which in your case, buddy, is a fucking vanishingly small distance indeed.”

“So you’re looking for these guys?” Jules asked.

“No, I’m looking for one guy in particular. The one in charge.”

“Ha!” said the Rhino. “I knew it.”

“Well, look, I don’t know if it helps,” Jules said, “but we saw a bunch of those guys come charging out of Saks on Fifth Avenue and tearing off downtown like a greyhound with chili pepper stuck in its arse.”

For the first time since she’d snuck up on them, the woman regarded Jules as something other than a potential target. “You,” she said, pointing at the Rhino. “You can make yourself useful gathering up every bit of paper and documentation in this place.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “As you say.”

Jules noted that the woman shifted her stance slightly to be able to track the Rhino with a small movement of her automatic rifle.
Who was this chick?
She knew the Americans were so pressed for manpower these days that they’d opened up a lot of their combat roles to women. But this woman was no grunt.

“Go on,” she said. “What did you see at Saks?”

Jules tried to recall the memory with as much detail as possible.

“We were tucked away in the rubble of St. Patrick’s, I think it was. Dozens of these characters suddenly emerged from the department store and took off downtown in groups of five and six. It was noticeable because there were a lot of other fighters heading into Rockefeller Center in even greater numbers. They’re holing up there, I think.”

“I know. Were many of them wearing headscarves? Keffiyehs? You know, like you used to see on the Palestinians on television?”

“I have been to Palestine, you know.”

“Why am I not surprised?” said the woman. “Did you see anyone near Saks who looked like they might have been part of the leadership group, somebody who could have been in charge?”

“Of the beardy nutters, you mean?” Jules asked. “No, I’m sorry. We didn’t. We were just checking out the ground. Making sure we didn’t get caught up in somebody’s turf war.”

The Rhino confirmed her story with a shake of the head that nearly tipped off his helmet. “Sorry, ma’am. But no, we didn’t see anyone like that.” He approached her carefully, holding out a massive paw full of papers. She gestured for him to put them down on a nearby table.

“Okay, then. I’m gonna go. And so are you. You need to get yourself uptown and bunkered down, and you need to go now. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Jules.

“What about those documents?” the Rhino said. “You’re not going to have time to deliver them to anyone. And they’re important. They need analyzing.”

“I can’t believe I’m being lectured by a busted-ass smuggler without the fucking sense to do some basic research before he takes on a job. So what, Coast Guard, are you offering to come on board for the big win now? You going to carry these precious documents back through Injun country, are you? Because that would mean I’d have to give them to you first, which would make me a bigger fucking idiot than you.”

“Such spunk!” The Rhino grinned. “I
like
her, Miss Jules. I like her a lot. This is the reason America is still chewin’ gum and kickin’ ass.”

Julianne sighed. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Irrelevant.”

“Okay. Fine. Look, mystery girl, you’ve got all sorts of whiz-bang-looking comms gear hanging off your spanky little outfit. If you can talk to the military, get hold of some special forces bods we ran into; they’ll vouch for us. We did save them from their own unpleasant incident of ass fuckage, as you put it so very well. We can carry your papers back if they okay us. As you said, there’s nothing here for us now, and frankly, I’d like to get the hell out of New York. It’s all been a very bloody fear-and-loathing trip, to tell the truth.”

“Hell yes!” said the Rhino. “We were somewhere around the edge of the city when the drugs began to take hold and the giant bats swooped down. Remember that, Julesy? The giant bats?” He grinned maniacally.

Jules couldn’t help but giggle at the incongruous fucking madness of it all.

The woman with the gun shook her head. “I hate this fucking city.”

New York

“Down, down, down!” Wilson shouted, taking cover behind the splintered, pockmarked doors leading to the public reading room of the library.

“I am down, Wilson,” Milosz yelled back. “And I am staying down now until stupid asswits and ragheads get bored and go home. This is not so much fun anymore.”

Tracers spewed out of the vast reading room into the smaller catalogue area where the rangers and militia troops were holed up. They poured through in a lethal torrent of tracers, cutting down anyone foolish enough to stick his head in the way. Milosz kept himself well out of the line of fire, which was coming from a makeshift stockade constructed of dozens of upturned wooden desks and the wreckage of a large, dark wooden booth that appeared to divide the vast cavern of the room on the other side of the doorway. The uproar of gunfire and screaming from inside was so loud that you had to shout into someone’s ears to make yourself heard.

“Worthy’s had it,” Gardener hollered, dragging the militiaman back toward them, using the cover from the old catalogue files. Worthy had lost his melon and most of his gray matter trying to throw a frag into the main room. The same grenade had gone off a few yards away and clipped two exposed members of the New York militia, who were screaming as a medic did his best to shut them up.

“Got one critical here,” he yelled.

“Get some of those militia pukes to drag his ass out of here,” Wilson shouted. “Fred, we need to gather up some claymores. And a bucket. A big fucking bucket. Gardener, can you handle that?”

“Holy shit,” she protested. “Sex discrimination case? Would you like me to come back barefoot and pregnant, too?”

“No, just fetch me a fucking bucket, zoomie.”

The Polish
NCO
snaked forward, his ass puckered and his head down. Hundreds of rounds zipped and cracked through the air just above him. “You have a cunning plan, Wilson?”

“I always have a plan, Fred.”

Milosz stuck his carbine up over the ruined cabinet behind which he was sheltering and popped off three rounds. Elements of their ad hoc team were trying to break into the reading room from multiple points of entry, but where those other points were, Milosz had no idea. He tossed another precious frag into the reading room, where it went off with a cracking roar that seemed to interrupt the volume of fire coming at them for a second or two. Charred and burning pages of God only knew how many good books came drifting back into the anteroom.

Milosz shook his head.

This was not right. Destroying a library like this. Libraries were sacred places—his father had taught him that. Hallowed halls where silence and stillness and modest learning was the order. Not screams and gunfire and crazy fucking schemes involving explosive mines and big fucking buckets that Master Sergeant Wilson would not even bother to explain to him.

More hammering automatic fire started up somewhere behind and above them, but he had no idea where.

“Motherfuck—”

“Man down!” someone shouted.

“Worthless fucking militia,” Wilson muttered, using his 203 launcher to plunk another 40-mm HE grenade into the reading room. The boom sent another dirty snowstorm of shredded, smoking paper into the air but this time it did very little to turn down the volume of fire coming their way.

Gardener’s feet squealed and skittered across the marble floor as she returned with two steel buckets and a mop.

“Damn, we didn’t need the mop,” Wilson shouted over the din.

“Sorry,” Gardener cried out. “Couldn’t hear you. Fred, give me your claymore, buddy.”

Milosz unlimbered the olive drab bandolier holding two M18A1 claymore antipersonnel mines. He fired a burst of suppressing fire through the door and tossed it underhanded to Gardener across the deadly gap between them.

Tech Sergeant Gardener spilled the contents of the bandolier onto the floor.

“You’re supposed to leave the mine in the bag,” Milosz said, regretting it instantly. He simply couldn’t help himself.

“I didn’t know this was a common task test, motherfucker!” Gardener shouted back.

“It is just that I have investments now,” he called back. “A reason to live. I plan to die as wealthy oil tycoon, not stinky-ass soldier with head blown off.”

She ignored him and unrolled a copious amount of slack from the spool of firing wire. “How much do you think we need?”

“Thirty feet,” Wilson said.

“Right.” She unspooled thirty feet of slack and set the wire at her feet before jamming the mine into the bucket. Milosz smiled as he read the words
FRONT
TOWARD
ENEMY
. That always made him smile. Perhaps they should have had a tag at the end of their rifle:
BULLET
COMES
OUT
HERE
.
VERY
FAST
.

Using “hundred mile an hour” tape, the air force lady fixed the mine firmly in place and opened the detonator well.

The tracer fire abated just a little, and Milosz could hear voices through the ringing in his ears. The sound of a muffled footfall reached him. A lieutenant from the 82nd Airborne dived and slid across the floor to fetch up beside him.

“You Sergeant Milosz?” he asked at full volume.

“Not if you are from Immigration.”

“What?”

“Sorry. Bad joke. Relieves tension of waiting for pointless death. Yes, yes, I am Milosz. You bring good news for me, yes? Otherwise, you will please to be fucking off backward out door through which you slid. Nice work, by the way.”

“Thanks. I’m looking for you and a Master Sergeant Wilson and—”

“Present!” cried out Wilson.

“And T.S. Gardener.”

“That’s me,” she yelled without stopping her work on the improvised mine. Milosz was beginning to worry about the punch she was trying to pack into those two buckets. Wilson had collected another three claymores from the militia troops scattered about the room.

“I’m Lieutenant Cleaves,” the airborne man explained. “I got sent here by battalion. They need to confirm you met a couple of civilian contractors, a—” He checked a small piece of folded paper and frowned. “—a Mister Rhino A. Ross and a Ms. Julianne Balwyn.”

“That’s Lady Julianne,” Milosz corrected as Wilson looked up and gave him a warning look. “Her family once had castle and everything. Not so much now, though. Why you ask?”

“We’ve had flash traffic from a classified source. Says they have some documents and need airlift immediately.”

Milosz leaned around the corner of the cabinet and squeezed off a round. The tracer fire resumed, impacting against the marble wall above his head, steadily chewing through the masonry and showering him with stinging chips of hot rock. The small clutch of militiamen hiding over there scurried away to find better cover.