Exile Hunter (27 page)

As Linder opened the
door to the corridor, he found himself face to face with a
fresh-looking Neil Denniston carrying a tall lidded cup in each hand.

“Did you sleep well?”
Denniston asked offhandedly as he offered Linder one of the cups.

“What the hell are
you doing here?” Linder asked with an amused smile.

“I’m from the
government and I’m here to help you,” Denniston quipped. “Are
you here to see Bednarski, too?”

Linder nodded.

“Well, then, we might
as well combine forces.”

“Where are you posted
now? Headquarters?” Linder inquired. “Have you read any of my
reports lately?”

“All of them,”
Denniston acknowledged. “That’s why I flew out here. The Chief
thinks your assessment of rebel plans on the West Side is right on
the money and he wants to make sure that Bednarski is giving enough
weight to it.”

“Nice of you folks to
notice,” Linder answered. “But, at this point, my work here is
just about finished. If I’m right and we block the rebel offensive
I’m expecting, the militias will figure out sooner or later who
spilled the beans and come gunning for me. If I’m wrong, and they
fail to mount a campaign, it’ll prove the Cleveland militias are
the spent force that most people think they are. So, either way,
there’s not much point in my sticking around after I see Bednarski
one last time.”

Denniston pried the
plastic lid off his cup and tossed it aside. He drank deeply of the
steaming coffee, then approached the window to scan the horizon. To
the southwest was a clear view of the airport’s primary military
facility at the I-X Center. The center was built as a bomber aircraft
factory during World War II, operated as a tank factory until the
1960s and, after lying vacant for most of the 1970s, saw intermittent
use from the 1980s until Civil War II as an exposition hall and
indoor amusement park. Rumored to have several levels of
nuclear-hardened facilities underground, the two million square foot
behemoth was the perfect place from which to rule a city operating
under martial law. As Linder and Denniston surveyed the complex, a
steady stream of traffic flowed in and out.

“Is this the part of
Cleveland where you grew up?” Denniston asked Linder after a long
silence.

“No, we lived across
town, on the East Side. But I had an aunt and uncle who lived in
Parma, not far from here.”

Linder pointed out the
window to the southeast.

“The area surrounding
the airport is a patchwork quilt of neutral and pro-government
neighborhoods,” he explained. “The ones closest to us, and all
those to the northeast of here are solidly Unionist. They’ve been
home to unionized blue-collar workers since the early 1900s. Now you
find government employees, teachers, and technical people there, most
of them left-leaning. But drive just a few miles to the northwest or
the south, and the majority of locals side with the insurgents. Where
I operate, out west in Rocky River, Bay Village, and Westlake, it’s
mostly white-collar, with high concentrations of professionals and
business owners. Both the western lakefront and the wealthy East Side
suburbs, a few miles beyond where I grew up, are where the militias
have taken strongest root.”

Linder stopped to drink
from the coffee Denniston had given him.

“Wow, this stuff is
good! Is that real cream? Where on earth did you find it?”

“The Air Force PX,”
Denniston replied with a sly smile. “Rank has its privileges.”

Linder drank deeply and
felt the warmth of the invigorating brew.

“So when are we going
to see Bednarski?” he asked. “Do we call him or will he call us?”

“I already called
upstairs,” Denniston replied. “His aide will ring us back when
he’s ready to see us. Meanwhile, why don’t you freshen up? You
look like hell.”

“How kind of you to
notice,” Linder answered in a weary tone, suddenly annoyed at
Denniston’s compulsive one-upmanship. “Stay right there. I’ll
find a bathroom and be back in a flash.”

A few minutes after
Linder returned, a phone rang across the office and Linder ran to
pick up the receiver.

“You have ten
minutes,” the voice said.

The DSS Base Chief’s
office was located several floors above where Linder and Denniston
had been waiting, in a nondescript glass-and-brick administration
building overlooking the Berea Freeway. The Chief of Base, Bob
Bednarski, had been an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and had been seconded to the Ohio National Guard
shortly after Civil War II broke out. That war had largely bypassed
Cleveland and other major cities on the Great Lakes States, but even
while the flames of the secession movement died out, a few pro-rebel
pockets and militia strongholds remained. Now Bednarski, as DSS Base
Chief, provided intelligence support to the Ohio National Guard and
local law enforcement agencies operating against domestic insurgents.

Cleveland, one of the
five poorest cities in America, had been in steady decline since the
1940s, with a post-Events population down to less than 300,000 from a
peak of nearly a million in the early 1950s, and half a million as
recently as 1990. Once the fifth largest American city, it had
dropped out of the top fifty by 2020. Entire neighborhoods had been
razed when neglect, arson, and abandonment had rendered them
uninhabitable. In the remaining slums, only the indigent, the
criminal and the insane stayed behind.

A chasm now separated
the impoverished inner city from the scattered islands of affluence
in the outlying suburbs. In those relatively comfortable enclaves,
resistance to the Unionist regime was mounting.

Linder, having been
born and raised in Cleveland, was a perfect DSS candidate to
infiltrate the Rocky River Militia. Now on his third domestic
assignment since joining the DSS the year before, he had been
unexpectedly thrown into undercover work against the rebels following
the Unionist coup and the outbreak of civil war soon after. Posing as
a refugee from a neighborhood along the burnt-out confrontation line
separating the city’s blighted urban ghetto from affluent eastern
suburbs like Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, Linder had joined
the anti-Unionist militia in the closing months of the civil
conflict. At that time, government forces across the Midwest were
stretched thin from having launched incursions into Canada to capture
fleeing rebels, and few troops were left to root out insurgent
pockets along Lake Erie’s western shore.

With interstate
vehicular traffic rerouted around the city along a ninety-mine
stretch between Elyria to the west and Ashtabula to the east,
bypassing entirely the I-90 route through downtown Cleveland,
Unionist forces saw no compelling reason to patrol the suburban wedge
north of I-480 and west of the airport. Sensing government weakness,
the militias recruited heavily among local youth and focused on
boundary-drawing between pro- and anti-government neighborhoods,
expelling loyal Unionists from their midst in a manner akin to the
ethnic cleansing practiced in Bosnia, Serbia, and Lebanon decades
earlier.

Within the affected
areas, the entire civilian population lived in fear of flying
checkpoints, nighttime raids, and random massacres. Mutilated corpses
of registered Unionist voters and federal employees were found daily
along roadsides, in burnt-out buildings and dumped in ravines.
Pro-government forces retaliated with death squads of their own and
razed entire residential blocks along the confrontation lines. Over
time, it became impossible to distinguish the excesses of one side
from the other. But the militias thirsted for vengeance, and before
long, Linder learned of secret plans for an attack that promised to
humiliate Unionist forces and reinvigorate the rebel cause.

Base Chief Bob
Bednarski met Linder and Denniston at the elevator and led them past
the pair of contract guards and the receptionist into his office, a
corner suite with a view to the north and east along the Berea
Freeway. In the distance, Linder could see the Terminal Tower rising
above the downtown skyline. Unlike the Spartan offices on the floors
below, Bednarski’s office was paneled in dark wood and the
furniture was several grades above standard government issue.

“Okay, tell me
something I don’t already know,” Bednarski began after retreating
behind his mammoth desk.

Denniston exchanged a
knowing look with Linder and spoke first, being the senior of the two
and having flown in directly from Headquarters.

“Over the past few
days we’ve been seeing signs that the Cleveland militias intend to
mount a coordinated attack somewhere in the downtown area. This is
based not only on signals intelligence and overhead photography, but
also on agent reports, including those from undercover operators like
Officer Linder. What’s unique is that, for the first time, we’re
seeing militias on the West Side cooperate on a large scale with
their counterparts east of the city. This is significant because,
while the West Siders have far more men under arms, the East Siders
are better funded, better equipped, and better led.”

Linder suppressed a
smile. Denniston’s line of reasoning dovetailed closely with what
he had been reporting from Rocky River, but until now Bednarski was
having none of it.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,”
Bednarski scoffed. “Analysts have been predicting that sort of
thing all year. What they’re missing is that, apart from detesting
the President, these people have absolutely nothing in common and
hate each other’s guts. What kind of sophisticated joint operation
do you expect from people who can’t agree on the time of day?”

“What we’re seeing
is a radical change in rebel strategy that runs completely counter to
conventional wisdom,” Denniston persisted. “What most observers
have anticipated from the West Siders are attacks on weapons storage
facilities aimed at capturing the heavy weaponry they lack. And from
the East Siders, analysts have expected attacks on political targets
to show that the insurgency can still challenge government power in a
way that matters to ordinary citizens.”

“This is still
nothing new,” Bednarski claimed, folding his arms and tilting back
in his swivel chair.

“What is new,”
Denniston replied, “is that the rebels seem to have recognized the
complementarity of their capabilities and goals. The West Siders
control their own turf but lack the ability to project power outside
their enclave. The East Siders have the capability to mount a
large-scale operation that could breathe new life into the
insurgency, but the scope of their ambition requires them to enlist
additional troops from the West.”

Now Denniston was
drawing even more directly from Linder’s field reports. Bednarski
cast a skeptical glance toward Linder.

“Okay, then, so
what’s the target?” Bednarski demanded. “Obviously, it’s got
to be downtown.”

“That much seems
clear,” Denniston went on. “We’ve had fragmentary reports
pointing to the Federal Building, the new Coast Guard Station, the
Federal Reserve Bank, City Hall, the Terminal Tower, the KeyBank
Tower, and several other targets. One possible scenario is a
multi-pronged attack aimed at occupying four or five major downtown
sites to make it appear that the entire city center is in rebel
hands.”

This was the thesis of
Linder’s very latest report, dispatched only two days before. And
now, it seemed, Denniston had come to Cleveland to get Bednarski to
take the reporting seriously. Linder felt a warm glow inside and
wondered if it showed.

“If they had the
troops and the weaponry, that sort of operation might give us a black
eye, I suppose,” Bednarski conceded. “But the National Guard
doesn’t have nearly enough manpower to defend every high-value
target in the city. Even if we enlarged our downtown footprint, the
insurgents could still seize the undefended sites and put us all in a
pickle. What you’ve given me isn’t nearly enough to go to the
Guard Commander and suggest a redeployment. I’d be putting the
Department’s credibility at risk.”

“Maybe you’re both
right,” Linder broke in, spotting an opening now that Denniston and
Bednarski had reached momentary stalemate. “Maybe what we need at
this point is a better sense of the enemy’s priorities. To me, the
key is that every insurgency runs on money. And downtown is where the
money is.”

Bednarski gave a
tentative nod in Linder’s direction.

“Fair point.
Insurgents are always low on cash,” he allowed. “One expects a
certain number of bank and payroll robberies from them, especially
from those on the left. But the militia guys around here are
right-wingers. They claim to defend private property and get their
funding from the rich. To my knowledge, none of them has even laid a
hand on a bank or an armored car.”

Denniston scowled and
seemed ready to speak, but Bednarski kept going.

“The Federal Reserve
is a whole other kettle of fish, of course,” the chief observed.
“Everybody hates ‘em. And with the electrical grid down in so
many places and electronic payments disrupted, the Cleveland Fed has
been holding unusually large amounts of paper money. But the place is
a goddamned fortress.”

“Fortress or not,”
Denniston argued, “I think we should put it at the top of the
enemy’s likely targets list. The militia leaders must know that our
forces would crush them if they attacked the Fed, but let’s not
forget that they’re fanatics. Over the past forty years, every
insurgency worthy of the name has eventually resorted to suicide
attacks. If these local boys have the stomach for it, downtown could
get ugly real fast.”

“After living among
them, I believe they do have the stomach to take on something big,”
Linder noted. “And in the past few weeks, we’ve seen an unusual
influx of battle-hardened rebel fighters from the western states and
Appalachia, where government forces are mopping up the last pockets
of resistance. I’ve met a few of those guys and they’re total
dead-enders; when they fight, they get jacked up on a half-dozen
drugs and become well nigh indestructible. If you ask me, I think
they’d love nothing more than to go down fighting in a modern-day
Alamo. And whether or not the rebels make off with the Fed’s money,
the publicity would draw millions in donations from wealthy exiles
and bring in thousands of new fighters. Given their current weakness,
some of them have to believe that a sacrifice play is worth a try.”