Foreign Enemies and Traitors (23 page)

“That’s why you have an empty .380, and an Army nine millimeter Beretta.”

“That’s right.  I didn’t figure it’d help to stick around and try to explain how it was self-defense, so I took off in an Army pickup truck.  I was trying to get out of Mississippi as fast as I could.  The last part of it I was on foot—and that’s where we, ah, met.  So, how close was I to Tennessee?”

“About a quarter mile from the border.”

“Shit.  I almost made it.”

“Yeah.  Almost.” 

“And now what?  What’s next?  Are you going to turn me in, Zack?” 

The boy paused and then replied, “Naw, I don’t reckon so.”

“Why not?  You could get in a lot of trouble for harboring a fugitive.”

Zack snorted, almost a laugh.  “Like things are so great around here already?  You know what I was really doing up in that deer stand?  I was wondering if I ought to do what my mother did and jump off a bridge.  Or maybe just walk into Tennessee and try to kill the first foreign S.O.B. that I saw.  Things haven’t exactly been going so well for my family—they’re all dead.  If I told you about it, you’d understand what I was thinking about up in that tree stand.  Nothing good, let me tell you.  Then you came along and, well, after you didn’t shoot me when you could have, I figured that was some kind of a sign.  Christmas morning, and everything.  So, no.  I won’t turn you in.”

“Well, I appreciate that.”

“Hard to figure why you’d want to walk into Tennessee, though.  When I was thinking about doing it, I figured it for a one-way trip.”

“Can’t be much worse than getting hanged for murder, here in Mississippi.”

“You’ve got a point there.  But you ain’t going to Tennessee or anywhere else real quick, not till your hindquarters heal up.  You try and walk too soon and it’s going to bust wide open.”

“Thanks for taking care of me, Zack.  You’re a pretty good medic.”

“Thank my father, he taught me.  But there’s some other reasons I figure to keep you around a while, besides pure Christian charity.  I found some interesting things on you when I was playing nursemaid.”

“Such as?”

“Well, your belt seemed sort of heavy, and it’s not the kind of a nice leather belt you often find on a soldier.  Not even on a fake colonel, I’d reckon.  That was another giveaway—no real colonel would wear a non-regulation belt.  I split it open with a razor and I found your gold.  Then I checked the sneakers in your pack, and I found some more.”

Carson stared at him.  “I see.”  The boy was formidable.

“And I found a little bitty list of names and addresses, written real tiny with a sharp pencil.”

“You found that too, did you?”

“I did.  Piss-poor security, Phil Carson, carrying around a list like that.  You know, if the wrong people found that list, everybody on it could wind up skinned alive.  Or sent to a relocation camp, which probably ain’t much better.”

“Where’d you get ideas like that, Zack Tutweiler?  Your father?”

“That’s right.  Plus I read a lot—there’s not much else to do out here.”

Carson smiled.  “Except to go out bow hunting, right?”

“Well, there sure ain’t no TV or video games, not when there’s no electricity.”  Zack smiled back, revealing his twisted front tooth.

“You’re right about it being bad security, my having that list.  I know it’s a poor excuse, but when you get to my age, you have to write things down.  My memory isn’t what it was.”

“I see.  So, were you really a soldier in Vietnam?  Or was that just more crazy-man dream talk?  You know, all that ‘Sneaky Pete, Roger Dodger, over and out’ stuff?”

“What do you think, Zack?”

“I think it matches up with that old parachute tattoo on your arm.  The Army jump wings.  And all them old scars you’ve got—and some not so old.  Like that beauty on your noggin.”

“Yeah.  And don’t forget the one you gave me.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Neither said anything for a long minute.

“So, what’s next, Zack Tutweiler?”   

“I don’t know.  It’s going to be a while before you’re up walking.  Your butt cheek is all torn up, and I’m not much of a surgeon.  I hope that broadhead didn’t clip anything important, like nerves or something.  Can you lift your leg?  Wiggle your toes?”

“Let’s see…damn, that hurts!  Maybe I’ll wait a while on that.”  Carson went slack, breathing heavily while fixing his eyes on the diving Spitfire above him. 

“Suit yourself.”  Zack stood and idly rearranged small knickknacks on top of his dead brother’s bureau.

“Zack, how safe is it here?”

“Safe?  Are you kidding?  It ain’t safe at all.  Everybody in my family died here.” 

“I mean, do they ever come to check this place out?”

“ ‘They’ who?”

“The Mississippi Guard, the police, the sheriffs…any of them.”

“No.  We’re at the end of a dead-end dirt road, and it’s made to look like nothing’s back here.  I hardly ever run the generator, and I never show lights at night.”

“How are you set for food, without your parents?”

“I’m okay.  My father stocked us up pretty well.  We’ve—I’ve still got food left over from before.  There were six of us.  Now there’s only me—and you.”

“How do you get drinking water?”

“We have a hand pump in the backyard.  Our own well.  Every day I pump water into a gravity tank.  Filtered rainwater goes into it too.”

“Your father was smart.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure.  But smart wasn’t enough.  It didn’t save his family, or him.”

“Zack, do you have a mirror?  I’d like to see my wound.”

“Not yet, it’s all bandaged up.  Don’t worry, it’s not infected, or you wouldn’t be talking right now.  You’d still be out of your head.  I’ve seen what happens.  You know, this was my little brother’s room.  Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you wouldn’t be the first to die in that bed.”  Zack began to tear up, but pushed the display of emotion from his face.  “Your wound is clean.  I used a real suture kit and lots of antiseptic.  There’s no infection, at least not so far.  The miracle is you’re still alive after all the blood you lost.”

“Thanks.”

“It was Christmas Day.  I guess I felt generous.”

“I’m not a freeloader, Zack.  I can pay you.  For what I eat.  For all your trouble.”

“It’s no trouble, don’t worry about that.”  Zack held up a gleaming coin the size of a dime between his thumb and index finger.  “I’ve never seen these little gold ones before.  They’ll come in handy—you can buy just about anything with gold at the free market down in Corinth.  Gold is worth twenty times silver, that’s what they say.  We had some old silver coins, but they’re all gone.  Hey, don’t worry: I’ll only take what we need.  I’m not a thief.”

“You said you’re a Boy Scout.”

“I
was
a Boy Scout.  Eagle, in fact.  But that was before all this.  Now I don’t know what I am.  The Last of the Mohicans, I guess.  The end of my tribe.”

****

Lieutenant General Lucian Armstead detested Bob Bullard.
  He would have preferred to sit on a filthy rug in a Bedouin’s tent for a luncheon of goats’ eyeballs than to share a table with the so-called director of rural pacification.  Their eleven o’clock meeting had been requested by Bullard, who, predictably, would have his hand out.  The general had agreed only because these meetings gave him some measure of oversight of Bullard’s civilian-run operations in Tennessee and Kentucky.  These meetings were a bare fig leaf hiding the general’s lack of authority in the two states.  The informal get-together was for the two of them only, with no aides in the room.  The general deliberately wore his pressed ACU combat uniform.  Wearing his blue Army Service Uniform would show too much respect for a man for whom he had no respect.

Now Bullard was standing him up, already ten minutes late.  This simply was not done to lieutenant generals!

They had agreed to meet at the Cole Park Buffet, which in long bygone years had been the Fort Campbell  Officers’ Club.  “Classist” officer–enlisted rank segregation was no longer permitted in military clubs or dining facilities.  The location was neutral territory and convenient for both of them.  At least his general’s rank had allowed them to have a small private dining room set aside for their one-on-one meeting.

The civilian club employees even managed to find a clean white cloth for his table, unlike the gray, stained ones in the adjoining main dining room.  A dented stainless steel pitcher of sweetened iced tea was put on the table, along with two empty glasses, two glasses of tap water, and a basket of stale dinner rolls, without butter.  Oh, how standards had declined over his long career!  While he waited for Bullard, the general studied the military oil paintings hanging on the walls around him, depicting battle scenes from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.  He wondered how much longer these unabashedly heroic paintings would escape the attention of the new commissars of political correctness.

General Armstead had privately met with Bullard only a few times before, even though they both lived in Senior Officer Housing by Fort Campbell’s golf course, less than a mile away from where he was sitting.  How had Bullard qualified for one of the few generals’ houses on Fort Campbell?  Bullard was certainly no general, despite his Senior Executive Service federal supergrade position. 

Armstead liked nothing about Bullard.  He disliked his cocky overfamiliarity, his lack of manners, and perhaps most of all his affectation of a faux uniform of khaki slacks and shirts.  Bullard, who had never served in the military, liked to pretend he was some kind of mysterious CIA operative.  In reality, he had only been a senior BATFE official before moving up to Homeland Security.  Nevertheless, the general had been ordered to cooperate with this civilian “to the fullest extent possible.”  This kind of non-traditional relationship gave General Armstead an ulcer.  He had graduated from West Point fifth in his class, and had served his country for thirty-one years, across the globe from Korea to the Middle East.  He had attended the War College and had a PhD in history from Georgetown, and now he was in the demeaning position of taking orders from a civilian thug with mail-order baccalaureate and masters degrees!

General Armstead understood that this pitiful state of affairs was largely the president’s fault.  It all came back to Jamal Tambor and his inner circle of crypto-communists and one-worlders.  He was deliberately trying to hamstring the United States military, while entangling the nation in adverse treaties that served only to destroy what vestiges remained of American sovereignty.  Lucian Armstead had considered resigning his commission a hundred times since Tambor’s election.  Only his knowledge that many of the generals coming up behind him were left-wing perfumed princes, groomed and selected for their politically correct views, had kept him in uniform for the last three years.  Under U.S. law, the president nominated generals for promotion, and the Senate approved them.  It had traditionally been done that way, in accordance with the doctrine of civilian control of the military.  But what happened to the very nature of the military when the White House and the Senate were dominated by Fabian socialists, America-hating internationalists who had even managed to overturn and rewrite the very constitution he had sworn to defend?

General Armstead was the Commander of U.S. Army North, NORTHCOM, the Fifth Army, sometimes referred to as the Homeland Command.  On paper, he was charged with responsibility for the defense of America, plus Canada and Mexico.  In reality, his so-called Army had no permanently assigned combat troops to call its own.  He was the leader of six hundred staff chiefs but no Indians.  Active and reserve military units were assigned to NORTHCOM on an ad hoc basis as needed, the need determined by the president and the Joint Chiefs.  He was a paper general with a skeleton command. 

This phantom army had been headquartered at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, prior to the ratification of the new constitution and the passage of the Aztlan Agreement.  Then his virtual army’s staff headquarters had then been shifted out of Texas to Fort Campbell, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border.  The logic of the move had been sound: Fort Campbell was half-empty after the last round of troop cuts had decimated the Regular Army once again.  God had one hell of a wicked sense of humor was all General Armstead could think about the timing of the move, coming only seven months before earthquakes devastated the region.  No matter.  Command of NORTHCOM was meant to be a meaningless sunset tour for a soon-to-be-retired three-star general from the Old Army.  At least that was how command of NORTHCOM had been seen, before the earthquakes and the virtual secession of the Deep South and the “free states” of the Northwest.  Now, finally, his paper command was going to be fleshed out and called upon to deal in fire and steel in the American homeland. 

But not in the Southwest.  The Aztlan Agreement took care of that.  And not in the Deep South.  His former colleague Lieutenant General Marcus Aurelius Mirabeau was effectively the unchallenged ruler from the Mississippi River to South Carolina, Georgia, and North Florida.  NORTHCOM had no operational control in these Southern states, although General Armstead personally maintained cordial relations with General Mirabeau.  Of the quake-damaged states, NORTHCOM had a field presence only in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, consisting mostly of attached National Guard units.  The general had genuine authority only in these three states, which had been the least severely damaged by the quakes and where central authority had not entirely collapsed.

This certainly could not be said for Kentucky or Tennessee, which lay on either side of Fort Campbell.  After the devastating back-to-back earthquakes that had practically leveled Memphis and wrecked the transportation and energy infrastructure in the area between Nashville, Little Rock and St. Louis, the National Guard had been the first responders.  At least those who had mustered for duty.  Almost a quarter of the Guardsmen had failed to report, and another quarter of them slipped away over the following weeks.  Three months later, the remaining troops were ordered withdrawn by the president for “lack of performance.”  His National Guard regiments had been sacked, fired for failing to demonstrate sufficient zeal at forcing the evacuation of the stricken areas.  President Tambor had lost faith in the military’s ability to pacify the region, in particular Western Tennessee and Kentucky, between the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.  NORTHCOM had been ordered out.