Foreign Enemies and Traitors (44 page)

Boone misinterpreted this reluctance among American soldiers to obey the president’s orders as the beginning of an active resistance movement.  He had naïvely believed that after the introduction of foreign soldiers into Tennessee, he would soon be leading his own guerrilla band of patriots.  He thought that by this point in the war he would be leading a rebel operational detachment consisting of at least a dozen former specops troops, one of many similar groups of freedom fighters taking on the foreign enemies.  But he had never mustered more than four semi-qualified troops at any one time, troops who were willing to take part in offensive direct-action missions.  His tiny pick-up squads had conducted successful sniper attacks, set roadside bombs, and made a few snatches of foreign troops and American traitors.  He knew that other American patriots had been sniping at foreign targets of opportunity.  He heard the echoes of their high-powered rifles, and later he heard the rumors of foreign soldiers and domestic traitors who had been shot from afar.

This unorganized resistance had faded away when the revenge attacks began in the early autumn of last year.  Now sniper attacks brought immediate harsh reprisals, which alienated the local population against the few remaining resistance fighters.  The Cossacks and other foreign units were not restricted by genteel American rules of engagement.  When a foreign soldier was shot, his mates went into the nearest occupied dwelling and dragged out its inhabitants.  Sometimes these unfortunates were executed on the spot as suspected terrorists or as terrorist sympathizers, and sometimes they simply disappeared.  Five Americans killed in reprisal for every dead Cossack, Nigerian or Pakistani was too high a price to pay.  If an insurgent fired a shot from near his own property, he risked the lives of his family.  If he took a shot from somewhere else, he only transferred the danger to the innocent inhabitants of the nearest dwellings.  The undeclared policy of reprisals led to terrible moral and ethical dilemmas for the few active insurgents.  Most of them gave up the fight rather than see their neighbors murdered in reprisal attacks.

In the end, Boone’s guerrilla strikes were merely a series of uncoordinated pinpricks, largely because there was no way for different rebel groups to communicate effectively, or even to know of each other’s existence.  Their enemies, both the foreign occupiers and the domestic collaborators, owned the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  Hand-delivered messages and dead drops were too slow and unreliable a method of communication.  The problem of establishing timely and effective communications between insurgent groups was a nut he had failed to crack.  Without secure communications, Boone had not been able to mount more than isolated nuisance attacks.  This was a factor he had been unprepared to deal with.  During his military career, he had taken the ready availability of secure communications for granted.  It was a very different ball game to operate as an insurgent without logistics, resupply or secure radio communications.

Six months after deserting the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Boone was down to leading one drafted Army private, one old Vietnam veteran, and a couple of teenage civilians.  He laughed, scattering sleet from his beard.  When crunch time had come, most Tennesseans had been content to wait in long lines for a booklet of government ration cards.  Apparently, fighting for freedom was not high on many people’s lists of priorities, compared to assuring themselves a supply of food and electricity.  Maybe this should not have come as a surprise. 

Radford County and the surrounding area had been among the few exceptions.  After the earthquakes the federal government had put the region dead last on the list for recovery assistance, and the locals had said screw you right back, and gone on living without government help.  And now look what their stubborn independent streak had brought them: death in a ravine.  The proud nails that had stood up to the government…had been hammered down flat.

Even in Radford County, people for the most part were only willing to defend their own neighborhoods.  Very few were willing to take the next step, to go on the offensive and violently resist the foreign “peacekeepers.”  It was too risky.  Wives and children needed their fathers.  Basic survival needs consumed all of their waking attention.  There were too many random checkpoints, and always the threat of an unseen missile-armed UAV staring down at them, or an attack helicopter popping up over the next rise.  Guerrilla attacks were countered with bloody reprisals, and gradually most of the people turned against the handful of active insurgents, blaming the rebel fighters for the revenge attacks instead of the foreign soldiers who carried them out.  Boone thought of this as the Stockholm syndrome in reverse.  Fewer and fewer doors were open to him, while his fear of being ratted out by informants grew.  It took only one weak member of a family to go to the enemy, seeking to collect a blood-money bounty payment, paid in red TEDs or gasoline ration coupons.

Over time, the people had become worn down by hunger and cold, and had slowly bought into the government propaganda.  They came to believe that active resistance to the foreign occupation would only mean a delay of the day that the bridges would be reopened, the roads graded and repaved, and the electricity reconnected.

Despite the steady diet of propaganda, some of the Radford County locals had supported his cause with food, and a place to hide and rest up when he arrived at their back doors after midnight.  And as a reward for their defiant patriotism, most of the members of his network were dead now, lying frozen in the snow a few yards above him.  So that’s it, it’s finally over, he thought.  Active resistance is finished in Western Tennessee.  If there was anyone else still actively opposing the foreign enemies in Western Tennessee, he had no way of knowing it.  Sitting in the icy rain below the bodies of his neighbors, Boone Vikersun was the last guerrilla fighter.

****

Bob Bullard’s blue and white Eurocopter
was waiting
on the runway apron when he arrived at 6:30 a.m.  He was dressed in a khaki thermal snowmobile suit, the pants tucked into calf-height black rubber boots.  The sleek civilian helicopter was dwarfed by rows of Blackhawks and Chinooks stationed at Fort Campbell’s Sabre Army Airfield.  His pilot was waiting in the right seat; the helo’s turbine engine was already spooling up.  As usual, he sat in the empty left front seat.  There were no copilot controls in the civilian Eurocopters.  It was a mystery to him why pilots sat in the right seat in helicopters but on the other side in fixed-wing aircraft.  He handed the pilot a slip of paper with the GPS coordinates provided by the Kazaks, and when he slipped on his headset he told him, “No filming today, Jack.  No video, no audio, no GPS tracking—nothing.  No record.”  The Eurocopters could automatically be set to record everything beneath them, with both visual and infrared cameras, and that was the last thing Bullard wanted on this day.  Three bodyguards in black and Jeff Sinclair, his assistant, sat behind him in the passenger area, and they lifted off. 

The 150-mile flight from Fort Campbell south to Radford County roughly followed the course of the Tennessee River in reverse.  The helicopter crossed the river several times as it meandered northward across the state on its final big looping turn back up from Alabama, on its way to meet the Ohio River.  With the twin failures of the Tennessee and Pickwick dams after the first big quake, the water level in the western part of the Tennessee River had dropped more than fifty feet.  Six hundred square miles of artificial lake had disappeared downstream in a calamity of Biblical proportions, washing away bridges already damaged by the earthquake.  This left only the original Tennessee River channel snaking between wide mud banks that in places stretched for miles across, revealing entire drowned forests.  The two earthen dams were designed and built during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and they had lasted three-quarters of a century.  Well, Bullard mused, eventually they’d be rebuilt during the current Greater Depression.  Once the region was fully pacified, those two reconstruction projects would mean work for thousands of men that would last for years.  Pacifying the region so that the work could begin was his contribution to the overall mission.

The helicopter banked and swept inland from the river, with dawn just breaking in the east.  The Kazaks had sounded both guarded and uncertain in their radio calls, last night and this morning.  The only thing he was reasonably sure that they had communicated accurately were the GPS coordinates of this flight’s destination.  Like most of his foreign battalions, the Kazaks were practically useless without their American liaisons.  Martin Zuberovsky had just been assigned to the contract battalion, and now he’d gone missing, only a few miles from the scene of yesterday’s events around the town of Mannville.  Bob Bullard hated these kinds of coincidences.

The pilot flew toward the GPS coordinates provided by the Kazaks.  He had not even entered the latitude and longitude numbers into the helicopter’s onboard navigational system as a go-to point; instead, he clipped the slip of paper to his console and flew manually.  Evidently, he had taken the admonition about no flight records seriously, and Bullard was pleased with his attention to detail.  Icy rain clicked against the helicopter’s windscreen and streamed back.  Their destination was a snow-covered hilltop, where an old house was finishing the process of burning down into its foundation.  A plume of gray smoke and steam marked the location.  Bullard ordered his pilot to orbit the knob a few times while he studied the situation from a thousand feet up.  A circle of twenty or so widely spaced oak trees made a bull’s-eye a hundred yards across, with the burned-down house in the center.  The pile of timber and charcoal was still smoldering, hours later.  The snow had melted near the ruins, exposing a ring of brown grass.  Obviously, any response from the local fire department was out of the question.  There were no more operational fire departments in this part of West Tennessee. 

A pair of four-wheeled armored security vehicles was parked near the top of the destroyed home’s driveway.  A large green military truck with a canvas-covered cargo area was parked below it.  Last night’s snow had accumulated to a few inches, but even though it was still overcast, the day was warmer and it was already melting away in patches.  The wind had swung around to the south, and it was raining.  He could not figure out Tennessee weather to save his life.  It wasn’t San Diego, that was for sure. 

The pilot set the helicopter down between the oaks and the former home site, where the ground was nearly level.  Snow and ash whipped outward from the chopper’s downdraft.  His retinue of bodyguards and his assistant climbed down with him onto the snowy field, and spread out around him.

The Kazak officers stepped down from one of the green camouflage-painted ASVs; it was a stretched-out commander’s version without a turret, but with plenty of extra antennas.  They walked halfway around the burned home to meet the Americans.  Their new commander, Colonel Arman Burgut, did not have any of the problematic Colonel Yerzhan Jibek’s dash or charisma.  Colonel Burgut suited Bullard much better.  Burgut was shorter than his former commander, at no more than five seven or eight.  This meant that Bullard could look down at him, unlike the taller and, frankly, more handsome Colonel Jibek, now deceased.  Burgut had a half-Asian face, and a long mustache that covered his upper lip and reached nearly to his chin on both sides, in the Kazak style.  He was wearing the Russian-style camouflage uniform and jacket, mostly brown with bold black zigzags, topped with a fur hat.  Unlike the late Colonel Jibek, his successor made no pretense of culture or refinement.  Burgut’s English was rudimentary at best, and his knowledge of American customs and culture was nil.

Never one for small talk, Director Bullard got right to the point.  “Colonel Burgut, where is my liaison officer, Major Zinovsky?”  This was the alias that Special Agent Martin Zuberovsky was using while attached to the Kazak battalion. 

Burgut spoke haltingly, struggling to form comprehensible sentences.  “Ah, General Blair, good it is to seeing you again.  After very succeeded operation as we conducted yesterday, it is much I regret to inform to you that your officer is…he is missed.  Missing.  I am thinking that he is there, under.”  The Kazak officer indicated the smoking heap of timbers and ash with a hand sweep.  They were standing near enough to the pit to hear steam hissing from the still-burning main beams somewhere below.  The harsh stink of burnt paint and plastics assaulted their noses.

“Are you sure that he was inside the house during the fire?”

“Yes, I think…very sure.”

“How many of your men were lost?”

“Praise be unto…that is…thankfully, we lost no men.  All my officers were able to remove selves from house quickly.”

“I don’t understand.  Then why is my liaison officer missing?”

“He…Major Zinovsky was first to go up steps to number two level of house.  The fire had begin—had began—on number two level.  I saw this with my two eyes, standing where now we stand.  There were places on number two level to make a fire, with small parts of tree, that is to say, wood.  To give heat to bedrooms.  Word in English is fire place?  Yes, fire place.  Big fire in house, I think came from small accident of fire place.  I do not know why Major Zinovsky not did remove self from house.  Frankly, General Blair, some of my officers were taking much strong drink.  I think perhaps Major Zinovsky have taken too much whisky made from corn.”  Colonel Burgut mimed lifting a bottle to his lips, grinned and rolled his eyes.  “White thunder is called this whisky, you are knowing of?”

“White lightning.  The homemade corn whisky is called white lightning.  Thunder is the noise.  Tennessee is famous for it.  The whisky, I mean.”

“Yes.  Too much of this corn whisky can make even the strong man go blind of eyes.”

“Colonel Burgut, have you found any remains in the fire?”

“Remains?  I am not understanding.”

“Human remains.  A corpse.  A dead body.”