Ralph Peters (5 page)

THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

He remembered little of the Azores. Just the monotony of the tent city where every evacuee had to remain for ninety days, moving from one
"
sterile
"
subsection to another, and his surprise to find that he had been presumed dead and that he had been posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on the strength of his last radio messages, which had been recorded by a U.S. Military Intelligence outfit. He remembered listening to the ranting of a fellow captain, a Military Intelligence officer named

Tucker Williams, who swore that he was going to live for sheer spite just so he could beat the service back into shape. Taylor half-listened to the man's tales of how Military Intelligence had corrupted itself in the quest for promotions—
"
We stressed the jobs that brought tangible rewards in peacetime, command, XO, operations officer, everything except the hard MI skills. And when the country needed us. we went to Africa with more commanders and XOs and S-3s than you could count, but without the analysts and collection managers and electronic warfare officers it takes to fight a war . . . and I swear to God I'm going to fix it, if I have to pistol whip
my way up to the Chief of Staff
...
"
Taylor was not certain what his own future would hold. He suspected he would remain in the military, although he was not sure now that he was the right man for it, in view of his battlefield failure. But he wanted, above all, a chance to prove himself, to get it right. To atone.

He did not worry about Runciman's disease, even when two other officers in his tent came down with it. He was convinced that he had some sort of natural resistance. If Africa had not cut him down, the Azores certainly were not going to get him. Then he briefly awoke to his own screams and abdominal pains of unimaginable ferocity. For the first few moments he managed to tell himself it was simply the multiple parasites for which the Army doctors were treating him. Then the truth bore down upon him, just before he lost consciousness.

Beyond the initial shock, he remembered virtually nothing of the disease. It was merely a long sleep from which he awoke with the face of a monster, where once the mirror had reflected an overgrown boy.

He was lucky, at least to the extent that his faculties were not impaired. The battery of tests given to all survivors revealed no deterioration in his mental capabilities whatsoever. Later the Army even offered him plastic surgery, as they did to every soldier who contracted RD in the line of duty. In the wake of the plague years, plastic surgeons developed fine techniques for repairing disease-damaged skin. The results were never perfect, but the work allowed you to sit in a restaurant without disturbing those around you.

Taylor never submitted to the treatment. In the years of our troubles he wore a lengthening personal history of medals and campaign ribbons on his chest. But when he was alone in front of the mirror, it was his face that was the true badge of his service, and of his failure on a clear morning in Africa.

2

Los Angeles
2008

First Lieutenant Howard
"
Merry
"
Meredith,
child of privilege, stood among the dead. The medics had moved on, shrugging their shoulders, leaving him alone with the boy he had just killed. There were plenty of casualties, on both sides, although he did not yet know the exact number. Voices called out orders, as the Army began to put the street back in working order. But for Meredith the familiar commands and complaints were only background noise. Another helicopter thundered overhead, drawing its shadow over the scene, while a mounted loudspeaker instructed the local residents to remain indoors. The wash of air from the rotors picked over the loose fabric of the dead boy's clothing, as though sifting through his pockets. Well, there would be time for that too.

The color of blood was far softer than the tones of the boy's costume. The garish rejectionist uniform of the streets. Meredith would not even have worn those mock satins and gilt chains to a costume party. They were almost as foreign to him as the lush, loose prints worn by the Zairean women had been. He wanted no part of them.

And yet, they were a part of him. In a way that he could not understand, in a manner intellectually suspect, perhaps only learned, imagined, imposed. The dead boy's eyes appeared swollen and very white in their setting of black and deep maroon. Far from achieving any dignity in death, the boy looked like something out of an old, vulgar cartoon. The moronic minstrel who chanced upon a ghost.

No connection, Meredith insisted. It's bullshit.

It occurred to him that the light was very good. It was an off-season light, soft, yet very clear. The smoke of the firefight had withered away, and there was almost no smog in a city come to standstill. The slum was almost picturesque, when you discarded the baggage of your preconceptions. A poor neighborhood in some handsome southern place. Drowsing, in a very good light. It seemed unreasonable to Meredith that he could not see his way more clearly in a light of such quality.

Merry Meredith, child of privilege, born to confidence, handsome and markedly intelligent, fumbled to put his pistol back in its holster. He turned away from the boy he had killed and began to call out orders to his men. His voice had the brilliant confidence of an actor stepping back out onto the stage while his life crumbles behind the curtains.

He had come a long way from Ann Arbor, where the first serious prejudice he had encountered was that of his parents against his choice of a career. He always thought fondly of his parents, grateful to them for so much, sorry only that he had never managed to find the time to sit down with them as an adult and explain why his life's path had needed to diverge so markedly from theirs. Anyway, he had not possessed the words. So much of it was a matter of feelings, of intuitions.

The plague had swept through the ranks of the university's professors with a ferocity that seemed to seek revenge for finding the dormitories emptied of students. Whether the victim was liberal or conservative, a mathematician or Chaucerian scholar, Runciman's disease had shown a great appetite for knowledge. His father had been a historian whose lifework consisted of reinterpreting the history of the United States through the eyes of its minorities, while his sociologist mother had labored to explain the statistical problems of a black population from which her own background, education, and standard of living had kept her utterly separate, despite the color of her skin. The plague had called them in swiftly, as though starved for their expertise, before a son returning from the confusion of Zaire could take them in his arms one last time.

When he remembered his parents it was usually in terms of a golden, astonishingly untroubled childhood, or in the light of scenes where their exasperation, anger, and very best intentions struggled against his desire to go to West Point. He set his face in a near smile, recalling their well-meant reproaches: Where had they gone wrong? Where had they failed? How had they been so inept in the transmission of their values that a son of theirs would want to become a military officer? Had he declared himself a homosexual or perhaps even a drug addict, they would have felt far less a sense of parental inadequacy. They even reached the point where they were willing to let him stay home and go to Michigan. He could even continue to play football. . . .

Well, he had played football, on the first winning team West Point had fielded in a decade. And the child who had been forced to hide his toy soldiers from his parents the way other children hid only partially understood works of pornography became an officer in the United States Army. His parents had come up to the Point for his graduation, but his mother wept helplessly and his father's face bore the stoical look of a man whose son had just wed the town harlot.

Then his childhood ended. Two days before he graduated from the Military Intelligence Officer's Basic Course at Fort Huachuca, his orders were amended to send him to the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. He was to proceed directly, without home leave. Almost his entire class found themselves in the same boat, as the Army struggled to flesh out at least a few key units to full strength during the Zairean crisis. At Fort Bragg he underwent emergency in-processing, signed for his field gear, and loaded onto a transport aircraft to join his new unit, which had already deployed to Kinshasa.

He had been excited, and only occasionally did his stomach suffer a quick tinge of fear. He was going into combat. All of his training would be put to immediate use. A range of dramatic, if nebulous, opportunities seemed to open up before him.

But he did not see combat. Instead he remained in the grubby, diseased environs of Kinshasa, sitting behind a bank of intelligence work stations that glowed with multicolored electronic displays and did absolutely nothing to alter the outcome of the campaign.

But he learned. He learned the emptiness of the things he had been taught in school about war, and, above all, he seemed to learn the depth of his Americanness. Despite his rebelliousness, his parents had managed to imbue him with a residual belief that there
must
be some magic in his African heritage. Their casual iconography promised an untutored wisdom about life, a deeper, richer humanity, and a natural splendor beyond compromise, beyond the reach of the cold, pale refugees from the Northern Hemisphere.

Instead, he found plague. And a level of corruption, greed, and immorality that shocked his middle-class soul. He detected no evidence of spiritual grace or moral charity—no single hint of latent racial greatness. He resisted the African reality that confronted him, struggling against the evidence of his senses with an outraged ferocity, unwilling, even now, for his parents to have been
so
wrong in the dreams that had shaped their lives.

In the end, he had to recognize that he had more in common with a white private from backwoods Alabama than he had with the Zaireans. Culture, the immersion in television, video, automated games, music, advertising, textbooks, social habits, conveniences, breakfast foods, the triggers to personal embarrassment, the simple differentiation between the good deed and the bad, overpowered any real or imagined racial bonds. Instead of romance, he found squalor. In the end, the Africans did not want his brotherhood. They only wanted his money.

He wrote to his parents that, while war and disease limited his opportunity to really see the country, sunrise on the big river was very beautiful, and the vegetation was full of color.

Then, still unable to comprehend how things had gone so wrong for
his
army, for
his
country, he loaded back onto another transport plane and went into quarantine in the Azores. By an accident of fate, Runciman's disease passed by his bunk. Things had gotten so bad in the quarantine camp that virtually everyone assumed they would die or at least suffer the corollary effects of the disease. The suicide rate among the waiting men and women soared. At one point, the last bulldozer broke down and details of still-healthy men had to dig burial pits by hand. They ran out of body bags. Then the decision was made to burn the corpses. Then came the order to disinter the earlier victims and burn them too. Terribly afraid, Meredith volunteered for the worst of the details. He told himself it was his duty. As his penance for sitting safely in Kinshasa while his classmates were dying downcountry.

Even though the smoke from the chemical-laden fires haunted his nostrils, burrowing into his lungs, his temperature never climbed, his bowels never exploded, and his skin never blotched with the special badges of the African campaign. It occurred to him that, perhaps, he was being saved for a special destiny, even though he tried to suppress the notion as unlucky.

On the island the living talked primarily of one thing— of going home, to a safe, healthy land. But Runciman's disease got off the plane ahead of them, and by the time Meredith stepped off the military transport at Dover, the plague had spread across the United States, just as it was sweeping impartially around the world. The schools and universities closed early on. Then the theaters and restaurants closed. Then the shops that sold nonessentials were shut. But the plague would not be appeased. The disease snaked out from the transportation hubs, uncoiling down the exit ramps of the interstates, tracing secondary routes to their intersections with county roads, then following unmarked lanes to the farms and ranches and mining patches. In the Midwest isolated towns crumpled and died on dusty sidewalks, along rural routes where the fields went wild. But the greatest impact by far was on the cities.

Public services were swiftly and severely stricken. No prophylactic measures tolerable in a free society seemed to work. Medical masks and gloves were of no greater utility than the beaks and pomanders of medieval plague doctors. The disease gobbled sanitation workers, policemen, transportation workers, repairmen . . . health workers. City residents began to wander the rural areas in their cars, looking for an untouched hamlet where a room might be had, spreading the plague until they ran out of gas, or until they died in a fever by the side of the road. Or until a property owner shot them as they approached. Towns and villages tried to close the roads that led to their limits. But it was no longer possible to live cut off from the rest of the world, when even your bread came from far away. And RD arrived in any case, even when the delivery trucks failed to show up.

The plague brought out the worst in men. From hucksters pitching expensive miracle cures, to television prophets who damned their contemporaries in terms of the Book of Revelations before demanding money to intercede with God on the viewers' behalf, from street criminals who thought nothing of breaking into the homes of the sick to steal and to murder the already dying, to doctors who refused to treat RD victims, men learned the measure of each other and of themselves. In the backcountry posses took to sealing off the houses of victims with an armed ring of men, then burning the structure to the ground along with all of its inhabitants, living or dead. In better-organized areas, schools and National Guard armories were converted into hospitals—but there was little that could be done beyond the intravenous replacement of lost fluids and simply waiting for the victims to live or die on their own. Then the sterile solutions began to run out, as the demand skyrocketed and the production facilities closed and the distribution network collapsed. Black-market fluid packs killed as many as they saved. Ambulance attendants were gunned down and their vehicles torched as rumors spread that they were a major source of contagion. Among those who recovered, some found that their families or lovers, landlords or neighbors, would not accept them back into the fold, and hobo camps of scarred survivors developed into semipermanent settlements beside the interstate and rail lines, while renegade colonies sprang up in the national parks, where the residents were somewhat less likely to be massacred in a midnight vigilante raid.

Yet, the will to civilization never disappeared entirely. There were always volunteers, men and women who against all common sense and personal instinct went to work manning the ambulances or lugging the mass-produced chemically lined body bags. Men whose lives had been spent behind desks and computers strained to load the mountains of accumulated garbage in the streets, while others served as police auxiliaries or truck drivers. When the state governors called out the National Guard, the Guard came—not every man or woman who had sworn the oath, but enough to deliver the essential food, to dig the burial pits, to patrol the most lawless of the city streets and country roads. There seemed to be no way to predict who would cower and try to flee, or who would risk his life to serve the common good. Neither religion nor race, nor age or income served to indicate the man or woman of courage. But they were always there, never quite as many as might be wanted, but always more than the logic of self-preservation alone would have allowed.

The plague hit hardest in the great coastal cities of California. In the boundless sprawl of Los Angeles, the haphazard infrastructure quickly went to pieces, and the desperate efforts of surviving officials and volunteers could not begin to put the situation back together. The gangs permanently embedded in East Los Angeles and in other enclaves of the underclass, whose grip had developed greater strength with each passing year, ruled their territories completely now, even deciding who would have access to the sparse supplies of food. And the plague brought opportunity. The gangs soon reached out, first rampaging through the more prosperous districts of Los Angeles, then embarking on expeditions to ravage small towns, settlements, or individual homes as far away as Utah. Along with their increase in membership and wealth over the decades, the gangs had also learned increasingly sophisticated methods of presenting themselves to the world. At a time when food suppliers were afraid to enter gang-controlled areas, aware that their loads would be pirated and their drivers beaten or killed—if the plague spared them—gang representatives appeared on public-access radio and television to accuse the government of purposefully spreading Runciman's disease in the ghettos and barrios, and of attempting to starve minority survivors. Even the commercial media made time for the gang stories, anxious to offer something other than reruns and official announcements. The gang members were colorful, provocative . . . entertaining.