Ralph Peters (6 page)

An attempt to move the California National Guard into Los Angeles resulted in the deployment of understrength units with little or no training for such a mission. Assailed whenever they drove or marched down a street, whether to unload canned goods or to pick up the garbage, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would eventually open fire. This time, the media stories focused on the Guard's brutality and on their victims. The reporting proved so inflammatory that violence erupted in other cities across the nation, where the situation previously had been brought under control.

In Los Angeles, the power system failed and water service became erratic, with the available water contaminated. Bodies lay in the streets. Unable to enter vast areas of Los Angeles County, the thinned ranks of the police and the Guard struggled to protect those neighborhoods where the gangs did not have roots, leading to even more strident charges of racism, both from the now unprotected poor and from reporters who did all of their investigations by telephone, afraid to risk their lives on streets that the plague and the gangs had divided between them. Increasingly, the media relied on gang-supplied video material.

The Kingman massacre, in which a desert town was largely destroyed as its residents fought it out with far-better-armed gang members, forced the issue onto the President's desk. Against the advice of the most politically adept members of his cabinet, he declared a national state of emergency and ordered the United States Army into Los Angeles County.

The Army took only volunteers. Many of the men who stepped forward were victims of the disease who had survived and thus had nothing to fear from at least one of the enemies ravaging Los Angeles. As a result, the first units deployed often had the grimmest look of any the United States Army had ever fielded. But there were other volunteers as well, men who were willing to risk everything at the call of duty. Unit commanders were not always certain whether they should be ashamed of how many men refused to go or proud of the majority who quietly signed the release forms and earned their pay. It was an Army whose morale had been shattered by the African debacle— but which still discovered the strength within itself to face a mission that promised to be even more thankless.

Lieutenant Meredith found himself cradled in a relatively safe job at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, working on computer analysis models that attempted to explain the African debacle, and mourning the dreams of his parents. The worst of the plague seemed to have passed by the local area, and Meredith was slowly overcoming the nightmare of death and disfigurement that had followed him from Kinshasa to the Azores, intensifying even as the regularity of horror numbed the conscious mind. He had always been vain about his looks. Yet he put in the paperwork to join the special task force on duty in California. Terrified whenever he paused to think, he could not explain to his bewildered commander or to himself why he would choose so foolish a course of action. There was no logic in it, no sense. They could not even offer him an intelligence position of the sort for which he had been trained. There were, however, plenty of openings for substitute cavalry and infantry platoon leaders, who seemed to die as soon as they breathed the East Los Angeles air.

He found himself in charge of a ground cavalry platoon on escort duty east of the Interstate 710-210 line. He received no special training. There was no time. The platoon itself was operating at an average strength of sixty percent, and the troop commander under whom Meredith found himself looked as though he were barely up from his own sickbed, his face and hands gruesomely scarred by Runciman's disease. Although the man was rumored to be one of the few genuine heroes to emerge from the mess in Zaire, it took all of Meredith's selfcontrol to reach out and accept the hand his superior offered in welcome.

Meredith entered no-man's-land. White residents feared and did not trust him. The Hispanics attacked him with insults whose thrust was unmistakable despite the language barrier, pelting his utility vehicle with dead rodents and excrement. But the worst of his problems came with the black gang members and their hangers-on. Meredith found himself accused of levels of betrayal he had never realized might exist. Shots punctured his carryall and a firebomb barely missed him. Late one night he returned from a dismounted patrol to find a decaying corpse propped behind the steering wheel of his vehicle.

Thankfully, there was little time for soul-searching. There were always more convoys to be escorted than there were available cavalry platoons, more ambulances to be accompanied, more streets to be patrolled than the most rigorous schedules allowed. And there were soldiers for whom lieutenants needed to care.

Keeping the soldiers under control was one of the most difficult aspects of the mission. It was hard for young boys not to lose their tempers and respond with the loaded weapons they kept at the ready. Further, the gangs sought to corrupt the soldiers with money, women, and drugs— and not every soldier proved to be a saint. In his first three months in L.A., Meredith found it necessary to relieve one man in every five, including one bone-thin mountain boy overheard bragging that he had come to California to do him a little legal coon-hunting.

Slowly, the tide appeared to be turning. The plague began to signal an intent to move south for the winter, and the system of food distribution points, medical care, and quarantine sites took hold. There were more volunteers from the public at large now, usually men or women who had survived a bout with RD. The Army had established order in the city during daylight, and the nighttime situation was improving. The media were never censored, but they were required to have a reporter on the scene if they wanted to file a report from the martial law zone, and they were required to publicize the sources of any secondhand news footage they broadcast. The hearsay reports taken by telephone across a continent stopped, and the reporters who were gutsy enough to accompany the Army into the most troubled areas soon began to air and publish stories far less deferential to the gangs. Incidents and even small-scale firefights continued. But there was no doubt about who was winning. The reorganized National Guard even began to assume some of the Regular Army's responsibilities in the county.

The gangs grew desperate. The number of soldiers lost to snipers or assassination increased, and the gangs threatened to execute volunteer workers. There was a pitched battle when a coalition of gangs attempted to raid the internment camp for gang members that had been established at Fort Irwin, California. Four bloody hours of fighting, with the camp guards forced to defend themselves against external attack and an internal prisoner revolt, resulted in dozens of Army casualties—and hundreds of dead or wounded gang members. A heliborne response force had blocked the escape of the raiding party, and many of the gang members involved in the attack found themselves inside the camp with the prisoners they had intended to rescue. The raiders who attempted to escape fared even worse. Army patrols continued to find corpses in the desert for months.

Meredith grew confident. He still seemed to lead a charmed life, untouched by bullets or disease, and his training as a Military Intelligence officer proved to be a good background for the challenges his cavalry platoon faced on the streets of Los Angeles. He had even become something of a favorite with his former troop commander, who had been promoted to major and appointed acting commander of the squadron after the car-bombing death of the lieutenant colonel who had been in command. Major Taylor was a hard, taciturn man, who showed his partiality by giving those officers in whom he had the most faith the most challenging assignments. Meredith, who had just pinned on the silver bar of a first lieutenant, received more than his share, and he relished it, quietly growing vain.

Then the inevitable happened. Unexpectedly. There was nothing special about the feel of the day. Just another food convoy to be escorted into Zone Fourteen. Slow progress through the streets, taking care. Machine gunners standing at the ready in the beds of their carryalls. Watching.

But there was nothing to watch. Only the slow movements of the city struggling back to life. The novelty of a taco stand that had reopened, and the routine chatter on the operations net. Down streets that seemed asleep, turning into others where rudimentary commerce had resumed. Street punks hurling curses out of habit, bored by it all. Then a gutted street where Meredith could remember spending one very bad night. It had all grown routine.

Meredith's vehicle was positioned in the middle of the long convoy, where he could best exercise control. He could not even see the problem that had brought the convoy to a halt. The lead vehicles had already turned the corner up ahead.

"
One-one, you need to talk to me,
"
he said into the radio hand mike.
"
What's going on up there? Over.
"

He waited for a response for an annoyingly long time, then he ordered his driver to cut out of the convoy and work up to the head of the column. He could smell burning tires now.

As soon as he turned the corner he saw the smoldering barricade of junk. A crowd had begun to emerge from the stairwells and alleys, from storefronts and basements. Meredith immediately recognized a gang-sponsored
"
event
"
in process.

Meredith's driver hit the brakes. A body lay sprawled in their path. It was impossible to tell whether it was a plague victim or just some local drunk on bootleg liquor. But the carryall sat at an idle.

Meredith could see the head of the column now, and he could see why Sergeant Rosario had not answered his radio call. His vehicle was surrounded by the crowd.

"
One-one, I've got a fix on you. Just hold on. Out.
"
Meredith flipped to the operations net.
"
Delta four-five, this is Tango zero-eight. Over.
"

The ops net was ready.
"
This is Delta four-five. Go ahead, Zero-eight.
"

"
Roger. We've got an event. Between checkpoints eighty-eight and sixty-three. Looks like a big one. Maybe two hundred cattle, unknown number of cowboys working the herd. No smoke-poles in evidence, but you can feel them out there. Over.
"

"
Lima Charlie, Zero-eight. Dad's on the way. Just hang on.
"

Meredith calculated. If the choppers were busy with a higher priority mission, it would take a wheeled response . . . two to three minutes for the reaction force to mount up ... at least a twenty-minute drive ... it was going to be a long half hour.

In the distance, Meredith could see Sergeant Rosario's beefy chest rise above the crowd. The NCO was standing on the passenger seat of the roofless vehicle, trying to talk the mob down.

"
I'm dismounting,
"
Meredith told his driver.
"
Listen to the radio.
"
He turned to the machine gunner and rifleman in the bed of the carryall.
"
Keep your eyes open, guys. And don't do anything stupid.
"

He slipped out of the vehicle and began to trot forward along the stalled line of trucks, hand on his pistol holster, more to keep it from flapping than out of any intent to draw his weapon. Restraint had pulled him through more bad situations than he could count. If you could put up with the taunts and the little humiliations, you could survive. The gangs usually did not want to take on any Army element in direct combat.

He could see that Sergeant Rosario held no weapon in his hands either. The technique was to appear confident but not overly threatening. It took good nerves. He tried to remember which of the privates were manning Rosario's vehicle today. He hoped that they could just control themselves. Panic would make a mess of everything.

Walters was driving, he remembered. And Walters was all right. He'd sit tight. And Jankowski was on the machine gun. Who was the other one? Meredith could not recall. The replacements came so fast. Few vehicle crews and fire teams could maintain personnel integrity for very long.

His heart pounded. The civilians huddled in the doorways or grouped on the sidewalk watched him coldly. This was definitely Indian country, and none of these people were likely to be the sort who did volunteer work for the Red Cross.

Faces sullen. Touched with death. Scars from RD, scars from fights. No way to tell who was armed in the crowd.

Meredith slowed to a walk. He did not want to appear nervous. And he was close enough to hear the voices now.

"
You fucking spic,
"
a black man in a small leather cap taunted Rosario, shouting loudly enough for the crowd to hear.
"
You got no business here. You don't need to come around here with no guns. All that food you got, all that shit belongs to the
people.
"

The crowd agreed. Noisily. Rosario tried to respond, calling out something about the food being on its way to the people, but his voice sounded unsure. Rosario was a good NCO, but Meredith could sense the wavering in his big torso now. Meredith began to feel the specialness of this crowd, this street, this air. He could not begin to put it into words, but a charged, fateful feeling quickened his skin.

Rosario made a mistake. In a desperate, peevish voice, the NCO yelled at the crowd: