After America (9 page)

“Man in left,” he called out, and Milosz entered, his finger with a half pull on the trigger, the muzzle pointed down the dark musty stairwell. The rangers switched on their tac lights, illuminating a small world of mold, peeling paint, and pigeon shit. The stairs were slick with four years of inattention to care and cleaning.

Wilson and Sievers followed him, the team moving down the steps like a death adder with its teeth out. The crash and uproar of the battle outside fell away only marginally, and Milosz could tell from the heavy drilling sounds below them that at least one heavy weapon was still firing from this building. Every so often, he could hear the
whoosh
of an
RPG
climbing away.

Wilson held a closed fist up to halt the squad in place in the stairwell while he queried the enemy’s position via his headset. Milosz moved up with Sievers to cover the door leading to the top floor.

“This is Romeo one-one to any element,” Wilson said. “We’ve effected entry. Request location of hostile elements, over.”

Milosz could not hear the reply on Wilson’s headset. He watched the black soldier nod his head once, twice, then a third time.

“This is Romeo one-one, verifying. North side, one floor down from the top floor, one heavy machine gun and an unknown number of RPGs. Is that correct?” Wilson asked the unseen, unheard voice.

After a fourth nod, Wilson signed off. Milosz often wondered why, in the American Army, he could get a headset in the Blackhawk but they did not have individual headsets for soldiers. Delta Force had them, those few he had encountered,
GROM
had them, and even the British doled them out to their troops, but not the Americans. And so in this way the Americans wasted vital time yet again.

“Okay,” Wilson said in a low voice. “Like I said, one floor down, at least halfway along the northern face of the building, we got a crew-served machine gun, something heavy and nasty, and a couple of
RPG
launchers, which are pinging our birds. Some prisoners would be good but not essential. Let’s go. Sievers, you’ve got the
SAW
, so you got the lead.”

“And lovin’ it,” Sievers said without any real enthusiasm.

The team moved out behind him, sweeping the hallway in front of them as they went. Milosz brought up the rear, pausing and turning to cover their asses every ten yards or so. There was no indication of any hostile activity on this floor, no sounds of gunfire or voices. Outside the building, though, all was murder and bedlam. They turned the corner at the end of the corridor and flowed around into the next hallway. Rocket fire had struck heavily on this side of the building and opened it up to the outside, collapsing part of the floor between this level and the one below. Small fires burned here and there, and Sievers brought the team to a halt well short of the worst of the devastation. Milosz could see the sky through an enormous hole that looked as though some hungry giant had taken a bite out of the top floors of the structure.

A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed away into the air from somewhere below. Milosz heard a babble of excited Arabic that he lost in the roar of a heavy machine gun from the same location. The team perched silently, their weapons trained on the enormous breach. Wilson signaled to Milosz to ready a couple of frags, and they all inched toward the opening. The thunder of battle rolled on outside, with the crump of rockets and the pounding of guns drowned out by the percussive roar of close-quarter Blackhawk and Apache flybys. The ranger fire team took up position just back from the ragged edge of the collapsed floor and wide-open facade, every man tossing his grenade at a signal from Wilson. The detonation hammered at the floor underfoot like a short, spastic tom-tom beat, and when Milosz’s ear stopped ringing, he could hear nothing of the men below.

“Clear,” called Raab, who had moved up to take a quick, furtive look over the edge.

“Right, let’s keep moving,” said Wilson.

Milosz was exhausted. He had not been this tired at any time in Iraq. But then, he had not been involved in such dangerous, close-quarter battles there.

An hour after the last shot sounded in anger, Miguel lifted a cigarette to his lips with a badly shaking hand.

Why didn’t I stay in Poland?

He knew the answer to that. There was no future in Poland. But having just nearly been killed in a room-to-room firefight with three dozen doped-up pirates who weren’t worth … what was Wilson’s phrase? Ah yes, hen shit on a pump handle. A good phrase. He would note it down in his little book of useful American words. Yes, having nearly been killed by these fools, he did have cause to question his decision to move out here with his brother’s family. They were safely tucked away in some big homestead down in Texas where the cowboys lived while he was being shot at by pirate fools who did not even have the decency to allow him to get close enough to stick his fighting knife in their gullets to settle the score.

When Raab and Sievers had attempted to capture one of the wounded pirates, the crazy man had blown himself up, killing Raab and crippling Sievers and very nearly doing the same to one Fryderyk Milosz, too.

Perhaps he would be better off behind a mule, like his brother. Perhaps it was preferable to holidays in the woods of Washington State trying to harden soft volunteers into rangers who were less soft. Perhaps behind a mule would be better than filling out requests for the Special Forces qualification course, the next step on his journey toward Delta Force. A maddeningly slow journey since the U.S. Army made him go through the hoops regardless of his
GROM
service.

But farming was not an option, of course.

He was here because his service had bought the ticket that allowed his brother Stepan and his family to join the federal settler program down in Texas two years ahead of time. He hoped his brother appreciated it, Milosz thought as he manhandled a naked and wounded Somali out of the building and toward the Manhattan militia patrol boat.

The Somali was naked because neither Milosz nor Wilson would take his surrender without proof that he had not booby-trapped himself like his crazy-ass Arab friend. Two civilians in khakis and dark polos took the man without comment, probably superspooks from the National Intelligence Agency. He was not the first naked pirate they had carted off, apparently. Milosz gladly washed his hands of the African fighter and made his way over to the ruins of a barge, stepping over the guts and brains of a recently departed combatant without batting an eye. A pair of Navy SEALs were in the debris, sifting through it all.

“Anything?” Milosz asked.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the SEALs asked.

“Fryderyk Milosz, staff sergeant, army rangers,” he growled back. “That’s who the fuck I am, you dolphin-fucking dickwad. So. Did you find anything?”

“No, Sergeant,” the
SEAL
said, not much chastened. “Aside from some old Soviet-era manifests, we haven’t found shit. Some of these crazy fuckers preferred blowing themselves up to giving it up for us. Ended up shooting most of them. Anything else,
Sergeant
?”

Milosz grunted and walked away. He sometimes grew tired of the xenophobia of some Americans, especially ones who should know better. Did he not just prove himself to this man? Had he not been proving himself since he set foot here and took up a rifle for his new country? Seemingly not.

He left the SEALs to do their work and returned to the Blackhawk, where a subdued Wilson was sitting with his legs dangling from the cabin, pouring the contents of a Tabasco sauce bottle into an
MRE
meal pack.

“Want some, Fred?” Wilson asked. He set the bottle on the floor of the Blackhawk with a badly shaking hand and started to turn the food over with a shit-brown spoon. “Got chili mac for once. They are getting harder to find.”

“No thank you,” Milosz said, squatting down beside Wilson. He removed his kevlar helmet and proceeded to rub his scalp until the blood flowed again.

“Don’t let that asshole bother you,” Wilson said. “I’m glad you’ve got my back.”

“Yes.” Milosz nodded wearily. He jerked his thumb back toward the barge. “I am not to be upset by asshole who eats the pussies of rotting beached whales, no. I am tired and upset by Raab and Sievers. They were good guys, yes?”

Wilson exhaled raggedly, “Yes, they were. I only knew them since getting out here from the West, but they were a good team. We all were, Fred. You were a big part of that. Still are.”

“Thank you,” the Pole said as he leaned against the chopper and felt waves of lassitude roll over him. “Is it normal, these pirate bitches blowing up themselves and good guys like Raab and Sievers? It reminds me of crazy men in Iraq, yes? Before Jews turn them all into melted glass.”

The senior
NCO
gave two empathetic shakes of his head.

“No way,” he said. “I was here for the sweep and clear of Lower Manhattan. Didn’t see nothing like that. Didn’t see much resistance at all, really. Pirates just sort of melted away.”

“Have you heard anything yet about who these brazen nig nogs were to be shooting rockets at President Kipper?” asked the Pole.

Wilson pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Fred, you’re gonna have to learn to watch your words, my brother. You’re an American now. You cannot say things like that.”

Milosz tilted his head, genuinely perplexed.
Does Wilson think I am referring to him as well?

“Like what?”

Wilson looked as though he’d been struck by a bout of the squirting assholes and was straining to stay puckered.

“You know, the N-word.”

“Nig nog?”

Wilson winced yet again. “Yes, please. Don’t say it anymore.”

Milosz shrugged. Never mind that he heard many black soldiers saying far worse to each other. He had seen more than one confrontation erupt when someone who was not black also said it. The rationalizations and counter arguments made his head spin. What was the saying?

Oh, yes: not the hill you want to die on.

“If you say so.”

They were strange, these Americans, he thought as he dug a half-melted chocolate-covered cookie, a track pad as they called them, from one of his pockets.

They would think nothing of killing a thousand nig nogs in a morning’s work but became entirely discomfited if you referred to the nig nogs in any but the most delicate of terms.

He had come to a very peculiar place.

Texas, Federal Mandate

They used bedsheets and coverlets as shrouds for the dead. Few words passed between them. Sofia seemed too stunned to say anything. Miguel had expected her to cry or lose control of herself, but that had not happened. Sofia moved mechanically to collect her rifle from the house along with a first-aid kit. She took the keys to the gun cabinet from him without a word. Even though he implored her not to, she passed from body to body, checking vitals to see if anyone was left among the living. He managed to stop her before she reached little Maya; that was a task from which he wanted to spare her. She flatly refused his offer to remove herself from the scene of the massacre and stand watch for the road agents.

The agents had turned right at the main gate to the ranch less than an hour ago, probably headed for the village of Connor, a few minutes up the road toward the junction with Route 21. Perhaps they had looting to be getting on with up there, or perhaps they had carried on to one of the other settler ranches. For now Miguel’s main concern was to be gone before they returned in search of their dead comrades. But before he could get Sofia safely away, he had his own dead to attend to.

He carried all the bodies inside the homestead himself. One of the few times he did speak to Sofia was to tell her not to pick up her little brother.

“No, no,” he said softly as she bent over Manny like a poorly strung puppet, all stiff limbs and awkward swaying. “I shall do that. Go inside and get me some more blankets.” He spoke as gently as he could, adding “please” as an afterthought.

Miguel did not need any more sheets or shrouds; he had plenty, but nothing was served by having the girl there.

He was determined that she would not carry through life a memory of the terrible dead weight of her brother in her arms. One day, with God’s blessing perhaps, she might remember Manny smiling and squealing as they wrestled on the floor of the homestead.

What God?
he thought bitterly. No loving God could visit such horror on the world.

He turned again to Sofia. “Could you see to the dogs, I can hear them barking; they are still tied up in the barn out by the pond.”

She nodded stiffly, as though she had hurt her neck, before moving slowly away. Miguel spit into the mud and tried to ignore the acid burning in his guts. Much of his body felt numb, his limbs in particular, as though he had lain awkwardly for hours and cut off his circulation. His fingers sometimes tingled painfully, however, a feeling not unlike having grabbed an exposed electrical wire. Having felt like it might explode out through his chest earlier in the day, his heart now beat slow and hard like a pile driver.

He covered Grandma Ana in the bright patchwork quilt she had begun knitting in the evenings in the refugee camp in Australia. Darkness stole in at the edge of his vision and a thick crust of salt hardened around his heart as he draped an army blanket over his son, little Manny. It had been given to them by the federales in Corpus Christi when they arrived to take up their place in the resettlement program. The children had driven Mariela to the edge of madness turning it into a tent in the lounge room on rainy days all through the winter just passed.

Corpus Christi, he remembered, was where he had first heard about the road agents, in a lecture from an
FBI
man about the dangers of the frontier. He had said nothing about them being Fort Hood’s men, but Miguel had made it his business to find out as much as he could about them. He had thought he was being careful, but it had not helped.

As he moved from one member of his family to the next, covering them for the last time, he tried to murmur a prayer for each one, but found that the words would not come. He had no prayers to offer. Just once in the terrible business of collecting his dead did he falter, when he picked up Maya. Still so small and looking as vulnerable in death as she had in life. A high-pitched keening sound caught in his throat, and he had to bite his cheek hard enough to draw blood to regain some control over his feelings. He would mourn for her later. He would mourn for them all later, but for now Sofia still lived and it was to her safety and welfare he would have to attend first, after seeing to the remains of his family.