First Citizen (43 page)

The turn came in ’21. Arkansas sued for peace after the Battle of Little Rock and offered me command of their State militia. Oklahoma and Kansas joined in the terms of the peace, even though Wichita had been hotly fought eighteen months earlier. The two Dakotas claimed me for their own—that story of my being a “native son”—and subscribed to the peace. Indiana withdrew from further fighting because, they said with Hoosier wit, they were “tard of all the noise.” I was splitting the country.

When Colorado and Utah closed ranks with the TENMAC, Pollock was caught in the north. He had his eighth army—counting serially the ones he’d lost—outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in May of ’22 when Nebraska began making fed-up noises. They sent him polite warnings that if he dragged another shooting war across their cattle ranges, they’d hang him for me. I obliged by sending an aircav unit west from Kansas City as fast as I could.

There was nothing Pollock could do but retreat further to the west, into Idaho. To have gone north into Montana, which was wavering, would have meant eventually ending up in Alberta or Saskatchewan. And to cross the international boundary now would lose him the war for sure. So he went into Idaho, with Oregon—my part of the country—facing him on the other side of the Snake River.

My army, with Alcott in tactical command, caught up with him at Shoshone and stripped away his ground forces in a dawn strike. The air component they chased another 120 miles and the rest of the day, finally bringing them to heel at Eagle, just west of Boise.

Because most people don’t know where Eagle is, this clash went into the history tapes as the Battle of Boise River. However, given a map and three guesses, most people couldn’t have found that either without a key.

Alcott had his orders: cut it short and clean it up. With the war going my way, at last I wanted either a high casualty count or humble prisoners to parade back to the East. No more daring escapes, no more lucky heroes.

So the Battle of Boise River had to be an air war of attrition. It’s hard to surrender a Stomper or an F-25 convincingly. What do you do—promise over the radio to give up and then fly with your hands linked over your head? The only certain surrender had holes in it, with flames coming out. We littered a pretty little valley with burned-out birds.

Two days after the battle, I walked the ground with Alcott “So, Mike, where’s Pollock?”

He was looking over the aluminum cradle and starred plexi of a Stomper cockpit, one of theirs. Apparently the plane had hit the riverbank in a flat spin and come apart like a toy, without much fire. The bodies inside had already been tagged and removed.

“We shot down everything that was flying that day,” he said after a pause.

“And there’s nothing here in the wreckage.” I concluded the thought.

“No—no papers, no prints, no teeth.”

“And your observers didn’t track any low-flying bogies, no blips …?”

“Not in this fight. But … right after we hit them at Shoshone, there was a lot of scrambling.” He said this with a tight grin, embarrassed by the professional sloppiness. “Pollock could have snuck off then.”

“Abandoning his army in the first twenty minutes.” I made a face.

“He was already losing.”

“And he’ll never get another one. … Worse than a dead hero.”

Alcott kicked a fragment of spar, spinning it away over the sand. “This area’s clear, Gran, and no one’s going to find his body. Does it matter?”

“Not anymore.”

Chapter 20

Granville James Corbin: War Among the Lotus Eaters

Late in life, I found love. Love. Not the brittle mutual-advantage syndrome that my other wives and I had practiced. I finally found a woman with a perfect sense of herself, who fitted perfectly inside her body and her chosen life. Who could share openness and candor with me, yet remain caring and committed. I finally found someone who was like me in her loving. I found her in California, that great state of anarchy that had shaped so much of my early life. Actually, I went there looking for someone else.

Three weeks after the Battle of Boise River, a game warden patrolling the Malheur River basin in eastern Oregon found the wreck of a Command Stomper. This was a larger version of our aircav workhorses, fitted with extra comm and cyber gear for airtac, or airborne tactical control. It was the kind of plane a general would take into battle with twenty of his staff advisors. It had FSF markings on the fuselage and tail.

The crash site showed a short gouge in the rangeland grasses, ending in a bounce that broke the plane’s spine. The pilot had flown to the limit of his, or her, fuel reserves, then come in at a shallow, controlled angle from about 50 feet with the landing gear up. Why she, or he, hadn’t popped the gear and set down VTOL two or three miles back, in country no more rugged or closer to anywhere than this was, was a mystery. The game warden reported no bodies, no evidence of injuries, no telltale papers or personal effects, and the data banks were purged. Twenty anonymous men and women had crashed on a hillside and walked away.

Alcott sent a tech team to the site and the mystery became clear. Two sets of truck tires had gone cross country, cutting into the ground a mile west of the plane and—judging from the vegetation’s recovery—at about the same time as the crash. So the pilot had been stretching it for a rendezvous and run short of fuel. One answer.

Now, which way had they gone? North into Washington State and ultimately Canada? West to the coast, Coos Bay, and a boat? Or south into California? The tire tracks ceased to give evidence the minute they touched paved road, five miles from the site. We settled it by process of elimination: North or west took them out of my jurisdiction; south was the place to look. But if they, he, Pollock had gone into California, we might never find them, him.

Over the years since the breakup of Federal power in the late ’90s, California had become more and more isolated, especially in the north. The great eastern road, Interstate 80 from San Francisco to Reno and out across the deserts of Nevada and Utah to the rest of the country, had suffered when Federal money was no longer available to maintain it. The Californians paid to plow snow and repair potholes on the section through the Sierra to Reno, where the gaming action was. Then they figured it was cheaper to allow gambling in their own cities; Reno withered when there was no reason for people to go east.

I-80 was also the main truck route into and out of the region. When the road closed, the Santa Fe Southern system had regained its rail monopoly, which drove up the price of eastern freight, at least for bulk commodities and manufactured goods. In return, Northern California had turned its face more and more toward trade with the Pacific Rim for these things. Lately there had been rumors of exchange difficulties and embargoes with Asia, although this was all too far from my field of activity to bother sorting out.

In the south, connections through Vegas and Phoenix had remained more open, but mountains and deserts were still to be crossed. The water way, to Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, would eventually draw their eyes and their dollars, too.

Except for air travel to the eastern States, which only the rich could afford, the Pacific Coast became as isolated as it had been in Gold Rush days, when goods and news came around the Horn and were never less than three months out of date. The Californians, avant-avant and a little crazy by nature, developed a breed of anarchy that even I couldn’t control. They were part of TENMAC by geography and personal choice, not because they submitted to anything like a regional government.

We would be following Pollock into the worst of it. The Redwood Empire stretched from Crescent City to San Francisco along the Coastal Range. And facing it across the strip of upper Sacramento Valley were the dark forest counties: Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Sierra, Nevada, Placer, Eldorado, Amador, dense, green, secret, ingrown. The people of the valley towns like Red Bluff and Chico were sane, plain farmers compared to the ones who lived up in the forests.

The hill-country tradition had started fifty years ago, in the ’70s, when independent marijuana growers had taken over the national forests and held them with automatic weapons against backpackers, game wardens, Federal narcs, and the National Guard. Commerce Department statistics for the period might have said Northern California’s biggest crop was wine grapes. Pooh! The biggest
cash generator
in the State—bigger than financial paper, food processing, or petroleum—was maryjane. And all of that cash was going into private, very private hands.

The sheriff’s deputies learned to unbuckle their holsters and leave them in the patrol car whenever they stopped to take a leak. County extension agents learned to draw their salaries from the comfort and safety of their offices and keep off the land, thank you. State officials learned to check with the growers before proposing any tiresome legislation that, ten to naught, would be righteously ignored wherever the roads left the flatlands. A situation like that, carrying on for fifty years, erodes the social contract. It draws lines around what people will and won’t do. It leaves a lot of shadows where the mushrooms of not-sane behavior grow.

And we were going on a manhunt into this legal wilderness. I told Alcott I wanted at least five rifle companies at my back when we moved south from Oregon. But I left Mike in Oregon. Someone had to be outside, able to come pull me out if things got sticky, and Birdsong was rallying forces for the final push into the East.

I took a battalion of about 600 troops down I-5, which
had
been maintained, from Medford into Siskiyou and Shasta counties. We were mostly in Turtles, with a convoy of supply trucks behind and a short wing of Stompers overhead to provide high cover and spot ambushes. I’d ordered that everything be painted with TENMAC markings, the yellow sun-and-sea, at twice normal size. We didn’t want to be mistaken for an invasion force, although that’s what we felt like. I also ordered the pilots and Turtle gunners to keep their safeties selected. I’d preferred they took the first hit than spook the locals with nervous bursts at shadows. The shadows would probably fire back.

I-5 took us around the knees of Mount Shasta, across the spidery lake that was backed up by Shasta Dam, and down into the Central Valley. The highway purposefully bypassed the smallest cities and towns, which our recon flights said showed evidence of recent occupation but no people in sight. That didn’t surprise me: The phones still worked and you’d crawl into the storm cellar, too, if your neighbors up the road reported an army coming south.

The point was not to track Pollock, like a posse with dogs, nor locate him with detective work, asking questions door to door. No, we wanted to see the land, see what there was for him to encounter. And so far, we had found a typical early-summer day in the Sacramento Valley. Which is to say, the sun was just baking the green out of the fields and turning the concrete highway ahead into a river of white lead. No wonder the people kept indoors.

We were following the interstate south, beyond Cottonwood, when it ended. Not a washout but a cut, as clean as if it was made with concrete saws, thirty feet wide. The roadbed layers of aggregate, rebar, and gravel had been carefully dug away to the underlying soil, and that removed in a ditch fifteen feet deep. If we had been moving at night, we would have lost the head of the column into this hole. As it was, we pulled up, popped hatches, and looked in while the Stompers circled and swooped overhead.

“Turn back. You are not welcome here.”

The voice, electronically amplified, had come from a windbreak of trees a hundred yards away from the highway. There were trees on either side here, I noticed, dense ones. Backed up by knobs of hills that could have hidden a column of heavy tanks, although the Stompers reported nothing. They couldn’t see into the trees, however.

I went to my Turtle and fished out the handmike for its bullhorn.

“Who asks us to turn back?” I blared.

“The Federated Growers of Tehama County.”

“We have come in peace. We do not want to disturb your plantings.”

“You won’t, Bub.”

“We are looking for a party of men and possibly women, who may have come through here less than a month ago. About twenty people with—”

“No one comes through here.”

“But we have every reason to believe—”

“You have your feet planted on a piece of ground, Bub, that’s zeroed in for a dozen wire-guide, armor-piercing rockets, which we’re gonna let loose in about ten seconds if you’re not packin’ into your clamshells and gettin’ out of here.”

The morning sun was raising a dome of heat under my combat helmet. The sweat was leaking through my hair and running down my neck. I decided to try the obvious approach, an appeal to authority.

“I am General James Corbin, chief military officer of the States of the TENMAC, to which California is an original signatory. I respectfully request your civilian assistance in locating an enemy of the—”

“ ‘Corbin’ did you say?”

“Yes. General Granville James—”

“Then you’re the one.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. Shouting “One what?” seemed undignified, a slack-jawed dumb question for a commander to be asking in front of his own troops. The silence grew.

Then, from the trees, a party of men, ten or so, came toward the road. They were dressed in patchwork cammies, but were still civilians from their walk, the way they bunched and straggled in the face of an armored column. As they got closer, we could see that they were carrying machine pistols and carbines. Their rockets and their reserve troops, if any, were still in the trees. I noticed that the one in front was carrying a twenty-inch, tripod-mounted bullhorn, an awkward thing you
would
leave back there, if you had any sort of installation. One of his friends lugged along the twelve-volt car battery that powered it.

For the first time, I focused on a slat-sided green farm truck, parked innocuously on the other side of the ditch, about half a mile down the highway.

“I’m Jerry Dorner,” the man with the horn said. I recognized his voice without the amplification. He held out his hand to me. Caught off guard, I took it and shook with him.