Foreign Enemies and Traitors (11 page)

“He’s usually riding a horse this time of morning,” offered Bullard.  “A white stallion.”

“Well then, let’s start over at the stables.”  Harry steered the camera, and in a few minutes of searching he found a mounted party.  He zoomed in the camera until the men were vaguely recognizable. 

“That’s him, in the middle.  With the mustache and the brown beret.”

“How do you want to do this?”

“Well, you can just shoot him, can’t you?”

“Right now?” asked the senior UAV tech.

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Kind of unusual, taking out one of our loyal allies from the People’s Republic of Kazakhstan.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say he was so loyal,” replied Bullard.

“Hey, it’s your call, chief.  Okay, here’s how we’ll do it.  I’ll line the SniperHawk up for a straight glide-in, right at his back.  As long as he doesn’t turn too much, this should work just fine.”

“They won’t hear the drone?”

“A SniperHawk?  Hell no.  No way.  Silent but deadly—that’s our motto.  I’ll bring her in low and just pop her up for the shot.  They’ll never see it or hear it.”  Harry cracked his knuckles and went back to his keyboard while staring at the screen.  “Okay, watch a pro at work, see how it’s done.  We’ll use both screens: this one is the Predator, this one is the SniperHawk.  This’ll take a minute to sync up.  Okay, I’m cutting the Hawk’s engine now, and arming the rifle.”

“What’s that thing shoot?”  Bullard already knew; he was just testing Harry’s level of knowledge.

“What caliber?  It’s a special round, very fast.  A 6.5 millimeter.  Fully suppressed, so there’s nothing but sonic crack, and that doesn’t give a directional reference.  Okay, here we go, just watch your man on the horse.”  Harry used his track ball to put a white crosshair on Colonel Jibek’s back.  “Fully stabilized.  Once I designate the aim point, it’ll lock on and fly the bird.  There, it’s done.  You want the honors?  Just push this button here when the crosshair is where you want it.”

“Sure thing.  This is great.”  Bullard leaned across and pushed a red button on its own small keyboard.  A second later he was rewarded with the image of Jibek slumping forward and sliding from his horse to the ground.  Around him, the other horsemen wheeled and reared their mounts.

“Okay, I’ll take her back around now.  Nice shot, chief.”

The director of rural pacification chuckled.  “Yeah, I’m a natural.”

****

Lieutenant Colonel Foley
returned for another visit on Friday after lunch.  Phil Carson met him outside the tent this time.  Carson had been exercising, jogging around the dozen tents in his section of the quarantine center, trying to get into shape for a possible escape.  Once again Foley was wearing his unpressed camouflage uniform, with his beret worn like a rag and his hair over his ears.  Like many military doctors, he lacked any semblance of military bearing, and looked anything but sharp.  Carson attributed this sloppiness to the doctor being drafted into the Army for a second hitch, only this time four decades later, at retirement age. 

The weather was unseasonably warm, in the low seventies.  Carson had rolled up the tent’s back wall.  The doctor brought a promising-looking brown paper bag.  They entered the tent together without exchanging greetings, and Foley sat down at the white plastic table.  He removed his beret and dropped it on his lap, then ran his fingers through his gray hair.  He gestured to the other chair, and Carson took a seat opposite him.  Carson was wearing cutoff shorts, sneakers and a tan T-shirt with the logo of a bait company on the front.  The three T-shirts Carson had packed from the catamaran were chosen to be disguises of one type or another, including a commercial fisherman with amnesia.   

“Good afternoon,
John Doe.
  I brought you some snacks.”  Foley opened the bag and pushed a can of Coke across the table.  “There’s some cookies in there too.”

“Thanks, doctor, I appreciate it.”  It was the first can of pop Phil Carson had seen since the catamaran was halfway up the Caribbean, when their stock of sodas had run out.  There should have been plenty for the entire voyage from Brazil, but Paulo had been sneaking extras on his watch.  He imagined that soft drinks must be quite precious in Mississippi under the present conditions.  In the quarantine camp, all he’d had to drink was tepid water that smelled of sulfur, and weak Kool-Aid.  The Coke was a rarity, something that was not grown or produced locally.

“Are they treating you all right?” asked the doctor, removing his wire-rimmed glasses and wiping them off with a cloth from his pocket.

“I suppose.  I hardly ever see anybody, except when they bring the food around.”

“You’re getting enough?”

“Peanut butter sandwiches?  Yeah, great protein—I’m not complaining.  So what brings you around today?”

“Well, I was hoping maybe there was some improvement in your condition.  Your head injury looks fine.  The wound is closing, and the swelling is gone.  Definitely no infection.  Any more headaches?”

“Some, but not as bad as before.”

“How’s the memory, any change?”

Carson had to measure his words carefully; a slip before a trained medical professional might betray his false amnesia.  “Well, I’m getting some flashbacks now and then, but it’s mostly old stuff.  I think it’s from when I was a young man.  I’m fairly sure I was in the Army.  Maybe I’m just mixed up—maybe I just saw too many war movies—but I think I was in Vietnam.  Sometimes I think I was in the Special Forces.  It’s all kind of floating around in my head.  Maybe I’m just getting confused by being on this Army base.  Maybe I’m just inventing false memories, I don’t know.  Nowadays practically everybody around here is wearing a beret, but for some reason I think I used to wear one too, way back when.  Most soldiers didn’t used to wear berets, did they?” 

“No, only the elite units.  Personally, I hate the things; we have to wear them in garrison.  Off base, we can usually wear patrol caps, depending on what we’re doing.  So, is anything more recent coming back?  Any places where you might have been, any faces of family members?”

“No, it’s all pretty vague, kind of swirling around.”

“Hmmm…okay.  Well, I’ll leave you a pen and paper; a notepad.  When you remember things, anything, write them down.  That’ll help get your thoughts organized.”

“Thanks.”

“You mentioned ’Nam,” said the doctor.  “You know, I did a tour over there, in ’69.  As an enlisted man—college and medical school didn’t come until later.  I wound up as a Huey door gunner.  Not something I’ll ever forget, I can tell you that.  We hauled Special Forces around sometimes…doing insertions and extractions, medevacs.  You must have taken quite a whack to the noggin to knock
those
memories out of your head.  Too bad I can’t send you out for an MRI or a CT scan.”

“Don’t worry about it.”  Carson took another grateful sip of his tepid cola, eyeing the doctor.  The flavor was off; it didn’t taste like a real Coke.

“Hey, there’s another reason I’m hoping you get your memory back.”

Now we’re getting to it
,
thought Carson.

“It’s no big deal, but…I was sort of hoping you’d remember where you came by the coffee.  Maybe there’s more where that jar came from.”  Doctor Foley locked his eyes on Carson, and the stare was reciprocated.

“Doc, I’m not sure of anything.  I just remember stumbling around in wreckage that went on forever.  It’s almost like I was
born
there, somehow.  I couldn’t remember anything before it.”

The doctor paused, subtly casting doubt on Carson’s story.  “Do you think the coffee was already there? On the land, I mean.  Like you just happened to find it out there somewhere?  Or if you were shipwrecked in the hurricane, maybe it was on your ship, or on your boat?  You have a sailor’s hands, and better muscle tone than most men our age.  Could you have been on a fishing boat?”

“I guess it’s possible.  Maybe it’ll come back to me.”

“Well, if it did come back to you, that’d be a good thing.  Let me tell you, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some real coffee of my own.  I only managed to snag a few cups from what my medics took from you.  It’s already gone.”

“I’m sorry I can’t help you out.”

The doctor stared heavily at him across the white plastic table.  Carson wondered if he believed the amnesia story at all.

“Well,” continued the doctor, “just FYI, real coffee is worth serious money these days.  Coffee doesn’t grow anywhere in the emergency zone.  It has to be imported, and, well—it’s not.  At least not that I’ve seen.  Not in Mississippi anyway.”

Carson smiled inwardly while maintaining a poker face.  “The emergency zone?  What’s that?”

“Most of the Southeast.  Eastern Louisiana and Mississippi, over to Georgia and South Carolina, and the top part of Florida.  We’re under martial law.  That’s how I got drafted…again.”

“Martial law?  When did that happen?”

“After the hurricanes.  A year and a half ago.  Two in July, one after the other.  Then a real monster hit in October—a category five.  Matilda, the mother of all hurricanes.  Hundred-and-ninety-mile-an-hour sustained winds.  The whole country was already in a depression, and those hurricanes just broke our backs down here on the Gulf.  Especially Matilda.  She dumped twenty inches of rain on most of the South in one day.  Floods like you would not believe.  And practically nothing came from FEMA or the federal government.  We were on our own.”

“What about the hurricane last week?” asked Carson.

“Ricardo?  Oh, that one was just a baby.  Hardly a hurricane at all, just a December freak.  Anyway, October a year ago we got hit by Matilda.  Hooked in across Louisiana and zigzagged right along the Gulf Coast.  ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ they called her.  Took out most of our reconstruction, what we’d managed to put back together after the two July hurricanes.  Then six weeks after Matilda, that’s when the Memphis quake hit.  You don’t remember hearing anything about the quake?  Nothing?”  The doctor was wide-eyed, incredulous at Carson’s flat affect.

“No, nothing, I can’t remember anything about a quake,” Carson lied.  He’d heard about it on shortwave radio news broadcasts, and from individual ham radios he was occasionally in contact with.  There was a high percentage of propaganda and rumor on the official and unofficial radio news, but he’d heard about the devastating quakes that followed the killer hurricanes.

Doctor Foley eyed him doubtfully while sipping his own cola.  “Memphis got hit by a Richter eight on December the 15th a year back.  The aftershocks went on for weeks, and there was another big one in January.  That was just about the worst part.  The aftershocks kept everybody living outside in the rain and cold.  Memphis just about got flattened.  Nashville and St. Louis were slammed hard too.  The whole Mississippi Valley, really, but Memphis was the worst.  It was practically cut off from the world.  Most of the bridges went down.  Barges couldn’t move because the bridge wreckage blocked the rivers.  Coal and grain couldn’t move on the rivers, and the highways were cut all over the place too.  Bridges, overpasses…they all went down.”

“All of the bridges?” 

“I’m not sure how many, but enough to stop just about anything from moving.”  The doctor smiled wistfully.  “Railroads too: they got all twisted up.  And pipelines.  Most of the pipelines that took natural gas from the Gulf up to the Northeast got taken out, right in the middle of the winter.”

“Damn…”  Carson had never heard these details before.

“Then without the coal barges on the rivers, most of the power plants shut down—the ones that weren’t already knocked out by the quake.  So people froze, and
more
power plants went down, one after the other.  It was like dominoes, a chain reaction.  The quake came right after Matilda, so it stopped the hurricane relief effort…what little there was anyway.  The South was written off by Washington.  Triage, I guess.  Then after the second big quake, everything just spiraled out of control.  Religious folks called it God’s judgment.  The people in Memphis went crazy.  It was like a race war up there when the power went out and there was no more food coming in.  They were starving in no time, but where could the refugees from Memphis go? 

“We sure couldn’t take them here in Mississippi…we already had enough of our own problems.  So we kept them out: we held the line.  We could do it, since the state National Guard was already in control down here after Matilda.  The refugees couldn’t cross the Mississippi River either, not with the bridges down, and Arkansas wouldn’t take them anyway.  Arkansas was almost as bad off as Memphis was, so they couldn’t help even if they wanted to.  We were on our own.  One problem just fed off the other, it was a cascade of disasters.  Anyway, that’s what happened.  But I’ll tell you what—martial law beats what we had before it.  Beats it by a mile.”

“And that’s why coffee is so hard to come by a year later?  Martial law?”

“That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Well, the economy is a wreck.  And not just because of the hurricanes and the earthquakes.  We were already in a depression before them.  The disasters just put the final nails in the coffin.  Here’s how it goes now.  Things like coffee can only be sold for an official price that’s set by the government, plus a percentage for ‘reasonable profit.’  That probably comes to something like fifty bucks for a two-pound can of coffee, except I haven’t seen any coffee being sold for months.  I’m just guessing.”

“Why would they do that?  Price controls never work.”

“It was to be
fair
, so that everyone could afford things, right?  Everybody was against hoarding and gouging.  Maybe right after the hurricanes and the earthquake, maybe it made sense, for a while.  But the price controls never went away, since we’re still in a state of emergency.  So now, a year later, who’s going to sell coffee or anything else for the official price?  Nobody.  And who’s going to bother to import it if they can only sell it at a dead loss?  Nobody.  That’s why we’ve got no coffee.  The government tried to fix the economy and make it fair for everybody, but instead they just about totally wrecked what was left of it.  Plus, coffee comes from South America, and they won’t sell it for New Dollars.”