Foreign Enemies and Traitors (5 page)

The president’s eyes narrowed.  “My God Sidney, this is almost like the Ukraine in the 1930s.”  The corners of his mouth subtly turned upward, to form the icy smile that only his closest confidants recognized as an expression of true joy.  His broad public smiles and easy television tears were as false and calculated as any masks of wood or plastic.  This was the real Jamal Tambor, a sphinx with the political brain of a chess grandmaster and the cold heart of a crocodile.  Only a handful of people had ever seen this private side of the president, and Sidney Krantz was one of them.

“You do know your history, Mr. President.  I wouldn’t say that it was exactly the same but…yes, there are parallels.  Hunger can be an effective weapon.  And as you know, we have established dozens of feeding centers in the relocation areas to draw them out of the evacuation zones.  The problem is that too many of the local people are still holding out.  They won’t leave their homes, even without electric power.  So thousands of them are staying in place and resisting our relocation and reconstruction efforts.  But that’s all right: there are less of them every month.  It’s winter.  They’ll either come into the FEMA relocation centers or they’ll starve.”

“I’m not seeing any starvation on television.”

“No, of course not.  The earthquake-damaged areas are under emergency law, and that means the media are kept out.  It’s a fairly simple matter to control the news flow, to spin it our way, because this time the insurgents really are shooting at our troops.  If it’s too dangerous for our troops, it’s too dangerous for reporters.”

“
Our
troops?” the president corrected.  “Don’t you mean the NAL troops, and the foreign contract battalions?”

“Well, you know what I mean.  Technically, they’re ‘our troops,’ even if they’re not American citizens—yet.”

“But using starvation as a weapon…Sidney, if it ever gets out…”

“Don’t worry, it won’t.  Back when Stalin was starving them by the millions in the Ukraine, the
New York Times
even won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting how great things were there.  And the
Times
is still on our side.  They hate those inbred snake-handlers down South just as much as we do.  And what the
New York Times
reports, the rest of the media are happy to parrot.  Don’t worry, it’ll never get out.  The major media are behind us.  There’s nothing in writing about this food policy.  We have perfect excuses; we’re covered in every direction.  It’s all because of the earthquakes, and the rebels who are shooting at our troops.  I just don’t see a down side for us.”

“Well I do—time,” retorted the president.  “Starvation takes time, time we don’t have.  We need Tennessee wrapped up before summer.  Before we can move our forces to the Northwest we need to have complete control everywhere east of the Mississippi River.”

“I agree.”

“Then tell this Robert Bullard to light some fires down there!  He needs to motivate those foreign troops and get this thing over.  Finish it!  I want to visit Memphis and Nashville by the time the magnolias are blooming.  You can do this for me, can’t you, Sidney?  It’s very tricky, this strategy.  There are many perils, many risks…”

“Don’t worry, Robert Bullard has a handle on it.  We’ll make your schedule.” 

Actually, Sidney Krantz wasn’t sure if the starvation strategy would work in time, but he didn’t tell the president that.  And he certainly didn’t tell him about the one ace left up his sleeve; this option was a little too radical for Jamal Tambor to hear about.  If the foreign mercenaries, freezing temperatures and starvation couldn’t clean out the last rebel pockets in West Tennessee, he had another ally ready to bring to the battle.  From old university contacts he had obtained a research vial packed with tiny germs called
Yersinia pestis
, more commonly known as the bubonic plague, or the Black Death.  Plague was long endemic among wild rodents in the American Southwest, but at a very low level.  A few infected rats could have hitchhiked into the earthquake zone on trucks, and then nature would have taken its tragic course…yes, that was plausible.

Coming on the heels of Cameroon fever and the avian flu, nobody would be too surprised by an outbreak of the Black Death in Tennessee.  With the remaining population already compromised by stress, cold, hunger and illness, the plague would rapidly finish them off.  Even among a healthy population, the untreated mortality rate was well over 50 percent.  Yet because plague was easily treatable with standard antibiotics, it would pose little danger of spreading across the river boundaries of West Tennessee, beyond the quarantine zones and into the rest of the federal states.  Once the plague outbreak was publicized, the last stubborn holdouts in West Tennessee would rush to the FEMA relocation centers in order to gain access to the lifesaving antibiotics.  Even if a relatively small percentage of the remaining population were infected, blind fear of the plague would drive them into the welcoming arms of the government. 

Krantz had done his homework.  He had learned that the plague germs needed a local species of immune rodents to serve as a reservoir, in order for them to become a long-term problem in a given region.  Once the infected rats and humans died off, the epidemic would wind down.  At temperatures above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, fleas infected with
Yersinia pestis
did not transmit the disease.  When they died, the germs died inside them and the cycle was broken.  Warm, dry summer weather would finish off the plague outbreak.  With no pool of immune rodents to contain the disease until the following autumn, the danger would disappear after one killing season.

Foreign troops operating in the Mid South, with ready access to antibiotics, would be at almost no additional risk.  And if any of them did contract the disease and die, well, they were just foreign soldiers anyway.  In the end no tears would be shed for dead mercenaries, no matter what the cause of their demise.

Probably, though, it wouldn’t come down to using bubonic plague as a weapon.  Sidney Krantz could give starvation, cold and the foreign soldiers a few more weeks to finish the job.  But if they were still stuck in this Mid South quagmire next year…then he’d do whatever it took to accomplish the president’s mission on time.  People didn’t whisper that he was the president’s Rasputin for no reason.

                                     
           2

Phil Carson left Seabago for the last time
at dawn
on the second day after his shipwreck.  The occasional bloated bodies of the recently drowned were beginning to stink, and he was glad to depart the catamaran, jumping from the starboard hull over onto rotten timbers and rusted cars.  Feral dogs, rats, crows and vultures, already at work on the dead, scurried or flapped away at his approach.  The bodies must have been carried in on the surge tide; there were no signs of nearby human habitation.  Scattered bones, some partial skeletons still wearing scraps of faded clothing, reminded him that this landscape of death and ruin was not new.  In sharp contrast to the death and decay around him, it was a beautiful winter day along the Gulf.  The sky was clear blue, streaked with high cirrus; he guessed the morning temperature was in the fifties.  A fine day for a walk, he told himself.

His tan pack weighed only about thirty pounds.  Almost half of that weight was drinking water contained in various recycled plastic bottles.  For now, he was wearing old Reeboks, stained khaki work pants, and a torn green T-shirt.  He knew that he would eventually be confronting officials, and his outward appearance was carefully considered.  He was unshaven since Brazil, and the gash at his hairline was obviously new, as were his black eyes and other bruises and contusions.  He carried the bare minimum, only items that would plausibly be in the possession of a recently shipwrecked mariner.

Climbing up, over and around the jumbled debris with thirty pounds strapped to his back, Phil was grateful for his recent weeks of sailing.  The constant exercise involved in sailing had left him strong, agile and fit, especially compared to most men his age.  His knees bothered him less now than they had a decade earlier.  The constant searching of distant horizons had actually honed his vision.  His old blue eyes betrayed him only at close range, when reading fine print or working with tiny parts.  Reading glasses were a small but indispensable crutch, a nagging reminder of his age.  He had gray hair to be sure, and permanent crow’s-feet and laugh lines on his face, but most of the time he felt no different than he had at age fifty—or at forty, for that matter.  Aches and pains were more frequent and longer lasting, but what else could be expected after sixty-four hard-lived years?  Only his face betrayed his decades.  Sun, wind and weather made him look his years, and with his cut and bruised face, he looked even worse. 

By noon, the marshes and creeks had turned into a swampy forest of skinny pine trees.  Many of them were snapped or cracked halfway up by previous storms, forcing him to climb over and through the deadfall.  Like the marshes, these woods were jammed with trash and debris.  Just after 1:00 p.m., he climbed up a final steep bank and found railroad tracks, running east to west.  They were unused, if the rust on top of the steel rails was any indication.  A hundred feet beyond the tracks was a paved state road.  He walked the tracks for an hour until they diverged away from the road, heading back into the marshes to the southwest.  This presented him with a choice.  After pausing to drink water from one of the plastic bottles in his pack, he quit the elevated berm of the railroad for the asphalt road, and continued west.  The two-lane road was covered in many sections by sand and mud left behind by the storm surge.  Where its surface was uncovered, he walked on the left side of the cracked asphalt.  There was no traffic.  Not a single car.

Trees, billboards, utility poles and wires were down across the road, but even two days after the storm nobody was working to clear the obstacles.  The scattered houses still standing were roofless and long abandoned.  An old cinderblock gas station and an even older roadhouse bar were windowless and empty. 

****

“Put it down right there, on this side of the barn.” 
Robert Bullard liked to sit up front in the empty copilot’s seat.  His four-man personal bodyguard detail sat behind him in the chopper’s passenger compartment.  The choice of seats was a perquisite of his Senior Executive Service rank.  He had never been in the military, but sitting up front, he felt like an Apache or Blackhawk pilot, racing across Western Tennessee.  Wearing a headset, he could listen to air traffic control or switch over to other military and law enforcement radio nets. 

It was great to be working again, after that fiasco in California had sidelined him for almost two years.  Sidelined hell—he had been under virtual house arrest.  At least the views had been terrific from his bayside penthouse condominium in downtown San Diego.  The important thing was that he had not been indicted.  Actually, he considered himself fortunate to have avoided a stretch in Club Fed.  His first month under house arrest, he had expected to be served with an indictment on an hourly basis.  Now he understood why he had been kept in the deep freeze, under investigation instead of arrested.  When the highest echelons of the federal government needed the most difficult and dirty jobs handled, they needed men like Bob Bullard.  Well, he really couldn’t bitch.  Even though he had lost his millions in gold back in California, at least he had not been arrested or imprisoned.  Now he was just glad to be back in the saddle.  After two years of house arrest, he would have accepted a posting to Alaska, just to get out of his condo in San Diego.  It was all relative.

“Those are stables, I think,” the pilot answered on the intercom.  They both wore headsets over ball caps and sunglasses. 

“Yeah, whatever.  Put her down.”  Bullard pointed to the spot.  He was wearing his usual unofficial uniform of khaki pants with a matching khaki windbreaker.

“But we’ll spook the horses if we land there.”

“And do I look like I give a shit?  No, I do not.  Just put this chopper down where I tell you.”  Bullard knew from experience that the Kazaks could spend entire days galloping back and forth on these mile-wide fields.  The chopper would run out of fuel long before they finished playing their game of goat polo.

Bullard’s pilot flared out for the landing and brought the machine down.  He set the blue-and-white executive helicopter on the grassy field, scattering horses and riders, a few rearing or bolting off at a full gallop.  While the rotors were still turning, Bullard stepped down from the helo, accompanied by his bodyguards.  They all wore black combat vests and matching ball caps over black uniforms and were armed with compact assault rifles.  Alongside another barn was a row of military trucks and a separate line of ASVs, menacing four-wheeled Armored Security Vehicles with little tank turrets on top of their angle-faceted bodies. 

The helicopter’s jet turbines were still winding down when the leader of the Kazaks trotted up on his white Arabian.  The horse was nervously tossing its head in fear of the chopper, and it was tightly reined in by its rider.  Colonel Yerzhan Jibek was also accompanied by his own squad of horse-mounted bodyguards, Kalashnikov rifles slung across their backs.  The horses and riders made visible breath plumes in the frosty air.  Colonel Jibek was dressed in the earth-brown garrison uniform of the Kazak Battalion, with knee-high leather riding boots.  A leather pistol holster with a cover flap and a leather Sam Brown belt matched his boots.  He was tall for a Central Asian, at least a six-footer.  On horseback, he positively loomed over Bullard and his bodyguards.  The man exuded health and confidence.  Bullard guessed he was quite a lady-killer, with his thick mustache, high cheekbones and dark eyes.  (Not that the local girls had much choice in the matter of romance with the foreign peacekeepers.)