*
After listening for a few minutes to Brother Frankland’s Hour of Prophecy, and rerunning the Kiowa’s recording one more time, Jessica decided that, whatever the dangers, she needed to send her rescue mission after all.
“We’ve got to dust off that farmhouse,” she told her staff. “I don’t know what the people in there did to get those others shooting at them, but I think we’d better do our best to part the combatants and sort out who did what later.”
Most of her helicopters had returned from their day’s errands, and after refueling she sent a half-dozen to Rails Bluff. Each craft was FLIR-enhanced so as to be able to navigate and maneuver at night without giving themselves away with spotlights or floods. Her own Kiowa was out of action until its ground crew could determine the extent of any damage, but since her pilot knew the country, she sent him as an observer on another craft.
The helicopters either weren’t armed or had no ammunition loads, but Jessica was able to send a platoon of engineers armed with light weapons and grenade launchers, soldiers who could either fire from the helicopter doors or deploy on the ground. They were to avoid confrontation, and fire only if fired upon, but primarily they were to find out who was in that farmhouse and evacuate them if it was at all possible.
The other helicopters could support by making threatening, low-altitude passes over any opposition, by illuminating them with spotlights, or— if their lives were in danger— by returning fire.
After dispatching the mission, Jessica filled out the paperwork justifying the sortie— work that was inevitable and mindless, and therefore almost adequate for distracting her from the knowledge that she’d just sent her people into danger— and then she went to the communications tent to listen as the radio reports came in from Rails Bluff.
Her booted feet crunched the plastic sheeting underfoot as she paced. After a while she noticed that the crackling made the communications techs nervous, so she sat on a canvas chair in the semi-darkness and tried not to fidget. Disaster scenarios panned across her mind, her people flying into an ambush, fanatic bunkered Arkansas bushwackers letting them land, then mowing them down with entrenched weapons. Her rescue team pinned down in the farmhouse, the unarmed helicopters unable to properly support them.
The scenarios contrasted with the calm words of the chopper crews that floated toward her across the miles, illuminated in the commo tent by the soft glow of LEDs and liquid-crystal displays. The lights reminded her unpleasantly of the fireworks she’d been seeing behind her left eye, and she closed her eyelids so as not to stir her unease, but then the fireworks began to flash, like helicopters burning in the night.
“Want some coffee?” She heard Pat’s voice.
Jessica thankfully opened her eyes. “Yes. Thanks.”
He poured from a thermos into a plastic cup. She took the cup and held it below her chin, letting the aroma float up to her nostrils. Pat brought a chair, sat next to her, and silently took her free hand; their linked hands dangled between their seats.
She tensed and leaned forward as the copters turned off their running lights in the final approach to the target area. The leader hovered over the bluff, scanned the area with their infrared detectors.
“The farmhouse is afire,” the observer reported. “I see no heat signatures in the area that resemble vehicles or human beings.”
Jessica restrained herself from lunging forward to snatch up a microphone and start barking out orders. The sortie leader gave the orders that Jessica would have given anyway, to reconfirm the absence of human or vehicle IR signatures, then to advance cautiously in a dispersed formation so as to get a wider view of the area.
“I am on visual,” another observer reported. “I see what appear to be two bodies in the yard of the farmhouse.”
“I confirm.” Another observer.
“An adult and what appears to be a child,” the first observer said.
Jessica squeezed Pat’s hand. A child. God in Heaven.
The sortie commander brought in a Huey to land in the yard while the others flew cover. Armed engineers piled out of the Huey on landing to secure the area, scout the outbuildings, and examine the corpses.
“A middle-aged man in civilian dress,” the report came. “A little girl, maybe five years old. Both dead by gunshot.”
At this point Jessica decided that it was time to give an order. She took the microphone and ordered the Huey to return with the casualties, keeping over the Delta and flying without running lights until they were well clear of Rails Bluff. The rest were to spread out and gather as much intelligence as they could without giving away their presence.
Jessica returned to her seat, took Pat’s hand again, and gave thought to what she would do next. It was clear she must report this matter to her superiors. After that it was very probable that the matter would be taken out of her hands. Her authority involved civil engineering, not military operations. The area was full of military units that were getting really tired of looking after swarms of complaining refugees and their screaming children. Tired of repairing roads, cutting brush, and jacking up buildings that had fallen off their foundations. A lot of soldiers who just wanted to get back to soldiering. One of them would get the Rails Bluff assignment, she knew, whatever it turned out to be.
But she badly wanted to be a part of what happened next. She didn’t want to turn the matter over to some hotshot who was going to get a lot of people killed.
Besides, she thought, those motherfuckers shot at me.
She turned to one of her radio operators. “Get me the commanding general, First Army,” she said.
She was going to figure out a way to keep her hand in, whatever happened.
*
Jessica contemplated Matthew “Tex” Avery, the burly black man who, with his family, had been pulled by one of her helicopters out of a cotton field near Rails Bluff in the middle of the night. Tex had sprained his ankle falling into a crevasse as he ran with his family from the Reverend Frankland’s camp, and now sat in a cot in a corner of the infirmary tent. His sprained, bandaged ankle was propped up in front of him on a folding chair, with a plastic sack of ice melting atop it. His abrasions had been cleaned and bandaged, and he’d been given a clean set of BDUs in a forest camouflage pattern. With his scraggly two days’ beard, he looked less like a refugee than a guerilla fighter just extracted from the wilderness.
“Tex?” Jessica said. “This is Colonel Rivera. I’d like you to repeat to him everything you told me this morning.”
Eddie and Rivera shook hands. Colonel Orlando Rivera was a stocky man who wore the sleeves of his tunic rolled up above biceps clearly sculpted by many dedicated hours at the curling machine. He commanded a Ranger unit that CG First Army had assigned to the liberation of Rails Bluff, and he had come in ahead of his command, which was still being pulled out of its rubble-searching duties in Greater Memphis and reunited with its combat equipment and transport.
The commanding general had said that Rivera was a reasonable type, a War College graduate, not a hothead, willing to work and play with others instead of stomping in and taking charge and committing heinous bloody massacre and otherwise acting like a macho stud. Jessica had been skeptical of this assessment, but so far Rivera seemed perfectly amiable.
And a Ranger, too, Jessica thought. And one with biceps. Would miracles never cease?
More important than the Ranger, perhaps, was the ruling she’d received from the Army’s legal counsel. Her proposed action, the ruling stated, was legal. Martial law had been declared by the civil authorities in that part of Arkansas over two weeks ago, and never rescinded. The Army was allowed to get as martial as it felt necessary.
Jessica and Rivera sat crosslegged on the ground by Tex’s cot while he went through his story. Rivera asked questions about the chain of command at the camp, the number of guards on duty at any one moment, how often the guards went on and off watch. Tex answered as best he could, but it was clear he had tried to keep as far away from the guards as possible and had little information on their movements.
Jessica and Rivera thanked Tex and returned to the tent Jessica had erected on the edge of the helicopter pad, where she had gathered everything available on Rails Bluff: all the maps, tapes of radio broadcasts, all the videos from the various aerial scouting missions, and all the interpretations of the data that had been provided by MARS sources.
Among the various data present was the fact that someone trained in photo interpretation had counted no less than ninety-six human-sized infrared signatures in Rails Bluff and vicinity. The Pentagon had people whose job it was to count things on reconnaissance photographs— numbers of tanks, antiaircraft missiles, and soldiers marching in formation— and Jessica had no reason to question the basic accuracy of the number.
That was a lot of people to get caught in a crossfire.
“The question is,” Rivera said as he frowned down at the information, “how many of them are armed? And of those armed, how many are willing to offer resistance?”
“Tex said that most of them had no weapons. That there was a hard core of supporters from the churches of the three preachers, but that everyone else was without arms, and that a lot of those were apathetic.”
Rivera didn’t seem reassured. “So how many is this hard core? Fifty? That still leaves a lot of bystanders.” He looked grim. “Or hostages, however they want to play it.”
Jessica looked at him. “We own the night,” she said. One of the Army’s unofficial mottoes, proudly proclaiming that they could move and fight as well in darkness as they could in the day.
Rivera looked at Jessica for a long moment, then nodded. “It’s best that everyone wakes up tomorrow morning and finds out their camp’s under new management.”
“I think that’s how it should be played.”
He stroked his chin.
“Well,” he said, “let’s look at a map.”
“There.” Pointing. “The key to the position. This big tank, or whatever it is.”
“Tex said it was a catfish pond,” Jessica said. “Ten acres.”
“That’s where the sniper was, according to Tex. Just one man. We could put a battalion in there and they wouldn’t see us unless we wanted them to.” Rivera looked at the photograph. “Can we see any sentries on that embankment? If I were trying to hold that camp, I sure as hell would put people up there.”
The latest photographs from Rails Bluff had just come in. Jessica had managed to get an Air Force RF-16, the reconnaissance version of the F-16 fighter, tasked to her command from a combat wing in Texas. The RF-16 had overflown Rails Bluff at high altitude, presumably without anyone on the ground taking notice, while snapping one detailed photo after another. The results had been flashed to Jessica’s command tent, printed, and were on her desk within two hours of the sortie’s landing.
Jessica took her magnifier, bent over the photo, looked down at the catfish pond through her left eye. There were strange little flashes in the corner of her eye, and she shifted the magnifier to the right.
“I don’t see any sentries there,” she said.
“That camp’s spread out along the road, made up of smaller camps lined up in a long row. With the unmarried men at one end, the unmarried women at the other.” Rivera grinned. “They’re not so much interested in defense as keeping the single men and women as far apart as possible. We can flank the camps and cut one off from the next. Particularly if we can maneuver out of that catfish pond.”
“Sorry to interrupt, General.” One of Jessica’s staff standing by the door and offering a folder. “The latest weather forecast.”
“Thank you.”
Jessica looked at the satellite photos, the attached isobar map, the analysis, and didn’t know whether to feel relief or not. The strong high-pressure system that had been sitting on the south-central U.S. since just after Ml was finally moving. A big wall of low pressure was dropping out of the Rockies across the plains, bringing cooler, wetter weather.
It would be a relief to be out of the heat for a while. But as the whirling high-pressure area was shoved eastward, the moisture it had been sucking out of the Gulf of Mexico and dumping on the western plains would move with it. Torrential rains pouring across her entire area of operations weren’t going to make her primary job any easier, not when half the country was flooded and the rest was bogged in the muck.
“This is going to help us,” Rivera said. “In foul weather the camp sentries are going to be spending their time under cover, not looking for us.”
“It may affect our ability to surveille the area.”
“Can we get another photo mission scheduled before sunset? The long shadows would be valuable in showing us anything we’ve missed.”
“The Air Force is cooperating.” She gave a laugh. “They’re just like the Army— in the national emergency, the glamour units are tired of taking a backseat to the support elements.” She glanced quickly at Rivera, suddenly aware that she’d just been tactless. Keep your opinions to yourself, she mentally snarled.
“No offense,” she added.
Rivera grinned. “No problem,” he said.