Nobody said anything to that. They just looked at one another grimly and did their jobs.
They’d worked through the night, and the longer they’d worked under the portable floodlights, the more what Honky Joe said made sense to Kim. They unloaded fencing from the flatbeds and set it up in a great perimeter, and there was no getting away from it: it looked like a holding pen. No, actually, it looked like a clean version of a refugee camp. Trucks and troop transports kept coming in; support material, portable toilets, water trucks, and tents getting set up. There was a constant stream of traffic. Trucks with supplies and trucks that were mobile buildings. Kim couldn’t help but wonder where it all came from. Los Angeles? San Francisco? Las Vegas? All three? By six in the morning it was a terrifying sight: the US military mobilized. Near as Kim could tell, there were in the neighborhood of four or five thousand troops, a full brigade. It was fucked-up. This wasn’t some sort of make-work training drill.
She was tired, and grateful for the coffee. The food could be pretty bad sometimes, and the coffee occasionally tasted like it had been filtered through socks, but it was always full of caffeine. She looked up and watched the tiny plane doing a lazy circle around the small city they were building. A black helicopter was buzzing around maybe a mile away. There were a couple of AH-64 Apaches loaded with missiles and ready to be all badass, but they were on the ground, rotors stilled. The airborne helicopter wasn’t marked, but as near as Kim could tell, it was the sort of bird that muckety-mucks in suits liked to play in. After a few minutes of the plane circling overhead, the helicopter, which had been lingering out near where flatbeds were still pulling in, peeled off hard and up toward the direction of the plane. Whoever was in the plane, whatever civilian it was at the yoke, wasn’t curious enough to stay; the plane straightened course and headed out. The helicopter tracked it for a few more seconds then turned back to where it had been hovering, came in low, and settled.
The lieutenant gave a yell for the platoon to finish up. Kim drained her coffee, pulled her work gloves on, and looked at her squad, Honky Joe, Sue, and the few other soldiers around her. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever the fuck we’re doing, just look alive. Something’s coming down the pike.”
Point Fermin Park,
Los Angeles, California