One Year After: A Novel Read online

  He tackled Makala, knocking her to the floor and rolling with her up against the outer wall, the window a foot over their heads shattering into a thousand shards. A split second later, Wagner was dead, nearly torn in half from a bursting twenty-millimeter shell that also killed his assistant and the boy they were both trying to save. For a second, the room was a cacophony of exploding twenty-millimeter shells, shattering glass, blood splatters, screams, and hysteria. John’s memory flashed to the videos posted on the Internet showing the work of gunships killing terrorists in the years after 9/11, the comments on the web pages nearly orgasmic with delight, laughter, and jokes. Yeah, they had been enemies who deserved to die, but had all those commentators ever seen people up close as twenty-millimeter shells exploded in their bodies?

  Makala was screaming not with fear but horror at the sight, and John buried her head against his chest, holding her tightly, forcing her up against the wall and shielding her with his body. Where were Elizabeth and Ben in all this madness? Elizabeth’s post was on campus. He had caught a glimpse of her as he’d left the communications center, but he had not had time to speak to her. Ben, thank God, was in a shelter in the basement of the girls’ dorm.

  He spared a quick glance up over the edge of the windowsill and then instantly ducked back down. The second helicopter was nearly on the tail of the first, which had roared overhead in a sharp banking turn to avoid slamming into the mountains that bordered the northwest slope of the valley. Another volley of fire ripped into the room, but there was nothing left to kill or destroy; all three surgical stations were a shambles. The chopper roared overhead, and John stood up, pulling Malaka to her feet.

  “Run!” he screamed. “Get into the back rooms. If they had put a rocket in here, we’d all be dead. Now run, and keep down until they’re gone!”

  She looked about wide eyed, and for the first time since they had met long ago, he could see that she had become completely overwhelmed with the horror of it all.

  John pushed her into the hallway, which was a sea of chaos. He heard the helicopters coming back, and a few seconds later came that surreal sound almost like yards of cloth being torn, but it was not hitting the Assembly Inn this time. He cracked open an emergency exit to look out and saw the old gym getting torn apart, and this time, two rockets were unleashed into it, blowing off part of the roof, igniting fires within.

  He smiled grimly.

  So you did see me go in there, he thought with bitterness. He wondered if their supply of rockets was running low, perhaps the last two reserved for a personal strike against him. If so, it had spared those in this building.

  The helicopters continued on down the valley after the two strikes, and he slipped out the door, crouching low. A minute later, he heard distant explosions. They were back to ripping Black Mountain apart.

  He went back down the corridor and spotted Makala in one of the storage rooms, struggling with a set of forceps to dig into an elderly woman’s arm to close off an artery and clamp it shut. Though the woman was obviously in agony, she was talking calmly to Makala, reassuring Makala that she was doing a wonderful job. Makala clamped the forceps shut, telling the woman to hold on to them with her good hand and that someone would be along shortly to tie the artery off.

  In a gesture John thought nothing less than surreal, the elderly woman first reached out with her good hand and gently stroked Makala’s cheek, telling her that she was a beautiful woman whom she would pray for. Makala actually leaned against her for a moment, beginning to sob again. The woman saw John, and he recognized her as an old friend who had worked in the bank and then disappeared into retirement some years earlier.

  “John, I hope you are well,” the woman said in a soothing voice. “I think your wife needs a good hug before you go running off again.”

  Her tone so startled John that it actually did take him aback. He smiled, thanked her, and put his hands on Makala’s shoulders, turning her around.

  “Sweetheart, I have to go now. And you have to do your job. I love you.”

  She hugged him tightly, then exhaled deeply, drew in another breath, and stepped back.

  It was mostly just acting now, but for the moment, she had regained some control. The shock, the nightmares, the waking up screaming in the middle of the night, that would come afterward, as it did for so many veterans, but for the moment, she could still do what she was trained to do.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “Be safe.”

  “And you too, John.”

  As he turned to go back out into the madness, the old woman looked at him and smiled. “God will watch over the two of you,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on her, John.”

  That nearly broke him as he came back to kiss her on the forehead and then went back out into the fight.

  He found Maury with his Jeep, tucked into a side road a couple of blocks to the south of the Assembly Inn. As he climbed into the Jeep, he heard more gunfire and looked back to see one of the Black Hawks circling high, undoubtedly to avoid small-arms fire, pouring a long stream of tracers and incendiaries into the campus, igniting numerous small fires.

  “All right, let’s try to divert that son of a bitch,” John announced, Maury grinning at him as he reversed the Jeep out of the driveway of a private home.

  “Where to?”

  “Right down Montreat Road, but get ready to break up a side road.”

  “Sure thing.”

  They turned out onto the main road in and out of the cove, most of it well covered with trees. Once the gate was in sight, John told Maury to slow down while John stood half up and kept a very close watch overhead. It sounded like the Apaches had finished up their third run over Black Mountain and were most likely heading back to Asheville to rearm. But one of the armed Black Hawks was still up there, and though John wanted to be seen, he definitely did not want to get the last surprise of his life by a Black Hawk suddenly rearing up from behind some trees and unleashing on him and his friend.

  The observation Black Hawk remained, slowly circling above Montreat for another half minute while Maury guided the Jeep through the stone gate and continued on the main road into town. The circling helicopter swerved slightly and turned south.

  “Okay, get us the hell under some cover!” John shouted, and Maury pulled into the camp just south of the Montreat gate, the forest-canopied hiking paths and bridle trails the perfect place to hide from eyes looking down from above. John prayed they didn’t have infrared, as well, because if so, the hot block of Maury’s engine and exhaust could be their death signature.

  A Black Hawk suddenly came swooping in from the east and banked up sharply. It was a tense moment, as if they were probing, trying to flush game, John feeling like a terrified rabbit that knew it must remain absolutely still even though the hunter was but a few feet away. The helicopter then leveled out, continued on a few hundred yards, and hovered for a moment, shooting up an abandoned convenience store farther down the road before continuing on with its search.

  Continuing along back lanes, the two pressed back into town. Parking in an alleyway on the north side of State Street, John and Maury slipped across the road and back into John’s first observation post above the hardware store. A fair part of the downtown had been shot apart, a dozen or more buildings aflame. The Posse had never gotten this far, the damage of that battle confined to the east end of the town. It was heartbreaking to see the devastation wrought by two helicopter air strikes. Though shops had been long closed, their owners who were still alive were desperately trying to contain the flames to salvage what little they had left.

  His firefighting teams were under the strictest orders not to mobilize out except for fires that threatened shelters and hospitals. Several residents of Cherry Street, seeing John slipping along a back lane and into the rear of the hardware store, called out to him for help. He paused.

  “God forgive me, we can’t help you!” he cried. “Any crowd right now will draw fire from those bastards up there!” No one argued f
urther or cursed him as the bringer of this doom, a curse he half felt he really did deserve.

  Once back in this reserve position, he took in the sight of the wreckage, the smell of wet, charred wood, and the stoic gaze of the two old radio hams who were monitoring traffic.

  “News?”

  “Three choppers are back on the ground, according to our observer up on the parkway. They also report it looks like their fuel bladders are running low.”

  John nodded at that. They certainly had been profligate these last two days, burning more fuel than he would ever dream of allocating for months of productive labors. With a regular army unit of Apaches going into action from a forward deployment, there would be enough fuel, ammo, and rockets on hand to support several dozen sorties before calling up the chain of command for additional support. In Desert Storm, an entire brigade of airborne—the largest air assault since the Second World War—had gone in with scores of helicopters and set up a forward base inside Iraq with dozens of the new fuel bladders and had torn the hell out of the rear lines of the Republican Guard. It was the first full demonstration of air/ground warfare that had been refined in the long years after Vietnam.

  Fredericks was most likely operating on a short leash, and he had to gamble on that one now. A strike against the reivers, with four aircraft or sorties. Upward of a dozen more sorties now against him since early this morning. Surely he was beginning to come up short on fuel and ammunition. Hopefully the air attacks were finished, at least for now.

  “Report coming in that a fourth helicopter is coming in to land,” one of the hams announced.

  John nodded. “You still have the frequency they are operating on?”

  The ham nodded.

  “Switch to transmit.”

  “John, they’ll track us the same way they tracked that forward recon unit.”

  “He’s on the ground or just about down. Now’s the time to send him a message, and then we move this unit down south of the railroad tracks.”

  The ham smiled, nodded, and handed John the mike. “Fredericks, do you read me?”

  There was a moment of static and then the click of another radio coming online. “Who is this?”

  “You know damn well who it is.”

  A pause.

  “You drag out your response to more than thirty seconds, and I shut down,” John replied sharply.

  “You called me,” Fredericks replied.

  “Just to tell you this, Fredericks: I’ll not be satisfied now until I see you dead, and I hope your people are listening to me. Your alleged leader has violated the most fundamental laws of humanity, of warfare, and of what our country and Constitution stood for. Refuse to obey his orders, and you’ll be spared. Comply further, and you are as guilty as he is, and in the eyes of the world, you are no longer any part of what America was and will continue to be.”

  He clicked the transmission off before Dale could even reply.

  “Let them stew on that,” John said coldly. “Wait twenty minutes, then get on the horn and send out the coded message for our unit leaders to meet in the Ingrams’ building at six tonight. It is time for some payback. I’m heading back to the hospital.”

  Though there was no indication that another strike was up, Maury maneuvered cautiously until they finally pulled up a block behind the Assembly Inn, and he walked the rest of the way.

  He thought he had learned to get used to it; an essential part of his job had become visiting the wounded and dying on a near daily basis after the battle with the Posse and the numerous other skirmishes afterward. He had dealt with bullet wounds to the gut, students facing death with all painkillers depleted, asking him to hold them and pray. He had dealt with far too much, but this was different. The hospital had been deliberately attacked, nearly a hundred within, most of them already wounded and torn apart by the strafing attacks.

  Drying blood was splattered against the walls in the corridor. Out behind the Assembly Inn was now an open-air morgue. More than seventy dead from the attack lay side by side, covered with blankets and bloodstained sheets. Families and loved ones were sitting beside bodies, lost in shock, and he recognized many of them, horrified to see a former student holding the lifeless hand of a girl he had married but a month earlier.

  All of it filled him with cold, intent calculations as he sat down beside Forrest’s cot, his room a storage closet that was windowless and stifling hot in the late-afternoon heat, the scent of unwashed bodies, blood, and filth hanging strong in the room. John coughed to conceal his gag.

  Forrest chuckled weakly. “Guess I stink like shit,” he whispered.

  “Well, you ain’t no bouquet of roses, Forrest.”

  “How bad is it out there?”

  “Bad.” John sighed. “More than a hundred dead here and a couple of hundred wounded downtown. It is devastating.”

  “I feel responsible for this,” Forrest said. “You doing what you did for us.”

  “What the hell was I supposed to do? Turn away a bunch of kids?”

  “You could have taken the kids and dumped me by the side of the road or turned me over to Fredericks, and all this could have been avoided.” He pointed out to the hallway that was a charnel house.

  John shook his head. “We both went through the same training a long time ago, Forrest. Our wars were different, we took prisoners and treated the wounded.”

  Forrest chuckled. “Well, at least when CNN was around.” He paused. “But yeah, unless we were dealing with a sniper or some bastard who had killed a lot of innocent people, we still took them in.”

  “Handing you over to Fredericks is not what this community is about. And besides, I owed you one. That guy with you, George, tried to take me out, and you were the one who put him down. So what the hell was I supposed to do? But honestly, I didn’t expect this level of retaliation.”

  “And now you wish you had done different?”

  “Hell no! If that bastard is willing to do this, he would have wound up doing it anyhow at some point, to others if not to us, Things are spinning out of control. I pray it’s not all the way up to Bluemont, but this is not the way to pull this country back together.”

  “So why are you here?” Forrest whispered.

  “I think you and your people are the experts we need now.”

  “Go on.”

  John ran his idea past Forrest, who nodded with approval. “You have to act now, tonight,” Forrest replied, “otherwise, tomorrow will be even worse. You have to assume he has at least a few people infiltrated in here who are reporting on everything, and more targets will be pinpointed.” He paused and smiled weakly. “Hate to admit it, John, but in those first minutes when my encampment was hit, I thought it might have been some of your people who called it in. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. Remember an old song—Crosby, Stills & Nash—the line ‘Paranoia strikes deep, into your soul it will creep.’”

  “Never heard of them.”

  John forced a smile. “Different generation, I guess.”

  “Anyhow. Get some of my people in here, John; we’ll go over the plan. They know the way in and will be your point men.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DAY 749 • 2:50 A.M.

  As each member of the lead assault team went into the drainage pipe that ran under Interstate 240, John offered them a pat on the back, a soft word of encouragement. Seventy were going in, divided into five assault teams, each one guided by one of the reivers. It was a route they had used for over a year to infiltrate in and out of the area of Tunnel Road to scavenge for supplies from the abandoned stores that had once lined the road—and also for raids for food. They had even been so bold as to pull a raid and holdup on Mission Memorial and disappear back through this concealed approach, which emptied out onto a trail that took them back over the parkway and then over the mountains to their home base.

  This whole thing was one desperate gamble, but the report that had come in even as he was leaving Forrest’s bedside had sealed t
he decision for John. A transport plane had touched down at the Asheville airport, apparently loaded with supplies for the choppers. If they didn’t do this now, come morning, the nightmare over Black Mountain would resume. It was obvious that Fredericks would just keep pounding from the air until either they submitted or the entire town was destroyed.

  John looked down at the illuminated dial of his old-style wristwatch. Five minutes to go. He leaned back against the embankment, breathing hard. It had been a day and a half since he had slept, and he cursed the fact that he was getting older. He felt utterly exhausted, his chest, head, and mouth aching, but in the next few minutes, he had to be sharp and ready to go.

  Everyone had made clear to him that his forays to the front were finished, and he reluctantly agreed. The concussion was clearing up, but all the running, ducking for cover, and slamming Makala up against the protection of the wall in the surgery ward had cracked his barely healed rib open again. Each breath was a stabbing pain, a sneeze or cough absolute agony.

  To ensure he stayed back from the front line, Kevin Malady gladly conspired with the town council, assigning Grace and a half dozen of their best as his security and communications team, along with his neighbor and friend Lee Robinson, who was given the order that if need be, he was to knock John down and sit on him, something Lee could easily do.

  He kept staring at the watch. It was still three more minutes before everyone was to be in place, especially the one crucial player for this entire attack plan who needed the most time to infiltrate into position.

  Suddenly, a shot rang out, and then another, and then a long staccato burst of automatic fire, followed by a white flare going up, the magnesium light burst flooding the area around the mall with startling brilliance, revealing many of his troops out in the open, not yet across Tunnel Road.

  “The shit just hit the fan!” Lee whispered. John looked back at his reserve team, mostly students but veterans, as well, whom he would have to commit if the lead assault failed—which, at this moment, he feared just might be happening.