Standing in the Storm (The Last Brigade Book 2) Read online

  “Yeah, for you to get out of my way.”

  “General, sir, shouldn’t we be getting back? You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

  “Move. I’m not going to shoot the bastard, at least not until S-2 gets through with him. And make a note, Lieutenant Sully is now Captain Sully.”

  “I heard, General.”

  Walking straight to Busson, Angriff put his mouth inches from the prisoner’s nose. “Do you know who I am, Sergeant?”

  Busson had rarely interacted with General Patton or his men. Among his own small circle, he’d commanded respect and fear, and was not used to people getting in his face. But combined with seeing his friends gunned down, the long ride back, and the uncertainty of his future, it all left him trembling. “You’re a… a general?”

  “That’s only one thing I am, Sergeant. Among other things, I’m a man who doesn’t like pissant cowards who shoot helpless old women. I’m also a man who hates, and I do mean hates, deserters from the armed forces of the country I love, the United States of America. And if you think that nation no longer exists, then you have made a serious error. See that flag?” Angriff pointed to the far wall, where hung the largest American flag ever made. It measured more than one hundred feet long.

  “As long as that flag flies over any part of this continent, the United States lives. And since it’s flying here, that means you are now in the United States of America and governed by the laws of that nation — in this particular case, by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which you swore to abide by when you joined the United States Army, and against which you have committed God knows how many violations.”

  “But General, I didn’t—”

  “Shut up. Did I give you permission to speak?”

  Angriff paused to let the effect of his words sink in. He had decades of experience chewing out errant subordinates. In the past he’d often had to feign anger when the infractions were pranks or practical jokes he’d actually found quite funny. This time he did not have to fake it. He wanted to put a bullet in Busson’s brain on the spot, and only self-discipline held him in check. But Busson’s danger was palpable.

  “The thing that you should be most concerned about,” Angriff said, continuing in a softer, more sinister tone, “is that I am the only judge, jury, and executioner who matters in this place. When it comes to your life I am God. Unfortunately for you, I’m not the God of the New Testament, the God of forgiveness. I am the God of the Old Testament, the God of hellfire and damnation.”

  Angriff stopped, turned his head this way and that, and sniffed. Then he looked at Busson’s pants, wet from the crotch down. “You really are a spineless piece of shit, aren’t you? So listen close… you have one chance to avoid a prolonged and painful death, Sergeant, and only one chance. You are going to be interviewed by my intelligence staff. You will tell them anything and everything you can think of about whatever they ask you. You got that?”

  His face a sickly white, Busson swallowed.

  “If you hesitate to answer, if you try to mislead, if you give them any reason to think that you are not being one hundred percent cooperative, I will guarantee whatever time you have left on God’s green Earth will be as torturous and miserable as it is humanly possible to be. Do I make myself clear?”

  Busson nodded, eyes wide.

  “In this army, you say ‘Yes, General.’”

  “Y-yes, General.”

  “You see, those intelligence officers play nice compared to who comes next. If they don’t get what we need from you, we turn you over to a very attractive young lady. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a nice figure… no doubt your initial impression will be favorable, but that won’t last. See, she’s a psychopath who likes to hurt people. It’s kind of a hobby with her. So you tell the nice officers what they want to hear, and we’ll make sure you don’t have to meet her. Do you understand?”

  Busson nodded.

  “Get him out of here before I shoot him.”

  Chapter 9

  Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

  Karl von Clausewitz

  0800 hours, July 2

  Lt. Colonel Roger ‘Rip’ Kordibowsky loved his job. When they’d first met, he’d explained to Angriff how puzzles fascinated him. He found the mental challenge from deciphering a message or solving a problem addictive. As a child, he’d needed to know how something functioned and why. Why were mills located beside rivers and who’d figured out how to harness water to turn the millstone? When was the breakthrough moment when someone figured out thrust produced lift by forcing air under a wing’s surface? Who first brewed beer? Angriff had known right away Kordibowsky was his S-2. Their partnership had lasted more than a decade before both went cold.

  Kordibowsky’s mind saw intelligence questions as an evolutionary process. You started with scraps of information or details, and began to build the larger picture. Under Angriff’s tutelage, he’d flourished. With no family to hold him back, he had not hesitated to follow his mentor into Long Sleep as S-2 of the 7th Cavalry Brigade.

  Thus he found himself sitting near Angriff as Colonel Walling began the second full meeting of the brigade’s staff. S-3 Norm Fleming gave a brief recap of operations to date, and updated the status of the eight established OPs. He also outlined preparations for the first FOB (forward operating base) at the site dubbed the Junkyard. (With its burned-out trucks and human skeletons picked clean by scavengers, Junkyard beat out Kill Zone as its nickname.)

  Hardwiring connected all OPs to base, with radio backup, eliminating any chance of a surprise attack on the base itself. After sketching an outline of future lurps, Fleming wrapped up and turned it back to Walling, who introduced Kordibowsky.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Kordibowsky said. He had a slight New England accent, an underlying hint in a word here and there. “Before I start, allow me to say that I have far more questions than answers. My purpose today is to share with you a snapshot of what we know to be true, which is not much, and what we believe to be true, which is a little more. I’ll keep unfounded speculation out of this.

  “But if I cannot give you an answer, please understand it’s because I do not have one for which there is adequate supporting evidence. Attempting to cover my whole report,” and here he held up a thick sheaf of papers, “is impractical, so I will cover the high points. You will each receive a digital copy once the meeting has ended.

  “This information was synthesized from the few sources we have available. General Tompkins and his men provided the only first-hand information we have on the Collapse. They gave us a broad overview of what happened west of the Mississippi during the intervening years. For events east of that river, we simply have no reliable intelligence. Of course, we have the media reports, so viewing the catastrophe from a wide angle is possible. But the further one attempts to dig into specifics and details, the less one finds. As for the current conditions, we cannot guess what those might be.

  “For our purposes, we are quite fortunate. When the sequence of events collectively called the Collapse occurred, General Tompkins was here in the United States on leave. You were in Montana, I believe.” He turned to Tompkins.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Trout fishing on the Gallatin River.”

  “The Collapse was not one single disaster. We cannot say with certainty the exact order of events. But we do know a catastrophic earthquake along the New Madrid Fault was the triggering event. This occurred in mid-May. Rumors at the time attributed the quake to a nuclear device, but no one found conclusive evidence to support this. Geologists’ predictions for seismic events along the New Madrid zone gave such a quake a high probability, so the simplest explanation is probably correct. It was a natural event.

  “General Tompkins had the opportunity to watch news coverage before… well, that’s getting things in the wrong order. The Center for Earthquake Research and Information, located at the University of Memphis, estimated the quake at nine poin
t three on the Richter scale. Given the wide and total destruction, it was at least that strong. During similar events in 1811 and 1812, reports said the Mississippi River ran backward. This time, we know for a fact that it did. There were numerous after-shocks with strengths measured up to seven point zero.

  “What made this catastrophe worse was the flow of the river at Memphis, the closest large city to the epicenter, which was near record levels. Typically around five hundred thousand cubic feet per second of water flow past a hypothetical point at that city. That’s a huge volume of water. That year, winter and spring had seen significantly higher than average precipitation along much of the Mississippi River Valley. As it drained south, the river level at Memphis was estimated at three times the average.

  “Media reports at the time claimed the quake disrupted the flow of the river for more than an hour. As impossible at that may seem, it makes sense given what followed. Record levels of water returned north, pushed by the energy released by the quake. At the same time, record levels were still flowing downstream. This created flooding in the surrounding areas and formed a giant lake. Imagine Lake Erie transported to the four corners area where Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee all come together.

  “As long as the seismic energy kept driving water north, the lake continued to grow. But once the energy dissipated, the flow returned to normal and that enormous body of water moved south as a wave. It flooded everything in its path. For those of you familiar with vulcanology, think of a pyroclastic flow, such as the one that buried Pompeii. Billions of tons of volcanic material were held aloft by the force of the eruption. But when the upward pressure eased and could no longer support the material’s weight, gravity sucked it back to Earth in a pyroclastic flow hundreds of feet high. It was a tidal wave of burning ash that swept everything before it.

  “In a sense that is exactly what happened after the earthquake. Once the river flowed south again, it became just like the pyroclastic flow at Pompeii. Imagine a tidal wave hundreds of feet high sweeping through the valley of the Mississippi. St. Louis drowned in the backflow, and it destroyed every city downstream. Memphis was on a high bluff forty feet above the river. That didn’t save the city. Flooding upstream drowned it from the north. The delta flatlands in Mississippi and Arkansas flooded for thirty miles inland, and the water levels were said to be fifty feet deep. Very little survived intact and casualties were almost total.

  “As bad as it was from St. Louis south, it was much worse at New Orleans. When the inland tidal wave reached that city, it pushed a gigantic wall of debris before it. River barges, paddlewheel steamers, freighters, and all manner of private craft, trees, houses, cars, anything and everything you can imagine. The wave was choked with debris and struck the merchant and cruise ship fleet in port. It washed those giant ships downstream, eventually becoming so packed it created a giant dam across the river.

  “When the water could no longer flow to the Gulf of Mexico through its normal channels, it flooded the surrounding area, which included New Orleans. If we were to compare catastrophes, Hurricane Katrina might be a four or five on a scale of one to ten. This was a ten. There was nothing left alive except snakes and gators. There were survivors, but they fled New Orleans because that city had ceased to exist.”

  After sipping some water, Kordibowsky turned to each person at the table in turn. “Overstating the damage from this event is not possible. Every bridge from St. Louis south to the Gulf of Mexico was swept away, but it was much worse than just losing the bridges. All functioning infrastructure was destroyed. Rebuilding those lost bridges would first mean clearing the highways on either side to allow access to rebuild. This would start with making the highways safe again, to a distance of perhaps fifty miles on both sides of the river. Then would come the massive job of restarting power in those areas. This, in turn, required rebuilding the local power grids. In the meantime, truck and rail traffic had to be routed north of the Ohio River, or to remaining ports along the Gulf Coast. In a real sense, America had been cut in two.

  “Within the affected areas, there was no food, water, energy, or transportation. The total lack of roads crippled efforts to aid the survivors. Compounding what was already the greatest natural disaster in American history, we also lost huge food-producing areas.

  “All this information we know with some certainty, and not only because General Tompkins watched the situation evolve on live television. We have additional reports in our databases from National Guard units, the NSA, FEMA, military bases in the region, and various government agencies. It makes for chilling reading.

  “After two days, General Tompkins’ unit recalled him and he could not keep up with the national picture. But we know the bombings began within days of the initial earthquake. A wave of terrorism spread across the country. Suicide bombers, truck bombs, Molotov cocktails dropped from highway overpasses, snipers, IEDs, attacks on grammar schools, all manner of attacks were launched in what appeared to be coordinated assaults. The obvious objective was to disrupt life and hamper recovery efforts.

  “At one water filling station in Louisiana, more than five hundred refugees were killed by a truck bomb. These were mostly women and children, with older folks unfit for rescue duty also caught in the blast.

  “Five women opened fire in Jackson, Tennessee, at a temporary aid station set up for refugees from the Memphis area. They shouted Islamic slogans and targeted children. Few people got hurt, however, because those at the station had their own weapons and returned fire, killing the terrorists. Four children were shot, but they all survived.

  “In other areas, where the population was less well armed, similar attacks resulted in very high casualty rates. There were, quite literally, hundreds, and maybe thousands, of such attacks, to the point where people were afraid to gather in groups.

  “This is when the news reports began to end. Military and government reports became sporadic and incomplete. We know plagues broke out, but the nature of the pathogens remains a mystery — ebola, anthrax, or bubonic plague, we don’t know. The starting points appear to have been San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Miami, Boston, and New York. Whatever it was, the mortality rate was high, especially considering how overwhelmed the medical services had already become. We should keep this in mind before we enter those areas, since some pathogens can survive for decades, if not centuries.

  “From this point, events become much less clear. There were undoubtedly electromagnetic pulse attacks. It’s possible most areas of the country suffered such attacks, because reports of all kinds ended in the same time frame, many simultaneously. The only conclusion we can now draw is that terrorist cells infested the country in greater numbers than even the alarmists had dreamed.

  “At what point in time the United States quit functioning as a nation is much harder to pin down. It is not impossible that a rump government exists to this day. We simply have no data. General Tompkins can tell you his own story, but he was assigned to a unit deployed to protect Lake Tahoe as a potential source of potable water. They bivouacked in the Tahoe National Forest and were isolated, which probably explains why they survived.

  “That brings us to the present. We have some idea of what conditions are like west of the Mississippi, again thanks to General Tompkins and his intrepid command — small settlements dotted here and there, a hundred people, perhaps two hundred at the most. Big cities, well… some are ghost towns. The general never went into a large city if he could help it, because in some of them the criminal element existing before the Collapse was able to survive and institute a sort of warlord society. In others, if there are any survivors, they are aggressive and unreasonable.

  “There is one place General Tompkins never verified as actually existing, a place called, with some sense of irony, Shangri-La. In the intervening years it became something of a legend, a Camelot, if you will, of post-Collapse America, where free men still live under the flag of the United States. Some say it’s in the Lake Tahoe area, or
perhaps merely in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Others place it in Colorado, Montana, Northern California, or even here in Arizona.”

  When Kordibowsky paused for more water, Angriff turned to Fleming. “Before this goes any further, Norm, let’s find out the truth behind this Shangri-La. If it’s real, those are the very people we need. Start working out the details for some super long-range recons and we’ll talk later. Please continue, Colonel.”

  Fleming nodded, betraying nothing of his thinking. Lake Tahoe was more than six hundred miles from Overtime Prime, and Colorado was not too much closer. Sending a slurp so far was tantamount to a suicide mission. But he said none of this. His opinion would be given in person and alone.

  Kordibowsky went on. “Let us now move beyond the Collapse to intelligence collected by this command. First, let me address the issue of this so-called Caliphate. The official name, and this seems to be accurate, is the Foretold Caliphate of the Seven Prayers of the New Prophet.”

  “That’s a mouthful,” Angriff said. “Any idea what it means?”

  “We have no hard information on its structure, size, or beliefs, but we do have enough to speculate on some aspects. We know, for example, it has moved as far west as Tucson, and has invested New Mexico, Old Mexico, and Texas, but with no idea of the exact boundaries.

  “We suspect, although again, it’s hard to know for certain at this point, that there is something radically different about the teachings of this religious state from other Islamic sects. For example, the Caliph is referred to as God’s New Prophet, and while we can all guess what that could mean, right now it’s just a guess. We also know they are called to prayer seven times a day, instead of five. For this reason they are referred to as Sevens, and two of the prayer sessions are made directly to this New Prophet. This is radically different from traditional Islam. But again, details of how this sect originated, what exactly it believes, and how it is structured internally are all unknown.”