These mountaintops were dead and ancient places, never meant for human beings. The orange-gray rock had been worn smooth and broken and worn smooth again. The elements could do the same to them in far less time. Hernandez had issued orders to dig and build only in the few hours of midday, and only on staggered shifts. No one worked every day, no matter how urgent their situation. His command had reached this slope just forty-eight hours ago. Already he had three troops on sick call, plus Kotowych, and there was little sense in having superior ‚ghting holes with no one capable of ‚ghting from them.
He was committed to doing more than his share of the grunt work, rather than sitting back and passing out bad jobs. He was too worried about morale and too many of his Marines were strangers to each other, thrown together from the remnants of ‚ve platoons. There were too many rumors and fears.
“We’re almost there,” he told Kotowych.
Their bootsteps faded into the clear, brittle sky. Hernandez kept his eyes on his footing, but the mountainside fell away so dramatically that it was impossible not to see the immense up-anddown horizon, a collision of dark peaks and snow and far open spaces. It was a distraction. Panting, Hernandez glanced west. There was nothing to see except more mountains, of course, but he imagined reaching across the basins of Utah and Nevada to the heavily urbanized coast, where everything had gone wrong for him in one minute.
By necessity, the American civil war was mostly an air war. The urgent struggle to claim and scavenge from the old cities below the barrier was dependent on the ability to maintain their helicopters and planes. Infantry and armor could only cross the plague zones if they were †own over, and yet this patch of ground he’d been ordered to hold was still a frontline assignment, when just a week ago he’d been the security chief for Leadville’s nanotech labs and a liaison between the scientists and the highest circles of the U.S. government. Hernandez had been tapped to lead the expedition into Sacramento because they relied on him, because that con‚dence was more valuable than food or ammunition. Now he was on the outside. The hell of it was that he understood.
Their mission hadn’t been a total loss. They’d returned to Leadville with a stack of computers, paper ‚les, and a good deal of machining hardware. The hidden cost was the conspiracy itself. All except ‚ve of the ‚fteen traitors had been accounted for — six dead, four captured — but their betrayal screamed of larger problems.
Who could be trusted? The rebellion had ‚nally reached the innermost circles of Leadville itself, although no one had said anything so blunt to Hernandez. He’d seen the doubt in their eyes. The fact that he hadn’t been called in to meet with General Schraeder or any of the civilian leaders was also telling. The top men had distanced themselves from him. They couldn’t help but suspect the possibility of his involvement. His friendship with James Hollister was too well-known. As the head of the labs, James had been instrumental in substituting the wrong scientists aboard the plane. Worse, Hernandez’s Marines failed to put down the takeover by the Special Forces unit.
No one in the leadership had anticipated their betrayal either. That was beside the point. Hernandez had been the man on the ground, and if he’d kept the vaccine, the rebels almost certainly would not have launched their new offensives against Leadville.
Hernandez had been the linchpin. Resources were too scarce to waste an of‚cer, however, especially with the sudden surge in the war. The irony of it annoyed him. The ‚ghting had saved him. There were no courts-martial. There was not even an outright demotion. Instead they’d given him nearly twice as many troops as before, a mixed infantry-and-artillery detachment of eighty-one Marines supported by a Navy communications specialist and a priceless medic, a conscript who had been a ‚re‚ghter in another life.
The rebels in New Mexico were said to be mounting an invasion by helicopter and ostensibly that was why he was here, ready to rain ‚re down on choppers or ground troops coming through the pass. It could be seen as an opportunity to prove himself again. They were positioned on a southern face nearly twenty miles from Leadville — twenty miles as the crow †ies, which in this upheaval of land was more than twice that distance on foot. The trucks that brought them to the base of this mountain were long gone. Hernandez had a lot of independence out here. He wanted to believe that the leadership wanted to trust him. Realistically, though, his people were only a speed bump. A small deterrent. They might launch a few shoulder-mounted missiles at incoming enemy aircraft but then they would be irrelevant or dead, either passed by or devastated by bombs or rocket ‚re. And his troops knew it. They had been condemned to hard labor and a potential death sentence for no other reason except that they were infantry and therefore disposable.
“Hey! Hey!” A man yelled below them and Hernandez saw four troops hustling across the slope, including Powers and the medic. They carried extra jackets and a canteen.
“Nice work, both of you,” Hernandez said to Tunis and Kotowych. Then the others closed around them.
“What happened?” the medic asked.
“Let’s get him back to the shelters ‚rst,” Hernandez said. “I’ve stopped the bleeding.”
“That gorge is fuckin’ killing us,” another man said.
Hernandez stiffened, but this wasn’t the time to assert himself.
They were excavating rock from far up the hill because he didn’t want to mark their position with a ‚eld of open scars. It required more effort but their shelters blended in fairly well, piles of granite among piles of granite. The waiting was the hardest part. They had a few decks of cards and one backgammon set and he knew his troops had taken to drawing names and pictures on themselves with ballpoint pens. It was better to work. Lugging rocks wasn’t much of a challenge, but it made them plan and it made them cooperate. It gave him a chance to evaluate them. He could have ordered the use of more explosives, and he supposed it might still come to that. The ground here was like concrete, hardened by eons of short thaws and long winters. The only way they’d gotten their bunkers started was to detonate too many of their AP mines facedown against the earth, but he wanted to save as much ordnance as possible.
It was a threadbare camp that Hernandez saw as they helped Kotowych over a low ridge — a few scattered troops, a few green tarps nearly lost on the mountainside. Their shelters would never be enough. Even if New Mexico attacked somewhere else, their tents and sleeping bags could not protect them from the cold inde‚nitely. Still, Hernandez felt pride. He felt as good as he thought was possible. They’d built this together and that counted for something, although he couldn’t help surveying their positions and reanalyzing the distribution of heavy machine guns and Stinger missiles.
The troops were right to worry. Fortunately, helicopters always had dif‚culty at this altitude. The weather was their ally. They could expect New Mexico to wait for a high pressure front to get as much lift as possible. The terrain was their friend as well. It would channel any approach into the pass below, where the slope tumbled away into a valley lined with the †at, winding ribbons of Highways 82 and 24.
They took Kotowych to Bunker 5. Two more soldiers emerged from inside and one of them said, “I’ve got him, sir.”
Hernandez shook his head, wanting to stay with Kotowych.
The soldier insisted. “Please, sir.”
Sergeant Gilbride surprised him. Gilbride appeared from the downhill side of the bunker, †ushed from exertion. His bearded face was red in his cheeks, nose, and ears. He looked like he’d jogged all the way across camp and Hernandez felt a bright tick of alarm.
“Major, I need for you a minute,” Gilbride said.
“Fine.” Hernandez separated himself from Kotowych. “I hope you’re all right,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Gilbride had already started down the hill again and Hernandez went after him. Then he heard two high, clean notes of a woman’s voice. He glanced back. Powers and another man were watching him and quickly averted their eyes.
Nearly all of his troops had been garrisoned inside Leadville before being redeployed. They’d lost lovers and friends along with any sense of safety. His noncoms reported that there were at least three women smuggled in among his eighty-three troops— three women who were not Marines — but Hernandez had kept quiet. Only eleven of his troops were female themselves, so the disparity was bad. There hadn’t been more than a couple ‚st-‚ghts, though, and Hernandez didn’t want to start a battle of his own, being heavy-handed about fraternization. The extra
