car’s warm interior, where he would not be able to survey the entire column. Occasionally, he broke into short frenzies of shivering. But he did not climb down off his perch.
He looked back over his shoulder, and saw Carmody’s jeep coming up from the column’s rear, where four more of the total of ten cars were posted. He frowned slightly, turning his head to peer forward once more. Holland had kept the column clear of Philadelphia, pointing for the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. Probably, they were about to make contact with the Philadelphian command post set up there.
Garvin bared his teeth in an uneasy grimace, and rose to an abrupt crouch. He waved to the jeep’s driver as the vehicle whined up close to the armored car, and scrambled over the turret. He clung momentarily to the rung of a step, then dropped off into the road, easily matching the car’s speed without a stumble. He caught a handhold on the jeep and swung himself into the back seat, behind Carmody, the Armored Lieutenant, a balding man descended from the remains of the old Marine colony at Quantico.
“Got a contact,” he said. “My lead car just radioed back—in Tampa code. There’s some sort of half-arsed CP at the bridge, all right, but my boy’s upset about something and Dunc doesn’t upset very easy.”
Garvin frowned. Tampa had been intercepting their communications, and they’d had to improve a code during the siege. Now Carmody’s man in the scouting armored car was using it again—which could only mean that he didn’t want Philadelphia to intercept his observations on the Philadelphian post.
“Think he expects them to give us any trouble?” he asked.
“Be a crazy thing to do, with our armor.”
“Might blow the bridge”’ Garvin pointed out.
Now, what’s making me think they’d do a thing like that? he wondered with a stab of illogical panic. “You think they’d feel that way?” Carmody asked, not quite incredulous enough for Garvin’s peace of mind.
“I don’t know,” Garvin said slowly, abruptly realizing that here, deep in the Republic’s territory, it was still as though they were moving into the silent lands to which they were accustomed, waiting for the crash and flame of hidden and unexpected dangers. It was as though they were on the verge of combat.
“But let’s get up there in a hurry,” he told Carmody.
The Command Post was a badly armored shack set beside the bridge approaches. An aerial projected from its roof, and there was a jeep with scabrous paint parked beside it. Someone had daubed a red-and-blue V of converging swaths on its hood.
“What the hell kind of army are you in?” Garvin barked at the man they had found there.
The man spat over his shoulder and stared grubbily up at Holland in the armored car’s forward hatch. “He ain’t Berendtsen, is he?”
“I asked you a question, mister!”
“I’m in the same goddamn army you are, I guess,” the man said irritably. “He ain’t Berendtsen, is he?”
“I’m Commander Holland, commanding A Company, Army of Unification,” Holland said impatiently. “Where’s the rest of your detail?”
“Ain’t none,” the man answered.
“What’s your rank, Bud?” Garvin asked, looking at the man’s grimy jumper.
“Sergeant, Philadelphia Military District,” the man answered, spitting again.
“Okay, Sarge,” Garvin said. “We’re going to cross your little bridge.” He could feel the veins pounding on the backs of his hands, and he could see mounded white crests bulging out the corners of Holland’s jaws.
“Not without a pass from Commander Horton, you’re not.”
“Who the hell’s he?”
“You kidding? He’s Philadelphia Command, and nothing goes over this bridge east without his pass.”
“You kidding?” Carmody said softly, and tracked his jeep’s machinegun around to bear on the man.
The man turned pale, but he cursed Carmody at the same time. “You still ain’t going over that bridge.”
“That settles it,” Garvin said to Holland. “They’ve got the bridge wired. Miler! Find anything like a detonator in that shack?”
“No soap, Jim,” the corporal called back from the CP’s door.
“Okay, sonny boy, let’s you and me go for a ride,” Jim said. He drew his Colt and aimed it at the man’s belly. “Up on the hood with you,” he said, motioning toward the CP’s jeep. The man climbed on sullenly. Jim climbed behind the wheel and kicked the starter. The motor turned over balkily, and he had to nurse it for minutes before it was running well enough to move. Then he pulled out into the highway and pointed the jeep over the bridge.
The man on the hood turned around, his eyes staring. “Hey!” he yelled back, “You wanna get killed?”
Garvin cut his speed. “Where’s she wired?”
The man licked his lips, but said nothing. Garvin gunned his motor.
“Okay, okay! There’s trips buried in the asphalt up ahead.” He was breathing heavily, scared to death. Not of the mine trips, though, Jim decided, but of what would happen to him now he’d given away their location. He wondered what sort of methods Commander Horton used to enforce orders.
They blew the CP to scrap and shot the jeep’s engine into uselessness. As they crossed the bridge, Garvin looked back and saw the black speck of the guard, half-running up the riverbank, away from Philadelphia. He looked at Jack Holland, and didn’t like what he saw in the commander’s eyes, because he knew the same expression was in his own. There was something wrong—something so wrong that it made him debate disregarding orders and recommending that the column turn toward New York at the fastest pace the men could march.
Holland looked at him and shook his head. “Berendtsen knew what he was doing when he sent us down here,” he said. “Let’s get to finding out what it was.”
The Army marched into a New York City turned sullen. Berendtsen, feeling the hate like a clammy fog, sucked in his breath.
A crooked smile edged the corners of his mouth He was almost always right. It was a feeling that prickled the back of his neck, each time he made a decision, apparently on the basis of no more than a feeling, and found that he had acted with almost prescient exactness.
Second sight? Or just a subconscious that worked immeasurably well?
There was no way of telling.
There were barricades up in the streets, and the people stayed behind them, kept there by squads of soldiery. There were armed men up on the housetops, and heavy weapons concentrated at strong points. And there was a flight of helicopters overhead, tagging them like whirling crows against the sky.
He could feel the Army growing apprehensive behind him. They had marched into enemy cities before.
He halted the first column in the familiar square in front of Stuyvesant Town, noticing, with a part of his mind, that the bare and rough-hewn outlines he had left were gone, furbished over, so that there was no sign that a block of buildings had once stood there.
The rest of the Army marched into the square and halted at attention, the sergeants’ commands echoing sharply and yet alone in the silence.
And still the people looked out of the windows.
What were they expecting? What were they waiting for, from him? Were they waiting for him to suddenly sweep the buildings with fire? Did they think he’d conquer this city as he’d defeated the others? Did they think somehow, that he had done all this, fought all those battles, killed all those good men, for any sake but theirs?
He turned toward his Army, seeing their white faces turn up to him, noting the men who stole glances at the building, seeing the fingers curled around the rifles, the bodies ready to twist and crouch, firing. Most of these men were not New Yorkers. And all of them were his. All he had to do was issue a command.
He felt a breeze, coming down the street from one of the rivers, touching the skin of his face.
“Dismissed!” he ordered.
Company A maintained routine contact with Philadelphia and Camden, learning nothing. Horton’s communications operators relayed their reports back into silence, and they heard nothing from Horton himself. Nor from Berendtsen. The fog that had hung over the Delaware seemed to have suddenly taken on far tougher
