Kinninmore picked up his helmet and retrieved his personal weapon. He turned to his colleagues from the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Airborne Division. 'Gentlemen, I'm going forward. Care to join me?' Governors Island had reverted to a natural prehuman state in the four years since the Wave had swept over it. After the pollution storms, only the hardiest trees had flourished, their roots and trunks shrouded by the rapid growth of underbrush and weeds-until the U.S. Army arrived and began returning the island to its earlier role: a fort. The gun bunnies of 1/5 Field Artillery and the Sixth Field Artillery dug themselves into the fields around Fort Jay, establishing Firebase Euler, home to the long guns, heavy mortars, and rocket batteries that had chopped down wave after wave of pirates, insurgents, and freebooters inside the city. The island also housed the core of the local civilian administration, run by the appointed governor, Elliott Schimmel, and protected by a battalion of troops from Schimmel's irregulars-now reduced to a mere company by the need to reinforce the army on the main island.
Governor Schimmel was a New York native, an historian who had been guest lecturing in Japan back in March 2003. From the battlements of Fort Jay he watched the skyline of his city shrouded in dark oily smoke, an ungovernable rage churning in his innards.
'Governor Schimmel?' one of his officers called over to him. 'I just got word from the firebase commander.'
'Any news of resupply?'
'Yes, sir,' the officer replied. 'It is coming now. ETA twenty minutes. But what I wanted to tell you, sir, is that they're going to blow the bridges.'
'What?' Schimmel roared, turning on his underling.
Before he could say another word, the 155-mm howitzers barked into the dawn. The metal-on-metal crash of the guns spit their ordnance out toward Long Island. Metal boxes on tank tracks swiveled until they, too, were facing Brooklyn and Queens. Stacks of fresh ammunition for the multiple rocket launch system sat a safe distance away, ready for use.
No, Schimmel thought. Not the bridges. The president had promised him they would not do this. Not to his city.
He jumped a few inches when the first missile shrieked into the sky, ripping at the very fabric of the morning. Others followed immediately, filling the firebase with white acrid smoke.
In the distance he heard the first rumble of thunder as the high-explosive shells began to pound his precious bridges into scrap.
Manhattan was being cut off, and all who stood on it without the say-so of the American people would soon have no choice but to surrender their liberty or their lives. Having gathered another thirty troops along the way, Colonel Alois Kinninmore arrived at Fifth Avenue and West 48th Street, where the sharp end of the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry Regimental Combat Team was located. To say the cavalry was assembled at the intersection would be to gloss over the reality. The wounded streamed south down Fifth Avenue toward aid stations set up in the shells of once-fashionable shops. A murderous stream of tracers poured into the cross streets from the 1930s Depression era concrete skyscrapers that made up Rockefeller Center. Kinninmore and his scratch team of marines, militia, and soldiers kept their heads down and their weapons up and edged along the walls, mindful that there was no safe place to be found.
'Colonel!' someone shouted from a cluster of troops right at the edge of the fighting. 'Have you lost your fucking mind?'
Kinninmore grinned. 'No, but I lost my sense of humor around Forty-second Street.'
The soldier ran over to Kinninmore, mindful of the tracer fire hosing down the intersection. Captain Frankowski didn't bother to salute his commanding officer. No one needed a sniper to know that he was around.
'Pretty fucking sporty up here, sir,' Frankowski said. 'If you don't mind my saying.'
'I don't,' Kinninmore replied. 'Status?'
Frankowski turned and gestured toward Rockefeller Center. 'We're hung up on these fucking scrapers. Depression-era shit built with old-fashioned concrete, rebar, and probably more than a few bodies courtesy of the mob. No good estimate on effective combatants, but they've set it up as a strongpoint with good intersecting fields of fire. I think we're gonna find almost all of them in there, Colonel. It's a great defensive position.'
'I can see that,' Kinninmore said. 'Don't fret, son. We have them exactly where we want them. Who's the on- scene commander?'
'I was until you got here. Colonel Callahan took a shot to the chest. While the medics were working him, he got another one to the melon. Game over. You're it, sir.'
'Any contact with higher up?'
'Sporadic,' Frankowski said, ducking against a roar of gunship turbines. Kinninmore saw the black burst of explosives against one of the larger skyscrapers, which had been defaced by so many such strikes that it looked like an ancient ruin.
'Who have we got on our flanks?'
'Fourth Cav combat team on the Avenue of the Americas; they've worked their way up to Fiftieth Street,' Frankowski said. 'Fifth Cav is to the east over on… looks like Park Avenue. They're chopped up pretty bad, and I've not had any word from them in the last hour.'
Kinninmore pulled a map from his cargo pocket and unfolded it. 'Any support fire available?'
'Fifth Field Artillery is up. They're at Firebase Euler, but the support has been somewhat spotty. These skyscrapers are really fucking with our comms, especially since we lost the retrans unit up in the Chrysler Building,' Frankowski said. 'You need to know our ammo situation is critical as well. I've had our troops strip the wounded and the dead, our guys and the enemy, but we're still hurtin' for certain.'
Kinninmore got the map out and started making notes, placing units where Frankowski described them. He pointed at Madison Avenue. 'Fifth Cav got anyone on this?'
Frankowski shook his head. 'Not near as I can tell.'
'Get me a commo dog over here who knows his shit. Anyone. I don't care who they are or what branch.'
'I'm on it,' Frankowski said.
Kinninmore tossed his map onto the ground and pointed to his scratch collection of trigger pullers. 'All of you with me. We're moving fast, and we're killing anyone who gets in our way.'
'Where are we going, Colonel?' one of the marines shouted.
'Over to Madison,' he shouted back. 'It ain't Iwo, but it'll have to do. Let's move out!' Kinninmore ducked behind an overturned trash truck, and gathered a few of his team members around him. The rest of the scratch team engaged the vehicles, not waiting for a dramatic command or any heroics from their commander. Looking back the way they had come, the colonel could see a thin, scrawny figure running down the sidewalk toward him, a radio antenna prominent on his back. Two other men flanked him, watching for fire from above. There were snipers everywhere.
'Over here!' Kinninmore shouted. He tapped the female military police trooper next to him. 'Hold this position, Sergeant. No matter what.'
'I've got it!'
Kinninmore ran toward the commo dog and shoved him through a doorway. One of the two rangers escorting him actually bulled Kinninmore out of the way.
'Watch where you going, ignorant shithead,' he shouted in a thick Polish accent. 'We have had enough of being pushed around today.'
'Anybody teach you to use cover, son?' Kinninmore shouted back. 'What's your name? Do I know you?'
A tuft of blond hair poked out from under the first soldier's Kevlar helmet. 'It ain't son, sir. It's Sergeant Bonnie Gardener. USAF TAC. Someone said you needed a rainmaker. Well, I'm it.'
52
New York Motherhood was making her soft. There was no way, in her salad days, she would have bothered helping out a couple of losers like these two. She didn't need them to get the documents back to G2. She could've dialed up a chopper to swoop in and grab them any time she wanted. But as the three of them hunkered down against the blast of the rotor wash from the descending Blackhawk, Caitlin told herself she was just acting
