current problem? In New York, I mean.'
Drawn away from contemplation of his daily nightmare, Ritchie shook his head.
'I am afraid there will be no easy solution, Mister President. There never is. I will offer this for consideration: How long will the bulk of New York City last without human intervention? We have found significant natural deterioration of the places we've already resettled. Am I correct?'
The president nodded.
'Even if we were to secure the New York City area, and even I agree that it has to be secured somehow, just how long will it be before we need all of the possible living space?' Ritchie asked.
Culver leaned forward. 'If current immigration trends continue and our birthrate remains nominal, perhaps a hundred years from now.'
Ritchie nodded. 'By that point, Mister President, we would need to demolish what is there and build something new. Well, not us, of course, but you know what I mean. Nature will have destroyed the city for us even if we are able to drive the pirates out.'
'What do you suggest, Admiral?'
Ritchie backed away from suggesting anything. The idea of mushroom clouds consuming a dead city full of memories and pirates was just too much.
'I have no easy solution, Mister President. That is the best I can tell you.'
Kipper did not look happy, and part of Ritchie urged him to leave it at that, but he couldn't. 'Do you mind if I speak freely, sir?'
The president seemed surprised he'd asked, but then, he was neither a military man nor a career politician.
'No. Go on,' he said.
'Mister President, I understand it is a terrible thing sending men and women into combat. If you are a halfway decent human being, it should weigh on you like no other decision you will ever make in your life. But sir, just because it is emotionally difficult and morally challenging, it is not necessarily wrong. Those men and women were not press-ganged into service. It was not just a choice for them. It was and remains a calling. And sir, no nation on earth can hope to survive long without people who will answer that call. No nation can hope to survive if it does not respect what they have offered and do the hard things that history sometimes asks of us. Sometimes, Mister President, there is no answer but blood.'
James Kipper stared out at him from the screen, his hands held together as if praying, pressed against his lips. He seemed to be weighing what Ritchie had said. After a moment he replied.
'Thank you, Admiral. I'll think on that some more.'
28
New York 'CLAYMORE!' Milosz shouted. He squeezed the clacker three times. The intersection before him lit up with a flash and a roar of three claymore antipersonnel mines set up to optimize the body count. When the dust, the smoke, and the ringing in his ears cleared, he could see an intersection full of shredded offal and bone where screaming asswits had been.
'This is like the shooting of monkeys in a barrel, yes?' Milosz shouted as he exchanged an empty magazine for a full one. 'Except we are these fucking monkeys. No racial offenses to be intended, Wilson.'
Tracer fire punched into the polished stone column behind him, chewing out chunks of powder and sharp, stinging fragments of marble. An armored truck sporting the logo of the Wells Fargo Company lurched into the intersection with a 12.7-mm DShK mounted on top. A rail-thin Somali worked the machine gun around the intersection, spraying the walls with heavy fire. Sergeant Veal laid down return fire with his M240, firing off short bursts of 7.62s while his partner worked her radio. Veal's rounds shattered the armored glass of the truck.
'None taken! I'm more offended that you didn't bring the fifty-cal, Fred!' Wilson roared as he lifted his carbine over the windowsill of the bank at the corner of East 29th Street and Madison to squeeze off a few as Somalis and Yemenis started to pour in around the Wells Fargo truck. Return tracer fire zipped through the air in torrents like deadly horizontal rain, but inaccurately, as if blown everywhere by a squalling wind. Milosz kept his head tucked in so tightly that his neck started to cramp, but straying even an inch too high could mean losing the top of his skull. This was the problem with operating behind enemy lines, he thought: Always it sounds like such a very glamorous sort of adventure until the fucking enemy turns around and realizes you are there.
'Throwing white,' he yelled over the infernal din before pulling the pin on a smoke grenade and tossing it through the shattered windows and into the street outside, aiming for the center of the intersection.
'White smoke at your three o'clock, over,' Tech Sergeant Gardener yelled into her radio headset. There was a brief pause before she yelled again. 'Target in platoon strength, one hundred yards south of smoke. Enemy in the open, moving toward us. Over.'
Milosz picked up his M4 carbine again and risked a peek over the solid gray stonework behind which they were sheltering. He got a quick picture of two dozen or more men running and darting from doorways to smashed cars, moving from one scrap of cover to the next, firing and yelling as they came. In among them he spotted a lone man who seemed to be directing traffic, his head swathed in what looked like a red scarf. A single round sizzled past Milosz's ear and clanged off something metallic behind him. He heard the speeding projectile as a distinctly separate entity inside the storm of battle, a single shot out of the bullet swarm that raged around them. He leveled the muzzle of his M203 on them and fired a forty-millimeter high-explosive grenade into a car across the street where many of the nig nogs were taking cover. A crunching explosion blew chunks of shrapnel and fresh man meat into the street. A quick check. The scarf was nowhere to be seen.
'Cleared hot!' Gardener yelled, before she grabbed Milosz by the shoulder and pulled him down hard. He heard the thudding roar of a swooping gunship a split second before the deafening buzz-saw howl of its minigun turned the street outside into a mess of flying metal, glass, and spent brass casings. A few seconds later rockets whooshed in, detonating with deadly effect in the concrete valley of Madison Avenue. Milosz risked another look and was horrified to see that one of the attackers-the asswit in the red scarf, back from the dead!-had somehow sprinted through the fiery maelstrom and thrown a grenade into Sergeant Veal's position. The air force machine gunner was blown in half as he tried to throw the grenade back. Gardener screamed, and Milosz shook his head, which rang like a giant gong.
The attacker cocked an arm back to throw another grenade into their hiding place. Before Milosz could get his weapon up to snap off a shot, Technical Sergeant Gardener, firing one-handed while still yelling instructions to the gunship pilots, put half a clip from her M4 into his stomach. Milosz would swear that for just a moment he could see right through the man in the scarf to the burning wreckage of the street behind, where secondary explosions were tossing cars around like throw pillows, melting tires and windshields, and blowing out windows high above the street.
'Fucker!' Gardener yelled as she swapped mags.
'Ha! Take that Captain fucking Crunch,' Wilson shouted half hysterically. 'You like that, huh? Sucks to be you now, don't it, bitch!'
The pirate spun around, ending the weird effect-had it been an illusion?-of being able to see right through the huge, ragged hole in his torso. Milosz and Gardener ducked as the grenade exploded, adding its cracking bass note to the explosive symphony.
'I do not imagine Colonel Kinninmore will be having such a full and frank exchange of views with this motherfucker, eh?' Milosz cried.
'Whoa! Three o'clock!' Wilson yelled, quickly shifting position to one of the big, soaring windows that looked east down 29th Street. 'There's more of them.'
'Cursed be your mother's anus and your father's testicles!' Milosz roared in demented anger as he scrambled over to cover the new line of attack. 'This is not how we do stealth in Polish special forces, I tell you, Wilson. And yet Poles it is who everyone makes joke about. Is this fair, I ask you? Is this fair?'
He yelled that last while methodically firing single rounds one after the other into six charging pirate asswits. Most of them wore red keffiyehs like the man Gardener had just killed, and as they charged, Milosz distinctly heard the war cry 'Allahu akbar!' One came so close that he heard his bullet strike flesh, like the sound of a hand slapping
