from what Miguel could see, the graft was not taking well. They sat apart, sullen and suspicious.
The women they had so recently treated as less than human distinguished themselves by the care and consideration with which they attended to the needs of the whores, who had been cleaned up and dressed in more respectable attire. Perhaps that was behind their surly disposition, Miguel thought, smiling to himself. Once they had been prized out of their leather miniskirts and tight T's and draped in long, shapeless floral frocks, all of their intimidating sexual power had vanished. The livid bruising and splints and bandages for their wounds did not help much in that regard, either. Miguel kept his eye on them for a few minutes, but they were being guarded by Trudi Jessup, the woman he had rescued last night, who was neither camp whore nor captive Mormon. He had not spoken to her at length beyond quietly accepting her thanks after the executions. She had spent all her time with the other women, but something about her marked her as being separate and somehow different.
He supposed it was simply because she was not of their church.
After a short while observing her, it was obvious the whores would be given no opportunity to cause trouble, and he relaxed a little. It was not such a wise thing accepting the enemy into camp like this, he thought. Taking a few apples from a plastic bowl, and supplementing them with a slab of biscuit and a small piece of hard cheese, he walked over to where the leadership group was still discussing what they might do. He had always assumed Mormons to be a little backward in their treatment of women-although no more so than many traditional Catholics, he had to admit-but here the women seemed to be equals with their men.
'Come over, Miguel, please,' Aronson said when he saw the vaquero watching them idly.
He had met all the women already, of course, but he was never especially good with names, and despite making an effort to commit them all to memory, he could not be certain who was who. Jenny, the betrothed of Willem D'Age, he remembered without a problem. And Aronson's wife, Maive, he recognized, of course. She had been very good to Sofia and the only one who did not appear to judge his daughter for her behavior on the night of the rescue, although Tori, the betrothed of Ben Randall, had taken Sofia aside to thank her for shooting down the murderous harpy who had intended him murder.
Of the others, besides Sally Gray, who was younger and thus no part of this conference, he had no idea, but he was comfortable enough addressing all as ma'am.
A pall still hung over the small band, with all of them speaking as though they were in church, not quite whispering but not speaking as loudly or gaily as one might expect of people who had just escaped death. Miguel supposed the close nature of that escape would naturally suppress their spirits. The wound of losing one of their own, the violence to which they had been a party, and, most serious of all, the outrages committed upon the women would take some time to heal.
'Miguel,' said Aronson, 'my wife agrees with you that we should not delay long in our departure from this place.' Maive surprised him by placing a cool hand on his forearm and squeezing lightly.
She looked over at the camp whores, and Miguel was certain he detected just a flash of ill feeling directed toward them, but Maive Aronson immediately softened her gaze and went on.
'It would be best to get the women away from here. We have enough supplies from the stop at Leona. We should be gone from here as quickly as possible.'
'That is probably wise,' Miguel said. 'I do not know that there would be much worth salvaging here, anyway. The center of the city is badly burned out and looted already.'
'That was the agents,' Jenny said, with much more obvious bitterness than Maive. 'One of them told me they had been using this town as a base for six months and had destroyed a good deal of the town center for the fun of it.'
She sounded as appalled by the suggestion that anyone would do such a thing as she was by having been captured and mistreated by the same men.
'Then we should move on as soon as we can,' said Miguel. 'Where do you next plan to make camp?'
'Palestine,' Aronson said.
33
New York No, thought Milosz, you do not obtain military-specification P90s from stroking pussycats. You steal them or buy them on the black market, or, given the way this country was, you loot them from a deserted gun store. But what the hell. He could not care less where the strange hippopotamus man in the very odd Viking helmet and his English lady friend got the weapons that had saved his ass. All Milosz cared about was that his scrawny ass remained in one piece, while back at Madison and 29th the asses of many nig nogs and crazy ragheaded asswits were scattered about the street in many, many pieces.
'You need to get out of this part of the city,' Wilson insisted in the same tone of voice Milosz had heard him use when pushing around lower ranks and junior officers.
The man and woman, however, seemed oddly immune to the master sergeant's imprecations. 'Imprecations' was another word Milosz had learned from reading Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with 'orgastic,' which admittedly remained something of a mystery and not a word he was confident about throwing into this conversation.
'I'm sorry, Sergeant-' the woman began.
'Master sergeant, United States Army Rangers.'
'That's lovely. But I'm sorry, Master Sergeant, no, we cannot leave the city until our work is done.'
'Your work was hauling rusted fucking car wrecks out to the salvage barges, according to these papers,' Wilson said. 'Not spooking around Pirate Island capping motherfuckers and looking for fucking treasure maps. Your work didn't involve any of that crazy shit at all.'
'Well,' the woman said, smiling in a rather sexy fashion, Milosz thought, 'our work didn't involve saving your asses from Captain Fucking Feathersword and his merry band of cutthroats, either. But we did. So perhaps you'd be a darling and let us toddle off before your friends arrive. Honestly, being sent back now would ruin our whole day.'
Milosz peered out of the office window down into the streets of midtown Manhattan. From their vantage point on the forty-second floor of the building to which they had fled he had a good view of the OPFOR concentrations around the approaches to Madison Square Park. They were a lot less concentrated. A lot more 'attrited,' as that American colonel had said. The lower end of the city looked like hell. Frankly, he was glad to be out of it for a little while.
He idly examined the office, wondering what kind of business the occupants of this particular floor had carried on. Whatever the case, they'd been busy on March 14, 2003. The leavings of the Disappeared lay everywhere: at desks, in hallways, mounded in a pile of stiff, blackened suits and dresses encircling a box of petrified Krispy Kremes. He did his best to ignore them and Wilson's argument with the smugglers, for that was surely what these two must be.
'Halo to any element, request close air. Location is…' Gardener said into her headset.
He returned to the drama unfolding below, where dozens of city blocks were aflame. Sunrise was mere moments away. Gunships darted in and out of the shattered canyons, hosing long ropy streams of tracer fire onto unseen targets. Every few minutes a jet fighter would fall out of the sky, loosing rockets or bombs into the cauldron of battle, their detonations causing the window in front of him to vibrate. The scale of destruction was fantastic.
'Troops and vehicles in the open,' said Gardener. 'Approximately one hundred effectives plus five civilian trucks moving toward…'
She sat in a corner that had not been given over to the office of any single executive. A breakout space, she called it, a small open area decorated with a couple of couches and a small coffee table on which lay old magazines and a vase of brown dried-up flowers. Gardener, comfortable on a musty couch, examined the maelstrom through her binoculars, apparently unaware she was sitting on a red dress left behind by one of the lost souls who had worked there. Her muddy boots were propped up on the coffee table, and her carbine lay across her lap. She had taken her helmet off, leaving the radio headset in place, exposing some of her stray blond locks. She pressed her fingers to the earpiece of her headset and called in a string of air strikes, punishing the foes who had killed her partner, Sergeant Veal, and had very nearly taken her life as well.
'I copy, Talon. What have you got?' she asked. She waited a moment and then replied. 'Clusters will be
