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  “Charlie Company, come in, over.”

  The radio operator and joint terminal air controller (JTAC) in John’s Bradley was Senior Airman Christopher Lewis, a kid who couldn’t be a day over nineteen. Skinny as a bean pole, he had a long face covered in painful-looking acne and an Adam’s apple that gave the distinct impression he’d swallowed a potato.

  “Charlie Company, come in, over,” Lewis said again with no luck. “Sir, I can’t reach them.”

  “Keep trying,” John ordered the young airman. Lewis was a liaison from the Air Force whose job it was to help call in air strikes and ensure the safety of troops on the ground.

  With the recent advent of what the Pentagon was calling ‘Transformation’ and network-centric warfare, each of the Bradleys had been hastily outfitted with Blue Force Tracking, a GPS system which helped identify friend versus foe. A digital map of the area was populated with blue and red icons representing US and coalition forces in blue and enemy combatants in red. Overhead, Predator drones flown remotely by pilots in air-conditioned trailers in the New Mexican desert searched for Iraqi army units, relaying the information via satellites to the military internet. It was all complicated stuff and for many of the young soldiers, it helped to have more than a passing familiarity with video games.

  The intention was to coordinate all arms of the military and maximize their effectiveness while minimizing friendly fire incidents.

  Dependence on a computer and satellites had made John uncomfortable from the get-go, but as a lowly lieutenant in the army, it was hardly his job to question policy. He couldn’t help feel, however, that the satellites which tied the entire system together were a major vulnerability. Without GPS, guided munitions wouldn’t work and his troops would be almost completely blind. There was a name for that kind of thing. It was called the fog of war. As John’s company spotted the bridge over the Saddam Canal, he was beginning to realize that haze of war was thicker than he thought.

  Bravo Company’s objective was to race across the Euphrates and hold the bridge for the rest of the regiment coming up behind them. The problem was most of the men under him were seeing combat for the first time. If that weren’t bad enough, their radio had stopped working and Charlie Company—moving along their right flank—wasn’t showing up on John’s Blue Force Tracking display.

  “What should we do, sir?” his driver, Specialist Sutton, asked, a swell of panic in his voice.

  “We’re gonna complete our objective and trust that Charlie’s doing the same,” came John’s reply.

  They were halfway across the bridge when the first RPG went sailing over them.

  “Contact, eleven o’clock,” John called out as small arms opened up from buildings across the canal. Rounds dinged off the hull, making Lewis wince.

  Another RPG struck the lead Bradley. Black smoke billowed out from a hole in the vehicle’s side. Slowly, almost drunkenly, it veered right and over the bridge into the water below. Another hail of RPGs flew past them.

  “We’ve got guys with rockets and small arms shooting from the upper story of those buildings,” John called out. The gunner maneuvered his 25mm chain gun and opened fire. Huge puffs of dust kicked out as the rounds battered the side of the building and finally found their targets.

  The row of Bradleys fought their way across, all firing in different directions at the buildings on the other side of the canal. Soon another Bradley was hit, but the explosive charge didn’t penetrate the armor and it kept on moving. It was starting to feel as though every time they fired on an enemy position, the bad guys would simply run to another. The battle was quickly turning into a game of Whac-A-Mole.

  “Call in a Warthog to level that front row of buildings,” John ordered his JTAC.

  Lewis hesitated.

  “Do it quickly before we’re cut to shreds.”

  Fumbling with his radio, Lewis called in the strike. “Easy Rhino seven three three, this is Bravo six nine requesting immediate air strike. Target location is grid golf one one. Target is troops in buildings two, five and eight. Danger close. Over.”

  The good news was that the Warthogs were already in the area and should be over the target in a matter of seconds. In the meantime, John ordered the vehicles struggling to cross the bridge behind him to pour as much fire as they could through those windows. The idea was to keep the Iraqis pinned down until the air strike could take them out.

  A moment later came the distinct rumbling of an A-10 Thunderbolt streaming overhead. A slow and ugly plane, it had been designed to hunt and kill Soviet tanks during the Cold War. Rapidly headed for the trash heap, the Warthog had been narrowly saved by Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War, where its missiles and bombs made it the perfect platform for supporting advancing infantry.

  But the aircraft’s real strength lay in its 30mm Avenger Gatling cannon around which the entire frame of the plane had been built. A two-second burst of armor-piercing rounds would be more than enough to shred any enemy before them.

  John’s Bradley was still firing when he heard the all-too-familiar giant zipper sound as the A-10’s gun strafed the buildings on the other side of the canal. A cloud of brown smoke was kicked into the air from the impact as the first structure and everyone in it was destroyed. Four runs later and all fire from the opposing side of the bridge had stopped. The men were cheering as the last of the enemy was neutralized.

  “Glad they’re on our side,” Lewis said.

  John agreed wholeheartedly.

  Once they secured the bridge, they would set up a defensive perimeter and get to that Bradley that had gone into the canal. Even though the chances were slim that anyone had survived, John was still hopeful. He glanced down at his hands and saw that they were shaking.

  In spite of the adrenaline coursing through his veins, John couldn’t help but wonder how Charlie Company was doing west of his position along the Euphrates. Popping the hatch, he immediately heard serious gunfire in the distance. It sounded like they were in a firefight of their own. If John’s own crossing was anything to go by, he might even say it sounded like the men of Charlie Company were in serious trouble.

  Chapter 11

  John’s eyes snapped open, a face hovering over him.

  “Honey, you okay?”

  He recognized Diane’s voice a second before her features came into focus in the early morning light. Cool air tickled his nose, but the rest of his body was sopping wet.

  Diane felt his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Was it another bad dream?”

  It would take him another few minutes to phase back into the real world, making the prospect of answering his wife challenging.

  “Iraq?”

  He nodded. “Nasiriyah.”

  That was all he needed to say. She became solemn.

  “That wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  One of the many reasons he loved Diane was her never-ending battle to ease his guilty conscience. From bus drivers to airline pilots and military commanders, it was a weight that anyone responsible for the lives of others felt. It was usually in situations where that conscience was lacking or even dulled by some distant objective that human beings became numbers and commodities.

  Emma joined them for breakfast, quietly nibbling at the oatmeal before her. At least she was eating. No doubt when she was done she would escape to her room and the sketchpad and fantasy world waiting for her there.

  Across from her sat Gregory, who seemed pensive. The chatterbox, that was what Diane had nicknamed him years ago, since he was always talking about his plans for the day, each goal exaggerated into a life-or-death struggle. He could make digging a foxhole sound like a Hollywood movie. If things had turned out differently, he might have made a fine actor or newscaster.

  John understood his son’s desire to head off to the front and do his part. Back when he was Gregory’s age, John would have felt the same, but rushing off to get yourself killed wasn’t brave, it was foolish. And besides, if Gregory really wanted to fight Russian o
r Chinese troops, the chances were good they would be arriving at Oneida’s doorstep in the not-too-distant future. John knew this not only because the U.S. forces were at a serious tactical disadvantage without the integrated technology they’d been trained to fight with, but because they seemed to be refusing to accept that fact themselves. Flexibility and adaptability were essential qualities for any leader—a bit of wisdom that wasn’t his own. It went back about two and a half millennia to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

  Once Gregory was busy with the hard work ahead, John was sure he would forget his disappointment.

  Not long after breakfast, the town was abuzz with activity. With a population just over two thousand strong, it had many helping hands, but that also meant more mouths to feed. Mounted patrols on six horses watched the outer perimeter for any signs of trouble. It didn’t seem to matter that foreign armies were on U.S. soil. Reports about gangs of thieves and raiders trickled in every day. Those groups weren’t large, maybe ten to fifteen hungry and desperate men who’d decided to survive off the hard work of honest people. A reality that in the present situation was unavoidable. To date, they tended to rummage through outlying cabins, robbing and killing anyone who was too dumb or stubborn to accept John’s invitation to come to Oneida.

  In the first two days following the Chairman’s death, John had sent envoys to as many of the surrounding hills and mountain retreats as his men could find. The message was a simple one. The country was at war and they needed everyone they could get. Unlike the Chairman, John hadn’t used intimidation or threats. If news of an invasion by foreign powers wasn’t enough to kickstart your sense of patriotism, then nothing would. In the end, many of the families who preferred to go it alone had quickly changed their minds after suffering attacks from raiders on a near-nightly basis. Every day a handful of families continued to stagger in, battered, often hungry and many having lost loved ones to disease or assaults.

  Diane rushed past him with a group of women in tow.

  “You seem in a hurry,” he commented.

  “We’re grabbing a pickup and heading to the pot farm to salvage what we can,” she said. “Might also scout around some of the produce and dairy farms to see what we can find.”

  “Pigs would make a nice addition if you can find any,” John told her. “They’ll eat just about anything. Even urban families in the 1800s owned a pig, which they let graze in the yard and fed with leftovers.”

  “That’s fascinating, Mr. Mayor,” a twenty-six-year-old brunette named Samantha Todd exclaimed. She looked at John, her eyes twinkling in the morning sun.

  “Call me John, please.”

  “Okay, John,” Diane said, giving him dagger eyes as she took Samantha’s arm and led her and the other women away. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Ask Moss to provide you an armed escort,” John called after them.

  Diane tapped her hip and that was when John spotted the holster and the Colt 1911 inside of it. The first thought in his head was one he could never say to his wife out loud: that .45 might be too much for her.

  Not far away, another group under the direction of Shelley Gibson was setting up a water collection system around town. They would start with fifty-five-gallon barrels connected to the rain gutters of the surrounding houses. Of course, this was only an emergency backup since Oneida was surrounded by reservoirs. All that needed to be done was purification and storage and Shelley knew what she was doing.

  In a grid-down situation, food and clean drinking water were the biggest challenges. This was precisely why grocery stores were the first to be emptied out in a crisis. Lucky for John, hardware stores weren’t as high on the list. If the disaster had been a hurricane or a tornado, then things would have been different. The Ace Home Center stood with most of its shelves bare. That meant a trip to the closest Home Depot was a must and soon.

  Did John expect the store to be in pristine condition three months after an EMP? Of course not, but with most folks running around trying to keep themselves fed, there was a chance some useful items might still be there. Parts they could use on the windmills they planned to build. PVC pipes for Dan Niles’ waste management projects. Additional fifty-five-gallon drums, nails, hammers and perhaps a few table saws if those windmills ever managed to get the power back on. The list was endless and it was going to be a big job. But the real problem was the distance. The closest Home Depot was in Oak Ridge fifty miles away. They would need a number of vehicles as well as the security personnel to keep them safe.

  John was in the middle of making a series of mental notes when a whistle shrieked in the distance. The sound made him think of that whistle Tim Appleby had blown moments before he’d been killed. But this was one was bigger and louder. When it sounded again, John knew exactly what it was and for a reason he couldn’t quite explain, his heart leaped with joy. The army’s supply train had arrived.

  Chapter 12

  A cloud of steam vapor billowed in the air as the train slowed to a halt at Oneida’s modest station. Its arrival was met with cheers from the crowd that had assembled to watch it roll in. The locomotive looked like something out of the Wild West, although steam-powered trains hadn’t been completely replaced by diesel locomotives until the end of the 1950s. That meant this was likely pulled from a museum or private collection, and surely there were many more like it around the country being put back into active service. They might not be fast, but they were EMP-proof.

  Soldiers in woodland camo fatigues hung from the open doorways and windows waving at the jubilant crowd just as they had during both world wars.

  Moss came up beside John, a radiant smile on his face. He ran a hand through his mohawk and cupped the back of his head. “A beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

  John agreed and looked back to find fifty men and women lined up in formation.

  “Are these cadets we’re sending to the front?” John asked.

  “It’s the most we can afford right now,” Moss told him. “When the call went out, I was swamped with volunteers. Seems everyone wants to do something to help, but I went through the list of names and picked fifty. With only one backhoe, digging trenches and fortified positions takes manpower.”

  “I know,” John replied, watching a group of girls handing loaves of homemade bread to the soldiers. “We’re working on getting you more backhoes to fill those gabions.”

  “Fill? I gotta find the material to build them first.”

  “Start with whatever chain-link fences you can find.” John told him about the trip to Home Depot they would need to make.

  Moss chuckled. “Sounds like a regular Saturday errand run.”

  “It does, doesn’t it,” John agreed.

  A man in woodland fatigues with a patch on his left breast which read U.S. Army headed their way. The insignia on his uniform indicated that he was a colonel.

  “Colonel Paul Edgar,” the man said, holding out his hand to John. With dark, short-cropped hair and olive skin, he certainly looked the part.

  John greeted him and introduced him to Moss. “This is my head of security.”

  “I can’t tell you what a sight for sore eyes you boys are,” Moss told him, swept up in the moment.

  “We feel the same way,” Colonel Edgar replied. He turned to John. “I don’t mean to be unceremonious, but we’re gonna need to get moving. Where are the troops you’re giving us?”

  The men and women in formation behind them saluted, some better than others.

  “Yes, I saw these,” Edgar said, “but where are the rest?”

  John was taken aback. “This is all we can spare.”

  “I was told by Colonel Higgs to expect several hundred volunteers.”

  “Several hundred?” John said, shocked. “I wasn’t given a specific number, only told to send whoever I could spare.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is our last stop and I have two empty cars at the back that I need to fill before we leave.”

  “But Col
onel,” John protested. “We need these people to maintain the train tracks and help make biodiesel and everything else the army needs to help with the war effort.”

  “John, if we don’t get more soldiers to the front to help plug the gaping holes that open up every time the Chinese launch an attack, then there won’t be a war effort.”

  Reluctantly, John turned to Moss. “All right, round up the rest of the volunteers. How many did you say there were in total?”

  Moss paused, counting in his head. “Nearly three hundred.”

  “Can you fit them all in?” John asked.

  The colonel smiled. “Even if I have to strap them to the roof.”

  Moss left as one of Edgar’s sergeants led the group of fifty toward the back of the train. If this encounter was anything to go by, the front was surely a chaotic and disorganized place.

  Losing that much manpower would require John to shift the workforce around in order to compensate. If John’s concerns about sending his people to the front were vague before, they weren’t anymore.

  •••

  Less than an hour later, the rest of the volunteers were stowing their things in the last two train cars when Colonel Edgar returned. Accompanying him were eight soldiers carrying four heavy containers.

  “What’s this?” John asked.

  “Call it a gift,” Edgar replied, patting the largest of the boxes. “This here’s a Ma Deuce. Along with five thousand rounds.”

  Moss furrowed his brow. “A ma what?”

  “Army slang,” John told him, “for a .50 caliber machine gun. Don’t you need those up at the front, Colonel?”