Against All Enemies (25 page)

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

Jonathan studied the kid’s expression for a while longer. In his experience, few creatures in the universe were more dangerous than a young man with a gun that he had permission to shoot. “Okay,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”

“Yes, sir.” The kid seemed to be resisting the urge to snap to attention.

“Good night,” Jonathan said. He rolled up the window and waited for the gate to rumble open. “Jesus, Box,” he said. He wanted to sound angry, but laughed in spite of himself.

“I just saw an opportunity,” Boxers said. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

It turned out that the adjutant who sat perpetually outside General Karras’s office was a local boy named Tommy Piper. He was twenty-three years old—older than Ian would have guessed—and was kin to a long line of local Pipers. The line was destined to stop with him, however, thanks to an explosion in the mines that killed his father and two brothers when Tommy was only eleven. His mother hadn’t taken the stress well, and in trying one night to drown herself with a few belts of moonshine, she drowned herself for real while skinny-dipping in the quarry. Social workers had sniffed around Tommy for a few years, but this was West Virginia, where eleven-year-olds had been working hard for generations, and the government do-gooders ultimately lost interest in him.

One day at a time grew into a month at a time, and then, in the normal course of things, he evolved into an adult with little ambition but tons of street smarts. When he got word of Karras’s Patriots’ Army, he jumped at the opportunity to become a member—of anything, probably, but this in particular—and he impressed the right people.

Ian had grown to like Tommy, and the sentiment appeared to be mutual. He greeted Ian with a bright smile. “Good morning, Colonel,” he said.

“Hello, Tommy. Is the Old Man available?”

“Yes, sir, he is.” He lifted the receiver on his phone and pressed the button. When Karras answered, Tommy said, “Colonel Carrington to see you, sir.”

Karras said, “Send him in.”

When he hung up and lifted his gaze, Tommy looked offended. “Why are you laughing?”

Ian waved the concern away with broad strokes of his hand. “No, no, it’s not about you. It’s the phone. You can hear every word from the other side of the wall. What’s the point?”

“It’s the way the general wants it, sir.” His answer came straight, devoid of irony.

“Then so he shall have it,” Ian said. He opened the inner door and let himself into Karras’s office. If this were a real army with a real general, he’d have entered smartly and snapped to attention. As it was, he just entered.

Karras looked up from the stuff on his desk. “Good morning, Colonel. Why are you giving my adjutant a hard time?”

Ian pulled out one of the metal torture seats and helped himself. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at.” He waved his fingers at the flotsam that cluttered Karras’s desk. “What the hell do you do with all that paper?”

“Mostly I wish that it wasn’t there.” He chuckled. “We feed a lot of people here. We burn through lots of ammunition and we buy a lot of structures. All of that has to be contracted and paid for.” He laughed at what he saw in Ian’s face. “That’s the difference between government procurement and insurrection. Cash flow has to be managed.”

Ian acknowledged the point by arching his eyebrows. He’d never given that a lot of thought. Uncle Sam employed legions of rear-echelon types to manage that stuff. It ever occurred to him that it would fall on the shoulders of the man who claimed to be in charge.

“Please tell me that’s not why you’re here,” Karras said.

“Actually, no. I’ve got some strategic issues we need to discuss.”

The general’s eyes brightened. “Sounds a lot more interesting that what I’m doing now. I’m all ears.”

“I think we need to reexamine our strategic model. A couple of weeks ago, you told me that the general wanted to move away from my single-shooter teams. I thought he was right then, and I think he’s even more right now. The same problems that existed for the single shooters exist for the three-man teams we’ve been assembling. Such a small group has to be prepared to perform that many more operations. We just don’t have the availability for that kind of training.”

Karras sat taller in his seat. It was his tell for getting defensive. “If you’re suggesting an entirely different strategy, then this conversation is over. General Brock was very specific—”

“Just listen for a bit.”

Karras recoiled. He looked unsure whether to be offended or amused.

Ian didn’t wait to find out. “I think we need to shift the strategy to larger shooter teams.” He was talking eight-man teams who would be organized and trained as stand-alone operating units. They’d be cross-trained, but every operator would have a primary job and a secondary job. All would have combat medic training—or, in this case, advanced first aid, because that was the most advanced level of instructor they could field.

“We need to make these teams cohesive, dependent upon each other. If the shit hits the fan—
when
the shit hits the fan—even if they lose sight of the larger mission in all the mud and blood, they’ll at least fight for each other. And when it comes time to take the important shot—that history-making twitch of a finger that sends the bullet downrange—they’ll have the emotional support of their team to give them that last dose of courage.”

“Doesn’t a larger team sacrifice some element of security?” Karras asked. “There’s that many more people who’ll know the mission upfront, and that many more people to be caught and turned.”

Ian acknowledged, “That’s one way to look at it, but as I see it, those concerns are outweighed by their converse. There’s that many more operators to defend each other if the police get too close. That many more people to keep their buddies from yapping. Call it a wash, security-wise, but operationally, I think it’s hands-down the best way to go.”

Karras leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers over his chest. He looked at Ian the way a chess player tries to read his opponent’s mind—pursed lips, squinted eyes. After maybe thirty seconds, he said, “What’s the operational impact of this change? Are we talking a small modification of the training regimen, or something bigger? If you’re thinking that everything we’ve been doing so far is a wasted effort and we have to start over again, I’ll tell you right now that I can’t sell that.”

“That’s not it at all,” Ian assured. “It’s more an organizational change than anything else. I want to reorganize the troops into squads, and I want to make them autonomous. They eat together, they train together, but they do not interact with the other teams in these capacities. I want to pit the teams against each other in ways that make them compete for everything.”

“Won’t that destroy morale?” Karras asked. “Life is lonely enough up here on the mountaintop. Why make them feel even more isolated? Friendships have already been formed. You can’t accomplish what you’re talking about without pulling those apart. At least some of them.”

Ian fought to suppress his satisfaction. It was exactly where he’d hoped Karras would go. “General, with all respect, this is not a social experiment. The Patriots’ Army is not about comradery or ideology or shared social experimentation. It is about accomplishing a mission that is dangerous and bloody and will likely leave us with no friends among those who will not understand the need for change. If we fail, we face charges of treason. I can imagine no lonelier position than that. Individual soldiers will have virtually no chance for survival when the hunt for them starts. But well-organized teams will have a better chance.”

“I understand that,” Karras said, “but why isolate the teams from each other?”

“To build dependence within the team and independence from others.”

Karras’s eyes narrowed again as he considered what he’d heard. Ian had zero respect for the man as a military mind, but he’d come to admire his management skills. He was smart in a way that Ian imagined would have made him a rich man if he’d applied his skills to his stepfather’s business.

“Where does that leave
us
?” Karras asked.

“I don’t understand the question.”

“As you say, if things go wrong, life is likely to get ugly. I hear your point about these coherent units fighting and dying for each other, but won’t that be their primary loyalty? To each other, I mean? What about loyalty to the rest of the army?”

“You can’t get that,” Ian said, opening the door to another point he’d been wanting to make. “You and I are ideologues. I believe that General Brock is as well, along with your father and any other benefactors of this place. But the soldiers—that group of two hundred young men who are so gung ho to fight—are nothing of the sort. Some are, I suppose, but not on average. I see it in the lack of military discipline among the majority, the lack of respect for rank. For the most part, those boys are angry men, adventurous men,
bored
men who are anxious for a fight. They want to shoot people, and they’re willing to shoot anyone we identify to be the enemy.”

Karras formed a T in the air with the fingertips of one hand, and the palm of another. “Time out, there, Colonel. I’ve known these men for longer than you, and I think you’re selling them short.”

“No.” Ian said it with percussive finality. “I don’t sell them short, you sell them long. You
want
them to be loyal to something greater than themselves, but I’m telling you that that’s simply not the case here. More to the point, that lack of loyalty is not necessarily a bad thing. We are going to dispatch them on missions to kill. There’s no way to put some shiny cloak of morality around taking a life. The fact that the killings are necessary in order to put the country back on the right track matters in real time only to people whose fingers are not on the trigger or the knife. In that moment immediately before the life is taken, in the moment
when
it is being taken, all that matters is getting it done and living through the ordeal. Morality issues come into play only after the fact, and then only for those who have difficulty living with what they’ve done.”

“I’m talking loyalty, Colonel. Why are you talking about morality?”

“Because they’re the same thing,” Ian said in a raised voice that he quickly modulated. How could Karras be so dense? “Pick any war you can think of. Pick one where the other side was clearly the bad guys. Those bad guys didn’t think they were being immoral in killing our kids in uniform. They were merely being loyal to the cause that sent them to war. To those bad guys, our boys—the ones who were loyal to God and country and to the National Command Authority—were immoral monsters.”

Karras raised his voice, too. “How does—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ian said, cutting him off. “As long as our Patriots’ Army soldiers do their jobs and accomplish what we ask them to do, it doesn’t matter what their loyalties are. You and I and the Uprising and all the rest are irrelevant to them, and it’s unreasonable for us to expect it to be any other way. If we reorganize them into the small operating teams I’m talking about, they’ll at least be loyal to each other, which will make them dedicated to their missions.”

“But where does that leave
us?
” Karras asked. He emphasized his frustration with a slap on the desk. “Literally
us?
You and me and the rest of the command structure?”

Ian reared back in his chair. Was the general really so clueless that he couldn’t see something so obvious? “If we prevail, General—if everything goes right with nothing going wrong, if the public hears our battle cry and rise higher and faster than the police and the FBI and every other alphabet group can stop them—then we’ll be leaders of the new American order. If, however, any of that does not happen—and I suspect that much of it won’t—then we die.”

Karras paled. “For God’s sake, Colonel, you’re a
leader.
That kind of pessimism—”

“Never confuse pessimism with realism, General. I am one hundred percent behind the mission. One
thousand
percent behind doing what is necessary to undo everything that Darmond and his clowns have done. That is the mission and I believe that is achievable. But the rest—the part where the people rise—is a pipe dream. The American people aren’t risers anymore. They’re lazy, and half of them love the handouts and the Socialist agenda. They value uninterrupted cable television service over liberty. So, we will die for our cause. In the short term, we’ll be labeled as monsters, but in the longer term, I have faith that we’ll become known as heroes.”

“As martyrs,” Karras said. It was hard to tell whether the thought pleased or repulsed.

“If you’d prefer,” Ian said. “In the longer term, we’ll become known as martyrs.”

Chapter Eighteen

J
onathan smelled bacon. It was 8:45 the next morning, and he felt hungover, despite the fact that he hadn’t had a drop to drink last night. Rough mornings were just one of the list of fines that were due after many years of abusing his body.

But bacon? What the hell?

He rolled out of bed naked and pulled on yesterday’s jeans, slipping a shirt over his shoulders and his Colt into his waistband at the small of his back. He couldn’t imagine that an attacker would invade the place and then cook breakfast, but almost all of Jonathan’s todays were built on the shoulders of yesterday’s caution.

He padded barefoot out of his bedroom on the second floor, and down the hall to the open stairway that led in a long spiral down to the living area. None of the boards creaked because he had paid an enormous premium for the quality of construction that prevented creaking. It wasn’t a stealth thing, it was a quality thing.

While he didn’t know who had gathered in his kitchen, the fact that no alarms had gone off and no shots had been fired clued him in to the fact that the threat was minimal.

He was halfway down the stairs when he heard a familiar laugh. Venice. She’d driven out from Fisherman’s Cove, and of course she’d arrived early. Some things were as reliable as the rising sun. There was another voice, though, a male, that he didn’t immediately recognize. Whoever it was, he seemed to be getting along well with the presumed hostess.