The Rift (85 page)

“Do you really think a dozen killers are going to turn this country around?” he said. “Do you really think that?”

“You’ve always stood up for the white man,” David said. “That’s all I’m doing.”

“I’ve done what I can for myself in this place,” Omar said. “Our family has been here for seven generations and we’ve never had anything to eat but shit from the people who run the parish. The Klan’s the only answer for a man like me. But you—” He looked at his son. “You’re in college. You’ve got what it takes to make it outside Spottswood Parish. You can leave this used-up old place. And that’s what I want you to do.”

David was still bewildered. “I ain’t never heard you talk like this.”

Omar felt cold beer seeping up his crew socks. “I want you to go away!” he shouted. “I want you to save yourself!”

“There’s no way out of town, Dad.” A reasonable tone had crept into David’s voice. “The bridges are down. Besides, I don’t
want
to leave. Not when we’re all going to be famous!”

Omar stared at his son. “Famous?”

“With our pictures on TV and everything!” There was a drunken glow in David’s eyes. “Then we’ll disappear into the underground, like Knox does after he rescues some Jew money from a bank, and we’ll wait to strike again. And then after the Liberation—”

“After the
what?”
Omar repeated.

“After we win. After the white man’s in charge again.”

Omar’s heart beat sickly in his temples. His head whirled. He couldn’t quite seem to catch his breath.

“My God,” he said, half to himself. “My God in this world.”

Micah Knox would pay for this, he thought. Would pay and pay.

David reached out, patted Omar in a comforting way on his knee. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Everything will be fine. You’ll see. We’ll come through, and maybe you’ll even be President.” He laughed. “Won’t that be something! You and me in the White House.”

Omar threw his head back and felt anguish twist in his heart like a knife. He wanted to howl his pain aloud. “I wanted you to be better than me,” he said.

David looked at him with drunken amiability. “Nobody’s better than you, Dad,” he said. “Nobody in this world.”

*

Jessica’s helicopter lurched as wind shear tried to fling it into the invisible Arkansas Delta below. Water coursed over the windscreen in streams, and blinking red and green navigation lights reflected off the slanted raindrops like a thousand distant stars. The command radio channel hissed in Jessica’s ears, then crackled to the sudden flashes of lightning that lit the strange, featureless gloom in which the Kiowa traveled.

The rescue mission to Rails Bluff was underway. It was a little after two in the morning. Rivera’s Rangers, with units of Jessica’s engineers in support, were scheduled to be in position around the camp by five. The camp was due to be under new management, as Colonel Rivera had put it, by dawn.

Brightly colored star shells flashed in Jessica’s left eye as the helicopter gave another lurch. She blinked, tried to will the flashing lights away. Gravity clutched at her stomach.

She enjoyed thrill rides, but this was absurd.

Lightning dazzled Jessica’s eyes and thunder boomed through the cabin. “Jesus Christ,” her pilot murmured, and then, “Sorry, ma’am.”

I want my high-pressure system back,
Jessica thought.

Suddenly the pounding rain ceased, and the remaining droplets were blown off the windscreen by prop blast. The Kiowa floated through cloud, a world of cotton-wool eerily remote from the rest of the universe. Enhancing the sense of unreality were the ghostly symbols on the heads-up display, navigation and other information projected onto the interior of the windscreen so that the pilot could read them without looking down at the instrument panel. Though the data from those displays, from the Inertial Navigation System and the Litton AHRS, tracking their location in the murk to within a hundred meters, kept the outside world a lot closer than it seemed.

“We have reached Point C,” the pilot said. He touched the rudder bar with one foot while his hand made an adjustment to the collective. “Turning to course two-one-zero. Navigation lights—” A gloved hand reached for the instrument panel. “Off.”

Jessica felt her mouth go dry as the night shadows closed in. The outside world was getting closer by the second.

The late-afternoon Air Force overflight had revealed that the Rails Bluff camp had made defensive preparations. Sandbagged emplacements had appeared on the camp’s perimeter since morning, and some of the strong shadows inside the camp suggested that slit trenches had been dug here and there.

And worst of all, there were two sandbagged outposts planted on the embankment of the catfish farm across the road. One of them showed a tripod-mounted machine gun that could dominate the flat country for a thousand yards in all directions.

In the early evening Rivera, Jessica, and their officers made hurried revisions of their plan of operations. The machine gun had to be neutralized or taken out. Likewise the sandbagged bunkers.

“Good thing we’ve got bad weather coming in,” Rivera said. “Anyone in the camp’s going to be under cover, and that MG is probably going to be wrapped in plastic.”

We hope,
Jessica thought.

The Kiowa gave another lurch, leaving Jessica’s stomach about two hundred feet above her head. Jessica wondered if Rivera was still thankful for the rain.

We own the night.
Jessica hoped it wasn’t as empty a boast as
We control the river
turned out to be.

Rivera’s voice crackled on the command channel. “Badger Team has landed and is taking position. All is copacetic.”

“Roger that, Badger.” Rivera’s primary combat team had landed north of the catfish farm, out of earshot— it was hoped— of any sentries in the camp. That would mean a long slog through flooded fields to the camp, but that shouldn’t be a consideration to people who Owned the Night.

Other reports came in as other teams landed. Jessica’s Kiowa reached its landing point and began to descend. The cloud cleared, and below, in the infrared light of the chopper’s FLIR, Jessica saw Rivera’s helicopters spread over several acres of mud. Little glowing figures, Rangers, were setting up a perimeter.

Jessica’s own engineers would be in support, and would not approach the Rails Bluff camp unless the Rangers called for them, or when the camp was secured. Likewise Jessica would leave Rivera to take care of tactical operations and only intervene with the capture of the camp if it was absolutely necessary. Which meant only if things went terribly, terribly wrong.

The Kiowa settled gentle as a dandelion seed onto the muddy field.

Jessica sighed. It was going to be a long night.

*

Rain drummed on Frankland’s rain hood as he tramped to the door of the radio station. He wiped his boots on the mat and prepared to step inside, then hesitated with his hand on the doorknob as he heard a throbbing sound, distant but clear in the waterlogged night. For a moment his nerves hummed—
black helicopters!
— but then lightning cut loose somewhere to the west, freezing the world as if in a photo flash, and he shook his head and opened the door.

This weather was impossible. The black helicopters would come, he thought, but they could not come tonight.

Sheryl looked up from the reception desk. The desk light pooled on the long linen Apocalypse spread out before her. When the storm had blown up, after dark, Sheryl’s magnum opus had suffered considerable damage from the wind before she and Frankland could rescue it and bring it indoors.

“The camp’s going to be a real mess in the morning,” Frankland said. “We’d better have a hot meal ready when people get up.”

Sheryl nodded. “Already taken care of.”

“How you doing, honey bun?”

Sheryl looked at him over the rims of her reading glasses. “Dreadful damage. Just dreadful.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Just watch where you put your feet.” A lot of the linen rolls had ended up on the floor for lack of anywhere else to put them. Frankland shuffled his boots from the fragile artwork.

“I’m going back to the studio.”

“Mm.”

He opened the inner door and walked down the corridor to the control room. Lights glowed, and dials clicked back and forth unattended as the station broadcast a recording that Frankland had made weeks ago, before the first great earthquake

Frankland felt an aftershock rumble up through his boots. That, he thought, must have been the throbbing sound he’d heard.

He took off his rain slicker, then unstrapped the AR-15 he carried across his chest to protect it from the weather. He propped the gun in a corner, took off his pistol belt— the grenades made it too uncomfortable to wear while sitting— and sat in front of the microphone.

He hadn’t broadcast much new material since the first quake. He’d been too busy organizing the camp. But now that he knew the black helicopters were coming, Frankland felt he wanted to talk about what had happened, to explain his point of view and the necessity for everything he’d done.

Frankland wanted to leave a testament behind him. So that after the black helicopters came people would understand.

It was for souls, he wanted to say. The bodies didn’t signify, it was winning souls for Christ that mattered.

And so he cued up a tape, positioned himself behind the microphone, and as the rain drummed on the roof and the building rocked to thunder, he began to speak.

When he broadcast his testament in the morning, the world would know.

*

The Rangers moved forward, hunched in their cloaks beneath squalls of wind and rain. While the pouring water streamed down the canopy of her helicopter, Jessica listened to her helicopter’s command channel, the terse, breathless communications of the officers. Her hands clutched the sides of the seat as reports came in of the camp coming into sight, as night-vision and infrared gear was used to carefully scan the camp and spot any sentries who dared to stick their heads out.

There weren’t many, it appeared. The camp was buttoned down against the storm.

“Coffee, General?” Jessica’s pilot produced a thermos.

“No. Thanks.” Much as she craved coffee at the moment, she was wound tightly enough as it was.

Jessica had read that Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery used to go to sleep the night before an attack, with strict orders not to be disturbed until the battle had already developed. She wondered how he managed it.

The smell of coffee filled the cockpit, activating Jessica’s salivary glands. A mild aftershock rolled up the Kiowa’s struts as commands hissed into Jessica’s earphones. The Rangers were crawling forward toward the camp under cover of the intermittent squalls. They were moving toward the machine-gun nest at the catfish farm by crawling along the base of the earth embankment, so a lightning flash wouldn’t silhouette them on the top.

“This is Badger Six,” a voice crackled. “We have secured our objective on the northwest perimeter. The guards did not resist. Repeat, no resistance.”

“Roger that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice.

Jessica’s breath eased from her aching lungs. One corner of the unmarried women’s camp was secure.

“Holy shit!” came Badger Six’s voice again, very excited. Jessica jerked forward in her seat as if pulled by an invisible wire. “We got fragmentation grenades here! And a couple M-16s. Do you copy that?”

“Copy that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice was laconic.

“These people are loaded for bear, sir!”

“No chatter on this channel, Badger Six. We copy.”

Another outpost fell in silence, then another. Then— Jessica wanted to scream out her relief— the machine-gun nest on the catfish farm.

And then the rest. The camp’s perimeter had been secured without a shot, without an alarm, without a single act of violence.

Relief sang in Jessica’s veins.

Rivera began to position his teams to cut the camps off from one another, to secure the church, the radio station, and Frankland’s house.

Jessica leaned back in her seat.

“I’d appreciate some of that coffee, soldier,” she said.

*

They will say I have committed murder.
The phrases rolled through Frankland’s mind as he pushed back from the microphone.
Certainly I have killed, but I have killed justly. And God will judge me in the end, as he will judge all men. I have no terror of standing before the Throne of the Almighty.

Frankland stood, stretched, felt his vertebrae crackle. His body was weary, but his mind still churned with ideas, with images. The spirit still sang in him, stirring his nerves, and he knew that it would be hours before he would sleep.

He got ready to cue the new recording, then turned up the in-studio speaker on the recording that was already playing. He waited until the older recording came to a natural pause, then Frankland turned it off and cued his testament.

“This is the Noble Frankland of the Church of the End Times.” The voice came from the battered old speakers in the room. He turned down the volume, then strolled down the hallway to where Sheryl still sat behind the desk, working briskly with her tweezers.

“Any news?” he asked.

“No.” She looked up from her work. “Rain’s slackening off, I think,” she said.

Frankland looked at his watch. It would be dawn shortly.

And then the door opened and a pair of armed men entered, rifles held across their chests, faces blackened and rain-streaked below the broad, dripping brims of their hats. “U.S. Army!” one of them said. “Nobody move!”

Frankland stared as his heart lurched into a higher gear.
Caught!
he thought. His rifle, his pistol, and his precious grenades were in the control room. He was helpless.

Another man entered the room, a pistol held lightly in his hand. “Colonel Rivera,” he said. “U.S. Rangers. I understand you had some trouble here?”

Frankland could only gape. He couldn’t understand how this could happen. He had
guards
!
He had
outposts
! He hadn’t heard a single shot.

Black helicopters!
his mind screamed. Black helicopters of Satan! They had come in the night, and he and his poor people had been caught unprepared.