The Polish commando, so far from his birth home, walked carefully through the apartment, navigating partly by memory, partly by dint of the fact that he and Wilson had pushed most of the furniture up against the walls while they still had daylight. It gave him a clear path back into the kitchen, where he'd set up a little Coleman stove in the sink. He could use it safely back here without fear of the tiny blue flame giving away their position. Milosz brewed two cups of strong coffee and contemplated adding a slug of brandy-the apartment had been furnished with an excellent bar-but it was an idle thought. He had also salvaged a bottle of vodka, which he would enjoy when they came off the line, but for now, he was so sleep-deprived and physically exhausted that a mouthful of alcohol might be the end of him.
The fighting had not ceased completely with the fall of darkness. Both sides enjoyed the advantage of night vision equipment, and a small battle appeared to be raging in the foul weather some ten or fifteen blocks to the north. But the rain had flooded huge tracts of Lower Manhattan, making tactical movement difficult, if not impossible, and the huge brigade-level encounters of the morning had died down as conditions had deteriorated. At first the Americans had been choppering in, right on top of the pirates-or looters, as Milosz insisted on calling them. To him the word "pirates" sounded a bit too glamorous for the lowest forms of criminal scum, scavengers raking over the junk heap of a dead city. But so many men and helicopters were lost to shoulder-fired rockets that all movement was now either on foot or by armored fighting vehicle, and even they could fall prey to giant bombs hidden at the roadside or in piles of refuse and wreckage. All in all, Milosz was more than happy to sit up here in his well-furnished eyrie, picking off random targets as they presented themselves. A troop of cavalry had his back, securing the lower levels of the building against infiltrators, and the Apaches circling beneath the cloud cover would swoop down on any large group attempting to rush their position. Forward observers even coordinated concentrated bursts of accurate cannon fire from the army and the naval vessels on the East River now. It was such an agreeable setup, all things considered, that it could not possibly last.
He returned with the coffees and a Mars Bar chopped in two with his Gerber knife, a prize from a game of poker with Wilson two weeks back.
Happier times.
The master sergeant leaned forward in his own luxury armchair, pressing his fingers up against the single earpiece of their radio. Milosz, without a headset on, could not hear the exchange.
"This is Gopher one-three," Wilson said, using the latest in an ever-changing series of call signs. "Go with your traffic."
Milosz waited for Wilson to finish his conversation.
"Gopher copies," Wilson said. "Out."
He took the hot coffee from Milosz and inhaled the chocolate bar all in one go.
"Sorry, spring break is over. Militia company pushed a little too far forward up on Madison Square, got 'emselves surrounded. The disco lights just started up from that direction. We're moving up with the cav to dig 'em out."
Milosz took a few moments to savor his half of the Mars Bar and sip the rest of the coffee. His gear was ready to move at moment's notice, and he did not know when they might eat again. The nig nogs were flooding in from…
Milosz forced himself to back up and rephrase that. He had promised Wilson there would be no more nig nog talk. And anyway, not all the looters were nig nogs. Many were ragheads. Some were beaners. There were even a few outfits from his part of the world, Slavic crews out of Serbia and Russia. The latest intelligence even had a few dozen players from the Chechen mafia working the north end of the island. For some reason, though, the loose coalition of bandits who were actually spoiling for a fight were mostly African or refugees from the Second Holocaust, a grab bag of different Arab nationalities and Iranians. They were flooding into the blocks around Madison Square Park, where Alpha Company of Governor Schimmel's First New York Militia Regiment was cut off and in danger of being overrun.
"The better part of Alpha has holed up here," said the colonel as he pointed at a strange map surrounded by cups of stale coffee, pencils, rulers, and message printouts on a dusty conference room table. It showed not only the street grid for that part of the city but 3D-like drawings of the buildings. They reminded Milosz of a tourist guide to Rome he had once owned. He had never been there, of course. Sergeants in the Polish Army did not earn that sort of money. But as a staunch Catholic he often dreamed of visiting the Pope in his hometown, even when the blessed John Paul II had passed on to his reward and been replaced by that creepy German, Ratzinger. So he had bought a copy of that guide to Rome, which featured maps just like this one.
The colonel, whose name tag read KINNINMORE, stabbed his finger down again, pointing to a richly illustrated wedge of parkland.
"Unfortunately," he continued, raising his voice over a wash of radio chatter that spilled out of a makeshift communications area. The sound of panic filled the room until someone turned the speakers down, reducing the gunfire and shouts to a tolerable level. The colonel resumed his speech. "Unfortunately," he said, "there's a platoon and spare change pinned down out here, in the open. They have good tree cover and have dug themselves in as best they can, but the pirates are pouring it on. They want to wipe out a whole company. We're shielding them with protective fire out of our ships on the river, but they're running low and resupply is dicey at best."
Again with the pirates, Milosz thought. They really needed a better name for these asswits. There. Asswits. That would do perfectly well. Master Sergeant Wilson could not complain about that that because asswits, in Fryderyck Milosz's long and all too common experience, came in a variety of colors and ethnicities. Whereas the pirates who had first raided New York in the weeks after the Wave rolled back came from one place only, Nigeria, specifically the port of Lagos. They were real, modern-day pirates, too, who until then had made a living seizing and ransoming container ships in the Gulf of Guinea when they didn't simply kill the crew and take the cargo for themselves. The news of the first of their number to strike out across the Atlantic and come home with a hold full of treasures saw most of the port's pirate cohort immediately slip anchor for the New World. Then most of the port's other inhabitants followed them. Then, increasingly, competitors from neighboring countries, from the Caribbean and South America and of course from the benighted wastelands of all those lands destroyed by the Israelis' nuclear strikes.
As far as Milosz could tell, the original Nigerian pirates weren't even operating here anymore, having been driven off by larger, better-armed and -organized competitors. So it just wasn't correct to call them pirates anymore. Whereas "asswits"-a term he had picked up from a British officer in Iraq-well, asswits very much appealed to him.
Colonel Kinninmore, however, was sticking with "pirates."
"The pirates we're looking at here are probably sourced from over a dozen different crews, until recently none of them coordinating very well but all of them pretty well established in the AOR, and with good equipment. Suspiciously good equipment. They have solid Russian AKMs, PKMs, a lot of Chinese Type 56s, and some crew-served stuff, which they've taken off the trucks since we started interdicting them by air. They have some night vision capabilities, a mix of Chinese and Russian gear, which seems to be unevenly distributed. Same with body armor; even got some scavenged NYPD vests thrown in. Their comms gear is very good. Although their radio security is not."
Milosz stole a glance out the window of the conference room. It was on the fourth floor of a nondescript office building near Union Square, looking out across a little park. All the big boys had been brought to the conference, special operators from all four branches of the U.S. military along with private contract operators from Sandline. One of the Navy SEALs from Ellis Island recognized Milosz and nodded to him.