His ass chewed out by a four-star general, the major snapped to attention, answering, “Yes, sir! Crystal, sir!”
Fifteen minutes after Couture cleared the zone, the Fort Apache sign went back up. The FOB was attacked that same night, and eight more civilians lost their lives. The next day, an actual civilian militia began to form on the north side of the city, where there was talk of marching on division headquarters. Nobody really took the talk seriously, but the threat of a nuclear bomb had obviously become a secondary concern in Chicago, and this forced the president (by this time commanding from Andrews Air Force Base) to recall General Couture for the purpose of discussing at least a partial withdrawal from the city, fearing the occupation there was doing measurably more harm than good, and that the discord might spread to the other occupied cities.
Daniel Crosswhite and Brett Tuckerman knew next to nothing about any of this. For the past week, they’d been too busy knocking over drug pushers well outside the military cordon to the south, not far from where they had returned the little girl to her home.
The little one’s parents had been completely stunned to answer the door at seven in the morning and see their long-lost daughter — now almost a year older — standing on the porch between two unshaven white guys in dark sunglasses, clutching a truck-stop teddy bear and a big bag of McDonald’s hotcakes.
“Remember… we were never here,” Crosswhite said gravely. He handed the bag of hotcakes to the little girl’s father, and then he and Tuckerman disappeared on foot down the block.
Each pusher they’d taken down over the subsequent five nights was forced to rat out the locations of his associates’ hideouts, and the money had piled up fast. They were about ready to blow town the night before, but the last pusher they worked over ratted off a competitor whose house was located a half mile inside the military cordon.
“That motherfucker got half a mil easy!” the pusher had sworn, his bloody face mashed between his expensive white shag carpet and the sole of a Fort Lewis combat boot.
Now Crosswhite sat in the back of the van watching the run-down house through his night vision goggles. “What do you think?”
Tuckerman picked his teeth with a toothpick. “Looks like a shit hole to me.”
“Could be intentional if they’re really holding that much cash.” Crosswhite reached over and jerked the black hood off the head of their battered informant, who sat against the bulkhead with his hands flex-cuffed behind his back. “If you’re setting us up, asshole, I’m gonna stuff you headfirst down a sewer pipe. You got that?”
The man nodded wearily, duct tape over his mouth, nose broken, and one eye swollen nearly shut. Blood and snot oozed over the tape as he breathed.
“Let’s do it then.” Crosswhite put the bag back over the dealer’s head and yanked the cord tight, tying it in a knot. Then they flopped him over onto his belly in the middle of the satin bedspread they had taken from his bed and roughly rolled him up in it. A sharp blow to the side of his face through the bedspread with the stock of an M4 knocked him cold.
They dismounted the van and moved swiftly toward the house, scanning the darkness through infrared as they made their way around back. A sharp burst of 9 mm gunfire from a first-floor window struck Tuckerman in his chest and shoulder armor. The two men returned fire, spraying suppressed .223 caliber fire through the window. The shooter’s head disintegrated, and the body dropped with a thud inside the house. Someone else opened fire from another window, and they dove for cover behind an old brick barbeque pit that hadn’t been used to cook a meal in a half century.
“It’s a goat fuck,” Tuckerman said, switching out the magazine on his M4. “Wanna split before the army hears this shit and rolls in?”
“No, I want my half a mil,” Crosswhite said, reloading quickly.
“Dude, there ain’t no money. This was a fuckin’ setup.”
“I don’t think so. Look.” Crosswhite pointed up at the eve of the house, where a small infrared camera was mounted below the rain gutter. “They’ve got real security here, and that means money.”
“It also means we should split.”
“You go if you want. I’m takin’ this place down and retiring to Guate-fuckin’-mala.”
Tuckerman chuckled. “When we get killed, it’ll be your fault.”
“Roger that.”
They each pulled the pin from a high-explosive grenade and then hurled them through the windows. Even as the grenades were exploding, they were pulling the pins on two more, hurling them into the house on the tail end of the first pair of explosions. Glass blasted outward in blinding white flashes, and the entire house groaned within from the force of four nearly simultaneous detonations.
Tuckerman and Crosswhite dashed from behind the barbeque pit and blew the back door off its hinges with plastic explosives. Three busted bodies littered the kitchen floor, one of them missing most of its head, and the smell of cordite hung heavy in the air. They found two more busted bodies in the dining room and a matching number of scattered Tec-9 machine pistols, which they kicked contemptuously aside. The inside of the house was now a shambles, but there was a lot of expensive stuff in the place: leather sofas and chairs, a big-screen hi-def television, stereo… the works.
“Let’s get the money.” Crosswhite put a burst of fire through the basement door and kicked it apart with his boot. They took off their goggles and switched on the rail-mounted flashlights attached to their carbines, making their way down the stairs, careful to watch for booby traps. Procedure and all common sense dictated that they clear the entire house before cornering themselves in the basement, but both men had seen enough combat by this point in their lives that they felt safe enough trusting instinct, and instinct told them the fight was over.
In the basement, they found what they had been told to look for: a steel gun locker in the corner with a combination dial on the front.
“Looks tough,” Tuckerman said, chewing the inside of his cheek.
“It’s a gun locker, not a bank vault.” They put plastic explosives on the dial and all three hinges, set the timer, and ducked upstairs.
The blast shook the floor, and they scurried back down to find the locker laying over on its side with the mangled quarter-inch steel door still wedged crookedly in place. The steel locking pins had held for the most part, but banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills were falling out through the opening. They pulled a pair of nylon gym bags from beneath their body armor and went to work filling them with cash.
Three minutes later, they were dashing out the back door with red and blue lights dancing in the trees and on the walls of the neighboring houses. They darted across the backyard, hurling the heavy bags over a fence and jumping over after them, snatching them up again and scrabbling over a pile of car tires, old asphalt shingles, and rotting drywall to make their way deeper into an increasingly deteriorated and largely desolate neighborhood.
They could see army Humvees between the houses racing up and down the streets, and it quickly became apparent the army was cordoning off the block. “I got a feeling we’d better get ready to look like a pair of harmless civilians in a hurry,” Tuckerman said.
“I think you’re right.”
They hid the bags of cash beneath the foundation of a collapsed garage, filling in the opening with broken cinder blocks to conceal the bags and dashed down the alley.
A searchlight snapped on at the end of the lane, and a voice boomed out “Halt!”