"Open fire."
The officer does not flinch. The six troops and the interpreter hit the ground and light the area up. The young woman hits the ground.
The officer stands there. The large, angry, man explodes apart from a .50 caliber round, blood and less identifiable bits splashing on the officer. The officer does not flinch. He simply waves away some more flies. Rounds crack past his ear, he feels a tug from one on his lower left arm.
When the firing stops, he smiles.
Troops move in and ensure all the vehicles are clear.
"Hollywood, find someone in this rat-fuck who can be put in charge. Have Salah start rounding up the girls. All of these for starters. Don't add any of these below the age of . . . sixteen to the thirty count. Any chosen who have children can bring them as well. And if they might not be their children, that's okay, too."
The camp was moved. Some of the refugees had to be carried, but they all survived. It was moved to the other side of the road. A man who said he was a mullah was put in charge. He never carried a gun. (He was later recognized as one of the "diggers" from the first few days. The guys who got off their ass to bury the bodies. Good enough.) Others were found to carry the guns. The example of Abu Bakr was pointed out to them. Food and water distribution was rationalized. Tents and cots were brought out. A roadblock was put on the road to control who came out to the camp. Latrines, eventually a kitchen, etc.
Of course, that brought more refugees. But . . .
Some good in the world. For a time. A moment.
Pax Americana. It's like a gnat in a blast furnace in the Middle East.
Chapter Four
We Get Ammunition?
Did I get my tubes cleaned?
Dude, I was the base commander.
Her name was Shadi. She was eighteen. The reason I know is that I had a conversation with Hollywood.
"How old is this young lady, Hollywood? She's eighteen, right?"
"Uh, sir, she said she thinks she's . . ."
"Eighteen, right?"
"Yes, sir! She's eighteen, sir!"
She was eighteen and she looked, even after all that time in that fucking place, like a god damned model. Long legs, gorgeous face, high cheekbones, aquiline nose, gigantic dark eyes and very nice hooters. She was, by a smidgeon admittedly, the best looking of the young ladies who had chosen to enter the employ of the United States Army.
She was my "personal maid." She kept my quarters straight, shined my shoes, cleaned my clothes, made sure I ate . . . Stuff like that. She also, yes, participated in the general housekeeping chores for the unit. That was the point of it, not to get a personal concubine.
Butterfill got one too. Rank hath its privileges. The lieutenants, four, had two. The senior sergeants I'm not sure how it broke out. And really don't ask me about the troops. I know there was a rota of some sort but I did not get into it. That's what first sergeants are for.
Were there "issues?" Oh, hell, yeah. Guys in their twenties fall in love with anything that's got pussy. But the issues paled before the benefits. I'm not talking personally although the benefits were nice. I'm talking about troops who were more alert and with soaring morale. My morale was better than it had been in a year. And, hell, the girls weren't exactly unhappy.
By the way, did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"?
I'd just stood there cool as a cucumber in the middle of a firefight. The boys do love someone with big brass ones. Those who hadn't previously served with Bandit Six had heard the rep and might have believed it and might not. They knew it now. Big brass ones, calm as hell when the shit hits the fan. Bandit Six rocks.
(I did not tell them I was nearly peeing myself. There'd been a lot of reasons, including the above, that I did it that way. Didn't mean I liked it. Rank has way more to it than privileges.)
Did the boys have problems with "rank hath its privileges"? No. They would have for the fucking battalion commander who hardly ever left the fucking FOB and created no end of trouble when he did. But not for Bandit Six. Or Fillup who was a stand-up guy.
We eventually dipped further into the well for some more for the Nepos. The girls that "assisted" them were getting a bit ragged.
Some of them had kids. Their kids? I dunno. Didn't care. Some of them, despite my best efforts (there was a supply of birth control pills on the base, naturally, and I kept telling guys to use fucking condoms) got pregnant. Or were pregnant when we brought them in. Deal with that bridge when we came to it. Hell, we were bound to get "relieved" . . . more relieved sometime.
Or were we?
Look, the U.S. was a shambles. The military, Army, Air Force, Marines, even the damned Navy, was stretched to the nth degree trying to keep things from coming totally apart. People thought they were apart. They weren't. Hell, television stations were still broadcasting. CNN was up. Fox was up. Networks were mostly showing repeats but if you had satellite and power you could pretend things were normal if you didn't watch the news.
Civilization in the U.S. was hanging on by a thread. Civilization everywhere was hanging by a thread.
Europe looked as if it might survive or it might not. Besides all the shit the U.S. was going through, its average mortality, despite an I'll admit better distribution of the vaccine, was higher than that of the U.S. See that long bit about why and pick what you're willing to believe. Bottomline, they'd gotten hit massively.
Oh, yeah. Might be time to talk about how effective the vaccine really was. They had distributed vaccine. And gotten a goodly part of their population. Type one vaccine. Turns out that the strain of H5N1 that actually broke out almost all had mutated binding proteins.
(What the hell? Mutated what? You mean it stalked around growling "Braaaains . . ."?)
Here's what a flu virus does. A flu virus is a little packet, it can't really be called a cell, that looks sort of like a robot and acts a lot like one. Depending what kind of cell it's "targeted" on, it finds that type of cell and hooks on with proteins that look remarkably like hooks under an electron microscope. Then it shoots a package of DNA into the cell. The package of DNA first tells the cell to make a shitload more viruses then kills itself (lyse) so they're released.
This is the way that immunization works.
Immunization doesn't attack the flu. It tells your body's defenses what the flu is going to look like when you get it. It's sort of like giving the body's policemen a picture of that flu bastard and telling them "Shoot to kill." So when the flu attacks, your body produces a bunch more policemen (antibodies) which attack the flu.
The problem with most flu vaccines is that the "picture" that the antibodies get only describes those hooklike proteins. And it, chemically, describes them precisely. If the antibodies see different proteins, they ignore them. Otherwise you can get what's called an "autoimmune" disorder where your antibodies are attacking you.
A virus can only mutate in a host, therefore who it infects is as important as how—certain human genes control how and when the virus mutates—a blended genetic culture such as U.S. is much less likely to produce a uniform mutation that could spread (see Patient Zero discussion)—so the monocultures in the rest of the world were much more likely to be infected by a resistant mutant that was practically tailored to wipe them out.