"After America" - читать интересную книгу автора (Birmingham John)

6

New York "Incoming fire!" the Blackhawk pilot shouted.

Milosz winced as his headphones amplified the man's cry to painful levels.

Between the crackle and chatter of the headset and the hammering blades of the helicopter, Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz could not hear the distinctive and all too familiar sound of the BM-21 rockets that were pounding Castle Clinton. But he didn't need to. He could easily follow the bright arc of their flight paths as they zipped in over the river, and the results were laid out beneath him like a grotesque work of art painted in blood and fire. It greatly distressed the former Polish Army GROM operator to see his new countrymen scurrying about, trying to avoid the pepper-black bursts of high-explosive warheads. It distressed him even more to see some of them fail. Scattered around the grounds of Castle Clinton were a number of mangled bodies, some still crawling, some limping heavily, others writhing on the ground in agony. Here and there a few crimson lumps did not move at all. Fortunately, the bastards behind this atrocity were very poor artillerymen. Many of the rockets fell short into the river, throwing up plumes of dirty brown water or not exploding at all. A handful of warheads flew wide, crashing into the surrounding skyscrapers, detonating with extravagant blasts of color that rained deadly shards of glass into the concrete canyons of the city below. A largely empty city, he thought, thank the Virgin Mary.

"I have them. The island at two o'clock," Milosz called out over the intercom, pointing at a collection of massive, aged brick structures on the island to the north of the big Liberty Lady statue. "In the car park behind the buildings. There! See?"

He pointed out the launch plumes to the ranger fire team in the cabin. Great eruptions of smoke and flares that would not have been visible from ground level on Lower Manhattan, hidden as they were behind the buildings.

"Copy that," the pilot said. "Viper one-three, this is Saber six-one, approaching Ellis Island from the northwest for a visual."

"Viper one-three copies," Milosz's headset told him. He glanced out over the water to see if he could catch a glimpse of Viper one-three, an Apache tank killer assigned to the security detail. He found the helicopter and turned his attention back to the island. "Approaching low from the east. ETA thirty seconds."

"They are BM-21s!" Milosz shouted, scoping the truck-mounted launchers with his rifle. They were still too far off for a decent shot. Plumes of smoke obscured one or more multiple rocket launch systems, Katyushas. As the Blackhawk, flying high and out of reach, orbited Ellis Island, a voice in his headset crackled, "I count six, seven… no, make that a dozen combatants and two launchers."

"Viper, this is Saber. Did you copy last?"

"Viper copies. Stay clear of the island. It'll be rotten with RPGs," Viper one-three said.

"No! Get us closer," Milosz insisted, taking aim at one of the combatants, African by the look of him, clad in ragged olive drab fatigue pants and a ludicrously loud yellow and red patterned shirt. "I can take them. Get us in there."

"Not no, but hell no," the pilot called back.

"But if you get us closer, I can take them out," Milosz argued.

"Negative, Sergeant," the pilot replied. "They'll be waiting in there for us with RPGs."

"Saber six-one, this is Viper one-three. I count fourteen combatants around four truck-mounted BM-21 launchers parked in the parking lot of Ellis Island on the west side. Possible combatants in the museum complex. I am not authorized to fire on a historic landmark," Viper said.

Milosz felt as though his head was going to turn inside out.

These Americans will lose their country yet, he thought, amazed and not a little angry at their reluctance to fire on the enemy. He gauged the range at well over a thousand meters away, too far to make a decent shot with his M14 rifle. It was a good weapon, especially with the Leupold scope, but not quite what he needed for the nig nogs on the island. Now, if he had a fifty-caliber, the story would be very different. Milosz had to content himself with scoping the launchers as a furious exchange went back and forth between the pilot and somebody higher up his chain of command. Even at this distance, with the vibration of the Blackhawk shaking his view in the sight, he could tell the pirates were whooping it up down there, loving every minute of this. They danced and twirled, and a few even performed somersaults as the rockets flew away. Milosz shook his head.

Fools. He tuned out an argument between the Blackhawk's crew chief and the pilot over whether to engage with the M240 door gun. The crew chief lost the argument, fueling Milosz's frustration that much more. He lowered the scope and shook his head at the other three rangers in the bird: Wilson, Sievers, and Raab. Hollywood pussies, he had once called their sort, and his time among them had not changed his opinion entirely, even if it had made him more circumspect about expressing it. They were good men, dedicated, but not as dedicated as his former comrades in the Polish Army. When Germans and Russians have had their boots on your throat for generations, you learn to explore new whole levels of dedication to the task of defending yourself from their ilk.

"Eager to die for your new home, Fred?" Master Sergeant Wilson asked, a thin black man who served as Milosz's squad leader.

The Pole shook his head. "No, I am eager to kill the enemies of my new home."

"The chance will come soon enough," Wilson said, holding a pair of binoculars up to his face. "Looks like Africans or Arabs, do you think? Maybe Jamaicans."

"What does it matter?" Raab asked. "One dead fucker's the same as any other, right?"

"Angolans or Yemenis most likely," Milosz replied, ignoring Raab's contribution.

"Why do you say that?" Wilson asked.

"Those states operate that particular model of BM-21," he said. "They have many to spare and run big looter gangs here, no? It is nothing to loan one to these so-called pirates. That is why I say this."

"Could be anyone," Wilson said, examining the scene below as they banked around to the west.

"We shall see," Milosz said. He watched a U.S. Army AH-64D Apache Longbow come to a hover over the water, outside the reach of the few on the ground who noticed it.

"Stand by," Viper one-three said over the headset. "Engaging. Missile away."

"Put a hurtin' on them fuckers," the Blackhawk pilot said.

Smoke and the flame of more steel javelins climbing away from the launchers in the parking lot obscured the enemy, but as Milosz watched, a barrage of 2.75-inch folding-fin Hydra 70 rockets sliced through and struck the vehicles, tearing them apart in a maelstrom of explosive fire. The cabin of one truck went spiraling high into the air, lazily describing a tumbling flight path back toward a big patch of cleared ground on the Jersey side of the bay but falling well short, dropping onto the causeway that ran out to Ellis Island.

Milosz heard the words "chain gun" through a rush of static just before dark charcoal-gray bursts of smoke began chewing over the parking lot, which quickly disintegrated into a storm of torn steel and fleeing men. Meat and metal swirled in the air, caught in a tornado, as the 30-millimeter cannon fire set off secondary explosions in the wreckage of the Katyusha launchers.

"Yeah!" the Blackhawk pilot whooped. "No one's coming back from that party."

Weapons fire winked at them from one of the larger buildings, a rather beautiful and ornate structure to Milosz's mind, somehow reminiscent of a wedding cake, with four green domed turrets, at least two of them occupied by hostiles. He instinctively reached for a grab bar as the chopper dipped and turned to avoid a line of tracer. The brutal ripping noise of the chain guns sounded again, and when the helicopter had leveled out and he had regained his balance, Sergeant Fryderyck Milosz could see that those turrets were no more.

So much for not shooting up historical monuments, he thought wryly.

"It is good, yes," he said to nobody in particular. "Better that monuments get shot up than Milosz."

An RPG spun forth from a window on an unerring heading, straight toward the Blackhawk.

"Incoming!" Milosz shouted.

The chopper banked and surged, and his stomach felt as though the patron saint of alcoholics had reached inside him and tried to rip it out through his ass. G-forces pressed him down into the deck, and he had trouble holding his head up to watch the action below.

His efforts were rewarded by the sight of another Blackhawk taking an RPG round in the cockpit.

The fast rope insertion went without incident. The four-man team dropped onto the flat roof of what looked like the second largest building, under the shadow of a towering water tank and northwest of what Milosz continued to refer to as the wedding cake building. He thanked the Lord that no shooters had thought to position themselves up there, although he had to admit, that if they had, the Apaches would have reduced them to pink gruel by now.

"On me," cried Master Sergeant Wilson, and the operators rushed to follow him across the roof toward the small cabin that would give them access to a stairwell dropping down into the structure. It was maybe a hundred yards, but it felt like a mile to Milosz, who could not help glancing over at the smoking wreckage of the nearest turrets on the wedding cake. What chance that some new hobgoblin would suddenly pop up there and start spitting fire at them? The hammering thud of an orbiting gunship providing them with cover allowed him to wrestle his thoughts back to the here and now. He fingered the safety on the matte black Mossberg 590 shotgun he had substituted for his M14 back on the chopper. The first shot in the chamber was a breaching round, a shell filled with wax-bound metal powder that would be no good in a fight unless you jammed the muzzle right into the face of your man. It was, however, purpose-built to destroy deadlocks, hinges, and door handles. The team made the entry point as a stray bullet caromed off the sheet metal roof structure. Milosz heard the sudden roar of the Apache's chain gun but did not turn around to see the results. Wilson and Raab took up positions on either side of the door.

Milosz wasted no time, calling out "Clear!" as he ran up, took aim, and blasted a melon-size hole where the door handle had been. Racking another round into the chamber, a man killer this time, he kicked in the door and fired into the interior.

"Frag out!" Raab called as Miloz sidestepped and the corporal tossed a grenade into the breached doorway. They all took cover from the explosion, which seemed to shake the entire roof structure beneath their boots. Sievers entered with his M249 squad automatic weapon up and ready to hose off any resistance, but no answering shots came from below.

"Man in left," he called out, and Milosz entered, his finger with a half pull on the trigger, the muzzle pointed down the dark musty stairwell. The rangers switched on their tac lights, illuminating a small world of mold, peeling paint, and pigeon shit. The stairs were slick with four years of inattention to care and cleaning.

Wilson and Sievers followed him, the team moving down the steps like a death adder with its teeth out. The crash and uproar of the battle outside fell away only marginally, and Milosz could tell from the heavy drilling sounds below them that at least one heavy weapon was still firing from this building. Every so often, he could hear the whoosh of an RPG climbing away.

Wilson held a closed fist up to halt the squad in place in the stairwell while he queried the enemy's position via his headset. Milosz moved up with Sievers to cover the door leading to the top floor.

"This is Romeo one-one to any element," Wilson said. "We've effected entry. Request location of hostile elements, over."

Milosz could not hear the reply on Wilson's headset. He watched the black soldier nod his head once, twice, then a third time.

"This is Romeo one-one, verifying. North side, one floor down from the top floor, one heavy machine gun and an unknown number of RPGs. Is that correct?" Wilson asked the unseen, unheard voice.

After a fourth nod, Wilson signed off. Milosz often wondered why, in the American Army, he could get a headset in the Blackhawk but they did not have individual headsets for soldiers. Delta Force had them, those few he had encountered, GROM had them, and even the British doled them out to their troops, but not the Americans. And so in this way the Americans wasted vital time yet again.

"Okay," Wilson said in a low voice. "Like I said, one floor down, at least halfway along the northern face of the building, we got a crew-served machine gun, something heavy and nasty, and a couple of RPG launchers, which are pinging our birds. Some prisoners would be good but not essential. Let's go. Sievers, you've got the SAW, so you got the lead."

"And lovin' it," Sievers said without any real enthusiasm.

The team moved out behind him, sweeping the hallway in front of them as they went. Milosz brought up the rear, pausing and turning to cover their asses every ten yards or so. There was no indication of any hostile activity on this floor, no sounds of gunfire or voices. Outside the building, though, all was murder and bedlam. They turned the corner at the end of the corridor and flowed around into the next hallway. Rocket fire had struck heavily on this side of the building and opened it up to the outside, collapsing part of the floor between this level and the one below. Small fires burned here and there, and Sievers brought the team to a halt well short of the worst of the devastation. Milosz could see the sky through an enormous hole that looked as though some hungry giant had taken a bite out of the top floors of the structure.

A rocket-propelled grenade whooshed away into the air from somewhere below. Milosz heard a babble of excited Arabic that he lost in the roar of a heavy machine gun from the same location. The team perched silently, their weapons trained on the enormous breach. Wilson signaled to Milosz to ready a couple of frags, and they all inched toward the opening. The thunder of battle rolled on outside, with the crump of rockets and the pounding of guns drowned out by the percussive roar of close-quarter Blackhawk and Apache flybys. The ranger fire team took up position just back from the ragged edge of the collapsed floor and wide-open facade, every man tossing his grenade at a signal from Wilson. The detonation hammered at the floor underfoot like a short, spastic tom-tom beat, and when Milosz's ear stopped ringing, he could hear nothing of the men below.

"Clear," called Raab, who had moved up to take a quick, furtive look over the edge.

"Right, let's keep moving," said Wilson. Milosz was exhausted. He had not been this tired at any time in Iraq. But then, he had not been involved in such dangerous, close-quarter battles there.

An hour after the last shot sounded in anger, Miguel lifted a cigarette to his lips with a badly shaking hand.

Why didn't I stay in Poland?

He knew the answer to that. There was no future in Poland. But having just nearly been killed in a room-to-room firefight with three dozen doped-up pirates who weren't worth… what was Wilson's phrase? Ah yes, hen shit on a pump handle. A good phrase. He would note it down in his little book of useful American words. Yes, having nearly been killed by these fools, he did have cause to question his decision to move out here with his brother's family. They were safely tucked away in some big homestead down in Texas where the cowboys lived while he was being shot at by pirate fools who did not even have the decency to allow him to get close enough to stick his fighting knife in their gullets to settle the score.

When Raab and Sievers had attempted to capture one of the wounded pirates, the crazy man had blown himself up, killing Raab and crippling Sievers and very nearly doing the same to one Fryderyk Milosz, too.

Perhaps he would be better off behind a mule, like his brother. Perhaps it was preferable to holidays in the woods of Washington State trying to harden soft volunteers into rangers who were less soft. Perhaps behind a mule would be better than filling out requests for the Special Forces qualification course, the next step on his journey toward Delta Force. A maddeningly slow journey since the U.S. Army made him go through the hoops regardless of his GROM service.

But farming was not an option, of course.

He was here because his service had bought the ticket that allowed his brother Stepan and his family to join the federal settler program down in Texas two years ahead of time. He hoped his brother appreciated it, Milosz thought as he manhandled a naked and wounded Somali out of the building and toward the Manhattan militia patrol boat.

The Somali was naked because neither Milosz nor Wilson would take his surrender without proof that he had not booby-trapped himself like his crazy-ass Arab friend. Two civilians in khakis and dark polos took the man without comment, probably superspooks from the National Intelligence Agency. He was not the first naked pirate they had carted off, apparently. Milosz gladly washed his hands of the African fighter and made his way over to the ruins of a barge, stepping over the guts and brains of a recently departed combatant without batting an eye. A pair of Navy SEALs were in the debris, sifting through it all.

"Anything?" Milosz asked.

"Who the fuck are you?" one of the SEALs asked.

"Fryderyk Milosz, staff sergeant, army rangers," he growled back. "That's who the fuck I am, you dolphin-fucking dickwad. So. Did you find anything?"

"No, Sergeant," the SEAL said, not much chastened. "Aside from some old Soviet-era manifests, we haven't found shit. Some of these crazy fuckers preferred blowing themselves up to giving it up for us. Ended up shooting most of them. Anything else, Sergeant?"

Milosz grunted and walked away. He sometimes grew tired of the xenophobia of some Americans, especially ones who should know better. Did he not just prove himself to this man? Had he not been proving himself since he set foot here and took up a rifle for his new country? Seemingly not.

He left the SEALs to do their work and returned to the Blackhawk, where a subdued Wilson was sitting with his legs dangling from the cabin, pouring the contents of a Tabasco sauce bottle into an MRE meal pack.

"Want some, Fred?" Wilson asked. He set the bottle on the floor of the Blackhawk with a badly shaking hand and started to turn the food over with a shit-brown spoon. "Got chili mac for once. They are getting harder to find."

"No thank you," Milosz said, squatting down beside Wilson. He removed his kevlar helmet and proceeded to rub his scalp until the blood flowed again.

"Don't let that asshole bother you," Wilson said. "I'm glad you've got my back."

"Yes." Milosz nodded wearily. He jerked his thumb back toward the barge. "I am not to be upset by asshole who eats the pussies of rotting beached whales, no. I am tired and upset by Raab and Sievers. They were good guys, yes?"

Wilson exhaled raggedly, "Yes, they were. I only knew them since getting out here from the West, but they were a good team. We all were, Fred. You were a big part of that. Still are."

"Thank you," the Pole said as he leaned against the chopper and felt waves of lassitude roll over him. "Is it normal, these pirate bitches blowing up themselves and good guys like Raab and Sievers? It reminds me of crazy men in Iraq, yes? Before Jews turn them all into melted glass."

The senior NCO gave two empathetic shakes of his head.

"No way," he said. "I was here for the sweep and clear of Lower Manhattan. Didn't see nothing like that. Didn't see much resistance at all, really. Pirates just sort of melted away."

"Have you heard anything yet about who these brazen nig nogs were to be shooting rockets at President Kipper?" asked the Pole.

Wilson pursed his lips and shook his head.

"Fred, you're gonna have to learn to watch your words, my brother. You're an American now. You cannot say things like that."

Milosz tilted his head, genuinely perplexed. Does Wilson think I am referring to him as well?

"Like what?"

Wilson looked as though he'd been struck by a bout of the squirting assholes and was straining to stay puckered.

"You know, the N-word."

"Nig nog?"

Wilson winced yet again. "Yes, please. Don't say it anymore."

Milosz shrugged. Never mind that he heard many black soldiers saying far worse to each other. He had seen more than one confrontation erupt when someone who was not black also said it. The rationalizations and counter arguments made his head spin. What was the saying?

Oh, yes: not the hill you want to die on.

"If you say so."

They were strange, these Americans, he thought as he dug a half-melted chocolate-covered cookie, a track pad as they called them, from one of his pockets.

They would think nothing of killing a thousand nig nogs in a morning's work but became entirely discomfited if you referred to the nig nogs in any but the most delicate of terms.

He had come to a very peculiar place.