The only answer was withdrawal. Give up Boston. Game over.
That, or extermination. Get some armor. Announce a curfew. Put Bradleys and Humvees on every street, Apaches in the air, and have them shoot everything in sight. Totally clean house.
The Colonel, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. It was against doctrine. The U.S. Army had given up the initiative early in the game. The infected had become the most dedicated, deadly enemy the Army had ever faced. But doctrine still regarded the crazies as sick civilians.
The civilian leadership and the Big Green Machine would realize what had to be done at some point, but by then, it would be too late, if it weren’t already. So instead of concentrating overwhelming force and doing what needed doing, the battalion remained dispersed in small formations, trying to maintain law and order while getting chewed up for it.
Imagine you deploy an army on a series of hills. From there, you command the region. Then a flood comes. The hills become islands, and your army commands nothing but the ground it’s standing on. And the waters keep rising…
The Humvees drove past trees from which a grisly collection of bodies hung by their necks. Men, women, children. In the distance, a group of laughing women roasted a flayed corpse on a spit over an open fire. One wore a helmet that once belonged to an infantryman.
They waved and flashed their breasts as the Humvees passed.
“Can I light them up?” Foster yelled, yanking the charging handle on his heavy machine gun.
“Don’t waste the ammo.”
“It’s time for some payback, Captain.”
Lee shook his head. With the Taliban, payback had meant something. Killing the infected for payback was like punching a shelf after you accidentally slammed your head against it. The shelf wouldn’t care, and you’d probably just hurt yourself.
Murphy growled, “Give it a rest, Foster. You’ll see more action soon enough. We need you to stay alert up there.”
“Wilco, Staff Sergeant.”
The little convoy drove the rest of the way through the park without incident.
“I got some family here,” Murphy said after a while. “Distant relatives.”
“I didn’t know,” Lee said.
The big staff sergeant shrugged.
“Are they okay? Have you heard anything?”
“No.”
“If they’re on our route, we could stop and check on them.” It was an offer Lee would not have made to anyone else.
“Right now, sir, I’m focused on getting back to Hanscom alive.” Murphy spit into his cup. “We weren’t close or anything, but I’d visit them from time to time. I liked coming here. You know, it used to be a really nice town.”
Lee knew he should say something earnest about it becoming a great city again once they completed their mission. The streets would be packed with people and traffic, and the Red Sox would play again at Fenway Park. But he couldn’t. He said nothing.
At that moment, he realized he’d lost faith in their ability to win this war.
Murphy sighed and nodded as if he’d read the captain’s mind. “Yeah.”
“We’re still here,” Lee said. “We won’t lose it all.”
It was more a vow than a prediction.
SIXTEEN.
SCOTT WADE knew he was going to die in this hospital.
He’d survived horrific battles against the Taliban over the past year. Only once had he truly been convinced he was going to be killed. After it became clear the Americans were pulling out to fight a new war, the Taliban, still fighting the old war, staged an all-out assault on Combat Outpost Katie. They wanted American bodies and weapons as trophies to show off. They could then claim they’d driven out the infidels.
In a night attack, the Taliban took out the gun placements in the tower with rocket-propelled grenades. Soviet-era heavy machine guns rattled along the ridges. The red sparks of tracer rounds blurred across the rocks. A stray rocket blew up the fuel truck and drenched the compound in fire. The ammo in a burning Humvee began to cook and pop at intervals.
The first two waves of fighters blew themselves up on the claymores. The rest raced to the walls. They threw grenades and emptied their AK-47s.
The platoon threw everything they had at them. The air filled with hot metal flying in all directions. After Guzman toppled with a smoking hole in his helmet, Wade took over his M240 machine gun and returned fire until the barrel got so hot it began to melt.
Apache gunships approached but didn’t engage, the soldiers afraid of killing American troops. Outpost Katie replied if the helicopters didn’t start dropping ordnance, they were going to be overrun. The Apaches opened up with their chain guns. After this pounding, the guerillas melted away into the mountains while the gunships pursued like angry wasps and mopped up the stragglers.