GWOT VI - Red Lion Roars

I had given the UN commander twenty four hours.

Members of the military community knows what twenty four hours means. There are several references to this time period in the laws of war.

It's a pause before you're really gonna fuck shit up.

And since the UN wasn't going to stop this genocide, by God the California Republic will.

What we had here, and I'd known it since before leaving California, was a genocide in slow motion. The Christian fundamentalist mega churches were slowly pressuring anyone not willing to submit to their rule to leave town. 'Bandits' were attacking isolated non X-tian communities. When the sheriff helpfully showed up on the heels of the bandits, they were somehow more focused on helping the survivors move than pursuing said bandits. And I kept hearing persistent rumors of 'camps' at which Xtian youth were training, or refugees were being massed.

The last straw for the world community had been finding a pile of several hundred bodies just outside town, an atrocity insufficiently hushed up. And the state police less than a mile away … hadn't heard a thing. Not the rumble of trucks, not the bursts of machine gun fire, not the barks of pistol fire finishing off the wounded.

We couldn't blame this one on Homeland. Even during the War, they'd (correctly..) considered Iowa a safe zone. Bear Force hadn't operated here either, one of the reasons California Republic could be here at all.

Human trafficking is a different beast. I'd just spent a year on the Border fighting that. Promise people a better life, and they will crawl over concertina wire and razor mesh to get to it. But even that, saving people from indentured servitude cleaning up and mining the ruined cities of the American Midwest, had a flavor of business to it. We needed the same desperate refugees to clean up San Francisco, you see, and we were just offering a better deal - food, medical care, immigrant visas, as opposed to being worked to death on a thousand calories a day.

This was separation preparatory to extermination.

The Xtian youth were training to become genocidaires. I really didn't want to reopen Alviso and kill them all. Better an ounce of prevention than a ten foot drop of cure.

California Republic SDF's motto, "Revenge is too late."

The refugees were terrified. In town, there were witnesses, but not enough food. Outside town, there was the illusion of hope, but the strong likelihood that one would end up just another dead body in a ditch.

The megachurches were giving food aid … to their people, only. And they were strengthening ration controls, cracking down on anyone who sold food to anyone outside of Church channels.

Langar Aid giving away two vegetarian means a day in the heart of town was a powerful weapon. And if it weren't for the UN security control point, they'd already have been suicide bombed.

How much do you have to hate someone to strap on a bomb and go give them a hug?

We had to take this fight to the Churches. And I had some ideas. But right now, it was a matter of figuring out how to protect the remaining isolated communities before the 'bandits' eliminated them.

I could light up bandits. But the sheriff following on the heels was a problem. Especially if I started finding badges and 5.11 uniform parts on the bandits.

I also needed to do something about the Church buses. They had the fuel and drivers to keep moving people around, a shell game. I hadn't seen any involuntary passengers; that didn't mean kidnappings weren't happening.

I had a trick up my sleeve for the buses. But I had a lot of missions and not enough people to do them.

What I was really afraid of, and in the history of the UN had happened, that we had actually been deployed to ease the process of concentrating the non X-tians to a centralized point that we could protect. Then the Iowa churches toss us out, and hey, look, their victims are in a convenient spot! Toss out the reporters, bring out the machetes.

So I needed humanitarian aid personnel. Soldiers could do that work, but I need them for a thousand other tasks. And we're a combatant, not a neutral, no matter what color we paint our helmets.

I heard a medium vehicle come to a stop outside, put on my helmet and grabbed my rifle.

Probably not a car bomb, but that was too close for comfort.

I ducked out of the bunker, climbed up and saw an ambulance.

Civilian 'big box' style, now painted an eye hurting glossy white with a Red Lion inside a large red diamond on all sides. No red crosses, no red crescents.

Oh goody, Red Lion!

I slung my rifle and introduced myself to the woman wearing the severe business suit with the combat boots.

She had a lanyard around her neck with a photo ID that proclaimed her in huge letters, "RESCUE - RED LION" and gave her name and title in smaller print.

Her team of eight were opening the back of the ambulance for detailed security inspection. Four of them wore blue fatigues with Red Lion armbands and white/yellow reflective vests. Orderlies and drivers. Two wore big red vests with the Red Lion inside a red diamond, and were festooned with medical equipment. Medics.

One wore desert ACUs and carried a rifle. I looked closely. RIfle / grenade launcher! He also had the same white/yellow reflective vest as the orderlies, but nothing to show that he was anything other than a combatant.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

I assume he saw a California Republic military officer, because major's tabs and full battle rattle say all that.

I saw a security guard. But one willing to alone shepherd Red Lion disaster workers through a genocidal war zone.

I'd have a fucking grenade launcher too.

"I am Lovetta Sanchez, humanitarian aid attorney, Red Lion Field Force. Looking for Echo 18. Seem to have found him."

"Same. How can we help?"

Red Lion is the Republic's humanitarian aid society, in the same relationship to us that the Red Cross is supposed to be to America. But Red Lion started off utterly insane - knocking on the gates of Homeland killing sites armed only with chutzpah! - and had been doing the thing ever since.

"We're here to help _you_. Under your command."

"I take it you are the advance party?"

Common practice, to send a small group ahead to pave the way and grease the skids for the larger force to follow.

Her face fell.

"We're it."

"How did you make it here?"

Not only did I want the intel they had gathered on the way, but I was very curious how that nice big vehicle had not attracted any 'bandit' rockets.

"We were working Cleveland as an observer team during the ceasefire. We're actually on the way _back_, eventually."

"I take it the ambulance was locally obtained?"

"The city fire department had no further use for it. It's been decontaminated of course."

Of course.

We were all coping with the facts of post nuclear life. The crater, the (usually) center of the city within the radius of total destruction, was uninhabitable and would be for at least a lifetime. The outskirts were habitable, if decontaminated, and if essential services such as water and electrical were restored. The no man's land in between was unhealthy to live in, and impossible to keep a community going there, but still contained valuables to mine. It's much easier to pull copper and other metals out of a wrecked building than to mine it, especially if the mines are over an ocean and the wrecked building is right here.

No Cleveland, no Cleveland Fire Department.

"Why Iowa?"

"Red Lion wanted to send a humanitarian action team with you. We were told the Republic didn't have the lift."

Well, we didn't. This whole deployment had been a favor from the UN, and it had been nerve racking putting California Republic troops on American aircraft. But one would think they'd rather bring in Red Lion disaster workers than California Republic troopers.

I thought about that for a second.

We weren't intended to stop the genocide. And we weren't intended to be alive to witness it either. We were … bait.

Well, good bait wriggles on the hook.

"Report to my medical platoon. Your guard stays with your vehicle until we work something else out."

"Actually he's to be paid off. He's Gray Wave."

I turned to my orderly.

"Get Captain Johannsen. With his duty gear. Now."

My orderly heard my tone and walked away slowly when his instincts told him to run.

I looked carefully. The guard was overwatching all of us, including his charges as is only proper. But he was in a position to see the body language between his former boss and myself.

I said carefully and mildly, "Gray Wave is a unlawful combatant organization implicated in numerous war crimes, including in California."

"Steven's been nothing but helpful to us."

"I'm sure he has. I am very sure he has. Is anyone else with him, or is it just him?"

"What are you saying?"

I looked at the ambulance, at the ongoing search, at the sight lines. I ran a calculation in my head, measuring lives in feet.

How would I break this to Sanchez, Esquire?

How would I separate everyone from this particularly nasty problem?

I looked at Steve. He seemed bored. Neither particularly alert nor particularly inattentive. Just another day in the life.

Not at all the reaction I'd expect of a merc about to get paid off. Or even relief that he'd made it to a secure zone.

They hadn't fought their way through, or bribed or bartered or snuck.

They'd been waved through. Which meant the Churches want this ambulance right here, right now.

Which meant I really, really didn't.

"Break," I called to the inspection detail. "Never mind, Red Lion is good. I'll show their orderly where to park. Who has the keys?"

One of the orderlies did. I put a nice big arm around him and walked him around the corner from Steve's view. Then I palmed my punch dagger and put it to his neck.

"Do as I say or you're fucking dead," I whispered. "Hand me the keys. Where is the bomb?"

His face was the picture of confusion and puzzlement. He handed over the keys without hesitation. Only then did his eyes widen.

"Get in the ambulance with me," I said very quietly as I made the dagger disappear, and went to the front left door.

I made him get in first. If he had shown any hesitation, I'd have pithed him and stepped over his corpse. He scooted over on the cab seat so I could drive.

I clenched my anus as I started the ambulance.

I released the parking brake and moved forward slowly. There was a radio, I turned it off.

"Touch nothing," I hissed.

I swung slowly in a sweeping turn, back away from the bunkers in which over a hundred of my troops were in immediately mortal peril.

Pulling out back to the road, I keyed my radio as I spoke, to the Red Lion orderly and to the radio as well.

"Listen to me. You will drive the ambulance to the corner of Hastings and Seventh. You will get out of the ambulance, _with the keys_, and bring them back to me. If you do anything else but park there and walk back, I will engage and destroy this ambulance with machine guns and rockets. Do you understand?"

At his nod, I came to a brief halt. I'd never put on my seat belt. I opened the door, clenched again to avoid soiling myself, and stepped out.

I couldn't run for it, I had to appear natural.

He slid over to take the wheel, so I didn't shoot him.

He drove away so I turned and walked back, very aware of where the nearest little bits of cover might be. Curbs. Power and telephone poles. Corners of buildings.

Every moment improved our odds.

The inspection detail was just starting to realize that something was very wrong, and trading glances with each other trying to come up with a plan.

Sanchez was irritated. Stupid military security games, of which she'd probably had her fill of.

The machine gunner on the corner bunker had battlesighted the ambulance and was half a thumb twitch from lighting it up. His loader was lying on the floor of the bunker with her hands wrapped over her helmet. To take over the machine gun after her partner was killed by blast.

Suddenly the detail bum rushed Steve, grabbing his arms and yanking them away from his body as hard as possible, stripping the rifle / grenade launcher out of his hands, tripping him and kicking him in the nuts from behind, slamming him to the ground and kneeling on his outstretched wrists.

Captain Johannsen came around the corner. He hadn't had his radio on, but he took in the situation at a glance.

He called out quietly, "Attention to orders. Everyone look natural. VBIED."

As long as the ambulance-bomb kept rolling away from us, our situation kept improving.

But all good things come to an end.

Power walking, only apparently slowly, I made it back to the entry point and nearly to the bunker when the world roared.

I shook my head, trying to get my head clear and my ears to work. I came up with my rifle.

I was lying in the dirt about twenty feet from where I had been.

There was a big mushroom cloud about halfway down Seventh from Hastings.

The Red Lion orderly was dead, saving our lives at the cost of his own.

And we had an enemy prisoner.

Even in the blast, the team kneeling on him hadn't given up their charge.

"Steve, you are taken into military custody for conspiracy to commit war crimes as an unlawful combatant," I said without hearing my own voice.

He didn't hear me either.

The security detail husted him towards cover as our camp went into a defensive posture.

The machine gunner, unharmed, scanned for threats and his loader popped up with her rifle to support him.

Now I had some work to do.

We were under enemy observation. That had been command detonated, I just knew it.

I wanted to interact with the observer and thereby change his position.

I could have used the ambulance.

But trying to find the bomb in it might have cost us fifty dead.