Fracture
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson's sudden salute caught me off guard. For a brief moment I wondered how a civilian was supposed to receive the salute of a field-grade officer.
Then I saw the look in his eyes, and I had my answer. It had nothing to do with rank or affiliation. It was a soldier's unvarnished respect for the man who had won the fight. I squared my shoulders and returned it.
He held the position with a hard, unwavering gaze until I lowered my hand. A short silence hung between us.
"Thank you, Polar Bear."
Gibson's voice was low and grave.
"Thanks to you, my men are still alive. More than that — you kept the entire state of Nevada from going under."
He seemed to have a complete picture of how the fight had gone.
"I have the reports from Evans and the follow-on units. If the enemy had taken Fallon and cut US Route 50, we would have been isolated completely — east from west."
I said nothing.
"Polar Bear, your speed of judgment and the defensive line you built — and with nothing more than a single reinforced squad, you stopped a force of battalion strength or better. That was a miracle."
"I didn't do it alone. Lieutenant Evans and his soldiers fought like hell, and the reinforcements arrived in time."
"No need to be modest. The decision to stop their main body at the forward outpost. Digging in a fixed position there and setting the ambush. The way you allocated fire to wring every last bit of efficiency out of your mobile assets."
I waited.
"And the command presence that had those soldiers moving as one in a heartbeat... it's simply astonishing."
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson studied me for a long moment, then asked the question he had been holding onto.
"Polar Bear... just what kind of life have you lived?"
It was not mere curiosity about a contracting partner. It was a genuine question aimed at something he could not quite place.
"What good would the past do anyone now?"
"Ah. Fair enough. I was only curious. Don't take it the wrong way."
"More to the point — do you know anything about the armed group that hit us today?"
"It's a long story, but I'll tell you what I know."
I gestured toward my trailer.
"Then let's talk inside. I've got decent coffee, as it happens."
Gibson stepped into the trailer. The authoritarian bearing I had first seen in him was gone.
Gunner was still coated in dust, sipping hot coffee with the tension not yet gone from his face. He stood as we came in. Gibson walked over and held out his hand.
"You did fine work out there. We're deeply in your debt."
Gunner was not used to that kind of talk. He took the offered hand with a grunt, and I introduced him.
"This is the man who killed the enemy Stryker at the start of the fight. We wouldn't have held the position without him."
Gibson looked Gunner over again before he spoke.
"There's a rumor that a SOCOM veteran is running with Polar Bear. That him?"
"That's him."
I handed Gibson a cup of hot coffee and carefully brought up Lieutenant Evans.
"Colonel, I need to say something about the trust Lieutenant Evans placed in me today."
Gibson caught my meaning at once and smiled.
"Put that worry away, Polar Bear. Evans setting aside his own authority and handing you command was as brave and as sound a call as a man can make on a battlefield. And today's result proved he was right."
He took in the aroma of the coffee, then added,
"Granted, delegating combat command to a civilian is unprecedented. But the entire command staff holds his judgment in the highest regard. There will be no mark on Evans's record. No career damage of any kind."
The conversation drifted naturally to the enemy we had faced that day. Gibson let out a long breath.
"Oregon boys."
"Oregon? Didn't they declare neutrality?"
I waited. He sighed again.
"It started with Oregon National Guard deserters, back at the beginning of the catastrophe."
A rumor I had picked up on the CB coming down out of Canada flickered through my mind.
"Deserters? The numbers and the organization I saw today don't add up to a handful of runaways."
"Company-sized elements walked off from the Oregon Guard at the start of the Great Winter, and they grew fast. They encouraged more desertions from inside the ranks and absorbed every raider outfit they could get their hands on."
"Ah..."
"We started paying attention once they hit battalion strength. But you know how it is — intelligence assets are hard enough to run as it is, and projecting them into another state was a sensitive proposition at the time..."
"So did they come south with everything they had, or have they grown even larger?"
"At least regiment strength. Hell, they might even be telling the truth when they call themselves brigade-sized or better."
"When they call themselves what?"
"They call themselves the 3rd Brigade. The original deserters came out of the Oregon National Guard's 3rd Maneuver Brigade, and they kept the name."
"Colonel. That's a military mutiny, plain and simple."
"I know that. But in the middle of that chaos, what the hell was functioning the way it was supposed to?"
His question left me without an answer for a moment. I pressed on.
"Even so — what are the Oregon and Idaho state governments doing about it?"
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson waved a hand, as if he was tired of even saying it.
"It's a goddamn mess. Completely out of control."
"So a deserting army became its own power. A warlord faction."
"That's about the size of it. Oregon and Idaho have effectively recognized them. They look the other way so nobody has to touch anybody else."
"Look the other way? That's—"
"Call it an unofficial ceasefire. Better that than bleeding each other dry inside the same state. And the 3rd Brigade figures they've already stripped the northern states for everything worth taking."
"So they came to Nevada."
"That's the idea. Head north and all you'd get is more blood and nothing to show for it."
I said nothing.
"The problem is they didn't stop at recruiting deserters. They absorbed every raider gang in Oregon and Idaho, big and small, and turned themselves into a real warlord outfit."
"Even so — soldiers without a territorial base don't last."
"Unfortunately, they planted roots. They've built a stronghold in the Blue Mountains, along the Oregon-Idaho border."
I waited for him to go on.
"They'd raid across into northern Nevada now and then, but we never expected them to come south in force like this — organized, deliberate, the whole package."
"So today's battalion-sized attack could have been a reconnaissance in force."
"We still don't know what their strategic objective is. But in practical terms, yes. Which is why what you did today matters as much as it does."
I said nothing.
"If they'd taken Fallon, they would have poured more troops in and tried to sit on the whole city. But the unit they sent got all but wiped out. They won't move easily for a while."
He was right. If we had failed to stop their push south, it would not have been just cargo lost. The people at Carson Camp and the Union at Hawthorne Base could have been cut off from each other entirely.
Even so, something still did not sit right.
"Even granting all that, something doesn't add up."
"Go on."
"If their goal was expanding territory, they wouldn't have bypassed towns sitting right on their route — Winnemucca, Lovelock — and driven straight for Fallon."
"Exactly. That's the part that has headquarters climbing the walls."
Gibson tapped a finger on the table.
"I'm afraid... we may have someone on the inside talking to them."
"A mole? In a world where staying alive is hard enough, why would anyone take that kind of risk?"
"The 3rd Brigade has gone beyond a warlord pack of deserters and raiders."
"Beyond?"
"They're arming themselves with ideology, if that makes sense."
"Ideology?"
"They've pulled in secessionists who blame the federal government for every failure, and racists who shout about being the 'real Americans.' Grown fat on both. And unfortunately, there's no law that says those kinds of people don't exist inside the Nevada National Guard."
He set his cup down and went on.
"Nevada has officially declared neutrality. We aren't cooperating with the federal government in any capacity."
I waited.
"The secessionists have decided that counts as enabling the feds — as collaboration. They've classified us as a hostile. And we're sitting right between the secessionist factions in Arizona to the south and those bastards to the north."
I said nothing.
"The sky lanes are shut down by the Great Winter, and we've barred their military assets — and the Southern Confederacy's — from our airspace and our territory. As far as they're concerned, we might as well have gone over to the enemy."
"It just keeps getting better."
"That's not even the end of it. Recently a bizarre religious group up in northern Idaho — something calling itself the Iron Kingdom — stood up an armed wing they call AR. And word is the 3rd Brigade and AR have an alliance."
I stared at him.
"And the truly funny part? The cult's leader is Asian, and he's allied himself with white supremacists. The whole thing's a goddamn circus."
Gibson's briefing left my head as tangled as the world itself. Suddenly I wanted a cigarette badly.
"Colonel, do you smoke?"
"I quit, but... ah, hell. Let's step outside."
We stepped out of the trailer. I lit up, and the colonel asked for one. Gibson exhaled a long stream of smoke and spoke like a man talking to the dark.
He drew the last of the cigarette down like he hated to let it go, then breathed the smoke into the air.
"Polar Bear, today's fight was only the beginning. Before I came to find you, I got a report from the follow-on units cleaning up the battlefield."
I waited.
"Among the dead was a 3rd Brigade battalion commander. One of the key men who'd been leading that deserter pack since the Oregon Guard days."
He paused, then went on with a look that carried weight.
"And there's one more interesting detail. They found Road Warrior markings on several of the bodies."
"Ah... so the remnants got absorbed into the 3rd Brigade."
"Looks that way. A key man is dead, so now they've got a cause of their own — plus whatever grudge the Road Warriors were already carrying."
I said nothing.
"Nevada walked the tightrope of neutrality and kept the big war off our doorstep. Now a different kind of fight has started, whether we want it or not. For this state... and for you."