Free After America by John Birmingham Page A

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