Free After America by John Birmingham Page B

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