Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“I want to counsel everybody; you don’t want to resist or you may get clubbed or beaten. Don’t yell at them, don’t taunt them. Just go limp. Remember, this is your bridge, it’s not theirs. We’ve liberated it. We own it. Hell, no, we won’t go.”

“Hell, no, we won’t go,” repeated Peter.

“That’s the evil part,” Julie said bitterly. “They don’t come themselves, the guys in the offices who make it happen. They send in Donny, who’s just trying to do his job. He gets the shitty end of the stick.”

But Peter wasn’t listening.

“Here they come,” he said, for ahead, out of the blur, they could now see them drawing ever closer in a phalanx of rectitude and camouflage: the United States Marine Corps advancing at the half-trot, rifles at the high port, helmets even, gas masks turning them to insects or robots.

Hell, no, we won’t go! came the chant, guttural, from the heart. Marines, go home! Then again, Hell, no, we won’t go!

The unit advanced at the half-trot, to the sergeant major’s urgent cadence, Hup-two-THREE-four, Hup-two-THREE-four , and Donny’s squad stayed tight in the crowd-control formation, a little to the left of the point of the arrow.

Jogging actually helped Donny feel a little better; he settled into a steady rhythm, and the constellation of equipment bounded sloppily on his body. His helmet banged, riding the spongy straps of the helmet liner with a kind of liquid mushiness. He felt the sweat run down inside his mask, catch irritatingly at his eyelashes, then flood into his eyes. But it didn’t matter.

Through the lens of his mask the world seemed slightly tarnished, slightly dirty. Ahead, he could see the mass of demonstrators sitting on the bridge as if it were theirs, looking fiercely at them.

Hell, no, we won’t go! alternating with Marines, go home! Marines, go home! rose to fill the air, but it sounded tinny and idiotic. They closed on the crowd until but fifty yards away, then the sergeant major’s yell reached out to stop them.

“Ready, Halt!”

The two young Americas faced each other on the bridge. On the one side, about two thousand young people, ages fourteen through possibly thirty, most around twenty, college America, the nonconformism of complete conformism: all wore jeans and T-shirts, all had long, flowing, beautiful hair, all were pale, intense, high on grass or sanctimony, standing and drawing strength from one another under a bristle of placards that proclaimed PEOPLE’S COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE and other, ruder signs, like GIS, JOIN US! or STOP THE WAR! or FUCK THE WAR! or RMN MUST GO!

The other America, 650 strong, wore the green twill of duty, three companies of Marines, average age twenty also, armed with unloaded rifles and sheathed bayonets. They were earnest and, behind the rubber and plastic of their masks, clean-shaven and short-haired, yet in their way just as conflicted and just as frightened as the kids they faced. They were essentially the same kids, but nobody noticed. Behind them were cop cars, ambulances, fire engines, deuce-and-a-halfs, their own Corpsmen, news reporters, Justice Department officials. But they were the ones out front.

A man in the blue jumpsuit of the Justice Department stepped beyond the Marine formation. He had a bullhorn.

“This is an illegal parade. You do not have a parade permit. You are hereby ordered to disperse. If you do not disperse, we will clear the bridge. You are hereby ordered to disperse.”

“Hell, no, we won’t go!” came the response.

When it had died down after a sweaty bit, the Justice official reiterated his position, adding, “We will commence with CS gas operations in two minutes and the Marine Corps will move you out. You are hereby ordered to disperse!”

A moment of quiet followed and then a young man stepped forward, screamed, “Here’s your fucking parade permit!” then pivoted smartly, bent, and peeled down his jeans to reveal two white half moons of ass.

“God, he’s beautiful,” said Crowe through his mask, but loudly enough for the squad to hear. “I want him!”

“Crowe, shut up,” said Donny.

The man from the Justice Department departed. The sun was high, the weather sticky and heavy. Overhead, helicopters hovered, their rotors kicking up the only turbulence.

Another amplified voice, this from the demonstrators as the older people warned the kids.

“Do not attempt to pick up tear gas canisters as they will be very hot. Do not panic. The gas is not contained and it will disappear very quickly.”

“Gas!” came a command.

Six soft plops marked the firing of six DC Police gas guns, and the missiles skittered across the pavement leaking white fumes, spun, rolled and slid raggedly along. The point of firing them into the ground was to bounce them into the crowd at low velocity rather than firing them into people at high, possibly killing velocity.

“Gas!” the command came again, and six more CS shells were fired.

The sergeant major’s scream carried through the air: “Assault arms!” and with that the rifles left the cross-chest position of carry and were brought around the right side of the body, stocks wedged under right arms and locked in, muzzles with sheathed bayonets angled outward at forty-five degrees to the ground.

“Prepare to ad-vance!” came the command.

Only Crowe’s rifle wavered, probably out of excitement, but otherwise the muzzles lanced outward from the formation. Donny could sense the crowd of demonstrators drawing back, gathering somehow, then reinflating with purpose. Tear gas drifted loosely amid their ranks. It was just a crowd, identities lost in the blur and the gas. Was Julie over there?

“Ad-vance!” came the final command, and the Marines began to stomp ahead.

Here we go, thought Donny.

They looked like Cossacks. The rank was green, slanted in two angles away from the point, an arrowhead of boys, remorseless and helmeted, their facial features vanished behind their masks.

Julie looked through her tears for Donny, but it was useless. The Marines all looked the same, staunch defenders of whatever, in their sharp uniforms with their helmets and now their guns, which jutted out like threats. A cloud of tear gas washed over her, crunching her eyes in pain; she coughed, felt the tears run hot and fluid down her face, and rubbed at them, then dipped for her wet washcloth and wiped the chemical from them.

“Assholes!” said Peter bitterly, enraged at the troops advancing on him. He was trembling so hard he was locked in place, his knees wobbling desperately. But he wasn’t going to move.

“Assholes!” he repeated as the Marines closed in at a steady pace.

Donny was in the lead, solid as a rock; next to him, on the left, Crowe seemed strong. They clomped forward to a steady beat of cadence from the sergeant major, and through the jiggling stain of his dirty lenses, Donny watched as the crowd grew closer. The sergeant major’s cadence drove them on; tear gas wafted through the chaos; overhead a helicopter swept low and its turbulence drove the gas more quickly, into whirlwinds and spirals, until it rushed like water across the bridge.

“Steady on the advance!” screamed the sergeant major.

Details suddenly swam at Donny: the faces of the scared kids before him, their scrawniness, their physical weakness and paleness, how many of them were girls, the cool way the leader exhorted them with his bullhorn and that shocking moment when at last the two groups clashed.

“Steady on the advance!” screamed the sergeant major.

Maybe it was like some ancient battle, legionnaires against Visigoths, Sumerians against Assyrians, but Donny sensed a great issue of physical strength, of pure force of will as expressed through bodies, when the two came together. There was no striking; no Marine lifted his rifle and drove through for a butt stroke; no blade came unsheathed and leapt forward into flesh. Rather, there was just a crush as the two masses crunched together; it felt more like football than war, that moment when the lines collide and there are a dozen contests of strength all around you and you lay what you’ve got against someone else and hope you get full-body weight against him and can lift him from his feet.