The Enemy Within

Twice he heard Haskins pulling the police line back to tighten its sagging formation. He saw another policeman dragged down and grimaced. They were running out of men and maneuvering room.

And still the mob came on.

Calvin felt a bullet whiz past his head and heard the deafening sound of a shot close by in the same moment. His eyes focused on a man in his twenties, heavyset and bald, coldly aiming a pistol at him at point-blank range.

Oh, hell.

The man fired again and Calvin felt his shield take the bullet this time, deflecting it, but the shock of its impact ran up his arm. It felt like his elbow had been hit by a ball peen hammer. He staggered backward.

The gunman fired a third time. This time the round tore through the Plexiglas shield and slammed into his bulletproof vest. At such short range, the 9mm slug had enough velocity to shock and bruise him, but the shield and vest stopped it from doing more damage.

His assailant snarled in frustration, acting as though the policeman had broken the rules by not falling down dead. The man raised his aim, pointing the pistol straight at Calvin’s unprotected face.

No! He didn’t have time to draw his own weapon.

Calvin lunged forward and slammed the point of his baton into the gunman’s sternum. As the man doubled over in agony, he slashed downward, striking him across the back of the neck, just below the skull. That was potentially a killing blow, but the policeman didn’t give a damn. There was only one law operating right now the law of survival.

He looked up, gasping for breath, and realized that he was surrounded by screaming, shouting rioters. His lunge had carried him well out into the midst of the mob.

People swarmed past him, pouring through the sudden gap in the police line. Others dove on top of him, knocking him over as they tried to pull off his helmet or grab his weapons. His shield protected him from many of their blows, but it also trapped one of his arms. Punches and kicks rained down in an unrelenting hail. Something sharp stabbed into his leg. He felt himself being driven down into unconsciousness.

Calvin struggled desperately to get up off the ground. Staying down meant dying.

A baseball bat swung overhand caught his shield and knocked him back down. Someone else stomped on his wrist and grabbed his baton away. The world blurred in a red fog.

Shots rang out suddenly. Calvin felt the pressure on him slacken as his attackers turned away in surprise. Seconds later, another ragged volley cut across the crowd noise. Somebody was firing tear-gas guns a lot of them. A dozen brilliant beams of white light lanced into the plaza, blinding rioters caught staring at them and turning night into artificial day.

Clouds of grey mist billowed up from each gas canister. The mob began coughing, gagging as the tear gas rolled over them. Their shouts changed swiftly in tone from anger and hate to fear.

Calvin heard the growing roar of diesel engines moving closer.

The crowd began backing away, slowly at first, and then faster. More and more of them turned to flee.

Still barely clinging to consciousness, Calvin lifted his head just high enough to see what was going on. Hundreds of soldiers in full battle gear and gas masks were advancing across the wreckage-strewn Renaissance Center Plaza. Armored personnel carriers mounting searchlights trundled behind the troops.

Suddenly, Bob Calvin lay alone. He tried to get up, but his right leg crumpled under him and he landed heavily on the pavement. The ground seemed very cold. He heard someone calling for a stretcher as he surrendered at last to the pain filling every corner of his being.

11:30 P.M., EST ABC News Special Report: “Shutdown”

The ABC News Special Report showed signs of being hurriedly assembled. Half the video aired was live or only minutes old. And none of the news was good.

The Midwest’s phone system was still down, and it would remain down for the foreseeable future. Caught without the ability to communicate, tens of thousands of businesses had been forced to close, idling millions of workers. So far the only beneficiaries of the disaster had been messenger services. Most normal commerce had ground to a halt. The economic losses alone were already estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

But there were other, far more serious losses. Detroit was not alone. With police and emergency services degraded, every major city in the region had experienced a vicious crime wave. The governors of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa had all mobilised their National Guard units by midafternoon and instituted an immediate nighttime curfew. Hundreds were already dead, and hundreds more were seriously injured in the continuing civil disorder.

Pressed hard for an explanation, company representatives now blamed “an external cause, most likely the deliberate sabotage of the switching network by a highly sophisticated computer virus.”