Distraction - Bruce Sterling [5]
Dusk began to settle gently over the pines. Traffic was backed up for two kilometers on the east side of the Sabine River bridge. Oscar and Norman buzzed up along the road shoulder, the smart bike and sidecar scrunching over the oyster shells with oozy cybernetic ease. The people trapped within the stalled traffic looked stoic and resigned. The big road professionals—eerie-looking biochemical tankers and big, grimy, malodorous seafood trucks—were already turning and leaving. Roadblocks were a sadly common business these days.
The state of Louisiana’s office of tourism maintained a roadside hospitality depot, perched at the riverside just at the state border. The tourist HQ was a touchingly ugly structure of faux-antebellum brick and white columns.
The building had been surrounded with fresh, razor-edged concertina wire. The highway into Texas was thoroughly blockaded with sentry boxes, striped barriers, and nonlethal clusters of glue mines and foam mines.
A huge matte-black military helicopter perched on its skids at the side of the highway, mechanically attentive and deeply bizarre. The black copter lit the tarmac with searing bluish spotlights. The colossal machine was armed to the teeth with great skeletal masses of U.S. Air Force weaponry. The ancient air-to-ground weapons were so insanely complex and archaic that their function was a complete mystery to Oscar. Were they Gatling fléchettes? Particle accelerators? Rayguns of some kind, maybe? They were like some nightmare mix of lamprey fangs and sewing machines.
Within the brilliant frame of helicopter glare, small squads of blue-uniformed Air Force personnel were stopping and confronting the cars attempting to leave Louisiana. The people within the cars, mostly Texan tourists, seemed suitably cowed.
The Air Force people were engaged in an elaborate roadblock shakedown. They were pulling white boxes out of refrigerated trishaws, and confronting travelers with their contents.
Norman-the-Intern was an engineering student. He tore his fascinated gaze from the copters’ appalling weaponry. “I thought this was gonna be a party roadblock, more like those cool gypsy bikers back in Tennessee,” Norman observed. “Maybe we’d better just get out of here.”
“There’s Fontenot,” Oscar parried.
Fontenot waved them over. His advance vehicle, a sturdy all-terrain electric hummer, was straddling the roadside ditch. The campaign security manager wore a long yellow slicker and muddy jeans.
It was always reassuring to see Fontenot. Fontenot was a former Secret Service agent, a security veteran of presidential caliber. Fontenot knew American Presidents personally. In fact, he had been serving as bodyguard to an ex-President when he had lost his left leg.
“The Air Force flew in around noon,” Fontenot informed them, leaning on the padded bumper of his hummer and lowering his binoculars. “Got their glue bombs down, and some crowd-foamers. Plus the saw-horses and the tanglewire.”
“So at least they didn’t destroy the roadbed?” Norman said.
Fontenot cordially ignored Norman. “They’re letting the lane from Texas through with no problems, and they’re waving everybody with Louisiana plates right through. There’s been no resistance. They’re shaking down the out-of-staters as they leave.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Oscar said. He put his helmet aside, adjusted his hair with a pocket comb, and donned his hat. Then stepped carefully out of the bike’s sidecar, trying not to dirty his shoes. The Louisiana bank of the Sabine was essentially a gigantic marsh.
“Why are they doing this?” Norman said.
“They need the money,” Fontenot told him.
“What?” Norman said. “The Air Force?”
“Got no federal funding to pay their power bills at the local air base. Either they pony up, or the utility cuts ’em off.”
“The continuing Emergency,” Oscar concluded.
Fontenot nodded. “The feds have wanted to decommission that air base for years, but Louisiana’s real mulish about it. So Congress