By design, the main body of Melanie's army left Annapolis at the same time the convoy was approaching the North Carolina border. Within minutes, her military advisers were certain, the Airborne divisions would be on their way, and they would arrive well before she and her troops could reach Washington. Air Force and Navy jets would attack them as they came, but they could not expect to stop them all. In response, Melanie had given an order that the jets were to focus on the large transports, the ones likely to be carrying tanks and artillery, in preference to troop carriers.

She'd issued a general order to her own troops, as well. Although neither of them would ever know it, she agreed with General Hammerhill's assessment of her strength--the numbers of her followers--and what had be done to maximize it. Accordingly, she'd written a memo, to be copied and then dropped as leaflets all up and down the column.

"These are not easy orders for me to give," she wrote, "And yet, I must.

"Very shortly, you will encounter U.S. Army troops whose mission is to stop our advance. These are well-trained and well-armed troops, and they will be heavily armed. Thanks to the Navy, we have been able to provide all of you with automatic assault rifles. But we cannot supply heavier weapons, because we cannot expect that you as civilians will know how to use them, and there is no way for us to provide you with training in their use. The Navy and the Air Force will be attacking some emplacements of heavy weapons, but we cannot expect them to get them all.

"Our advantage is our numbers, we outnumber the Army troops many times over. But we will not be able to use that advantage if we try to fight them in the usual manner, from cover. If we do, they will certainly be able to hold back our advance until the regular Army troops arrive from North Carolina, and that may spell disaster for us.

"And so, my orders are for our civilians troops to push forward with all possible speed, regardless of conditions. We are required by circumstances to ask our civilian soldiers to run forward toward Army soldiers who will be shooting at them. As you advance you should be firing as well, but you must resist the natural urge to stop and take cover. Once you are among the Army troops you can expect that they will use bayonets. Even so, you must press on. The more closely we fight this war, the better our chances of winning.

"If you are reading this and thinking, 'this means that thousands of us will die,' you are correct. In fact the vast majority of those leading our attacks will be killed. I urge you to talk among yourselves within your group and try to decide who will lead. Since those leaders are almost certain to be killed, they should ideally be volunteers.

"As I said at the beginning these are painful orders for me to issue, knowing as I do that they will result in thousands of deaths. But we have no other way of winning this war, and for the sake of all of us, for the sake of the country, we must win. And that means we must buy victory with our blood and our lives.

"And for all those who do survive, let me remind you: it may not be easy, when you are in fierce combat, to observe what is going on around you. But as much as possible, watch the sacrifices of your fellow warriors. Watch, remember, tell the stories. No man or woman here should ever feel that he or she is dying unnoticed and will be forgotten. In the minds and in the stories of the survivors, they will be immortal."

She closed it with what seemed to her to be meaningless drivel about their loyalty and patriotism, then passed it around to the others for approval. They all approved it, and she shook her head as it went out, back to Annapolis to be copied and airlifted as leaflets. She had, she felt, not expressed very well how hard it had been for her to give orders like that; the result was going to be, she was sure, carnage on both sides.

But there was no other way. She did not presume that the jets would be able to stop all carriers of heavy weaponry, and beyond that some was already in place around Washington. As soon as they had done what they could to intercept the Airborne, the jets were to focus on taking out tanks and artillery emplacements, and lastly to try to dislodge any troops that took up protected defensive positions.

Melanie's initial desire had been to "take the point"--to again ride in a truck or perhaps an armored vehicle in the front position of the new column. This time she was so overwhelmingly and loudly overruled by literally everyone involved that she gave in. One of the reasons they gave was that she needed to have an overview of the fighting, and the easiest way for her to do that was to set up her command center in one of the Navy's large twin-rotor helicopters. That left the issue of the driver of that lead vehicle, according to everyone a suicide mission. Melanie asked for volunteers and got quite a few. In the end, in the interest of fairness, she put all these volunteers in the first section of the column. The lead driver, however, was someone she knew but had not seen for years--Fred Lufkin, who had come to the Preserve with Dave and Al Calder. He'd been among the first and the most forceful of the volunteers, and Dave did not, to Melanie's irritation, enlighten her as to who he was until after the choices had been made.

"Damn impressive, isn't it?" Harry mused as the helicopter cruised slowly over the advancing column.

"Incredible," Melanie murmured. She looked down and frowned. "There, down there, what's that? Pilot, can you drop down a little lower?"

"Yes, ma'am." He did; Melanie found herself looking at a group of young women, more than a hundred of them, pacing along with a flatbed truck about a mile back from the front of the line. Some were riding, some walking; as she watched some of those riding gave up their spaces to the walkers and took their place. All of them were carrying military-issue assault rifles, and all wore sneakers and backpacks. None were wearing anything else. A number of young men were mixed in with them, but these were dressed mostly in camouflage.

"Those girls," Melanie noted, "are not survivors of the Preserve. Can anyone tell me why they're all naked?"

Jackie, who like Melanie consistently refused clothing, laughed. "That," she said, "has become known as 'The Melanie Look.'"

Melanie rolled her eyes. "Oh, great."

"It's become very popular among the young women in the group," the ex-gymnast went on. "And even some of the not-so-young. There's a general belief, too, that in close combat it'll give the woman a bit of an advantage, that an opposing soldier may stop and look for a moment."

"I never noticed that at the Preserve," Melanie observed. "Did you?"

"Not a fair comparison," Jackie answered. "In the Preserve we were all naked all the time. The men's objective was to bring us down so they could play with us. The situation here today is totally different. They may have a point, in fact."

"Maybe. You know who those people are?"

"Student volunteers from one of the Universities we passed." She looked closely. "I think that's the group from Florida State. Or maybe the one from Miami. Hard to be sure, from here they're going to look mostly the same. There are at least twenty or so groups like that."

Melanie watched them a bit sadly. "Have they had any training with those rifles?"

"Minimal," Captain Miller said. "As much as we could manage but not much."

Lambs to the slaughter, Melanie told herself. She shook her head. The losses among her inexperienced fighters was going to be horrific, there couldn't be a doubt about that.

"Don't imagine," Mitch said, "that they don't know what they're getting into, Melanie."

"Mitch, they probably think they're at summer camp! Damn it, they--"

"No. They don't. They know perfectly well that many of them are going to die before this is over. Maybe all of them. They aren't just dedicated, although they are that too. They also don't feel they have a choice."

She looked around at him. "What do you mean?"

"They're pretty young girls," Dave said. "Class-A and Class-B. What's happening to them hasn't escaped their notice. Every year, fewer of them graduate, more of them are arrested on the usual charges and sentenced to death--or as they put it, death-for-profit--or found in violation of some odd government regulation and sent off to the brothels or the games. They're the currency, the gold standard, for this government, and they're disappearing, just like Prof used to say, slowly but surely. And since they know it, they don't feel they have a choice except to do what they're doing. You haven't been on-line, you haven't heard the numbers of them who say they'd rather die for the cause than die to make the government more money."

Melanie smiled, nodded, and watched them for a moment. Their manner was, in fact, as if they were going to summer camp; playful, laughing among themselves. And yet, somehow, she did not doubt that they'd acquit themselves well in the battles to come. She looked up again, toward the front of the column. They were making good time considering that their pace was basically a fast walk; even with the resources the Navy had provided in Annapolis, they did not have anywhere near enough vehicles to carry all their soldiers--and even if they did, the column would stretch out so far that the front end would be entering Washington almost before the rear was leaving Annapolis. She wished they could move faster. The faster they moved, the quicker they engaged their enemies, the better the odds were. But there was really nothing they do to speed up the pace.

Her musings were interrupted by a wing of Navy jets screaming overhead, headed south and west. The radio crackled; Mitch informed her that it was a message from the fleet, the Airborne was on its way. Information came trickling in. The jets had taken out quite a few of the heavy-weapon carrying aircraft, but not all of them, and practically none of the troop carriers. They were being confronted by heavily-armed gunships fitted out with heat-seeking missiles; three jets had already gone down, and the others were being kept busy dodging the missiles. The Airborne, Melanie was told, would be landing just on the Washington side of Bowie, and there they would try to stop and hold Melanie's column until the remainder of the Army, already breaking position at the North Carolina border and heading north on I-95, could arrive.

Their plan, Melanie told herself glumly, is at least as good as ours.

Hours passed. At Melanie's direction, the big helicopter moved back and forth along the long column. Morale among her troops, as far as she could tell, was extraordinarily high. And it seemed unchanged when they approached Bowie and they began to see, in the skies, the fighting that was already raging ahead of them. Melanie watched the first one through binoculars; a fat-bellied Army transport was coming in low, defended by a gunship which kept firing missiles out its side door. Three jets, two Navy and one Air Force, were engaging the pair. As Melanie watched, one of the Navy jets managed to get a straight shot at the gunship, and a part of its tail exploded in a fireball. It fired back, though, and one of the Navy plane's wings was torn away. Both went spiraling toward the ground; Melanie saw the Navy pilot eject and his parachute open. Meanwhile, the other Navy plane and the Air Force jet took aim at the transport, and soon enough it too was headed down in flames. Even as this was taking place, three troop transports moved past the scene in the background, disgorging paratroopers as they went.

"They're putting down where the railroad tracks cross the highway, about a mile west of Bowie," Dave told her. "Lots of subdivisions around there."

"Have someone call the radio and TV stations in Bowie," Melanie said. "Get the word out that residents should evacuate that part of town. It isn't going to be a fun place to be."

"Already done," Dave replied.

"It isn't going to be long now. Send a reminder out that as soon as any shooting starts, everyone is to forget about cover and push forward as fast as possible." She chewed her lip as she peered through her binoculars. "Do we know if they've managed to get any big guns set up?"

"We know they haven't."

"Good.... that's good, at least there's that..."

By that time, the highway had cleared completely of any other traffic. As it had done in South Carolina, the convoy split up, now using all four lanes, the median, the shoulders, and the areas immediately alongside. From behind, the speed of the convoy was increasing, at least the vehicle speed--some of those on foot were being left behind, but they were still coming and would provide a solid second wave.

The railroad tracks were in sight and Melanie's helicopter was about two hundred yards back from the head of the convoy when a fast-moving trail of smoke, coming from a rise near the tracks, announced the beginning of the battle. It struck a bus near the right side of the column, and the front end of it exploded in a ball of fire. Immediately the vehicles stopped and people started pouring out, weapons at the ready. Some of them, apparently instinctively, took cover behind the vehicles; others ran for the buildings and trees lining the roadsides. Others--a large number of others--seemed to be following Melanie's command to the absolute letter. Eschewing any cover at all, they ran straight for the tracks. The crackle of small-arms fire filled the air.

"Get us closer," Melanie told the pilot.

"But stay out of rifle range," Harry added.

The chopper moved forward. Melanie could see several people, her people, dead on the ground. At this point she could see the uniformed Army paratroopers, who had been trying to set up a defensive position but had run out of time. A huge mass of armed civilians surged toward them; they fired into the crowd and Melanie saw people falling, but the crowd was firing back and there were paratroopers falling, too.

"This is the part I was dreading," Melanie said. "Now I have no control. I can't tell them to retreat or push on or anything. They're all on their own now."

"They are not," Harry observed, "doing at all badly."

"Not so far," Melanie murmured. She continued to watch. The initial surge of the mob of civilians had been slowed by the blistering fire coming from the paratroopers, but it had not been stopped. They, on the other hand, were receiving just as intense a barrage of fire from the crowd, and it was they who were falling back. The civilians were not even close to being as skilled with their rifles, but there was a lot more of them; anytime one fell there was another ready to take his or her place.

With her binoculars, Melanie began picking out specific scenes. A heavy-set man, gray-haired, dressed as a hunter might dress, was dodging from tree to tree in a sparse section of woods just off the highway. He was using what appeared to be an old 30.06 bolt-action, and every time he fired his weapon a paratrooper fell. After a few moments the soldiers started recognizing the threat coming from his direction, and they started concentrating fire into the woods. The man, forced to take cover behind a tree, had to stop firing.

But, as the paratroopers focused on him they did not notice a group of a dozen or so young black men coming up on the other side. These men opened up on them with automatic military-issue rifles, and at least a dozen paratroopers went down before they realized the new threat was there. Screaming at each other, they tried to confront both threats, but the older man had taken advantage and picked off an officer. The remainder, demoralized now, began a hasty pullback. As they moved back, the crowd surged forward into the vacuum.

The helicopter moved on. Melanie focused on another group of paratroopers, a couple of platoons that were trying to take up positions in a nearby subdivision. These were having a little more success, at least at that moment. Firing from around the corners of houses and from within suburban homeowners' utility sheds, they'd forced the crowd to stop and fall back a little. At that point several of them threw hand grenades, and the crowd was forced back even further.

As Melanie watched, the group of college students she'd seen earlier on the flatbed truck--or one of the other groups like them that Jackie had mentioned--surged into the subdivision, at least a hundred strong. As they came around a corner dominated by a large house with a heavily wooded lawn, the soldiers looked up at them and, seemingly startled by the nude girls, froze for a moment. The general belief Jackie had mentioned was, Melanie thought, apparently correct.

The students took every advantage, rushing forward and firing from the hip as they ran. They were not, Melanie observed, terribly accurate shots, but even so several soldiers fell. At that point the soldiers counterattacked; a couple of them focused automatic rifle fire on a rather voluptuous blond girl leading the charge. She stopped and bounced grotesquely in place as dozens of holes appeared in her body, each spouting blood. When the fire stopped, she fell forward heavily. A man dressed in camouflage rushed up behind her, was shot in the head, and fell across her. The students did not slow their rush at all. They came on; a brown-haired girl took a shot in the belly and almost backflipped from the impact. As her companions surged past her she rolled over, picked up her rifle and, even though she was lying in a pool of her own blood, continued to fire. The paratroopers now looked as if they were trying to fall back--at least a score of them were on the ground by then--but the students weren't offering that option. As per Melanie's orders they kept pressing forward. The gunfire continued, and both students and soldiers continued to fall. And, at last, they were practically face-to-face and there was no time anymore to even load an empty assault rifle. At that point the soldiers shifted to their bayonets and the advantage shifted noticeably to the more numerous students.

One of the charging students, however--a long-legged girl with long flowing dark hair--was too close to stop, and practically ran right onto one of the bayonets. Even after the blade had pierced her midsection deeply, she raised her rifle and, at point-blank range, shot the soldier in the face. He started falling backwards, pulling the bayonet out of her as he went--and as he fell she kept firing, and two men behind him went down as well. As she staggered to keep her feet she was bayoneted again, in her side, by another soldier. Again, showing amazing discipline, she twisted her upper body toward him and shot him. He too fell back, and again she fought to stay upright, reeling forward as she tried to regain her balance. She could not, but her momentum carried her in between two of the paratroopers, where she fell between them, losing her grip on her rifle as she went down. As she rolled onto her back one of them stabbed downward with his bayonet, driving it into her chest between her breasts. She grabbed the rifle for a moment, then went limp; but she'd held it long enough to prevent him from using it on one of her male companions who'd rushed in close, and the soldier went down, shot in the head.

By then, the soldiers were fighting not to gain ground but to get away. They could not, the students came on inexorably. Melanie saw a blond girl get her throat slashed by a wildly swinging bayonet, saw a young man go down with a bayonet in his upper chest, saw a soldier manage to get a clip into his rifle and then empty it, on full auto, into the abdomen of a small Asian girl who was practically eviscerated by the bullets. But while this was happening at least seven soldiers had fallen under the students' assault and more were still coming. After another minute or two this small section of battle was over. The students had lost at least forty of their number but the paratrooper group had been exterminated.

At Melanie's command, the helicopter rose, giving her an overview of the battle. Her troops were paying a fearful price but they were winning, the paratroopers' line was being pushed back everywhere. They'd gained at least two or three hundred yards since first contact. Behind them was an almost solid mass of people who had not yet gotten close enough to the fighting to have been involved, and between them Melanie could see the ground littered with bodies, those of the soldiers and of her troops alike. Some of her troops had taken it upon themselves to act as medics, and these were carrying the wounded off to the edge of the crowd where Navy medics could get to them. Already medivac helicopters were buzzing in and out, ferrying the injured back to the Naval hospital at Annapolis.

Then there was a series of whistling sounds, and, a fraction of second later, a series of explosions rocked the center of the crowd. Bodies flew, and the crowd started to break up a little.

"Looks like some of them got mortars set up," Harry noted.

"Yeah. Can we find it?"

"Up there, I'd say," Miller commented, pointing.

"Pilot, see if you can find them. Maybe we can at least point them out. That sort of thing is really going to hurt us."

"It's going to happen, Melanie," Harry told her. "You can't stop them all."

"Still. Let's look for these." No one objected, and the pilot moved forward and rose at the same time. A few minutes later they saw the group firing the mortars, set up behind a little rise in the landscape.

"Damn it, they're well behind the line of battle, they can do that for a while!" Melanie said.

"Pull back," Miller commanded the pilot. "Quick!"

He obeyed; Melanie looked at the Guard officer curiously. "Why?" she asked.

As if in answer, a Navy jet screamed in almost right beside the helicopter, rocking it with its wake. Two missiles flashed from under its wings; there was an enormous explosion behind the rise, and the mortar fire ceased.

"Because I called in an air strike," Miller answered, grinning.

The afternoon dragged on, and so did the fighting. Melanie's helicopter had to make a run back to a substation they'd established a few miles back to refuel, and when they returned it did not appear that anything had changed. Melanie's troops continued to advance, pushing the paratroopers back slowly but surely. The enthusiasm of the first contact had begun to fade on both sides. Now some of those on the front line retreated to rest, leaving others to take their place. Navy helicopters swooped in, dropping rations to the groups of resting fighters, who looked more like picnickers than warriors from Melanie's vantage point. As the sun began to drop toward the horizon in the west, the battleline started to stabilize a little as even more fatigue began to set in.

"You think they'll stop at nightfall?" Melanie asked Miller.

He nodded. "Probably. They're beat, you can tell. Still, their officers might push them on; they do have an advantage after dark. But they're going to be too tired to make much use of it."

"We should try to hit them again at dawn. We need to keep moving. We're winning, we're beating them back, but they're slowing us down badly. And the rest of their army is on its way."

"Yeah," Miller grunted. "Frankly I was hoping we could break through before nightfall, fight them on our flanks as we move on toward DC. That's not going to happen."

"No, it isn't," Melanie agreed. "How long do you figure we have before the regular troops arrive?"

"We're figuring maybe sixteen to eighteen hours from their position on the North Carolina border here. Recon says they started moving maybe an hour before we started fighting here. We've been at this for around six hours, so that means nine to eleven hours from now."

Melanie nodded. "And it's close to eight now. That means we can expect them anywhere from five to seven AM."

"Yes."

"In other words," she said with a sigh, "around dawn. We're not going to make it. We're going to have to fight them after all."

"It looks that way, yes. Admiral Hansen and General Lilly--Air Force--plan to hit them with air strikes on the way, starting around midnight. That'll weaken them some and it'll slow them down a little, too. Not too much. Maybe an hour or so."

"Send them a message," Melanie said, "to focus on the front of their column. If there are bridges they can knock out, knock them out. We need more time."

"I'll pass it along."

Melanie turned her attention back to the fighting on the ground. Down below them a woman older than the students she'd watched before, a tall sandy-haired woman dressed in a white sleeveless shirt and blue jean shorts, was being machine-gunned by one of the paratroopers. Blood spouting from her shirt, she was doing the same grotesque dance the blond student had done earlier. A balding man shot the soldier; the woman, released from the impact of the bullets, collapsed in a heap. Melanie ground her teeth. All this sacrifice, all this courage--for nothing?

"We're probably not going to be able to break through before the rest of the Army gets here," Harry said flatly as Miller returned to the radio.

"No," Melanie agreed sadly. "It doesn't look that way."

"We're going to have to make contingency plans," he said. His voice sounded flat. "We've just been too slow about breaking through the paratroopers--or they're just a little too good."

"Yes. What we need to do is get the word out down there that we're going to start falling back at dawn. We'll be cut to pieces by the main Army. I can't doubt it. The Navy and Air Force, well, they're great, but they can only do so much."

"We'll go back to Annapolis. Regroup. Decide what our next move will be."

She turned to him. "We'll have a big problem, Harry. We'll have lost this battle. Everyone will know that. We've lost thousands of people down there. Thousands! And it'll be for nothing, there's no way we can put a good face on this. A lot of our popular support will start to fade. And it'll fade quickly."

"I always expected," Harry said, "years of guerilla warfare. That we've come so far so fast already--it's been incredible."

"Looks like it's over, though."

While they were talking, Dave had moved up close behind them. "Melanie, we can't give up now," he told her. "Don't forget, the Army was hurt, and hurt bad, down there at the border. General Hammerhill was killed. Their morale can't be great."

"No, I'm sure it can't," Melanie agreed. "But that isn't the point. We went around them because we could not afford to stall out fighting them at the border. Everyone agreed we can't lose our momentum; if we do we start losing popular support."

"But fighting them here--as they arrive--that's much better than--"

"Yes," she interrupted. "It's much better than trying to break through a set position. That isn't the point. The point is, we could not cut through the Airborne fast enough. What's coming is ten times the size of the Airborne, even if all they have left when they get here are their rifles."

"We still have a numerical advantage," Dave argued stubbornly.

"Yes. What was the estimate? Ten to one. Their troops are trained, ours are not. We're going to be slowed to a crawl even if we can win. Damn it, we're moving slow when we're at a hundred to one!"

"A part of that is because not everyone can even get into the fight. You have troops who haven't yet gotten close enough to even see the paratroopers."

"I know. But those regulars are going to arrive with mounted machine guns and things like that. We'll lose a hundred fighters taking out every one of those. And that's assuming the jets prevent them from getting their tanks and artillery here."

Dave fell silent for a moment, looking out over the battlefield. Their troops were still advancing, but it was apparent that they were advancing more slowly than ever. "Shit," he murmured. "Shit."

A moment later Mitch came up from his station at the computer desk they'd set up in the back of the helicopter. "Hey!" he yelled. He was wearing a big smile. "Why so glum?"

Dave turned to him and glared. "Because," he said, "we are, in effect, losing."

"Ho, you think so? Well, you come with me. I got some TV you just got to see!"

"TV?" Melanie echoed. But even so, she, Dave, and Harry got up and went back to Mitch's station, where Jackie was waiting for them. She was smiling too, and her eyes were wet. Melanie looked at the screen. There was an inset for video visible, but at the moment it was blank.

"I just have to do things this way," Mitch said as he sat down. "What you're about to see," he told them, "is a video feed from a Navy recon jet in the vicinity of Benson, North Carolina, where I-95 and I-40 cross." He swirled his mouse pointer around and finally clicked on a tab. A picture appeared; a little jerky and a little dark. Even so, it was obvious what they were seeing--the Army's main force.

Which had stopped cold on it's way north and was engaged in a fierce firefight with someone. As Melanie stared, a massive explosion billowed around an army tank, blowing off the turret and leaving the machine a flaming wreck.

"What's this?" Melanie asked. "The Navy jets are hitting them?"

"No, the Navy has been hitting them but they've been able to keep moving. This is different. Keep watching."

She did. The point of view of the camera kept changing--obviously, since it was mounted on an aircraft. Suddenly, another plane streaked by, momentarily blocking the view of the action on the ground. Melanie caught only a glimpse of it, but it was obviously a heavily-armed military jet.

On the wings she saw the letters "USMC."

Harry grabbed Mitch's shoulder. "The Marines?" he cried.

Mitch's head bobbed up and down so fast it looked like he might injure his neck. At the same time, the camera's view shifted to show another force, tanks and artillery, attacking the Army's column. "Damn straight!" he yelled. "Three divisions of them from Camp Lejeune! They've thrown in with us, and they hit the Army broadside about an hour ago! And man! Are they ever kicking ass!"

Melanie felt her own eyes growing at least as wet as Jackie's. "We've won," she said quietly. "It's all turned around, we've won. We're going to Washington..."