Subterrene War 03: Chimera (18 page)

“Yep.”

“How do you keep it juiced? Those things suck power.”

I pointed to my helmet and shoulders. “The chameleon skin polymer is also doped with a photovoltaic material, and the suit’s inside is coated with a piezoelectric
nanocoating. So anytime I’m in sunlight or moving, my batteries and fuel cells get a little extra charge.”

He laughed. “I never would have guessed it—that you, of all people, would have a semi-aware.”

“This one’s different,” I said. “This one is female and has a really sexy voice and promised not to tell anyone my secrets. She’s the only girl for me.”

Jihoon slid his vision hood on. A few minutes later he yanked it off and slid the chit out, snapping the paper-thin plastic between his fingers. “Looks like a mission.”

“Yep.” Thai officers blew whistles, and everyone loaded up at the same time the APC engine ground to life beneath me. “But it’s some mission.”

There was no forgetting that road. The highway took us over a bridge to the far side of the Chao Phraya River, in an endless line of vehicles that downshifted and ground their gears as the gaps between them shrunk and expanded so that from above the convoy must have resembled a spring. Seven years hadn’t changed anything. My mind had altered the memories and played tricks, the kind where I swore that a particular fuel-alcohol station had been on one side of the road but was actually on the other, and some places had been torn down to be replaced by new buildings, but it didn’t take long to repair the image in my mind. It wouldn’t be long, I thought. Not much farther until we hit the endless rice paddies and fish farms, beyond which the jungle would form a dark green scar on the horizon.

Jihoon had laid out his equipment on the bouncing APC deck. He checked and double-checked the Maxwell
carbine, its long barrel a dull black and formed by bands of ceramic under which coils of superconducting wire would juice themselves into magnets at the squeeze of a button. Unlike the smaller police models I’d seen in Spain or used in Sydney, these ones were for combat. A long flexi-belt fed thousands of fléchettes from the carbine’s breach to a hopper that would perch on the left shoulder, the weight a comforting reminder of the power in one’s hands.

“Seven years,” I said.

Jihoon yelled over the noise. “What?”

“Seven years. Seven years since I’ve been back in this awful country.”

“What’s wrong with Thailand?”

Jihoon could have his equipment. I searched my pack for one of the bottles I’d brought and uncapped it, offering him some but he declined. “There’s a different way of doing things out here, Chong. Not like in the simulators. We’ll see if it makes
you
sick.”

“You think I can’t hack it?” he asked.

“I think after the BAI you did your time in the regular Army, just enough to find your way into Special Forces. I also think you’re a good Korean American who salutes the flag every day and jerks off while reciting the pledge of allegiance.”

Ji started packing his kit, making sure that everything went in the proper place. “You really can’t stand Asians, can you? Not just me, I mean anyone who even resembles one.”

“That’s not true. I love Asians. Bangkok has some of the best hookers around; it’s a real shame there wasn’t time to try one or two while we were there.” The bourbon went in smoothly and took the edge off, but you couldn’t
mess around in this heat, even with the suit’s climate control; I reminded myself to drink plenty of water once I’d finished.

“All right. If you won’t tell me why you’re such a bigoted prick, how about you tell me why you hate satos so much?”

I thought about that one. It was a good question, one that warranted another drink because it was the second time he’d asked it and the guy wouldn’t give up. But even then the answer wouldn’t come, and several responses swirled in the cesspool of my brain, each of them almost right but none of them close to the whole truth.

“You were there, in Khlong Toei,” I said. “Didn’t you
see
that betty?”

Ji nodded. “Yeah. I saw her. She looked exactly like the pictures I’ve seen, but nothing there to hate so much.”

“Give it time. Maybe one of them will shove her hand through your best friend’s stomach and snap his spine while quoting their bible. You ever read their combat manual, Chong?” I didn’t bother to look if he nodded since it was likely he
hadn’t
read it. “It’s not about small unit tactics; it’s about how to get closer to God through killing. None of them should be breathing the same air as you or me. And some asshole like you and me made them.”
Assholes like Phillip’s father.

The convoy slowed, and ahead of us the lead vehicles took an exit ramp off the highway so they could turn onto a two-lane road, heading northwest into haze. It was late morning. We had our hoods and helmets off so the hot wind blew across my face, and the trucks’ exhaust made the air wetter, their alcohol-burning engines screaming as they shifted into low gear to slow down. When it was
our turn, we took the ramp slowly, spiraling around until facing the right direction again and in front of us saw nothing but green. Rice paddies lined each side of a small country road, and I wondered how many armies had taken this route north. You almost smelled the leftovers of war in this place, and thinking about it didn’t help because the more you thought about it, the more you wanted to pick up your Maxwell and hold it close, keep it ready. Paddy dikes could conceal anything. The trees topping them would make good cover, and before I could catch myself, I’d started to reach for my vision hood to take a closer look, scan the road ahead for signs of ambush, but the rough canvas was like sandpaper and made me laugh at the thought, so instead I took another drink.

Thailand made me feel old, I decided, but then it didn’t take much to make me feel old these days and Wheezer should have been there, not Jihoon. Wheezer would have gotten everything, could have said something to pull me out of the gloom. It was funny how dark everything had become despite the fact that the sun couldn’t have been more brilliant on its climb upward from the horizon, and the thought occurred to me that it had been years since I’d seen the ocean—
really
saw it, not just flew over or drove by. The last time had been with Phillip when he was two. In Beaufort. It had been a strange place where the forest went almost all the way to the ocean and where the surf pounded in booms so loud they drowned out the noise from the naval air station and its constant, roaring fighters. And there it was, the entry of another memory, one that I wanted least of all because it threatened to ruin the focus I’d need to complete the task at hand. Old age rode the APC next to me, laughing not at my jokes but at
me,
poking its finger in my eye because it knew that there wasn’t anything a guy like me could do and that the cracks had started to show, cracks into which it could push its fingers and work to wedge them even wider. Old age and a rube named Jihoon were the APC’s only other riders.

“They took Phillip out of the academy.” The words left my mouth before I’d thought about it, and after they did I wanted them back, but it was too late.

Ji glanced at me. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I whispered before chugging the rest of the bottle. “And here
I
am.”
Wondering why it is that I care about another guy’s kid
.

We spent the rest of the morning cruising northwest along narrow paved roads, forcing oncoming traffic to pull off to the side or risk getting crushed under the ceramic-armored APCs, and people stopped to stare with quiet curiosity. We had jumped back in time. Despite the progress of the last two centuries,
here
were old men walking behind water buffalo, their feet protected by nothing except sandals as they guided plows through the clay.
There
were women in conical hats; they stooped over in a dry field, yanking rice from the ground with hands that were darker than the clay itself, the sun having baked everything to well-done. Some wore white turbanlike things on their heads. But they all stood when the convoy roared up, holding both hands to their eyes, shielding them from the sun. Jihoon pulled an item from his kit, a tiny rectangle, and placed it against his face. It took me a second to realize that the guy was taking pictures.

I was about to laugh and give him hell for it when something else caught my eye. We were moving out of one farming area into another, and there were no fences to delineate separate areas, but I sensed it from the tree line and the fact that the new area hadn’t been tended as nicely; huge weeds and brush had overgrown much of its fields. To our front, a narrow concrete bridge spanned a canal. From where I sat, it looked like something was on the bridge so I yanked my vision hood on and stood, grabbing hold of the APC’s turret rear so I could see over the forward vehicles while zooming in. A truck had broken down. It looked like an ancient vehicle, rusted out in spots, and the engine hood had been propped up as if the truck had stopped and been abandoned when its owner couldn’t fix the thing. I looked back. Jihoon was still taking pictures, but the farmers had stopped staring and were moving in the opposite direction, some of them sprinting away once they climbed the dike and made it to the road.

“Chong!”
I yelled, dropping back to the deck to grab my helmet. “Ambush. Get your hood and lid on, and let the Thais know that the vehicle ahead is part of a trap.”

He didn’t even pause, and I had to give the guy credit. Jihoon slipped the camera into a pouch and geared up in under ten seconds, calling over our radio in twangy Thai that crackled in my ears. But it was already too late. Our road ran along the top of a dike, with steep dirt and gravel sides that dropped about ten feet into the fields on either flank; although the APCs could make it down such a slope, the trucks would have to stay put.

I had just grabbed my carbine, which had been slung over a shoulder, when the first rocket streaked out of the tree line ahead of us, clanging into the lead APC after a
loud
whoosh.
Time stopped. I don’t remember deciding what to do or telling Jihoon to follow, but we leaped from our APC as it screeched to a stop, and both of us rolled down the sides of the dike after an impact that snapped my jaws together; I tasted blood from having bit the inside of my cheek. Jihoon rolled to a stop beside me. We stood in a crouch and jogged toward the trees where the rocket had come from but kept to the area where the fields met the dike, our feet sucking in and out of thick mud in a shallow ditch. We had made it about ten meters when daisy-chained geysers of asphalt and clay leaped up to our left. At first it didn’t register. Then I noticed that my speakers had cut off to shield my ears, and shadows appeared where none had been before, so there was just enough time to look left and see the line of explosions work their way down the road, hitting the APC on which we had just ridden. The vehicle leaped up. A fraction of a second later the fusion reactor went and small jets of plasma shot out from cracks in the hull. The vehicle broke in two, already burning before the separate pieces landed. A few seconds later my hearing came back as bits of uniforms, armor, and ceramic chunks from the vehicles either floated down around me or thudded into the brush, along with, miraculously, our packs; they hadn’t even been singed.

“Mines,” I said over the radio.

Jihoon sounded shocked. “What?”

“Mines. They mined the road. Look sharp, and move up quickly. Whatever you do, don’t stop until we hit the tree line.”

Things were clicking again, making me smile with the feeling of being in my element. The APCs that survived whined as they turned off the road, crashing down the
dike face in front of us at the same time their autocannons and plasma guns opened up. Jihoon and I sprinted behind them, trying our best to use their hulls as cover. The vehicles blocked our view of much of the way ahead, but between them we saw the flashes of expanding plasma, which ignited dangling tree branches into long torches and crisped anything on the ground. Tracers from the APCs also rocketed downrange, chewing up the dirt in small puffs. It was hard to keep track of time during that advance, but when the APCs reached the far dike, they stopped, and by then I noticed that sweat had soaked through my undersuit, suggesting we’d been running for at least a few minutes.

The embankment, on top of which the trees burned, was steeper than the one supporting the road, and the APCs couldn’t climb it. They idled there—a pack of frustrated tigers.

“Tell them we’re moving up,” I said to Jihoon; there was no way I’d sit in the open for another second. “And make sure those asshats don’t shoot at us.” And I started up the slope, not waiting for Jihoon to let me know it was OK.

The trees crackled overhead, and one of them fell next to me, crashing to the ground and sending up a cloud of sparks. Two bodies had been charred. At first it was difficult to tell the difference between them and the scorched grass, but the remains of a rocket launcher rested between them, suggesting the Thai APC gunners had targeted the right location. I stayed down. Jihoon crawled up next to me, pointed right, and I nodded; we split up, moving in separate directions through the smoldering underbrush.

A figure jumped up in front of me but then vanished into
the brush. I’d chosen to head back in the direction of the road and had passed out of the burning zone into an area of dense grass, so by the time I lurched to my knees, he was gone and only the sound of crashing brush came from the far slope. I stood and ran. The adrenaline was kicking in now, and I heard the sound of my breathing as my feet slipped over the edge, sending me into a downslope slide to land in the far field. From there I saw the bridge to my left about ten meters away. It was quiet again. I moved toward the road, and stands of sawgrass swayed in a stiff breeze as my carbine rose so I could tuck it into my shoulder, the sighting reticle flashing onto my goggles, and a sense of satisfaction crept through my gut; the guy couldn’t be far. At the same instant, a group of men broke cover to my right; I reported the contact and fired as they fled, not stopping until the last one dropped in a spray of blood, my fléchettes kicking sparks when they passed through ceramic armor. The whole thing took a few seconds from start to finish.