Subterrene War 03: Chimera (30 page)

A half hour later we stopped. The map on my heads-up put us two kilometers inside Burma, and for a brief moment the thought made me want to give up because it looked as though we hadn’t moved. Ahead of us was a river. The
Gra Jaai
patrol route turned north to follow it, but the coordinates that Lucy had given us planted Margaret’s position almost ten kilometers due west, and the realization that we’d have to split up made me wonder if it was worth it; Jihoon and I would be alone then in the deep
jungle.
We could give up.
For the second time, doubt crept in and made me question the decision to keep going, but I knew there wouldn’t be any going back. I smelled the mission. It was a mating call that the bush relayed from tree to tree and transmitted to the primal parts of my brain, which transformed the operation’s completion into an autonomic need, just as important as breathing.

We listened to the jungle sounds, which returned a few minutes after we fell silent, and I had to suppress the fact that my stomach wanted to vomit out breakfast. The bugs had become our early warning system. No matter how good your chameleon skin was or how slowly you moved, the insects knew everything and would give the enemy away long before he reached you but only if you stayed still, stayed quiet.

“We have just over a kilometer to the river,” a Japanese woman said.

I nodded, catching my breath and wondering what she looked like. “We’ll have to leave you there.”

“You will need a way to cross the river. This time of year, the current will be strong. And on the far side was an enemy garrison, but our reports indicate they retreated with our counterattack yesterday.”

“Do you know of any boats in the area?”

A dot appeared on my map, a kilometer south of where we’d split up at the river. “There is a village,” the woman said. “You’ll probably find a boat there.”

I waited for the
Gra Jaai
to decide to move, but instead we waited. In a few minutes the sun would be gone. Around me the jungle darkened so that the million shades of green shifted into black as the shadows took over to send me a message: the bush was glad to have me back.
Here I had led Thai actions to murder villagers and soldiers; here were my secrets, the ones I’d learned to keep in my twenties before age had started to erode my mind with doubt and regret, and they laughed at me from the foliage so that when the woman spoke again it made me jump.

“Why do you need Margaret?”

“The US wants her to help. They’re sending more soldiers like her to keep the Burmese and Chinese from invading Thailand.” She and some of the other
Gra Jaai
chuckled at me, and it made me want to punch someone. “What’s so funny about that?”

“Help?” she asked. “What help do we need? This is a blessing, not a problem. War is our way of life now, and we see the path set down by our ancestors the day our homeland was obliterated. Tokyo had become soft. Delinquent and corrupt. War is the way to reach God, and we honor our ancestors by returning to a way long forgotten by Japan, a way to see beauty and light.”

“That won’t be possible once the Chinese take over your new home,” I said. “When they tear your children apart with grenades.”

They laughed again, and the woman had trouble talking, trying to form words around what must have been a tremendous smile. “Our new King has friends, Lieutenant. Nobody wants the Chinese to even exist, and
they
have other enemies beside Thailand and America. We have allies who will arrive soon, and when they do, the Chinese will meet another angry people who have never forgotten them, not even after hundreds of years.”

“What are you talking about?” Jihoon asked. He sounded as skeptical as I was, and the sensation that these people were crazy—more insane than satos—made me
wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just let the Chinese have Bangkok.

“If you live,” she said. “If you make it to Margaret and return safely, then you will see everything, including that we don’t want or need
American
help.” The woman clicked off, then came back a minute later. “We move. A patrol three kilometers to our north was just destroyed by Chinese scouts and are now at God’s side.”

“Are you going back?” I asked. “To Thailand?”

“No. We push forward and finish the route.”

“Fuck this,” Jihoon whispered to me. “Her and all the King’s
friends
.”

In infrared the mosquitoes and moths looked more like shooting stars as we eased through the brush, and by now we moved downhill, descending from the mountain until we reached the edge of an immense flat clearing filled with rice paddies and low dikes. The Japanese woman led the patrol. She had indicated for us to hold at the clearing’s edge, where we spread out to leave about five meters between us, and it was enough space to make me feel alone, sorry for myself until I saw her marker inch out into the paddies; she’d be exposed, and the woman made no effort to move slowly, jogging as if she wanted to be seen, heading alone into the empty field. I flicked my safety off and got ready.

The woman reached a spot about three hundred meters away before she froze. At first I wondered if she had bought it because her dot stayed put for almost twenty minutes, at which point streaks of tracer fire broke the darkness in front of me so that I stared through the reticle
that had appeared on my heads-up, praying for a target—anything to shoot at and break the tension. She shouted on her way back to us, the dot moving so fast it occurred to me that she could have been an Olympic sprinter.

“Five scouts,” the woman screamed.
“Get ready!”

A hand grabbed my shoulder, and I nearly opened fire. “Don’t shoot,” someone said. “Hold and we’ll handle them.” The guy moved off in the direction of Jihoon, and I struggled to keep my finger from squeezing the trigger.

The woman was almost to us, and when she got into range, my vision kit’s motion and shape detection outlined her and at least three other figures approaching fast, otherwise invisible on infrared except for a faint gray smear and the firing of their Maxwell carbines. The things chasing her were close to the ground. At first it looked like the Chinese scouts would get close enough to pounce before she could reach us, but finally the woman put on a burst of speed that carried her back to the edge of the paddy, while just behind her the splashes in the paddy water stopped when the scouts leaped.
Gra Jaai
flame units opened fire. Beams of white leaped from the line to swallow the Chinese in midair, where they twisted through the leaves before crashing into the jungle behind us so the
Gra Jaai
followed them, pumping several bursts at the scouts as they ran. The Chinese thrashed into the brush, trying to get away before the burning metallic fuel damaged their systems to the point where all of them fell still.

“That’s three,” someone said.

The Japanese woman was out of breath while she whispered over the open frequency. “Stay still. Two more are out there, and there may be others I didn’t see.”

“Can they see us?” asked Jihoon.

I clicked into his private frequency. “We don’t know all their systems yet. Assume they can detect movement and shapes unless you stay absolutely still or move very, very slowly. And only use burst transmission, but stay off the air unless it’s an emergency. They might have direction finding.”

Our group stayed put for over half an hour. After that, a chorus of frogs erupted from the paddies, their croaking a source of comfort because like the insects the fact that they made any noise at all meant that the animals hadn’t detected either us
or
the Chinese, and with each splash the frogs made, I had to hold my breath in an effort to keep from moving. At first the thought of the scouts terrified me. This wasn’t like the satos, who I knew and were a familiar enemy; these were the unknown, and a sensation of being stalked by some kind of monster made me wish I was back on the line where at least there was a measure of safety. Not doing anything was the worst for someone like me, inaction eating at my mind the same way waiting for a mission did until I’d had enough.

“I’m going out there,” I said. “Someone give me a flame unit.”

The woman clicked in. “Are you sure? You’re not one of us.” She said the last part as if the woman was sorry for me.

“Just give it to me.” Ten minutes later one of the
Gra Jaai
crawled up slowly, inching his way to my side where he slid my cloak and hood off, then helped me detach my ammunition hopper and set my carbine to the side.

The flame unit was a backpack frame with three cylindrical tanks attached to a flexible ceramic hose and tubular firing section, and I had to wriggle into the thing’s
harness so slowly that my muscles cramped and began to tremble. When it was on it felt heavy, pushing me into the mud near the paddies. I waited until the guy helped me put my cloak and hood back on and was shocked to find that almost forty-five minutes had passed and that it wasn’t a guy who had been helping me, it was the patrol’s leader.

“These average four to five long bursts before running empty,” she said, “and this one is half-full. You will probably die.”

“Thanks.”

“The Chinese are worse than you because the Chinese have no souls, no honor.”

“And I do?” I asked.

She laughed and began tightening the flame unit’s belt around my waist. “I see why Lucy likes you. Why Margaret agreed to see you.”

“What are you talking about? Have you spoken with Margaret?”

“I am in constant communication with her. She monitors all patrols, even when on one of her own. Margaret is deeper inside Burma than any of us have been, and you raise our opinion of Americans by going after her. To kill her.”

The fact that she had it all wrong confused me, and it took a moment to collect my thoughts.
Why would it make her happy that someone was going to kill her?
“I’m not going to kill her; I’m just going to find her and deliver a message, maybe ask a few questions, and that’s it.”

“Then you,” the woman said, “don’t understand us at all.” She made one last adjustment to my belt, and one of the dots closest to me on the heads-up display map
blinked. “You will move out now with Hiroshi, who will advance on your right flank. Good luck. The last place I saw them was from a position about three hundred meters out, and they were at the far edge of the clearing moving toward us. It’s best to go fast and get it over with, just draw them out so we can keep moving toward the river. If you run out of fuel”—the woman slid a thermite grenade into my harness—“use one of these as a last resort. It’s best done by jumping them from behind, arming the grenade, and then jamming it into the space between their chest or back armor and leg joints. If you can find them.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. She paused, the air shimmering next to me as she waited. “If I don’t make it, take my partner with you and get him back to Bangkok.”

“Done. But most likely none of us will make it out. Our job wasn’t so much to patrol as it was to find the leftover Chinese scouts and take out as many as we could. To buy Lucy and Margaret more time. We’re a penal unit, and all of us have to prove our courage before we can be accepted among our families again because we all hesitated when ordered into the trenches.”

“How do you prove your courage?”

“By dying or by killing everything.
Everyone
.”

The sight of her footprints forming in the mud with no sign of boots made the night dreamlike. Already the dot marking Hiroshi’s location was speeding into the rice paddies, tracing a path that followed one of the low dikes, and I stood to take one step before I froze.
What was I doing?
The dike closest to me stretched out, disappearing into the darkness beyond my infrared range so that it looked as if the soil dissolved in the distance, and I clenched the flame unit until my hands hurt.
They
were
out there. The jungle urged me onward, sending a gentle kind of electricity through the roots and into the mud so it traveled upward in my legs and forced me to move despite the terror. The bush wanted this to happen, and it always got what it wanted, so to hesitate wouldn’t buy me a different outcome from the one already fated, and the mission was out there, pulling at me while the bush pushed from behind.

The dike soil was soft and gave under my weight as I crept forward. Wind blew across the paddy. My motion detectors pinged when the grasses waved in the breeze so that I froze trying to pinpoint a target until giving up with a touch of embarrassment for having reacted; Hiroshi was on a dike parallel to mine, and I had just moved forward again, trying to catch up and even out the advance, when the Chinese opened fire.

Fléchette tracers reached out for us from the far side of the clearing, but instead of two, the firing came from at least seven locations and slammed into my shoulder so that I spun in place before plunging into the black water of the paddy; the dike provided some concealment for a moment, and I cursed when the initial shock wore off.

“Suit penetration in upper right suit area,” said Kristen. “Minor damage to your shoulder, Lieutenant.”

“Call me Bug!”
I shouted. “How bad is it?”

“Three fléchettes punctured your tissues. They exited, causing minor skin tears, but there is little chance of damage to bone and a high probability that you can continue—although with discomfort, Bug. Air filters are saturated, and air intakes are currently blocked; switching to emergency oxygen.”

Something splashed behind me. Tracers still flicked
overhead, and I kept my head down, but with my back in the paddy and the huge cloak and flamethrower tanks lodged in the mud underwater, there was no way for me to get up or move. The splashes got louder. I raised the firing tube and pointed it toward the dike I had fallen off, just as my motion detectors showed three of them, Chinese scouts, leaping over the low dirt ridge and toward me. I squeezed the firing lever. Compressed gas propellant hissed at the same time the igniter sparked to send a jet of flame that swung as I screamed, my anger at not being able to move boiling over. The fire touched the first one. Although it landed in the paddy with a loud smack, the water did nothing to extinguish the flames, and from the corner of my eye, I saw the scout roll in an attempt to put them out, just to find them reignite as soon as it came back into the air. The gel splashed against the second one, then the third, and both fell into the ankle-high water next to me to burn, while steam curled up, bright white on infrared.