A Separate War and Other Stories (27 page)
Read A Separate War and Other Stories Online
Authors: Joe Haldeman
After they had gone, he punched Fred's combination.
“Oh, hello, sir.”
Without preamble: “I signed the goddamn thing.”
Fred nodded soberly. “No choice, really. Let's hope Congress handles it right.”
“Well, I'm knocking off for the night.” Braxn reached for the switch.
“Oh wait, sir, just a secondâ¦one thing, uh, might not be tooâ¦uh.”
“Well?”
“Well, one of my men got the dossier on Tweed, slipped it off the backseat while everybody was watching the old man die. I checked it over, though, and the last page is missing. A Xerox of an old photostat of his Army psychiatric profile.”
“You rechecked the car?”
“We took the damn thing apart, couple of hours ago. No sign.”
“I guess we just sit tight. What about the helicopter pilot?”
“No sweatâ¦we found him this morning, holed up in a fleabag hotel in Philadelphia. He was scared, sir, really almost out of his mind. He was sure we'd killed Tweed and were after him. We persuaded him otherwise.”
“Not too convincingly, I hope.”
“Naturally not. We also purchased the article from him, just as a safeguard. Ten thousand bucksâabout a tenth what he was going to get. Took the money out of the party's campaign fund, chalked it up to âghost writing.'”
“All this and a lousy sense of humor, too?”
“Yes, sir,” Fred said with a little smile.
After they punched off, Braxn returned the draft bill to its black leather case and gave it to his secretary on the way out, instructing that a courier run it over to the Speaker's office. He knew the old geezer wouldn't be there this late, though: probably over at II Caesars', soaking his brain.
His wife met him at the door, trading him a glass of chilled Tavel '88 for his coat. They were still in the downstairs apartments; Braxn knew that Harriman would have wanted to stay there as long as possible.
“Hard day today, dear?”
“Hmmph.” He sat down in an overstuffed recliner. “Conferences. Audiences. Two secretaries, four congressmen, a general, two ambassadors, and twelve Macedonians in full battle array. Actually, I think they were Boy Scouts.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“It was, I must have woken up twice. What's for dinner?”
“Oh, Rosa's fixed something special.” She spoke into her watch. “Rosa? When may dinner be served?”
She put the watch up to her ear for a second. “Whenever you're ready.”
He had just picked up a copy of the
Star
nitefax. He refolded it along the original crease and tossed it down. “Let's go. I could eat a can of dog food.”
“That won't be necessary for a while, I hope.”
While they were walking to the dining room, the world shimmered and split again.
It was dawn in Barisal, the least likely time for an ambush; besides, most of the fighting had been confined to the city proper, so the Americans
we'd been so glad to get out of those damn streets let the gooks fight for their own city said this goddamn jungle patrol was gonna be a picnic fuck you colonel wish you were here with
“Is something wrong, dear?”
“No, IâI just stood up too fast. Drinking too much coffee, not enough sleep, I guess.”
Jesus Christ did we ever walk into it a classic box
from three sides heavy .65-calibers sprayed tiny anvils, making a ceiling of lead never more than three feet off the ground. Men were screaming in pain to the left and right, and just ahead Lieutenant Hernadez was thrashing around in the elephant grass with a sucking chest wound.
“Excellent,” Braxn said, chewing mechanically. “Tell Rosa I wouldn't trade her for a Lib majority in Congress.”
“Take it easy, LieutenantâI SAID TAKE IT EASYâthere.” He got the man to stop squirming long enough to stop the sucking with the plastic from the bandage wrapper
Okay, now the bastard's chest might fill up with blood, but at least I won't have to listen to that horrible shhik-shhik
“Well, if any Dixiecrats come by, we'll tell 'em it's
Taiwan
duck⦔
Now the bandage over the plastic and run the strings behind the lieutenant's back
God they could have made these strings a little longer where the fuck is a medic
“Ten-six! Ten-six, God damn it!” Down flat, burst of fire seeking out his voiceâ¦
“You really
do
seem distracted, dear.”
Braxn took off his glasses and polished them with his napkin.
“Really nothing, Lindaâ¦but I wonder if you could get me an aspirin?”
Captain Brown crawled up through the fog and smoke, moving on his back like a swimmer trying to do a backstroke with his shoulders. “Fall back and get me a medic.” His left hand cradled his right, blood gushing from the stump of a thumb. “Hernandez KIA?”
Jesus Christ by the book all the way
“Not yet, sir. Just about.”
“No wonder we haven't got any fuckin' support, get me his maps, they're in the right leg pocket. Then GET THATâ”
Braxn stared at a forkful of rice, then levered it into his mouth. “Oh, thank you, dear.” He washed the tablets down with ice water.
The medic was in a shallow depression behind a stand of saplings, bandaging a tall Negro flanker whose lower jaw was shot off, thick blood drooling around the pressure bandages.
“Where you hit?”
“Not me, Docâthe captain's bleeding pretty bad from a hand wound and Lieutenant Hernandez got shot in the chestâ”
“Motherfucker musta stood up.”
A burst of machine-gun fire rattled through the saplings. The medic cringed down, but the big Negro just lay there, eyes filming.
“Fuck 'em both.” Doc pushed a morph-plex syrrette through the dying man's sleeve, blood-slick and shiny. “Let's go.”
“âjust a combination of a headache and a stomach ache.”
“Maybe you shouldn't be taking aspirin, then.”
An artillery spotting round popped maybe two hundred meters away. The captain was lying beside a dead radioman, talking on the horn while he looked at the map. “Drop one-zero-zero and fire for effect, one-two over and out.” He hung up. “You fellas better dig a deep hole. That's comin' in right on topâ”
“Oh,
now
look! You've got that orange sauce on your sleeve. Let me take some cold water to it before it sets.”
She patted at the stain. “Are you
sure
you're feeling all right?” she asked nonsensically.
O God Jesus Christ make it stop
the ground fell away and slapped back, twice, four times
so loud
so loud you didn't hear it with your ears but with your lungs and guts and bones and ballsâ
Braxn rose from the table and supported himself with a hand on the chair back. “I'm going to lie down for a while.”
“Let me rub your back.”
“No!âno, finish supper; I'll just lie on the couch for aâ”
“TEN-SIXâDOC! Ten-six?”
Look at Doc over there without a head he was always a lazy fucker wonder why it doesn't hurt I always thought it'd hurt so much but you can't put 'em back in they keep slipping around and between your fingers almost no bloodâ¦
“I better call Dr. Dean⦔ “No, no, it'llâ¦pass.” “I'll call him.”
so weak Holy Mother Mary of NO I'm not gonna I don't wanna God God it hurts now maybe if I put some dirt on my hands they'll
“TEN-SIX”
they won't slide out so easy and I can stuff Holy Mary God of shit fuck it hurts, what's the use
Not as easy as it used to be but the involuntary telepathic link helpsâpushâ¦
Braxn was lying in a stand of elephant grass, grey-white smoke clinging to the ground around him, the soft yammer of battle sounds whispering in his ears. Bluish bloody intestines spilled out of a foot-wide wound in his abdomen.
He willed his hands sterile and carefully rolled the guts back into the abdominal cavity. With his fingers and his mind he debrided the wound and held the bloody lips of it together for a few seconds until it healed. He cleansed himself internally against peritonitis, then fixed the broken eardrums.
Now for the larger problem. Could he still affect the rate of subjective time flow? He concentrated on slowing down this little corner of the universe. Make it lazy. Come on, Reality, isn't it hard to support a war? So much noise and confusion. Easier just to let it allâ¦runâ¦downâ¦
A machine gun about ten meters in front of him was firing at a hysterical cyclic rateâ
dubdubdubdub
âbelt-fed, rattling off a thousand rounds per minute. After about a hundred rounds it started to signal the results of Braxn's efforts.
Dubdubdub-dub-dubâdubâdub, doob, doobâ¦doomb. Thud.
Braxn stood up and walked through the grass to the machine gun. He was halfway there when a bullet crawled through the air toward him, moving with the speed of an overfed bumblebee. He caught it between two fingers and lifted itâit was heavy with fossilized kinetic energyâand released it above his head. It glided on.
Another bullet was just coming out of the muzzle when he reached the gun. He swatted the slug into the ground. No wonder the gunner had been firing hystericallyâa piece of shrapnel had hit him in the face and spirited away his nose and half a cheek. He was in profound shock and dying.
Braxn took the necessary elements from nearby plants and insects and a pinch of dirt and fashioned the man a new nose and cheek. Of course, it wouldn't look exactly like his old one, but at least it was consistent with Pakistani somatypes.
The gunner's loader, the man who keeps the belt of ammunition feeding into the gun, was splayed out behind the gun with an ugly wound in his throat. Braxn healed the hole in the trachea, closed the wound in the neck and teleported the inspirated blood out of the man's lungs. Then he visualized the bolt of the machine gun and made the firing pin disappear. He started to wander through the battle area.
A hand grenade hung suspended in midair, imperceptibly rotating and falling. Braxn plucked it out of the air and unscrewed the top assembly. He snapped off the blasting cap inside, then screwed the thing back together, its firing mechanism useless, and let it continue on its way.
In all, Braxn deactivated sixty-three rifles and pistols and four machine guns, eighty-one hand grenades and two grenade launchers. He revived seven dead men and healed the wounds of fourteen others. One person, who had evidently sustained a direct hit from an artillery shell, he had to leave the way he found himâthere were no pieces larger than a section of liver to work with. The all-important brain cells were disorganized and scattered over an eight-meter radius.
Braxn returned the soldier's body to the stand of elephant grass. As a final touch he cleaned all of the blood and smoke from the battleground. He lay down and pushed his persona back into Harriman's body.
Ugh, what's that? Of course, of course, this body's deadâor at least not alive. It wasn't alive when I took it over. What a botherâ¦have to reprogram the brainâ
So quiet all of a suddenâ¦wait! I was hurt, I was dying but O God, sweet Jesusâ¦
â¦must be careful in the futureâif I leave this body againânot to leave it too long. It'll start to smellâ¦
“I know, goddamn it. I can't get my fifty to work eitherâstop those bastardsâ”
Braxn stood up Harriman's body and experimentally wiggled it around and stretched. Everything seemed to be in order, but numb and aching. He shuffled back into the living room. Linda was sitting on the couch, not-reading a magazine.
“Oh, Ross. You look just awfulâcome and put your head in my lap.” Braxn did so to humor her, found it felt good. “I checked on you while you were sleeping. You looked soâwell, so
bad
that I called Dr. Dean.”
“Ah. Well. It's not that serious. Butâ” Braxn closed his eyes and shook his head. “The bill.”
“What was that, dear?” Linda was stroking his forehead with a cold wet napkin.
“The draft bill. I shouldn't have let it through.”
“Didn't you veto it day before yesterday?”
“No. That was a different one, not as sneaky. This one just reapportions various Selective Service districts.”
“But it still increases the draft?”
“Overall, yes. Lowers it in some noisy districts.”
Linda dipped the cloth in water again. “Well, I agree. You should've vetoed itâthose poor boys. Don't you remember how you felt after⦔
