Arc Riders (27 page)

Beyond the Sikorsky were two buildings and forty or more men around the bonfire. The buildings were roofed with sheet metal.
The lower course was boards slatted outward to provide ventilation instead of being nailed firmly edge-to-edge. The upper
portion of the walls was screen wire, though the fabric was ripped in many places.

The roofs and walls were chewed by hundreds of bullet holes. Many of them appeared to have been fired from the inside.

The buildings were side by side with about fifty feet between them. That was where the bonfire, built in a dozen 55-gallon
drums, flared wildly. Each steel drum had been cut off a few inches above the sand-filled base, soaked with diesel fuel, and
ignited. Several pigs had been roasted above the oily flames on a grill woven from barbed wire. The bits that still remained
hung toward the fire, burned to carbon.

Carnes thought of the National Guardsmen in Iowa and of the napalm victims she’d treated over the years. She supposed it was
pork Watney’s men had roasted this night.

Watney lolled on a couch covered by a tiger skin on the opposite side of the fire. The bandage on his right calf was red with
fresh blood. Carnes knew from her own experience that Watney wouldn’t stay in hospital if he could walk away—even if he had
to walk with the aid of two of his scarred thugs, each of them armed like a fire team. Nurses who knew him didn’t even bother
to argue. Nowadays nobody had the time or energy anyway.

“You might wait—” Carnes started to say. She leaned closer to Weigand and repeated in a shout, “You stay here! He knows me.”

Pauli nodded, though his impassive face didn’t mask his concern.

Carnes passed close to the end of one of the buildings. A Caucasian man was making love to a Vietnamese woman on the raised
porch. The woman still wore a brassiere, though her small breasts scarcely required being confined. Her eyes followed Carnes
as the man on top grunted and swore softly.

The building wasn’t a barracks, though it might have been built as one. The 504th was using it as an arsenal. Carnes saw quivering
firelight reflected from machine guns, racks of rifles of differing design, shoulder-launched rockets, and crates of grenades,
ammunition, and high explosives.

The one-eyed Vietnamese squatting beside Watney stood up and tossed a bottle into the nearest barrel. The flames puffed blue
and settled back to their normal sluggish red.

The man wore a belt of machine gun ammunition across the chest of his black T-shirt. He lifted the ammo over his head and
flung it into the bonfire also.

Carnes cringed and looked away. The belt, at least a hundred rounds, went off in rattling explosions. The noise was doubled
by bullets and fragments of cartridge casings hitting the sides of the drums. Somebody screamed. Somebody else emptied an
automatic rifle into the fire, flinging blazing sand in all directions. Drunken men laughed and hooted.

Sparks landed on the arsenal’s riddled metal roof. Carnes resumed walking around the fire. Her right thigh, her wrist, and
her ear all stung from bits of embedded metal.

Watney himself was the first person to notice Carnes, though she didn’t think he recognized her personally—just as an intruder.
Watney locked her in a wide-eyed stare as emotionless as that of a shark starting its run toward prey.

Watney’s Vietnamese henchman followed his leader’s gaze. The Viet reached behind him for the folding-stock Kalashnikov stuck
into the ground by its bayonet. Watney caught the man’s arm and used it as an anchor by which to draw himself off the tiger-skin
couch.

The attention of most of those present turned to Rebecca Carnes, though there were some exceptions. On the side facing the
building still used as a barracks, a black, a Caucasian, and an Oriental were seeing how far they could piss into the bonfire.
Flames rolled up from the steam and spat a curtain of sparks. The black turned away, cursing brokenly. His urine continued
to splash the ground. The other two men clung to each other and shrieked drunken laughter.

“You remember me, Colonel,” Carnes said. She didn’t know if he could hear her over the music. Maybe he could read her lips.
“Nurse Carnes from the 96th? You remember me!”

Watney nodded slightly, recognition arriving with the tiny click of pins mating in a tumbler lock. Watney bellowed an order
in the direction of the barracks. The music came from a boom box under the eaves. It was hooked to external speakers and an
amp driven by an aircraft battery.

A naked Vietnamese sprawled beside the unit with a smile and open, glassy eyes. He didn’t move when Watney spoke.

Watney’s henchman wrenched his Kalashnikov loose and pointed it—toward the boom box or the stoned attendant, Carnes couldn’t
be sure which. Watney snarled “Slopeheaded bastard!” and pushed the muzzle of the automatic rifle aside.

The Vietnamese fired anyway. The three-shot burst slammed over the heads of several men still lolling beside the fire. A Caucasian
laughed, but the stocky Oriental beside him jumped into a crouch and leveled his M16.

Watney jerked the Kalashnikov away and flung it toward the stockade behind him. He shouted again at the attendant who, now
awake, lowered the volume as directed.

Watney eyed Carnes again. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I remember you. Come here to join us?”

He turned to look around him and swayed. He’d been drinking, in addition to fatigue, loss of blood, and whatever painkillers
he’d taken for the wound.

“We’re mostly guys right now,” he said, slurring the words slightly. His henchman put out an arm to steady him. “But I don’t
have any prejudice, Carnes. You just have to want to die for the good old US of A, that’s all.”

“I’m here with some friends,” Carnes said. “They’d like to talk with you.”

She nodded across the fire toward Weigand and Barthuli. The analyst was picking up something on the ground at his feet. From
Carnes’ angle, the flames were as much a screen as illumination, but the object looked like a grenade—part of the insane jumble
of lethal hardware that strewed the compound. She hoped to God that Barthuli himself wouldn’t blow them all up.

Watney and his henchman both followed the direction of Carnes’ glance. The Viet’s muscles were rigid and trembling with fury.
On his forehead was crudely tattooed
SAT CONG
—“Kill Communists”—a self-delivered death sentence if he were ever captured. The butt of a .45 automatic stuck out from the
cargo pocket of his tiger-striped fatigue trousers.

“Are they suits?” Watney asked with a lack of affect which didn’t deceive Carnes in the least.

“No,” she said sharply. “Not the way you mean.”

She eyed her companions more critically. The last thing she wanted was for this man to think she was lying to him. It was
hard to know how to describe Gerd Barthuli; but he certainly wasn’t an administrator from an air-conditioned office.

“One’s a field operative,” she said. “The other, he’s a specialist. They’re not suits.”

Watney’s henchman said something to him. Carnes had more than a smattering of Vietnamese, but she couldn’t follow the passionate
flood of language.

Watney smiled at Carnes. “Tak thinks you all should go away,” he said. “He doesn’t trust you. I think Tak’s right.”

Carnes took the chance she had to take. She smiled back and said, “They want to talk to you about what happened on March 31,
1968.”

Watney’s eyes opened a little wider. Carnes looked into them and through them, and all the way to the soul of a man in hell.

Watney smiled. The expression had a jagged look, like that of a jack-o’-lantern carved with a straight razor. “You’re from…”
he said. He lifted his chin, a slight gesture and one that could have meant anything, except to someone who knew the answer.

“I’m not,” Carnes said. She flicked her eyes toward Weigand and Barthuli again. “They arc, though.”

Watney shook himself like a dog emerged from a pond. He wore shorts made from fatigue trousers, sandals cut out of automobile
tires—Ho Chi Minhs—and a shoulder holster holding an inverted revolver. The surface of his body was covered with sears. Most
of Watney’s back was pink keloid from napalm, and the dozen dimpled bullet wounds across his chest looked to have been a certain
death sentence.

Yet Kyle Watney still moved with strength and even a certain raw grace. The limp from the present wound would be unnoticeable
in a few weeks. Chances were the same would be true of whatever damage he received in the next operation or the one after
that.

“Yeah, I’d like to talk to them, too,” Watney said. He spoke with no more expression than an oyster has sliding down a diner’s
throat. He started around the fire.

Tak grabbed Watney by the shoulder and spun him around. Carnes didn’t see Watney’s hand move, but when he faced the Viet,
the revolver was pointed at the man’s nose.

Tak shouted. Watney tapped the revolver muzzle on the Viet’s forehead, between the words
SAT
and
CONG
. Watney said something in a voice as dry and lethal as the rustle of a cobra through grass.

Carnes had been wondering how a man with such open contempt and hatred for Orientals could lead a unit made up largely of
Vietnamese and Chinese—many of them ralliers, turncoats from the Communist armies. She hadn’t even been sure what Watney was
fighting for. He didn’t seem to have any political beliefs or even interests.

But now she understood. Kyle Watney was fighting in order to die, and to kill Orientals. He didn’t care whether they died
under the lash of his bullets or at his side, trying to execute his orders. And the men of the 504th were as mad and desperate
as their leader. It was really as simple as that.

Tak tried to hug Watney to his chest. Watney slapped his henchman on the forehead,
hard
, with the butt of the revolver. The Viet fell to the ground.

Other irregulars shifted uneasily, watching the tableau. Watney holstered his revolver and turned, following Carnes to the
shadows where the two ARC Riders waited.

Weigand’s hands were spread on his thighs in plain view. Barthuli was examining a baseball grenade with the interest to be
expected of an entomologist for a rare moth. Around the fire, men went back to their previous pursuits. The attendant turned
up the music, then lapsed again into somnolence.

“Colonel Watney?” Weigand said. “I’m Weigand, this is Barthuli. We—”

“Where do you come from?” Watney said, as harsh and direct as an incoming rocket. Weigand’s size brought out a hostile undercurrent
that Carnes hadn’t heard before in the smaller man’s tone.

Weigand glanced at Carnes. She shrugged. “He knows,” she said.

“We’re from about three centuries up the line from you,” Weigand admitted without hesitation. “Two and a half, perhaps.”

Watney’s henchman got groggily to his feet. He wiped his forehead, smearing blood from the pressure cut there. He glared across
the fire with bestial hatred.

“You can turn this around?” Watney said. He gestured with a clenched fist. “Turn it
back
?”

“Yes,” Weigand said simply. “With your help we can.”

“All right,” said Watney. “I’ll help. I’ve been waiting—”

His face melted into a childlike wistfulness, utterly at variance with any expression Carnes had seen there before.

“Twenty years, I guess,” he said. “I didn’t mind that we couldn’t go back. I’d been willing to die. Even then I was. But it
was three years or so before I really understood what we’d done.”

Watney began to cry with great wracking sobs that drained the strength from his legs. He knelt because he could no longer
stand. Carnes squatted beside him, trying to comfort something she still thought of as a rabid animal; but an animal in pain,
and therefore her responsibility.

Tak screamed, “I kill all you fucking fuckers!” He aimed an M16 across the bonfire. The fresh punctures caused by the belt
of ammunition pursed like bleeding mouths. Other irregulars jumped up, reaching for weapons.

Weigand knocked the Viet backward with a jolt to the forehead from his acoustic pistol. Barthuli’s arm swung in a long arc.
That was the wrong way to throw a grenade. Carnes had treated a lot of men who’d forgotten to lob a grenade like a shotput,
the way they’d been trained to do. The grenade was much heavier than a baseball of similar dimensions, and the man throwing
it the wrong way was likely to chip bones and pull tendons by the excessive strain.

Barthuli hadn’t had any training at all, but the bomb flew accurately through the open door of the arsenal building. “Incoming!”
he shouted as he turned and ran.

Carnes lurched to her feet. Weigand picked her up bodily and followed the others, helped on his way by his light-amplifying
facemask. Watney was already dashing toward the gate. The colonel’s reflexes hadn’t been slowed by whatever mix of hope and
memory drove him to tears.

A thousand one, a thousand two
…

Grenades had five-second fuses, Carnes remembered that. And remembered men who’d been brought in horribly mangled, because
their grenade had gone off early, or because it had sprung back almost into their arms after hitting a springy cane of bamboo.

…
a thousand three, a
…

Weigand, as strong as a horse, carried her around the flank of the Sikorsky and threw himself forward with her in his arms.
His elbows and belly took the shock rather than crush her. Despite that cushioning, the ground felt as hard as the top of
a cast-iron stove when Carnes’ buttocks slammed it.

…
thousand f
—

An irregular fired at them with a Kalashnikov. A green tracer ricocheted skyward from a stone only inches from Carnes’ outflung
hand.

The grenade went off. A moment later, the stacked munitions followed in a blast that turned the night white, then orange.
The ground rose and hit Carnes harder than when she’d fallen on it a moment before. She gasped, throbbing with pain.

The helicopter staggered. The upper half of its fuselage ripped like tissue paper in a tornado. The ruptured fuel tanks ignited
in a spreading, deep-red bloom.