Arc Riders (34 page)

The airport’s defenses were manned by the Presidential Guard. Weigand doubted the troops’ quality was any higher than that
of Oakley’s brassarded equivalent, but it takes very little effort to shoot down an aircraft on its landing run. The sight
of six or seven lumbering transports—there’d have been ten if Oakley’s spares and maintenance situation had permitted them
to make a 5,000-kilometer flight—would fill the air above the runways with tracer bullets.

The PA system rattled something unintelligible. Buildings, then water, raced by beyond the scratched Plexiglas of Weigand’s
window. He closed his faceshield.

The wheels thumped. The men in the passenger compartment swayed as a single mass. The plane hit a second time. The pilot was
coming down deliberately hard to shorten his run, but the tires were in no better condition than the rest of the aircraft.
One of them blew like a bomb.

The plane slewed. Somebody screamed a prayer in Spanish. Another tire blew and a roostertail of sparks shot back from where
metal abraded on concrete with a shriek that silenced all voices and all hope.

The pilot brought the nose straight, then made a deliberate turn to the right. Metal still rubbed, but the sound was petulant
rather than triumphantly bloodthirsty.

Wind roared through the cabin. The Air Force officers acting as cabin staff were opening the doors while the DC-8 still taxied.

Brakes moaning like damned souls, the aircraft shuddered to a halt at the terminal. Weigand had seen only three other aircraft
through his window; one of those was deadlined for repair, starboard control surfaces and engine removed.

“Go!” an officer shouted, but his voice was a poor, weak thing compared to the bellow of over a hundred killers heading into
action down the emergency slides.

“Go, go, go,” Watney mouthed. The revisionist was taut as an E-string, but he waited under Weigand’s orders until the assault
force cleared the aircraft.

Watney understood
their
mission had nothing to do with capturing the airport. So far as the team was concerned, the attack was merely a ride to Washington,
necessary because the suits—the suit—couldn’t displace spatially.

General Fern had tasked “Watney’s Squad” to eliminate the blockhouse armed with 20mm cannon—aircraft guns on improvised ground
mountings—on the roof of the building. Weigand had no intention of getting involved in a battle, on the roof or elsewhere,
but anything that caused confusion was to the benefit of the team as it escaped from the area.

Weigand paused on the emergency side hatch, aiming his EMPgenerator. His three companions, Watney in the lead, went out the
parallel hatch two rows back instead of waiting for him. That wasn’t what he’d intended. The air glittered with muzzle flashes,
tracers, and shattered glass falling in the noonday sun.

Weigand pulsed the three microwave communication cones he could see from this angle, then aimed at the airport radar antenna
and gave it a full two seconds. The radar receiver would fail—and possibly explode—when it tried to amplify the pulse. The
control staff would have enough to think about already, but a healthy fear of their equipment might delay them from summoning
help by the channels that hadn’t been put out of commission.

His companions were almost to the terminal. Carnes turned to check Weigand’s progress. He jumped down an emergency slide which
was already collapsing from a burst seam. The top half of the terminal exploded.

The assault force’s gunfire had raked the upper floor where the gates had been in the days when the boarding bridges were
in use. The blast blew the walls out and threw bodies, scores of bodies, as far as fifty meters from the building.

The shock knocked Carnes down, but she’d risen to her feet before Weigand reached her. Some of the bodies had been stripped
by the explosion; others were wrapped in their own burning garments.

The disused floor had been occupied by folk who otherwise wouldn’t have had a roof over their heads. The squatters cooked
their food in narrow warrens partitioned with cardboard. One family had a stove with a gas bottle big enough to blow themselves
and everyone camped in that gate area to kingdom come when a bullet hit.

All across the upper floor, smoke belched through bullet holes and the gaps where windows had been before the blast. Fuel,
flesh, fabrics—sooty flames, gnawing the air with petulant orange teeth. Weigand supposed he should be glad. The smell and
screams would increase the confusion still more.

Weigand led Carnes into the building. They had to get into the city proper. Going through the terminal was shorter and a safer
bet than trying to go around the U-shaped building, chancing gunfire from the dozens of doorways and windows.

Watney and Barthuli waited inside. The analyst held his recorder/computer rather than an acoustic pistol. He hadn’t bothered
to bring the Kalashnikov “assigned” to him out of the DC-8.

The lounge was a charnel house. It had been crowded with would-be passengers—more people than aircraft the size of those serving
National could have accommodated. They’d been pushing toward the doors to be sure of getting places on the outgoing flight.

To be able to fly in these final days, you needed some connection with power; and as always in chaos, power surely did flow
from the barrel of a gun. Most of those in the lounge were wearing military uniforms. That might have been the reason, or
at least the excuse, the assault force had for opening fire indiscriminately.

On the other hand, Oakley’s shock troops were men only days back from jungle and the loess hills of Yunnan. They might not
have thought they needed an excuse to kill REMFs like these.

The man lying in front of the door had silver hair and an aristocratic face. His uniform had been white and gold; now it was
red as well. His hands were spread on his chest. The man’s eyes were open and he wasn’t dead yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

One of his bodyguards was headless. A 40mm grenade had eviscerated the other, though he, too, was technically alive for the
moment.

There had been hundreds of people in the lounge. They were mostly there still, where air-bursting grenades had killed them,
or sprawled in windrows of three to a dozen as automatic rifles and machine guns raked their running backs.

A few survivors tried to hide behind the luggage carousels. Men in battledress shot them down, working in pairs like hunters
driving squirrels around a tree trunk to one another.

“Okay,” Weigand said, as a placeholder for thoughts that he couldn’t permit himself to think. He pointed out the front of
the terminal building, toward the parking lot and beyond it the city in which they would go to ground while planning the next
maneuver. “Straight on through, me in the lead.”

The entryway’s marble floor was treacherous with slippery pooling blood. Weigand skidded twice, catching himself on cracks,
but his balance was nearly perfect when the adrenaline was flowing as now.

Half a dozen members of the assault force were ahead of him. Apparently because the automatic opening mechanisms no longer
worked, the door slides had been wedged open. Four of the attackers ran through one open doorway; their two fellows used the
next one to the right.

A 105mm high-explosive shell from a tank in the parking lot hit one man of the pair. The shell didn’t explode then because
a human chest didn’t provide enough resistance to set the fuse. Instead, the round screamed across the terminal, hit a concrete
pillar in the far wall, and blew bits of its across the distant runway.

The man whom the shell had hit was a head and shoulders poised above running legs. The center of his chest had vanished, and
the air behind him was a fog of blood. The parts of his body toppled as machine gun fire riddled the four men in the next
door opening.

“Down!” Weigand screamed, throwing himself flat. A second 105 round blasted through the terminal, in and out in a shock of
air. There was a huge explosion beyond and a gush of orange flame lighting the terminal through all openings on the runway
side. The shell had opened up the DC-8 like a plow through fallow land.

Bullets from two or three continuously firing automatic weapons punched in from the front of the terminal. Machine guns weren’t
a danger to Weigand in the displacement suit, but 20-kilogram tank shells would kill him as dead as they had the soldier who’d
taken the direct hit.

Barthuli was saying something. Weigand tuned the analyst’s words out. He didn’t have time for answers that might not be to
the precise questions that mattered now. He had to focus on his suit’s sensors and artificial intelligence.

There were two tanks, bow on to the terminal building and about a hundred meters away. They had diesel engines and hydraulic
controls. The only equipment an electromagnetic pulse could affect were their laser range finders and radios. The range finders
didn’t work to begin with and were needless with the tanks firing at pistol range.

Kyle Watney extended the tube of one of his anti-tank rockets, arming the weapon. He rolled out from behind the pillar where
he’d been sheltering. Weigand grabbed the revisionist’s ankle and pulled him back down.

Two more 105mm shells hit the terminal. One was aimed at the south end, from which somebody’d been shooting at the tanks.
There was a red flash: a telephone flew from that wing of the building as a secondary projectile.

“I’ve got to get between them!” Watney screamed at the smooth surface of Weigand’s helmet. “The LAW charge won’t penetrate
from the front, I have to hit them from the side! They’ll shoot us to shit if we stay here!”

The automatic cannon on the roof opened fire. The wracking 30-round burst terminated in a
whoomp
! as something went wrong.

“I’ll go,” Weigand said, taking the missile from Watney’s hands. The revisionist didn’t try to resist. “Give me the other
two. You wouldn’t get through.”

The south wing ruptured in an oily blast. God only knew what had been stored there. The explosion wasn’t caused by a tank
shell, because the next pair of those streaked across the anteroom a half second later. The vehicles were firing armor-piercing
arrow shot this time. One projectile drilled the pillar above Carnes and Barthuli in a blaze of green and scarlet light, sparks
from the reinforcing rods and the tungsten penetrator.

Weigand thumbed his inner left wrist. Displacement’s familiar disorientation was a relief after the carnage of the terminal
building. He couldn’t have gotten through the alerted tanks, either, not with the certainty required. Pauli Weigand would
have risked his life without hesitation, but he couldn’t risk the operation that would fail if his displacement suit took
a main-gun round.

The tanks weren’t alerted, weren’t even present, on August 4, 1991, when a man in bulky armor appeared in the terminal of
National Airport. The figure pushed screaming travelers out of the way, lumbering through the front door and across the sun-drenched
humidity of the parking lot beyond.

Weigand had displaced back to a point one hour before he, Carnes, and Barthuli had arrived in Iowa at the start of their odyssey
across this temporal horizon. If he was delayed in the past longer than an hour, he was… dead, he supposed; certainly vanished
from this timeline. But only death would delay him that much anyway.

A pair of guards with submachine guns patrolled the front of the terminal building. They shouted at Weigand—shouted at his
back, because he ran by without pausing. The grid of lines on his helmet were centered on the spot in the pavement where he
needed to be when he returned to August 24. That was all that mattered for the moment.

A helicopter was moving slowly up the Potomac River. Sound reflecting from the water’s surface syncopated the clop of the
blades.

One of the guards threw his weapon to his shoulder, shouted another challenge, and fired. Three or four of the pistol-caliber
bullets hit Weigand and bounced off with bitter whines. Protected by his armor, Weigand heard but couldn’t feel the projectiles.

Maybe this was why the tanks were waiting in front of the terminal when the force from California assaulted it. Three weeks
earlier an armored figure had burst from the terminal carrying anti-tank rockets, had run into the parking lot—and there vanished,
an enigma and a threat. That could easily have spurred the authorities to shift a pair of tanks from the Pentagon garrison.

But if the tanks hadn’t been present on August 24, Pauli Weigand wouldn’t have displaced to outflank them in time. Maybe Nan
understood these things, maybe those up the line did. For now…

Weigand checked the cocked anti-tank rocket, checked his location; both were correct. A dozen more submachine gun bullets
spanged and sparked from his armor.

Weigand returned to August 24 and the middle of a firefight.

Fire had fully involved the terminal’s upper floor. The lower level of the building would be uninhabitable in mere minutes
if it wasn’t now. Ten meters of the south wing had been blown to rubble. In the bay at the back of the terminal, hotter flames
from the DC-8’s jet fuel mounted fifty meters in the air.

The tanks were fifteen meters apart, firing into the building with both cannon and machine guns. No one aboard the vehicles
noticed that Weigand had appeared between them, but an automatic rifle in the terminal raked him with its fire. The bullets
didn’t have enough energy to hurt
him
, but they could damage the rockets he held if he didn’t use them promptly.

Weigand aimed at the side of the turret of the tank on his left. The bow slope and the front of the turret were thicker armor
than this small missile could penetrate, but the sides were less of a problem.

Weigand pulled the long trigger. The rocket fired with an angry
thow
! and a gush of orange flame from the back of the tube. The missile hit the turret exactly where Weigand had intended. It
ricocheted skyward from the curved armor without exploding and struck again a good five hundred meters distant. This time
it went off, blasting a divot from a sparsely traveled roadway.