Arms Race (17 page)

The searchlight snapped off and the four craft lifted away, trailing obnoxious laughter.
Marlow was bent double.

Oh, you too? Alex demanded. Hilarious.

Sorry, sister, Marlow wheezed. Peace. I'm just laughing 'cause I'm scared.

They camped at the lookout. Alex gathered firewood in a rage. Marlow sat out of the
wind with his hood up, watching her and smoking. Every few minutes a drone flight
scorched overhead.

You still want to walk in there? Marlow said.

Alex ignored him. She lit the kindling.

Marlow grinned. You do, don't you? He crossed to the truck and returned with his
pack. He dug out a bottle of vodka. They got a name for people like you in Baltimore.

What's that?

Dead. Here.

Alex unscrewed the cap and took a shuddering mouthful. I'm going to find that kid
and spit roast him, she said, coughing.

No doubt. But out there? Who's gonna survive that?

The wind was gusting now, bringing a brutal chill
from the north. Snow flurries settled
into the fire with a wet hiss. Alex chewed her salt-flavoured army rations and swigged
from the bottle in silence.

First real snow, Marlow said. If the drones don't kill us, we'll freeze. Or the wild
animals'll eat us.

The ghostly glow of another flyover lit the clouds. A series of flashes lit the valley
below, and a rolling boom swept through the campsite.

C'mon now, girl, Marlow said. I wanna blow this wide open as much as you do, but
we gotta stick to the camps. You're too beautiful to get yourself killed out there.

Alex thrust out her front teeth like a beaver. And if I looked like this? Straight
to the slaughter?

I'm kidding.

Yeah, yeah, can't take a joke. Alex took another slug of the vodka. What the hell's
beauty got to do with anything?

It's how you got your job on TV, right?

Fuck off, Alex said. I studied at Columbia.

Aww, Marlow said. Oppressed by beauty. FPW, girl.

What?

First World Problem.

Dumbass, Alex said. FPW would be First Problem World.

Whatever. You know, I was watching NTV the night you blew it.

Through the vodka and the cold, Alex felt her skin prickle.

What went wrong? Marlow said. You were looking so good. You made such a mess.

Alex closed her eyes. She'd been fighting with the producers for months. They vetoed
every story she put forward about conflict with China. They were happy to broadcast
the president speaking of peace when, to many, the signs pointed to war. There was
constant friction over air-defence zones in the Pacific and North Asia. General Hurtz,
a complete unknown, was appointed CEO of the Armed Forces, and military spending
went through the roof. Preschools received donations of ultra-realistic flight simulators.
Both the Americans and the Chinese began drone exercises in Mongolia. Then it was
more than exercises; Mongolians began flooding over the Russian border. How could
the network not run stories about going to war?

Because we haven't
gone
to war, the executive producer shouted. I don't want to hear
another fucking word about Hurtz and the coming apocalypse. I do not pay you to speculate.
I do not even pay you to be a journalist, because you are not a fucking journalist.
I pay you to sit, look good, and read exactly what we put in front of you.
Ex-act-ly
.
So let's get to it.

Alex took her place on set. One minute until she was live in front of sixty million
people. All her friends and family, every stranger she was ever likely to meet. Sit.
Look good. Read.

There was commotion in the control room. She could
see them flapping in her peripheral
vision. Not a fucking journalist, huh?

Thirty seconds. Cameras one and two fired up. Could she just recite a story about
Hurtz and the coming war from memory? She would choke if she ad-libbed. Once they
went live she was on autopilot. She was a drone.

Ten seconds. Brassy theme music flooded the set. There was sudden chatter on the
crew-only channel. The cameramen were listening intently. One of them choked on his
coffee. Two seconds. The autocue began its relentless glide. Alex blanked her mind
and lit her smile. They were live.

Good evening. Welcome to NTV News, I'm Alexandra Davidson. President West today returned
from day five of joint friendship talks in Beijing—

She read without registering a word. It took total concentration to maintain her
composure, her famous sparkling eyes. Her voice was a bottomless well of empathy.
She read about the mid-term run-off in Maryland. She read about firestorms in Australia.
She read about fears of a viral outbreak in the Pacific. The next story rolled up
on the autocue.

Speculation is mounting that America and China are preparing for large-scale drone
hostilities in
North Asia. Following tension between Washington and Beijing over
resource allocation, trade tariffs and cattle exfoliation, sources in the Department
of Defense point to a threefold increase in spending on unmanned aerial circus, in
response to China's expansion of military cutlery into their northern steaks.

There was something wrong with the autocue. Alex dimly noted that one of the cameramen
had fallen over. She pushed on.

China has responded by erecting a series of preposterous tents, including the desecration
of a bilateral mermaid, and the retooling of US wing nuts held by Chinese foals.
Department sources name General Hurtz as the traitor behind this—

They were sabotaging her. People would forget she was reading an autocue and assume
she'd lost her mind. The second she choked they'd cut to a commercial break and fire
her on the spot. But her training was good: the expressive dance of her eyebrows
never faltered, and her voice ran true. An incredulous silence took hold on set.
Alex calmly read on, even as the autocue gave up all pretence of a news story and
collapsed into a foul swill of Celine Dion lyrics, fragments of Hitler's speeches,
rejected dialogue from
Avatar
and jokes from far-right
chat rooms, before disintegrating
into a string of binary code that seemed to run forever.

Zero.

One.

One.

Zero.

One.

Zero.

Zero.

Zero.

Zero.

One.

Zero.

One.

Zero.

One.

One.

Zero.

One.

Zero.

Zero.

One.

One.

Zero.

Zero.

Zero.

Alex snapped.

You pigs, she screamed into camera one. You pigs! We're going to fucking war!

The lights went out.

Alex stood unsteadily. She dropped the vodka bottle. She felt like she'd swallowed
a fistful of dirty snow. Cold, she mumbled. Putting up the tent.

Better sleep in the truck, yo, Marlow said. Warmer.

She stumbled over to the truck, and flung open the back door. All yours, she said.
I'm tenting by myself.

You wanna freeze to death? Marlow said.

No, that's your job, Alex said. She yanked her heavy pack down from the Hummer and
slammed the door. I'll be camped over here.

She stalked off into the trees. The snow was coming in thick and soft now, the dark
earth turning to an even white.

ATTENTION, ATTENTION
.

Alex froze.

EXCUSE ME, MA'AM
.

She turned back to the fire. It was Marlow, drunk, helpless with laughter.

show us your tits!

Hey! Fuck you! Alex shouted, but the wind snatched her voice away. She turned and
walked faster. Screw that bullshit ghetto nomad prick. She hoped he froze to death.
And screw that runt kid and his pervert mates and whoever put children in charge
of that sort of firepower, and the whole insane war—and screw the NTV producers:
not a fucking journalist, huh?—and screw her friends, the bastards, telling her to
stay home, keep her head down, vanish, die, as if being embarrassed was the problem,
and while she was at it screw her parents too, making half-assed soothing noises
like demented pigeons when it was obvious, it was so fucking obvious, they hated
that she wouldn't leave it alone. Screw every last goddamn one of them.

Alex halted her march. She'd forgotten what she was doing. What the hell was she
doing? Looking for a campsite. In a blizzard.

She turned slowly. By the beam of her head torch the world was just a ragged circle
of tree trunks and steep, snowy ground. Through her fury, and the false and viscous
warmth of the vodka, she registered an urgent signalling. She was freezing. She had
no idea where the truck was. Her tracks were just a faint disturbance, growing fainter
all the while.

Alex dug more layers from her pack, strapped on snowshoes and set off into the blizzard,
quickly now. For what felt like hours she followed her prints back towards the truck.
Twice she paused, terrified, certain she'd heard someone shouting over the wind.

There's no one there, she told herself. Keep moving. You'll freeze if you stop. Just
follow the tracks. Don't stop.

She stopped. There were no tracks anymore. Her brain was linking random humps and
hollows. She was exhausted and cold and lost.

Shelter, dumbass
, said a voice inside her.

Alex staked down the tent, rolled out her sleeping mat, climbed into her down bag,
cracked a chemical heat pack and turned off the torch. She lay there, exhausted.

Show us your fucking tits, she muttered.

Sleep came swiftly down.

Alex woke, sore but warm, in the muted glow of dawn. She groaned: that was a lot
of vodka. The walls of the tent pressed close beneath a weight of snow. She lay and
listened. Nothing. Just the crisp silence that follows a blizzard.

Alex sat up. There was someone curled next to her in the tent. She screamed.

Oh my god, Marlow groaned, rolling over in his sleeping bag. His face was chapped
and red from windburn. You still trying to kill me?

What the hell? Alex said.

Take the tent
and
lock the truck, huh? Marlow said. Let the Mongolian nigger sleep in a ditch?

Christ, Alex said. Did I really lock it?

You blipped the damn thing as you stormed off.

Jesus, sorry. I don't remember doing that. How'd you find me?

Just followed the swearing.

What?

I could hear you a fucking mile off. Sweet place to camp, by the way.

Alex unzipped and scrambled out. She'd pitched the tent in a round depression high
on the ridge. They must have been walking in circles in the night: the view over
the bombed out hills was almost identical to the view from the lookout. Except it
was pristine with new snow. And it was backwards.

Oh shit, she whispered, dropping to a crouch. They were looking back towards Russia
from the opposite side of the valley. They'd stumbled through no-man's land, across
the border into Mongolia, and camped in a bomb crater.

Bullseye, Marlow said, poking his head from the tent. Blizzard must have grounded
the drones.

Alex whistled. How long do you think we've got before they dig out the runways?

You tell me. Could be hours, could be days.

Days? Alex said. She stood and scanned the absurdly blue sky. Nothing. She looked
south, into the war-torn interior. You got your pack, right? she asked.

Yeah, Marlow said. Why?

I've got my camera. We've got everything we need.

Tranquillisers, Marlow said. That's what you need.

We can make it to the Protected Area in four or five
days, Alex said. There were
villages round there. We film whatever we find, then get out. Let's blow this thing
wide open.

Marlow tapped the side of his head. What, this thing?

I'll buy you a beer.

Oh, what the hell, Marlow said. Let's get killed.

Down that day and up the next, Alex and Marlow followed the GPS south through snow-bound
hills. Cold air burned in their lungs. They wandered charred corridors where drones
had come down among the trees. The snapped trunks resembled the pillars of ruined
temples, leading to altars of heat-deformed steel.

Further from the border there seemed less wreckage. They began to see snow hares
and the precise tracks of foxes. At night wolves called to a brilliant frozen sky.

Three days in, they caught the hiss of resumed drone flights along the border. A
squadron of blue-grey fighters slit the sky from east to west. That night they woke
to the ground-shaking
crump
of explosives. Alex unzipped the tent. The skyline beyond
the trees rippled and burned in a terrifying light show.

The next day they found a road, winding south out of the hills towards the Ghenghis
Khan Protected Area, where the fighting had been most fierce. The surface of the
road was churned by the tracks of huge vehicles. Alex
crouched to take photographs.
A flock of crows launched into flight above them.

Marlow looked up. Move it!

They clawed their way up the bank as the gun barrel of a Chinese drone tank swung
around the bend.

The monstrous grey-white vehicle ground through the snow at speed. Five more thundered
past. Next came a line of drone fuel tankers, then more tanks bringing up the rear.
The convoy passed on and was gone.

Alex rolled onto her back and blew out her breath in a long cold plume. Now we're
getting serious, she said.

She was halfway to her feet when Marlow dragged her back down. The revs of another
tank column filled the valley. Patton tanks: American. One after another the armoured
beasts shot past in pursuit. Alex brought her camera to her eye. More supply trucks,
more tanks. Then just the reek of diesel and the empty road. Marlow was digging frantically
in his pack.