Cold Allies (14 page)

“You asked to be assigned?”

“Yes,” he said, remembering his mission. “You have been having a problem pinpointing the satellite. I thought I might be of help.”

Wasef saw Yussif’s lips tighten. The colonel knew the man was jealous of his duties. He hugged them to himself and refused to share, like a young boy with a handful of candy. Of late the captain’s jealousy had gained a mean streak. Yussif was indeed failing to hit the satellite, and even Wasef’s patience had become strained.

‘There is no real problem,” Yussif said.

“Well, of course there is,” Gamal replied, either not reading or ignoring the warning in Yussif’s expression. “But it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s hard to distinguish between microwave sources unless you know what you’re looking for. And it’s doubly hard to shoot one down.”

“Would you care for some breakfast?” Wasef asked before Yussif could rebut.

“Please,” Gamal said, a childish delight in his eyes. “I skipped dinner last night.”

“Captain Mustafa? Will you get something for our new laser fire officer?” Wasef ignored the effect of this rebuff and blandly turned to Gamal. “Your father agreed to this?”

“Yes,” Gamal said. “And he thought I might get a close-up

The chill on Wasef’s wind-whipped cheeks moved to his chest. “Sit down,” he murmured.

The boy took a seat against the granite wall of the tunnel. Wasef hunkered next to him, wishing that the boy would change the subject, wishing that he had never come. Since the deaths of the tank crew, the men had begun looking over their shoulders. They’d painted warding signs on their rifles, their trucks. Even Yussif had come to believe the lights were supernatural, and Wasef himself ...

“They are a heat sink, you see,” Gamal was saying. “I have instruments in my jeep. Infrared, a gravimeter ...”

Yussif walked up and shoved a can of sardines at Gamal.

The young man stared in surprise at the sardines before muttering a dubious “Thank you. So anyway,” he said, “I was hoping to get a closer look, to determine what the blue lights are. I have some theories of my own—”

“They are the devil,” Yussif snapped.

A small smile tugged at Gamal’s lips, a smile not of mockery but simple disbelief. “Surely you don’t—”

“They are the devil! If you had seen men killed as we have. If you had seen the blood sucked from their bodies—”

Gamal was shaking his head.

“Superstition ...”

“Islam is not superstition,” Yussif said.

Gamal stopped. His face was bewildered, unsure. “I never said that.”

Wasef caught Gamal’ s questioning glance. “Here. Let me open the can for you,” the colonel said, gently taking the sardines from his hand.

“Allah has nothing to do with the blue lights, Captain Mustafa,” Gamal told him, “if they are alien.”

In a voice that was too loud, a voice that drew the attention of the men, Yussif exclaimed, “Allah has everything to do with everything!”

Lips pursed, Gamal sat for a moment, watching Wasef open the can. The smell of fish rose like an oily cloud in the thin air.

“What I meant was,” Gamal went on quietly, “these lights put out a radar signal and microwave noise. They are a physical presence, captain. Not ghosts.”

“It is not up to us to question the nature of demons.”

Wasef handed Gamal the open can. The boy looked around, as though in search of a fork. Finally he gave up, pinched a sardine out with his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth.

“You know?” he asked as he chewed. “Humans must question the nature of the universe. It was not my choice, Captain Mustafa, to think of aliens. I am a scientist above all. However, given Occam’s razor—”

“You are
stupid!”
Yussif spat.

“Stop it,” Wasef said, looking from one to the other. “Stop arguing like this. If you wish to debate this point, I’d suggest you not use words but tanks.”

The pair were staring at him now in surprise. He got to his feet. “Famine aside, isn’t Western objectivity and Eastern passion what this war is all about? Gentlemen, I will get some sleep now. Wake me at dusk. And in the meantime confine your discussions to less inflammatory topics.”

Shaking his head, he walked off to his sleeping bag.

Seated around the laser, his soldiers watched him. They also snuck sidelong glances at Gamal Sabry. Glances full of righteous indignation, ignorance, and fury.

NEAR LERIDA

“Wake up, Capt’n,” Dix said.

Rita opened her eyes. She was lying alone at the bottom of the foxhole. Someone had thrown a coat over her. The air was cold. The bluish light of dawn trickled into the trench.

“Get up, Capt’n,” Dix said, looking down. “We’re moving out.”

Rita sat up, her sweaty uniform sticking to her skin. She yearned for a toothbrush, Colgate, and a hot shower with lilac-scented soap. Then she caught sight of the trench. It startled her. The tank had plowed into the left side of the hole, its treads scouring a track some three feet wide and two feet deep.

“You want some breakfast?” the lieutenant asked. Below her helmet, Dix’s blue eyes were as cold and tranquil as the dawn.

Rita shook her head, looked around for her own helmet.

I could just hide here till the end of the war,
she thought.
That would be good.

“You coming, ma’am?”

“Yeah,” Rita sighed. “I’m coming.”

Tossing her gear over the edge of the trench, Rita clambered up after it. In the orange grove, the fire had not gone out. Gray smoke drifted into the violet sky. The abandoned hut where Dix had parked the Humvees was flattened.

The patrol lounged around in the grass and rocks, just finishing a cold breakfast. Rita slipped her coat on and noticed them watching her. Their gazes were level and, in their dispassion, frightening.

“Forward OPs tell me there was a doo-wompus of a battle due south,” Dix said as she ambled up, her own breakfast in hand. “ANA and the Allies done caught each other with their pants down. Left their dead on the field. We all heading up there. Might be bad,” she added, her cornflower eyes settling on Rita’s face.

“I’m a pathologist, Dix,” Rita said. “I’ve seen bodies up closer and nastier than most.”

Dix nodded. “Listen here, Capt’n,” she said quietly. “I sure do hate to say it this way, but—”

“Just say it.”

Dix took a deep breath. “You all a senior officer and everything. And you been put in my care. But don’t you go endangering my troops. I give everybody one free freak-out, okay? Last night was yours. With all due respect, you done shot your wad.”

“I’ll hold it together,” Rita assured her, wondering if somewhere in those Spanish hills she’d find her missing courage.

THE PYRENEES, NEAR BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

Gordon had overslept, and by the time he got the CRAV out of its hiding place, the sun was up and the birds were singing. Now it was past noon, and he still had no idea where the laser was.

The first thing he’d done that morning was find the cow pasture. He saw the marks of tank treads in the grass, and the knobbed mark of tractor tires. The Arabs had used a tank to tow the vehicle out of the mud.

Then, somewhere on the road, he lost the trail. The tank had gone back to its base, but he wasn’t sure the LDV had gone with it.

Center yourself,
Toshio had told him the evening before, over supper.
Center yourself, find the quiet, and knowledge will come.

Yeah. Okay. Only nothing was springing to mind.

He turned his head and looked up the road. Where the timberline ended, rocky peaks rose, snow snuggled around their shoulders like a soft, tasseled shawl.

Suddenly he knew. The tank had gone down the mountain and the LDV had gone up. Up to try another potshot at the satellite.

The Arabs were pushing their luck, two firings in three days. The laser probably needed all sorts of maintenance. But Gordon also knew they wanted that last satellite bad.

He glanced behind him. Rover was playing over the rocks, Gordon’s blue, happy albatross. As soon as he looked Rover’s way, he could hear the clatter start up in his mind.

“Noisy son of a bitch,” he muttered, and was jolted to feel the light touch of Toshio’s hand on his arm.

Normally Gordon hated that. He hated when someone touched him while he was on-line. The sensation was eerie, disorienting, like bilocation.

But Toshio’s touch seemed soothing, as if reminding him that he wasn’t really in the mountains and about to get his ass kicked.

“No problem,” he told Toshio, breaking another cardinal CRAV rule of solitude.

Gordon headed into the naked rocks, keeping to the side of the road. Behind him Rover appeared to be trying to stay out of sight.

A jet passed over, and Gordon dived for whatever cover he could find. It was a Mirage, either a French sortie looking for the LDV or an Arab sortie protecting their own. Hoping he hadn’t been seen, he trundled out from behind a boulder and continued his trek.

The incline steepened. Hollows in the granite cupped creamy mounds of snow. The trees had given way to a few patches of juniper and alpen roses.

Gordon looked across a gorge at a gossamer waterfall. Close by, a falcon called out with its raucous, tuneless voice. He raised his head and saw it turning lazy circles in the sun.

Something in the sky glinted. An instant later he heard the air-ripping scream of an approaching plane. The Mirage dropped from the glare of the sun and headed straight toward him.

“Oh, my God!” Gordon shouted. There was no place to hide, nothing but sheer wall on one side and precipitous drop on the other. He gunned the accelerator. The CRAV shot forward.

The Mirage was so close, he could see the clear bubble of the canopy, could count the missiles on each wing. Suddenly one fell free of its mount, spraying a mist of propellant.

He ducked, a completely futile gesture. The CRAV didn’t understand
duck.
It only knew
run.
It knew
hide.

The missile hit wild, blasting a hole in the stone above Gordon’s head. Debris flew. The CRAV shivered on its springs. Then the Mirage was rocketing past, up and over the mountain.

“Ha, ha, asshole! You missed me!” Gordon laughed. Hearing a curious rumble, he looked up in time to see the granite wall above his head slough off. A heartbeat later, part of the mountain thundered down on him.

MICHÓW, POLAND

Baranyk stabbed his pointer at the map. “Here, Major Shcheribitsky. The Arabs have been here at Lubertnów, and there are reports of skirmishes at Parczew. Gaze into your crystal ball and tell me what you think they are doing.”

The small major, his wedge-shaped badger’s face grim, eyed the map reluctantly, as though it might bite. “They are sending scouts to our flank, general.” He drew a line with his finger, arcing up over Lubertnów, Parczew, and straight to Warsaw. “When they move ... if they move, they will go north.”

The general grunted. “I want a reconnaissance flight south.” He stabbed the pointer into Lipsko, leaving a dent in the paper.

“Yes, sir,” Shcheribitsky said calmly, as if he planned to get to the order sometime that afternoon. “But then Landsat shows no major incursion.”

“Landsat is a blind bitch. She sees only during the day, and then with not enough resolution. They could be hiding in the villages and moving only at night. Perhaps our scouts are lazy, and keep to the main roads.”

Baranyk stared at the map, and suddenly the Arab plan coalesced. He saw it clearly, as though the red arrows had already been drawn and the battle commenced.

“Now, major,” he snapped. “Fly the recon now!”

The major motioned an officer to his side and whispered into his ear. The man nodded and hurried out of the room.

Baranyk went on. “And let us send a tank battalion out to meet them at Parczew where you think there is a company and I think there may be much more. Include those German miracles, those new Mercedes tanks. And give me air cover. Helicopters. Those BO-105s with HOT missiles Reiter has given us.”

Baranyk saw Shcheribitsky’s pockmarked cheeks pale. “What?” Baranyk asked, impatient.

“Fuel, sir,” Shcheribitsky said. “The diesel has arrived for our tanks, but the jet fuel—”

“Call the Poles,” the general growled.

Shcheribitsky was apologetic. “They say they have their hands full themselves, sir, with the battle at Kraków. And they have no fuel, either.”

Baranyk brought his pointer down on the table so hard that it broke, a piece flying off and narrowly missing a lieutenant. “May the fuel be fucked!” The gathered officers flinched. Baranyk scarcely noticed. He was looking into the mind of the Arab commander as though the man’s skull were made of glass.

“We are using alcohol for some of the flights, general,” Shcheribitsky said quickly, “but the Polish alcohol is unreliable. Sometimes we find it mixed with water. We have enough fuel, perhaps, for the reconnaissance flight and two helicopters, but—”

“Listen to me!” Baranyk said, thrusting his face so close to the major’s that the man stumbled back, his russet eyes wide. “I smell it. Only one time has my intuition left me, and that was at Kiev.”

In the sudden silence, he gazed again at the map. “No, gentlemen,” he said to his officers. “I believe the Arabs mean to surround us, and, to save ourselves, we must attack before the net is closed.”

THE PYRENEES

When Gordon had stopped screaming, he felt Toshio’s hand on his arm. The Japanese wanted him out of the chair and, judging by the grip, he wanted him out quickly.

Gordon ignored the order. He was still trembling. His unit’s visuals were up and running even though there was nothing to see but gray-shot black.

When the panicked snag in his breathing unkinked and the ringing in his ears subsided, he tipped his head to bring up the diagnostics.

The avalanche had disabled his missiles. Everything else looked good, though. The small reactor was intact, not bleeding radiation into the Valley. The turret was probably movable, even though he couldn’t, with the rockslide’s weight on it, coax it to turn.

As an experiment, he eased his foot down on the accelerator. The CRAV’S engines whined, but the unit stayed put.

Toshio’s hand was cutting off his circulation. With a furious jerk Gordon pulled his arm away. Servomotors screamed. Rocks shifted uneasily. Gravel rattled on the CRAV’S turret.

Gordon pushed again at the rock. The stones on his left gave a quarter-inch. Outside his grave he could hear a grinding noise as part of the slide gave way.

No one touched him again. Face grim, Gordon settled in the chair, licked his lips, and set about, stone by stone, to dig himself out.

MICHÓW, POLAND

In the quiet of his field office, Baranyk lifted the phone and punched the eleven-digit number, listening to the noise of the circuits clacking through. A secretary answered, the protective and suspicious kind. She immediately tried to take a message.

“Get him,” Baranyk said. “Trust me. He will know who I am. Tell him Lt. General Baranyk is calling from Poland.”

Baranyk consulted his watch. It was a full three minutes before Fyodorov picked up the phone.

“Valentin Sergeyevich!” the senator cried in a voice so hearty that Baranyk knew it had been rehearsed.

“Vassily Petrovich!” Baranyk replied in a tone equally lighthearted. “Did you know you can gauge the importance of a man by timing how long it takes to get him on the phone? I clocked you at three minutes. To get me would take four.”

Fyodorov laughed. It wasn’t the deep-bellied laugh Baranyk knew. There was a distance to it. Fyodorov must be wondering why the general had called. “How are you, my friend?” he asked. “And how go things in Poland’?”

Baranyk dropped all pretense of cheer. “I call my debts,” he said.

In the silence on the line Baranyk imagined he could hear the slow, heavy tread of the years rolling back. Afghanistan. Fyodorov was remembering Afghanistan.

What was Fyodorov like now? It had been ten years since they had last met, and ten years could change a man. Was he fat, his Italian suit packed tight as a sausage? Was he bald? Ah, worse yet, was he complacent?

Fyodorov laughed again, this time more circumspectly and with a sort of sadness. “I am too old to put on battle dress and take up my gun again, but, if you need me,
tovarich,”
he said, using a term Baranyk knew he had not used for years, “I will come.”

“I wish you to make an appointment for me with Pankov.”

Silence. Baranyk could hear his question rattle against the sides of Fyodorov’s mind. Now Baranyk knew the answer as to how Vassily Petrovich had changed. The man would still die for him; but he hesitated to be embarrassed because of him. Fyodorov had become a politician.

“Well,” Fyodorov replied, “as you must know, he is very busy. There is unrest. Siberia has its farmers’ strike, and the coal miners are out again.”

Baranyk fought a surge of temper. First Russia was elder brother to his Ukraine, pushing and pulling and insisting on its own way. Then, when the Greenhouse heat had made the tundra arable, Russia began to play solitary games.

“Surely, Vassily Petrovich, you are not out of favor so soon?”

“Out of favor?” Fyodorov replied with a defensive chuckle. “With democracy there are no ins or outs to favor.”

“Please,” Baranyk said, using the most deadly weapon in his arsenal, the poison arrow of guilt. “Please. I beg you on our friendship.”

If Fyodorov wanted him to crawl, then Baranyk would crawl. If he wanted him to cry, then Baranyk would force tears to his eyes. He would not, could not, see his army destroyed again.

“God. Do not beg,” Fyodorov whispered, sounding not at all like a politician. “I will ask him.”

“Send a plane for me to Warsaw. We have very little fuel.”

“Da, da.
I have my own plane now, you know. A little Cessna. Very pretty. Yellow and white. You will like it.”

Baranyk pushed the matter of the plane aside. “Will he meet with me, you think?”

The senator sighed heavily. “Pankov is a whore. He will meet with anyone.” Swiftly he added, “I never said that.”

“Shoot you, would he?” Baranyk chuckled.

“Ah, worse than that. Pankov has been known to be petty. He would have my office redecorated as he did with Shulubin.” Fyodorov was laughing happily. “I would be stepping over painters for years.”

Baranyk laughed along.

Fyodorov’s laughter sputtered and died. In
a quiet voice, a voice much like the young, frightened soldier he’d once been, he said, “He will meet with you, Valentin Sergeyevich, but I don’t know if he will give you the answer you want.”

NEAR CALHAN, COLORADO

When someone crawled under the blanket with him, Jerry Casey woke up. An arm slipped around his hip and skinny fingers tugged at the waistband of his underpants.

“I’ll do you for something,” a voice said in his ear. “Whatcha got?”

He pulled away and sat up. The girl he’d met the first night was lying next to him. Her hair was all stuck up on her head. A smudge of dirt ran down the side of her cheek, and just under it was a single bruise like the dot of an exclamation point.

“What happened to you?” she asked him. In the shadows of the lean-to, her eyes were dark and wide.

He put a hand to his throbbing face and felt around the tom skin, the congealed blood. “Troopers caught me sneaking out west.”

“Lucky you wasn’t killed.”

A silence fell. Jerry didn’t bother to break it.

“I like to sit out and watch the buzzards go wheeling,” she said wistfully, staring out of the lean-to with a faint smile. “Pretty the way they do, all big and easy, like black airplanes, you know? Then sometimes I think about what they’re circling around, and it makes me kind of sick. There’s lots of people who think they can make it out of here. Not a one of ’em does.”

The sky outside was blue and empty. The sight of the mountains to the west set his heart to racing again.

“I seen something last night,” he said softly. “I seen something pretty.”

“Yeah?” She scrabbled around on the blankets, then settled down like a dog trying to make itself comfortable. “What was it?”

“I dunno.”

“What’d it look like?”

“Heaven,” he told her.

Desert mirages were already shimmering across the flat burial ground, and the mountains were reflected over the graves. Suddenly he knew there was no point going to Colorado Springs. No point hiking to the cool; not when the best cool of all was corning to him.

“It talked to me,” he told her.

She was right at his shoulder. He could feel the heat from her body; smell the sour odor of her sweat. “Yeah? What’d it say?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t understand the words.”

Tonight,
he decided. Tonight he’d go back and see if he could understand those clattering voices.

NEAR LERIDA

They’d been moving out for hours. Rita’s shoulder was sore from the weight of her gear bag’s strap; her feet hurt all the way to her ankles.

Before Lerida, she had thought she was in good shape. But now Lauterbach had thrown her in with a bunch of twenty-year-olds, and she was beginning to understand that aging wasn’t just something that had happened to a body on a steel table. Aging, down and dirty and intimate, was happening to her.

She’d taken her coat off once the sun began climbing the sky. Now she was dusty and sweating. Her stomach reminded her that she’d missed breakfast.

She watched Dix. The diminutive lieutenant had a stride like an energetic boy.

Trudging up a hill, Rita lowered her head and studied her feet. Marvelous, she thought, how feet could move while the brain kept begging them not to.

Mesmerized by boredom, by the sameness of the gray-green grass and the stones, she bumped into Dix before realizing that the lieutenant had halted.

“We all here,” Dix said laconically.

Rita stared dully down the hill. In the center of a demolished town, an M1-A1 tank and an M-113 ambulance were still burning.

There were bodies everywhere. The ones in Arab uniform had been caught on the slope. Some still lay in orderly ranks, rows and rows of them, toppled like green dominoes.

“You can see what happened,” Dix said, drawing a line of imaginary fire with her finger. “Some dimwit of an Arab colonel told them to take Baláguer, and those folks kept coming and coming, just like they had sense.”

There were ANA tanks there, too, the camouflage paint charred to black. An AFV squatted like a burned alphabet block some child had forgotten to put away.

“We’re gonna find most of the Allied boys down there in the streets,” Dix told her.

Baláguer bore only a passing resemblance to a village. The houses that weren’t gutted had become gray, formless rubble.

Staring numbly at the destruction, Rita caught a flash of blue. When she looked, the blue disappeared behind a wall.

“What?” Dix asked.

“I think I saw something.”

Instantly Dix crouched and motioned the others down. Rita fell to her knees beside her.

“Probably just the wind,” Dix whispered. “Or your eyes playing tricks. Still, no point taking chances. You keep up with me.”

Suddenly Dix was sprinting, still crouched, to a boulder.

Rita hurried after the lieutenant at a limping trot.

When she reached the pooled shadow at the base of the rock, she turned and saw the rest of the platoon spread out, moving down the slope stealthily.

Then someone shouted, “CBUs!” and the next instant she heard a small pop. A soldier’s leg disappeared in a mist of blood.

“Shit. Goddamn,” Dix was muttering under her breath.

She whirled on Rita. “Get the hell out of here up that hill. Just the way you come, understand me?”

But instead of backtracking, Rita started moving across the hill. A soldier was coming from the opposite direction, a medic with a field emergency kit over her shoulder. The medic was staring intently at her feet. Rita looked down and saw a small, olive-green metal ball to the right of her boot. She froze, her pulse beating a rapid tattoo in her neck.

“Capt’n! Capt’n Beaudreaux!” Dix was shouting.

Rita took a deep breath and moved forward, reaching the screaming man a few moments after the medic did.

“Start me an IV drip, stat. Quarter grain of morphine.” Rita told the medic. She looked into the soldier’s terrified eyes. He was a black kid, and something about him, maybe his vulnerability, maybe the shape of his face, reminded her of her nephew, Allen.

For the first time since her arrival at Lerida, Rita felt competent. She might be rusty at surgery, but at least the tools were familiar. No damned little bomblets. No baffling grenade launchers.

Rita examined the wound. The foot was gone. Inches above the ankle, the peroneal artery was pumping bright red. Both tibia and fibula had shattered to push shaved-ice splinters of bone into the surrounding fascia.

With quick, sure motions she snapped on her gloves and tore the suture pack open.

In his drugged confusion, the boy was trying to move his leg. Rita steadied him with one hand and caught the steel tip of the needle in the tough, rubbery shaft of the peroneal artery. In five quick stitches she had it closed. Tying off quickly, she moved to the saphenous vein.

“Look!” the medic shouted.
“Madre!
What’s that?”

Heart faltering, Rita looked around.

A blue globe of light was drifting lazily from the village, moving against the gentle, dry breeze. As Rita stared, her hand still raised over the boy’s leg, she thought she could hear a sound coming from the light, the tap-tap-tap of sleet. The platoon was paralyzed with fear, spellbound by wonder. The blue light moved in silence, the macabre, inexorable silence of death.

“Don’t fire!” Dix suddenly screamed. “Don’t fire!”

But none of the platoon had brought their weapons to bear. The light seemed too ghostly for bullets to stop it.

It was so close now, Rita could feel the cold radiating from it, could feel a slight breeze pulling at her blouse.

The medic stiffened as if poised to flee. Too late. The light was close enough for Rita to touch. Her shoulder was freezing cold, her right hand, her suturing hand, shook from the chill.

Then a thought sprang to mind, a thought so clear, so foreign, that it might have been planted there. The light was curious, she realized. It was taking in the scene, it was asking clattering questions.

“Go away,” she told it firmly.

Logic said run; but fascination held her. There was something at once ghastly and serene about the light. Something seductive. That corpse she had autopsied, had the boy’s single eye been wide with fear or awe?