Cold Allies (2 page)

SPRING, CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Even though he had overslept that morning and had to be dressed in two minutes flat, Sergeant Gordon Means stopped dead on the porch of his barracks. Cocking his head, he listened to the low, angry rumbling from the south. He stood, his non-reg Nikes unlaced, his fatigue shirt tucked messily into his unbelted battle dress trousers, wondering if the base was under attack and whether he should go get his M-16 or hide under his cot.

Across the mist-shrouded, pine-scented yard ambled two Brit officers, one still chewing on a piece of toast. Gordon watched them pass.

Yoo-hoo, guys. We’re under fire,
he wanted to call.
Christ.

Hadn’t they heard it?

“ ... ball went right between the goalie’s feet,” the Brit captain said to the major, sounding as though he were not in a war at all but auditioning for the BBC.

The low thuds came again. Gordon fought the urge to dive for cover.
Oh,
he thought, recognizing the sound for what it was and feeling more than slightly stupid.

Thunder.
Just thunder. The ratcheting of his heart began to slow.

When he felt steady enough to walk, he left the porch and trotted to the bunker. On its pad all Apache helicopter dripped condensation down its sleek, greenish hide. The sun, just under the eastern horizon, was backwashing the overcast sky with gray light. To the west, feather boas of fog caressed the shoulders of the mountains.

Glancing at his watch, he noticed it was past 0700. He was late for duty again.

Hurrying, he took the four flights of cement steps a pair at a time until he was deep in the fluorescent-lit guts of the bunker. He rushed down the olive-painted hall, past the other blast doors, and paused before the third from the end on the right. Performing his morning ritual, he took a skipstep, brought his right leg out hard, and kicked the ill-hung and often recalcitrant door under the knob. It popped open, colliding with a bang against the block wall.

Gordon landed in the entrance, crouched in his killer karate posture, and froze. Someone was sitting in his room. And not just any someone. Between Gordon’s upraised hands was framed the solemn, unsmiling figure of Colonel Pelham.

“As you were,” the colonel said.

Gordon automatically straightened. As he did, his pants slid to his bony hips. He caught them before they fell any farther.

‘They killed another satellite,” the colonel told him. Gordon glanced up from buckling his web belt. Pelham’s round face was the exact color of semisweet chocolate; at his temples was a dusting of sugar-white. Had his expression been kinder, he might have resembled a Hershey elf.

“We’ve tracked the laser pulse to the Pyrenees again,” Pelham went on. “You didn’t get all the cannon.”

“Oops. Sorry about that, sir. But begging the colonel’s pardon, if I had some backup, maybe the lasers would be easier to get.”

“Convince the French, sergeant,” Pelham said dryly. “You just go convince the French the Arabs are up there. They keep telling Centcom-West that the Arabs are firing from the Spanish side, not theirs.”

For a moment there was quiet. Gordon could hear the faint clack-clack of Stendhal’s unit from the other room.

He wondered where Stendhal’s CRAV was headed and if it would survive.

“Close the door,” Pelham said.

Gordon eased the door to and gave it a shove, jamming it more or less closed. When he turned, the colonel was eyeing him. Gordon wished he could hide his Nikes, wished he had made it to work a few minutes earlier. Wished he hadn’t come Kung-Fuing it through that door.

“Sit down,” the colonel ordered.

The only other place in the room to sit was at the controls of his CRAV. Gordon perched uneasily on the padded seat, his eyes darting away from the wire-basket gloves and the black plastic goggles.

Gordon hated people watching him work with the robot, even though, with the goggles on, he could see nothing but what the CRAV unit saw, could hear nothing but what its microphones picked up. Still, he figured, it was like sex: he could get deaf-and-blind involved in that, too, but wouldn’t want anyone making notes on his performance.

“Mitsubishi’s here. Their munitions product manager will be monitoring you.”

Gordon snapped his head toward the colonel.

Pelham must have caught the panic in his expression, Gordon thought, because the colonel smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but, then, the war was going so poorly that that was all Pelham could probably manage.

“Don’t sweat it,” the colonel told him. The man had a voice that mimicked the semisweet chocolate of his face: it was thick and dark and smooth. “Just the usual contractor curiosity. He wants to monitor all the operators. I told him, as far as performance was concerned, you were probably the best.”

Pelham, perhaps wisely, let the compliment lie. He sat, his hands clasped over his taut, camouflage-covered belly, and stared. He watched Gordon the way a psychiatrist watches a new patient.

When the silence between them grew uncomfortable, Gordon finally asked, “When’s he going to be monitoring, sir?”

“Beginning today. Answer any questions he asks. Treat him with the proper courtesy.” The colonel stood up, all lean six feet four of him. He was, as usual, ramrod straight, his bowed head the only concession to the low-ceilinged room. “I’ve downloaded the targeting to your computer. Lunch, of course, will be brought in. This is a Till-Kill mission.” Suddenly his face softened. “You’re late again. Get any breakfast?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I didn’t feel like breakfast,” Gordon lied, not wanting to admit he hadn’t awakened in time to drop by the mess hall.

“Take out that laser, sergeant,” Pelham said, his gaze, heavy with allotted responsibility, settled on Gordon. “And do it fast. If they shoot down our last Super Keyhole and discover you’re still alive and kicking, they may put two and two together. They’ll fire on the civilian AT&T satellite, and you won’t have an operational CRAV anymore.”

On his way out, Pelham patted Gordon’s shoulder absently and fought with the door until it opened. When he was gone Gordon slipped his hands into the gloves of his Computerized Robotic Assault Vehicle and set the opaque goggles over his face. To boost his morale, he started to hum the CRAV corps song.

THE PYRENEES

It was like waking up for the second time that morning, or like God creating the world: first there was darkness; then Gordon jerked his head twice to the right, activating the unit.

He was deep in the forest. Somewhere to his right a lark trilled in the fog. He slipped his feet into the control shoes, finding them blind, and pressed down on the accelerator. The CRAV came to life, the hum of its nuclear motor so quiet that the bird never stopped singing.

Tipping his head left, Gordon brought the Global Positioning System on line. The military satellite’s lime green map superimposed itself over the mist-bound forest. To the lower left of his vision field his own software noted that all weapons systems were functional.

So. Here he was. Yes, sir. Right in the mountains just below the town of Bagnères-de-Luchon. Like a caution light, a yellow dot blinked at the head of the valley. That’s where the pulse laser was presumed to be, along with a company of pissed-off Arabs.

Shuffling his feet, Gordon brought the piano-sized robot up out of the trench he’d dug for it the night before. The engine’s mosquito hum rose to a faint squeal. The bird stopped its singing mid-verse.

According to the engineers, CRAVs conveyed no sense of touch, but all the operators felt things anyway. They talked about it sometimes, but only among themselves. At that moment Gordon could feel the knobbed backbone of the mountain under the treads of the robot, could feel the belly-soft, pine-needled loess in between. He’d felt the artillery shell that killed his first CRAV. Sometimes it seemed to him he’d died right along with it.

Hey, hey, Ma,
he’d written to his mother, who was living in a refugee camp somewhere in Arkansas.
I died today.

Died not as he had thought he might two years ago, of hunger and thirst in the Nebraska desert the Greenhouse Effect had wrought. No. He’d died quick and hard, in a hot-air burst of shrapnel in the rain-soaked Pyrenees.

It had been weeks before he talked about the loss of the unit. After that, he joked about the experience with the other CRAV freaks, but only a little. Almost a year later, it still bothered him. The diamond vapor-plated CRAV was a heroic extension of his scrawny body, a Superman Doppelganger of titanium and steel. It was, in away, his better half.

Carefully, cautiously, he made his way down the mountain until he was in sight of the road. There he stopped, engine idling. Pressed into the narrow asphalt trail were the serrated prints of tanks.

He strained to listen, but there wasn’t much to hear: no growl of diesel engines, no voices. In the still air, the fog lay thick across an enamel-green pasture.

“Da-a-angerous, deadly,” he breathed. The wraparound goggles shut off all sounds from the command room, even his own. He sang on in silence. “A missile clutched between our che-e-e-ks.”

There should be some noise,
he thought. The village wasn’t that far, just a mile to the west. He should be hearing the lowing of cattle, the tinkle of goat bells.

“Ro-o-bot geeks.”

He pressed his foot gently, dubiously, to the accelerator.

A half-mile up the road he found a body.

An old peasant woman. Black shawl. Gray hair beginning to revolt from the tyranny of its pins. She was lying on the other side of the road, head resting on her arm, body curled as though in sleep. Blinking once hard, he activated his telescopic vision. There were goddamned flies crawling on her face.

He blinked again quickly, more a reaction of surprise than a command. His vision returned to normal, and suddenly she was just an old lady who had decided to plunk down where she was and catch a few Zs.

There was no blood on her. No wounds. Her eyes were open, her lips fish-mouthed. Her face a dusty blue.

“Scene One, Act One of
Night of the Living Dead.”

Gordon whispered, even though he couldn’t hear himself talk, even though he knew he was four hundred and fifty miles away.

He trundled on nervously, knowing where there was one gas victim, there were bound to be more. At the next turn of the road he found them, sprawled over a yellow and white buttercup-massed pasture. All of Bagnères-de-Luchon was there. The Arab National Army had obviously marched them into the flower-bedecked meadow. And the people had stood and waited, wondering what would come next.

Death had. Only a few, it seemed, had figured out the mystery early and tried to flee the helicopter’s spray. They lay on the road, they hung over fences, they sprawled loose-limbed in the sweet grass of the roadside ditch. A yellow hound was feeding on a body.

“Whoa. Stephen King does France,” Gordon whispered.

Abruptly the dog yelped and bolted, glancing to the field in alarm.

His heart doing a triple-step, Gordon turned to see what had scared the dog. At first he thought it was his imagination, the morning was so misty, the thing moving in the pasture so subtle. A cold thing, neon blue.

He blinked. The pasture clicked into close focus. The blue light was real. Not much brighter than the fog, it flitted from corpse to corpse, like a butterfly among flowers.

The light halted. Gordon had the eerie sensation it was regarding him. A sort of wintry lassitude weighed him down, the same placid comfort that precedes a death by freezing. His eyes started to close. Faintly, in the back of his mind, he could hear the monotonous tap-tap-tap of sleet striking a window.

He shook himself out of the half-sleep, and his eyes popped open to darkness. He’d inadvertently shut down the CRAV.

He gasped. Violently he jerked his head twice to the right. The vision field came back. The blue light was closer, right at the fence; and he could sense, as he could feel his robot arms and treads, the light’s intense curiosity.

“Arm missiles!” he screamed.

The head-up display sprang into life. The blue light was square in the center of the kill box.

The words MISSILES ARMED, MISSILES ARMED marched in red across his vision.

He touched the stud in the little finger of his left glove and tried to bring it into contact with his thumb. His hands were shaking like a drunk with the d.t.’s. Jesus God. He didn’t have the strength to push his fingers together hard enough to fire.

The thing was closer now, moving through the log fence like a ghost. The sound in his mind grew louder, the tap-taptap more authoritative now, hail more than sleet. Gordon was afraid that he would freeze where he sat and that the duty officer would find him at lunchtime, arms and legs encased in ice, mouth open like the gassed dead in a last, airless shriek.

A few clustered anemones bowed their heavy heads at the light’s passing. It eased over the body of a teenaged girl, ruffling her hair, her clothes.

Gordon’s thumb finally found the bulge at his little finger, finally steadied a bit. He backed up a few feet to move the light into the kill box. Out of the corner of his vision he could see the robot fingers mimic his hand’s firing position. The steel hand, too, was trembling.