Cold Allies (9 page)

“I guess so, sir. They’re like big, friendly dogs.” Justin’s coffee was strong and hot. The sip he took burned the roof of his mouth. “When we get down, my wingman makes a joke of it. Hey, Justin, he’ll say. You had a blue Woofer sniffing up your tail, a Woofer with a twenty-foot hard-on.”

Abruptly he had the jarring thought that his wingman was downed over ten minutes ago. Behind him in the pit, Tyler was screaming, “Approaching Woofers!,” but Justin, who was preoccupied by the AAA they’d taken in the port engine a while back, was fighting the stiffness of the stick and the crazed bumpy-road feel of the plane.

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

“Eject,” Justin said as he turned, expecting to see his RIO. Lieutenant Commander Harding was there instead.

“Eject?” the exec asked pleasantly, lifting one eyebrow.

“I had to punch out. We were losing hydraulics,” Justin said. Or were they? Or was the AAA part of the test, too? He whirled around on the stool to stare out the plate glass window. Over the desert mountains streaked the red dot-dash-dot of tracers. Chaff sparkled in the dark. From a desperate, evading plane hot pink flares fell like garish beads from a broken necklace.

“Look into your coffee,” the exec said.

Justin looked. The inside of the cup was a green radar scope and at twelve o’clock was a tight pattern of white blips. Fuzzy bogeys.

Woofers.

“What do you think they are?” the XO asked.

Justin started to sweat In the back of his nostrils was tile ghost of a stench, the smell of burning insulation. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Look it up in your dictionary.”

Justin had a book in his hands. WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, the cover read. Below that was printed TOP SECRET.

It wasn’t the words that made him remember. It was something else. Maybe the frigid blue of the executive officer’s gaze, maybe the wintry chatter in his mind.

He remembered the numbers in his Head-Up display counting down to minimum controllable airspeed; the way the nose of the plane began to dip.

Oh,
he remembered.

He remembered Tyler’s screams of ‘‘What, Searles? Are you crazy?” and reaching, reaching to pull the face protector down, setting in motion the automatic ejection sequence. With a burst of fire the canopy blew, carried away on the hurricane wind. Tyler was rocketed out first. A second later, Justin, too, was blasted upward, his speed jeans inflating as he pulled breathtaking Gs.

He remembered hearing the lacy flutter of the deployed parachute above; he remembered seeing the F-14 plummet to the dark earth below. And, almost peripherally, he noticed that some sort of light was painting him blue. His parachute harness was blue. His palms were blue. And there was something cold at his shoulder.

Something inquisitive.

“Oh, Jesus God!” Justin screamed. He lurched up from his seat at the counter and ran to the window where an F-14 was going down in flames and a Woofer was snaring its slow-falling prey.

He launched his body through the window, shattering the paper-thin glass. On the other side of the broken window, the air didn’t have that scorched-metal smell of the desert or the humid, sweat sock smell of the land near the Gulf. Instead, the atmosphere was blue and moist and January cool and suddenly Justin realized beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond the blind high confidence of a fighter jock, that there were some things he was better off not knowing.

THE PYRENEES, BELOW BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

Gordon had pulled his CRAV into some brush, caught an hour’s nap, some chow, and bathroom time. Now he was up again and running, running as fast as he could.

The helicopter was still after him. He would hear it close in every once in a while. When it passed overhead, he’d dig his way into the debris at the side of the stream and hide as best he could.

Earlier that morning he’d tried dragging brush to obliterate his tread marks; but the scoring in the mud looked suspicious. He’d given up hiding and had fled, knowing that, with the helicopter after him, the laser deployment platoon wouldn’t be far behind.

Gordon was breaking no land-speed records. The streambed got rockier, and the fastest he could go was a daredevil ten miles an hour.

The sides of the gully were so steep now that he could barely see above them. God only knew what was up there. A road, maybe. With trucks. A BTR-80 full of soldiers.

He’d miscalculated the whole thing. The banks to either side were pure, sheer shale. If he tried to climb them he’d tip over, and Gordon didn’t want to spend time on his back.

Not now, when he was being hunted.

The streambed widened. At a bend, dead branches and trash were piled from earlier flooding. He rolled on a bit and stopped in alarm.

He’d come out at the fucking Garonne River.

Goddamn if,
he thought, staring in dismay at the boiling rapids and realizing he would have to double back and fight it out with the LDV platoon. Swiveling, his treads clacking against the stones, he looked up at the opposite bank and froze.

A T-72 was trundling down the slope. The scene, as in a good movie, was all eerily clear: the camouflage paint on the tank’s armor; the gaping black hole of the 125mm muzzle. The grass. Gordon could see every damned blade of grass, every fucking green leaf and pine needle. He could see the dark eyes of the tank commander standing in the cupola rim, and God, Gordon could hear things, too—Dolby Sound distinct. The muted squeal as the turret turned, finding its bearing. A bird singing somewhere in the brush.

“Arm missiles!” Gordon screamed, shaking himself out of his trance. His display sprang into life, along with the words: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.

“What the hell’s the matter with your’ he shouted; but the software was already working on the problem. The kill box blinked out. A schematic came on.

TUBE COVERS STUCK, the display said after a second’s pause.

Oh, Christ. It was the mud. When he’d dug himself into the stream bank, he’d accidentally jammed shut his tube guards.

Slamming the CRAV around, Gordon splashed downstream, heedless of the rocks. Behind he heard the squeal of the cannon as it tracked him.

No time to run. No time to think. Those shells were goddamned sabots, armor-piercing. At this distance, the depleted uranium boot would squash him, diamond plating and all, like a bug. He backed up fast, clanging hard against an outcropping, and stared at his readout, hoping he’d dislodged the clay. No such luck.

And then he wondered why the tank hadn’t fired; if maybe it had come down with constipation of the automatic loader.

Gordon looked. The tank commander’s helmet was off, and his head was lowered to his outspread arm. The cannon was aimed at a spot Gordon had been a moment ago.

Gordon splashed through the shallow water to the left. The cannon did not follow. On the hill the tank stood quietly, its gun aimed at the ravine as though it were a statue of a man pointing.

Look,
the tank might have been saying.
Look.

Jerking the CRAV into reverse, Gordon bounced off the shale bank like a pinball.

MISSILES 4-8 AVAILABLE, the readout said.

Trundling right, he got as close to the bend in the stream as he could to get a better view of the opposite bank.

The tank commander’s face was turned slightly, his chin resting on the metal deck. His dark eyes were open and his skin was the almond color of the Hotpoint refrigerator in the bunker. There was a neat, perfectly circular, absolutely bloodless hole in his forehead.

From the graveyard hush that had fallen, Gordon figured the gunner and the driver were dead as well.

He stood befuddled, his CRAV patiently waiting for a kill order that was unnecessary now. He stared until his eyes teared from fatigue, until a flash of blue at the edge of his screen caught his attention.

Rover was back. The blue light hovered near the lifeless tank, happy as a dog that has just brought in the morning paper.

IN THE LIGHT

“Read me the book,” Harding said.

Justin Searles looked down in his lap and gently stroked the XO’s balding head, leaving imprints of his fingers in the skull. Clack-clack. Clack-clack. The interior of the bus was dim, and the sound the carriage made against the steel rails was soothing.

Smiling, Justin turned the first page.

“Chapter One,” he read. “Procedures on Encountering UFOs.”

The words were meaningless. Justin saw them and mouthed them. The book seemed to please Harding, though. The XO settled down and sighed with satisfaction.

On the seats around them sat the bus driver and the waitress and Ann, their eyes huge and dark with wonder, as though Justin was telling them the most fascinating story.

Justin read.

His mind was an albatross running over the snow, taking to the air on its wide clumsy wings. The wind caught him and boosted him into the glowering clouds, where there were no missiles, no hot flak.

He looked up from his book to smile into the freezing rain of their gazes.

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Someone squeezed Gordon’s upper arm. Obeying the command, he closed his eyes. When the CRAV had powered down, he pried the glasses off and saw Pelham standing over him, Ishimoto behind. The two were breathing hard, as if they had run all the way from the monitoring room.

“Out of the chair,” Pelham said.

“But, sir—” His CRAV was sitting somewhere out there, only half its missiles working, the Garonne in front of it, the LDV platoon behind. And Pelham was asking him to
leave the chair?

He began to protest, but Pelham had his stem colonel face on, a scowl that erased all resemblance to a friendly Hershey elf.

“You’re not security-cleared for this, sergeant. Out. Consider yourself dismissed.”

Military training took over, like the thoughtlessness of instinct. Gordon freed his hands from the controls and leaped off the seat. Quickly Ishimoto sat down and began putting on the gloves.

“Sir—” Gordon said.

Pelham rounded on him. “Get out,” he said in a cold, hard voice. “That is an order.”

Gordon flinched away. He wrestled the door open, and turned back once, in time to see the Mitsubishi rep putting on the glasses.

He trudged up the three flights of stairs. In the middle of the fog-bound yard he felt the impact of what had just happened. He stopped dead, a silent wail of loss in his brain.

“Hi,” a female voice said.

Gordon whirled to see Stendhal next to him.

“Listen. Pelham’s been on my ass,” she was saying. Her BDU blouse was open, the light wind whipping at it so Gordon was getting a now-you-see-it now-you-don’t peek at her nipples.

“You know the CRAV better than anybody, and I thought, well, if you’re not busy or anything, maybe you could give me some pointers.”

Gordon wasn’t listening. Be was feeling his outrage grow from a small, toothless thing into something huge and fanged and clawed.

Ishimoto had never taken a CRAV into battle. He didn’t know tactics, and would be unprepared for the little eccentricities of the unit. Each robot had its own particular feel. Gordon’s CRAV was skittish, needed a light touch on the accelerator; firm, slow pressure on the brake.

Stendhal was looking at him funny, and Gordon knew he should say something. But all that wanted to come from his mouth was a shriek

“You okay?” Stendhal asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Gordon had always been the odd one out, the loner, the guy the jocks beat up in middle school. When he was a kid, Nintendo had allowed him to pretend he was strong, courageous, deadly; then the CRAV came along and made that dream come true.

“I hate to bother you, but is now a good time?” Stendhal was saying, “Or after dinner? Maybe we could even go to the mess hall together of something, I really need some help.”

Gordon turned and, leaving Stendhal open-mouthed behind him, ran back down the steps to the third level of the bunker.

The monitoring room was empty, he saw as he halted in the doorway in surprise.

“Colonel?” he called, walking inside.

Five screens peered down from their brackets on the ceiling. Only two were on. In the first, someone was thrashing through brush by a mountain road. The other screen was showing a close-up of a shale bank and a robot hand clutching a thick tree root. The picture shook, and droplets of water were beaded on the camera lens.

Gordon felt a splintered-ice shiver of alarm. The second screen was the visuals from his CRAV. Ishimoto was going to try to swim the Garonne River.

Is he fucking crazy?
Gordon wondered, his panic blossoming into hysteria.

“Colonel Pelham!” Gordon shouted, pivoting to the open doorway. Then he caught sight of something that brought him up short: to better analyze Rover, an ambient temperature gauge and an electromagnetic counter had been plugged into his CRAV’ s monitor.

He looked at the screen again and saw that Ishimoto had brought up the CRAV’ s diagnostics. ALL MISSILE TUBE COVERS CLEAR, they read.

Then the CRAV was moving, hand over hand, grasping for purchase. The shaking of the screen lessened, and suddenly the CRAV was free of the riverbank. It dropped to level ground and bounced on its stiff McPherson struts, its camera pointed directly down the ravine.

“Whoa, mother,” Gordon said under his breath, admiring the Mitsubishi rep’s skill in spite of himself. Jesus. Talk about iron balls. Ishimoto had dipped the missile tubes in the river to wash the mud out.

Fascinated now, Gordon watched the CRAV trundle its way up the streambed, missiles armed and ready. Ishimoto the Fearless was setting out to destroy the LDV platoon.

The trees and rocks blinked out so quickly that Gordon reflexively took a step back, bumping into a rollered chair. The CRT monitor was blue. Bright, neon blue.

The screen was shaking now, as though Ishimoto had once more plunged the CRAV into the rapids of the Garonne. Gordon glanced down and saw the numbers on the digital of the thermometer dropping: 53, 37, 16. The needle on the electromagnetic gauge leaped into the red.

“Colonel Pelham!” Gordon screamed, running from the room. In the hall he was stopped by the thought that there was only one place the colonel could be; that there was only one kind of emergency that could have taken him from the action. Gordon raced down the hall to the men’s bathroom.

He threw the bathroom door open so fast, it banged against the wall with the noise of a howitzer.

No one was standing at the urinals. But two feet showed under the door of one of the stalls. A pair of camouflage pants sagged around the silent ankles.

“Colonel Pelham?” he called.

There was a long moment before a reply came, as though the owner of the feet was hoping that Gordon would go away. “Yes?” the colonel finally asked.

“Sir? I was just in the monitoring room. The Woofer’s attacking Ishimoto,”

From behind the stall door came the frantic sound of paper flapping. A
People
magazine dropped to the tile.

“I’ll be right there!” Pelham called in a high, tight voice. Gordon stepped into the hall. A moment later Pelham wrenched the door open and hurried out, his face grim and urgent.

“Where is he?” the colonel barked. “Is he all right?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Gordon admitted, running to keep up.

At Gordon’s door Pelham stopped, put his shoulder to the green-painted metal, and shoved. The door popped open, and Gordon peered around Pelham.

Ishimoto’s back was arched, his body convulsive-rigid.

Pushing the colonel aside, Gordon stumbled into the room and ‘grasped Ishimoto’s upper arm. The man was trembling so violently that the metal leads of the gloves mimicked the noise of chattering teeth. “Power down!” Gordon shouted even though he realized Ishimoto couldn’t hear him. “Power it down!”

But the Japanese paid no attention to the bruising clutch of Gordon’s fingers.

Pelham took a breath. “We’d better get him out.” Gordon tore the goggles from the rep’s face and then jerked him out of the seat. Ishimoto landed with a thump on the floor.

“Sorry, sir,” Gordon said to the astonished Pelham as he climbed into the chair and slipped on the gloves. “But I’m getting my CRAV out of this shit.”

THE PYRENEES

The moment Gordon had the goggles on, he could feel the bone-numbing cold, could hear the thunderous clatter of sleet in the back of his brain.

“Back off!” he shouted at Rover.

Suddenly there were trees again, the calm stream trickling over the rocks. A few yards away Rover skipped through the air, and the din in Gordon’s mind became a chill hiss.

“You’ll burn out my controls with that electromagnetic crap, you asshole!”

Raising his arm, Gordon checked the fine three-fingered claws of his unit. The metal was coated with a thin film of frost just now burning off in the sun.

“Now stay behind me,” Gordon said, swinging his arm a couple of times to show Rover the way. After a few moments of either confusion or petulance, the blue light floated to Gordon’s rear and stayed.

Gordon moved out through the shallow water of the stream, and Rover kept his distance, bobbing along behind the CRAV. It was later—much too late to do anything about it—that Gordon realized the chance he had missed. Stendhal had talked to him. And he’d been so rude, she would probably never speak to him again.

IN THE LIGHT

Justin woke up to see Harding and the bus driver staring at him. “That was an interesting book,” the driver said. ‘Thank you for reading it to us.” His eyes were dark, luminous holes in his spongy face.

Harding sat down so close to Justin’s thigh that Justin could feel the chill of his body. ‘‘Tell us about war, now,” he suggested.

Outside the window the night was flashing by. The F-14 was gone, left miles behind. Justin pulled the blanket around himself. “It’s cold in here,” he said to no one in particular.

“Would you rather tell Ann about the war?” Harding asked.

The sound of sleet was softer now, a comforting hiss, like the song of tires on a wet road. “No,” Justin said.

“We can call her, if you’d like,” the bus driver told him.

Deep in his blanket, Justin shivered. He felt as though his bones had turned to ice and nothing, nowhere, could warm them. “She bothers me,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” The meager light winked on Harding’s bald head and the brass buttons. “We thought she would make you calm.”

“She just bothers me,” he told them.

Harding reached out and put a nerveless hand on Justin’s arm. “Then we’ll tell her to stay away. Would you like to drive the bus?”

“Would you like that?” the driver asked, leaning forward intently.

“Yes,” Justin said. “Oh, yes. I’d like that a lot.”

He was in the high metal-and-vinyl seat, the starry highway spread out before his windshield. Harding and the driver were beside him, grinning.

“Go ahead,” the driver said encouragingly. “Go ahead, son, and take her up.”

Justin pushed the gearshift forward slowly, feeling the rumble of the engines through his legs, his spine. The bus shot down the spangled road. When he thought he had gained enough speed, he pulled the steering wheel toward his belly. The bus soared up into the night.

“Do you like it?” Harding asked.

Justin was smiling so broadly, he couldn’t answer.

Euphoria caught the words in his throat, as though he’d glutted himself on joy. Ahead of him the stars merged, clustering in the center of the windshield. An instant later they turned a frail, lovely shade of blue.

“Where would you like to go?” Harding asked.

Feeling the speed of the bus like a glad ache in his chest, Justin considered the blue-shifted stars. “Florida,” he told him.

“Then fly there. Go ahead and fly there. And when you reach Florida, will you tell us about war?”

“If I can reach Florida,” he whispered, “I will tell you everything I know.”

CENTCOM AIRFIELD, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

The M-16 propped awkwardly between her legs, Rita Beaudreaux stared at the boxes of supplies around her and listened to the sound of the Sikorsky powering up.

“Dear God,” she whispered. Her voice was covered by the angry whine of the rotors, and that was fine with Rita; she didn’t want the pilot to overhear. Rita’s mother, when she was alive, had grumbled that she’d never taught her girl anything; but she had bequeathed two unforgettable childhood lessons. One, iron with the weave of the fabric; two, always pray aloud.

“If you get me out of this weirdness, God,” Rita promised quietly, “I’ll start going back to church. Really. I mean it. Amen.”

God wouldn’t have much time, it was all happening so quickly. Another moment or so, she’d be airborne, and a couple of hours after that she’d be hiking through the minefields near Lerida. Her fingers toyed with the fat metal attachment on the bottom of her M-16’s muzzle. A grenade launcher. Some idiot had given her a grenade launcher. And not bothered to ask if she’d like a user’s manual.

The scream of the rotors overhead lowered to an idling whine.

“Rita?”

General Lauterbach clambered into the passenger compartment.

“You okay?” the general asked.

Rita crossed her fingers and waited for miracles.

After a cursory glance around, Lauterbach took a seat atop a box labeled MRE—HAMBURGER PIZZA. He took off his helmet and put it in his lap.

“Glad I could catch you before you left,” he said.

Before you left.
Rita felt her religious faith sink back into’ agnosticism.

Lauterbach leaned across and peered closely at her rifle.

“I see someone gave you a grenade launcher,” he chuckled.

“Yeah. Like I was a real soldier or something,” she said dryly.

His smile died. “Something’s come up. Something important.” His yellowish hazel eyes were calm, the gaze of a lion aloofly considering a gazelle. “I need to know if there’s any way to duplicate those alien mutilations.”

“No,” she said. “I already told you, nothing I know could do that.”

Lauterbach nodded. “I see. Your orders have changed.” Rita caught her breath.

“I’m going to try a little psychological warfare on our Arab friends. If you come across mutilations, I want you to leave the Arabs in place. The mutilated Americans who can pass for Arabs are to be stripped and their uniforms replaced with BDUs you get from dead, non-mutilated Arabs. You understand?”