Ralph Peters (26 page)

"
Get your mask on, you stupid bastard.
I don't want any unnecessary casualties.
Do you hear me?
"

No answer. His nerves were going. He had stepped on the other man's transmission. They had merely canceled each other out. He was forgetting the most basic things. He needed to rest.

"
All stations,
"
Babryshkin said, enunciating slowly and carefully.
"
Report in order of your call signs.
"

This was the test. How many more call signs would have disappeared?

The overpressure system had worked. The woman and her children were still breathing on the floor of the crew compartment. The boy screamed without stopping, making up for his earlier silence. Babryshkin was about to command the woman to shut the brat up, when the skewed angle of the boy's arm caught his eye, evident even through the camouflage of his winter coat.

Nothing to be done. At least the boy was alive. Arms could be set. The woman looked up at Babryshkin, her eyes near madness. Her forehead was bleeding. She had protected her infant in the fall, not herself. A good mother. Hardly more than a child herself.

He listened as his subordinates reported in. The voices were businesslike, if weary and a bit slurred. Everything was reduced to a matter of routine.

The reporting sequence broke. Another crew gone.

Babryshkin spoke into the intercom, ordering his driver to turn back toward the road. Then he ordered the radio reporting to resume at the next sequence number.

Unexpectedly, his vehicle jerked to a halt. The engine was still running, however, and Babryshkin did not understand what was happening.

"
Wait,
"
he told the radio net. Then he switched to the intercom.
"
Why in the hell did you stop? I told you to get
back on the road.
"

The driver mumbled something, unintelligible through the protective mask.

"
I asked you why the hell we've stopped, goddamnit,
"
Babryshkin barked.

"
I can't . . .
"
the driver said in a flat voice.

"
What do you mean, you can't? Are you crazy?
"

"
I can't,
"
the driver repeated.
"
I'd have to drive over them.
"

What in the hell are you talking about?
"
Babryshkin demanded, putting the eye piece of his protective mask as close to his optics as he could.

The driver did not need to answer. Where there had been a plodding army of humanity a few minutes before, there was only a litter of dark, fallen shapes. No hysteria, no struggling, no shivering movements of the wounded, not the least evidence of suffering. Only stillness, except where scattered military vehicles continued their slow, aimless maneuvers, like riderless horses on an antique battlefield.

The only thing that still held the power to shock Babryshkin was the ease with which death came. The casual quickness. Whether to the man whose legs had so unexpectedly been gobbled by a tank, or to this stilled multitude. No allowance for struggle, for passion, for heroism. There was barely time for cowardice.

They said that the new nerve gases were humane weapons. They killed their victims so swiftly. And, within minutes, they dissipated back into the atmosphere, grown completely harmless.

Babryshkin radioed to the chemical defense officer. Do you have a definite reading at this time?
"

"
This is Kama. Superfast nerve, type Sh-M. It's already gone. I've unmasked myself.
"

Babryshkin shook his head at the universe. Then he tugged at his mask, feeling the sudden wetness as the rubber lifted away from his skin. He shook the mask out, then tucked it methodically into its carrier.

"
Hold in place,
"
he ordered his driver.
"
I'm going to dismount.
"
But first he reentered the radio net.
"
All stations. All clear, all clear.
"
He paused for just a moment, searching for the right words. When he could not find them, he simply said,
"
Clean off your vehicles.
"
Then he unlocked his hatch and climbed out.

He was lucky. There wasn't so much dirty work. All of his passengers had tumbled from the maneuvering tank in their struggles with death, save for the old man, who still lay coddled against the rear of the gun housing, burned-out cigarette stub in his hand. Babryshkin got him under the armpits and rolled him off the side of the tank.

There was nothing you could do. He stood up, drinking in the cold, harmless air. As far as he could see, nothing remained alive in the roadway. Worse than the plague, he thought. Far worse. No act of God.

Something white caught his eye in the middle distance. At first, he was baffled. Then he recognized the carcasses of the two sheep that had been driven from God knew where.

Pointless.

Suddenly, a scream slashed out at the world, piercing, even over the idle of the big tank engine. Babryshkin looked around.

The woman whose life he had saved was standing up in the commander's hatch, screaming at the panorama with a ferocity that hurt in the listener's throat.

Well, at least she's got a voice to scream with, Babryshkin thought, glad even of this much evidence of life.

10

Moscow

2 November 2020

Ryder sat in the sparsely furnished office out
side of the interrogation block, drinking gray coffee and waiting for his Soviet counterpart to return. Although he had drunk no alcohol the night before, he felt hungover. The captain billeted in the next hotel room had been hammering one of the Russian bar girls all night, with an energy that was as impressive as it was annoying. For hours, Ryder had lain awake as his neighbor's bed thumped against the wall. Now and then, the captain's partner would call out in a language Ryder did not understand, but whose message was unmistakable, and Ryder's thoughts would return to his wife, Jennifer, who refused to be called Jenny, and who had always been so silent in the bedroom. Ryder suspected that his old friend had been right when he declared that Ryder was biologically programmed to end up with the wrong women, but Ryder felt no malice toward his wife. Lying there in the Moscow night, he simply missed her, without understanding exactly why. The one affair in which he had indulged since his divorce the year before had been premature and unmemorable, and had not made the least impression on the lingering image of his wife-Ryder hoped she was happy now, with her new husband who promised to be all that he had failed to be.

Finally, Ryder had given up trying to sleep. Propping
himself up, he drew his field computer from the shoulder holster slung over the bedpost. The tiny machine lit up at the electronically recognizable touch of Ryder's fingers, unable to spring to life under any other hand, unable to share its secrets with anyone else. It was almost as if the machine was relieved at his touch, as though it, too, had been made restless by the lions in the next room. Ryder called up a program he had been working on in Meiji, the Japanese military-industrial computer language, and he strummed through its odd music until he came to the problem that had been annoying him for days. Then the sexual thunder exploded again.

The problem between Ryder and his wife had not been physical disappointment. If anything, he had shown the greater appetite and resourcefulness, and he had never tired of her. But Jennifer had married him as a very promising graduate student in one of the elite new government-funded programs, not as a soldier. Ryder had been specializing in computer science and Japanese, along with a variety of specialized Japanese computer languages. It was a program open only to the brightest, and although it called for four years of military service after graduation, the longterm prospects were fantastic. American industry was screaming for employees with such qualifications, and Jennifer had married that particular future, while Ryder had been delighted to marry such a smart, beautiful, loving girl. Her parents had died in the plague years, she was alone, and he imagined that he would fill a terrible need in her life.

The problems had begun in the Army. Although Ryder's specialty pay as a warrant officer interrogator put his income above that of the average line major, Jennifer could not accustom herself to what she perceived as their low financial and social status. Her behavior was not the behavior of the physically enthusiastic college girl he had married. In private, then, later, in public, when she was drunk, she took to calling him Pretty Boy. She said that she should have married a man, someone who knew how to get ahead in the world, and not a child.

Ryder had actually looked in the mirror one night when Jennifer did not come home, wondering at his face, trying to understand
how
a man looked and what it meant. He had never cared much about his appearance. But the girls back home in Hancock, Nebraska, had cared, as had the wonderful, sun-washed girls of Stanford University a bit later on. There had always been girls, to the envy of his friends, who could not believe he would not take advantage of every last opportunity, who were utterly baffled by his inclination to treat girls and, later, women as people.
"
You're nuts,
"
his old friend told him.
"
You're crazy. You treat them too good. If you just learn to treat them like shit, they spend their lives on their knees with their mouths open. Jeff, I swear, you're biologically programmed to end up with the wrong
...
"

He wanted to be a good man, to behave responsibly and decently toward women and toward other men. And the more Jennifer complained and threatened, the more attractive his military service became to him. On his own, he would never have dreamed of joining the Army. But the financial support for his attendance at the university had allowed him to study hard at a good school, instead of working his way through a mediocre one. He had initially regarded his term of required military service as an obligation to be fulfilled, nothing more. But he found the work satisfied him, filling him with a sense of worth he knew he would never find in Jennifer's dreamworld of corporations and credit cards. So he betrayed her, her trust, her faith. When he told her he intended to remain in the Army, she paled. Then she began to scream, cursing him with a vividness for which her relatively demure conduct in the bedroom had not prepared him. She swept her arm across the nearest countertop, hurling glass, wood and cork, dried flowers, and magazines across the room. Then she left, without real argument and without a coat.

She returned the next day but did not speak to him. Yet, their lives slowly seemed to normalize. Just before he went out on maneuvers, she even slept with him again. She seemed to be trying. Then, in the middle of the war games, he had the opportunity to return to main post for a few hours, and he phoned her, asking her to meet him in the cafeteria. She did. And she told him she was leaving him, just as he was biting into a slice of pizza.

Well, Ryder told himself, Moscow was an easy enough city in which to become depressed. The hotel rooms were never quite clean, the food was difficult to get down, and the daily ride to and from the fabled faded building that housed KGB headquarters led through dishwater gray streets where no one ever smiled. Not much to smile about, of course. From what little Ryder had seen of their lives, these people lived under conditions an American would find absolutely intolerable. On top of that, the war was going very badly for them.

Ryder felt sorry for the Russians. He was sorry that any man or woman had to live in so gray a world, and he yearned to make a professional contribution to the joint U.S.-Soviet effort, to somehow make things better. But, thus far, the joint interrogation sessions, although revealing as to Soviet capabilities, had produced little of value concerning the enemy.

Ryder took another sip of the thin, bitter coffee to clear his head and glanced again at the subject file. He had almost memorized the data. The case was a windfall, a miracle of good luck—but it promised to be tough going, perhaps the most important and difficult interrogation in which he had ever been involved. The subject was potentially very lucrative, but there would be layers of defenses. And time was critical. The Soviets were collapsing, and Ryder had just learned that morning, at the prebreakfast U.S. staff meeting, that the Seventh Cavalry, who were out in the thick of things beyond the Urals, were going to be committed early. None of the officers of the Tenth Cavalry, all military intelligence specialists, had been happy to hear that. Men had mumbled through their hangovers, still wearing the smell of women with whom they were not supposed to be fraternizing. The speedup in events meant that carefully plotted work schedules had to be discarded and that the officers, got up in a poor imitation of businessman's dress, would have to wake up properly and scramble to get some results with their well-meaning but hopelessly bureaucratic Soviet counterparts.

Ryder knew he had been lucky in at least one regard. Nick Savitsky, his counterpart interrogator, seemed to be completely open, and he was relatively flexible for a Soviet, anxious to learn about the American methods. Of course, much of that was simply the desire to gain information for the KGB files—but Ryder was doing the same for the U.S. It was the nature of the business.

Ryder was worried about Savitsky today, however. The subject they were going to work on had the potential of opening up the enemy's entire infrastructure. But you had to go delicately, patiently. Savitsky, like the other Soviets Ryder had encountered, did not always seem to understand that. They were given to excesses that sometimes ruined a subject's ability to respond. A Soviet interrogation, no matter how sophisticated, always had an air of violence about it, and there was a tendency to mishandle a subject severely, without really thinking through the consequences. He had already seen Savitsky in one fit of
vengeful fury.