Ravenous Dusk (39 page)

"You are not mercenaries now, any more than you were in the Army. Make no mistake, motherfuckers: You're in my Army, now, but this is not just my war. This is the real one we all knew was coming, some day. That day is upon us."

He looked down the rows of men standing at attention, stern, mannequin-faces. "And none of you knows what the fuck I'm talking about.

"I'm talking about a bunch of defense scientists and spooks who run a fifth column group called the Mission. They hide behind a lot of peacenik disarmament rhetoric, but their Mission is a world government by scientists. In and out of the halls of power, they've been the real enemy that's stood between us and ultimate victory, all these years. I'm talking about the soft-headed cocksuckers who gave the Russians the atomic bomb, and every vital defense secret we've ever had since. I'm talking about the godless motherfuckers who held back our own weapons programs, and dragged out the Cold War, and Vietnam, and instead gave us agent orange and yellow rain, and BZ, and depleted uranium shells. I'm talking about the scumbags who knew what happened to our brothers who got left behind in Nam, because they
sold
them."

Disbelief and outrage mingled in their faces, but the point was scored. The collective sound of gritting teeth was like an iceberg chewing up a mountain.

"I've read it all in National Security Agency intercept documents some of you helped me get. It made me sick to my soul, gentlemen, to read the list of their crimes. And that wasn't the worst of it.

"They have an accomplice, who has covered their treason up for decades, in hopes of getting a few more trinkets out of them, a few more shiny new toys they'll never actually play with. That accomplice is the United States government, gentlemen, your fucking tax dollars at work. They covered up the Mission's theft of fifty tons of napalm from China Lake last July, and the dumping of said nape on the first Radiant Dawn hospice village in California, killing one hundred civilians. Then they nuked it. Think about that for a minute. The third nuclear weapon detonated in anger in history, and they did it in California. I didn't see any of it on the news, did you?"

"No, Sir!" most of them shouted. Two of the squad leaders were with him on the chopper when the EMP wave from the nuke knocked them out of the air over the Owens River. A few still looked at him, though, like he was wearing a tutu.

"Now there's one final thing, gentlemen, but I don't even want to tell you, it makes me so goddamn mad. The Missionaries aren't just a gang of egghead traitors. You're all elite soldiers, and you've heard the stories about brother soldiers who went MIA in an engagement, and were quickly written off as dead. Some of them are alive and well and fighting for the Mission. Maybe some you know. That's why nobody's going to watch this fight on TV, either. That's why you had to come out here, my brothers.

"I know you've been training for offensive rather than defensive ops, but we've got artillery up the ass, and good crews to man it, and air support I think you're going to like. We're going to keep it simple and perforate anything that comes into this valley. And then, God willing, we're going to follow them home and exterminate their traitorous asses. Any questions?"

For a long moment, nobody raised their voice. Then a man in the back, Gruber, ex-Delta, sidelined for emotional stress, raised his hand. "Sir, if they nuked the last place— I mean, how're we supposed to—"

"Good question. They nuked it as a last resort. The bomb was on a downed chopper, and the arrangements were different. Most of this hospice village is underground. The Mission'll have to go in through the building or the vents to get to the target."

Next question. Three raised their hands right away, but Talley beat them to it. "Maybe I missed it when you covered it before, but how do we know they're coming here, sir? If this is a cancer village," he said dubiously, taking in the healthy, happy children still playing on the front steps, all but oblivious to them, "then why blow it up? If it ain't, what the hell is it, that they want it so bad?"

Greenaway's eyes roved over each man's face again before he answered. "All I know is, it's top secret, and it's research. More egghead shit, but the Mission wants it destroyed. Maybe it's bioweapons research, and maybe it's a cure for cancer, and maybe it's the eternal search for a delicious, non-pants-shitting fat substitute. What I know, and what you now know, is that there are still a few good people in government, who have seen fit to show us where the motherfuckers are going to be, and who have given us the tools to make sure they never leave. They have also seen to it that nothing that happens here will leak—this might as well be Mars.

"The enemy you are going to face is smarter than you, and he has a lot of technology to fuck with your head, your weapons, and your bodies. But we have technology, too. And we have a beautiful mountain on which to fight, and if nobody fucks up, we have the element of surprise. They're not expecting a fight like this, they're just coming up to blow up this building and all the civilians, mostly children, holing up in it. This fight may drag on for days, or it may be over in seconds. God willing, none of you expendable bastards will stub a toe out here, but as God is my witness, if any of you should fall here, know that you gave it all up for the highest cause, against an enemy only we can see. If any of you still have questions, see Staff Sergeant Keller, who has some of the documents I mentioned available for review. Master Sergeant Talley has got the maps of this place, and the deployment assignments, which he'll go over with you squad leaders, directly. I want the trucks unloaded and cleared out of here in ten, the works completed by 0200 hours tomorrow. This company is dismissed."

The formation flew apart and swarmed over the trucks again. Greenaway watched them work for a minute, letting their vigor feed him. He felt strong again, the shit before must've been the altitude, and he was an old man, and this fucking place—

A bell shrilled from the tower, and the children ran for the doors. Recess was over. He watched them racing over the snow like jackrabbits, so preternaturally graceful and vital that he began to feel heavy and weak again. He looked at the tower then, and blinked, looked again, his eyes going wide in disbelief.

A few adult residents came out the front doors and crossed the parking lot towards a big shed Greenaway figured was the motor pool. One man, tall and gangly, split off from the group and headed towards the bridge on foot. He wore the identical black coveralls that everyone else wore, but even at a distance, even after twenty-eight years, he was pretty sure he recognized him.

In '72, his White Star unit was ferrying weapons into Cambodia and heroin out when they encountered a Special Forces deep recon A-team with a whole tribe of Montagnard irregulars. He only saw one of them, a scary, tightly wound redneck scumbag who wore ears around his neck. Bastard demanded tribute for passing through, like a fucking tribal warlord. Greenaway felt snipers all over his caravan and legions of Yards creeping through the undergrowth all around them, so he paid the redneck off in food and ammunition, and went on his way.

He learned later that he had probably been hit up by Spike Team Texas. The legendary lost patrol had vanished two years before in Laos, and were thought to have gone native. Myths wrapped around the hush-hush core of their story—they grew opium, they were cannibals, they radioed for ground reinforcements, then killed the unwary grunts who showed up to "save" them—and they became bogeymen as much to their old outfit as to the NVA. That no such unit was ever acknowledged to have existed by the brass only gave a glint of reality to the legend. After all, White Star didn't exist, either.

The tall, jittery hillbilly walking across the parking lot was the motherfucker who robbed him in 1972. He closed his eyes.

He took out his binoculars and peered through them at the man. The lenses were fogged up, and he wiped them off with his gloved fingers while he tried to keep the man in sight as he walked away faster than most people could sprint.

Talley touched his shoulder, making him jump. "Fine pep talk, Mort. Long as nobody stops and thinks about that line of bullshit, we ought to get along swimmingly." He spat between his boots and looked at Greenaway. "What's the rumpus, Mort?"

Still looking through the binoculars, he asked, "Burl, d'you remember the stories about Spike Team Texas?"

Talley chuckled. "The lost patrol? What made you think of that?"

He looked over the eyepieces. The lone figure had dwindled to a black twig on the misty edge of the lot, but he had him. He adjusted the focus ring and handed the binoculars to Talley, who took them and scanned the mountaintop. "You want the Vulcan battery up there, Mort? 'Cos I don't think we're gonna get the Bofors up there, 'less you wanna airlift 'em…"

"No, the man going to the bridge, look at him! He's—"

"What're you talkin' about, Mort?" Talley handed the binoculars back to Greenaway, his face looking more worried than ever. A brown string of tobacco juice dangled from his slack lower lip. "That's just a girl, boss." He walked away, shouting at the men off-loading the first light APC off one of the trucks.

Greenaway looked again. He must've lost the man, because there was only the one figure striding across the lot, and Burl was right, like always. A very young, compact girl with short, black hair looked over her shoulder at him as she crossed the bridge. Looking across a half a mile, she looked down the binoculars and into his eyes, and she winked.

Greenaway put away his binoculars and went to look for a trailer where he could have an undisturbed drink, and maybe a long nap.

They had agreed to meet in the forest at midnight. Beyond that, Major Aranda knew, everything else would be in dispute.

He stood with his command staff in one corner of a triangle in the glade at the center of the Missionary underground forest. He had come expecting a stand-off between the soldiers and scientists, like usual, but was pleased to find that the eggheads' united front had collapsed, and split along predictable lines.

Dr. Calvin Wittrock headed the surviving bomb-makers, the veteran physicists, chemists and engineers who once wielded godlike power at places like Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Pine Ridge. Some of them had worked on the first hydrogen bomb. Others helped to make worse weapons that the world had not yet seen—super bugs, neutron bombs, RADIANT. Horrified at what the world did with their sterile laboratory exercises, they defected and formed the Mission, tried to expiate their sins by dragging the superpowers back from extinction or unilateral hegemony. They were haunted men, their souls etched by the ashes of millions incinerated by their theories, and the nightmares of billions more who lived under the swords they forged. But they were alive, while their military counterparts from the early days of the Mission were all long-dead and forgotten.

Dr. Barrow fronted the Greens, the younger generation of scientists. Most of them had come over too early in their careers, and they were not guilty enough by far. Their righteous rage had made them into a faceless mob, and after years of working side-byside with them, Aranda found it harder every day to tell them apart. They hated themselves, too, but, they hated everyone else more, everyone but poor stricken Gaia, the beleaguered Earth-Mother. Aranda had to admit that Wittrock had been right, back on the plane. He trusted the Greens less than the bomb-makers. If Barrow and his people ever discovered a way to cleanly and quietly remove humankind from the biosphere, he believed they'd simply stop showing up at the meetings.

Aranda had gone first, laying out the plan of attack, walking them through slides of satellite images and computer simulations on a projection screen set up like an altar in the center of the glade. There were few objections to the tactical elements—what little they understood, they had little reason to object to. He would lead the ground teams himself, and it would be his men who'd face death. They'd ground up the least details of the operation and polished them to a glinting state of diamond-readiness. They drilled in the woods, on a mock-up of the approach to the ventilation shaft shed behind the complex, until it became the substance of their dreams. The massive defensive build-up around the complex would come to nothing if the air support delivered, it was decided. His other concerns about the safety of his troops were likewise brushed aside by both egghead factions in their haste to get to their own arguments. He gratefully left them to it.

Now he tuned back in as the voices raised to a shouting pitch. Wittrock was explaining the deployment of his lysing agent, which Aranda's men called NGS, or Nasty Green Shit. Dr. Barrow's reedy, strident voice razored Wittrock's dry monotone as he shouted, "It's an invitation to a massacre, Wittrock, and not theirs, but ours!"

"You've seen the lysing agent in action, Dr. Barrow," Wittrock calmly replied. "If the Major's aerial deployment forces are up to the task—"

Catching Wittrock's pointed pause, Aranda irritably nodded. "Dr. Costello has the software thoroughly tested, and is programming in the terrain data we've collected. He's even more solid on the planes themselves," he added, too quickly, relieved that none of them actually knew Costello.

Wittrock keyed the attack simulation in ultra-high speed, so it ran surgically clean all over his face a dozen times before he spoke. "I have yet to see your team provide a more elegant solution."

"It was never our problem to fix,
blanc
." Aranda noticed Dr. Chretien Hanley, the black female incarnation of Barrow who stood at the airlock, at the back of the Green faction. A high-ranking civilian virologist at Ft. Detrick, she was dismissed abruptly and only escaped federal jail time by faking international flight and defecting into the Mission. The legend was that she'd been caught trying to synthesize a smallpox strain linked to sickle-cell markers, that would kill only non-blacks. Barrow's right arm and sometime bed-mate, she'd helped him whip the Greens from a ragged pack of bitter left-leaning radical scientists into a cult, of sorts. "You made the monster."