A small group of Chaco Canyon wanderers stayed together in what might once have been a small enclosed village, though it was nowhere near as grand as Pueblo Bonito. Fire Team Eclipse of the 101st Airborne had chosen a structure that ranged along a south-facing crescent backed by a soaring bluff. A single central community room with a massive clay-lined hearth was the main entrance to the complex, with antechambers large and small radiating out both sides. A small but very hot fire snapped merrily on the hearth, and what little smoke there was from the dry mesquite tinder jetted straight up toward a smoke hole in the roof.
Captain Concord Slaughter kicked a log, then looked up speculatively at the convenient hole as the smoke dissipated and disappeared through it. At six feet four inches, he was the tallest man in the room, but then he was generally the tallest man anywhere. With long arms and legs and a rangy build, his shadow from the firelight looked oddly like the stick-man hunter paintings that graced the canyon. He had spiky sandy hair, a no-nonsense mouth and chin, a sun-creased face. Even a stranger viewing the scene would know that he was in command of the group of soldiers.
A noise, alien and forbidding, intruded on the homey sounds of the fire and low conversation: the low growling thumps of Messerschmitt-Daimler Dolches, or Daggers, the newest, most deadly attack helicopters ever designed. They flew over constantly. No one knew where they were coming from or going.
“Amazing how those air passages built into the ceiling dissipate the smoke before it filters out into the air,” Niklas Kesteven mused. He looked like a great grizzly bear drowsing by the fire, his thick shoulders slumped, his unkempt beard growing almost up to his eyes and falling down his chest. “I’m certain the Anasazi weren’t trying to be covert—it’s obviously a crude heating and cooling system— but it does work for our purposes.”
“Those Daggers are sure to have thermal imaging,” Lieutenant Deacon Fong said. His dark eyes were wistful as he looked up to the soaring ceiling of the great room as if to try to see the helicopter through the six feet of stone. He was the fire team’s helicopter pilot, and a pilot without an aircraft was a sad thing to see. “They’re going to register the heat aura sooner or later.”
“If they’re looking,” Con Slaughter said sturdily. “And I don’t think they are.”
“Maybe not now, but will they?” his sergeant, Rio Valdosta, asked darkly. Short, with rich walnut skin, he was built like a tank.
As the team’s gunner, he was performing one of his favorite rituals: cleaning Captain Slaughter’s 12-gauge shotgun. It already was so highly polished inside and out that it looked as if it were made of onyx instead of blue steel.
“They might sometime, but for now I guess they’re pretty taken up with invading the inhabited parts of America,” Ric Darmstedt said. He was subdued, almost unrecognizable from his usual rowdy Texas swagger. He was in his stocking feet, for he was cleaning and polishing his boots. Ric had to be the only soldier in the world who still spit-polished his boots every night. Such meticulous habits were one of the things that gave away his Germanic heritage—that, and his tall, muscular, blond, blue-eyed Nordic good looks. He could have been a poster boy for the Aryan Wunderkind.
Only two women were in the room, and both hovered by Ric, Con Slaughter noted with some amusement and some envy. He’d never been very good with women somehow, though he had a rugged appeal. Slaughter felt awkward around them, while Darmstedt seemed to be able to make himself perfectly at home with women or girls, regardless of who they were or what they were like. The scene was a perfect example of how all women seemed to be drawn to Darmstedt, for there were never two women more different from the two who managed to stay close by him. Seated behind him now, excluded from the circle of soldiers, but still determined to stay close, was Gildan Ives; she was a fashionably skinny woman with much-corrected, but still pretty, facial features and outrageous cherry-colored hair. She was a veterinarian, and now she was playing with the two brindled cats that lived in Chaco Canyon.
By Darmstedt’s side—very much a part of the team—was the grave and dignified Colonel Vashti Nicanor of the Israeli Air Force, lately inextricably joined to Fire Team Eclipse. She had a quiet, unobtrusive beauty, Con decided, with her shining black hair and liquid dark eyes and olive skin, now darkened attractively by the sun. She never looked directly at Gildan, though that woman shot Vashti looks of intense dislike every time Vashti spoke. Vashti always ignored her.
Her fellow wandering New Zionist, Colonel Darkon Ben-ammi, who was seated on her other side, suddenly sat up straighter, training his sharp eyes on Dr. Niklas Kesteven.
“Dr. Kesteven, it appears that you are well rested,” Ben-ammi said in a low, concerned tone. Niklas and Gildan had slept night and day since the fire team had rescued them from the ranch with the death house of a lab underneath it.
Niklas nodded. “Yes, it’s amazing how well I’ve been sleeping and how relaxing this place is, considering how primitive it is.”
“So you are feeling recovered, and stronger?” Ben-ammi persisted, albeit politely. He gave Captain Con Slaughter a peculiarly intense glance, but Con couldn’t decipher the meaning. He wasn’t a very subtle man.
“Oh, yes, I’m feeling very well, thank you,” Niklas responded with an air of importance. On their journey none of the soldiers had shown him such concern, though they had taken very good care of him and Gildan in the physical sense. Niklas Kesteven was an acknowledged genius, a very important man in the scientific world. He was accustomed to being treated with more homage.
With the slightest hint of exasperation, Colonel Ben-ammi directed to Con Slaughter: “Then perhaps Dr. Kesteven, as he was obviously an important scientist working in the Man and Biosphere Project, might be able to help us, Captain Slaughter.”
Darkon outranked Con, but he tried, as much as possible, to defer to him as the leader of the team Darkon had voluntarily joined.
Sometimes it was hard, though. Darkon was a member of Mossad, and his greatest expertise was intelligence gathering, while Con was first and foremost a combat soldier.
“Huh?” Con said. He was still wool-gathering about Ric and his women. “Oh—yes, sir, Colonel Ben-ammi, I—yes. Dr. Kesteven. As you know, we all came from Fort Carson, and our communications went down in this massive blackout. As I understand it, Zoan and the Indians have been here for a couple of months. So no one here has had any contact with the outside world since the autumnal equinox. What about your lab? When did you lose power?”
Niklas suddenly looked wary. He realized that Darkon Ben-ammi had set him up for a debriefing, and he didn’t much relish it.
While Con questioned him, Niklas was thoroughly uneasy, and his speech showed it. Usually an articulate, even pointed, conversationalist, he stuttered and faltered as he related the three days after the equinox when he and Gildan had been “up top.”
That one’s hiding something . . . or a lot of somethings, or a really Big Something, Darkon Ben-ammi thought shrewdly. I’m glad we adopted him and that silly woman and cared for them, but I’m also glad that the team remains suspicious of him. Anyone who works that hard to hide something definitely has something important to hide.
He’s so very bad at it, too.
“Look, Dr. Kesteven, I’m not going to stick bamboo shoots under your nails or burn the soles of your feet with hot irons,” Con stated. “Valdosta here might, but I won’t. So why don’t you just spit it out? We need every bit of information we can get, and you don’t have anything to lose by letting us know everything we can about this blackout and how it’s affected the rest of the country.
What’s your crisis?”
“I don’t have a crisis,” Niklas blustered, his face growing red.
“I’m just telling you that I hardly paid attention to the Cyclops broadcasts. I thought the alerts were some kind of stupid hopped-up Sixth Directorate drill.”
Niklas had long ago decided—on the night that the lab had lost power, in fact, when the deadly effects of the blackout had be
en so personally illustrated to him—that he must never tell anyone that he’d been the man who’d discovered Thiobacillus chaco and brought this terrible scourge to the United States and loosed it. He didn’t shirk from that fact or try to shift responsibility onto Alia Silverthorne or anyone else—in his mind. But he saw no reason that anyone else should ever know. Certainly not these grim men whose fellow soldiers had been killed. Even though they had died from German bullets and bombs, their deaths had still been an indirect result of Niklas’s criminally careless handling of a dangerous organism. Everything had started with that, and he knew it. But he was determined that no one else should know it.
“So what’s the crisis, Captain Slaughter?” Niklas went on arrogantly. “America’s blacked out. We’re in the Stone Age. We have to learn to deal with it.”
Slaughter said in his best professional-soldier-to-ignorant-civvie rasp, “The crisis is, Dr. Kesteven, that we don’t know that’s true of the entire continent. We’re fairly certain that the western half of the U.S. is down, especially since you’ve given us the information you have, regardless of how scanty and careless that information is. How, exactly, do you know that the entire continent’s down?”
Niklas reddened, though whether from discomfort or anger no one could tell—except maybe one person, and Niklas had dismissed Zoan from his calculations. “Because, Captain Slaughter, this blackout must be the result of one of two things,” he said in his most superior lecturing voice. “Either it’s solar flares or an EMP detonation.”
Niklas had thought of these two plausible scenarios long ago. An electromagnetic pulse detonation was an explosion of a device at a very high altitude. With no air to absorb the shock wave, instead of converting to mechanical energy—like the air blast in ground explosions—it reached and then traveled through the atmosphere in its simplest form: electrical energy, or more precisely, an immense electrical surge. At least that was the theory. No one had ever actually used an EMP, though it had been invented nearly a century earlier.
Slaughter merely glanced at Ric. Ric spit heartily onto the toe of his right boot, then polished in slow, deliberate circles. “Dr.
Kesteven, either you’re delusional, or you’re not nearly as smart as you should be. Our compasses still work, and you know that would be impossible if it were solar flares. Aside from the fact that our tech-heads, not to mention your people, would have given us a heads-up long ago.
“As for an electromagnetic pulse detonation—yes, it could have wrecked the power grid and Cyclops network. But, sir, it wouldn’t have blasted your car’s electrical systems or your flashlight or your battery-operated toothbrush. Perhaps you weren’t aware of this. And finally—”
Niklas wasn’t a very humble man at best, but this grunt questioning his intelligence—even though he’d set himself up—enraged him. He roared, “And perhaps you aren’t aware of who I am and what I do. What do you think we did in that lab? Do you think maybe it might have had something to do with advancement in weaponry? Did it ever occur to you that I might know more about EMP detonations than you do? Maybe, Lieutenant Darmstedt, you ought to let someone else use the team brain tonight.”
David Mitchell and Zoan were slightly back from the others, talking together in half-whispers. Now David started, his eyes narrowing. Zoan slowly shifted his luminous black eyes to Niklas with an expression of deep sadness. Niklas started visibly; Zoan couldn’t possibly comprehend the connection between his long-ago questions about the ohm-bug and Alia Silverthorne and Niklas’s cover stories, could he?
Could he?
Con said nothing; his eyes flickered dangerously. Beside him, Rio growled and made a sharp movement, but Con made a curt gesture and Rio remained still. “I think that was uncalled for, Dr. Kesteven,” Con said in an ominously soft voice. “I think you’d better apologize to me and my team. We’re all hot-wired these days.”
Niklas looked angry and seemed to be staring at Zoan, but then his face fell. “I am sorry,” he said and was openly sincere. “It was uncalled for and also untrue. All of you please accept my apologies.”
“Forgotten, Dr. Kesteven,” Con said shortly.
“You can call me Niklas,” he said awkwardly.
“You can call me Captain Slaughter,” Con retorted. “Go on, Darmstedt.”
His eyes an Arctic blue, Ric continued, “So, Dr. Kesteven, if you’re such a genius about EMP detonations, can you tell us how the Germans have a defense against them?”
“What—what do you mean?” Niklas asked, startled.
“The spray,” Darmstedt elocuted carefully. “The glue-salt spray they protected all their electronics with. You know, the helos that fly overhead all the time, the Tornadoes that blew our base to bits!” His voice grew angry.
Niklas’s eyes opened wide; he was astonished. Jumping up, he paced with heavy, shambling steps. “What do you mean? A spray preventive? I thought—I knew all those helos and planes could have auxiliary fuel tanks fitted for Atlantic crossings—I thought they’d flown over from Europe.”
Con and Ric glanced at each other uneasily; they realized that they hadn’t yet told Niklas about observing the Germans at Hollo-man spraying all their equipment before the blackout. They’d been disrespectful to Niklas and without just cause. It made straightforward, honest men like Con and Ric uncomfortable.
“I apologize, Dr. Kesteven,” Con said in a rough half-whisper. “I didn’t realize that you didn’t have all the facts. The Goths have a spray that they used on all their electronics. We saw them at Holloman, just before the equinox. We procured a sample of the spray and had it analyzed. It turned out to be a compound of— of—what was it, Darmstedt?”
Darmstedt frowned. “I don’t recall the chemical compounds.
It was a sticky spray with a high concentration of sea salt.”
“What?” Niklas blustered. “You’re—saying they sprayed this stuff onto delicate electronic equipment? What—never mind. Let me think.” His beard dropped onto his chest again; his eyes grew thoughtful but unfocused.
Con Slaughter then turned to speak to Colonel Ben-ammi hulking on his left.
Though the individuals were sitting close together, the intricacies of human interaction were readily apparent. Slaughter and Ben-ammi talked in low tones that no one could overhear, and no one tried to. Rio Valdosta had never stopped cleaning his and Captain Slaughter’s weapons. He and Deacon Fong talked animatedly about weapons and choppers, and sometimes laughed. Ric Darmstedt meticulously polished his boots and occasionally joined in with them. At his side Vashti Nicanor said very little, watching the three men—particularly Ric—very closely. Gildan Ives leaned up to occasionally whisper something to Ric, and he gave an automatically polite nod.
David Mitchell and Zoan, sitting by themselves on the far side of the fire, had returned to their private whispers. The dingo, which adored Zoan as all animals seemed to, had begun by lying at Zoan’s feet but had managed to sneak up until his head was in Zoan’s lap. Absently Zoan stroked him, and the dog’s mismatched eyes were half-closed.
Most peculiar of all were the two Indians, young, whipcord-thin Cody Bent Knife and old Benewah Two Color, the dull gleam of the white streak in his hair gleaming like red gold in the firelight. They were seated cross-legged on single blankets, back in the shadows, isolated from each other and everyone else. They never spoke or moved. Cody and Benewah might have been ghosts of the children of light who’d lived and died here so long ago.
After a long time, Con rose, went to the stack of tinder by the door, and returned with an armload of small, dry sticks. He tossed them onto the fire one by one, and everyone grew silent, expectant.
“We completed our mission, Eclipse. We got the burros and the horses, even though there’s no base to take them back to,” he said in his short, to-the-point manner. “So what’s our next mission?”
Rio spoke up in a hard voice, “I say we go kill Goths, sir.”
Con nodded slowly, to the Indians’ astonishment. “That�
�s our job, Rio, no doubt about it. To make war on our enemies. But to do that, we have to have a plan—a clear objective and a strategy to accomplish it.”
Rio shrugged. “Let’s go shoot Germans. They die. Mission accomplished.”
Con couldn’t stop the corner of his mouth from twitching. “Rio, you have a lot of good qualities, but tactical planning isn’t one of your brighter lights. Let somebody else use the team brain, huh?”
“Fine with me, sir. As long as I have the guns,” Rio replied carelessly.
“C’mon, Colonel Ben-ammi, we’re all friends here,” Con said. “Give me a hint, would you? I never expected to be the commanding general of the American army, you know.”
Colonel Ben-ammi spread his hands, palms upward. They looked like picnic hams. “Captain Slaughter, you’ve read the books. How do you think the commanding generals decide on strategies? By the books, of course.”
The light dawned. Con said slowly, with growing revelation, “I don’t know what I’m doing . . . because I don’t have information. And I don’t have any information because I don’t have any intelligence. And if you say one word, Dr. Kesteven, I’m going to do that orthodontist work I promised you when we first met. Of course, I can’t map out a battle plan if I don’t have a clue who or what or where I’m fighting.”
“Sir, I know I gave up the team brain, but—” Rio began, frowning.
“Can it, Rio. We know the Germans bombed Fort Carson.
But we don’t know squat about the big picture. What about this power blackout? Can we fight it—and undo it? How long is it going to last? Forever?”
In a very subdued voice, Niklas said, “Captain Slaughter?
Some things that I’ve been considering might address that. One is that no one—at least, no one as intelligent as the Germans, if in fact they are responsible—would have used a complete power blackout as a weapon if it was going to be permanent.”
Fallen Stars, Bitter Waters Page 4