The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  He leaned closer, placing the finishing touches on her cheeks, and said, “Then we have nothing to worry about.”

  She looked across at Lightholler and Morgan. Lightholler found her face, broken up by the blotches and streaks of cream, savagely beautiful. His nod of approval was awkward.

  After completing Morgan’s face he began to work on his own. The kit mirror was thankfully tarnished. It felt better not having a clear view of his own visage. It was somehow simpler, applying the camouflage to the indistinct reflection in the glass.

  It took them twenty minutes to reach the fringe of the battlefield. Their procession ground to a halt following a signal from the first truck. They dropped the tailgate and Kennedy told Malcolm and Morgan to sit tight. Lightholler reached into the weapons canister and withdrew a holstered Mauser. Malcolm suggested, matter-of-factly, that he take another gun.

  “There are more than enough spent Mauser casings lying around without you making any further contributions.”

  He gave her an odd look and she added. “We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  She said “We”... How do you do that, Kennedy?

  He replaced the Mauser and selected a Browning.

  Kennedy nodded, saying, “We’re sticking to confed ordnance all the way from here. Shoddy, but serviceable.”

  He ordered two of his men to stay with Malcolm and Morgan, and led Lightholler away from the vehicles.

  There was the faint sound of a low breeze and the cooling creak of the trucks as they settled. Kennedy dropped down and fastened a paper-like covering over his boots. He indicated to Lightholler to lift his feet and slipped on similar covers.

  They moved across the desert floor in silence. He followed Kennedy towards the sloping edge of a bluff that rose away from the trucks. Looking back, he saw that he’d left no clear prints in the sand. He could taste gunpowder on the air—and something else. A subtle, biting scent.

  “Stay close by me,” Kennedy whispered. “I want to hear your assessment.”

  Lightholler, slightly bewildered, closed the gap between them. He crested the bluff, stooping low by Kennedy’s side. The scent became a stench.

  He could make out the rest of Kennedy’s crew, fanned out and working their way down to the smoking ruin below them. Kennedy had the binoculars out again. He passed them over.

  Lightholler scanned the carnage. He made out the silhouettes of seven vehicles, charred and smoking, amid fresh shallow craters of blackened sand. One appeared to be a personnel carrier, the other six were jeeps. The burnt-out frame of a mortar weapon, poised amidst the vehicles, was surrounded by a pile of Japanese bodies.

  There were more bodies spread out over the mesa, splayed in the graceless posture of violent death. Lightholler counted forty. Kennedy’s men moved among the dead. A dust devil swirled on the furthest ridge, a gloating dervish of sand and smoke. He handed the binoculars back.

  Kennedy did a quick once-over before pouching the glasses. One of his crew waved them over, before crouching back down to examine something by the mortar.

  Lightholler followed Kennedy’s steps down onto the plain. He tried to keep his eyes on the ground, while tracking the movement of Kennedy’s men. They scampered from body to body, inspecting uniforms and shoes, checking dog tags, ammunition and supply cases. They left little indication of where they had passed but he saw many boot prints: light where men had run; deeper where they had dragged heavy munitions. He saw cigarette butts and crushed ration containers.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a deck of Texas Teas. Made to light one when Kennedy extinguished the flame with a swift movement.

  “Not till we reach the Rock.”

  He stopped and stood there, his head tilted slightly back as he gave the horrifying tableau a slow three-sixty.

  Tecumseh rose from the wreckage of a jeep and gave the all clear. Kennedy signed to one of his men. The crewman vanished back up the broad face of the bluff and returned shortly with Malcolm, Morgan and their escort in tow.

  Without a word, Kennedy’s men positioned themselves in a loose circle around the gathering. They stood facing outwards, their rifles and submachine-guns at waist height, bringing to mind Lightholler’s encounter with the Brandenburgs in New York City all those days ago.

  Malcolm stood by Kennedy’s side. She had a handkerchief over the lower part of her face and her eyes were wide, pale holes in her camo-darkened face. Morgan was looking at a corpse that lay crumpled a few yards away. He fingered his rifle nervously.

  “What do you think, John?” Kennedy asked.

  For a moment it felt as if he was back at Sandhurst.

  “This was a heavy platoon.” Lightholler pointed at the mortar. “That’s what we heard coming in. Eighty-one mil.” He pointed to the personnel carrier. “That’s the command car, and that’s a medic’s jeep. They had a doctor here as well as the usual medics. Sharpshooters, snipers, radio gear. Judging by the set-up, I’d say they sighted the Rangers first but were overwhelmed by heavier firepower.” Lightholler pointed northwards. “Tyre tracks suggest they were retreating in that direction.”

  “Not bad,” Kennedy said. “Not bad at all.”

  Tecumseh smiled through pressed lips.

  “It was a heavy platoon, alright,” Kennedy continued. “One of three that was bringing up the rear. That puts us right between the other two, so I’ll make this brief. This is reconnaissance in force. They set up first but they were surprised here. The action was all local: sniper fire taking out the mortar team, grenade-launchers for the jeeps. Most of the kills are clean; one to two shots apiece, the occasional knife wound where it couldn’t be helped.”

  “I don’t see any Confederates,” Malcolm ventured in a small voice.

  “There were never any Confederates here.”

  “What about the cigarettes and the rations?” Lightholler said. “Those are confed.”

  “False trail,” Kennedy replied. “Just like those tyre markings you pointed out. The crew that passed through here marked the real trail. Only two jeeps made it out of here, four japs on foot, and they were dragging one of their wounded.”

  “They didn’t get too far either,” Tecumseh added.

  “Okay,” Kennedy said gruffly. “Let’s get out of here.” He brought his fingers to his mouth and gave a long shrill whistle.

  Suddenly there was movement all around them. The ground broke open where mounds of earth had been. Fallen foliage parted and fell to one side as more of Kennedy’s men emerged from the wasteland. Lightholler counted twelve of them.

  Twelve of his men took down a platoon?

  Kennedy communicated with the sign language Lightholler had observed earlier—a rapid exchange before the soldiers drifted back to their places of concealment. As a final coda, Kennedy summoned Tecumseh. “We need to place anti-personnel mines here and up along the false trail.”

  Tecumseh nodded gravely.

  Clearly Kennedy had no problem with burning his bridges. He said, “From here on in, it’s a clear route to the Rock.” He turned and began trudging back up towards the trucks.

  “Why did you bring me out here?” Malcolm asked, falling into step beside him. She cut an unlikely figure walking in his shadow, conjuring up the image of a youth marching off to war.

  “I don’t want you kept in the dark any longer, Patricia.”

  “The first time I met Webster,” she said, gasping with the exertion of their ascent, “he asked us what we thought an army of your men—scattered through the Union and Confederacy—might be capable of doing.”

  “And?”

  “With all the information at his fingertips, and all the resources at his command, I still don’t think he has a damned clue what he’s up against.”

  “Webster’s not my enemy,” Kennedy said softly. “I see that now.”

  Observing her difficulty with the climb, he held out a hand.

  She clasped it and said, “What’s going on, Joseph?”

  “It won’t
be long now, I promise. Just stay with me.”

  She fell silent and let him guide her back along the trail. He left her standing with Morgan and Lightholler while he went to inspect the prisoners’ vehicle. He returned after a few moments and said, “They’re okay.”

  She thanked him and walked to their waiting truck.

  Kennedy said, “We’ll be at the Rock within an hour.”

  Lightholler gave a low whistle through his teeth. “Hard to believe we made it this far.”

  Morgan’s look became suddenly earnest. “What about Shine?”

  “I don’t know.” Kennedy frowned.

  “We might have to take one of Tecumseh’s men with us instead.”

  “I can’t see anyone convincing a ghost dancer to board the carapace.” The frown deepened.

  Some new thought manifested itself in the flash of Kennedy’s eyes. His face took on a less serious aspect as he continued in sonorous tones, “One thing I can’t abide among my men is low morale.” He checked the pouches at his belt and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and tossed it to them.

  Lightholler snatched it out of the air with deft fingers. He checked the pack. Crumpled and worn, it bore the lettering of a popular Japanese brand.

  “Exhale that way,” Kennedy said, pointing eastwards, in the direction they had come.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Trackers’ll catch that scent from half a mile in this wind.”

  “Over this stench?”

  Kennedy nodded. He turned back to the truck.

  Lightholler lit up and was surprised to see Morgan’s hungry look. “You smoke now?”

  “A little.”

  Lightholler flipped the pack. Morgan shook it and brought a cigarette to his lips. He lit up and cupped the cigarette between his hands as he inhaled.

  “We talked about war a while back, you and I,” he said, drawing a deep lungful of smoke. “Had you asked me then what I thought about war, I’d have told you that it describes a situation where two nations, unable to achieve their goals by diplomacy, come to believe that they each have the means of imposing their will by violence. I’d have said that it was a tool used to define the balance of power among adversaries.”

  “And now?”

  Morgan ditched the cigarette. “Now I think it’s just an absolute fuck-up. Go ask that dead Jap back there if he cares who wins or loses this fight.”

  “Even if we manage to go back and fix things,” Lightholler said carefully, “we won’t take any of this away. There’ll always be war. Let’s just hope we only get to fight the right ones.”

  Morgan looked down at the crushed butt and remembered where he was. He pocketed the refuse and said, “Let’s just hope no one has to fight any of them at all.”

  XVI

  April 28, 2012

  Alpha Camp, Nevada

  Shine and his father had been assigned to the commissary. Most of the tables had been disassembled. The remainder were pushed together in the centre of the room to form a single counter. Shine watched as a group of agents streamed into the building and made themselves comfortable. They wore their uniforms open and a number of them had their boots propped up on the tables. They looked exhausted and restless at the same time but there was the occasional burst of strained laughter.

  He caught the tail end of a joke, followed by a harsh cackle of amusement. The speaker drew his eye. He was hatchet-faced under a mop of unruly thick hair. The butt of his pistol swung loosely in his shoulder holster.

  “Alright, alright, alright. What do you call a coon in a limo?”

  “The chauffeur?” someone ventured across the table.

  “Nah.” He guffawed loudly and slapped his thigh. “A thief.”

  Shine slowed his steps. He felt his father grab his shirt-sleeve.

  “You eyeballing me, boy?”

  “Don’t...” his father murmured

  “Be the last thing you’ll ever do.”

  His father propelled him through the kitchen door. There were seven other people in the room. Three leather-faced indians, stooped by age and injury, worked over a large vat that bubbled and oozed a warm savoury scent. A tactical agent sat in a corner of the room. His eyes flicked briefly across Shine and his companions before being drawn back to the steaming stew.

  “We’ll get started on the vegetables.” Shine’s father moved slowly towards a rack of shelves where bowls of tomatoes and potatoes had been laid out.

  There was a large window set in the wall beyond the shelving. It faced the north end of the compound where the land began to rise up into the low mountains that surrounded distant Groom Lake. Somewhere out there, beyond the pale purple hills, the major was working his way towards Red Rock. His father had told him so.

  Tecumseh, the medicine man of the ghost dancers, had contacted them from the other place to announce that his arrival was at hand, that he was bringing the culmination of all their prayers for a world’s restitution.

  While Bravo camp had its mixture of indians and negroes, its faithful and its atheists, most of the men who’d trained at Alpha were ghost dancers, members of a religion that had been outlawed by the United States over a hundred years ago. The major had never discouraged their ideology. In fact, it could be argued that he’d promoted its practice. Shine had overheard their whispered conjectures in the barracks that afternoon and, listening to their words, he’d begun to appreciate the harvest sown by Kennedy’s tolerance.

  One of the prisoners had claimed to have visited the other place, saying that it lay in the heart of the Demilitarised Zone between the Japanese and Confederate factions.

  Another said that the place was in the Arctic Circle and contained a weapon that shrivelled man and machine alike, that reduced atomics to dust.

  One of the elders, a companion of Tecumseh who’d led a company at Mazatlan, described a spirit-dream he’d entered, just the previous night. He’d seen the major and Tecumseh crossing the Central Plains at the head of an army of all the indian dead. None of the others spoke after this pronouncement.

  It had occurred to Shine that, occasionally, a man may become something more than a man. He may become the vessel for the aspirations of many. And under such circumstances, what boundaries or limitations could hold him back?

  He stared out into the deepening shadows and held his hand against the glass. He heard his father’s voice calling him back and stood blinking for a moment as he regained his bearings. He saw his father struggling to peel the jacket of a potato with a bread knife and asked, “Where are the regular knives?”

  The tac agent chuckled. “Like we’re going to leave knives around a bunch of redskins.” His laughter grew with appreciation of his own joke and then ceased with a sudden spluttering cough.

  “Hush, now.” One of the old indians was standing close by him and something flashed, bright and cruel, at his fingertips.

  A shallow red line appeared across the pale cords of the agent’s neck.

  Other men crossed the floor with a swiftness that belied their age. Their fingertips formed dazzling patinas, courtesy of the razored metal shards they extruded from callused pads.

  The agent stared at Shine in astonishment.

  Shine’s father replaced the half-peeled potato on the shelving. He approached the agent with a broad smile. The agent made the slightest movement towards his gun holster, then thought better of it. He’d opened his mouth to speak when a sputtering sound burst from his belt radio.

  “Go on,” Shine’s father said. “Answer it.”

  The agent gingerly reached for the receiver and brought it to his ear. He made a strange sound in his throat and said, “It’s for you.”

  Shine’s father took the receiver and listened for a few moments. He placed it on his own belt and held out his hand. The agent handed over his Dillinger.

  He transferred the pistol to Shine and said, “We’re to wait here a spell.”

  “Want me to do anything?” Shine asked.

  “Maybe l
ater.”

  There was an explosion of noise in the commissary. The sound of tables being turned and shattering glass. Three pistol shots rang out and echoed and then there were just the low moans of the injured. Distant gunfire sounded like the crackle of cheap fireworks.

  The door swung open. Two ghost dancers stood at the entrance. Behind them lay broken furniture, cracked plates and three agents sprawled in a communal spatter of dark blood.

  The remaining agents, unarmed, were on their knees. Shine’s father led their prisoner in and dropped him on the floor by his comrades. One of the agents, his hatchet face now pale and blood-streaked, met Shine’s eyes in abject fear.

  “Tell me,” Shine asked. “What do you call a coon with a gun?”

  XVII

  April 28, 2012

  CSS Patton

  “Sir.”

  Webster barely glanced up. He’d set up office at one of the spare consoles in the communications room. His needs were immediate and the rate-limiting step in his intelligence gathering was the journey from communications to his cabin five decks below. That was too long.

  “This just in for you.”

  He accepted the post from the com officer with a curt nod. It was an encrypted dispatch from CINTEX. He ran it through the decoder. It was sketchy; shoddy work someone would have to answer for. He decided that somewhere out there, a village yearned for its lost idiot. He made a note of the person’s name and read on, filling in the blanks.

  Malcolm’s Raptor had refuelled at Barksdale air force base, Louisiana, prior to its final flight. Evidence Response personnel were still working the crash site but Webster was willing to bet his last dollar that no trace of Kennedy or his crew would ever be found. Two abandoned parachutes had been retrieved ten miles from the wreck.

  The parachutes were bait and Webster wasn’t biting.

  He took a shot in the dark, rifled through the files on his desk, and pulled the notes on Hughes Aeronautics. Thirty flights in the Louisiana region, and three had departed Barksdale within half an hour of the Raptor. One bound for Houston, one for Nevada, and one that accompanied the Raptor over the Louisiana wetlands. Promising.