The Company of the Dead

by David Kowalski

  Morgan observed their movements—the light steps, half-sliding, that left little trace in the sand. His approximations were laboured and clumsy and he gave up after the pain in his leg mounted to a steady throb.

  Everett, observing his attempts, gave a wide smile and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll clean that shit up on the way back.”

  Morgan nodded back thickly.

  Ten minutes’ march brought them to the foot of the ridge. He wiped the beaded sweat from his forehead and looked back again, cheered to see that the base was lost from sight. The cliff presented a moderately difficult climb and that was good too. The ridge was part of a rocky wall that encircled two-thirds of the base. It wouldn’t be any easier for Japanese troops to descend this face—especially under fire—and there were dancer gun emplacements trained in this direction.

  Morgan ascended to where the others were already perched. Everett was calling across to two sentries spread flat across the summit. They signalled back and one began crawling towards them along the ridge’s brow.

  “Gee, but they sure glad to see me.” Everett turned to the radio operator and said, “Slip Mr Morgan the ’scope, Frost.”

  The radio operator unslung the binoculars and handed them across.

  Morgan skimmed the horizon. An undulating profile of purple blue greeted him, untenanted and bare, melting into cinnamon skies. Strangely disappointed, he made to hand them back.

  “Pan down,” Frost suggested.

  He returned the viewer to his eyes. There was an area of grey and brown that could have been scrubland at the edge of his field of vision. He panned across and adjusted the focus.

  “Don’t forget to breathe, man.” The ghost dancer’s voice was a whisper in his ear.

  Morgan let the binoculars slip. “Has to be hundreds of them out there.”

  “Thousands,” Frost grunted. “But they’re right where we want them to be.” He took back the binoculars and slid them into their case.

  Morgan tried to catalogue the vision. A tent city stretched out to the west and south. Tanks and trucks, clearly operational, arrayed in loose formation. Smaller figures of men milled back and forth in large knots between dark pavilions that may have housed more vehicles or munitions.

  “Been gathering together since dawn,” Everett said. “Pre-dawn. That’s how they deal with what we bring them. Draw their supplies together under one central picket. Keep their command local and covered. They stopped our lightning strikes cold, but they all in the one place.”

  “Look where that column’s headed,” Frost said.

  Everett studied the movements with his own set of binoculars.

  “They’re making to assault the decoy.”

  Frost said, “Won’t be pretty.”

  The sentry had reached them and was scrambling down next to Everett. “Going to be damn ugly, if you’re asking me.”

  Everett handed him a fresh canteen and said, “I’m thinking you’re a glass half-empty kind of guy. Tecumseh’s got the decoy covered.”

  The sentry took a swig and replied, “I’m the guy what’s leaving you up here on this hilltop while I’ll be taking a dip in Doc’s old pool.”

  The ghost dancers all laughed.

  Morgan smiled weakly.

  “Anything else you’d like to see?” Frost asked him.

  Everett had already begun snaking his way over to the sentry post.

  Morgan said, “Think I might be done here.”

  “Then let’s move the fuck out.”

  Frost led them back down the slope.

  XVI

  “Martin, can you work that equation for me again, incorporating the new variables?”

  Shine gave Doc a questioning look.

  Doc slumped heavily at his desk, his forehead supported on an outstretched palm. He removed his reading glasses and said, “Re-enter those coordinates I just gave you and try them against the location data set.”

  Shine typed in the numbers as requested. The computer, patched together from salvaged terminals, was barely serviceable. He instructed it to operate the stats parcel and hit the enable key. Its components, narrowly compatible, seemed to shudder within the machine’s metal casing.

  “Sorry, Doc. I’m never sure what you mean by the variables.”

  “That’s okay, Martin, they ... vary.” Doc rose from his slouch and approached the printer. “Whenever we select a point of view, whether it be time, location or the insertion angle, whatever’s left varies. But as long as the resultant equation equals Pickover’s Constant, it’s workable.”

  They both stared at the paper tray, waiting for the results to come in.

  “We need to get this right,” Doc continued. “The two staging runs between here and 1911 have to correlate. The first stage has to be a small jump—real short, like a couple of hours back. It’s a pilot study, a test run, calibrating the relatively minute changes between the new time–space location and the point we started from. Then we can proceed further with a second-stage jump. But this second insertion has to be placed in exponential series between our baseline and destination.”

  “Two weeks, right?” Shine said.

  The printer began hammering away. A curl of paper wound its way through the machine.

  “Give or take,” Doc said. “That’s why I have you doing calculation after calculation.”

  He snatched the results sheet from the reel. His eyes raced across the spreadsheet and he pored over the graphs.

  “How’s it looking?” Shine asked.

  “Grim.” Doc crushed the paper in his hands and tossed it onto the floor.

  Shine glanced down. Paper scraps were scattered everywhere.

  Doc went over to the keyboard. He fussed with the insertion angle and retyped the question. “All the equipment is already stowed aboard. We’ll be fully charged in just over two hours, but without the math, what we’ve got here is a strapless slingshot.”

  “What about all that stuff? Want me to pack it while we’re waiting on the next print-out?”

  Doc followed Shine’s eyes to the grey canisters that lay arranged around the carapace’s struts. “Trust me, you don’t want to go anywhere near that shit.”

  The printer began to rattle again. Shine tore his eyes away from the canisters and examined the results sheet. Doc stood at his shoulder.

  “Any better?” Shine asked the question with little expectation.

  “Could be worse,” Doc said.

  It was with some relief then that Shine watched him strip the sheet delicately away from the spool and take it back to his station.

  “Okay, let’s try bringing the first stage a little closer.”

  XVII

  Malcolm had gone over the prison barracks with a fine-toothed comb. Studied the composition of the rooms, noting with interest that in one of the larger cubicles three chairs had been arranged against a wall. She had pictured Joseph, then, standing before the three prisoners. Pacing back and forth. But had he been interrogating them?

  There was no overt indication of violence. No scratches, scrapes or bloodstains. Just the ash that might have fallen from Reid’s cigarette, ground into the floor.

  What could he possibly want to know that she couldn’t tell him? Why would he violate a basic tenet of information-gathering by having all three prisoners present at the one time? The room’s set-up brought to mind her meetings back in Houston.

  This was no Box, she reasoned. This was a briefing room.

  What terms had he arrived at that justified his releasing them?

  Malcolm trod another circuit of her own room. Joseph’s office, empty now, lay across the hall. All of his files—all the documentation pertaining to the whole sordid affair—were hers for the reading.

  She didn’t know what else to do. Walking past her bed to the door, she felt reprimanded by the disarray of her bedsheets. I’m not coming back here, she told herself, smiling sadly. She straightened the sheets, but only found the letter after arranging the pillow.

 
; The paper, a leaf torn from her notebook, shook in her hands.

  She read his letter with dazed wonder, and heard again last night’s earnest request. “Will you come with me?”

  You’ve consigned us all to hell, Joseph, and you’re not going anywhere. What choice does that leave me?

  She went out to find Lightholler.

  XVIII

  April 29, 2012

  Echo Site, Nevada

  Lightholler handed the field glasses back to Tecumseh. “That’s impressive for a morning’s work.”

  “We’ve had practice. This was going to be the original location of the installation.”

  Lightholler gave the expanse a general once-over. The prefabs had been thrown up on a level plain, ensconced within moderately high shelves of rock. A trail wove its way into the ravine from the southwest. The plain itself was just a wide digression in the path. It squeezed back to a narrow stretch of desert, and continued to wind its way to the northeast. Following it would bring you up behind Red Rock, but between the trail and the base rose high cairns of broken stone, impenetrable to any mechanised vehicle.

  “This would have been the place to build it,” Lightholler said.

  The carcasses of gutted trucks and jeeps had been made to appear outfitted in the semblance of a motor pool. Heat demons shimmered along the trail so that the distant prefabs looked as though they might have been etched upon water. “Echo” was as apt a name as any for the decoy; this Fata Morgana of Kennedy’s hidden place.

  “I’ve had word. Shouldn’t be too long now.” Tecumseh was using the field glasses again. He studied the bodies of the Japanese patrol he’d eradicated, spread haphazardly where the path broke through the western cliffs.

  The ghost dancers were dug into the earth approximately fifteen yards away from the trail, concealed in a similar fashion to the men Lightholler had encountered on the previous afternoon. Thirty men comprised the team. Ten more, occupying Echo site itself, had taken up posts throughout the installation. Lightholler considered the fact that this particular venture was going to expose almost a third of Red Rock’s total complement.

  If it failed, the Rock would be left wide open.

  Delay and electronic detonation mines had been positioned to either flank of the two-hundred-and-fifty yard region Tecumseh had designated as the kill zone. Heavy machine-gun teams had been placed between and behind the line of explosives. A few nested in select breaches, higher up along the rock wall. An assault squad, located just in front of Tecumseh’s surveillance post, lay in wait for deployment, while two-man security teams covered the escape routes where barbed wire had been impractical.

  “How’s this going to play out?” Lightholler asked, his voice a whisper.

  “They know where we are,” Tecumseh said. “Way the major wanted to run this relies on the assumption that the japs want to take this place, not destroy it.”

  “Why is Red Rock turning into the world’s worst-kept secret?” Lightholler asked.

  “That’s the nature of secrets, Captain. Revelation is only ever a matter of time.” Seeing Lightholler’s frown he added, “They probably know about Alpha camp. But if they really knew what was going on here, they’d have more than two divisions on site, believe me.”

  “True enough.”

  “They’ll use artillery to soft en us up. Fire wide, if they can help it. They don’t want to demolish the only way in, and they don’t want to wipe the place out.”

  “Are we going to be safe here?” Lightholler asked. The trail was only a stone’s throw away.

  “If they aim straight we’ll be alright.”

  Lightholler didn’t find that entirely reassuring.

  There were less than six hours to go, by Doc’s last estimate. They might have done nothing, Lightholler reasoned. Left off building decoys and marshalling defences, let the minutes slip by until the carapace was fully functional. The Japanese might have held off on any further advance.

  The ongoing delays in Doc’s progress made that course look more and more like a long shot.

  Tecumseh was nudging his shoulder. Lightholler looked over at him. The medicine man had a hand cupped to his ear. Lightholler strained, but all he heard were the soft sighs of dry desert breeze.

  There.

  The distant drone rose rapidly. Tecumseh pointed upwards as a recon plane soared briefly into view.

  “Secure your goggles and keep your head down,” he said.

  The first shell smashed into the rock face across the way, not a hundred-and-fifty yards from their position. Striking midway up, it sent showers of stone and sand down onto the trail. The Japanese guns found their range, dropping shell after shell across the plain. Fountains spewed sand and debris high into the air as a block of prefabs embered cinder-red on Echo’s edge.

  Five minutes of heavy fire, then everything faded to silence. Smoke and ash lay thick on the ground, cloying at Lightholler’s lungs, clouding his vision. He suppressed a cough and adjusted the goggles.

  The smoke thinned, seceding to grey vapour. A low, intermittent rumble manifested at the threshold of perception, intensifying his unease. He placed the palm of his hand on the wall of their concealment and felt the earth tremble.

  The clank of tracked wheels became distinct.

  Other sounds carried: the voices of men. Tones of command, bawled in unfamiliar speech.

  Lightholler peered carefully out of their burrow. A few samurai moved in and out of the unsettled dust close by. They crouched down, taking bearings, searching the sides of the trail and the way ahead. Clued in now, perhaps, to the mysterious apparition of enemy soldiers who seemed to manifest and melt away as readily as their namesakes. They scoured the terrain and then moved on, towards burning Echo.

  The crack of rifle fire rolled suddenly through the ravine, muted, and one of the figures dropped. The rest scattered along the trail and began answering with suppressing bursts of machine-gun fire. The rifle fire, episodic and short-lived, was choreographed to suggest a limited number of men and munitions. The Japanese vanguard might suspect that they were dealing with assassins and saboteurs; brothers to the men that had been sniping their officers and burning their fuel depots these last long hours. Then again, they might smell a trap.

  The invading vanguard lay longer bursts, spraying the prefab walls, advancing again into the face of diminishing replies from Echo. The rifle fire was confined to intermittent shots. Lightholler watched the figures disappear into the smoke-shrouded construction. He glanced at Tecumseh.

  The medicine man had his eyes fixed on the trail’s western extremity. He raised an arm, penetrating the roof of their shelter. Any casual onlooker might suppose that a grave was unwillingly releasing its tenant. Vigilant eyes, however, would recognise the first signal.

  Heavy machine-gun fire chattered within Echo, answering the summons. Lightholler tried to imagine the thoughts flitting through the minds of the Japanese officers. There was clearly more here than met the eye. Pull back and bombard, or press on?

  Do it, Lightholler urged. Bring what you have.

  Scampering feet answered his plea. More figures rushed along the trail before the unseen armour resumed its fearful clatter.

  The burrow shuddered. Grains of sand began sliding down the walls in widening streams. Spears of light penetrated the burrow’s cover, spotlighting dancing motes of dust.

  Steadying himself, Lightholler looked out along the trail. Tanks rumbled by slowly in two columns. Men advanced in file beside them. There were no Union uniforms included in the mix. Long crimson-snouted Dragon tanks rode beside stub-nosed light battle armour. Track-churned sand raised thick clouds of dust. Lightholler counted twenty-five vehicles in all.

  “They’re packed in pretty tight,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Tecumseh nodded. His eyes narrowed decisively. He punched a closed fist through the roof. Phase two. Echo’s occupants had thirty seconds to evacuate.

  Lightholler was forced to his knees as the blast rocked
the narrow chasm, its energy funnelled along the trail. The den began collapsing around them in earnest. Cries filled the air, a confusion of commands and curses, all in Japanese.

  Tecumseh called across to him, “Be ready.” He had his submachine-gun tucked under his right arm.

  The fifteen-second delay between the charges at Echo and the flanking mines seemed to stretch into an indefinite period that found Lightholler flailing for balance on unsteady ground. He secured his weapon and scrambled up the burrow’s buckled edge.

  The mines detonated in sequence, catching both edges of the convoy in a ripple of destruction.

  Heavy machine-gun fire slashed out from the dancer emplacements, raking the sides of the convoy in a devastating broad fire that sought the vehicles with automatic weapons and poured on the hapless soldiers.

  Tecumseh was up and out of the burrow, perched on its crest and ululating a fearsome war cry. His gun coughed bright death, selecting choice targets among the chaotic mass. Lightholler painfully clawed his way up and dropped to one knee by Tecumseh’s side. He trained the muzzle of his weapon across the mass, but held his fire. He was superfluous.

  He watched the withering fire move across corpses that only responded reflexively to the scorching metal. Incendiaries and anti-tank weapons ranged along the arrested armour. The tanks popped and sizzled. Peeled like overripe fruit, revealing the pulpy contents of bodies mixed in metal.

  Return fire was clumsy, striking where the dancers weren’t. A Dragon tank sent a shaft of red flame along the rocks, catching a machine-gun nest before bursting into flames itself. Three light tanks were working their way towards Lightholler’s position when the second line of mines ignited.

  They settled into their craters on ruptured bellies. Caught between the inferno that had been Echo and the assault team, the Japanese soldiers were carved to a man.

  Tecumseh gave a new signal and the assault team descended into the kill zone. They moved rapidly among the dead and dying, searching for officers and couriers. Rifling through the blood-crusted uniforms for documents and maps that might yield further knowledge of the enemy.