The Crisis

by David Poyer

  “I’m here. Where are you?”

  He breathed again, but the flame in his lungs was getting worse. He sprawled, but it was smoky near the floor too. It blew past him toward her, whirling to the right as it sucked through. A gap? . . . “Stairwell’s clear. We can take the stairs down. If we hurry. Can you get to me?”

  “You sure?”

  “I got there and back. There’s smoke but it’s . . . navigable.” He saw a towel and shook glass from it and mopped his face. It came away looking like the Shroud of Turin. “We don’t have much time. The fire’s taking hold.”

  “Coming.”

  He saw her hand first, groping through the fallen roof. Then her arm. But that was all. “I can’t get through.”

  “Try to the right. No, to your left, your left.”

  She was hacking hard. “There’s a lot of glass.”

  “See where the smoke’s coming out? Is there a hole there?”

  Her arm first again, then her head, hair blackened with flakes of dark matter. Her face was charcoaled except where tears had gouged streaks. She still wore the robe, but it wasn’t white anymore. He worked his way in, got an arm and pulled. Something snagged and she cursed. Cloth ripped but her torso came free. Then her legs, kicking and dirty. She’d slung her cased laptop over her back like a rifle. Her eyes looked boiled as she stared around. “Okay, fuck this, which way?”

  SHE was so angry she could barely keep a civil tone even to Dan. Once she was out of here, let everybody just fucking beware.

  Her husband’s naked chest was streaked with blood and soot. So were his trousers. His face was black except for tear trails down his cheeks. His grip was very strong and she held it gratefully. She’d been terrified out on that balcony, waiting for it to give way. A chopper had circled but then flown away. Couldn’t it lift them out? Maybe that one hadn’t had the right equipment. She’d been tempted to stay, but if they could make it to the stairwell, it’d be a more dignified exit than dangling naked in some goggled aircrewman’s embrace like Jane in Tarzan’s arms.

  Crawling was tough on the knees . . . but nothing hurt. Yet. They just had to get out. Nothing mattered but that. Her eyes burned, weeping so continually in the smoke she could barely see. A hand had the back of her robe. It tugged her along. The floor slanted and she started to slide. She twisted to look where she was going and caught her breath in a near scream. Yellow flames beckoned deep in a smoking pit of shattered rubble.

  Far down in it, a human figure moved. Impossible, in that chaos, yet it moved. She blinked as it squirmed past a broken support column, across a cracked slab. It groped its way with dreadful slowness toward what once had been a lobby exit.

  Then a third-floor wall collapsed. A cloud of dust and smoke drifted across the scene. When it cleared, the figure was still there, but broken. Motionless as a crushed bug on a pavement.

  Dan kept tugging her along. Every few feet she’d stop in her tracks and stare down into the abyss to their right. But gradually they neared the bottleneck. It was shakier now than the first time he’d crossed. Like that bridge he’d read about, with Hell beneath for sinners who couldn’t keep their footing. All too literally, here. He hoped she didn’t freeze in the middle of it.

  “Want me to lead, or follow you?” he yelled over the clamor of the flames.

  “I’ll go,” he thought she said.

  There wasn’t room for two, side by side. She could see that. If she went over, she wanted him behind her. Then he could go back and wait on the balcony.

  She felt it vibrating beneath her, like the floor of an aircraft in flight. Only there wasn’t twenty thousand feet of air beneath them here. Just jagged steel and flames.

  She coughed and coughed, then made herself creep out onto it. The carpet was slick and hot. Was it starting to melt? It was smoking. The smoke was choking. The bloke was croaking. The blond was broken. “Just fucking stop it,” she muttered.

  Dan followed her dirty rump, one hand on her ankle. She was crowding the ragged edge of the floor, where it was fraying like a worn rug. Cracking, pieces crumbling off as they put weight on it. Somewhere below another section gave way with a roar like a calving iceberg. Where were the rescuers?

  Then he remembered, and it wasn’t a good feeling: there was no such thing as a fire main or a fireman in all Ashaara. Except for whatever extinguishers the military had in their trucks, the flames below were going to have to burn themselves out. And except for a few soldiers, and maybe some foolhardy bystanders, anyone who wanted to survive would have to see to it himself.

  Blair felt the black coming back. There wasn’t any air, only asphyxiating fumes that felt like sucking lava. Her hands were burning. She didn’t want to look down, but the drop and the slickness below kept pulling her eyes. Nietzsche and the abyss. For the first few minutes after the blast she’d felt superhuman. Now what little strength she had left was going fast.

  Her knee skidded on the carpet, on something that was both slick and burning hot. Her hips twisted toward the drop. She clawed the carpet like a cat, feeling her fingernails tear, but still lost ground. She was going. Going . . . a scream burst from her throat, raw and savage.

  A palm on her ass and a terrific shove sent her sprawling across the melting polyester. She clawed again, trying to use the momentum to carry her up onto the level section ahead.

  She teetered, mass and energy balanced so precisely that for a second she didn’t know if she was going to make it or not.

  Behind her Dan was fighting just as grimly to recover from the shove he’d sent her skidding ahead with. A smoking black rain drooled and spattered around him. The melting tar was burning their hands, greasing away their traction. It scorched his legs, dripping from the melting roof. On the next floor down flame hissed and leaped where tar ran like molten lead poured by a hunchback from a cathedral’s downspouts. At any moment the flames could climb that liquid ladder and ignite the very surface they crawled on. He squinted through streaming eyes. Had she made it? The round white blur that was her rear end, was it slipping backward?

  The clawing fingers of his right hand found a patch of carpet without tar. His left boot, bent and pushing, got a grip. But he was still slipping. Still slipping—

  Savage fingers closed on his hair and yanked hard enough to brake his slide. Then yanked again, and he scrabbled desperately, leg kicking at intangible air. With a breathless scramble he surged across the crack as it opened up, falling away into the flaming chasm, and slammed into her.

  They collapsed wheezing and choking, unable to speak as sparks blew overhead. Black greasy patches ignited, some on the carpet, some on them, and he beat at her with his hands as she beat at him, locked in a strange embrace, grunting and panting.

  They crawled up and onward, like creatures emerged from the deep, toward the black rectangle of the stairwell, outlined in the growing orange flicker from all around.

  WHEN they emerged soldiers in camouflage and black men in civilian clothes were carrying limp smoking bundles out of the building. “Over here,” shouted a trooper. He draped a blanket over Blair. She tried to thank him, but couldn’t force a word past whatever blocked her throat. Detached pieces of the world whirled around the bowl of her sight. A high tinnitus went on and on, making it hard to hear what people were saying, or formulate a response when she did.

  The first thing those around them did was lead them an agonizingly long way off down the road. When she looked back she understood: the hotel was still yielding to gravity, wall by wall and floor by floor. Each collapse sent a gush of spark and flame out into the street, where the rescuers ducked and cried out, retreating; then, when it withdrew, darted in again. Windows were smashed. Walls lay toppled all along the street. Cars lay on their sides or thrown into buildings, gushing up greasy smoke. Cables lay in dangerous snarls, wrapping toppled power and phone standards. Women in the bright local clothing crouched wailing over clumps of scorched cloth and flesh.

  Ashaaran and American stood in line toget
her at a makeshift aid station. Dan was talking to a man in a ripped suit and no tie. She felt too apathetic to listen. Until something the Ashaaran said woke her. “What’s that?” she said, forcing her attention through the ringing silence that kept threatening to seal her away from everything that could hurt.

  “I saw it,” the man said, keeping his voice low. “A welder’s truck. Square like a box. A blue truck. The driver looks scared. He drive up to hotel. He sit there, until a guard go up to him. Then, the explosion.”

  “How’d you see this?” Dan asked.

  “I was in other car, getting briefcase for the minister.”

  “What minister?”

  He didn’t answer, just kept on in a low insistent voice. “They are all there, in the front room. The doctor and the others, those to be ministers. They wait for an American woman.”

  “That was this lady,” Dan said. The man stared.

  “So what are you saying?” she asked more sharply than she’d intended. “I’m sorry—I meant—they were in the conference room when it went off?”

  “The roof comes down.” The Ashaaran spread his palms, then clapped them together. “Then walls fold in. Then, all the hotel above. And fire. All are dead, I think.”

  “Over here. Here she is.” Heavyset GrayWolf PMCs in ponytails, beards, and bulky protective vests emerged from the smoke. The leader rasped, “Miz Titus? Ma’am, we can treat you elsewhere, no waiting. This your husband? We got to take you out of here. There’s snipers reported on these rooftops.”

  She didn’t object. Without her in line, those behind would get treated more quickly. One guard handed her a soft cloth dampened with what smelled like pure alcohol. She used it to mop her face, wincing as it stung. The contract guards scrummed around them and began to move, in a unit, like a Macedonian phalanx. Their rifles traced the rooflines until they reached an SUV two streets back. As soon as the doors slammed it pulled out, a Humvee in front, another behind, sandwiching it as machine guns swept the street.

  Behind them sirens faded, the wails dropped away. They turned onto an open road and added speed. She leaned into Dan, drawing quavering breaths. The anger was gone, vanished. Only now was she really frightened, totally filled with breathless terror.

  She’d never show it. Not to these men. Not to him. And never to the public that watched for any sign of weakness or frailty.

  The anger would return, she was sure of that. Probably her confidence would, too. It always had before, after a bad fall from a horse.

  But right now, she was very frightened indeed.

  IV

  THE SNIPER

  27

  Joint Operations Center,

  Camp Rowley

  THE JOC was icy in a hot land, bright in a dark night, murmurous with subdued speech and the gunfire crackle of keys. Dan snapped up from a doze, from exhausted dreaming to exhausted waking. He’d been trying to make formation but couldn’t find some item of uniform. Did every academy grad have the same recurring dream? Everyone who’d ever worn a uniform? Silver islands had floated on a violet sea. He’d known them in some previous life, but where? If only he’d found the belt to his trop whites . . .

  He massaged bristly cheeks and reached for coffee. Instead his fingers groped a mess of grounds and cigarette butts the previous JOC chief had left in the arm of the watch captain’s chair. His face was haggard in the semireflective screen of an overhead monitor above. He had on smelly BDU trou worn for too long and the olive drab T-shirt that was all he could stand on his back since a corpsman had picked out thirty-one shards of glass. The bandages rasped when he moved. His throat was still raw from the smoke.

  But he’d been lucky. None of the shards had gone deep enough to kill.

  The truck bomb at the Cosmopolite three days before had killed forty Ashaarans, eight Americans, and one Briton, wounded scores more, and wiped out Dr. Dobleh and almost the entire leadership of the ADA. The explosion narrowly missed Ambassador Dalton and General Ahearn as well as Blair, all scheduled to be in the conference hall too, but who had for various reasons been delayed. Someone had known exactly when that meeting would take place. No one knew the bomber’s identity, though the NCIS was investigating.

  The foreign-educated professionals everyone had been depending on as a provisional government, to make a graceful handover possible, were either dead or so badly injured they’d be out of the game for months, if not permanently. A ton of Czech-made Semtex and a suicidal maniac with a push button had derailed every plan they’d made. And almost killed Blair.

  For that alone, it was his personal mission to find whoever was behind it.

  The SecDef had had Blair flown out as soon as she was treated. Dan had been with Ahearn; they’d had to say good-bye by cell. Since then he’d slept only in uneasy snatches.

  Well, lost sleep wasn’t new to anyone who’d been to sea. He slid out of the chair and wove between terminals to the coffee mess. Straining for some semblance of alertness, he stared at the map.

  THE country was staggering, bleeding, once more headless. Gripped by what seemed like insanity, but had obviously been cunningly planned.

  First a respected religious leader had been killed. Then the tribal elders decimated. No one seemed sure who’d committed those outrages. But they’d crippled, if not destroyed, what little remained of the traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms—tribal courts, clan treaties, all the blood-money and bride-wealth arrangements that had once kept a wide-flung, nomadic population from endless war.

  The truck bombing did the same thing to what nascent democratic institutions the country had evolved.

  But worst of all, and revealing some mastermind at work: militias throughout the country had begun a Tet-style offensive against refugee camps, hospitals, water-drilling operations, feeding stations, transport garages. They’d assaulted a Seabee unit and nearly wiped it out before the survivors withdrew to a hilltop and called in air support. They’d taken over all the refugee camps, even the one within sight of the capital. They’d blown up the Victory Bridge and staged a dawn assault at the marine terminal. The security team had beaten it back, killing the attackers, but every handler, crane operator, and truck driver had deserted. Four ships lay offshore, unable to offload. Along with everyone else in JOC and on the ground, Dan had scrambled to get units out to the aid agencies, get their personnel loaded into trucks or helicopters, and pulled back to the airfield.

  Reactive, not proactive. But at least he’d done it so fast that friendly forces had arrived at most of the posts ahead of the insurgents, who’d found only empty drilling sites, evacuated medical centers, unguarded piles of food and medicine. Sometimes the aid workers protested. The dispensary at Camp Two had been run by Caritas, the Catholic aid agency. The staff had refused to leave, putting mission before safety. The marines had unceremoniously flex-cuffed and hustled them onto the CH-46s. The nun in charge had buttonholed the first colonel she saw at the airfield, who happened to be Pride. Dan had overheard the exchange, along with everyone else in the terminal, so there was a new expletive in circulation: “Innemagott.” That’s how she’d blistered the speechless colonel: “In nema Gott, Colonel, in nema Gott, you are fulss, fulss.”

  Unfortunately so far that was their only strategy: react and pull back, to airfield and port. If the JTF had to evacuate, those were the only ways they could exit. Dan didn’t think they’d have to—the insurgents weren’t targeting the U.S. military per se, unless it was colocated with aid agencies—but no commander could let his forces be trapped.

  Still, they couldn’t react forever. They had to retake the initiative. Or the mission, and the whole country, was going down the tubes.

  FIFTY miles to the west, going two hundred knots in the dark a thousand feet off the deck, Teddy sat hunched over his rifle, chewing pineapple-flavored bubblegum Sumo’s mother had sent from Hawaii. Trying not to think about where they were going.

  It was too noisy to talk, to even think. They were all covered in a thick, buttery
film of sweat. You’d think things would cool down at night but if anything it felt hotter. The stripped-down, metal-walled cabin felt like a microwave oven on high. It was pitch dark aside from an orientation strip down by their boots. He was so gear heavy, and they were packed so tight into the rear of the SH-60, his jaw was all he could move. But he had a knobber on; he did have that.

  Him and Sumo and Whacker and Bitch Dog, on their third back-to-back mission today. Ever since the hotel bombing, the quick reaction force had been on nearly continuous call. Fly to a camp or distribution station, secure the high ground, stand by in case hostiles tried to obstruct the exfil. Once you set up lookouts you might catch a catnap on a protected roof. The night before he’d even gotten a couple solid hours in half watches in a night defensive position. Nothing like Hell Week at BUD/S, but it made you just that little bit slower, put some glue in your reactions. Eventually you started seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. He’d have to nitpick the guys tonight. Have to watch himself, too.

  Only once in three days had he even taken his safety off, warning away four dudes with honest to God spears who’d objected to his taking away their U.S. government–funded free health care. Most times, the whack of helo blades and the sight of the QRF had been enough to make the insurgents disappear.

  This time, though, the head shed guaranteed they’d take fire. The major had given it to them straight at the briefing. Teddy had to admit, no one talked to that guy and came away confused. “Tonight’s payback,” he’d said. “These shitheads killed the Seabees at Hill 153. They’re coordinating attacks all over the country. Killing doctors. People who came to help. If they don’t surrender, Article 556 ’em.”