Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  A snowflake caught at the corner of the young man's eye. He paused to wipe it away, touching a gloved hand to his shying eyelash.

  And Captain Jack Sturgis jerked perfectly upright, gripped by a pain the intensity of which no human animal had ever before experienced.

  19

  3 November 2020

  "SIERRA FIVE-FIVE, THIS IS SABER SIX. SIERRA FIVE-FIVE, this is Saber six . . ."

  Taylor knew immediately that something was seriously wrong when he heard Reno's voice on the command net. The general's son was always careful to maintain a studied coolness over any open communications means, except when he was verbally destroying one of his subordinates, or in combat, when his voice screamed for medals, awards, citations. Now Reno's voice strained with emotion and he had done something which he never had done before. He had used the call sign "Saber six" on Taylor's net.

  Taylor knew that Reno affected the call sign on his squadron's internal comms, but the man was always careful to use his proper call sign on the regimental command net, both because Taylor made it plain that he disapproved of unauthorized nonsense and because "Saber six" was a timeworn cavalry handle reserved for regimental commanders—not for the subordinate lieutenant colonels who commanded squadrons.

  "Tango five-five, this is Sierra five-five. Over."

  "This is Saber—I mean, Tango five-five. I can't contact anybody at A A Silver. I was on the horn with the One-three, and he just cut out in midsentence. I've tried calling Whisky five-five, but I don't even get anything breaking up. Nothing. Is something going on down there? What's going on?"

  "Tango, this is Sierra. Wait. Sierra one-three," Taylor called Heifetz, "this is Sierra five-five. Over."

  Taylor waited. Around him, he could feel the tension in Meredith and Parker, as well as the concern of the surviving staff NCO. The crowded cabin stank with sweat and dried blood, and at the very back the shock case sat dully beside the bunk they had jerry-rigged for the soldier with the concussion.

  Nothing.

  Taylor knew that something was wrong. This was not a single comms malfunction. It was funny how you knew. The instinct you developed over the years of living in the proximity of death.

  "Sierra one-three," Taylor tried again, "this is Sierra five-five. I cannot hear your station. If you are monitoring my transmission, meet me on the strat link, over."

  He knew that something was wrong. Yet, he struggled against knowing it. He turned to the special satellite communications link that was normally reserved for conversations with the nation's highest authorities.

  Meredith was already keying the system. Then they all waited again, while in the background Reno pleaded for attention and answers over the regimental command net.

  They waited for five minutes. But there was nothing. The heavens were dead.

  Finally, Taylor turned back to the command net, determined to make one last attempt.

  "Any Whisky station, any Whisky station," he called First Squadron, his words reaching out toward Assembly Area Silver, "this is Sierra five-five. How do you hear this station, over?"

  Nothing.

  Suddenly, the comms set fuzzed to life. But it was only Reno with another plea for information. The man was badly shaken.

  Taylor ignored him. He turned to Meredith.

  "How long until we reach Silver?"

  Meredith glanced at the panel. "Fifteen minutes. Do you want to divert until we find out what's going on, sir? We might just be able to make the northeast edge of AA Platinum before we run out of fuel."

  Everyone looked at Taylor. There was a heaviness in the cabin's air that sobered each man like the sight of a dirt-encrusted skull.

  "No," Taylor said. "We're going in. We're going to find out what the hell's going on."

  Taylor called ahead to Second Squadron at Platinum, just outside of Orenburg. The squadron commander had been monitoring the traffic on the net, digesting it and maintaining radio discipline.

  "If you lose contact with me," Taylor said, "you are to assume command of the regiment." Everyone knew that Reno was the senior squadron commander by date of rank. But Reno was in no condition to lead the regiment at the moment. If he ever had been.

  Reno did not contest the message that had been sent openly for all command net subscribers to hear.

  Well, Taylor thought, I've still got Second and Third squadrons. If worse comes to worst.

  "Contact the escort element," Taylor told the assistant S-3. "Tell them we're going in ready to fight."

  Meredith did not believe in ghosts. Even as a child, the dark had held no power over him, and the demonic tales each generation felt compelled to recast and retell simply bored him. The only witchery of interest had been the spell of the eighth-grade blonde with whom he shared his first date. Guaranteed a safety net of their mutual friends, she agreed to go with him to see a film that had captured the attention of young America for a split second. Their friends were noisy, probingly teasing, and, finally, unmistakably separate in the gloom as popcorn smells meandered above the tang of cleaning solution. When the seating lights died and the screen began to redefine the universe, a vault door shut over the mundane cares of homework and team tryouts. Actors labored to convince him of scarlet, improbable horrors, but their exaggerated agonies were nothing compared to the doubt he felt in the long minutes before his classmate took his hand. Unlearned, she gripped him with athletic ferocity as a once-human beast rampaged across a film set. He remembered feeling mature and very strong then, with his unwavering eyes and unquestioned command of the fingers another child had anxiously intertwined with his. These dressed-up unexamined fears were of too primitive an order to move him, and he grew older in a world where hauntings always turned out to be headlights reflecting off a window, and "supernatural" was merely a word from which ill-dressed hucksters tried to wring a profit. His devils had always lurked elsewhere, beyond the reach of vampire, astrologer, or special-effects wizard, and the last time the hackles on the back of his neck had alerted had been under the torment of a woman's fingernails, before love settled in and the woman became his wife.

  The last time. But now his wife was half a world away, and the ghostly white snow fields unnerved him with their stillness. Translated through the monitor screen, the imagery of Assembly Area Silver had an unmistakable quiet about it that frightened him with its wrongness. It was eerie, unnatural. It occurred to him for the first time that silence could have a look about it, an intrusion across sensory boundaries that jarred the working order of his mind. The silent display of M-l00s, partially camouflaged and dispersed over a grove-dotted steppe, was somehow so insistently incorrect that he could feel his body responding even as his mind struggled to process the information into harmless answers.

  First Squadron was supposed to be quiet, lying still in hide positions. The goal was to blend into the landscape, to avoid offering any signs of life to searching enemy sensors. To play dead. Even beyond that—to become invisible. The problem was that the M-l00s burrowed so neatly into the snow fields had achieved the desired effect too well.

  No unit was ever completely silent. No unit was ever so disciplined that it could avoid twitching a human muscle or two for the practiced eye to spot. Perfection in camouflage and deception operations was, a matter of degree.

  But the First Squadron site had a special, unbearable silence about it. It had begun with the refusal of every last oral communications channel to respond to Taylor's queries. They all had assumed that First Squadron had been hit and hit badly by an enemy strike. Then Meredith tried a computer-to-computer query.

  Each computer in First Squadron responded promptly when contacted. Data passed through the heavens instantly and exactly. The machines continued their electronic march through the endless battlefields of integers. It was only their human masters that made no reply.

  The first imagery Meredith called up had filled them with a sense of relief. Yes. There they were, all right. Carefully dispersed M-l00s. There was not a single indicator
of battle damage. The snow drifted across the site with blinding purity, and when you looked carefully, the concealed contours of the M-l00s on the ground betrayed no trace of destruction. The squadron looked exactly as it was supposed to look, and it occurred to Meredith that the whole business just might be a bizarre communications anomaly.

  It was only the feel that was all wrong.

  "Run a systems check on our environmental seals," Taylor ordered.

  "You figure chemicals, sir?" Meredith asked.

  "Could be. I don't know. Christ," Taylor said quietly, "I've seen week-old corpses that didn't look that dead."

  "Nerve agent strike?"

  Taylor bent closer to the imagery, narrowing his eyes, obviously straining to achieve a greater intensity of vision. "That's what I'd have to bet, if I were betting. But it doesn't make any goddamned sense. Even if a strike had caught some of the birds with their hatches open, others would have been sealed. If only because of the cold. And the automatic seals and the overpressure systems would have kicked in." He backed away from the monitor, touching his eyes with thumb and forefinger, weary. The palm and back of his hand had been wrapped in gauze that already showed dirt. "It just doesn't make any sense, Merry. If it was nerve gas, or any kind of chemicals, somebody would have survived. The autosensors would have alerted, and we would have had more flash traffic calls coming in than the system could've handled." He shook his head very slowly, then touched the edge of the gauzed hand to his hairline. "It just doesn't make any sense."

  "Looks like a ghost town," Hank Parker said. The clumsy, too-colorful image annoyed Meredith, and he almost made a dismissive comment. Then he realized, with a chill that ran along his arms, legs, and spine, that the assistant S-3's comment bothered him so much not because it was naive but because it was precisely correct. There was no town in the imagery, and Meredith did not believe in ghosts, but the feel that rose from the monitor like cold air was exactly the feel of a ghost town—of a no-nonsense, technologically affluent military kind.

  "Rapper," Taylor called through the intercom, "get us down there as fast as you can. Get a fix on the S-3's bird and put down right on its ass."

  "Roger."

  "Sir?" Meredith said, suddenly forgetting his personal alarm and remembering his duty , "are you sure you want to put down? If there's something down there we don't know about... I mean, the regiment needs you. We could direct one of the other squadrons to send in a recon party, do it right . . ."

  "I don't want to wait," Taylor said.

  "Neither do I," Meredith said truthfully. "But we've got to think about the big picture. We've got to—"

  "Be quiet, Merry. My mind's made up." There was a tautness in the voice that Meredith had never before suffered.

  Something was terribly, inexplicably wrong. Each man in the cabin knew it, but none of them could bring it out in words.

  "What's that?" Taylor demanded, stabbing a finger at the monitor. As the M-100 approached the heart of the site, the on-board sensors picked up greater and greater detail.

  Meredith squinted and saw only a black speck. He touched the selector pencil to the screen and the lens telescoped down.

  It was a body. A man's body. Where before there had been only the disguised outlines of machinery and the insistent silence.

  "He's moving," Parker said.

  They all bent down over the monitor, each man's stale breath sour in the nostrils of his comrades.

  Yes. It was unmistakable. It was definitely a man, in uniform, and he was moving. He was lying on his back, making jerking, seemingly random gestures at the sky.

  "What in the name of Christ?" Taylor whispered.

  The unintelligent, wasted movement of the man's limbs came erratically. But he was unmistakably alive, although the snow was beginning to bury him. The man's movements reminded Meredith of something, but he could not quite place it.

  "Get us down on the ground, goddamnit," Taylor roared.

  It seemed to Meredith that Taylor had just realized what was going on. But the old man seemed to have no intention of sharing his knowledge.

  "Yes, sir," Krebs's voice came back through the intercom, just a second late. The old warrant officer's voice seemed to tremble, astonishing Meredith, who had grown used to Krebs's theatrical toughness.

  The sensors on the M-100 were very efficient, and although they were still several kilometers from the thrashing soldier's location, Meredith could already begin to make out the exact contours of the body, even the more pronounced facial features. He almost thought he recognized the man.

  Suddenly, he realized what the man's unfocused pawings reminded him of: a newborn infant.

  "Get a grip on yourself, Merry," Taylor said gently.

  Meredith shook his head and wiped his eyes. He could not bring himself to look at Heifetz again. Or at any of the others.

  "I'm going to be sick," he said.

  "That's all right," Taylor told him. The old man's voice labored to steady him. "Just go outside. It's all right to be sick."

  Meredith did not move. The smell of human waste hung thickly in the ops cell of Heifetz's M-100. Meredith closed his eyes. He did not want to see any more. But, behind his eyelids, the image of the last several minutes grew even grimmer.

  "I'm going to be sick," Meredith said again. He could feel the" tears searching down over his cheeks for a streambed, seeking out the lowest hollows and contours of flesh.

  Taylor took him firmly by the arm.

  "Don't let it beat you," he said. "I'm going to need you, Merry."

  "I can't," Meredith said, "I just can't," although he had no clear idea of what it was he could not do.

  "It's all right."

  "My God."

  "I know."

  "Oh ... my God," Meredith said. He felt another wave of nausea. But it was not quite strong enough to set him in motion.

  "Let's go outside for a minute." Taylor said. "We'll both go." He spoke as though he were addressing a good child in a bad hour. Meredith could not understand it. Not any of it. And he could not begin to understand how Taylor could be so calm.

  Unwillingly, Meredith looked around again. It was a little better now. When they had lugged the young captain's snow-dusted body into the shelter of Heifetz's M-100, they had found Lucky Dave and the crew spilled over the floor like drunkards, eyes without focus, limbs twitching like the bodies of beheaded snakes, mouths drooling. The smell of shit had soaked out through their uniforms, and they made unprovoked noises that seemed to come from a delirium beyond words. Taylor had immediately put Meredith to work, untangling the men's limbs, repositioning them onto their bellies so they would not choke on their spittle.

  "What is it?" Meredith had demanded. It took all of his willpower to assist Taylor in repositioning the stricken soldiers. It was especially difficult with Heifetz. "What is it?

  "I'll tell you later," Taylor had said patiently. "Just help me now."

  Meredith had set his hands upon his fellow officers and the crew NCOs with the combination of trepidation and over-resolute firmness he might have employed with plague victims. Yet, these men were unmarked by evident disease. The warmth of their skin seemed normal. Nor were there any signs of wounds, except where one NCO had tumbled forward, breaking his nose. The man snorted blood like an ineptly shot animal as they laid him down properly.

  Then Meredith needed to stand, as the nausea grew stronger. He saw Lucky Dave's eyes, and for a moment he thought they were staring at him. But it was only a trick of angles and light. There was no recognizable human expression on Heifetz's face. Only an unintelligent confusion of muscles.

  "Let's go outside," Taylor repeated. He held Meredith firmly by the upper arm, and he steered him as carefully as possible over the closely aligned bodies.

  The bloody-nosed NCO began to grunt loudly and rhythmically. Meredith recoiled, as if a corpse had bitten him. But Taylor had him in a close grip. He directed the younger man toward the rear hatch.

  "Watch your step, Merry," he
said.

  The clean, cold air cued the sickness in Meredith's stomach. He stumbled down onto the snow-covered earth and began to retch. Taylor loosened his grip slightly, but never quite relinquished control of Meredith's arm.

  When he was done, Meredith scooped up a handful of clean snow and wiped his mouth. He chewed into the cold whiteness. The regimental surgeon had counseled the men not to use snow to make drinking water, since the regional pollution had reached catastrophic extremes. But Meredith instinctively knew that anything was cleaner than the waste remaining in his mouth.

  "It's all right," Taylor said.

  Meredith began to cry hard. He shook his head. He knew that something was terribly, horribly wrong. None of his experiences offered a frame of reference for this. He could not understand what his eyes were seeing. He only knew that it was hideous beyond anything in his experience, without having any conscious understanding of why.

  "What happened?" he asked, begging for knowledge.

  "Quietly," Taylor said. "Speak quietly."

  Meredith looked at the colonel. The cold made the old man's scars stand out lividly. But the sight of Taylor's ruined face was nothing beside the inexplicable condition of the men inside the M-100.

  "Why?"

  "Just speak quietly."

  "Why? For God's sake, what's the matter with Lucky Dave? Is he going to be all right?"

  "Merry, get a grip on yourself. We have work to do."

  "What's going on?" Meredith demanded, his voice almost a child's.

  "You have to keep your voice down. They might hear you. Let's not make it any worse for them."

  Meredith looked at Taylor in shock. It had never occurred to him that the ruptured behavior of the men they had found might include consciousness of the speech of others. It was too incongruous. The men had obviously lost their minds. Their eyes didn't even focus. They were shitting and pissing all over themselves.

  "Listen to me," Taylor said quietly. The snow was beginning to decorate his shoulders. "I think they hear us.