Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  She could not do it. She did not have the strength.

  She rose carefully from her barstool, avoiding as much of the pain in her rump as she could. It was hard to imagine bearing the weight of a man on top of her now. She felt bruised to the bone. But, she reminded herself, there were worse things in the world, as the security officers had been glad to point out.

  There were no women at the man's table. It was still early, and the man and his comrades were drinking brown bottles of beer and talking. Valya hunted her way between the tables, catching an already-sore hip on the jut of a chair. She tried to walk with dignity, while her insides sickened. The big man turned and called to the waiter again, with less patience this time.

  She could not do it. She had no idea where the words would come from.

  She paused for a moment, aching for an excuse not to continue. She would have been glad of an incontestable physical illness, one so fierce it would give her tormentors pause. She thought again of the darkened room, the single lamp, of questions and irresistible blows. She remembered the threats, and how it felt to lie soaking on a concrete floor.

  One foot in front of the other, she told herself. Just like a soldier. It won't be anything. You've been through far worse.

  She stopped behind the man's chair, waiting for him to notice her. But he was speaking rapidly to the two other men at the table. Finally one of his listeners looked up in Valya's direction. A moment later, the big man's head turned to seek out the new attraction, twisting coils of fat over his collar.

  "Hello," Valya said.

  The big man looked up at her with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. He said nothing.

  "We have met," Valya went on.

  The big man nodded. "I know that."

  "The other night," Valya said, fighting to remain calm. She wanted to cry and run away. Instead, she tried to outfit her voice with the easy sexuality of a woman in a film. "I was with my friend. Her name is Tanya."

  "I know," the big man said. "I never forget a woman who walks away from me with a full drink on the table." Their eyes met fully for the first time. Valya saw hatred in the dark pupils.

  I cannot do this, she told herself.

  She laid a hand on the man's shoulder, resting her fingers over a cold colored shield. She felt as though she had been forced to touch a snake. But she kept her hand in place.

  She smiled as richly as she could manage. "Oh," she said, laughing, "this is such a misunderstanding. But I thought you did not find me to be attractive. I thought you wanted me to go away. I believed you to be in love with Tanya."

  The big American's eyes softened just a little. Then his face widened with a smile full of big white American teeth. Meant to devour their American steaks, Valya thought.

  "Me?" the man laughed. "Me? In love with old Tanya?" His drinking companions joined in the laughter. "Wouldn't that be the day?"

  "You hurt my feelings," Valya lied. "I thought you wanted for me to go away." She tried to remember a few colloquial English phrases of the sort not taught in the Soviet school system. "You made such eyes for Tanya."

  "I didn't know you had the hots for old Tanya, Bill," one of the other drinkers said. "Didn't know she was your type."

  The big man laughed again, but less forcefully this time. "Old Tanyer," he said. "Now that gal's been drove hard and put away wet. Wouldn't nobody but Jimbo take that mare for a ride."

  The third man shook his head as if he had tasted something foul. "Old Jim's blind as a bat."

  "I think Jimbo just likes a lot of bacon on his gals," the big man said. His accent made it hard to catch all of his words. He still had not moved to shake off Valya's hand, and she warmed it back and forth on the heavy shoulder. "Christ," the big man said, "I remember him way back when at Huachuca. Sonofabitch was always over in Naco or Agua Prieta jumping some big Mex gal. Almost lost his clearance."

  "Those were the days," the third man agreed. "At least them Mex gals had sense enough to wash every so often." He looked up at Valya, then down along the trace of her figure, then back into her eyes. His face bore an expression of incomparable insolence.

  The big man turned out from under Valya's hand. She thought he was going to send her away. She nearly panicked. She was ready to do anything, to get down on her knees. She saw the huge, soft-faced interrogator standing over her again. And the younger, handsome officer, telling her that they merely wanted her to befriend someone for them, saying it in an easy tone that threatened the end of the world.

  The big man kicked a chair back from under the table. "Have a seat," he told Valya. "What are you drinking?"

  Valya half-tripped down into the chair. Her backside hit with force, and her backbone shook with a presentiment of age. It took her a moment to relax into the pain.

  "Anything," she said. "It does not matter. Something strong."

  Suddenly the big man leaned in close to Valya, inspecting her. She cringed back into the bad light.

  The big man whistled. "Jeez. Your boyfriend give you that shiner, honey-pie?"

  Valya could feel her face swelling with the blood of embarrassment. "An accident," she said. "I have fallen down the stairs."

  The big man smiled slightly and sat back. "Yeah, I guess fell down them stairs a couple times myself."

  He reached around behind Valya and jerked her chair next to his. He settled a big hand on her far shoulder, then railed it down her side before halting it on the swell of her bottom.

  He nodded, figuring. "You're a skinny little gal," he aid, "but I guess you'll do." He leaned in close so that his friends could not hear. His lips brushed Valya's hair. He smelled like a puddle of stale beer.

  "One hundred American dollars," he said, "and not a penny more."

  24

  4 November 2020

  NOBURU DREAMED OF A YELLOW HORSE BY A SALT LAKE. He approached the horse, but the animal paid him no attention. Browsing over tufts of stunted grass, the animal appeared weary beyond description, and its back was so badly bowed that a child's weight might have broken it. Noburu himself wore a fine English suit, but he had come away without his cuff links. He was searching for his cuff links on the sandy waste, and he feared that the horse might devour them by mistake. He called out to the animal. He knew its name. And the horse raised its head, swiveling dully in Noburu's direction. The yellow horse was blind. Disease had whitened its eyes. It soon turned its nose back to the dying grass.

  Brown men came. Out of nowhere. Coming from all sides. They rushed slim-legged from the sea, wailing in a foreign language. Noburu assumed they had come to slaughter the horse. He ran toward the uninterested animal, determined to shield it in his arms. But the brown men were not immediately concerned with the horse. Noburu had been mistaken. They were coming for him.

  Countless hands slithered over him, catching his limbs in small firm grips. They had made a cross of light from antique headlamps, and they intended to crucify him. He struggled, for he sensed that hanging from that cross of light would be the most painful of tortures. But the mob had him in its power. Their hands grew in strength, clamping him. He smelled the foreign spice of their breath. He tried to reason with them, explaining that he could not possibly be crucified without his cuff links. It was impossible to think that he might end like that, badly dressed in public.

  Then the dragon came out of the sky. The world burned. He could see the profile of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, dark against the flames. He could not quite see the dragon. It was dark and shapeless. But he knew it was there. He could feel the wash of wind slapped earthward by its wings. The brown men were gone. In their place, the dead approached him, in moldering uniforms. Crippled by plague, with white skulls showing beneath old flesh, they limped hungrily toward him. And he knew them. He had known them for a long, long time. They were old acquaintances from his personal darkness. But they had never come so close before. The most terrible one of them all lunged forward, reaching for Noburu with fingers of light.

  "They're coming back," Akiro
said.

  Noburu set his nose to the wind. The scent of death. He had tried to nap, to rest a little. But it would have been far better to remain awake. His dreams were on a collision course with reality. Hungover with visions, he had staggered back to his vantage point atop the headquarters roof.

  Yes. You could hear them now. Climbing back up the hill in the retreating light. The brown men. Singing.

  "I cannot understand it," Akiro said. "I cannot understand it." He was not speaking to Noburu now, but to himself, in the vacant tone of a man confronted with the collapse of all his certainties—and with the simultaneous prospect of death.

  "Has the ammunition been cross-leveled?" Noburu asked. He touched the silly skullcap bandage on his head. It had loosened during his nap. His mind was still unsure of what was real. The dream warrior danced on a ragged carpet of facts. Noburu felt drugged after his healthless sleep, and the unearthly singing and chanting out in the streets seemed to weave the world of dreams into the pattern of common existence.

  "Sir," Akiro answered, glad to busy himself with a concrete matter. "The redistribution is complete. The men have an average of eighteen rounds per automatic rifle. We have also brought in a number of irregular weapons taken from enemy casualties. There are approximately seventy rounds per machine gun. One grenade for every two men."

  Yes. So much had been unforeseen. The mob climbed steadily up through the streets, preceded by its medieval wail. The ammunition might suffice to beat off the first rush, if they were lucky.

  "Still no direct communications with the rear, or with Tokyo?" Noburu asked.

  Akiro hung his head. "The situation seemed to be improving. Then, an hour ago, the interference began again."

  "The same parameters as last night?"

  "No. Different. The communications officer says that last night's attack was barrage jamming. He calls the present effort leech-and-spike."

  What could it mean? In the course of his military career, Noburu had never been so utterly cut off from information. He had come to take ease of communication for granted. Now, at too old an age, he had been transported back through the centuries, to fight his last battle in darkness.

  Well, he thought, it did not make so great a difference now. Even had the communications leapt suddenly back to life, it would have been too late. The friendly forces were too far away. He had scoured the map, analyzing the undeveloped road network from the standpoint of both a relief column and an interdiction effort. And the advantage was all on the side of his enemies. In an hour, perhaps sooner, the foreign, foreign faces would come over the walls for the last time, blowing in the doors, clambering through the windows. It was finished.

  He wanted to say something to cheer up Akiro, to buoy him to the last. But the words would not come. Even his language had failed him in the end.

  "Come on," Noburu said. "We'll try a last broadcast. For form's sake."

  They went down through the arteries of the headquarters building, stepping between the lines of wounded men lying in the hallways. Here and there, a conscious soldier tried to rise at the passage of his commanding officer. But each attempt failed. Two officers and an enlisted helper shuffled boxes of documents into the room where the paper shredder was kept. You could smell the heat of the machine as you passed by, and Noburu caught a glimpse of disembodied hands dealing papers into the device's gullet. The days of careful document control and neatly logged numbers were over.

  They negotiated a stretch of hallway cluttered with bureaucratic tools but no men, and Noburu halted Akiro by grasping his arm.

  "Someone," Noburu said, "has been designated to . . . look after the wounded? Just in case?"

  "Sir," Akiro said sadly. "The necessary ammunition has been set aside. Two NCOs have received the task."

  "Reliable men?" Noburu asked.

  Akiro hesitated for a moment. In the space of little more than a day, his armor of selfassurance had been reduced to a coat of rags.

  "The best we could find," the aide finally replied.

  It was a terrible waste, Noburu thought. For the first time, he began to feel a measure of real affection toward the younger man. Akiro was learning to empathize with his fellow man at last. But the development had come too late.

  But that was eternally true, Noburu realized. Understanding always came too late. It certainly had come too late in his own case.

  They passed the room where the master computer culled through its electronic dreams, unperturbed. The computer had been left running, but its consoles were locked so that no outsider could enter it without possessing an unbreakable complex of codes. For the mob the machine would be a useless prize. But if the Azeris did not physically destroy it, the computer would be invaluable after its recapture by the relief column.

  And the relief column would come. Eventually. It just was not going to come in time to save the defenders of the compound. Noburu could feel that much in his old soldier's bones.

  He stopped, then backtracked a few steps and opened the door to the computer room. The machine glowed in the soft light, unattended. Looking in on it, Noburu felt as one of his ancestors might have felt in saying goodbye to a favorite horse in its stall. Noburu had ridden the magical horses of a new age to an unanticipated end. In the final hour there was no warm coat to stroke, no eyes asked affection, there was no wet nuzzling. The machine simply moaned to itself, ticked, and sailed off into its galaxies of numbers.

  Noburu, who still imagined himself to have been hardened by the years, found it uncharacteristically bitter to reflect that this machine was worth far more to his country than any combination of men. He himself, along with all of his principal officers, down to the assistant of the helper's helper, meant nothing beside the power and splendor of this machine. The machines made war now, while the men involved simply meandered through a waking dream of bygone glories.

  No. He knew that, even now, it was not true. The glib formula was as false as everything else in his life had been.

  He closed the door on the bright machine, leaving its fate for other men to determine. Tokyo could still send an electronic self-destruct message, should they so choose. It was not up to him. It would have embarrassed him, even under the present circumstances, to reveal to Akiro that he, the senior officer in the theater of war, did not have sufficient personal authority to order the destruction of a master computer.

  They entered the operations center. The room was astonishingly calm. The well-staffed excitement of modem warfare had given way to a watch consisting of a single officer and NCO, while the rest of the logisticians and programmers, technical advisers and fire support specialists, were up above ground, manning a thin line of final defensive positions.

  "The radio set is over here," Akiro said, leading the way. Noburu followed him to an antique Soviet-built radio, something he might reasonably have expected to see only in a military museum.

  "And this . . . seems to work?" Noburu asked.

  "It's the only way we were able to establish contact with anyone," Akiro answered. "It's an old VHF set. The loyal garrisons are using them. But the jamming is very bad."

  How he had laughed at the ancient gear with which the Soviets had been equipped. It seemed there would be no end to his lessons in humility.

  No. That was wrong. There would be an end soon enough.

  "It works ... the same way?" Noburu asked. Even as a lieutenant, he had never handled anything so crude.

  "The same way. You press this, then speak into the microphone."

  "But no one has answered?"

  "Not for hours."

  Noburu picked up the chipped microphone. He looked at the younger man to ensure he was doing everything correctly.

  "We have the call sign Castle," Akiro added.

  Noburu pressed the button to transmit. "Any listening station, this is Castle . . . this is Castle. We are under siege by indigenous elements . . . and require immediate support." These old sets were not secure, of course. It was impossible to enumerate the
concerns he felt required to address as a professional soldier. There was as much chance now that his enemies were listening in as that his own side would monitor the broadcast. ". . . Let it be recorded that the subordinate officers and men of this command served the Emperor honorably . . . and fought to the last man." The words felt wooden in his mouth. But he owed his men at least that. The final tribute of their commander. But he could not bring himself to end on a note of false enthusiasm. "This is Castle. End of transmission."

  The two men stood over the old radio in the big quiet. The operations center held the silence of a theater after a performance, when even the janitors had gone home. Each man, in his different way, hoped that the radio would crackle to life on its own, bringing them words of hope, news of an approaching relief column, or at least the acknowledgment that some distant station knew they were still alive. But there was nothing.

  Noburu looked at the younger man. Despite the marks of weariness on his face, Akiro looked impossibly young. Noburu wished he could send the boy back to a safe office in the General Staff complex or to some overheated academy classroom. And to the young wife Akiro had neglected, as all ambitious young officers neglected their wives. Simply, he wished he could send Akiro back to the world where grown men played at being soldiers and still had their lives ahead of them.

  Noburu took the younger man by the arm, a little surprised that Akiro was every bit as warm to the touch as were other men. This little staff tiger.

  "Come," he told the younger man. "We'd better go back upstairs."

  They made their way back to the helipad on the roof. Colonel Kloete was still on guard, with the stump of a cigarette in one hand and his other hand holding fast to his light machine gun. Beside him, the surviving South African NCO slumped with his eyes closed. It was impossible to tell whether the man was merely resting or deep in sleep. Noburu had to admire the arrogantly casual attitude of the South Africans toward their impending deaths. But each culture faced the inevitable in its own way.