Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  Parker groaned again. It was the noise of a man waking after an ungodly drunk.

  "First." Meredith said, "we zero out all of the electronics, Then we collect whatever we can carry and use. Then we rig the grenades in here and in the cockpit. Then we start walking."

  Krebs slipped into the compartment from the canted passageway. His face looked deadly serious.

  "Major," he said, "we got company."

  Working frantically, the men wiped out the codes on the electronics that had not been destroyed in the crash Krebs rigged a splint for Parker's arm with the same casual dexterity he displayed working on an engine or a control panel. Parker had an ever greater perception of the pain he was undergoing, and he bobbed just above and below the surface of consciousness Working together. Meredith, Krebs, Ryder, and the NCO, who had largely regained his senses, carefully lowered Parker out into the snow. Parker came up from his dreams just long enough to say:

  "You can leave me, guys. Don't let me hold you up. You can leave me."

  And he swooned back into his pain.

  Their visitors could not see them at the rear of the M-100. Only the machine's snout and cockpit protruded from the treeline, and the dense evergreens offered good concealment with their impenetrable blankets of snow. But every man waited for the sound of movement in the deep snow. Or of gunfire.

  Krebs had spotted the first intruders through the windscreen: men in ragtag winter clothing, but heavily armed. In the moments before he crawled back to inform Meredith, the old warrant had watched the entire visible rim of the little valley fill with armed men.

  It was very cold outside of the shelter of the M-100.

  "They make any gestures?" Meredith asked. "Did it seem like they were looking for trouble?"

  Krebs threw him a bitter laugh. "I'm not sure we're in a position to be much trouble to them," he said. "Anyway, they were just standing there. Probably trying to figure out who the dumb shits were who just crashed their asses out in the middle of nowhere."

  Meredith nodded. "I'm going to blow the cockpit and the ops cabin."

  Krebs shook his head, as if in sorrow.

  "Won't they, like, think it's a hostile act or something?" Ryder asked.

  Meredith answered him as honestly as he could. "Probably. But we don't have any choice. This baby's loaded with top secret gear." He shivered with the sharp mountain cold. "All I can do at this point is toss in a couple of grenades. Before these characters, whoever they are, start closing in. It may not do a hell of a lot of good. But we've got to do everything we can to make it hard for the enemy's technical intelligence boys."

  Krebs raised his head sharply.

  Meredith followed the turn of the old warrant's attention.

  "You hear something, Flapper?"

  "I don't know," Krebs whispered.

  Parker moaned.

  "What the hell," Meredith said. And he pulled himself back up into the belly of the M-100. "Get your asses over behind those fallen trees," he ordered. And his boots disappeared.

  He had to stand on a monitor worth several million dollars to reach the compartment where the extra ammunition was stored. Despite the fact that he was about to do his best to blow the furnishings of the cabin to hell, he still felt awkward planting his boots on the state-of-the-art equipment.

  Boxes of ammunition came crashing down, starting his work for him. He had to duck out of the way.

  He retrieved the box of high explosive grenades from the fallen clutter, ripping open the top of what resembled a very special egg carton. He filled the blousy lower pockets of his tunic.

  He didn't waste any time. Popping his head into the cockpit, he could just make out the line of armed men up on the valley's rim. There were hundreds of them now. Standing in a dark, still line.

  He primed two grenades, tossed them at the control panel and scrambled back to the ops cell, banging his knees and elbows without caring a damn. He just managed to slam shut the compartment door when the twin blasts blew it open again. But the door had absorbed most of the force, and except for a huge ringing in his ears, Meredith was untouched.

  Smoke.

  Meredith scrambled out through the hatch. As soon as his boots hit the snow, he primed three grenades in succession, lobbing them forward into the ops compartment. Then he flattened himself on the ground along the armored side of the M-100.

  The machine's belly shook and groaned under the blasts. But the armor and insulation contained the power. The design was so good that there were not even any secondary explosions from the stored ammunition. The machine had been far more reliable than its human masters. And that, Meredith figured, was that.

  He hustled over to the remainder of the crew. Krebs and the NCO were rigging a litter for Parker, stripping down branches the M-100 had sheared off during its crash. Ryder knelt behind a fluff of evergreen boughs, on guard.

  Krebs looked up. "I don't figure those guys just went away, by any chance?"

  Meredith shook his head.

  "Why don't they come for us?" Ryder asked nervously. "Why don't they make a move?"

  Meredith did not know. They had crossed into a world where the best analysts found their knowledge to be spotty. Behavior and allegiances did not fit the sensible, predictable patterns that gave bureaucrats a chance to get their forecasts right. There were countless armed factions in Armenia, representing indigenous nationalists, occupiers, sectarian Moslems, obscure irredentists, and splinter groups more closely aligned with a particular family or valley than with any coherent platform. The only thing of which Meredith was reasonably certain was that the men who lined the valley's rim were not Islamic Union forces, since they would have been in uniform.

  What would Taylor have done in such a situation? Meredith wondered. Would the old man have made one last valiant stand? That sounded like the obvious thing, but Meredith didn't really think so. Taylor always found a way out of spots like this—really, this was minor stuff, by the old man's standards. He remembered Taylor in Mexico, bluffing his way through situations where the odds were impossibly against him.

  "I'm going out there," Meredith said suddenly. "I'm going to try to talk to them. There's a good chance they speak some Russian."

  Krebs looked at him sadly, without any of his usual "grizzled old warrant" banter. The NCO simply carried on with the construction of the litter. And Parker's eyes wandered ineffectually from one man to the other, propelled by misery.

  Unexpectedly, Ryder spoke up. "I'll go with you, sir. You shouldn't go out there alone."

  "It isn't necessary," Meredith said.

  "I want to go," Ryder said adamantly. But he looked frightened.

  Meredith shrugged. It was an hour for every man to make his own decisions. Anyway, it might be better to have a white face out there beside his own. There was no telling how these partisans or whatever they were might react.

  Suddenly Parker arched from the bed of evergreen boughs where his comrades had laid him while they prepared the litter. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes looked through Meredith.

  "Get the colonel, get the colonel," he cried. "We've got to go back for the colonel."

  Krebs gently pressed the captain back down on his green bed.

  "It's all right," the old warrant said. "The colonel's just fine, don't you worry." The old soldier's voice managed a tenderness Meredith could hardly credit. "Don't you worry," he repeated. "The colonel can take care of himself." Meredith noticed that Krebs's eyes were glistening. "You just lay down and keep still now. The colonel said he wants you to keep still."

  "No time like the present," Meredith said. He dropped his pistol belt in the snow and emptied the last grenades from his pocket. He left his rifle where Krebs had propped it against a tree trunk.

  He began to trudge up through the trees.

  Ryder followed, jogging through the snow with his knees high like an old-fashioned runner.

  It was very beautiful to Meredith in the little strip of forest. The boughs
were heavy and white, and as he moved away from the wreckage of the M-100 the world seemed a pure, clear place. It was not a bad place to finish up, if it came to that. Far better than many of the other places where he had spent time.

  And he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had done good work. The strategic communications set had been on the blink, for some reason, but he had been able to relay the results of their mission by conventional means—including the brilliant surprise about the Japanese homeland space shield. If he had to die, he was going to die in a world he had already changed for the better. His nation and his people would prosper.

  He thought of his wife, suddenly and luxuriously. He owed her so many debts on promises unkept. Hard to be a soldiers wife. Maureen. But she would get over him. She was a handsome, handsome woman, still young and so full of life that life would not be able to resist her. He was sorry that he would not hold her again, sorry that he had not done better by her.

  "Sir," Ryder called after him, panting heavily at the burden of climbing up through the snow. "Maybe we ought to call out or something. To let them know we're coming. In case they're jumpy or something. "

  Yes. The kid was right.

  Meredith began to whistle. Then he smiled, and it bothered the whistling, so he forcibly tightened his lips. Taylor would appreciate it, he thought. Proudly. And he marched up toward his fate, whistling "Garry Owen" and remembering the guidon in his pocket.

  The trees came to an abrupt end. Up across a smooth low slope of the sort richer cultures used to teach their children to ski. a skirmish line of armed men stood silhouetted against the winter sky. The valley was very small, a matter of just a few contour lines on a map. The sort of place easily overlooked during a planning session, or perhaps noticed, then rapidly forgotten. Its only distinguishing feature was transient—the hundred or so armed warriors standing slightly hunched against the wind, many of them bearded, all of them with the hard look of men who had been fighting for a long, long time.

  Meredith stopped whistling. He continued to walk up the slope until he was within easy calling distance of the line of men. The guerrillas watched without a trace of emotion.

  When Meredith sensed that the distance was right, he stopped. Ryder's footsteps came to a crunching halt in the snow beside him. Cold wind rinsed down the slope.

  As good a time and place as any.

  "Hello," he called out in Russian. "We're service members in—"

  Dozens of the men raised their weapons in unison.

  "Don't shoot," Ryder shouted in English. "Don't hoot."

  A man in a black kid hat barked an order, and the men lowered their weapons partway. Obviously a leader, he stepped forward, his bearing proud, and came a little way down the slope toward Meredith and Ryder. Another man followed, and Meredith pegged that one as a bodyguard.

  The two guerrillas halted about ten yards up the slope from Meredith and Ryder. The bodyguard's trigger finger looked naked through a woolen glove, tickling the old Kalashnikov automatic rifle in his hands.

  "Who are you guys?" the leader asked in the English of a stumped cab driver.

  Meredith was so surprised that Ryder had to answer for him.

  "We're Americans. From the United States Army," the warrant officer said. "Who are you?"

  The guerrilla leader drew himself up to his full height.

  "We are members of the Armenian Christian Liberation Front," he declared. Then he smiled broadly, revealing strong white teeth in the frame of his black beard. Hey, maybe you know my Uncle Abel in Chicago?"

  Epilogue

  New Year's Day, 2021

  CLIFTON REYNARD BOUQUETTE SAT ON THE EDGE OF the bed in his boxer shorts. Behind him, the woman breathed regularly and deeply, with her plain face half buried in the pillow. She had had too much to drink, and he could smell the decaying alcohol in her body. He did not find it offensive. Had she stopped drinking at a reasonable hour, she would not have allowed him back into her bed.

  The draperies were closed, but enough light filtered through to give the air the color of gray flannel. He listened to the rain. He did not need to look outside to register the appearance of the world. Northern Virginia was drearily predictable on a wet winter morning. Anyway, he did not want to admit that the morning had come. Traditionally, New Year's Day was a time of family parties with old friends, with the morning reserved for taking stock of his achievements in the year past and his prospects for the year ahead. While the rest of the family slept, he would drink black coffee with a side of cognac in his study and treat himself to a triumphal mental procession featuring Clifton Reynard Bouquette of Newport and Georgetown. But this year there would be no victory parade, and he simply wanted the morning to be over. Much better to have slept through it. Only the old trouble in his kidneys had roused him from his hiding place in the woman's bed.

  It had ended as a very bad year. Against all odds, Maddox had won the election, riding the triumph of American arms abroad. And the cracker in the overly tailored suit had demoted him. Had he been fired, the situation would have been bearable. It might have been represented as the result of an important policy disagreement. In Washington important men were fired all the time. But he had not been deemed of sufficient importance to fire. Maddox had simply condemned him to a smaller office and fewer perks.

  Then that little bitch from Smith had given him a Christmas present. She had come down from school with his daughter for a holiday visit, and Bouquette had merely made a few suggestions to her of the sort that had often brought a fair return in the past. The little tart had passed on the details to his daughter, who in turn shared them with her mother. Bouquette's wife had filed for divorce the day after Christmas.

  Money wasn't a problem, of course. Thank God for that. But money was not really an important consideration to him, since he had always had plenty and knew he would always have enough. What mattered was the respect of men and the admiration—preferably active—of women. But he was under a cloud, both up on the Hill and between the sheets. Oh, the trend had been noticeable for some time. But he had refused to admit it. When his wife filed the papers, he had smiled, poured himself a drink, and picked up the phone. He had left messages on a vast archipelago of answering machines. But the plain, drunken girl in bed beside him was the only one who had bothered to return his call.

  He had not seen her for over a month. She had quit her job at the Agency, against all logic. She was unemployed, and she drank. It couldn't go on, of course. One could not live within a reasonable commute of the District without a decent job. For a girl from her class background, the position would be financially untenable. He could help her out a bit there, of course, but he did not think he would. A part of him wished she would move to distant parts without leaving a forwarding address.

  The woman moaned, as though all the alcohol was hurting her at last. She rolled to the side and the bedclothes tightened under Bouquette's shorts. In her drunken vigor she had torn at his back and called him "George." The slip had rather spoiled things.

  She was inconsolable. It wounded him deeply. Perhaps he was not all that he once had been—his hair was thinning just a bit, though the effect was not undistinguished. But I while his stamina had diminished ever so slightly, he believed he made up for it in art. He was rich and accomplished. He could offer a woman everything she might reasonably desire. He could not begin to fathom how the woman had talked herself into the notion of loving a man with whom no discriminating female would be seen in public.

  No. He was being dishonest. He rested uncertain hands on his horseman's thighs. The woman had genuinely loved. She had loved with a depth of feeling that shamed Bouquette, for he recognized that he had never inspired such uncalculated love in another, not even in his wife, when they had both been young and utterly perfect. His loss would not have shaken the life of anyone the way her lover's death had broken this woman. He wondered what magic his competitor could have possessed. Bouquette had known something of a genius for bedding the right gi
rls, and not a few deliciously wrong ones. Yet he had never filled another's life so fully that his loss would have left such distress in its wake. Certainly, he had left regiments of women in tears—but their expressions of grief, by and large, had been matters of style. He had made love to many, but he had reached no one as that shabby colonel had managed to reach this woman. He wondered how it was done.

  Then again, it might be nothing but affectation on her part. He had been deceived before. After all, she had not bothered to attend the memorial service at Arlington, and I when he tried to pass her a few off-the-record details that had not appeared in the media, she cut him off sharply. Perhaps no one loved with such literary perfection, after all. Except for the emotionally unbalanced, of course.

  Bouquette stood up, rising gently so that he would not wake the woman. She began to snore. He stepped over the litter of their clothing and went back into the bathroom, turning on the light to examine his face in the mirror, trying to understand how things had managed to turn out so badly.

  Lieutenant Colonel Meredith sat beside the hospital bed, listening to the hideously cheerful music piped into the ward. This was one of several wards in the Veteran's Administration hospital serving the victims of the Scramblers and, during the day, radio programs, recorded books, and the General Accounting Office's notion of appropriate music sounded nonstop over cheap speakers. The men in the beds remained as helpless as infants. They could not keep their eyes on a television screen. But they could hear, and preliminary studies indicated that they could process audible information as well as any healthy man. They simply could not act on it.

  Meredith recognized many of the faces in the ward, and he had made a brief stop at each bed, offering the men the encouragement he had struggled to assemble during his drive to the hospital. Then he settled into the gray chair beside Heifetz, scooting it around so that he could look at the expressionless mask of the man's features. Christmas decorations drooped above Heifetz's bed, and a string of garland framed the little plaque of medals that hung over the headboard. Meredith had been on the verge of pointing out to the duty nurse that Christmas decorations were not quite appropriate in Heifetz's case, but the woman looked exhausted, and she had not stopped moving since Meredith entered the ward. It was a bad day to be on duty, and a very bad ward.