Slinging the Barrett over his shoulder, he opened his door and slipped from the jeep into the darkness.
Kuhl settled back and looked out the windshield. His team was right on schedule despite the wearisome inconveniences of their ride. There was nothing to do now except wait for Antonio to complete his work, and then for the others to arrive and give their signal. Perhaps he would even be able to glimpse them coming over the treetops.
They sat in absolute silence, hard, lean men in black combat outfits, their faces daubed from chin to forehead with camouflage paint. All but the sniper who’d gone on ahead carried French FAMAS assault rifles fitted with modular high-explosive munition launchers and day/ night target-tracking systems.
Still undergoing field trials by the French military, these adaptations of the standard FAMAS guns represented the state of the art in small arms, and were not slated for mass production or issuance to general infantry troops until 2003—two full years in the future.
Kuhl always made it a point to stay ahead of the game. It cost money, true, but unless one was willing to accept failure, the expense was more than acceptable. And he himself was paid handsomely enough that he didn’t mind spreading the wealth.
Impatient, he raised his night-vision goggles to his eyes, swung them from the compound’s checkpoint gate to the pair of men occupying its sentry booth, then studied the irregular outline of the buildings that lay beyond. He wanted nothing more than to get moving. While his team might be outside the observable range of the compound’s guards, he had seen enough in his mercenary career to know that only a fool or an amateur neglected to consider the unpredictable, and that each passing second brought an increased risk of discovery. It mattered little how well they formulated their plans, or how careful they were in bringing about their execution.
Secrecy, he thought. It was an essential requirement of his profession, and yet the very idea paradoxically seemed a joke. In an age when satellites could photograph a mole on your chin from somewhere up in space, there were no true blind spots, and nobody was ever out of sight for long. The best one could wish for was temporary concealment. If his men failed at that, if they were noticed too soon, all their elaborate precautions would be worthless.
Kuhl sat, watched, and waited. In his taut silence, he could almost feel that gigantic, damnable eye overhead, looking down, pressing down. Seeing what it wanted to see, peering through every shadow, its relentless gaze scouring the world....
Yes, Kuhl felt it up there, he did, and was only hoping it would once again blink as he went about the lucrative business of destruction.
“There’s smoke in the cabin. Elevated CA 19-9 and CA 125 levels. LH2 pressure’s dropping. Terra nos respuet. ”
Annie feels her book about to slip off her lap, catches it just in the nick of time. She blinks once or twice, completely out of sorts, guessing she’d sunk into a light sleep while reading on her sofa.
She had been reading, hadn’t she?
She readjusts the book and glances up at the man standing in front of her, the man whose voice startled her from her doze. In his midfifties, he has reddish-brown hair, a full mustache, and is wearing a white doctor’s frock. Phil Lieberman, she thinks. The oncologist who has taken over her husband’s case, not exactly the type to make house calls. She wonders what he’s doing in her living room, wonders whether one of the kids might have let him in the door... but then suddenly realizes that this isn’t her living room after all, isn’t even part of her home, and that the children are nowhere around her.
She straightens, blinks again, rubs her eyes.
The chair on which she is sitting is contoured plastic. The air has a recycled quality and carries commingled antiseptic and medicinal smells. The walls are an institutional noncolor.
It abruptly dawns on her that she is in the hospital.
In the hospital, in the third-floor waiting room that has become so numbingly familiar over these past few months, and where she must have dropped off like a stone with an open book on her lap. The hospital, of course. However strange it might ordinarily seem for her to have forgotten, these are far from ordinary days, and her brief disorientation is understandable in view of what’s been happening in her life. She has gone for weeks with precious little rest, rushing from her husband’s bedside to her training sessions at the Center and back again, trying not to neglect the kids amid her compounding pressures. It would not be the first time lately that the effort of keeping everything together has caught up to her without warning.
Looking at the doctor, she begins fidgeting nervously with the edges of the book—actually, she sees now, it is a magazine, a dog-eared copy of Newsweek with a featured piece about upcoming space shuttle launches connected with the ISS program—the magazine, then, that is spread across her thighs. The doctor’s expression is unrevealing, his voice without intonation, but there is a sobriety in his eyes that sends a cold, silent shiver running through her.
“Like the old Titan rockets,” he says. “Third stage fires, you’re up and out. ”
“What?” she says. “What was it you—”
“Mark’s latest tests, we need to discuss their results, ” he interrupts with the kind of patronizing abruptness medical professionals seem to take as their right, an exalted privilege bestowed on them the moment they recite the Hippocratic Oath. It is as though even the ones capable of showing some compassion—and Annie acknowledges that Lieberman has, by and large, been decent with her—must insist on reminding you they have other patients, other cases, more urgent demands than having to explain their findings.
“Laparoscopic exam revealed metastic tumors in the liver and gallbladder,” he says rapidly. “Statistically common once the disease has spread from the intestine to so many of its associated lymph nodes. Would have had a better chance with three lymphomas, but five is quite a bad crop. Very, very unfortunate. ”
Annie sits very still as she listens, but can feel herself crumbling from the inside out, truly crumbling, as if her soul is made of brittle, hundred-year-old plaster. She gives him a decimated look.
“He’ll be gone in five months,” she says, the absolute certainty behind those words filling her with horror and bewilderment. She feels weirdly detached from the sound of her own voice, almost as if she hasn’t really spoken at all, but is listening to a tape recording of herself, or maybe even some flawless impersonation issuing from a concealed intercom.
Dr. Lieberman regards her a moment in that serious yet matter-of-fact way of his. Then he shrugs his sleeve back from his wristwatch, glances down at it, and holds it out to her, turning his arm to display the dial.
“Yes, five months, three days, to be precise,” he says. “We’re on the fast track now. Time runs by until there’s none left. ”
Perplexed by his comment, Annie looks at the watch.
Her eyes quickly grow enormous.
Its face is a blank white circle. Perfectly featureless, without digits, hands, or markings of any kind.
She feels another chunk of herself give way.
Blank.
The face of the watch is blank.
“Stay calm, Annie, it tends to run a bit ahead,” Lieberman says. “There’s still a chance for you to say good-bye. ”
Annie suddenly finds herself out of her chair, and this time makes no attempt to catch her magazine as it spills off her thighs, landing on the floor at her feet. From the corner of her eye, she sees that the cover, which has partially folded under one of the interior pages, consists of a photo of a shuttle and launch tower consumed by a roiling ball of flame. Its bold red copy—also less than altogether visible from where she stands—screams something about an explosion involving Orion, one of the mid-schedule ISS assembly flights.
Confusion churns within her. How can this be? Orion’s mission is still a couple of years off, and besides, the article had been an overview of the ISS program... at least she’d thought it had ...
All at once Annie isn’t sure she remembers, just as
she’d initially been unable to remember being at the hospital. Her memory seems a flat, slippery surface without depth or width.
“Your husband is in Room 377. But you already know that, you’ve been there before,” Dr. Lieberman is saying. He gestures toward the far end of the corridor. “Not often enough, perhaps, although I’m no one to talk. We’re both busy professionals. ”
Annie watches Lieberman turn in the opposite direction, her eyes following him as he starts up the hall. While his voice had remained neutral, that last remark had been superloaded with accusation, and she is unwilling to let it pass. He might think it is his God-given prerogative to relate his test results without climbing down off his perch to tell her what he means to do about them, but if there is some criticism he wants to level at her, then he damn well ought to be saying it in plain English.
She starts to call out to him, but before she can utter a sound, Lieberman pauses and looks back at her, giving her a thumbs-up.
“Turnips first and always,” he says, and grins. “I’d advise you to hurry. ”
Then he tips her a little salute and hustles up the hall, dwindling in perspective like a motion picture character about to vanish over the horizon.
I’d advise you to hurry.
Her heart stroking in her chest, she forgets about Lieberman and whirls toward the room in which her husband lies dying.
In instant later Annie is standing at its door. Breathless, she feels like she’s come running over to it at full tilt, yet has no sense of her legs having carried her from the waiting room, of physically moving from point A to point B, of transition. It is as if she’d been staring at Lieberman’s back one moment, and found herself here in front of the door the next, trying to stop herself from falling to pieces in spite of the death sentence that has been pronounced upon her husband.
For his sake, trying to hold up.
She takes a deep gulp of air, another. Then she reaches for the doorknob, turns it, and steps through into the room.
The light inside is all wrong.
Odd as it may be for her to register this before anything else, it is nevertheless what happens. The light is wrong. Not exactly dim, but diffuse enough to severely limit her vision. Although she can see the foot of her husband’s bed without any problem, things start to blur immediately beyond it. As if through a layer of gauze, she sees the tubes, fluid drains, and monitor wires that run to the bed, sees the outline of Mark’s legs under the blankets, sees that he is resting on his back, but his face...
She thinks suddenly of those televised news reports in which someone’s features are concealed to protect his or her anonymity, the sort that might involve use of a hidden camera, or show crime suspects being led toward their arraignments by the police. Pictures in which it almost looks as if Vaseline has been dabbed over the part of the frame in which the person’s face ought to appear.
That is how Annie sees her husband from the doorway of Room 377 in the hospital where he will die of cancer in five months and three days. Five months, three days that have somehow collapsed into a dreadful and inexplicable now.
“Annie?”
Mark’s voice is a hoarse whisper. Its weakness shakes Annie, and for an instant she thinks she is going to burst into tears. She covers her trembling lips with her palm.
“Annie, that you?”
She stands there, trying to regain her composure, the room silent except for the quiet beeping of the instruments at Mark’s bedside. The fuzziness of the light makes her feel strangely lost and isolated, like a small boat adrift in fog.
Finally she lowers her hand from her mouth.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s me, hon. I’m here. ”
He slips his right arm partially out from under his blankets and beckons her with a feeble wave. His face is still a blur, but she has no difficulty seeing the gesture.
Her eyes fall briefly on the sleeve of his pajama.
“Come over here, Annie, ” he says. “Hard to talk when you’re standing there by the door. ”
She steps forward into the room. His sleeve. Something about it isn’t right, something about the color of it—
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” he says. Pulling his arm further out from underneath his blankets and tapping the safety rail of his bed. “You belong with me. ”
There is a harshness in Mark’s voice, an anger that has become huge within him in recent days—but although Annie often brushes up against its sharp outer edges, she is aware that the cancer is its real target. In the beginning it had flared up from beneath the surface only on occasion, but its progression has matched that of the disease, consuming him, ravaging his personality. He is resentful of his loss of independence, resentful of his inability to care for himself, resentful of his neediness ... and beyond all else resentful of having his future stolen from him by something as insipid and indiscriminate as an uncontrollable growth of cells. Annie has come to accept those feelings as constants that she is helpless to relieve, and can only hope to skirt past on delicate tiptoes.
She wades through the filmy light toward her husband. His IV stand and the wall of beeping instruments are on the left side of the bed, so she walks around its foot to the right and rolls back his plastic hospital tray in order to approach him.
Suddenly his hand reaches over the safety rail and clutches her wrist.
“Give it to us, Annie, ” he says. “Let’s hear how sorry you are. ”
She stands there in shock as his fingers press into her with impossible strength.
“We trusted you,” he says.
His fingers are digging deeper into the soft white flesh under her wrist, hurting her now. Though Annie knows they will leave bruises, she does not attempt to pull away. She looks at Mark across the bed, wishing she could see his face, mystified by his words. Their hostility is more intense, more cuttingly directed at her than at any time in the past, but she can’t understand why.
“Mark, please, tell me what you mean—”
“My girl,” he breaks in. “Always in a hurry, rushing from one place to another without a look back. ”
She winces as his grip tightens.
Us. We.
Who can he be talking about? Himself and the kids?
Annie can scarcely guess.
No, that isn’t the truth. Not really.
The simple, inescapable truth is that she’s afraid to guess.
His grip tightens.
She wishes she could see his face.
“You were supposed to be responsible. Supposed to look out for us, ” he says.
Annie still doesn’t pull away, absolutely refuses to pull away. Instead she moves closer to him, pressing up against the bed rail, thinking if she could just see his face, if they could just see each other eye-to-eye, he would stop this nonsense about her leaving him—
The thought is abruptly clipped short as her eyes once again fall on his sleeve. The color, yes, the color, how had she failed to identify it right away? She doesn’t know the answer, but realizes now that what he’s wearing isn’t a pajama, its carrot-red color and heavy padded fabric marking it as, of all things, all impossible things under the sun, a NASA flight/reentry suit. At the same instant this occurs to her, the quiet beep of the instruments measuring her husband’s vital functions pitches up to a shrill alarm, an earsplitting sound she recognizes from some other place, some other when.
It is a sound that makes her gasp with horror.
The faceless man in the bed is shouting at her at the top of his voice: “H2 pressure’s dropping! Look for yourself! Check the readings!”
On impulse, Annie shoots her gaze over to the right side of the bed, recognizes the forward consoles of a space shuttle where she had seen hospital instruments only moments before. For some reason this causes her little surprise. She takes in the various panels with a series of hurried glances, her eyes leaping from the master alarm lights to the smoke-detection indicators on the left-hand panel of the commander’s console, and then over
to the main engine status displays below the center CRT.
Again, what she sees is not unexpected.
“Stay calm, Annie, we’re on the fast track now! Better reach for that ejection lever or nobody’s making it home!” the man in the bed practically howls, and then wrenches her arm with such violence that she stumbles off balance and crashes forward against the rail. She flies across it, whimpering, throwing out her free hand to check her fall. It lands on the mattress beside him, preventing her from sprawling clear across his chest.
“The world spits us up and out, so where’s our goddamned parachute?”
He keeps holding onto her right arm, keeps shouting at Annie as she braces herself up over him with her left. Though their faces are just inches apart, his features are still too distorted for her to make them out.
Then, suddenly, the sense of disconnection she had experienced in the waiting room recurs for a fleeting moment, only now it is as if she’s been split in two, part of her watching the scene from high above while the other struggles with the man on the bed. And with this feeling comes the whole and certain knowledge that his face would not belong to her husband if she could see it; no, not her husband, but someone else she has loved in a very different way, loved and lost. Annie doesn’t understand how she knows, but she does, she does, and the knowledge terrifies her, seeming to rise on the crest of a building hysteria.
“Where’s our goddamned parachute?” he shouts again, and yanks hard at her wrist, pulling her down onto himself. As she finally tries to break away, Annie catches another glimpse of his clutching fingers ... and sees for the first time that they are horribly burned, the fingernails gone, the outer layer of skin sloughing off the knuckles, baring raw, strawberry-red flesh underneath.
Shadow Watch (1999) Page 5