“Mines,” I said over the radio.
Jihoon sounded shocked. “What?”
“Mines. They mined the road. Look sharp, and move up quickly. Whatever you do, don’t stop until we hit the tree line.”
Things were clicking again, making me smile with the feeling of being in my element. The APCs that survived whined as they turned off the road, crashing down the dike face in front of us at the same time their autocannons and plasma guns opened up. Jihoon and I sprinted behind them, trying our best to use their hulls as cover. The vehicles blocked our view of much of the way ahead, but between them we saw the flashes of expanding plasma, which ignited dangling tree branches into long torches and crisped anything on the ground. Tracers from the APCs also rocketed downrange, chewing up the dirt in small puffs. It was hard to keep track of time during that advance, but when the APCs reached the far dike, they stopped, and by then I noticed that sweat had soaked through my undersuit, suggesting we’d been running for at least a few minutes.
The embankment, on top of which the trees burned, was steeper than the one supporting the road, and the APCs couldn’t climb it. They idled there—a pack of frustrated tigers.
“Tell them we’re moving up,” I said to Jihoon; there was no way I’d sit in the open for another second. “And make sure those asshats don’t shoot at us.” And I started up the slope, not waiting for Jihoon to let me know it was OK.
The trees crackled overhead, and one of them fell next to me, crashing to the ground and sending up a cloud of sparks. Two bodies had been charred. At first it was difficult to tell the difference between them and the scorched grass, but the remains of a rocket launcher rested between them, suggesting the Thai APC gunners had targeted the right location. I stayed down. Jihoon crawled up next to me, pointed right, and I nodded; we split up, moving in separate directions through the smoldering underbrush.
A figure jumped up in front of me but then vanished into the brush. I’d chosen to head back in the direction of the road and had passed out of the burning zone into an area of dense grass, so by the time I lurched to my knees, he was gone and only the sound of crashing brush came from the far slope. I stood and ran. The adrenaline was kicking in now, and I heard the sound of my breathing as my feet slipped over the edge, sending me into a downslope slide to land in the far field. From there I saw the bridge to my left about ten meters away. It was quiet again. I moved toward the road, and stands of sawgrass swayed in a stiff breeze as my carbine rose so I could tuck it into my shoulder, the sighting reticle flashing onto my goggles, and a sense of satisfaction crept through my gut; the guy couldn’t be far. At the same instant, a group of men broke cover to my right; I reported the contact and fired as they fled, not stopping until the last one dropped in a spray of blood, my fléchettes kicking sparks when they passed through ceramic armor. The whole thing took a few seconds from start to finish.
After an action ended, you sensed it—a letting out of pressure as if you were an overinflated balloon that had been on the verge of popping but now could relax, and you didn’t know the pressure had been there until it was gone. My legs burned from all the running, and when Jihoon showed up, sliding down the bank to my right, they felt on the verge of giving out. Killing had filled my head with fog, and I sensed rather than heard him say something until I had to shake my head clear, waiting for the buzzing to leave.
“I said,” Ji was yelling, “are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Six KIA. Come on.”
We followed the beaten grass until we had found and counted all the bodies. Jihoon radioed it in. We couldn’t see them, but behind us we heard the APCs resume their drive, turning around and climbing back up the dike and onto the road.
Ji stood over one of the dead. “You shot him through the head. Clean.”
I nodded. “Burmese.”
“How can you tell?”
“Chinese armor. This is the stuff they used in the Asian Wars, way obsolete, and no chameleon skin. Burmese infiltrators.”
Ji stooped and removed the guy’s helmet but dropped it when brains and blood slid out, spilling over the ground and making the grass bright red. He turned, fumbling for his locking ring. By the time he got his own helmet off, Ji was heaving and threw up into the bush to leave a little of himself in Thailand, and I understood because it was a normal reaction that everyone had when faced with the reality of what lived inside their skulls. When he finished, I picked up his helmet for him.
“Different from the simulators, I guess, and let me warn you; that won’t be the last time you puke. Come on. We have to see how many vehicles are left on the road and get our packs.”
Jihoon caught up with me and pushed his hood off, so it hung from the back by its wires. “Where’d you get your armor, Bug?”
“I had it custom made. Once you get the rhythm of all this, you should do the same. Think about what features might help you do your job, and get the armorers to put it all together.”
“Why does your helmet look that way, all elongated?”
I reached up, running my gauntlet along the extended snout, wondering why I hadn’t just asked to have a standard suit sent since there wouldn’t be any reason to use my add-ons, and told him what it was for.
“Jesus,” he said. “Now I know why they call you Bug.”
“Now you know it all, Chong.”
We got back to the road to find a crowd of pissed-off Thais. Jihoon spoke for about five minutes with the convoy commander while I walked through the wreckage, staring at the two-meter craters that had appeared where once there was blacktop. It could have been worse. When I’d seen the mines go off, it looked as though the entire line of vehicles had blown, but in reality the Burmese got about ten trucks and three APCs, which the Thais were now pushing off the road and down into the fields. A couple of the men cried; soot covered their faces, and the tears cleaned off narrow lines from their cheeks so that it looked as if the Thais, in reality, had black faces and had smeared on thin, ruddy lines of makeup. Their presence made everything surreal—a troop of crazy clowns that had popped into the war for a pantomime.
Jihoon tapped me on the shoulder, yanking me from my thoughts while handing me my pack. “The Thais are going after the locals.”
“Good.”
“Good? What if they kill them all?”
I shook my head and ran a gauntlet through my hair, which had matted with sweat, and when I pulled my hand off saw that water had mixed with soot from the burning vehicles to turn the gauntlet gray.
“How do you think the Burmese operated here, Chong, this far inside Thailand? We’re barely outside the Bangkok urban zone. I don’t know, maybe the whole area is sympathetic to the Burmese. Maybe they’re all Chinese immigrants from the war or Japanese. Maybe they’re Korean.”
“That’s a load of crap,” Jihoon said. “We have to do something. These guys are ready to go round up every person in town and execute them.”
This was getting out of hand, and if Ji had taken the time to look around, he’d have seen that we were the only two Americans for miles. “Shut up and listen. You will do nothing. Just stand there, and let the Thais do whatever it is angry soldiers do in this crappy little country because you don’t know shit. I do. I’ve been here. If you get in the way and try to be some kind of hero, these guys will take your head off and piss into your neck before you’re half-dead. They don’t fight like we do, Chong.”
Ji clenched his carbine in both fists and turned around to watch as the soldiers in the convoy, escorted by one of the APCs, jogged toward the town. The APC pushed the broken-down truck off the bridge. When they reached the other side, the road sloped downward and we lost sight of them, the last thing visible a radio antenna that swayed with the motion of its vehicle.
“This is shit,” Ji said.
“Yeah. But you signed up for it. Sometimes, in this job all you can do is stand back and watch, stand back and take it because the mission is what matters and you never do anything to jeopardize it
. We’re all alone here, Chong, and nobody will help you if these guys decide you’re a liability. Think about that.”
I was sorry for him. He didn’t realize that from here on out it would get worse and that the closer we got to the mountains and their jungle it would get crazier, the insanity ramping upward until he’d have to accept the fact that there wasn’t any limit to what could happen in the bush. The jungle’s canopy was impenetrable. Dark. It gave men the feeling that no matter what they did, nobody would ever see a thing, but I knew that idea was wrong; the jungle saw it. The bush had its own mind and marked the players, put an indelible stamp on their souls so they’d wake up in the night and swear that the shadows were out to get them. Now that we had moved out of the city, it was on the wind, and I broke into a sweat, hating the fact that we were headed to another place I swore never to see again and that soon, whether he wanted it or not, Ji would change forever. The funny thing was that he wanted this life and had volunteered for it; we all had. There were no saints on the road that day, no saints in all of Thailand maybe, and if he wanted to make it out alive, Jihoon would have to armor his brain with an excess dose of the fuck its so that none of it would make any difference. And he’d have to do it soon.
Maybe that’s why I cared so much about Phillip; they’d tried to steal his right to choose: saint or anti-saint.
The sun nailed itself overhead when we passed through the town. I refused to look at the signs on buildings because I didn’t want to remember the place’s name, and that was because the Thais had snatched the mayor and his wife and strung them up by their necks. We passed them along the main road, a pair of corpses that swung in the breeze, their empty eyes looking through me, and already the heat had started the swelling so their faces were bloated and gray. Although they couldn’t have stunk yet, I held my nose shut until the APC turned a corner. Finally they were out of sight. But you knew that they saw through the walls of the town’s buildings and followed you with the X-ray vision of the dead, a stare that ripped your skin off until they saw your heart and laughed without twitching a muscle.
Jihoon wasn’t talking. That was fine with me because there was a lot to think about, and after we cruised through the town, the convoy made good speed, driving for at least two hours until we hit a city, the first one outside Bangkok that we’d seen. The convoy slowed and pulled over into a huge bus station. One by one the remaining tankers lined up, and the other trucks and APCs refueled while a platoon of Thai soldiers formed a perimeter to stand guard.
“I’m hungry,” said Jihoon. We had jumped off the vehicle to stretch our legs, and I rested the carbine behind my neck, hanging both hands over either end like a yoke.
“Don’t eat the local food. Stick to your ration packs, or you’ll have problems pushing solid waste out your port.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Ji looked uncomfortable and pale, and I started laughing. “When was the last time you wore a suit?”
“This is the first time in a few months. Does your ass always itch like this?”
“Always.” I nodded. “It takes awhile to get used to the waste tubes. Drink plenty of water, and do yourself a favor and give yourself the trots.”
“How?”
I unsnapped a pouch and pulled out a plastic bottle, tossing it to him. “Take a swig of this. In an hour, take another swig.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Trooper’s best friend: castor oil. I got a bunch from the motor pool back in Florida a while ago and never travel without it. The problem is that I can’t take a solid dump anymore.”
“You didn’t need to explain all of that.”
His expression made it look as though Jihoon would vomit again, but he swallowed a dose and then sat beneath the shade of a palm tree, laying his carbine down and pulling both knees up to his chest. It didn’t matter how tough you were. The suits reduced even the hardest to crying babies during their first couple of days—from feeling confined and not being able to itch the hundreds of spots that you’d forgotten existed. Claustrophobia came later. The helmet wrapped you in its ceramic, and once you couldn’t run a hand through your hair, it started to make you wonder if the world existed, and the fact that you couldn’t see in your periphery or turn to look behind you stuck a pin in some guys. Most people would look at me in the States and wonder how I could stand the fighting—the chance of dying. But those weren’t the toughest things for me. Things like having to deal with the suit made them pale in comparison because you saw combat every once in a while, but the suit was with you every day, even when you slept.
“What’s the longest you’ve gone in a suit?” Jihoon asked.
“Without a break?”
“Yeah.”
“Four months.” I’d pulled out my bourbon and drank some, wishing that I could get drunk, but I wasn’t that stupid. Out there, I might need to be wired at any minute. “It was early in the Subterrene War in Kazakhstan, when they weren’t sure how to use us, so I got attached as a forward artillery observer to some line outfit.”
Ji nodded. “How many fire missions did you call in?”
“None.”
“None?”
“None. For Christ’s sake, we were over a kilometer underground in a freaking tunnel near the main mining area, so what was there to observe? That’s logic for you. Put me in as a forward observer to call in artillery for an underground unit.”
The whistles blew, and Jihoon picked himself up. He walked bent over, like an old man, and I grabbed his weapon for him, removing the fléchette hopper from his shoulder when something started bothering me; my antennae were up. Over the noise of the vehicles, I heard Thai soldiers speaking loudly, hurriedly, and then noticed that some pointed down the road to the north where a line of vehicles approached from the opposite direction.
“Put your hood and helmet on,” I said.
Jihoon moved slowly, and I tossed our weapons onto the APC so I could free my hands to put my helmet on too. We had just finished when the first vehicle crept by.
Four satos sat in an open scout car. All wore Thai combat armor, which they had painted in different patterns with bright colors, and one of them had put black-and-yellow stripes on her gear to channel some kind of construction warning sign, but it got your attention. These ones didn’t want to blend in with the jungle. All of them had short hair dyed in crazy colors as if someone had replaced the hair fibers with tiny neon tubes that glowed even in the daytime, and it was all so distracting, I almost failed to notice that the girls didn’t even bother to glance our way, leaving me with the sense they had already judged our column as insignificant. It made me angry; they didn’t know who I was or what I’d been doing for the last several years. I put my hand on my carbine as I climbed back onto the APC deck, wishing I could lift it and open fire, get a clean shot at them from the back as they lumbered away.
Behind the scout car was a string of four trucks, each one filled with soldiers who had made themselves up in ways similar to the girls, but these were men. Some of them looked Thai. Others had the paler features of Japanese and stared at me blankly, and one had a white bandage wrapped around his head with red blood that had seeped down his face while he smoked. The man smiled. A few of them shouted things at our convoy, and I nudged Jihoon.
“They’re insulting us,” he explained. “Loosely translated, they’re calling the regular Thai Army a bunch of lost little girls.”
“I’ve heard worse,” I said.
“They’re speaking Japanese. I’d say most of those guys were Japanese.”
“Gra Jaai. Looks like we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Yeah,” said Jihoon. “Right.”
The trucks wound their way through the town and disappeared in a cloud of exhaust that blended into the day’s haze at the same time our APC lurched forward. Jihoon lay down on his back, not bothering to take his helmet off.
“How much farther to the mountains?” he asked.
I pulled my helmet
and hood off, sticking a cigarette in my mouth but was too tired to light it. “Tomorrow. We should get there by tomorrow.”
The convoy crawled northward at about thirty kilometers an hour, just fast enough to get a nice breeze but slow enough that we knew we’d be spending the night on the road. We passed towns that were so poor that at some point I stopped looking; there were only so many crumbling structures and water buffalo that you could notice without yawning. Then the towns disappeared for a while, to be replaced by tiny villages dwarfed by huge fields that stretched from horizon to horizon, the green of their crops making me grin with the realization that I was free. Out here there was no Assurance, no microphones hidden in the rice paddies, and it had been some time since I’d seen any surveillance cameras. Progress, I decided, was overrated. Although the average Thai farmer would trade places with me for a chance to live in the States, how long would it be before he got sick of having the government watch his every move and how long would it take him to go crazy wondering if tomorrow he’d do something wrong and bring the full focus of the BAI on his life, their sole mission to build a case against him—whether one existed or not? It hadn’t been reasonable to blame Ji for the Assurance program or the semi-awares; but the hatred returned nonetheless, and I shook my head, trying to clear it.
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 14