A gray hair clung to the inside of my vision hood. I pinched it between two fingers and stared at the thing, wondering how it had gotten there and where it had come from, the recognition of what it was making me feel older and giving me phantom pains in my back until I sucked at the bottle, draining it of bourbon and throwing it from the APC into an empty field. To be in my thirties shouldn’t be this horrific, I figured; how many people my age could point at all the things I’d done and come close to measuring up with their life? Then again, how many people could I tell about what I’d done? None. The depression of having now seen my life from the perspective of near middle age slammed into my brain with the force of a pickup truck, machine-gunning me with questions and doubt, and at the top of my list was the fact that I had no idea what I was doing there. This was a young man’s job for guys like Jihoon. The Asian Wars had lit up when North Korea and China teamed against South Korea, at which point mutual defense treaties kicked in to force Japan, Russia, America, and about half of Taiwan to Seoul’s defense, just to have more nukes than we could stomach tossed our way. Japan was gone. Taiwan was half-radioactive, the other half cratered beyond recognition when China used its space-based kinetics. So what did we do? We repopulated and went straight to war again in Kazakhstan, this time for rhenium and every other trace metal we could find, this time against our former allies, the Russians, who also had a thirst for resources. And now China was back. We were down in population, not reconstituted for war, and yet war had reconstituted for us whether we wanted it or not.
Old age was a hell of a thing, I thought, because it made you see—not what you hoped or what you wanted, but how it was. The US wouldn’t be coming to Thailand’s aid any time soon. Moscow now belonged to the Chinese, who had attacked Russia en masse after we weakened them in Kaz, and what Japanese were left had decided to follow a bunch of psychopathic genetic soldiers trying to make their own death wish come true via the Gra Jaai. And the Koreans? Well, I figured, that’s what we are here for—to find out what the hell they are doing. It was funny, though, that we had to go to Thailand to find out what Unified Korea had up its sleeve. It all stunk to hell, and I was too old for any of it.
Jihoon raised himself on his elbows at the same instant I smelled something foul, the sign that his waste port had opened and sent its filth to spill on the APC deck. I moved away and waved the air in front of my nose.
“Jesus, Chong. Next time ask for a bathroom break.”
He pulled his helmet off, grinning. “I feel a hell of a lot better; the castor oil worked. What time is it?”
“I have no idea.” The sun had started to approach the mountains in the west, and the eastern horizon had turned a deep purplish color that I had forgotten about; it had been so long that the sight left me speechless for a second, hypnotized by the colors. “I’d say almost five, but I’m too tired to put my hood on and check the chronometer.”
Jihoon nodded and gestured for a cigarette. I lit it for him.
“What’s it going to be like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Out there.” He gestured toward the northwest, and my gut churned when I realized that I hadn’t factored in their significance when I’d looked at the sun: mountains. We were getting closer now, and tomorrow I’d be back inside. Hidden from the scrutiny of civilization under a green blanket, where death and I had become first cousins.
“It’s going to be rough. You know as much as I do, though, and I have no idea if the Thais have borers. Don’t know if we’ll be above-or belowground.”
We ducked at the sound of an explosion and had to look around since it wasn’t clear where the blast had come from. A small black cloud rose from far in front of us. Then a second detonation made the APC vibrate, and those damned whistles sounded until the convoy ground to a halt so all the Thai soldiers could jump down and spread out, and we got clear of our vehicle before it veered off the road, repeating the maneuver it had made at the ambush. It crashed down an embankment and disappeared.
Jihoon was about to sprint after them, but I grabbed his arm. “Stay put for this one. Have a cigarette.”
“There’s a lot of chatter over the radio. Another group of infiltrators; Thai troops from the town ahead of us have encircled Burmese saboteurs and are asking us for the convoy’s help.”
“So?” I asked. “Then the Thai boys can handle it, and we’ll stay here with the trucks. We’re close to the mountains here, Chong.” I pointed west. “Out there is the bush. You’ll get plenty of action once we’re in, and I bet you can’t even feel it yet.”
“Feel what?”
“Eyes. The jungle has ’em, sure as shit. And right now they’re watching us, waiting for a taste of our spines, so you don’t want to go and get killed or wounded now because it wouldn’t do to leave the bush hungry. That wouldn’t do at all.”
Jihoon just stared at me, probably thinking I was crazy. And maybe I was. But as the sun winked out of sight, you saw the mountains outlined, a long jagged line of black with a tinge of green at the edges that fooled you into thinking they were the only mountains around, but they weren’t. These were part of a network—a wide and branching web of the earth’s veins, with its heart in the Himalayas—a silent organism with the patience of an entire planet and that hated us, hated me. And we’d be in its grip soon enough.
To our north the explosions continued, punctuated by plasma flashes and crackling fléchettes, until they died out so we could hear the bugs. They filled the air with a humming kind of music. Mosquitoes buzzed my ears, and I pulled on my vision hood, then buckled my helmet around my skull, finishing by sliding the locking ring in place to get a seal before I powered up my girl’s systems one at a time.
“Kristen.”
The computer hummed to life. “It’s been several months since last we spoke, Lieutenant. Congratulations on your promotion. Systems are all nominal, and records indicate that I had routine maintenance less than one week ago. New hardware detected.”
“What?” I asked. Nothing should have changed. “What new hardware?”
“Standard tracking device, burst transmitting on random frequencies.”
“Can you deactivate it?”
She sounded amused. “Of course, Lieutenant.”
“Call me Bug, Kristen. Do it. Deactivate the hardware.”
A second later she chimed, “Hardware deactivated. Was there anything else, Bug?”
“Yeah.” Jihoon had started talking, and I held up my hand to shut him up for a second. “Geography. Given our current location, I’ll need to know how long it will take to get to a place called Nu Poe, near the Burmese border to our west.”
“One moment.” Kristen went silent and then came back immediately, a light green map opening on my heads-up with a red line tracing a path. “Your current location is the town of Mae Poen, and straight line distance to Nu Poe is approximately fifty-three miles. Road distance is 133 miles, which factors in elevation changes in the Thai Highlands.”
“Thanks, Kristen. And can you do real-time translation of Thai and Burmese into English?”
“Of course, Bug. And as we did in Kazakhstan with Russian, I can route my voice to output speakers and relay your English answers into those languages.”
I sighed, grateful that on the line I wouldn’t have to rely on Jihoon to understand what people were saying. “One last thing: scan the guy wearing type-ninety-seven armor next to me, look for tracking devices or any anomalous transmissions.”
“Of course.” She did it and chimed back in, “An identical tracking device located at the base of his backpack unit in the fuel cell compartment.”
“Thanks. Go ahead and power down. And Kristen?”
“Yes, Bug?”
“You are so damn sexy.”
“Thank you.”
I nearly lost it while ripping my helmet off and then yanked the hood from my head, spitting once my mouth had cleared. “Assholes.”
“What’s wrong?” Ji asked.
&n
bsp; “Data. Information. It’s all those pencil-necked bean counters care about, Chong, all they freakin’ know, and so it’s not enough that they bug our houses. Now they have to bug our suits.” He said he still didn’t get it, and I explained what Kristen had told me, making him turn so I could dig the thing from his backpack and toss it into the field.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jihoon. “I don’t care if they know where we are or not, and besides”—he pointed northward—“it sounds like the APCs are on their way back, and it’s getting dark.”
He was right. I’d forgotten so many things about Thailand that it made me wonder if my mind really was starting to slip because once the sun dipped under the mountains that was it. Night came almost immediately afterward. Ahead we saw the flickering lights of a town, which lit the valley in a yellow glow and glittered with the colors of neon signs. It was almost surreal. A moment ago, a firefight had raged to the town’s south, and even now the fires still burned in fields, with flames that leaped upward in orange flashes. But the neon made everything happy.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’d see whether I was too old for this kind of op or not.
We drove toward the jungle just before sunrise. A dirt road wound its way through the hills outside town, where we saw a long line of Thai observation bunkers spaced a few hundred meters apart and strung together with multiple rows of bots whose autocannons pointed northwest toward the Highlands. The bots were ruthless. Concrete mushroom caps equipped with infrared cameras, motion sensors, and shape detectors, they would pop up at the first sign of a living organism and check for a friendly response from anyone or anything approaching. If you were supposed to be there, your suit computer would ping the appropriate encrypted response. If you weren’t supposed to be there, they’d open fire. Their presence meant that somewhere below us were underground tunnels where the bots’ ammunition was stored and where Thai soldiers would live, in tunnel fortifications that had been prepared as a second line of defense against invasion from Burma, and I was glad to not be going down into the deep.
When we reached the checkpoints through the bunker line, a group of Thai boys scurried around the vehicles and yelled at the troops or drivers, until they caught sight of me and Jihoon; then the entire lot converged around the slow-moving APC, so reckless that I thought one or two might get sucked under one of the huge wheels. They laughed and pointed.
“Hey, American, got money?” one cried. This set off a chorus of different efforts.
“Candy? You got candy?”
One of them slapped two fingers against his lips. “Smoke?”
“Sure,” I said. I dug a pack from my pouches and ripped it open so the cigarettes spilled into my hand, then threw them as hard as I could, watching the kids run up to the edge of the safe zone, which had been marked by a series of yellow stakes. Some of the cigarettes landed beyond. You saw their little minds working at the problem, thinking that if they moved fast enough or slow enough or stayed low or jumped high, maybe they could get the cigarettes and dash back to safety before any bots opened fire.
“Number one,” I yelled. “American cigarette, number one. Burmese, number ten, right?”
And we were through the checkpoint without even having to stop, without having even seen anyone manning the guard stations. Only those kids existed. And to them, a few cigarettes were just as good as bhat and could make anything happen, would give them something to trade back in town and render everything greasy and paved, so that within ten minutes, after the bunkers spat us onto the other side, I smiled. In that moment I was happy; the kids had reminded me of Phillip, and Ji scowled at me—either for giving cigarettes to the kids or for sending them so close to the bot field—but I figured to hell with him, because those kids didn’t care that they weren’t old enough to smoke, and if they decided not to trade them, but to light up for themselves, so what? Smoking was the least harmful thing to them in this place, and maybe they needed cigarettes more than I did.
But the happiness didn’t last long. Our line of vehicles crept upward along the road, weaving its way through boulders and elephant grass, and then we climbed a steep hill. Once we crested it, the jungle spread out before us, an endless rampart of dark and light greens so that it made me wonder if my goggles had somehow been filtered, letting nothing in except green, a color that made my stomach churn and wish we were back in Bangkok. Each moment brought me closer, the jungle looming larger. I looked for signs of life, like birds or monkeys, and then listened for any sounds that might suggest the jungle wasn’t a crypt and that at least some animals could exist in such a place, but the one sound I heard was of engines growling, struggling to make it up the road, which had gotten steeper.
Jihoon pulled his camera out again and started snapping pictures.
“Amazing,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I opened another bottle. “I have.”
“How do you even fight in that stuff, Bug? I mean we simulated jungle warfare, but this is insane. It’s so thick you can’t see ten feet.”
“It’s so thick,” I started, but the first bourbon of the morning burned my throat and mouth, making me pause before finishing my thought. “That you can’t see the guy walking in front of you, even if you’re marching crotch to ass.”
“What are those?” Jihoon asked.
I looked where he pointed and saw a series of poles arranged in random fashion on either side of the road but couldn’t bring them into focus until I’d pulled my vision hood on. The goggles zoomed in. Each pole held a corpse in varying stages of decomposition, some new and some already bare skeletons that had started to fall apart at their joints, and at the top of each, a sign in Thai had been painted on a wooden plank.
Jihoon had also pulled his hood on. “The signs say that ‘no man or woman can come further unless their souls are prepared.’ ”
I shook my head and took another drink. “Satos.”
“What’s it supposed to mean?”
“That we’re getting close. But not close enough to button up. I’m not sure if we’ll get there by tonight or not, but I’d hate to have to spend a night in the open, in the jungle, and I’d bet these guys feel the same way. I just hope they don’t drive off the road in a hurry to get us to Nu Poe before sunset.”
Jihoon lifted his carbine and checked its power level. “I’m beginning to see what you meant, Bug. About the jungle.”
“What about it?”
“It’s spooky.”
“That it is, Chong,” I said, taking another swig. “That it is.”
The road snaked toward the bush through the rows of bodies until at last it hit the first trees and took us inside, and I glanced once over my shoulder, back into Thailand, to see the hole we had entered disappear around a bend at the same time the light dimmed, huge trees blocking every part of the sky. The bush made you feel abandoned, cut off, like someone had just slammed and locked the door behind you. It was dead quiet. Leaves absorbed the engine sounds and made it feel as though everything was muffled, and the air became heavier now that the trees blocked any breeze, so that climate control could barely keep the heat out, and I began to feel as though there wasn’t any air, that we had just entered an underwater nightmare. I lifted my carbine and shook it, making sure the fléchettes ran free in their flexi. Then I adjusted my hood to make sure it was snug and buckled my helmet on. Jihoon noticed and did the same. The troop truck in front of us had been packed with Thai soldiers, and without having seen us, the Thais also helmeted up or sealed their battle suits’ hoods tight around their shoulders before they all rested their weapons on the truck sides, pointing them outward.
“Is anything wrong?” Jihoon asked, his voice sounding loud in my helmet speakers.
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“We’re in the jungle.”
“So what?” he asked.
“So now everything’s wrong. Shut up. We’re not that far from the Burmese border, and I need to concentr
ate.”
SIX
Secret War
The convoy had stopped, and now people were shouting. Thai soldiers jumped from their vehicles and scattered as far into the jungle as they dared, which wasn’t far at all, and most of them kept checking to make sure they could see the road after dropping into the foliage. It was noon, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Banyan trees crowded us on either side, their roots snaking far enough onto the road that for the last four hours the APC had bounced so hard that I’d had to hold on for fear of being thrown off. Branches crowded overhead. The limbs scraped the highest of the convoy’s vehicles and sent clusters of roots into the clay so that they looked like tentacles reaching for something that rested far belowground and lent an alien feeling to an already growing sensation that we had landed on another planet. I jumped from the vehicle and motioned for Jihoon to follow.
By the time we reached the front of the column, the convoy commander, a lieutenant, had already asked for the two of us, and as soon as Ji rounded the front APC, the guy started jabbering—so quickly that I couldn’t activate Kristen in time for a translation. He sounded terrified. Kristen translated Jihoon’s response in my ear, her voice a perfect imitation of his.
“We can’t stay here,” he said.
“My men will not move forward. Not under these conditions.”
“What do you mean? I can’t understand half of what you’re saying, and the other half doesn’t make any sense.”
“These are madmen,” the lieutenant shouted. “The Gra Jaai will kill us just as soon as they would kill a Burmese. I’m radioing this in.”
“How will you even turn around? And what the hell got you so spooked? Radio what in?”
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 15