You’re dying. There will be no rescue. The American forces are in retreat. The best you can hope for is the Russian advance.
Think of something else. Think of your family. Think about Lissy. He tries to recall his daughter’s face, but can’t. Brown hair, freckles, pixie nose. It means nothing to him. How she used to beg him for rides on his knee, pretending it was a pony, no, a horse, Daddy, ponies are for children and suddenly he sees her there, right in front of him, she is really there and he tries to smile for her and tell her it is all right and that he loves her more than anything but his smile turns into a grimace and all he can do is croak. When he tries to reach out to her the pain hits him in his belly like fifty-millimeter cannon fire. He clenches his jaw to keep from screaming, then spits the blood out of his mouth. She isn’t there, she has never been there at all and he will never see her again.
And then he can hear them, a low rumbling throbbing of the dirt beneath him, treads and six-legged walkers rumbling across the broken pavement of the city. But this isn’t a hallucination; this is real. God! Could it be?
He tries to move, to look, but the pain is too much. Something winks in the corner of his vision, and he slowly turns his head. Indicators on the broken spaz launcher suddenly glow to life. The IFF light flickers, on and off, red. Foe. And another light insistently green: targets acquired and locked, warheads armed and ready.
The spaz launcher is still working! Somehow the advancing Russians have missed it; the broken building must have shielded it from their surveillance drones. Guessing from the rumbling in the distance, the advancing mechs must be a whole division. He could put a big hole in their advance, if he gives the launch command.
And then their drones will home in on him and blow him away.
Or he could wait, he could disable the launcher, he could wait for them to find him. Surely they take prisoners of war? They would bring him to a hospital, fix him up, and maybe someday in a POW exchange he’ll be sent home, disabled but still alive. A hero. Nobody would have to know about the launcher. Nobody would ever know . . .
He looks at the launcher. Go away, he thinks. I don’t want you. I didn’t ask for you. I never asked to be a soldier.
He could go home a hero, but inside he would know. And the Russians would advance, they would take Boston, and Worcester, and Springfield. Lissy would grow up speaking Russian, she would go to Russian schools, and after a while she would learn to hate him.
He can hear scrabbling, something coming up the hill. A lens pokes around the corner, just as he’d imagined it, but it is a Russian lens, attached to a camera on six spidery metal legs, an unarmed battlefield surveillance unit. It looks at him, humming softly to itself.
They’ve found him. It is now or never.
He pulls his hand away from the wound in his belly and tries to sit up. The hole opens up afresh, and a new flow of blood wells into his lap. He tries not to look at it. He tries to ignore the pain. The drone—unarmed, thank God!—continues to watch him.
He reaches out to the panel and hits actuate. The launcher shudders and vibrates like an epileptic having a seizure, as armor-piercing hunter-seekers chuff from the aperture. The hum of the drone watching him changes pitch and he knows that the Russians are zeroed in, but it is too late; too late for them, too late for him. He leans back and gasps. For a moment, the world goes purple-black. Far away, he can hear the chumpf of explosions as his missiles find their targets, and closer, much closer, the rising whistle of incoming shells.
The first shell explodes a few meters away, and the ground swells up like a wave and tosses him casually against the broken building. He opens his eyes, and after a moment, they focus. In a frozen moment of perfect clarity, he sees the shell that will kill him swell in an instant from a speck into an absolutely perfect circle, deadly black against the blue, blue sky.
And then there is nothing at all.
2.
Rorvik remembered the day his draft notice had come as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It had been seven-thirty in the morning, and Angela was about ready to head for work. As she kissed him, promising to hurry home, there was a knock on the door.
Angela pulled away from him and turned. “Who could that be at this hour?”
“Probably a salesman.” The knock came again, three measured raps. He was annoyed. The few minutes in the morning while Lissy was still asleep and before Angela went off to work was about the only time he had Angela to himself. “I’ll get it.” He jerked open the door, ready to give somebody an earful. “Yes?”
It was a balding man in a plain blue suit. Standing just behind him, flanking him on either side, were two larger men. The man looked at a piece of paper. “Mr. Davis C. Rorvik?”
“What do you want?”
“Excuse me. You are Mr. Rorvik?”
“Yes, but—”
The man glanced toward Angela, and then back. “May we speak to you alone for a moment, Mr. Rorvik?”
“You may not,” Angela said sharply, coming up behind him. “If you have something to tell him, you can say it right here.” She made a show of looking at her watch. “And quickly.”
The man shrugged, and addressed Mr. Rorvik. “Mr. Rorvik, as a duly authorized agent of the United States Selective Service, it is my duty to inform you that as of this moment, you are a member of the United States Armed Forces.”
“Wait one moment—”
The man opened a folder and removed a stack of photocopied papers. He ran his finger down the top page to the signatures, and then showed it to Rorvik. An ancient student loan application. “This is your signature?”
He didn’t remember the particular document, but the signature was clearly his. It had seemed a good bargain at the time: tuition money for college in return for a promise to serve if needed, and they probably wouldn’t even need him anyway. With the collapse of communism across the globe, there was no prospect of war in sight. “Yes, but . . .”
The man nodded at one of the goons, who pulled something out from under his jacket.
“I’m too . . .” There was a hiss, and Rorvik felt a cool sting at the back of his neck. “. . . too . . .” His knees suddenly buckled, and he slid slowly to the ground. Inside the house, Angela screamed.
He couldn’t move. His muscles felt like warm pudding; his head felt as if somebody had swathed it in lint. The man continued to speak, presumably to Angela. “Under the provisions of Emergency order 09-13A, you are forbidden under the penalty of law to discuss this draft notice or to divulge any information concerning the whereabouts of Mr. Rorvik.” One of the men wrapped his arms under Rorvik’s armpits. The other picked up his legs. “This includes discussing the matter with any agents of the press.” Angela had stopped screaming, and was, as far as he could tell, listening in silence. “The provisions of the Emergency order allow for full compensation for any inconvenience occasioned by Mr. Rorvik’s service.” The two men picked him up and started to take him away to the gray station wagon idling at the curb. As the two men swung him around, he could see his next-door neighbor, Jack, on his way to the subway stop, briefcase in hand. He was taking an intense interest in the weeds poking out through the cracks in the sidewalk. He didn’t once look in Rorvik’s direction.
As they bundled him into the car, Rorvik managed to complete the phrase he had started, hours ago “. . . too old to be drafted. I’m thirty-eight years old . . .”
3.
“It’s the Eff-En-Gee. What’s your name, FNG?”
“Rorvik.”
“That Swedish?”
“Close enough. It’s Norwegian.”
“Wrong answer, FNG.” The big corporal tapped him on the chest. “Start counting. I’ll tell you when you can stop.”
Rorvik dropped down and began doing push-ups. “One! Two! Three!”
“Either you’re an American or you’re meat. Got it?”
“Heard and understood.”
The corporal—Driscott, his nametag had said—watched him for a few
moments. “You may think your name’s Rorvik, but I think your name is FNG. You mind that, FNG?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. You learn fast, FNG. You know what FNG stands for?”
“No, sir.”
“Stands for Fuckin’ New Guy. Means you’re dangerous, FNG. You’re going to get us all killed. Forget yourself, go outside. Feel good to get outside for a few minutes, wouldn’t it, FNG?”
“No, sir.”
“Good answer. Get yourself specced by a flying Bear eyeball, and you realize you made a fuck-up when you get pounded to dust by arty. One tremendous ker-powie is the last thing you’re going to hear. Now, that wouldn’t bother me a bit—nobody much cares if the Army’s got one FNG more or less—but that same arty fire is gonna spread me across a few acres of landscape too, and I wouldn’t like that very much, no.
“—Count real quiet there, Private FNG, I want you to hear me and hear me good.
“Reason we call you FNG is so that we don’t forget, even for a moment, that you’re not to be trusted. One FNG is as dangerous as a dozen Bear-eyes. Live ’til the next new guy comes in, maybe you deserve a name of your own, and he’s the FNG.”
Driscott put his foot on Rorvik’s back and pressed him against the ground. “ ’Til then, you don’t do nothing outside of rules, and maybe we all live a little longer. Got it?”
“Heard and understood.”
“Good. I think I’m gonna get along with you, FNG. I think we’re gonna get along fine.”
There had been no air travel, of course—Russian microsats could spot an airplane and their SAMs would blow it out of the sky from a thousand miles away. Rorvik, along with half a dozen other draftees, dazed and scared, had been taken across the interdiction zone in an armored convoy that dashed from hardpoint to hardpoint, screened with chaff, decoys, jammers. At first he wondered why it was necessary to get to the battle zone at all; later he was taught that radio relays were weak links in a battle, and that a critical half of their communications was by line-of-sight microwave and laser links that required proximity. No communications link was entirely secure, but the shorter the link, the more reliable it was.
Later yet he realized that it didn’t matter where the soldiers were actually located. The fire zone could move a hundred miles in the blink of an eye when the Russian computers made a new guess at the American command location. The front lines were everywhere.
Driscott took his foot away and reached down a hand. It took a moment before Rorvik realized that Driscott was offering him a hand up. “You’re gonna learn about this war fast, FNG. First thing you gonna learn, we don’t get the information here. They don’t tell us nothing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You married, FNG? Got a family?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad. Forget ’em. War first started, the soldiers stayed back from the lines and let the metal take the fire. Sometimes even got to go home on weekends. That got stopped real quick. Fuckin’ Russkies didn’t know the rules; too many civvies killed when the Russkies targeted the ops. You’re here for the duration, got it?”
“Understood.” The funny thing was, he could barely even remember the war starting. He was old enough to remember watching CNN with his parents by the hour during the breakup of the Soviet Union, remembered the sense of relief as the world stood down from the brink of nuclear annihilation. But the rise of the Russian junta and the new cold war had seemed to occur in the blink of an eye when he hadn’t been paying attention. In hindsight, it was inevitable—though nobody had predicted it at the time—that a strongman would take over control from the ruins of the Soviet system. It was funny how something so important could seem so distant. He had been too busy marrying, trying to start a family, trying to keep a job in an economy going sour year by year. He knew it intellectually, could quote the headline statistics, but the threat of war had never seemed real to him, even as the cold war turned into a war of hot steel.
And the new threat of war wasn’t like the old. It was to be a war of computers, not missiles. “I don’t even understand why we’re here,” Rorvik said to Driscott. “They’d told us that the computers made war obsolete. That battlefield simulations can predict the outcome of every battle, so nobody would actually fight anymore.”
“Yeah?” Driscott seemed amused. “Tell me about it, new guy.”
“If our battlefield simulations say the same thing the Russian ones do, and they know the outcome of a battle before the first shot is fired, why are we fighting? They said that whoever was going to lose would know, and back down. What happened?”
“You got sold a bill of goods, FNG. Listen to too many of those TV commentators.” Driscott shook his head. “Just goes to show. Nah, them computers don’t know everything. Ya can’t predict the psy-fucking-cology of the guys in the field. You can put in the numbers, but can you put in morale? Can you put in fuckups?” He tapped Rorvik’s chest. “It’s you and me, buddy, you and me make the difference. We aren’t just fighting a war. No, what we’re doing is showing them Russian computers that they don’t got a clue about just how tough the American soldier really is. No matter what they throw at us, no matter how tough things get, even if all we have left is rocks, we just keep coming. We never give up. Never. Got it?”
“Got it.”
4.
For a moment after he wakes, his dream of being a civilian seems like it had been only yesterday, the memories of civilian life stronger and more alive than those of the war. The feeling fades. It was just that the war had started so fast, and his life had changed so quickly and completely, it sometimes feels like he had been a civilian just hours before.
Rorvik is a tactical operator on the fly-eyes, one of the best. A fly-eye is a tiny infrared-visible camera with an encrypted radio transmitter, hung under a plastic flex-wing with a miniature propeller and motor, the whole thing folding up to a streamlined package about the size of a pencil that fits into a rifle. It is up to him to find targets for the artillery, located somewhere in a secured hiding place fifty miles or more distant.
The war is a huge game of hide and seek. When the enemy is found, the smart shells pound cracks through his armor to incinerate the meat within.
Somewhere in the city below, a grunt hiding in the deserted city fires him into the sky. Rorvik knows nothing about the soldier who launches him, nor cares, but waits with a rising sense of anticipation until he hits apogee and spreads his wings. Deployed, silent, nearly radar invisible, he soars over darkened buildings looking for movement, flying in slow zigzags to present a less predictable target. His motor gives him about five minutes of power, but it is a point of pride with the fliers not to use it, but to soar the tiny flexwing on thermals and on the ridge lift from rooftops, prolonging his flights for hours before he has to return to the drab world of concrete and first sergeants and smelly underwear and MRE packages eaten cold to avoid unnecessary IR signature. He hates cold water shaves and the endless pinochle game the E-5 sergeants play in their den; he hates the smell of stale piss that washes over the room whenever one of the men opens up the latrine canister to take a leak, and the rotten-fruit smell of unwashed bodies the rest of the time. (There is a perennial rumor that the enemy is developing an odor-sensitive homing bomb, and that when it is developed the field troops will be subject to a smell discipline as strong as the IR discipline is now. God, he wishes they’d hurry.)
But, flying his eye, he is far from all that. He flies above the city, the flier’s electronic eyes becoming his own, heedless of his body controlling the flier far below.
He soars over the darkening city. It is spring, but the few trees left in the city provide scant obstruction to his cameras. A flutter of movement attracts his attention, and he wheels around. Nothing. No, there! He zooms in. A piece of paper blowing in the wind. He circles for a minute, hoping to catch something else, but nothing moves. MI will examine his snapshot of the paper, he knows, trying to determine where it came from, if it is ours or theirs.
“Little Eagle? Word from Uncle Henry that they’ve seen Bear footprints north in sector Tiger three-niner. They want you to eyeball it for them. Do you need a new bird?”
Tiger 39. He flashes up a map. About a kilometer north of him, in the areas that once used to be north Cambridge. “Negative, unless they’re in some real rush about it. I can get there in five minutes.”
“Roger. We’re standing by.”
He can see the pink warmth of a thermal off to his left, and banks around. He increases speed until his wings begin to ripple and lose lift, then backs off a hair. Four minutes later he is circling the area.
The sky is muddy brown in the falsecolor of his IR display. “It’s an evac zone,” the voice in his earphones says. “Anything you see will be Bears.”
He hears the slight riffle of air behind him. He snap-rolls instantly, and the diving hawk misses him by inches. He pushes into a dive to gain airspeed, with one eye watching the Russian hawk pull up to come around at him again, with the other flashing to his map to find if he is near a sector where he has fire support from the ground. Negative. He flips his mike on.
“Load up another birdy, Wintergreen. I’ve drawn a hawk.”
“No can do, Little Eagle. A couple of Bear eyes moved in too close to our guys on the ground. Advise you run for the green in sector X-ray niner.”
The Russian hawk, abandoning stealth, has lit its tiny pulsejet and is coming at him from below. “Negative, negative. It’s too far. Blow the eyes away.”
“Sorry, Sport. Too many eyes. We don’t want to risk the Bears getting a fix on our artillery. You’re on your own.”
“Fuck you very much, Wintergreen.” He starts an evasion pattern. No way he can outrun a hawk; he pushes the stick forward to the edge of flutter and heads in zigzags toward the turbulence of a fragged building.
He’d been hoping he could ride the turbulence, but the gusty wind is too much for him. The wind-rotor grabs him, flips him upside down. He rolls out inches away from smashing against the concrete, pulls out hard, and stalls. Hanging dead in the air for the instant before falling, he feels more than sees the hawk coming at him. He is dead meat.
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