No one touched him again. Face grim, Gordon settled in the chair, licked his lips, and set about, stone by stone, to dig himself out.
MICHÓW, POLAND
In the quiet of his field office, Baranyk lifted the phone and punched the eleven-digit number, listening to the noise of the circuits clacking through. A secretary answered, the protective and suspicious kind. She immediately tried to take a message.
“Get him,” Baranyk said. “Trust me. He will know who I am. Tell him Lt. General Baranyk is calling from Poland.”
Baranyk consulted his watch. It was a full three minutes before Fyodorov picked up the phone.
“Valentin Sergeyevich!” the senator cried in a voice so hearty that Baranyk knew it had been rehearsed.
“Vassily Petrovich!” Baranyk replied in a tone equally lighthearted. “Did you know you can gauge the importance of a man by timing how long it takes to get him on the phone? I clocked you at three minutes. To get me would take four.”
Fyodorov laughed. It wasn’t the deep-bellied laugh Baranyk knew. There was a distance to it. Fyodorov must be wondering why the general had called. “How are you, my friend?” he asked. “And how go things in Poland’?”
Baranyk dropped all pretense of cheer. “I call my debts,” he said.
In the silence on the line Baranyk imagined he could hear the slow, heavy tread of the years rolling back. Afghanistan. Fyodorov was remembering Afghanistan.
What was Fyodorov like now? It had been ten years since they had last met, and ten years could change a man. Was he fat, his Italian suit packed tight as a sausage? Was he bald? Ah, worse yet, was he complacent?
Fyodorov laughed again, this time more circumspectly and with a sort of sadness. “I am too old to put on battle dress and take up my gun again, but, if you need me, tovarich,” he said, using a term Baranyk knew he had not used for years, “I will come.”
“I wish you to make an appointment for me with Pankov.”
Silence. Baranyk could hear his question rattle against the sides of Fyodorov’s mind. Now Baranyk knew the answer as to how Vassily Petrovich had changed. The man would still die for him; but he hesitated to be embarrassed because of him. Fyodorov had become a politician.
“Well,” Fyodorov replied, “as you must know, he is very busy. There is unrest. Siberia has its farmers’ strike, and the coal miners are out again.”
Baranyk fought a surge of temper. First Russia was elder brother to his Ukraine, pushing and pulling and insisting on its own way. Then, when the Greenhouse heat had made the tundra arable, Russia began to play solitary games.
“Surely, Vassily Petrovich, you are not out of favor so soon?”
“Out of favor?” Fyodorov replied with a defensive chuckle. “With democracy there are no ins or outs to favor.”
“Please,” Baranyk said, using the most deadly weapon in his arsenal, the poison arrow of guilt. “Please. I beg you on our friendship.”
If Fyodorov wanted him to crawl, then Baranyk would crawl. If he wanted him to cry, then Baranyk would force tears to his eyes. He would not, could not, see his army destroyed again.
“God. Do not beg,” Fyodorov whispered, sounding not at all like a politician. “I will ask him.”
“Send a plane for me to Warsaw. We have very little fuel.”
“Da, da. I have my own plane now, you know. A little Cessna. Very pretty. Yellow and white. You will like it.”
Baranyk pushed the matter of the plane aside. “Will he meet with me, you think?”
The senator sighed heavily. “Pankov is a whore. He will meet with anyone.” Swiftly he added, “I never said that.”
“Shoot you, would he?” Baranyk chuckled.
“Ah, worse than that. Pankov has been known to be petty. He would have my office redecorated as he did with Shulubin.” Fyodorov was laughing happily. “I would be stepping over painters for years.”
Baranyk laughed along.
Fyodorov’s laughter sputtered and died. In a quiet voice, a voice much like the young, frightened soldier he’d once been, he said, “He will meet with you, Valentin Sergeyevich, but I don’t know if he will give you the answer you want.”
NEAR CALHAN, COLORADO
When someone crawled under the blanket with him, Jerry Casey woke up. An arm slipped around his hip and skinny fingers tugged at the waistband of his underpants.
“I’ll do you for something,” a voice said in his ear. “Whatcha got?”
He pulled away and sat up. The girl he’d met the first night was lying next to him. Her hair was all stuck up on her head. A smudge of dirt ran down the side of her cheek, and just under it was a single bruise like the dot of an exclamation point.
“What happened to you?” she asked him. In the shadows of the lean-to, her eyes were dark and wide.
He put a hand to his throbbing face and felt around the tom skin, the congealed blood. “Troopers caught me sneaking out west.”
“Lucky you wasn’t killed.”
A silence fell. Jerry didn’t bother to break it.
“I like to sit out and watch the buzzards go wheeling,” she said wistfully, staring out of the lean-to with a faint smile. “Pretty the way they do, all big and easy, like black airplanes, you know? Then sometimes I think about what they’re circling around, and it makes me kind of sick. There’s lots of people who think they can make it out of here. Not a one of ’em does.”
The sky outside was blue and empty. The sight of the mountains to the west set his heart to racing again.
“I seen something last night,” he said softly. “I seen something pretty.”
“Yeah?” She scrabbled around on the blankets, then settled down like a dog trying to make itself comfortable. “What was it?”
“I dunno.”
“What’d it look like?”
“Heaven,” he told her.
Desert mirages were already shimmering across the flat burial ground, and the mountains were reflected over the graves. Suddenly he knew there was no point going to Colorado Springs. No point hiking to the cool; not when the best cool of all was corning to him.
“It talked to me,” he told her.
She was right at his shoulder. He could feel the heat from her body; smell the sour odor of her sweat. “Yeah? What’d it say?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t understand the words.”
Tonight, he decided. Tonight he’d go back and see if he could understand those clattering voices.
NEAR LERIDA
They’d been moving out for hours. Rita’s shoulder was sore from the weight of her gear bag’s strap; her feet hurt all the way to her ankles.
Before Lerida, she had thought she was in good shape. But now Lauterbach had thrown her in with a bunch of twenty-year-olds, and she was beginning to understand that aging wasn’t just something that had happened to a body on a steel table. Aging, down and dirty and intimate, was happening to her.
She’d taken her coat off once the sun began climbing the sky. Now she was dusty and sweating. Her stomach reminded her that she’d missed breakfast.
She watched Dix. The diminutive lieutenant had a stride like an energetic boy.
Trudging up a hill, Rita lowered her head and studied her feet. Marvelous, she thought, how feet could move while the brain kept begging them not to.
Mesmerized by boredom, by the sameness of the gray-green grass and the stones, she bumped into Dix before realizing that the lieutenant had halted.
“We all here,” Dix said laconically.
Rita stared dully down the hill. In the center of a demolished town, an M1-A1 tank and an M-113 ambulance were still burning.
There were bodies everywhere. The ones in Arab uniform had been caught on the slope. Some still lay in orderly ranks, rows and rows of them, toppled lik
e green dominoes.
“You can see what happened,” Dix said, drawing a line of imaginary fire with her finger. “Some dimwit of an Arab colonel told them to take Baláguer, and those folks kept coming and coming, just like they had sense.”
There were ANA tanks there, too, the camouflage paint charred to black. An AFV squatted like a burned alphabet block some child had forgotten to put away.
“We’re gonna find most of the Allied boys down there in the streets,” Dix told her.
Baláguer bore only a passing resemblance to a village. The houses that weren’t gutted had become gray, formless rubble.
Staring numbly at the destruction, Rita caught a flash of blue. When she looked, the blue disappeared behind a wall.
“What?” Dix asked.
“I think I saw something.”
Instantly Dix crouched and motioned the others down. Rita fell to her knees beside her.
“Probably just the wind,” Dix whispered. “Or your eyes playing tricks. Still, no point taking chances. You keep up with me.”
Suddenly Dix was sprinting, still crouched, to a boulder.
Rita hurried after the lieutenant at a limping trot.
When she reached the pooled shadow at the base of the rock, she turned and saw the rest of the platoon spread out, moving down the slope stealthily.
Then someone shouted, “CBUs!” and the next instant she heard a small pop. A soldier’s leg disappeared in a mist of blood.
“Shit. Goddamn,” Dix was muttering under her breath.
She whirled on Rita. “Get the hell out of here up that hill. Just the way you come, understand me?”
But instead of backtracking, Rita started moving across the hill. A soldier was coming from the opposite direction, a medic with a field emergency kit over her shoulder. The medic was staring intently at her feet. Rita looked down and saw a small, olive-green metal ball to the right of her boot. She froze, her pulse beating a rapid tattoo in her neck.
“Capt’n! Capt’n Beaudreaux!” Dix was shouting.
Rita took a deep breath and moved forward, reaching the screaming man a few moments after the medic did.
“Start me an IV drip, stat. Quarter grain of morphine.” Rita told the medic. She looked into the soldier’s terrified eyes. He was a black kid, and something about him, maybe his vulnerability, maybe the shape of his face, reminded her of her nephew, Allen.
For the first time since her arrival at Lerida, Rita felt competent. She might be rusty at surgery, but at least the tools were familiar. No damned little bomblets. No baffling grenade launchers.
Rita examined the wound. The foot was gone. Inches above the ankle, the peroneal artery was pumping bright red. Both tibia and fibula had shattered to push shaved-ice splinters of bone into the surrounding fascia.
With quick, sure motions she snapped on her gloves and tore the suture pack open.
In his drugged confusion, the boy was trying to move his leg. Rita steadied him with one hand and caught the steel tip of the needle in the tough, rubbery shaft of the peroneal artery. In five quick stitches she had it closed. Tying off quickly, she moved to the saphenous vein.
“Look!” the medic shouted. “Madre! What’s that?”
Heart faltering, Rita looked around.
A blue globe of light was drifting lazily from the village, moving against the gentle, dry breeze. As Rita stared, her hand still raised over the boy’s leg, she thought she could hear a sound coming from the light, the tap-tap-tap of sleet. The platoon was paralyzed with fear, spellbound by wonder. The blue light moved in silence, the macabre, inexorable silence of death.
“Don’t fire!” Dix suddenly screamed. “Don’t fire!”
But none of the platoon had brought their weapons to bear. The light seemed too ghostly for bullets to stop it.
It was so close now, Rita could feel the cold radiating from it, could feel a slight breeze pulling at her blouse.
The medic stiffened as if poised to flee. Too late. The light was close enough for Rita to touch. Her shoulder was freezing cold, her right hand, her suturing hand, shook from the chill.
Then a thought sprang to mind, a thought so clear, so foreign, that it might have been planted there. The light was curious, she realized. It was taking in the scene, it was asking clattering questions.
“Go away,” she told it firmly.
Logic said run; but fascination held her. There was something at once ghastly and serene about the light. Something seductive. That corpse she had autopsied, had the boy’s single eye been wide with fear or awe?
“Go away,” she said.
After a hesitant, almost winsome moment, it began to float back down the hill, light as thistledown, blue as a gas flame. Suddenly it arced up into the sky, its speed astonishing. A heartbeat later, it was lost in the turquoise Mediterranean sky.
WITH THE CRAV IN THE PYRENEES
Light, damn it. Not a lot of light, but light all the same, seeping through a hole in the jagged rocks.
Inching his arm up, Gordon pushed his hand out the hole. Rocks shifted, clicked, rolled down the mountain to his left.
When his hand was free, he groped blindly in front of him. The engineers who built the CRAV would have thought Gordon crazy, but he knew he was feeling the chill stones.
He dislodged a few at a time at first. Then, in gathering excitement, he was knocking them away, causing his own mini-avalanche.
There were only two feet now between him and freedom.
He brushed at the rocks harder. They pattered down, raising dust. He put his foot to the accelerator. The motor strained. Stones pinged against the turret.
“Go, baby, Go, baby,” he urged under his breath as though rooting for a befuddled pet or unsteady toddler.
Something big dislodged and rang against his crushed missile tubes.
“Go, baby,” he pleaded.
The nuclear motor rose to a high whine. The treads lifted, grinding rock.
The world crumbled. There was an ear-splitting crunch.
When the dust cleared, he was looking at the road.
For a while he just sat there, his arms cramping. The light outside his rocky grave was blue and shot here and there with brass. Sunset. It was sunset. And somewhere up ahead of him the laser was preparing to fire.
Frantically he pried his right arm from the rubble. When it was loose, he battered the wall again. This time it gave. At the rear of the vehicle he heard the slide shift like a beast from sleep. The treads found purchase, and suddenly he was lurching, bouncing, over the lip of the wall.
As soon as the treads hit the asphalt, he gunned the engine. Behind him was a Judgment Day roar as the rocks tumbled the rest of the way down the mountain.
WITH THE LDV IN THE PYRENEES
Standing atop the LDV tractor, Colonel Wasef gazed at the night sky, dimly aware of Gamal mumbling beside him. The air was thin and sharp, the gathered stars strewn ice chips.
“There,” Gamal said at last.
Wasef looked down. Bathed in the glow of the screen, the fire control officer was smiling. Among the crosshatched green of the VDT lay four red dots. A fifth dot, a stuttering red shadow, was moving slowly north-to-south across the screen.
“There are the three communications satellites,” Gamal said, lightly touching a forefinger to each. “This moving signal is an old Keyhole in a low polar orbit. In the center is the newer, geosynchronous KH-176.”
“He is wrong,” Yussif grunted. The colonel turned to stare, but it was too dark to read Yussif’s expression.
“It is all out of position,” Yussif went on. “The one there in the middle. That is the target.”
“I am not wrong,” Gamal said.
“Tell me,” Wasef urged quietly. “Tell me why you think you are right.”
“I know the stars, the planets, the satellites,” Gamal said. “I have known their names since childhood. My family had a place in the desert, and we would go there, my father and I. He gave me books and a small telescope, and I would map the heavens for him. I know what is up there,” Gamal said, “because when I close my eyes, I can see the stars.”
Wasef stared up into the shimmering heavens. So far away, he thought. The satellites were so far away, one would think they were untouchable.
“The one in the middle is the target,” Yussif said sternly. “It is in the correct position.”
“The Allies have moved it. Placed it in with the others,” Gamal said. “They think to hide it from us.”
Yussif grabbed Wasef’s arm. “Don’t listen to him. He is a traitor.”
Wasef caught his breath. Yussif was a man-shaped spot where the viscous night had clotted.
A traitor. It was possible. How many years had Gamal been away from his people? What loyalties had the boy forgotten? Yussif’s grip tightened. “He will fire on the wrong satellite and it will be weeks before we know.”
A cold wind whipped down the mountain, tugging at Wasef’s coat.
“Traitor?” the boy said in a tiny, intimidated voice. “But my father—”
“Target the satellite, Captain Rashid,” Wasef ordered, his voice harsh.
Gamal turned back to the screen, tapped the data into the computer. On his arm Wasef could feel the fierce weight of Yussif’s hand.
The servomotors of the laser hummed. Majestic as Allah’s accusing finger, the barrel raised slowly into the night, its bulk eclipsing the stars.
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