Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  “Check coolant pressure, captain,” Gamal said, his voice now firm and sure.

  “Check the coolant pressure, Captain Mustafa,” the colonel said.

  With a grunt, Yussif walked to the second VDT and sat down. “Coolant pressure optimum,” he muttered.

  The laser powered up. Its low throb pulsed in the pit of Wasef’s stomach. The servomotors halted with a heavy clunk.

  “Locked on,” Gamal said.

  Traitor? Wasef wondered, looking down into the greenlit boyish face. The colonel felt helpless, as though fate were rushing at him, huge and inescapable.

  “Give me a pressure readout,” Gamal said.

  Yussif glared. “Optimum, I tell you.”

  “A readout, please.”

  “Four-oh-one,” Yussif barked.

  Gamal nodded, intent on his screen. The throbbing hum of the laser might have been the slow heartbeat of the mountain.

  “Firing,” Gamal said.

  Wasef looked up in time to see an arrow of green shoot starward. The peak was bathed for a moment in emerald glow. Then darkness crashed down. The laser’s hum lowered to a dull headachy beat.

  Wasef heard another noise. A strange noise. A clanking. He turned. Something was rushing at them from the tunnel.

  WITH THE CRAV IN THE PYRENEES

  Gordon dashed from the tunnel the instant the laser went off. GPS MAPS DOWN—AT&T SEND FUNCTIONAL flashed in red across his visuals. The Arabs had hit the last Super Keyhole.

  Soldiers scrambled for weapons, but the platoon didn’t have a chance. Arms spread wide, Gordon hit them at his top speed of sixty-eight miles per hour.

  His metal treads ground bodies. Bones popped and cracked. Someone screamed, a high-pitched sound of despair.

  Gordon screamed, too, caught in a paroxysm of fury and an intoxicating adrenaline high. He slewed the CRAV around and made for the truck. Shoving his hand through the radiator, he tore off the grille. Green fluid gushed like exotic blood.

  He rushed the laser and grabbed a corner of the housing, the only thing he could reach. Above him he saw three startled Arabs looking down at him: two by-God captains and a fucking colonel. In his metal hand the housing tore like paper, came loose, fell, bringing a shower of sparks and two keyboards with it.

  The smaller captain ran. Gordon rounded the back of the tractor to follow. Behind him the survivors of the Arab platoon, recovering from shock, were firing their AKs.

  “I’m fucking, goddamned Superman!” Gordon shouted, punching a nontactical dent in the tractor’s chassis as he passed.

  AK rounds chimed off his diamond-plated skin. Bullets hit the rocks, spraying dust, sparking fireflies on the steel sides of the laser tractor.

  Gordon could see the shorter Arab captain frantically trying to set up a mortar. Before the man could aim, Gordon was on him. The captain howled in agony as Gordon threw him into the night.

  “I’m a goddamned assault vehicle, aren’t I?” he shouted as he turned, Thinking that it was too bad the Arabs couldn’t hear him. Gordon wasn’t a wuss anymore. Wasn’t a pussy. And if the guys who beat him up in high school had been there, he’d have whipped their asses, too.

  The tall, horse-faced colonel had climbed off the tractor and was running for the only other armed vehicle: a machine-gun-mounted jeep. The platoon was firing wild, with as many rounds kicking up dust around Gordon as zinging off his armor. In the glow of the electrical fire atop the tractor, the younger captain stood unarmed, motionless, his expression not fear but fascination.

  Gordon headed for the colonel. He was nearly at the jeep when behind him he heard wails of panic. The colonel stared past the LDV, and his long, intelligent face went slack with horror.

  Rover was sailing through the darkness of the tunnel. The soldiers scattered. Some tried to climb the sheer rock face. A few broke away and ran by Gordon in the direction of Spain.

  Then it was quiet, the only sounds the fire lapping at the laser’s insulation and the low moans of the wounded. Gordon turned to the colonel and saw him sitting with the machine gun between his legs, his arms at his sides.

  Abruptly the man seemed to remember what the machine gun was for. He jerked the barrel at Gordon and let fly with a rattling burst. A few bullets stitched the ground to Gordon’s right before they started slamming into him.

  Gordon picked up the nearest object, the mortar, and hurled it at the jeep.

  It was a good throw. A strike dead-center into the batter’s box. The colonel tried to duck, but the machine gun was in the way. The mortar shimmed into the colonel, and he disappeared off the vehicle, bleep, like a Nintendo character.

  Gordon grabbed a rock and lofted it into the laser. It hit the coils hard, and must have hit home; because a fine mist sprayed into the air. The captain on the LDV turned, saw the mist, and hurriedly clambered down off the trailer. By the time he reached the ground, Rover was right beside him.

  “Ain’t we gonna see some shit fly now!” Gordon howled. “This is the fucking Day the Earth Stood Still! This is goddamned Arabs Versus the Flying Saucers!”

  But nothing happened. The Arab didn’t run, and Rover didn’t advance. They stood there, just staring at each other. Amazement in his face, the young captain put his hand out, as if what he wanted most in the world was to touch the light.

  Rover skittered backward. The captain’s arm slowly dropped.

  What was in the Arab’s face? Reverence? Oh, my God, infatuation? He took a step toward Rover, and suddenly the light shot off down the mountain.

  Gordon turned and left, his hormone high dispelled, the cries of the wounded behind him raising the hair at the nape of his neck.

  The battle hadn’t gone quite the way he’d planned. Nothing in life works out the way you imagine. This ain’t Nintendo, he decided. The thing about computer characters, when you hurt them, they didn’t cry.

  NEAR CALHAN, COLORADO

  Early that afternoon, men came riding up from Calhan in big official vans. There were lots of men and they climbed out of their trucks wearing white decontamination suits and toting Uzis. To Jerry the scene looked eerie and unreal, as if the camp were being attacked by Mars.

  The people gathered around because the men had brought food; but the officers didn’t give out the food right away. Instead, a tall, gray-bearded man in a doctor’s white lab coat climbed on top of a van and read off a paper.

  “Pursuant to Colorado State Injunction 53,” he announced in a weak, halting voice. “Public Sanitation.”

  “It’s a bunch of shit,” a voice beside Jerry said. He looked over and saw the girl.

  The doctor lowered the paper and closed his eyes, apparently reciting from memory. “The State of Colorado claims the right to control disease within its borders.”

  Three men from the camp had made their way out of the crowd, Jerry noticed, and they were talking to the officers in the decontamination suits. The group was a small, gossipy knot, and Jerry could see the men pointing—there, there, and there.

  “Carriers of contagious disease—” the doctor said and paused. He bent his head and looked at the paper again. He looked at it a long time.

  The wind pushed its invisible shoulders through the camp.

  It rattled the paper in the doctor’s hand, kicked up stinging dust, and made the tents flap and their rope supports sing.

  “Carriers of contagious disease,” the doctor went on in a whispery voice, “to wit: typhus, cholera, and bubonic plague—are asked to leave the state immediately or suffer the full consequences of the law.”

  Jerry turned to the girl. “Plague?”

  “Just their excuse,” she told him. “Just Public Sanitation’s excuse to do some housecleaning.”

  The men in the white suits shoved through the crowd and the people scattered. The doctor climbed
down from the van. After an embarrassed glance at the officers, he crawled inside the vehicle and shut the door.

  Jerry walked up to the van and peered through the tinted windows. Through the glass Jerry could hear the clear, bell-like tones of classical music.

  “Sir?” Jerry called.

  The doctor looked up.

  “Sir? Is there really a plague here?”

  The doctor stared at Jerry, then bent over and turned up the radio.

  “That was Telemann’s Concerto in E Major for Flute,” the radio announcer said in a somber baritone, “by the Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Christopher Hogwood. And now for our Arts Notes—”

  From the back of the camp came the pop-pop of gunfire. People began to scream. Jerry swiveled.

  “—will be conducting the Colorado Springs String Ensemble in a selection of ...”

  “Sir!” Jerry shouted, slapping the window.

  The doctor flinched, but refused to turn around.

  Jerry went cautiously down the small rutted alley between the tents. Hearing a screech, he pivoted and saw sanitation officers dragging a woman from a tent. She was sick from the dysentery. A yellow-brown line of diarrhea ran down one leg of her jeans.

  As the officers carried her past, Jerry looked into their dark visors. One officer stopped and stared back, the tinted glass of his helmet expressionless as an insect. Jerry read the shoulder patch. COLORADO SPRINGS DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION.

  He licked his lips. “If there’s ... if there’s plague,” he stammered, “why don’t the troopers wear them suits?”

  The man’s reply was muffled through the helmet. “We’re city. You’ll have to ask state.”

  Then they walked on past him, their stiff white suits crackling. Jerry followed. At a little ravine outside the camp the officers stopped and made the woman kneel. Other sanitation men were there, and other prisoners, a dozen or so, all of them sick.

  The fretful wind had stilled. Par to the west, the mountains stood cool and aloof. The sun on the desert floor shimmered.

  They couldn’t be arresting them, Jerry thought. Lord help us. They can’t be going to arrest sick people.

  A loud crack. One of .the sick women, who had been kneeling, went down. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The reports from the .45 against the bases of the people’s skulls had a chilling rhythm. A few of the sick fought back, but they didn’t fight well. When an executioner couldn’t get a shot at the base of the skull, he fired into upturned faces.

  Why doesn’t anyone stop them? Jerry thought in horror.

  The people from the camp were standing, their hands in pockets, watching the murder with quiet discontent, like fans of a football team at the end of a losing season.

  Say something! Do something! Jerry wanted to scream, but then it was too late. A sanitation officer came forward with two cans of alcohol, kicked the bodies into the gully, threw some dry brush over them and set them on fire.

  The fire burned for what seemed forever. Long after Jerry had gone back to his lean-to, the greasy smoke was rising and blowing off toward the east. When he closed his eyes, he could still hear the sputter and hisses and pops of the corpses as they burned.

  He opened the food packet the officers had left: saltine crackers and a slab of cheese. Stuffing a cracker into his mouth, Jerry watched the smoke climb the sky.

  I can’t get a fever, he told himself, and the dry cracker caught in his throat.

  THE PYRENEES, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN FRANCE AND SPAIN

  Wasef’s arm felt as though a torturer had packed it with splintered glass. In a few minutes, he promised himself, the medics will get to me with the morphine.

  He had given the order himself: Tend to the troops first. Now he was regretting the order a little, like a cranky child who wants to go back on his word.

  Rolling his head to the right, he looked up at the laser.

  Gamal was still fiddling with it. And to his left, the medics were just now zipping Yussif into a body bag, after the long fight to save him.

  Yussif is dead and Gamal should be with the troops, Wasef thought angrily. Not fussing over a machine. So like a Westerner, he decided. So like. So like.

  As though he had heard the unspoken criticism, Gamal climbed off the laser, wandered over, and squatted beside Wasef. The colonel could hear, a little ways down the mountain, the flutter of another Mil Mi-8 coming in for a landing.

  How many choppers did that make now? He had lost count. Surely there were too many. Their movement would raise an Allied alarm. He tried to get up. Agony stopped him. A moment later he forgot what it was he had wanted to do, and lay back, staring into the weak morning light.

  “The laser may be beyond repair,” Gamal said with an exhausted sigh. “How is your arm?”

  “It hurts,” Wasef replied. It hurt as Gamal’s treachery hurt, the injury deep, to the marrow. Wasef was angry, then pain made his mind drift, as though part of him were winging over the valley.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said.

  “Yes,” Wasef whispered faintly. The voices of the wounded and the medics echoed. “I am so sorry we have to tell your father.”

  Gamal was bending over him, and Wasef felt a metallic thread of fear stitch his belly. Gamal would hold a rock like a pillow to Wasef’s face. He would smother him in stone. Yes. Gamal was planning to murder him the way he had murdered Yussif.

  “Tell my father what?” Gamal asked.

  Was that warning or suspicion in his eyes? “You killed my father,” Wasef whispered, his voice barely above the noise of the wind. No. That wasn’t quite right. He hadn’t said it right. “Oh, God. I will kill your father.”

  “I don’t understand, colonel.” The skin between Gamal’s eyes was knitted into a frown.

  “It will kill your father when I tell him.” Wasef wished he could get away from the pain in his arm. If he ran fast enough down the mountain, perhaps he could leave it behind. Fast as quicksilver fish, as the shifting of an eye. Oh. Rapid as a treacherous thought.

  “Tell my father what?”

  Wasef tried to move. Broken bones gnashed. What am I running from? he asked himself in confusion. The pain? The boy?

  No, he realized as his mind cleared briefly, a patch of blue sky between gathering clouds. No, I am terrified of hurting General Sabry.

  “I will not tell anyone,” he promised. “Let your father decide what to do. I will not bring you back to Barcelona in chains. In chains. Listen. Is that another helicopter landing? I could have ordered you killed.”

  The boy stared at him. “It is the pain which makes your mind wander, colonel. Shock ...”

  Yes, it was shock, seeing the robot rolling through the tunnel and knowing, oh knowing, that he had made a mistake.

  “You shot down the wrong satellite,” Wasef murmured.

  “No! I—”

  A medic made his way to Wasef’s side. Gamal left. Soon the morphine was oozing drowsiness though the colonel’s body. His eyelids drooped.

  “You have too many helicopters here,” Wasef told the medical corpsmen as they lifted his stretcher.

  A man looked down. He was an Azerbaijani, Wasef saw. Old enough to have been trained by the Red Army. Realizing he was in capable hands, Wasef finally relaxed and closed his eyes.

  Far away, as far as the minarets of the peaks, as distant as the pain in his arm, he heard the corpsman saying in oddly accented Arabic, “Don’t worry yourself, colonel. There was an early airstrike today on Lerida, and we caught the Allies sleeping. Apparently their satellite is down.”

  NEAR WARSAW

  Baranyk studied the plane gleaming under the lights. Not a small Cessna, he saw, but an eight-passenger craft. Through shrewdness or graft or most probably both, Fyodorov had slithered his way into big money.

  As Baranyk approac
hed the ladder, the pilot reached down and took his briefcase. “Welcome aboard, general,” he said in Russian colored by the rural accent of Siberia. “We are just now receiving a call from your headquarters. Would you care for me to patch it through?”

  Baranyk glanced around. The main terminal was a five-minute walk behind him, too long a time for his people to hold. “Yes,” he said.

  He climbed up the ladder into the spacious passenger compartment and pushed aside the curtain to the cabin. The copilot was still going through his flight check, clipboard in hand, headset loose around his neck. He did not seem about to leave his seat to offer Baranyk privacy.

  The pilot reached for the radio and handed Baranyk a headset. “Patch through now,” he told the tower in such fluent, easy English that Baranyk wondered if Fyodorov had hired him off a transatlantic Aeroflot flight.

  How did the Russian boys learn to fly now that their MiGs were mothballed? He glanced into the young pilot’s face and saw a softness he had not seen among his own soldiers in a long, long time.

  Neutral countries too easily accepted the cocks shoved in their mouths, Baranyk decided. Russia’s heart might be in the right place, but her dirty hands and dirty mouth were not

  He pressed one side of the headset against his right ear.

  “Baranyk here.”

  “General?” Shcheribitsky’s voice was loud.

  With a worried glance at the copilot, Baranyk lifted the hand-held mike. “Major!” he said boisterously. “I am in Senator Fyodorov’s new Cessna. Don’t worry yourself! The pilot and copilot are with me and they seem to know what they are doing. The plane is so pretty that I am considering a career in politics.”

  Ah, just as he had thought. The copilot understood Ukrainian. Baranyk saw the ghost of a smile flicker across that impassive face.

  Baranyk wondered if the Arab cock spewed money, wondered if Fyodorov had got fat on it. Fat enough for him to buy this plane ...