We stopped at the entrance to a national park, maybe the only one Kazakhstan had, and I recognized the place. Much of it had already been leveled, its alpine meadows stripped of trees and brush, the ground blackened from plasma barrages and littered with armor fragments.
The general must have seen me staring after we dismounted. “Many things happened here, son.”
“When?”
“Long time ago, back when we first lost Pavlodar and had to fall back; airborne held out in the park, made their last stand until we were able to mount a full counterattack, just after I found you on the plane.”
“I’ve seen pictures of this place, I think. Maybe when the war started, and it used to be beautiful.”
The general grunted. “Not anymore. And they disbanded the one hundred first airborne after the action. Only two hundred men survived out of a full division, and they just couldn’t replace it. Come on. Battalion HQ is this way.”
The general led me into the meadow, and in the open we felt exposed, all of us crouching and buttoning helmets as we jogged forward. Eventually the corporal disappeared into the ground, next the general, and then I saw a ramp heading down into the earth. The hole swallowed me. A few seconds later I had popped my helmet, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness of combat lamps in a wide concrete vault, its space filled with computers and men. The general and corporal had already found the line commander, and Urqhart was deep in conversation, so I found a quiet corner and sat, sliding to the floor to wait.
A few hours later, the general shook me awake and whispered, “Let’s go, son. Move it.”
“What’s going on?”
“Popov. He’s not waiting for us to attack.”
That woke me up. We sprinted from the command bunker and headed for the road, and I had to dive to the side to avoid being run over by a tank. At least a hundred of them lumbered past to head in the direction of Russian forces, and their treads kicked up dirt and chewed wide divots into the ground, which almost tripped me once I got to my feet. Without warning, bright light turned the meadows white. It was as if a million camera flashes had gone off. I instinctively dove, landing next to the general just as the booms arrived. An intense heat cooked the back of my scalp, through the vision hood. Someone dragged me to my feet, and before I knew it, I was in the scout car again, the corporal speeding back down the mountain road until a plasma round detonated nearby, sending the car into the air. It was strange. Your mind went into overtime when something like that occurred, and deep down you knew that it was bad, but there was a detachment, as if it was happening to someone else, and when the car impacted, I felt nothing, flying forward at first and then bouncing around inside as it tumbled over and over. We had left the road. When the car stopped, I crawled from the wreckage and looked up the slope we had just rolled down, a steep ravine at the top of which was the park entrance, backlit by plasma rounds and explosions that even from this distance ripped the air from my lungs and forced wind up the mountainside, blowing so hard that I had to lean against it.
The general grabbed my arm. “We have to get back to Almaty, Oscar. Now.”
“Does it matter anymore? If they’re coming, they’re coming.”
“Half our armor is buying us time. The rest is falling back to cut off the southern approach to the city, and we need to get inside the new perimeter. There won’t be any breakout now.”
The hopelessness of it hit me in a wave. I stumbled after him as we clawed our way back to the road, but there was no more energy, no goal, and although my legs moved, there was no will motivating them, so my flight was more a function of autopilot than any instinct for survival. None of it mattered. A glance over my shoulder showed men firing from holes in the ground only to be swallowed by plasma, and our tanks, their cannons bucking with each round, launched a continuous barrage against an enemy that remained invisible, somewhere beyond a bend in the valley. That made it worse. With no sight of them, my mind created a scenario in which an endless mass of Russians advanced, oblivious to our fire. They were supermen. Inhuman. And as I stumbled down the road after the general, I laughed at my inhumanity, realizing that not only had I given up the title of Oscar Wendell, but nobody would classify me even as an animal, because didn’t animals want to survive? The general turned at one point and spoke. But the words disintegrated in my ears and may as well have been a foreign tongue, only able to convey a sense of a question, something like What the hell is wrong with you? but they didn’t fully register, and I laughed all the harder. Whatever was wrong with me, did it matter? What did the general think he could do if I answered? Help me? All my experience of warfare had accumulated into a critical mass of horror so that “the present” transpired outside time, in some universe that made a second an hour and an hour a week, made the road stretch and elongate so that my legs moved in slow motion and would never get me to the safety of Almaty.
And once Almaty, what then? Ox and Bridgette had taken the easy way out, the path of least resistance, and didn’t have to face the war anymore, and I whooped with a new energy, the realization that it wouldn’t be long now making me happy. I’d join them. My legs carried me past the general, faster now that my feet recognized what I had just begun to suspect—that we were all dead already, and that when it happened, the moment would be one of painlessness, of emptiness. I hadn’t felt anything when our scout car crashed; it was an epiphany. The scout car had taught me that when my moment came, I’d be ready, and I knew that it would be a happy event, a festival in which all trouble would be shed, all sadness and terror. It would be a moment—if that—of pain, maybe a millisecond of incredulity, and then freedom via death.
The sight of men surprised me. Endless lines of them guided fusion borers into steep dives or dug massive holes into which tanks had begun to inch, to bury themselves in a protective mantle of earth and rock, leaving only turrets exposed. It took a moment for me to realize that someone was in my face, screaming, pointing a pistol at my forehead.
“Your suit computer won’t sync, give me the fucking call sign,” he said.
“I don’t get it. You don’t get it.”
He slammed the butt of his handgun against my chin and knocked me to the ground. “Who are you?”
“I’m all of it, man. Do it. Take me out, and then it’ll be cool because you don’t get it but I do, you don’t matter but I do. Take it down. You didn’t know her and now I’m nothing and let’s look into the abyss because once you do that you’ll see it’s all OK, that it’s just the way it is.”
“What?” The soldier looked up and then drew to attention so that I knew before hearing the voice, knew without turning around, that he’d saved me again.
“It’s OK, he’s with me, son. Where’s General Stinson’s HQ?”
The man pointed his pistol in the opposite direction, behind him, and I felt the general lift me by the shoulders, push me down the road and back into the Almaty rubble. The bubble burst then. I started crying and hung my head, wishing that it had ended back on the mountain, in the meadows that had once looked so beautiful and calm.
The general shook his head. “I didn’t know you were so far gone, Oscar.”
“I’m not gone. I’m here.”
“Don’t. Just don’t.”
I heard the blasts again, in the distance now, but when I looked toward the mountains, it was clear that the fighting had intensified, and even more plasma lit the sky. “They’re coming. They want us all, General, even you, even our dead. You said you’d get us out.”
“Not anymore. Now I just want to kill as many as I can before they kill us.”
“Not me; I just want to die, to go. It’ll be OK then. I know it. Let the Russians come in, General. Dying won’t be so bad.”
“Son, you don’t get it at all. They might not kill you, they might capture you. And that’s a hell of a lot worse.”
Just before we arrived at the command post, I looked around. “Where’s the corporal?”
“Dead. Decapitated
in the wreck.”
We jogged down a ramp and back into the earth again, but the feeling of security that subterrene had once lent me was long gone, so that now the earth felt like a prison.
We felt them closing in. There wasn’t any moment that a historian would be able to point to, declaring with certainty that this was the instant Popov closed the circle around us, but we all sensed it happening, a feeling that made your hair stand up, and it took everything to keep from turning to jelly. Men sat at terminals in the command post and smoked nonstop and nobody chewed them out, because air handling didn’t matter anymore. The floor rumbled with far-off detonations. A digital map unit rested on the main wall and showed Almaty with friendly forces marked in green and blue and Popov in red, but nobody needed it; you felt the perimeter and the false sense of security it lent, because all those men had a nervous energy that pulsated and expanded, keeping you warm. The command post had been dug into rock, under the city center, and our forces assembled themselves into two concentric rings with us in the middle. I breathed a sigh of relief the one time I did look at the map, recognizing that some of the forces had survived the mountains—had dug in just at the edge of the park to keep Pops out of south Almaty.
My problem wasn’t just being trapped: I was a lunatic. I wanted drugs, anything to take the edge off and let me roll into a deep hole, escape the reality of our situation and get out—even though I wouldn’t really be out. But juicing up wouldn’t work and I knew it, because deep down the recollection of time in the mountain meadows, the wilderness after Karazhyngyl, all of it played in a continuous loop to remind me that getting lit would be just as useless as it always had been. I’d get high and then what? The comedown would be worse, darker with the added benefit of knowing that nothing had changed except that I’d failed again. I swear to God that at that instant, with Pops encircling us and getting ready to attack, I didn’t worry about the Russians as much as I wondered how I would get through life without drugs, which really was a wacky thought. Like there would be a life beyond Almaty. The thought of spending my days with nothing to help me get by, like a normal person, made me cringe, because it didn’t seem possible.
A voice asked for volunteers to check different sections of the perimeter and I raised my hand. Not because I wanted the job. It was clear that someone else would have been better suited; I just wanted to do something, to get out of my head for once, because the thoughts never got brighter and the only way to escape was to escape them, to do something that would make me stop thinking.
The general handed me a new helmet and a carbine. “Take them.”
“I didn’t know I’d lost my helmet.”
“You left it in my car on the mountain. If this were another war, I would have made you climb back up and get it, but it doesn’t matter now. Take the northern section, from areas ten through fifteen. Just make for the Premier Hotel and then north on what’s left of Dostyk Avenue from there.”
He punched keys on his suit and a map popped onto my faceplate, showing the section of the line, one where Popov still hadn’t arrived in force.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tell the boys we’re doing fine; for now our guys are giving air cover to keep the skies clear, and that’s something. Ask if they need anything. Give them a hand job if they want one.”
The general walked me to the ramp and my night vision clicked in, the stars twinkling in greenish yellow.
“Come back and tell me what you learn,” he said, and headed back into the ground.
I crept over the rubble. Our engineers would have an underground defense network established eventually, and we prayed that it would be soon, but this time it was almost guaranteed that Pops would also hit us topside. Remnants of an Army battalion had emplaced all their sentry bots around the perimeter and had some artillery, but it wasn’t nearly the amount we’d need, not even close to what would make topside attacks too risky for the Russians. Overhead, drones whined and fought each other. But the real battle hadn’t started yet—this was the quiet before the attack—and I felt my nerves begin to slip again, so I had to play games of counting blocks of rubble as I traversed the city streets, and of watching the map display to make sure I headed in the right direction, reminding myself that thinking was just as real an enemy as the Russians.
In the darkness, a square shape emerged from the rubble, a building. It had sustained some damage but was largely intact, a huge thing that had once been Almaty’s biggest hotel, the Premier, and it stopped me in my tracks so that I stood, dumfounded, just staring. How had we gotten this far? Almaty had once been a city like any other, with people who had dreams of doing something other than being invaded and killed, and I doubted that many of them even knew the current market price for rhenium or selenium or lanthanum; they probably didn’t even know what the metals were used for. But we did. The Russians did. At the moment word got out that Kaz had something everyone wanted, someone at the Pentagon dusted off the abacus and did the math, a simple equation that estimated cost of deployment, engagement, and retreat, to be balanced against the estimated reserves of rhenium and someone’s wild-ass guess at how much we could get out—a kind of lottery that the locals hadn’t even known they’d played until they were notified of winning the grand prize: us. I recalled the discussions when I first arrived in Bandar, when reporters in the bar would still haggle over the amounts we’d be able to pull out before the Russians countered, and how I’d engaged in them too, because it had all been so important back then. Now? Now it was like seeing a trillion one-dollar bills in person versus hearing it described; if you saw the cost of getting our share, it was indescribable, and you’d realize that there had been no words for all this until now. The cost was a hotel in the middle of an empty rubble field, surrounded by the dead. Useless. I pushed past and did my best to shake the feeling that the Premier watched me as I left, staring at my back with a look of you-did-this-to-me-and-I’ll-never-forget-it. Its empty windows made strange noises in the breeze, and if Ox or Bridgette lived there now, I wasn’t ready to see them.
When I reached the inner perimeter, I dropped into a trench manned by three Army guys, and one of them nearly shot me.
“Jesus.” He lowered his Maxwell and turned to face north. “Jesus Christ.”
I asked, “How are you guys doing?”
“What do you mean how are we doing? Who the fuck are you?”
The other two didn’t even look at me, hadn’t thought I was worth shooting, much less speaking with.
“Command sent me to check on things, to let you know that we still have air cover. Where’s your CO?”
“Yeah, right. CO. I’m the CO. My name’s Private Jerk-off. I don’t know, smart guy. You tell me where he is, because I haven’t seen an officer since they put us here.”
“What did they tell you to do?”
The question made all of them laugh, and the one who had almost fired at me leaned his Maxwell against the trench and slid into a crouch. He popped his helmet.
“They told us to watch north, toward the outer perimeter, and if we see any of our guys booking this way, to give them cover, because it means Pops is coming.” He lit a cigarette and then looked at me, his night vision goggles glinting. “Hey, you got any drugs?”
“No. I’m heading to check the outer perimeter, but I’ll be coming back this way, so if you see someone headed toward you, don’t shoot.”
And I booked it. Pops waited, gathering strength so he could roll in and roll over, and when he did arrive, I didn’t want to be trapped in a trench with those guys. They were lepers. My stomach turned at the realization that all those green and blue dots, which were supposed to represent able-bodied soldiers on the map, hadn’t really meant anything. These were soldiers in a way. But none of them were in one piece.
Sentry bots hissed, popping out to scan as I approached the outer markers, and then returned to their holes, allowing me to pass and slide into a second set of trenches. This one was filled with men
, shoulder to shoulder, who faced north and ignored my joining them. I tapped one on the shoulder and waited for him to turn.
“Command sent me to check on the lines, to let you know that we still have air cover and the engineers are working out a tunnel network. You guys see anything?”
“Yeah.” He faced north again. “I see it all now, like in daytime. Jesus is on a white horse at the head of Popov’s army, and he’s pissed. He’ll be coming soon. Jesus wants revenge.”
This time I was the one who slid to the trench floor, trying to figure out how I’d do it, how I’d make it across the entire sector, because that close to the front, you knew like these guys did, sensed it: the Russians had finished prepping and were just waiting for the right time to come in. It was obvious.
I picked myself up and wormed through the trench, heading east, unable to shake the feeling that sooner or later I’d get high again.
Cut Off
The Russians didn’t attack. It was lucky for us, because the respite gave engineers the time they needed to dig their underground fortifications, ringing Almaty’s subterranean territories with tunnels and bunkers so that the men topside could take cover in rock. By the time the tunnels were complete, massive piles of soil and mud dotted the city’s rubble fields, monuments to the amount of material removed. There already were tunnels in place from the first defense of Almaty, which saved the sappers time and effort, so on the third day I found myself back where it had all started, underground, albeit under different circumstances this time and without any friends. Some men stayed topside. Most rotated down to be replaced at eight-hour intervals, but the tank and APC crews didn’t get that luxury and had glared at us when we’d first descended to leave them behind in the dirt, exposed. I didn’t blame them for hating us; they had been assigned to die first, to take out as much Russian armor as they could before plasma fried them in ceramic coffins, and that was if they were lucky. If they weren’t, and we lost our air cover before Pops attacked, the auto-drones would come before our tanks had a chance to get off a single shot.
Germline: The Subterrene War: Book 1 Page 12