Arc Riders

by David Drake

Forty meters from the lowboy, an airman scanned the hangar through an image-intensifier sight attached to an M16. Weigand raised and aimed his pistol, though he wasn’t sure how effective acoustics would be at that range—particularly because the gunman wore a Kevlar helmet.

  Before the rifleman could fire—if that’s what he meant to do—he slumped backward and lay without twitching. The gas shells had landed in the areas of the hangar where people were most concentrated. The rifleman had breathed a wisp of the gas. He’d awaken some time around dawn, feeling refreshed though stuffy. There might be holes in his memory, but no serious long-term damage.

  When the shells burst, their pressurized contents cooled the air it spilled across. Through his facemask, Weigand saw blue waves spreading in a ripple pattern from where each grenade had gone off. Barthuli or Carnes must have fired the full magazine, though he’d heard only the first round.

  The headlights on the armored car’s front fenders carved bright swaths across the hangar’s interior. The vehicle was four-wheeled and boat-shaped: its small turrel carried a pair of machine guns.

  The driver put the car in gear and turned slightly. Weigand recognized Barthuli and Carnes as the two figures in jungle fatigues crouching to either side of the personnel door at the edge of the headlights’ illumination. They were probably safe as long as they didn’t do anything to call attention to themselves, but—

  The analyst held the EMP generator. If Barthuli aimed at the armored car while the headlights were on him, he’d probably get both of them killed. It wasn’t just a matter of the vehicle’s gunner, if any. Barthuli would be targeting himself and Carnes for everyone in the hangar with a weapon.

  “Gerd, don’t shoot at the car!” Weigand shouted.

  “Pauli, of course not,” the analyst said with a hint of inappropriate amusement in his voice. All right, he knew better, but how was anybody to know how the crazy bastard’s mind was going to work?

  The armored car drove through a layer of gas, invisible to the vehicle’s occupants. The turn tightened because the driver dragged the steering wheel as he slumped back. Moving at the speed of a fast walk, the car collided with a side wall of the hangar. The seven-tonne vehicle bounced back and hit the wall a second time. This time the engine stalled.

  The headlights continued to burn, though they dimmed visibly when they lost the alternator’s output. The hangar wall reflected the light back onto the car, showing where the letters AIR POLICE had been painted over on the blue side when the new circle-and-star was applied.

  “Pauli, Rebecca is loaded with tanglefoot now,” Barthuli said over the commo system. If anybody but the analyst had spoken the words, he’d have been prodding Weigand to get a move on with the third suit of armor. That might not have been Gerd’s intent, but the point was a valid one.

  “Gerd, I’m coming,” Weigand said as he sent the third suit into limbo with the other pair. He stepped from the back of the trailer and trotted toward his companions.

  There’d only been the single burst of gunfire. Someone with a bullhorn was trying to restore order. The gas shells had already accomplished that by strewing at least 90 percent of the hangar’s occupants unconscious on the floor.

  The enhancement feature of Weigand’s facemask made running through the dark almost as safe as doing the same thing in daylight. Unprocessed forward-looking infrared (and the same was true of unprocessed image intensifiers) gave a clear view of objects but no trustworthy way to judge relative distance. The processor in Weigand’s headband modeled objects with false shadowing so that they appeared to be the distance from the viewer that they were in cold fact.

  Carnes opened the door as Weigand joined them. A pair of guards with automatic rifles lay on the concrete outside the door where an acoustic pistol had dropped them. Canted nearby on its sidestand, already turned to head back in the direction of the C-141, was a large motorcycle.

  “Rebecca knows how to drive it!” Barthuli announced with pleasure. He took the tanglefoot projector Carnes handed him, then passed it and the EMP generator as well on to Weigand.

  Carnes swung her right leg over the stepped saddle with a grunt, then rocked the bike upright. The spring-loaded side-stand flew up when the weight came off it.

  “The one useful thing I learned from my husband,” she said. Her thumb stabbed a button. The engine spun and caught with an out-of-synchronous rumble. “I didn’t think so at the time. Now get on carefully. Keep your feet up, I know there’s not pegs for both of you, and lean when I do.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to leave the suits,” Weigand said as he boarded the motorcycle gingerly. If he stood on the pegs and braced his lower back against the sissy bar, there’d be—barely—enough room for Gerd to squeeze onto the seat between Carnes and Weigand.

  “I wish I was five years old and home with my mother!” Carnes said. She revved the big engine, ripping the night with its double note. “There’s no way I can carry all of us and the suits besides.”

  “Ready,” said Barthuli. He reached behind himself to grip Weigand’s waist rather than cling to the driver.

  Carnes eased in the clutch. The bike wobbled forward, then stabilized as she gassed it.

  The fuel truck was no longer flashing its warning light from the C-141. The transport was still on the turn-out apron, but it looked to Weigand as though the ramp had been raised. He didn’t have a hand free to adjust this facemask’s magnification.

  Carnes shifted into second gear. Acceleration rocked Weigand back hard. Carnes caught third and the exhaust note boomed out behind them.

  “Come to think…” Carnes shouted over the windrush, “my husband taught me not to marry drunks, too!”

  The bike roared as she shifted into fourth gear, blasting across the dark runway.

  Out of the frying pan…

  Bien Hoa

  Air Force Base

  Timeline B: August 14, 1991

  The mob surged around the aircraft even before the ramp was fully lowered. The mass of people pushing aboard prevented the passengers who’d come from the States on the C-141 from disembarking.

  A US Navy captain wearing a short-sleeved khaki uniform knocked Rebecca Carnes aside as he cannoned toward the front of the cargo bay. The officer held a blue duffle bag in one hand and clutched the wrist of a Vietnamese woman in the other. The woman was strikingly beautiful, with ivory skin and high French cheekbones. The infant she carried in a sling on her breast had solemn gray eyes.

  The loadmaster shouted to no effect against the uproar. The copilot came aft, the plug dangling from the headphones around his neck. “What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded.

  He spoke first to Carnes, then realized she was a passenger trying to leave the aircraft. He switched his focus to a master sergeant, also in khakis, who was transporting several pounds of gold chains by the expedient of hanging them around his neck. The sergeant had an aluminum briefcase in either hand. From the way the handles dug into his fingers, the contents were extremely heavy.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the copilot shouted. “You could’ve been killed when you pushed through the barriers while we were still taxiing! Don’t you know that? We could have run over the whole lot of you!”

  The sergeant set the briefcases on the fold-down bench beside him without loosening his grip on the handles. He was fat and sweating, even more than the familiar muggy warmth of Vietnam justified.

  “I’m going to Japan,” he said hoarsely, speaking through his gasping intakes of breath. “That’s where you’ll refuel, isn’t it? Yokota? Look, buddy, I’ll make it worth your while, but don’t think you’re getting me off this bird! Do you understand?”

  His voice rose shrilly on the final interrogative.

  Weigand murmured “Stay close to me” as he stepped ahead of Carnes. He held his barracks bag on his left shoulder where it couldn’t be stripped from him by the pressure of the crowd. “I’ll make a path.”

  “We’ve got cargo to unload!” the copilot
said, gesturing to the pallets and the remaining Conex.

  “Then fucking unload it!” the sergeant snarled. “But I swear I’ll blow this fucker up if you try to get me off it!”

  There might be explosives in his cases. Carnes doubted it, but somebody in the cargo bay probably did have a grenade. Shrapnel might not destroy the C-141, but it would make the bird unflyable.

  Carnes pressed her body against Weigand’s back, stepping each time the big ARC Rider took a shuffling step forward. Barthuli was behind her, just as close. It was the only way they could proceed against the thrust of the mob.

  “Will they be able to take off?” Barthuli asked curiously as the linked trio reached the ramp. “With such a load, I mean.”

  The crowd stretched back in a broad fan, a multicolored blotch on the concrete. There must beat least a thousand people present, desperate to leave the war zone. Rumors of the use of nuclear weapons in Yunnan must have gotten out. How many of these folk had an idea of what world they’d be returning to on the other side of the Pacific?

  The master sergeant, the black marketeer, probably did. That’s why he was heading for refuge in Japan, not the once-united States.

  Weigand clenched his huge left fist and extended it like a galley’s ram, cutting a path through the center of the refugees. If he’d taken a line closer to the edge of the ramp, the three of them would have been pushed over the way hapless boarders were in the team’s stead.

  “Fly?” Weigand said. He had an instinctive grasp of practical matters. The analyst could have answered his own question, but only by researching it. “Sure, you can’t pack enough flesh aboard one of these to equal the weight of tanks and ammunition it’s built to carry. Whether any of them will be able to breathe, though, that’s another matter.”

  Carnes glimpsed a convoy of two military ambulances and a deuce-and-a-half truck loaded with stretcher cases beneath a canvas awning. The vehicles were caught at the back of the crowd. A female doctor in fatigues stood on the step to the driver’s seat, bracing herself on the open door as she peered over the mob.

  “That’s Dr. Byerly!” Carnes said in surprise. “I knew her when I was with the 312th at Chu Lai two years ago.”

  “We need a local contact,” Weigand said. “We’ll join her. Is that all right?”

  “Yes!” said Carnes, surprised at her own enthusiasm. She’d seen no one she knew since the orders transferring her to the 90th Replacement Battalion and abruptly reassigning her to command a battalion of Argentine mercenaries.

  The people who hadn’t reached the belly of the aircraft were dispersing, hoping to find another long-haul aircraft to board. Carnes wondered how often this drama had been enacted in recent days. How many planes and ships still arrived from the States to feed the meat grinder of this war?

  Some of those excluded slumped in exhaustion over their baggage; a Vietnamese woman wailed in a high voice. The Air Force colonel who’d accompanied the woman was talking in a threatening tone to the copilot at the foot of the ramp, pointing repeatedly at the eagles on the shoulders of his dress uniform. The copilot looked too tired and frustrated even to move away.

  “Will it be the same all over, do you think?” Barthuli asked as the trio separated to a more comfortable interval. “The mobs leaving, that is. Moving against the flow could be difficult.”

  The humid air was doubly heated by sunlight reflecting from acres of concrete runway and laced with the gut-churning residues of turbine exhaust. Bien Hoa smelled like the anteroom of hell.

  As it was in plain fact.

  “These are Saigon commandos,” Carnes explained with a bitterness she’d never tried to suppress. “The worst thing they’ve had to worry about in this war is a problem with the office air-conditioning or the price of drinks in the officers’ club. The closer you get to the field, the less you see of that. The less you see of anything except blood and mud.”

  A pair of flatbed semis, one of them mounting a winch on the tractor section, drove up to the C-141 and stopped. Cargo handlers, stripped to the waist and wearing sweatbands rather than hats, got off the vehicles. They eyed the refugees packed into the cargo bay.

  “If they leave them there a day or two,” Weigand said, “perhaps they’ll melt and run out the bottom.”

  He lifted his olive drab baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his right hand. The ARC Riders’ normal garb was climate-controlled, but Weigand and Barthuli were in jungle fatigues to avoid unnecessary questions. The only reason they hadn’t discarded the coveralls entirely was the possibility that they’d want the camouflage abilities of fabric that could blend to any color or pattern.

  The driver of one of the ambulances walked forward to join Byerly at the lead vehicle. He was an MD, though he was much younger than Byerly. The third driver, a slender Oriental—perhaps Filipino rather than Vietnamese—waited beside his ambulance.

  “Colonel Byerly?” Carnes called, because the doctor had stepped down to talk to the ambulance driver coming from the other direction.

  Byerly turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Her hair, cut short to keep it out of the way, frizzed in all directions from beneath her cotton boonie hat. “Carries?” she said. “Major Carnes.”

  Byerly’s face hardened into something close to rage. She pointed to the C-141. “You’re part of that lot?”

  “We were disembarking, Colonel,” Carnes replied, deliberately using the anger she’d felt as well. “Though that mob of Saigon’s finest made that pretty hard.”

  “Sorry, Rebecca,” Byerly said. As if the anger had been the only thing stiffening her body, she sat down abruptly on the fuel-tank step of her vehicle. “I’m so tired, and it’s no damned good, none of it.”

  “Look, Colonel,” the doctor from the lead ambulance said. “Let me go talk to them. These patients have got to get to Japan if they’re going to have a chance, the way our personnel situation is.”

  He gestured toward the refugee-packed transport. “They’ll understand that, don’t you think? Some of them?”

  A nurse leaned out from the bed of the two-and-a-half-ton truck. “Look,” she called in a rasping voice. “I’m going to start losing them any minute now if they don’t get some fluids. If we can’t board, get us into the shade, for God’s sake!”

  The nurse looked eighteen. Carnes wondered if Rebecca Carnes had ever been as young as that girl seemed. Maybe one time, a lifetime of war ago….

  “You want to put your patients on board the transport, is that it?” Pauli Weigand said. He continued to hold the barracks bag on his shoulder, as if the weight meant nothing to him.

  Byerly looked at him from where she sat. The step had a punched nonskid surface, but she was obviously too tired to care. “That was the idea,” she said. “I’ve even got movement orders from USARV, for what that matters.”

  She nodded toward the transport. “Like as not, some of the REMFs who signed off on the orders are right there now.”

  “Rear Echelon Mother Fucker!” Barthuli translated, delighted to have heard an idiomatic phrase in its normal context.

  Byerly returned her attention to the other doctor. “No, Vincent, I don’t think a single one of those bastards would give up his chance of escape in order to evacuate our patients. After all, most of our people arc battle casualties, so they’ve got nothing in common with the pigs on the plane.”

  “But we’ve got to get them to Japan, Colonel,” Vincent said pleadingly. “Or they’ll die. And who knows when another plane will be available?”

  Fatigue had stripped the layers of maturity from the young doctor’s psyche. He sounded like a child reacting to an adult situation with complete disbelief.

  “I can clean the plane out for you,” Weigand said. “Make it possible for the interlopers to be removed, that is. If I do that, can you put us up while we find passage for Son Tay?”

  “Pauli, I used all the gas shells at Travis,” Carnes warned. If she’d understood correctly, the acoustic pistols were individua
l, not area weapons. If the three of them started shooting, no matter how nonlethally, at the occupants of the C-141, somebody was bound to shoot back within a matter of seconds.

  Byerly rose to her feet. “There’s a medical supply flight to the 96th in Son Tay tomorrow,” she said. “If it leaves, at any rate. I don’t promise that. But what can you do about…” She motioned to the aircraft.

  Weigand winced and looked hesitant. “The fifth round in the magazine isn’t tanglefoot, it’s an acoustic grenade,” he said to Barthuli, the only other person present who would understand his concern. “It’s, ah—”

  He met Byerly’s eyes. “There’s a risk of permanent injury to those who are closest to the grenade when it goes off,” he said. “Besides rendering them unconscious. Maybe death.”

  Byerly snorted. “The only reason I haven’t gone looking for a CS grenade to throw aboard that plane,” she said, “is that I couldn’t load my patients until all the gas was scrubbed out of the bay. The fact that half of those bastards would trample the other half to death while they were puking their guts out, that wouldn’t stop me in the least. Do whatever you please.”

  “Gerd,” Weigand said, shaking out of his momentary diffidence, “help me make sure that the aircraft’s crew is out of the way. Rebecca, I want you to stand well to the side of the aircraft when I discharge the grenade. Gerd and I will be protected by cancellation waves. You don’t have a headband so you’ll be at risk if you’re in line with the opening. The bay will act as a resonance chamber.”

  Carnes glanced at the baggage handlers. “I’ll go grab those guys,” she said, waving. “I’ll keep them out of the line of fire.”

  She grinned. “I’ll also keep them from wandering off. We’ll need as much help as we can get to throw the REMFs onto the taxiway after you knock them cold or whatever you’re going to do.”

  The six cargo handlers stood together in the thin blob of shade thrown by the cab and winch mechanism of the lead truck. The leader of the detachment was a black with a paunch, massive arms and shoulders, and a Spec 5 shield pinned to the front of his sweatband. As he and his fellows watched Carnes approach, his primary interest was in her gender. His eyes gave only the briefest glance toward the oak leaves on her collar before refocusing on her breasts.