by Ralph Peters
Ryder's face had turned pale. He looked up at Taylor with an expression of helpless loss.
"What's the matter?" Taylor said calmly.
"I… I can't tell which system is which," Ryder said. "I don't have the right key."
"Fuck it. Just destroy them all," Taylor said, beginning to lose his patience.
Ryder shook his head. "Sir… the way the program's set up… you have to destroy each system individually." He half-turned back to the console. A flashing star identified an alphanumeric. Ryder tapped a key. The alphanumeric disappeared and the blinking star moved down to the next number.
"See?" Ryder said. "All you have to do to destroy something is tap the control key. Right here. But you might be destroying anything. Maybe a tank. Or just a radio set. Or one of the scramblers. I can't tell. But you have to hit the key for every single number. And there are thousands in the data base." Ryder tapped the key again, erasing another number, destroying another unidentified system out on the distant battlefield. "It's going to take a while," he said. And he hit the key again.
More explosions sounded from the world beyond the building. A closer blast shook the ceiling. The overhead lights blinked. But the computer had its own miniaturized power source — it was an independent world.
Ryder shifted his full attention back to the computer, striking the control key again each time the star moved down. It seemed to take two to three seconds to destroy each system. So easy. And yet.
"Give me the microphone," Taylor ordered Parker. "And get Kozlov in here."
Parker handed over the mike. Meredith dashed into the hallway to fetch the Russian.
Taylor had forgotten the day's call signs. He had forgotten everything but the business at hand. "Nowak," he called the ground force commander, "can you hear me?" He waited. Hoping. And then the familiar voice came heavily over the comms set. "Bravo four-five. Over."
"I want you to disengage. Start pulling out. Get your men loaded up as fast as you can and get into the air. Do it now. Over."
"Wilco. You need help?"
"Negative. Just get in the air. Zwack's out of bullets. Your ships can do us more good in the air now than your men can do on the ground. We're almost done," Taylor lied. "Break. Zwack, you sonofabitch, don't do anything crazy. As soon as Nowak's in the air, I want your ass on the way to Turkey. We're going to exfiltrate individually, and you won't do anybody any good dead. The war's not over yet. You read me?"
"Lima Charlie." It was the voice of a man who had chosen hard service over the safest life money could buy.
"Don't screw around," Taylor said. "Regard my transmission as a lawful order. Out."
Ryder continued to punch the control key, deleting line after line. But his mood of playful competence was long gone.
Meredith brought Kozlov in from the hallway. Taylor tossed the mike back to Parker.
"Want me to cover the hallway again?" Parker asked.
Taylor considered this officer he had only recently gotten to know. They were all so brave, so fine. What a lucky, lucky country to have such men.
"No," Taylor said. "I want everybody to listen to me. Chief, you keep punching that keyboard with your ears open." Taylor looked at the faces. Meredith, so handsome and bright. Kozlov, with his bad teeth and naive honesty. Parker, a little bulldog of a man. And Ryder. Time had begun to collapse for Taylor. Since he and Noburu had looked into each other's eyes. Ryder blurred into another young warrant officer, a boy hardly known, suffering in a wreck in the African grasslands. It was only a moment before that Taylor had raised his pistol, with ants chewing at his hand, to shoot a boy through the forehead. Then he had blinked his eyes and found himself here.
Ryder sat at the computer, while Taylor raised an invisible hand with an invisible pistol.
No. Never again.
Taylor settled his eyes back on Meredith. A tormented boy growing up late in the streets of a diseased city. An earnest lieutenant, standing stiffly before his commander's desk, while outside combat helicopters churned the night air above Los Angeles.
Manny was there too. And Lucky Dave. But they stood apart from Meredith and the rest of the men, forming a distinctly different group. Taylor knew to which group he belonged. He was overdue for membership.
"Merry," Taylor said, "you are now acting force commander. Your mission is to extricate the raiding force and get every ship and every man across the Turkish border. I'm staying."
"No," Meredith said. The word of complaint had none of the pompous formality of duty perceived but unfelt. It was a cry. "No," Meredith repeated. "Sir… you're too valuable. I can stay."
Taylor briefly closed his eyes and shook his head. "Goddamnit," he said softly, "you're a soldier, Merry. And soldiers take orders." Outside, the thumping and sputter of battle underlined each word. "There's no more time. And there's no point in all of us…"
Meredith set his jaw. His facial expression had grown so serious it almost made Taylor laugh. "I'm staying with you," Meredith said adamantly. "The others can go." Taylor dropped a hand onto Ryder's shoulder, steadying himself. He could feel the young man trembling. But the warrant's fingers never stopped working the control key.
An enormous blast shook the building. The lights went out and the only illumination in the room was the cool colored glow off the computer monitors. Then the ceiling lights flickered back on.
No one had moved. The officers in the room simply looked at him. Taylor saw his last hopes for any decency in the affair's conclusion slipping away. And he could not bear it.
"Please," he said, offering them the strangest of words. He carefully chose his language to include them all. But his eyes remained on Meredith as he spoke.
"Listen to me," Taylor said. "You're all I have. I have nothing else. No children. No life. You're my children. Don't you understand that?" He stared hard at Meredith. He wanted to take the younger man in his arms, to protect him now and forever. "You're the only sons I'll ever have. And no man wants to watch his sons die." Then he narrowed his focus. "Merry. Please. Get out of here. Take them all with you. For Manny and Lucky Dave." Meredith opened his mouth. His lips formed the word, "No." But he never spoke it.
The sounds of battle ruptured something in the building above their heads.
The tiny voice of the radio squawked, barely audible.
"Where are you? Everybody's in the air. Your ship's exposed. Where are you?"
"Go now," Taylor said. "It's time."
Hurriedly, Taylor reached down inside his tunic to an inner pocket. He drew out a worn cavalry guidon. The tiny flag unrolled from his fingertips. The cloth had grown very thin. The red flash was a faded pink, the white had gone yellow. The numbers were shriveled and bent like old men. He held it out to Meredith.
"There's a woman," Taylor said. "Back in Washington. You'll find her name and address in my gear." He briefly broke eye contact. "It won't mean much to her. If anything at all. But I want her to have it."
Meredith accepted the rag, his fingers briefly grazing Taylor's with a last warmth.
"Get out of here," Taylor said. He could no longer look at any of them. He roughly pulled Ryder from his chair before the computer and took his place. He turned his back to them all.
They left. In a local silence. With the lulls and sudden eruptions of combat shaking the building above their heads. They moved slowly as they exited the room. Then Taylor could hear them running down the corridor, with Meredith shouting at them to move, move, move. Taylor smiled. Meredith sounded like a merciless old drill sergeant. Then Taylor lost the sound of them in the clamor of battle.
He pressed the code key. Again and again.
In a little while, he imagined that he heard the sound of an aircraft lifting off. The building trembled. But it might only have been from the increasingly frequent shell impacts.
Taylor chose to believe it was his M-100, taking Meredith and the others home.
The door opened behind his back.
Taylor did not sway. He continued to p
ress the control key at the required cadence. Fighting to the last, as best he knew how.
"Colonel Taylor, sir?"
Taylor whipped around in shock and fury.
It was Kozlov. Cradling an automatic rifle. The staff officer looked awkward and uncomfortable with the killing tool.
"I told you to go," Taylor said coldly. He turned his attention back to the computer, immeasurably relieved that he had not found Meredith standing in the doorway.
"They're all gone," Kozlov said. "I watched them take off. All of your men are safe."
"I told you to go, goddamnit," Taylor said. "You're a soldier. Soldiers obey orders." He pressed the magic key again.
"This is my fight," Kozlov said to Taylor's back, his words competing with the racket of combat. There wasn't much time now. Not much time at all. "This is my country. It's more my fight than yours."
"You're a fool," Taylor said. But his voice was not so fierce. He wasn't sorry for this bit of company, after all. The selfishness never ends, he told himself.
"And you, too, are a fool," Kozlov said. "We are both fools. But sometimes… I think it is better to be a fool." I should say something kind, Taylor thought. Something decent. To reach out to the poor bastard. But he could not make the words. There was only the screen and the key and a lengthening shadow.
"Anyway," Kozlov said, "I will guard you. Perhaps I can make some extra minutes for us."
Taylor's finger punched the wonderful key again. And again. Hundreds more systems had been destroyed. It was impossible to keep count. Perhaps the Scramblers were already gone.
I am the destroyer, he said to himself, recalling the disembodied quote but not its source. Poetry? An Indian religious text? It was all the same.
I am the destroyer.
"I am going to the hallway now," Kozlov said. His voice was almost feminine in its sadness. "Goodbye to you, Colonel Taylor."
And that was the end. Kozlov never reached the corridor. He died in the doorway. A burst of automatic weapons fire sounded loud and close. The Russian made a single weak sound and dropped to the floor.
Taylor swiveled around in his chair. With one hand he reached for the deadly fruit hanging from his carrying harness. The other hand remained on the keyboard, tapping away in the acquired rhythm.
Kozlov lay on the floor, his face pointed away from Taylor's field of vision. Above the body, a wiry Japanese commando stood with his legs spread, weapon at the ready. He looked at Taylor, then at the computer. He shouted a single word in Japanese.
Taylor drew the pin from the grenade without removing it from his harness. In the seconds before it exploded, he had time to appreciate his opponent, who was young, lean-featured, and obviously well-trained. The commando stood helplessly in the doorway, frozen by the instability of the moment. Unable to fire, as long as Taylor sat framed by the precious computer. The commando had the look of a healthy, magnificent animal. Ready to kill, but restrained by a higher authority. With his dark, hyberalert eyes and the feel of brutally conditioned muscles beneath the fabric of his uniform, he was a perfect example of what a soldier should be. Taylor pitied him, understanding him as well as any man could ever understand another.
Taylor felt wonderfully peaceful as he waited and waited for the grenade to do its work. He even smiled at the recognition that his opponent's face was, after all, identical to his own, and that it had always been his own face on the other end of the gun.
25
5 November 2020
Morning
"We're not going to make it," Krebs told Meredith. The S-2 sat in Taylor's old seat in the cockpit, watching the frozen landscape scream by. The M-100 was following the terrain as closely as possible on its exfiltration route. And the terrain of Armenia was rugged and wild.
"You can do it, Flapper," Meredith said. "It's not much further." And, in truth, it was not far. The Turkish border lay just beyond the next line of mountains.
"Major," the old warrant said, "you can kiss my ass and suck my dick, if it makes you feel good. But we ain't going to make it, I done my best. But the sonsofbitches put so many holes in us you could run the Mississippi River in one side of this ship and out the other. We're falling apart. And we're running on fumes. I can either put her down now, or we can just wait until we fall out of the sky."
They were so close. Each of the other M-l00s in the raiding force had sent the code word hours before to indicate that they had crossed the border into neutral airspace and safety. But the command ship had waited too long to lift off from the rooftop helipad. Its armored sides had been battered and pierced. Barely half an hour out of Baku, Krebs had found it necessary to put down in the hills so that he could try to carry out whatever immediate repairs were possible. With Meredith trying clumsily to help and the others standing guard with their popguns in the darkness, they had struggled to slap enough mechanical Band-aids on the ship to get her back into the air before dawn brought about their inevitable discovery by the enemy. With the first light sweeping over the barren hills, Krebs had miraculously managed to get the M-100 airborne again. It sounded like a sick old used car. But it flew. And they climbed up above the snow line into high Armenia.
Meredith stared obstinately forward, across the gray and white landscape, as though he could will the ailing machine to continue over these last critical miles. The broken earth beneath them was terra incognita. The situation in Armenia was so chaotic, with so many factions and occupation forces engaged in butchering each other, that a landing would bring completely unpredictable consequences. If the Islamic Union occupation forces got to them first, they would be shot out of hand. If the wrong partisans got them, their fate might be considerably worse.
"Major," Krebs cried in exasperation. "Look at the goddamned controls. We're fucked. I've got to land this baby. Now. "
Meredith refused to look at the control panel. He stared at the line of white mountains that meant freedom. And life. They had to make it now. For Taylor. So that it would not end as a bad joke after all.
"How far is it?" Meredith asked.
In response, the engines began to choke.
"So much for the decision-making process," Krebs said.
"Mayday, mayday," Meredith shouted, working the radio and intercom simultaneously. "Prepare for uncontrolled impact."
The engines were finished. Krebs struggled with the manual controls, trying to bully the autorotation system to perform at the top of his voice. But the threats didn't help. They were too low for the autorotation to fully activate, and before Meredith could call any further warnings or instructions to the men in the rear compartment, the M-100 began to slice its way through a stand of evergreen trees in a shallow valley.
The machine crashed through the forest, splintering tall conifers. The armored sides and underbelly screamed as the M-100 scraped through the boughs. The ship bucked badly, tilting over on its side. Meredith could hear the sound of man-made materials wrenching apart in the last instant before the fuselage slammed into the ground, and he thought of Taylor. His wife, his parents — they all deserved him now. Only Taylor remained. With his ruined face and haunted eyes. Taylor wanted him to live.
What was left of the ship ploughed into a snow field amid the trees and came to rest on its side.
To his astonishment, Meredith found that he was still alive. The slash wound on his neck had torn open again from the strain, and his spine and joints felt as though he had made a very bad parachute landing. But his seat harness still held him in place And he was unmistakably, incredibly, deliciously alive.
"Sonofabitch," Krebs said with spectacular emphasis. "That's it. I've had it. I'm going to retire."
"You all right, Chief?" Meredith asked. He could hear his own voice shaking.
"Sonofabitch," the warrant officer repeated. His voice, too, had begun to tremble.
Meredith moved to try the intercom. But the mike had been torn from his headset in the crash. In any case, all of the electronic systems appeared to be utterly inert.
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He tested his limbs, then carefully undid his safety harness, lowering himself until his feet caught the edge of the copilot's seat. The M-l00 had settled almost perfectly at ninety degrees, its right wing and rotor torn away. Awkward and stiff, Meredith clambered back through the passageway that led to the ops compartment, crawling in a sideward world, under the surreal glow of the emergency lights.
Parker and Ryder were both bloody and unconscious. The ops-and-intel NCO was awake but dazed, the lower half of his face covered in blood. At the sight of Meredith, the NCO's eyes gave a flicker of recognition, but he immediately sank back into himself.
Parker was in the worst shape. The seats in the ops cell had safety belts, but the overall ergonomics were not nearly as developed as the cockpit seats. Parker's chair had ripped free of its pedestal, throwing him forward-His arm was badly twisted and there was blood seeping through his uniform sleeve where an unnatural jut against the doth announced a compound fracture. His face was misshapen on one side, and it appeared as though both the jaw and cheekbone might have been broken Parker snored blood out of his nose and mouth.
Ryder came to. The young warrant officer was bruised and stiff, but far luckier than the others. Hardly a minute after waking, he was moving tentatively about the cabin, trying to assist Meredith.
"What happened?" Ryder asked.
"We crashed."
Ryder thought for a moment. It was evident that his head was not yet completely dear "We in Turkey?"