A Song Called Youth (102 page)

Men sprang into view all around him, rifles clicking smartly. Aiming at his chest, or head. They’d been hidden behind crates and machinery, not more than six feet away.

Roseland was paralyzed, impotently clutching the rifle.

“To answer your question,” Torrence said, walking up behind him, “we use it for training.” He nodded at the guerrillas. They lowered their weapons. “You’re going to train with these people.”

The island of Merino, the Caribbean.

“Someone at the State Department fumbled the ball,” Witcher said. Smoke had difficulty hearing him over the whine of the jet. “They couldn’t know Hand is with you. They must know that if they bomb an installation with a hotshot American TV journalist in it, it’s going to look pretty bad.”

“Not necessarily,” Smoke said. He was sitting beside a very nervous Norman Hand in the cargo plane’s little passenger compartment, talking to Witcher on a fone. He kept the fone screen on the seatback blanked, so Hand couldn’t see who he was talking to. “They’ll pull some strings, whitewash it, say that Hand was covering this imaginary ‘Puerto Rican Communist guerrilla air attack.’ Same old bullshit. It’ll be worth it to them, to get us.” There was a staticky pause before Witcher’s reply. He was talking via satellite, a continent and an ocean away, safe in his Kauai estate. “Suppose you’re right. We’ll try to call them on this one . . . But it’ll be too late to—Whoa . . . A trace. Got to go.”

Smoke glanced at Hand, saw the reporter’s knuckles were white on the arms of his seat. Hand peered out the scratched window; Smoke looked over his shoulder. The airfield was near the beach, and out to sea the picket of American destroyers was visible, gray notches against the horizon. “Why don’t we take off? I should’ve called that damn chopper back—”

“It wouldn’t have come,” Smoke told him, not for the first time. “They’re . . . civilian. They won’t ignore the aircraft advisory.”

He was thinking of Alouette, glad he had gotten her out ahead of the others. He worried about the islanders. They’d gone into hurricane shelters, a long way from the NR base, but American naval artillery was notoriously inaccurate; its smart missiles so poorly made—by the contractors who routinely ripped off the Pentagon—they weren’t so smart . . .

“Why don’t we take
off
?” Hand demanded again, his voice a little shrill. Across the aisle, his technicki smiled in quiet satisfaction.

As if in answer, the plane lurched into movement.

The pilot’s voice crackled from the fone. “We’re getting a stay-down warning, Jack. They claim we can surrender peaceably.”

“Accept!” Hand burst out.

Smoke shook his head. “It’s a lie. This isn’t a military operation, this is CIA. They might or might not take us alive, but eventually we’d all die in their hands.”

You they might just put under an extractor and erase your memories of the whole thing, Smoke thought.

He wasn’t going to tell Hand that. It would be an acceptable option to Hand. Unacceptable to Smoke.

“See if you can stall them, tell them we’re thinking about it,” Smoke told the pilot. Feeling sweat stick his back to the seat; hearing his heart hammering in his ears.

There were seventy others with them in the passenger compartment. A few were muttering; no one crying, no one panicking. Every one of them NR; every one of them ready to die.

Their silence touched Smoke, made his throat contract with emotion.

The plane took to the air; two others, almost simultaneously, took off in other parts of the field, carrying the entire NR base. The island was at the end of its usefulness to the NR anyway, Smoke reflected. Most of their work was in Europe now. And on FirStep. They’d divide their operations between the space base and, probably, Israel. A springboard to Europe.

On some level, he was conscious that he was thinking of these things, making these mental preparations, to cover the fact that he was scared as a son of a bitch. He was trying to convince himself he had a future to plan for.

The US Navy, lied to by the CIA, was going to try to shoot them out of the sky.

Of course, Smoke had tried to talk to the ships on radio. He was presumed to be an American radical sympathizer, lying to protect Puerto Rican Commie compadres.

The plane was angling up as steeply as the pilot dared. “We’re for it,” Hand said. “They’ll use hunter-seeker missiles. Exocets, whatever. Blow us out of the fucking sky.”

“Quite possibly,” Smoke said. He wondered if Alouette was taking good care of his crow.

Smoke looked at Hand, wondering if he was going to become hysterical. Hand sat there rigidly, staring out the window, watching for a missile. Obviously not the war-correspondent sort of reporter.

Trying to broaden his résumé, Smoke thought, and look what it got him.

Finally, Hand took a deep breath and relaxed. “Whatever happens, happens,” he said hoarsely, shrugging.

Smoke nodded, then held on to the seat as the plane banked sharply, its engines roaring now. “If it’s any comfort, this plane is augmented for defensive actions.” He could feel the inertia trying to pull his spine one way and his rib cage another. “Might surprise them.”

“Ohshee, cheh’dow,” the technicki said, staring out his window, his voice cracking.

Smoke looked over. The plane had banked so that the port wing was pointed almost straight down at the island. Alongside a surfline of blue-white butterfly-wing delicacy, a line of fireballs huffed, threw tons of sand into the sky. The sound and muted shock wave rolled through the plane, which shivered and rattled. Smoke saw the next wave of artillery shelling hit the NR’s little airport tower, blowing off its top and splitting it down the middle.

“Neb’zah?” the technicki asked.

Smoke shook his head. “No, nobody there. Evacuated in good time.”

“What the hell are those?” Hand blurted. “Look like flying saucers . . . ”

Smoke didn’t have to look. “They are, sort of. Saucers about two feet across. They fly, or glide anyway, down behind us. We just let go a cloud of them.”

“Pulse camouflage,” the technicki said, saying it in standard English.

Smoke nodded. “Some of our defensive augmentation. They put out an electromagnetic pulse that distracts the missiles—”

“We got past two of them,” the pilot said.

“Two what?” Smoke asked.

“My guess is Patriot Fourteens. Very nice missiles with Multiple Target Capability. The defense industry’s finest. But that’s not saying much.”

Irony in the pilot’s voice. You deal with it how you can, Smoke thought.

“We lost them with the pulse cammies?” Smoke asked.

“Looks like. But we’ve got SPVs coming after us . . . ”

“Stop with the goddamn acronyms!” Hand snapped at the intercom.

“Self Piloted Vehicles,” Smoke translated. “Drones. They can do things no human pilot can. Sometimes they make mistakes no pilot will, too.”

“They’re turning off for . . . ” the pilot said. “Oh, waitaminnut. Here comes another, and it’s not taking the bait. Well, shit.”

Smoke closed his eyes. Assuming the pilot had seen a missile getting through to them. He waited for the impact, the noise, the crushing and tearing and screaming. The pain.

A dull, distant
whud. “
They got Number Two.” The pilot’s voice was almost too soft to hear.

Smoke opened his eyes, relief and horror leapfrogging in his gut. He saw the fireball through the window. Trailers of vapor left by pieces of the disintegrating passenger plane, making it into an exotic flame-red and smoke-black flower against the sky. Sixty-four NR operatives, dead in an instant. Shot out of the sky. To the American media, it would be sixty-four Puerto Rican Terrorists shot down while en route to a bombing run over San Juan.

“Holy shit,” Hand breathed, face pressed to the glass. “Fuck. We’re next.”

Smoke shook his head, feeling tears on his cheek. “No, we’re probably out of range by the time they get their RPVs back in line. They haven’t got any human-Piloted vehicles.” He felt like he was locked up in a flying steel jail, while some fake Smoke was outside the jail cell, chatting with the warden.

“Are we really going to make it?” Hand said. “Get away scot-free?”

Smoke winced. Scot-free. Dozens of his brothers and sisters blown into meat scraps. Scot-free.

Smoke felt like he should have died back there too. Glad he didn’t and disgusted that he didn’t. Both.

“There’s a good chance we’re away,” he said, clearing his throat. “We . . . If we hadn’t got the jump on them, we’d be dead by now . . . ”

“So where to now?” Hand asked. “What happens to me?”

“We’re going to a place in Mexico,” Smoke said distantly. Still seeing, as if projected on the blank screen in front of him, the chrysanthemum of fire and smoke as the second NR transport blew up, like the centerpiece of a funeral’s floral arrangement. “You can go on your merry way or go with us, see some things,” he said dully. He should try and talk Hand into going along. But he didn’t have it in him to say a word more than he absolutely had to.

He felt the old wrenching come back, the uncertainty about what was real and who was important and who he was; seeing, not so far away, the brink: beyond it, the madness that had held him at the beginning of the war. He had been fractured when the SA goons had taken him, tortured him; fractured still deeper when he saw the new Nazis tearing like jackals at the dying corpus of European civilization. Steinfeld and Hard-Eyes had saved him, welded him back together. But the fracture was still there, like a badly welded crack in a steel post. Maybe there was too much pressure on the post. Maybe it was going to break again.

Several of the others were sobbing. Some had lost friends, lovers, maybe relations on the exploded jet. Some simply wept after seeing sixty-four people expunged like flies in a cloud of insecticide. Instantly snuffed out, like pests.

Smoke got out of his seat. There was an NR doctor sitting two rows back; a stocky Filipino woman in glasses, a white dress, and anomalously, a flak jacket. She’d just finished throwing up into a vomit bag as Smoke labored up the aisle to her. Straining against the inertia of the accelerating jet, Smoke leaned against a chair back and said, “Give me something.”

(Steinfeld wouldn’t ask for a tranquilizer, Smoke thought. Steinfeld wouldn’t show his pain, not like this. He’d be moving around, comforting people, helping them get over this. He’d be tougher, more caring; he’d be what we needed now. I’m not Steinfeld.)

The doctor nodded, folded the bag up, dabbed her mouth, wiped tears from her eyes. She took a bottle of pills from her coat pocket, popped one herself, and gave one to Smoke. “Don’t take it if you have to do something in an intelligent way.”

“Who the hell knows what’s intelligent?” Smoke muttered, popping the pill and sitting down.

From the Second Alliance psych evaluation report on Patrick Barrabas, aged twenty-one, Citizen of the United Kingdom:

Barrabas has the usual British obsession with class issues. He is perhaps more obsessive about it than most. Angry about class barriers—cited the appeal of Nazi Party’s promise to dissolve society into one class of grass-roots Caucasians. Hypocritical about class: Seems to have been Cockney, worked hard to eliminate the lower-class accent, manages most of the time to sound upper middle class. Clear-cut and steerable convictions about the lesser races, but maintains: “Not that I believe in genocide, none of that. Repatriation, that’s my idea for them.” Probably salvageable aggression curve . . . Grew up in a poor London neighborhood where several ghettos intersected, was persecuted by a black gang: good resentment foundations there . . . two years with the National Front “skinheads,” for the sake of street protection at first, then politicized firmly. Gave up video technology vocational school after two terms due to inability to pay tuition. Minor digi-vee editing job experience at VidEx before the company became a war casualty: possible use in battlefield video-journalism but deep motivation speaks well for counter-insurgency assignment. No neuroses that are not utilizable. Recommendation: recruit for SPOES enforcement, front line.

[
Witcher files note:
The American psychologist who conducted the interview and composed the preceding report was recently stripped of his standing by his colleagues for his racist papers on what he called “The Sociobiological Foundation of the Caucasian Imperative.”]

Swinshot, England.

Patrick Barrabas was marching through a ground fog with twelve other men. They were marching in close formation behind their American trainer. Barrabas was a short, muscular young man. At five foot four and a half, he was a bit touchy about his height. He had good looks: bright blue eyes, wavy red-brown hair, pretty but masculine features—“You should have been a digi-star,” his last girlfriend had told him. That had salved his ego a little. He wore a flat-black SA trainee’s uniform with infantryman’s green plastic boots, carried an SA/Jæger Mark 3 assault rifle, one of the new “smart” rifles, with its special ordnance launcher and microprocessors for aiming and heatseeking and warning you when it was overheated or dirty. But it didn’t yet have a battery—or ammunition—more’s the pity.

Barrabas was beginning to feel at home in Swinshot, decrepit though it was. Swinshot was the flesh-plucked skeleton of a rural village northwest of Southampton. The New-Soviets had made only tentative forays into England, low conventional bomb runs over military installations. Either confused military intelligence or bad aim made harmless, bucolic Swinshot the target of a carpet-bombing raid. As if synchronicity had arranged another delicious irony, the few surviving buildings were the only ones with any strategic value: the post office still stood, and the city hall, and the police station. The school and the clinic and the old people’s home and most of the houses in Swinshot—all were devastated. One of the chapels still stood, only half-caved-in. The village’s survivors had been relocated by the government.

The intact buildings were unoccupied, except the chapel, and City Hall, which had been turned over to the company that had been given unofficial-and-yet-official use of the Swinshot area: the Second Alliance International Security Corporation.