Cold Allies (4 page)

“Through the center of the sternum, a hole seven millimeters in diameter. The edges of the hole are clean and well defined.”

As if made with a cookie cutter,
she thought.

Clearing her throat, she added, “With no evidence of bruising.”

Too neat for a bullet hole. She’d seen enough of those during her six years as a forensic pathologist at Bellevue. No, firearm trauma made a mess of the muscles, it liquefied fat.

Her scalpel cut through the corpse. The flesh made a peculiar sound, like tearing silk. “Fascia layer shows evidence of desiccation.”

The corpse’s underlying muscles were marbled, the color of port cheese. She followed the neat, perfectly circular hole down through the brittle balsa-wood sternum until she came to the empty pericardium. The hole that had caused the boy’s death was small; but through it something or someone had neatly cut the aortic arch and lifted out the fist-sized heart.

There was no smell. There had been no predation. Of course not. All the fluids, all the red corpuscles were gone.

Disease?
she wondered for the third time. But no disease she knew of could deliver this sort of full-body punch. The Army must not have thought so either, because they hadn’t bothered to give her a clean room and her own sterile air supply. Still, the worry persisted somewhere in the dim med-school part of her mind. When studying oncology, she had imagined lumps in her breasts; and cardiology had made her await fearfully the occasional flutter of her heart. Now, looking at the corpse’s flesh, she felt her skin begin to dry and tighten.

Chemical agent?
Perhaps even now it was active. Perhaps it could penetrate her gloves. Her fingers began to itch.

Impossible. No disease, no chemical could drill through muscle and bone to suck up a living heart.

She was struck again by the horror on the young boy’s face. Could her own face wear that horror? And under her coffee-and-milk skin would be parched coffee-and-milk flesh. “Well?”

The voice came from behind her. She nearly dropped her scalpel. Whirling, she came face-to-face with “Loon” Lauterbach. The Saceur, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander looked nattier in his camouflage BDUs than most men did in full dress.

“Damn it!” she snapped. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

Lauterbach blinked in surprise, then laughed. “At ease,” he said.

“Crap,” she said under her breath and turned back to the corpse. She heard Lauterbach’s approaching footsteps. He stood beside her, looking down. Most people, even Army people, wouldn’t have had the guts for that.

“I thought you were in Portugal,” she said.

“Flew in this afternoon.” The small, balding four-star general did not lift his eyes from the corpse. “What killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it possible the shrapnel injury did?”

She began the caudal incision, making the tail of the autopsy Y a few inches higher than normal. Even the intestines, she noticed, were dehydrated. A little dust drifted up in the glare of the light. Cellular dust, creamy pale. She stepped back reflexively. Lauterbach didn’t.

“Well?”

“I don’t know,” she told him.

“This soldier was alive yesterday. What could have done this to him?”

“Nothing could have,” she answered. “Well, something did.”

‘‘True desiccation reduces mass, and there is no sign of that here. Look at him. Just look at him, general,” she ordered. “He’s still a pudgy-cheeked boy. If he were mummified, those cheeks would be sunken and drawn.”

At the last word, Lauterbach glanced up at her sharply.

His yellowish hazel eyes were dispassionate, the eyes of a puma, a wolf. “You’re not getting enough sleep.”

“Neither are you,” she shot back.

His expression wavered, his gaze became furtive. “I’m flying to Poland tonight. It’s important for me to know. Did the shrapnel kill him?”

She looked at the wound. In one lightning-from-God instant, the kid had lost half his face. “Given medical attention soon enough, he would have lived.”

The corners of Lauterbach’s mouth dipped in revulsion.

She could almost read his thoughts:
For what?
“Do you suppose he wanted to die?” he asked quietly.

Rita glanced at the general curiously. His face was so weary that he seemed close to illness. War was a lamprey, a sucker of life. It found its victims in battle where death came easy, and even in bunkers where it did not.

Lauterbach was a hands-on commander, flitting from one front to the next, exhorting his tired army. Maybe his dearest wish was that his plane would go down. The young white boy on the stainless steel table must have ached for a desperate peace like that.

“Yes. I’m sure he did,” she told him.

The general nodded. “Then it was as though he were killed by friendly fire.”

“Friendly?”

“Loving fire.” His voice was so soft, it could barely be heard above the sound of the circulated air from the ducts.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

Linda Parisi trudged home from the city bus stop, suitcase in hand. The gig in Boston had been a killer: too little money, too many strange people. They’d come up to her after the lecture, their eyes wide with hope and desperate invention, to tell her how they, too, had talked to the Eridanians, and how the Eridanians had turned their lives around, blah, blah, blah.

She limped up the concrete steps of the red-brick apartment house, staggering under the weight of her battered Samsonite.

Maybe, she thought, some chivalrous or impressionable soul would hear her and come out to help. As loud and slow as she made her progress, however—banging her suitcase pointedly against the walls as she passed—no one hurried to the rescue.

The hall of the apartment house was dim and littered.

At her chipped steel door she fought the usual battle with her keys: two for the twin deadbolts, one for the regular lock.

Inside she found that her poodle had thrown up on the carpet in revenge for her trip. Farther in, she discovered the full extent of the obtuse dog’s retaliation. Lacy had spilled his water and carpeted the kitchen with soaked and crumbling Kibbles and Bits.

The light on the answering machine was blinking. On her way to the cramped closet for the broom, Mrs. Parisi hit the MESSAGE pad on the phone.

“Call me,” said the machine.

She found the broom and dustpan and was toting them to the kitchen by the time the beep sounded and the next message came on.

“I’m not kidding.” The same voice. “Call me.”

“Oh, ca-ca,” she replied, unleashing the irritation she’d kept in check the entire weekend. “Oh, ca-ca on you. I hope you find yourself chin-deep in the smelly.”

Mrs. Parisi knew the voice, of course. Feet aching, she halted in the door of the kitchen and surveyed the chaos. Next to her sat Lacy, tail a-wag, obviously delighted with his handiwork.

Beep. “Call me at home, call me at work. Just call me.

Our lives are in danger.”

Sighing, Mrs. Parisi swept the dog food into a pile and used the dustpan to dump it back into Lacy’s bowl. “Dindin,” she said with a venomous smile.

Before she called her editor/publisher, Mrs. Parisi took off her sensible pumps. When she was comfortably settled on the sofa, she lifted the receiver, hit the 1 button, and listened to the rapid, tuneless tones as the phone automatically dialed.

“Tau Ceti Publications,” the receptionist chirped. The girl sounded very dim and very young.

“Is Tad Ellis there?”

“He’s on another line,” the girl said. “May I take a message?”

‘This is Linda Parisi—”

“Oh!” The girl was so startled that the perkiness left her voice. She sounded older, and even intelligent. “I know he wants to talk with you, Mrs. Parisi. Please hold.”

Mrs. Parisi was treated to Muzak: the Valium String Quartet’s rendition of
Evergreen.
Then the tenor voice of Tad Ellis came on. “The pogrom’s started,” he said.

Mrs. Parisi didn’t respond. She sat contemplating the ache in her elbow and pondering the indigestible Kibble that Ellis had just fed her.

“You there?” Ellis asked at last. “Of course.”

The IRS?
Parisi wondered.
The Justice Department?
Just who did silly Ellis think was after them this time?

“Two guys in dark suits came by,” Ellis went on. “They asked about you. They asked about your
books.”

Mrs. Parisi’s eyes fled to the shelves where
Meeting the Eridanians, The Eridani Way,
and
In the Bright Eridanian Light
were displayed.

“It’s started, Linda,” Ellis said in a breathy, conspiracy theory voice. “They asked for your address and phone number. I gave them your old one, but they’re bound to catch up with you sooner or later. They’re
very
interested in what we know about UFOs. They’ve picked up Gene. They got to Sally.”

“Well, bless their hearts.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, dear. I am.”

“Get out of town,” Ellis said in a firm voice and hung up, leaving Mrs. Parisi listening to the hum of the empty line. She put down the receiver and stared at the watching dog.

“Sillies, Lacy,” she told him with a sigh. “This business is simply packed full of sillies.”

CENTCOM-EAST, WARSAW, POLAND

Lt. General Valentin Baranyk looked up from his doodling and caught the eye of the German commander, Kurt Weiderhausen. The German was young, probably no more than forty-five or -six, so there was no way for him to remember the Great Patriotic War. Still, Germans were sensitive about the subject. The smooth-faced German looked uncomfortable, and Baranyk wondered if that was because of the progress of the eastern campaign, or the fact that the American was late, or simply because he found himself at the head of another invasion of Poland, however friendly.

Andrzej Czajowski, on the other hand, seemed placid.

The Saceur-East was smiling as he toyed with his coffee cup, smiling as though remembering some childhood song. It was easier, Baranyk knew, to find a pleasant spot in your memories and tuck your mind away there. He himself had made reliving childhood a habit. To keep from remembering Kiev.

That was where it had all got away from him, everything: his peace of mind, his good name, his army. The battle out of control, the troops spilling through his incapable fingers like water. At night, when Baranyk closed his eyes, he could hear the squeak of the tanks, the thuds of the artillery. And could see, painted on the smoke-dark southern sky, the glow of Kiev in flames.

Baranyk was startled from his reverie when an aide announced the American. Dourly he watched the German and the Pole look up. They stared at the door as though God and His archangels were about to make an entrance.
Stupid,
Baranyk thought. No one, not even the Americans, could save them.

“Gentlemen,” the entering American said with a nod.

Lauterbach was an intelligent-looking, small, spare man, too small, Baranyk thought, to be a warrior. He fought small and smart, too, like a trapdoor spider, popping out of his hole at the oddest times. The Arabs fretted and plucked
at him without effect, as though he had somehow got into their clothes.

Before the American even sat down, he began a rapid-fire monologue as though he realized, even better than the men in the room, that time was running out.

“Two days ago, we lost a pilot,” the American general said. “A Lieutenant j.g. Justin Searles. He was flying an old Super Tom. It was hit by flak and went down. He and his radio intercept officer bailed out at the same time. The RIO made it to the ground. Searles did not. If we are to believe the RIO, the Woofers captured him.”

Baranyk shifted his gaze to the other commanders at the table. The German looked worried, but that was his usual expression. The Pole seemed stunned.

“Then they are not simply observing,” Czajowski said. “No.” The American linked his hands on the table, ignored the coffee the aide poured for him. “We must consider them a player. But that does not necessarily mean they are an enemy.”

“The mutilations?” Weiderhausen asked. “You are having them, too?”

Lauterbach nodded.

“If they are killing our soldiers ...”

“We’re not sure of that,” the American said quickly.

“The mutilations might be a form of mercy killing. They take only the severely wounded. Besides, as many Arabs have been found mutilated. We must not forget that we are dealing with an alien mentality—”

“You assume aliens,” Baranyk blurted.
“You
assume, general. Perhaps the rest of us believe something else.”

Lauterbach gave him a level, appraising look. ‘The lights are extraterrestrial ships. And the beings who control them are centuries ahead of us in technology. If you fire on them, you may find it the worst command decision you’ve ever made.”

“Kiev was my worst command decision. The rest, as you Americans say, is uphill from there.” Baranyk glanced up from his own entwined hands in time to catch the pity in the German’s face.

Baranyk tore his gaze away from Weiderhausen’s pale blue eyes and back to the emotionless hazel eyes of the American. ‘These Woofers have nothing to do with the war. They are irritants only. Where are our supplies? You cannot fly planes on piss.”

“Nobody has fuel,” the American told him quietly.

“And the Gibraltar Dam keeps our tankers out of the Mediterranean. If you want oil, why don’t you go to your old comrades in Russia? Siberia’s oil-rich.”

Baranyk snorted and shook his head. ‘The Russians bartered my Ukraine for their own safety. They wouldn’t give me adequate maps; why should they give me oil? In the meantime we are losing a war.”

“I still say our best chance is to get the Woofers to join the fight with us,” Lauterbach told him.

“If you insist they are alien,” the Ukrainian replied, “then how can we communicate? We fail to understand the Arabs. How do we understand little blue lights?”

“Oh, Valentin,” the American sighed. “I think I understand the Arabs. They’re just hungry.”

Baranyk dismissed the Greenhouse Effect with a wave of his hand. “Let them eat dirt.”