Dreamcatcher (31 page)

“Say
what
?”

“Low-grade, but there's really not any question about it. The men sense something, but they haven't put a name on it yet. Give them a few hours and they will. Our gray friends are telepaths, and they seem to spread that just as they spread the fungus.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Owen Underhill whispered.

Kurtz sat calmly, watching him think. He liked watching people think, if they were any good at it, and now there was more: he was
hearing
Owen think, a faint sound like the ocean in a conch shell.

“The fungus isn't strong in the environment,” Owen said. “Neither are they. What about the ESP?”

“Too soon to tell. If it lasts, though, and if it gets out of this pine-tree pisspot we're in, everything changes. You know that, don't you?”

Underhill knew. “I can't believe it,” he said.

“I'm thinking of a car,” Kurtz said. “What car am I thinking of?”

Owen looked at him, apparently trying to decide if Kurtz was serious. He saw that Kurtz was, then shook his head. “How should I . . .” He paused. “Fiat.”

“Ferrari, actually. I'm thinking of an ice cream flavor. Which f—”

“Pistachio,” Owen said.

“There you go.”

Owen sat another moment, then asked Kurtz—hesitantly—if Kurtz could tell him his brother's name.

“Kellogg,” Kurtz replied. “Jesus, Owen, what kind of name is that for a kid?”

“My mother's maiden name. Christ.
Telepathy.
”

“It's going to fuck with the ratings of
Jeopardy
and
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,
I can tell you that,” Kurtz said, then repeated, “
If
it gets loose.”

From outside the building there came a gunshot and a scream. “You didn't have to
do
that!” someone cried in a voice filled with outrage and fear. “You didn't have to
do
that!”

They waited, but there was no more.

“The confirmed grayboy body-count is eighty-one,” Kurtz said. “There are probably more. Once they go down, they decompose pretty fast. Nothing left but goo . . . and then the fungus.”

“Throughout the Zone?”

Kurtz shook his head. “Think of a wedge pointing east. The thick end is Blue Boy. Where we are is about the middle of the wedge. There are a few more illegal immigrants of the gray persuasion wandering around east of here. The flashlights have mostly stayed over the wedge area. ET Highway Patrol.”

“It's all toast, isn't it?” Owen asked. “Not just the grayboys and the ship and the flashlights—the whole fucking geography.”

“I'm not prepared to speak to that just now,” Kurtz said.

No,
Owen thought,
of course you're not.
He wondered immediately if Kurtz could read his thought. There was no way of telling, certainly not from those pale eyes.

“We
are
going to take out the rest of the grayboys, I can tell you that much. Your men will crew the gunships and your men only. You are Blue Boy Leader. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kurtz did not correct it. In this context, and given Underhill's obvious distaste for the mission,
sir
was probably good. “I am Blue One.”

Owen nodded.

Kurtz got up and drew out his pocket-watch. It had gone noon.

“This is going to get out,” Underhill said. “There are a lot of U.S. citizens in the Zone. There's simply no way to keep it quiet. How many have those . . . those implants?”

Kurtz almost smiled. The weasels, yes. A good many here, a few more over the years. Underhill didn't know, but Kurtz did. Nasty little fellows they were. And one good thing about being the boss: you didn't have to answer questions you didn't want to answer.

“What happens later is up to the spin doctors,” he said. “Our job is to react to what certain people—the voice of one of them is probably on your tape—have determined is a clear and present danger to the people of the United States. Got it, buck?”

Underhill looked into that pale gaze and at last looked away.

“One other thing,” Kurtz said. “Do you remember the phooka?”

“The Irish ghost-horse.”

“Close enough. When it comes to nags, that one's
mine. Always has been. Some folks in Bosnia saw you riding my phooka. Didn't they?”

Owen chanced no reply. Kurtz didn't look put out by that, but he looked intent.

“I want no repeat, Owen. Silence is golden. When we ride the phooka horse, we must be invisible. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect understanding?”

“Yes,” Owen said. He wondered again how much of his mind Kurtz could read. Certainly he could read the name currently in the front of Kurtz's mind, and supposed Kurtz wanted him to. Bosanski Novi.

4

They were on the verge of going, four gunship crews with Owen Underhill's men from the bus replacing the ANG guys who had brought the CH-47s this far, they were cranking up, filling the air with the thunder of the rotors, and then came Kurtz's order to stand down.

Owen passed it on, then flicked his chin to the left. He was now on Kurtz's private com channel.

“Beg pardon, but what the
fuck
?” Owen asked. If they were going to do this thing, he wanted to do it and get it behind him. It was worse than Bosanski Novi, worse by far. Writing it off by saying the grayboys weren't human beings just did not wash. Not for him, anyway. Beings that could build something like Blue Boy—or fly it, at least—were more than human.

“It's none of mine, lad,” Kurtz said. “The weather
boys in Bangor say this shit is moving out fast. It's what they call an Alberta Clipper. Thirty minutes, forty-five, max, and we're on our way. With our nav gear all screwed up, it's better to wait if we can . . . and we can. You'll thank me at the other end.”

Man, I doubt that.

“Roger, copy.” He flicked his head to the right. “Conklin,” he said. No rank designations to be used on this mission, especially not on the radio.

“I'm here, s . . . I'm here.”

“Tell the men we're on hold thirty to forty-five. Say again, thirty to forty-five.”

“Roger that. Thirty to forty-five.”

“Let's have some jukebox rhythm.”

“Okay. Requests?”

“Go with what you like. Just save the Squad Anthem.”

“Roger, Squad Anthem is racked back.” No smile in Conk's voice. There was one man, at least, who liked this as little as Owen did. Of course, Conklin had also been on the Bosanski Novi mission in '95. Pearl Jam started up in Owen's cans. He pulled them off and laid them around his neck like a horse-collar. He didn't care for Pearl Jam, but in this bunch he was a minority.

Archie Perlmutter and his men ran back and forth like chickens with their heads cut off. Salutes were snapped, then choked off, with many of the saluters sneaking did-he-see-that looks at the small green scout copter in which Kurtz sat with his own cans clamped firmly in place and a copy of the Derry
News
upraised.
Kurtz looked engrossed in the paper, but Owen had an idea that the man marked every half-salute, every soldier who forgot the situation and reverted to old beast habit. Beside Kurtz, in the left seat, was Freddy Johnson. Johnson had been with Kurtz roughly since Noah's ark grounded on Mount Ararat. He had also been at Bosanski, and had undoubtedly given Kurtz a full report when Kurtz himself had been forced to stay behind, unable to climb into the saddle of his beloved phooka horse because of his groin-pull.

In June of '95, the Air Force had lost a scout pilot in NATO's no-fly zone, near the Croat border. The Serbs had made a very big deal of Captain Tommy Callahan's plane, and would have made an even bigger one of Callahan himself, if they caught him; the brass, haunted by images of the North Vietnamese gleefully parading brainwashed pilots before the international press, made recovering Tommy Callahan a priority.

The searchers had been about to give up when Callahan contacted them on a low-frequency radio band. His high-school girlfriend gave them a good ID marker, and when the man on the ground was queried, he confirmed it, telling them his friends had started calling him The Pukester following a truly memorable night of drinking in his junior year.

Kurtz's boys went in to get Callahan in a couple of helicopters much smaller than any of the ones they were using today. Owen Underhill, already tabbed by most (including himself, Owen supposed) as Kurtz's successor, had been in charge. Callahan's job was to
pop some smoke when he saw the birds, then stand by. Underhill's job—the phooka part of it—had been to yank Callahan without being seen. This was not strictly necessary, so far as Owen could see, but was simply the way Kurtz liked it: his men were invisible, his men rode the Irish horse.

The extraction had worked perfectly. There were some SAMs fired, but nothing even close—Milosevic had shit, for the most part. It was as they were taking Callahan on board that Owen had seen his only Bosnians: five or six children, the oldest no more than ten, watching them with solemn faces. The idea that Kurtz's directive to make sure there were no witnesses might apply to a group of dirtyface kids had never crossed Owen's mind. And Kurtz had never said anything about it.

Until today, that was.

That Kurtz was a terrible man Owen had no doubt. Yet there were many terrible men in the service, more devils than saints, most certainly, and many were in love with secrecy. What made Kurtz different Owen had no idea—Kurtz, that long and melancholy man with his white eyelashes and still eyes. Meeting those was hard because there was nothing in them—no love, no laughter, and absolutely no curiosity. That lack of curiosity was somehow the worst.

A battered Subaru pulled up at the store, and two old men got carefully out. One clutched a black cane in a weather-chapped hand. Both wore red-and-black-checked hunting overshirts. Both wore faded caps, one
with
CASE
above the bill and the other with
DEERE
. They looked wonderingly at the contingent of soldiers that descended upon them. Soldiers at Gosselin's? What in the tarnal? They were in their eighties, by the look of them, but they had the curiosity Kurtz lacked. You could see it in the set of their bodies, the tilt of their heads.

All the questions Kurtz had not voiced.
What do they want? Do they really mean us harm? Will doing this bring the harm? Is it the wind we sow to bring the whirlwind? What was there in all the previous encounters—the flaps, the flashlights, the falls of angel hair and red dust, the abductions that began in the late sixties—that has made the powers that be so afraid? Has there been any real effort to communicate with these creatures?

And the last question, the most important question: Were the grayboys like us? Were they by any definition human? Was this murder, pure and simple?

No question in Kurtz's eyes about that, either.

5

The snow lightened, the day brightened, and exactly thirty-three minutes after ordering the stand-down, Kurtz gave them a go. Owen relayed it to Conklin and the Chinnies revved hard again, pulling up gauzy veils of snow and turning themselves into momentary ghosts. Then they rose to treetop level, aligned themselves on Underhill—Blue Boy Leader—and flew west in the direction of Kineo. Kurtz's Kiowa 58 flew below
them and slightly to starboard, and Owen thought briefly of a troop of soldiers in a John Wayne movie, bluelegs with a single Indian scout riding his pony bareback off to one side. He couldn't see, but guessed Kurtz would still be reading the paper. Maybe his horoscope. “Pisces, this is your day of infamy. Stay in bed.”

The pines and spruces below appeared and disappeared in vapors of white. Snow flew against the Chinook's two front windows, danced, disappeared. The ride was extremely rough—like a ride in a washing machine—and Owen wouldn't have had it any other way. He clapped the cans back on his head. Some other group, maybe Matchbox Twenty. Not great, but better than Pearl Jam. What Owen dreaded was the Squad Anthem. But he would listen. Yes indeed, he would listen.

In and out of the low clouds, vapory glimpses of an apparently endless forest, west west west.

“Blue Boy Leader, this is Blue Two.”

“Roger, Two.”

“I have visual contact with Blue Boy. Confirm?”

For a moment Owen couldn't, and then he could. What he saw took his breath away. A photograph, an image inside a border, a thing you could hold in your hand, that was one thing. This was something else entirely.

“Confirm, Two. Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Hold your current positions. I say again, hold your current positions.”

One by one the other copters rogered. Only Kurtz
did not, but he also stayed put. The Chinooks and the Kiowa hung in the air perhaps three quarters of a mile from the downed spacecraft. Leading up to it was an enormous swath of trees that had been whacked off in a slanted lane, as if by an enormous hedge-clipper. At the end of this lane was a swampy area. Dead trees clutched at the white sky, as if to snatch the clouds open. There were zig-zags of melting snow, some of it turning yellow where it was oozing into the damp ground. In other places there were veins and capillaries of open black water.

The ship, an enormous gray plate nearly a quarter of a mile across, had torn through the dead trees at the center of the swamp, exploding them and casting the splintery fragments in every direction. The Blue Boy (it was not blue at all, not a bit blue) had come to rest at the swamp's far end, where a rocky ridge rose at a steep angle. A long arc of its curved edge had disappeared into the watery, unstable earth. Dirt and bits of broken trees had sprayed up and littered the ship's smooth hull.

The surviving grayboys were standing around it, most on snow-covered hummocks under the upward-tilted end of their ship; if the sun had been shining, they would have been standing in the crashed ship's shadow. Well . . . clearly there was
someone
who thought it was more Trojan Horse than crashed ship, but the surviving grayboys, naked and unarmed, didn't look like much of a threat.
About a hundred,
Kurtz had said, but there were fewer than that now; Owen put the number at sixty. He saw at least a dozen corpses, in
greater or lesser states of red-tinged decay, lying on the snow-covered hummocks. Some were facedown in the shallow black water. Here and there, startlingly bright against the snow, were reddish-gold patches of the so-called Ripley fungus . . . except not all of the patches
were
bright, Owen realized as he raised his binoculars and looked through them. Several had begun to gray out, victims of the cold or the atmosphere or both. No, they didn't survive well here—not the grayboys, not the fungus they had brought with them.