Fog (18 page)

No,
he types.

Good. We start phase two of the attack in a few hours. Runner?

Excellent. How long until you can move our ships and aircraft to the location?
he asks.

We have three armed vessels at our disposal, and two aircrafts plus one helicopter. The ships are on the way to China. In four days’ time, the last of them will drop anchor close to Hong Kong. Then, we can fly in within four hours of a go signal, and drive in within twelve hours.

No problem. We can give you four days. Once our forces are in position, keep them ready, but don’t advance yet,
Runner types.
Wait for my signal. If you don’t hear from us for twenty-four hours, move in.

Acknowledged.

He ends the conversation and pockets the SatPad. ‘We’ll keep them busy, degrade their forces. Play a long game at lowest possible risks to our own lives. Step one: Dig foxholes.’ He draws with a stick into the soil. ‘Here and here, so we can take them in a cross-fire. And here, here, so we can switch positions. They’ll never know where we are, and when they think they know it, we’ll be gone already. We’ll be moving often, firing bursts of five shots, no more. Then, we shift again. The first strike will be spectacular, the second one, shocking, the ensuing ones…terrorising.’

‘What did Kat mean? “North America is dead,”’ I ask.

‘Oh, that. You know I did this study on violence—’

‘You wrote a standard work,’ I correct him.

‘One has to study something before writing about it. Don’t interrupt me,
pupil.’
 

I kick his shin lightly and he grins.

‘It’s not clear what happened precisely. It’s as if…as if a scale tipped and from one day to the next, a number of governments flicked the switch. Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Turkey, the Ukraine, and even Germany and France directed their long-range missiles to large cities in the U.S. The U.S. reacted by firing from space. Most of what they claimed to be missile defence satellites were, in fact, orbital weapons — satellites equipped with tactical high-energy lasers, tungsten rod thrust systems, and missiles with radioactive warheads. From that point on, it gets all muddled. Who was the first to press the button, who fired the hundredth shot. Central America played a role, too. Mexico whipped out nuclear weapons no one knew they had. North Korea took a few shots as well and Russia sent half their arsenal of nuclear warheads to wipe out the entire eastern half of the U.S. No one knows why Canada was taken down, too. Alaska doesn’t look all that much better. There was no one left to ask what had happened, and all my conclusions are basically guesses. All we know with certainty is that North America is a radioactive wasteland. I spent two months searching for human life, but couldn’t find anyone.’

‘You used satellite imaging?’ I ask.

‘What else would I… Are you suggesting… That’s impossible! Too long ago, too much work, too many people to manipulate. Forget it, Micka.’

I shrug. What would I know about Erik’s motivations?

Rain is pissing down on me. My fingers twirl thin wires around the contacts of a control unit. Five minuscule dollops of C4 cling to each wire pair; ten pairs trail to the controller. Explosive squirrel droppings on a string.

‘Ready,’ I whisper and a small
crack
sounds in my ear. Runner doesn’t speak now. He’s too close to the BSA camp, compressing soil to the sides and bottom of the fourth and last of our foxholes. Or maybe he’s already smoothing dirt and leaves over the bamboo lid.

I crawl back to our hideout, a two-layered shelter made of a tarp with a grass-covered netting a few centimetres above it. The tarp blocks our thermal signatures. Should the tarp begin to warm up — it hangs a mere twenty centimetres above us — the netting and greenery above it will cloak and diffuse the thermal signatures of our bodies and muzzle flashes to an undetectable blur.

I wait, scanning the camp through my night-eye and trying to find Runner, but there’s no trace of him. He must be on the way back already.

In these past days of reconnaissance and preparation, the Taiwanese forest has begun to feel like home. It’s not too different from where I grew up. Mountains, beeches, maples. The firs look a bit different, though, and the red cypresses are impressive — taller and thicker than any tree I’ve ever seen. I love these ancient giants that seem to touch the sky with their crowns and grab the Earth’s belly with their mighty roots. The bamboo forests freak me out; they feel like a trap — nothing to climb, nowhere to hide, only a too-evenly spaced mass of slender stems.

Even the birds here are familiar. Some of them, anyway. I’ve seen nuthatches and great tits, red tails, and dippers. Others look like odd versions of the birds I knew. There’s a blackbird with a white head, and ravens with blood-red beaks. I’ve yet to find out what sings like a creaking door — that thing is so loud, it grates my eardrums. Or the creature that sounds as if someone is rasping a piece of metal over a comb. I’ve never seen it, but I guess it’s an insect.

‘On my way back,’ sounds in my earbud. ‘At the stream, now. I’ll wash and find us some food.’

‘I’ve got your back,’ I answer, and scan the small river until I find Runner stepping out of the woods and stripping naked. My gaze is stuck to his skin. The night-eye paints his caramel body white as marble with a greenish glow. His long hair is tied back; one strand escaped and now rests on his collar bone. His beard is cropped; short black hair covers his chest, a thin black line trailing down to…

I tilt my rifle a fraction to scan the forest behind him. It’ll be kept in my crosshairs until he’s on the move again.
 

Two hours before sunrise, Runner returns. All is prepared, the rucks are packed, rifles and ammo are in position. He lies down next to his weapon, and I rest my eyes for a bit, drink water, and eat handfuls of the berries he’s brought.
 

Tonight, I’ll be the spotter, correcting for windage and distance in the twilight, reporting on spray of dust if his bullet misses the target. I’ll also control the small detonations that mimic muzzle flashes up on the crest of our side of the mountain. With the rising sun at our backs, no one will be able to see Runner’s muzzle flash. Instead, the BSA will see minuscule explosions four hundred metres away from us, just at the edge of the rising sun.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he whispers.

I stare through my scope and see the first movements in the camp. A man walks out of a tent, stretches his muscles and walks south. To us, the camp is a map in the sand with sections identified by number-letter combinations. The man walks from B2 to E1 and pisses at a tree.

The fifteen minutes are up. The rising sun shields us now.

‘E1,’ Runner says. ‘Centre mass.’

When the first shot rips through the morning, I press the first button. Up on the crest, the first pop echoes. The man in my finder falls. Red explodes from his shoulder.

‘Right shoulder,’ I whisper and he fires the second shot. The abdomen rips open. ‘Target down.’

Runner has to fire five shots in increments of approximately two seconds to match each series of five miniature explosions up on the crest. ‘E5. Centre mass,’ he says and hits a man in the chest.

‘Target down,’ I answer. ‘Centre mass.’

The camp snaps into frantic activity. Men run to their weapons, but none of them has the slightest clue where the attack comes from.

‘C4.’

‘Down.’

‘C4, again.’

‘Down.’

Men try to find cover behind the sandbags. A group runs into the forest and I’m not sure if they are running away from danger or trying to find us. Erik has left and that is a good thing. The commander is the most vital part — cut the head off and you’ll get a wildly twitching body.

Now, the kids come swarming into the centre of the camp, herded by men with rifles.

Runner raises his head from his scope and looks at me. Severe is what comes to my mind. ‘Endure,’ he says, and aims.

When he doesn’t announce the camp section he’ll be firing into, I look through my scope. One of the girls is dragged to the trunk of a fallen tree. She’s screaming and kicking. A man holds her hair in one fist, an axe in the other. Her heels kick up dust.
 

‘B4,’ Runner rasps.
 

No, no, no!
I think.
That’s not where the man with the axe is!

He fires and I automatically press the second button. A man falls, and I say, ‘Down.’
 

As I’m supposed to.

Screeching pulls my view to the girl on the chopping block. The man swings the axe, the blade reflects the orange light of a rising sun.

‘A2.’
 

A crack and a moment later, both man and axe drop, and the girl runs away, splattered in her attacker’s blood.

‘Down,’ I huff.

‘A2,’ he says again, and I repeat, ‘Down.

Wind picks up and ruffles the trees. Runner says, ‘A1,’ and I have no time to tell him about the windage before he shoots. Dust flares up at the girl’s feet just before her throat is slashed by another man.

‘Favour right, gentle wind from south-east,’ I say and the next shot hits the man and takes off his hip. He twists and falls. Two seconds later another falls in A1.

Runner takes down twenty-three men, missing only two shots, before the BSA seems to spot our fake muzzle flashes up at the crest. ‘Movement at C3,’ I say. That’s where they keep their rocket launcher.

‘I know. Can you see it?’

‘Yes.’ A flap opens at the tent’s side, a small window cut hurriedly, and a muzzle the diameter of my leg pokes through it. I hope their aim is good. Being on the dangerous side of a heavy gun is not how I’ve imagined it — I need to pee.

Trees bend before I hear the
WOOOOOMP
of the launcher.

‘Shitty aim,’ I squeak when Runner coolly says, ‘C5,’ and pulls the trigger.

The wind drops and he misses. I call corrections, and he kills another four men before the rocket takes off the mountaintop not far from us. We roll onto our sides, cover ourselves with our rucks as we’ve practiced earlier, and rocks begin to pelt netting and tarp until they collapse on us. When only dust thickens the air, we pull our equipment from the rubble and pack it, hump our packs, and grab the rifles. We brush dust and small rocks over our foot and belly prints, and run down the hill before the BSA comes looking for our dead bodies.

———

Runner draws new figures into the soil. He outlines the camp and points to where men died, and where he missed. He shot twenty seven men. With Erik and two of his men gone, there must be twenty-six men and thirteen kids left in the camp. ‘We’ll rest for two days, then we’ll return. Ask your questions now, Micka.’

‘Why did they kill the girl?’

‘To demoralise us. Every time we attack, they’ll drag one of the kids out into the open and dismember them. Not only do they know how to shock their attackers, they also know that this will stir the hate in each of these kids. They’ll hate
us
, not the men who kill them. It’s
us
causing the bloodbath. That’s what these men have drilled into the kids’ brains. They make much better weapons that way.’

That makes no sense to me. I shake my head.

‘When you were little, wouldn’t you have done anything to please your parents? When your father injured you, who was guilty?’ He bends forward, eyes black like mulberries. ‘Who did you blame, Micka?’

‘Myself.’

‘Now, tell me how that makes sense.’ He leans back, giving me space to breathe. ‘A single nice gesture has tremendous weight because these kids hunger for it. Beat them half-dead and tell them you had to do it because the enemy made you do it, then, tell them you don’t want to beat them because you love them, but you have no choice. It works, every time.’

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

‘Next time, we’ll both fire. When a man drags one of these kids out into the open, he chooses the moment well. He usually wants to distract from something bigger. Look out for that bigger thing. The next best thing you can do is shoot the kid.’

‘What?’

‘The one they pick is killed the same day, no matter the outcome of the battle. Even if I fire only one shot, they’ll cut a child’s head off in return.’

‘There are thirteen kids in the camp,’ I croak, trying not to count the days we’ll be firing at men, and causing bloodshed among the kids.

‘Twelve,’ he corrects me.

Feeling sick, I drop my gaze and swallow. Bile burns in my airways. When I look up at him, I can see it — it’s as if he’s opened a door to his own darkness. Something is coiled up inside, waiting to be sprung. He just took twenty-seven lives as if they meant nothing. Yet, he tries to make my life easier for me. I’ve been his accomplice. I’ve helped him kill and cheat the enemy. And all of a sudden, I find myself wanting to be there when he drops his guard.

I shake my head and stand.

‘If you have a magic wand,’ he growls. ‘Wave it now, because self-pity doesn’t get you anywhere.’

‘I…What?’

‘Go ahead and lay down your weapon, weep, and go hug someone who needs saving. I’ll not help you dig your own grave.’