Single Combat (2 page)

Sanger placed her hand on his breast as if to smooth away the tendons that stood out, fanning inward and up from pectorals to throat. Then she coughed, a demand for attention.

When he opened his eyes again she was smiling, almost in apology. "
I suspect she was on guard
," said the lithe fingers. "
Rebel medic now; couldn't find her
." About the big things, she
had
to lie.

"Bitch. Could've told me an easier way."

"
Sorry; honestly
," she signed in shame.

Suddenly suspicious, he squinted as his hands said, "
Really couldn't find her? Or wouldn't
?"

"
Think I want to die? Tried my best
," she lied again.

His exhalation lasted at least five seconds. "
I
believe you
."

Now she was up on one elbow, frantic with the notion that he might
not
believe her. They were both professionals; it was his duty to report suspicions, even such a one as this. Perhaps she could phrase it in a way to compel belief. "
Listen hotsy; better believe me. If you ever deliberately funk a mission, make sure you tell me first
."

"Why?"

"
Because I want you to get it from friendly fire
," said graceful hands that could kill him as easily as caress him.

Search & Rescue was both highly publicized and saturated in secrecy. Boren Mills was one of a dozen outside S & R ranks who knew its double purpose. At war's end in 1998 America's great Mormon president, Yale Collier, had envisioned a regular cadre of young civilians who would operate directly under executive orders, and who would be superbly trained to rescue citizens in mortal trouble. Freeway overpasses, weakened years before by nuclear blasts, still occasionally collapsed without warning—as did buildings, dams, and underground structures. Along the eastern border of Streamlined America, hotspots of paranthrax sometimes appeared, usually borne by some illegal immigrant from the Confederation East of the Mississippi River. Along the vaguely-defined southern border region called Wild Country, ranchers from Texas to the San Joaquin valley appealed for help against a variety of deadly problems.

To the North, Canada now controlled what had once been most of the northern U. S. until the keratophagic staph plague scare during the great war; and along that border, the problems were less obvious.

Collier had become infused with a dream that Streamlined America, under the Mormon stewardship of his administration and those groomed to follow, would be rebuilt into the true Zion. But Yale Collier had been infused with cancer, too. He lived long enough to see his Search & Rescue teams become a symbol of young American altruism and audacity, and he entrusted the development of S & R to his successor, Blanton Young. Collier was spared any suspicion that Young might have his own ideas about the uses to which a small cadre of daredevils might be put.

Shortly after the death of Yale Collier in 1999, President Young exercised some executive options. Search & Rescue's three hundred regulars already had Loring Aircraft's sleekest new close-support sprint choppers, with the shrouded fans swiveling on stubby wingtips to provide both helicopter modes and level flight in excess of six hundred kph—and the hell with fuel consumption.

They already got the best training: paramedic skills, alpine and desert survival courses, flood and mine disaster seminars. Their equipment was already the latest, including dress and mission uniforms familiar to millions who saw holovised rescues to the greater glory of Blanton Young and his Federalist party.

What S & R did not initially have,—what the sainted Collier had not
wanted
it to have, as an arm reporting only to the Chief Executive—was a covert military charter. Blanton Young wasted no time in swelling the S & R ranks with another select group which had been attached to Army Intelligence during the war. The group had been known to its members as T Section; T, as in 'terminate'.

Survivors of T Section were almost all wary youthful specimens to whom the quick covert kill was paramount, and these few became S & R's rovers. Regulars gave each other nicknames. Rovers did not answer to nicknames, scorning even the small luxury of feeling damned together. Quantrill was only Quantrill; Sanger only Sanger.

Blanton Young did not regard himself as a heretic.
He
took great pains to show that one could remain on the church's Council of Apostles while serving as the nation's chief executive. America was recovering; and as always during a reconstruction period, the government relaxed its restrictions on business and industry. And individual freedoms? That was something else again.

An industrial spy, a union organizer, or an anti-Mormon activist was more likely to disappear than to face public trial. The President viewed his
S &
R cadre as a nicely-balanced tool. Regular missions, eighty per cent of the total, searched out the vulnerable and rescued individuals. The rover missions searched out dissidents and rescued the status quo. So far, Young's hit team was barely a rumor even among grumbling Catholics and members of masonic orders. Certainly the regular S & R members would not broach the secret because they did not share it. Just as certainly the assassins would not divulge it; each of them still carried small mastoid-implant transceivers, 'critics', with self-destruct charges that could drive a gram of debris into the brain with the same results as an explosive bullet.

The critic had been a wartime innovation and, working with Naval Intelligence, Boren Mills was as quick as Young to see the potential peacetime uses of this tiny, deadly audio monitor buried behind the ears of agents thoroughly trained in single combat. If government and business found common cause, they could also share common remedies. When both could fly the banners of a popular religious movement, a certain amount of excess could be made palatable to the public.

This was not to say that most Mormons, guided by their Council of Apostles, sought a repressive society. In a genuine ecumenical spirit, LDS tithes helped defray the costs of some protestant sects and promoted open forums for debate. The church had even donated campaign contributions to some fence-straddling legislators of the Independent party, though Indys were similar to Democrats of the prewar era, many of them openly critical of this growing connection between the state and the church of the LDS.

It was not the fault of devout Mormons if open debate helped pinpoint certain rabble-rousers who might, if they proved both troublesome and refractory, simply disappear while crossing the path of an S & R rover.

Quantrill felt the
sprint chopper
lurch in treacherous downdrafts behind Cloud Peak, wrestled his backpac into place without disconnecting his seat harness. "Sorry 'bout that," said the voice of Miles Grenier in his headset. "These ugly birds are too sensitive with a light load."

Like all regular S & R pilots, Grenier disparaged the beauty of his sprint chopper and his expertise in flying it, as a good Mormon curb against excessive pride. Grenier did not ask why he'd been ordered to leave the alpine survival exercises near Sheridan, Wyoming to drop this lone S & R/over into broken country to the South.

For an S & R regular, the primary virtues were skill, unquestioning obedience, a good nature, and good looks—in that order. Rovers were a phylum apart. The rovers trained first with one team, then another. They seldom talked about their 'surveillance' sorties and were clearly not LDS in outlook. For a rover, good looks were secondary and good nature just about nonexistent. Rovers had been known to rage against a mission, to swill illegal hard liquor, even to grow combative. The one thing a rover almost never did was to encourage close friendship with regulars or, so far as Grenier knew, anybody else.

Of course some rovers seemed to relax among themselves, thought Grenier. Quantrill, the youngest rover of them all, definitely seemed to unwind in the company of that gorgeous creature, Marbrye Sanger, during paradrop practice into rotting snow in the Bighorn National Forest.

Sanger, one of the half-dozen female rovers, could have had all the friends she wanted merely by a toss of those chestnut curls or a flirt of the long strong legs. Instead, she spent much of her time as companion to the silent, muscular Quantrill. Grenier thought them an unlikely pair: Sanger in her mid-twenties, elegant even in her mottled coverall, vivacious on a team problem but otherwise aloof. Ted Quantrill, and scarcely out of his teens, a sturdy churl of Sanger's height with chilled creme de menthe eyes and a talent for doing nothing until the last possible second. When Quantrill moved, you knew he'd been thinking about the problem; the little son of perdition might make a botch of it the first time, but it was the fastest botch anybody could ask for. The second time—with a rappel, recovery winch, whatever—he was usually perfect. And quicker still. Grenier decided that Quantrill had already had his second time with Sanger, and cheerfully damned him for getting there first. But then, Sanger was a rover, too…

Another lurch. Grenier let the autoleveller have its head, watching the coleopter shrouds at the wingtips jitter as they sought to obey the gyros. "Still with me, Quantrill?"

"If you really crave my lunch, bub, I'll come forward and flop it over your shoulder," was the reply, with a Carolina drawl in it.

"We're nearly out of it," Grenier promised. "That's Powder River Pass just below. I'll swing past Hazelton Peak and throttle back at the DZ. If it'd been up to me, we'd have come over the top." It was as near as Miles Grenier would come to complaining about a flight plot.

"You pays your money and you takes Hobson's choice," Quantrill said. "Maybe CenCom knows what he's doing; quien sabe?" in the S & R chain of command, the synthesized male voice of the central computer surrogated the President himself; could countermand an S & R instructor or even the Executive Administrator, Lon Salter. S & R regulars did not even joke about CenCom's omniscience, and felt discomfort when a rover did it.

Miles Grenier could not know that rovers obeyed a second, vaguely female, voice they called Control. To Control, rovers showed a more rock-bound obedience than a regular ever could; a surly obedience residing in a bit of chemical explosive that Control alone could detonate within the rover's skull. If Control was listening, whatthehell: she knew how complete was the rover's subordination.

The sprint chopper, its dull radar-absorbent black surface set off with distinctive yellow S & R sunflower emblems, throttled back behind a grassy knoll and maintained a three-hundred meter altitude as a bulky object fell from its belly hatch. Quantrill, his descent controlled by a handheld frictioner on the thin cable, grimaced as the harness connectors pulled against the epaulets of his mission coverall. Now he was no longer falling, but hurtling over uneven ground twenty meters above high grass with God knew what footing beneath. "Once around the park, Grenier," he said into his helmet.

The 'once' was a joke; it took several tight circles for Quantrill's mass, pulling a tight curve into the cable, to stabilize over a precise point on the ground. Many years earlier the trick had been discovered by a missionary whose small aircraft, with a bucket winched on a rope, could maintain a circular bank with the bucket nearly motionless at the center. The missionary had supplied friends in a South American jungle clearing too small for a landing. A sprint chopper could land and take off vertically, of course; but any casual eye could see that landing and might draw sensible conclusions.

Quantrill's drop from the hatch to treetop height had taken only seconds. Several tight spirals by Grenier brought them near enough to a stable position that Quantrill could ease off the cable tensioner and hit the quick-release when his feet neared the rank grass that invaded from nearby prairies. A landing would have taken a little more time. From experience, S & R instructors knew that most casual witnesses at a drop zone only recalled seeing a sprint chopper banking in tight circles for a few moments before it accelerated away from the DZ with the droning whirr peculiar to shrouded props.

Quantrill was not concerned with
casual
witnesses. He dropped into knee-high grass, rolled, lay prone. "I'm down and green, Grenier," he muttered into his helmet mike in their 'green for go, red for no-go' jargon. "Hit it."

Grenier hit it. The cable's whine dopplered away behind the little craft which spurted off at full boost; and nothing but a rocket accelerated faster than a light polymer aircraft pulled by big props.

Quantrill lay quietly for a time, using his helmet sensors to test for the sounds of other humans. But the afternoon sun was hot, and the dry up-country breeze did not venture below the grass tops, and he heard nothing of interest. Quantrill quickly doffed his helmet, pressed its detent, let the visor and occipital segment slide into their nested positions. He stowed it, a greatly diminished volume no greater than a medium slice of watermelon rind, in the curve of his backpac that cupped near his left armpit. His right armpit was already occupied by a seven mm.
chiller
carrying explosive slugs in its magazine.

The nice things about a chiller were numerous. While it had only a small suppressor instead of a bulky silencer, it did not say BLAM! It said cough, cough, cough, and would say it twenty-four times, as quickly and delicately as a tubercular butterfly. Its gas deflectors kept recoil almost at a null category, so that you could aim it and keep it aimed. It was small enough, with few enough projections, for a breakaway holster. And thanks to the cold-gas plenum in each cartridge, there was exactly enough endothermic blowdown to match the ferocious heat release of the powder charge that consumed the cartridge case.

It was the so-called caseless cartridge, with no telltale spent rounds nor even a muzzle flash from the dual-propellant system, that made this side-arm practical. The exhaust gases were not literally chill; the chiller's name sprang from its lethal efficiency. A chiller's only limitation, went a rover joke, was that it couldn't hide the body.