The Clone Assassin (31 page)

Location: Flying from Mazatlán to Washington, D.C.
Date: August 5, 2519

Hauser and I sat across the table from each other on his shuttle. Perry MacAvoy joined us via a confabulator. Looking at him through the window, it looked like he was actually in the cabin.

“They’ve gotten smarter,” said MacAvoy. “They used to start wasting their batteries the moment the shooting started. Now they’re carrying spare batteries, and they don’t switch their shields on without encouragement.”

“What kind of encouragement?” asked Hauser.

“Snipers and mortars, mostly,” said MacAvoy. “When we pick off a couple of guys in a platoon, the rest of them turn on the juice.”

I asked, “How is your situation?”

MacAvoy and I were members of an exclusive club to which Hauser would never be admitted. We were ground pounders, foot soldiers, men who took their chances on the battlefield. Hauser fought his battles from the comfort of his bridge, drinking coffee, dressed in his service uniform, making his ship perform the same sorts of maneuvers we performed on our feet.

“They took back some of the city, but they aren’t getting any more,” said MacAvoy. “We can keep them bottled up as long as they don’t get reinforcements. They’re down to thirty or forty thousand men; sooner or later, they are going to run out of stiffs.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “They may have just as many men as we do.”

“Bullshit,” said MacAvoy.

“It doesn’t matter if they do,” said Hauser, sounding formal and more than a little prissy. “We’ve got our entire fleet blockading the planet. They might have been able to slip a spy ship or two past us . . .”

“And a destroyer,” said MacAvoy. “They slipped that bitch right under your nose.”

“Yes, thank you for reminding me,” said Hauser. “I had almost forgotten about that.

“We have our ships parked tight around the planet right now.”

“That would hold them if they didn’t already have their boots on the ground,” I said. Then I dropped the punch line; I said, “They’re hiding in Cousteau underwater cities. Admiral, the reason you didn’t spot them flying into the city is because they came in underwater from the Chesapeake Bay.”

When I explained about the SCUBA gear that Pugh had shown me, Hauser said, “That doesn’t prove anything . . . nothing at all.” Then I brought up something Hauser should have noticed on his own. I said, “Gunships and transports keep materializing above the ocean, either you’re running a shitty blockade, or those birds are already down here, down deep, someplace where our satellites don’t see them.”

MacAvoy said, “Speck. How the hell are we gonna hit ’em down there?”

That was going to be a problem. Four hundred years had passed since the nations of the world merged under the watchful umbrella of the Unified Authority. There’d been no reason to maintain a Wet Navy for over four hundred years. All of our boats now floated in space. Submarines ceased to exist. Once mankind turned its attention to colonizing space, guarding oceans no longer mattered.

 • • • 

Back in 2110, as more and more nations signed pacts with the Unified Authority, the French government created the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration Program, an initiative that involved the creation of several underwater cities. The initiative died after a few short years, and no one knew what became of the underwater cities.

Somebody once told me that one of the cities, which the French had named Mariana, was built in a deep trench somewhere in the Pacific. From what I had heard, Mariana could only hold a few thousand people, but it might have been one of the smaller sites.

This was all theoretical. The French had supposedly shut the Cousteau program down in 2115. The cities they built must have survived, though. All of the attacks—the Pentagon, Sheridan Penitentiary, and Washington, D.C., had taken place near coastlines. We always spotted their gunships and troop carriers coming in over the ocean and assumed that meant they had been dropped there from outer space. Bad assumption.

 • • • 

Hauser and I spent the rest of the flight discussing undersea cities and how to destroy them. We hadn’t come up with any workable solutions by the time we reached Washington, D.C.

As the shuttle touched down, Hauser asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer. He asked, “How much of this is personal, Harris? How much of this is you and your need for revenge?”

Amazingly, I hadn’t even mentioned Franklin Nailor at this point.

 • • • 

We had gunships and fighters flying over Washington, D.C. We had troops and convoys evacuating the city. Not all of the civilians we evacuated came willingly, but most did. We sent troops to patrol neighborhoods and armed those who stayed behind with orders to shoot looters on sight.

MacAvoy’s soldiers enjoyed shooting looters. They considered looter shooting a cross between MP duty and target practice.

We touched down in a secure area on the northeastern corner of the city, and I immediately recognized the trappings of a war zone. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the landing field. Looking around the field, I saw tanks and sentry drones and guard towers.

Standing beside me as we prepared to step off the shuttle, Hauser whispered, “This all seems a little draconian, don’t you think?”

I said, “This is how you fight battles when you’re not floating in space.”

He caught my drift, and said, “Oh.”

Hauser seemed nervous. He was a talker under normal circumstances. On this day, he couldn’t stop talking. He made stupid little puns and hemmed and hawed.

We had come to take a tour of the battlefield. A fighter escort circled overhead. MacAvoy had a gunship prepped and waiting just a few dozen yards away. He met us as we stepped off the shuttle and saluted. He asked, “Are you sure you don’t want some time to rest before we head out?”

Hauser said, “Now is as good a time as any.”

I said, “I don’t know about you soldiers, but we Marines don’t rest until the battle’s over, General.”

He said, “I always heard it the other way around. I always heard that you Marines didn’t battle until your rest is over.”

I called him “Cannon fodder.” He called me “Leatherneck.”

Thomas Hauser rolled his eyes and boarded the gunship ahead of us. We followed like dogs on a leash.

Never let it be said that armored gunships are fast, aerodynamic, or shielded. They are slow, ponderous, bloated birds covered with weapons and heavy armor. They don’t have shields because you can’t fire rockets and bullets from within a shield, and the whole point of gunships is to deliver missiles and rockets and chain-gun fire. Gunships aren’t really helicopters; they’re more like flying tanks.

The overhead rotors ran merry-go-round laps around the gunship as we strapped ourselves into our seats. The whirl of the rotors rocked the bird and everyone inside her. The churn was loud, too. Every turn of the blades echoed in my ears.

“Any news on Travis Watson?” I yelled to MacAvoy, as the rotors spun faster, and their noise increased from a throb in my temples to an actual headache.

“We found his limo,” said MacAvoy. “It had several bullet holes, but there wasn’t any blood. We found it abandoned in an alley beside an apartment building.”

“Did you search the building?” asked Hauser.

“I hope he’s someplace else,” said MacAvoy. “That was the first building the Unifieds attacked. My men sort of demolished it during the fighting.”

“Sounds like the Unifieds are looking for Watson as well,” Hauser observed.

“Maybe not anymore,” said MacAvoy. He looked at me and smiled. “Watson isn’t really the commander in chief with Harris around.” He turned in my direction, and added, “With any luck, they’ll go after you instead.”

Hauser nodded, and said, “Good thought.”

Seeing that Hauser was already nervous about touring the battlefield, I said, “Yeah, maybe we should let them know I’m on this gunship.”

“There’s no rush,” said Hauser. He didn’t like flying in a clumsy bird inside the atmosphere. He looked nervous and fidgeted. “If telling the Unifieds we’re on this ride brings them out of the sewers, I’m all for it,” said MacAvoy. “Hell, if it brings their asses out, I’ll attach a streamer that says ‘
Vote for Harris
.’”

The engines became louder as we lifted off. I could tell that Admiral Hauser was nervous by the way he jolted in his seat every time the gunship dropped or hiccuped. Trying to be heard over the engine, MacAvoy yelled, “The front is about six miles ahead of us. We’ve got them pinned down tight. That’s the good news.”

The side doors of the gunship hung open. Gunners sat beside the chain guns, ready to fire at anything that moved. The noise of the rotors thudded in my ears, making it hard to hear and harder to think. Below us, the city seemed to unfurl like a scroll, like a three-dimensional map with realistically rendered holographic buildings. The streets were empty.

Three fighters flashed past us. I didn’t know they’d been behind us or see them go by. They were hundreds of yards ahead of us by the time the thunder of their engines shook our ride. The gunship shivered in their wake, and I felt my stomach lurch into my chest.

Looking through an open door, I stared at geometric shapes that made up the skyline, skyscrapers and towers forming its lower edge, cutting into the sky like the ridges of a serrated blade. August in Washington and the sky was such a light blue that I almost dismissed it as white.

Somebody fired a rocket at us. They could only hit us with rockets, not missiles, because gunships transmitted radio waves and other distractions that baffled the computers on missiles. The problem with rockets was that they were no more intelligent than bullets. Missiles lock on to targets, often tracking their motion or their heat. Rockets simply fly in the direction that you point them; missiles make course corrections. But while missiles are more accurate, their brains make them vulnerable.

Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk.
The gunner to my right responded with his chain gun, firing rounds that could pierce a tank or a truck as if they were made of paper. When I was in boot camp, one of my drill sergeants fired a chain gun at a nearby hill, then he sent my platoon with shovels to dig out the slugs. That little task took all night. We had to dig more than twelve feet down before we finally found them.

That was the same kind of gun that Nailor and his soldiers had used to massacre the men I left guarding the ridge while I looked for Freeman. A bullet that can split armor and bury itself deep in the earth can cut a man in half. I reminded myself of that as I thought about the score I would soon settle.

“Did he get them?” asked Admiral Hauser.

MacAvoy shook his head. “They fire their rockets, then switch on their shielded armor. It takes more than armor-piercing bullets to kill those bastards. You either have to bury them or catch them with their shields down.

“So far we’re having more luck burying them.”

Off in the distance, I saw Sunny’s building, sticking out of the ground like an old-fashioned bayonet. It was tall and silver-gray, its tinted windows a perfect mirror of the sky. I pointed, and asked, “Have the residents been evacuated from that building?”

“Yes. We’ve evacuated everything west of 16th Street,” said MacAvoy.

That must have been a massive effort; it included a third of the city and a lot of high-priced real estate. You can’t just relocate rich people and politicians; you need to transport them someplace nice and send soldiers to patrol their neighborhoods for looters while they’re gone.

The sight of Sunny’s building, pointing like an accusing finger, unnerved me. I wanted to ignore it, tried to put it out of my mind, tried to put her out of my mind. I gave in. “Did you keep records of the people you moved and where you stashed them?” I asked.

“Sure, we did. And we treated them properly, too. No shitty relocation camps for these natural-borns. We placed them in hotels and houses outside of town.”

“And you kept records of who went where?” I asked.

“Sure,” said MacAvoy.

So I asked what I needed to ask, protocol be damned. I asked, “Is there a way I can check on someone you relocated?”

MacAvoy didn’t seem to hear me. He pressed the pointer finger of his right hand to his earpiece and stared out the open door to his left.

Seeing Sunny’s building, I felt the weight of my betrayal. She and I had never fought. We rode bikes together and went for long drives.

Bullshit,
I told myself. The truth was that the only place Sunny and I fit together was in bed. We came from different worlds. I reminded myself that she and I had never belonged together. She didn’t like my friends and refused to introduce me to the people in her life. She always wanted to be alone with me . . . “wanted me to herself,” she would say. It got boring quickly. There were times that we made love because we’d run out of things to do.

Another rocket struck the gunship; this one hit low on the cockpit, causing the bird to buck. Apparently, Unified Authority Marines were no more capable of transporting heavy artillery underwater than we were. They seemed to have a good supply of handheld rockets, but I saw no tanks or jackals or missile batteries on the ground, not that I was looking. When the second rocket hit the gunship, I still had my eyes on the apartment building.

One of the gunners swung his chain gun, tracking the smoke trail from the rocket. He fired. The low
thunk-a-thunk-a
blended with the thud of the rotors, neither burying it nor being buried beneath it.

I wondered how soldiers could stand having a Military Occupational Specialty that kept them flying around in an airborne target, the grinding of the engines numbing their ears. The crew wore headsets, probably noise-canceling headsets. Maybe that was their secret. My MOS was infantry, all Marines specialized in infantry first, then we added other skills afterward.

I tapped MacAvoy on the shoulder. When he turned to look at me, I pointed toward the apartment building, and shouted, “There, that building. Is that behind enemy lines?”

He shook his head, and answered, “No. It’s on our side of the line.” He pointed out the door and two blocks ahead to a wide diagonal street. “There. That’s Massachusetts Avenue. That’s the line. Everything between Massachusetts and the river is theirs.”