The Clone Assassin (34 page)

One thing about Pernell MacAvoy—he didn’t waste time worrying about the subtler things in life. Most commanders try to win battles using the least amount of force that will still guarantee them victory. Not MacAvoy. Be it battle or skirmish, he came to crush the opposition, and he brought as many men as he could muster, logistics be damned. When his men came to find me, they would march right up to this building. I hadn’t found apartments filled with rockets, but I had killed four U.A. Marines so far, and the night was still young.

The door to the apartment opened. Either the Unifieds had found themselves a passkey or they had a device that scrambled computerized locks. I heard the soft whir of the bolt sliding and turned in time to see the door open. By this time, my combat reflex had waned, and I chose to hide instead of shoot.

I dropped to the floor and belly-crawled into the master bedroom and, beyond that, into the master bathroom, ending up on the tile floor wedged between the toilet and the shower. I aimed the little pistol at the bathroom door, held my breath, and willed my heart to beat slowly.

They didn’t give the room much of a search, might not have even stepped in the door. They didn’t so much as peer through the bathroom door.

I waited another minute before squeezing out from behind the toilet. The difference between live Marines and dead heroes is often the extra minute the live ones wait before crawling out of their hiding places. That’s probably what separates live hares from dead ones as well.

The Unifieds really hadn’t spent much time searching the apartment. I came out from behind the porcelain and chrome, the little pistol still ready, and saw that the apartment was indeed empty. I mentally chided the U.A.M.C. for the laziness of its recruits, then I saw what they must have seen, the reason they gave up so quickly. Out on the street, tanks had rolled into the neighborhood. Gunships hovered in the air, flitting between the buildings like prehistoric hummingbirds. Jeeps and Jackals led the procession, followed by a full battalion of men.

The Unifieds must have spotted the battalion’s approach and interpreted it as an invasion. Maybe they were right. As I watched the force roll in, I realized that MacAvoy might have used rescuing me as an excuse for carving new boundaries. If he didn’t run into resistance in this demilitarized area, he might just keep rolling west, but he was going to encounter resistance. Of that much, I would make sure.

The three men standing in the hall were dressed like civilians and armed. I shot them. I opened the door, shot the first man I saw, then the two men gabbing with him.
This is a war zone, assholes, stay alert or die,
I silently told the dead men.

The men had been standing outside an open door, so I went to the door for a peek. Inside the apartment, a man held a large hammer. I shot him.

These men hadn’t come looking for me. They had other business in mind. A line of crates ran parallel to the glass wall on the far side of the apartment. I knew the contents of the crates without opening them—DL-148 shoulder-fired rockets.

I had come to this building looking for Sunny, and now I was doing scouting. Here were rockets, and powerful rockets at that. Around the corps, our grenadiers told jokes about “burying enemies at 148 Dreary Lane.” The address “148 Dreary Lane” referenced the name of the rockets, “DL-148s.”

I looked at the line of boxes and the dead man lying near the window with the rocket launcher in his hand and the Army parading up the block, and realized that I had stumbled into something a lot more dangerous than a few rogue officers vacationing in my ex-girlfriend’s abandoned apartment building. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, these bastards had selected this one.

Specking coincidences, they shoot you in the ass every time,
I thought.

This building had approximately one thousand apartments, five hundred of which faced east toward MacAvoy’s advancing army.
They couldn’t possibly have men with rockets hiding behind every door, could they?
I wondered.

I’d heard stories about bullets bouncing off skyscraper windows. Somewhere along the line, somebody had told me these windows were nearly unbreakable and that they were stronger in the center than along the edges. I picked up the dead guy’s hammer and swung it like a baseball bat, rolling my wrist at just the right moment and connecting with the window along the side. The glass shattered like a poor man’s dreams.

The spot I hit exploded into a million microscopic pieces. A moment later, the rest of the window slipped free from its mold and dropped in one jagged scale.

I borrowed a page from Ray Freeman’s playbook and fired a rocket at an empty stretch of road. I aimed in the general direction of the approaching soldiers to make sure they saw it but several hundred yards ahead of them. My rocket flew through the window, crossed open air leaving a very traceable smoke trail, and left a fiery crater in the street.

MacAvoy’s troops couldn’t have missed it.

I was feeling pretty good about myself as I watched one of the EME gunships fly toward the smoke. I remembered the way MacAvoy’s pilot had responded earlier that afternoon, stood rooted in place just long enough to see the bird turn so that one of her chain guns faced in my direction, and I bolted for the hall.

I was already out of the room when the gunship opened fire. Let me tell you, the fifty-cal armor-piercing bullets that gunships shoot aren’t slowed by skyscraper glass or aluminum-frame walls. Those bullets entered one side of the building, drilled through walls and halls, and exited the building on the opposite side.

I had hoped to warn MacAvoy. Instead, I had initiated a firestorm. It wouldn’t matter any longer if the Unifieds had a thousand men standing at a thousand windows firing a thousand rockets; they would not win this one. Never in a million years.

A single well-placed missile would bring down this entire building, and so would the right shell from a tank. The fighters circling outside had bombs that could reduce the entire neighborhood to rubble. I’d seen it happen. Early in my career, I had served under an officer who referred to this as his “urban renewal plan.”

I sprinted toward the stairs, not bothering to look back at the damage that gunship had inflicted in the hall.

Someone had propped the door to the stairwell wide open, so I slid in like a baseball player stealing home. I sprang to my feet, and started down the first set of stairs. Dozens of men ran ahead of me. Judging by the clatter, hundreds more were at my back.

I found myself panicking along with the Unified Authority Marines. In another minute or two, the Army of the Enlisted Man’s Empire would bring down this building and everyone in it. Anyone unlucky enough to trip in this stairwell, be he in shielded armor or wearing civilian clothing, would find himself buried under a thousand thousand tons of rubble, so we all had the same need—we needed to escape. Then again, the bastards were Unified Authority Marines. I pulled out my little pistol and shot the guy in front of me in the back of the neck. The way he fell, it probably looked to everyone else like he tripped, and his dead form tackled four people in front of him. I leaped over his corpse and kept running.

Then MacAvoy shut off the lights. I didn’t know if his men turned off a circuit breaker in the building or cut through the cables to the entire neighborhood; all I knew was that the stairs went from dim to dark, then to dusk as the emergency lights produced what little glow they had to offer.

When I reached the landing for the twenty-third floor, I shot the guy to my left in the gut. He fell, and people trampled him; I lost track of what happened after that. If it weren’t for the combat reflex saturating me with adrenaline and testosterone, I wouldn’t have lasted these five more floors. Now though, with my endurance boosted and mind alert, I had all the strength I needed to continue. Without looking back, I aimed my gun over my shoulder me and fired three shots. Somebody shrieked.

None of the people in the stairwell carried rockets. Only a few wore armor. As I crossed a landing and approached a ledge overlooking the next flight of stairs, I pushed the man to my right over the top of the rail. It didn’t take much strength, just a quick shove, and he cartwheeled over the railing.

Killing him might have been a mistake. He fell onto the next landing, crashing down on five or six people, who formed a human snowball that clogged the next flight of stairs. As I reached the sixteenth floor, a tangle of heads, backs, and limbs formed a dam at the top of the stairs. While other escapees stood staring, mindless and confused, I climbed over the rail and swung myself so that I dropped onto the next set of stairs. Dozens of Unifieds saw what I had done and tried to follow. When I did it, I’d been alone. With so many men clamoring on such a short stretch of rail, they climbed on top of each other, kicking and punching and trying to knock everyone else out of the way. A few of them might have followed me down to the next landing, but I saw a steady stream of men falling past the stairs and dropping sixteen floors.

When I lowered myself, I landed on the heads and shoulders of the men ahead of me, inadvertently causing a human avalanche that conveyed me down to the next landing. Men fell on top of me, behind me, in front of me. I shot some and clambered over others.

Somewhere deep inside me, I realized that I had become a vampire feeding off the panic of these men, these enemies of my state, these sons of bitches who had returned to my world hoping to reclaim it for themselves. In the darkness of the stairwell, I saw their writhing bodies as silhouettes, as shadow-men; they were something less than human, and I felt no worse about killing them than I would about stepping on roaches or ants.

That was when I threw that little pistol away.

I had slipped into combat reflex overdrive, killing for the fun and the adrenaline boost in my blood. That was happening more and more frequently. Killing enemies in battle came with the job; shooting men in the back as they ran for their lives held no honor.

About the same time that I had tossed away my pistol, the lights came back, and soldiers wearing the uniform of the Enlisted Man’s Army and clear plastic breathing masks entered the stairwell. They had guns and they had orders—anyone who surrendered was a prisoner of war, anyone who resisted would be shot.

As I stood, a captain approached me and asked, “Does your shirt match your pants?”

I looked at my pants—khakis with blue piping. All the while that I had spent hiding my blouse, it never occurred to me that my pants would give me away. I opened the jacket, and the captain said, “General Harris, would you come with me, sir? General MacAvoy would like a word with you.”

The real battle for the capital began that evening. Everything else had been a prelude, just a feint that enabled the Unifieds to establish a beachhead from which they could infiltrate our strongholds.

I had exposed them.

With that jacket off and my blouse on display, MacAvoy’s soldiers recognized me. They gave me an Army helmet and a flak jacket and led me outside. Warm darkness now covered Washington, D.C. In that darkness, a gunship flew low to the ground, taking advantage of a wide avenue to fly lower than the rooftops. The men in that bird were hunting, daring any Unifieds to fire their rockets, while fighters circled overhead, and tanks rumbled down the boulevard.

The building across the street lay in ruins, its walls unrecognizable, a mere corner still standing while flames danced on its bric-a-brac slopes. I looked along the street and saw glowing light shining from street gutters.

I pointed and told the captain escorting me, “There! Under the street.”

He didn’t even give it a glance before saying, “Yeah, yeah, they’re under the street; there’s not much we can do about it. We don’t want to blow up the streets if we can help it, sir. General MacAvoy wants to keep the collateral damage to a minimum.”

He seemed so specking nonchalant about my spotting; that was what bothered me more than anything else. I started to say something and stopped myself.

A platoon of men in shielded armor appeared around a distant corner. They looked like phosphorus creatures, like something that lived deep in the oceans, with phosphorous light glowing from its skin. I supposed these men had lived deep in the ocean before they invaded.

The gunship swooped in, firing chain guns. A standoff. The gunship’s chain guns couldn’t penetrate their shields; they couldn’t harm the gunship with their fléchettes.

I heard a fizzing noise and looked in time to see the explosion. Someone had fired a rocket from a building two blocks away. The gunship did a half flip in the air. Clearly injured, it pivoted and returned fire. A missile hit the window from which the rocket had been fired, and the entire front of the building caved in and poured into the street in a flash of fire and light and white smoke.

A few feet from where I stood, one of our soldiers pulled a grenade and tossed it at the Marines in the shielded armor. The guy had a good arm; he threw that pill an entire city block. The grenade hit the sidewalk, and bounced into the enemy platoon, where it exploded. Out here in the open, the pop of the grenade didn’t seem nearly as visceral.

“Better get in the jeep, sir,” said the captain. “It’s getting hot around here.”

It could get a lot hotter,
I thought, remembering Thomas Hauser’s inability to stop that stealth destroyer. I asked myself what other surprises the U.A. Navy might have up its sleeve. I knew the answer. The Unifieds had one of our fighter carriers in their fleet as well—the
de Gaulle
, piloted by a crew of reprogrammed clones.
For all you know, they might have more,
I reminded myself.

I stepped into the passenger’s side of the jeep. Up in the sky, a fighter pilot must have seen something of interest. He took his jet hypersonic, vanishing so quickly that I didn’t even see the flame from his engines, and all that remained of his bird was a loud boom.

That jet wasn’t only the vehicle that left the scene in a hurry. The corporal driving our jeep gave the captain and me a moment to buckle ourselves in, then he sped off, tires screeching.

“What are they going to do about those glowboys?” I asked the captain.

“Ignore them,” he said with a smirk.

“Ignore them?” I asked.

“Ignore them and keep out of their way,” he said, adding a shrug to signal that he had stated the obvious. Seeing that his answer hadn’t satisfied me, he said, “General MacAvoy’s orders are to capture them if they’re still around when their shields run out of juice and to bury them if they’re stupid enough to stand near a building.”

It sounded so specking simple. In my experience, the U.A. Marines were the terrors of the battlefield. Yes, their weapons were short-range, but they could kill us, and we couldn’t touch them.

Seeing that I still didn’t understand, he said, “We contain them with our tanks, sir. Their fléchettes don’t penetrate tank armor, and they can’t fire rockets when their shields are on.

“Look, sir, they’re only dangerous when they’re fighting troops, they don’t have any answer for heavy armor.”

Armor.
I laughed. I was a Marine, and as a Marine, my primary military occupational specialty was infantry. I seldom dealt with mechanized cavalry and heavy armor.

MacAvoy was beating the Unifieds better than I ever could. I wasted time searching for elegant solutions; he happily relied on brute force. They weren’t used to his methods.

 • • • 

General MacAvoy had moved his headquarters to a two-story portable in the shadow of the now-ruined Pentagon.

The captain led me into the building, a long Quonset-shaped structure made out of a metal-and-plastic composite that insulated its occupants against heat, cold, and indirect hits. The missiles that destroyed the Pentagon would smash this structure to splinters, but MacAvoy didn’t bother with details like that.

He had a perfectly good office, but that wasn’t where we met. As we entered the building, I spotted him standing a few feet from the door, berating two colonels and a major.

“Oh, I’m sorry, ladies. Were you having your nails done this evening?” he asked with faux concern.

“No, sir,” said one of the colonels, sounding unsure about whether or not he should answer the question.

“Then why the speck aren’t you out there with your men? I hope to hell you don’t think those worthless birds over your boobs make you special! Those are eagles, damn it, not chickens. If I wanted cowards for colonels, I’d drop the eagles and decorate you with chicken feathers instead.”

He saw me standing near the door, stared at me for just a moment, then turned back to the officers, and shouted, “Why in speck’s name are you sons of bitches still breathing my air? Get out of my building!”

They saluted.

He returned the salute.

They rushed out of the building. As soon as they were gone, MacAvoy said, “Those are some of my better officers. I think I’ll put them down for medals and promotions when this one is over.”

He stood there for a moment, lost in thought. MacAvoy stood five-ten, of course, a man nearing retirement with mostly white hair. He was thick and solid, a brick of a man with an incisive internal compass that never questioned whether north was north or south was south.

“Did Grayson tell you that we mobilized V Corps?”

I hadn’t even noticed the captain’s name, but he had to be Grayson. I asked, “You’re sending an entire corps into the Territories?”

As we spoke, I removed my flak jacket. It was not tight, heavy, or constricting, but I wouldn’t describe it as a comfortable fit. I folded the jacket over once and placed it on an empty desk. MacAvoy’s Corps of Engineers had provided him with a building and furniture, but he had not yet selected the personnel to man it.

Most high-ranking officers surround themselves with posses of ass-lickers. Not MacAvoy. The way he beat down his officers, I wasn’t sure anybody wanted to kiss his ass. Entourage officers avoided benefactors like Perry MacAvoy. He liked visiting the front and watching the action up close; they preferred admirals and generals who specialized in summits and diplomacy. Tom Hauser, for instance, had a congregation shadowing his every move.

“Did you find your girlfriend?” asked MacAvoy.

My girlfriend,
I repeated to myself. The question left me confused. At that moment, Kasara and Sunny occupied no real estate in my head.
My girlfriend?
I thought of Kasara first, then realized he meant Sunny. I had gone to that building searching for Sunny. I had been to her apartment . . . had destroyed it with a grenade. Hell, MacAvoy and the Unifieds had left the entire building in tatters.

“The only people I saw were Unified Authority Marines,” I said.

“A lot of people left town before we started evacuating,” he said. “I’ll tell my men to keep an eye out for her, but she’s probably off in Chicago or Seattle watching us on TV.”

I thanked him.

“Hell, who knows what we’ll turn up looking for your gal,” he said, “You sent us searching for Travis, and we discovered an invasion. You asked me to meet you at your girlfriend’s apartment, now the whole damn city is in flames. Damn good thing we’re activating V Corps; we’ll probably run into the whole specking U.A. Army in the Territories.”

He led me up to the empty second floor of his headquarters. The bottom floor had furniture. The top floor had no desks, no partitions, no chairs, just light fixtures, which he had set on dim. There were large windows at either end of the building; one faced southwest toward the remains of the Pentagon, the other northeast to the Potomac and the lights of downtown.

In a hollow voice, he said, “They took back most of my view. I used to control the riverfront; now I don’t even have Capitol Hill.”

I walked to the window. The world outside was dark and dotted with tiny lights. Looking to my right, I saw the 14th Street Bridge, an unadorned stretch of road that spanned the river without suspension towers or cables. From this second-floor spot, I saw monuments and government buildings across the river, but they were so distant they looked like miniatures instead of the real buildings.

An unsteady darkness covered Washington, D.C. Off on the horizon, artillery flashed. No stars showed in the sky. Dual layers of clouds and smoke obscured them.

MacAvoy came and stood beside me. We both stared out the window, trying to read the flashes of light as if they held some sort of code. After a moment, he asked, “Did you ever play football?”

“I never did,” I said. I wrestled and boxed. Whenever my teachers gave me a choice, I always selected combat training instead of phys. ed.

“It’s an interesting sport, football,” he said. “You have two kinds of defenses in football—man-to-man and zone. We’re running a zone operation out here. If the Unifieds want the capital, they have to fight us for it. If they want a foothold in the New Olympian Territories, they can fight us there. There’s no place they can go without having to fight us; that’s a zone defense.

“Harris, Hauser says you want to fight man-to-man. He thinks you’re making this your own personal war.”

“Does he?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know who it’s about, and he doesn’t know what it’s about, but he says you’re after somebody.”

“Did Hauser play football?” I asked, unable to imagine him wearing pads and breaking tackles.

MacAvoy laughed, and said, “He strikes me as more of the chess-club type.”

“But he thinks I’m adopting a man-to-man defense?” I asked.

“He thinks you are headhunting.”

Headhunting?
Two particularly bright flashes lit up the horizon. It was like watching a lightning storm.

“We’ll lose some tanks and some gunships, but the fight is already won,” said MacAvoy. “They thought they would run into the Marines, not the Army.”

“Oh, shit, MacAvoy, let’s not make this a battle between soldiers and Marines,” I said, though I wouldn’t have minded a stupid argument.

“Depends on the mission,” said MacAvoy. “I think they expected to run into you when they invaded. They expected to face a Marine using Marine tactics. They weren’t counting on artillery and gunships.

“They didn’t get the fight they had prepared for, and it’s going to cost them.”

Before leaving the Territories, I had already known that I would need Admiral Hauser’s help. He was a by-the-regulations-type officer, meaning I would need to sell him on the idea of my private retribution. That would require meeting him on his terms, on his ship, where he held all the ace cards. I had requested a one-on-one with him before I arrived in Washington, D.C. I could have told Hauser my plans before climbing on the gunship, but I thought he might be more generous if I met him on his ship.

My ride, the military transport that would carry me to the
Churchill
, landed a few yards away. We watched the bulky, nearly wingless bird through the window. Her booster rockets flared as it touched down on heavy skids. That bulky warhorse of a ship would take me to space and from there to whatever boneyard Franklin Nailor had chosen for a hiding place.

MacAvoy watched me instead of the transport. Once she landed, he said, “You’re going to get your fight, Harris. I hope it’s the fight that you’re looking for.”