The Nirvana Plague (20 page)

Then a deep and violent spasm came through the earth. He felt dizzy.

“What was that!” he said.

“Follow me!” Tennover shouted, pulling Marley after him.

But Marley couldn’t make his legs move. He was tangled up in his sleeping bag.

Tennover pulled him off his feet.

He fell over something, someone, on a cot.

It was Delacourt in the cot, struggling to get out of her own bag.

“Get off me!” she yelled.

Suddenly Tennover’s hands were on him, yanking his sleeping bag open.

“Come on!” he yelled.

He heard other voices all around him, yelling.

“Move! Move! Move!”

Then he heard the splattering noise of automatic weapons. It sounded far away. Outside.

He lurched forward in the darkness, stumbling after Tennover. He couldn’t see anything, and wondered how Tennover could. He’d been sleeping in his socks. Half off, the loose toes flopped under his feet across the hard floor.

There was a tremendous crack, fantastically loud, and a blinding pink-white flash. In the flash, he saw the room around him, a freeze-frame of running figures and broken columns. It was like being hit by lightning.

He felt that his mind was not processing the scene properly. He was in the temple. They were under attack.

Tennover brought him hard against a wall. They flattened themselves against it.

More flashes and cracks. They were being shelled.

Marley strained to see through the darkness, his eyes sparkling from the flash. He could hear a lot of yelling in the distance, men running for their lives in the camp beyond the temple.

Tennover shouted, “Orders, colonel!”

Benford shouted back, not far away: “Outside! before the rest of the ceiling comes down!”

Excited, Tennover shouted in Marley’s ear: “Stay right with me, sir!” then hauled him to his feet again and started moving fast along the wall.

Marley thought, ridiculously, I did
not
come here for this! But he stayed close to Tennover, and in a few seconds they were out on the porch of the temple. On the right, the sky beyond the wall was a wild red-orange ball of flame.

“They hit the choppers,” Tennover said.

Marley was getting his bearings now. His thoughts cleared. He was terrified, but he could see now, and he could think.

By the light of the fireball, Marley saw that Tennover had his helmet on. That’s how he had been able see in the darkness inside. Marley didn’t know where his own helmet was.

Benford was there the next moment, crouching beside them, Tyminski with her.

“Which way?” she said.

“Can’t tell,” Tennover answered.

“They have to be uphill or across the valley.”

“Do they have that much range?”

“What are they using?”

“Can’t tell. Not RPG’s. Bigger.”

“Real artillery?”

Benford didn’t have her helmet either.

“Command on comm yet?”

“Yes, sir,” Tennover answered. “They’re hitting us damn hard.”

“Orders?”

“Nothing yet, sir.”

Other team members were stumbling out onto the porch, looking scared.

Debris from the explosions in camp was falling into the courtyard, pinging off the paving stones.

Marley said, “Where are the patients?”

“We need to get clear of this structure,” Benford said. “Move toward the back corner of the yard.”

Tennover tugged on Marley’s shoulder, but Marley pulled back.

“What about the patients, colonel?”

“I’m going back in for them.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Where’s your helmet?”

“Where’s yours?”

She shook her head. “We’ll get them.”

He didn’t know whether she meant the helmets or the patients, but, motioning to Tennover, she headed back inside, and they followed her. Tyminski had a flashlight, and he put the beam onto the spot where they’d been asleep on their bedrolls just a few minutes ago. They ran to it and quickly threw on their powerpacks and helmets and jacked each other in.

Inside his helmet, Marley flipped his visor down, and the gloom around him was instantly transformed into a dull green digital geometry. He could see the pale outlines of the temple’s main room, the columns, and the warmer floor. Benford, Tyminski, and Tennover stood out more brightly, lit from within by their body heat. Blue labels with their names floated over their heads. Everyone else was outside.

The comm was a mad roar of commands and yelling. And groans of pain. After three seconds of chaos, proximity- and rank-dampening kicked in, and Benford said:

“Anybody see them?”

“No, sir,” said Tennover and Tyminski together.

“Who was on watch?”

“I was, sir,” Tennover said.

“Where did you see them last?”

Tennover pointed across the way with a ghostly arm. “Standing over there, same as before.”

“Did you see where they went?”

“No, sir. Next time I looked that way after the first hit, they were gone. I was at the door, sir. No one went out.”

“Pair off. Search the side chambers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dr. Marley, you stay on the lieutenant’s ass.”

“OK,” he answered automatically.

Inside the helmet, he felt more distant from the firestorm outside. The dark world turned an electronic green, the yelling and blasting filtered by the noise dampeners, everyone around him properly labeled, the universe seemed more under control. And he had a purpose to distract him from the violence of the assault.

Tennover headed right, toward the side chambers nearby. Benford and Tyminski sprinted across the room toward the opposite chambers.

Marley chased Tennover through the columns into the first little room. Nothing.

They ran on to the next one. Nothing.

They worked their way from room to room to the back of the hall, where a double row of columns stood across the entrance to a second smaller hall, really a wide corridor. They stopped, crouching between the column bases.

“Nothing our side,” Tennover said on comm. “No sign of them.”

Benford and Tyminski ran up, blue labels chasing them, and crouched down.

“Nothing our side either,” Benford said, breathing heavy. “Anybody outside on comm?”

No answer.

“Damnit. Nobody picked up a helmet?”

“Everyone was asleep,” Tennover said.

Another brilliant pink flash and thunderclap blasted through the room. They all flattened to the floor instinctively.

“Was that in the courtyard?” Benford said. “No. Couldn’t be. But close.”

“That’s some serious ordnance,” Tyminski said.

“Dave, grab all the helmets you can find and get them outside to the others. Northwest corner of the wall.”

“Yes, sir!”

Tyminski ran off across the hall.

Benford tapped Marley on the shoulder.

“Let’s find these people and get the hell out of here.”

Benford ran down the wide corridor, hugging the wall, and Tennover and Marley followed. At the end of it, a post and lintel door opened at the head of a stone stairway. They plunged down it, the cold walls getting darker around them. The steps were wet and slippery. At the bottom of the flight, the landing turned and opened into a larger chamber, pitch black. The floor crackled under their boots.

And there they were, floating in the blackness of his nightvision like emerald ghosts, their eyes burning like bright coals. Marley started when he saw them. They were sitting all in a row along one wall, crossed arms resting on their drawn-up knees, like glowing gargoyles, or jack-o-lanterns along a dark porch.

Benford flipped her visor up so they could hear her clearly. “Let’s go, people!”

None of them moved.

Benford bent down close to Davis.

“Lieutenant Davis, follow me out with your squad!”

Davis gave no reaction.

“That’s an order, Lieutenant! All of you! Let’s go.”

None of them responded.

“Colonel,” Marley said.

“What?”

“This room must be underground. It must go back into the hill behind the temple. It’s a natural bomb shelter.”

Benford glanced around the dark room. No windows.

“Yes. It would be safer. — You two stay here with them. I’ll send the others back. Lieutenant, don’t let them leave.”

“Yes, sir.”

The walls were so evenly cool that with nightvision it looked like they were floating inside a dim cobblestone sphere. Without nightvision it was just featureless blackness, as dizzying as freefall.

“We need a flashlight,” Marley said.

“Yes, sir.” In fact, Tennover had his, still clipped to his vest. He snapped it on and flipped his visor up— “
Holy shit!
”

Marley jumped like he’d been shot. “What! What is it!”

“Look!”

Marley flipped his visor up and looked at the spot of light on the wall. Despite himself he stepped back from what he saw.

“Bones,” Tennover said.

“Human bones.”

The walls were all made of bones. Skulls and hands, ribs and spines, arms and legs, feet and hips.

“It’s a tomb,” Marley said.

Long dead centuries of bones stood round them, packed together and daubed with mud. There were no intact skeletons. The bones were all mixed up together. Some had fallen out of the walls and been kicked into the corners.

Tennover tried to shrug it off. “Find a place to sit, sir, so we can cut the light.”

Marley sat down on the floor against the wall opposite the ten. It was not comfortable. The bones pressed into his back. The broken bits of trampled bone on the floor made an unpleasant seat.

Tennover sat down beside him. He shone his light quickly over the ten, making them blink, then snapped it off.

Marley took note of the blinks. They were recovering their senses. They had deliberately moved in here.

The darkness was absolute, but the earth rumbled around them. The comm roared with the fury of the fight in the camp above. With every explosive rumble, bits of mud and bone shook lose from the wall and ticked off his helmet and shoulders.

On comm, a new voice:

“Colonel Benford! Where are you?”

It was Dr. Estrada. He was angry.

“Near the temple,”
they heard Benford answer.
“Where’s Reiser?”

“Reiser’s dead,”
he said.
“We’re pinned down in the surgery. You’re ranking officer, colonel.”

“I’m not a field officer. I’m not even part of your unit. Who else is up there?”

Another voice:
“Captain Solso here, sir.”

He sounded scared.

“Captain. Where are you?”

“Between you and the Major, sir, I think. Trying to find some cover.”

“Anybody else? Officers?”

Nobody else spoke up.

“It’s a mess up here, sir,”
Solso said.

“Situation?”

“Sir, Colonel Reiser sent out two squads an hour ago. Attack came when the birds came back, as soon as they put down. Hit the choppers first, and the fuel dump. Charlie squad was onboard. Bastards, couldn’t have timed it better.”

“Enemy position?”

“Artillery appears to be coming from across the valley.”

“You call for support?”

“Communications dead, sir.”

“Backup?”

“Looking for it, sir.”

“Take command there, Captain. I’m moving in your direction with a couple of my team. We’ll try to help out. Get some communications established and get some counter fire on that ridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marley was impressed. She’d been in battle before.

Peters and Delacourt, led by Friedlander, Peters’s aide, came clattering down the stairs into the tomb, helmets on, visors down.

Friedlander said to Tennover: “You stay here with the civilians, all right? I’m going back out. They’re getting the shit kicked out of them.”

“OK.”

Friedlander vaulted back up the ancient stairs.

Peters and Delacourt hunched down against the wall next to Marley. Peters realized what they were leaning against and lurched away.

“What the hell?”

On comm, they could hear that Benford and her three men were making their way into the camp against heavy fire.

“Red uphill!”
someone yelled.

“Enemy units moving down on us!”

They could hear the wap-wap-wap of small arms fire raining down on the camp, followed by yelling and screams of pain.

“Medic!”

“I’m hit! Oh God!”

“Any communications yet?”

That sounded like Benford, though it was hard to tell in the confusion of voices.

“Return fire! Return fire!”

“Where’s the doc?”

“Incoming! RPG!”