A Song Called Youth (50 page)

Dan Torrence was tired. He was gritty tired and aching tired; physically, mentally, emotionally tired. He cranked the side window open a little more, to let the cold air wash over his face, revive him a little. He wouldn’t let himself sleep, because Steinfeld was there, and Steinfeld never seemed to sleep, never showed his weariness except a sort of tangible moodiness, a tendency to lapse into scowling silences. There were forty-four of them in three trucks, moving southeast toward northern Italy, as they had been for almost four days. They were supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the French NR in twelve hours.

But most of the French New Resistance probably wouldn’t make it. Most of them were probably dead, or swallowed up by the SAs “preventative detention camps.” And two hundred of them had died when they’d broken through the blockade around Paris. They died to get Steinfeld safely through. Which, perhaps, was why Steinfeld never seemed to sleep.

Torrence had lost his three closest friends in Paris, at the end. Rickenharp and Yukio and Jensen. Killed by the Fascists; crushed by the Jægernauts like small animals under a jackboot heel.

But he’d found Claire. They’d met in the wartime chaos of Paris.

Now she was curled up in the back of the truck, probably asleep beside Carmen and Willow and Bonham and the others. Claire was a short, frail-looking woman who’d killed seven of the enemy back in Paris, one of them with a knife.

Torrence wanted to climb into the back of the truck and curl himself up around her, try to keep the warmth of her humanity from slipping away into the mountain shadows.

But he remained sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, staring blearily out the mud-spattered windshield. Feeling his eyelids twitch from exhaustion, his back ache from the hours in the truck.

Steinfeld shifted his bearlike bulk in his seat, stretching as much as he could in the cab’s confines, wincing.

“Find cover soon, Hard-Eyes,” he muttered.

Torrence heard himself say, “Don’t call me that, anymore. Call me Torrence. Or Dan.”

“Oh?” Steinfeld looked at him but didn’t ask why. He shrugged. “Well, Torrence—satellites’ll pinpoint us. New-Soviets will think we’re NATO; NATO’ll know us for Unauthorized in this area; they’ll collate it with the Fascists.” His voice was gristly with fatigue.

Torrence nodded. “You know a place?”

Steinfeld shook his head. “Don’t know this stretch. Just hope I’m where I think I am.”

A single short honk from the track behind them.

Torrence felt a chill, then a hot surge of adrenaline wakefulness. They wouldn’t be honking unless something was wrong.

He looked in the passenger-side mirror. “They’re stopped—looks like they’re stuck . . . ”

Steinfeld cursed in Hebrew and pulled over, close under the cliff side. He put the truck into park, left it idling as he got out, breath pluming in the chill air, and went back to see what was wrong. There wasn’t enough room between the truck and the mountain for Torrence to get out on the right side, so he slid across the seat and climbed out the driver’s side door, grateful for an excuse to stretch.

Levassier was the driver of the second truck. He was standing in the headlight beams, arguing in French with the big, bald Algerian, an NR guerrilla Torrence barely knew.

Levassier had driven a little too close to the edge of the road, on the eastern side. The road’s shoulder was badly eroded by winter weather and the shock of air-to-ground missiles that, earlier in the year, had torn up parts of the roadbed. The road had crumbled away under the left front tire, and the truck was beginning to tilt toward the ravine. The Algerian—Torrence hadn’t found a chance to learn his name—was saying, so far as Torrence could make out, that Levassier should simply back farther up onto the road. Levassier was making grand gestures that seemed to say, “What an imbecile!” as he maintained that there was ice under the rear wheels, so the truck wouldn’t make progress backward, but might well slip about, slide into the ravine if they tried.

Steinfeld was crouching, looking at the rear wheels of Levassier’s truck.

Torrence lifted the edge of the canvas tarp and looked into the rear of Steinfeld’s truck. Claire was sitting up, with her back to the truck cab, staring into the shadows. He looked for Bonham, the other refugee from the Colony, saw him curled up on a sleeping bag, snoring through his beakish nose, wide mouth open. Reassured to see that Bonham wasn’t sleeping beside Claire, Torrence looked over at her again. She didn’t look up at him. He could just make out her eyes, open in the darkness, staring at the truck bed. Blinking, staring.

Why wasn’t she asleep? Why was she sitting there in the dark, staring at nothing?

Steinfeld shouted, “Torrence!”

Torrence walked back toward Steinfeld. Looking at the sky as he went, wondering if they were under surveillance. And wondering if a Second Alliance patrol plane might not happen by. Or the New-Soviets. Or NATO.

Everyone was their enemy.

Steinfeld had appointed Torrence as captain. He had no bars, no insignia to show his rank. He wore blue jeans and a ski jacket and black hiking boots. But Willow and Carmen and the Spaniard, Danco, went instantly into position when he told them, “You three—grab the S.A.G. and the grenade launchers, stand watch for air attack.”

Torrence walked on, found Steinfeld and Burch unloading a heavy tow chain from the rear of the third truck. Burch was a stocky, glum black from the People’s Republic of Central Africa. He wore a parka and wire-rimmed glasses.

Without looking over, Steinfeld said, “Torrence, detail a crew to hook this up.”

Half an hour later they were still trying to safely move the teetering truck. It was packed with ordnance; there wasn’t room for the stacks of rifles and ammo boxes in the other trucks, and Steinfeld didn’t want to leave it behind, so they continued to struggle with several tons of metal poised on a cliff edge. Torrence had cut his hands on the chain as they added manpower to the rear truck’s pull. His hands ached with the cold; the knuckles were swollen. The shadows had shrunk, the growing light was blue-gray; it was a watered-down light, but they no longer needed the headlights. The sun was edging over a mountaintop that looked to Torrence, in his weariness, like a Klan hood slightly cocked to one side. There was just a faint suggestion of sun warmth on the top of his head.

They couldn’t back the towing truck very far, or it would have gone over the edge behind it. So they couldn’t use its full power to move the one it was pulling.

Steinfeld made up his mind. “Unload the rest of the gear, anything useful; we’ll run the truck over the side, make do with two. Hope they’ll get us up over the pass.”

Torrence gave the orders. All the time looking at the sky, or at the first truck, wondering about Claire. He looked up at the austere mountainsides; listened to the men talk, their voices sounding tinny and lost in the mountain vastness. Thinking he’d be moved by this place, another time—the scenery, the heady purity of the morning air . . . but now it was just another pain in the ass, something to hump over, trudge through . . . 

He heard a distant thudding sound. Soft and repetitive but distinctly man-made in its ominous regularity.

He looked around, frowning, losing the sound in the noise the others made as they unloaded a crate of ammunition . . . there it was again, louder.

He felt his scalp tighten, the hair rising on the back of his neck. He looked around for Carmen, saw her perched on a boulder with a grenade-fitted rifle in her arms. She was looking at the sky, frowning. He started toward her.

Steinfeld shouted, “Where are you going, Torrence?”

Torrence opened his mouth to reply—and the reply caught in his throat when he saw Carmen pointing, and then saw what she was pointing at.

Three aircraft. A jet accompanied by two helicopters. They were side by side, in close formation, coming at them from the east over a serrated shoulder of mountain, a little more than a quarter of a mile off, and closing. It looked like one of the new stealth models of the Harrier jumpjet, shaped like a hunchbacked triangle, flat black; not particularly fast, but lethal in its copterlike maneuverability. And flanking the jet: the autochoppers, American made, equipped with sidewinders and 7.62-mm miniguns.

They could spray a target area with six thousand rounds per minute . . . 

He opened his mouth to shout a warning but Carmen was already shouting; the others saw the aircraft now too. Levassier was looking through field glasses. He must’ve seen the Second Alliance Christian crosses on the undersides of the jumpjet’s wings, the black and silver of its trim because he shouted, “SA!”

They could hear the thudding of the chopper blades clearly now and the whine of the jet. Coming in slow for a jet.

Maybe,
Torrence thought,
they’ll see the Army trucks, take us for NATO.

No. They’d see we’re all out of uniform. They’ve been looking for us in this area. There are a half dozen other telltales. They’ll know.

As he thought this, he was looking around. There was no time to drive the trucks out of the way. They’d have to find cover.

The cliff face to their right, on the western side of the road, rose about a hundred feet. But about forty feet ahead of the lead truck, there was a fissure running back into the cliff. It looked as if it might be wide enough to run into, but narrow enough to give them cover. He couldn’t see anything else.

Steinfeld had come to the same conclusion. He was shouting orders. Everyone was running now; some of them with crates of ammo slung between them; some running to the lead truck, shouting at the others to get out, make for the fissure: Levassier arguing that they should get in the trucks and drive like the devil. But the trucks would make excellent targets on the road.

Torrence shouted, “Get what you can carry and run for that opening in the cliff! Go, go,
go
!”

The jumpjet and the copters were almost on them; they occluded the sun, sending their shadows racing like hungry panthers ahead of them. The cannons mounted on the nose of the Jump Jet were tilting downward. The jet and the autochoppers swung off to the north, and for a giddy moment Torrence thought they’d decided not to engage—but then he saw they were coming around for a strafe run, angling to follow the north-south course of the road so they could come in low. The choppers followed the jet in precise flight-path replication: they were Bell
Heeldogs,
unmanned, entirely automated, robot pilots responding to the orders of the human pilot in the jet.

Weariness was forgotten. Mouth dry with fear, Torrence looked around for Claire, saw her climbing out of the back of the truck, carrying a light machine gun, her face white, her lips pressed to a thin line. She was the last out. Steinfeld and the others were mostly up ahead. Someone—Burch, maybe—had gotten into the lead truck, was starting it, and driving ahead to block the gunships from the main body of guerrillas. Drawing fire.

Hot knives clashed in Torrence’s lungs as he ran to Claire, shouting, “Leave the fucking gun!” She shook her head angrily, continued to carry it, staggered under its weight. He slung the CAWS over his shoulder and wrenched the machine gun from her, tossed it aside, took her elbow, and dragged her along, knowing that if they survived, she’d lecture him about women carrying their own burdens.

But he didn’t care because now the autochoppers had let go four sidewinders. He heard a quadruple thud and the scream of rending metal as the missiles struck the two rear trucks; Torrence felt heat on his back, and the arrogant shove of shockwaves. He stumbled, but Claire steadied him and they ran on, the world dancing jerkily around them—

Something sizzled past them, drawing a line of white exhaust in the air, the line finishing in the back of the lead truck, which still trundled awkwardly up the road, and a second later the truck Torrence had ridden in all night was consumed in an orange-red ball of fire.

Heat and the zing of shrapnel. Reflections of fire shimmering from the patches of snow; a long, thudding echo off the mountainsides.

Burch, one of the best of them, was dead.

Claire shouted, “Here they come!” and tugged Torrence into the poor shelter of a boulder jutting from the cliff as the Harrier and the autochoppers bore down on them. The rocks around them spat chips and sparks as the steel-jacketed rounds impacted. Something stung Torrence’s cheek; something more slashed at his neck. He and Claire tried to press farther into the hollow; their backs were bruised by knobs of cold rock.

Torrence thought,
If they pull up and turn toward us, we’re fucked. They’ll mince us.

But the killing machines kept going, chasing the main group of the rebels, who’d just reached the fissure, twenty yards ahead; Bonham paused at the opening to look back, probably looking for Claire—then he ducked inside. Carmen was crouched in the opening with her rifle propped on a small boulder; she fired, and a grenade arced up, only to bounce off the underside of an autochopper before exploding; the chopper rocked in the air but showed no other effect as it whipped by, following the Harrier.

Torrence pulled at Claire’s arm, and they were running toward the fissure, wondering if they could get to it before the choppers and the jet circled back. They ran past three bodies sprawled in red splashes. No time to see who they were.

The jet slowed, stopped in midair, and the autochoppers obediently came to heel.

Take out the jet,
Torrence thought. Somebody take out the fucking jet
.

The jet and its faithful dogs were coming at them, about fifty yards up, angling down, red sunlight gleaming on the cockpit and flashing off the steel curve of the autochoppers’ blind front ends.

Running hard, Claire beside him, Torrence saw an autochopper swiveling toward him and Claire, lining them up in its sights. He felt her hand in his, palm moist with sweat, fingers rigid with tension, and there were things he wanted to tell her—

And then she was pulling him into the shadows of the crevice as 7.62-mm minigun rounds screamed off the rock a few feet behind them. Someone returning fire with the ground-to-air missile launcher . . . a satisfying
ka-whump
as the missile struck an autochopper.