A Song Called Youth (55 page)

Ahead, the crooked corridors of rock were sunk in shadow; dark, hunched figures shifted there. Lila said, “We cannot see them. Their uniforms are colored like the rock.” She took a flare gun from a pack lying on the ground beside her, dropped a shell in it, fired it; the shell arced up, down, and splashed the gray dimness with sparks and the blue-white dazzle of burning magnesium. Someone screamed, and even Claire smiled at that.
Burn, you bastard, because you’re going to kill me.

And then they saw something else in the light of the flare.

Torrence remembered snorkeling once, off the coast of Florida, seeing a shark nosing slowly toward him among the coral formations. That’s what this thing looked like, from here. The shark in the undersea maze had swum past, ignoring him. This one wouldn’t do that.

It was a seeker missile, moving slowly—not much more than hovering in place, just drifting forward as it picked out a target—held up by jets on its underside, its tail rocket dormant, waiting for the missile’s micro computer to make a decision, wavering in and out of the flare light behind it. The self guided drone was a sleek thing of shiny chrome, a sensing grid on its nose looking for heat in human-body outline. Nosing this way, that. Why was it taking so long?

Maybe it was confused by the still flickering flare, reflected from the cold rocks. Soon it’d pick out the heat from a group of people, though, and it’d find its way—

One moment the self-guided missile was drifting in and out of shadow, almost absently; a split second later, rattlesnake flash, it struck, impacting with the top forward edge of the cratered boulder where Sortonne and Sahid had been . . . Had been.

Torn outlines of the two men were flung from the fireball; dolls from which some sadistic kid had torn the hands and heads. Warm droplets spattered Torrence’s cheek. Chunks of rock flew from the blast, and a small boulder smacked meatily down onto Levassier’s shoulder—smashed down himself now, shoulder crushed, upper arm nearly mangled away, hanging by shreds. Steinfeld was running to him, removing his belt for a tourniquet. Torrence felt blood—Sortonne’s? Sahid’s?—running down his cheek toward his mouth. He smeared it away with the back of his hand so he wouldn’t have to taste the blood of other NR. Blood already cold to touch.

Shouts of outrage from his fellows; someone sobbing; spastic volleys of gunfire; two more on the line fell back, one gut-shot, shit from his ruptured intestines adding its ugly tang to the iron taste of blood in the air and the scratchy tang of gun smoke; the writhing as a rift through his neck pumped out his life. There was no helping him without too much risk, they had to ignore his frantic hand signals—
Help me!

Try not to see him, look down the sights of your gun . . . 

“Don’t shoot without a clear target!” Steinfeld yelled.

NR firing slowed and stopped. Echoes and then quiet. Torrence looked for the enemy and saw no one . . . 

Motion. Gleaming metal motion. Another seeker. The sight freezing his bowels as it nosed into a band of wan sunlight, sniffing for group heat.

Torrence squeezed off a three-shot burst at the seeker, hoping to detonate it while it was still a hundred yards away. Glimpsed sparks as the rounds ricocheted from stone. Anyway, it was well armored, you’d have to hit it precisely, squarely, in the nose, almost impossible at this range. Try again—no, wait!

Claire had taken something from Lila, was up and running ahead of them, toward the missile.

“Claire!” Torrence heard himself shout.

She was bending beside Sortonne’s body, lifting it up, her hands under its armpits, her face twisted. What the fuck was she doing? Recovering bodies?
Now?

The seeker missile was drifting closer, its tail rocket beginning to show flame as it picked out a target. Any second it would lance out, blow two or three or five of them to shreds.

Claire had set up Sortonne’s body so it leaned on a boulder. She fired the flare gun into it and turned to run.

The body’s chest erupted with the burning flare.

The missile sensed the flare heat, saw the body outline; the heat more than enough for a group. It streaked to the decoy, exploding it along with bits of boulder. Still running, Claire stumbled, caught in the shockwave or by shrapnel, fell flat, skidding. Torrence shouted something and vaulted over the boulder, ran to her, picked her up in his arms . . . she was heavier than she should have been; his legs were wobbly. He felt a stickiness on the back of his legs; he’d started bleeding again. Someone, maybe Steinfeld, was shouting to him to let her lay and get under cover. But he staggered back to the low boulder with her, the others laying down suppressive fire to give him cover.

He laid her on her back behind the stone. Bullets ripped the air overhead. His ears ached from the gunfire noise of the guerrillas, just to his left. Claire’s eyes were open, moving. Alive. But registering nothing.

A tympanic roll announced the tons of killing machine suddenly blocking out the sky overhead, a machine giant’s voice booming shakily through the thudding. copter blades, “
If you surrender, you will not be killed. If you surrender . . . 
” The words were shattered by light machine-gun fire as someone opened up at the copter; it returned fire with its miniguns, and the machinegunner screamed. All the time Torrence was looking at Claire’s face. Was she hit? Internal bleeding?

“Claire?”

Danco and Lila were shouting something at him. “More choppers!” someone yelled, and something more in French. He looked up and saw a group of large brown choppers moving in, guns alongside firing. Red stars on the helicopter’s doors. New-Soviet choppers. The New-Soviets were involved now. Why? He didn’t really care.

His eyes stung from dust in the rotor backwash. “Claire . . . ?”

A shell burst threw bushels of the stony ground into the air somewhere behind him and slapped him down with the hot ripple of its blast, sending a single sharp ringing tone through his head as he fell sprawling across Claire.
Am I hit? Is she hit?

“Claire?”

After a moment Torrence realized he was lying facedown across her, his body making an X with hers. And he was holding his breath. He let it out, becoming aware of a whirlwind of noise and motion, of people running nearby, fire chattering in their hands. It seemed to him that it was all mixed up now; it wasn’t the enemy over there, NR here—the enemy had overrun them, were all around; the NR was there, too, emerging and sinking in smoke. He saw two SA regulars running up the slope toward him. He rolled off Claire to his rifle, rolled into prone sniper’s position, popping the gun into the hollow of his shoulder, firing instantly, and one of the SA fell. The other one was still coming, pointing a submachine gun right at Torrence. Any second he’d feel the slugs. But the submachiner seemed to gush fire and he fell, writhing in flame, shrieking . . . somebody’d hit the guy with an incendiary grenade . . . after a moment the soldier lay still, facedown, quietly burning. But the New-Soviet choppers were looming like great golden dragons overhead as they descended, rotors whipping the smoke.

“Dan?” Claire’s voice. “Let’s get up, let’s get under cover.” Sounding weak. But she was all right.

But . . . 
Fuck, the New-Soviets are going to take us, Torrence thought. Fuck that. They’ll torture Claire and then they’ll execute us. That’s what they do. Wring you for information and kill you for convenience. I got to kill her myself. Save her from torture.

Rifle in hands, he got to his knees beside her. She was turned on her side, away from him, starting to get up.

He pointed his rifle’s muzzle at her head.
So they don’t torture her.

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

No ammunition.

He tossed the rifle aside, looked around for another gun.

And then Steinfeld was kneeling beside him, pulling him up.

“Got to kill her before they . . . ” Torrence said. Or tried to say, he wasn’t sure which. He felt like he was made of soggy cardboard. His lips didn’t want to work; his tongue felt thick. He managed, “They’ll take her . . . ”

The choppers were settling down in an open space just ahead of him. The SA had taken cover, driven back by cannon blasts from the New-Soviets.

Steinfeld said, “They’re not Russians. That’s cover. Kind of camouflage. That’s the Mossad. They got transmission. They’ve come to get us out.”

Torrence must have lost consciousness for a while. But not more than a few minutes. Because when the fuzziness around him resolved, he saw he was inside a helicopter, hearing Steinfeld say, “They’ve gone into the cave. They sent in ten regulars, it looks like . . . I doubt they send in any more. Go ahead, Danco.”

Torrence heard Danco chuckle as he reached for the remote-control detonator.

Torrence found himself wanting to say,
Don’t trigger the detonator. Don’t kill them. I know what they are. I know they’re enemy, I know they killed my friends, I know they’re some kind of Nazi and I know what that means, but it’s enough, it’s too much now, so let them go, just let them go, please let them go, it’s all too fucking much . . . 

Torrence was distantly aware that there was a field IV plugged into his arm, a Mossad medic kneeling beside him holding up a plastic bottle of plasma, Claire sitting up across from him, her leg bandaged, staring into space, but she was alive, Lord, she was alive . . . 

He heard Danco laughing. “Hey,
pendejos, vaya con Dios!”
as he threw the switch on the detonator. And the cave blew, taking ten SA with it.

Torrence thought:
I’m glad they’re dead. I have to be glad of it or nothing means anything and everything I’ve done and everything that happened—all of it was meaningless. Accept it. They needed to die.

He felt the acceptance lock into place in him; he turned away from the thought that just a little more of his humanity might’ve gone when the acceptance came.

Ten more of the enemy were dead. That was all.

He smiled and went back to sleep.

• 03 •

Lyons, France.

Jean-Michel Karakos stood at the window looking at the prisoners in the detention pens below. On either side of him stood the pale Dr. Cooper and the pink Colonel Watson. Behind Karakos loomed an enormous Second Alliance guard—the man must have been close to seven feet tall. Karakos could feel the man back there, hulking over him.

Karakos’s hands were cuffed together, and the cuffs were locked to a chain around his waist.

Karakos, Watson, and Cooper were looking through the polarized window at a nightmare concocted with the simpleminded efficiency of a high-school science fair project.

Cooper was about forty, Karakos guessed, though it was hard to tell with an albino. He was stooped, potbellied; he had one pink eye and one blue eye, hair that looked like mold, and an unsettling waxiness to his skin. It looked as glossy as a balloon. He wore a blue lab smock over a tweed suit.

“It’s an interesting experiment,” Watson was telling him. “It was Cooper’s brainchild.” Watson was a tall, thick-bodied Englishman in his early fifties, with a round, weathered face, a brickish complexion, and poker-chip blue eyes. He wore a black-and-silver Second Alliance officer’s uniform but stood in a kind of boyish slouch, as if to defuse the harsh punctilio implied by the regalia. He was the Chief of Tactics, a title that encompassed a great many public and private responsibilities. Some said he was the number-two man in the Second Alliance.

“Oh, well,” Cooper said with a modesty that was clearly insincere, “the experiment is actually an old sociobiological concept—we’re merely bringing it to life.”

“You are a sociobiologist, then?” Karakos asked, as if he were a magazine interviewer and not a prisoner.

“A sociobiologist? No, we’re beyond that here.” They were standing at the second-story polarized window that looked out over detention pens ten, eleven, and twelve. Karakos didn’t know where he was; he’d been brought here in the back of a big windowless truck, packed in with seventy others. The trip had taken only half an hour—he was sure only that he was still in France. The building was big, drafty, echoey, built of a dull white alloy that looked like plastic, but was in fact alumitech.

Watson had the air of a proud man of property giving a friend the tour, telling Karakos they’d put the place together from its component parts in two weeks, once the foundations were sunk. There were fifteen “pens,” most of them not visible from here; pens ten and eleven were side by side under the window; pen twelve was as big as ten and eleven together and ran alongside them to the right. Each pen was separated from the others by two chain-link fences, and each fence’s crown of thorns was concertina wire. Between the two fences was a five-foot concrete path patrolled by helmeted SA guards.

Karakos was deceptively brutish-looking. He was stocky, brown-eyed—his eyes were sunken now, from poor diet. He had thick lips, a wide mouth full of widely spaced teeth from which the gums were beginning to recede; oily, stringy brown hair; and eyebrows that grew together. He wore a detainee’s polyplas bright orange overalls—for maximum visibility in case of escape—and a yellowed T-shirt. He had ten days’ growth of coarse brown beard, and in the months he had been in detention, he had been so long without a bath that he could no longer smell anything but himself. He was not an elegant figure. But as Watson had written in his Extraction Experiment 5F evaluation for Sackville-West,
“Karakos was one of the NR’s most effective propagandists. His scathing attacks on the SA (for the banned newspaper
Égalité
) were noteworthy for their eloquence and sheer panache, and it is said he worked closely with Steinfeld planning the NR’s first field campaigns.”

“No,” Cooper was saying, “I’m not a sociobiologist. We left that behind years ago.” Tight, smug smile. “I’m a social geneticist.”

Karakos noted Watson’s reaction, an arch look that Cooper interpreted as humorous acknowledgment, but which probably signified Watson’s barely contained contempt for the albino. Cooper was, after all, a genetic aberration himself. But he was useful to the SA.