Directive 51 (14 page)

At 4:42 P.M., those conditions were all met. The computer sent 750 phone numbers to the server, which dialed the triggers in all 750 of the bottles filled with black powder. As each came online the computer told it to arm and check; all were armed and checked in less than four seconds. The computer sent a signal to fire; a hundredth of a second later, when the 750th call dropped, the computer fired a small charge to destroy itself. People on the street thought it was a gunshot, looked around, and concluded it was something else.

Davidson resented like hell the way he had to be out there on collection days from fucking three thirty till goddam well six fucking o’clock sometimes, because although he had a great team with Howard and Isaac, and a tolerable one with Dorothy and Juan, the team of Fred and Annie was just absolutely not to be trusted at all. Sure enough, they came in late because they’d stopped to check on their kid in the day care, and they gave him some routine about how it smelled so bad they had to take showers, because it would never’ve occurred to numbnuts Fred or his fat slobby wife that maybe they should wait till they were done to shower instead of just getting all stunk up again.

Now they were busy telling Davidson their whole fucking life story, which was something they often did on the clock. He could have told it for them: Fred used to drink and party, and Annie did too. They got Jesus after their firstborn baby died, and he must have been sent from heaven to straighten them out.
I’m sure that comforted the shit out of the little fucker, drowning in the bathtub while you idiots got stoned
. But Davidson didn’t say that; people who would at least show up weren’t all that easy to find.

So he let them ramble on about how bad it stunk, and take him to the bin to show him. It was about three-quarters full of plastic bottles, a good week, but son of a
bitch
, this was like putting your head up a constipated cheesemaker’s butthole, and the slimy look of the plastic was weird too. And—hadn’t it been in the middle of lunch? Erin had just been doing the red lingerie number—Howard
had
called him, something about—

The biggest boom since the IED in Iraq, when he’d gone there for Bush twenty years ago. This one knocked all three of them flat on their asses. Lying on his back, he was perfectly positioned to see the sky fill instantly with a great cloud of dirty blue smoke, which tumbled to the east almost before it fully formed. From the cloud fell a rain of plastic bottles, a few into his plant, most over the fence, and quite a lot of them, caught in the strong mountain breeze, tumbling and blowing off far to the east. Some of them were going to be in fucking South Dakota before they came down, he thought, and then he realized that one whole day of recycling had just blown off into the sky, with all the trucks and workers already paid for, and he screamed and beat the ground with his fists like a two-year-old having a tantrum, until he realized that Fred and Annie, with their bleeding ears, couldn’t hear it, his hands were getting sore, and his ears hurt horribly. He couldn’t hear anything, though bits of plastic bottles were crashing down all around him and on the steel roofs of his buildings, and it should have been a terrible din.

Howard was stroking Michiko’s breasts and hair, real soft and gentle the way she said she liked. She was handling Isaac, who was breathing like he was about to finish.

Something went off like a cannon. Isaac, sitting up, bumped heads with Michiko; they were both still apologizing when Lenya, the Russian lady that owned the place, knocked on the door and said, “Howard, Isaac, so so sorry, something happen to your truck, dress and come out, okay?”

A few minutes later, hastily stuffed into their clothes, barefoot on the sunny parking lot, they stood stupefied in awe by the burned and scarred truck bed and the shattered windows. One other car, nearby, had taken a big crack in the rear window, but Reverend Nickleson had already driven it off to the auto-glass place, saying he didn’t want to involve his insurance company.

The cop who came out, unfortunately, was Matt Storey, who had enough trouble figuring out how to fill out speeding tickets, so no matter how much they tried to tell him about the two mystery bottles they’d been carrying in the back, he just kept shaking his head and saying it was probably kids. It was dark before he left to write his report, which would say something blew up in the pickup truck bed and it was probably kids.

After they swept the glass off the seat, Howard tried starting the truck. It was drivable, though it stank like a firecracker, and most of the gauges weren’t working.

“Probably leaking everything everywhere, too,” Isaac said, shining his flashlight under it. “Got oil and radiator, at least, dripping, and a couple things I ain’t sure of. But if we top up the oil and drive it home slow and careful, we can probably get it there. Think we got gas leaking?”

Howard sniffed. “I don’t smell any—just the sulfur from those bombs.”

Lenya told them no charge, rain check, and she’d take care of paying Michiko. “Reminds me when I’m still one of the girls, back in Brooklyn,” she said. “I had me a real good customer, one day he goes out, turns on his car, boom, he’s not a good customer no more. I even gone to his funeral and cried, especially when I seen he had a pretty wife and a bunch of kids. Never did heard what that was all about. You boys ain’t have no enemies?”

“Just bums going after the recyclables,” Isaac said.

“There’s a bum in my recycling cart this afternoon. I chase him away. He tells me God loved me anyway.”

“I doubt it was him,” Howard said.

As they drove through town, keeping it to about fifteen miles per hour from fear of the gas tank and because of the shattered windshield, Isaac said, “You know, old Lenya will still be feeling generous about that rain check tonight, but she might not in a week. It’s only about three miles, we could walk back in an hour. I say we park this thing, walk on in, let Lenya spoil us, and maybe catch the last of Game Seven and have us a steak at Mary’s. Hitch a ride or take a cab after. It’s been a day.”

“Me too, on everything,” Howard said.

“Green Leader, Green Flight is authorized to cross over into Aksai Chin. The American satellites have laid you an intercept course at 321 degrees 9 minutes; we’re relaying it to your computer now—”

The flight leader passed orders to the other three planes in his flight. “Looks like we’re cleared to go get them.”

“How was it authorized so quickly?” Green Two, the pilot of one of the two fighters in the flight, asked.

Normally the flight leader would have reprimanded the excess chatter, but he was excited and nervous himself. “They told
me
the Americans told—not asked—Beijing and Islamabad to let us do this.”

The four Sukhoi jets of Green Flight flew on, high above the spectacular, deadly wastelands: the Aksai Chin, a flat, featureless saline desert surrounded by the high Himalayas. It could be reached by road for less than half the year, was more than three miles high with almost no rainfall, and offered death by thirst, starvation, or exposure at all times of year; three nations and one liberation movement claimed it, but not one of them would have expended a single life to maintain the claim.

China patrolled there more often than the other nations, but today India was there first with the requested flight of two fighters and two fast reconnaissance planes to the target. Swift agreement by all parties that this was strictly a favor to the Americans and reflected nothing else had been enabled by their shared perception that the United States was about to go utterly berserk.

Dawn overtook Green Flight. The old silver Sukhois glinted with steely fire in the abrupt daylight, and the missile pods on two of them, camera package on the third, and radar/communications boom on the leader stood out like diagrams of themselves.

“I have it on radar,” the flight leader reported. “Confirming orders: We are to secure as many photographs as feasible, while repeatedly warning them; if we are defied, or not answered, we are to shoot them down at the last feasible prudent time.”

“Those orders are confirmed, Green Leader.”

Feasible prudent time. I suppose it wouldn’t be prudent if it weren’t feasible, and maybe vice versa.
Green Leader shrugged the thought off; the phrase was obviously just cover for his superiors if anything went wrong.

The high peaks off to their east dazzled them like monster flashbulbs as the morning sun found angles from glaciers and snowfields into the pilots’ eyes. Long, deep shadows extended across the salt plain below, crawling visibly back toward the mountains in the first moment of dawn. In late October, the mountains were piled high and deep with snow; they would have been snowcapped even in July, but for practical purposes that inaccessible, high, far land below them had been in winter for more than a month.

Coordinating with an American satellite operator, two of their own radar operators, and what must be an American observer relaying information from a Chinese or Pakistani radar, they moved in on the target. “Green Leader, this is Green Three.” That was the camera plane. “I have him on visual, Green Leader, proceeding to close with him.”

They turned to follow Three and then they all saw it: a white 737 flying at what must be about its max cruising altitude, gleaming white in the morning sun. In moments they had closed with the white plane and were circling it in the air like American Indians around a covered wagon in one of their old Westerns. The 737 neither deviated from its course nor answered any radio hails, though there was a soft hiss in one distress channel.

“Green Three, do you have a clear photo of that tail?”

“Several. Yes, and in close, you can clearly see that it used to display a red Lion Airways logo, under that runny, patchy paint. I’m going in close to see if I can see anyone in the cockpit and perhaps photograph them.”

“I’ll follow you in for a look, myself.”

After two passes, and with just thirty kilometers left in authorized airspace, Green One and Three had seen no evidence of life; the 737 continued to fly on a constant heading and altitude. Nothing moved in any window. The recon planes backed off to observe.

“Green Two and Green Four, we’re clear now. You are authorized to close in and fire at will.”

Two and Four accelerated past them, taking up positions at an angle behind the white airliner. R-73s lashed out in long white streaks. Two’s rocket blew the port engine to fiery bits, and the wing fell away; as the airliner tipped, the second R-73 tailpiped the remaining engine, stripping off the starboard wing. The airliner’s fuselage tumbled wildly downward, end over end; the rest of Green Flight circled while Green Three descended for better pictures of the impact.

The fuselage slammed into the gray-white, stony ground and vanished in a great blob of white-hot flame. Green Three peeled away; a collision with wreckage thrown into the sky might have doomed him to crash into the nightmare void of the desert below.

“Did you get spectroscopy, Green Three?” Green Leader asked.

“The instruments say we’ve got everything we’re supposed to get. That was quite an explosion. I wonder what they had on board?”

“They’ll know when they analyze your recordings, but you know they’ll never tell
us
. All right, let’s head for home, we have a storm coming, and I don’t want to be here when it hits.” They wheeled and headed for home, four contrails tipped with silver spearheads; with nothing but itself to burn, the wreckage burned briefly, smoldered a little longer, and was as bitter cold as everything around it before noon.

When Jason reached to knock on the door of Room 215, it opened.
Suburban dad-type, knit polo shirt, cheapie chinos, penny-for-the-love-of-god loafers.
“Hi, I’m Zach. I’d rather not be too close to what you have there, so I’m going to prop this door open”—he did—“and walk over to the Denny’s across the street. I’ll be having coffee at the counter. My stuff’s already in the car so here’s the key to the room.” He tossed the card onto the bed. “Are you carrying anything plastic you need to keep?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, my stuff ferments flexible plastic, loves beverage bottles but really any plastic, semiaerobic so you kill it with bleach or peroxide. There’s three gallon jugs of peroxide on the table—pour it over any surface you need to touch before you handle any of your plastic.”

“My stuff makes nitric acid wherever there’s a fluctuating electromagnetic field, and powers off a temperature gradient,” Jason said. “Strong alkali, like lye, shuts it down temporarily and neutralizes the acid.”

“Thanks! Why don’t you walk out, and then I’ll walk in?”

“It’s a deal.” Jason stepped back to let Zach walk past the door and out into the sunlight. He was obviously careful not to step anywhere near where Jason had stood.

Not worrying about the Holiday Inn’s carpets since they’d never have time to bill Zach before Daybreak took hold, Jason poured peroxide over a big patch of the carpet, and followed up by sprinkling Liquid-Plumr there. He set his pack in the center, disinfected it, and gave it some more Liquid-Plumr, splashed more of the nasty chemicals onto his gloved hands and onto the plastic bags that had held his laptop and change of clothes.

With water from the faucet in a glass he had just removed from the hotel paper wrapper (SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION), Jason rinsed his sealed plastic bags, including the one with the laptop. He stripped and threw his clothes and shoes on the bed, helping the maid to scatter more of his nanospawn and Zach’s biotes.

After the long day, he took longer in the hot shower than he’d meant to—might as well enjoy the Big System one last time.