Radiant Dawn (35 page)

"I'll assume that you are drunk and irrational with remorse at the discovery of your past indiscretions, but I won't hear you badmouth the Director. Leave now, Lane, or I will be forced to have you carried out."

"At least Hoover was a man," Hunt said in a louder tone, "and not some sad fucking court eunuch like you, Martin. J. Edgar got his rocks off with Clyde in the DoJ inner sanctum, but at least he had rocks. You're not even a man, Cundieffe."

Cundieffe's hands came up and Hunt flinched in a drunken attempt to evade the junior agent's fists, but they never came close, cupping over his purpling ears. He looked like a puny kindergartner on the schoolyard, seconds away from bursting into raw, hot tears. Hunt had a moment to relish the moment he punctured Cundieffe's composure, but it was over before his bleary eyes could fully imprint the sight in his memory, for Cundieffe's mask resurfaced and his hands came down in a defensive pose as he leaned into Hunt's face. "I never asked to replace you, Lane," Cundieffe whispered, "but make no mistake: I'm the man who burned you, and I'm the man who's going to see that you never hold a position of responsibility ever again. You're finished, Lane. Go home and do the honorable thing before I'm forced to burn you again."

Hunt staggered backwards into a desk with such force that many in the office believed the junior agent had indeed struck him. "Backstabbing faggot, I'll fucking kill you!" Hunt's invective stream devolved into growls as he charged Cundieffe, who easily sidestepped him and summoned four of the more physically adept agents to carry him out.

Once all the commotion had died down, Cundieffe ordered the agents back to work, and moved Hunt's files to a less pungent cubicle in which to sit and update them.

It was after the gas and before the helicopters.

Storch was crawling away from the holes, inching forward just ahead of the creeping gas tide, retching and vomiting fluid out of every orifice in his body. The faceplate of his MOPP suit became a Jackson Pollock splatterscape. His arms heeded only every fourth or fifth command to move to hold him up. He was falling down, and he was going to sink under the tide of gas when a hand seized him and lifted him up out of the wave of green death. His hood was snatched off and he found himself dangling in front of the face of the biggest, meanest-looking motherfucker he'd ever seen in his entire life.

"Well, hello, little camper," said the commando in a voice so impossibly deep that it seemed to come from within Storch's own bowels. He heard the others gasping for breath, heard bubbling sounds of lungs trying to work through foam, heard death-rattles and prayers and pleas. But he wasn't dying. Cold, pure night air flooded his lungs, the breath kept coming until he thought he might burst. He felt something else. Deep, deep inside himself, he felt something
other
, from outside, reaching into him and actively transporting the poisons out of his bloodstream. Gradually, his nerveless limbs returned to him, his fingers and toes tingling with pins and needles, as if he'd slept on them for weeks. He jerked and wriggled with the pain of it, but the soldier's hooklike hands held him fast. And Storch knew that it was the soldier's hands inside him, growing through his suit and his fatigues and his skin and his muscles, into his veins and arteries, into his blood.

"What is…this shit?" Storch managed.

"Just a favor for a brother Beret," the commando answered. "You'd do the same for us, if you could."

Storch looked around now, saw the other two phantom soldiers holding two men each by the throats, but he knew they weren't choking them. They were sucking the poison out of them.

The men who saved them were giants, plain and simple, and not like the fragile, acromegalic freaks in the Guinness Book, either. The one who held Storch stood seven feet and change, every inch of it rawboned angles and knobby muscle, with a weatherbeaten, scar-torn hide stretched so taut over it that it creaked like the rigging of a ship when he moved. He smiled broadly, his jaw was a beartrap, each of his teeth the size of a big toe, and set down his load, a Barrett sniping rifle and a cylindrical steel case that looked like something you'd carry bubonic plague in, if you had to. Storch studied the forearm that held him. In the dim starlight, he could barely make out the tattoo on that corded, knurly limb:
Don't Mess With Texas
.

The man next to him could be charitably described as morbidly obese, but he looked like he ate morbidly obese people for breakfast. No military in the world would have such a man; indeed, Storch had never seen such a fat man standing up. Yet this man was standing, and not even breathing hard while holding Preston and Wachowiak over his head. His belly lolled halfway to his knees like a gigantic tongue, greasy and gray in the stark moonlight. He carried a weird-looking flamethrower with corrugated metal hoses running back to a humming sprayer on his back. His face, too, split in a monstrous grin that made Tue's look like a fawning puppy's.

The third man was as slim as the last was fat, but whipcord muscles rippled in his arms like elevator cables as he held Chappelle and Gagliardo. Slung over his shoulders were some kind of pressurized oildrum and a battered old M-16 with a mounted grenade launcher. Every muscle in his body gave off an almost audible hum of galvanic tension. Veins like gardenhoses pulsated and writhed in his temples and throat as he surveyed his two…rescuees? Captives? Victims? He did not smile.

All three wore ancient flak jackets that were black with old stains and scrawled obscenities, ragged fatigue pants and steel-toed boots. Storch was reminded of the gear his father had brought home from Vietnam and kept in his closet, forever damp and pungent with jungle-rot—even ten years later, wherever they lay for more than a week, black mold began to grow. The men they held in their grips—Storch's men, now—twisted on the commandos' arms like hanged suicides who could not die, their eyes half-lidded and streaming foamy tears, their mouths gobbling and bubbling discolored drool. How conscious they were remained a mystery.

"You don't know how glad we are to see you boys still here," the soldier said, sounding so warm and boisterous Storch could close his eyes and imagine he was at a GI bar back home. "Sorry 'bout the natives. Got some snacks from a little Shiite village a few klicks back. They were none too anxious to part with 'em, I'll tell you that."

"Who—what the fuck are you?" Storch gasped.

"Pardon me all to hell, Sergeant. Lieutenant Dyson, Spike Team Texas. This unstoppable sex machine here is Sergeant Holroyd," nodding towards the stupendously fat man, "but we just call him 'Royd. And this here is Sergeant Avery, but you can't call him anything."

"Nobody else was supposed to be here. What's your mission?"

"Why, that's funny, we knew y'all'd be here, didn't we, 'Royd?"

"First to go, last to know," 'Royd gurgled.

"Fuckin' reg'lar Army bullshit," Avery grated, the words striking bloody sparks.

"Are we in the same Army, Dyson? I don't know who the fuck you are or how you got here—" With a start, Storch realized suddenly that he could breathe easily again. Now it was his mind that was choking up.

"That should tell you all you need to know, right there. Let's mount up, boys. Our ride's comin' fast." The three dropped the survivors like infants and picked up their gear, tromped back to the rocky peak. Storch dimly heard rotor blades chopping the air, ripping away the last threads of green death that swirled around them. A chopper—Storch tried to get to his feet, tried to find his voice again to order the men—his men—to get ready to exfil out of this place, but a gentle, firm hand pressed against his chest, forced him back to the ground.

"This isn't your ride, little Sergeant," Dyson said. "You just forget about everything you saw tonight, you'll be one happy prick. Have patience. This, too, will pass." And Storch settled back down on the ground as the wind whipped sand and stinging gravel over him and carried the three commandos away. And the silence closed over them, broken only by the sounds of his fellow soldiers' steady breathing, like the distant sound of a sleepy ocean. Storch sank into that sound, into the tidal rush of his own breathing, let it wash him away, let himself forget.

And finally, the chopper came for them, the chopper that had been grounded in Bedrock for one hundred and ten minutes because of sand in its rotors.

Stella was sound asleep and wrapped in nourishing, shapeless dreams that she would not remember when she awakened, but which were the glue without which her mind would have choked on its own bile months ago. Cold, dry hands reached into her dreams and dragged her out into fluorescent lights and the round, cheerless Mrs. Claus mask of Mrachek. "I need your help. There's a wounded man." Mrachek scurried out of her cell, into the thick of the commotion across the corridor, leaving Stella to pull herself together.

It was yet another strange awakening in a string of them that was fast making her incapable of imagining waking up to a normal day. She had no desire to make Mrachek's life any easier, but curiosity got the better of her. She'd never heard so many people in one place in the complex before, let alone heard them shouting as they were now. She slipped on one of the one-piece surgical scrub suits she'd been issued, slipped a net over her hair, and went to sickbay.

Stella stopped at the door, unable to get any further into the room and unwilling to make her self noticed just yet. If she'd been hoping for trouble, she wasn't disappointed. No less than eight soldiers crowded the main room, squared off against five nerdish types who radiated civilian harmlessness and braininess though they wore the same unmarked military fatigues. Between them, strapped onto a gurney and under deep sedation, lay the apparent bone of contention. It was the soldier they'd caught at the truck stop, the one they'd made such a fuss about grabbing, the one who'd escaped. And he was much the worse for wear since she'd seen him last. One arm lay across his chest in a makeshift sling, and one of his legs looked as if it'd been dragged here from Las Vegas. His stubbled skull was dinged up, but not critically, and the brutally economical bone structure of his face was marred by bruises across one cheek and around one eye. Stella recognized road rash, having seen more than her share of superbike crash injuries, and wondered that the soldier wasn't much more badly beaten up. He must've had something soft to land on. She wondered for a moment if he hadn't suffered these injuries at the hands of his captors. No one had tried to harm her, but he'd gotten away from them once, and they seemed pretty inflamed about what to do with him. Stella knew she'd probably begin to hate him the moment he woke up and opened his mouth, but for the moment, she began to like him very much.

One of the soldiers, the older black man the others called the Major, shouted in the face of the senior egghead. "It's my operation, my men to risk. I have too damned few of them as it is."

The scientist looked to be in his early sixties, with skin so pale and unlined it looked as if he'd never used his face for anything but reading. His oiled black hair was clipped short like the others', but still managed to look untidy, as if he'd done it himself. A profound detachment informed all his gestures; his gaze focused on the wounded soldier as the officer raged at him, his head shaking in minute arcs that totally negated the officer's argument.

"It's no good, Bangs, for a number of reasons I thought we were clear on already. Even discounting the unresolved issue of his loyalties, he's unstable. He's unmotivated. He's probably incapable of grasping the significance of the Mission even if there was sufficient time, and, in case you haven't noticed, he's critically injured. If you'd simply followed your instructions—"

Major Bangs leaned across the body and into the scientist's face, as if he fully intended to bite off the smaller man's nose. "To execute him? Fuck you! He's right here, he's strapped down, and your stand on the value of human life is legendary around here, so why don't you do it?" The officer unholstered a huge automatic pistol and handed it grip-first to the scientist. His men went crazy at the exposed weapon, grabbing at his arms and shouting at him to stand down. When he made no move to take the gun, Bangs waved at Mrachek. "Maybe that's too messy for you. Delores, get a hypo full of air for Dr. Wittrock to execute Sergeant Storch, here."

Wittrock shook his head and managed a wooden grimace. His voice became increasingly strident as he spoke over the angry soldiers, but it never betrayed a mote of anger. "Major Bangs, your instability is tolerated because of your leadership skills and your dedication to the Mission, but I must caution you that no one is so valuable as to jeopardize it. That holds true for all of us. I urge you to dispose of this…questionable man forthwith, and prepare for the terminal phase."

"I believe Harley Pettigrew," Bangs said, jamming his gun back in its holster. "He gave everything for the Mission, and he said this man was gold."

"I believe he also said that this man was unfit for duty," Wittrock retorted, "which is why he was never brought in, in the first place. What you're asking is beyond the pale of acceptable risk, and, frankly, leaves me with serious doubts as to your sanity."

Bangs made a visible effort to regain control of himself as he explained, "There. Are. Not. Enough. Men. We were spread too thin in the original plan. We can not execute our part of the operation and secure an area for you to work. You, and I, and all of my men, will die. For nothing."

Radiant Dawn 193 "And one broken-down, sociopathic Gulf veteran will tip the balance."

"We'd need at least ten, but I only have the one." He did something then that took Stella's breath away, and would've melted any dissent away in a normal opponent. "Please," he said, "let me use him." He seemed to break open, his schooled battlefield exterior giving way to a deeply wounded, frightened man with too many dead soldiers on his conscience. Stella thought she understood Major Bangs, then.