Ravenous Dusk (38 page)

He leapt out and sank up to his hips in compressed powder. Looking around, he still saw the residents of this godforsaken place zipping around on the wind-scoured crust of the snowfield like water-striders on the skin of a still pond. Shaking off the crew chief's helpful hand, he fought the snow until he was out from under the prop wash, then wondered if he hadn't made a horrible miscalculation.

They stood around him, totally unfazed and unimpressed by his entrance, merely shading their eyes and taking him in. Like military choppers set down in the middle of their cancer winter wonderland every damned day. Like he was expected. This made him extremely nervous, though he couldn't figure why. He knew that some people, on up to the top brass, fed him a little of their fear when they first came into contact with each other, but he'd never known that he
needed
their fear before. The children watched him, looking into his eyes as he struggled through the crowd towards the center, feeding
on
him. He turned to the chopper, to the pilot's black goggles. He nodded, and they ascended in a single lunge, disappeared over the ridge to oversee the land transport.

He went back to slogging, cursing himself in a thick cloud that hung around his head. He could feel his head heating up, blood boiling his brain, his muscles tearing and protesting the work. His lungs burned with the effort and with the stringent tang of the pines, his throat almost closing up in allergic reaction to the pollen, like it was midsummer in the Sierras. That was strange, wasn't it? He wrapped his scarf around his face, strapped on goggles, and resolved not to take them off until he got back to Virginia.

He was less than an eighth mile from the concrete apron around the medical center, but it seemed to stretch away from him, even as the snow seemed to get deeper. It greedily soaked up his first wind before he was halfway across the field, and now the children circled around him silently, like pack dogs rounding up a dying lion. It was disgraceful, but he wouldn't let himself yell at them. He had come here to
protect
these people, for fuck's sake, or at least that was what he was selling them today. Stupid goddamned chopper pilot…

One of the children took his hand, and he didn't so much lean as fall on it, because he was suddenly old, and sinking into the white, and thinking only about lying down. "Get away," he huffed, but he couldn't hear himself, and the kid tugged. Greenaway was so weak, he slumped forwards and levered himself out of his hole only with the boy's help. He lay prone and gasping on the snow. The hand the kid was still holding felt numb, a dead leash, was he having a goddamned heart attack
now
?

Cascades of flinty gray light filled his vision. He shook himself and swore, and thought he was free of them, but when he looked around, he was standing on the edge of the concrete apron, and they were walking away.

God damn that pilot. Greenaway mopped the sweat off his brow and caught his breath before he strode shakily into the hospice center. He stopped in the atrium, puzzled by what he saw. Row upon row of couches filled the ground floor room. With the massive skylight overhead, the room seemed to be designed for a hundred people at a time to bask in the milky winter sunlight. He crossed the atrium to get a closer look, fought the urge to sink down on one and rest.

What the hell was this place? He knew somehow that the one document in the batch that had still been encrypted, the one called ROYAL PICA, might have told him.

He felt closer to death than he had at any time since the war, but there was no adrenaline rush or the assurance of command to push it back. He was going to get his wish, his own army, his own war, and die before the first shot was fired. Like when Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and an invincible campaigner, embarked on the Third Crusade at age 67 in 1190, only to freeze to death bathing in a river.

"Lieutenant Colonel Greenaway?"

He whirled and caught himself against a column. Only a trained eye would notice that he had nearly fainted.

It was the main man. Greenaway immediately recognized him from pictures, but the real thing was something else again. Dr. Cyril Keogh stood about Greenaway's height and looked to be about his age, but he had that grandfatherly air about him that fixed him in memory as a head taller, and twenty years older. He wore a quilted black coverall with the white coronal logo on the breast. He was thin, but unbent by his age, and his white hair had receded only so far as to make his forehead higher. His flat gray eyes regarded Greenaway with a flicker of amusement.

"I apologize for not providing you with assistance," said Dr. Keogh. "The snowfall has been surprisingly prolific, of late, and most of the able-bodied residents are absorbed in construction projects. We have many unoccupied trailers on-site, where your men will be quartered." Keogh started to walk away.

Greenaway looked around at the weird solarium, at the couches and the massive skylight overhead. He had lost all the momentum. He had planned to walk in like John Wayne and circle the wagons, but he stood there, still shaking from his walk in the snow, for Christ's sake, like a patient checking in for treatment.

"Hey! Keogh!" he shouted, running into a dim, narrow corridor after the Doctor. "Wait a goddamned minute! How long have you known we were coming?"

The doctor didn't stop or turn around as he walked. "You didn't think you would come as a surprise, did you?"

"Who else knows?"

Keogh ducked into a doorway, but paused on the threshold. The sun must have broken through the clouds, outside, because the sunlight suddenly flooded the doorway through a window in the room, and Greenaway found it impossible to look directly at Keogh. "Your element of surprise is safe with me, Lieutenant Colonel. You were not sent for, nor do I believe your occupation of these premises will prove a wise strategic move, on your part. There are, no doubt, other parts of the world where a veteran mercenary of your experience could make himself useful?"

Greenaway made himself look Keogh in the eye, his own eyes straining to adjust. He couldn't sort out his own thoughts, let alone his feelings. Who the hell was this motherfucker? "Listen, Doctor. I came here to burn down the Mission when they come, and the same people who told you all about me believe they are coming, and soon." He walked up close to Keogh, inflated his chest to drive the egghead back into the room. When he didn't give ground, Greenaway got up in his face. "I don't give a shit about your hospice village, cult, whatever the fuck you want to call it. I don't give a shit about your people, they can all drink the punch and die today, as far as I'm concerned. I don't give a shit why they—" pointing emphatically east, at
them
"—don't want the Mission to kill you, but won't just call out the troops. I want the Missionaries to come here, and I want to kill them all. Then everybody can get on with their own fucking business. Do you copy?"

Keogh's forehead touched his, and he flinched. Those eyes. They were like the layer of metamorphic rock at the bottom of very deep holes like the Grand Canyon, the two billion year old stone that predated everything that ever lived. Like that ancient stone, looking at you. Flinched? He backed away until his head hit the wall.

"You want revenge on them for what they did to your men? To your face? Your career? You were only collateral damage in an act of madmen, as were we. If you are still capable of learning, of adapting, I would urge you to take notice of the changing environment. Your Army has taught you to bring the tools of the last war to the next one. I sincerely hope they don't come, but for your sake, more than ours."

"So you don't need protection?" Greenaway asked. His eyes skidded off Keogh's gaze again and he looked into the room. A trauma center, empty of patients. Outside, the children frolicked in the dazzling sunlight. He could see no sign of his army.

"We adapt, Lieutenant Colonel. We are creating a world beyond war, beyond death. It amuses me that you would come to protect us with weapons of war. We don't need them, but you're welcome to stay the season, if you must."

Greenaway backed away, out of the light. His men would be arriving soon, he had to—

"I understand the impulses of genetic programming," Keogh went on, pursuing him into the dark. "It takes more than a lifetime to overcome them, and how many of us have that much time? A human lifetime is very short, is it not, Lieutenant Colonel?"

He could think of nothing to say, no reason to be here another instant. He turned and began to walk away, back to the solarium and the light and the outside.

"I have no doubt you'll perform adequately, if and when the time comes, Lieutenant Colonel. The Mission is your natural enemy, yes? You'll destroy them or die trying. It's in your programming."

Greenaway hit the front doors running and slid to a stop out on the front walk. The sun had retreated back behind silver-gray clouds. His heart thumped an arrhythmic tocsin pumping blood thicker than chili in his brittle arteries.

The color of his eyes. He should have kicked the slimy old motherfucker's ass. He was one of them. An egghead. The enemy.

The first of his trucks crested the ridge and lumbered down the last couple of switchbacks to the bridge. The Bell 406 hove into view and circled over the field. Greenaway walked out to the edge of the concrete apron and waved his arms high over his head. His heart stopped racing. He closed his eyes for a moment and let it all out of his mind as he got back into character.

The last truck was crossing the bridge when the first pulled up in front of him. His men fell out and ran down the convoy line. The last man out of the truck jumped down, spat a brown stream of tobacco juice at the snow, and strode up to Greenaway on stout, bowed legs. Barely coming up to Greenaway's chin, the man had a torso like a trash can, and worse breath. His weathered Okie face was distorted by a sizable plug of Red Man, perpetually working in his cheek. "Ho ho, ho! What's in the fuckin' bag, Santa?"

Greenaway's laugh was deeper and more real than he'd let himself be since the last time he shared the company of Master Sergeant Talley. It took ten years and fifty pounds off him. "Toys, Burl. Toys for all the bad boys of No Such Company." The name was a throw-away, a final fuck-off to the pencil-necks who made all this possible. Something better would come to him, once the unit was blooded.

In his many dreams of a perfect army, there was only one constant: a mess of shit-kicking, brass-balled, no-bullshit veteran Master Sergeants, and in his dreams his hod-boss of killers was always Talley.

"Shit, Mort, I got Bradleys, snowmobiles, choppers, three artillery batteries, two APC's, a couple tripod-mount M60's, grenade launchers, a trunkful of mines and Stingers and shit, a ton of NBC crap, about eight million rounds of what-have-you, and sixty-odd ill-tempered, pigignorant, heavily armed sonsobitches who've been living on gas station

hot dogs, an' pissin' in Coke bottles for purt near eighteen hours, now."

Candy-ass bullshit. "Morale's bad?"

"They're pissed, Mort. So'm I, you want the truth. Half of 'em are acting like this is some sorta goat-rope wargame, and the ones who're taking it serious
scare
me, Mort. I ain't even told 'em yet what we're defending, 'cause I'm scared I would've ended up here with empty fuckin' trucks. I know you picked 'em, but some of them boys're damaged goods." He spat on the ground and looked up at Greenaway. Talley was ten years out of retirement with a fourth Purple Heart in the Gulf. Plate in his skull and shrapnel everywhere else, a pig farm in Arkansas, kids off to college or the service, a wife who still liked to bend the bedsprings. Next to Talley, the helicopters and the artillery had been child's play to pick up. "I don't need this shit any more, Mort."

"Tell them what I told you, Burl. This is not a game. This is real. This is what we trained for. All our lives."

The artillery and the APC's were coming down off the trucks, and Talley knew damned well he should be overseeing it. But he stood there, boring into Greenaway's head and trying to see what the hell the big fucking picture was. Greenaway didn't like being on the business end of that look. His own face was slashed with creases from giving that look to the brass. They had trained for this operation—storming bunkers like the one in Baker, learning electronic countermeasures, playing with the kind of toys they only dreamed of having in the real service. But none of them had heard, or asked for, a word about what this was. What Burl was waiting for was for Greenaway to say he was ready to send men to die for this.

"Get the men together, Burl. Now."

Talley flashed a broad, ingratiating smile, its warming power undiminished by his teeth, which were the color of corn in shit. His mouth twitched, stopped just short of saying something. He snapped off a smart salute and double-timed it after the soldiers, barking patented Burl Talley obscenities at them. They formed up in six rows of eight, looking as smart and pissed-off as Greenaway could ask for. He knew them all, or nearly all. In their eyes, he saw ninety-six mirrors that gave him back his younger self.

"Some of you know me as Lieutenant Colonel, some as Captain, or even Sergeant Major, and some of you know me from places where we didn't get ranks, and nobody used their real names. But you signed on for this because you trusted me when I was your CO then, and I never got you killed. I kept you alive to save you for this.

"You're here because each and every one of you is the best, many so good the Army threw your murderous asses out—" pause for laughter, of which there was more than a little. "You understand the doctrine of covert warfare, and you've come together beautifully as a unit, considering the clusterfucked op tempo. I know all of you have questions, and many of you have doubts. I see a lot of bitching and titty-twisting in your eyes, too, though, and it all stops now.