A Grey Moon Over China (7 page)

And then, slowly and gracefully, into the grey circle of the moon came a giant silhouette—the breathtakingly huge, powerful shape of an aircraft, gliding silently through the top of the smoke layer, its nose rising majestically as it began its flare for the landing. The nose lifted higher, then higher, then gasps came through our headsets as the nose rolled higher still, exposing a glowing, jagged edge where Tanaka’s heater had melted the great plane in two.

The front end of the aircraft rolled slowly onto its back, settling closer and closer to the runway, the glowing maw of its wound approaching as though to swallow us all. Molten fragments floated across the island and flared into pillars of flame where they hit the jungle, making no sound at all.

Then suddenly the trance was broken as the plane plunged through the wall of smoke and smashed into the runway, spinning furiously toward us along the right side, crushing the remaining crews watching from behind their machines.

Polaski jumped. I strained to see through the smoke, and then I saw it too.

Barely outlined against the glow of the flames, a black figure was walking toward Elliot where he stood by Tanaka’s big heater. I started to run, pulling off my headset as I went. “Elliot! Elliot, look out!”

Elliot spun just as Cole raised his arm and pulled the trigger.

He hit Ellen Tanaka squarely in the face from just inches away.

W
e lifted off in a helicopter two hours later. The island was in flames, a pyre whose smoke churned into the night like oil, blotting out the moon.

Chan sat hunched in a corner of the deck as the turbines swept us through the night, her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking as she wept. Elliot slumped against the after bulkhead, head turned with his cheek against the cold metal. Paulson sat to one side, frowning at her hands and counting something on her fingers. Polaski looked out a window with pursed lips. I stood across from him, holding onto a strap. I was staring out through
the door, not wanting anyone to know how frightened I’d been when I’d thought the gun was aimed at Elliot.

The five of us were the only ones left, the only ones who’d been at that end of the runway. The rescue crews hadn’t found Cole, or any trace of his body.

A
t dawn the next morning a pillar of black smoke still blotted out the sky over the island. I sat on the stoop of our bungalow and watched, far to the east.

During the night I’d gone to find Chan, and she’d taken me into her bed. But the picture of oily flames and charred bodies hadn’t left me, and finally she’d put a hand on my chest and sent me away. Elliot had come later, and now sat tossing pebbles into the dirt. They made faint little thumps in the darkness where they hit.

“Cheer up,” he said.

“You should talk.”

“Hell, it ain’t so bad. We still got stuff to look forward to. We could have breakfast, you know, with that real good egg shit, then—well, come on, Torres, think of all the stuff we could do. Your head gets to hurting, thinking about it . . . You don’t believe me, do you? That’s the trouble with you, Torres, you take everything so serious. It’s depressing being around you, sometimes.”

“They’re dead, Tyrone. A hundred forty-two of them. How the hell can you let them go so quick?”

“No, sir, you don’t ever let them go. You hang onto them real tight. But you don’t let them drag you back, neither. Don’t forget that, you hear?”

What had the old man done when the fires came? Had he tried to hobble away on his cane? Call out for help?

M
usic from a flute brought me out of my sleep. It came from the trees, the same tune I’d heard the other night. Again, as I listened, it seemed to bring back some other place, some other time, hard to remember.

A chair scraped in the room behind me. Elliot was gone. The air was still, with a light mist hiding in the trees.

The chair squeaked again.

“Torres.” It was Polaski’s voice.

“What.”

“How rich is it possible to get?”

“As rich as you want, Polaski.”

Silence.

“I mean, can you have a trillion dollars?”

“Christ.” I went inside. Boots hung off the end of my bunk where Elliot slept. I sat down across from Polaski and took a drink from his canteen.

“Okay. No, you can’t get trillions. At a certain point money doesn’t mean anything anymore. In the end it’s something the other guy only honors if he feels like it, and if you’ve got almost all of it, he’s not going to feel like it. You reach a point where you’ve got too big a claim on society’s resources and they devalue the money or cut you off, because you’re bidding against it for labor and goods it has to have.”

“How can they cut you off? It’s legal money, isn’t it?”

“Grow up.”

“Fuck you, too. What if we’ve got some other kind of hold?”

“Listen, Polaski, if you’re talking about selling those plans, you’re not going to get anywhere near that kind of money. It doesn’t work that way.”

He looked disgusted. “No one’s getting those plans, Torres.
We
build the power cells, and
those
we sell.”

“Forget it. And don’t even mention patent rights. They’ll duplicate it overnight, and by next morning every company and government on the planet will have a nice tidy little reason why we need to be deported and our facilities nationalized.”

Polaski reached for the canteen.

“Fuck ’em,” he said.

T
he overcast had lowered even more an hour later.

“So listen, Torres. You made copies yet?”

“Before we moved out yesterday. There was just the document in the blocks, so I copied it off and wiped them. He was done with the modeling.”

“So how long to build a power cell and find out if it works?”

“That’s not the way it’s done, Polaski. You tell an MI to build a virtual
copy and simulate it. That’s what the old man was using the big blocks for, and his MI said it works. Assuming all the materials exist.”

“Yeah, okay. So what do you need to prove it can actually be built?”

“Faster systems, like Canberra. Or China Lake’s better, if California let the U.S. keep it open.”

“They did.” Elliot was sitting up on the bed. “U.S. got to keep it under the treaty. What the hell are you up to?” He was looking at me.

Footsteps came from the porch and Bolton stepped in, still in his dress whites.

“Whatever you’re up to, lads, you can forget it.” He threw a yellow flimsy onto the table. “They’re breaking us up, with unaccustomed dispatch. Possibility of courts-martial relating to the aircraft, with additional rather cryptic questions regarding our search for a missing researcher—about whom we know nothing, hm? The Army are not amused, gentlemen.”

I looked away.

“When?” said Polaski.

What the hell did it matter?

“Fifteen-hundred hours. We have six hours, lads, to come to terms with the wretched little scraps of our lives they will leave us.”

For a minute no one spoke, then Elliot left abruptly. When he came back it was with Chan, who stopped and leaned in the doorway. She looked tired.

“Listen, Chan,” said Elliot. “Bolton says they’re busting us up at fifteen-hundred. How come you can’t break into someone’s communications and put out a message that we’ve been picked up or we’re dead or something?”

She sighed. “One,” she said, “that’s not the way you work a bureaucracy. What you do is create a classified unit somewhere with no known access code, then transfer us to that unit. Then you reassign that unit to this island. In the military mind, we no longer exist.

“Two. I can’t get that deep into their systems. I can file personnel status changes, but I can’t move units around or requisition equipment or classify information. They change those passwords every ten days, and without a much bigger front-side store it would take me months to crack one. They know that.

“Three. What do you think I’ve been trying to do all night?” She didn’t look at me. “Most of the night.”

“All
right!
” Polaski’s fist slammed into the table. Chan frowned, in no mood for dealing with him, but I was reaching into my pockets at the same time. I set the silver blocks on the table.

Chan gave me a puzzled look, then snatched up the blocks without another word and pushed her way back out the door.

*  *  *

I
t was sometime after three when a CH-77’s lethargic thumping approached from above the clouds. It materialized through the layer just offshore, then beat its way in toward the clearing.

We were sitting under the mess canopy, waiting for the Army and the rain. We hadn’t seen Chan since morning, and the brief hope sparked by her departure had faded. We’d told Bolton and Elliot about the plans for the power cells. Bolton listened with a polite skepticism, his eyes flicking restlessly across the landing field. Elliot hummed and spat sunflower husks.

Now we sat and watched the ugly machine coming in across the clearing. It was squat and slow, and spent a while finding the right position before it waddled onto its tiny legs and the pilot killed the engines.

We wandered out to watch. As the rotors spun down one of the cargo doors slid open and an MP stepped out and looked around. The pilot and her chief kicked open their own doors and leaned against the fuselage. It got quiet.

Then all at once Chan was racing around a corner and up to the helicopter. She pushed her way past the pilot with a mumbled apology, then pulled herself up to look at the instrument panel. She slipped back down and ran out of sight between the buildings.

The pilot took the performance with good enough humor, but the MP tensed. He watched her go, then walked over and stopped in front of Bolton.

“I understand we’re giving you a lift off the island? Kits ready? Anything heavy?” He was being friendly, but he looked at each of us in turn and didn’t seem to miss much.

We couldn’t think of anything to say.

The silence was broken when Chan ran up to the helicopter again, back past the pilot and into the seat. She picked up the microphone and set one of the radios, breathing hard from the run.

The pilot put her hands in her pockets and watched. The chief wandered around the nose to see. The MP folded his hands across his chest.

Chan brought the microphone to her lips.

“Paradise Control, Watchdog Three on guard.”

“Watchdog Three, Paradise. Go ahead.”

“Paradise, be advised I have a signature on a CH-seven-seven in grid four-two oscar, restricted zone.” She seemed to be reporting a sighting of the very aircraft she was calling from, although our island’s position in 42-oscar had never been restricted.

A pause by the controller.

“We show no restrictions in forty-two oscar, Watchdog. Say your point of origin, please.”

Chan ignored him. “Check your overlays, Paradise.” The morning’s airspace notices, not yet on the master grid.

“Stand by.”

Chan’s hand shot out to the frequency selector and waited. The MP turned to glance at Bolton, then looked back.

“Thank you, Watchdog,” said the controller.

Chan spun the selector and the same controller’s voice came up on the new frequency.

“—ster one-five, Paradise Control. Acknowledge.”

Chan stuck the microphone out the door to the pilot.

“It’s for you.”

The pilot raised an eyebrow but took the mike.

“Duster one-five.”

“One-five, you’ve entered restricted zone niner-zulu without authorization—”

The controller stopped.

“Stand by, one-five.” Apparently something else had popped up in front of him.

Chan ducked under the microphone cord and walked lightly around the MP to stand between me and Bolton. She squeezed my hand. The pilot and her chief looked at each other. The MP stared at the microphone.