Cold Allies (19 page)

Praying that the captain wouldn’t fire off a grenade, Gordon put his arms up.

WITH LIEUTENANT DIX’S PLATOON, PONS, SPAIN

“Put it away, captain!” Dix shouted from a dark corner.

Rita was nonplussed. Put the gun down? But some toy tank had just rolled into the barn. The thing had robot arms, and it was lifting them over its head in an I-give-up gesture.

“We’ve seen these things before,” Dix told her. “It’s American.”

Slowly Rita let her gun drop. The small tank’s arms fell with twin clinks, and curled around braces on the cannonless turret.

“Where’s the guy?” Rita asked.

“What guy?”

“The guy in the tank.”

“There’s no guy there, sugar,” Dix laughed. “It’s just a robot remote. The operator’s back in Portugal somewhere. Hi, honey,” she said and waved at the robot.

With a slight whine of its servomotors, the robot lifted an arm and waved back. Rita found herself smiling—smiling as if Balaguer had never happened.

Pushing herself up out of the straw, she walked over to it. The robot had taken a beating, she saw. There were scratches along the turret, and the back end was a mess. As she approached, the turret swiveled toward her and the robot held out a hand.

After a hesitation, she put her own hand into the steel claw. Lightly, considerately, the claw closed. The arm lifted a little and lowered again.

Then Rita caught a glimpse of something blue, something cold, between the slats of the barn. She turned, but the blue was gone.

Her heart climbed her throat. Unless her imagination was running away with her, the alien had come back. It had followed them from Balaguer. It would corner them. It would suck the blood out of their bodies.

“What’s wrong?” Dix asked.

The doors banged open. A globe of blue light sailed into the barn.

Rita dived for cover. Startled pigeons exploded into a dry-feathered maelstrom. Around her she could hear the rattle of weapons coming to bear. Then she whirled, M-16 in band, and saw that the robot was moving between the crouched soldiers and the light. Its metal arms gestured forcefully.
Go to the corner,
the robot seemed to be saying to it.

Like a well-trained dog, the light obeyed. Hunched against the opposite wall, heart beating triple time, Rita waited, staring suspiciously.

WITH THE CRAV AT PONS, SPAIN

Don’t shoot!
Gordon wanted to scream.

Every gun in the six-person squad was pointed at Rover.

Desperate, he rolled toward the captain. She shied back, but the little lieutenant didn’t. Instead she watched, her blue eyes wide.

He cleared a space in the straw with one swipe of his arm.

DON’T SHOOT, he wrote in the sand.

“Okay,” she said, her voice taut. “Okay, just keep it away from us, understand?”

He smoothed out the dirt and scribbled, GOT IT.

Gordon glanced back. Rover was in the corner pretending to be Good Dog. He was practically doing an imitation of Roll Over and Play Dead.

“You all
friends
with that thing, or what?” the lieutenant asked.

Gordon turned to her. CLASSIFIED, he wrote.

The lieutenant and her squad stared at the word. They looked at it a long time.

Gordon wouldn’t have minded telling them more, but knew Pellham and Toshio were watching on the monitor. Rover was more than Classified, higher than Top Secret. He was Eyes-Only. Say more, and Gordon, like Justin Searles, would be the victim of a gang bang by a court-martial board.

He smoothed the sand again. GET OUT OF PONS BFFORE SUNDOWN, he wrote.

There. That was cryptic enough. Not anything Pelham could take exception to. Looking at his own sentence, Gordon thought it sounded a bit too much like a B-Western. He could add THIS TOWN’S NOT BIG ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US, but since he was wearing the best poker face of all, the squad might not understand the humor.

“In Balaguer we seen fourteen people that light sucked the blood out of,” the little lieutenant said, resting her suspicious gaze on Rover.

NOT THIS LIGHT, Gordon wrote back. IT WAS WITH ME ALL THE TIME.

Rover had an alibi for the deaths at Balaguer all right, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a killer. He had nailed three people in an Arab tank and one member of the LDV platoon. God only knew how he spent his time while Gordon slept.

I’LL KEEP IT AWAY FROM YOU, he wrote with more confidence than he felt.

“Make damned sure you do.” The peach-faced lieutenant with the blue eyes checked her watch. “Listen. We got a couple of hours yet until dusk. My men had the stuffing worked out of ’em. You mind if we hole up here and grab some down time?”

Gordon knew little about flesh-and-blood women. His fantasies centered either around the posters of blondes in chain-mail panties he purchased at comic-book conventions or the fainthearted heroines of old horror movies. What little sex life Gordon had had contained a confusing mixture of his awe of women’s fragility and his fear of their strength.

The lieutenant with the wiry forearms didn’t seem as though she was about to suffer an attack of the vapors; but she didn’t resemble a Valkyrie with a ray gun, either. He liked her sunburned snub nose, her candid blue eyes. DIX, the name patch on her fatigues read. Gordon thought that if he could get over his shyness, he’d look her up sometime.

Hi,
he’d say.
Remember me?
And maybe Dix would overlook his weak chin, his complete and total dweebiness. Maybe one day she’d look at him and see not the disappointing man but the CRAV’s chiseled, powerful form.

As though she’d read his mind, the lieutenant smiled up into his optics, a flirtatious twinkle in her eye. “I’ve always wanted to meet one of you all. And the way you shook the captain’s hand, like she was Steuben crystal or something. Hey. You a boy robot or a girl robot?”

The teasing look both shocked and scared him a little.

Keeping his optics lifted so that the monitor wouldn’t snoop on his reply, he wrote without looking: BOY.

“Well, ain’t that interesting,” she said.

AT BALAGUER, SPAIN

A Palestinian NCO bent down and whispered in Wasef’s ear, “Another one.”

The colonel nodded and clambered up from the shade of an olive tree, whose branches had been tattered by small arms fire. Holding a handkerchief tight to his nose and mouth, he followed the noncom up the hill.

Three thousand Arabs lay sprawled along the grassy crest, rotting in the sun. In Balaguer itself were almost two thousand Allied corpses, British and American both.

So where were the burial details? Wasef had never known the Allies to leave their dead so long. Before reaching Balaguer, he’d sent a Hind D out in a reconnaissance flight, but so far everything was quiet, terrifyingly quiet, as if the enemy intended to let their dead rot to bone.

Single file, Wasef and the sergeant made start-stop progress though the field of corpses like children playing Simon Says.

“Here, sir,” the NCO said, pointing to a body.

Wasef looked down. The soldier was the wrong color, the wrong shape. The others were blue-gray, their gas-distended bellies straining at uniform buttons, their faces swollen like those grotesque American Cabbage Patch dolls.

This soldier might have been alive but for the pale cream hue of his skin, and for the bloodless hole in his forehead.

“This is the tenth one we have found,” the sergeant said in a hushed voice. “All of them Arabs. Not one American or Englishman.”

Wasef nodded as though he understood, but he did not understand at all. It was obvious that the blue lights were at war with the ANA. These ten Arab bodies spoke louder than a formal declaration.

He lifted his head and looked back at Balaguer, seeing the burned American M-113, its red cross still legible on one side. The red cross had not stayed the ANA missile, just as the red crescent often did not stay the killing hand of the Allies. Nothing was safe.

Looking at the bloodless corpse, Wasef felt cold terror spill down his back.

“The men are afraid,” the sergeant told him. Wasef saw pleading in the-man’s face.

“They think Captain Rashid talks to the lights,” the NCO went on. “They think he brings this terror down on their heads.”

“Ignorance,” Wasef grunted.

“Yes, sir.” The noncom shrugged helplessly. His face looked pinched and wan. “But in battle, bullets sometimes stray from the mark.” The man’s voice lowered. He glanced around in embarrassment. “And for the colonel’s safety, sir, I would suggest he keep away from the captain.”

PONS, SPAIN

Rita hunkered, her back against the barn wall so she could keep an eye on the blue light and also watch Dix and the robot.

The pair were nestled as close as two peanuts in a shell, and just as happily. The robot had cleared part of the dirt floor, and the two were carrying on an animated conversation, Dix speaking low and the robot responding in writing.

Rita was just close enough to read the words. R&R?

Dix glanced around at her squad. Most were asleep. A few were sitting up, snacking, and cleaning their weapons. They were pointedly not looking in the lieutenant’s direction. When Dix glanced Rita’s way, Rita tactfully turned toward the blue light.

Odd, Rita thought, how still it was. How deceptively peaceful, as cool and blue as dusk. As she watched, she heard a tapping sound start up in the back of her brain, a sound to drowse to.

Quickly she looked away and saw Dix smiling up at the robot. “Three weeks,” the lieutenant whispered.

LISBON? the robot wrote in reply.

“Probably. Why? You all interested?”

Rita watched the metal finger make a slow arc in the dirt, then another arc. The heart-shape completed, the robot drew an arrow through it.

Rita felt a titter of mirth in her throat and hurriedly lowered her gaze to the straw. It was somehow hilarious, macabre, and sweet at the same time, seeing the two talking together, the large metal object and the tiny pink-faced girl.

“Lieutenant?” one of the men said. “I hear something.” Rita saw Dix erase the heart. Then she, too, heard it. A throbbing growl in the distance.

“Helicopter,” Dix whispered, grabbing her gun.

Rita eased herself into a mound of straw. Around her, the rest of the squad did the same.

The sound of the helicopter went from a throb to a flutter and finally to a definite whop whop. It was coming right down the center of the village, fast and low.

“Shhh,” Dix whispered.

No one moved. The robot was still as a boulder, and even the blue light seemed to dim.

WHOP WHOP

The helicopter passed overhead, the sound of its rotors dopplering as it went.

In a splash of sun, a soldier sat up. “It’s raining,” he said in wonder. “It’s—”

From the dark roof, a pigeon fell. Then another. The soldier’s trembling hand halted halfway to his face and he stared at it moronically. “Raining,” he whispered.

Dead pigeons fell like feathery bombs into the straw.

The soldier gave a strangled, prolonged gurgle. He stared at Rita, eyes cartoonishly wide, face darkening to a cyanotic blue.

Rita lunged forward to help, when a pigeon fell by her outspread hand. She blinked in surprise and noticed she was seeing double.

Her muscles were weak and trembley.
Dear Christ,
she thought.
How stupid. I’m going to faint.

Then she realized that the soldier wasn’t dying from a coronary. What was killing him had felled the pigeons. And had also touched her.

Nerve gas was fatal within seconds.

She tugged at the Velcro fastener of her mask. A few feet away, Dix’s small body was twitching on the straw, and the robot was trying to hold a gas mask to her face.

Rita jerked, the Velcro ripped apart, and the mask fell to the hay. She tried to pick it up, but fumbled, not able to tell which of the two images was real.

Atropine,
she thought.
I have to get the atropine.
But an instant later a shudder jackhammered its way up her spine, demolishing logical thought as it went.

The world went dark, and something heavy slit on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Blindly she reached out and encountered a shuddering hand.

The blue of Dix’s eyes enveloped her. Wide, staring, dead eyes. Curious eyes.

A serene, catacomb chill settled down. Somewhere water was trickling. She was in a cold blue bed in her old house in New Orleans and in the bathroom the faucet had begun to drip.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Gordon ripped the smothering goggles off his face without waiting for the CRAV to power down, He fought free of Toshio’s restraining hands, tore off the gloves and bolted from the room. At the door he collided with Pelham, nearly knocking him down.

Gordon didn’t stop. Gasping, he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. In the sun-drenched yard he halted, pressing his hands against the sides of his head.

Never. Never. He’d never felt so helpless. Had never seen people die like that. This wasn’t the corpses of Bagnères-de-Luchon lying in the grass as if they were movie extras.

I should have died with the squad,
he thought. And then his mind screamed back,
Goddamn. You weren’t even there.

The tasteless, odorless venom of reality was soaking into him. In seconds he could drown.

“Sergeant,” Pelham said softly.

A hand touched Gordon’s shoulder. Gordon pushed his face into the rough wall.

“Come with me, sergeant,” Pelham said. “Now.”

The colonel grabbed him around the chest, and pulled him backward. Gordon stumbled, almost fell.

“Come on,” Pelham said as he pulled him across the yard.

Gordon’s ankle bumped something. Pelham’s grip tightened.

“Get me something!” the colonel was shouting to someone. “Get me a sedative for this soldier!”

Someone tried to claw his fingers from his face, but Gordon wouldn’t drop his hands. This wasn’t some horror flick on HBO. This wasn’t something he could skip by glancing down at his popcorn.

If he looked, he would see real people. He’d see Dix and her men glass-eyed, fish-mouthed, and staring. If he listened, he would hear the gurgling of their lungs.