The Company of the Dead (64 page)

Morgan glanced at his watch from time to time. The minutes crept past midnight with reluctance.

The occasional volley of gunfire, the odd crump of light artillery, broke up the silence.

Lightholler asked, “How the hell does he expect us to rest?”

Morgan formulated a reply but it was hard to put the words together. His thoughts were a jumble, notions jostled for attention. Hardas pressed his consciousness, sweet-talking him with offers of sudden bright bursts of bravery that all ended, cold and still, on the
Parzifal
’s shattered deck. He finally opened his mouth to speak and found Lightholler asleep.

He picked up an old magazine and lay on his side, squinting to read the print in the half light. The text blurred, each ponderous word slipping in and out of focus. There was a photograph of a woman. Blonde, pale, frosty. Teutonic chic.
Come to Berlin
, she said.
You’ll never want to leave.

He only meant to rest his eyes for a moment. To let closed lids soothe chaotic thoughts; after all, the major might return any time now. Sleep had been a dull weight nudging at his brain for long days on end; so when the magazine slid to the floor it took him with the subtlety and breadth of nightfall. It was like opening a door.

Kennedy brought Patricia to his quarters, a sparsely appointed collection of rooms for which he’d rarely found use.

Fatigue had overtaken her. First contact with the carapace had left her barely conscious. He coaxed her towards the shower and sorted through his belongings for a fresh set of clothes. He grabbed some fresh shirts, socks and a pair of boxer shorts from his wardrobe and laid them out by the shower recess.

He’d given her kitbag a cursory run-through at Morning Star, retrieving his Mauser and her Dillinger but leaving her notes untouched. As if to say, nothing you discovered could possibly interest me now. Nothing you imagined verges on the truth.

He examined them now.

There was an assortment of punch cards, useless without an ENIAC. There was an Atlas print-out with nine international listings for Morning Star. There were photographs: graphic forensic shots from the Queens Midtown Tunnel and Osakatown. The crimes that had been laid at his doorstep.
She really should have known better.

A separate folder contained the names of trainees, allegedly associated with Camelot’s third camp. The accusation she’d thrown in his face back in the prison cell. She’d scrawled a series of notations along the margins. There were additional scraps, copied from financial transactions and police charge sheets. The name
Webster
, underlined, had been etched deeper into the paper by someone else’s hand.

Pieced together, they suggested a scheme designed to poison the tip of Camelot’s blade. To set bloodier and more definitive endpoints for the project’s completion and mire Kennedy in the grisly aftermath, when governments, both North and South, might be scrambling for a scapegoat. He read on, tracing her leaps of faith and intuition, from faked serial numbers on his pistol to a document implicating Webster in the abortive election campaign of ’98.

It was an impressive body of work.

He had to admire the crude simplicity of Webster’s snare. Spanning the rapidly hatched frame-up to the carefully crafted insertion of a third source of trainees, his vision had sustained what appeared to be almost a decade and a half of ill-masked hatred. Longer, if you went back to Mazatlan.

For want of an eye...

Kennedy wondered at his own detachment and replaced the papers.

She emerged from the recess wearing a T-shirt and the boxers. She held the elastic of the shorts bunched in a fist at her side, hitching them to her waist. The shorts ended midway down her thigh, where a purple discoloration marred the pale alabaster of her skin. Her hair, damp and tangled, framed her face. The scar was a vivid weal across her cheek.

“You might want to put another shirt on. It gets cold out here.”

She nodded. Her eyes flicked across to her files.

“How did you find me?” he said. “How did you know to look in Morning Star?”

“Something you used to say, every once in a while, pointed me in the right direction.”

“Uh-huh.” He watched her move across the room.

She thumbed through the pages of her notes before replacing them on the bed. “I worked so hard to catch you, Joseph. I wanted to find you first. Find you alive. Bring you in.”

“You
did
find me first,” he offered.

“All I managed to do was ensure that you ended up exactly where you wanted to be.”

He took a step towards her. She turned to face him with her hands on her hips.

“What does that tell you?” he asked.

“That you have more luck than brains, and all of it’s bad.”

“Maybe it says that I couldn’t have done this without you.”

“You’ve caused enough mayhem without my help, Joseph.” Her tone was indecipherable.

“I’m saying, maybe it’s supposed to be this way.”

“And I’m thinking you’ve spent too much time with your ghost dancers. Don’t you dare try to reckon me into this madness of yours. I’ll be no part of it.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“For God’s sake, Joseph, do you know what you’ve got down there in that cavern?”

“I know better than anyone else. I think.”

“Well,
I
don’t think so.” She frowned. “If you had any real understanding, you’d have destroyed the thing the moment you found it.”

He held back his reply. She needed rest, not goading. She needed to stop talking and get some sleep. But she wasn’t finished.

“Joseph...” Her look was almost imploring. “Can’t you see what’s been happening here?”

He listened to her words with a slender notion of dread. She was about to say something extremely important. How could he possibly know that? Somehow his time away from the carapace had left him unprepared for this: the unpleasant sense of premonition associated with exposure to the machine.

“Think back to when you were first given the journal,” she urged. “To when you found the machine. Camelot was in development and you were the project’s golden boy. You had a three-year mandate to reunite the states.

“Don’t look so goddamned stunned, Joseph, I was given complete access to all your files.
Three nations
looked to you as the redeemer. And now, barely two years on, they curse you. Your director slaps together a frame-up, wants you dead. You’re an enemy of the German
and
Japanese empires. And right in the middle of established peace talks, we’re all plunged into ... into
this
.”

“You’re not thinking straight,” he said.

“Don’t give me that. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” She grasped his shoulders, sat him down on the bed, and stood before him. “The world you saw in the future is the world
you
made, Joseph.”

“That’s not true, Patricia.”

“And what’s worse,” she said, ignoring his defence, “the absolute, total
fucking
horror of it all, is that you’ve known it the whole damn time.”

“That’s not true.”

She sat down next to him and spoke softly. “You’ve known it the whole time, Joseph. What else would have driven you all those months and all those miles?”

He felt unwell; a sickness that had coiled latent in his heart now seeped through every vessel, coursed through artery and vein. “I’m not responsible for all this,” he said. “I want to
stop
all this.”

“You
have
to stop it. You’ve left yourself no choice.”

He nodded—mostly to himself—and asked the question that had preyed on his mind since Morning Star. “Will you come with me?”

“I don’t know.”

Tecumseh’s going to tell me that the radio’s working.

More and more, Kennedy was becoming convinced that control of events was illusory, self-mastery an exertion, and free will just a poor and dirty joke.

He despised himself for asking Patricia to accompany him on his journey. After she’d drifted off to sleep, he wandered the compound in a dream, his steps strangely sluggish, his mind struggling for the password at each sentry’s challenge.

He’s going to say that the Japanese are coming from the west and the north.

He’s going to apologise.

He found the medicine man at the western watchtower. The tag was a misnomer. A culvert, burrowed into the western face of a low-lying ridge, sufficed for the observation post. Tecumseh sat alone, poring over a series of maps. He managed a grin at Kennedy’s entrance.

“Hey, Major, we got a radio working. There’s a lot of interference out there, though. Hayes is trying to put together a picture for us.”

“What have you got so far?”

“Mixed tidings. Shine was picked up and brought to Alpha late yesterday.”

Kennedy smiled. “Is he okay?”

“Some of our crew managed to leave the camp before the atomics went off. He was with them, but there’s been no radio contact—not even smoke signals—since then.”

“How many got away?”

“Near fifteen-hundred.”

Shine played it by the book. Yet instructed to make his way to the ranch, he’d somehow managed to end up at Alpha.

“We need him. We need those men.”

“I’ve sent ten runners south.” He read the need on Kennedy’s face and added, “It was all I could spare.”

“I’m going to assume that was the good news. What do we know about the blast?”

“It was a jap strat, somewhere out west.”

“What was the target?”

“No target, at least not as far as we can tell.”

Kennedy stared.

“The whole
strat
detonated. Somewhere out over the Mojave. No one’s sure if it was deliberate or not. And no one can tell where it was supposed to be headed.”

“That bullshit didn’t wash with Berlin. Why should it be any more convincing now?”

“Before it went up, it was hit by a wave of Confederate scouts, early last night. Latest intel’s talking about an accidental trigger.”

Kennedy gave it some thought. “They might have intended to blanket the ionosphere. Damage communications, radar, transportation.”

“Don’t think so, Major. Hayes figures there’s two jap divisions due west of us, and a third further off to the north. That blast would have given them a world of hurt too.”

“Any friendlies in the region?”

“The odd long-range patrol, a couple of regiments of Rangers by the state border, and that column of German tanks north of Vegas. Nothing particularly close by.”

“Are the German tanks workable?”

Tecumseh scanned a report. “Maybe thirty per cent.”

“Tell me more about those jap divisions.”

“If they’re the same guys that crossed the Demilitarised Zone two days ago, they’re the 2nd Imperial Tank Army. We’re looking at one armoured and one mechanised division, plus a regiment of Union artillery. Last word had them steering north of us, but their main body’s about twenty miles out... and mobile.”

“
Union
troops?”

“I’m as surprised as you are to see them out here.”

“They were probably holding them back in reserve. If the pulse hit the japs’ own artillery, they’re stuck with the Yankees. But why here?” Kennedy added, muttering. “And why now?”

“I reckon we might’ve aroused their interest, creating that corridor from Alamo. We’ve also been operating some hit and runs on any patrols that wandered too close to home.”

“So they could still pass us by.”

“They just might.” Tecumseh shifted uneasily.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m sorry, chief. I’m thinking that maybe one of my Braves suffered too much from pride, and talked when he should have walked. I worry that someone might have given our legends too much credit, and been a little too vocal about it.”

“No one knows what we have here,” Kennedy said.

“Maybe... or maybe someone suspects that we have something worth hiding, worth protecting. The path through Red Rock is as good a road as any into Texas.”

Kennedy checked his Einstein. A fine crack now cut across its face. Dawn was six hours away. Another eight hours, nine to be safe, might see them through.

He said, “We need to keep drawing the japs south. If we’re lucky enough, they’ll bump heads with the German armour and we can leave them to duke it out.”

“I’ve got a platoon engaging Japanese patrols out past the lake bed. You want me to throw more men south? I’ve got three fresh squads between here and Alamo I can bring down.”

Kennedy inspected the map. Tecumseh pointed to the positions of the Japanese patrols and the locations of the squads.

“Bring them down but skirt them along the edge of the base,” Kennedy said. “Don’t let them strike. The japs might know we’re out here but they don’t know where. Their intel’s as screwed as ours. We’ve been hitting them from the east and south; we throw in a force from the north and they’ll come straight through here. We have to concentrate our attacks south and draw them away.”

“You want to give the appearance of an ordered retreat?”

“No,” Kennedy said.

Tecumseh’s expression grew more intense. The medicine man’s fears had sparked new possibilities. Kennedy chewed them over.

“You think the Japanese are coming through here for a specific reason...”

“Maybe,” Tecumseh said.

“Then let’s give them what they want.” Kennedy selected another map from the pile and let his hand drift across the chart to a point south of the Rock.

Tecumseh’s concern gave way to fiendish satisfaction. He said, “It might work.”

“In the meantime I want snipers and knife-men on their officers. I want their fuel, water and ammunition depots extirpated. Leave the Union forces untouched for the moment.”

“Untouched?”

“Go easy on them.” Kennedy stared out beyond the culvert to where the ridges fell away into an expanse of low dunes. The night’s storm had swept across the mounds leaving its signature in hollowed-out banks and heaped knolls of sand. He gazed to the west.