The Company of the Dead (73 page)

“Okay,” Tecumseh said, finally, “those fighters will only be able to make a few runs before they have to turn back. The bombers are another problem entirely. Iron Horse has gone to ground, and the cliffs around the west tower will afford his men some cover. The major’s men, however, are dangerously exposed.” He turned to Lightholler. “Your cavern will withstand a limited raid from the air, but after the bombers leave, the ground assault will resume.

“Will you see reason now?” He peered intently at the three men.

“Did you speak to the major?” Shine asked.

Tecumseh shook his head.

“Could you get us to him if I asked you to?” Lightholler asked.

“Maybe, but once there, I can’t see us returning in any reasonable length of time.”

“I can’t see him ditching his men,” Morgan offered glumly.

“
We’re
his men,” Lightholler said.

“No,” Tecumseh said. “You’re his weapon, fashioned to undo changes that were wrongly made.”

Lightholler looked at him for a long time. The expressionless cast of his mask did little to conceal the regret of his reply.

He said, “Take us back.”

Atop the escarpment, Tom Shine had made short work of directing the Union guns. His last transmission had assured Kennedy that the column of Japanese reinforcements was mired in the detritus of their own shattered armour. Of the four companies Kennedy had dispatched in their pursuit, however, barely two hundred men remained. Red Thunder, warned of the impending air strike, had been instructed to disperse them. They would have to find their shelter somewhere on the open plains between the Japanese camp and the environs of Red Rock.

Little appeared to remain of the Japanese depot. Kennedy’s men, scattered and bereft of any specific orders, had taken to following their own dark itinerary. Death, random and swift, struck from the shifting sand.

If not for the fact of the inbound bombers, he might have called this victory. Modest, Pyrrhic, but victory all the same. The Japanese camp was a turmoil of disordered ranks. There was no evidence of leadership among the confusion. If triumph was determined by the moral collapse of the enemy, it was prefigured in the fleeing shapes that loomed and vanished in the sandstorm.

But still the bombers were inbound.

Only one company of men and seven of his Jacksons remained to augment the thin blue line of Yankee regulars. If Hayes’ last estimate was correct, he only needed ninety minutes.

The Japanese guns fell quiet. The Union forces, deprived of targets, stared out into the retreating haze. The attacks ceased and the silence of their adversary screamed his intentions. Even the infantrymen had halted their appalling suicidal rushes against the ghost dancer lines.

A band of samurai broke through the perimeter. Hurdling the piles of their dead, they emptied their machine-guns; ornate, pearl-handled weapons that gleamed in their hands. They leapt from cannon to cannon. A flash of sharp silver skewered a gunner here, a dancer there, before the concerted efforts of Kennedy’s band finally stretched them in the dust. The glittering edge of a shuriken still protruded from the side of an eighty-eight where it had missed its mark.

“They’re coming.”

There was nothing to do but seek cover beneath the armoured hem of the artillery.

Shadows, long and dark, swept over them. Machine-gun fire ploughed narrow channels, raking the ground. Dust, freshly settled, flurried in clotted droves, plastering his goggles.

The bombers began to drop their payloads. Time and again he was heaved bodily against the underside of the tank as the landscape reformed around him in tectonic mockery of some act of creation. The clamour was a vice, compressing his skull.

Ninety minutes...

If the cavern was being targeted, they would barely last nine.

Kennedy pictured the vaulted ceiling crumbling beneath the barrage. The carapace, sundered and sinking beneath its own weight. Cracks splitting through the framework of Tecumseh’s mysterious art as the walls themselves gave way. And Patricia, grey and silent and broken within the mausoleum he had constructed.

There was Hobbes’ radio set, tilted crazily near the frayed pennant of his command tent. A globe, pale red, flickered still on its console.

He dived across the sand and rolled between the criss-cross path of strafing fire. He latched onto the set and dialled up a prearranged frequency with bloodied fingers.

The signal was there, loud and clear.

He brought the mouthpiece close to his lips and shouted his question above the din of falling doom.

“
Where the fuck are you?
”

One last gesture of defiance.

One last grab for the ring.

A blast tossed him onto his back. His shoulder exploded in a callous burst of agony.

Looking up, he saw a fighter swoop down through a break in the cloud. He saw the wingtips flare brightly and felt the rapid thud of bullets as they danced towards him along the desert floor. The fighter bobbed wildly, as if already preparing for a victory roll, then rolled over completely in a nebula of red flame, disintegrating.

Behind it, soaring past the wreckage, two Confederate biplanes veered back up into the clouds.

A voice, muffled by static, crackled over the radio set. “On my way, Joseph. We should arrive at your soirée any time now.”

Kennedy crawled back to the transmitter. “You sure took your damn time.” He coughed into the mouthpiece.

Despite the interference, Webster’s reply still managed to seethe some secret satisfaction.

“You have no idea how difficult it is to hijack a stratolite. I suggest you and your men find yourself a deep, deep hole. I’m in foul spirits.”

They galloped four abreast. Calamity dogged their heels, a rolling wave of destruction that lashed the tortured earth with jubilant abandon.

The Rock loomed wildly with every juddering stride as the foam-flecked horses bore them across the burning plain. The shack, cloven to reveal the domed cement entrance to the cavern, was less than a hundred yards away.

Lightholler fixed his eyes on the quaking hoof-tossed earth. He cringed at each fleeting shadow that heralded another plane’s strafing run. They entered a vast darkness too thick for cloud and when he emerged he found that he was galloping alone.

He reined in hard, twisting his stallion in a tight turn that brought him to rest a short distance from the dome’s entrance. Tecumseh and the others, just feet away, had also stopped, and they had their heads tilted skywards. He lifted his eyes to join theirs and a vertiginous shudder racked his body.

“Jesus fucking
Christ
.” Morgan, bent back in his saddle, was in danger of losing his seat.

Shine was trying to settle his mount.

Tecumseh just stared in awed wonder. Perhaps he was thinking about his thunderbird, perched above the deluge, snapping lightning and bringing thunder. For above their heads, impossibly large and impossibly near, hung the
Patton.

Webster, standing at the stratolite’s Eye, gazed down upon the wastes of Kennedy’s realm.

Pre-dawn, the
Patton
had been a lifeless husk pitched on uncaring seas. Suspended out over the Nevada–Arizona border, derelict and insensate, millions of dollars worth of steel and high-grade plastic listed within a swarm of bi-winged gnats.

Pinked to the gills, Webster lay face up on his bunk while renegade dreams buffeted him along narrow corridors, down, down, always down, towards that infinitely sharp barb that awaited the soft pulpy orb of his right eye. The pounding of his heart resolved into the steady thud of a fist against his door.

With heavy, cloddish movements he lurched towards the cabin entrance.

“Director.” The agent’s voice broke through the syrupy miasma of pharmaceutical enfoldings. “Radio. Inbound. Urgent.” Words forced their way through ramparts of delirium. “Black Knight.”

That did it.

Webster’s eye throbbed syncopal as he clawed his way out of stupefaction.

By the time he’d traversed the five decks to communications, his head had almost cleared. His desk was as he’d left it. A light flashed, agitatedly, on the receiver.

He heard Agent Reid’s voice, tremulous, saying, “Who could have imagined?”

Who indeed?

And then, inconceivably, Kennedy was on the line with his proposal.

The offer: information, the only currency worth dealing in, and the negotiation was to be held face to face in Kennedy’s own lair.

“What’s in it for you, Joseph?”

“I’ll let you decide that.”

“Surely we’d be more comfortable up here.”

“I want to show you what’s behind the curtain, Director. But you only have sixty seconds left to triangulate my whereabouts and I’ll be done in thirty. Bring enough security to make yourself comfortable. Your pilot only gets the coordinates in the air. If your plane is escorted, we blow you all out of the sky. I’ll call back in three for your answer.”

Then Agent Reid’s voice. “Director, you
really
need to see this.”

Then static.

He’d assembled his best men, blustered his way past Illingworth’s feeble protest, and was airborne in fifteen minutes. No escort. Reid’s tone, chilling and awed, had left no doubt.

He’d be entering his enemy’s camp, outnumbered and outgunned, yet this bore no scent of a trap. Behind Kennedy’s bid, he’d sensed a desperate need. He knew—beyond any shadow of a doubt—that this would end with Joseph on his knees.

Reid had greeted him on the runway, a desolate stretch of recently smoothed sand. Will-o’-the-wisps flitted among an uneven tract of low mounds, suggesting some ancient, troubled burial ground. The entire plain lay cupped between the crenellated ridges of craggy rock. Reid led him past the rounded knolls—squat, prefabricated buildings, meshed under cowled netting, blending into the desert. Phosphorescent glows purposefully followed his every movement. They coalesced into a body of figures that converged on his destination: a twisted clot of red rock.

Kennedy met him at the door of the shabby profile of a dilapidated cabin. He’d greeted Webster’s security team—three seasoned tactical agents—by name. He was unshaven, his brow disfigured by a poorly sutured gash, and was wearing a garish shirt of blue, partially concealed beneath Confederate fatigues. Thinner, paler, dishevelled, he had a haunted look.

Webster didn’t dare mistake him for a cornered prey.

The shack was more smoke and mirrors. Within, a grey dome enclosed an elevator shaft. The walls were a mishmash of primitive paintings and damaged electronic equipment.

“From here on in, Director,” Kennedy had said, “it’s just you and me.”

Webster had offered a brilliant smile. “That strikes me as an unwise course.”

“Your men stay up here. This isn’t something you want to share.”

Webster cast Reid a dissecting look. The man had suffered some injuries, but that wasn’t what ailed him. Some new knowledge had stamped itself behind the agent’s eyes. The vacancy of his stare sought some crucial misplaced item. Webster decided it was hope.

“Don’t take anyone down with you, sir,” Reid said.

This was getting interesting. Webster said, “After you, Joseph.”

They descended the ladder. Blank screens and exposed wires; the noxious scented tresses of torchlight confirmed that the same pulse that had struck the
Patton
had wrought its wrath here. It also explained his presence within these strange walls.

Kennedy’s penchant for melodrama had been evident from the hovel’s entrance to the ruby-lit chamber at the foot of the shaft. A blanket, embroidered with a map of the stars, iced the cake.

“Through there?”

“Through there.”

There might have been someone operating a computer terminal. He didn’t recall. The cavern was large, its roof cathedralled into darkness beyond the flicker of torches. He stared at the machine. Form, alien and inexplicable, somehow revealed function.

“Well...” he said after long moments.

“Yes?” Kennedy murmured.

“My eye.” Webster turned to Kennedy. “It doesn’t hurt.”

The smile Kennedy had returned was oddly warm, though it didn’t sit well on his harried features.

“You didn’t build this.”

“No. I found it.”

“And it’s broken.”

“Not quite.”

Webster removed his patch and ran a finger around the numbed ridge of the socket. “This explains a lot, Joseph.” Part of him was working the odds. Reid plus three tac agents against Kennedy’s little army. There was the
Patton
, he supposed.

He took a step towards the machine. There was...

His thoughts muddled, reshuffling. Ideas became kaleidoscoping colours. It tasted like a purple flashback.

Kennedy’s expression was bemused.

Webster smiled at him. “I had to consider it,” he said.

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“So. Why am I here, Joseph? Gloating doesn’t feature heavily among your flaws.”

“I need your help.”

“You should have come to me earlier.”

Kennedy gave a scornful laugh. “The thought of you and this, together, has kept me awake for long hours.”

“And yet, here we are.”

Kennedy’s face had resumed its haggard mien. He’d explained how he’d discovered the machine; shed from a world where America had never blinked, never splintered, never faltered at the first trembling step. He described the attempts to determine the machine’s function, and the nuclear holocaust he’d witnessed, unveiled by its first and only journey. He outlined the objectives of his mission and the make-up of his team.

The Lightholler scenario fell into place. The manipulation of governments, the movement of funds, a push here and a shove there, revealed the deft touch of Kennedy’s hand.

It would appear that the reckless act of a madman had undone the world; a slow, lingering death a century in the making. Solutions lay in prevention, Kennedy argued. An incisive intervention to excise the cancer that was Wells.