by R. K. Syrus
“Howdy ter y’too!”
“That night,” Bryan said, “when Ethan Eddington fell in that trap.”
Hag Gantzer’s eye widened innocently. “Got some potluck opossums stewin’ on account o’ the holidays.”
The stirring brought a chewy-looking tail to the surface of the liquid in the battered old cooking pot.
“You were on that hill by the Old Reidt Mine,” Bryan said, not letting his cousin (twenty times removed) off the hook, “spoiling other people’s traps with bobcat urine.”
“If you’ve come to bring me to your folks’ place for supper, I accept. Just let me make sure the lid’s tight. I don’t want to spill any of this stew.” Glantzer patted her bowie knife. “Y’think your pa will let me carve the turkey?”
“Oh, just fess up.” Bryan tried to recall details from that night. “Come to think of it, little Ethan wasn’t making a sound from deep down inside that deadfall trap.”
The woodswoman smiled crookedly under her eyepatch. She raised hands so permanently dirty they looked tattooed and put them to her lips. A pretty good wild turkey hen call came out. Glantzer could imitate all kinds of sounds.
“You didn’t think the little feller got innat hole all by himself, did ya?”
Bryan was stunned. Yet not surprised.
That night had been the turning point of his younger years. Taddy never bothered him again. Better, he hardly noticed the absence of bullying. During the rest of his time at Cape Fear High, he was too busy with Junior ROTC and a mess of new, true friends. He rarely thought about that night of flight and fear that had him crouching down in a charcoal-rimmed pit inside an abandoned mine chapel.
There was no way Hag Glantzer could have known any of that would happen, no way in creation. But still…
Getting Cousin Glantzer fit to be at table was not that cumbersome. She had, on her own initiative, dropped in on the Seven Hills shelter. She did not like going there because she got tired of telling people she wasn’t homeless. She was free, and they should try it.
When the two of them got home, their special guest was asked to leave the pot of opossum-tail stew outside along with her long all-weather coat, which had a hundred pockets in the lining. Hanging on a peg on the porch, it appeared to wriggle, but that was probably only the wind.
Bryan was about to bring the big bird to table. His father got up to help.
“Your arm must still be sore,” Mr. Bryan said. “Took eight or nine stitches to fix, didn’t it?”
“I hardly feel ’em, sir,” he said. “I’ll go in a week early; maybe they can come out. Doc used a new technique they teach at Chapel Hill where she did her internship.”
“She’s on base?” Mrs. Bryan said, perturbed. “You could have invited her.”
“I thought, y’know, it was family only.” He looked at Glantzer. The rangy widow was behaving herself, using cutlery and keeping her Bowie sheathed.
“It’s only Christmas once a year.”
He couldn’t dispute that logic.
“Atten-shun, phone,” Bryan said to his handset. The display lit up, ready to receive its orders. “Dial Captain McKnight.”
3
23 YEARS AGO
WANDERING DESERT
AFGHANISTAN (TODAY’S KHORASAN)
CORPORAL BRYAN
Here, even the sky was at war with itself. Bolts of lightning lanced between clouds. They hung heavy and low over the hard earth, cracked, dusty, dry, greedy for rain. Over the centuries, these hills and plateaus had seen countless battles, human and celestial.
Corporal Bryan watched the combat. He drank coffee and waited for his watch to begin. Through pale albino eyes he saw one cloud and then another strobing with ever-increasing intensity until it let loose a jagged fork into the guts of its nearest rival.
Not everyone could see the buildup of electric charges before a lightning strike. He’d been told he was the only person ever measured whose naked eyes could see the circles of drifting ozone that followed. These were like melting auroras, gone in few blinks.
By a quirk of achromia genetics, his natural vision was highly sensitive. Charleston’s top eye specialist was a supporter of his parents’ ministry. Around what they reckoned was his first birthday, the doctor examined him. So did the doctor’s friends from the university, more than once.
Experts found he could see a single photon of light. This was many times more sensitive than the vision of differently colored people. Bryan learned none of the other kids, not even adults or teachers, could see ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized light. They called them “butterfly eyes.”
That had ticked him off.
Bryan was old enough to understand that butterflies were frilly things often seen on girls’ hairclips and dresses. After some research, he discovered many albinos were the opposite of the way he was. They had vision problems and nearly normal-looking skin. He was the other way around, in ways the scientists had not seen before. He also found out other animals had special vision too. Vampire bats could sense more than average wavelengths. Vampire-bat vision was cool.
That evening, riding on top of a desert that was moving, inching along and devouring everything in its path, those old eyes of young Corporal Bryan scanned a blasted landscape. It was like pictures of Mars, only this place was more hostile to human life. He was part of an international peacekeeping mission: United Nations UNISCOM 90 CH. About three thousand men and women were hunkered down in the fortified compound they had tagged “90 Charlie.”
Hundreds of tons of square-blocked HESCO bastions (collapsible wire-mesh containers filled with dirt) challenged the wind and the animosity it carried. A giant kid’s deadly serious LEGO setup. Two feet would stop an AK bullet. About four feet of packed local dirt would deflect shrapnel from the average Toyota suicide bomb. And five full feet were needed to protect the bodies of soldiers from an armor-piercing RPG. There were many of those. Thousands, probably, in the hands of people itching to use them.
Locals were employed on 90 Charlie. They even had baking pits on one side of the post to make their lunches. The bread that came out was flat and tasted like naked pizza dough.
Any of the workers who shared their water and smiled at him during the day could, come nightfall, put down shovels and picked up AKs and RPGs. Anyone could be just beyond the halo of the halogen towers itching for a clear shot and a clean getaway.
There had been a change in enemy tactics—small to generals in DC and dangerous for grunts on the line. It was partly their fault. Officers had no real plan for engaging with the enemy other than driving them out and waiting to be shot at. Besides the obvious downside of ballistic perforations, they completely gave up the initiative. The ground, the time, and the intensity of contacts were never their choice. They gave the enemy time to innovate.
One of those innovations made Corporal Bryan the go-to guy for night sentry duty. Enemy snipers had started shooting at UN troops with infrared homing .50 cal rounds. It was the US Army and DARPA who invented the damn things.
Copycats! he had fumed.
Instead of following a laser line to the target, these guys were using their own infrared technology as the target. Light up a dark area with IR and you could expect to be vulnerable to deadly accurate rounds fired from up to a mile and a half away. These bullets found you in the dark by the invisible light you were shining out. Before the crack of the enemy sniper’s muzzle blast came your way, your eardrums and the rest of your head would be blown into pieces the size of good-quality road gravel.
What a crappy time to be a soldier.
Rain on plywood roofs beat a steady drumroll.
“Let me guess, you want me on exterior perimeter.”
“Ja, Corporal Bryan.” The commander of third watch was Fänrik Lasse Jerker Björneborg. “If you would please to be on the main barrier pass duty during this storming rain. Your eyes, they can be seeing more.”
True. Bryan’s natural night-vision goggles did not send out electronic bullseyes, a
nd they never ran out of batteries.
He met the Swede inside a dirt-topped Containerized Housing Unit, which everyone called the Hobbit House. It was the tidiest and safest structure inside the perimeter.
Björneborg was a graduate of Karlberg, his country’s West Point. He didn’t speak English well enough to be comfortable with typical base humor. The fänrik (Swedish for second lieutenant) was, however, one of the few international soldiers who took the time to learn Dari and Pashtun. He got a reputation as a hard-ass officer whose eagle eye you could not escape.
A private from Bryan’s own platoon had learned that when he questioned whether fänrik was a rank or the name of a dish at the Swedish House of Pancakes. Finding out the European officer’s middle name was Jerker had not helped the enlisted man find a cork for his humor bottle. By the time he came up with a limerick that rhymed “Jerker” with “berserker” and “twerker,” the private’s fate was sealed. He was put on all-base crapper-burning duty for a week straight.
Maybe as a result of the incident, the blond coalition officer was also extra careful not to appear prejudiced.
“I am not meaning anything irregular by this duty assignment, you must know,” Björneborg said stiffly but sincerely. “About the way you are being. Your skin and your race. I am not treating you with difference. I would never do this.”
“I know,” Bryan assured him. “Heck, if you were any whiter, people would think we’re related.”
The Nordic soldier’s hair was just a shade yellower than Bryan’s snow-white afro. Björneborg asked him to sit a spell and became as gabby as he’d ever seen him.
“I think your men, USA personnel, they are surprised to find Swedish has armed services with much capability,” he ventured.
Bryan could not deny a certain blind spot Americans had about countries they had not fought recent major wars with.
“You should know a few small things about us,” Björneborg said with matter-of-fact pride. “Sweden has never been invaded. Not by French, German, or Ryssland.”
“Maybe everyone’s just flat scared of you Vikings,” Bryan suggested. “For a while there you guys had a reputation of rolling up in your ships, killing everyone who didn’t run away, and taking their shit.”
The Swede thought a moment. “Yes, the raiding by ships and taking of people’s shit, that lasted many years. It was done by men and our schildmaids, shield maids, whose participation was in war and loot equal to the men if they pick this way of life.
“But even recently, Sweden could put to field armed forces commanding in the number of one million soldiers. Not so small for having ten million total population, huh, Corporal?”
That was a damned impressive number for a country everyone thought was kind of laid back. After a friendly and thoughtful discussion about the comparative skull-splitting power of Viking iron axes versus Native American stone tomahawks, Bryan left for his stint on watch.
“Please let the staff sergeant know if you need anything,” Björneborg said. “Extra slicker or coffee. Yes? It looks like the not-good weather is staying for a while.”
“Sir, I will. Yes, sir.”
He passed other CHUs. Through the slits between entrance flaps, he saw soldiers enjoying hot food and all the comforts of a UNI-SCOM outpost. The British brought food, the Aussies and Canadian brought beer, and the US Army sprung for everything else.
“Everything else” included a sophisticated mobile surgical unit mustered at his home station in North Carolina and reassembled in the middle of the desert. It was headed by the military’s finest trauma surgeon, one who had stapled Bryan back together more than once, Dr. Theodora McKnight. While there had been no all-out attacks on 90 Charlie, over the past weeks, the hospital had received a steady stream of customers.
As he got to the gate, he cinched his ceramic body armor tighter. Bryan’s thumb nudged his weapon’s safety, confirming the mode it was on by touch. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something, not just someone, was watching him from just out of range of even his vision.
He turned his head into the storm. Rain here was hostile. Droplets hit you like wet bees. Flying like they aimed to trick you up and grind you down. It was not normal rain.
On the roads leading up to their fort, streets of hardpack became rivers. Sensors were useless. MechBrain ears were deafened by the thunder. Motion sensors got dazzled by sky-splitting lightning. Blobs of mud sprang meters in the air to splatter over camera lenses.
An enemy force could just walk past them and knock.
4
Two insulated thermos flasks later, midnight crawled past.
Five more hours.
Rain metered a steady counter beat to Bryan’s pulse. His mind balanced between hypnotic percussion and needling pinpricks of anxiety. No chance of dozing off.
The next flash could be distant lightning or a sniper’s cold-barrel shot. If the latter, he’d have all of half a second to duck behind the sandbags. Maybe longer if it was a conservative assassin warming up a weapon from farther off. Blinking was a luxury he tried to keep to a minimum.
He stared. The distance pulled. Like it wanted something he was not gonna part with.
A week before, he’d been out for the day with a group of Brits sweeping for mines along the road to the regional capital. Wide-angle metal detectors on the lead vehicle went off. The convoy skidded to a dusty stop. A soldier would have to risk his ass to find out what was up.
Robots were expensive and slow. Explosive-seeking drones hadn’t been invented. Eye augments that could see the muon decay of TNT and Semtex under a foot of earth were only standard equipment in science fiction shows. Back then, the best bet to handle an IED without blowing a meteor-crater-sized hole in a vital road was the human touch. Brits called their guy the Vallon man, after his specialized ground-penetrating sensor rig. He was the new one.
The threat of instant death underfoot turned the mood jovial, in the kind of grim way those guys had a knack for.
“Oy, McTaggert,” one enlisted called down the line in that hushed voice people use around live ordnance. “Your time in the spotlight’s arrived. The bomb-sniffing mice have the day off, so naturally we sub on a Taff.”
The butt of the friendly name-calling was from South Wales. He was kinda thin and looked even more lanky in his overstuffed bomb disposal vest. His predecessor in the job, the old Vallon man, wore one just like it when they had brought him into Dr. McKnight’s operating room. It had saved his torso but nothing else.
McTaggert caught Bryan’s gaze through his Oakleys.
“You Yanks use field mice, ah, in the field as well?”
Bryan nodded. “We do, Corporal. We’ve got a Rodent Automated Training System to train local recruits.”
This maze system had been developed by DARPA. It rewarded fast learners with food snacks. Slow students got electrocuted. Bomb techs held with dogs, said they were more accurate. But rats could get into drainpipes. Also, the science guys had devised a gizmo that could intentionally set off almost any kind of bomb. It was small enough to strap onto the backs of the beady-eyed critters. Everyone liked dogs. No one really minded if a rat ended up as bloody spooge.
The British bomb jockey thought for a second. “Rodent Automated… Ye Yanks and your acronyms.” He grinned. “Tha’ spells R-A-T-S, tha’ does.”
A freshly spray-painted red line marked minimum safe distance. Smiling, and careful not to smudge it, McTaggert stepped over.
Moments later, he was lying on his stomach and poking at the ground with his hand. Turned out not to be any explosive at all. Just some encrusted metal. After rinsing it off, the patrol commander held it up in the sunlight.
“Bugger me,” Captain Dorrit said. “This poor fellow was British.”
It was an old badge of the Royal Horse Artillery. Under it lay human bones.
One of Dorrit’s men had studied archaeology. He uncovered more of the skeleton. Hand, arm, and shoulder knob. There was also a big pointed cleaver rusted nea
rly beyond recognition.
“A Khyber knife.”
“Genuine antique, that.”
Best guess: These were relics of the East India Company’s War, Part One. Some colonial soldier got his arm hacked off and the limb fossilized where it fell.
Spooky thing was, Dorrit, McTaggert, and all of the guys who dug it up were from the same regiment. Nowadays they rode up-armored Panther CLVs, not horses, but they were still called the Royal Horse Artillery regiment. They had found one of their fallen brothers from two centuries ago, or at least his right arm. He’d been hacked to bits by the ancestors of the same guys who were trying to blow them up now.
“Bugger, bugger,” Dorrit muttered. He turned to Bryan. “Up until well, I’d say the 1980s, British soldiers killed in action were treated quite disgracefully. Bodies stuffed into communal graves, put under rocks, or tossed in crevasses.” Dorrit didn’t seem able to take his eyes off their find. “All different now, of course.”
The skeletal arm still had most of its hand. The index finger was extended, pointing them back the way they had come.
“Bugger.”
The captain radioed 90 Charlie.
Someone from the War Graves Commission got back.
“All right, everyone!” Dorrit pointed to the team’s medic. “Phelps, you take a DNA sample. After that, you two cover this soldier’s final resting place over and double-check the GPS coordinates. Log them in your mission report. Orders are to let the remains be. Whitehall will try to notify any ancestral relatives through the NHS database.”
Everyone stared at the finger bones, pointing.
“Ghastly fingerpost marker, that.”
Dorrit pretended he didn’t hear.
“Sergeant, see that gets done!” He slammed the door of his Panther.
After some communications with base about a corporal’s twisted ankle, the patrol ended early. Dorrit took his thirty soldiers back behind HESCOs while they still numbered thirty. Bryan didn’t blame the guy. Soldiers were no more prone to superstitions than the average person, but some signs were just too creepy to ignore.
