Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  “What the hell is she doing here?” he wondered. It was a better question. People with the sort of money to look that good didn’t come to Norfolk, and they certainly didn’t come to the Fry.

  Suddenly, Patty became animated, pointing at his own chest, at her, waving expansively. Nate couldn’t be sure but he thought the man was yelling, or at least speaking loudly. He didn’t seem happy, which Nate couldn’t imagine, not when talking to someone who was probably the most beautiful woman the Kentuckian had ever met, or would meet.

  “What’s going on?” Roach asked plaintively, clearly frustrated she couldn’t hear them.

  “Why don’t you go ask them?” he suggested, only half serious.

  She sniffed. “Maybe I will.”

  Before either of them could make a move, Patty threw his hands up as if in exasperation and stalked away from the blond, heading deeper into the Fry around the opposite side of the plaza.

  “He’s pissed off,” Roach observed.

  “He’s always pissed off.” Nate shrugged. “It’s her I’m curious about. Think I should go talk to her?”

  “You?” Roach eyed him with a brow arched dubiously. “Maybe I should be the one to try it.”

  “Be my guest, Sergeant Mata,” he said, waving a hand invitingly.

  She headed off across the plaza, striding purposefully like a missile homing in on the blond, but she hadn’t gotten more than a dozen meters or so before the mysterious woman’s head snapped up and her eyes narrowed.

  She’s blown, Nate thought.

  Sure enough, the blond disappeared into the shadows a moment later.

  “Well now what?” Roach asked, coming back to him, fists clenched as if she wanted to punch someone.

  “Now we go eat our burgers,” he suggested. “If Patty wants to tell us what’s going on, he’ll have his chance.”

  “You’re too damned patient,” Roach told him as they headed back to the bar. “I hope I never get that old.”

  Interlude:

  The cot creaked under my weight, wobbling slightly off-balance as I rolled in it, one of the rubber boots at the end of the right-hand front leg worn down further than the others. The sound and the motion only served to magnify the pain throbbing in my head, to send it bouncing back and forth from one temple to another like someone had fired a .22 round inside my skull.

  How the fuck did I wind up on a cot? I forced my eyes open against the glare of far-off lights. I wasn’t in my quarters. There was no closet, no wall of pictures and diplomas, no nightstand. I felt something over my legs and thought it was my flight suit just tossed on top of me. I opened my eyes completely and wiped the moisture and sleep out of them and finally saw I was in an empty room, stripped of all other furniture. It might have once been a mess hall or a briefing area, but now it was just bare walls, overhead lights…and one cot. And me.

  I sat up and swung my legs off the cot, feet bare, a chill in the air that sent shivers up my back. I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts like I usually did when I slept. Everything was usual except why the hell was I in this empty room? Hell, where was this empty room? Hadn’t I been in…was it Georgia? South Carolina?

  Shit, I can’t remember. They all seem to run together.

  I pulled the flight suit on as if I were a puppet in someone else’s hands, going through motions without any internal purpose. I found socks tucked into my combat boots and pulled them on then strapped on the boots. I looked around for anything else, for a toothbrush or soap or even a bottle of water, but there was nothing. No, wait. There was a bottle of water, tucked under the edge of the cot. I unscrewed the cap and drank it, downing it in one, long, breathless gulp, except for the last little bit. I swished that around inside my mouth before I swallowed it, trying to get rid of the dead-cat taste. It wasn’t as good as brushing my teeth, but it would have to do.

  I looked around for somewhere to throw the bottle away but didn’t see a trash can. I shrugged and tossed it on the bunk before I headed toward the door. The double doors to the room had narrow windows set in them and through them was furtive motion, ghostlike, as if the building had been abandoned decades ago but was still haunted. I didn’t believe in ghosts, so I pushed through the door.

  The place was being cleared out. Everywhere I looked, cardboard boxes, plastic storage tubs, wooden crates were stacked beside doorways. Men and women in Army battle utilities were carrying armloads out towards an open doorway, like a colony of ants taking food to their queen. I moved through them, staring at each face, trying to find one I remembered. They were strangers. They didn’t meet my eyes, avoided looking at me, as if I were the ghost haunting them.

  I wandered out the front door into the morning light. It felt warmer out in the sun and I wondered what month it was.

  How did I not know what month it was?

  The trees were pine and oak crowding in around cracked pavement and square, unimaginative buildings and I could have been anywhere. Well, anywhere they didn’t have mountains because it looked pretty flat out here, not a hill or mountain to be seen over the tree line.

  Cargo trucks were idling impatiently in the street in front of the building, as if they were ready to run and resented having to wait for the line of soldiers loading boxes and crates and duffle bags into their covered beds. Each was guarded by at least a couple armed soldiers, visors shut on full-head helmets I didn’t remember seeing before. They carried standard M37 carbines, though. Some things never changed. I remembered how new those had used to seem when they finally replaced the old M4’s.

  Wait. How along ago was that? How can I remember that?

  “Captain Stout?”

  I turned at the call and saw an incredibly young second lieutenant jogging up to me, out of breath, holding her hat on against the breeze, her blond hair matted with sweat.

  “That’s me.”

  “Sir,” she said, seeming slightly uncomfortable calling me that, her eyes not quite willing to meet mine, “Colonel Solana wants to see you in his office.”

  “He still has an office?” I chuckled, but her face remained totally serious, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Okay, Lieutenant, lead on.”

  We walked with purposeful quickness, circumnavigating the building where I’d woken and heading for another, smaller, connected to the first with a covered walkway. No one stopped to salute either of us, even the ones who didn’t have their hands full. I thought that was curious, but I said nothing.

  “What’s the hurry?” I asked her. “Why’s everyone pulling out?”

  “The Colonel will give you all the information you need, sir.”

  Well, that was rude.

  I thought about pulling rank on her, but I’m a pilot and we aren’t too good at that. For pilots, rank is more about how few people can actually tell you what to do instead of how many people you can order around. So I just waited patiently and squeezed past at least a dozen more enlisted grunts pushing handcarts or operating motorized pallet jacks through the hallways of the smaller building.

  Colonel Solana’s office was still furnished, though it, too, was stuffed with packed boxes, the shelves and desk bare of any accoutrements or personal items. Solana himself was short and grey-haired and looked like a man who’d just come home from a three-day bender, with bags under his puffy eyes and deep lines in his face. He’d been typing a report into a tablet when we arrived at his open door and barely looked up at our presence. The lieutenant saluted him and announced our arrival, but Solana just waved her away.

  “Sit down, Stout,” he said, nodding toward the folding chair in front of his cheap, pressed-wood desk.

  Solana’s hands seemed to want to go back to typing and he visibly pulled them away from the keyboard and made himself face me.

  “Okay, we don’t have a lot of time. The Army is pulling out of here…”

  “Sorry, sir,” I interrupted, “but where is here?”

  He sighed, rubbing a hand over his eyes.

  “Shit, you still don’t remember eve
rything yet, do you? Why the hell did those stupid DoD fuckers drop you off when they fucking knew we didn’t have a use for you?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, didn’t even understand the question, so I didn’t say anything. Solana raised his hands palms out as if he were about to launch into a lecture.

  “Okay, I’ll make this quick, because we don’t have time for anything else. You’re a dupe, Stout. A genetic duplicate of the original Nathan Stout, who lived like thirty fucking years ago. He volunteered for the dupe program because the guy who came up with the mechs was his friend, Robert Franklin and he knew there was no other way the DoD would approve them with the radiation leakage from the isotope reactors.”

  You ever splashed ice-cold water in your face on a chilly morning, just to wake up, knowing how painful it’s going to be? That was me, right then. Everything he said was true, and I remembered it as he said it as if a veil had been lifted off my eyes.

  “But the program’s over now,” he went on, finally telling me something I didn’t know. “We just got our first batch of the new Hellfire mechs with the new radiation shielding. They finally cracked the problem and anyone can pilot a mech without risking dying of cancer in twenty years. You were the last of the bunch cloned before they shut it down and the stupid assholes at DoD shipped you out here like clockwork anyway after the last version of you bought it on a mission. But we’re pulling out of Maryland and there are already enough pilots where we’re heading, so we don’t need you.” He shrugged. “You got a choice here. You can either go with us and spend the rest of your life being a gopher stuck running whatever errands the Army can find for you, or you can take your discharge, along with a hell of a lot of back pay from your various incarnations, and stay here.”

  “You’re pulling out of here,” I said numbly. “The Russians are still pushing in, trying to take the eastern seaboard. What the hell would I do here?”

  “There’s a new program the DoD is marching out,” Solana told me. He seemed genuinely interested now, and I had the sense that if he were a younger man, he would have done it himself, although that might have been salesmanship. “It’s called Broken Arrow, and basically, you’d be a private military contractor working for them. You’d recruit your own team through a list of candidates who’ll receive free DoD training on piloting and maintaining and repairing Hellfires, and the government would supply you with weapons and ammo and spare parts and send you on assignments where needed.”

  I shook my head, confused.

  “How is that any different from just keeping the Army out here?” I wondered.

  “Because the government ain’t paying for medical treatment, insurance, retirement, housing, transportation, food, support…” He shrugged. “Need I go on? It’s a million times cheaper to pay you a contract fee, give you the weapons you need and let you take care of the rest.” He grinned, again with that sense of almost envy. “And you’ll be in charge. No one looking over your shoulder, no one telling you to police your mustache, tuck in your shirt, paint the fucking rocks in the parking lot.”

  I nodded slowly. It was a lot to take in, but…

  “You know, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

  And it wasn’t as if I had a long life or a retirement ahead of me anyway. The family I remembered, what little I remembered of them, was long gone, probably dead, certainly very old. And these people obviously thought of me as a freak, and not even a useful one anymore. Travelling with them out west so they could stick me cleaning toilets didn’t sound at all appealing.

  “Where do I sign up?” I asked him, the decision making itself for me.

  “Not here,” Solana said, gesturing around us at the disarray. “I’ll get you a flight out to the DoD liaison office in Philadelphia. They’re handling the Broken Arrow program from there.” He stood and so did I, not forgetting that bit of military courtesy despite all the other things the original Nate Stout had known and not passed down to me. “Good luck, Stout. Take the fight to those Russian bastards. Maybe you can finish what we started.”

  He offered a hand and I shook it. He was still being a salesman, closing the deal. I wondered exactly what I was buying into.

  Ten

  That bitch. Patty took a long swig of the moonshine, feeling the tiny, jagged cracks in the mouth of the used and used and reused bottle he’d had to pay a premium to take out of the bar. The home brew steamrolled down his throat and crashed with fiery finality in his stomach, numbing mercifully behind it, making it easier for the next hit.

  “That fucking bitch.” He said it aloud because there was no one around to hear it. He looked down at the remains of the Tagan U-mech. They’d hauled with them from the warehouse and it made a convenient seat, resting on a pallet on the tiled floor.

  He’d come back to the base, paying for a ride in a pedicab until he was close enough to walk because he hadn’t wanted to ride back in the truck with the others. He couldn’t look them in the face right now. He couldn’t believe Svetlana had taken the risk of showing up at the Fry. Was she monitoring him? Had she concealed a bug somewhere in his clothes when they were together? Did she know he’d been thinking of leaving? Why else would she be there?

  She’d denied it of course. Her words played in his mind over and over, like those After-Action Reviews Dix had always insisted they have after every mission.

  “I am here because our sources said you were headed here,” she’d told him, calm and unflappable in the face of his consternation. “I was concerned there might be a problem so I came to see if you required assistance.”

  “And what if they saw you?” he raged, waving his arms back toward the bar where the others were. “What if they see us together?”

  She snorted a laugh. “Then they’ll believe you are, as they say, punching outside your weight.”

  “You think this is fucking funny?” he demanded. “You told me you weren’t going to kill any of them! You promised me!”

  “I promised I would try not to kill them,” she corrected him. “If it were possible. But I am not always the one with the final say. You forget, Geoffrey, I too work for someone and they make the choice whether or not to listen to my recommendations.”

  “And their choice was to take me off the table?” He thumped a finger into his chest. “Am I not useful to your boss anymore? He thinks he can just toss me out with the trash and save himself the money?”

  “It was a golden opportunity. Everyone was gathered together, outside their mechs. We thought we could take what we needed and be out before there was any fighting. We did not anticipate the defense system.” She shot him a glare. “You did not inform us of the defense system.”

  “Because they don’t tell me shit like that!” he insisted. “That’s the sort of shit Dix and Nate handled! I’m not a tech or a mechanic, just a pilot!”

  “If you want to be important enough to my boss to not be disposable,” she said, cocking her head toward him, “it’s something you need to find out and pass on. Otherwise, why would he bother to keep you around, as you say? Why not just save himself the money and the trouble?”

  He took a deep breath and tried to control himself. Yelling at her would only draw more attention.

  “I will be in touch, Geoffrey. Until then, I suggest you learn as much as you can and endeavor to make yourself useful.”

  With that, he’d left her there and gone off to get drunk. Alone.

  “I’m better off alone,” he murmured at the mechs surrounding him, standing in silent judgement.

  “You always talk to yourself when you’re drunk?”

  Roach’s voice scared the shit out of him and he jumped up from the chest panel of the ruined Tagan, holding his bottle back defensively, as if someone was about to try to grab it from him.

  “How the fuck do you move so quiet?” he asked, finally spotting her coming in the doorway from the outer hall.

  “Everyone’s quiet when your head’s buzzing that loud, man,” Ramirez said with a wry grin, coming ou
t behind her.

  Nate was last. He didn’t look mad, just disappointed. He always seemed disappointed when he looked at Patty. Just like his mom.

  “Where’d you get off to, Patty?” Nate asked him, tone soft and even. “We were worried about you.”

  “I’m still here, man,” he muttered, not meeting the man’s eyes. He took another hit from the bottle. “Isn’t that all that’s important? That I stay here and pilot a mech for God and fucking country?”

  “Come on, Nate,” Roach urged him, motioning past him to the entrance to the offices where they’d made their quarters. “You aren’t going to get anything coherent out of him right now. Everything right now’s the alcohol talking.”

  “In wine is truth,” Nate said, eyes locked on Patty, boring into him. “I wonder what’s in moonshine?”

  “Bullshit, I’d guess,” Roach told him. She pushed him toward the door.

  Patty wanted to ask Nate if he was getting any of that, but he wasn’t quite drunk enough for that. Roach was dangerous. He chuckled at the thought, then laughed outright as the two of them disappeared through the interior doorway.

  “What’s so damn funny, Patty?” Ramirez asked him. He wasn’t leaving, was just standing there, hands on his hips, watching Patty like he expected him to start doing tricks. “You think it’s so fucking hilarious you’re alienating everyone? Dude, there’s only four of us now! We need to stick together and you keep pushing everyone away.”

  Patty shook his head. The Mule didn’t know. He couldn’t know. I should tell him.

  He took another drink, a long one. Everything was numb now, from head to toe, and the moonshine felt smoother going down.

  “Dix is dead because of me.” He’d blurted it out, but not the confession he’d meant. The words wouldn’t come.

  “That ain’t true, man,” Ramirez insisted, rubbing a hand over his neck as if the words made him feel uncomfortable. “There was nothing you could have done.”