The Doomfarers of Coramonde

by Brian Daley

  Van Duyn and Gabrielle were already there, and when the other two entered, they both looked strangely at the Prince, and Springbuck had the impression that they’d been arguing.

  He perched on a stool while Andre drew obscure diagrams on the floor over a pentagrammic inscription and Gabrielle read in an inflectionless tongue from a codex of unguessable origin.

  Van Duyn was charging the braziers which were placed in each comer of the room; seeing the Prince, he asked, “Well, boy, do you want to stay on with us? I intend to see Yardiff Bey thrown down. I owe him that.”

  Springbuck answered haughtily, not liking Van Duyn or his tone of address. “I will—accept your aid in regaining my throne, if that is what you’re offering.”

  Gabrielle laughed again, but this time the outlander was the butt of it and he colored with fury.

  “Stupid brat! The days of throne and crowns are over here! D’you think we’re toppling your brainless brother just to replace him with you, you spineless coward?”

  Springbuck restrained himself no longer. He lurched forward and grabbed a fistful of the scholar’s shirt with his left hand, preparatory to striking him; but before he could, the man seized his left wrist with surprising strength and in some clever, rapid manner twisted it so that Surehand’s son was forced to his knees, wrist painfully doubled over and in real danger of breaking. The Prince cried aloud in shock.

  The deCourteneys were both watching now. “You must be quiet,” Andre reproved. “We dare weighty things here; we must concentrate to the fullest. Edward, please take your place.”

  The outlander unwillingly released the Prince, who locked eyes with him in mutual agreement that the issue wasn’t settled and resisted the impulse to cut him down on the spot. The scholar and the deCourteneys stepped to various prearranged locations among the occult designs on the floor.

  Springbuck held his throbbing wrist to his chest and flushed with shame. He was sure that he had lost face among them irredeemably, and regretted most that Gabrielle had seen it. Then his gaze met with hers, and he read a rare message there, a soft and feminine one of sorrow that he had been hurt and worsted. He tried to fit this with what he knew of her already and made his first dim start at understanding the enigma that was Gabrielle deCourteney.

  “Your Grace,” she said softly, “please stand there—yes, there in that circle of protection, that any powers liberated here work no harm upon you.”

  He stepped into it, a small circle picked out in dust that looked like crushed emerald. Flexing his fingers, he decided that his wrist had not been badly sprained. Van Duyn, white-faced, set the braziers to burning.

  Springbuck noticed with curiosity the contrast between Andre and his sister: he with broad torso, bowed legs and fat, jiggling belly and buttocks and she mystically lovely. She posed unconsciously, weight on one firm leg, the firelight sending ruby combers breaking across her hair. Springbuck felt a desire rising in him, one he’d not wished to acknowledge.

  Old Van Duyn, now, was an angular sort of fellow whose muscles had begun to show the slack of age, but with considerable sinew about him, as the Prince now knew to his discomfort, and moved with the ease of fitness.

  As the unusual trio—unusual foursome, he amended, for surely he was as oddly met as they—moved to their tasks, Andre took the lavaliere from his neck and took his sword from its scabbard. Unscrewing the pommel knob, he dropped the chain and Calundronius into the hollow there, then replaced the cap.

  “Within this container Calundronius is itself nullified for a time,” he explained, laying the sword in a corner.

  He took his place again and he, Gabrielle and Van Duyn began a unified chanting in some monotonous language, unlike that of the codex and somehow much more disquieting.

  The windows were curtained, but some daylight had penetrated prior to the incantation. Now, though, it was as if all light was forced from the room save the glow in the braziers and a single candle in the center of the pentacle. They were in darkest night and a bone chill had taken over; Springbuck couldn’t suppress the conviction that they had somehow left the room and arrived elsewhere, in a place where it was beyond his ability to orient himself or apprehend reality.

  Gabrielle threw her hands over her head and her entire body began to glow with a blue light that pulsed and flickered.

  An amorphous shadow rose amid the runes, expanding from the floor in a manner which struck the Prince as unwilling. He had the distinct impression that it was listening to the chanting, that it scrutinized him briefly and then ignored him, and that it received instructions with a hateful resentment.

  Gabrielle and the scholar were silent now, though the woman still radiated the eerie aura and gave the appearance of being in a trance. Andre changed his tone from a chant to a steady, placid mode of speech. Springbuck thought that he assumed the attitude of a schoolmaster assigning a complex task to a defiant and not-terribly-bright student.

  Without warning the darkness rolling within the pentacle was throwing itself from one side of its invisible confinement to the other, straining to break free and destroy the mortals in the room. Andre spoke a syllable of duress in a voice fearsome and completely unlike anything Springbuck had heard from him before. The thing within the pentacle was instantly quiet.

  Andre issued a last instruction and, with an almost vocal snarl, the being was gone. Light and warmth returned to the chamber.

  Andre stepped from his spot to recover Calundronius and Springbuck noticed that he was bathed in sweat and that his pudgy hands trembled badly.

  “Well,” asked the Prince as Gabrielle began to reorder the room, “where is our defender? Where is this fabulous metal war machine?”

  Van Duyn, extinguishing a brazier, replied, “Our . . . unwilling benefactor has gone to arrange for its transportation here. It wouldn’t do to have the contraption materialize in this room, so Andre specified that it be brought to the meadow outside the castle. If it’s moving when it arrives here, it could do damage within the confines of a room or the bailey.”

  The scholar and the wizard hurried off together to watch for the fruit of their handiwork, chattering importantly in the way of experimenters everywhere. Springbuck shifted his attention to Gabrielle as she bound up her hair with rawhide throngs.

  She came to him where he stood nursing his wrist and there was much, much in the glances they exchanged.

  “I—I knew that you and Edward would come to conflict, knew it in my heart when I first saw you,” she told him, her eyes still holding his. She took his injured wrist between cool, elegant hands.

  “Not hurt seriously,” she decided after exploring it gently with her fingertips. “The pain will leave it soon.”

  They stood quite motionless so, for a moment.

  His gaze was first to fall away.

  “I suppose we should be on the ramparts with the others,” he murmured,

  Her hands left his and he was immediately sorry he had spoken. He would have continued, for there were more words that he wished to say to her, but he was forestalled by a staccato blast from the distant meadow.

  PART II

  APC

  Chapter Seven

  We will ride ’em, we’ll collide ’em, and we’d drive ’em straight through hell. We’re the Chosen Few who ride the APC’s.

  —From “APC’s,” an unofficial song of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regt., U.S. Army

  The metal monster forged along to the squeaking and clanking of full-track treads, the reddish dust of the anhydrous dry season spuming behind it, doing maybe forty-per on the flat, straight road from Phu Loi.

  If we were in a convoy, thought Gil MacDonald to himself as he stood in the track commander’s cupola, I’d be digging that shit out of my teeth right now. But I’d feel better.

  The vehicle he rode was known by assorted names: “Armored Calvary Assault Vehicle,” “track,” or “Armored Personnel Carrier,” but was most often referred to as an “APC.” He shifted his weight at the hips with automa
tic ease to compensate for the rigorous swaying and tossing of the journey; the rhythms of his mechanical environment had long since become part of the substance of life, like the rolling which fosters sea legs.

  Silly idea of the Old Man’s, he reflected, to have the crew come into base camp to pick him up instead of waiting for a chopper to ferry him out to the forward area. Still, it pleased the twenty-one-year-old sergeant in a personal way to know that Captain Cronkite wanted him back on the job immediately after his return from R and R. The run forward wasn’t such a long one, but enemy activity was on the upswing in the wake of Operation Big Sur.

  He resettled his headset under his helmet liner and steel pot, not as comfortable an arrangement as a crew helmet, but crew helmets don’t stop shrapnel too well either, and so, just as they endured hot, heavy, fiberglass flak jackets, he and his men opted for safety. He squinted around him through the searing heat that floated in waves from the baked road.

  At least, he knew, Alpha-Nine, his APC, was topped off with fuel and stocked with ammo. He ran his eye over the .50-caliber machine gun on its mount before him, satisfied that it had been well maintained in his five-day absence. He knew, too, that Handelman, Olivier and Pomorski were sitting on the open cargo hatch behind him, scanning the terrain as he was. Sometimes he found himself thinking of them in simple terms of rates and fields of fire, the first two as M-60 machine guns and the latter an M-79 grenade launcher. They were his friends, but they were part of the APC, just as he was, the parts that guided it and reached out from it to kill. Spend enough time in one of these things, he mused, and maybe you’d become integrated altogether, stop thinking of yourself as a human being.

  The big V-8 engine pulled them briskly, equal to operating conditions even in Southeast Asia. He blinked sweat from his eyes and made a mental note to grab a salt tablet the first time they stopped. A sudden hissing from the radio brought him back from a brief reminiscence of his stay in Bangkok.

  “Steel Probe one niner, Steel Probe one niner, this is Steel Probe six, Steel Probe six, over.”

  A cultured voice, it carried the faintest hint of the Southern Black drawl. Wondering why Captain Cronkite would want him right now, Gil flipped the transmit switch on his headset.

  “Steel Probe six, this is Steel Probe one niner, over.”

  “Steel Probe one niner, this is Steel Probe six. Halt and remain at your present location. Ahh, Steel Probe one zero will rendezvous with you there in approximately one five mikes. Do you roger? Over.”

  “Steel Probe six, this is Steel Probe one niner, roger your last transmission, over.”

  “This is Steel Probe six, out.”

  Gil flipped his microphone over to intercom and told Al Woods to pull the APC over to one side of the road for the fifteen-minute wait. He didn’t like the stretch they’d stopped in; the grass grew high and there were dense stands of rubber trees nearby, abandoned to undergrowth. He forgot all about his salt tablet. But the rendezvous wasn’t too far off, and he didn’t know from which direction the other APC would come. Steel Probe ten would be Bronco Jackson and Gunfighter, Alpha-Seven, maybe the second-best track and crew in the 32d Armored Calvary Regiment.

  Of course, Gil MacDonald and his squadmates, known collectively as the Nine-Mob, knew past all question that no better track flattened turf than Lobo, their own Alpha-Nine.

  Still keeping watch as Woods killed the engine, he said conversationally, “News reports about Operation Big Sur had me worried about you clowns.”

  “So,” answered Pomorski from behind, “whip some current events to us. We been beatin’ the boonies for a week; haven’t seen a Stars & Stripes, even.”

  Gil dug a late copy of the American serviceman’s newspaper out of the pouch pocket of his jungle fatigues. He opened and began to read it, glancing over the top of the page to check out the landscape with nervous caution.

  Getting shaky, he chided himself, letting the Shortimer Syndrome get to you.

  He read: “An ancient tactic in the timeless business of war was employed this week by commanders of the U.S. Army’s Second Field Forces as a part of the ongoing effort to maintain the safety of the Saigon Capital Military District.

  “In simplest terms, the maneuver was a well-coordinated trap, tempting bait with crushing jaws poised around it. The bait in this case was from the 32d Armored Cavalry Regiment.

  “Counterintelligence sources permitted the compromise of information concerning a convoy route and schedule. The convoy, to be made up of thin-skin cargo vehicles, rolled on time, but was actually composed of the 32d’s durable 1st Squadron.

  “As hoped, Charlie showed up to make his kill on easy pickings promised by the bogus rumor, but received a rude shock upon springing his ambush. With lethal precision, assembled APCs and tanks turned their firepower on the Communist infantry, repelling them and killing many while close air strikes were called in to F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers already in the air.

  “Airmobile troops were flown in by helicopter immediately after the last strikes to support mop-up operations. In all, over forty-three enemy dead were confirmed by body count.

  “1st Squadron Commander Colonel J. B. Woolmun—”

  Gil stopped reading and looked up. “Hey, anybody want to hear a quote from Wooly?” The mildest reply he received was to the effect that the colonel had Oedipal tendencies.

  “What journalism washout wrote that?” Pomorski wanted to know. “And how can a timeless business have ancient tactics?”

  Gil folded the paper and stared across the quiet countryside before him, gnawing his lower lip, nerves still on edge. Then they got to him, and he thumbed the transmit switch.

  “Steel Probe six, Steel Probe six, this is Steel Probe one niner, Steel Probe one niner, over.”

  He repeated the call twice, drawing no response whatever, with the same results when he tried to raise Bronco Jackson. Stuffing the newspaper back into his pocket, he snapped, “Light it up, Al. Everybody look sharp, we’re haulin’ balls out of here. I got the boss five-by on his last call and now I can’t raise him or the boys on Gunfighter. I never asked the CO to authenticate his message because I thought I recognized his voice, but it doesn’t sound like him to stick us out here and wander out of radio contact.”

  They were all alert now, suspicious as wild animals. Sure, they can tell something’s wrong, just like me. You show up at a convoy point and there’re no kids or mama-sans around or at night on the perimeter you hear the cans you’ve tied to the hurricane wire start clanking. Or something like this happens. Ice on your backbone and knots in your belly.

  Woods’ hands were firm and quick on the laterals, the braking levers, but moisture covered his brown face. While the three machine gunners searched anxiously around them, Pomorski, nosing his grenade launcher apprehensively this way and that, played what he called “tailgate trombone,” eyes-behind on the rear hatch.

  They’d reached a stand of particularly high grass when the ambush came. Later, Gil was thankful that Charles Cong hadn’t come up with a land mine for the occasion; the radiotelephone deception implied that someone had been planning it for a while. The enemy op’s imitation of Captain Cronkite’s voice had been extremely adept. Probably the ambush of Lobo was a trial, a tryout preparatory for a more ambitious trick.

  He never knew why the first RPG-4 rocket missed. At that range Lobo was a sure hit unless the man handling the launcher was awfully unsteady, the only explanation he could think of.

  The rocket sizzled a foot or so in front of the APC and exploded to the left and rear, sending shrapnel spanging off the cupola and splash shields.

  The clout of an AK-47 opened up to the right. Gil brought the .50 around and he and Handelman, who manned the right-side M-60, opened up on the deep grass in blind reply, the slower base boom of the sergeant’s piece coupled with the rapid tattoo of Handelman’s weapon. The man who’d fired the RPG-4 was cut to bits, but they couldn’t spot the covering man with the AK.

  A gut conviction gri
pped Gil. As Woods sent the APC shooting forward, he traversed his gun to the left and watched for a backup man. He missed the parting of the grasses caused by the extension of the second launcher, and so did Olivier, for all their intense surveillance. Gil caught the movement out of the corner of his eye only in the last, irrevocable moment. The man had waited until they were slightly past him and he had no worry about hitting his comrades. The Vietnamese stood up and took quick, competent aim on Lobo’s broad side. Even as he wrenched at the .50 Gil knew with dismal certainty that neither his gun nor Olivier’s could come to bear on the track killer in the half second available to them before the rocket was sped on its way, small and invisibly swift and incredibly destructive. There was only time to know mournfully that the next instant would see the missile punch its way through Alpha-Nine and destroy them all, men and machine.

  All at once the small brown man who was about to dispatch their deaths from the tube on his shoulder was flung sideways, bent double. Another cover man with an AK-47 stood up in surprise, looking to Lobo’s rear, then collapsed in a paroxysm of pain, leg flying from under him at the sudden insistent pounding of a .50 machine gun. Gil swiveled his head in the direction of the fire, his rear.

  Over Pomorski’s shoulder he could see, perhaps ten yards behind Lobo, another APC. It was layered with mud and dust, sides gouged and apparently scorched by flame, its wooden trim vane crushed and splintered. Bronco Jackson? Impossible; the transmissions about Jackson had been a hoax.

  The track commander in the following APC raised a clenched fist to Gil, who returned it gratefully. He couldn’t read any unit markings on the newcomer because of its battered condition, nor had he heard it or been aware of its approach until its main gun had opened up.

  He turned back to the grips of his own .50, moving to cover the opposite field of fire, when an intense chill passed over him. Lobo’s surroundings were blotted out by a world of gray, 360 degrees without content, gone almost the instant it appeared. Alpha-Nine, 32d ACR, U.S. Army Vietnam, was plunging over a green sweep of lush meadow, VC and Asian road nowhere to be seen.