Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘We do not give up,’ Captain Lewis told Stone, bellowing over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. He had a strong accent. ‘This is what we dream of for fifty years. You break your word, but we do not care. We fight anyway. We fight and we win.’

  Tom clapped the young officer on the shoulder. ‘You believe the balls on this guy?’

  ‘If you don’t help us, we fight on our own,’ Captain Lewis said. ‘What else can we do?’

  They passed through a security check into a compound where Jeeps and powder-blue sedans with military plates were parked in front of a fieldstone farmhouse. A line of soldiers carried stacks of accordion files and sacks of shredded paper out of the farmhouse to feed fires burning in a row of oil drums. Ashy curls and flecks sifted out of the cold air like snow. Off to one side, a small black helicopter squatted beneath its drooping rotor blades.

  Tom Waverly told Stone that the helicopter had brought in the Old Man about an hour ago.

  ‘What’s Knightly doing here?’

  The Old Man, Dick Knightly, had been in charge of the Central Intelligence Group’s Directorate of Special Operations ever since it had been set up in 1968. He’d lost his job two days ago, when President Carter had been sworn into office and his reorganisation of the CIG - the Company - had taken effect.

  ‘He delivered four helicopters to Baines,’ Tom said. ‘Crop dusters rigged with rocket launchers and machine guns.’

  ‘Jesus, Tom. They could put him in jail for a stunt like that.’

  ‘He has paperwork showing they were donated by a wealthy patriot. Watch out for him,’ Tom said, as Stone climbed out of the Jeep. ‘He might try to feed you a line about how us old-school guys will need to stick together because bad times are coming down. Don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘I quit Special Ops, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, and the Old Man got himself fired. But he still thinks he can call on his cowboy angels whenever he needs some help.’

  ‘What kind of help? What is he into?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I’m giving you some friendly advice, Adam. Don’t try to take advantage.’

  ‘Why don’t you come inside with me? This thing I have to do won’t take long. Then we can talk—’

  ‘I have some business of my own,’ Tom said, and gave Stone a sloppy salute. Before Stone could say anything, Captain Lewis popped the handbrake and the Jeep sped off with a slippery squeal of tyres.

  Stone pulled out his cell phone, called Bruce Ellis, and told him that he was worried that Tom was planning to do something spectacularly stupid. ‘He just rode away from Baines’s HQ with one of the Free American officers.’

  ‘I don’t have any jurisdiction inside the camp,’ Bruce said.

  ‘You have security camera coverage. Can you keep track of him for me? I want to talk to him again as soon as I’ve finished with Baines.’

  General Baines’s aide was waiting on the porch of the farmhouse, flanked by two soldiers. He insisted on patting Stone down for concealed weapons, asked him to open the briefcase.

  ‘What’s in the briefcase is for General Baines’s eyes only,’ Stone said.

  The aide stared at Stone and said with frosty disdain, ‘It is not necessary for me to see, because I know already what you bring.’

  ‘So how about letting me do my job,’ Stone said. ‘Or are we going to stand out here in the cold and keep your general waiting?’

  With the soldiers at his back, he followed the aide into the farmhouse’s front parlour. Blinds pulled down over the windows glowed with the last of the sunlight. Lamps dropped pools of light at a table where men talked in low voices over a tiling of maps, on the desk where a sergeant was typing with two fingers on an IBM Selectric. A grey cumulus of cigarette and cigar smoke drifted under the sagging horsehair plaster ceiling. The air was hot and oppressive, stale with the weary sense of failed intrigue.

  General Wendell Baines was sitting in an armchair in a corner of the crowded room. A short, straight-backed man with a lined and deeply tanned face and crew-cut white hair, dressed in neatly pressed camouflage fatigues, he studied Stone and said at last, ‘I’ve seen you before, son.’

  ‘We met at a briefing at the State Department, sir. Two weeks ago.’

  Stone was sweating inside his overcoat, but he couldn’t take it off because his briefcase was cuffed to his wrist.

  ‘I remember now,’ Baines said. ‘You were with the incoming Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Turner. How do you like your new boss, by the way? Is he the right man for the job?’

  ‘It’s too early to say, sir.’

  ‘The impression I took away from our brief meeting is that he’s the kind of unimaginative martinet more interested in the state of the cutlery in the canteen than in the morale of his men. Well, I suppose we must get this thing done. In the last week I have many meetings with members of your government and armed forces, and I talked on the telephone to your Admiral Turner this morning. He confirmed his government’s position and told me to expect you. He told me what you would be carrying. Show me, please. Let us complete this formality.’

  Everyone in the room was watching them. The sergeant had stopped typing, and Stone’s former boss, Dick Knightly, was standing in the doorway, lean and tough as whipcord in his trademark tweed suit and yellow waistcoat. He looked straight at Stone, then inclined his head and whispered something to the muscular man who stood just behind him.

  Stone unlocked the handcuffs, set the briefcase on a side table, worked its combination locks, and took out a thick cream envelope printed with the Presidential seal. The aide intercepted the envelope and slit it open in a single fluid motion, extracted and unfolded the single sheet of paper, and with a click of his heels presented it to Baines.

  The general glanced at it, then told Stone, ‘I have great respect for Floyd Davis. He is a man of vision and integrity. He sees an eternal chain of Americas connected to each other by your Turing gates, each freed of oppression, each spreading its democratic influence to other histories. This operation, which means everything to me and my men, was part of that vision. Your new President, I don’t know him too well, but I see that he is at least a man of his word. He promised that he would withdraw tactical support for this thing of ours if he was elected, and this letter confirms it.’

  The men in the room gave a kind of murmuring sigh.

  ‘He requests that we consider standing down the entire operation, ’ General Baines said, raising his voice. He was speaking to everyone in the room now, but his gaze was still locked on Stone’s face. ‘He offers us repatriation. I say what I have been saying this past week. I say the hell with him. I say that we take orders from our President, not from this spineless upstart. And our President honoured me with the task of leading my men into war, not away from it.’

  Several officers began to clap. The general silenced them with a raised hand.

  ‘Mr Stone, you may tell your new Director of Central Intelligence that we’ll strike at twenty hundred hours, as already agreed. I will not betray the loyalty of my men; nor will I throw away this opportunity. Besides, I already have guerrillas in place. They are preparing to knock out much of the local air force and military, and they are under a radio blackout. I can’t recall them.’

  From the door, Knightly said, ‘The gates will be opened on schedule, General. Carter doesn’t have the guts to cancel the entire operation.’

  ‘Of course they’ll be opened,’ General Baines said. ‘We are unwelcome guests, and it is the easiest way to be rid of us.’

  ‘I’ll see that they’ll remain open as long as possible,’ Knightly said.

  ‘That’s very good of you, Dick, and I hope you won’t get into any trouble for it. But I do not intend to come back.’ General Baines looked at Stone and said, ‘I believe you have my answer. Go tell your boss.’

  Knightly’s bodyguard intercepted Stone on his way out of the farmhouse and told him that Mr Knightly wanted to have a word.

  ‘Mr Knightly a
nd I have nothing to say to each other.’

  ‘He told me to tell you that it’s about Tom Waverly.’ The bodyguard had about six inches and a hundred pounds on Stone, and wore a black suit and a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck.

  Stone pictured the Jeep carrying Tom and the Free American captain speeding down the hill toward the Turing gates, and said to the bodyguard, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Flynn. Albert Flynn.’

  ‘Are you with the Company, Albert?’

  ‘No, sir. I resigned when they fired Mr Knightly.’

  ‘So you work for Mr Knightly now.’

  ‘Yes, sir. But if you’re going to ask me what this is about, I don’t know.’

  ‘Does Tom Waverly work for Mr Knightly?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Albert Flynn had a pretty good poker face.

  Stone thought for a moment, told Flynn that he would talk to Knightly once he’d made a couple of phone calls, and walked outside into the cold, floodlit compound.

  He talked to Bruce Ellis first, then made an encrypted call to Bud Goodrich, the special assistant responsible for the disposal of SWIFT SWORD. He told Goodrich that the letter had been delivered, gave a summary of Baines’s response, and said that the general was committed to the execution of SWIFT SWORD.

  ‘You can stand down,’ Goodrich said. ‘I’ll expect a report on my desk oh nine hundred tomorrow, but there’s no need to pad it.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Stone said. ‘Dick Knightly is here. He was with Baines when I delivered the letter, and I believe he brought four modified helicopters to help the Free American cause.’

  ‘I know. Some gung-ho cattle baron fronted the papers.’

  ‘Do you know what he’s up to? Is he being watched?’

  ‘He’s showboating, making a political point about honouring promises. Don’t worry about it, Stone. It’s none of your business. Your work is done.’

  ‘Right,’ Stone said, although he knew that it wasn’t.

  Albert Flynn was waiting on the porch of the farmhouse. Stone walked up to him and said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

  Dick Knightly stood at the edge of a steep drop beyond the farmhouse, hands clasped at his back as he studied the army assembled in front of the Turing gates down in the valley. ‘I’m sorry to see you reduced to running errands for chair-warming bureaucrats like Bud Goodrich, ’ he said. ‘You deserve better.’

  ‘With respect, sir, that’s a cheap shot,’ Stone said.

  ‘It’s my honest opinion. I know you had a hard time of it on your last mission for Special Ops, and I don’t blame you for opting for a nice easy job in the DCI’s office, but frankly, son, you’d be better off in an insurance company. It’s the same kind of work, and at least you’d get a gold clock at the end of it. Speaking of retirement, I hope you’re not too attached to your new job. Stansfield Turner was a classmate of Carter’s at Annapolis, and Carter put him in office for just one reason: to cut us off at the knees. Word is, he’s going to open the Company’s cupboards and ransack the family jewels. Clandestine operations, black ops, executive orders - they’ll smear us with everything we had to do for the good of the Real and all the other Americas. And don’t think that your new position is going to save your lily-white ass from a reckoning for your past sins. If he thinks it expedient, Turner will throw you to the wolves without a second thought.’

  ‘Is that a warning, sir?’

  ‘It’s sound advice,’ Knightly said, and extracted a cigar and a silver penknife from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and sliced off the end of the cigar and plugged it into his mouth.

  Down in the valley, one of the pair of giant Turing gates blinked on, its circular maw suddenly lit by the reflected light of the setting sun. The familiar deep hum of the gate filled the dark air and sharpened Stone’s anxiety, but he knew it would do no good to ask straight out about Tom Waverly. Knightly would come to that in his own sweet time, or not at all. So Stone stepped on his impatience and waited quietly while his old boss returned the penknife to his pocket and took out a Second Infantry Zippo lighter and snapped it open and bathed the end of the cigar in its flame. The little finger and ring finger of Knightly’s right hand were missing, lost to frostbite during the Battle of Moscow. Like many senior Company men, he was a veteran of the Russian Campaigns.

  ‘I must have seen hundreds of gates open,’ Knightly said, ‘but it still makes my blood race.’

  ‘I thought this wasn’t kicking off until twenty hundred.’

  ‘That’s when the main force goes through. But the gates have been opening and closing all day, retrieving scouts and sending in advance parties.’

  A Jeep shot out of the blood-red mirror and swerved to a halt at the bottom of the ramp. On the other side of the gate, in an alternate version of America under Communist rule, an observer would have seen the same vehicle vanishing into a shining circle of light hung in thin air. A moment later, the mirror vanished like a burst soap bubble and the deep, ground-shaking hum faded away as technicians returned the Turing gate to its resting state.

  ‘The poor bastards,’ Knightly said. ‘They spent fifty years in exile, hoping all the while that the Communist government would somehow collapse so that they could return home. And then we appeared out of nowhere and told them that we were willing to give them the chance to take the fight directly to the Communists, that if things went wrong they could disappear back into our reality, regroup, and try again. Who could resist a deal like that? We were the answer to their prayers. So we brought them through the mirror, we armed and trained them, and we helped them gather intel and work up a credible Order of Battle. And then, just when they’re fired up and ready to go, we turn around and kick ’em square in the ass.’

  He drew on his cigar, looking down at the army arrayed in the floodlit dusk.

  ‘Baines is an exceptional soldier, but this isn’t like George Washington and Valley Forge. He isn’t trying to evict an overextended colonial power. He’s going toe-to-toe with an entrenched government that exercises complete control over an entire nation. Even if he and his men manage to melt into the countryside and start up a guerrilla campaign, it isn’t likely anything’ll come of it.’

  ‘“If anything can happen in the multiverse, it will happen somewhere.” ’

  ‘No use quoting that at me, son. I may have invented that little bon mot to screw funding out of the Senate, but it doesn’t mean I believe it. Oh, I don’t deny it’s possible that SWIFT SWORD will split history into a hundred separate sheaves, and Baines may defeat the Commies in one or two of them. But mostly he won’t. The bad outcomes will outnumber the good outcomes. The sum of human happiness will be diminished.’ Knightly blew a plume of smoke into the cold dark air. ‘Did you follow the election?’

  ‘I know who won, sir.’

  ‘It was a true contest of thesis and antithesis. Davis is a visionary; Carter is an opportunist. Davis supports continued expansion, locating new Americas in need of aid and enlightenment, going to war to bring them the freedom they deserve, carrying the flame of freedom to every corner of the known multiverse. Carter wants an end to what he calls military adventurism, an end to exploration of anything but so-called wild sheaves. The difference is as clear as day and night, right and left, good and bad. Do you know who I supported?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was Carter.’

  ‘The fact is, I think both of them are wrong. Carter is wrong about ending exploration, and Davis is wrong about using military force to expand our influence. War is a blunt tool, it’s costly, and if it goes badly there are huge political costs. In short, as Davis has so recently discovered, no democratic government can maintain a permanent war state. The sad thing is, it should never have come to this. We didn’t need to fight all those wars. I’ve always argued that the best way to topple a government is by covert action. With just a few good men applying force at exactly the right place, you can do anything. And if you fail, no one has to know about it. I
t’s how we started out, it’s what the Company does best, it’s what we should be doing right now. How about you, son? Do you still have fire in your belly? Are you still ready to lay down your life for your country?’

  ‘If I didn’t know better, sir, I’d think that you were trying to recruit me for some kind of covert op,’ Stone said.

  Knightly looked straight at him, the same heavy-lidded stare that Stone had endured when he’d first reported for duty in the makeshift headquarters of the newly created Directorate of Special Operations, some fourteen years ago. Marsha Mason, the only woman in the first batch of Special Op field officers, had once said that it was like having your soul X-rayed.

  ‘You always were the smart one, Adam. Not the most intelligent of my little band of cowboy angels, not by any means, but the most savvy. As a matter of fact, I do need your help, but not for any operation, covert or otherwise. No, I want you to go to the assistance of your friend Tom Waverly. He went through the mirror about half an hour ago with one of the advance units . . . You don’t seem surprised.’

  ‘I talked to Tom before I came up here. I was pretty sure that he’d try something like this, so I asked perimeter security to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Ah yes, your old friend Colonel Ellis.’ Knightly smiled around his cigar. ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it? What would you say if I gave you the chance to go after Tom and bring him back?’

  ‘Is that an order, sir?’

  Stone was having a hard time hiding his relief. When Bruce Ellis had told him that Tom had gone through the mirror, he’d immediately decided to try to rescue him from the consequences of his stupid bravado, even if it meant chasing after him through the middle of a battlefield. He’d agreed to talk to Knightly only because he needed all the help he could get, and suspected that the Old Man wanted to save Tom for reasons of his own.