“Do me a favor,” I said. She paused, the air shimmering next to me as she waited. “If I don’t make it, take my partner with you and get him back to Bangkok.”
“Done. But most likely none of us will make it out. Our job wasn’t so much to patrol as it was to find the leftover Chinese scouts and take out as many as we could. To buy Lucy and Margaret more time. We’re a penal unit, and all of us have to prove our courage before we can be accepted among our families again because we all hesitated when ordered into the trenches.”
“How do you prove your courage?”
“By dying or by killing everything. Everyone.”
The sight of her footprints forming in the mud with no sign of boots made the night dreamlike. Already the dot marking Hiroshi’s location was speeding into the rice paddies, tracing a path that followed one of the low dikes, and I stood to take one step before I froze. What was I doing? The dike closest to me stretched out, disappearing into the darkness beyond my infrared range so that it looked as if the soil dissolved in the distance, and I clenched the flame unit until my hands hurt. They were out there. The jungle urged me onward, sending a gentle kind of electricity through the roots and into the mud so it traveled upward in my legs and forced me to move despite the terror. The bush wanted this to happen, and it always got what it wanted, so to hesitate wouldn’t buy me a different outcome from the one already fated, and the mission was out there, pulling at me while the bush pushed from behind.
The dike soil was soft and gave under my weight as I crept forward. Wind blew across the paddy. My motion detectors pinged when the grasses waved in the breeze so that I froze trying to pinpoint a target until giving up with a touch of embarrassment for having reacted; Hiroshi was on a dike parallel to mine, and I had just moved forward again, trying to catch up and even out the advance, when the Chinese opened fire.
Fléchette tracers reached out for us from the far side of the clearing, but instead of two, the firing came from at least seven locations and slammed into my shoulder so that I spun in place before plunging into the black water of the paddy; the dike provided some concealment for a moment, and I cursed when the initial shock wore off.
“Suit penetration in upper right suit area,” said Kristen. “Minor damage to your shoulder, Lieutenant.”
“Call me Bug!” I shouted. “How bad is it?”
“Three fléchettes punctured your tissues. They exited, causing minor skin tears, but there is little chance of damage to bone and a high probability that you can continue—although with discomfort, Bug. Air filters are saturated, and air intakes are currently blocked; switching to emergency oxygen.”
Something splashed behind me. Tracers still flicked overhead, and I kept my head down, but with my back in the paddy and the huge cloak and flamethrower tanks lodged in the mud underwater, there was no way for me to get up or move. The splashes got louder. I raised the firing tube and pointed it toward the dike I had fallen off, just as my motion detectors showed three of them, Chinese scouts, leaping over the low dirt ridge and toward me. I squeezed the firing lever. Compressed gas propellant hissed at the same time the igniter sparked to send a jet of flame that swung as I screamed, my anger at not being able to move boiling over. The fire touched the first one. Although it landed in the paddy with a loud smack, the water did nothing to extinguish the flames, and from the corner of my eye, I saw the scout roll in an attempt to put them out, just to find them reignite as soon as it came back into the air. The gel splashed against the second one, then the third, and both fell into the ankle-high water next to me to burn, while steam curled up, bright white on infrared.
After that it was quiet. I tried to dislodge my tanks from the paddy mud but after a minute had managed to work myself deeper and gave up, switching onto the general frequency.
“Kristen, translate this into Japanese,” I whispered. “Hiroshi.”
There was a moment of static before he answered. His voice was quiet. “Lieutenant?”
“I got three. How about you?”
“Three also,” he said.
“That means there’s one more. Any way you can work your way over to my location? I’m stuck in the paddy mud and can’t move.”
“No, Lieutenant, I’m sorry. One of the scouts took my legs off before I could kill him.”
The news shook me. I imagined Hiroshi out there alone on one of the dikes as he looked up at the sky, bleeding out with the threat of one more Chinese soldier who by now had stopped firing, probably to move in after us. I tried to dislodge myself again, grunting with the frustration of having landed in something that resembled quicksand, but there was no way to get out.
“Hiroshi, you still there?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
I sighed, and my hands shook with the thought of what I was about to do. “Stay still. Your cloak works and will keep you hidden. I’m going to draw the last one to me and try to burn him out.”
“No, Lieutenant.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“He is here already. Ten feet away and moving in. Death and faith.”
There was a loud splash in the distance, and I tried once more to free my tanks until I heard a loud pop followed by the roaring of a thermite grenade, the intense heat of which turned the sky toward Hiroshi so bright that my infrared overloaded. The man screamed. Once more the field went quiet, and I lay on my back, not sure what to think anymore.
Ten minutes later, something splashed on either side of me, and two sets of hands grabbed my cloak and arms, rocking me back and forth until there was a loud sucking sound when my tanks exited the mud. I tried not to scream with the pain from my shoulder.
“Nice job,” said Ji.
The Japanese woman clicked in. “Hiroshi is dead. He killed the last scout with a grenade and will be remembered with honor.”
“This is crazy,” Jihoon said. “Why don’t you guys use more nanomaterial to deactivate the Chinese chameleon skins? Don’t you have any grenades with the stuff inside or something?”
“No. The nanomaterial is too difficult to make, and we used it all in last night’s attack. We’re wasting time here, Lieutenants. It’s time to keep moving. More Chinese will come now that they’ve lost contact with ten horrors.”
We crossed the remaining section of the paddies quickly, making a beeline for the jungle canopy. But something had changed the bush—maybe because of Hiroshi. I wanted to reach the tree line as quickly as possible because the jungle now promised safety, and the obscurity that I’d once cursed seemed a blessing since it would hide us from the things that now hunted us instead of hiding atrocities. Hiroshi’s death had been a thing of beauty. Maybe it was because I’d imagined it without seeing a thing, but he’d not sounded scared at all, just detached, and in the end had made a calculated decision to remove a threat with the last strength available. Hiroshi had been a perfect man. He’d be eaten by the jungle now. And as soon as we stepped into its foliage, I sighed with relief, wondering if the Gra Jaai’s blood had already soaked into the gray leaves that now surrounded me, filling them with something good for once.
I said a silent prayer and begged God to take Hiroshi to his side and for the jungle to absorb his corpse so it could grow again. It was the first time I’d prayed for real in decades, without it involving a request to save my own ass, and hoped it would work; tonight we’d risk heading into the village, and tomorrow we’d have to cross the river. If God existed, I figured a little prayer might be in order.
The Hwangtharaw River flowed by on our right as we crept south through the overgrowth, a combination of trees, bushes, and vines that went up to the water’s edge and grabbed at my cloak any time I tried to move. One of the Gra Jaai was on point. Morning hadn’t yet arrived, but fear of Chinese scouts and harder terrain than we’d anticipated slowed our progress so that arrival at the river had come two hours late, and to our relief, the Gra Jaai decided to accompany us into the village instead of peeling north to continue on patrol. Once we found a b
oat they’d head back into the jungle on their original route. Exhaustion was now a constant companion, and my mind had almost reached its limit with attempts to ignore the pain from a wounded shoulder and from both legs, my knees threatening to give out at any minute; the others must have been just as tired or we would have seen the trap before we stepped into it.
I followed the trail blazed by four Gra Jaai ahead of me. Even with them pushing through the toughest overgrowth, the vines and foliage were still thick, making it difficult to walk with the limited view my infrared vision gave, and I was about to step over a fallen limb when I saw it: a thin line, strung low and taut across our path, which the ones ahead of me had somehow passed safely. I was about to tell everyone that the area was booby-trapped when a loud crash made me jump, after which the man on point screamed.
“Nobody move!” I hissed. “Traps.”
The Japanese woman clicked in. “Where?” I told her about the trip wire in front of me, and she moved forward to my position.
The wire ran through the bushes and into a loop bolt screwed into a tree, and when I looked up, it was easy to see a huge wooden gate-shaped structure that had been studded with long spikes. Had I tripped it, the gate would have swung down with enough force to push the spikes all the way through me, impaling me in multiple places even with my armor. The woman marked the line with yellow tape, told the others, and then we made our way forward until reaching the point man.
He was still alive. A sapling had been nailed to a tree and then bent as far as it would go so that when he triggered the trap it snapped out to send a metal rod—sharpened at one end—through him, where it now stuck from his lower back. He pulled his hood off so I could see his head and then pushed at the sapling, trying to free himself. After a few more seconds he screamed again, and the Japanese woman told us to step clear.
“What are you doing?” asked Jihoon. I hadn’t noticed him creep up, and it startled me.
The woman paused before answering. “He is already dead. I will hasten the process.”
“He’s your own man.”
“That’s why I have to do this,” she explained. And before Ji could say anything more, the woman fired into the Gra Jaai’s head so the man fell limp.
“Jesus Christ,” said Ji. His voice was getting louder, and I reached for the shimmering spot closest to me to have my hand slapped away as soon as it touched his shoulder. “You don’t freakin’ get it; you’re just as bad as them.”
I sighed and glanced toward the river, where even in infrared I could see through the trees; the sun would be up in a matter of minutes. This wasn’t the place to deal with any of it, and Ji worried me because we hadn’t spent enough time among the Gra Jaai to know how they’d react to his kind of outburst.
“He was giving our position,” I said quietly, “so get it together or I’ll shoot you too. We’re in Burma, for shit’s sake.”
Jihoon didn’t say anything, and another of the Gra Jaai took point so that within a few seconds we moved forward again, the town two hundred meters to our south. At first I wondered if the village would be tucked in between the trees and if we’d walk right by without finding any sign because here near the river the growth was even more dense than on the mountain, the tall bushes and vines like an impenetrable, fibrous wall. Then without warning we came to the end. The jungle opened in front of us into a wide track of cleared land and elephant grass that stretched from the river east into the mountains, in the middle of which stood a series of low huts, whose roofs consisted of colorful metal sheets—colors that I now saw because my infrared had switched off. Morning had arrived. Although we couldn’t yet see the sun, it was just bright enough to make out the village’s details, and between the huts a thin fog rested in low spots to render the scene eerie.
“We can’t let the villagers live.” The Japanese woman had clicked in, and I was relieved to see that it was on a private channel.
“I know.”
“Your friend, the other lieutenant. He isn’t like you.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
The woman sighed. “You understand all this. From what I’ve been told and the way you’ve performed, I’d guess you’ve been here before and know the jungle. You’ve killed Margaret’s sisters and drew blood from Lucy.” She paused for a moment, and I was about to say something when she clicked back in. “He doesn’t know how it works.”
“I’m too fucking old, and I need a drink. Badly.” A thin stream of smoke rose from the closest hut, and to our east the sky turned brighter over the mountains to wake the billions of insects that began their deafening whine. Talking made it all soft. As long as we spoke, we didn’t have to move, and my legs felt as though they needed a breather. “And I don’t even know your name.”
“You haven’t asked,” she said. “And I didn’t want to know yours yesterday, but today is different.”
“I’m Stan.”
“Stan. I’m Nanako. And you sound just like Margaret.”
I chuckled at her comment before realizing that a week ago what she’d said would have enraged me. “How?”
“You think a lot, but fight without thinking, and there is nothing left of the peacetime world in your manner. Margaret also says that she feels old.”
How old was she now? It took a moment to recall what I’d memorized from Margaret’s file before deciding that the girl would be in her mid-twenties. “Margaret isn’t old. I’m old enough to be her father. Almost. And sometimes I fight because I’m no good at anything else so everything becomes a war.”
An old woman exited one of the huts and made her way down to the riverbank, where she dipped a bucket into the water, struggling with the weight on the way back. We all froze. The woman took twice as long for her return trip, and I’d hoped to keep Nanako talking so we could rest a few moments more, but by the time the Burmese woman returned to her hut, the Gra Jaai were ready to act. You could feel it, the way they shifted around us, impatient.
“What will you do with the other lieutenant?” Nanako asked.
I thought for a moment; from our vantage point we could see several canoes pulled up onto the riverbank near the village. “Why don’t we just grab one of their canoes and forget about the town?”
“These are Burmese, and we can’t take the chance.”
“Can your people handle the village? I’ll hold Jihoon here and make sure that he doesn’t do anything stupid.”
“I don’t advise it. This would be an excellent opportunity for all of us to learn if war is his way.”
Nanako was beginning to piss me off. “Jihoon is my man, Nanako. Not yours. And it’ll take him some time to get used to the bush because you’re right: he’s not like us. Not yet.”
“As you wish,” she said and then clicked onto the general frequency. “Take the town.”
Nanako’s and the others’ dots moved out on the map, not worrying about motion detection because getting in and doing the job as quickly as possible was the most important thing. But you could see their shimmer. Sometimes one of their cloaks would flap up, and the Gra Jaai’s feet would appear to kick up dust from the packed red clay surrounding the village, and my thoughts drifted inward to reflect on the conversation I’d had with Nanako because now it was clear that a shift had occurred. The bush had corrupted me again. It wasn’t just a military necessity to do the whole village; now war was a thing to be enjoyed because my gut told me that all of the Burmese civilians would be going to a better home when they moved on from such a crappy place; the same way the Gra Jaai rationalized it. There was no such thing as an atrocity, and forget about Jihoon needing to learn these ways; Phillip needed to see it. The tanks provided a facsimile of war, and now that I’d returned to the jungle it was all clear—why it had been calling to me the second I’d hit Bangkok. The bush hadn’t finished teaching me when I’d left, years ago. It’d been like dropping out of high school when the Army recalled me from Thailand’s jungles so they could prep me for missions in Kaz, and if I�
��d just stayed in Thailand for a few more months, I’d never have left. This wasn’t just the home of the Gra Jaai; it was also the place of my birth, my first missions. Ji would never be a part of the bush because he fought it too hard and had been wired with a quality that prevented its magic from dyeing his soul the right color, but out here children like Phillip would learn the most important lesson: the truth about the world. I guessed from my experiences with Ji that the difference between lessons taught by the tanks and by the jungle was like the difference between seeing a fight on holo or at ringside: one was mere entertainment, the other gave you a sense of reality that couldn’t be duplicated.
Movement yanked me from my thoughts. The map showed that Nanako’s team had taken up positions outside each hut and were about to take care of the villagers when something streaked in from the fields to our left, moving toward her team and the river. Elephant grass, almost as tall as me, filled the field with thick green blades, and as Ji and I watched, it swayed and parted as if a herd of invisible leopards sprinted through it.
“Nanako!” I shouted into the radio, but it was already too late. One of the Gra Jaai squeezed a burst from his flame unit and hit the things bounding toward him so they burst into moving torches just as one leaped into the air, after which it closed invisible pincers around his neck. The rest of the Gra Jaai fell without ever realizing what hit them. Within seconds Nanako and her patrol had been erased silently, her men and women lying in pieces and bleeding into the clay.
“What—” Jihoon started, but I cut him short with a whisper.
“Quiet. Don’t move.”
“But they’re gone.”
“I said quiet. They’ll be looking for others now. For us. Just take it easy, and we’ll get through.”
Ji sounded terrified, and I didn’t blame him but I couldn’t relate because all my fear had been replaced with the jungle’s program, where this was just what it was and it was too late to change the deal. Being scared didn’t help.
Chimera (The Subterrene War) Page 23
