He turned and trotted along until he reached the line of trees that ringed the base of the first mountain. And then man, horse, cat, dog, and bird were silently swallowed up by the evergreens.
TWO
IT LOOKS LIKE HOME.”
Vashti Nicanor spoke softly, and that surprised her comrade Darkon Ben-ammi. Vashti was not a woman of smooth edges and satiny manner. Though she was a striking woman, with great dark eyes and raven-wing eyebrows accentuating them, her mouth was a little firm for a woman’s, her brow so determined, the line of her jaw of such flinty strength. Darkon made no response to her moment of forgetfulness, however. He followed her wistful gaze to the ground dashing past the helicopter’s side door only three hundred feet below.
“You’re right, Vashti,” he agreed. “But only a New Zionist would find this the most beautiful part of this tour.” Though they defiantly termed themselves “New Zionists,” disdaining the religious overtones of “Jews,” they both knew that they missed the only home they, and all Jews, had ever known—Israel. Both of them lived in Beersheba, on the edge of the Negev Desert. Now they flew over a likeness of it: a desert plain of a thousand tints of browns and golds. It was a harsh land, with no cheerfully bright primary colors and no soaring trees or awe-inspiring mountains, only hardy scrub bushes and thirsty ground-clinging succulents. It was lovely to their eyes.
“Now you’ll get to see something pretty,” a deep voice drawled right behind them. “This scrub’s kinda harsh, isn’t it?”
Vashti and Darkon exchanged secret “I’m amused” signals, invisible to anyone but the two of them. They’d worked together so long, so hard, and so successfully, that they almost had developed a mental telepathy. “Yes, Lieutenant Darmstedt,” Darkon agreed. “It’s a dry and thirsty land.”
“Yup,” was Ric Darmstedt’s succinct agreement to the poetic observation. “But we’re coming up on Mesa Verde. I think it’s real pretty, the colors in the cliffs and all. And how about those old cliff dwellers? Did you know that nobody’s figured out yet who those people were, what they did, or why they left?”
“So I heard,” Vashti said dryly. “I can’t imagine Americans not being able to find the answer to something.” Darkon gave her a heavy-lidded glance of warning, and Vashti shrugged. She thought the big, handsome, blond Alaric “Ric” Darmstedt was something of a clown, with his slow drawl and constant jokes. He was of German heritage, too, and that might have had something to do with Vashti’s impatience with him, though she never would have admitted it out loud.
“Give us a low-and-close, Lieutenant Fong,” Captain Slaughter ordered the pilot.
“H-U-A, Cap’n,” Fong returned smartly. It was the “Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged” all-purpose response that had been a catchphrase of the 101st Airborne for more than one hundred years.
Fong banked the helo sharply to the right, and dropped about four hundred feet into a slash of a canyon. Unfortunately, the two Israeli “advisers” had been lounging so nonchalantly at the helo’s open pod doors on the left side that both turned turtle and slid all the way to the right side of the helo. Luckily, those bay doors weren’t open. Both of them banged noisily against the interior wall.
“Aw, man! Fong, look what you did!” Lieutenant Darmstedt protested. “Here, ma’am, let me help you—”
“I don’t need your help,” Vashti snapped, struggling to regain her equilibrium and her dignity. “And don’t call me ma’am.”
“No, ma—sir,” Darmstedt said lamely. After all, the woman was a colonel in the Israeli air force. He couldn’t just call her, “hey, you.”
But the new AH-64D Apache helicopter was just as smooth as it was silent, and it only took a few seconds for Vashti to jump to her feet on the now-level floor. With a pointed glance at Darmstedt, who was helplessly hovering and fidgeting, she grabbed Colonel Ben-ammi’s outstretched hand and hauled him up. Ben-ammi had a round, jolly paunch and was gasping a little with surprise. “Now, what is the emergency that we needed to take a combat dive to see?” Vashti huffed.
“Sorry, Colonel, for the spill,” Captain Slaughter, who was copiloting, said. But he didn’t sound very sorry. “I just thought you might want to see the cliff ruins.”
They were eerie. Tucked under great cliff overhangs and fronted by soaring pine and fir, the ancient city of golden stone and cunning masonry work was hidden from all eyes, unless you happened to have an agile and maneuverable helicopter like the Apache.
“No one ever sees them, I guess, except us. And maybe some Green techies working in this biosphere, but I doubt it. Those fat, wallowing Vindicators they use couldn’t cut in and out of a canyon like this,” Captain Slaughter continued with relish.
This was getting back down to business, Vashti thought with satisfaction. She ignored the poignant sight floating by the hovering helo’s pod doors and studied the members of Fire Team Eclipse generally, gauging who to try to worm some information from.
The pilot, Lieutenant Deacon Fong, was of no use, even if he hadn’t been busy flying the helo. He was half Chinese, half American, and so was his personality. He could be just as boisterous as any American male Vashti had ever seen, but he clamped up tight and became infuriatingly “inscrutable” when she tried to talk to him of important matters.
Captain Concord Slaughter, tall, rangy, sandy-haired, casually handsome, was almost as bad; he was polite, respectful, and forthcoming on all technical information that he had been ordered to give the Israeli “advisers.” But his interaction with Vashti and Darkon was exactly the same as any captain’s would be to any higher-ranking officers. Nothing personal, just business.
Sergeant Rio Valdosta, Con Slaughter’s right-hand man, might talk a little. But he was more wary when Captain Slaughter was around, and when they were on a practice mission. Even though this mission was kind of ambiguous and lighthearted—they were just taking a practice flight to test some of the helo’s new features— Valdosta was still a little tightly wound.
Lieutenant Ric Darmstedt would, of course, talk the ears off a water buffalo, Vashti reflected, and would never say anything worth listening to. His best friend on Fire Team Eclipse, however, was another matter. It seemed that David Mitchell rarely said anything unless he took some time to decide if it was worth saying. His carefulness was nothing like Ric Darmstedt’s required attention time, for it seemed to take him forever to finish a sentence in his agonizingly slow Texas drawl. Sergeant David Mitchell just didn’t talk much, that’s all, but when he did he sounded fairly sensible.
Vashti chose him.
They were using their helmet comm system, though the Apache was silent-running and they probably could have heard each other speaking in a normal conversational tone. Still, airmen have their habits. She focused on him, and David, a nice-looking young man of quiet face and ways and long-lashed light blue eyes, met her gaze with a friendly half-smile. She asked, “I believe you’re from Albuquerque, Sergeant Mitchell? So this is your land? How do you feel about this program that has so changed your lives in the past twenty years?”
“You mean the Man and Biosphere Project, Colonel?”
“Yes. That’s why so much of your land is deserted now, isn’t it? Like these magnificent ruins—” She gestured out the open bay doors, but unfortunately they’d gained altitude, and all that was out there now was the twilight sky. “I mean, those ruins we just saw. No one lives here, no one is allowed to visit here?”
David Mitchell answered in measured tones, “That’s correct, Colonel Nicanor. This is part of the Shortgrass Steppe Biome, and these lands are cared for by the Man and Biosphere Second Directorate. The human population has been redistributed to sustainable development areas.”
“You sound just like that beautiful blonde lady that is always on Cyclops,” Vashti joked. “You say these high-sounding words, but what does it mean? How can a bloodless thing like a directorate take care of the earth? What do they do, issue it standards and rules of order? And what does it mean, ‘sustainable
development areas’? I am curious, you see, as I hear and see this all over the West since we’ve arrived.”
Sergeant Mitchell nodded soberly. “Yes, here in the western United States, the Man and Biosphere Project is about 85 percent complete, so you are right, ma’am, it’s a much bigger part of our lives than in the American South, say, or along the eastern seaboard, where you and Colonel Ben-ammi have been.”
The Israelis, who truly were colonels and pilots in the Israeli air force, were also members of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization. They had just been “invited” to Fort Carson, Colorado, by some genius in Washington to “advise” the 101st on the new Apache prototype. Actually, Fire Team Eclipse had been briefed that the Israelis were to be treated and addressed as if they were advisers, as a courtesy to the Israeli government. But actually they were to do a lot of advising to the two colonels, mainly on the Apache’s weapons modifications and improvements, and especially on its two most secret new features, the Bioscan Definition Array and the Crossbow Navigational System.
After his oh-so-gentle reminder that he knew Ben-ammi and Colonel Nicanor had been in Washington for the last month, and therefore certainly understood all about the MAB Project by now, David Mitchell continued. “To answer your questions, Colonel Nicanor, the five directorates are responsible for overseeing the re-wilding of as much of the land as possible, so that America can be returned to its ecological native innocence,” he recited in a bored tone.
Valdosta snorted, and Lieutenant Darmstedt punched his ribs so hard they could hear the thump even through their helmets. Valdosta shut up. Deadpan, David went on, “And the human population is assigned to certain areas, called ‘co-op cities,’ or just, ‘co-ops,’ that the directorates feel can best sustain a human population and urban development without damaging the ecosystem surrounding it.”
“Ah, I see,” Vashti said gravely, noting Valdosta’s expression of disgust and Lieutenant Darmstedt’s too-obvious attempts to keep him as neutral as Sergeant David Mitchell was. The exchange had taught her much, but not enough. She pressed on, “But you didn’t answer my original question, Sergeant Mitchell. How do you—all of you, the American people—feel about this sweeping project, with all the changes it’s made in your culture?”
Politely, David Mitchell answered, “Feel? What do you mean, Colonel? It’s the law of the land. We all uphold the laws of this country to the utmost of our abilities.”
“Of course,” Vashti said in a bored tone that she hoped would disarm the sudden wariness that flared in David Mitchell’s big, innocent blue eyes. She should have known better, she should have learned better by now in her eight years of intelligence work. Never, never, ask a man from whom you’re trying to gather intelligence how he feels about the information. All it does is make him shy like a startled bird.
Darkon gave her a covert glance both of knowing and understanding. He’d been in Mossad for more than twenty years, and he would never have been so clumsy. But since this was just the beginning of their attempts to understand the undercurrents of the Man and Biosphere Project in America, Vashti’s gaffe that gave a sort of warning to Sergeant David Mitchell wasn’t really significant. Vashti knew that before long, if Darkon spent much time with Fire Team Eclipse, they’d all be running to him, telling him about everything as if he were their father. Vashti comforted herself with the knowledge that there were many other situations where she could extract information much more easily than her partner could. This all-male soldier-boy network was really much more suited to his particular talents.
Captain Con Slaughter twisted in his right front-facing copilot’s seat to face the main cabin of the helicopter, where the other three members of Fire Team Eclipse and Vashti and Darkon were sitting. “Sergeant Valdosta, why don’t you and the team demonstrate some of the special features of this great new helo to our advisers? Valdosta, you take the weapons systems; Darmstedt, you take flight control and navigation; and Mitchell, you take communications.”
Everyone stood up; Vashti and Darkon started toward the pilots’ cabin, expecting as usual to have to lean over into the tiny space to see the displays and controls. Sergeant Rio Valdosta, a short, powerfully built young man with thick paratrooper’s legs and wide shoulders, jumped up from the bench seating along the helo’s starboard wall. “Look here,” he began, then quickly amended, “uh—Colonels—sirs. The Apache AH-64D has four redundant control panels built right into the main cabin. Any and all systems— except the actual piloting of the craft—can be controlled from any one of the four stations back here.” He touched a button, and a panel in the helo’s wall slid down silently to reveal a Cyclops II flat screen and a pull-down keyboard. Amusingly, a stool—obviously on air hydraulics—popped up out of the floor for the operator to sit comfortably at the computer. Vashti and Nicanor exchanged looks: Americans.
The soldiers showed emotion now, all right, Vashti thought. They were as excited as ten-year-old boys with their new toys. And, she had to admit, they did have some wonderful toys. This helo, which was the newest under the American Multi-Task Force guidelines, was designed to fill slots that used to require two or three different aircraft types. It was a troop transport, attack helicopter, ground-cover aircraft, air-to-air combat weapon, and covert insertion-extraction stealth craft. It could do anything except make MRE’s—Meals, Ready to Eat—that all soldiers for the last century had learned to hate. And Vashti wondered about that. Knowing Americans and their heaven-high demands of comfort, there’s probably a kitchen and a bar on this can, hidden somewhere in the walls and floor like everything else.
Valdosta, Darmstedt, and Mitchell gave Vashti and Darkon lectures on their assigned topics, and then Valdosta said into his helmet comm, “Sir? Would you please key in the authorization codes for the BDA and Crossbow?” These two features were still classified Most Secret, and only Captain Con Slaughter had the codes to download them to the accessory databases in the main cabin.
“Keyed in,” Slaughter said. They watched the Cyclops screen, and suddenly incomprehensible numbers, letters, symbols, and line graphs flew by at speeds incomprehensible to the human eye.
“These are the Crossbow raw readings,” Darmstedt said, and suddenly he actually sounded as though he had some intelligence. Vashti did have to reluctantly admit to herself that Darmstedt was highly intelligent, as he seemed to have more expertise than anyone else on the team with the high-tech complexities. “This feature can gauge any environmental influence on the helo, and then automatically compensate. If it starts raining, it can adjust all the radar-sonar settings. If a power line is up ahead, it can either alert the pilot or make a flight adjustment on its own, or both. When it gets dark, it turns on the lights,” he finished, with a lopsided grin.
“Sounds as if you don’t need pilots anymore,” Darkon said, with a hint of wistfulness.
“Actually, we tried some unmanned aircraft, both fixed-wing and helos,” Darmstedt told him, reverting to his professional voice. “But they never could achieve satisfactory success rates, even though the technology plainly exists. There are just too many variables, and even a Cyclops can’t figure out all of them.”
“What about the weapons systems?” Vashti asked. “Does Crossbow interact with them?”
“No ma—sir,” Darmstedt stammered. “It’s just an environmental compensation, not a weapons manager.”
“Let’s try the BDA,” David Mitchell said enthusiastically. He was particularly interested in this toy, which was not only a brand-new piece of equipment, but also a brand-new concept.
“You tell ’em about it, Sergeant Mitchell,” Darmstedt said generously, though he was more proficient and knowledgeable about the tool. At least he didn’t have to try to figure out what to call Vashti Nicanor for a few minutes.
“The Bioscan Definition Array,” David said proudly. The screen changed to a digitized topographical map of the ground below. “What it does is find life-forms, scan them with biosensors, and then identify them . . . inclu
ding their size, weight, gender, temperature, pulse, respiration. The BDA can even give genetically coded information, such as the color of their eyes or hair.”
“That’s impossible,” Vashti scoffed.
“No, Colonel, it really works,” David said, his eyes twinkling.
“We tried it out yesterday. Hey, Lieutenant Darmstedt, would you give me a hand? I’m not sure I remember . . .”
They worked on the keyboard for a few moments, as Ric Darmstedt gave David quiet instructions. “I got it, sir, here we go. Hey, look—man, there’s something huge down there!”
“Yeah, must be Godzilla,” Ric Darmstedt said dryly. “Look, David, you gotta use a little bit of sense. Nothing’s that big, so it’s got to be a lot of little somethings . . . that’s it, reset the parameters, tell Baby BAD what you want . . .”
It was a herd of mustangs, running swiftly through the desert night. The outline of each horse was shown on the screen, an odd sort of electric blue line drawing, and it actually recorded their individual movements, even down to the flow of their manes.
“The display is kind of like a visual aid,” Darmstedt explained, without adding “for dummies,” for which David Mitchell was grateful. “It’s not really very accurate, it’s just sort of an artist’s rendering of the raw data that Baby BAD is receiving. Now, if we want to see what’s really up with these horses—” He poked a few keys, and the screen changed to columns of letters and symbols.
Ric Darmstedt was facing Vashti and Darkon, and wasn’t really looking at the Cyclops screen. But David Mitchell was, and he leaned forward and whistled. “Sir, look,” he said softly.
Ric turned and narrowed his eyes at the columns of data. “I can’t believe it . . . where’d he come from?”
“And where’s he going?” David murmured.
“What is it?” Vashti demanded. The readout was nonsensical to her; she thought it might truly be a Godzilla, whatever that was.
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 4
