by Jack Yeovil
Comeback Tour
( Dark Future - 4 )
Jack Yeovil
The King isn't dead! Elvis Presley might not be a Colonel in the US Army anymore, but he's got a reputation as being one of the toughest independent Sanctioned Ops in the South. Yet, can he prevent the world being destroyed (further) while fighting off the KKK, swamp mutants and voodoo priests?
Jack Yeovil
Comeback Tour
Dark Future 4
PROLOGUE
Cape Canaveral, 1978.
The Dream was dying.
Commander Lawrence Jerome Fonvielle gritted his teeth and held back tears as the console lights went out, bank by bank. The technicians were calmly proceeding with the shutdown, going from desk to desk, flicking switches and pulling wires. They were as thorough and efficient as he would have demanded them to be, had he still been responsible for issuing their orders. His title was almost purely honorary, now. You couldn't be a Commander when the Suits took your command out from under you.
"We have a splash-down, sir," said Wardle, still monitoring the Big Screen. "Dead centre of the target area."
The Old Magic. American Know-How. It was still there.
"The USS Eisenhower is deploying the Sikorskis to pick up Santini's men."
Fonvielle nodded. He could not count the number of splashdowns he had anxiously lived through. This, he knew, would be the last.
Bobbing out there in the South Pacific in their Vulcan capsule were the last generation. Eleven men and three women in a tin can, waiting to be choppered out before the spacecraft sank.
"Camp Glenn is still operational, sir. Good steady signals."
Fonvielle could not reply. He looked at the monitors. The base in the Sea of Tranquillity, so recently evacuated, would continue its measuring, evaluating and transmitting long after there was anyone on Earth interested in the data. These days, if there wasn't any money in it, no one gave a damn. Fonvielle was an old-time fighter jock himself, and the new math gave him a headache, but he could appreciate the beauty of the data. He understood the gleam in the scientists' eyes as they pored over the rock samples or the graph curves.
The Dream wasn't about money. It wasn't just about data, either, but that was part of it. The Dream was about Victory. This was America's purest conquest, the fulfilment of a national destiny. The wars were still being fought, the war for the ownership of the sky." Fonvielle still believed what he had heard all through his training. The sky belonged to the men who could take it, to the men with the Right Stuff. The Dream was about sticking your hand into the sky and making a fist, holding it fast.
"Edwards has been monitoring steadily since last night," said Wardle. "I'm closing our contact."
Fonvielle had done his year in Tranquillity back in the '60s, when Richard Nixon was president and the Needlepoint System was still in the planning stages. He remembered Camp Glenn as a peaceful place; his off-duty time spent suited up outside the dome, his intercom down, the silence and stillness stretching out forever, had been the most intense experiences of his life. None of his marriages had offered any hours to compare with those. He had been withdrawn from the spaceside of the programme after a psychiatric evaluation diagnosed him as prone to what they were calling Raptures of the Stars, that curious detachment that affected long-term astronauts. A lot of space jocks got religion when they flopped down to Earth, or cracked up. Fonvielle had just hiked himself up the chain of command. If he couldn't have the sky himself, he would make sure that his country kept its grip on it.
"Excuse me, sir."
An orange-suited technician slipped between him and the Tranquillity Monitor, and broke the contacts. The screen winked out. Glenn was still transmitting, but its signal was being fed into a computer bank at Edwards now. The administration trusted the machines to alert them if the automatic sensors came up with anything interesting.
The Needlepoint System. That was where the programme had sailed into choppy waters. It had been President Nixon's legacy. Trickydick had done so well with his 1960 inaugural promise to put an American on the moon by 1965, with Glenn and Schirra touching down a full nine months ahead of schedule, that he had resolved publicly to do something about the balance of power, and sworn to ring the Earth with a series of weapons satellites capable of knocking out a flight of Soviet bombers scrambling in Tashkent, or, indeed, a cockroach scuttling across a loft floor in Harlem.
A woman came into the control room with an armful of semi-opaque polythene sheets, and doled them out. They fitted over the equipment like loose condoms, and gave the consoles, monitors, terminals and databanks a ghostlike feel. Now the dust could settle in peace.
Fonvielle had been second-in-command of the Needlepoint Project when Nixon gracefully bowed out in '68, passing on the presidential seal to Barry Goldwater. Then, NASA had really screwed the pooch. During the years of struggle and failure, as system after system crashed, he had fought long and hard with his subordinates at suppressing the nickname everyone in NASA was using for the programme. The Needledick System.
Wardle took off his headphones, and dropped them on his desk. The usual clutter—pictures of his kids, coffee cups, markerpens, scribblepads, the Mickey Mouse mug—had been cleared away. He was the last of them. And he would be transferring tomorrow. A few ot the lesser lights were dim enough to put up with the travesty at Edwards. The rest were quitting the service. The private sector was dangling fat contracts in front of more than a few NASA personnel, particularly ex-astronauts with high-profile names. But Fonvielle knew those jobs were just glamour assignments, with no guts. The corporate space programmes didn't need men, they needed human adding machines with currency symbols carved on their hearts.
"The Eisenhower just hauled Santini and the rest out of the drink. That's over with."
Fonvielle couldn't trust himself to reply.
"Chrissie Farren says 'hi'."
Fonvielle nodded. Chrissie had been the third woman in space. He remembered her as an eager-beaver lieutenant. The jocks had taken bets about who would get first into her electrically-heated long Johns. He couldn't remember who, if anyone, had swept the pool.
Wardle was disengaged from his console now. He pulled on his civilian jacket, and walked away.
Fonvielle had been among the first to transfer to NASA, shifting from the X-11 programme in the '50s. And now he was one of the last to get out of the kitchen.
The heat had really started with President Agnew. Spiro T. had insisted on seeing some return for the billions of federal dollars that had been flushed into the bowl of the Needlepoint Project. Fonvielle had argued the System wasn't ready for testing. He knew only too well that the bugs needed a through ironing-out.
After the moonbase fiasco, when Needlepoint had come within fifteen feet of breaching the dome during the test run, Agnew had ridden hard on NASA. Senate Committees were set up, and the Suits descended on Houston and Canaveral. Men with ledgers eased men with vision out of their seats.
The space programme had had a twenty-year run, and the gravy days were over. America had conquered the moon, and left the Soviets and their sputniks standing. Russia had had too many internal problems to divert the funds to Star City, and their programme had fizzled when the first man into space rained back on the steppes as microscopic ash. His name had been Yuri Gagarin, Fonvielle remembered. The Soviets could have recovered, but the pointless war in Vietnam had drained all their military and scientific muscle. Star City had been a ghost town for ten years.
A ghost town. Just like Canaveral would be tomorrow.
"Sir?"
Fonvielle was distracted. The matronly woman in charge of the shut-down shoved a clipboard at him.
"Your signature, sir. By the X."
She hand
ed him a pen, and he scrawled.
"Thank you, sir."
The lights on the big board went out one by one.
Fonvielle remembered the American dead. The. programmes had all been costly. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Hercules, Pegasus, Circe, Argos, Vulcan. But there had always been men and, for the last seven years, women. Everyone wanted to cross the threshold, and reach into space. He had lost friends to the stars. More than he should have. Alan Shepard, Grissom, Cap Collins, Capaldi, Len Nimoy, Rusoff, Mikko Griffith, Mildred Kuhn, Mihailoff, Hamill, Con Lindsay, Garret Breedlove. The white heat of the early '60s, with Nixon riding them for results, had been exhilarating at the time, but the historians were right. Corners had been cut, and the drive to get Apollo together had killed too many people. He remembered the blown hatch that had taken Grissom, lightheaded from the first spacewalk, to the bottom of the ocean. And the computer error that had turned Richard Rusoff into a second moon, silently orbiting the Earth for a projected five centuries before the burn-up cremated his dried and preserved body. And the fuel leak which had burned up Griffith, Kuhn and Mihailoff in an instant just before take-off.
But it had taken the Needlepoint failures to bring down the programme.
Needlepoint was up there somewhere, glinting in the night sky. A ring of satellites, fully equipped with laser weapons, hanging useless in their erratic orbits. It would be at least thirty years before they started tumbling towards the ionosphere or out into space. Every time an American strategist looked up at the stars on a clear night, he would be reminded of the money pit the Needlepoint System had turned out to be. And he would curse the memory of President Trickydick Nixon. And of Commander Lawrence Jerome Fonvielle.
They left him alone, and turned off the main lights. He stood in the dark, surrounded by dead machines.
At last, he could give in. Tears coursed down his cheeks, and his entire body was racked with silent sobs.
He slumped onto a polythene-covered swivel chair, and wiped his leaking eyes.
The skeleton programme NASA was keeping up at Edwards Air Force Base was a joke. Just a few green airmen peering at the monitors to make sure all the government-owned satellites were still spinning in their orbits, keeping out of the way of all the private junk. Agnew had given up the country's hold on the sky, and left only a few multinats in the space market. And all they were interested in was throwing up a horde of little silver balls so they could beam porno into the depths of the Amazon basin, or shift electronic blips of money from Switzerland to Osaka. The age of the explorers, the pioneers and the heroes was over. The Suits had thrown it away, and now the merchants were moving in.
His face dry at last, he swore to keep the Dream alive.
PART ONE: DIXIE
I
"C'mon, Jesse Garon, don't fail me now…"
Whenever he was alone, which was most of the time, the Op talked to Jesse Garon as if his brother were there. In a sense, he was. In the backwoods, they said that when one of identical twins died, the survivor would carry the baby's soul for the rest of his natural life.
"C'mon…"
Despite his thick leather waders, the cold of the Mississippi Delta swamp was seeping into his legs. He had been in one place for over two hours, since before sundown, waiting for the attack to come.
On a still night, you could hear the helicopters coming from a long way away. He had enough time to take the rocketlauncher out of its watertight case, and load up with a GenTech one-shot Ground-to-Air missile. The weapon was heavy on his shoulder, but he stood his ground, putting up with the ache, his right eye to the nightsight.
Around him in the swamps, the cicadas trilled. There were water moccasins weaving across the surface of the rancid waters, and he had heard that the 'gator population was rising now they were raising the reptiles for food. But he'd been trailing through swamps all his life, and nothing had bitten him to death yet.
He wore a heavy black leather jacket, zipped up to his chin. Underneath, his shirt was a vivid pink. He didn't want that flash of colour in the night, marking him out as a target for the CAF. His face and hands were camouflage-streaked.
Finally, he heard the whup-whup-whup of the spidercopters. The CAF nightriders were flying out of Vicksburg in precise military manoeuvers, raiding, extracting tribute, coralling a load of indenture boys and girls, and retreating. They were connected in the state legislature, the Op knew. Indenture was a profitable system for the corps and politicos. In boardrooms across the world, they had wet dreams about workers you don't have to pay. The swampies had tried to get some official law in to deal with the Confederates, but no one was interested. They had had to pool their money and hire themselves some protection.
When he was first mustered out of the army, back in '60, he had gone to a Western movie with his Mama Gladys and the Original Colonel. The Magnificent Seven. In that picture, a group of poor Mexican fanners were being terrorized by a gang of bandidos led by Eli Wallach. They put all their money together and appealed to some American gunfighters to come and help them out. Although they had very little, the cowboy heroes agreed to fight and mostly die for the farmers. Back then, when he was taking down $10,000 a week, he hadn't believed those seven gunfighters would really take the job.
But here he was, nearly forty years later, with a rocketlauncher cricking his neck, preparing to go into battle with a couple of chopperloads of Klan-hooded killerscum for what amounted to a potful of beans and some used-up cashplastic tokens.
He could see the spidercopters now, stealthing their way across the bayou, ripple-patterning the waters. They were painted with the stars and bars, and they were packing enough hardware to burn out a small town. Which, since Mayor Kettle had refused to pay tribute or hand over any more young people as indentees, was exactly what they planned to do to what was left of Yazoo City.
The New South was full of factions like the Confederate Air Force, semi-official gangcults with some money behind them. With the gradual erosion of centralized government and the permeation of the state law-enforcement agencies by the big corps, a whole slew of patriotic warlords had set out to carve themselves little empires.
The Commander-in-Chief of the CAF was a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist fanatic called Burtram Fassett whose last gangcult had called themselves the Knights of the White Magnolia and operated out of Phoenix. Turner-Harvest-Ramirez had broken up that crap game in the early '90s, but now he was in the bigotry and intolerance business again, lording it over a cadre of tightly-drilled white trash soldiers dreaming of white-columned, ivy-swathed mansions they'd never get their dirty boots into. Robert E. Lee would have had them shot down like dogs, but they sang "Dixie," "The Bonnie Blue Flag" and "I'm a Good Old Rebel" while they were burning out black churches and families, and could recite all the dialogue from Gone With the Wind if prompted. The South had always raised as good a crop of hatred as of cotton.
There were three spidercopters, moving in the classical arrowhead formation. The Op had flown similar ships in Central America in the '80s, and remembered how devastating it had been when the Sandinistas got hold of weapons like the one he was hefting right now. He grinned at the memory of high-tech engines of death crashing in flames in the jungle. It was time the CAF birdmen got a taste of their own napalm…
The young men of Yazoo City—despite its name not much more than a collection of swamp-harvester's huts these days—were spread out through the swamp, hefting rusty burpguns and flamethrowers. The Op had drilled them for a few weeks, and knew they would do their best. They couldn't hope to stand up to Fassett's forces for any length of time, but he was counting on the CAF being so spooked by meeting any resistance at all that they went to pieces. That was more than likely. The fanatics were always the first to run when you shot back. He remembered only too well being the only one to stand tall outside Managua when the government troops popped out of the ground. Those Contra yellowbellies Uncle Sam had had him supporting probably hadn't stopped running.
The lead copt
er hovered, and its attendants held their places in the formation, noses slightly down, weapon arms bobbing. The Op had the flying machine in his sights, and initiated the launch sequence. The LED below the sight counted down from twenty. He found himself twitching to the beat of the LED, his hips moving in his waders, his free hand clicking his fingers to the music only he could hear. The music he had heard all his life. A hatch opened in the spidercopter, and the cross speared down into the swamp, rooting itself deep into the mud bottom, only slightly askew. The Op raised the rocketlauncher as the chopper lifted up. The cross exploded into flame, and stood there burning.
Thirty yards to the left, William Soule swore. 95% of the citizens of Yazoo City were poor and black, and that put them high on the CAF's list of undesirables.
The spidercopter to the left squirted bunting napalm in a high arc over the swamp. The CAF knew there were people down in the waters waiting for them, and were trying to end it early. Large things crashed through the burning waters, and the Op hoped his line of defence would hold. It was time. It was time to rock and roll. The rocket whizzed out of the launcher, and he had the weapon back in its case before it struck home. The pilot saw it coming too late, and tried to take evasive action, but the missile's inbuilt homing system adjusted its course. It exploded dead centre on the spidercopter's nose, and the craft's napalm tanks went up. It was like a small sun for a moment, and then fell in fiery metal chunks into the swamp. The Op held a clump of hanging moss as the wave hit him at chest-height. Water slopped into his waders, and he was nearly knocked over.
The other copters were rising out of range, computerized baffle systems coming on-line to defer any further high-tech assaults. The Op didn't mind that. He knew he would only have one shot with the tube. The baffles meant that the CAF couldn't use any of their smart missiles on him either.
