"How old are you, kid?" "Thirteen."
"You're too big for thirteen. You're fifteen." "Go to hell."
They found the ID card he hadn't bothered to show them, and sent him into the testing center. The testing procedures were routine, the operators bored and indifferent. They paid no attention to Bahr's resentfulness and hostility; when he scored a sloppy dull-normal on the initial tests, the test teams looked no further, assumed the worst, and hustled him through the Rorschach, thematic apperception and Vor-nay without ever getting far enough behind the shell to even glimpse what the big, belligerent youth's mind was really like. He looked big, tough and stupid. They sent him to Riley to let the military knock the rough comers off.
Fort Riley Infantry Tech School, the new kind of military academy, where boys in their early teens were molded into the toughest guerrilla troops in the world. Just as they reached the beginning of their peak years in stamina and physique, they were offered the option (which they all accepted) of a ten year enlistment in the 801st. The weeding-out was enormous; screened before they entered, only twenty percent survived as guerrilla fodder, while the rest were sloughed off into the normal backwaters of Army administration and logistics. The Hitler youth groups in its most fanatic hour had never approached the tremendous group pressure techniques that drove, goaded, and quite often crushed the raw material into the proper shape.
In the first few days at Riley, Bahr moved mechanically at the furious bellowing of the non-coms, still too stunned to realize what was happening to him. Then came the initiation, die inevitable judgment of his fellows—could he take it?
A framed-up infraction, which Bahr knew was a frame, and a kangaroo court of second-year supervisors in a locked barracks squad room.
"Ten belts," the second-year "judge" said. "If the prisoner flinches he will be restrained and the sentence doubled. Assume the position." The mocking, overbearing authority drove the blood from Bahr's face and made his fists clench, but he had made up his mind that they were not going to break him, and he bent over, mute and burning with anger. The belts were delivered with a flat paddle longer than a baseball bat and swung with two hands so it struck like a mule-kick and left welts and black-and-blue marks for a week.
He took nine blows impassively. Then a voice was raised. "The prisoner flinched. Any witnesses?"
"Yes, I saw it. The prisoner moved evasively." There was a clamoring of assent in the excited circle of men. Bahr mentally estimated twenty more blows. "The prisoner will be restrained. Rope. Double him over the railing and tie . . ."
Bahr straightened up, turned slowly. "Nobody ties me up," he said.
"No? You'll get twenty more for insubordina—" But the new threat was too late. Bahr grabbed the paddle out of the executioner's hand and swung it sidewise against the fish-sergeant's head with a loud thunk, knocking him sprawling and unconscious to the floor.
In the stunned silence Bahr leaned on the paddle and looked into the circle of shocked white faces.
"Next?"
They tried. For two weeks, gangs of upperclassmen tried to gang up on him, beat him up, break him. But when they crept into his barracks at night they found him gone, and returned to discover their own bedding soaked and knotted with far more imagination than they could achieve. One day five of them cornered him, beat him up and broke his nose; one by one they suffered return engagements and were beaten and mauled with systematic ferocity. The dispensary medics became experts at setting broken noses.
The silent cure, ostracism, fell flat because to his own classmen, in spite of indoctrination lectures, Bahr was a hero. In a grimly silent mess-hall Bahr could tell a dirty joke and the whole first year class would laugh on cue.
Halfway through the first year, the training officers at
Riley consulted the BRINT people who were responsible for the 801st.
"He's a misfit," they explained. "He has too much drive, too much intelligence. We can't see why DEPEX sent him here in the first place."
"But a natural leader, you say," the BRINT contact man said.
"Highest morale a first-year group ever had. But a maverick is dangerous if he can't be controlled. Question is, should we weed him out now, or keep him and hope he falls in fine?"
The BRINT man thought it over. "Your field maneuvers are coming up, am I right? Which is your weakest platoon, poorest in training and discipline?"
"Third, Baker Company."
"Put this Bahr chap in charge of it during maneuvers."
The Riley people didn't like it. "They're fourth-year men. They 11 never take orders from a first-year man. The platoon will fall apart the first day out."
"Let's try it anyway," the BRINT man said with a note of finality. "We'll prepare his orders."
Baker Three was still legendary at Riley years after the maneuvers of '02. Bahr's mission was given to him by BRINT, and by the time he reported to their field unit in Ontario three weeks later with sixty percent of his platoon still intact and uncaptured, and with four prisoners, the Army, the police and the DIA were weary of the fruitless search and were posting imposing rewards for any of his troops who would turn themselves in.
BRINT spent a week interrogating Bahr, his troops and prisoners, on the tactics, techniques and devices they had used to avoid capture, then swore them to absolute secrecy on the methods; but enough fragments had crept out so that when Bahr and his men got back to Riley it was almost a victory parade.
The next three years were almost anticlimactic. Bahr was a made man. All work, play and friendship groups led to him. But while he built his little encysted empire in power relationships at Riley, getting ready for a hitch in the 801st, the same psych-testing machinery that had misplaced him before had been growing, spreading and self-fertilizing. The powerful DEPCO had begun to emerge in the government as the great peg-placer. They were feared, admired, hated, worshipped, but unquestioningly recognized except at Riley and a few other similar sociological eddies.
Bahr's first contact with DEPCO came when he applied for Commissioned Officer's School, and he ran headlong into a stone wall.
After two days of testing, with polygraph, Brontok symbols and Vargian analysis, Bahr returned to Riley baffled and angry by the continual procession of impassive young men and women who didn't seem to listen to what he said, but only to how he said it.
DEPCO's report to Riley was uncompromising. Bahr had too much drive to fit into a leadership position in a government that was fighting, at all costs, for stability. He was too ambitious for the new Army of administration and logistics that DEPCO was planning. What the Army needed was administrators, not executives. The decisions were to be made elsewhere, many of them by computors working against the VE equations.
Riley went to bat for him, but DEPCO was immovable. Bahr did not go to Commissioned Officer's School.
He swallowed the first blow, even though he realized intuitively that he had gone as far as he could go as a non-com in his first two years at Riley, and was not satisfied to stop there. The second blow was even more unexpected. Revised placement tests, again sifted through the DEPCO filters, pulled him from guerrilla-training status. He had blundered unknowingly in the tests; he had tried too hard and done too well, and particularly scored unusually high in electronics and mathematics aptitude sections. The DEPCO sorter, looking for candidates in these priority scientific fields, dropped his card in the hopper, and he, of all Riley graduates, was assigned to Communications Command and sent to Antarctica.
His appeal was immediate, vehement, and futile. Even BRINT, which had been following his career at Riley with interest, was unsuccessful in its subtie efforts to alter the assignment. With the new upgrading of the social sciences resulting from the Vanner-Elling innovations, and the witchhunts against physical scientists and technical people during the crash years, there was an urgent demand for any talent available. And with the signing of the Yangtze semi-truce, guerrilla activities were unpopular. Communications priority was high.
Bahr's
tenure in Antarctica, terminating with his court-martial from the Army at twenty-nine, had seemed to him like the first spadeful of dirt dumped back into the grave he had been digging himself out of all his life. He had taken his new civilian greencard assignment as a maintenance man and wire-jockey in the DEPOP computer center with apathetic resignation, burying old memories and bitternesses under a pile of empty whiskey bottles and long moody silences. Maybe Libby Allison might have broken through the apathy eventually, but even she had almost given up when the past, like the proverbial penny, turned up in the form of Frank Carmine.
Carmine had been a year ahead of Bahr at Riley, and with many other veterans of the 801st, had wound up in DIA after his ten-year tour. McEwen, founder and director of DIA, was looking for a man to keep his field units co-ordinated and working under pressure; he advertised his desires to some of the new people, hoping they might know somebody from the 801st or BRINT who could fill the bill. There were a few reticent suggestions; then one of the veterans of Baker Three said wistfully, "What we really need is a man like Julie Bahr to light a fire under this outfit!"
Carmine was assigned the task of locating and approaching Bahr. Bahr knew little about DIA, but the appeal of the old camaraderie, and the opportunities for control and power rang a bell. With the reorganization of the field units that he demanded, and his political jockeying to get his friends into key positions, Bahr soon began to exert much more power under McEwen than the organizational charts credited him.
McEwen recognized the man's voracious ambition quite early; he realized that Bahr was, eventually, after his job. Soon McEwen could not sleep, his eyes became sunken and bloodshot, his mind wandered, he complained bitterly to his underlings about anything and everything except Julian Bahr. He took vacations, came in to work late, overslept, muddled and whined, and retreated further and further into himself, with the inevitable result that he was forced, irresistibly, to depend more and more on Bahr to keep his organization running. McEwen feared him, but he did not stop him.
And if Bahr ever realized that it was he who was forcing the change in McEwen, he never showed it. He worked with people, with groups, with scattered individuals. As his power increased, imperceptibly, he found people who were eager, willing, desperate to help him, people who wanted his friendship, who sought his influence, who surrendered their confidences to him, and moved in to his side in loyalty that bordered on blind devotion. In a world of unstable personal relationships and obviously cardboard leader figures—senators, congressmen, and especially chief executives who were put in office chiefly on the basis of appeal, good looks, friendliness and the knack of projecting "sincerity" through the TVs—the segment who wanted someone powerful and confident to identify with gravitated their affections, fixations, and complexes on men like Bahr.
The true extent of his personal contacts probably was not known even to Bahr. People who said they hated him, or ridiculed him, or distrusted him, went out of their way consciously or unconsciously to help him. Rumor was that he had contacts, friends and informants in the fringe-underworld, in BURINF, in BRINT, even in the KMs, and that within DIA itself he had a private power-group of former Riley men who held their grim loyalty to him above dieir contracts, oaths, or national obligations.
Of all these dependables the most loyal, the most devoted, the most unswerving of legmen was Frank Carmine.
Which was why, when Bahr found a discontinuity in his space-plan, coming unexplained and unheralded from a source that would have seemed least suspect, he did not surround himself with other DIA subordinates who were close to him.
It was not by accident that he had not been notified of Harvey Alexander's capture. And if Carmine could defect . . .
He moved alone, slit-eyed, dje Volta speeding through the vague shallow fogginess of the Jersey flatlands, his mind unraveling threads of contacts, relationships, and attitudes, probing for a motive, preparing himself to inflict the necessary, just, inevitable punishment upon the errant who stood in his way.
The first stop was a southwestern Newark suburb near the Newark Jetfield. Bahr drove into a shabby housing development, parked near the lobby of the main building, hurried inside to the elevator.
The building was silent, the halls dimmed down, the carpet quiet to his footsteps. He picked a door, checked the number, and rang. Inside, some stirring sounds and a muffled answer. A moment later the door opened into a black room, and a brooding, questioning silence yawned at him.
"Julie?"
Bahr stepped into the room, swung the door quietly shut behind him. "Chard? A job. I need help. Are you with me?"
A hand tapped his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. "In a minute, soon's I get dressed. Say, honey, this is . . ."
"Better keep her out of it," Bahr said.
"Oh."
The man dressed quickly in the darkness, and soon he and Bahr were in the Volta, picking their way through the apparently endless tiers of housing developments, then out on a road strip and into the dark, hostile, run-down fringe area, still dotted with last-century buildings, that had once been Elizabeth.
"You've worked with Stash Kocek before," Bahr said. "The nervous one? Yeah. But he makes me . . . you know
"I hope he's in," Bahr said. "I didn't call ahead." He stopped the Volta, motioned Chard to stay inside, and walked across the street to the rooming house that was Kocek's current residence. He went up two flights of stairs quietly, down the hall, and paused in front of the door with the ribbon of light showing under it.
Bahr tapped a pattern on the door and the light went out instantly. In a minute the door opened a crack. "Bahr?"
"Yes. A job."
The dimmer went up a little, and a thin, weasel face looked out at him, the eyes dark-circled slits. "Jesus, Bahr
"You on that stuff again?"
Kocek shrugged. "What'U I need?"
"A stunner.Two. Chard's working with us."
There was a flash of hostility on Kocek's face, then resignation. "No stunner."
"What do you mean?" Bahr said, sudden anger rising. "If you sold that stunner . . ."
"I'll get it back, Jule, I just hocked it today, I'll get it back. I needed some credits fast . . ."
Bahr pushed into the room. On the drab iron bed someone ducked quickly under the covers.
"Get your credits from him," Bahr said in a harsh tone.
"I didn't know, Julie, I didn't know you'd want me tonight. I'll get it back." The high-pitched voice was whining, cowed. Bahr looked at the lump on the bed again. Kocek had been booted from the 801st for that trouble; he had always been such a mixture of fear, viciousness, guilt and hatred that Bahr could never have gotten him a rating to work as a janitor in DIA. Kocek was a mess, but Bahr had enough dossier on his sundry illegal addictions to get him recooped any hour of the day or night. Kocek lived in mortal terror of
Bahr, so Bahr could trust him. At least, he could trust him while he watched him. "What have you got? Burps?"
"No, a couple of Wessons.With silencers. And some concussion grenades. You think we'll need them? I only got a couple."
"Bring them," Bahr said. "And step on it. I've got a Volta outside."
"Let's go, let's go." Kocek grabbed a trenchcoat off the chair, zipped his tailored coveralls with the flashy, overdone jumptrooper look. He picked up his briefcase arsenal, and dimmed the light, ignoring the lump on the bed.
Outside in the hall Kocek paused, in the habit of long military discipline, to let Bahr go ahsiad, then remembered Bahr's aversion to letting people walk behind him, and resignedly started down the stairs.
"Two Wessons and a stunner," Bahr growled disgustedly. "And God knows what they've got!"
It was two-forty, and Bahr rubbed the side of his face impatiently, looking out of the phone booth at Kocek, who was sprawled indifferently on one of the benches in the Red Bank Ground Terminal, and then up at the clock.
Two-forty, and there had been no sign of Carmine, nor of the double who was supposed to have arr
ived at the terminal by monorail ten minutes before. Bahr wondered, in sudden angry reflection, if his whole DIA organization had been infiltrated and seduced into an anti-Bahr putsch. Unconsciously his hand went to his stunner as he considered the prospects that even Chard and Kocek might be part of the enemy. But the motivation—that was the puzzle to him. He could not credit Carmine—small, sad-faced, balding Carmine—with the drive, the personality, the political ambition or the money to mount a secession against him.
It didn't wash. Carmine was an order-taker, not an order-giver. Someone was behind Carmine, someone with drive, money, and a ruthless desire to get him, Bahr, out of the way.
He saw Chard, across the lobby, throw down a cup of coffee at the vendor and hurry across the nearly deserted station, his stocky body almost bouncing, heels smacking down on the concrete floor.
"What's wrong, Chief? I thought Carm was going to show."
"Something got fouled. There should have been a mono in here ten minutes ago. Check with the station officer and find out what went wrong."
Chard hurried off. He returned a moment later, almost running. "Crackup," he panted. "The mono jumped off the L-ramp just north of the station, went through a guard rail. Eighty foot fall. They haven't even put out the fire yet."
So that was the way it was, Bahr thought. And if he knew Carmine, he would be right there in the throng of onlookers, waiting to make sure that Bahr had really been on that train. "All right, fine," Bahr said. "It'll take Carmine a while to get back to the DIA HQ here to smooth out an alibi." He looked at Chard and Kocek. "Carmine's got a surprise coming, I think."
Back in the Volta, Bahr sat knotted in anger, boiling slowly while Chard drove. "We may find they have a prisoner there," he said. "Keep him alive. The rest are yours, except Carmine. He's mine."
Chard nodded and swung the wheel harshly. Kocek was half-smiling, his eyes shut, humming to himself, his mind obviously still back in the rooming house. Finally Bahr turned and smashed him across the mouth with the back of his hand. "Stop thinking about that stuff," he said as Kocek blinked, uncomprehending. "If you can't get your mind on killing people, I'm better off without you."
Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer Page 16
