Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  He thought to ask the captain about them, but didn’t have the heart. Soon, Wasef thought, soon they would make another move into France. The Eastern army would push through Poland and then through Germany. The two fronts would meet, hammer and anvil. And, even though it was too late for him, the other men could bring their families out of that sandy hell.

  “I’ve sent a platoon downstream,” Yussif said, motioning with his hand. “The helicopter has searched, but there is so much leaf canopy, the pilot could not see anything. I ordered the T-72 to the Garonne River. The stream comes out there.”

  Wasef nodded. “A good plan. Very good,” he said, seeing the pleasure in Yussif’s face, an unimportant backdrop to the disturbing memories of Zahra.

  “We-will get the robot, colonel.”

  “Yes. Of course you will.”

  Before they left, Wasef glanced down at the streambed again and suppressed a shudder. There wasn’t much that Colonel Qasim Wasef feared. But this. This scared him to death. There was the crater, tangible and real as the stones, with no signs of a kill around it. Yet something other than the robot had gone into the ravine and not come out.

  Allah must be punishing them for abandoning the desert, he decided. For leaving the women, the old men, the children to their prolonged deaths. Wasef had the cold thought that perhaps General Sabry was wrong. Perhaps the blue lights were not UFOs but some sort of avenging angels.

  IN THE LIGHT

  A calm voice said, “Go ahead. Call your mother.”

  It was suddenly quiet. Lieutenant Justin Searles dropped his hand from his eyes and saw that he was standing in one of those bus rest stops. To his right was a pay phone. Before him, a long bar where silent passengers, motionless as stuffed animals, hunched over their coffee. The place smelled of onions and grease.

  “Call your mother,” Ann said.

  Justin turned to the pay phone and realized there was a quarter between his forefinger and thumb. He put the coin in the slot and dialed the old number.

  “Hello, Justin,” a voice in the receiver said. The voice was female; it wasn’t his mother’s.

  “Mom,” he said anyway. He wasn’t feeling much like a fighter jock anymore. He was so scared that his voice cracked like a little kid’s. “Mom. Where am I?”

  “You’re close. Just picture home in your mind. Picture it very, very hard.”

  He thought of Florida, the squat, blocky pink house, the mango tree in the front yard, the lemon tree in the back. The thick, sweet, green grass and the gray thunderheads in the humid sky.

  But Florida wasn’t like that anymore, was it?

  “They’ll let you come home,” his mother said kindly, “if you’ll read them your book.”

  He slammed the receiver on the hook and stared in horror at the phone.

  Oh, sweet Jesus. The ANA had him and he would never go home. The Arabs had him by the short hairs and all he was allowed to tell them was his name, rank, and serial number, and he could remember only two thirds of that.

  He glanced out the plate glass window of the diner. In the dark sky an F-14 was going down in flames, the blue lights of Woofers around it.

  “Good thinking,” a familiar voice said.

  He whirled. Lieutenant Commander Harding was standing there.

  “Name, rank, and serial number.” The XO nodded. He was dressed in his whites, and there were huge rings of sweat under his arms. It was always hard to stay cool in the desert. “Tell you what, lieutenant,” he said. “You’ve come through this test admirably. Let’s go have a cup of coffee.”

  Harding put his huge hand out. Justin took it. The man’s palm was firm and dry. Light winked on the XO’s balding dome and the embossed anchors of his brass buttons.

  “A test, sir?” Justin asked, afraid not to believe it.

  The XO clapped him on the back. “Sure, kid.” His voice was so gentle that it made Justin want to cry. “Don’t you remember the test? Well, I guess the drugs are still working on you. Let’s have that cup of coffee and wipe the cobwebs out.”

  There weren’t any cobwebs in Justin’s mind. There was only scattershot ice so slick that his thoughts kept sliding.

  Justin sat down on a stool next to a glass container of donuts. The waitress pushed a white cup and saucer in front of him.

  Saucers. He stared at the dish. Something nibbled and fretted at the edges of his memory.

  “You run into many Woofers, son?” the lieutenant commander asked, taking a cautious sip from his steaming cup.

  “Always run into Woofers lately,” Justin answered, pulling his gaze away from the saucer. The waitress was staring at him. Something in her cold eyes, her pulpy face, reminded him of Ann.

  The XO said, “Tell me your story. Everybody’s got a Woofer story, don’t they?”

  The XO’s spoon made a musical, frosty sound against the thick sides of the cup.

  ‘The first time my radio intercept officer saw one in his screen, it scared the shit out of him.” Justin laughed into the sudden, vacuous silence. ‘Then he got where he could identify their fuzzy returns and they didn’t worry him anymore. I’ve seen ’em fly off my wingtip and follow me like a dog, like they were curious or something.”

  “Oh?” the exec asked with a strange, flaccid smile. “Do you think they’re curious?”

  “I guess so, sir. They’re like big, friendly dogs.” Justin’s coffee was strong and hot. The sip he took burned the roof of his mouth. “When we get down, my wingman makes a joke of it. Hey, Justin, he’ll say. You had a blue Woofer sniffing up your tail, a Woofer with a twenty-foot hard-on.”

  Abruptly he had the jarring thought that his wingman was downed over ten minutes ago. Behind him in the pit, Tyler was screaming, “Approaching Woofers!,” but Justin, who was preoccupied by the AAA they’d taken in the port engine a while back, was fighting the stiffness of the stick and the crazed bumpy-road feel of the plane.

  MAYDAY

  MAYDAY

  MAYDAY

  “Eject,” Justin said as he turned, expecting to see his RIO. Lieutenant Commander Harding was there instead.

  “Eject?” the exec asked pleasantly, lifting one eyebrow.

  “I had to punch out. We were losing hydraulics,” Justin said. Or were they? Or was the AAA part of the test, too? He whirled around on the stool to stare out the plate glass window. Over the desert mountains streaked the red dot-dash-dot of tracers. Chaff sparkled in the dark. From a desperate, evading plane hot pink flares fell like garish beads from a broken necklace.

  “Look into your coffee,” the exec said.

  Justin looked. The inside of the cup was a green radar scope and at twelve o’clock was a tight pattern of white blips. Fuzzy bogeys.

  Woofers.

  “What do you think they are?” the XO asked.

  Justin started to sweat In the back of his nostrils was tile ghost of a stench, the smell of burning insulation. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Look it up in your dictionary.”

  Justin had a book in his hands. WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, the cover read. Below that was printed TOP SECRET.

  It wasn’t the words that made him remember. It was something else. Maybe the frigid blue of the executive officer’s gaze, maybe the wintry chatter in his mind.

  He remembered the numbers in his Head-Up display counting down to minimum controllable airspeed; the way the nose of the plane began to dip.

  Oh, he remembered.

  He remembered Tyler’s screams of ‘‘What, Searles? Are you crazy?” and reaching, reaching to pull the face protector down, setting in motion the automatic ejection sequence. With a burst of fire the canopy blew, carried away on the hurricane wind. Tyler was rocketed out first. A second later, Justin, too, was blasted upward, his speed jeans inflating as he pulled breathtaki
ng Gs.

  He remembered hearing the lacy flutter of the deployed parachute above; he remembered seeing the F-14 plummet to the dark earth below. And, almost peripherally, he noticed that some sort of light was painting him blue. His parachute harness was blue. His palms were blue. And there was something cold at his shoulder.

  Something inquisitive.

  “Oh, Jesus God!” Justin screamed. He lurched up from his seat at the counter and ran to the window where an F-14 was going down in flames and a Woofer was snaring its slow-falling prey.

  He launched his body through the window, shattering the paper-thin glass. On the other side of the broken window, the air didn’t have that scorched-metal smell of the desert or the humid, sweat sock smell of the land near the Gulf. Instead, the atmosphere was blue and moist and January cool and suddenly Justin realized beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond the blind high confidence of a fighter jock, that there were some things he was better off not knowing.

  THE PYRENEES, BELOW BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

  Gordon had pulled his CRAV into some brush, caught an hour’s nap, some chow, and bathroom time. Now he was up again and running, running as fast as he could.

  The helicopter was still after him. He would hear it close in every once in a while. When it passed overhead, he’d dig his way into the debris at the side of the stream and hide as best he could.

  Earlier that morning he’d tried dragging brush to obliterate his tread marks; but the scoring in the mud looked suspicious. He’d given up hiding and had fled, knowing that, with the helicopter after him, the laser deployment platoon wouldn’t be far behind.

  Gordon was breaking no land-speed records. The streambed got rockier, and the fastest he could go was a daredevil ten miles an hour.

  The sides of the gully were so steep now that he could barely see above them. God only knew what was up there. A road, maybe. With trucks. A BTR-80 full of soldiers.

  He’d miscalculated the whole thing. The banks to either side were pure, sheer shale. If he tried to climb them he’d tip over, and Gordon didn’t want to spend time on his back.

  Not now, when he was being hunted.

  The streambed widened. At a bend, dead branches and trash were piled from earlier flooding. He rolled on a bit and stopped in alarm.

  He’d come out at the fucking Garonne River.

  Goddamn if, he thought, staring in dismay at the boiling rapids and realizing he would have to double back and fight it out with the LDV platoon. Swiveling, his treads clacking against the stones, he looked up at the opposite bank and froze.

  A T-72 was trundling down the slope. The scene, as in a good movie, was all eerily clear: the camouflage paint on the tank’s armor; the gaping black hole of the 125mm muzzle. The grass. Gordon could see every damned blade of grass, every fucking green leaf and pine needle. He could see the dark eyes of the tank commander standing in the cupola rim, and God, Gordon could hear things, too—Dolby Sound distinct. The muted squeal as the turret turned, finding its bearing. A bird singing somewhere in the brush.

  “Arm missiles!” Gordon screamed, shaking himself out of his trance. His display sprang into life, along with the words: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.

  “What the hell’s the matter with your’ he shouted; but the software was already working on the problem. The kill box blinked out. A schematic came on.

  TUBE COVERS STUCK, the display said after a second’s pause.

  Oh, Christ. It was the mud. When he’d dug himself into the stream bank, he’d accidentally jammed shut his tube guards.

  Slamming the CRAV around, Gordon splashed downstream, heedless of the rocks. Behind he heard the squeal of the cannon as it tracked him.

  No time to run. No time to think. Those shells were goddamned sabots, armor-piercing. At this distance, the depleted uranium boot would squash him, diamond plating and all, like a bug. He backed up fast, clanging hard against an outcropping, and stared at his readout, hoping he’d dislodged the clay. No such luck.

  And then he wondered why the tank hadn’t fired; if maybe it had come down with constipation of the automatic loader.

  Gordon looked. The tank commander’s helmet was off, and his head was lowered to his outspread arm. The cannon was aimed at a spot Gordon had been a moment ago.

  Gordon splashed through the shallow water to the left. The cannon did not follow. On the hill the tank stood quietly, its gun aimed at the ravine as though it were a statue of a man pointing.

  Look, the tank might have been saying. Look.

  Jerking the CRAV into reverse, Gordon bounced off the shale bank like a pinball.

  MISSILES 4-8 AVAILABLE, the readout said.

  Trundling right, he got as close to the bend in the stream as he could to get a better view of the opposite bank.

  The tank commander’s face was turned slightly, his chin resting on the metal deck. His dark eyes were open and his skin was the almond color of the Hotpoint refrigerator in the bunker. There was a neat, perfectly circular, absolutely bloodless hole in his forehead.

  From the graveyard hush that had fallen, Gordon figured the gunner and the driver were dead as well.

  He stood befuddled, his CRAV patiently waiting for a kill order that was unnecessary now. He stared until his eyes teared from fatigue, until a flash of blue at the edge of his screen caught his attention.

  Rover was back. The blue light hovered near the lifeless tank, happy as a dog that has just brought in the morning paper.

  IN THE LIGHT

  “Read me the book,” Harding said.

  Justin Searles looked down in his lap and gently stroked the XO’s balding head, leaving imprints of his fingers in the skull. Clack-clack. Clack-clack. The interior of the bus was dim, and the sound the carriage made against the steel rails was soothing.

  Smiling, Justin turned the first page.

  “Chapter One,” he read. “Procedures on Encountering UFOs.”

  The words were meaningless. Justin saw them and mouthed them. The book seemed to please Harding, though. The XO settled down and sighed with satisfaction.

  On the seats around them sat the bus driver and the waitress and Ann, their eyes huge and dark with wonder, as though Justin was telling them the most fascinating story.

  Justin read.

  His mind was an albatross running over the snow, taking to the air on its wide clumsy wings. The wind caught him and boosted him into the glowering clouds, where there were no missiles, no hot flak.

  He looked up from his book to smile into the freezing rain of their gazes.

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  Someone squeezed Gordon’s upper arm. Obeying the command, he closed his eyes. When the CRAV had powered down, he pried the glasses off and saw Pelham standing over him, Ishimoto behind. The two were breathing hard, as if they had run all the way from the monitoring room.

  “Out of the chair,” Pelham said.

  “But, sir—” His CRAV was sitting somewhere out there, only half its missiles working, the Garonne in front of it, the LDV platoon behind. And Pelham was asking him to leave the chair?

  He began to protest, but Pelham had his stem colonel face on, a scowl that erased all resemblance to a friendly Hershey elf.

  “You’re not security-cleared for this, sergeant. Out. Consider yourself dismissed.”

  Military training took over, like the thoughtlessness of instinct. Gordon freed his hands from the controls and leaped off the seat. Quickly Ishimoto sat down and began putting on the gloves.

  “Sir—” Gordon said.

  Pelham rounded on him. “Get out,” he said in a cold, hard voice. “That is an order.”

  Gordon flinched away. He wrestled the door open, and turned back once, in time to see the Mitsubishi rep putting on the glasses.

  He trudged up the three flights o
f stairs. In the middle of the fog-bound yard he felt the impact of what had just happened. He stopped dead, a silent wail of loss in his brain.

  “Hi,” a female voice said.

  Gordon whirled to see Stendhal next to him.

  “Listen. Pelham’s been on my ass,” she was saying. Her BDU blouse was open, the light wind whipping at it so Gordon was getting a now-you-see-it now-you-don’t peek at her nipples.

  “You know the CRAV better than anybody, and I thought, well, if you’re not busy or anything, maybe you could give me some pointers.”

  Gordon wasn’t listening. Be was feeling his outrage grow from a small, toothless thing into something huge and fanged and clawed.

  Ishimoto had never taken a CRAV into battle. He didn’t know tactics, and would be unprepared for the little eccentricities of the unit. Each robot had its own particular feel. Gordon’s CRAV was skittish, needed a light touch on the accelerator; firm, slow pressure on the brake.

  Stendhal was looking at him funny, and Gordon knew he should say something. But all that wanted to come from his mouth was a shriek

  “You okay?” Stendhal asked.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Gordon had always been the odd one out, the loner, the guy the jocks beat up in middle school. When he was a kid, Nintendo had allowed him to pretend he was strong, courageous, deadly; then the CRAV came along and made that dream come true.

  “I hate to bother you, but is now a good time?” Stendhal was saying, “Or after dinner? Maybe we could even go to the mess hall together of something, I really need some help.”

  Gordon turned and, leaving Stendhal open-mouthed behind him, ran back down the steps to the third level of the bunker.

  The monitoring room was empty, he saw as he halted in the doorway in surprise.

  “Colonel?” he called, walking inside.

  Five screens peered down from their brackets on the ceiling. Only two were on. In the first, someone was thrashing through brush by a mountain road. The other screen was showing a close-up of a shale bank and a robot hand clutching a thick tree root. The picture shook, and droplets of water were beaded on the camera lens.