Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  “Dismissed,” Pelham said softly. “Be back here at 0700 to get the CRAV on the road.”

  Gordon saluted, walked out the door, and trudged up the stairs into the twilight. His stomach told him to stop by the mess hall; his body told him to crawl into his bunk.

  After an instant’s indecision, he obeyed the directive from his aching muscles. He limped up the stairs into the barracks. The moment his head touched his cot, he was asleep.

  IN THE LIGHT

  In the cone of light at the end of the pier, minnows sailed the green, translucent water. Jerry watched his Pa bring the rod up, snap it down. The line purred as it was cast. With a hollow plunk the sinker submerged into the dark lake.

  Jerry took a breath. The evening air smelled of silt and stagnant water and clean rain. Beyond the clattering reeds a thin eggshell of moon rose.

  “I like it here,” Jerry said in a low voice, careful not to scare the fish. It was important not to scare the fish. It was important to his Pa.

  At his feet his Pa hunched, a half-lit, motionless boulder. “Sit down,” his Pa said. “Dangle your feet in. I know growing boys like that.”

  Obediently Jerry took a place by his Pa. The water was cool on his toes; against his hip his Pa’s body was soft mud. Jerry looked around the lawn to the cabin, the boathouse, and wonderingly up into the cherished spongy face. His Pa’s nose dimpled in for a queasy moment, then swelled out again, as though it couldn’t decide whether to be a nose at all.

  “Fishing,” his Pa said. “You like fishing, don’t you, Jerry? You see? I know all about you. I know what you like.”

  Of course he did, Jerry thought. He was the perfect Pa.

  Jerry turned and saw a man in camouflage staring at them from the bank. After a moment, the soldier walked down the pier to them.

  “Hi,” Jerry said.

  “I’m dreaming,” the man said. He was blond, with a weak chin and dazed blue eyes. Jerry noticed that the camouflage pants were tucked into high-top Nikes, He also noticed that if he stared at the soldier hard enough, he could see the trees and the lake right through him, as if the man were a ghost image on a TV screen.

  “Who’re you?” Jerry asked him.

  The soldier didn’t reply. He was frowning out across the lake, as though listening to the gossip of the clattering reeds and wondering what to make of it.

  “Who’s that, Pa?” Jerry asked.

  His Pa jerked the rod. There was a click-click-click from the reel as it turned. “Who?” his Pa asked.

  Jerry pointed at the soldier. The man stared at them, his eyes dazed and sleepy.

  Pa turned around. “I don’t see anyone. You growing boys,” he chuckled in an indulgent television-dad voice, “you’re always teasing your fathers.”

  When Jerry looked again, the soldier was gone and the pilot was making his way down the shadowed grass.

  “That other boy. Why don’t you go talk to him?” his Pa asked. “Go see if he wants to play.”

  Jerry found himself standing in the dark grass by the pilot. The man grabbed Jerry’s elbow and hung on. “You’re real,” he said in astonishment. “I met someone else tonight. A sergeant. But when I talked to him, he went away. Are you going away, too?” His voice was high and frightened.

  “No. You want to come meet my Pa?’

  “He’s an alien,” the pilot said. “They’re all aliens.”

  Jerry looked lovingly toward the bent figure at the end of the pier. “I know,” he said.

  The man went on urgently. “They’re playing mind games. Everything’s an illusion. Have you ever touched one? Have you? God. And seen how their faces change? Just look at that thing down there. Look at it. What the hell do they want?”

  Jerry shook his arm free and walked away, but the man caught him, gripped him so tightly, it hurt. Jerry’s Pa would never do that. He could never hurt him with his spongy hands. Even if he made a fist and hit Jerry, as his old Pa had done, the blows would fall cool and harmless.

  “I told them classified information,” the pilot was saying. “They didn’t threaten me, they tricked it out of me. I could be court-martialed for that.”

  The pilot wouldn’t let go. “Look, kid. I’m finally thinking straight now. I’ve had time to think. We’re prisoners of war, you understand? You understand what I’m saying? We have to try to escape.”

  Jerry stumbled away from the pilot and back to his Pa, to safety. His Pa turned and saw him, the rod dangling in his shapeless hand, his eyes now so huge and dark, there wasn’t much face left.

  “Didn’t he want to play with you, Jerry?” his Pa asked in a resonant voice that tickled Jerry’s skin. A voice like the hum of an enormous engine. “Didn’t you want to play with him?”

  “No, Pa,” Jerry answered. “I didn’t like him much.”

  Across the lake, a loon cackled. The reeds clattered like a train rushing over tracks. His Pa returned to fishing, his head sinking into the bulge of his shoulders.

  He cast the line. There was a whir, a liquid thunk.

  “You’re a good boy,” his Pa told him in a dead, quiet voice.

  NEAR PARCZEW, POLAND

  “Grigori Mikhailovich Pankov,” Baranyk muttered as he lifted the night scope to his eyes, “may God squeeze your balls like ripe grapes.”

  “What, sir?” Major Shcheribitsky asked, leaning across the darkness of the scout’s deck.

  “Nothing,” the general sighed. “Tell A Company not to move forward so quickly. This is not a race.”

  The Arab artillery stuttered, the incendiary flashes going off on the horizon like glitter winking on a fallen evening scarf. An answering boom from one of Baranyk’s own tanks, the flame from the barrel revealing, for a strobing instant, its hiding place.

  So far, so good. Baranyk had not had the time he would have liked to develop his strategy; there had been only a day between his return from Moscow and the tightening of the Arab net.

  Shcheribitsky had waited for his return, perhaps wisely.

  By the time he’d spoken to Baranyk in the Cessna, the southern arm of the net had nearly closed.

  Baranyk would try to break out in the north, the side where he sensed weakness. Now if only the cheese of nine tank kills would draw out the Arab mouse. From his high perch the general saw promising movement. Scouts. On foot. Coming from the northeast, across the grass, less than three kilometers away.

  “Company A shall hold,” General Baranyk said. “Remind them, when they move, to be careful.”

  Oh, so careful. Cautious and tender as booted feet striding through a roomful of kittens. That morning he had rehearsed his tank squad for the punch-through, had rehearsed them until their legs ached and they had respectfully requested to sit down.

  In the flat, open churchyard of Michów they had practiced, ignoring the tombstones and the dead.

  Move there. No, captain! Are you blind? You have stepped into Artillery Battery C. Look down at your clumsy feet. See, you have killed ten of my men!

  There was not enough fuel to simulate the tank battle mounted, so they’d run through it on foot, again and again, like courtly dancers at a cotillion.

  Damn you, lieutenant! Are you stupid? Left! Left! Into the trees! Don’t you know not to leave yourself’ exposed?

  Now in the calm, dark evening the Ukrainian artillery was waiting in a semicircle for the opening bars of music that would signal the start of the dance.

  “Very soon, sir,” Shcheribitsky whispered.

  “Yes,” the general answered. “Very soon.”

  Suddenly, in the ant crawl of the Arab scouts, Baranyk saw larger moving squares.

  “They’re approaching. Pull Company A back in a leapfrog,” Baranyk said.

  He could hear the major’s soft mutter into the handset. The Ukrainian tanks
began pulling back in twos: the first firing and then retreating behind the second; the second firing and then retreating behind the first, each time searching for cover.

  This was the time to sweat. The German tanks would be buttoned up, but in the T -80s, tank commanders would be sticking their heads out of the safety of the turrets to find the path in the dark. If they got lost, the battle was lost. Five tanks would be moving blind. They could roll over Baranyk’s waiting men.

  A kilometer now between his own tanks and the enemy. Only two kilometers now of withdrawing until the Arabs were surrounded and Baranyk’s artillery could catch them in a fatal crossfire.

  A fierce storm raged in the field. Thunder and gunpowder lightning and steel rain. Even the soft breeze seemed to tremble. The Arabs were coming, racing pell-mell, heedless, toward the nine Allied tanks.

  Holy Father. Hadn’t they learned anything from the Israelis’ defeat of the Syrians? Baranyk wondered. The Arabs were using the old Red Army formation. They were too exposed, too bunched.

  He watched as one of his leapfrogging tanks destroyed an Arab T -72, a good clean hit that sent a ball of flame rising ‘into the night.

  The deep-throated Arab artillery roared. In answer, his own antiaircraft batteries behind him suddenly began stitching the heavens with hot thread.

  Baranyk dropped the night scope and looked up. The bellies of the clouds flickered orange, reflecting the fire on the ground. A plane? he thought in disbelief. The Arabs couldn’t be sending planes, not on an overcast night.

  But over the clamor of battle he could hear it coming in fast and high. He saw nothing break the clouds, but something must have. The entire northeastern part of the field ignited into the fulminating hues of sunset.

  “God!” Shcheribitsky gasped.

  Baranyk threw his hands over his eyes. Too late. The intense brilliance had already been burned into his vision and now’ replayed the explosion in neon pink and green.

  Then a soul-battering WHUMP, as of Heaven’s great door slamming shut. He opened his eyes and saw the earth ripple out in concentric waves, as though the bomb had been dropped not into solid ground but into a quiet pond. In the wake of that oxygen-thieving swell, twenty Arab tanks lay dead.

  “Have the Poles helped us with an air strike?” he asked Shcheribitsky in awe.

  Bringing the night scope to his eyes, Baranyk saw tiny toy tanks and tiny toy soldiers burning. Nothing moved on the field but his own, and they were backing away as if Satan had leered from his pit.

  “No, sir,” the major said. “The Poles have no jet fuel, and even the Germans are out of fuel air explosives.”

  The devil’s own luck. Some Arab commander with poor judgment had sent out some Arab pilot with lousy aim.

  “Shall we attack now?” the major asked smartly, taking the headset from his ear. “Company A is asking, and our infantry is itching to move.”

  “Never lose sight of the objective, major,” Baranyk said, still stunned by his good fortune. “It is good to be flexible, but one must remember one’s goals.”

  “Sir?”

  “Our objective was to blast our way out of the closing net. We have done so.” Then Baranyk laughed, a hearty, belly-shaking laugh. With that laugh his anxiety drifted up and floated away like the smoke from the burning dead.

  “Let us fall back toward Warsaw,” he said, slapping Shcheribitsky playfully on the arm, “before the pilot discovers what he has done. Let us remove ourselves, major, before he returns with a Seeing Eye dog.”

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  To Gordon’s astonishment Toshio picked up a junk-food breakfast on the mess-hall line. Gordon stuck to real nutrition: oatmeal, eggs, and whole-wheat toast.

  Gordon hated whole-wheat toast In fact, his hatred for whole wheat was in inverse proportion to his love for sausage and bacon. But he wasn’t about to sit with a Buddhist and eat breakfast meat Probably even the eggs were iffy, although when the two sat down and dug in, Toshio didn’t shoot offended glances into Gordon’s plate. He simply picked up his jelly donut and started to eat.

  “You ever have one of those dreams,” Gordon asked, “where you can feel things? You’ know, like the wind in your face?”

  Toshio glanced up from his donut. There was a flake of glazed sugar at the corner of his mouth.

  “And smell things, too,” Gordon went on, “like flowers?”

  “You dream a great deal?” the Japanese asked.

  “Yeah.” Gordon chased a pale yellow clot of scrambled eggs around his plate, cornered it with his toast, and scooped it onto his fork.

  “And in color?”

  “Yeah, most times. So,” Gordon said, pursuing his subject, “I had this weird dream last night.”

  “Tell me,” Toshio said, taking a sip of his orange juice.

  Gordon gestured with his fork. “I was out at this lake, and there was a stand of pines and a lawn. And a pier, and this kid, and this pilot was there, and ...” Gordon’s voice cut out for a moment, like a Chevy with a carburetor problem. “... and there was this alien. He was like, I don’t know, two hundred pounds of slug. And here’s the funny part. The alien was fishing. He had this nice Shakespeare rod and reel, an expensive son of a bitch, like he’d gone shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch.”

  “A strange dream,” Toshio said. “What did the pilot look like?”

  “A little taller than me. Dark hair. Anyway, the next thing that was weird was that I was looking at the reeds—you know, in the center of the lake—and they were clattering just the way Rover does sometimes. Isn’t that wild?”

  “Air Force?” Toshio asked, putting his donut down half-eaten.

  “Huh?”

  “The pilot. Was he Air Force?”

  Gordon thought about it. The scene was clear, clearer than any dream had a right to be. He remembered the silty smell of the lake, the springiness of the pier’s boards under his feet. “Navy. A Navy lieutenant. Anyway, I just thought it was ... Hey, you finished already?” he asked as Toshio got to his feet.

  “We will go now,” Toshio said. “We must talk to Colonel Pelham.”

  Gordon looked down at his unfinished plate. “All right,” he muttered. He picked up his tray, took it to the disposal area, and followed Toshio out the door.

  Toshio left him in the colonel’s empty office. Sitting there, Gordon wondered what could be so important about the dream, important enough to miss half his breakfast.

  Pelham came in the room so fast, Gordon didn’t have time to salute.

  “Did you get the pilot’s name?” the colonel snapped.

  “In the dream, sir?”

  “Yes!” Pelham said with irritation. “Yes, of course in the dream!”

  Toshio burst in, accompanied by a nervous major. Taking a sheet of paper from the major’s hand, the colonel said curtly, “Dismissed.”

  The major hotfooted it.

  “No, sir. I didn’t ask his name. It was just a dream. He was there. I was there. The alien was there, and this kid.”

  “Is this the man?” Pelham shoved a faxed photograph at him.

  Gordon took the fax, looked at it, and had trouble breathing.

  “Is that him, sergeant? Is that him?” Pelham was practically shouting.

  Eyes wide, Gordon stared at the colonel and then back at the photograph. “Yes, sir.”

  “Goddamn,” the colonel said. “The Parisi books talk about dream communication. I’ll inform General Lauterbach we have a first contact.”

  ON THE ROAD BETWEEN LERIDA AND BALAGUER

  Wasef stood up on the floorboard of his jeep to study the dark shapes of the tanks behind him.

  “A pretty night,” Gamal said when Wasef sat down again.

  “Yes.”

  “What is wrong?”
<
br />   The young captain’s question was galling. Everything was wrong-and yet nothing was. “Two nights ago there was a disastrous battle at Balaguer. We may be spending the day among corpses.”

  He heard Gamal shift in the darkness. Behind and in front of them, the column of vehicles crept at a frustrating twenty kilometers an hour, in order not to burn out the engines of Wasef’s aging tanks.

  “How many dead?” Gamal asked.

  “Two thousand of theirs, three thousand of ours,” the colonel answered, peering into the night. The Catalan sky was star-shot. The countryside smelled of lavender and diesel exhaust.

  Gamal fell silent, either in contemplation or drowsiness. Their progress had a mind-numbing rhythm, the soporific growl of the engines, the monotonous rocking of the jeep.

  “Before the battle on the mountaintop,” Gamal said, “I had never seen a dead man.”

  “You should have seen the flight from Egypt.” Wasef remembered the long lines of the starving, the sick; faces like skulls, bodies like skeletons. Since Egypt he had thought a great deal about his own death. He would die, of that he was sure. How, though? Was it better to die piecemeal, feeling life slough off your bones, as eighty thousand Egyptians had during the famine? Or to meet death in utter surprise, as the villagers would in Pons?

  “I am sending a Mil Mi-24 Hind ahead to Pons,” the colonel said. “Tomorrow they will conduct an aerial spraying of Sarin. No one must see us as we pass.”

  In the darkness he could feel Gamal’ s accusing stare.

  “Can’t we simply detain the people?”

  “We kill, Captain Sabry,” Wasef said mildly. “Soldiers kill. That is their duty.”

  Yussif would have understood, Wasef knew. Yussif would have agreed with the order, would have assured the colonel he was right. Wasef needed that blind loyalty now.

  PONS, SPAIN

  Hefting her rifle, Dr. Rita Beaudreaux walked across the rosemary- and lavender-dotted meadow toward Pons. To her right an olive tree caught the wind, its two-toned leaves shifting from light green to silver.