"Yeah, I'm nervous. You okay?"
"I'm fine, Commander."
"Okay, I'm going to run up to the cockpit and check with the pilots."
"Got you."
He turned and walked up the big ship's dark bay to the cabin, cracked a door and leaned in.
Back here it was dark, with a few red safety lamps lit, and the subtle roar of the big engines chewing through air on the other side of the fuselage. It felt very World War II, very we-jump-tonight, strangely melodramatic.
Here I am again, he thought.
Here I go. Face some other motherfucker with a rifle.
Been here before.
But he did not feel lucky tonight. He felt scared, tense, rattled, keeping it hidden only because poor Bonson was so much more rattled.
He looked at the end of the bay, where the big ramp was cranked up. In a few minutes, it would yawn open into a platform and he would get a signal and he would step out, and gravity would take him. He'd fall for two minutes. Maybe the chute would work and maybe it wouldn't. He wouldn't know until it happened.
He tried to exile his feelings. If you get mad, you get excited, you get careless, you get dead. Don't think about all that shit. You just do what has to be done, calmly, professionally, with a commitment to mission and survival.
Don't think about the other man. It's what has to be done. It's the only thing that makes sense.
He tried not to think of Julie or of the man who'd come across time and space to kill her for what she didn't even know she knew. He tried not to think of his ancient enemy and all the things that had been taken from him by the man. He tried not to think of larger meanings, of the geopolitics of it all, of the systems opposed to each other, and himself and the other, as mere surrogates. He exiled all that.
"Sarge?"
He turned, it was a young air crewman, a tech sarge who looked about fifteen.
"Yeah?"
"You got your parachute on upside down."
"Oh, Christ," said Bob.
"You haven't been to jump school, have you?"
"Saw a guy parachute in a movie once. Ain't it the same thing?"
The kid smiled.
"Not quite. Here, let me help you."
It took just a few seconds for the young NCO to have him geared up correctly.
Yeah, that made sense. It felt much better, now it fit right, it was okay.
"You need oxygen, too, you know. There's no air to breathe this high."
"Yeah, they told me."
The kid had a helmet for him, a jet pilot thing with a plastic face shield, an oxygen mask and a small green tank. The tank was yet another weight on the belt over his jumpsuit, and the tube ran up to the helmet, which fit close around his skull and supported it in plastic webbing.
"I feel like a goddamned astronaut," Swagger said.
It was nearly time.
Bonson came back.
Behind them, with a shriek of frigid wind, the ramp door of the Hercules opened. It settled downward with an electrical grind, and outside the dark sky swirled by.
Bonson hooked himself up to a guy wire so he wouldn't be sucked out. The tech sarge gave Bob a last go-round, pronounced him fit and wished him well. With the ramp down, there was no oxygen and so they were all on oxygen. He felt the gush of air into his lungs from the clammy rubber mask around his mouth, under the face plate. He tasted rubber.
Bob and Bonson edged down the walkway to the yawning rear of the aircraft. The wind rose, howled and buffeted them, the temperature dropped. Bob felt the straps of the chute, the weight of the jump bag tethered to his ankle, the warmth of the jump helmet. Outside he could see nothingness with a sense of commotion.
"You cool?" said Bonson over the radio.
Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.
"You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall, you fall, then the thing opens up automatically.
You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the chute. I don't need to tell you. You've done it before."
Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own microphone.
"No problem. You get there, you save the women, you'll be all right. And we get Solaratov, no problem.
We've got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team goes in, it's all taken care of."
Another nod.
"Okay, they're saying thirty seconds now."
"Let's go."
Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no sense of anything, just blackness beyond the ramp.
"Okay, get ready," said Bonson.
Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.
"Go!" said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into nothingness.
-Nikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.
Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of snow to explore.
She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it, and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes, it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.
The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and softened. It was everywhere, on the fences, drifting over them, in strange hills that had been bushes, mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile.
She had never seen so much snow in her life.
The children who had once lived here had a sled, she'd seen it in the barn. She knew where she'd go, too. Off to the left, not too far, there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good momentum.
She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming somehow. She couldn't wait for daylight. She couldn't wait!
Solaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the temptations of snow, she'd come early and stood, outside on the porch, a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.
The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in the display superimposed on the right of the image.
Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this, but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.
The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to the earth, and held the dot there with the professional shooter's discipline. No wobble, no tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and she would leave the earth forever.
He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.
Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.
He knew something was wrong immediately.
Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just his limbic system, he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter helplessness.
The wind
hammered at him like fists, his body planed and fluttered and he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of miles an hour.
He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in his helmet.
He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he'd had to kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had seen or caused or had just missed him. He'd never screamed in grief or rage.
He screamed.
The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost in the hugeness of the air pressure.
He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all, vulnerable.
Don't let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in complete treason to everything he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.
Don't let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don't let-The parachute shuddered open with a bang, he could simply sense it mutating strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not, it puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered, his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere.
He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable.
He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second's worth of air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on.
The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles, fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a flat, there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
CHAPTER forty-seven.
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real, but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier than they'd ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob's father, Earl, who'd been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.
Maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who'd loved her so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband, his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter's feelings got very hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and that somehow made him more poignant.
He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn't in him to hurt anybody's feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk about was anybody's guess.
And there was someone else.
He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and then at last she knew it was Trig.
She'd seen him twice, no, three times. She'd seen him that night when Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she'd seen him when he'd driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.
Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated. Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny, dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob, the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends. Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?
"Mommy?" her daughter asked her.
"Oh, honey," she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the dark, warm bedroom.
Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn't a dream.
It couldn't have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.
"Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled."
"Oh, Lord, honey, it's--" "Please, Mommy."
She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside, just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the shade.
"Oh, baby," she said, "it's so early. The snow's going to be around for a long, long time."
The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by the arm cast. She hadn't taken a painkiller since last night, halfway through Singin' in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her lap.
"Please, Mommy. I'll go get Aunt Sally."
"Don't you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she's earned her escape from the Swaggers and all their problems.
I'll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two."
"Yes, Mommy. I'll go get dressed."
The child ran out.
So early, thought Julie. So damned early.
He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, "Bob One, Bob One, where are you, we have lost contact, goddammit, Swagger, where are you?"
He spoke: "Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?"
"Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?"
"Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody hear me?"
"Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact."
Shit!
He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to check was th
e rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn't shoot now so there wasn't a thing to do except hope that Unerti built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where the other stuff didn't.
He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he might lose it, faint, and die under the snow.
They'd find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.
Fuck me if I can't take a joke, he thought.
He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy mountains. That couldn't be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light, signifying the east.
He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the mountains and the ranch.
If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not latitudinal, that would put him on Mount Me Caleb theoretically on its northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be where the ranch was.
He couldn't see, the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks across a gap that he took to be a valley.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off down the slope.
The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life.
The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the smooth white crust.
Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn't even hear the wind. He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and care.
He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to a rock outcropping and detoured around it.
Occasionally, he'd stop, flip down the night-vision goggles, and see--nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green, cut now and then by a black scut of rock.
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