Arc Riders

by David Drake

  “Mr. Calandine will be joining us?”

  “Not necessary,” said the black mustache, twitching above the tall man’s lips like an animal in pain.

  “I wonder if you could tell us—” Nan Roebeck began as the doors opened again and two more men stepped in, one florid-faced blond with a khaki suit and a briefcase, the second short and rotund in a blazer and slacks, with hair combed back from a pronounced widow’s peak and a huge head with Germanic features.

  “That’s what we’re here to do, ma’am,” said the khaki suit, slapping his briefcase down on the table.

  The tall guy nodded. There were to be no introductions, no cards exchanged, Grainger realized as the florid-faced man in khaki began to speak.

  “The Soviets have a mind-control weapon and they’re using it on the National Security Advisor,” he said flatly. “We know it’s portable, highly directional, and emits at probably around 11.5 cycles per second. What we don’t know is how to stop it.” He pulled charts from his briefcase and laid them out with grave precision, so that they faced Roebeck and Grainger.

  Soviets? Soviets just means “friends,” or some such. Grainger racked his brains, and then realized that the man meant the Russian-dominated USSR.

  “How do you know?” Roebeck asked with more presence of mind than Grainger had shown.

  “We know, young lady,” the short rotund man said with patronizing cordiality, “because it’s our job to know.” His voice was grainy and cultured. Grainger was now sure that this was the senior officer in the room. Some very senior officer, given the room in question. “I want you to be very sure that we know.” Twinkling eyes and the jovial, conspiratorial smile of a seasoned agent-runner took the sting out of his words.

  Nan Roebeck flushed and sat back, grasping the blue leather arms of her chair hard with whitening fingers.

  “Mr. Calandine,” said the tall man with the mustache, “felt that you needed to have these specifics.” He tapped the charts on the table. One was a map of DC. One was a credible drawing of an acoustic device that no Soviet or Russian or all the combined technological skills of the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could have made in this century. “Mr. Calandine felt that you might have some light to shed on how one counters such a device.”

  Fuck. Grainger was going to hang Calandine out to dry, first chance he got.

  The three intelligence officers stared at Grainger while his mind raced. “Earplugs,” Grainger said. Did they understand sound cancellation in the mid-20th century? Probably not. “A… wet… suit. Lead-lined baffles. Glass-sandwich soundproofing. Or… let us handle it.” He had to take the initiative. He was here as a representative of Los Alamos’ super-secret national security and intelligence component, one of the nuclear lab’s baddest bad boys. That was the legend that had gotten him this meeting. Need to know, especially technical need to know, was sure to extend to a rival intelligence service, even in these ancient times. So he stonewalled. “Give us some idea what else you have besides basic drawings and this map of… possible past incidents….”

  He pulled the map closer to make sure he was reading it right. That’s what it was. Time- and date-marked points, all in the temporal past. “Give us some tracking data on the targets you’ve identified, or what you’ve got for site intel, and just stay out of our way.” Any number could play this game.

  “We can’t have you running around town shooting possible perpetrators, not when we can’t explain why we’re doing it. This can’t blow,” said the rotund man. He tripled his chins and laced his stubby fingers. The cordial smile was gone from his face, but his hooded eyes still twinkled.

  “We won’t kill anyone,” Nan Roebeck promised with more authority than Grainger could have mustered. “We’ll take the device out of play.”

  “Tell me another one,” said the khaki-suited man.

  “No, let’s assume they can do that. Calandine says they can. And my parameters on this are clear,” said the mustache. “But we want the device.”

  “So do we,” said Grainger, suddenly hoping against hope that he understood the game. “But we can’t guarantee it won’t be destroyed.”

  The rotund man punted back to two chins and smiled his cherubic smile. “We can do something with the remains—of the device, of course.”

  Who could? Was there a Defense Science Board in 1967? Did Johnnie Foster run it then, if it existed so far back? And if not, was “we” the Directorate of Intelligence—the analysts? Because if that was so, then the short, rotund man was very probably the deputy director for intelligence himself.

  “What can you give me, sir,” Grainger asked, looking at the rotund man, “that will take this discussion out of the hypothetical?”

  The rotund man looked at the khaki-clad man. The khaki-clad man looked at the mustached man. The mustached man nodded. Data-heavy sheets came out of the briefcase. Two photos were reproduced there, along with names, addresses, and general government tracking data circa 1967. The khaki-clad man pushed those over to Grainger. He had to put his acoustic pistol back in his pocket to take them with his right hand, but he didn’t want to awkwardly grab the sheets with his left and advertise that his right was otherwise engaged.

  Once he’d pocketed his pistol, Grainger swept the two sheets off the table as if he could care less. He got up. “If that’s it…”

  Roebeck rose with him. The rotund man rose suddenly and the khaki-clad man scrambled to his feet.

  The tall man stayed seated. “What’s the procedure for dealing with any collateral damage, exposure, and hand-over of people or matériel?”

  “Whatever you recommend, within feasibility for us,” Nan said in a yawning silence during which all Grainger could think of was that there wasn’t going to be any collateral damage, exposure, or hand-over of people or matériel. He had what he’d needed and hadn’t dared to ask for. He just wanted to get out of there alive.

  “We’ll expect a call from you,” said the mustache, “to Mr. Calandine. Then this group will convene again. Please give us as much warning as possible if you think the wheels are going to come off this mission.” The mustache lifted to reveal, for the first time, a full set of large, white teeth.

  The mustached man held out his hand and Grainger recognized a Citadel ring as he shook it. When he let go, the other two men were already disappearing through the double doors.

  “I’ll walk you down,” said the tall guy, herding them toward the door. “Good brief, everybody. The DDI bought it. Now all you have to do is make this problem go away—invisibly, if possible.”

  Before Grainger could stop her, Roebeck said, “Invisibility’s our strong suit.”

  “Just make sure to bring me back whatever’s left,” said the mustached man. “He really wants that device.”

  Neither Grainger nor Roebeck answered. Their footsteps were loud on the marble as the mustached man escorted them in silence to the elevator and down, past the guards, where they handed in their V for Visitor badges.

  Not until they were alone out on Pennsylvania Avenue did Roebeck say anything. “Just like a historical novel.” She shuddered. “We’re not really sure, though, if we can trust them.”

  “Why not? They want the same thing we do. They’re not going to get all they want, but they’ll get the most important part.”

  “You hope.”

  “I promise,” Grainger said grimly. In a strange and sad way, he’d come home. The spooks in there were a lot closer to him intellectually and operationally than were the ARC Riders. Their allegiance was one he’d shared too long not to remember—or to honor.

  The United States was a place he’d sworn an oath to protect, an ideal he’d lost when he’d been cut lose from his native time. A part of him was glad to have it back, even though that ideal and that place were grossly changed and more threatened than ever before.

  Or since.

  Son Tay Base,

  North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Timeline B: August 17, 1991


  As Pauli Weigand swung his long legs out of the back of the jeep, he set his facemask to sweep the thermal spectrum for a half second every three seconds. That was a refinement of the headband’s capability which he hadn’t bothered to explain to Carnes.

  Carnes started to get out of the front passenger seat. The driver, a nurse named Sendaisa with captain’s bars, put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Becky, are you really sure you want to do this? We could sure use you as chief of nursing again. And don’t worry about Saigon learning. Saigon can’t figure out which direction the sun comes up, these last few months.”

  Carnes capped Sendaisa’s hand with her own and squeezed. “Thanks Val,” she said. “I’m on another job, now.”

  She got out of the jeep before Sendaisa could say anything further. Carnes was part of Weigand’s team. Weigand wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t think it was as simple as the ex-nurse fearing to be left behind as her horizon sank into chaos and H-bombs.

  Weigand was glad he had Carnes along. The one piece of good luck in the whole business was that Carnes and Barthuli were with him when he got separated from TC 779.

  Sendaisa hesitated a moment longer, looking past the team to the compound where she’d delivered them over her protests. After the ambush, the MPs towed the ambushed truck from the soft ground with their armored personnel carrier. The damaged vehicle, only marginally drivable, had barely gotten them to the 96th. Carnes had found Sendaisa, an old friend, to run the team a kilometer across the base to where Watney stayed when he was in Son Tay.

  The compound of the 504th Provisional Company was on the northern perimeter of Son Tay Base. It was encircled by a bamboo stockade interlaced with concertina wire and razor ribbon. Grenade booby traps hung from the wire, deliberately obvious in warning.

  Barthuli had determined before the team left the Continental US that the 504th was carried on the books of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In reality, the unit was the personal fiefdom of Kyle Watney—Colonel Watney, though there was no evidence that either the US or Vietnamese governments had granted Watney rank of any kind. Watney had raised the 504th, staffed it with a combination of volunteers and the dregs of military prisons transferred to him to do with as he chose, and paid for the unit in fashions that didn’t leave a ripple in the formal record.

  Watney ran the 504th as if he were God. There were six human heads on stakes outside the stockade’s gate. One was a skull with scraps of dried flesh still clinging; two were so fresh that the eyeballs hadn’t yet sunken into the sockets. From the stories Carnes and Sendaisa had told, any or all of the heads could have belonged to members of the 504th who’d offended Watney in some way.

  Weigand glanced at his companions. Carnes looked… perhaps tired, perhaps disgusted; not afraid. Gerd was his usual interested self, though he limped slightly from the bruise his left thigh had taken when he flew from the truck as it left the road.

  Weigand shrugged. “Let’s go, then,” he said.

  “I’ll lead,” said Rebecca Carnes, putting her hand on Weigand’s chest to slow him to a half step behind her. “Watney knows me.”

  A bonfire in the heart of the compound swirled sparks into the night sky and glimmered through the interstices of the bamboo. There were no electric lights. Recorded music with a throbbing bass line played loud enough to be audible half a klick away. If any of the other residents of Son Tay Base objected to such noise at 0200 hours, they had better sense than to complain to the 504th directly.

  The gate was of barbed wire woven on a bamboo frame. It hung ajar. A crossbar, a length of broken torsion bar from an APC, lay beside the opening.

  “Hello?” Carnes called. She swung the gate fully open.

  The guard was behind a curtain of dried grass. He showed up clearly when Weigand’s faceshield swept the infrared spectrum.

  The guard lunged from the darkness with a sharpened bayonet, thrusting at Carnes’ throat. Weigand grabbed the man’s knife wrist with his left hand. The fellow was short, strong, and spiked on drugs.

  “I’m a friend of the colonel’s,” Rebecca Carnes said. She sounded as calm as a clerk taking inventory. “We’re here to see Colonel Watney.”

  The guard writhed like a snake. The pupils of his eyes were shrunk to pinholes. He should have been virtually blind in the faint moonlight, but he’d seen Carnes’ throat clearly enough.

  “Colonel not here,” the man said. His voice was husky; there was the dimple of a long-healed bullet hole above his larynx. “Go away or I kill you. I kill you anyway!”

  He was amazingly strong. Weigand was afraid he’d break the guard’s wrist if it was necessary to squeeze any harder to hold the man. The fellow wore a fully automatic Czech machine pistol slung like a lavaliere. The weapon bumped against the tattoos on his bare chest as he struggled. Neither he nor Weigand was using his free hand.

  Gerd spoke to the man in a language Weigand didn’t understand; Oriental, certainly. The guard stopped struggling, though he still held tense. He snarled back to Barthuli and spat on the ground at the analyst’s feet.

  Barthuli leaned forward within ten centimeters of the guard’s face and shouted at him. The guard shouted, then dropped the bayonet. He stamped the weapon against the ground with his bare foot as he continued to curse Barthuli in broken desperation.

  “Let him go,” Barthuli said.

  Weigand released the guard’s wrist, giving the man a slight push as he did so. He wasn’t going to second-guess Gerd, but it seemed at least as likely as not that the guard was going to try to kill them all as soon as he was loose.

  Instead, the man turned his back on the team and squatted, wrapping his arms around his knees. He began to sway and keen.

  Weigand glanced at Barthuli and asked, “What on earth did you say to him?”

  “It wasn’t really what I said,” the analyst explained. “I told him we’d force all his female relatives to have sexual congress with hogs before we killed them. But my recorder had analyzed his speech patterns, and I was able to address him in the dialect of his home village. I think that was the important thing.”

  “Oh,” said Weigand. His stomach turned. Not because of what had happened. That was a slick maneuver which avoided the physical violence Weigand had thought was inevitable. “Good job, Gerd.”

  The problem was that Weigand knew if the situation required (and allowed) it, Barthuli would have set women out to be raped by pigs with the same cool reason that permitted him to make the threat.

  “He’s from a village about seventy kilometers northwest of Beijing,” Barthuli said. “Colonel Watney has recruited ralliers from the Chinese forces as well as Vietnamese.”

  “Let’s go talk to the man,” Weigand said. He worked the strain out of his left hand, clenching and spreading the fingers.

  Ahead of them, music pounded the night and the sparks swirled high. The guard had slumped into a drugged stupor, but his eyes were still open. Weigand felt the needle-sharp pupils drilling into his back as the team walked onward.

  Son Tay Base,

  North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Timeline B: August 17, 1991

  Rebecca Carnes supposed she’d been that close to death at other times. The moment the Chinese soldier aimed his rifle at her in the middle of Firebase Schaydin, if not before; and probably before as well. Not from a knife, though, six inches short of her neck when Pauli caught the gooner’s wrist.

  She mustn’t call them gooners anymore. They were all human, the way she herself was human; and thus capable of human weakness, like depersonalizing someone faceless in the darkness who’d tried to rip her throat out.

  An armored personnel carrier sat on a trailer to the left of the gate. The APC seemed to have been abandoned. Both tracks were missing, and several forward road wheels on the left side had been blown off by a mine. She walked past the disabled vehicle, leading her two companions in the direction of the bonfire.

  The wind shifted slightly. The APC smelled as though it were regularly used as a lat
rine. A fly lit on Carnes’ wrist. She crushed it against the thigh of her trousers with a quick motion. She’d seen worse.

  Carnes hadn’t been afraid when the irregular at the gate tried to kill her. She hadn’t really been afraid since the ARC Riders showed her the flash and mushroom absorbing Tampa, Florida. The world Rebecca Carnes knew had died in that moment, and a part of her person had died with it.

  A huge Sikorsky helicopter, a Sea Stallion, was parked in the middle of the compound. Its six rotor blades drooped like the branches of a young willow. When Carnes had seen similar birds they’d been in naval markings, frequently with the orange fuselage panels of the Air-Sea Rescue Service. This helicopter was painted flat black without even tail numbers to identify it.

  Two men leaned against the dual landing-gear wheels, kissing and fondling one another’s genitals. One of the men was Caucasian, the other Oriental. The joint of opium-laced marijuana they’d been smoking smoldered on the hard ground beside them.

  Someone screamed in the near distance. Perhaps it was an animal.

  “Do you think Watney might really be gone?” Weigand asked. She’d returned the headband with working commo to Barthuli. He had to bend close to Carnes’ ear and shout to be heard over the thunderous music.

  “Val says the 504th came back from an operation this morning,” Carnes shouted back. “Watney was treated for a through-and-through puncture wound in the right calf muscle and released. They won’t be out again so soon.”

  She thought for a moment, then added, “This is probably a victory celebration. I suppose victory.”

  Beyond the Sikorsky were two buildings and forty or more men around the bonfire. The buildings were roofed with sheet metal. The lower course was boards slatted outward to provide ventilation instead of being nailed firmly edge-to-edge. The upper portion of the walls was screen wire, though the fabric was ripped in many places.