by David Nickle
“Really? The baby-killer?” Neil had asked.
“The soldier,” his mother admonished. “The ex-soldier,” she added, making significant eye-contact with his father, who was until that instant following Augustus with white-knuckled determination. He paused, looked at her with gimlet-eyed obedience.
“And it’s Christmas,” she finished—saying Christmas in the same tone she used to keep Neil away from live electrical sockets when he was younger.
Obediently, Neil’s father drew himself back and crossed his arms. Aware of Neil’s mother’s glare, he made a smile with the rictus-hard muscles of his face.
“Hi August,” he called, voice taking a sing-song cadence. “What brings you here?”
Santa Claus—or August, Uncle Augustus—stepped into the doorway, leaned on the frame. In those days he weighed in at about 320, most of it up high in his gut, and the wood creaked under that weight. He grinned through his prematurely white goatee, spread his arms out in front of him, slipped a bit then recovered his footing.
“I’m over it!” he hollered.
Nobody had said anything for that moment. Augustus kept his arms out, waggled his bushy white eyebrows and kept grinning, like an actor waiting for his cue. It was finally Neil who broke the silence.
“Over what?” he asked.
“Viet Nam, dear,” his mother said to him. Then, to Augustus: “Well that’s great news, Augustus. We know how hard it’s been for you.”
“Yeah,” said Neil’s father. “Super. That’s super news.”
Augustus grabbed the back of a chair and pulled it up to the dining room table. “Super! Ha! That’s a word for it! The dreams—I think they’re gone for good! And the drinking—”
“Yes?” said Neil’s father, more than a little scepticism creeping into his voice.
“Hell, I gotta save something for New Year’s,” said Uncle Augustus, and he guffawed. “Now what’s for dinner? Assuming of course you’ll have a smelly old Santa like me at your table, brother.”
Although for a while his eyes had said differently, Neil’s father hadn’t been able to bring himself to object.
“Good,” said Neil’s mother. “Good.”
And then, the spirit of reconciliation still driving her, she stepped across the room, took Augustus’ hand, and led him over to Neil.
“I have someone for you to meet, August,” she said, and took Neil’s hand. Neil didn’t quite know what to do, and from the uncertain look in his rheumy eyes, neither did Augustus.
“It’s your nephew,” she said. “Neil.”
The two stood there for an uncomfortably long time, Neil’s mother a narrow bridge between them.
“Well shake!” she demanded.
“Yeah.” Augustus’ voice was soft at first, but as he spoke it was as if a flame caught in him, and he repeated: “Yeah! My nephew Neil!” And he pulled his hand away from hers, took hold of Neil’s, and squeezed it so hard Neil’s fingers crumpled like origami in his uncle’s fist.
Neil shouted: “Ow!”
“August!” shouted Neil’s father.
“August,” said Neil’s mother in her don’t-touch-the-socket tone.
But Augustus just kept his eyes locked on Neil’s. It was like they were on fire—like the bourbon in his belly had ignited, spread to his eyeballs, and now the flames were licking across the air to Neil.
Neil was never certain of what happened next. It could be that Augustus had let up a bit—given him just the room he needed to manoeuvre, that one opening in the flank that meant the difference between a rout and a victory. Or it could be that Neil had found something in himself that Christmas Day. A strength that had never before been tested, but had been itching for the chance…
Whatever the cause, in that next instant, Neil found his grip. His fingers slipped around the meaty heel of Augustus’ palm, and wrapped August’s own thick fingers. And then, before his uncle could react, Neil put his own pressure on. The fingers collapsed among each other, knuckles clicking and cracking under Neil’s nine-year-old grip. Augustus’ eyes widened, and his mouth formed a tiny ‘o’ shape. Heart pumping, Neil squeezed harder, then brought his other hand up and squeezed with it too.
“Pleasedtameechya!” he yelled, pumping his uncle’s hand up and down furiously. “Pleasedtameechya pleasedtameechya!”
Augustus fell to one knee, and the ‘o’ of his mouth shifted into the upper case, and as Neil raised his uncle’s collapsed hand over his head, to push him even lower to the floor, Augustus started to scream:
“Ah sweet mother! Stop! Stop! Call the boy off, he’s breaking my hand! For the love of God!”
Neil’s mother started to say something, but now it was his father who stopped her, with a shushing gesture and a wink. She stepped back, her forehead creased with a worried frown as Augustus collapsed onto his back and Neil jumped onto his ample gut. Something cracked in his fists, then, and Augustus let out a howl.
“Pleasedtameechya,” he said once more, before letting his uncle’s hand go and getting off the old man’s stomach. Augustus looked at his hand, tested each finger and winced when he tried to bend the pinky.
“Neil!” said Neil’s mother finally. “What kind of way is that to greet your uncle!”
“I think it’s broken,” said Augustus, wonderingly.
Neil’s mother turned to his uncle. “Oh, August, I’m sorry—”
Augustus held up the damaged hand. “No, no,” he said. “Don’t be sorry.” And he turned to Neil. “That,” he said—his tone deepening respectfully, “is one hell of a grip, Little Soldier.”
Neil beamed—and the smile didn’t stop until long after dinner—long after Uncle Augustus had left for the night, for a visit to the local emergency room to get his swollen, crooked pinky looked after.
Lying in bed, Neil flexed his fingers and held them up to the glow of the city sky outside his windows. One hell of a grip, all right. He wondered when Augustus would be back, to help him test that grip again.
Neil Nyman, who was now Cadet Lieutenant Neil Nyman, pulled himself out of the trench just over a kilometre away from Station Black Ice and paused for a moment. Eight, nine, ten…Good, he thought. All fingers still present and accounted for.
If he were of a more vindictive frame of mind, Neil could probably have found it in himself to blame Uncle Augustus for all this. In the first place, if it weren’t for Augustus, Neil probably would never have gone to West Point; his parents were old-fashioned peaceniks, and as far as Neil could tell even disapproved of World War II (which Uncle Augustus had called “the best friggin’ fight this country ever elbowed its way into”) and thought that their country’s involvement in Viet Nam was an atrocity too terrible for words. The CARTER bumper sticker on their old Datsun was barely visible underneath the strata of MONDALE and DUKAKIS decals. That Datsun was, like his parents, too small to find room for anything trumpeting REAGAN, or (God forbid, if you listened to them) GEORGE BUSH.
Throughout the 1980s, Augustus and his parents formed a kind of truce—but it was an uneasy truce, and Augustus was careful to reveal himself sparingly in their presence. It was only when he talked to Neil (his Little Soldier) that he revealed the true extent of his philosophy.
“There is nothing better than the honour born of combat,” he would say. “Never let your buddy down. Take a bullet for a friend, but give three of your own back to the bastard that tried to shoot him. This is the best God-damned country in the world, and there’s nothing better to do than prove that to those sonofabitch Communists with the business-end of your M-16.”
If they were walking, Uncle Augustus would lift his own phantom M-16 at that point, and aim it at a tree, make chuffing noises with his mouth. On the rare occasions that he was driving, he would just leave it at that for a moment, and go on to his explanation of supply-side economics or the rights of the unborn, or why it was no sin to carry a gun at your belt or utter a prayer in school. But it always came back to one fundamental maxim: “Serve your coun
try, Little Soldier. It’ll never turn you away.”
Like your father turned me away. That was the unspoken finish.
And there came the second lesson that Neil had taken from his Uncle Augustus—the lesson that had, ironically enough he supposed, sealed his fate this Christmas of 1991. That had caused Colonel Wilkit to send him to Station Black Ice, alone in the arctic midnight for Christmas, rather than home to Birmingham…
“Christmas,” Uncle Augustus had told him, “is a time of sweet redemption. Treasure it, and avail yourself of its power.”
It had seemed like a good idea when Augustus had spoken it—and it had certainly proven true for Augustus. But something had changed—in the intervention of years between 1983 and 1991, perhaps in the generational change between Augustus and Neil.
Or maybe, as seemed to happen so often, Neil had just gotten it wrong.
It was early December, and Neil had finished his next to last end-of-term exam in Military Economy in the Modern State. The test had gone well—Neil was certain he had aced the essay question on free-market triage—and the last thing he had expected was to find himself called up to the Colonel’s office.
“Sit down, Cadet Lieutenant,” Colonel Wilkit had said. “But before you do, tell me one thing.”
“Sir yes sir,” Neil had replied.
“Did you really think that what you did to Sergeant Thorpe-Wyles was funny?”
Neil had not known what to say, so he remained standing.
“Did you really think that placing a self-inflating rubber rescue raft in the top right-hand drawer of Sergeant Thorpe-Wyles’ hand-carved mahogany desk was amusing? Was it a big hoot for you, Cadet Lieutenant?”
“It was a…Christmas gift…” Neil had taken if not a liking to Sergeant Thorpe-Wyles then at least the kind of unquestioning respect and admiration that Neil felt he ought to cultivate for his betters at West Point. When the term drew to a close, Neil’s only thought was to give Sergeant Thorpe-Wyles, an avid yachtsman, a small token of his unquestioning respect and admiration, along with a nice card. Redemption, Uncle Augustus had always said, comes at Christmas.
He had not intended it to lead to the kind of situation it evidently had.
“If I hadn’t served a tour in ’Nam with your Uncle Augustus,” said Colonel Wilkit, “I’d have you drummed out of here so fast your scrawny worthless neck would snap like a Thanksgiving turkey’s. As it stands, you’re still not getting off easy.”
No, Neil supposed that two months missile-watch duty in the high arctic couldn’t reasonably be described as getting off easy.
Christmas is a time of sweet redemption. Treasure it, and avail yourself of it.
Christmas had failed Neil once in the availing, and he probably should have known better than to try to apply Uncle Augustus’ wisdom again. But he couldn’t help himself. Redemption as Neil saw it was barely a few hundred metres away.
He could see the dim flickering of its beacon, oddly reminiscent of the light he’d seen at the end of the trench. Redemption’s name, thought Neil a little crazily, his inner voice taking on the Carolina rhythms of Augustus’, is Station Black Ice.
The station, which was really not much more than a plywood shack with a navy-issue coal stove, a short-wave radio and a barely-adequate supply of food, wasn’t much use as a second-tier missile-spotting station anymore (not since the Cold War officially ended, just months earlier, with the August Coup and the collapse of Communism). But when Neil reported the object that he’d just found—well, even if it wasn’t Christmas, that would have to redeem him; they’d be sure to bring him back.
Neil picked up his pace, and as he got closer, the light in the station grew brighter. In his heat-starved state, it even seemed to be pulsing—hearth-warm red, inviting Neil in from the cold.
Neil rehearsed the report that he would deliver, once he got the shortwave cranked up: “Oh twelve niner, this is Black Ice over. Reporting unidentified—” flying? Hardly “—unidentified object due south of Black Ice some”—Neil staggered on, checked the pencil marks he’d made in the pocket notebook, and recited in kilometres the numbers they most closely resembled. “The object shows stress from extreme heat, possibly re-entry. Evidence of power tools and large-scale engine parts, possibly Soviet. Evidence of atomics…” Neil thought about this. “Inconclusive,” he finally said.
Ah, hell; atomics or no, it didn’t matter—everything he’d seen should be enough to get him out of this backwater and back to West Point on the next flight from Baffin Island.
He was only ten metres away from the front door when he looked up again. And saw the “ember” in the station up close.
It was no ember. It came from a big wire-covered lamp in Station Black Ice’s ceiling that Neil had thought was dead.
The light was flashing red.
The arctic silence was cut by the squawking of his shortwave. Neil couldn’t quite make it out from this distance—even inside the station, even with his ear pressed up against the three-inch speaker cone, it was sometimes hard to understand what his contact at Baffin Island was saying.
And what the hell was that light doing flashing?
Neil hurried the rest of the way to the door. He pulled it open—the seals sucking and cracking like his mom’s refrigerator—and stepped inside to the station’s barely-heated interior. The Navy-issue coal stove in the corner by Neil’s cot clicked and rattled, and as he pulled off his mouth-cover and yanked down the hood, Neil heard the short-wave come alive again. “—Claus is coming! Prepare for rendezvous,” it said, and then after a suitable burst of static, “Imminent!”
Imminent. Neil felt something shift under his feet, then he felt a rumble.
No, it wasn’t a rumble exactly. It was a rending. A definite, dentist-chair rending that shook the ice underneath him and rattled the fillings in his teeth.
He picked up the microphone and thumbed transmit.
“This is Cadet Lieutenant Neil Nyman—I mean, this is Station Black Ice, reporting a—” he checked his notes. By his cot, the Navy issue coal stove began to hum and the flashing red light shivered. “Reporting an unidentified object, over.”
“Cadet Lieutenant Nyman!” came the reply. “State your position, over!”
Neil frowned. Deep beneath his feet, the rumbling stopped, and the floor thrummed as something snapped. “Station Black Ice,” said Neil. “Over.”
“Then get out!” screamed the radio. “For God’s sake, kid! Haven’t you been listening? Santa Claus is coming! Rendezvous is, repeat, imminent!”
Santa Claus. Neil stood dumbstruck for a moment. Santa Claus?
“Is that some kind of code?” he asked. But he didn’t press transmit. Not until he thought it through. Rendezvous. Is.
Imminent.
It sunk in to Neil all at once, even as the rumbling resumed and the red light went dark again. He stepped backwards out the door, and in a rare moment of prescience leaped backwards again, just as the ice beneath his feet cracked.
Miniature avalanches of snow collapsed into the fissure and as it stretched towards Neil he scrambled back further, crab-like.
What the hell? thought Neil.
He watched, transfixed, as the ice between himself and the station rose into the blackness, a frozen Krakatoa that tore with a sound like bending timbers.
Neil stumbled to his feet, turned and ran in the opposite direction. But he had barely gotten up to speed when the ice buckled again—this time more violently. He found himself sliding now, faster and faster down the ever-growing incline along with broken chunks of ice and cutting, granular shifts of snow.
Above him, a black, finned tower of metal grew out of the ice. From the place where the first eruption had occurred, the narrow beam of a searchlight speared across the ice-plain. Briefly it crossed Neil’s eyes, then crawled up the side of the tower above him. Neil barely had time to make out a serial number—628—painted in man-sized letters across the tower’s side before the blade of light travelled onward and
Neil was buried in a rush of sound and motion and ice.
The fifth and last attack submarine broke through directly underneath Checkpoint Black Ice. The flimsy plywood structure of the checkpoint collapsed along its central axis with an almost grateful ease, and the remains slid off the U.S.S. Frankenmuth’s emerging tower like a movie star’s house in a mudslide. It lay in a smouldering heap at the submarine’s feet, the coals sputtering ineffectually at the edges of the plywood in the minus sixty-eight degree arctic night. The main hatch of the U.S.S. Frankenmuth creaked open and a figure climbed out. He was a stork-legged, silver-haired man with deep-set dimes for eyes and lips that even in the arctic freeze seemed damp, fresh-licked. He wore a blue knee-length parka and a brown corduroy cap with the earflaps down, and galoshes that couldn’t have been warm enough for the weather—but seemed to suit him fine. He had boarded the Frankenmuth just the past week and was known to the crew only as Mr. Beland.
Mr. Beland stuffed a bird’s-nest of tobacco deep into a dark mahogany-belled pipe, and looked expectantly into the sky. He had the look then of a man who had spent his career using billion-dollar military craft like limousines, missile silos as weekend retreats. Although essentially accurate, it was a look that Mr. Beland was careful not to display often.
Around the circle, other hatches swung open—and from each, a similarly-dressed figure climbed out. For a long moment, all were silent.
“Soon,” shouted Mr. Lockhardt, the only one of the five who had actually stepped down from his submarine. He strode across the ice to the very edge of the detritus. “Be patient.”
Mr. Beland looked at the other man. “I’m always that, Mr. Lockhardt. I’ve followed this thing from New Mexico to…well, to here. But this is the last consignment, and I’ll be glad when the job is finished.”
Mr. Lockhardt dug in his coat pocket for his own pipe, and said nothing.
“Where is the guard?” Mr. Beland pointed to the ruin of Station Black Ice on the opposite side of the tower. “Do you suppose he was inside that?”
