A Song Called Youth (108 page)

• 05 •

Paris. Processing Center 13.

“So, where’s Steinfeld?” Roseland asked.

“He’s in Egypt, trying to get us some backup,” Dan Torrence said.

“He’s not going to be here for this?” Roseland said. “Christ!”

“ ‘Christ’? Some Jew you are.”

“Okay, okay:
Moses!
You happy? Me, I’m not so happy, I mean, this is delicate, isn’t it? It’s not that I don’t trust you to—I—” Roseland fumbled for words.

“I know what you mean. I wish he was here too. We’ll do all right, man.”

They were crouched in the rooftop blind, close but not too close to the high-rise concentration camp, watching the skyline, ready to give the signal to the others. It was a warm, gently breezy night. Paper trash scraped and fluttered on the rooftop outside.

Some Jew you are,
Torrence had said. His idea of a joke. Not a racist joke, just a weak one. Roseland’s own sense of humor had only started to come back to him in the last week. You needed strength to make jokes. Torrence seemed to feel a little threatened by Roseland’s humor, felt he had to contribute from time to time. An uncle of Roseland’s, old Dave Meyers, used to say, “People without a sense of humor shouldn’t try to be funny.” And it was true of Torrence. Not much of a sense of humor. But you didn’t tell “Hard-Eyes” things like that . . . 

Anything, apparently, to avoid thinking about what was coming. Roseland dreaded it. Dreaded going to PC 13. Dreaded seeing the blood of the innocent mixed with the blood of the guilty.

Just do it, he told himself. Just do the job.

Torrence was looking fixedly through the slat. Roseland saw him tense; or sensed it somehow, in the dark. Heard him speak into the headset. “That’s it, it’s the change of the guard. Tourists, take your pictures.”

There was a staticky snip of reply, and then Torrence’s gun clattered against his gear as he moved out the back way. Roseland followed, his own rifle on its strap across his back, and in minutes they were climbing out through the first-floor window, into the little, narrow street behind the building where the others in the first assault team waited.

Pasolini was there, and Musa and Jiddah, and a French woman, Bibisch: a pale, lanky, long-faced woman who almost never spoke, but cared for her submachine gun lovingly. And others Roseland hadn’t got to know much yet. There was a moment when they clustered on the corner, in the light from the full moon; they stood next to the window of a deserted butcher’s shop, waiting for Torrence, who conferred with other assault teams on the headset. And in that moment Roseland found himself looking at his own reflection in the glass of the shop. Roseland had been eating modestly but regularly, and his face had filled out some; usually he looked almost healthy but not in this reflection. In the muted light, his reflection in the dark glass was hollow-eyed, cadaverous, his face a thing of shadows and sallow planes. As if he were looking out from the dimension where dead things dwell, he thought. The way he’d looked in the concentration camp they’d called a processing center.

He stared at himself, thinking:
That’s me inside.

He’d always had a deep empathy for children. And he remembered, when there were children in the Processing Center, how they had died of dysentery and cholera and malnutrition, shaking from spasms of endless diarrhea, puking when there was nothing left to puke, feverishly pleading for water; the dull anguish on the parents’ faces when they gave up trying to explain about the water ration; when they had to accept:
I cannot help my child. I cannot even comfort the child.

Someone had been shot one morning for giving away their own water ration; for no particular reason, giving away your ration was forbidden. And the children, dying slowly, had begged, as their parents hugged and rocked them, and one of the guards had become annoyed and shouted, “Shut that brat up or I’ll feed ’er me boot!”

Roseland had seen what was happening that day in the Processing Center, and hadn’t the strength, then, to fight. Couldn’t say a word.

Maybe that was when his insides had shriveled to match his outsides.

He thought these things, staring at his sunken-eyed reflection, until Torrence said, “Here it comes. Let’s do it.”

Here it comes but still a ways off, between the buildings, the clean-edged, cold, crystallized steel arc of the hijacked Jægernaut, slicing up through the skyline. The distant, ringing thunder of its approach, coming through areas already war-ruined, or condemned.

They were in the prearranged positions in seconds, Musa and Jiddah and Bibisch and Roseland under Pasolini’s command; Musa with his RPG; Torrence rendezvousing with a second group taking out the guards.

Torrence came out of one alley down the street, while a third team on a rooftop opened up on the guards with armor-piercing explosive rounds. The cluster of guards meeting for the change in shift had the new kevlar-7 armor, more resistant than the old SA bull outfitting, and the rounds tended to explode on the armor or on the ground near them, with little effect; but one high velocity round hit at just the right angle and penetrated the armor. The guard fell writhing while his armor ballooned with blood. The others were staggering with the small explosions, trying to bring their rifles into play, the so-called “smart” rifles, computer-enhanced, except they were stupid because you had to perform two steps, accessing the firing chip and rangefinder, to get them to fire, and by then Torrence was on them with three others, tossing the explosive disks at them . . . one of the disks deflecting, the other two sucking flat on the armor and blowing. The NR to Torrence’s right going down, spinning, cut in half by a burst from a guard who finally convinced his smart rifle to defend him . . . 

Roseland only glimpsed this in fits and snatches as he steadied Musa’s RPG-8 and stepped out of the way. Musa had brought three of the vintage twentieth-century rocket-firing weapons with him when he’d slipped into Paris, and a small truckload of rounds: a masterful stage-magicking act of smuggling. A survival skill handed down through generations of Mujahedin.

The RPG hissed exhaust from its vents, and the rocket went
shuh-shuh-shuh
directly to the third-floor window. Roseland prayed it was the right window. The rocket punched through the plaster and fiberboard patch over the window, detonating, obscuring the socket with a fireball—

Almost simultaneously another guerrilla RPG on the roof ripped the security-camera-and-machine-gun system to shreds—

The horizon’s battle-ax thundered closer—

The last of the outer guards went down, blown in half, his screaming amplified by his helmet PA system to echo around the street—

(There are
men
inside those mirror fishbowls, Roseland thought.)

A guard stumbled out of the front door of Processing Center 13, missing his helmet, coughing in the smoke that billowed after him, his face charred, but firing at them, bullets strafing up the street until Pasolini cut him down with a short, neat burst that punched his face into his skull.

Roseland couldn’t move.

You’re Point Cadre,
he told himself.
Go!
But the monolithic bulk of the converted high-rise seemed to lean forward, as if poising to fall on him, to scoop him into itself, like some gigantic shell-creature eating a worm.
How could he have come back here?

He looked at the tumbled ruins of 12, thought he could just make out a human skull and a yellowing, skeletal hand emerging from beneath the massive pinch of a boulder. Whose body?

Gabrielle’s, bulldozed there?

Pasolini kicked him in the tailbone. It hurt like a bitch, like the bitch she was, Roseland thought, but it was a blow that could have come from the other, angry part of him, personified.

“Get moving, asshole!” she shouted, saying what he was saying to himself.

And he remembered Father Lespere telling them earnestly, “All of us are already dead. That is what you must accept, and then you can begin to do the work.”

Jamais plus. Never again!

The dam burst and the rage poured through, carrying him with it, his rifle spitting fire and metal at the second guard staggering from the door. The bull’s armor deflected the bullets, sparking, but the firepower’s impact knocking him backward. Roseland was running at him, firing again, screaming something (What? Maybe it should have been: “Never again!” But it wasn’t. It was: “Die, you ASSSSSSHOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLESSSSSSSSS!”) as the guy got to his feet, only to be knocked back again by Roseland’s next burst. But still the guy got up, almost literally wading upstream against Roseland’s gunfire. And then Roseland’s clip gave out and his assault rifle lapsed into sheepish silence and the guy was firing back . . . 

Pasolini shoved past Roseland, tossing a grenade, everyone flattening except the guard who reacted too slowly, the explosive flipping him through the air so that blood made a spiral against the wall behind him.

Roseland: Up and plunging into the building, running up the stairs, not allowing himself to think, not even stopping to reload (aware that Pasolini was yelling at him, cursing him in a mix of Italian and English), climbing over the body of a guard dying under a heap of imploded masonry. The guard’s crushed body giving a little under the slab that Roseland clambered over; the guard screaming with pain—

Then Roseland was past, kicking down the door, and there they were.

They were being punished.

Outside, Dan Torrence issued commands, sending guerillas into the building to begin evacuating prisoners as the articulated truck Musa had stolen that morning backed up to the door. Torrence moved across the courtyard, checking the blockades, moving from one to the next as they were set up: stolen cars blocking the street.

Behind him, Pasolini dispatched the wounded enemy. Torrence had given her the job because she’d argued for the necessity of it the night before. Torrence had argued that wounded men are a burden on the enemy; leave their wounded alive and you slow them down and force them to use resources and time and personnel. But Pasolini pointed out the SA Army was relatively small and most of them were racist fanatics. A greater advantage was had in reducing their numbers than in inconveniencing them. If these wounded recovered, they were a political and military resource for the enemy.

But killing the enemy wounded is not a sound political move, Torrence had said.

Oh, but it is, Pasolini said. It underlines our commitment. We’re more a force to be reckoned with . . . 

She’d persuaded Steinfeld, and now it was done. Sometimes Torrence wondered if they hadn’t skirted the real issue: that he simply wanted to spare lives, and nursed some guilt over the act of killing; whereas Pasolini enjoyed killing.

Crack:
a shrieking soldier silenced.

More gunfire now, on the perimeter of the little square, as the vehicles the guerrillas had driven up to block the street came under fire from advancing SA. There were only about a dozen Second Alliance, so far. They were containable: Torrence’s backup team were holding them back with rifle-launched grenades and firebombs.

The greater threat was from the north: Second Alliance reinforcements in large numbers were moving in with armored cars, maybe only blocks away.

But the Jægernaut was there: he felt the ground shudder under him, glimpsed a gargantuan shifting, as if a tower of steel were stretching itself after a long hibernation. Voices in his headset: “
Swineherd, we’re making contact with the trotters.”
The Jægernaut hijack unit was moving the gargantuan machine into place.

What potential power there was in controlling a Jægernaut, Torrence thought . . . 

He noticed Roseland running from building 13, white-faced. Panicked, maybe. Looked like he was going to lose it, after all. They might have to—

But then he saw Roseland rummaging in the cab of the evacuation truck, coming out with insulated wire clippers, swearing to himself as he turned and raced back into the building. Torrence went in to see what was holding up the evacuation.

Upstairs, past the rubble, he found Roseland in a large stinking room that had been made when the walls in the original apartments had been knocked down. He was using the clippers to cut away plastic restraints from the necks and wrists and ankles of the prisoners. Every one of them had been bound in the stuff, tied together, squeezed in so tightly there was barely room to move or breathe. Torrence recognized the hard but prehensile gray plastic, as sparks shot from the clippers, severing it. Restrain-o-Lite, it was called. Used by British cops to hold large numbers of prisoners after a riot; the stuff absorbed static electricity and gave it off whenever you moved. Sit still and it didn’t hurt you; squirm and it gave you a nasty shock. The condition of the prisoners . . . 

Torrence, who’d thought himself inured to horror, had to turn away till his stomach quieted down.

About a fourth of them had died in the restraints; were hanging there, rotting. Some had rotted free, slipped to the floor. The others were starved, bruised, cold, semiconscious, drained of dignity. Looking like plucked game birds hanging in a string.

And there were more, hundreds more on the floors above. Torrence took a breath and turned around, began to shout orders, commencing the evacuation. Glad Claire wasn’t here to have to see this. And yet wishing she was at his side . . . 

The Hôtel de Ville, Paris.

Colonel Watson, Klaus, and Giessen stood at the monitors in the Security Center, watching the shaking TV image shot from the underside of the chopper approaching Processing Center 13.

“How did they get hold of a Jægernaut?” Giessen asked, not troubling to conceal his disgust. “That is supposed to be impossible—”

“I know it is,” Watson snapped. “And I don’t know how.”

“How many gunships can you muster?” Giessen asked. “Air support will compensate for the Jægernaut . . . ”

“Only about three, at the moment,” Klaus murmured, as he stabbed a number on the fone.

“I’m afraid I cannot commend your planning, Herr Watson,” Giessen said.