A Song Called Youth (51 page)

Torrence threw himself down into a pebbly alcove between two, low boulders, Claire hunching down beside him, both of them gasping, shaking with fear, but amazed to be alive, feeling a transitory buzz of triumph . . . until he saw that Potter and the Algerian were splashed over the rocks near the entrance to the crevice. They’d been caught coming into it.

Torrence felt despair drag like a heavy lead weight. But he forced himself to get up, look for Steinfeld.

There were four volunteers near the entrance to the fissure, shooting at the aircraft in order to draw fire, to give the others a chance to move back into cover, away from the road. The fissure was about forty feet deep, V-shaped; it was about eighteen feet across at the top, narrowed to a snow and pebble-packed floor, angling upward toward the mountainside; there was a slight overhang on the south side that gave them a little aerial cover. The sun shone almost directly into the crevice; the bluish light was broken up here and there by sharp blades of shadow.

“How . . . how many of us?” Claire asked, arms propped on her knees, face buried in her arms.

He said, “Looks like we’re down to about thirty-two.” She said something more, but he couldn’t hear it because of the bark and chatter and scream of gunfire from the front of the fissure. Steinfeld and Levassier were just turning a corner farther down the crevice, moving up to deeper cover. Cursing as they slipped on patches of snow and uneven rock, other guerrillas carried wounded, and a few crates of weapons, food, guns. They hadn’t gotten away with much.

The wounded were giving out short, sharp cries of pain with each jolt as they were moved.

Some mocking inner voice told Torrence:
You wanted to be where the conflict was real. This real enough for you?

The remaining autochopper opened up with long, blanketing bursts of its miniguns at the four guerrillas drawing fire at the opening of the fissure.

Torrence saw the rough
V
of the fissure’s opening blur with dust and rock chips and smoke and spattered blood. He saw the bodies of the four volunteers jerking, slamming against the stone with the impact of the bullets: four people, gone instantaneously. Each one had a life history; parents, family, friends, perhaps children. The ribbon of each one’s life history—summarily snipped.

He saw the
Heeldog
hovering fifty feet up, wind from its rotors swirling dust and smoke and snow. Like an opaque-helmeted SA security guard, it had no face. It was computer-driven; it was a machine for hunting, for killing, and nothing more.

The jet was coming in from the opposite direction looking for targets. Claire had gotten her breath. She stood and they followed the others back into the fissure, feeling like small animals running from an exterminator.

They turned the corner in the fissure just as the rock behind them erupted with a cannon shell from the jumpjet. The ground seemed to ripple; the shock thickened and distorted the air, and the ground seemed to leap out from under Torrence . . . till he found himself lying facedown, his ears ringing.

Thinking,
Have I been hit?
Someone was pulling at his arm, shouting over the screaming roar of the jet, the thump of the autochopper blades, “Get up, damn you, Torrence!” Claire’s voice. “Come on, Danny!”

Torrence? Danny? He remembered the names, remembered everything that had brought him here. It seemed nonsensical now—even as he forced himself up, got his rubbery legs moving, as he and Claire stumbled back into the crevice: it seemed absurd, a meaningless exchange of chaos.
They throw chaos at us, in flying bullets, shrapnel, explosions; we throw chaos back at them. Waves of chaos heaved back and forth, driving me up a mountain for two days, then on foot into a mountain fissure. Waves of chaos driving us like field mice before a thresher. Small animals under the jackboot again . . . The Jægernaut that had killed Rickenharp as he played his guitar
 . . . The ideological origin of the conflict was an excuse. The conflict, the killing, had a life of its own.

And he wanted out of it, just then. In that exhausted, meaning-drained instant he wanted to hide in a hole till the wave of chaos passed him by; till he could crawl back down the mountain, find his way to the sea, to a ship or a plane, back to the USA and the walled-in enclaves of safety his parents lived in . . . 

But then he looked at Claire and saw no despair in her. He saw fear and anger, but no tears. He felt her hand in his, and the sensation was somehow the organizational locus for meaning. In that instant all meaning proceeded from her touch. Steinfeld, the New Resistance—all that was distant just now. Now they were running, struggling to survive, together; and that
together,
by itself, had to be meaning enough, paltry though it was. It was like using a small, leafless tree as your only shelter against a raging desert sandstorm.

There were three more volunteers up ahead, where the fissure widened for a short distance. They were setting up a missile launcher, which wasn’t much more than a ten-foot tube of olive-drab metal on a tripod. A rifle fitted with a grenade leaned against the stone wall to one side. The jet and copter were converging overhead.

Torrence had a choice, then. He could pick up the rifle, join them in drawing fire away from Steinfeld, and be killed. Or he could tell himself:
I’m a captain, officers are necessary, important to the Resistance, I’d be squandering a resource if I sacrificed myself. And Claire is with me. I brought her into the NR. I feel responsible for her.
Tell himself all of that . . . and use it as an excuse to scramble for safety.

Some irresistible clockwork mechanism of his personality made the choice for him. He pulled away from Claire as they came up to the volunteers, shouted, “Go on, join Steinfeld, I’ll be there in a minute!”

“That’s bullshit, Torrence! Come
on
!”

But he’d grabbed the grenade rifle, was wedging it in the hollow of his shoulder (wondering if she was going to get killed because she wouldn’t leave him here, killed because of his gesture, his gesture of selflessness ultimately selfish because it sacrificed her too), aiming at the autochopper . . . its blades blew grit in his eyes . . . he saw the jet loom up, its wings vibrating from its hover-retros; he felt it emanating heat, poised over them like a monstrously oversize sword of Damocles . . . he shifted aim and fired . . . the grenade arced toward the jet and—didn’t explode. A bum charge.
Fuck!
He was going to die for nothing . . . 

The chopper’s miniguns opened up, but it was a few yards too far south, and most of the rounds rang off the rock overhang; a ricochet caught one of the volunteers in the eye, a young black woman who clutched at her bloody socket, screamed and crumpled as the other two fired the missile. The launcher belched: white flash and a white rope of smoke behind the missile. It struck the sidewinder tubes on the right side of the autochopper. At the same moment the jet’s cannon fired—its aim thrown off by the shockwaves from the exploding autochopper, its shell struck the rock wall over the two surviving volunteers.

Torrence seemed to see an orchid of fire that blossomed gigantically to consume his field of vision, and he felt himself flying backward—

Torrence came to himself sitting with his back to the curved stone, a patch of snow chilling his tailbone. His head seemed to reverberate with a metallic singing. Red and blue smoke swirled. The red smoke wasn’t real; it vanished. The blue smoke remained, so he decided it was real.

Claire?

He turned his head, and winced. Saw her sitting beside him, laughing to herself. Her upper left arm was laid open, thickened blood making the cloth of her coat indistinguishable from the torn flesh of her wound. Her hysterical laughter was almost lost to him through the roaring, metallic ringing in his ears. He looked up (flinching with head pain) and saw that the sky was clear over the fissure. Where was the jump jet?

The natural stone wall across from him was painted uniformly red. The paint was still wet. He looked at it for a long time before he knew it was blood.

A man’s raggedly severed arm lay nearby in an iridescent patch of snow; the fingers were curled as if the hand were playing the piano. The skin was blue-white.

All the time there was the hissing, roaring, in his ears, an aural motif for the scene.

And then Willow and Carmen were there, bending over him. Their faces seemed fish-eye distorted. Willow was a gaunt, straw-haired Brit, with bad teeth and a perpetual air of quiet suspicion; Carmen was a lanky punk in an Army surplus ski trooper’s jacket, waterproofed green canvas with a hood; the hood was thrown back to show her ring-clustered ears, her black hair shaved on the sides and the back of her head, spiked like a paradoxical anarchist crown atop.

“Anything broken, mate?” Willow asked. Each word accentuated by the white puffs of his breath in the cold air.

Torrence thought about it. Decided Willow meant bones. He moved experimentally. The movements brought some aches and a whirligig of nausea. But none of the grating pain accompanying broken bones. “I think I’m all right. Just kinda . . . blurry.”

“You’ll be okay,” Carmen said.

Claire had stopped laughing; she sat rocking with pain, silent. Carmen put a tourniquet on Claire’s arm, and then she used a medikit to clean and close the wound. Claire made hissing sounds between clenched teeth. “It’s a nasty-looking cut, but it’s shallow,” Carmen said. “Artery’s intact. Nothing embedded. Looks worse than it is.” Torrence didn’t want to move. He wanted to lie there. Stay there. Sleep, maybe.

He must’ve mumbled something aloud about it, because Willow said, “We got a camp, up the crack. Sleeping ’ere’s not on for you, mate.” Willow helped him up. Torrence groaned.

“The jet . . . ” Claire said huskily.

“Gone,” Carmen said. “I think it was damaged when the second chopper blew. But it’ll be back.
They’ll
be back. Trucks are gone. We can’t use the road. Steinfeld says we hide up in the mountain . . . ”

The Island of Merino, the Caribbean.

Jack Smoke tapped the broad, wafer-thin computer screen and said, “They’re somewhere in here . . . about ten miles northeast of the Italian border.” The big, glossy-black crow perched on his shoulder fluttered a little when Smoke moved.

Witcher, standing beside Smoke, was frowning at the map on the screen. He nodded and tapped the terminal’s keyboards for zoom magnification on one small segment of the map. That part swelled to fill the screen. “There’s nothing much around there. No villages . . . just the pass . . . ”

“And it’s a high elevation, not much cover except rocks. They’re exposed.”

Smoke and Witcher were in the Comm Center, at the place called Home: the heavily fortified New Resistance world headquarters on the island of Merino somewhere between the Antilles and Cuba. It was hot and oppressive between the thick, white-painted concrete walls, the gray concrete floor splashed with paint around the edges where the painter had been sloppy; white plastic, aluminum, and black plastic equipment crowded the room, and in some places you had to turn sideways and press hard to get through between the monitoring gear. Two technicians sat at satellite link monitors at the other end, recording information about SA, NATO, and NSR troop movements, and alert for information pertaining to Steinfeld. The technicians were a man and a woman; the man was black. Both were topless, wearing only shorts, because the room was stifling, turgidly hot. Smoke and Witcher each wore white shorts, sandals. Witcher wore a gold polo shirt, darkened by sweat to clay color under his arms. Smoke wore a flower-print Hawaiian shirt, mostly blue. And in a way he wore the crow.

Smoke was silently cursing Witcher’s fear of air conditioners. Mention air conditioners and Witcher’d mutter darkly about “lethal mutations of the American Legionnaire’s bacterium.” But Smoke had come to accept Witcher’s fits of hypochondria, his mercurial shifts from expansive openness to tight-lipped reserve. Witcher was the angel of the New Resistance, its billionaire backer, and if his eccentricity should shift him from supporting the NR, the resistance might well collapse.

They were too dependent on Witcher, Smoke decided. Perhaps Steinfeld should take steps to reduce their reliance on him.

“Smoke,” Witcher said suddenly, “what about the contingent at Malta? We could air-drop some assistance.”

Smoke shook his head. “That’d be just another group of NR trapped in the area. We’re too badly outnumbered to help Steinfeld that way. If we could get the men in, it’d have to be from a high-altitude drop. The airspace there is monitored by three armies. If we had some helicopters, something that could fly in under radar, but big enough to pick up forty men . . . ” He shrugged.

Witcher grimaced. “We tried.” He’d dispatched a ship disguised as a tanker, with six copters; hidden in holds designed for oil. One of the NR’s American operatives had been captured, interrogated with an extractor. He’d known about the tanker, because he’d supervised the construction of its false walls. The extractor, a device using molecular biology to extract information from a subject’s brain, had told the SA about the tanker and its destination. The SA pulled strings, claiming there was a terrorist plot afoot, and NATO simply sank the ship, fifty-five miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar.

“Maybe we could stage a diversion, draw the SA away from him,” Witcher said.

“I considered that. But we’ve intercepted their field transmissions. They’ve ID’d Steinfeld. They’re certain it’s him. Getting him will be first priority.”

“So what do we do?”

“Hope Steinfeld finds a way out on his own.”

“You saying there’s nothing we can do for him?”

“It looks that way.” Smoke’s voice was flat, emotionless. But he reached up and stroked the crow, as if comforting it.

Southeastern France.

If was late afternoon when Torrence woke, but in the cave it was twilight. It was a shallow cave, only forty or fifty feet deep, with a high, cracked ceiling that effortlessly swallowed their campfire smoke. Torrence sat up and looked around.