Arc Riders (22 page)

The headlights continued to burn, though they dimmed visibly when they lost the alternator’s output. The hangar wall reflected
the light back onto the car, showing where the letters
AIR POLICE
had been painted over on the blue side when the new circle-and-star was applied.

“Pauli, Rebecca is loaded with tanglefoot now,” Barthuli said over the commo system. If anybody but the analyst had spoken
the words, he’d have been prodding Weigand to get a move on with the third suit of armor. That might not have been Gerd’s
intent, but the point was a valid one.

“Gerd, I’m coming,” Weigand said as he sent the third suit into limbo with the other pair. He stepped from the back of the
trailer and trotted toward his companions.

There’d only been the single burst of gunfire. Someone with a bullhorn was trying to restore order. The gas shells had already
accomplished that by strewing at least 90 percent of the hangar’s occupants unconscious on the floor.

The enhancement feature of Weigand’s facemask made running through the dark almost as safe as doing the same thing in daylight.
Unprocessed forward-looking infrared (and the same was true of unprocessed image intensifiers) gave a clear view of objects
but no trustworthy way to judge relative distance. The processor in Weigand’s headband modeled objects with false shadowing
so that they appeared to be the distance from the viewer that they were in cold fact.

Carnes opened the door as Weigand joined them. A pair of guards with automatic rifles lay on the concrete outside the door
where an acoustic pistol had dropped them. Canted nearby on its sidestand, already turned to head back in the direction of
the C-141, was a large motorcycle.

“Rebecca knows how to drive it!” Barthuli announced with pleasure. He took the tanglefoot projector Carnes handed him, then
passed it and the EMP generator as well on to Weigand.

Carnes swung her right leg over the stepped saddle with a grunt, then rocked the bike upright. The spring-loaded side-stand
flew up when the weight came off it.

“The one useful thing I learned from my husband,” she said. Her thumb stabbed a button. The engine spun and caught with an
out-of-synchronous rumble. “I didn’t think so at the time. Now get on
carefully
. Keep your feet up, I know there’s not pegs for both of you, and lean when I do.”

“I wish we didn’t have to leave the suits,” Weigand said as he boarded the motorcycle gingerly. If he stood on the pegs and
braced his lower back against the sissy bar, there’d be—barely—enough room for Gerd to squeeze onto the seat between Carnes
and Weigand.

“I wish I was five years old and home with my mother!” Carnes said. She revved the big engine, ripping the night with its
double note. “There’s no way I can carry all of us and the suits besides.”

“Ready,” said Barthuli. He reached behind himself to grip Weigand’s waist rather than cling to the driver.

Carnes eased in the clutch. The bike wobbled forward, then stabilized as she gassed it.

The fuel truck was no longer flashing its warning light from the C-141. The transport was still on the turn-out apron, but
it looked to Weigand as though the ramp had been raised. He didn’t have a hand free to adjust this facemask’s magnification.

Carnes shifted into second gear. Acceleration rocked Weigand back hard. Carnes caught third and the exhaust note boomed out
behind them.

“Come to think…” Carnes shouted over the windrush, “my husband taught me not to marry drunks, too!”

The bike roared as she shifted into fourth gear, blasting across the dark runway.

Out of the frying pan…

Timeline B: August 14, 1991

T
he mob surged around the aircraft even before the ramp was fully lowered. The mass of people pushing aboard prevented the
passengers who’d come from the States on the C-141 from disembarking.

A US Navy captain wearing a short-sleeved khaki uniform knocked Rebecca Carnes aside as he cannoned toward the front of the
cargo bay. The officer held a blue duffle bag in one hand and clutched the wrist of a Vietnamese woman in the other. The woman
was strikingly beautiful, with ivory skin and high French cheekbones. The infant she carried in a sling on her breast had
solemn gray eyes.

The loadmaster shouted to no effect against the uproar. The copilot came aft, the plug dangling from the headphones around
his neck. “What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded.

He spoke first to Carnes, then realized she was a passenger trying to leave the aircraft. He switched his focus to a master
sergeant, also in khakis, who was transporting several
pounds
of gold chains by the expedient of hanging them around his neck. The sergeant had an aluminum briefcase in either hand. From
the way the handles dug into his fingers, the contents were extremely heavy.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the copilot shouted. “You could’ve been killed when you pushed through the barriers while
we were still taxiing! Don’t you know that? We could have run over the whole lot of you!”

The sergeant set the briefcases on the fold-down bench beside him without loosening his grip on the handles. He was fat and
sweating, even more than the familiar muggy warmth of Vietnam justified.

“I’m going to Japan,” he said hoarsely, speaking through his gasping intakes of breath. “That’s where you’ll refuel, isn’t
it? Yokota? Look, buddy, I’ll make it worth your while, but don’t think you’re getting me off this bird! Do you understand?”

His voice rose shrilly on the final interrogative.

Weigand murmured “Stay close to me” as he stepped ahead of Carnes. He held his barracks bag on his left shoulder where it
couldn’t be stripped from him by the pressure of the crowd. “I’ll make a path.”

“We’ve got cargo to unload!” the copilot said, gesturing to the pallets and the remaining Conex.

“Then fucking unload it!” the sergeant snarled. “But I swear I’ll blow this fucker up if you try to get me off it!”

There might be explosives in his cases. Carnes doubted it, but somebody in the cargo bay probably did have a grenade. Shrapnel
might not destroy the C-141, but it would make the bird unflyable.

Carnes pressed her body against Weigand’s back, stepping each time the big ARC Rider took a shuffling step forward. Barthuli
was behind her, just as close. It was the only way they could proceed against the thrust of the mob.

“Will they be able to take off?” Barthuli asked curiously as the linked trio reached the ramp. “With such a load, I mean.”

The crowd stretched back in a broad fan, a multicolored blotch on the concrete. There must beat least a thousand people present,
desperate to leave the war zone. Rumors of the use of nuclear weapons in Yunnan must have gotten out. How many of these folk
had an idea of what world they’d be returning to on the other side of the Pacific?

The master sergeant, the black marketeer, probably did. That’s why he was heading for refuge in Japan, not the once-united
States.

Weigand clenched his huge left fist and extended it like a galley’s ram, cutting a path through the center of the refugees.
If he’d taken a line closer to the edge of the ramp, the three of them would have been pushed over the way hapless boarders
were in the team’s stead.

“Fly?” Weigand said. He had an instinctive grasp of practical matters. The analyst could have answered his own question, but
only by researching it. “Sure, you can’t pack enough flesh aboard one of these to equal the weight of tanks and ammunition
it’s built to carry. Whether any of them will be able to breathe, though, that’s another matter.”

Carnes glimpsed a convoy of two military ambulances and a deuce-and-a-half truck loaded with stretcher cases beneath a canvas
awning. The vehicles were caught at the back of the crowd. A female doctor in fatigues stood on the step to the driver’s seat,
bracing herself on the open door as she peered over the mob.

“That’s Dr. Byerly!” Carnes said in surprise. “I knew her when I was with the 312th at Chu Lai two years ago.”

“We need a local contact,” Weigand said. “We’ll join her. Is that all right?”

“Yes!” said Carnes, surprised at her own enthusiasm. She’d seen no one she knew since the orders transferring her to the 90th
Replacement Battalion and abruptly reassigning her to command a battalion of Argentine mercenaries.

The people who hadn’t reached the belly of the aircraft were dispersing, hoping to find another long-haul aircraft to board.
Carnes wondered how often this drama had been enacted in recent days. How many planes and ships still arrived from the States
to feed the meat grinder of this war?

Some of those excluded slumped in exhaustion over their baggage; a Vietnamese woman wailed in a high voice. The Air Force
colonel who’d accompanied the woman was talking in a threatening tone to the copilot at the foot of the ramp, pointing repeatedly
at the eagles on the shoulders of his dress uniform. The copilot looked too tired and frustrated even to move away.

“Will it be the same all over, do you think?” Barthuli asked as the trio separated to a more comfortable interval. “The mobs
leaving, that is. Moving against the flow could be difficult.”

The humid air was doubly heated by sunlight reflecting from acres of concrete runway and laced with the gut-churning residues
of turbine exhaust. Bien Hoa smelled like the anteroom of hell.

As it was in plain fact.

“These are Saigon commandos,” Carnes explained with a bitterness she’d never tried to suppress. “The worst thing they’ve had
to worry about in this war is a problem with the office air-conditioning or the price of drinks in the officers’ club. The
closer you get to the field, the less you see of that. The less you see of anything except blood and mud.”

A pair of flatbed semis, one of them mounting a winch on the tractor section, drove up to the C-141 and stopped. Cargo handlers,
stripped to the waist and wearing sweatbands rather than hats, got off the vehicles. They eyed the refugees packed into the
cargo bay.

“If they leave them there a day or two,” Weigand said, “perhaps they’ll melt and run out the bottom.”

He lifted his olive drab baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his right hand. The ARC Riders’ normal garb
was climate-controlled, but Weigand and Barthuli were in jungle fatigues to avoid unnecessary questions. The only reason they
hadn’t discarded the coveralls entirely was the possibility that they’d want the camouflage abilities of fabric that could
blend to any color or pattern.

The driver of one of the ambulances walked forward to join Byerly at the lead vehicle. He was an MD, though he was much younger
than Byerly. The third driver, a slender Oriental—perhaps Filipino rather than Vietnamese—waited beside his ambulance.

“Colonel Byerly?” Carnes called, because the doctor had stepped down to talk to the ambulance driver coming from the other
direction.

Byerly turned, shading her eyes with her hand. Her hair, cut short to keep it out of the way, frizzed in all directions from
beneath her cotton boonie hat. “Carries?” she said. “Major Carnes.”

Byerly’s face hardened into something close to rage. She pointed to the C-141. “You’re part of that lot?”

“We were disembarking, Colonel,” Carnes replied, deliberately using the anger she’d felt as well. “Though that mob of Saigon’s
finest made that pretty hard.”

“Sorry, Rebecca,” Byerly said. As if the anger had been the only thing stiffening her body, she sat down abruptly on the fuel-tank
step of her vehicle. “I’m so tired, and it’s no damned good, none of it.”

“Look, Colonel,” the doctor from the lead ambulance said. “Let me go talk to them. These patients have got to get to Japan
if they’re going to have a chance, the way our personnel situation is.”

He gestured toward the refugee-packed transport. “They’ll understand that, don’t you think? Some of them?”

A nurse leaned out from the bed of the two-and-a-half-ton truck. “Look,” she called in a rasping voice. “I’m going to start
losing them any minute now if they don’t get some fluids. If we can’t board, get us into the shade, for God’s sake!”

The nurse looked eighteen. Carnes wondered if Rebecca Carnes had ever been as young as that girl seemed. Maybe one time, a
lifetime of war ago….

“You want to put your patients on board the transport, is that it?” Pauli Weigand said. He continued to hold the barracks
bag on his shoulder, as if the weight meant nothing to him.

Byerly looked at him from where she sat. The step had a punched nonskid surface, but she was obviously too tired to care.
“That was the idea,” she said. “I’ve even got movement orders from USARV, for what that matters.”

She nodded toward the transport. “Like as not, some of the REMFs who signed off on the orders are right there now.”

“Rear Echelon Mother Fucker!” Barthuli translated, delighted to have heard an idiomatic phrase in its normal context.

Byerly returned her attention to the other doctor. “No, Vincent, I don’t think a single one of those bastards would give up
his chance of escape in order to evacuate our patients. After all, most of our people arc battle casualties, so they’ve got
nothing in common with the pigs on the plane.”

“But we’ve got to get them to Japan, Colonel,” Vincent said pleadingly. “Or they’ll die. And who knows when another plane
will be available?”

Fatigue had stripped the layers of maturity from the young doctor’s psyche. He sounded like a child reacting to an adult situation
with complete disbelief.

“I can clean the plane out for you,” Weigand said. “Make it possible for the interlopers to be removed, that is. If I do that,
can you put us up while we find passage for Son Tay?”

“Pauli, I used all the gas shells at Travis,” Carnes warned. If she’d understood correctly, the acoustic pistols were individual,
not area weapons. If the three of them started shooting, no matter how nonlethally, at the occupants of the C-141, somebody
was bound to shoot back within a matter of seconds.