Peace and War - Omnibus (67 page)

Out of the forest, I could run faster. It was exhilarating, bounding over the rows of low coffee bushes, even though in some corner of my mind I always knew I was lying inert a hundred miles away, inside an armored plastic shell. I could hear the others running just behind me and, as I moved up the hill toward the pickup, the faint hiss and snap of the approaching chopper and flyboys.

When it's just us soldierboys they snatch us at speed; we hold up our arms and grab the bail as it sails by. For a warm-body snatch, though, they have to actually land the helicopter, which is why she had two flyboys as escorts.

I got to the top of the hill and broadcasted a bleep, which the helicopter returned. The rest of the platoon came loping up in twos and threes. It occurred to me that I should have called for two choppers; do a regular snatch on the other eleven. It was dangerous for all of us to stand out in the open for any length of time, with the helicopter noise attracting attention.

As if in answer to my concern, a mortar round hit fifty meters to my left, orange flash and muted thump. I linked with the flyboy in the chopper and sensed a short argument she had with Command. Someone wanted us to drop the body and do a regular snatch. As the flyboy came over the horizon, another mortar round hit, maybe ten meters behind me, and we got the modified order: line up for a regular snatch and she would come in as slowly as practical.

We got together in file with our left arms up, and I had one second to wonder whether I should hold Madero tightly or loosely. I opted for tight, and most of the others agreed, which might have been wrong.

The bail snatched us with an impulse shock of fifteen or twenty gees. Nothing to a soldierboy but, we found out later, it cracked four of the woman's ribs. She woke up with a shriek as two mortar rounds hit close enough to hole the chopper and damage Claude and Karen. Madero wasn't hit by the shrapnel, but she found herself dozens of meters off the ground and rising fast, and she struggled hard, beating at me and screaming, writhing around. All I could do was hold her more tightly, but my arm had her pinned just below the breasts, and I was afraid to press her too hard.

Suddenly she went slack, fainting or dead. I couldn't check her pulse or respiration, hands full, but there was not much I could have done in any case, other than not drop her.

After a few minutes we landed on a bald hill, and I confirmed that she was still breathing. I carried her inside the helicopter and strapped her into a stretcher that was clamped to the wall. Command asked whether there were any handcuffs, which I thought was kind of amusing; but then she elaborated: this woman was a true believer. If she woke up and found herself in an enemy helicopter, she would jump out or otherwise do away with herself.

The rebels told each other horror stories about what we did to prisoners to make them talk. It was all nonsense. Why bother to torture someone when all you have to do is put her under, drill a hole in her skull, and jack her? That way she can't lie.

Of course, international law is not clear on the practice. The Ngumi call it a violation of basic human rights; we call it humane questioning. The fact that one of ten winds up dead or brain-dead makes the morality of it pretty clear to me. But then we only do it to prisoners who refuse to cooperate.

I found a roll of duct tape and bound her wrists together and then taped loops around her chest and knees, fixing her to the stretcher.

She woke up while I was doing her knees. 'You are monsters,' she said in clear English.

'We come by it naturally, Señora. Born of man and woman.'

'A monster and a philosopher.'

The helicopter roared into life and we sprang off the hill. I had a fraction of a second's warning, and so was able to brace myself. It was unexpected but logical: what difference did it make whether I was inside the vehicle or hanging on outside?

After a minute we settled into a quieter, steady progress. 'Can I get you some water?'

'Please. And a painkiller.'

There was a toilet aft, with a drinking water tap and tiny paper cups. I brought her two and held them to her lips.

'No painkillers until we land, I'm afraid.' I could knock her out with another trank, but that would complicate her medical situation. 'Where do you hurt?'

'Chest. Chest and neck. Could you take this damned tape off? I'm not going anywhere.'

I cleared it with Command and a foot-long razor-keen bayonet snicked into my hand. She shrank away, as much as her bonds would allow. 'Just a knife.' I cut the tape around her chest and knees and helped her to a sitting position. I queried the flyboy and she confirmed that the woman was apparently unarmed, so I freed her hands and feet.

'May I use that toilet?'

'Sure.' When she stood up she doubled over in pain, clutching her side.

'Here.' I couldn't stand upright in the seven-foot-high cargo area, either, so we shuffled aft, a bent-over giant helping a bent-over dwarf. I helped her with her belt and trousers.

'Please,' she said. 'Be a gentleman.'

I turned my back on her but of course could still see her. 'I can't be a gentleman,' I said. 'I'm five women and five men, working together.'

'So that's true? You make women fight?'

'You don't fight, Señora?'

'I protect my land and my people.' If I hadn't been looking at her I would have misinterpreted the strong emotion in her voice. I saw her hand flick into a breast pocket and caught her wrist just before her hand made it to her mouth.

I forced her fingers open and took a small white pill. It had an odor of bitter almonds, low-tech.

'That wouldn't do any good,' I said. 'We'd just revive you and you'd be sick.'

'You kill people and, when it pleases you, you bring them back from the dead. But you are not monsters.'

I put the pill in a pocket on my leg and watched her carefully. 'If we were monsters we would bring them back to life, extract our information, and kill them again.'

'You don't do that.'

'We have more than eight thousand of your people in prison, awaiting repatriation after the war. It would be easier to kill them, wouldn't it?'

'Concentration camps.' She stood and pulled up her trousers, and sat back down.

'A loaded term. There are camps where the Costa Rican prisoners of war are concentrated. With UN and Red Cross observers, making sure they're not mistreated. As you'll see with your own eyes.' I don't often defend Alliance policies. But it was interesting to watch a fanatic at work.

'I should live that long.'

'If you want to, you will. I don't know how many more pills you have.' I linked through the flyboy to Command and brought a speech analyzer on line.

'That was the only one,' she said, as I'd expected, and the analyzer said she was telling the truth. I relaxed slightly. 'So I'll be one of your prisoners of war.'

'Presumably. Unless this has all been a case of mistaken identity.'

'I've never fired a weapon. I've never killed anybody.'

'Neither has my commander. She has degrees in military theory and cybernetic communication, but she's never been a soldier.'

'But she has actually killed people. Lots of us.'

'And you helped plan the assault on Portobello. By that logic, you killed friends of mine.'

'No I didn't,' she said. Quick, intense, lying.

'You killed them while I was intimately connected to their minds. Some of them died very horribly.'

'No. No.'

'Don't bother to lie to me. I can bring people back from the dead, remember? I could have destroyed your village with one thought. And I can tell when you're lying.'

She was silent for a moment, considering that. She must have known about voice analyzers. 'I am the mayor of San Ignacio. There will be repercussions.'

'Not legal ones. We have a warrant for your detention, signed by the governor of your province.'

She made a spitting sound. 'Pepe Ano.' His name was Pellipianocio, Italian, but her Spanish converted it to 'Joe Asshole.'

'I take it he's not popular with the rebels. But he was one of you.'

'He inherited a coffee plantation from his uncle and was such a bad farmer he couldn't make a radish grow. You bought his land, you bought him.'

She thought that was the truth, and it probably was. 'We didn't coerce him,' I said, guessing. I didn't know much about the town's or province's history. 'Didn't he come to us? Declare himself–'

'Oh, really. Like a hungry dog would come to anybody who put out food. You can't pretend to think that he represents us.'

'As a matter of fact, Señora, we were not consulted. Are your soldiers consulted before being given orders?'

'We … I don't know anything about such matters.' That one set the bells off. As she knew, their soldiers
were
in on the decision-making process. That cut down on their efficiency but did give some logic to calling themselves the Democratic Army of the People.

The helicopter suddenly lurched left and right, accelerating up. I put out a hand and kept her from falling.

'Missile,' I said, in touch with the flyboy.

'A pity it missed.'

'You're the only living creature aboard this craft, Senora. The rest of us are safe in Portobello.'

At that she smiled. 'Not so safe, I think. Wasn't that the point of this little kidnapping?'

T
he woman was one of the lucky ninety percent who survived jacking intact, and she did give Alliance questioners the names of three other
tenientes
who had been in on the Portobello massacre. For her own part in it she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the large POW camp in the Canal Zone, the jack in the back of her skull guaranteeing that she wouldn't be part of any conspiracy there.

Unsurprisingly, during the four hours it had taken to get her to Portobello and install the jack, the three other
tenientes
and their families had dissolved into the bush, driven underground – perhaps to return. Their fingerprints and retinal patterns tagged them as rebels, but there was no real guarantee that the ones on file were authentic. They had had years to effect substitution. Any one of them might show up at the entrance to the camp at Portobello with a job application.

Of course, the Alliance had fired every Hispanic employee at the Portobello camp, and could do the same everywhere else in the city, even the country. But that might be counterproductive in the long run. The Alliance provided one out of three jobs in Panama. Putting those people out of work would probably add one more country to the Ngumi ranks.

Marx and others thought and taught that war was fundamentally economic in nature. No one in the nineteenth century, though, could have foreseen the world of the twenty-first, where half the world had to work for its rice or bread and the other half just lined up in front of generous machines.

T
he platoon returned to the town just before dawn, with warrants for the three rebel leaders. They entered the houses in groups of three, simultaneously crashing inside in clouds of smoke and vile gas, lowering real estate values but finding no one. There was no effective resistance, and they sped away in ten separate directions.

They rendezvoused at a place about twenty kilometers downhill, a feed store and cantina. The cantina had been closed for hours, but one customer remained, collapsed under one of the outside tables, snoring. They didn't wake him up.

The rest of the mission was an exercise in malice dreamed up by some half-awake genius who was annoyed at not taking any more prisoners that night. They were to go back up the hill and systematically destroy the crops that belonged to the three escaped rebels.

Two of them were coffee planters, so Julian ordered his people to uproot the bushes and leave them in place; presumably they could be replanted the next day.

The third man's 'crop' was the town's only hardware store. If Julian had asked, they probably would have been ordered to torch it. So he didn't ask; he and three others just broke down the doors and threw all of the merchandise out on the street. Let the town decide whether they would respect the man's belongings.

Most of the town was tired of dealing with the soldierboys by now, and had gotten the message that the machines weren't going to kill anyone unless provoked. Still, two ambitious snipers came in with lasers and had to be shot, but the soldierboys were able to use tranquilizing darts.

Park, the platoon's new homicidal addition, gave Julian some trouble there. He argued against using the darts – which technically was insubordination under fire, a court-martial offense – and then when he did take aim with the dart, he aimed for the sniper's eye, which would have been fatal. Julian monitored that just in time to send a mental shout, 'Cease fire!' and reassign the sniper to Claude, who tranked him in the shoulder.

So as a show of force, the mission was reasonably successful, though Julian wondered what the sense of it was. The townspeople would probably see it as bullying vandalism. Maybe he
should
have torched the store and sterilized the two farmers' lands. But he hoped the restrained approach would work better: with his laser he wrote a scorched message on the whitewashed wall of the hardware store, translated by Psychops into formal Spanish: ' – By rights, twelve of you should perish for the twelve of us you killed. Let there not be a next time.'

W
hen I came home Tuesday night there was a note under my door:

Darling,

The gift is beautiful. I went to a concert last night just so I could dress up and show it off. Two people asked who it was from, and I was enigmatic: a friend.

Well, friend, I've made a big decision, I suppose in part a present to you. I've gone down to Guadalajara to have a jack installed.

I didn't want to wait and discuss it with you because I don't want you to share the responsibility, if something should go wrong. My mind was actually made up by a news item, which I've put on your queue as 'law jack.'