The Eternity Brigade (8 page)

“As you recall, the main reason for conducting this program was not to see whether men could be frozen for indefinite periods of time; that had already been pretty well established. No, we had you suspended because we knew that sooner or later there’d be another war, and we’d need good trained fighters to help us in the initial phases, until more of our draftees can become battle-hardened. That war is here, and you’re going to have to prove yourselves in battle once again. The army is hoping you’ll do as well there as you did in the suspension tanks.”

“Who are we fighting, sir?” one of the soldiers asked.

A portion of the old Captain Dukakis showed through, the man who hated having his well-rehearsed spiel interrupted. He turned and glared at the man who’d asked the question, then had to recalibrate his mental processes to answer it. “The situation is very complex,” he said slowly. “You’ll be given a much more thorough briefing on the exact political nature of the endeavor in due course. For right now, let me just say that there is a civil war in China. The incumbent government is being challenged by a reactionary clique of Maoist/Leninists. The hard-line Russian Duma stepped in to help the rebels, so we ended up being forced to help the official government.”

“You mean we’re fighting the bad Communists to save the good Communists?”
One of the men, Litwak, thought this was incredibly funny. Apparently, the irony was lost on Dukakis.

“I see nothing to laugh at,” the major said. “The Chinese government is now as capitalistic as we are. And I doubt you’ll find it funny either, once you’re dropped into combat. This is a hard and dirty war, as bad as any action you saw in Africa. It had already been going for nearly two years before we became involved, and the casualty rate is very high. Fortunately, according to our agreement with the Chinese government, the troops we provide will be mainly for support; their own soldiers will do most of the actual fighting. Still, we thought it best to activate you and see how you do under actual field conditions. Don’t expect a picnic over there; neither side shows the slightest bit of restraint or mercy to the other. The atrocities make Baghdad and Katumbwe look like Sunday school outings.”

Dukakis paused. “My portion of this particular experiment is over. I doubt you’ll be seeing me again.” One soldier started clapping, but Dukakis stared him back into silence. “Starting tomorrow, there’s more hard work in store for you. As I said, lots of physical therapy and calisthenics. There are also a few new developments in weapons that you’ll have to familiarize yourselves with—nothing you can’t handle, though, in view of your special training.

“You’ll find you can talk about the project openly, now. The secrecy was lifted a couple of months ago, when we were debating whether to use you in this war. Everyone knows the sacrifices you made, and the courage it took to make them. In some circles, you’re even being regarded as heroes. People are only now beginning to appreciate the applications of these suspended animation techniques to civilian life. You helped make it possible, and the United States is grateful.

“In two weeks, you’ll be shipped out to China. You’ve been in battle before, you know what to do. Just acquit yourselves as well in the field as you’ve done so far in the laboratory and I know that the army—and I personally—will be proud of you.”

Dukakis saluted smartly twice, once to each side of the room, then turned and walked down the center aisle and out the door. Behind him, he left silence.

***

That evening, while the glucose tubes were still in their arms, the soldiers received their first meal since awakening: lukewarm chicken broth and a dish of lemon Jell-O. The men started an uproar all at once; if they were heroes, they should eat like heroes. They’d been cheated out of a big “last meal” before being frozen, and they felt their first meal after waking should be a little more impressive. The nurses listened to the complaints with a minimum of tolerance, and continued to serve the food as ordered.

Despite their protests, the volunteers found they had trouble eating even as basic a meal as this. Their digestive systems needed time to readjust to real food, the nurses told them afterward. It was all perfectly normal, and had been anticipated. By the next day, most of the men would be eating normally again. In the meantime, less than half the men were able to finish the meager servings they were given, and some ended up vomiting what they’d eaten. Hawker himself had eaten three quarters of his meal, and paid for it the rest of the night with a painful series of stomach cramps that kept him from getting much sleep.

The meal the next morning was virtually the same, except for the addition of tea. After breakfast, the nurses removed the soldiers’ IV tubes; most of the men were fed up with bedpans, and the nurses spent a large percentage of their time helping the volunteers walk to the lavatories at either end of the ward.

After that, the patients were placed on gurneys and wheeled to a large physical therapy room—actually a gym that had been converted for this purpose. They lay on tables and were placed at the mercy of machines that stretched and bent them in more ways than they knew existed. All of them were sore and exhausted by the time they returned to their ward for lunch, but they were not allowed to sleep. After the bland midday meal, each man got an iPod-like device and watched a video briefing on the background of the Chinese civil war.

There had always been factionalism within the Chinese hierarchy, the briefing officer explained, and as a result the country went through periodic violent upheavals. The moderates had consolidated power over the last few decades; even though they still called themselves Communists, the increasing privatization of their economy and the reconciliation with Taiwan showed they were placing the improvement of their economy above ideological purity. There was still a vocal handful of militant reactionaries, however, who were far from happy with the course the moderates charted.

Running as a parallel thread through modern history was the antagonism between China and Russia. Even when they were theoretically allies in communism, border incidents had flared periodically. When the post-Soviet Russian economy went through a series of economic catastrophes and the resurgent Communist Party regained power democratically, its ultraconservative leaders looked quickly around for a way to take their peoples’ minds off the country’s internal troubles.

The Chinese factionalism offered an ideal opportunity. The Chinese militants were stronger than they’d been for years. When the moderates clamped down, the militants appealed to Moscow for aid. The Kremlin leaders saw this as a perfect chance to restore Russia’s mantle of greatness and divert their people’s attention away from their harsh economic realities.

Their biggest consideration was how the United States would react. The U.S. had been working for years to encourage capitalism in both countries, and considered the conservatives’ takeover of Russia a major setback—but could do little about it, since it occurred constitutionally. U.S. dealings with China were always unstable; though the two countries were economically entwined, their political relations went through sharp periods of ups and downs. After months of indecision, the conservative Russian government stepped in on the side of the Chinese militants.

Now all the pressure shifted to the United States. The Russian intervention was seen as a destabilizing factor. If Russia succeeded in this power grab, they and their Chinese allies would become a power more formidable than the United States and the European Union could counter. There was strong pressure to step into the fighting on the Chinese government’s side.

This pressure was countered, though, by strange ideological factions within the United States. To step in and preserve a government that still called itself Communist seemed counter to all American policy since the end of World War II. The Western conservatives loved nothing better than the thought of Russia and China fighting among themselves, hoping they’d knock each other off and leave the West free to step in and pick up the pieces. President Livingston, a conservative Republican, wavered for nearly a year while pressure to intervene—coming both from the left and from the normally Republican business community that cherished its Chinese trade—grew ever stronger. The decisive factor, finally, was the Russian nuclear strike—accidental, they claimed—against Shanghai. The United States could not remain neutral after that and so, with great reluctance, President Livingston committed the nation to a military alliance with the Chinese government.

There would be further briefings, the men were told, about the nature of the fighting in China and the extent pf the American commitment, as well as briefings on the new weapons systems. But this briefing had lasted most of the afternoon, and it was now time for dinner. There was only so much these men could be expected to absorb this quickly.

The next day began the same way, with a painful physical therapy session. The men were feeling much stronger, however, and afterward they were led into an exercise yard, where they were reunited with the rest of the volunteers from other wards. There was great rejoicing when people saw that their friends had also survived the experiment; even the normally taciturn Hawker let out a whoop at seeing Green and Symington again for the first time since his awakening.

The three friends compared their waking experiences and complained about the food. Green remarked that the “chicken broth” was an insult to chickens the world over, and that his grandmother would spin in her grave if she knew he’d been drinking it. The men were allowed little time for chatting, though; a tough old drill sergeant named Jenks—whom everyone promptly termed “Jinx”—came out and gave them a series of calisthenics that drove them all to the brink of exhaustion.

The days passed. The men were introduced to the new weapons, including laser rifles and satellite-guided bullets, whose trajectories could actually be altered by instructions from a spy-satellite. The men took these developments in stride; what mattered to them the most was that there had not been similar great advances in the army’s food preparation technology.

By the end of the two weeks, Hawker felt in better condition than ever before. His fears about this project had melted away to the point where he was actually looking forward to combat duty. It was something he knew, something he could cope with. The world was no stranger than it had been before.

The only negative note was sounded by Green early in their second week of recuperation. During a short pause in the exercise period, the young man looked around the yard and frowned. “Hawk, how many of us were there the morning we all got frozen?”

“Seventy-nine, I think. Why?”

“That’s what I thought. There are only seventy-seven of us here now, and as far as I can remember that’s all there’s been since we woke up. I wonder what happened to the other two.”

A chill went down Hawker’s spine. The army had been emphasizing how pleased it was with the success of the project, and how it had exceeded all their expectations—but never was it stated that the project was free of mishaps. Had two men actually died during the experiment, or had they perhaps merely been awakened early because of some malfunction of their equipment?
It was a question he never learned the answer to
—and to make matters worse, no matter how hard he strained his memory he could not remember which two men were no longer a part of the group. They had simply vanished from his universe as though they’d never been. Over time,a legend grew up among the volunteers about the two “ghost soldiers” who haunted their ranks.

***

At the end of the two weeks, when the volunteers had fully recovered from their long sleep, they were sent to China as promised. Once there, their group was broken up and distributed among other outfits.

Hawker’s new unit was a convoy detail escorting shipments of arms and supplies to outlying districts. Hawker and the team assigned to him were supposed to ride shotgun and make sure the equipment was delivered to the proper people—or, if an ambush developed, to blow up the trucks and make certain the supplies did
not
end up in enemy hands.
Hawker was given the authority to kill as many of his men and destroy as much of the convoy as necessary—and that scared him.

He was scared, too, by the responsibilities of command that were suddenly thrust upon him. There were officers above him in this unit, and theoretically his influence was small. But when it came to combat experience, the officers were as green as the ordinary sluggos—and
they
were fresh out of boot camp in most cases. Everyone in the outfit knew Hawker was one of the
“sleepers,”
and he was looked upon as the Old Man of the group. It was startling to realize that technically he
was
the oldest man in the unit, beating out even the captain by several years.

Hawker was constantly being asked for advice—and for someone who was uncomfortable talking, this was almost physically painful. He could not simply answer with a few well-chosen words; it was his duty to provide instruction with his advice. He had to let the others know why things were done one certain way and not another, and he often had trouble  explaining his reasons. He had developed an instinct for survival in enemy territory. Certain things
felt
wrong—but how could he put that feeling into words?

His position within the unit was awkward, too. The officers above him felt he undermined their authority because the men went to him for advice instead of to them—and also because they sometimes had to consult him themselves, which was humiliating. The other recruits resented him because he was one of them, but slightly better.