Tomorrow War (25 page)

There were dozens of small boats in the water, blocking his way. These boats were crawling with red-uniformed soldiers. They were chaotically unloading large black boxes from these boats, which were obviously serving as barges. Even from his poor vantage point, Y could tell the boxes were carrying ammunition. He could tell just by the way the soldiers were handling them.

It was his bad luck to come around this bend in the river just as the major supply of ammo was being landed for the Red Army troops. There was no way he was going to make his way around this blockade.

Y had just realized this when two soldiers in a just emptied boat spotted him drifting down the river. Y felt his stomach go cold as he saw the soldiers pointing at him and yelling to others on shore.

“Here’s another one!” one soldier cried from the boat.

An officer on the shoreline pulled two men from the ammo-unloading duty and directed them into the water. In thirty seconds they had waded out to Y and began dragging him in. He finally landed on a small beach in a heap.

The officer came and stood over him. He looked more perturbed than anything else.

He bent down on one knee and slapped Y a couple times lightly on the face.

“Where did you come from?” he asked in British-tinged English.

“The United States,” Y replied innocently.

The officer nearly smiled.

“No,” he said. “I mean just now … are you the last of them?”

Y pulled himself up to his knees and tried to get the water out of his ears.

“Last of who?”

The officer just shook his head. Obviously he had bigger and better things to do than deal with the waterlogged ex-prisoner.

He motioned to a pair of his aides to come forward.

“Bring him up to headquarters and put him in with the others,” the officer told the men. “Make sure he gets dry, and get some hot food in him.”

The officer looked down at Y and just shook his head. Y realized he must look somewhat pathetic at the moment.

“And give him a double ration of rum,” the officer added to the two aides. “This bloke looks as if he needs a drink.”

Z
OLTAN WAS DREAMING OF
finding Aztec gold buried beneath an Inca plain when something startled him awake.

He rubbed his eyes and felt his right hand go immediately to his temple. His head was buzzing as if filled with a swarm of bees. He opened his eyes fully, but the glare from a nearby light was too intense. He closed them again, took a deep breath, then opened them again slowly.

“I don’t believe it,” he whispered, sitting halfway up on his bunk.

Crabb was sitting on the bunk next to him, drinking a cup of rum-laced coffee. Brandy, Brandi, Brandee and Brayn-Di at his side.

“Don’t believe what?” he asked the psychic wearily. It had been a long twenty-four hours to say the least.

“I don’t believe he actually made it,” Zoltan breathed.

Two seconds later, Y came through the doors of the tent.

A cheer went up from all those gathered inside. The four girls rushed forward and smothered Y with hugs and passionate kisses—they did not know any other way to kiss. The Jones boys, huddled in the corner talking serious business, even came forward and shook Y’s hand heartily. “We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Seth said to him. “You took so long in getting here.”

Y began climbing into a new set of fatigues the guards had given him. He was glad to bid adieu to his old, wet combat suit.

“But where is
here
exactly?” he asked.

The Jones boys laughed. “Behind the Red Army lines,” Dave answered. “Or didn’t you notice when you floated in.”

“Oh, I noticed,” Y told them. “But why are we here?”

The Jones boys just shrugged. “The Reds saved us all from being shot,” Seth told him starkly. “When we were being taken out one at a time, that’s exactly where the Blue prison guards thought we were going. But the Reds had infiltrated the prison earlier in the day—lucky for us—in order to get some of their own people out. They freed us along with them.”

Y just stared back at them. Freeing a bunch of prisoners—with inner tubes? Why did that sound so familiar to him?

“As to why they helped us,” Dave Jones said. “Well, that’s a bit more complicated.”

They walked him to the corner of the tent, where they had been talking when he came in. Zoltan went back to sleep, Crabb went back to sharing coffee with the four “Brandy”s.

In the corner was a small collapsible desk and on it there was a map. Y took a quick look and realized it was a map of the city of Kabul Downs and the disposition of the opposing forces both defending and surrounding it.

Seth Jones pointed to a spot at the very edge of the map.

“We are here,” he said plainly. “Mile one behind the Red Army line, at what these guys call headquarters south. As you can see, the Red lines go right around the city. These guys are stretched very thin over a twenty-two-mile front.”

Seth told Y the story about the mysterious princess and how she was being held by the blue bloods and how the Reds were intent on getting her back, but had laid siege to the city for nearly a year now and had yet to come close to accomplishing that goal.

“This is being fought over a woman?” Y asked, somewhat astonished.

The Jones boys nodded gravely.

“She better be a real sweetheart,” Crabb chimed in from the other side of the tent.

The Jones boys turned Y’s attention back to the map.

“Inside the city, they are facing fifteen divisions of Blues. The Blues have a lot of tanks, the Reds have a lot of artillery.”

He cocked his head to one side and said: “Listen … hear that?”

Y listened and did hear the steady
whump-whump-whump
of big guns going off in the distance.

He nodded.

“Blue tanks and Red artillery shooting at each other,” Seth explained. “Whenever you don’t hear that sound, you know something is up. Something big. Either we have broken through a Blue line, and they’ve broken through one of ours—”

Y stopped him right there.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s with this ‘we’ and ‘they’ stuff?”

Dave and Seth just stared back at him for a moment.

“Well, look closer at that uniform you just put on,” Dave told him.

To help with this, Seth shined a flashlight on Y’s new combat suit. Sure enough, it was red.

“Didn’t anyone mention that to you?” Dave Jones asked. “You’re in the Red Army now. We all are.”

Y just stared back at them, his mouth agape.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he began. “We can’t join up with these guys. Even though they did save our lives—”

Seth Jones interrupted him. “Well, listen, if that’s what’s bothering you, we’ve been assured the Reds are the good guys in this little dustup. The Blues have been committing atrocities since day one. They’ve been threatening to kill this princess for a year or so, and there are a lot of indications they might actually do it very soon. So, you see, we have to work like crazy to make sure that doesn’t happen and—”

Y held up his hand again.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked plaintively.

“That’s not a good question to ask,” came Zoltan’s deep intonation from across the room, even though he seemed absolutely dead asleep.

“A day ago we were in prison,” Y went on. “The day before that we were flying over the longest goddamn railroad track in the world. The day before that we were in Thailand crawling all over the superbomber.”

“I’m surprised you can recall all of that,” Dave Jones said dryly.

Y felt his cheeks flush. He decided to ignore the comment.

“What I’m trying to say,” he began again through gritted teeth, “is that we started out on a mission here. A very important mission. And nothing can prevent us from fulfilling that mission—not even these guys breaking us out of prison and saving our hides.”

The Jones boys looked at each other again. It was their ritual to be performed when someone in their company had to be brought up to speed on a subject that everyone else in the room knew about.

Seth took the lead.

“That’s what we’re trying to tell you, dude,” he said. “We’ve fulfilled our mission.”

Y felt his head start to spin. Again. Seth looked at Dave.

“He’s confused,” he said to his brother. Dave nodded. “You want to un-confuse him, or should I?”

“I will,” Seth said.

With that, he took the flashlight and then Y’s arm and led him out of the tent. They walked quickly and wordlessly across the compound to another row of tents. These were bigger and more elaborate than the tent they’d been in. The security around this area was extremely tight.

They passed through one checkpoint being manned by no less than six guards. Y stared at them—they all looked familiar somehow. But in the dark and the confusion of the moment, he could not place their faces. Plus they were all wearing beards. He did however hear one guard refer to the other as “Brother Clancy.”

They passed this checkpoint with a word from Jones and moved toward the large elaborate tents. There was a small, muddy field beside one of the largest, and it was here that Y saw something else that seemed very strange. There were about fifty men in this field and they seemed to be playing a game of football.

Y started to comment on this but Jones interrupted him.

“That will explain itself in good time,” he said.

They finally reached the largest tent. There was a sign above it: “Red Army—Special Operations Branch.”

Three men were sitting in half chairs out front, smoking cigarettes and drinking what smelled like rum. One was an Asian; another looked like a rakish college professor. The third spoke with a thick brogue.

“Now there’s a man who needs a drink!” this man roared to the delight of the other two as Jones and Y passed by.

They went into the tent where they encountered a Red officer who had a distinct, slightly French accent.

“Can I help you?” he asked Jones, while eyeing Y. They both seemed to recognize each other.

“He’s here to see he major,” Jones said simply.

The officer nodded and indicated the next room over.

“He’s in there,” the officer said. “But he’s real busy—as always.”

“This won’t take long,” Jones said.

He led Y to the door of the next office and stopped. There was a man sitting behind a desk, his back to them poring over a map.

Jones gave Y a nudge.

“You’re on your own from here,” he said.

Y found himself inside the room, with Jones beating a hasty retreat.

He stood there silent for a few moments. Then he cleared his throat.

“Ah … excuse me?” he said in a near whisper.

The man spun around and took one look at Y. Then his face lit up and he pushed his hair back and suddenly it all fell into place.

Well, sort of.

“Jeesuz, man, I never thought I’d see you again!” the officer said, coming out from behind the desk to shake his hand.

“Me neither,” Y croaked.

It was Hawk Hunter.

W
HEN HE FINALLY WOKE
up, Viktor found himself in chains.

He was blindfolded, cold, and hungry. But he was not alone. There were others around him. The stink of body odor was very thick in the air.

His first thought was maybe at last he really
was
dead and had gone to Hell—and Hell was a small place where he was confined with hundreds of people who smelled worse than Soho.

But in his next groggy thought, Viktor became certain this was not Hell unless Hell floated. The constant up-and-down motion was unmistakable to his bones after his experiences as a sailor. There was no doubt about it, he was on a boat—again.

Why am I always drawn back to the water?

He shook his head to clear it and now heard a cacophony of despair rise up around him. Moaning, weeping, coughing, and even some snoring.

Where the hell was he?

That’s when it all came back to him.

The mercenary ship. The big black vessel he’d seen anchored in the harbor at Fiji, taking away the male islanders. That’s when he had his grim answer. He was in the bottom of this mercenary boat with the rest of the exiles from Fiji.

But heading where?

He lay there for a long time, trying to block out the sounds of the unfortunates around him, and failing miserably. His chains were heavy; there would be no way of breaking free or slipping his hands out between the clasps. And even if he could, what good would that do? Other than being able to remove his blindfold, he’d still be stuck on the ship, with hostile guards and no place else to go but back into the water.

And he’d had his fill of that by now.

The sound of human misery grew around him, and now the scent of blood was thick in his nostrils. The man beside him was moaning so loudly, his voice was cracking with a sickening wheeze. This sound was going in Viktor’s left ear and coming out his right. Never had he heard such a mournful cry. The man was begging to die.

Viktor stretched his chains as far as they would go. It was painful but he was able to place his fingertips on the dying man’s forehead. It was burning to the touch.

Viktor wiped the sweat from the man’s brow and said: “Be cool, my brother. Have peace. There is nothing to fear.”

With that, the man stopped moaning. And a certain kind of peace did descend on wherever he was. All the weeping and moaning and coughing stopped. Now all he could hear were the snores.

“Very impressive,” a strange voice said.

Viktor’s back stiffened. Someone had been standing there the whole time, staying perfectly still, watching him.

Now a hand reached down and roughly tore his blindfold away. Viktor’s eyes took a moment to focus. When they did, he saw he was indeed inside a dirty hold with greasy walls and a filthy deck. Three men were standing over him. They were all dressed in black uniforms. Viktor looked about the room. He was not surprised to find it was filled with dead and dying men.

The soldiers in black were laughing at him. They were all tall, blond, and blue-eyed. One was an officer.

“We’ve been watching you,” the officer said. “Even the captain had a strange feeling about you, and now it looks like he was right. You seem to have a way with the dying. And the living, too.”