Voyagers II - The Alien Within (22 page)

“I know,” Stoner said. “I need to find out what the war’s all about. What’s causing it.
Who’s
causing it.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

Reaching out his hand to her, he answered, “I’ve got to see it firsthand. That’s the only way I’ll be able to stop it.”

The land lay in ruins. Stoner and An Linh walked along a path that had once threaded through a rich forest. Now it was a wasteland, treeless, barren. The hot tropical sun hung high in a cloudless brazen yellow sky, beating down on them like a merciless god.

“The war did this?” An Linh asked.

“No,” said Stoner. “These trees were cut down by hand, one by one. There was no battle fought here.”

They had changed. For nearly two months now the two of them had been on the move across the width of central Africa. They had lost track of which country they were in. For more than a week they had been trekking on foot; the solar-powered electric jeep Stoner had “borrowed” from a puzzled, darkly suspicious Ghanian major had run over a land mine, blowing off its left front wheel and knocking both Stoner and An Linh completely out of the open car.

So now they walked. Stoner was leaner, tougher, his face taut and hard where it was not covered by the bristly dark growth of a month-old beard, hollows in his cheeks, gray eyes moving constantly, searching, probing, on the alert against hidden snipers or ambushers who would gladly kill him for his boots or the woman or just because he was not one of the local tribesmen. The camouflage green fatigues he wore were caked with dirt, one knee torn slightly, the sleeves rolled up past the elbows. He toted a bedroll and small pack on his back. He carried no weapon of any kind.

An Linh also wore fatigues. They were several sizes too large for her and hung limply on her slim frame. She had cut her hair boyishly short after a week in the bush, and with the dirty green baseball cap she wore, it was not easy to tell that she was a woman—at least, from a distance.

Stoner had lost his hat in a wild firefight they had been caught in a few days earlier. They never saw either side. They had been working their way down a steep wooded hillside, treacherously slippery after a sudden downpour, when automatic rifle and machine gun fire erupted on both sides of the trail. Stoner had grabbed An Linh and dived for the shallow cover of a fallen log. Bullets whined and cracked all around them, chewed up the log and churned up the yellowish mud in which they were both trying to bury themselves. Then it was over. A minute, perhaps. Or even less. It had seemed like years. The noise of gunfire still rang in their ears as Stoner slowly, cautiously, lifted his face from the slimy mud and took a careful look around. The woods were absolutely silent, a faint wisp of bluish smoke drifting upward and dissipating like a forlorn ghost, the acrid smell of gunpowder burning through the humid air.

Then insects began buzzing again, birds cried out, and the monkeys high in the trees started scolding angrily. Stoner got to his knees, then to his feet, his boots sticking stubbornly in the muck. He helped An Linh up. With shaking hands she tried to wipe the yellowish ooze off her face. She did not complain about the mud or dirt or heat. She did not mention how awful she must look, unwashed, without makeup, caked with days of grime. She just stared at the splintered log, realizing how close the messengers of death had come.

“It’s all right,” Stoner said to her quietly. “They’ve gone, whoever they were.”

She nodded and started down the slippery slope again. Stoner realized his cap was gone, looked around for a few moments, then decided it was better to be away from this spot, even bareheaded.

Now they walked wearily in the blazing sun through a deforested area. No sound of bird or monkey or even an insect. The ground was caked dry beneath their boots, powdery dust raised by each footstep.

“Defoliated,” An Linh murmured, her voice parched and strained.

Stoner shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Pointing to the stubble of tree stumps on both sides of the trail, “People have been cutting down the trees. Probably using them for firewood.” He realized that his own voice was harsh, his throat burning.

“Then there must be a village up ahead,” An Linh reasoned.

“Unless the people who did this were from the village we passed this morning.”

It had been utterly destroyed. Empty and dead as a desecrated tomb. A village of mud-walled huts scattered haphazardly around a single cinder-block one-story building—the village center, obviously. But the cinder blocks were scorched black, the building’s roof caved in by fire. Each hut had been methodically sacked, then burned. Stoner had poked into the still smoking ruins of the central building. Beneath the fallen timbers lay a half-dozen bodies, laid out neatly in a row, charred black. Shot before the fire was started, he realized. They found more bodies in some of the huts. But no living person or animal remained in the village. It had happened so recently that the stench of death was barely noticeable. Yet vultures were already circling high above in the merciless sky.

“Why would someone destroy a village like that?” An Linh asked as they pushed along the dead, dusty, deforested trail.

“Reminds me of Vietnam,” said Stoner. “Somebody came in, rounded up the village elders and shot them, did a little raping and looting, moved the rest of the people out, and then burned the place to the ground.”

“But why?”

“ ‘We destroyed the village in order to save it,’ ” Stoner quoted grimly. “They stole everything they could carry, burned the rest, and moved the people to someplace where they could be protected from the other side—who will one day come into the new village, shoot the leaders, rape the women, steal everything they can carry, and burn the rest.”

An Linh stared at him, her eyes red from fatigue and the dust that was blowing through the oven-hot air with every wafting breeze.

The sun was lowering over the hills when they caught their first sight of the village. It was surrounded by a rude palisade of lean poles, lashed together and topped with spirals of barbed wire. Thatched roofs rose above the top of the circling fence, and smoke was drifting up from several of the huts. Something glittered among the roofs, catching the brilliant rays of the sinking sun. It was too bright for Stoner to look at directly or to make out what it was. On the far side of the village Stoner could see cultivated fields and even a few oxen pulling plows. There were several corrals of gnarled poles lashed together, filled with fat cattle. Stoner’s nose wrinkled at their smell, but he realized that, by the standards of the war-torn land, this village was rich.

Rich enough to have armed guards posted at the palisade gate, he saw. Two old men in shabby shirts that hung out over their knee-length shorts sat beside the open gate, a pair of automatic rifles leaning against the rickety fence, within arm’s reach. The low sun was in their faces, painting them a rich reddish gold, making them squint and hold up their hands to shade their eyes as they saw Stoner and An Linh approaching.

They picked up their rifles and got to their feet. One of the men, the taller of the pair, rested his gun on his hip, pointing it at the strangers. The other tugged a palm-sized flat black object from his ragged cut-off trousers and spoke into it. A radio, Stoner realized.

“Who are you?” shouted the taller villager. “What do you want?”

His dark face was deeply wrinkled; squinting painfully against the sun made even more lines. His hair was grizzled, his bare arms and legs long and lean. But he held the rifle steadily, with the calm assurance of long practice. Stoner guessed that he could fire it quite accurately from his hip, especially at a range of only a dozen meters or so.

“We’re not armed,” Stoner said in the same language the villager had spoken. “We are looking for the Peace Enforcers.”

More villagers appeared at the gate, mostly old men, but some boys and even a few young women were among them. Each carried a gun of one sort or another. They scowled at the two strangers, whether out of suspicion or fear or hatred—or merely having the sun in their eyes—Stoner could not yet tell.

Satisfying themselves that the strangers were not armed, that neither of them was African, that they were indeed alone and not the vanguard of a marauding band of looters, they allowed An Linh and Stoner into their village. Under guard.

Stoner counted twenty-seven armed men, boys, and girls as they walked along the dusty twisting lane past mud-walled huts and a few square cinder-block houses scattered among them. Women appeared at the doorways, most of them hanging back in the shadows, silent, their black faces impassive, but their eyes bright with curiosity. Stoner smiled inwardly. It was the same curiosity that a scientist would show when he stumbled across a new and unexpected phenomenon. It’s built into the human race, he said to himself. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s raised human beings up from the level of the apes.

An Linh was taking it all in, just as curious and wide-eyed as any of the villagers. As they trudged along the twisting pathway in a silence broken only by the occasional clink of a gun butt against a bandolier of cartridges, Stoner saw up ahead of them a two-story building, topped by an array of dish-shaped solar mirrors, almost blood red in the reflection of the setting sun. That’s what was gleaming so brightly, he realized. This village has solar power. They don’t have to cut down the forest anymore.

As their escorts brought them toward the central building, Stoner could hear the clanking and buzzing of open-air workshops. The central square was surrounded by minifactories set up in lean-tos and makeshift sheds. Men and women worked side by side, bent over metal piping, welding in showers of sparks, cutting sheets of bright metal with whirring power tools. They hardly looked up from their work, and Stoner found himself beginning to burn with curiosity. He almost laughed at the human sensation of it. You still have some monkey genes in you, don’t you?

Behind the central building, he saw, a power station hummed away, converting the heat energy collected by the rooftop mirrors to the electricity that drove the workers’ power equipment and welding tools.

They stopped at the entrance to the cinder-block building, a set of blank double metal doors. The doors, the building itself, all the machinery that Stoner saw looked very new, shining, not yet scuffed and smudged by hard use.

The doors were opened from the inside by another pair of armed men. These two wore merely pistols strapped to their hips. Their sleeveless, buttonless shirts and baggy cut-off shorts, although less shabby than everyone else’s, were hardly uniforms. Both the new guards looked as sternly as they could at Stoner and An Linh, but they were too young to seem really fierce. The leader of the band that had been escorting them, the taller of the two old men who had been guarding the gate, spoke up loudly, saying that he and his men (he ignored the girls among them) had brought these two strangers to the chief’s house, as commanded. They had done their job, and now they would wait outside the chief’s house in case the chief needed them for some further tasks.

One of the young guards frowned and said, “No, no. You have done your duty. Get back to your post! The south gate is unprotected.”

They argued back and forth over that for a few minutes. Finally the old man dispatched almost all his people to the south gate. But he insisted on waiting here by the village’s central building to see what the chief was going to do about these two strangers. Reluctantly, most of the youngsters and old men in his charge started walking back toward the gate. Stoner noticed that the only members of his loose squad who remained were three of the young girls. The old man ignored them and sat on the dusty bare ground in front of the double doors.

The two young guards motioned to Stoner and An Linh.

“We’re being invited inside,” Stoner said, letting An Linh step through the open doors ahead of him. She went in silently, without a trace of fear on her face. Stoner thought that once she saw the solar energy array and the machinery, she felt that they were in a civilized setting, and now she was more curious than afraid.

Stoner half expected the cinder-block building to be airconditioned, but it was not. Yet it was insulated well enough to be noticeably cooler inside. Not really comfortable, by his own standards, but at least they were out of the searing heat of the late afternoon. His mind flashed back to the days on Kwajalein, where the salt air was so heavy with humidity that clothes, food, everything was always soddenly damp.

The guards shut the door behind them. After the bright sunlight outside, the building’s interior seemed dim and shadowy. There were no partitions, he saw as his eyes adjusted to the lower level of lighting. Just one large room, with desks and tables scattered about in no discernible order. The windows were shuttered tightly, although glints of brightness showed through chinks between the slats, like tiny beams of laser light trying to burn their way into the big, open room.

An Linh moved closer to Stoner and put a hand on his arm. But his attention focused on the far corner of the room, where a desk, a pair of chairs, a long table piled high with blueprints and other papers, an army cot covered by a single rumpled blanket, and a smaller table holding a computer and a telephone terminal were jammed together so tightly that a man could sit on either one of the chairs or on the rumpled cot and reach any one of the items there.

A man was sitting at one of the chairs. He got up and edged himself around the corner of the desk, past the narrow strait where the cot and the long table almost met, and then walked the nearly empty length of the room toward Stoner and An Linh.

He was a very tiny man, wizened and snowy-haired. His skin was deeply black, his eyes alert and piercing. Incongruously, he wore a pair of soldier’s khaki pants rolled up almost to his knees and a loose-fitting batik vest patterned in bold reds and browns. Over one breast of the vest was pinned a nametag: KATAI. On the other side another plastic tag proclaimed INTERNATIONAL PEACEKEEPING FORCE.

He stopped a few paces before them and looked the strangers over carefully, his hands clasped behind his back. He only came up to Stoner’s chest, and he could have weighed no more than a robust twelve-year-old, Stoner thought. His face had the sunken-in look of a man who had lost most of his teeth. He had obviously not shaved in days. Yet his eyes sparkled with undimmed intelligence. Stoner thought of his own appearance, bearded, gaunt, dirty. And An Linh, standing beside him, was equally disheveled and crusted over with grime.