The War in 2020

1

You came in over the grasslands, with animals bolting then turning again and again beneath the sound and shadow of the metal birds. It was punishingly hot in your flight suit and helmet, and you already had a water debt, but at least the patrols were a break from the monotony of life at the bivouac site. You came in over the light brown sea of the grasslands, skimming over islands of twisted shrubs, and the distant flight controller's voice tinned sleepily in your earphones. Then the country began to rise. Just slightly. You could see the hills of mining waste from a long way out, and you hardly bothered to glance at the controls. You wanted to fly. You always wanted to fly. It was the only life in the languid days. But now, with the squadron's African home in sight, a duller side of you was anxious to get back down on the ground.

You patterned in around the tallest waste bank, and the metal roofs of the mining complex mirrored the high sun of southern Zaire. Shaba Province, alias Katanga. You cursed and turned your head slightly. The glare quit, leaving you a view of military tentage and perfect rows of helicopters at rest in the dappled shade of the camouflage nets. A red and white cavalry guidon stirred to life atop the only two-story building in the settlement, and the dust began to rise toward you. A hatless soldier in aviator sun-glasses, his mouth and nose protected by an olive drab bandanna, raised his arms. Come to Papa. Africa disappeared in a brown storm.

You were home. Walking off the flight stiffness amid the familiar fixtures of a field site anywhere in the world: fuelers and lines, warning markers, portable guide lights, wind streamers, GP-medium tents with their sides rolled up to show neatly ranked cots with sleeping bags rolled or canoed, soldiers in T-shirts, dog tags hanging like macho jewelry. The torn brown envelopes of field rations. Texan heat. No war.

The unit had quickly settled into a normal field routine. Regular patrols flew south, inspecting the emptiness. There was an unmistakable feeling of disappointment among the men who had been primed for combat, but there was relief, as well. Soldiers cursed the weather, the godforsaken landscape, the insects and meandering snakes, the rations, and the brass who never knew what was going on and never got anything right. Some swore that the U.S. Army was on the wrong side again, that the Zaireans were worthless motherfuckers. The few books that had been tossed into rucksacks or kit bags for the trip were read, passed around, reread.

"Hey, George," a fellow captain called, passing down the lines of cots, "what the hell're you reading now?"

Taylor held up the cover of the paperback so his friend could see.

"That some kind of horror novel, like?"

"Not exactly," Taylor answered, lazy on his bunk.

"Heart of Darkness." The man laughed. "Sounds like one of my old girlfriends. You want a beer, George?"

"Got one."

The captain smiled good-naturedly. "Captain George Taylor, troop commander. The guy who has everything." And he headed off toward the field canteen.

Taylor and his comrades spent their nonflying hours getting magnificent suntans and listening to the English-language South African radio station that broadcast the most powerful signal in the region and played the best music. The female disc jockeys with their fantasy-inspiring off-British accents never said a word about crisis or plague or their own troop deployments, but as the situation seemed to normalize, they began dedicating songs to the "lonely GIs up north." Everyone's favorite announcer was a woman named Mamie Whitewater, whom the troops quickly renamed Mamie Skullfucker. When there were no missions to fly and the sun made it too hot to remain under the canvas, Taylor loved to lie in a jerry-rigged hammock with a can of beer chilling a circle on his stomach muscles, browning his skin for the girls back home and listening to the teasing radio voice. He knew she had to be blonde. And morally unsalvageable.

There was no war. Only the sun, boredom, and bad food. Taylor's unit had not been stricken by Runciman's disease, and the reports that filtered down through the staff of mounting RD casualties closer in to Kolwezi or back in Kinshasa held little reality for the aviators in their isolated cocoon. It was all somebody else's nightmare, less important than speculating about how long it might be before they all went home. They argued about whether or not there had ever been elephants in this part of Africa, and bored young pilots broke flight discipline in their efforts to take snapshots of the lesser wildlife they encountered on patrol. Occasionally, Taylor would get a flash that these long, hot days were idyllic, paradise before the fall. But his inspirations never lasted long, and most of the time he simply felt weighed down by the empty, uncomfortable drudgery of it all.

Once, he flew over a village where corpses lay at random intervals in the dirt street, bloating in the sun. Plague. His hands jerked at the controls. But the effect was ultimately no more than that of watching a troubling film clip. He simply banked his helicopter away, rising into the clean blue sky.

The last morning seemed especially clear, and the air still had a freshness to it when they took off. The mission was as routine as could be. Patrol south along the Lualaba River trace toward Zambia. No wild-assed flying. The squadron commander had delivered a stem lecture to all of the pilots the day before, after a lieutenant had nearly crashed his Apache trying to get a photo of what he swore was a cheetah. So it was going to be a day of dull formation flying, with no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. The squadron S-2 had even stopped delivering regular threat updates.

Taylor was in a down mood, and he was unusually snappish with his subordinates over the radio. He had received word that one of his classmates from Fort Rucker, a man who was almost a close friend, had died of Runciman's disease back at the lOlst's main command post. The death was absurd, since Chuckie Moss had the least dangerous assignment imaginable — chauffeuring general officers around in the best-maintained helicopter in the division. Chuckie was recently married, a bit of a clown, and not yet thirty years old. For him to have died, when there had not even been any combat, seemed absurd and inadmissible.

Taylor's thoughts strayed in disorder. Remembering Chuckie on a wild weekend down in Panama City, Florida, his thoughts tumbled into bed with an old girlfriend. Joyce Whittaker. An absolute wild woman. He could remember Chuckie, beer in hand, laughing about the noise and declaring that old Joyce was a gal of considerably more energy than judgment. And he remembered Joyce's body glazed with sweat, her eyes closed, as the scrublands slipped away under the belly of his aircraft. The sunlight began to dazzle through his face shield, and he wriggled out of his survival vest in preparation for the impending heat.

They were barely ten minutes out of the field site when the radar on Taylor's bird milked out, its screen frothing with pale discolorations. Taylor assumed it was an equipment malfunction, since the new electronics on the A5 Apaches were finicky on the best of days, and the dust of the field site was hard on them.

"One-four, this is Niner-niner," Taylor called to the aircraft flying echelon right to his own. "My radar's crapping out. You've got sky watch."

"This is One-four," a worried voice came through the headset. "I'm all milked out. What the hell's going on?"

Suddenly, the voice of an old chief warrant officer cut into the net from one of the trail birds:

"Goddamnit, we're being jammed."

Taylor realized instantly that the chief was right, and he felt stupid for missing the obvious, as though he had been half asleep. No one had expected hostile activity.

"All ponies, all ponies, open order. Now. Prepare for possible contact," Taylor commanded. Immediately, he could feel his troop's formation spread itself across the sky.

The radar screens remained useless. But no enemy appeared to the eye. Taylor wished he had a few scout aircraft out front, but the scout flights had been discontinued as unnecessary, since there was no real threat of hostile action.

"Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner, over," Taylor called, trying to raise flight operations back at the field site.

Static.

"Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Flash traffic. Over." Nothing. A low whining that might have been nothing more than engine bleed.

"Sierra—"

On the periphery of his field of vision, an intense flash replaced one of his helicopters in the sky. Lieutenant Rossi. In the wake of the flash, the distorted flying machine plummeted to earth as Taylor watched. The autorotation failed to work, and the ship dropped straight down and hit so hard that sections of the fuselage and subassemblies jumped away from the wreck, lofting back into the sky, as the frame disappeared in a cloud of fire.

Taylor's eyes dazzled, and the world seemed to crack into a mosaic. His voice continued to pursue a previous thought, "Sierra six-five…"

"Jesus Christ," a voice shouted over the troop's internal net. "Jesus Christ."

Taylor frantically scanned the horizon.

Nothing. Absolutely empty. Clear hot blue.

"Allponies. Take evasive action. Countermeasure suites on. " The control panel reflected the anxious actions of his weapons officer, a new boy Taylor hardly knew. "One-one," Taylor ordered, "break off and check the site for survivors… break…" Taylor radioed the chief warrant officer in the trail bird. "One-three, what do you have back there? Somebody on our six?"

"Negative. Negative." The chief's voice was high-pitched with excitement. It was the first time in their year-long acquaintance that Taylor had heard the least emotion in the man's voice. "Niner-niner, that was a frontal hit. And there ain't no survivors. Rossi and Koch are dead meat, and we're going to need One-one if we get into a dogfight." Taylor felt a surge of fury at this questioning of his authority. But, in a matter of seconds, he realized the chief was right.

He felt so helpless — there was no enemy to be seen, either in the air or on the ground.

"One-one, disregard previous instructions. Rejoin formation."

"Roger."

Apaches aren't supposed to crash like that, Taylor told himself. Apaches don't burn. Apaches don't break up. Apaches don't—

"Where the hell are they?" Taylor demanded of the microphone. "Does anybody see anything?"

"Negative."

Negative, negative.

"One-four, can you see anything?"

"My eyes are fucked up."

"Somebody's got a goddamned laser out here. A big goddamned laser," the chief interrupted, his voice impassioned with the suddenness of the revelation. "That was a goddamned laser hit. I seen that shit out at White Sands."

Impossible. The South Africans did not have laser weaponry. Nobody had tactical lasers, except for a few specialized blinding devices. Nonlethal stuff. Killer lasers were for stationary space defense, strategic shit. No one had yet managed the power source miniaturization required to make the weapons tactically feasible.

Taylor felt lost in the big, empty sky. All he could think to do was to continue flying. Even though he felt very afraid, flight suit soaking with sweat and his skin rashed red and white. He wanted to turn and scoot for the safety of the field site. But that was not the way cavalrymen behaved.

He tried again to raise flight operations. "Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Possible enemy contact, I say again—possible enemy contact. "

With no further warning, another of his aircraft flashed white and gold, then tumbled crazily out of the sky. This time, the Apache began to disintegrate while it was still in midair.

"Down on the deck," he ordered his remaining helicopters. "Get right down on the goddamned grass." He hoped that he could hide his ships from the unseen enemy by flying absolute-minimum nap-of-the-earth. "Taking her down," he told his weapons officer. "Hold on."

He wanted to shoot back. To fire at something. He even had the urge to fire into the empty sky. Anything not to passively accept the fate of the two lost aircraft.

"There they are," the old chief warrant officer called over the net. "Two o'clock high."

When he looked up through the canopy, Taylor could barely make out the distant black specks on the horizon. His eyes hurt, tearing, reluctant to focus.

They were out of range. And they had already knocked down two of his birds.

He could feel his remaining crews waiting for his decision, the order that would decide all of their fates.

There were only two choices. Run… try to outrun them… or attack, closing the distance in the hope they could at least get off a few in-range shots.

"Sierra six-five, this is Mike niner-niner. Confirmed enemy contact. Two friendly ponies down. We are moving to attack."

He knew without doubt that his aircraft were outclassed. He had always had faith in the old Apache, with its reliable multipurpose missiles and its good old Gatling gun with the depleted uranium rounds. But he knew now that somebody had changed the rules, that he was little better off than if he had been mounted on a horse, with a saber and revolver.

"Chief," Taylor radioed, forgetting the call signs, "you move wide to the right and fly cover. We're going straight for them. The evasion drills aren't worth shit. Let's go, Bravo Troop." He watched the black dots growing unmistakably larger. "Let's get those bastards."

But there was already little left of Bravo Troop. Another flash of light punched his wingman into the baked earth. The rotors slashed at the scrub, catapulting the fuselage wildly into the sky, then slamming it down to earth.

The chief warrant officer ignored the orders Taylor had given him, climbing fast toward the enemy, head-on, firing off a missile at a still hopeless range, as though to frighten the enemy away by a display of ferocity.

Before Taylor's ship could climb into the sky, an unseen blow sent it spinning brokenly against the rotors, and, although Taylor could still feel his hands on the controls, his eyes saw only shimmering ivory. In the instant before the aircraft skidded into the brush, Taylor screamed at his weapons officer:

"Fire, goddamnit, fire!"

He did not know whether the gunner could make out any targets, whether he could see at all, whether he was still alive. Taylor just knew that he did not want to die without hitting back, and the last thing he felt before the force of the crash knocked him unconscious was a fury as big as the sky itself.

No one had really expected the South Africans to fight. It had all appeared to be a matter of calculated risks, of posturing, blustering, of marching up and down. The wisdom in Washington was that the South Africans were just calling the world's bluff. Figuring that the Europeans had neither the will nor the forces to do much, and that the United States would not have the guts to send troops. Washington had confidently dispatched the XVIII Airborne Corps, certain that it was all just a matter of flexing muscles. The intel boys knew that the South Africans had an arrangement with Japan to put the latest generation of Japanese military equipment through its paces. But that was assumed to be merely a sales showcase. And the one Toshiba gunship that the U.S. technical intelligence community had gotten its hands on showed some interesting evolutionary features, but nothing that was likely to change the overall equation on the battlefield. In retrospect, it became obvious that the United States had been duped with a dummy model, stripped of its key systems. But no one had suspected anything before the intervention.

The South Africans had allowed the laborious shuttling in and out of Kinshasa required to deploy the barely mobile U.S. corps. And the U.S. Army had done its best, scrambling at the last moment to beef up the corps with troops from other units stationed throughout the country, juggling to avoid calling up Reserve units. The defense cuts and troop reductions of the nineties and the starvation budgets of the turn of the century had left even those formations at the highest readiness level short of everything from medics and linguists to ammunition and spare parts. The deployment was chaotic, with Air Force transports unable to fly, while the Air Force nonetheless insisted on deploying B-2 bombers to Kinshasa, even though no one could define a mission for them. The Navy sent two carrier battle groups, but neither jets nor missiles nor guns proved targetable against an enemy who lay dispersed and out of range in the heart of Africa. No one really expected a fight, of course, and everyone wanted to be on the scene. Military Intelligence threw up its hands. The collection systems worked, more or less. But there were no analysts capable of interpreting the data, since the Army had moved to maximum automation — and the automated systems were not programmed for so unexpected a contingency as a deployment to an African backwater. But the shortage of medical personnel trained for catastrophe soon proved the greatest deficiency.

With each passing day, the decision makers grew more convinced that the South Africans would never fight. It became a joke in Washington, if less so on the ground in Kinshasa, where confusion, shortages, and Murphy's Law kept attention focused on matters closer at hand. Still, even the corps command group reasoned that, had the South Africans wanted to put up a fight, their only chance would have been to strike while the U.S. was establishing its initial airhead — not after the entire corps was on the ground.

At first the South Africans had remained down in Shaba Province, noncommittal, while the United States threatened to deploy forward into the province itself. For a time the two sides simply postured, armies of observation, since no one on the U.S. side had quite figured out how to attack across half a continent where the road and rail network was either broken-down or nonexistent.

Slowly the XVIII Airborne Corps began to feel its way forward, attempting to threaten without actually forcing a confrontation at the tactical level. But there was an increasing sense of urgency now. For a new and terrible enemy had appeared.

By the time of the Zaire intervention, the AIDS epidemic was on the wane. Wide stretches of Africa had virtually been depopulated, since the effective vaccines were far too expensive for use on the indigenous populations. But the Western world felt safe, and even in Africa, the disease appeared to be sputtering out. Only Brazil continued to host an epidemic of crisis proportions, while the rest of South America appeared to have the situation reasonably under control. Few had paid serious attention to the reports of a new epidemic ravaging the surviving populations of backcountry Uganda and Tanzania, and even the World Health Organization at first thought they were simply seeing a virulent cholera outbreak. The difficulties in assessing the extent of the situation were compounded by the reluctance of image-conscious African nations to admit the extent of the problem in their hinterlands. The disease reached Mozambique. International health officials began to tally the losses in health-care workers and found that the rate of fatalities was unprecedented. Soon, much of East Africa seemed to be dying.

The rest of the world remained unmoved. International quarantines were imposed on the stricken nations. The epidemic remained just one more African problem.

In Uganda and Kenya the people called the disease Ash-bum fever, because of the burnlike scars it left on the skin of those lucky enough to survive. But it soon acquired a civilized name, when Sir Phillip Runciman isolated the startlingly new vims in a laboratory in Mombasa. Runciman's disease managed to combine viral potency and effects with symptoms normally associated with bacterial infections. Initial signs did resemble cholera, with rapid depletion of bodily fluids through diarrhea and vomiting, but there was an accompanying assault on the nervous system that appeared completely new. The disease quickly passed into a stage where the skin withered and died in discolored patches, while, in the worst cases, the brain began to separate, causing extreme pain, and, in most cases, death. Victims fell into three broad categories— fatalities, which ran as high as eighty-five percent without treatment, survivors with permanent brain damage and various degrees of loss of control over basic bodily functions, and the lucky ones, who were merely disfigured.

The issue of Runciman's disease had come up during the hasty planning phases of the deployment to Zaire, as one of the many matters of concern to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But there was a sense in the government of no time to lose; there were fears of yet another countercoup in Kinshasa, which might put a legitimate face on the South African occupation of Shaba. And the Department of State assured the President and the National Security Council that the ruling Sublime Democracy Party in Zaire had given guarantees that there was no evidence whatsoever of Runciman's disease along the middle or lower reaches of the Zaire — or Congo — River or in southern Zaire. There was certainly none in Shaba Province.

The U.S. ambassador to Zaire sent a supporting cable stressing that both the image and national interests of the United States were irrevocably at stake and that, although, frankly, there were some cases of Runciman's disease reported in the backcountry, the disease did not present an immediate threat to U.S. personnel, given sensible precautions.

The U.S. forces began their deployment.

The Department of State had worked out a special arrangement with the government of Zaire to "facilitate the efficient and nondestabilizing deployment of U.S. forces." Those U.S. forces were to remain confined to the general vicinity of the Kinshasa airport until they further deployed southeast to Shaba Province. A State Department spokesman told the press that the agreement was designed to prevent the appearance of some sort of American invasion of Zaire, of an unacceptable level of interference in the nation's internal affairs. But it did not take the arriving U.S. troops long to discover the real reason for the restriction.

The slums of Kinshasa were haunted with plague. The situation was so bad that, when ordered to dispose of the bodies of the victims of Runciman's disease, the Zairean military had mutinied. The back streets of the capital recalled the depths of the Middle Ages.

The U.S. Army command group on the ground immediately reported the situation. But the fundamental sense of mission, of commitment, did not waver. With a "can-do" attitude the XVIII Airborne Corps and the Air Force's Forward Command, Africa, instituted rigid quarantine procedures. Yet, exceptions had to be made. U.S. commanders and planners had to meet with their Zairean counterparts, U.S. and local air controllers had to work side by side, waste had to be disposed of beyond the confines of the airport, and senior officers had social responsibilities that could not be ignored without deeply offending local sensibilities.

By the time the U.S. Army began its wheezing deployment to the disputed area downcountry, it had become apparent that Runciman's disease — or RD, as the soldiers had quickly renamed it — was not strictly a disease of the African poor.

Still, operations seemed to go well enough. The Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division conducted a flawless combat jump into the grasslands near Kolwezi, the heart of Shaba Province. They found the South Africans had abandoned the town, after setting it ablaze. Quickly, the paratroopers secured a sizable airhead. And the next wave of transports began to land. The South Africans made no move to interfere. They could not even be located. It appeared that they had backed down, evacuating the province.

The forward deployment of U.S. forces continued, having become little more than a strenuous logistics exercise. On the scene in Shaba, at corps headquarters in Kinshasa, and in Washington there was jubilation. It was decided that U.S. forces would remain on the scene just long enough to tidy things up and to make our unequivocable support of the present Zairean government clear to all interested parties.

Taylor cried out in pain as he regained consciousness. There was a hammering at the back of his skull that made it painful to breathe, painful to move, painful to keep still. His eyes felt as though he had been punched with pepper-coated fists, and his head felt too large for the flight helmet clamped around it. Then he realized that his back ached deeply, as well, commanding him not to move.

But he did move. Jumping madly at the thought that the aircraft must be on fire. He tore at the safety harness, screaming, hurling himself out of the cockpit in a panic, a frightened child. His pant leg caught on the frame, and he fell facedown, the force of his weight sending a shudder through the remnants of the airframe. He tore wildly at his leg, struggling to free himself, almost dragging the wreck behind him until the fabric of his flight suit gave way, freeing his calf to cut itself against the sharp metal. The world seemed to have no end of pain in store for him, and he curled into himself, whimpering, imagining that he was screaming, still waiting to die.

There was no fire. The tattered aircraft frame sat erectly in the churned grassland, its Gatling gun loose as a hangnail and its snout nuzzled against a leathery dwarf of a tree. The tail section was missing, and the rotors looked like broken fingers. The multipurpose missiles were gone, perhaps fired off in the last moment, or stripped away as the machine skidded through the undergrowth. Taylor was so amazed that he was alive, unburned, and that his bird, at least, had held together the way it was supposed to, that it took him a long moment to remember the weapons officer.

None of it had been the way it was supposed to be. You were supposed to outfly and outfight the enemy. You were supposed to fly home in triumph. And if your heroics and sacrifice caused you to crash, the first thing you were to do was to think of your comrade. But Taylor had only been able to think of his own pain, his own fear, overwhelmed by a terror of burning alive.

The weapons officer sat slumped in his subcompartment. Not moving. As still as the inert fuselage.

A young warrant officer, hardly out of flight school. When asked why he had taken the most inexperienced man in the troop to be his gunner, Taylor always replied that it was his responsibility to train the man properly. But he also wanted someone who was malleable, who would do as he was told. Not some cranky old bastard who had seen a dozen troop commanders come and go.

Taylor hardly knew the man. As the troop commander, he always kept a bit of distance from the others, and the leadership technique was compounded by Taylor's essentially private nature. Now, dizzy and sick, with his eyes tricking out of focus, he looked up from the ground at the slumped figure in the aircraft, shocked at the summary of his failures.

This was not the way it was supposed to be. He had done nothing correctly, failing in everything. His troop lay squandered across the wastes, and the man for whom Taylor bore the most immediate responsibility had lain dead or unconscious or unable to move while his superior, the swaggering cavalry captain, had rescued himself without a thought for any other living thing. It was not the way it was supposed to be.

At the same time, Taylor could not suppress a physical joy, inexplicably akin to sex, at the knowledge that he was really alive, that he had survived.

He lifted himself up, half cripple, half crab, and began tugging and slapping the cockpit. The frame was bent, locking itself shut. Finally, Taylor had to smash it with a rock. All the while, his gunner's only movement was a slight shudder of the helmet and torso in response to the waves of energy Taylor's clumsiness sent through the machine.

"Ben?"

Nothing.

"Ben? Are you all right?"

The gunner did not respond. But Taylor's eyes had acquired enough focus to see that the man was still breathing, however faintly.

A few dark stains decorated the chest of the gunner's flight suit, and, as Taylor watched, a large fly settled near the gunner's name tag.

"Ben?" Taylor unfastened the man's oversize helmet, lifting it off, trying not to hurt him.

As the clam-shaped sides of the helmet cleared the gunner's temples, the man's head fell awkwardly to the side.

His neck was broken. So badly that he should have been dead. Yet, now, at last, he moaned.

"Oh, God," Taylor told him, unsure what to do or say. "Oh, God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. Oh, God."

The man's eyes didn't open. But he moaned again, and Taylor could not tell whether it was from sheer pain or in response to his voice.

"Ben? Can you hear me? Can you understand?" Taylor was weeping in shame, failure, frustration. "I can't get you out of there. Do you understand me? You've got to stay strapped in. I can't move you. Do you…"

Another fly settled on the gunner's face, strolling down a cheek to the dried blood painted under the man's nose. Taylor flicked at it, careful not to touch the head, not to do any more damage than he had already done. Looking at the caked blood, Taylor realized that they must have been sitting there for hours before he himself had come to.

Where were the rescue aircraft? The world was utterly silent.

The gunner made a sound that was more like that of a badly wounded animal than of a human being. Then without warning, he spoke one distinct word:

"Water."

The hopelessness of it all made Taylor begin to cry again. He could find no trace in himself now of the superpilot, the fearless cavalryman.

"Ben… for God's sake… you can't drink. I can't give you anything. You mustn't move your head."

The gunner moaned. There was still no evidence of genuine consciousness in the sound. The single word might have been an eruption out of a coma's dream.

"Please… water."

Periodically, throughout the afternoon and evening, the gunner would call for water, or mumble the word "drink." His eyes never opened. Taylor rigged a bit of shade for the man out of scraps, but there was no practical way to reduce the heat in the narrow cockpit. Taylor tried to fan his broken companion, but the effort was so obviously ineffectual it became ridiculous. Soon, he settled himself into the meager shade on the side of the wreck away from the sun, flare pistol ready to signal at the first sound of search helicopters. He tried to be stingy with the emergency water supply, but it was hard. He grew thirstier. Yet, invariably, after he allowed himself a taste of the sour wetness, the gunner would begin calling for water, as though he were watching as Taylor drank, accusing him of drinking his share too. Occasionally, Taylor would get up and chase the flies away from the injured man's face and hands. But they soon returned. The gunner's lips were already swollen and oozing.

In the night, the younger man's voice woke Taylor. The sound was a horrible rasp. But the man did not beg for a drink now. He spoke to a third person:

"Can't make me go off there. I won't do it. No. I'm not… going off of there…" Then he moaned back into his dream.

Taylor made one of his periodic attempts to bully the radio to life. But there was nothing. And the emergency transponder had gone astray somewhere in the course of the crash landing. He was afraid to light a fire, afraid that the wrong party might see it, afraid that it would attract animals rather than keep them at bay. He found it impossible to go back to sleep after the gunner's ravings had awakened him. All of his body seemed to hurt. But, far worse, he seemed to be thinking very clearly now. He realized that, although he wanted the gunner to survive, wanted it badly, he would unhesitatingly choose his own survival over that of the other man, if a choice had to be made. He had always imagined himself to be selfless, ready for sacrifice. But now it was very clear to him that he wanted, above all, to live, and that his own life was more important to him than was the life of any other man. His year of service in Colombia, during the drug-war deployment, had not truly tested him. Beyond occasional small-arms fire from the jungle or a hilltop, the greatest enemy had been boredom, and he had imagined himself to be fearless, a real stud. But the captain's bars on his shoulders, all of the words he had spoken in dozens of ceremonies, his cherished vision of himself… it was all a joke. In his moment of responsibility, he had failed, and there was no rationalizing it away. Even now, if he could have chosen to be in the warm, safe bed of any of a dozen girlfriends instead of here pretending to nurse the injured weapons officer, he would have made his decision unhesitatingly. Sitting afraid in the African night, under a painfully clear sky, he found that he had never known himself at all in his twenty-nine years. The man in the mirror had been a dressed-up doll.

A sharp new pain woke him from his doze, and, in the morning light, he could just make out the ants scouting over his body, feeding on his tom calf. He jumped up, slapping at himself in fresh terror. He danced wildly, smashing at the tiny creatures with his fists, scraping at his ankles and boots, tearing at the zipper lines of his flight suit as he felt the bites moving along his legs.

After stripping himself half-naked, he won his battle. Gasping and shaking, he went to check on the weapons officer.

The man's face was covered with ants. The eyes were open, their blinking the only sign of resistance against the swarm. The pupils never moved, staring straight ahead at the wrecked console. But they were unmistakably alive. Sentient.

"No," Taylor screamed. He tried to be gentle in his frenzy, scooping away the copper-colored ants. But he felt as maddened as if they were plundering his own face.

Despite his best efforts, the gunner's head shifted on its skewed axis, and the man moaned. Then the eyes moved, staring up at Taylor with perfect clarity from a face swollen so badly it was almost unrecognizable.

"It's no good, sir," the gunner whispered, his voice incredibly calm. "They're all over me. I can feel them." He paused, as though he were merely discussing a minor disappointment. "I was just afraid you were gone. I thought you were mad because I didn't fire."

Taylor carefully undid the zipper in the front of the man's flight suit. As he pulled it down, ants began to spill down the teeth onto the outer fabric. The cockpit floor, the man's boots were invisible under a coppery mass.

"Please give me something to drink."

Taylor could feel the ants working at his own ankles again.

"Just a drink."

"Ben… for God's sake… if I…"

"I know…" the gunner said. Tears were seeping out of his swollen eyes now. "It doesn't matter. I want to drink."

Taylor hastened to fetch the double canteen.

"Ben…"

The gunner closed his eyes. "Can't talk…'' he said. He seemed to be clenching himself against an unimaginable pain.

As gently as he could, Taylor put the canteen to the man's lips. But the mouth was already dead. He carefully tipped the water as ants began crawling up over his own hands.

With a jerk, the gunner gagged. His head lolled forward, throat gurgling, unable to accept the water.

Taylor almost dropped the canteen. But the self-preservation instinct in him was still too strong. He pulled back, spilling only a little of the water. With ants chewing fire into his hands and forearms, he carefully screwed the cap tight. Then he drew his pistol and shot his weapons officer through the forehead.

The map was useless at first, since the landscape was all the same, and he simply followed the compass. North. Flying above the earth, it had been easy to find beauty in the rugged grasslands and bush, but now, on foot, the country was a monotonous nightmare of heat, thorns, vermin, and snakes. It took him a full day of steady, pained walking before the waste hills of the mining complex swelled up in the distance. Then his water ran out. Maddeningly, the waste hills refused to grow larger, and the bush clutched at him, as if determined to hold him back. His flight suit shredded away from his arms, and sweat burned down over his opened flesh. In panic, he fired his pistol at a rearing snake that appeared immediately in front of him. He began to shake, and to dream. In his lucid moments he was uncertain whether he was suffering from fear or dehydration. He forced himself to focus on his goal, to remain focused, and he refused to consider the possibility that he might finally reach his squadron's field site only to find it evacuated. He thought about water and about safe rest in a place where nature's wretchedness would not crawl over him as he slept.

As he finally approached the bivouac site in the twilight, he scanned desperately for signs of life. He had not seen a single helicopter in flight. No vehicles stirred the dust along the portage roads. Crazily, he walked faster, almost running, staggering, his damaged back stiff, as though the spine had been fused into a single piece.

Surely, they would not have left him behind.

Water.

Rest.

He trotted dizzily around the spur of waste that shielded the field site from view.

And he staggered as though punched hard in the chest. Then he sat down in the dirt, staring.

The support site had been turned into a blackened scrapyard. Wrecked helicopters and vehicles sat in jagged repose amid shredded tentage and camouflage netting.

They had not heard his broadcast warnings. Or they had not reacted in time. Or they had been caught out by the same technological imbalance that had swept his troop from the sky.

Eventually he picked himself up, dizzy, and wandered about the ruins of his army. Not everything had been destroyed. Vehicles, a field kitchen, miscellaneous field gear, even a precious water buffalo had simply been left behind. No bodies, though. In the American tradition, the survivors who had pulled out had taken their wounded and their dead. But precious little else. Atop the two-story administration building, a red and white cavalry pennant hung limply from its pole, forgotten.

Taylor realized that it must have been very bad. But he could not quite feel sympathy for them, or outrage. He simply felt sick, with all the self-focus illness brings. He drank water too quickly from the tap of the water buffalo, then let the liquid stream over his head. He could tell from the pain the coolness produced that he was badly sunburned. But it seemed so minor a problem that he wasted no further thought on it. He wanted to rest.

The African darkness fell with the swiftness of a heavy curtain released from above, and Taylor stumbled through the litter of the administrative building up onto the flat roof where the cavalry guidon hung. He hoped that no creatures would pester him there. He had degenerated into a childish terror of all small crawling things, even of flies. He felt as though he had been overloaded with nature's horrors, and he wanted only to be left in peace for a little while.

The sun woke him. He jerked up from the concrete bed of the roof. Helicopters. He heard helicopters. But, even as he struggled to his feet to search the sky, he realized that the sound was only the buzzing of flies.

His legs were very weak, and he had to go down the stairs carefully. He drank more water, tasting it now, sour and warm. Stacks of ration cartons had been knocked about by the kitchen trailer. But the thought of food sickened him. Still, the day seemed hopeful. He was alive. And he could take his choice from a number of vehicles in operative condition. He could take a truck if he wanted. Or a lighter utility vehicle. It struck him that he might just survive after all.

He moved slowly, but he tried to move methodically. He loaded a light, all-purpose truck with boxes of rations, I with ten-gallon fuel cans, with water cans. He worked through the wreckage of the helicopters, searching out forgotten emergency kits. Ammunition, matches, first-aid kits, flare guns. It was possible to salvage something from even the worst wrecks. But he could not find a working radio. The late-model sets that had been left behind had been cleared, deprogrammed. Someone had been thinking about operations security.

There were civilian phone lines in the administrative building, but they were dead. Still, he was able to lift a decent set of maps from the abandoned stock, some outdated, others with broad expanses where there was no detail, yet far better than the single local flight map disintegrating in his pocket. He made a plan. No point heading for Kolwezi without adequate knowledge of the combat situation. Better to head north, roughly along the Lualaba, as the backcountry roads and trails allowed. In the wreckage of the tents, he sifted through the burned duffel bags and kits. His own oversize aviator's bag had burned, but he found stray uniform pieces of the necessary sizes where the enlisted tents had stood. He could even have taken a supply of pornographic magazines, but he settled for loading a sleeping bag onto the truck.

He was ready to go. He still felt weak, but he was convinced that he was going to make it. He could almost feel a spark of his old fire, thinking: George Taylor versus Africa, round two. He folded the local map sheet and tucked it in by the gears. He had loaded himself down with pistols and knives like a cartoon cowboy. He started the engine. But a last glimpse of the abandoned cavalry banner on the roof stopped him.

Laboriously, he reclimbed the stairs. He grabbed the fabric in one hand and cut it free from the pole with a sheath knife, noticing with his first smile in days that some young soldier had inked into the fabric, in small block letters, the informal cavalryman's motto:

Taylor folded up the guidon and slipped it into one of his oversize uniform pockets. Moments later he had left the scene of defeat behind, on his way to conquer a continent.

His journey took four months. He had hoped to link up with U.S. forces at a corps support command site at Lubudi, but he found only a dump of pallets and blivets, repair tents, and a plundered medical support site, all abandoned by the U.S. military and now inhabited by local squatters. The native dead lay casually about the compound, victims of RD that no one else would touch, let alone bury. Taylor sped off, trying to bathe away any contagion in the rush of air moving over the vehicle, unwilling to risk the contact questions would have required.

He followed the river. His fellow Americans were somewhere to the west or northwest, but he had no way of knowing how far back the war had carried them. The river, with its necklace of remote, fetid towns, was his only hope. Bukama, too, was dying, but the remnants of government and a few Belgian missionaries were fighting back, burning the corpses. Taylor had smelled the stench miles before he reached the straggling edge of the town, but nothing in his experience had allowed him to identify it. At a ferry crossing, a Lebanese wanted to purchase anything Taylor would be willing to sell from the stock aboard the vehicle, but Taylor was determined to husband his riches, rationing himself on the long progress toward Kinshasa. In response to Taylor's pidgin questions about Americans, the Lebanese responded angrily in French overgrown with localisms, so that all Taylor could make out was that the Lebanese did not know where there were any Americans and did not care where there were any Americans. Beyond that, Taylor could only catch the word death, which came up repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, just as the landscape was going bad, Taylor's vehicle stopped in the middle of a dirt track. Nothing he could do would make it start again, and he had no choice but to abandon the riches the Lebanese had so badly wanted to buy.

He continued on foot, bartering for occasional rides on ancient trucks, on ferries and riverboats seeping with plague. He had diarrhea, but it passed over him in cycles, hitting him hard, then weakening, then punishing him again. Each new surge of pain teased him with the thought that he was coming down with Runciman's disease. But he never sickened beyond stomach cramps and the breakdown of his bowels as his belly filled with parasites. Far from his dreams of military glory, he killed his first enemy in a filthy cafe, shooting the bandit in the instant before he would have been shot himself, then shooting the bartender-accomplice a moment later, watching an old hunting rifle slip from the man's hands. One more trap for travelers in a dying land.

He traveled over a thousand winding miles to the great falls and the ghostly city of Kisangani, its population first thinned by AIDS, now slaughtered by Runciman's disease. There was no help for him there, but the whores desperately trying to make a living along the enfeebled trade route told him that, yes, there was a very big war.

"Kinshasa. No one talk."

Americans?

A gold-toothed smile.

South Africans?

The wasting prostitutes so wanted to please, yet Taylor was utterly unable to make them understand with his shreds of high-school French. For two years, he had sat inattentively, his only thoughts concerning the wiry blond girl who sat in front of him, dreaming over her grammar. Now, at an incalculable remove, the precious words would not come. A whore raised her arm toward him, its long bone wrapped thinly in burned cork.

There was no escaping any of it. The mails did not function, phones were a memory. All that was left were the basic essentials: grim food — unnameable, slithering through the bowels — the nightmare whores who imagined that the pockets of his tattered uniform held wealth, and the incredibly resilient traders, who worked their way along the rivers on unscheduled steamers. Taylor passed through mourning towns and through villages where no sign of human life remained. Survivors of Runciman's disease wandered the bush and jungles, waiting for another death, many begging, some gone mad. The most amazing thing to Taylor was the speed with which he learned not to see, not to care.

Fragmentary details of the war filtered up the great river lines, jumbled out of chronology. On a river bank, between skewers of smoked monkey and displays of bright cotton, a merchant told him that the Americans had made a great fire, but he could supply no further details. Great fire, great fire. It wasn't until he reached Kabalo that a world-band radio shocked him with an offhanded reminder that the United States had struck the South African government center of Pretoria with a small-yield nuclear weapon weeks before. A last surviving relief worker let Taylor look through the stack of outdated newspapers awaiting service in the water closet. Taylor hurried through them, in a mental panic. Uncomprehending, he slowed, and began again, sifting the reports into the order of the calendar.

The South African military had set a trap, launching a broad, coordinated attack on the U.S. forces in Shaba Province, on those deploying downcountry, and on those remaining in Kinshasa. The same morning that Taylor's troop had been blasted out of the sky, South African commandos and rebel forces from within the Zairean military had destroyed the sixteen unnecessarily deployed B-2 bombers on the ground back in the capital. The planes had cost the United States well over one billion dollars each. The South Africans destroyed them with hand grenades, satchel explosives, and small-arms ammunition that a private could have bought with a month's pay. In the fighting downcountry the South African military's Japanese-built gunships with on-board battle lasers and a revolutionary arsenal of combat electronics had introduced a qualitatively new dimension into warfare. In the nineties the U.S. had built-down in concert with the Soviets, and even as the military force shrank, the only new weapons introduced to keep pace with the times were enormously expensive Air Force and Navy systems that had never proved to be of any practical utility. The only program that worked, even though underfunded, was strategic space defense, while the only service that saw significant action in the wake of Operation Desert Shield was the bare-bones Army, committed to a series of antinarcotic interventions in South America. But even that action was hampered by the Air Force's cutbacks in airlift capability, made in order to continue to fund the more glamorous manned bomber program. While carrier battle groups paid port calls around the world and stealth bombers flew patrols over Nevada, infantrymen cut their way through the jungles of Latin America with machetes and fought bitterly and successfully against the better-armed bands of the drug billionaires. When the Army had been ordered to Zaire, its tactical equipment proved to be, at best, a generation behind that developed by the Japanese — much of which had been based on technology initially developed in the United States in support of strategic space defenses.

The XVIII Airborne Corps fought hard, but the South Africans never dropped the initiative. The Japanese battle electronics proved impenetrable to the U.S. systems, while the lack of well-trained intelligence analysts left the Military Intelligence elements with nothing but useless equipment. The South Africans, however, always seemed to know where the U.S. forces were located and what their weaknesses were. The Japanese suite of electronic countermeasures and countercountermeasures would keep the U.S. forces deaf and blind, then the Toshiba gunships would sweep in, followed by strikes employing more conventional aircraft and fuel-air explosives.

U.S. casualties mounted so quickly, with such apparent helplessness on the U.S. side, that the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, after long-range consultation with the President, requested a ceasefire.

The South Africans ignored him and continued their strikes on the U.S. columns attempting to make their way northward to an imagined safety.

Finally, the corps commander attempted to surrender all remaining U.S. Army elements in Shaba in order to prevent the further loss of life.

The South African response was to strike a fifty-mile- long U.S. Army column with improved napalm.

The President ordered the U.S.S. Reagan, the nation's newest ballistic missile submarine, to strike Pretoria from its station in the Indian Ocean.

Taylor finally raised the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa on shortwave from an upriver station, only to be told that his case did not rate special evacuation consideration, given the general conditions in the country. He would have to make his own way for another thousand miles down the Zaire River.

He rode on asthmatic steamers where the crew shoveled the dead over the side at oar's length, and whose captains continued to work the channels and currents only in the hope that the next river port would be the one where the epidemic had already burned itself out and passed on. On one dying boat Taylor opened the rickety latrine door to find a corpse resting over the open hole, pants down and pockets turned inside out. Another night, he had to sit awake through the darkness, pistol in hand, to ward off the sick who insisted on sharing the magic medicine that kept the white man alive. And it truly was as though he were possessed of some remarkable power, so easily did he pass among the dead and dying, untainted except by the smell of his own filth. He began to suspect that he had some natural immunity, and, by the time he reached Kinshasa, that belief, along with a ragged uniform, dog tags, a half-empty pistol, and a folded-up, sweat-stained red and white cavalry guidon, was all he possessed.

Kinshasa, his goal, his city of dreams, proved to be the worst part of the entire journey. He had expected to be welcomed back into the safe, civilized, white fold, to be whisked away at last from this dying country. But as he approached the U.S. embassy compound, a bearded shambles of a man, the Marine guards in protective suits lowered their weapons in his direction. Stand back. Do not touch the gate. Taylor's rage eventually drew a Marine officer from the chancellery, but he only closed to shouting distance. He declared that, if Taylor truly was a U.S. serviceman, he should make his way to the U.S. armed forces liaison office at the military airfield. If everything was in order he would be evacuated to the quarantine station in the Azores. Almost all of the surviving U.S. personnel were gone now, withdrawn under the cover of the ceasefire that was the only positive result of the strike on Pretoria.

Taylor, hating the man, nonetheless craved information. About the war, about his world, about comrades and country. But the Marine officer was anxious to break off the discussion and go back inside.

Upriver the disease had created an atmosphere of resignation, a sense that the epidemic was the will of the gods, that there was nowhere to hide. For all the wails and songs of mourning, the dying out in the bush had a quiet about it. But in Kinshasa's motley attempt at civilization, the plague seemed to further distort and corrupt. Penniless, Taylor made his way across the urban landscape on foot, newly afraid now that he had come so close to rescue, forcing himself to go on. None of the few vehicles in the streets would pause to give a stranger a lift, and they drove with their windows sealed despite the torrid heat. Men and women came out into the streets to die, fleeing the premature darkness of their hovels or the broken elegance of colonial mansions. On the Zairean skin, the marks of the disease showed purple-black on the newly dead, but ashen as acid burns on those fortunate enough to live. And, despite the ravages of the epidemic, a fierce life persisted in the city. Howling children robbed the dead and dying, inventing new games in the alleys, and silken masks had come into fashion for those disfigured by the disease. Upriver, women waiting to die in way stations had made desultory overtures, but here, in the capital, brightly veiled prostitutes called out musically, playfully, threateningly. Shanty barrooms and cafes still did a noisy trade, and passing by their human froth, Taylor was glad that he looked so poor that he was hardly worth killing. After all he had seen, it struck him as all too logical that he might be killed now, at the end of his long journey. He felt that he was cheating his fate with each corner safely passed.

His most persistent vision of Kinshasa remained the public coupling of a big man with a woman in a red silk mask. The two of them leaned up against a doorway in a garbage-strewn alley. With no change in rhythm, the man turned his head and eyed the passing stranger with the disinterested expression of a dog.

"Yes, sir," the old master sergeant had said to him, as he guided Taylor through the disinfectant showers at the Kinshasa airfield processing detachment, "you're looking a little the worse for wear. But we'll fix you up."

The hot jets of the shower felt as though they were barely reaching his skin through the accumulated filth. The master sergeant had placed all of Taylor's uniform remnants in a dangerous-waste container. He had wanted to dispose of the matted cavalry pennant, as well. But the sudden look in Taylor's face, perhaps touched with just a bit of jungle madness, perhaps a look like the one his face had worn in the instant before he killed the bandit and the bartender upriver, had persuaded the other man to provide Taylor a special bag and receipt form that promised the item would be sterilized and returned to him.

"I suppose it's one hell of a mess up-country," the master sergeant said in a voice loud enough to reach into the shower stall with Taylor.

Taylor found it too hard to talk just yet. But the NCO went on, perhaps sensing a need in the half-crazed officer who had just walked in out of the bush, or perhaps because he was the kind of NCO who simply liked to talk — about wars and women and life's infinite small annoyances. He seemed wonderfully familiar to Taylor, a cursing, grunting, eternally weary symbol of Home. Taylor wanted to respond with words of his own. But it was very hard. It was much easier just to let the disinfectant-laced water stream down over him.

"It's a hellhole, I'll tell you," the sergeant continued. "Captain, I was in Colombia, from ninety-seven to ninety-nine, and I deployed to Bolivia a couple of times. But I never seen a mess like this place. They ought to just give it back to the Indians."

"I… was in Colombia," Taylor said, testing his vocal cords.

"Yeah? With who? I was with the Seventh Infantry Division. You know, 'Too light to fight' and all. Jeez, what a clusterfuck."

"I was with the Sixty-fourth Aviation Brigade." Taylor's hands trembled helplessly as he struggled to manipulate the big bar of soap under the torrents of water.

"Oh, yeah. Them guys. Yeah. Maybe you gave me a lift sometime."

"I was flying gunships."

"You were lucky. I hate to tell you what it was like humping up them jungle mountains. Christ, how we used to curse you guys. If you don't mind me saying. The chopper jockeys would be lifting off again before our butts cleared the doors. Of course, that's nothing to what the Navy done when the shit hit the fan with the South Africans."

"What's that?"

"You didn't hear, sir? Yeah, well. I guess you were out in the woods. As soon as the casualties started piling up— especially, the RD victims — that old carrier battle group that was sitting off the coast just unassed the area. Protecting and preserving the force, they called it. What it amounted to was that they weren't about to load any sick grunts onto their precious boats. But, I mean, what the hell? The only reason the Air Force is still flying us out is because of a presidential order. Ain't that a kick in the ass? Everybody was just ready to let Joe Snuffy die like a dog in a ditch. I guess they figured there weren't going to be any medals and promotions out of this one."

"You're kidding. How the hell did they expect us to evacuate?"

The master sergeant laughed, and the sound of it echoed through the concrete shelter. "The Air Force weenies… wanted us to book charter flights. They said it would be more cost effective. Of course, I guess they were a little gun-shy after losing twenty billion dollars worth of B-2s to a handful of cowboys. Like the Navy guys said, you got to protect and preserve the force."

Consciously steadying his hand, Taylor turned off the flow of water. As he stepped out of the narrow booth, rubbing himself hard with the towel, trying to wipe away the past four months in their entirety, the master sergeant looked him up and down and shook his head.

"Looks like you could use a good meal, Captain."

Taylor left for the Azores quarantine site on an evac run for those not yet ill with RD. Sitting in an ill-fitting special-issue uniform, with the freshly sterilized cavalry guidon in his breast pocket, he felt the greatest relief of his life as the shrieking Air Force plane lifted away from the African continent. He scanned old copies of Stars and Stripes, but even the relentlessly negative news articles could not fully suppress his elation.

In the poorly lit belly of the transport, he learned that the nuclear strike on Pretoria had been sufficient to force a South African withdrawal. The South Africans had overplayed their hand, after all. But the U.S. had lost far more than it gained. The world condemned the U.S. action. There was no sympathy, even from the nation's closest allies. Instead, the event gave furious impetus to the movement to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Japanese used the strike as a pretext to launch a trade war of unprecedented scale. Over the decades, the Japanese had slowly forced the United States and even the European Union out of key markets, such as electronics and high-grade machine tools, and now they announced that they would no longer trade with any nation that continued to trade with the United States. It was, Tokyo said, a moral issue. The Japanese did allow that they would continue to sell to the United States, since a total embargo would cause excessive hardship for innocent people…

The American government found itself helpless. There were no made-in-the-U.S. A. replacements for many of the items that made a neotechnological society function, and without Japanese spare parts, large sectors of the U.S. economy would have ground to a halt within weeks. Warfare suddenly had parameters that the military could not penetrate with radar-evading bombers or vast fleets. Even the military machine itself had come to rely on crucial components originally designed in the U.S.A. but improved and produced more efficiently in Japan.

The news media blustered about an economic Pearl Harbor, running their newspapers on state-of-the-art presses built in Yokohama, or broadcasting their commentaries over Japanese hardware to high-definition television sets made by Panasonic, Toshiba, and Hitachi. There seemed little hope for a second Battle of Midway in the near future. Certainly, even a strategic military response was out of the question, not only due to the debacle suffered by U.S. arms in Africa and the anti-U.S. sentiment prevailing worldwide, but also because the Japanese home islands' Space and Atmospheric Defense Complex — SAD-C — was far more sophisticated than were the partially deployed U.S. space defenses, which had both inspired and provided the initial technology for the Japanese effort.

The U.S. received the blame for everything, including the spread of Runciman's disease. Smug at America's humiliation, the European Union quickly forgot its initial support for the U.S. intervention. There was a sense that the Americans were finally getting what they deserved, and the Europeans congratulated themselves on having effectively dismantled the North Atlantic alliance back in the nineties. War, the Europeans declared, would no longer solve anything, and they pointed to their own miniaturized military establishments — barely large enough for a good parade — as cost effective in a world where the crippled giants of both East and West were equally condemned as failures. The fundamental thrust of Euro-diplomacy seemed to be to reach a market partition of the world with Japan and the less-powerful Pacific economies, even if appeasing the Japanese required significant concessions. After all, the Europeans rationalized, their home market would remain untouched by the agreements, and, at heart, the European Community had become almost as introspective as China.

The only thing for which the Europeans were not ready was Runciman's disease — and the crippling effect it had on the world economy, as well as on indigenous European production. Only the Japanese managed to initiate truly effective quarantine measures, sealing off the home islands but continuing their export trade through a vast clearing house on the island of Okinawa.

Taylor paged through the casualty lists, unwilling to look at them too closely yet. And he could not bring himself to study the accounts of lost engagements in detail. Even as he read, his resistance was growing. He had survived— and his country would emerge from all of this as surely as he had emerged from the jungle.

He finally tossed the dog-eared papers aside when one headline summed up the depressing jumble of reports:

He remembered little of the Azores. Just the monotony of the tent city where every evacuee had to remain for ninety days, moving from one "sterile" subsection to another, and his surprise to find that he had been presumed dead and that he had been posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on the strength of his last radio messages, which had been recorded by a U.S. Military Intelligence outfit. He remembered listening to the ranting of a fellow captain, a Military Intelligence officer named

Tucker Williams, who swore that he was going to live for sheer spite just so he could beat the service back into shape. Taylor half-listened to the man's tales of how Military Intelligence had corrupted itself in the quest for promotions—"We stressed the jobs that brought tangible rewards in peacetime, command, XO, operations officer, everything except the hard MI skills. And when the country needed us. we went to Africa with more commanders and XOs and S-3s than you could count, but without the analysts and collection managers and electronic warfare officers it takes to fight a war… and I swear to God I'm going to fix it, if I have to pistol whip my way up to the Chief of Staff…" Taylor was not certain what his own future would hold. He suspected he would remain in the military, although he was not sure now that he was the right man for it, in view of his battlefield failure. But he wanted, above all, a chance to prove himself, to get it right. To atone.

He did not worry about Runciman's disease, even when two other officers in his tent came down with it. He was convinced that he had some sort of natural resistance. If Africa had not cut him down, the Azores certainly were not going to get him. Then he briefly awoke to his own screams and abdominal pains of unimaginable ferocity. For the first few moments he managed to tell himself it was simply the multiple parasites for which the Army doctors were treating him. Then the truth bore down upon him, just before he lost consciousness.

Beyond the initial shock, he remembered virtually nothing of the disease. It was merely a long sleep from which he awoke with the face of a monster, where once the mirror had reflected an overgrown boy.

He was lucky, at least to the extent that his faculties were not impaired. The battery of tests given to all survivors revealed no deterioration in his mental capabilities whatsoever. Later the Army even offered him plastic surgery, as they did to every soldier who contracted RD in the line of duty. In the wake of the plague years, plastic surgeons developed fine techniques for repairing disease-damaged skin. The results were never perfect, but the work allowed you to sit in a restaurant without disturbing those around you.

Taylor never submitted to the treatment. In the years of our troubles he wore a lengthening personal history of medals and campaign ribbons on his chest. But when he was alone in front of the mirror, it was his face that was the true badge of his service, and of his failure on a clear morning in Africa.

2

First Lieutenant Howard "Merry" Meredith, child of privilege, stood among the dead. The medics had moved on, shrugging their shoulders, leaving him alone with the boy he had just killed. There were plenty of casualties, on both sides, although he did not yet know the exact number. Voices called out orders, as the Army began to put the street back in working order. But for Meredith the familiar commands and complaints were only background noise. Another helicopter thundered overhead, drawing its shadow over the scene, while a mounted loudspeaker instructed the local residents to remain indoors. The wash of air from the rotors picked over the loose fabric of the dead boy's clothing, as though sifting through his pockets. Well, there would be time for that too.

The color of blood was far softer than the tones of the boy's costume. The garish rejectionist uniform of the streets. Meredith would not even have worn those mock satins and gilt chains to a costume party. They were almost as foreign to him as the lush, loose prints worn by the Zairean women had been. He wanted no part of them.

And yet, they were a part of him. In a way that he could not understand, in a manner intellectually suspect, perhaps only learned, imagined, imposed. The dead boy's eyes appeared swollen and very white in their setting of black and deep maroon. Far from achieving any dignity in death, the boy looked like something out of an old, vulgar cartoon. The moronic minstrel who chanced upon a ghost.

No connection, Meredith insisted. It's bullshit.

It occurred to him that the light was very good. It was an off-season light, soft, yet very clear. The smoke of the firefight had withered away, and there was almost no smog in a city come to standstill. The slum was almost picturesque, when you discarded the baggage of your preconceptions. A poor neighborhood in some handsome southern place. Drowsing, in a very good light. It seemed unreasonable to Meredith that he could not see his way more clearly in a light of such quality.

Merry Meredith, child of privilege, born to confidence, handsome and markedly intelligent, fumbled to put his pistol back in its holster. He turned away from the boy he had killed and began to call out orders to his men. His voice had the brilliant confidence of an actor stepping back out onto the stage while his life crumbles behind the curtains.

He had come a long way from Ann Arbor, where the first serious prejudice he had encountered was that of his parents against his choice of a career. He always thought fondly of his parents, grateful to them for so much, sorry only that he had never managed to find the time to sit down with them as an adult and explain why his life's path had needed to diverge so markedly from theirs. Anyway, he had not possessed the words. So much of it was a matter of feelings, of intuitions.

The plague had swept through the ranks of the university's professors with a ferocity that seemed to seek revenge for finding the dormitories emptied of students. Whether the victim was liberal or conservative, a mathematician or Chaucerian scholar, Runciman's disease had shown a great appetite for knowledge. His father had been a historian whose lifework consisted of reinterpreting the history of the United States through the eyes of its minorities, while his sociologist mother had labored to explain the statistical problems of a black population from which her own background, education, and standard of living had kept her utterly separate, despite the color of her skin. The plague had called them in swiftly, as though starved for their expertise, before a son returning from the confusion of Zaire could take them in his arms one last time.

When he remembered his parents it was usually in terms of a golden, astonishingly untroubled childhood, or in the light of scenes where their exasperation, anger, and very best intentions struggled against his desire to go to West Point. He set his face in a near smile, recalling their well-meant reproaches: Where had they gone wrong? Where had they failed? How had they been so inept in the transmission of their values that a son of theirs would want to become a military officer? Had he declared himself a homosexual or perhaps even a drug addict, they would have felt far less a sense of parental inadequacy. They even reached the point where they were willing to let him stay home and go to Michigan. He could even continue to play football…

Well, he had played football, on the first winning team West Point had fielded in a decade. And the child who had been forced to hide his toy soldiers from his parents the way other children hid only partially understood works of pornography became an officer in the United States Army. His parents had come up to the Point for his graduation, but his mother wept helplessly and his father's face bore the stoical look of a man whose son had just wed the town harlot.

Then his childhood ended. Two days before he graduated from the Military Intelligence Officer's Basic Course at Fort Huachuca, his orders were amended to send him to the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. He was to proceed directly, without home leave. Almost his entire class found themselves in the same boat, as the Army struggled to flesh out at least a few key units to full strength during the Zairean crisis. At Fort Bragg he underwent emergency in-processing, signed for his field gear, and loaded onto a transport aircraft to join his new unit, which had already deployed to Kinshasa.

He had been excited, and only occasionally did his stomach suffer a quick tinge of fear. He was going into combat. All of his training would be put to immediate use. A range of dramatic, if nebulous, opportunities seemed to open up before him.

But he did not see combat. Instead he remained in the grubby, diseased environs of Kinshasa, sitting behind a bank of intelligence work stations that glowed with multicolored electronic displays and did absolutely nothing to alter the outcome of the campaign.

But he learned. He learned the emptiness of the things he had been taught in school about war, and, above all, he seemed to learn the depth of his Americanness. Despite his rebelliousness, his parents had managed to imbue him with a residual belief that there must be some magic in his African heritage. Their casual iconography promised an untutored wisdom about life, a deeper, richer humanity, and a natural splendor beyond compromise, beyond the reach of the cold, pale refugees from the Northern Hemisphere.

Instead, he found plague. And a level of corruption, greed, and immorality that shocked his middle-class soul. He detected no evidence of spiritual grace or moral charity — no single hint of latent racial greatness. He resisted the African reality that confronted him, struggling against the evidence of his senses with an outraged ferocity, unwilling, even now, for his parents to have been so wrong in the dreams that had shaped their lives.

In the end, he had to recognize that he had more in common with a white private from backwoods Alabama than he had with the Zaireans. Culture, the immersion in television, video, automated games, music, advertising, textbooks, social habits, conveniences, breakfast foods, the triggers to personal embarrassment, the simple differentiation between the good deed and the bad, overpowered any real or imagined racial bonds. Instead of romance, he found squalor. In the end, the Africans did not want his brotherhood. They only wanted his money.

He wrote to his parents that, while war and disease limited his opportunity to really see the country, sunrise on the big river was very beautiful, and the vegetation was full of color.

Then, still unable to comprehend how things had gone so wrong for his army, for his country, he loaded back onto another transport plane and went into quarantine in the Azores. By an accident of fate, Runciman's disease passed by his bunk. Things had gotten so bad in the quarantine camp that virtually everyone assumed they would die or at least suffer the corollary effects of the disease. The suicide rate among the waiting men and women soared. At one point, the last bulldozer broke down and details of still-healthy men had to dig burial pits by hand. They ran out of body bags. Then the decision was made to burn the corpses. Then came the order to disinter the earlier victims and burn them too. Terribly afraid, Meredith volunteered for the worst of the details. He told himself it was his duty. As his penance for sitting safely in Kinshasa while his classmates were dying downcountry.

Even though the smoke from the chemical-laden fires haunted his nostrils, burrowing into his lungs, his temperature never climbed, his bowels never exploded, and his skin never blotched with the special badges of the African campaign. It occurred to him that, perhaps, he was being saved for a special destiny, even though he tried to suppress the notion as unlucky.

On the island the living talked primarily of one thing— of going home, to a safe, healthy land. But Runciman's disease got off the plane ahead of them, and by the time Meredith stepped off the military transport at Dover, the plague had spread across the United States, just as it was sweeping impartially around the world. The schools and universities closed early on. Then the theaters and restaurants closed. Then the shops that sold nonessentials were shut. But the plague would not be appeased. The disease snaked out from the transportation hubs, uncoiling down the exit ramps of the interstates, tracing secondary routes to their intersections with county roads, then following unmarked lanes to the farms and ranches and mining patches. In the Midwest isolated towns crumpled and died on dusty sidewalks, along rural routes where the fields went wild. But the greatest impact by far was on the cities.

Public services were swiftly and severely stricken. No prophylactic measures tolerable in a free society seemed to work. Medical masks and gloves were of no greater utility than the beaks and pomanders of medieval plague doctors. The disease gobbled sanitation workers, policemen, transportation workers, repairmen… health workers. City residents began to wander the rural areas in their cars, looking for an untouched hamlet where a room might be had, spreading the plague until they ran out of gas, or until they died in a fever by the side of the road. Or until a property owner shot them as they approached. Towns and villages tried to close the roads that led to their limits. But it was no longer possible to live cut off from the rest of the world, when even your bread came from far away. And RD arrived in any case, even when the delivery trucks failed to show up.

The plague brought out the worst in men. From hucksters pitching expensive miracle cures, to television prophets who damned their contemporaries in terms of the Book of Revelations before demanding money to intercede with God on the viewers' behalf, from street criminals who thought nothing of breaking into the homes of the sick to steal and to murder the already dying, to doctors who refused to treat RD victims, men learned the measure of each other and of themselves. In the backcountry posses took to sealing off the houses of victims with an armed ring of men, then burning the structure to the ground along with all of its inhabitants, living or dead. In better-organized areas, schools and National Guard armories were converted into hospitals — but there was little that could be done beyond the intravenous replacement of lost fluids and simply waiting for the victims to live or die on their own. Then the sterile solutions began to run out, as the demand skyrocketed and the production facilities closed and the distribution network collapsed. Black-market fluid packs killed as many as they saved. Ambulance attendants were gunned down and their vehicles torched as rumors spread that they were a major source of contagion. Among those who recovered, some found that their families or lovers, landlords or neighbors, would not accept them back into the fold, and hobo camps of scarred survivors developed into semipermanent settlements beside the interstate and rail lines, while renegade colonies sprang up in the national parks, where the residents were somewhat less likely to be massacred in a midnight vigilante raid.

Yet, the will to civilization never disappeared entirely. There were always volunteers, men and women who against all common sense and personal instinct went to work manning the ambulances or lugging the mass-produced chemically lined body bags. Men whose lives had been spent behind desks and computers strained to load the mountains of accumulated garbage in the streets, while others served as police auxiliaries or truck drivers. When the state governors called out the National Guard, the Guard came — not every man or woman who had sworn the oath, but enough to deliver the essential food, to dig the burial pits, to patrol the most lawless of the city streets and country roads. There seemed to be no way to predict who would cower and try to flee, or who would risk his life to serve the common good. Neither religion nor race, nor age or income served to indicate the man or woman of courage. But they were always there, never quite as many as might be wanted, but always more than the logic of self-preservation alone would have allowed.

The plague hit hardest in the great coastal cities of California. In the boundless sprawl of Los Angeles, the haphazard infrastructure quickly went to pieces, and the desperate efforts of surviving officials and volunteers could not begin to put the situation back together. The gangs permanently embedded in East Los Angeles and in other enclaves of the underclass, whose grip had developed greater strength with each passing year, ruled their territories completely now, even deciding who would have access to the sparse supplies of food. And the plague brought opportunity. The gangs soon reached out, first rampaging through the more prosperous districts of Los Angeles, then embarking on expeditions to ravage small towns, settlements, or individual homes as far away as Utah. Along with their increase in membership and wealth over the decades, the gangs had also learned increasingly sophisticated methods of presenting themselves to the world. At a time when food suppliers were afraid to enter gang-controlled areas, aware that their loads would be pirated and their drivers beaten or killed — if the plague spared them — gang representatives appeared on public-access radio and television to accuse the government of purposefully spreading Runciman's disease in the ghettos and barrios, and of attempting to starve minority survivors. Even the commercial media made time for the gang stories, anxious to offer something other than reruns and official announcements. The gang members were colorful, provocative… entertaining.

An attempt to move the California National Guard into Los Angeles resulted in the deployment of understrength units with little or no training for such a mission. Assailed whenever they drove or marched down a street, whether to unload canned goods or to pick up the garbage, it was inevitable that the guardsmen would eventually open fire. This time, the media stories focused on the Guard's brutality and on their victims. The reporting proved so inflammatory that violence erupted in other cities across the nation, where the situation previously had been brought under control.

In Los Angeles, the power system failed and water service became erratic, with the available water contaminated. Bodies lay in the streets. Unable to enter vast areas of Los Angeles County, the thinned ranks of the police and the Guard struggled to protect those neighborhoods where the gangs did not have roots, leading to even more strident charges of racism, both from the now unprotected poor and from reporters who did all of their investigations by telephone, afraid to risk their lives on streets that the plague and the gangs had divided between them. Increasingly, the media relied on gang-supplied video material.

The Kingman massacre, in which a desert town was largely destroyed as its residents fought it out with far-better-armed gang members, forced the issue onto the President's desk. Against the advice of the most politically adept members of his cabinet, he declared a national state of emergency and ordered the United States Army into Los Angeles County.

The Army took only volunteers. Many of the men who stepped forward were victims of the disease who had survived and thus had nothing to fear from at least one of the enemies ravaging Los Angeles. As a result, the first units deployed often had the grimmest look of any the United States Army had ever fielded. But there were other volunteers as well, men who were willing to risk everything at the call of duty. Unit commanders were not always certain whether they should be ashamed of how many men refused to go or proud of the majority who quietly signed the release forms and earned their pay. It was an Army whose morale had been shattered by the African debacle— but which still discovered the strength within itself to face a mission that promised to be even more thankless.

Lieutenant Meredith found himself cradled in a relatively safe job at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, working on computer analysis models that attempted to explain the African debacle, and mourning the dreams of his parents. The worst of the plague seemed to have passed by the local area, and Meredith was slowly overcoming the nightmare of death and disfigurement that had followed him from Kinshasa to the Azores, intensifying even as the regularity of horror numbed the conscious mind. He had always been vain about his looks. Yet he put in the paperwork to join the special task force on duty in California. Terrified whenever he paused to think, he could not explain to his bewildered commander or to himself why he would choose so foolish a course of action. There was no logic in it, no sense. They could not even offer him an intelligence position of the sort for which he had been trained. There were, however, plenty of openings for substitute cavalry and infantry platoon leaders, who seemed to die as soon as they breathed the East Los Angeles air.

He found himself in charge of a ground cavalry platoon on escort duty east of the Interstate 710–210 line. He received no special training. There was no time. The platoon itself was operating at an average strength of sixty percent, and the troop commander under whom Meredith found himself looked as though he were barely up from his own sickbed, his face and hands gruesomely scarred by Runciman's disease. Although the man was rumored to be one of the few genuine heroes to emerge from the mess in Zaire, it took all of Meredith's selfcontrol to reach out and accept the hand his superior offered in welcome.

Meredith entered no-man's-land. White residents feared and did not trust him. The Hispanics attacked him with insults whose thrust was unmistakable despite the language barrier, pelting his utility vehicle with dead rodents and excrement. But the worst of his problems came with the black gang members and their hangers-on. Meredith found himself accused of levels of betrayal he had never realized might exist. Shots punctured his carryall and a firebomb barely missed him. Late one night he returned from a dismounted patrol to find a decaying corpse propped behind the steering wheel of his vehicle.

Thankfully, there was little time for soul-searching. There were always more convoys to be escorted than there were available cavalry platoons, more ambulances to be accompanied, more streets to be patrolled than the most rigorous schedules allowed. And there were soldiers for whom lieutenants needed to care.

Keeping the soldiers under control was one of the most difficult aspects of the mission. It was hard for young boys not to lose their tempers and respond with the loaded weapons they kept at the ready. Further, the gangs sought to corrupt the soldiers with money, women, and drugs— and not every soldier proved to be a saint. In his first three months in L.A., Meredith found it necessary to relieve one man in every five, including one bone-thin mountain boy overheard bragging that he had come to California to do him a little legal coon-hunting.

Slowly, the tide appeared to be turning. The plague began to signal an intent to move south for the winter, and the system of food distribution points, medical care, and quarantine sites took hold. There were more volunteers from the public at large now, usually men or women who had survived a bout with RD. The Army had established order in the city during daylight, and the nighttime situation was improving. The media were never censored, but they were required to have a reporter on the scene if they wanted to file a report from the martial law zone, and they were required to publicize the sources of any secondhand news footage they broadcast. The hearsay reports taken by telephone across a continent stopped, and the reporters who were gutsy enough to accompany the Army into the most troubled areas soon began to air and publish stories far less deferential to the gangs. Incidents and even small-scale firefights continued. But there was no doubt about who was winning. The reorganized National Guard even began to assume some of the Regular Army's responsibilities in the county.

The gangs grew desperate. The number of soldiers lost to snipers or assassination increased, and the gangs threatened to execute volunteer workers. There was a pitched battle when a coalition of gangs attempted to raid the internment camp for gang members that had been established at Fort Irwin, California. Four bloody hours of fighting, with the camp guards forced to defend themselves against external attack and an internal prisoner revolt, resulted in dozens of Army casualties — and hundreds of dead or wounded gang members. A heliborne response force had blocked the escape of the raiding party, and many of the gang members involved in the attack found themselves inside the camp with the prisoners they had intended to rescue. The raiders who attempted to escape fared even worse. Army patrols continued to find corpses in the desert for months.

Meredith grew confident. He still seemed to lead a charmed life, untouched by bullets or disease, and his training as a Military Intelligence officer proved to be a good background for the challenges his cavalry platoon faced on the streets of Los Angeles. He had even become something of a favorite with his former troop commander, who had been promoted to major and appointed acting commander of the squadron after the car-bombing death of the lieutenant colonel who had been in command. Major Taylor was a hard, taciturn man, who showed his partiality by giving those officers in whom he had the most faith the most challenging assignments. Meredith, who had just pinned on the silver bar of a first lieutenant, received more than his share, and he relished it, quietly growing vain.

Then the inevitable happened. Unexpectedly. There was nothing special about the feel of the day. Just another food convoy to be escorted into Zone Fourteen. Slow progress through the streets, taking care. Machine gunners standing at the ready in the beds of their carryalls. Watching.

But there was nothing to watch. Only the slow movements of the city struggling back to life. The novelty of a taco stand that had reopened, and the routine chatter on the operations net. Down streets that seemed asleep, turning into others where rudimentary commerce had resumed. Street punks hurling curses out of habit, bored by it all. Then a gutted street where Meredith could remember spending one very bad night. It had all grown routine.

Meredith's vehicle was positioned in the middle of the long convoy, where he could best exercise control. He could not even see the problem that had brought the convoy to a halt. The lead vehicles had already turned the corner up ahead.

"One-one, you need to talk to me," he said into the radio hand mike. "What's going on up there? Over."

He waited for a response for an annoyingly long time, then he ordered his driver to cut out of the convoy and work up to the head of the column. He could smell burning tires now.

As soon as he turned the corner he saw the smoldering barricade of junk. A crowd had begun to emerge from the stairwells and alleys, from storefronts and basements. Meredith immediately recognized a gang-sponsored "event" in process.

Meredith's driver hit the brakes. A body lay sprawled in their path. It was impossible to tell whether it was a plague victim or just some local drunk on bootleg liquor. But the carryall sat at an idle.

Meredith could see the head of the column now, and he could see why Sergeant Rosario had not answered his radio call. His vehicle was surrounded by the crowd.

"One-one, I've got a fix on you. Just hold on. Out." Meredith flipped to the operations net. "Delta four-five, this is Tango zero-eight. Over."

The ops net was ready. "This is Delta four-five. Go ahead, Zero-eight."

"Roger. We've got an event. Between checkpoints eighty-eight and sixty-three. Looks like a big one. Maybe two hundred cattle, unknown number of cowboys working the herd. No smoke-poles in evidence, but you can feel them out there. Over."

"Lima Charlie, Zero-eight. Dad's on the way. Just hang on."

Meredith calculated. If the choppers were busy with a higher priority mission, it would take a wheeled response… two to three minutes for the reaction force to mount up… at least a twenty-minute drive… it was going to be a long half hour.

In the distance, Meredith could see Sergeant Rosario's beefy chest rise above the crowd. The NCO was standing on the passenger seat of the roofless vehicle, trying to talk the mob down.

"I'm dismounting," Meredith told his driver. "Listen to the radio." He turned to the machine gunner and rifleman in the bed of the carryall. "Keep your eyes open, guys. And don't do anything stupid."

He slipped out of the vehicle and began to trot forward along the stalled line of trucks, hand on his pistol holster, more to keep it from flapping than out of any intent to draw his weapon. Restraint had pulled him through more bad situations than he could count. If you could put up with the taunts and the little humiliations, you could survive. The gangs usually did not want to take on any Army element in direct combat.

He could see that Sergeant Rosario held no weapon in his hands either. The technique was to appear confident but not overly threatening. It took good nerves. He tried to remember which of the privates were manning Rosario's vehicle today. He hoped that they could just control themselves. Panic would make a mess of everything.

Walters was driving, he remembered. And Walters was all right. He'd sit tight. And Jankowski was on the machine gun. Who was the other one? Meredith could not recall. The replacements came so fast. Few vehicle crews and fire teams could maintain personnel integrity for very long.

His heart pounded. The civilians huddled in the doorways or grouped on the sidewalk watched him coldly. This was definitely Indian country, and none of these people were likely to be the sort who did volunteer work for the Red Cross.

Faces sullen. Touched with death. Scars from RD, scars from fights. No way to tell who was armed in the crowd.

Meredith slowed to a walk. He did not want to appear nervous. And he was close enough to hear the voices now.

"You fucking spic," a black man in a small leather cap taunted Rosario, shouting loudly enough for the crowd to hear. "You got no business here. You don't need to come around here with no guns. All that food you got, all that shit belongs to the people. "

The crowd agreed. Noisily. Rosario tried to respond, calling out something about the food being on its way to the people, but his voice sounded unsure. Rosario was a good NCO, but Meredith could sense the wavering in his big torso now. Meredith began to feel the specialness of this crowd, this street, this air. He could not begin to put it into words, but a charged, fateful feeling quickened his skin.

Rosario made a mistake. In a desperate, peevish voice, the NCO yelled at the crowd:

"You're all breaking the law!"

Several of the men in the crowd began to laugh, and their laughter excited the laughter of others.

A lone voice called, "Fuck you," and, with no further warning, the sound of an automatic weapon, the yanking of a giant zipper, changed the laws of time and space.

Still on the edge of the crowd, Meredith's eyes telescoped in on Rosario. He could see the amazed look on the sergeant's face as the man felt the abrupt changes in his body. The automatic weapon was small in caliber, and Rosario stood upright for a long moment, bullish, unable to believe what was happening. The sound of the weapon came again. This time the sergeant toppled backward, disappearing behind the heads and shoulders of the crowd.

Weapons sounded up and down the canyon of the street. The crowd scattered. Meredith automatically took cover behind a dumpster at the mouth of an alley, pistol ready.

He could distinguish the clear sounds of Army weaponry amid the free-for-all. But he himself could identify no target at which to fire. Only running civilians, none with weapon in hand. Two boys raced down the alley, almost running into Meredith. But they were only interested in escape.

He decided to risk a look around the corner of his metal shield. The crew of Rosario's vehicle would be in a fight for their lives. If they had not already been killed.

The crowd between Meredith and the lead carryall had largely dissolved. Perhaps a dozen people lay on the ground, either wounded or simply frightened, forearms protecting their heads. Beyond them, a civilian with a machine pistol stood on the hood of Rosario's vehicle, emptying his weapon into the bodies of its occupants.

Meredith dropped to his knees and steadied his pistol with both hands before firing. Still, he missed twice before his third bullet caught its target. The gunman collapsed backward, falling headfirst to the street.

A round ricocheted off the dumpster, loud as a cathedral bell. Meredith looked around. There was plenty of firing. But there were no targets.

He huddled close to the dumpster, scanning. A woman ran from behind a truck where she had been trapped by the gunfire. She raced blindly toward Meredith. Then she stopped, standing upright. Staring.

"Get down" Meredith shouted.

But she continued to stare at him. Then she bolted. In the opposite direction. Afraid of the man in the uniform. The residents here lived in a different world. She made it halfway across the street when she seemed to trip, spilling forward.

But there was nothing to trip over, and her blouse began to soak red as she lay motionless.

Meredith thought he had spotted the killer. He fired into a window frame. But the shadow was gone.

Several of the civilians who had thrown themselves to the ground tried to crawl to safety, going slowly, in small stretches, trying not to attract attention. But the air was sodden with bullets. Meredith understood. Even though autopsies might not find Army bullets in innocent bodies, the deaths would be laid at the Army's feet. The gang was interested only in running up the casualty figures, regardless of who the casualties might be.

Perhaps a minute had passed since the first bullets bit into Rosario's chest. Now Meredith heard the distinct sound of machine gun fire.

He looked around. And he jumped to his feet, waving his arms, running.

"No," he screamed. "No. Stop it. Stop."

His carryall was working its way forward, sweeping the area with its machine gun. Coming to his rescue.

"Cease fire."

There could be no clear target for a machine gun. More civilians would die.

The machine gun continued to kick in recoil as the vehicle pulled up to the lieutenant.

"You all right, sir?" the driver shouted.

"Stop it," Meredith screamed. "Cease fire."

But, as Meredith spoke, the machine gunner seemed to jump off of the carryall, as though the lieutenant had given him a ridiculous fright. A second later the boy lay openeyed on the street, bleeding.

"Pull in between the trucks," Meredith ordered. He threw himself down beside the fallen machine gunner. "Hendricks, Hendricks, can you hear me?" He felt for the pulse in the boy's neck. But there was none. And the open eyes did not move.

Meredith scrambled toward his vehicle, firing wildly into the distance. There was still no enemy to be seen.

His pistol went empty, and he hurled himself over the back fender of the carryall, squeezing down between the machine gun mount and the radios. The driver and the rifleman had already dismounted and were firing from the far side of the vehicle, sandwiched between oversized delivery trucks. Shooting at phantoms.

Meredith grabbed the mike. "All Tango stations, all Tango stations. Drill five, drill five. Watch for snipers. "

The drill would bring his other platoon vehicles up along the convoy, working both sides and establishing overwatch positions so that the trail squad could dismount and rescue as many of the truck drivers as possible.

The sound of weaponry continued to ring wildly along the street, accompanied by the breaking of glass and the complaint of metal struck by bullets.

Meredith flipped to the ops net. "One-four, One-four — action, action. Multiple friendly casualties at last named location. We've got sonsofbitches shooting us up from all the buildings."

The squadron net came to life. "Battle stations, battle stations." Meredith recognized Major Taylor's voice. It was a reassuring sound. There was no panic in that voice. It was absolutely in command, practiced and economical. Surely, things would be all right now.

A spray of automatic weapons fire ripped across the front of the carryall. At the edge of Meredith's field of vision, the driver suddenly threw his arms up into the air, as if trying to catch the bullets as they went by. Then the boy crumpled out in the open, torso sprawled in front of the vehicle.

Meredith launched himself over the side of the vehicle and lay flat in the street. He jammed a fresh clip into his pistol. His knee hurt badly, although he had no idea what he had done to it. He looked around for the rifleman.

The boy sat huddled under the mud flaps of a delivery truck, pressed against the big wheels, weeping. Meredith scrambled over to him and grabbed the boy by his field jacket. "Get out of here. Head back toward the other squads. Stay on the far side of the vehicles. Go."

The boy stared at Meredith in utter incomprehension, as though the lieutenant had begun speaking in a foreign language.

Meredith did not know what to do. No one had prepared him for this. Even at the worst of times in his earlier experience, he had been able to maintain control of the situation. But now nothing that he did seemed to make a difference. He low-crawled forward around the carryall, to where his driver lay. The man was dead. Punctured by a gratuitous number of rounds, as though one of the snipers had been using him for target practice. Meredith tried to drag the torso back behind the vehicle. But the action only brought a welter of bullets in response. Meredith threw himself back into the tiny safety zone behind the carryall and between the trucks.

He caught an infuriating mental glimpse of himself. Trapped. Cowering. While street punks made a fool of him. In his anger, he raised himself and fired several rounds in the approximate direction from which the last wave of bullets had come. But the action only made him feel more foolish and impotent.

When he looked around, the rifleman who had been weeping under the truck was gone. In the right direction, Meredith hoped. He already had enough of his men on his conscience.

The quality of his anger changed. The bluster disappeared, and he felt very cold. His fear, too, seemed to change, turning almost into a positive force, into an energy that could be directed by a strong will.

Without making a conscious decision, he began to maneuver. Forward. Working up the far side of the trucks, from tire to tire.

At the first truck cab, he reached up and yanked at the door.

Locked.

"For God's sake, get out of there. Come on," Meredith yelled.

A muffled voice from within the cab told Meredith very graphically what he could do with himself.

Meredith ran for the next truck. He could hear the sound of his own men firing to his rear now, coming up in support, making the drill work.

A flash of colored clothing. Weapon. Weapon. A boy with a machine pistol. His destination was the same as Meredith's — the cab of the truck. There was an instant's startled pause as the enemies took stock of each other.

Meredith saw his enemy with superb clarity, in unforgettable detail. A red, green, and black knitted beret. Flash jacket and jewelry. Dark satin pants. And a short, angular weapon, its muzzle climbing toward a target. Vivid, living, complex, intelligent eyes.

Meredith fired first. By an instant. He hit his target this time, and he kept on firing as the boy went down. His enemy's fire buried itself in a pair of tires, ripping them up, exploding them. The boy fell awkwardly, hitting the ground in a position that looked more painful than the gunshots could have been. Unsure of himself, Meredith huddled by a fender, breathing like an excited animal.

The huge, unmistakable sound of helicopters swelled over the broken city. The closer sound of his men working their way forward, seizing control of the street, began to dominate the scene. He could even hear them shouting now, calling out orders, employing the urban combat drills whose repetitive practice they so hated.

The firing and hubbub of voices from the front of the column dropped off distinctly. The gang members were going to ground.

Pistol extended before him, Meredith began to step toward the twisted, restless figure of the boy he had just shot. His opponent's automatic weapon lay safely out of reach now, but Meredith's trigger finger had molded to his pistol. He could not seem to get enough breath, and he felt his nostrils flaring.

He guessed the boy's age at somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. It was hard to tell through the grimacing that twisted the boy's features.

As Meredith approached, his opponent seemed to calm. The skin around his eyes relaxed slightly, and he stared up at the tall man in uniform who had just shattered the order of his body. At first Meredith did not think that the eyes were fully sentient. But they slowly focused. On the winner in the two-man contest.

The boy glared up into Meredith's face, breathing pink spittle. Then he narrowed his focus, locking his eyes on Meredith's own, holding them prisoner even as his chest heaved and his limbs seized up, then failed.

"Tool," he said to Meredith, in a voice of undamaged clarity. "You… think you're a big man…" His lips curled in disgust. "You're… nothing but a fucking tool."

Meredith lowered his pistol, ashamed of his fear, watching as the boy's chain-covered chest dueled with gravity. There were no words. Only the hard physical reality of asphalt, concrete, steel, broken glass.

Flesh and blood.

The boy's chest filled massively, as though he were readying himself to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Then the air escaped, accompanied by a sound more animal than human. The lungs did not fill up again.

"Medic," Meredith screamed. "Medic."

The final tally was six soldiers dead and three wounded, five civilians dead and a dozen wounded, and four identifiable gang members killed in the firefight. The Army cordon-and-sweep operation rounded up another fourteen suspected gang members in building-to-building searches — a task the soldiers hated not only because of the danger of an ambush but also because they were as likely to discover rotting corpses as fugitives from the law. Few of the supposed gang members would survive. They would all go to the internment camp at Fort Irwin, to await a hearing. But the judicial calendar was hopelessly backlogged, and waves of disease broke over the crowded camp, preempting the rule of law.

That night Meredith went to see Major Taylor. The acting commander was never very hard to find. When he was not out on a mission, he literally lived in his office. Behind the desk, beside the national and unit flags, stood an old Army cot, with a sleeping bag rolled up tightly at one end. The closest the room came to disorder was the ever-present stack of books on the floor beside the cot. Whenever he had to see the commander, Meredith's eyes habitually went to the litter of books, curious as to what this hard, unusual man might read.

Meredith knocked on the door more briskly than usual, and at the command to enter, he marched firmly forward, relishing the ache in his banged-up knee, and stopped three paces in front of Taylor's desk. He came to attention, saluted, and said:

"Sir, First Lieutenant Meredith requests permission to speak with the squadron commander."

Taylor looked up from the computer over which he had been laboring, surprised at the formality of tone. For a few seconds, his eyes considered the artificially erect young man in front of his desk. Then he spoke, in a disappointingly casual tone:

"Relax for a minute, Merry. Let me work my way out of this program."

With no further acknowledgment of Meredith's presence, of the lieutenant's swollen intensity, Taylor turned back to his screen and keyboard.

Meredith moved to a solemn parade-rest position. But the stiffness of it only made him feel absurd now. He soon softened into a routine at-ease posture, eyes wandering.

He felt angry that Taylor had not automatically intuited the seriousness of his intent, that the commander had not paid him the proper attention.

Taylor's desk was unusually cluttered today. Meredith noticed that a stack of mail remained to be opened. The squadron S-3 had been evacuated, sick with RD, and the executive officer's position had gone unfilled for months. Meredith felt, in passing, that he might not have a right to take up any more of Taylor's time. As it was, the man slept little, and even the scars on his face could not hide the chronic black circles the major wore.

But the lieutenant was determined to have his moment. He had launched himself from hours of meditation, finally decisive. And he intended to stick to his decision.

Taylor fiddled with the computer for an unbearably long time. Meredith felt his shoulders decline as his posture deteriorated even further. He realized that he was very, very tired.

His eyes roamed, settling on the stack of books Taylor had gathered by his cot. Meredith was eternally amused by the changing titles. The only constants were the Spanish grammars and dictionaries. Tonight, Meredith could make out the titles of a work on urban planning, a text on the Black Death in Europe, Huckleberry Finn, the short novels of Joseph Conrad, and the latest copy of Military Review. Meredith was just trying to make out the title of a halfhidden book, when Taylor startled him.

"All right, Merry, what's up?" Taylor glanced back toward the computer. "You know, it must have all been a lot easier back in the old Army when all they had were typewriters. Then there was physical limit on how much nonsense the system could expect out of you."

Meredith stood before the man who seemed so much older than the few years separating them. And he found it very difficult to bring himself to speech, to articulate the decisive words he had so carefully prepared.

"This looks serious," Taylor said, and the lieutenant could not be sure whether or not there was a flavor of mockery in the voice.

"Sir, I request to be relieved and reassigned to conventional duties."

Taylor looked up at the younger man, eyes hunting over his face. It was always difficult for Meredith to read Taylor's expression under that badly mottled skin. He felt perspiration breaking out on his forehead and in the small of his back. The major was taking an unreasonably, an unconscionably long time in responding. Meredith had expected shock… perhaps anger, perhaps disappointment. But this silent consideration was as unexpected as it was intolerable.

When Taylor finally responded, he offered Meredith only a single word:

"Why?"

Meredith reached for the appropriate response. "Sir… I do not believe… that I'm suited for this job."

Taylor nodded slightly, but it was symbolic of thought, not agreement. Then he tensed and leaned forward slightly, like a big cat who had spotted something that just might be of interest.

"Don't beat around the bush. Merry. What you mean… is that you think you fucked up. And you're feeling sorry for yourself." He brought the tips of his fingers together. "All right then. Tell me what you think you should have done differently today."

Meredith had no ready answer for the question. Instead, he felt himself seethe, defiantly childish in his incapability. Was Taylor trying to humiliate him? He searched for a sharp, tough answer that would set this acting commander straight.

But it was hard. He had done everything by the drill. He had taken the actions prescribed for such circumstances. There had been no warning, no intelligence that so big an affair was in the wind. Try as he might, he could think of no practical way in which he might have changed the day's events. It would have required a quality of foresight no man could claim. He had done his best, playing his assigned role. The only other thing he might have done would have been to die with Rosario and the others, and, even in his fury, he recognized the senselessness of that.

And the boy dying in the street? His eyes, his words? What was this all about, anyway? Had his parents been right? Was he just an oversize boy playing a very dangerous game with living toy soldiers? He was too emotionally excited to answer himself rationally. He wanted to feel guilty. But he could not help detecting a tone of falsity in these attacks on his long-held convictions.

"Sir, I don't know. But I know I failed."

The fright mask of Taylor's face never changed expression.

"Bullshit. I'll be glad to let you know when you're fucking up, Lieutenant. In the meantime I need every officer I've got." Taylor breathed deeply, as if disgusted at Meredith's childishness, refusing to make any attempt to understand. "Request denied."

"Sir…" Meredith began, in a peevish fury. He did not know what he might say, but he sensed it was now utterly impossible for him to go on performing this mission. He would not go back into those streets. At least not in uniform.

"Lieutenant," Taylor cut him off, "it would be a wonderful thing if military service consisted of nothing but doing the right thing when the choices are easy, of kicking the shit out of some evil foreign sonsofbitches with horns and tails, then coming home to a big parade." Taylor's eyes burned into his subordinate's. "Unfortunately, it also consists of trying to figure out what the hell the right thing can possibly be when the orders are unclear, the mission stinks, and everybody's in a hopeless muddle. A soldier's duty…" Taylor intoned the last word in a voice of granite, "is to do an honest day's work in dishonest times… and to make the best out of the worst fucking mess imaginable. It means… believing in your heart that some things are more important than your personal devils… or even your personal beliefs. It means the willingness to give up… everything." Taylor sat back in his chair, never breaking eye contact. "And sometimes it just means lacing up your boots one more time when the whole world's going to shit. You got that, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir. I've got it," Meredith lied, feeling only confusion in his mind and heart.

"Then get out of here and get some sleep."

Meredith snapped to attention and saluted, hoping that this outward display of self-possession would hide his inner collapse. He did a crisp about-face and marched toward the door. He was no longer angry with Taylor. He simply hated him for his strength, his superiority.

"Oh, Lieutenant?" Taylor called, just as Meredith was about to step into the safety of the hall.

"Sir?"

"I heard that you killed a man today. First time, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

Taylor considered the younger man across the emotional vastness in the room. "Did you… happen to notice the color of his skin?"

Meredith felt an explosion of fury within himself beside which his earlier anger had been inconsequential.

"Sir. I killed a black man, sir."

Taylor nodded. He looked at Meredith calmly, ignoring the rage, the disrespect in the lieutenant's tone of voice.

"Lieutenant, it is my personal belief… that self-pity has ruined more good men than all the bad women in history. Decide who the fuck you are by tomorrow… and, if you still want to transfer out, I'll expedite the orders. Carry on."

Meredith returned to his billet and beat his locker with his fists until the knuckles bled and he could not stand the pain any longer. He did not know if he had broken any of the bones in his fingers or hand, and he refused to care. In the brackish hours before dawn, he decided, with the firmness of stone, that he would take Taylor up on his offer first thing in the morning. Then he fell asleep, torn hands burning, to the distant music of helicopter patrols.

He woke to a knock on his door. It was a Hispanic lieutenant Meredith had never seen before. The new man looked embarrassed.

"Sorry to wake you up."

Meredith mumbled a response, straining to clear his head.

"I'm Manny Martinez," the new officer said, thrusting out his hand, "the new supply officer. You're Lieutenant Meredith, right?"

"Yeah."

"The operations center sent me down to get you. Lieutenant Barret's down sick, and Major Taylor wants you to pull his duty for him. I told him I could do it, but—" Meredith looked at the new man as they shook hands. Earnest. He seemed very young, although Meredith recognized that they were, in fact, approximately the same age. The visitor spoke with an accent that declared, "I'm from Texas and I'm educated, by God," with no trace of a Spanish drawl.

"It's okay," Meredith said, recognizing that he could not be a party to any action that sent this unblooded officer out into the streets in his place.

"— the ops sergeant said it's just a routine convoy. Same route you had yesterday." The new lieutenant spoke nervously, infinitely unsure of himself. "I told them I'd be glad to do it."

"Take it easy, man. It's okay," Meredith said. "I just need to get some coffee."

3

"They call him El Diablo," the scout said, still breathless from his climb. The arroyo in which the guerrillas hid their vehicles lay far below the mountain village. "The country people say he has risen from the dead."

"What's he saying?" Captain Morita, the unit's Japanese adviser, demanded. His Spanish was limited to a very few words, and he showed little interest in learning more. Everything had to be translated into English for him.

Colonel Ramon Vargas Morelos did not mind that so much. He was very proud of his English, which he had learned in the border towns where he had worked hard as a drug runner in the days before he became a Hero of the Revolution. And the Japanese officer's lack of Spanish made him easier to control.

Vargas purposely delayed answering the Japanese. The man's tone was too insistent, almost disrespectful. Vargas was, after all, a colonel, and he took his time with the translation, glancing arrogantly around the smoky brown interior of the cantina. A litter of unmatched tables and chairs. An old dog who scratched himself with the imprecision of a rummy. Vargas stretched the moment, examining everything in the room except the Japanese. Disordered ranks of bottles behind the bar, a mirror split diagonally by a frozen fork of lightning. Fading postcards from Tucson and Pasadena, garish in the light of the storm lantern.

Finally, he turned to face Morita. "He says," Vargas began, "that the new gringo commander has brought a nickname with him. People call him 'The Devil.' " He did not bother to translate the matter of the American's supposed resurrection. It was one of those things that the Japanese officer would not understand, and Vargas had already suffered enough remarks about the backwardness of his countrymen.

Morita grunted. "That is hardly useful intelligence."

Vargas briefly turned his back on Morita and the scout and leaned onto the bar. "Hey, you fucking dog," he called to the bartender. "Bring me two fucking tequilas."

The bartender moved very quickly. Contented, Vargas rolled his torso around so that he faced the scout again, with his back and elbows resting on the long wooden counter.

"Go on, Luis," Vargas said. "Tell me about this devil who fucks his mother."

The scout was covered in sweat. The night was cool up in the desert mountains, but the climb up the trail to the broad, bowllike plateau where the village hid had drained the man's pores. That was good. It told Vargas that the man took his responsibilities seriously. Had he strolled into the cantina looking too easy and rested, Vargas would have shot him.

"There is a great fear of this one, my colonel," the scout continued. "The gringos brought him in from San Miguel de Allende. They say he was a bastard there. They say he has the face of a devil. He wears silver spurs, and he whistles an old Irish song. They say that no man who hears those spurs and the sound of his whistling will live long.

Vargas picked up one of the small glasses of tequila and gestured for the scout to help himself to the other. He had long since given up on offering drinks to the Japanese, who never accepted them.

"What does he say?" Captain Morita asked impatiently.

Vargas looked coldly at the Japanese, then made a sharp, dramatic gesture of downing his tequila.

"He says the American is a clown. He wears spurs. He whistles."

"He told you more than that," Morita said curtly. "What else did he say?"

"He said the American is one ugly cocksucker."

"What about his background? Did your man gain any information about the new commander's operational techniques? What kind of threat does he pose?"

Vargas laughed. Loudly. Then he wiped the back of his hand across his stubble. "Man, what kind of shit are you talking about? He don't pose no fucking threat." Vargas stuck his thumb in his gunbelt. It was made of soft black leather with a circular gold device on the clasp. "You know where I got this, Morita? I took this off an American general. Everybody said, 'Hey, Vargas, this guy's a tough customer. You better look out.' And you know what I fucking did? I cut his throat, man. Right in his own fucking house. Then I fucked his old lady. And then I fed her his eggs." Vargas spat on the plank floor.

"Ask your man," Morita said sternly, "whether he managed to collect any real information on this new commander."

Vargas gestured theatrically to the bartender. Two more. "You worry too much, man," he told the Japanese. But he turned his attention back to the scout. "Hey, what the fuck is this, Luis? You come in here with ghost stories. We don't need no stinking ghost stories. You tell me something serious about this dude."

The scout looked at him nervously. "This guy, my colonel, he don't play by the rules. He does crazy things. They say he's very different from the other gringos. He speaks good Spanish and carries himself like some kind of big charro." The scout paused, and Vargas could tell that the man was weighing his words carefully. "He brought his own people with him. He has this black guy who's pretty as a girl—"

"Maybe they fuck each other," Vargas said. The scout laughed with him. But not as richly as the man should have laughed. A question began to scratch at Vargas.

"Also, my colonel, he has a Mexican from north of the border. That one, he don't speak Spanish worth shit, but he talks real fancy English."

"That's good," Vargas said definitely. "All Mexicans go soft up north."

"And there's an officer who speaks with an accent. They say he is a Jew. From Israel."

"Another loser," Vargas said. "Luis, this fucking devil don't sound so bad to me."

The scout laughed again. But the sound was noticeably sickly. It was the laugh of a nervous woman. Not of a revolutionary soldier.

"You know, Luis," Vargas said, moving close enough so that the scout could smell his breath and get the full sense of his presence, "I think there's something else. Something maybe you don't want to tell me. Now I don't know why you don't want to tell your colonel everything."

"My colonel…" the scout began.

Vargas slapped a big hand around the back of the scout's neck. He did it in such a way that the Japanese would simply think it a personal gesture. Happy, dumb Mexicans, always touching each other. But the scout understood the message clearly.

"Here," Vargas said. "You drink another tequila. Then you fucking talk to me, Luis."

The scout hastily threw the liquor into his mouth, ignoring the usual ceremony.

"My colonel," he said, with unmistakable nervousness in his voice, "they say he is the one who killed Hector Padilla over in Guanajuato."

Vargas froze for a long moment. Then he made a noise like a bad-tempered animal. "That's bullshit," he said. He pulled his hand off the back of the scout's neck, then held it in midair in a gesture that was half exclamation and half threat. "Hector was killed in an accident. In the mountains. Everybody knows that."

"My colonel," the scout said meekly, "I only tell you what the people say. They say that the accident was arranged. That El Diablo infiltrated men into Commandante Padilla's camp. That—"

"Luis," Vargas said coldly. "How long have we known each other?"

The scout counted the months. The months became a year, then two. "Since Zacatecas," he said. "Since the good days. Before the gringos came."

"That's right, my brother. And I know you well. I know, for instance, when you got something to tell me. Like now." Vargas swept the air with his hand. "All this shit about Hector Padilla. When we're not really talking about Hector at all." Vargas stared into the scout's inconstant eyes. "Are we?"

"No, my colonel."

"Then who are we talking about, Luis?"

The scout looked at Vargas with solemnity in the yellow light of the cantina. "About you, my colonel. They say this gringo has been sent to… take you."

Vargas laughed. But the laugh did not begin quickly enough, and it was preceded by an unexpected shadow of mortality that fell between the two men.

Vargas slapped the bar. Then he laughed again, spitting. "What are you talking about?" the Japanese adviser demanded. "What's he saying?"

Vargas stopped laughing. He gestured for the scout to leave the cantina, and the man moved quickly, in obvious relief. Vargas shifted his broad-footed stance to face the tiny yellow man who sat so smugly behind his table. Vargas did not trust the Japanese. He never imagined that these people were aiding the revolution out of the goodness of their hearts. It was all about power. Everything was about power. The relationship between men and women, between men and other men. Between governments and countries. The Japanese were very hungry for power. Crazy for it. As crazy as an old man who had lost his head over a younger woman.

It was a shame that the Japanese weapons were so good. And so necessary.

"He just said," Vargas told his inquisitor, "that I got to kill me one more fucking gringo."

"There was more than that," Morita said coldly. "A great deal more. Under the terms of the agreement between my government and the People's Government of Iguala, you must provide me with all of the information I require to do my work."

Yes, Vargas thought. The great People's Government of Iguala. What was left of them. Hiding like rats down in the mountains of Oaxaca. The glory days were over. Thanks to the fucking gringos. Now it was a matter of survival. Of holding on to your own piece of dirt, your own little kingdom. They had come a long way since they had paraded down the boulevards of Mexico City under the banner of the revolution.

Vargas snorted. "Government of Iguala, government of Monterrey — it don't mean a fucking thing up here, man. You know what the government is, Morita?" Vargas drew out the ivory-handled automatic he had taken from the American general and slammed it down on the table in front of the Japanese. "That's the fucking government."

Vargas watched the Japanese closely. The man was obviously trying not to show fear, but the situation was getting to him. Morita was new to Mexico, to the food and water, to the simplicity of death. He was a replacement for an adviser lost months before. The system was breaking down. Vargas's men had received their late-model antiaircraft missiles without readable instructions, without training. Vargas had suffered through a season of relative defenselessness against the American helicopters. He had only been able to stage small operations — raids, bombings, robberies. Then, finally, this impatient captain had made his way up through the mountains.

Now they were ready for the helicopters. Vargas thumped the bar. More tequila. When the bartender came within reach of Vargas's arm, he found himself yanked halfway across the bar.

"You're slow, old man."

The bartender paled. White as a gringo. It made Vargas smile. They were ready for the helicopters now. And they would be ready for this devil in spurs.

The gringos were always too soft. That was their problem. They never understood what a hard place Mexico had become. They were too respectful of death.

"Your agent," the Japanese said, "seemed unbalanced by the thought of this new American commander. In fact, he seemed afraid."

"Luis? Afraid? Of some fucking gringo?" Vargas shook his head at the hilarity of the thought, even as he realized that it was true, and that some things were so obvious in life that you did not need to share the same language. "Morita, you don't know how we do things here. You don't know how Mexicans live, how we think. We're emotional people, man. Luis, he's just worn out from all that traveling. And he's excited to be back with his brothers. But he ain't afraid. That ain't even possible. He and I been fighting together since Zacatecas. I seen him kill half a dozen Monterrey government sonsofbitches with his bare hands." Vargas paused to let the effect of the exaggeration sink in. In truth, the only time he had seen Luis kill a man with his bare hands had been the time the scout strangled a prisoner.

"Perhaps," the Japanese said, "we should take increased defensive measures. Your sentinels, for instance. I've noticed that they do not have good fields of fire in all cases. The defense of your headquarters should be better organized."

Vargas hitched up his trousers, resettling the precious gunbelt he had taken from the American general. "Morita, you worry too much. I know this country. I been fighting now for six years. And I'm still here." In the background, out in the street, one of his men tuned in a radio to a station whose music combined the bright sound of horns with rhythms that made a man want to move his feet, preferably toward a woman. Someone laughed out in the darkness, and a second voice answered with a routine curse. "Anyway," Vargas said, "there ain't nobody coming up here, man. No fucking way. You need a fourwheeler to make it up that trail. And we'd hear anybody before we could even see them. And we'd see them long before they ever saw us. The only other way is to hump it right across the mountains. And, if the rattlesnakes don't get you, the sun will."

"They could always stage an air assault," Morita said.

"Yeah. But that's where you come in. With your fucking missiles. First, they got to find us. Then they got to make it through the missiles. Right? And, even if they landed the whole U.S. Army up here, we'd just shoot them down like dogs." Vargas looked at the other man with a superior smile. "Would you want to land a helicopter up here?"

"No," the Japanese admitted.

"So what are you worried about, man?" Vargas said, happier now that he had reassured himself. "Anyway, we're not going to be here much longer."

From somewhere outside of the cantina, a low throbbing sound became audible. The noise spoiled the gorgeous calm of the night.

Vargas cursed his way across the room. "I told those crazy sonsofbitches not to start up the generators anymore. We don't—"

He had reached the doorway of the cantina, where an old blanket hung at a slant. The noise was much louder now, and it no longer reminded him so much of the familiar throb of the generator.

"Jesus Christ," Vargas said. He turned back toward the Japanese in disbelief.

Morita's face mirrored exactly the way Vargas felt his own face must look.

"Helicopters," the Japanese said, half whispering.

Vargas drew his pistol and fired it into the darkness.

"Wake up, you sonsofbitches," he screamed, bursting out into the street. "The fucking gringos are coming."

Morita was already running down the dirt street toward the nearest air defense post.

The helicopters were thunderously loud now. It sounded as though there must be hundreds of them, swarming around the plateau, circling the mountaintops. Throughout the village, men began to fire their automatic weapons at phantoms.

Vargas dashed to the nearest cluster of gunmen. He slapped the first one he could reach across the back of the head.

"What are you firing at, you crazy sonofabitch? You can't see nothing."

"Gringos," the man answered.

"Save your fucking bullets. Wait till you see something. All of you — just get to your positions."

The men dispersed hastily, and Vargas trotted along in the wake of the Japanese adviser. Flares shot into the sky to illuminate the broad stretch of meadow between the village and the low western ridge. It was the only place where helicopters could safely put down. A machine gun tested its field of fire.

The helicopters could not be seen. They remained just outside of the cavern of flarelight, all mechanical bluster and grumbling. They seemed to come just so close, but no closer. Swirling around the nearby peaks. To Vargas, it seemed as though they were doing some sort of crazy war dance.

He came up to the first man-portable missile position just as the weapon's operator sent a projectile hurtling up into the sky with a flush of fire.

"Don't shoot," Morita screamed at the operator in English. He waved his hand-held radar in the brassy wash of the flares. "I told you not to shoot, you idiot. They're out of range."

The three men watched as the missile sizzled outward and upward. Then the light began to wobble. The missile self-destructed as it reached its maximum range without discovering a target.

"Put the launcher down," Morita commanded.

Even in the bad light it was evident to Vargas that the gunner had simply decided to pay no attention to the Japanese. The man could not understand Morita's English, in any case.

From the far end of the village, another missile burned up into the sky.

"Colonel Vargas," Morita said, in a voice that offered insufficient respect, "you must tell your men to stop firing. The helicopters are still out of range." The Japanese shouted to be heard over the surrounding throb and thunder, and his spittle pecked at Vargas's cheeks. "We can't afford to waste any more missiles."

Vargas was not yet ready to agree with the Japanese. Yes, the missiles had to be smuggled over an ever-lengthening route, finally coming by donkey up the mountain trail. And they truly were wonderful weapons, capable of putting the gringos in their place. But it was evident that Morita did not really understand the psychology of fighting. Vargas was ready to expend a few more of the precious missiles, as visibly as possible, to keep the gringos at a distance. He knew that the Americans had an inordinate fear of taking casualties, and even now, he thought he might just be able to warn them off. Then in the morning his force could begin moving to a new hiding place.

Suddenly, the helicopters seemed to lunge audibly toward the village.

"Fire," Vargas commanded the gunner. "Fire"

"I have to load this piece of shit first, my colonel. It's hard to do it in the dark."

"Morita," Vargas bellowed, ripping the apparatus from the hands of his revolutionary soldier. "Take this thing.

You fire it."

"They're still out of range," Morita said in a strained voice that betrayed the extent of his frustration. "Helicopters always sound louder at night. And they're echoing from the canyons. There is nothing I can do until they come closer."

"What kind of shit is that?" Vargas demanded. Maybe I should throw rocks at the gringos?"

Another surface-to-air missile sizzled up into the heavens from the far side of the village.

"It's a waste," Morita cried. "This is nothing but waste."

"You don't know shit," Vargas told the Japanese. "Why do you think the fucking gringos aren't already on the goddamned ground? They're afraid of the missiles, man." It did, indeed, appear that the Americans were afraid of the Japanese weaponry. For hours, the helicopters swooped and teased toward the village. But they always kept a margin of safety. No balls, Vargas decided. In the end, you could always back the gringos down. They expected their machines to do everything for them. But they were scared shitless when you got in close with a knife.

Intermittently, one of Vargas's men would send a burst of automatic weapons fire toward the stars. But ultimately the senseless circling and feinting of the helicopters simply had a numbing effect. The ears could barely hear, the head ached. From the panic that had gripped everyone at the sound of the Americans' initial approach, the atmosphere had changed to one of near boredom, of forced wakefulness.

"Here," Morita offered Vargas the use of his longdistance night goggles. For a while Vargas watched the black mechanical insects pulsing across the horizon. But he had seen plenty of helicopters in his day.

"No balls," Vargas told the Japanese. "They're burning up fuel for nothing, man. They're afraid to come in and land." He spat. "Shit, you know what I'd do if I was a gringo? I'd just blow this whole mountaintop to hell. But the gringos got no balls. They don't want to hurt no innocent civilians." Vargas laughed. "Morita, there ain't no such thing as an innocent man."

The deepest shade of black began to wash out of the sky, and Vargas realized that he had grown cold standing out in the night air. The sweat of fear had cooled his clothing, and he was ready to call out to one of his men to fetch his coat from the cantina when the sound of the helicopters abruptly diminished.

Vargas still could not see the enemy without the assistance of Morita's technology. But the change in the noise level was unmistakable. The helicopters were leaving. Without accomplishing anything. They had not even had the guts to make one attempt to land their cargoes of troops.

"They're going," Morita said. His surprised voice was already audible at the level of normal speech.

Vargas smiled at the weakening darkness.

"No balls," he said.

He strutted back toward the cantina, resettling his gunbelt under his belly. One more time, the gringos had failed to take him. He felt a renewed sense of confidence — and something greater, as well. It was as if the revolution, with all its excesses, with all its failures, had been vindicated in his person. And it would go on being vindicated. He would live to fuck their daughters and piss on their graves.

The scout's ramblings, all the spooky nonsense, had briefly unsettled him. But it was all right now.

"We wasted too many missiles," the Japanese said.

Vargas had been only faintly conscious of the smaller man trailing beside him in the street. He wiped his hand across the grizzle of his chin, cleaning the night from his lips. He spit into the pale gray morning.

"It don't matter, Morita. You got to learn. Those missiles were the price of victory." He laughed out loud. "The gringos were probably shitting in their pants.

Vargas pushed through the draped blanket and entered the sweet dark warmth of the cantina.

"Hey." he shouted. "Let's have some fucking light in here."

"My colonel," a voice called from the shadow's. It was Ramon, one of his captains. "I've been calling around to the outposts on the field telephone. Station number four doesn't answer."

Vargas grunted. Another deserter. He had watched his band dwindle from a full brigade in the Camacho Division of the North to the handful of half-organized survivors his will and their crimes had kept by his side. More and more, the men just disappeared into the mountains, or sneaked off to a woman in Guadalajara, or to a promise of amnesty.

The gringos were insidious. With their promises. But Varsas suspected that no amnesty would ever stretch to cover him.

A storm lantern sparked to life at the touch of a match. Through the gap in the doorway where the blanket did not reach. Vargas could see that it was already lighter outside than it was in the musty shadows of the barroom. It was a lean, half-blighted place.

"Hey. Morita," Vargas called. "Come on. We're celebrating." Vargas hammered on the bar. "Where's the fucking bartender? Hey, you bastard. Show some respect, before I have your eggs for breakfast."

"I don't want to drink," Morita said wearily. "It s time to sleep."

"First, we drink." Vargas insisted. He could feel the overtired village losing consciousness all around him. But he did not yet feel ready to lie down. There was still something chewing at him. Something he could not quite explain. He hammered the bar again. "Hey, you fucking dog of a bartender." Then he repeated himself to Morita. "First, we drink. Like two great big pricks. The biggest pricks in Mexico. Then maybe we go to sleep.

A ripple of explosions rattled the bottles on the shelf behind the bar. Before the glass had finished chiming, a new low-pitched rumble filled the morning. Vargas imagined that he felt the earth moving under his knees.

"What the fuck?" he said, in English, to Morita.

The Japanese looked blank.

A few weapons began to sound. Seconds later the morning had filled with the sounds of a pitched battle. The big rumbling sound grew louder with each instant, approaching the village, a tide of noise, as unrecognizable as it was powerful,

At first Vargas thought it was an earthquake. Then another series of explosions reawoke him to the immediacy of combat.

He ran for the doorway, drawing his pistol as he went. The thundering sound, utterly unfamiliar, seemed to engulf the entire mountaintop now.

He shoved the blanket aside to the sound of shots and shouts and wild howling. Stepping down into the street, he stared off toward the long meadow that began just past the last shacks of the village. And he stopped in amazement.

Cavalry. The gringo sonsofbitches were on horses. Ghosts from another century, galloping down from the western ridge where the trail came up from the valley. He just had time to see the full spectacle of the charge, as eerie as it was violent, before the first section of horsemen burst into the main street of the village, blocking his view' of the rest of the action, The riders screamed like lunatics, firing their automatic weapons from the saddle.

"Machine guns," Vargas shouted. "Use the fucking machine guns. "

But he knew it was already too late. He fired twice in the general direction of the horsemen, while beside him one of his men fell to a sniper's bullet.

The fucking gringos had used the noise of the helicopters to cover the approach of their goddamned horses. Right up the damned trail. And they had infiltrated snipers into the village. The machine guns had never had a chance to speak.

A fucking horse cavalry charge. Who would ever have thought of such a crazy idea?

Down the street, men in U.S. Army uniforms began to swing from their saddles, smashing and shooting their way into the buildings. Others rode onward, shrieking at the top of their lungs and laying down suppressive fire in their path.

Suddenly, Vargas knew exactly who had thought of such a crazy idea. He felt his shooting hand waver. The one of whom the scout had spoken. This fucking El Diablo.

Vargas could see the details of the riders' helmets and flak jackets in the pure mountain light. He could see their jouncing hand grenades and the drab cloth bandoliers. He could see their faces. And the flaring nostrils and huge eyes of the horses.

He ran back for the cover of the cantina, careening off Morita in his haste. Instantly, the Japanese threw up his hands at the morning and tumbled back through the blanketed doorway, exploding with blood.

The bullet had been intended for Vargas.

There were times when you were beaten. All you could do was survive to take your revenge another day.

With the enemy's horses pounding in the street behind him, Vargas raced through the front room of the cantina, sweeping chairs out of his way with a crazy hand. He pushed through the living quarters of the bartender and his family. A woman screamed in the body-scented dusk, and Vargas banged his knee against a jut of furniture.

Cursing, he ripped open the flimsy back door and was about to dash for the nearest animal shed when he saw that the gringos had already beaten him to it.

They were everywhere.

He jerked inside the cantina building just as a splash of bullets struck the nearby wall.

Behind his back, the bartender's wife shrieked and prayed, while her man cursed her and told her to shut up. Annoyed at his helplessness, Vargas turned around and shot them both.

Back in the barroom, he hurriedly smashed out the storm lantern with the butt of his pistol. But it was already light enough for him to see Morita's wondering stare. The man's corpse continued to discharge blood over the splintering planks.

Outside the shooting dwindled. Vargas heard Anglo voices calling out commands in elementary Spanish. Officers to prisoners.

He crouched behind the bar. There was a broken-out the window across the room, but he knew instinctively that it offered no safety. He considered surrendering. But his fear of punishment held him back. He had done things that he did not believe the gringos were ready to forgive.

With shaking fingers, he stripped off the precious gunbelt he had taken from the American general and stuffed it into a cabinet, hiding it behind dusty bottles of beer.

He was very much afraid. And he was aware of his fear. He had not believed that he, of all men, could ever be this afraid.

Now there was only the occasional snort of a horse, a resting hoof. The world had become an astonishingly quiet place. The silence was bigger in his ears than the sound of the helicopters had been.

He heard the faint jangle of spurs.

His shooting hand felt as wet as if he had dipped it in a bucket. He checked the slippery pistol, making sure that he had a round chambered.

The music of the spurs grew louder. He could hear booted footsteps.

Someone began to whistle.

It was morbid. Terrible. The melody was far too light and joyful. The notes cascaded through the morning, swooping like a small bird in flight. The tune was almost something to make a man dance.

The boots approached the cantina. Then everything stopped. No more metal tangle of spurs. No footsteps. The whistling, too, ceased abruptly.

Vargas hunkered lower. Unwilling to look, unwilling to risk being seen. He felt himself shaking. It was unthinkable that he might die here, in such dusty unimportance. He was not ready.

He realized that he was weeping. And praying. It had begun automatically, and he could not stop himself. Mother of God…

He heard the soft rustle of cloth, and he knew it was the blanket being drawn away from the doorframe. It was the perfect time to rise and fire. But he could not will himself to move.

The melody of the spurs began again. But the tempo was slower now, like the music at a funeral. Vargas followed each next footfall across the room. There was a heavier note as the intruder stepped over Morita's body. The spurs became unbelievably, unbearably loud.

Somewhere in the middle of the room, his opponent stopped.

Silence.

Vargas made himself ready. Hurriedly he crossed himself with the pistol in his hand. He seemed unable to fill his lungs with the breath he needed.

"Don't move, gringo," he shouted. But he could not move himself. He remained crouched in his hiding place, staring up from the canyon behind the bar, able to see only the blistered paint on the ceiling.

He clutched his gun, tightening his bowels. Imagining the other man somewhere out in the vast freedom of the room.

"I know your fucking rules, man," Vargas called out. "You can't kill me. I'm a prisoner of war, man."

Silence. It went on so long that dust seemed to settle and stale on a man's ears. Then a slow voice spoke in perfect Spanish.

"Throw your weapons over the bar. Then raise your hands. Keep the palms open and turned toward me. Get up slowly."

"All right, man," Vargas shouted, his voice hitting its highest pitch. He was already rising. He still held the gun in his hand, swinging it around toward the other man's voice. He squeezed the trigger too soon.

The last thing Vargas saw was the face of a devil.