The War in 2020

20

Daisy listened. She wanted to speak, but could find no words. She wanted to act, but there was nothing to be done. Everything had gotten out of control. They had failed. She had failed. All of the careful intelligence analysis had turned out to be a joke. And the Japanese had kept the punchline hidden until it was too late. Now it was all over, and the only thing she could do was to listen.

"Mr. President, it's time to throw in the towel," the secretary of state said. He was a dignified old man who consciously cheapened his speech whenever he spoke to Waters, employing catchphrases and slang otherwise foreign to his tongue. "We gave it our best shot, and we missed. Now it's time to cut our losses. I'm certain we can negotiate a safe withdrawal for the remainder of our forces in the Soviet Union."

Daisy looked appraisingly at the President. The smooth, photogenic face had gone haggard, and the man looked far older than his years. She knew that the President suffered from high-blood pressure, and it troubled her. The Vice President was an intellectual nonentity who had only been placed on the ticket because he was a white southerner from an established political family — the perfect counterbalance for Jonathan Waters, who was black, northern, and passionately liberal. The election ploy had succeeded at the polls, but Daisy dreaded the thought of a sudden incapacitation of Waters. For all his ignorance of international affairs and military matters, Daisy could not suppress the instinctive feeling that the President's judgment was sound, while that of the men who served him was increasingly suspect. The Vice President was, perhaps, the most hopeless of the lot. Even now, with the nation's armed forces in combat overseas, Vice President Maddox was plodding on with the original itinerary of a tour of environmentally threatened sites on the West Coast. He would not even be back in the District until early the next morning.

Daisy certainly did not agree with all of the President's decisions. But she was convinced that his incorrect decisions were made with the best intentions, while the motives of his closest advisers were too often shaped by self-interest or parochialism. Watching the man age before her eyes, Daisy hoped he would take the measures that had become so evidently necessary as quickly as possible, then rest.

The President slumped back in his chair. He seemed smaller than he had appeared to Daisy in the past. His suit rumpled around him like a refugee's blanket.

"And the Pentagon's position?" Waters asked, turning to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Give it to me straight."

The general leaned in over the table. He looked tormented. The secretary of defense had collapsed from exhaustion during a hasty early morning trip to the Building, and the chairman had been temporarily left adrift to define the military's position. He was a big, barrel-chested man, and his heavy face had the look of thick rubber that had lost its elasticity. His eyes were shrunken and dark, surrounded by a discoloration as mottled as camouflage paint.

"Mr. President," he began carefully, "we would do well to remember that the balance sheet isn't completely in the red. If you look at the raw numbers, for instance, the Japanese and their proxies have suffered a grave defeat at the hands of the United States Army. We've lost a squadron. They've lost their most potent field forces, the key combat equipment out of several corps. If the Japanese hadn't had an ace up their sleeve, we'd be sitting here having a victory celebration. Our forces performed brilliantly. Unfortunately, the intelligence services missed a vital piece of information—"

Daisy felt Bouquette bristle at her side. But it was true. It was all too true. The intelligence system had let them all down. And she already knew that they would not suffer so much as a single broken career for it. She knew Washington. Since she was a woman, her job was particularly safe.

"— and we got caught with our pants down. Our boys… did their best. They did a damned fine job."

"But?" the President said.

"Mr. President," the chairman said, looking at Waters with a face stripped of professional vanity, "I believe we should salvage what we can. It's not over. We can carry on the fight another day. But this round… Mr. President, this one's gone to the Japanese."

President Waters nodded. He made a church of his touched-together fingertips.

"And what does it cost us?" he asked. "If we just pull out?"

The secretary of state cleared his throat. "Mr. President… naturally, the Japanese will expect some concessions. I don't see it impacting on the Western Hemisphere… but, the Siberia question… of course, that's ultimately going to be resolved between the Soviets and the Japanese anyway."

Waters swiveled a few degrees in his chair, turning to stare down the table to where Bouquette and Daisy sat in the first row of seats beyond the table.

"Cliff," the President said to Bouquette, "is it the Agency's view that the Japanese will make repeated use of the Scramblers if we don't cut a deal?"

Bouquette rose. "Mr. President, there's no question about it. If they employed them once, they'll do it again. If we provoke them. We suspect that they've already delivered an ultimatum to the Soviets."

"And you now concur with the assessment of Colonel… uh, Taylor… that these are some kind of radio weapons?"

Bouquette pawed one of his fine English shoes at the carpet. "Yes, Mr. President. Radiowave weapons, actually. Yes, it now appears that Colonel Taylor's initial assessment was correct. Of course, he had the advantage of being on the scene, while we had to work with secondhand information."

"And these are weapons that could have been introduced into the U.S. arsenal a decade ago?"

"We can still build them," the chairman interrupted. "We could field new prototypes in six months."

"I don't want to build them," the President said. There was an unmistakable note of anger in his voice. "If we had them, I would not order their use. Even now." Waters slumped again, then smiled wearily. "Perhaps, after the election, you'll be able to take up the matter with my successor." He turned back to Bouquette. "Do we have any idea whether the Japanese have other tricks up their sleeve? Do they have any more secret weapons?" Bouquette glanced down at his hand-sewn shoes. Then he took a breath that was clearly audible to Daisy. "Mr. President, we have no further information in that regard. But we cannot rule out the possibility."

Waters nodded his head in acknowledgment. The movement was rhythmic and slight, the equivalent of mumbling to himself. It was the gesture of an old man.

The President looked around the room.

"Does anybody have a different opinion? Another view? Is it the general consensus that we should run up the white flag?"

"Mr. President," the chairman said quickly, "I wouldn't put it in quite those terms."

Waters turned to face the general. It was clear to Daisy that the President was having a very hard time controlling his anger. Despite his exhaustion.

"Then what terms would you put it in? What do you think the American people are going to call it? Do you think the man in the street's going to fish up some fancy term — what do you call it? — a strategic correction or something like that?" Waters looked around the room with harder eyes than Daisy had credited him with possessing. "I want you to be absolutely clear about this, gentlemen.

I am not talking or thinking about the election. Let me say it outright. I've lost already, and there is nothing anyone in this room can do about it. No, what concerns me now is that we have made some very bad decisions. I have made bad decisions. We sent our fighting men to die — for nothing, it seems. We have squandered our nation's international prestige yet again — Christ, what were you telling me earlier?" he asked the secretary of state. "The Japanese, along with two dozen 'nonaligned' nations, have already introduced a resolution in the UN condemning us for interfering in the sovereign affairs of third-party states. The Japanese already have diplomats standing up in the General Assembly and blaming us for triggering the use of these Scramblers. They're making fools of us all, with record speed. While we sit here with our thumbs up our backsides. Gentlemen," Waters said slowly, "I am an angry man." He smirked. "But don't worry. I know exactly who to blame. I'm just sorry I was so damned smug." His smirk deepened, forcing painful-looking cuts into the skin around his mouth. "Maybe America wasn't ready for a black president, after all."

No one dared speak. Daisy felt sorry for Waters. He was, she sensed, genuinely a good man. Carrying too much baggage, and with too little experience. They had all failed him.

They had failed George Taylor too. She had failed him unforgivably. But she would make it up to him. She imagined how he must be feeling now. With his life's dreams lying in ruins in a foreign land. But at least he was alive, and as yet untouched by the unspeakable weaponry that had hidden behind so innocuous a word. He was alive, and if there was no more foolishness, he would be coming home to her. Of everyone in the overheated conference room, she was the only one with cause for joy.

I could be good for him, she thought. I really could. He'll need me now.

"Before I make a final decision," President Waters said, "I want to consult with our Soviet allies one more time."

"Mr. President," the secretary of state said impatiently, "their position's clear. While we lost — what was it — a squadron? A few hundred men? The Soviets still haven't begun to total their losses. An entire city — what was it, Bouquette?"

"Orsk."

"Yes, Orsk. And dozens of surrounding towns. Hundreds of settlements. Why, the Soviets are overwhelmed. They have no idea how to cope with the casualties. We're talking numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And what if the Japanese use these weapons again? Mr. President, you heard the Soviet ambassador yourself. 'Immediate negotiations for an armistice.' The Soviets have already thrown in the towel."

President Waters narrowed his eyes. "Have the Soviets established direct contact with Tokyo on this?"

"Not yet."

"So they still have not taken any unilateral action? They're still waiting for our response?"

"Mr. President, it's merely a diplomatic courtesy. They expect us to join them in the discussions — we can still lend a certain weight, of course."

"But the Soviets still have not 'thrown in the towel,' technically speaking?"

"Well, not formally, of course. But, in spirit…"

"Then don't contradict me," Waters said. "I want to speak with the Soviet president. One on one. I want to hear his views from his lips."

"Sir, the Soviets have made it clear they're going to call it quits," the secretary of state said. His voice carried the tone of a teacher sorely disappointed with his pupil. "We stand to lose leverage if we—"

Waters turned on the secretary of state with a look so merciless that the distinguished old man broke off in midsentence.

"You can give up your efforts to educate me," Waters said. "Write me off as another black dropout. Just get President Chernikov on the line — no, first get me Colonel Taylor. I want to talk to that man one more time."

"Mr. President," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said carefully, "Colonel Taylor's in no position to give you an objective view of the situation. You heard what his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Reno, said about him. And you heard the man yourself. All Colonel Taylor wants to do is to hit back at what hurt him. He's reacting emotionally. He has absolutely no grip of the new geopolitical realities involved here."

Waters looked at the chairman. To her surprise, Daisy saw a genuine smile spread across the President's face.

"Well," Waters said, "I guess that makes two of us. Anyway, I'd be a damned fool not to hear out the one man who's got the balls to tell me when he's busy." Waters snapped his head around to look at Daisy. "Do excuse my language, Miss Fitzgerald. Just pretend you weren't listening."

The American was crazy. General Ivanov could not believe what he had heard. The memory of the American colonel's scarred face was troubling enough — now it appeared that the man's mind was deformed as well.

A raid.

A raid into the enemy's operational-strategic rear.

A raid on the enemy's main command and control center.

A raid on the enemy's computer system, of all things.

It was a madman's notion, in an hour when the world was coming apart.

The long day had begun so well. With American successes that promised to decisively alter the correlation of forces. American successes so great they both frightened Ivanov and made him envious, even though the Americans were on his country's side this time.

Of course, he and a select group of Soviets had known there would be a Japanese reply. They had even had an inkling of the form the Japanese response would take. But they had not understood the dimensions of the loss they would suffer, otherwise they would not have involved themselves with the Americans in the first place. They had attempted to call the Japanese bluff.

Then the world had ended for every Soviet citizen living within a zone of tens of thousands of square kilometers. A military transport had landed at Orsk to find its entire population reduced to infantile helplessness. It was worse than the chemical attacks. Worse, in its way, than the plague years had been. The Japanese had won. And, no matter how cruel and theoretically inadmissible their methods had been, their victory could not be denied. All that remained was to salvage as much of the motherland as possible. And that was up to Moscow, where there was already turbulence enough with the attempted coup in the Kremlin.

As nearly as Ivanov could sort it out from the incoming reports, the struggle was between the state security apparatus, which wanted to continue the war at all costs, and a faction of generals intent on salvaging what was left of the motherland. Ivanov had not been asked to support his comrades in Moscow, and he wondered why. He was ready. Oh, there were so many secrets. Thank God, the Americans seemed to have missed the revolt in its entirety.

Meanwhile, Ivanov waited in his headquarters for word that the Japanese terror weapons had descended from the heavens at yet another location, perhaps devouring an entire army this time. Perhaps they would come for a worn-out Soviet general who was no longer a threat to anyone.

Ivanov wondered exactly how the weapons worked. Was their effect instantaneous, or would a man who recognized what he was dealing with have time to put a pistol to his head?

"Viktor Sergeyevich," Ivanov said to Kozlov, "you realize the sensitivity of your role?"

"Yes, sir."

"The Americans have asked for an officer with firsthand knowledge of Baku, to help with their contingency planning. So help them. Answer their questions. And pay attention. Your real mission is to ensure that this American colonel takes no unilateral action. We cannot afford further provocations. Moscow is preparing a negotiating position."

"It's over, then?" Kozlov asked.

Ivanov nodded, unable to meet Kozlov's eyes. All these years, all the hard work and dreams, only to come to this. "Yes, Viktor Sergeyevich. We will continue to defend ourselves locally. But it's over."

"And there is nothing to be done?"

Ivanov shook his head. "How can we respond to something like this? The Japanese have made it very clear that the strike on the Orsk region was merely a warning."

"And the Americans have no technological countermeasure?"

Ivanov rose wearily and paced across his office. He stopped in front of the portrait of Suvorov with its faulty color tones. "If they do, they're keeping it a secret." He shrugged. "Moscow believes the Americans are as helpless as we are. Oh, there's some nonsense about attacking Japanese computers… But, really… with such weapons at the enemy's disposal… What is to be done?" Ivanov looked fully into Kozlov's stare for the first time, and saw the reflection of his desolation. "Nothing," Ivanov answered himself. "Nothing."

"Yet, Colonel Taylor is planning a raid? He plans to continue the fight?"

"We suspect it's all on his own initiative. As far as we know, Washington has approved nothing." He turned his back on the picture of the dead hero. "Watch him, Viktor. Watch him closely."

"Yes, sir."

"Answer his questions. Keep me informed."

"And he wants to raid Baku? The Japanese headquarters?"

Ivanov smiled wistfully. "Yes. The Japanese headquarters. Of course, you and I remember when it was otherwise."

"Exactly so."

Ivanov turned from the picture of the old czarist warrior and stared across the office. "I always had a soft spot for Baku, you know. Oh, not for the Azeris. They were simply animals. But I loved the warmth. I truly did. It was still good when you and I served there together, Viktor Sergeyevich. But it was better still, far better, when I was stationed there as a young captain. With the reoccupation troops." The tiniest of smiles slipped onto the general's face. "Old Baku. It's changed hands so many times over the centuries. The Persians. Then us. And the Persians again. And so on. Even the British were there for the blink of an eye." Ivanov shook his head in wonder. "Who knows? Perhaps it will change hands again one day. It's all part of the ebb and flow that foreigners never really comprehend. Oh, things look bad enough for us at the moment. But they've looked bad before. Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Persians, Poles, Lithuanians, Germans. And all the forgotten names of the forgotten people who crossed the soil of Russia only to disappear into the pages of unread history books. Perhaps Great Russia must become a smaller Russia for a time. So that she can become a Great Russia once again." Ivanov looked down at the worn Caucasian carpet that always lay in front of his desk, no matter where his assignments took him. "We must try to keep faith, Viktor Sergeyevich. We must try to keep our faith."

For all of his earnestness, the tiny smile reappeared on the general's face. "That carpet you're standing on. I bought that in Baku. Back when I had to count my rubles carefully. You know, I was detailed to the Interior Ministry that first time — and lucky to have a job, at that. So many of my friends were put out of uniform completely. That was back before we began the post-Gorbachev rebuilding, of course."

Kozlov knew the story. He always made it a point to know everything possible about his superiors. But he gave no sign of it now.

"Thirty years ago now," Ivanov went on. "And it seems like yesterday. I'd been serving in the Western Group of Forces in Germany when that all went to hell — I can't tell you how we all felt. One moment it's all brotherhood, then, overnight, you've got half a million people in the streets of Leipzig shouting for us to get out of their country. That was in eighty-nine."

"The year of counterrevolution," Kozlov offered.

"The year of endings, anyway," Ivanov said. "I used to love to walk the streets of Leipzig in the evenings, just to look in the shop windows along with my fellow officers. And to look at the proud German women. But I'm getting off the subject. We were talking about Baku. Well, after I got shipped home from Germany, it looked as though my military career had come to a premature end. Officers were being turned out into the street by the thousands. With no jobs waiting, not even a place to sleep. You have no idea how bad it was. Fortunately, I had a sterling record. I'm afraid I was a perfect little kiss-ass of a junior officer. So I was one of the fortunate few transferred to the troops of the Ministry of the Interior. It was still quite a comedown, after serving in the real army. But it was far better than any alternative I could see. And I served for a while, trying to beat my ragbag soldiers into shape. While things got worse in the country. New problems every day, with that silly dreamer in the Kremlin. Eventually, I was sent into Azerbaijan with the reoccupation forces. After all the bloodletting and the pogroms and the attempt at secession. We worked some long hours, I can tell you. And some of the duties were as bad as they could be." Ivanov's face reflected the memory of youth and old troubles successfully overcome. "I managed to enjoy myself in Baku, though. My fellow officers were so afraid — of the knife in the back and so forth. But I was crazy. I remember I used to like to walk up to Kirov Park when I was off duty. I was young, and fit, and I just stared down anybody likely to make trouble. Sometimes I'd even go down into the old quarter. But, usually, I'd just climb up to the park and sit. Staring at the city. The call to evening prayer would ring out over the loudspeakers, and the air was full of the smells of cooking oil and shashlik, and I was never afraid. It merely seemed like a great adventure to me. I was part of a long, long tradition. When you walked through the streets at dusk, you'd catch a sudden glimpse of some darkeyed girl, all spice and lavender, and you could not help feeling that the world was full of great possibilities. I had such confidence, such faith. I would sit in the twilight and make plans to save my country, Viktor. I was going to be a great hero." Ivanov's eyes glistened. "And now it's come to this. The Japanese in our old headquarters building. A world in ruins."

"I never cared for Baku," Kozlov said. "I always thought it was dirty."

"Oh, yes. But you're from a different generation. You have different eyes."

"I think of the heat. And dust. And the refineries."

"Yes, yes," Ivanov said. "And it's just as well. You don't feel the loss that way. In any case, lend the Americans your knowledge of the setup in Baku. Let them make their plans. I don't think it will come to very much."

"Anything else, sir?"

There was so much he would have liked to tell the younger man. Poor Kozlov, with his diseased gums and his passion for plodding staff work. Ivanov felt the old Russian need to talk, to confess, growing stronger and stronger in him. He had seen so much in his day. And it was all disappearing in the dust. He would have liked to order up a bottle of vodka and regale the younger man with all the lost possibilities, the things that might have been. But there was no time.

"No. Nothing else, Viktor Sergeyevich. Just keep your eyes open."

Kozlov snapped his heels together and raised his right hand, offering a soldier's respect. Suddenly, Ivanov lurched forward, drunk with memories. He embraced Kozlov, kissing him on both cheeks. Ivanov knew that the two of them were unlikely ever to meet again.

Kozlov had been surprised by the generosity of the gesture, and he only managed to brush his lips across the older man's jowls. Then Ivanov released him.

When Kozlov had gone, Ivanov turned his attention back to the portrait of Suvorov. It hung crookedly, when you looked at it straight on. Well, Ivanov thought, I never made it. Didn't even come close. I was going to be another Suvorov. Instead, it's my lot to preside over defeat and capitulation.

He closed his eyes. And he could hear it. The sound of the beginning of the end. Nineteen eighty-nine. That enormous, irresistible chanting of the East Germans in the streets. Even after he and his fellow officers had been restricted to barracks, they could still hear it. Every Monday night. Echoing off the glass and steel facade of the vast train station, resounding down the boulevards and alleyways of Leipzig. It seemed to him now that he had known that it was all over then, and that the remainder of his life had merely been a long rearguard action, waged more out of obstinacy than in hope. He had only understood the most rudimentary German, but he had gotten the meaning clearly enough. The hammering waves of words had been accusing him and his kind, flooding down the crumbling streets, splashing up over the barracks walls, impervious to the witless guards and barbed wire, a torrent of rage. The individual slogans did not matter. They changed. But their meaning could invariably be translated as, "Failure, failure, failure."

Kozlov did not mind the cold. He did not even think about it. Even the misery of his teeth, gums, and jaw seemed to have declared a truce. Soon, the aircraft would arrive to take him away. To join the Americans. He was glad he was going.

He still did not like the Americans. But he was even less comfortable with Ivanov's despair. And he was ashamed. For all their faults, the Americans had behaved honorably, had done their best. And they were still willing to carry on the fight. While his side had withheld key information, while his people were even now looking for ways to undercut the American effort instead of aiding it. Perhaps it was biological, Kozlov thought. The result of all the years of deception, of lies told to one another. Perhaps deceit had been bred into the substance of Soviet man.

And the Americans had come so close. Really, there was no substance left to oppose Soviet forces on the ground. Even in their battered condition, they could begin to sweep back to the south, through Kazakhstan. And beyond. The Americans, with their wondrous machines, had done the enemy coalition irreparable harm. The correlation of ground forces had shifted remarkably.

The only problem was the new Japanese terror weapon. Still, it was unthinkable to Kozlov that his people would let a single tool deprive them not only of victory but perhaps of their national independence. What had happened at Orsk? A terrible thing. Gruesome. But it was nothing compared to the sufferings of the Great Patriotic War. What had happened to the Russian character? To the spirit of sacrifice?

Kozlov refused to feel beaten.

The reserves of strength he found in himself surprised him a little. He had always considered himself a top-notch staff officer — but he had never cast himself in the role of a particularly brave man. Often he had been afraid to speak up in front of his superiors — even when he knew them to be dangerously wrong.

It was time to make up for those errors now.

He did not know what he would do. But, if the Americans had not yet given up hope, then he saw no reason why he should be the first to quit.

The Americans. They were simply impossible to like. He remembered when he had been a cadet in Moscow during the long twilight of the nineteen nineties. His girl of the moment had been obsessed with paying a visit to the McDonald's restaurant that had opened on Pushkin Square. He had resisted the idea, out of the sort of self-righteous patriotism only a cadet could feel — and because the prices were painfully high on his allowance. But the girl had been pretty. Irina was her name. And his teeth had not been so bad then. They had kissed, and she had nipped his tongue, accusing him of stinginess and cruelty. So they had gone. To McDonald's.

There was a line, of course. But it moved with remarkable speed. The employees behind the clean, brightly lit counter smiled, and he assumed that they must be foreigners. That led to his first shock. The salesgirl greeted him with a lilting Moscow accent, asking after his desires. He stumbled over the peculiar names — his military English classes had not included these "Bik Meeks." With startling speed, the meal appeared before him on a tray, artfully packaged. His money was taken and change returned, and the smiling little Moscow girl repeated her greeting to the next citizen in line.

It had been indescribably painful to sit in the spotless, bustling restaurant, eating the delicious sandwich with helpless appetite and watching his girl gobble and smile, with little bits of America clinging to the spaces between her teeth. They had still played staff war games against the Americans in those days, it was an old habit that died hard, and the dexterity with which this American system had maneuvered him through a restaurant, ambushing him with food and fizzy cola, controlling his every action — it was an unnerving experience. If the Americans were this good at so trivial an endeavor as running a restaurant… you had to wonder whether they might not be considerably better at military art than his superiors were willing to credit. It went back to the Marxist dialectic and the laws governing the conversion of quantitative change into qualitative.

After finishing the last seductive bite, he dragged his girl from beneath those golden arches of triumph. Out in the street they began a loud and too public argument as he vowed never to set foot in this restaurant of McDonald's again. She called him a pompous ass and a little shit. The skirmish took place in front of an extremely interested crowd, several members of which were anxious to take sides, and, in the end, the trip to McDonald's not only failed to result in a trip to Irina's bed — its outcome was his immediate and irrevocable expulsion from the beachhead he had battled to establish in her heart. She did not even return his calls, and the last time he caught a glimpse of her it was purely by chance. He was strolling through Moscow's broken heart, passing along the windows of the fateful Capitalist trojan horse. And there, imprisoned beneath those merciless golden arches, he saw his bright little Irina, driving her little white teeth into a hamburger sandwich and sharing her fried potatoes with another man.

The powerful drone of aircraft engines called Kozlov back to the present. Siberia. The razor's edge between victory and defeat. The immediacy of history in the making. And he realized that poor old Ivanov had picked the wrong man for this job.

It was impossible to like the Americans. But he had begun to suspect that they were not without honor. And courage. Overcoming his ferocious prejudice as best he could, Kozlov had decided to cast his lot on the side of the Bik Meek after all.

Valya stared at the sandwich in disgust. The protruding comers of cheese ran from yellow to brown and the bread looked dusty and withered. She did not even want to touch the food, much less eat it. Neither could she drink any more of the tea in which she had nervously and too readily indulged herself across the endless afternoon.

"Really, Citizen Babryshkina," the interrogating officer said, "you must eat something. To keep your strength up."

"I'm not hungry," Valya said.

The officer sighed. "I'm sorry we can't offer you something tastier. But, after all, this is not a luxury hotel of the sort to which you have become accustomed."

"I can't eat."

The officer threw up his hands in a motherly gesture. He was a very large man, with white indoor skin and colorless hair. Except for his size, he would have been invisible in a crowd.

"Citizen Babryshkina — Valya, may I call you Valya?" he asked, glancing at the stack of photographs that lay in slight disorder beside the plate. Valya's eyes automatically followed those of her interrogator. "After all," the big man said, "I don't think it would be too great an intimacy, under the circumstances."

Valya said nothing. She looked at the top photograph. Even in the bad light, the details were all too clear.

"Yes, Valya," the officer continued. "You're known to have quite an appetite. And you mustn't get sick on us. You're really—" he picked up a photograph, then discarded it again " — quite thin. Please do have a bite or two."

An obedient child, Valya took up half of the sandwich. But that was as much as she could manage. She could not raise it to her lips.

The officer came around the table, rushing to her assistance. He closed a big soft hand over Valya's fingers, pressing them into the staleness of the sandwich, and he helped her find her mouth.

"No," she muttered. Then she felt the stiffened edge of cheese, the sharp crust pushing against her lips. The big hand crushed it ever so gently into her face, and the stink of the cheese made her feel faint.

Abruptly, the officer gave up on her. He let go of her hand and the crumpled sandwich slipped down over her chin, leaving a trail of odor and crumbs.

The officer sighed again, a disappointed parent. "You're such a bad girl, Valya. I worry about you."

The big man moved back to his seat across the little table. For a moment, it seemed as though he had forgotten her. He took up the top few photos, inspecting them one after the other with the expression of a stamp collector paging through an unsatisfactory catalog. There wasn't the least hint of sexuality in his features.

"Hard to fathom," he said softly, as if to himself. "Now this, for instance" — he suddenly remembered Valya—"do you honestly enjoy that sort of thing?"

He thrust the picture at Valya. It was as if the picture, too, had a foul smell to it, an odor far worse than the rancid cheese that lay broken on the plate.

"I'm just curious," the officer went on. "I'm afraid I'm not a very imaginative man. When it comes to that sort of thing." He fumbled for a moment, hunting a specific photograph. Then he smiled and shook his head, offering yet another snapshot to Valya. "This, for instance. It never even occurred to me that people did such things to each other. I'm afraid I'm not much of a man of the world." Valya considered the photo. Herself. And Naritsky. One of Naritsky's little games. It seemed so long ago now. How had they known? How long had they been watching her?

They had photos of her with years of lovers. With every one except Yuri. Only her husband seemed to hold no interest for them.

The interrogator made a little scolding noise, then tossed the photo back on the pile with all of the others.

"Now the American," he began, "in a way, I can understand that one. They're so rich — how much did he pay you, by the way?"

Valya looked up in horror.

"I'm just curious," the officer said.

"Nothing," Valya cried. "For God's sake, what do you think I am?"

The officer looked at her for what seemed a terribly long time. Then he said:

"What should I think, little Valya? Surely, you don't expect me to believe that an attractive young woman— well, perhaps not so young anymore — but let's say 'an attractive Russian woman,' shall we?" He looked from Valya's face down to the line of her breasts and back up again. But there still was no trace of desire in his eyes. He might have been appraising an animal at a market. "Now you don't expect me to believe that you're so… so indiscriminate… that you would simply throw yourself into bed with a foreigner whom you had met hardly an hour before without receiving some sort of… compensation?"

Valya felt her cheeks burning. She recalled with piercing clarity the voices in the hotel night, the bellowing American beyond the thin wall, and the Russian woman cursing and demanding money.

"I am not a prostitute," Valya said quietly, as if trying to convince herself.

"Oh, now. I never used such a word." The interrogator smiled, more paternal than maternal this time. "Far from it. You're just a girl who likes to have a good time. And who, occasionally, runs a bit short of money."

"I'm not a prostitute, " Valya screamed. She gripped the sides of the flimsy table, even rising slightly from her seat.

The interrogator was unruffled. "Of course not. If you say so. In any case, I'm not a stickler about terminology."

Valya collapsed back into her chair. "I'm not a prostitute," she repeated, with a noticeable catch in her voice.

"Now, Valya," her tormentor continued. "Little Valya. Let's look at the facts." He glanced back toward the litter of photographs but made no move to consult them again. "You were a married woman. Nonetheless, you carried on a virtual carnival of affairs behind your poor husband's back. Why, when he was off supposedly defending the motherland, you even had to abort your child by a notorious black marketeer. Now let's see — that was your third abortion, correct?" He took up his pencil.

"Second," Valya said icily.

He made a tick in his notebook. "No matter. You aborted the child with which you had been impregnated by a public criminal. For whom you did… favors. Favors of the most questionable sort." The officer looked up from his papers, bright-eyed. "I don't suppose you would be interested in reviewing any of the photographs from the abortion clinic? No? Of course not. Anyway. You were married to a Soviet Army officer. You whored all over Moscow with a black marketeer—"

Valya caught the sudden hardening in the man's voice. And there was something else, something else. He had said something wrong — what was it? She was so tired. She could not think clearly.

"— got pregnant, aborted, then dropped your carcass into bed with a foreign spy. Without remuneration, of course."

"What?"

The officer appeared genuinely surprised at her outburst.

"What foreign spy?" Valya cried. She felt a terrible chill slither over her skin. The word spy had been haunted into her consciousness, into the genes of her race. The lonely syllable made her instantly afraid.

"Why, what should I call your American?"

"He's… he's a businessman." Even now, she wondered if he was waiting for her at the hotel. They had an appointment for dinner at eight o'clock. Had she seen a way, she would have burst free and caught a bus or a trolley… she would have even run all the way… to hurl herself into Ryder's arms, and into the embrace of the hopes he represented.

The interrogator laughed. He positively shook. Reaching clumsily for his glasses, he took them off so that he could dab at his tiny eyes.

"Oh, Valya," he said. "My little Valya. Surely, you don't expect me to believe that you — that you, of all people — could be so naive?"

Valya looked at him in confused horror.

"Why, my little angel," he continued, "your latest customer — excuse me, your latest lover—is a warrant officer in the United States Army. A reconnaissance man, no less. Oh, Valya, you have to be more careful. You need to construct better stories to cover your tracks."

Valya sat. Frozen. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.

"Now why don't you just tell me," her interrogator went on, "what sort of information you passed to him? What messages did your husband give you for the American?"

"You're mad," Valya declared in an awkward, stunned voice. "That's insane. Why Yuri… Yuri would never…"

"I'm just trying to keep the names straight," the officer said. "Now this particular Yuri would be your late husband?"

Valya stopped breathing. Everything stopped. The blood had gone still in her arteries and veins. Then her eyelids blinked.

"Yuri?" she said.

"Why, Valya — surely this doesn't come as a surprise? Surely you knew?"

"Yuri?"

"Oh dear. Oh, Valya. I am sorry. I thought you'd been informed." The officer ruffled through his file of papers. "Now where is it? Oh, I can't believe I'm so clumsy. Forgive me. Please."

"Yuri?"

The officer looked up to meet the change in her tone. He looked genuinely ill-at-ease. "Of course, one understands how such oversights occur. I mean, it was, of course, quite recent. But, even in cases of espionage, one would think… a basic respect for the decencies…"

"… Yuri?…" Valya began to sway sideward in her chair. When she closed her eyes, she smelled the ghost of the cheese sandwich on the hairs above her lip.

The officer jumped up from his chair and caught her. "Now, now," he said. "This must be a terrible shock. Why, I'm almost convinced you're not mixed up in any of this."

"Water, please."

The interrogator offered her the glass of stale tea. She sipped from it, then remembered why she had refused to drink any more. Her kidneys burned.

She tried to raise herself. But the officer's hand on her shoulder held her firmly in place.

"Please," Valya said. "Let me go to the toilet."

"All in good time." The hand pushed down ever so slightly. "It's not so urgent, is it? Just when we've almost resolved the issue of your involvement in all this."

She needed to go to the toilet. She tightened her loins, closing her thighs in a deadlock.

"So, let me see if I understand all of this," the interrogator said. "You had no idea that your husband was a traitor? That he was shot for collaborating with the enemy?"

Valya understood nothing. He was talking to someone else now. These words bore no relation to her life whatsoever.

"Of course, you realize that the penalty for such betrayals is always death?"

Betrayals? Nothing but betrayals. But which sort of betrayals was he speaking of now? None of it made any sense. It was all madness, and it had begun when they came for her at the school. After all of her efforts at maintaining a positive image before her superiors, they had come for her right in front of the students, unceremoniously hustling her out of the classroom. She had felt sick, realizing that she would never be able to explain this away.

What was he talking about now? Espionage? Yuri? And he said that Yuri was dead. But it was impossible for Yuri to be dead. She had only been thinking of him the night before.

"Please," she said, "I have to go to the toilet."

An enormous hand smashed into the side of her face. She flew to the ground, leaving the toppled chair behind her. She felt her body slipping out of her control. Then a foot kicked her very hard in the small of the back.

She moaned. A heel ground her into the concrete floor. Then her tormentor kicked her in the rump. The force slid her across the cement. But the boot followed her. The officer kicked her again. And again. In the spine. In the meager fat of her buttocks. Kicking through the fabric. Wet fabric. The hard toes hunted at her sex.

Above her, the officer grunted. She recognized the sound. She had heard it before. Under the weight of so many men.

"Slut," the officer said. He was so short of breath he could barely produce single syllables. "Tramp. Whore."

Yes, Valya thought dreamily, waiting for the next blow. Yes. I'm a whore. And Yuri. Where was Yuri?

Her American was going to take her away.

She was late for dinner.

Suddenly, a big hand gathered her hair and yanked her upward. She thought her neck would break, almost wishing it would. The interrogator dragged her across the floor like a dead game animal, hurting her badly. His other hand grasped her, briefly passing over her breast. Then he had her from behind, by the hair and and upper arm.

He dragged her back to the table where the photographs lay. He ground her face into them, then lifted her by the hair, just far enough so that her eyes might focus. He released her arm so that he would have a free hand to peel away the layers of snapshots.

"Look," he gasped. "Look. At this one. And this one. Look at yourself."

Valya began to cry. It was not he weeping of a grown woman. Nor even tears of physical pain. It was the helpless crying of a child. She sensed what was coming now. She sensed it in his hand.

"Please," she moaned. "Please. Please, don't."

The interrogator tossed her back on the floor as though discarding and empty wrapper.

"You piece of filth," he said. "Is that all you ever think of?" He strode over to her and spit on the side of her face. She had curled up like and infant, and she wept.

"I wouldn't dream of dirtying myself with a creature like you," the officer said.

"I'm sorry for my comrade's excesses," the beautifully groomed young officer told her. He reached across the table toward her face. She shied. But he was quick. He ran his fingertips along her cheek. "Here. Just let me have a look."

Valya whimpered.

"Now, that doesn't look to bad. Nothing to mar our girls beauty," the officer continued. He was handsome, obviously atretic, and Valya sat before him in great shame. She felt destroyed. As though she belonged in a heap of garbage.

"He's been overworked lately," the young man explained. "What with the war and all. Moscow hasn't been a quiet place. I'm sorry if he hurt you." The young man withdrew his easy fingertips. "I’m sorry things got out of hand."

Valya sobbed into the lateness of the hour.

"We’re not fools," the young officer said brightly. "We know you’re not a spy. It was ridiculous for my comrade to imply anything to the contrary. Valya, would you like a cup of tea? Or anything at all?"

"No."

"All right. I just want you to try to understand. It’s a very complex situation. To the careless observer, some of your actions might take on an ambiguous meaning. And I think you’ll admit that, now and then, you’ve been indiscreet."

Valya stared down into her sorrow. She was contrite. No Magdalene had ever felt so deep and genuine a contrition.

"If anything," the polished young man continued, "we want to help you. Now, obviously, the fact that you were married to an officer who betrayed his trust to the People— obviously, that complicates things. And then there’s the brief encounter with this American spy. Well, he’s not exactly a spy. That’s a slight exaggeration. And he’s gone now, anyway — left the hotel right after you did. Off to the wars," he said blithely. "But it’s still a difficult situation. And, of course, there’s the matter of simple criminal law. Some of your adventures with Citizen Naritsky, for example. I’m afraid that, even without the slightest hint of espionage or the like, well, I’m afraid the law demands a certain level of satisfaction."

The young man stared at Valya as though waiting for her to help him out. She sat there trying to feel a better, truer sorrow at the news of Yuri’s death. But it would not come. Yuri had been nothing but a tool to her. She recognized that now. She had been bad. But she was sorry. She was sorry for all of the things she had done. She was sorry for every scrap of joy she had ever felt. But she could not feel sufficiently sorry for Yuri.

"Valya," the young man said almost tenderly, "I simply can’t bear the thought of sending you to prison."

Valya looked up.

"Simply couldn't bear it," the officer went on. "Why, by the time you were done sitting out your sentence, those lovely looks would be gone. Long gone, I'm afraid. And it would be a shame to waste them on the sort of women one encounters in our prison system. I'm afraid we're a bit behind the West in prison reform. Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup of tea?"

Valya shook her head. Infinitely fatigued.

Prison?

"But don't worry," the young man continued. "I think I see a way out of this. Valya," he said gently, flattering her with his eyes, "you really are a lovely woman. Even now, like this. I'm certain that you could be very helpful to us."

Valya looked up into the young officer's eyes. They were deep and glittering. The sort of eyes with which she would have been delighted to flirt once upon a time. Now they filled her with a horror she could not confine in words.

"I just… I just wanted to have some sort of life," she said meekly.

The young man smiled warmly.

"You do want to help us, don't you?"

21

Noburu shut his eyes and listened. Even through the bunkered thickness of the walls and bulletproof glass, he could hear them out there in the night. The people. Gathering in defiance of the outbreak of plague that had begun to haunt the city. Tens of thousands of them, there was no way of counting them with precision. Inside the headquarters complex, his staff continued to celebrate the success of the Scramblers, undeterred. While, out in the darkness, men who answered to another god chanted their fates in an opaque desert language.

Noburu looked at his aide's neatly uniformed back. Akiro sat dutifully at the command information console, sifting, sifting. Noburu had unsettled the younger man with a remark made an hour before. He knew that Akiro was still trying to find an innocent interpretation for his general's words. But Noburu also knew that the aide would not look in the right places.

The rhythmic chanting echoed relentlessly through the walls.

"Death to Japan," they cried.

Noburu had not understood the words at first. That had required a translator. But he had understood the situation immediately. He had been waiting for it.

The demonstrators had begun to gather even as the Scramblers did their work. His staff counterintelligence officer reported that the rally began in the old quarter, in the shadow of the Virgin's Tower. A flash outbreak of Runciman's disease had begun to gnaw its way in through the city's windows and doors. Yet, the Azeris had gathered by the thousands. They came as if called by animal instinct, by scent. How would Tokyo explain it? Marginally literate roustabouts had known of the vast scale of the Iranian and rebel defeat almost as swiftly as Noburu himself. In response, they materialized out of alleyways, or descended from the tainted heights of apartment blocks where the elevator shafts were useful only for the disposal of garbage, where bad water trickled in the taps, when water came at all. The faithful came in from the vast belt of slums that ringed the official city, from homes made of pasteboard and tin, from quarters in abandoned railcars that were already in the possession of a third generation of the same family. They came under banners green and black, the colors of Allah, the colors of death. In the heart of the headquarters building, their voices had been audible before they halfway climbed the hill, and now, as they formed a great crescent around the front of the military complex, their voices reached down into the stone depths of the mountainside. To the buried operations center, where Noburu's officers were drinking victory toasts in confident oblivion.

Noburu had gone out into the dying afternoon to have a look for himself, brushing off the protests of his subordinates and the local national guards, all of whom insisted that the situation was too dangerous.

"What are they saying?" he had demanded of his escorts as they braved the pollution-scented air. "What do the words mean?"

The light had the texture of gauze. The men who spoke the local language averted their eyes in shame.

"What is it?" Noburu insisted. "What does the chanting mean?"

A local national officer in charge of security looked at Noburu like a bad child caught out. "They say, 'Death to Japan.' "

Death to Japan. Ah, yes.

Death. To Japan.

He had expected the process to take a little longer. But then he had been wrong about so many things.

Death to Japan.

Couldn't they feel it? How could they all remain so smug? Didn't they understand? The end was coming, Scramblers or not.

Death to Japan. The crowd did not speak with a human voice. The articulated passions had nothing to do with the reasoning of the individual conscience. All were subsumed in a hugeness that no extant terms could explain. The crowd had swarmed into an entity that was vast, deaf, and blind. No single element could make a difference. No counsel of logic would move them. It was as if a god had closed his mighty hands over their ears. The crowd raged, and knew no fear.

Noburu imagined the clinical language with which a Tokyo staff officer would master the event.

"Please," the local man pleaded with Noburu, "you are to go no closer."

Noburu walked onward toward the big steel gates that shut the mob out of the compound.

"Mr. General, please not to go there."

Noburu walked on. In the last weak sun. Drawn by the single voice of the crowd, as if a woman had spoken his name in the dark.

"Please."

The headquarters building was shaped like a U with short sides, forming a courtyard that opened out onto a broader space that functioned alternately as a parking area for military vehicles or as a parade ground. It was bare now, with the austerity of wartime. Beyond the cobbled and cemented space, the wall rose, defining the perimeter of the compound. The wall was built to a height greater than the tallest man and unruly coils of concertina wire stretched along its top, connecting intermittent guard towers from which automatic weapons scanned silently over the excluded crowds.

Noburu headed straight for the central gate. Closed now, the two oversize steel doors were crowned with spikes, a number of which had been bent or broken off. Noburu had no clear plan of action. He just wanted to see the beginning of the end with his own eyes.

The first twilight mellowed in the wall's shadow. The mob called out to him, begging him to hurry.

The security chief caught up with Noburu and tugged at his sleeve, pleading.

Both men stopped.

Before their eyes, men had begun to fly through the air. Soaring above the wall. Men with invisible wings.

The first few did not fly high enough. They caught in the curls of wire atop the wall, then hung limply. One sailed out of the low sky only to land gruesomely atop the spikes of the gate, impaling himself without a sound.

Noburu was baffled. Was this some new mystery of the East?

In a matter of seconds, half a dozen of the enchanted men had snared themselves in their attempt to soar over the wall and join Noburu in the enclave. They accepted the pain of their failures with remarkable stoicism. Wordlessly entangling themselves in the midst of the razor-sharp loops, the men sprawled their arms and legs across the barrier. They did not even flinch when the wire caught at their necks and heads. They appeared immune to pain. They flew through the sky, landed short, and took their uncomfortable rest. The man whose torso had been skewered atop the gate did not make a sound.

More and more of the odd angels rose from the crowd beyond the wall. Noburu could not understand the bizarre acrobatics. His mind filled with decades of old news film. Moslem fanatics lashing themselves mercilessly for the love of God. Riots, revolutions. Burning cities. The Arabian nights — and the tormented days. Endless calls for blood. Once, he knew, the Azeris had gathered to call for death to the Armenians, later for death to the Russians. Before that, their brethren to the south had howled, "Death to America."

Now it was "Death to Japan." As he had known it would be.

Oh, pride of man, he thought, and his heart filled with sorrow for his people.

At last one of the dervishes cleared the height of the gate. He arced just above his impaled brother, twisting in his flight, and dropped with a careless thud just a few feet from Noburu and his sole remaining escort.

The security officer had his pistol at the ready. He hustled toward the intruder, barking orders.

The visitor did not stir.

Suddenly, the security officer arched backward, away from the body. It was an exaggerated gesture, and it reminded Noburu of the way a startled cat could stop abruptly, pulling back its snout from evident trouble.

The security officer turned and bolted unceremoniously past Noburu. The man gibbered, and Noburu could make out only a single word:

"Plague."

Noburu walked forward until his toes had almost touched the body. The two men stared at each other. The dead citizen of Baku gazed up at the immaculate Japanese general, and the general peered back down in still curiosity.

Runciman's disease. It was unmistakable. The marbled discoloration of the skin. The look of pain that lasted beyond death. The corpse lay broken on the ground, in a fitting posture of agony.

Tokyo needed to see this, Noburu thought, raising his eyes back up to the bodies strung along the wire. Tokyo expected gratitude, treaties, observed legalities, interest on investments. Tokyo expected the world to make sense.

Another body cleared the wall and hit the ground with a thud.

Tokyo wanted thanks. And here it was.

Wondrous gifts flew through the air in this country. The people generously gave up their dead. Such a beautiful gift. Expressive. Noburu would have liked to have wrapped up at least one of the bodies and sent it to the Tokyo General Staff.

Noburu let his attention sink back to the corpse at his feet. You were lucky, he told the dead man. You were one of our friends. Had you been one of Japan's enemies, had you passed your years in the city of Orsk, or had you been one of those American soldiers, your suffering would only be beginning.

The crowd beyond the wall erupted in a scream that had the force of a great storm compacted into a single moment. It pierced Noburu. It was impossible to assign a cataloged emotion to the scream. The common words used to define the heart did not suffice.

We are worse than any other animal, Noburu thought. And he bent down to close the corpse's eyes.

He turned back into the parade ground's lengthening shadows, to the small group of officers awaiting him in horror.

"It's all right," Noburu assured them. "My shots are up-to-date. Tokyo has taken care of everything."

He gave an order to the effect that the guards were to hold their fire unless there was an attempt to penetrate the facility. After that, he did not look back. But he continued to see everything. The dream warrior saw. The faces of the vengeful dead, the population of Orsk, quivering in wonder, and the hallucinatory Americans from Africa, who came to Noburu even in the lightest doze now. Those dead dream-Americans were the worst of all, far worse than the reality of a diseased corpse hurled over a wall. Each time they came to him they grew larger and more clear. They came ever closer. Soon they would touch him. The dream warrior knew that it was finished.

In the controlled coolness of Noburu's office, Akiro assured the general that the disturbance was an aberration, inspired by false reports and likely provoked by the Americans as part of a devious plan.

Noburu looked at the younger man in wonder.

"Do you really believe," Noburu asked, "that the people out there would listen to the Americans?"

"Tokyo says—"

"Tokyo is far away, Akiro."

"The intelligence officer says—"

"He's lying, Akiro. He doesn't know."

It was the turn of the aide to look shocked. It was impossible for a Japanese general to say outright that another officer, however junior, had lied.

"He's afraid," Noburu went on, trying to explain to the younger man, to reach him. "He doesn't understand what's happening. His spirit is in Tokyo."

"Sir," the aide said, "it is impossible to believe that these people would turn against us without provocation. First of all, we have given them everything, and, secondly, they need us. Without us—"

"Akiro," Noburu said indulgently, "you're thinking logically." He waved his hand at the curtained window. "But the people out there… I'm afraid they have no respect for logic."

"It is an impossible situation," Akiro said primly. Noburu nodded, frumping his chin. "I agree."

"We have treaties…"

"Yes. Treaties."

"They will have to honor their treaties, our agreements."

"Of course," Noburu said.

"They cannot betray us."

"They believe," Noburu said, "that we have betrayed them. That what the Americans did on the battlefield was our fault. When things go wrong, they don't blame their enemies, they blame their allies. It's simply the way their minds work."

"That's inconceivable."

"Yes," Noburu agreed.

"They must honor the agreements."

Noburu smiled gently at the younger man.

"Or they will have to be taught a lesson," Akiro concluded.

Noburu turned toward the shrouded window and raised his hands as if conducting the choir out in the dark streets. "Listen to them," he whispered. The chanting rose and fell, rose and fell. Ceaselessly. "Listen, Akiro, and tell me what you hear."

The two men listened from their different worlds. Then Akiro said:

"I hear the sound of a mob."

Noburu listened a moment longer.

"No," he told the younger man. "That is the voice of death."

President Waters had just eaten a cheeseburger, and a damned big one. He was tired of taking advice, whether it came from the secretary of state or from the First Lady. Expert advice had gotten them all into this mess, and he did not trust the advice of those same experts to get the United States back out. He did not yet know exactly what he was going to do. But he knew he was going to make up his own mind this time.

"The President," a voice announced.

Everyone in the room jumped to their feet as Waters strode in. A quick glance assured the President that the key players were on hand: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his face a worn-out hound-dog mask, and the secretary of state, who looked like a Harvard man in his dotage — which happened to be exactly what he was. They were all there, down to that overbred cardsharp Bouquette and his plain-Jane sidekick.

"Sit down. Everybody. Please sit down. I know you're all tired."

"We're ready when you are, Mr. President, the national security adviser said. It was almost the only thing the man had uttered since the debacle at Orsk had become known. He had been a strong proponent of the expedition in the beginning, and now he was clearly rethinking his position.

Waters sat down, swishing back a last ghost of flavor with the tip of his tongue. The cheeseburger had been a lascivious thing, thick and studded with bits of onion, topped with blue cheese and a shower of catsup. It had been, by God, an American meal, and Waters had devoured it proudly. He had almost fallen into the usual routine of reminding the chef not to let slip his transgressions to his wife. Then he decided to blow it off. What the hell. If the President of the United States could send his armed forces off to battle, he could damn well treat himself to a cheeseburger without congressional authorization. Blood pressure and cholesterol be damned too. If this unholy mess in the Soviet Union didn't drop him in his tracks, he doubted he would topple over at the ingestion of a cheeseburger. He only regretted that he had not had the audacity to have the chef cook up some french fries, as well.

"Get me Colonel Taylor," Waters demanded.

"Sir, he's standing by," the communications officer said. "Good." He turned briefly to Bouquette. "Cliff, do you have anything further on that demonstration or whatever it is down by the Japanese headquarters?"

Bouquette rocketed to his feet. "Nothing new on the Baku situation, sir. All we have is the imagery, and from the appearance of things, I'd have to stand by our original assessment that it's an anti-American thing, whipped up by the Japanese and the Islamic Government of Azerbaijan. A response to the commitment of American forces, a demonstration of solidarity. You know how the Islamic types love to parade around the streets. And anti-Americanism is in their blood."

Taylor's face flashed onto the communications screen. The collar of his uniform looked rumpled and stained, and, despite his facial scarring, the weary lines and dark circles were clear for all to see. But the eyes were alert.

"Good afternoon, Colonel Taylor — what time of day is it where you are now?"

"Night, Mr. President."

"Yes. That's right. You're ahead of us."

Waters paused, allowing himself time to consider Taylor. Could this man be trusted? When so many others had failed him? After one of Taylor's own subordinates had accused him of dereliction of duty and impossibly bad judgment? At any other time, Waters would have dismissed such a questionable character out of hand. But he was desperate now.

"Colonel Taylor," Waters said, "I've had a look at the concept of operations you sent us. The chairman has done his best to explain to me what it means. But I'd like to hear it in your own words. Explain it to me the way you explained that weapons system of yours. Simple words for a simple man."

Taylor's eyebrows edged into his scarred forehead. "Well, Mr. President, to begin with, I can't take credit for it. While I was out with my regiment today, an old acquaintance of mine was doing some thinking for me. The concept for this operation was developed by Colonel Williams of the Tenth Cavalry, based on an intelligence breakthrough one of his young officers came up with yesterday."

Out of the corner of his eye, Waters caught Bouquette grimacing. Have to return to that, Waters thought. Then he shifted his full attention back to Taylor.

"Mr. President," Taylor continued, "I want to be as honest with you as I can be. This is a long shot. Only the potential results make it worth attempting." Taylor briefly broke eye contact, and Waters wondered to what extent this Army officer doubted himself and his capabilities at this point.

"It all started," Taylor said, "with a damned good piece of luck. The Japanese battlefield control computers have been considered impregnable. But a young warrant officer from the Tenth, working with his Soviet counterpart, cracked a key component the Russians had recovered from a downed Japanese control bird. I understand that you've been briefed on the matter, but let me explain it from the battlefield perspective. Using the knowledge we've already derived from this computer 'brain,' we've been able to electronically transliterate various offensive computer programs into the software alphabet that the Japanese computers will accept. Most importantly, we now have the means to enter anything we want into the Japanese system, and to do it very quickly. Of course, the Japanese have no idea about any of this, as far as we know. If we can just get to one of their main terminals before they realize they've been compromised, we could deliver a mortal blow to their system." Taylor was clearly excited by the concept, and the building fire in his voice was the only real enthusiasm the President had encountered for hours.

"The possibilities are incredible," the colonel continued. "We can direct their system to make fatal errors. Not only can we completely disorient the enemy's control system, we can direct his weapons to attack each other. We can direct communications nodes to commit electronic suicide. We can offset every grid and coordinate in his automated mapping system. And we can actually conjure up false worlds for enemy commanders. They'll be sitting at their monitors, imagining that they're watching the battle, when in fact everything portrayed will be an illusion. And we'll be the master magicians. At the very least, we'll destroy their faith in their electronics. We'll be altering not just the parameters of the system, but the perception of its operators." Taylor looked into the President's eyes from half a world away. "But the most beautiful part is actually the simplest. Every Japanese military system has a self-destruct mechanism built into it. It's ostensibly to prevent the gear from falling into enemy hands — but it also functions as a safeguard, in case, say, the Iranians turned against them—"

"Never happen," Bouquette muttered audibly.

"— then the Japanese could simply send out electronic signals to every system in Iranian hands, ordering the machines to self-destruct. The component the Russians captured has shown us how it's done. And it's easy. We may even be able to neutralize these new weapons."

"The Scramblers," Waters said.

"Yes, sir. The Scramblers." Taylor twisted up the side of his mouth, a half-leer in a dead face. "Unfortunately, it can only be done through a Japanese master control computer. That's the background. Here's the plan. I intend to take my command ship and a single troop of five M-l00s — manned by volunteers — on a raid against the Japanese theater headquarters at Baku. We will employ all of our deception systems going in, and, as we close, we'll jam everything in the area of operations. The Tenth Cav will be able to help us out with that. Our approach to the target will also be covered by a larger scale deception operation, as the rest of my regiment pulls out to the north. My raiding party will disappear in the noise of events. And we'll move fast. We won't be going in blind, either. The Soviets are sending me an officer who knows the layout of the Baku headquarters complex."

Taylor paused, and the President sensed that the man was searching through a tired brain for any key factors he might have omitted.

"We're banking on Japanese reluctance to destroy their computer system, no matter what happens," Taylor continued. "Since they don't know we've broken their code, they'll assume we couldn't access the system even if we had a year to take it apart and play with the components. Again, this system is considered to be absolutely impregnable, a sort of futuristic fortress. We'll count on going in very fast, loading in our programs, and getting out of there." Taylor stared hard at the President. "I want to do it tomorrow."

Waters nodded noncommittally.

"It's a long shot," Taylor admitted. "We'll have no time for rehearsals. We'll have to refuel once on the way in, and the Soviets will have to help us out on that. We won't be able to afford significant casualties — it's going to be a bare-bones operation. And we'll be counting on Japanese overconfidence so that they won't destroy the control computer and stop us in our tracks. Then, coming back out, we'll be vulnerable as hell — it appears that the Japanese can detect the M-100's signature from the rear hemisphere. Mr. President, I frankly cannot give you odds on the outcome. I'd just be guessing. We may fail. But… as an American soldier… I would be ashamed not to try." The layer of hard confidence dissolved from Taylor's features, and he simply looked like a vulnerable and very tired man. "Mr. President, we beat them today. We destroyed their finest forward-deployed systems. Their central Asian front is in a state of collapse." Taylor was obviously fumbling for the words to explain his view of the world. "The only thing that's holding them together now is the success of this new weapon."

"The Scramblers," Waters said, retasting the word. "Yes, sir. Otherwise, we've got them licked. You see, sir, in war… the loser is often simply the first guy to quit. Time and again, commanders have assumed that they've been defeated when, in fact, they were in far better condition than their enemies. We know how badly we've been hurt. But it's always harder to gain an accurate perception of the true state of the enemy." Taylor's eyes burned and begged across the miles. "Mr. President, just give us a chance. Let's not quit. Try to remember what it was like for our country after the African intervention, when everything seemed like it was coming apart. It's been a long, hard road back. But we're almost there. Let's not quit while there's still a chance."

Waters sucked his teeth. "Colonel Taylor," he said, "do you really believe you have a chance to pull this off?"

"Yes, sir. A chance."

"Nobody else seems to think so. The experts here don t think you could even get halfway."

"Sir, I know what my men and my machines can do. I saw it today."

"The Soviets want to quit," Waters added, "and, while I certainly do not want to belittle our losses, the Soviets have lost a substantial urban population and a regional population they haven't even begun to count. I even understand that the city — Orsk, was it? — was crowded with refugees from the fighting to the south. I'm not certain I could convince them of the wisdom of this move, even if I liked the idea myself."

"Mr. President," Taylor said, "I can't respond to that. All I can tell you is that I do not think the time has come to surrender."

"Now" — the secretary of state jumped in—"we're not talking about a surrender. The options under discussion are disengagement, an open withdrawal from the zone of conflict under mutual or multilateral guarantees, or, perhaps, a transitional ceasefire in place, to be followed by international regulation of the problem."

"Whatever words you use," Taylor said coldly, "it's still a surrender."

"George," the chairman of the JCS interrupted, "you re overstepping your bounds. Considerably."

Taylor said nothing.

Waters wanted to know what this battered-looking warrior really had to offer. Was there any genuine substance behind the disguise of the uniform?

"Colonel Taylor," Waters said, "I've even had a report from one of your subordinates, a Lieutenant Colonel Reno, that suggests you may not be competent for the position you presently hold. He makes it sound as though you had a pretty bad day."

Taylor's face remained impassive. "Mr. President, if you have any doubts about my performance, you can court-martial me after this is all over. Right now, just let me fight."

Waters measured the man. For a moment, Taylor was more immediate, more absolutely present in the room, than were any of the flesh-and-blood advisers. Time suspended its rules, and Waters slipped into old visions, accompanied by the aftertaste of a cheeseburger.

"Colonel Taylor," the President said slowly, "have you ever been bitten by a police dog?"

"No, sir."

"Neither was I. But my father was. Marching down a road in Alabama, with empty hands and a head full of dreams. They sent in the dogs… and my father was bitten very badly. It was a long time ago. I was not born in time to see those things. But my father had a powerful command of our language. When he described the fear he felt facing those dogs, well, his listeners felt it too. The dogs chewed him until he ran with blood. Yet, the very next day, he was out there again, marching and singing. He was even more afraid than he had been before, but, as he never tired of telling me, it might have been a very different world if he and just a few other frightened young men and women had given up." Waters tapped a pencil against an empty china cup. "My father… did not live to see his son become President of the United States. He died of Runciman's disease while I was off giving congressional campaign speeches to dwindling audiences. But I know that he would expect me to face those dogs today." Waters laid down the pencil and considered the image of Taylor on the screen. "The only problem is that I'm not quite sure what that means in this context. Does 'facing the dogs' mean sending one Colonel Taylor and his men back into battle with their sabers drawn — or is that merely avoidance, sending other men to face the dogs for me. Perhaps… facing the dogs means taking responsibility for my own bad decisions and cutting our losses."

"Mr. President," Taylor said flatly, "to quit now would be cowardice."

"That's enough, Colonel," the chairman said.

Waters merely nodded and looked down at his empty hands. They were smooth and unmarred by physical labor. Or by animal teeth.

"Colonel Taylor," he said, "I have to make a decision. I'm not going to keep you hanging on any longer than necessary. We're going to drop you off the network now, but I want you to be standing by in exactly thirty minutes. I'm going to go over everything one last time with the people in this room, then I'll give you my answer — oh, by the way — you didn't mention the disturbances in Baku in your plan. Have you seen the imagery?

"Yes, sir."

"And what do you think about it? Doesn't that complicate your operation?"

"Not necessarily. In fact, the demonstrations may provide us with a very good local diversion, if they continue. The Japanese must be worried as hell about their coming over the wall."

Waters pursed his face into a quizzical expression. "What do you mean by that? What do you think those demonstrations are all about?"

"Well," Taylor said, "my S-2 thinks it's pretty clear. And I agree with him. The Japanese are learning the same lesson we had to learn the hard way. In Teheran.

Waters thought for a moment. "Then you believe those demonstrations are anti-Japanese?"

Taylor looked surprised by the question. "Of course. It's obvious."

Waters nodded, pondering this brand-new slant. Thank you, Colonel Taylor. You'll be hearing from me in thirty minutes."

Taylor's image faded from the screen.

For a moment, there was a dull silence, reflecting the inertia of weary men. Then the secretary of state shook his patrician head in wonder.

"The man's crazy," he said.

"Good to see you, Tucker," Taylor said, rising to meet his old comrade. He tried to call up a smile, but an important part of him remained with the President, awaiting a decision.

"What the hell, George, you're looking ugly as ever." Colonel Williams extended his hand.

Taylor held out his bandaged paw.

Williams hesitated to accept it. "What the hell happened to you this time, George?"

Taylor went the extra distance and grasped Williams's hand, shaking it firmly.

"My own stupidity," Taylor said. "Minor stuff. I just wanted to make sure I collected another Purple Heart."

Williams laughed, but the sound was buried under the racket of the tactical operations center. The regiment had established its headquarters in a small network of field shelters near Orenburg, in Assembly Area Platinum. The facility offered good camouflage, light ballistic protection, and no defense whatsoever, should the new Japanese weapons descend through the darkness. The staff worked hectically, as was the American custom, and no one seemed bothered by the threat of a Scrambler attack. The weapons were so overpowering that men quickly blocked them out of their immediate consciousness, as soldiers from an earlier generation had done with nuclear weapons, or as men had learned to do with the plague.

Williams pulled a younger man into the circle of power defined by the two colonels. A warrant officer. Fresh-faced kid lugging a briefcase that hardly suited the field environment.

"George, this is my wonder boy, the one who broke the bank. He's all raring to go, just dying to get into the fight." Williams smiled happily at the younger man. "Chief Ryder, this is Colonel Georgie Taylor. The Colonel George Taylor."

"Honored to meet you, sir," the warrant officer said in an absentminded voice, as though he were thinking of things far away. He wavered about offering his hand to Taylor, eyes dwelling on the dirty bandage. But Taylor snared the boy and gave him a welcoming handshake even as he sensed that something was wrong. There was something about the kid, something uncannily familiar…

"Welcome to the Seventh Cav," Taylor said.

"So, George?" Williams said. "What's the word? We get the green light?"

"Still waiting," Taylor replied in disgust. "The President's making his decision right now. With the NSC."

"And all the fucking straphangers, I bet," Williams said. He made an exaggeratedly sour face. "Christ, I know one of those sonsofbitches personally, old Cliff Bouquette from the Agency. Talk about a worthless, lying, overdressed piece of shit."

"I'm worried, Tucker."

Williams folded his arms across his big chest, nodding. "Poor old Waters just doesn't have a handle on this stuff. But, what the hell can you expect, when less than five percent of the members of Congress have ever worn a uniform. They read a fucking book by another peckerhead who's never tied on a combat boot, and suddenly they're military reformers. Jesus Christ, the country needs a goddamned draft. Even if it only applies to freshmen congressmen."

Taylor nodded, used to Williams. "I almost thought I had him. I thought he was going to say yes. He seemed on the verge of it."

As he spoke Taylor could not help turning his eyes again and again to Ryder. It was as if he had known him, years before. Yet that was obviously impossible. The warrant officer was too young.

Who the hell did he resemble?

"Chief?" Williams said. "Why don't you head over to the deuce's shop and introduce yourself. Colonel Taylor and I need to talk."

"Yes, sir." Ryder ducked his head slightly in obedience, rendered a halting salute, and moved off in search of the intelligence section.

"Good boy," Williams told Taylor as soon as the warrant was out of earshot. "Computer tech. Absolutely brilliant. Not a field soldier, of course. I'm counting on you to take care of him, Georgie."

Taylor barely responded. His head moved slightly, but it was clear that his thoughts were elsewhere.

"That bad?" Williams asked.

Taylor shrugged. "I don't know." He clenched his hands into fists, bouncing them off each other, a boxer testing his gloves. The discomfort in his burned hand did not even register on him. "Damnit, I thought he was going to give me the go-ahead. Talking about his father and Alabama. Rousing stuff. Right off the campaign trail. Then he backed down at the last minute and told me he'd just made up his mind to make up his mind in a little while."

"Washington's not as crazy about all this as they were this morning, I take it?"

Taylor snorted. "That's a fucking understatement. You can hear them all running for the trees from here."

"I'll just bet that little puss Bouquette has his snout in it," Williams said. "Typical goddamned civilian hotshot. I never knew him to get a single tough intel call right. But he's got terrific connections. Never wore a uniform, unless it was at some overseas prep school. But he figures he knows your job and mine by virtue of family lineage and intuition."

Taylor did not respond. He knew of Bouquette. More than he wanted to know. Courtesy of Daisy.

He wondered if Daisy was still there, in the same room as Waters. But better not to think of all that now.

"Hard day, George?" Williams asked. His tone of voice made it very clear that he understood as only another warrior might understand.

Taylor looked at him. "I lost Dave Heifetz," he said matter-of-factly. "In the Scrambler business. And Manny Martinez. They hit us at Omsk on the way out." Williams looked pensive. "Didn't know Martinez. But Heifetz was a hell of a soldier."

"Yes. He was that." Taylor turned his head in disgust. "And here I am talking about him as though he's dead. While the poor bastard's bundled up in a wing-in-ground, pissing all over himself and wondering what on earth happened… and what's going to happen." Taylor took a step to the side, as if trying to move away from himself. "God almighty. I just don't know what to do for him. And for all the rest of them. What do you do, Tucker? What on earth do you do? You know what it's like to write the letters to the wives or parents when some poor trooper buys the farm. But what the fuck do you write when Johnny's coming home as a physical vegetable with unimpaired emotions and a perfect grasp of the world around him. With memories of what women are like, with—

"George. You're tired."

"No. Really. What in-the-name-of-Christ do you do? Send the folks back home a catalog for oversize cribs and disposable diapers? Oh, by the way, Mrs. Jones, your husband may prove a disappointment to you on several counts, owing to his recent unfortunate term of military service. Jesus, Tucker… it's a hell of a thing to find yourself wishing that your own men had died."

"Maybe we'll find a cure."

"Yeah."

"Heifetz was a damned good man.

"And a hell of a lot life gave him for it. And Manny. Martinez. Tucker, I can't tell you what a good man he was. I'm lost without him."

Williams smiled. "George, you've never been lost in your life. Why, hell. You even found your way out of Africa without so much as a credit card or a supply of condoms."

Taylor could not smile. He retreated into silence.

"You remember," Williams went on, "lying in that damned tent in the Azores? Playing poker with the grim reaper. And I lectured you for all the saints and sinners to hear about how I was going to clean up Military Intelligence. You know what I was always thinking, George? I was shooting off my mouth and thinking, Jesus Christ. I wish I had whatever the hell it is this guy Taylor's got. You used to lie on your bunk and look right through me. You didn't need me to explain the world to you. You already knew the things I was struggling to figure out." Williams smiled into his reminiscences. "Anyway, we came a hell of a lot further than either of us had much right to expect."

"Not far enough," Taylor said.

"Not yet. But maybe we're underestimating the President after all. He just may give us the green light."

"I don't know. Everybody's telling him to head for the bushes."

"Well, hope for the best."

Taylor sighed. "I gave it my best shot. Tucker. I really did. But I'm just so goddamned tired. I couldn't get the words to come out right. All I could think was how I wanted to reach out and grab him and shake the shit out of him. To bring home to him what it means if we quit now. Damn it, though," Taylor said. "All my life I've had a healthy respect for language. I read the good books. I paid attention. I always tried to write op orders in clean, clear language. I valued words, crazy as that sounds. But, when I really needed the right words, they wouldn't come."

"You can't do it all by yourself, George. What the hell, if the chickenshit bastards tell us to come home, it'll be on their heads. You and me can retire and go fishing."

"No," Taylor said emphatically. "It'll be on our heads. The Army will have failed. That's what the black words on the white pages are going to say."

"Fuck 'em, then."

Taylor glanced down at the dirty bandage on his hand and shook the burned paw lightly, without really thinking about it.

"You should've seen Lucky Dave," he said. "Tucker, I honestly did not think I could bear it. Maybe I don't have what it takes to be a soldier after all."

"When's the President supposed to get back to you?" Taylor glanced at his watch. "Seven minutes."

Down the length of the central environmental shelter, the internal entrance flap pushed to the side and a man in a Soviet uniform entered the headquarters complex. As the man straightened up in the dusky light, Taylor recognized Kozlov. He was glad to see him, anxious for any help he could get. Would the Soviets come through?

As Taylor watched, Merry Meredith came out of the S-2's compartment and headed over to greet the Russian.

Merry was the only one of them left now. Of the men Taylor trusted. And loved.

Taylor looked at Tucker Williams. It was odd how relationships developed in the Army. Taylor was never completely sure whether Williams should be classed as an acquaintance or a friend. There were varying degrees of intimacy in the military. Taylor always worked well with

Williams, respected him, and willingly drank a few beers with him whenever their paths crossed at some overly laminated officer's club. Yet, a nebulous spiritual gulf remained between them. Williams was right. In the Azores Taylor had, indeed, looked right through him, his thoughts in a different world.

There had been only Meredith, Martinez, and Heifetz, a brotherhood assembled by the odd chance of a bad year, by the simple accident of change-of-station orders and discovered affinities. And now only Meredith was left.

"I'd better get back to the comms bubble," Taylor said. "Keep your fingers crossed, Tucker."

"Will do."

Taylor began to turn away, just as a lightning bolt of recognition struck right through him. He had to call up his last reserves of determination in order to keep going, telling himself that it was all just the oversensitivity that came with weariness, a matter of emotional as well as physical exhaustion. The coincidence was absolute nonsense.

He had realized of whom Williams's young warrant officer reminded him. It was uncanny, as if the Hindus were dead right about the constant cycles, the endless and inevitable returnings.

Ryder reminded him of the young warrant officer who had been his copilot and weapons officer in Zaire, the broken boy who had pleaded for water until Taylor shot him in the head.

Daisy listened. She thought she would go mad. Wanting to speak, to cry out to them all that it was time to put an end to the folly, she could not find the opportunity or the courage. Her opinion was not asked as the men in the room labored through all of the arguments against further military action one more time. Unanimously, the President's advisers shared her view that it would be insane and pointless to accede to Taylor's wishes.

The Soviets, on the other hand, were no help at all. Speaking to Waters, the Soviet president had seemed preoccupied, inexplicably removed from the matters at hand. Readily agreeing to anything Waters suggested, the

Soviet seemed, above all else, to want to bring the conversation to a speedy end. Moscow seemed fractured. State security had been cooperating wholeheartedly with U.S. Army Intelligence on the scheme to strike the Japanese command computer system, while the Soviet Ministry of Defense seemed ready to run up the white flag. Something disturbing was going on in the Kremlin, and it gnawed at Daisy that she could not figure it out.

In any case, the raid was a hopeless idea. It was an act of desperation, conceived by a man who could not face reality. They all agreed. Yet, not one of them stated it with sufficient clarity and emphasis for her. She wanted to be absolutely certain that the President understood the absurdity of Taylor's vision. She had begun to trust Waters's judgment. But, given all of the evidence that had been presented, she could not believe the man had allowed the deliberations to drag on this long. It was indisputably clear that Waters needed to disengage American forces as rapidly as possible and bring the troops home.

To bring Taylor home. Alive.

On the sole occasion when she legitimately might have spoken up, she had held her tongue. The President had grilled Bouquette for the third time about the massed crowds in Baku, and Bouquette had repeated his conviction that Taylor was simply an old soldier who did not understand international realities. Of course the demonstrations were pro-Japanese and anti-American. Nothing else made sense.

Daisy had known better. Bouquette was a bureaucrat, while she had worked her way up this far with no adornment other than her talent as an analyst. And upon seeing the first scan images of the crowds in downtown Baku, then the pictures of the mob ringing the Japanese headquarters compound, she had recognized instantly that the Japanese were in trouble. Taylor, in a few simple words, had summarized her views. Those crowds bore with them the unmistakable odor of hostility.

But she did not care about the truth anymore. She did not care about the fate of nations. She realized that all of it was nothing but nonsense, games for grown-up boys without the courage to accept what really mattered in life.

Had the President asked directly for her opinion, she would have stood up and lied.

All she wanted was the return of that scarred, weary, frightened man whose features had appeared so briefly on the communications monitor.

"And what about the charge of unfitness?" President Waters asked. "What do we know about this Lieutenant Colonel Reno? Why should I put any credence whatsoever in his accusations?"

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff raised his hand from the table as if freeing a small bird. "I don't know Lieutenant Colonel Reno personally, Mr. President. But I knew his father. Good family. Army since Christ was a corporal. If you'll excuse the expression, sir."

"Mr. President," Bouquette jumped in, "I can second that. I worked for General Reno when he chaired the old interagency group. Any son of his would stand for the old tried-and-true values."

"I take it," Waters said quietly, "that Colonel Taylor does not spring from a good, old family?"

Bouquette and the chairman glanced at each other, sensing that they had maneuvered themselves into a dangerous position. After a brief mental holding action, the chairman replied matter-of-factly:

"Mr. President, I know nothing of Colonel Taylor's antecedents."

"But the man has a good military record?"

"Yes, sir. Colonel Taylor has a remarkable military record. But… even the scrappiest street-fighter may not turn out to be Olympic boxing material. Personally, I've always been fond of George Taylor. But we have to bear in mind that we just may have taken a superb tactical soldier and elevated him beyond his competence. Certainly, if I had to go back to, say, Mexico, I'd want George Taylor in my foxhole. Fine, fine soldier. But we may have asked too much of him by putting him in so independent and sensitive a position."

Waters nodded. "All right. Next issue. From a purely military standpoint, what chance would Colonel Taylor's operation have of success?"

This time the chairman did not require a pause to analyze the situation. "Only the slightest. One in ten? One in a hundred? It's not really possible to quantify it, as Colonel Taylor himself pointed out. But, you see, Mr. President, an operation of that kind requires careful and extensive planning… weeks, if not months, of rehearsals. You've got to war-game every possible contingency. Ideally, you'd want to build a mock-up of the Japanese headquarters complex, for instance. And you heard what Colonel Taylor admitted — he'd have to rely on the Soviets for refueling. Now, the Soviets are trying to look cooperative, but I personally don't believe they're about to support any more grand offensive operations, in the wake of what happened at Orsk. Turning over that computer brain, for instance — I suspect they were just anxious to get rid of the damned thing. They're passing the hot potato and they just want their fingers to stop burning." The chairman looked down at the fine wood of the tabletop. "George Taylor's a good soldier, and he doesn't want to admit he's licked. I admire him for that. But we have to take the broader perspective, sir. If nothing else, you can't just run an operation like this off the cuff. I'm willing to go on record to say I am one hundred percent opposed to this endeavor."

"You don't think," Waters asked gently, "that desperate times may call for desperate actions?"

The chairman put down his hand, retrapping the invisible bird.

"Desperate? Perhaps, Mr. President. But not foolhardy."

"Any further reverses at the hands of the Japanese," the secretary of state added, "would only lessen our international stature. As it is, we may even claim a substantial achievement in the direct effects of our latest generation of weaponry. We may even be able to turn around the world's perception of the Japanese, to advertise the fact that these Scramblers are inhuman. If we go cautiously and avoid further provocations, we may be able to draw a certain — and not inconsiderable — amount of political capital from all this."

Waters nodded. "I'm anxious to hear your view, Miles," he said to the national security adviser, who had been working studiously on his fingernails.

Ambushed, the man looked up in surprise. "Well, Mr. President… I think it's all perfectly clear. The Russians want to call it a day. They're heading for the lifeboats. We'd be fools to let ourselves get caught in the middle." Waters began tapping his pencil on his china cup again. The air in the room was very bad, despite the efforts of the ventilation system.

"Thank you," Waters said, "for your assessment. Now, Cliff," he turned to Bouquette. "Back to the intelligence front. Are you in a position yet to guarantee that there will be no new surprises?"

Bouquette looked embarrassed. He rose to his feet with considerably less alacrity than was his habit, touching the line of his tie.

"Unfortunately, Mr. President, I can't offer you such a guarantee. As you know, intelligence work is very complex. And, admittedly, we failed at least part of our test. I am, in fact, already working through a draft plan to streamline and improve the Agency's performance. I'd like to make it my personal mission to ensure that such a failure, however understandable, does not happen again."

"Thank you, Cliff."

"Mr. President?" Bouquette continued. He fingered his tie again, hand moving closer to the knot. "I feel I should add a comment about this Colonel Williams you've been hearing about. The one who came up with this cracked-brain idea in the first place, according to Colonel Taylor. You see, I've known Colonel Williams for years. The intelligence community is one big family. And, while one may have reasonable doubts about Colonel Taylor's qualifications, I can state categorically that it was a considerable error to allow Colonel Williams to deploy forward in the first place. Had he worked for me, the man would have been out of a job a long time ago. But these people sometimes slip through the system. Colonel Williams is the sort who enjoys turning over the apple cart, then leaving the mess for the more dutiful to clean up. He is exactly the sort who brings discredit upon the labors of the hardworking men and women of the intelligence community.

He is self-aggrandizing, and he is not a team player. He is definitely not to be trusted."

President Waters gave the china cup a last good tap with his pencil and asked, "You wouldn't happen to know, would you, Cliff, whether or not this Colonel Williams comes from a good, old family?"

"Mr. President," Bouquette stammered, "as you know,

I would never suggest… as regards Lieutenant Colonel Reno, I was only commenting that his family was known to me personally. But I certainly did not mean to suggest… after all, we all realize that this is the United States of America…"

"Thank you, Cliff." If nothing else, Waters thought, even if I have failed in my office, if I lose the election by the greatest majority in history, and even if I go down in the books as the most pathetically inept of presidents, I have had the satisfaction of seeing Clifton Reynard Bouquette nonplussed.

Waters glanced at the clock on the wall.

"Well, gentlemen," he said. "The time has come for me to make my decision. I feel that each of you has made his position abundantly clear. If anyone wishes to offer a last counterview, please do so, but it appears to me that you are unanimously opposed to any further offensive military action, and that you are specifically opposed to the plan recommended by Colonel Taylor."

The required moment of silence dusted the room, then the secretary of state said:

"I think that sums it up, Mr. President."

Waters looked around the room one last time, briefly inspecting each fixed expression. The girl, now, Bouquette's sidekick, she had fire in her eyes. Waters knew the type. The smart unattractive girls who expected the Joan of Arc story to have a happy ending the next time around.

"All right," Waters said. "Connect me with Colonel Taylor."

There was no delay. In a moment, Taylor's face filled the screen. It was evident that he had been waiting, and now Waters could read explicit worry in the haggard features.

Life hasn’t been very kind to that poor bastard, Waters thought.

"Colonel Taylor? Can you hear me all right?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Colonel Taylor, we’ve discussed your proposition at length, and I have to tell you that my advisers are uniformly opposed to the action."

Taylor flinched, as if punched hard in the body.

"Yes, Mr. President."

"The consensus is that this raid would have little chance of success, that it would be foolhardy, and that it could well do great harm to our negotiating position and international standing."

"Mr. President—"

"Don’t interrupt me, Colonel. I’m not finished. As I said: all of my advisers are opposed to your plan. It appears that there are only two people involved who are not yet ready to run up the white flag. By coincidence, Colonel, those two people are you and I."

The room stiffened around Waters. But no one said a word.

"Colonel Taylor, I direct you to implement your plan as presented to me. I will take it upon myself to delay any unilateral actions by the Soviets for — how long will you need?"

"Thirty-six hours," Taylor said hastily.

"For forty-eight hours, then. To give us a margin of error. The decision will be on record as mine alone. So be it. You see, Colonel, I can be thickheaded at times, but I believe I’ve finally figured out who the police dogs belong to this time around. And I am not yet ready to quit marching."

Taylor opened his mouth to speak, but Daisy was quicker. She rose from her chair, taking a single step forward.

"You can’t," she cried. "You can't. They don t have a chance. Everybody knows they don’t have a chance.

You’re crazy."

The room went as silent as the interior of a glacier. On the monitor, Taylor wavered slightly, as if trying to gain a better view against the laws of physics. Waters looked at the enraged woman.

"Thank you for your opinion, Miss Fitzgerald," he said quietly. "Please sit down now."

Daisy sat down. Her forehead had broken out with sweat and her blouse hung limply about her. She drew back into her chair as if shrinking, and her eyes stared into a personal distance.

"I will repeat myself to ensure that everything is clear to all parties concerned," Waters said. "Colonel Taylor, you are directed to strike the enemy as foreseen by your plan. The responsibility for this decision rests with the President of the United States alone." Waters looked up at the ruined face in the monitor. For a moment, he imagined that he saw a watery light in the warrior's eyes. But that was clearly an accident of lenses and technological effects.

"Yes, sir," the distant voice responded.

Waters looked for the last time into the face of this man whom he knew he would never understand. They were as different as two men could be, and only a brief spasm of history had brought them together.

"And may God be with you," Waters said.

22

Kozlov came back in from the communications cell. He was smiling broadly, and the brown wreckage of his teeth gave his mouth the appearance of a derelict cave.

"General Ivanov has said that we will help you, he announced to the assembled members of the planning group, clearly very proud that he could make this contribution. "Moscow has approved. Your president has spoken with them. The fuel will be provided."

"Good," Taylor said. He had just been working through the selection of the M-l00s in the most battleworthy condition, and he felt the loss of Martinez badly. Martinez would have known best about the status of the combat systems and how to handle the details of the fuel transfer. "That's fine, Viktor. But how about the refueling site itself?"

"It is all right," Kozlov said. "We still hold a large pocket here" — he pointed to the map spread over the worktable—"to the east of the Volga estuary. It should meet the time-distance planning factors."

The men bent over the map: Taylor and Kozlov, Meredith and Parker, who was functioning as the acting S-3, Tucker Williams — and Ryder, whose presence remained unsettling to Taylor. Meredith defined the area in question with a marker, under Kozlov's direction. Reflected off the map, the Russian's breath punished the American officers.

But it did not matter; Kozlov was so clearly anxious to help, to do his very best, that everyone was glad of his presence. He also appeared to be the only member of the group who had gotten any real sleep in days.

"I hate like hell to make a pit stop on the way in," Taylor said. "But putting down on the way out would be even worse. We've got a good shot at going in undetected But after we've hit them, they'll be looking for us with everything they've got. And our asses seem to stick out.

"The numbers work," Hank Parker said, turning from his computer workstation. "If we top off just to the east of Astrakhan, where Lieutenant Colonel Kozlov indicated, we should have adequate fuel to reach the target conduct the action at the objective, and still make it all the way back to the follow-on assembly area."

"In the vicinity of Saratov," Meredith picked up. "In the old Volga German region."

"Not much margin of error, though," Tucker Williams said.

Taylor shrugged. "This is strictly a low-budget operation."

"This will be very good," Kozlov said, still excited. He initially had seemed to have grave doubts as to whether or not" General Ivanov would be willing or able to help out, and the immediately forthcoming Soviet agreement to help apparently had surprised him more than anyone. "The area where you will take on the fuel is not a developed one, and the enemy has contented himself with the bypassing of our forces in the estuary. There is very much open space here, to the east. It will be very good."

"And General Ivanov is absolutely certain he can provide us with the fuel?" Taylor asked, still slightly skeptical of this very good luck. "At that location? On time?

"Oh, yes," Kozlov said brightly.

"Good. That certainly makes a difference." He turned to Meredith. "Lay that map of the Baku area back down, Merry. Let's go over that again with Viktor and see what he thinks."

Meredith stretched another map across the table. After trying to squeeze in around an undersized computer screen, the planning group had returned to the use of old-fashioned tools, incidentally making the work much easier for Kozlov.

"Viktor," Taylor said, "we've looked over the terrain, and the overhead shots and the map make it look like the best approach is to come in low from the north, using the peninsula to shield us. What do you think?"

Kozlov appeared doubtful. "Yes, I think you can do that, should you wish. But perhaps another way is better. You see, there are radar sites hidden on the ridge of the peninsula. But have you thought to come in from the east? Over the water? You see, there are many oil towers — what is the English word?"

"Derricks?" Meredith asked.

"Yes. The derricks. They are of metals. You would have natural radar shielding effects. I know, because our radars were always blind in this sector."

"Fuck me," Colonel Williams said. He had been munching on a packet of dehydrated pears from the field rations. "You still can't beat firsthand knowledge of your area of operations."

"You see, this is very good," Kozlov continued. "There are many landmarks for the eye as well as for the computer. And to come in such a way over the city, there are no air defenses." He traced over the corner of the map where an outsize city plan had been inserted. "You see? Over here is the tower of television. But you will come from here. There will be the high building of the Moscow Hotel and there is Kirov Park. From there it is easy."

"That'll take us right in over the mob scene," Colonel Williams said. "If the buggers are still out there."

"I think they will not have air defense weapons," Kozlov said.

"Check," Taylor said. "Okay, Viktor. Are there any obstructions on this parade ground or whatever it is in front of the headquarters? Anything the imagery might not clearly indicate?"

"No. Unless there would be trucks that day. It is very flat. I remember clearly. In the spring, the water would not drain properly. It was terrible for the shoes."

"Okay. You've seen the M-l00s. How many birds can we put down in there? In your view?"

"I think only six. Perhaps seven."

"Great. That's more space than we need. We ran the mensuration from the available imagery, but it's good to hear it from somebody who's walked the ground."

"You know," Kozlov said, "that there is also the roof here. It is not marked, but it is reinforced to act as a helipad. It is quite big. Can you land on a regular helipad?" Taylor grew extremely interested. "Piece of cake. And that's the roof of the main headquarters building?"

"Yes. This is always for the helicopter of the general."

"Better and better. So we can access the building from up there?"

Kozlov looked up blankly. Taylor's turn of phrase had baffled him. Meredith quickly put the question into Russian.

Kozlov's expression eased. "Oh, yes. Although it may be guarded."

Taylor reached for a detailed sketch Kozlov had provided of the building's various levels.

"All right, Viktor. You're convinced that this room will still be the ops center?"

"It must be so. Only this room is of a big enough size and with so much wiring."

"All right. And this should be the computer room?"

Kozlov chewed his lip with his coffee-colored teeth. "I must think it to be. All of the specialized wiring is only to here and then to here, you see. We had great problems in the remaking of the wires in the building. It is so old."

"You don't think they might have rewired the place?" Kozlov shrugged. "I cannot tell. But it would be very hard."

"All right. We'll just have to take our chances on that. Now, if we were to put one ship down on the helipad, say three in the central courtyard, with two flying cover for us all… how would the team from the helipad get down to the computer room and the ops center?"

Kozlov traced his finger along the mock blueprint. "There is perhaps a very good way. Here is the private lift for the general, but that is too dangerous, I think. Then there is a stairwell."

"Here?" Taylor asked, bending very close to the map to read the plan that Kozlov had drawn by hand while riding in an aircraft. Taylor's finger touched a small shaded square.

"Yes. That is the stairwell. You must go down three flights of the stairs. Then you are in the main corridor. The operations center and the computer room are only here. It is very good."

"Well, that's convenient," Williams said.

Taylor nodded. "It's great. If we can get down those goddamned stairs. That stairwell's a death trap, if ever there was one."

Everyone looked at Taylor. The dead skin on his face had turned to wax. There had not even been time to splash water over the layers of oil, dirt, and exhaustion that each of the Americans wore.

Taylor snorted. "But I don't see much choice. It's too direct a route to pass up." He looked at Kozlov. "We'll try it, Viktor. The fire teams from the main raiding force can strike from the parade ground. We'll link up, if we can. If not, they'll at least provide a hell of a diversion for us." Taylor shook his head. "I hate stairwell fights, though. I lost a damned good NCO that way when we had to retake the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara."

"The classic surgical strike," Colonel Williams commented, studying the map over Taylor's shoulder.

Taylor straightened, twisting the stiffness out of his back. "Wouldn't call it that at all, Tucker. This is a classic raid. Strike unexpectedly. Take out everything that moves. Do your business. And un-ass the area. Surprise, shock, speed… and all the firepower you can put out." Taylor turned to Meredith and Parker. "I want to hit them at sunset. We'll be coming out of the east, riding out of the darkness. I want to strike when there's just enough twilight for us to get our bearings visually, but when it's already dark enough to fuck with their heads." Taylor broadened his gaze to include the rest of the planning team. "We're going to come out of the sky like death itself. We're going to bring them fear."

Taylor shifted his field of fire to Ryder. It was difficult for him to look at the young warrant, because it was then so difficult to look away. The resemblance to the young man who had died so miserably in Africa was the stuff of bad, bad luck.

"Chief," Taylor said, "how much time are you going to need once we boot your ass into that computer room?"

Ryder shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his expression distinctly uncertain. He was obviously out of his element.

"Fifteen minutes?" Colonel Williams prompted.

"I guess so," Ryder said. He had a flat, midwestern accent.

"Don't fucking guess," Taylor said sternly. "Tell us how much time you're going to need."

The young warrant reddened. "If everything's in working order," he said, "I think half an hour would be best. If that's all right. See, I've got to insert—"

"Thirty minutes," Taylor said. "You got it. Now. Merry. Give me what you've got on possible enemy response forces. Who are they, where are they, what's the reaction time? You know the list of questions."

"Yes, sir." Meredith began. "Within the facility itself…"

The men labored through schematics and figures, turning again and again to the automated support systems or to subordinate staff officers and NCOs. Neglected cups of coffee went cold. To each man, the process was as familiar as could be, and even Kozlov slipped easily into the pattern of the universal details of staff work. Warning orders went out to the volunteer crews, along with photocopies of maps and the building plans. Junior leaders gathered to listen to Hank Parker, whose stature seemed to grow by the hour, while Meredith grilled others on potential threats and contingencies, forcing them to actively remember the crucial details of his briefing. No man had any healthy energy left. They continued to function only by the grace of the wide-awake tablets and individual strength of will. The importance of each moment prodded them along, yet it was important not to hurry so much that errors or oversights occurred. The genius of good staff work was always a matter of striking exactly the right balance between speed and thoroughness — and recognizing immediately when that balance shifted as the circumstances of the battlefield changed. Right now, the paramount enemy was the clock.

In the early morning hours, Taylor and Tucker Williams found themselves alone over disposable cups of coffee that really held only heated, disinfected water with a bit of brown color added.

"George," Williams said, "you need to catch a little rest. Those dark circles are going to be getting caught under your boots."

Taylor nodded. "I just have to go back over the ammo up-load figures." He sighed as though the years had finally overtaken him. "Christ, I feel like a brand-new butterbar locked in a supply room that just failed the IG. Old Manny picked a hell of a time to get himself killed."

"I'm sure he feels bad about it too," Williams said. "Listen, George — where am I riding? With you in the command bird? Or do you want me in another ship, just in case?"

"You're not going, Tucker."

Williams blustered like a character from an old cartoon. "What do you mean, you sorry sonofabitch? Whose goddamned idea was all this, anyway?"

"You're not going."

"The hell I'm not. You're going to need me, George."

"No," Taylor said matter-of-factly, "I'm not going to need you. One more shriveled-up bird colonel won't make a lick of difference tomorrow." He glanced automatically at his watch. "Today, I mean. Nope, I don't need you, Tucker. But the Army needs you. And the Army's going to need you more than ever after all this is over. You're going to have to finish what you started. Cleaning up all the shit."

"Don't give me one of your speeches, George."

Taylor waved a hand at his old comrade. "No speeches. I just hate to think of the U.S. Army having to do without both of us. Wouldn't be a decent scandal for at least ten years."

The two men sat quietly for a moment. The words between them had not been as important as the absolutely clear but unarticulated understanding that left no room for further argument: Taylor was the mission commander, and he had decided that Williams was not going. Therefore, Williams knew that he was not going. The rest was merely a ritual.

Williams knocked back a slug of the bad water masquerading as coffee. "George," he said seriously, "you don't sound like you think this one's going to be very clean."

Taylor twisted up his dead lips as though he were chewing a cud of tobacco. "Truth be told, I don't know what the hell to expect. Too many variables." Then he grinned. "So I'm just doing what comes naturally. And we'll see what happens."

The old intelligence colonel laid a hand on his friend's forearm.

"George," he said, "you take care. I'd miss you, you know." He chuckled. "I haven't seen all that much of you over the years. But I always knew you were out there. I always said to myself, 'Tucker, they may call you crazy. But you ain't half as crazy as that sonofabitch Georgie Taylor.' It was always reassuring." He fretted his hand on the cloth of Taylor's uniform. "I'm just not ready to assume the mantle of the U.S. Army's number one damned-fool lunatic."

"Don't underestimate yourself," Taylor said with a dead man's smile.

Williams shook his head and casually withdrew his hand.

"Well, do me one favor," he told Taylor. "Just don't fuck it all up, okay?"

Taylor looked at the worn face beside him. Veteran of so many mutual disappointments, of so much trying.

"Not if I can help it," Taylor said.

For the first time in days, Noburu's dreams did not wake him. This time it was a bomb.

At first, everything was unclear. He woke from haunted sleep as if his bed had convulsed and coughed him up. Unsure of his state, he sat upright in a waking trance, gripping the darkness as if falling. Was he dreaming this too?

The last echo of the blast receded, leaving an emptiness quickly filled by the noise of automatic weapons and the muffled but unmistakable sound of human cries from the far edge of reason.

Noburu reached toward the light just as the intercom beeped. The message began without the usual ceremonious greeting.

"They're coming over the wall," the voice warned. Volume turned down, the intercom had shrunken the voice and it sounded oddly comic: a midget in terror.

Noburu hurried into his trousers.

"— a bomb—" the voice went on.

Noburu grasped his tunic, shooting an arm down its sleeve.

"— the gate—"

Conditioned by an eternity of mornings, Noburu took up his pistol belt, strapping it on over his open uniform blouse.

Machine guns sputtered beyond the headquarters walls. Storm tides of voices swept forward. The floor pulsed underfoot as dozens of men hurried along nearby corridors.

"— local guards deserted—"

Another blast. But this one was distinctly less powerful.

Akiro burst into the room. The aide's brown eyes burned.

"Sir," Akiro barked. But the younger man could think of nothing further to say. He had been sleeping. Noburu noted that his normally precise aide had neglected to do up the fly of his trousers. It struck Noburu as odd that he still had the capacity to notice such details with death already brushing its cold fur up against him.

Noburu crossed to the wall where heavy draperies covered a window of bulletproof glass. He touched a button offset from the meaty fabric and the curtain parted.

Nothing to be seen. The fighting was around the other side of the compound, and despite the bluster of automatic weaponry, from Noburu's bedroom a man could see only the nighttime peace of the city cuddled around the bay. Beyond the moraine of buildings, the sea lay naked under voluptuous moonlight. It was a powerful and romantic view, and the background noise of combat seemed grotesquely inappropriate, as though the wrong sound track had been supplied for a film.

It occurred to Noburu that Tokyo would much prefer this view of things, but before he could smile a firebomb traced across the dark sky, tail on fire. It struck a balustrade a bit below Noburu's lookout point and flames spilled backward over a terraced roof.

"Come on," Noburu told his aide. "And pull up your zipper."

Noburu jogged out through his office and into the corridor, with Akiro close behind, trying to reason with the older man.

"Sir," Akiro pleaded, "you must stay here. You must remain where we can guarantee your safety."

Only when the closed elevator doors temporarily blocked his path did Noburu turn any serious attention to the younger man.

"Nothing is guaranteed," he said calmly. "Least of all, my safety."

The sliding doors opened with a delicate warning chime. Inside stood Colonel Piet Kloete, the senior South African representative on the staff. Two of his NCOs stood beside him. All three of the men were heavily armed. Kloete himself looked ferocious with a light machine gun cradled in his arms, while the other two soldiers had loaded themselves down with autorifles, grenade belts, a light radio, and ammunition tins for Kloete's machine gun. Noburu could not help admiring the appearance of the South Africans. He knew that he had reached an age where he would frighten no one, where a pose behind a machine gun would most likely amuse an enemy. But the South African colonel was at a perfect point in his life, his body still hard. The gray along Kloete's temples resembled reinforcing wires of steel.

"The roof," the South African said to Noburu.

"Yes," Noburu said. "The helipad. The best vantage point."

He entered the elevator. When Akiro tried to follow, Noburu barred the aide's way with a forearm.

"Go down to the operations center," Noburu commanded. "Gather information." He looked at the younger man. The perfect staff officer was out of his depth now. Akiro did not look frightened. He merely looked mortally confused. An orderly man from an orderly world, waking barefoot in a hissing jungle. "And get yourself a rifle," Noburu added.

The doors kissed shut. During the brief ascent, the muted sounds of battle surrounded them, yet the combat remained unreal, almost irrelevant. Voices bubbling down into an aquarium.

"Truck bomb," Kloete said casually. He boosted the machine gun until he had a sounder grip on it. "Fuckers took out the main gate."

The doors parted. Noburu went first, stepping gingerly through the short dark tunnel that led out onto the helipad.

"Bloody fuck-all," one of the South African NCOs spat, stumbling against something audibly metallic.

As the little group emerged from the concrete shelter of the passageway, the night wind off the sea splashed in through Noburu's unbuttoned tunic like ice water and rinsed back through his hair. Brassy flares dripped from the heavens, lighting the compound and the nearby quarter of the city. Lower down, tracer rounds wove in and out of the darkness, while the block of buildings just beyond the barracks complex burned skyward. Apparently, the first assault had been beaten off. There was little human movement in evidence at the moment. Noburu strode briskly across the helipad to gain a better look. The South Africans trotted on ahead, booted feet heavy under the burden of their weaponry.

"Machine gun," Kloete cried, "action." His voice carried the legacy of old British enemies, insinuated into Boer blood and transported now to the shore of the Caspian Sea. Kloete spoke in unmistakably British phrases, muddied by an Afrikaans accent.

The South African's long-barreled weapon began to peck at targets Noburu's aging eyes could not even begin to distinguish.

The body softened, the eyes failed. While the mind remembered youth too well.

As Noburu hunkered down behind the low wall along the edge of the roof, blossoms of flame spread out from under one of the guard towers, a construction that housed sentinels in a bulb atop a long, narrow stalk. Now the tulip came to life. Its base uprooted by the blast, the tower shivered, then seemed to hop, struggling to keep its balance. Finally, the construction's last equilibrium failed and the tower fell over hard, slamming its high concrete compartment down onto the parade ground.

The shouting came before the sound of the guns. Screaming unintelligibly, the Azeris rushed back in through the wreckage of the main gate. The big steel doors had been blown completely off their hinges, and the masonry of the wall looked as jagged as broken bone. Black figures dashed forward, silhouetted by flames. Other shapes dropped over the wall where long stretches of wire had been tom away. The lead figures opened fire with automatic weapons as they ran.

Fresh flares arced. Inside the compound, a crossfire of machine guns opened up. A few of the remaining guard towers laid down a base of fire on the far side of the wall, but other sentry perches remained silent and dark.

Screaming. Falling.

Surely, Noburu thought, these dark men were shouting about their god. No other words would have the power to propel men into this.

The garrison's machine guns swept the invaders off their feet. As Noburu crouched forward to see, a shower of spent shell casings nipped against his cheek and chest, their temperature scalding in the night air.

"Crazy buggers," one of the South African NCOs said to his mate. The man swapped out magazines and leaned back over the low wall that ringed the roof.

"Action left," Kloete cried. His subordinates followed the swing of the machine gun with their own weapons.

Noburu peered into the darkness, trying to follow the red streaks from his companions' weapons, seeking a closer glimpse of this new enemy.

Down on the parade ground, the flares revealed tens of dozens of bodies. Some lay clustered, others sprawled apart. Here a man moved over the cobblestones like an agonized worm, while another twitched, then stilled. Snipers went to ground, then suddenly blasted at the headquarters building, drawing concentrated fire in response.

Noburu had believed that the assault was over, when a fresh wave poured screaming through the gate. Outlined by the inferno across the road, one figure carried a banner aloft. His head had the grossly swollen look of a turbaned man at night. All around him, his followers shrilled.

Noburu thought he heard the word distinctly: "Allah."

"Allah" and then a pair of ruptured syllables, repeated again and again. He knew that his hearing was not much better than his eyesight, and that he might only be imposing the word on their voices. But it felt right. He watched as rivets of machine gun fire fixed the flag bearer to a wall, then let him drop.

Another shadow scooped up the banner.

Kloete cursed and called for another tin of ammunition.

Noburu briefly considered drawing his pistol. But he knew it would only be an empty gesture at this distance, like spitting at the enemy. And he was tired of empty gestures. This was a younger man's fight.

During his career, he had been acutely aware of being a part of history, and he had possessed the gift of casting the moment into the perspective of books yet to be written. But this. This was like being part of someone else's history. When madmen with flags and a god's name on their lips swarmed into the sharp teeth of civilization. This was the stuff of bygone centuries.

The machine guns methodically built up a barrier of corpses where once the steel gates had served. But the Azeris simply climbed over the corpses of their brethren at a run, continuing on to martyrdom.

A dark form raised a hand to hurl something, then toppled too soon. The grenade's explosion rearranged the pile of corpses into which the man had fallen.

"Terrebork," Kloete shouted without taking his cheek off the side of his weapon, "bring up more ammunition."

One of the NCOs mumbled a response and scuttled off toward the elevator.

"Crazy," Kloete said loudly, his voice half-wonder, half-accusation. "They're crazy."

But the automatic weapons made in Honshu or on the

Cape of Good Hope did good work. The assault again dwindled into a sniping between a few riflemen amid the landscape of dead and wounded and the defenders of the compound's interior.

Kloete unlocked the housing of his machine gun to let the weapon cool. He rolled over against the wall. "Shit," he said. Then he noticed Noburu. The South African snorted loudly. "Long way to travel just to shoot your colored," he said. He grinned, teeth white against his powder-grimed face. "Funny, I don't remember this part in any of the briefings." He looked at Noburu with the impolite stare of someone who knew exactly how far things had gone awry, as well as who was to blame.

Noburu said nothing. He simply looked at the hard angles of the man's face. Kloete's skin was burnished by the ambient light of the fires, and he resembled a hardcase private as much as he did a colonel.

"They're all gone, you know," Kloete continued. He tapped along his tunic pockets, then drew out a crushed pack of cigarettes. In the background, desultory gunfire continued. "Your local nationals," he said, settling a bent cigarette between his lips. "All of our little security force allies. Save for a pair of shit-scared officers, who're bloody worthless anyway. Gone over to those crazy buggers." He tossed a spent match over the wall in the direction of the mob. "Took their bloody weapons and jumped. Good thing we had Japs in some of the towers." He narrowed his eyes at Noburu. "Japanese, I mean."

A new sound rose in the background. Singing. An Asian scale as foreign to Noburu's ears as it would have been to Kloete's. At first there were only a few voices. Then more took up the chant. Soon the volume overpowered the last gunfire, echoing off walls and rolling through the streets until the returning sound skewed the rhythm, as if several distinct groups were singing at the same time.

"Bleeding concert," the remaining NCO commented. His voice sounded distinctly on edge.

Kloete nodded to himself. "Lot of them out there," he said. He smoked and talked without once removing the cigarette from his lips. "Something to be said for numbers, from a military point of view."

"You are under no obligation to stay," Noburu said in his best staff college English. "This is now Japan's fight. You may summon one of your transports to remove your men." Noburu looked at the oversize colonel sprawled just beyond his knees. "And yourself."

Kloete laughed. It was a big laugh and it rang out clearly against the background of chanting.

"That's very generous of you, General Noburu. Extremely generous. But we'll be hanging about for now." Nearby, the other South African chuckled wearily. But Noburu did not get the joke.

"As you wish," he said. "You are welcome to stay and fight. But I am releasing you from the provisions of your contract, given the changed cir—"

"Oh, just stuff it," Kloete said. "I'd be out of here like a gazelle, if I could. But your little wog friends took over the military airstrip while you were getting your beauty sleep. Baku's a closed city." Kloete looked up with the wet porcelain eyes of an animal. "Pity the lads at the airstrip, I do. Crowd doesn't seem in the most humanitarian of moods."

Two figures emerged from the sheltered passageway that led to the elevator and stairwell. One was large and loose-limbed even under the weight of boxes and canisters, while the other was small and exact, cradling an autorifle. Sergeant Terrebork, Kloete's ammunition hauler. And Akiro.

The South African dropped the ammo boxes one after the other.

"Bleeding last of it, sir," he told Kloete. Then he turned his nose to the wind, toward the chanting. In profile, he had the look of a dog who had scented game of unwelcome dimensions. "Gives you the willies, don't it?" he said.

A burst of fire made him duck to the level where the rest of them knelt or sat.

"Sir," Akiro said. Despite the fact that he was whispering, he managed to give the syllable its regulation harsh intonation. Then he began to speak in rapid Japanese, attempting to exclude the South Africans. "We have unforeseen problems."

Noburu almost laughed out loud. It seemed to him that

Akiro had acquired a marvelous new talent for understatement.

"Yes," Noburu said, forcing himself to maintain a serious demeanor. "Go on, Akiro."

"We do not have sufficient small-arms ammunition. No one imagined… there seemed to be no reason to provide for such a contingency."

"No," Noburu agreed. "No reason at all. Go on."

"Should they continue to assault the headquarters… Colonel Takahara is not certain how much longer we will be able to return an adequate volume of fire. Another assault. Perhaps two at the most." Akiro rolled his head like a horse shaking off rainwater. "I still cannot believe," he said, "that the Americans could be so clever, that they could so efficiently manipulate our allies."

Noburu almost corrected the young man again. But he realized it was hopeless. When they were all dead, there would be an Akiro school of historians who would insist that only American subterfuge and dollars could have inspired all this. Noburu knew better. But his people were an island race in more than just a physical sense. Perhaps their worst insularity lay in their lost ability to comprehend the power of irrational faith.

"You may tell Colonel Takahara to reduce the size of the perimeter. We will defend only the headquarters complex itself and the communications pen. Abandon the outbuildings," Noburu said. "And make sure the soldiers are, as a minimum, in groups of twos. Frightened men waste more bullets."

Noburu had expected his aide to fly off with alacrity. But the younger man paused.

"There's more?" Noburu asked sadly.

"Sir. We have been unable to report our situation to Tokyo. Or to anyone. Something… is wrong. None of the communications means works. Except for the main computer link, which will not accept plain voice text. We're working to format an appropriate automated message, but… everything was so unforeseen."

What were the Americans up to now? Noburu shuddered. Perhaps he was the fool, the one who had been living in a dreamworld. Perhaps Akiro had been right all along, perhaps this insurrection was American-sponsored. No. He still could not believe it.

Then what was wrong with the communications? Even at the height of yesterday's attack by the Americans, the high-end communications links had continued to function flawlessly. The only communications problems had been within or immediately adjacent to the combat zone. What was happening?

"Akiro? What does Colonel Takahara think? Is it possible that our communications have been sabotaged?" Akiro shrugged. He knew how to operate command consoles. But he was not a signals officer, and he personally had no conception of what might be occurring. "Colonel Takahara says it is jamming."

Jamming? Then by whom? It had to be the Americans. Only they possessed strategic jammers. Yet… the Americans had not employed their strategic systems in the combat of the day before, and the omission had baffled Noburu. The situation made little sense to him.

Were the Americans attacking again? Despite the employment of the Scramblers?

"Akiro. Listen. Tell Colonel Takahara to transfer all automated control of military operations to the rear command post in Teheran. That can be done easily enough through the computer. But it must be done quickly, in case the enemy has found a way to jam our automation feeds, as well. Just tell Colonel Takahara to transfer control. He knows what has to be done."

"Is he to shut our computer down?" Akiro asked.

"No. No, absolutely not. The transfer of control is strictly temporary. The rear will control the battle until we get the local situation under control. But our computer will remain in full readiness. I want to be able to resume control the instant the jamming lifts and we… discourage this demonstration."

But he did not believe. It was all a matter of form, of the prescribed gesture. He had lost his faith. The shadow men beyond the wall had stolen the last of it and turned it to their own ends. In an instant's vision, the dark, chanting men covered the earth.

"Sir. Colonel Takahara says that the jamming is of such power that many of our communications sets have burned out."

"It doesn't matter. I can fight the entire battle through the computer, if need be." Noburu caught an external glimpse of himself, as if his soul had briefly left his body. How far removed he was from his ancestors who had led the way with wands of steel.

The huge background of chanting continued. His ancestors, he knew, would have understood that sound. The dream warrior understood it.

A few stray rounds pecked at the facade of the building, and Noburu just managed to hear a soft exchange between the South Africans.

"What's junior on about, sir?" the ammunition carrier asked Kloete.

Kloete snorted as though his sinuses had been ruptured. "He's telling the old man we can't talk to anybody. And that we're out of bloody bullets."

Akiro lifted off his haunches to go.

"Akiro?"

The younger man turned obediently.

Noburu held out the aide's forgotten rifle.

"Sir," Akiro said. Noburu could feel his aide blushing through the dark.

"And, Akiro. Above all, Colonel Takahara is to safeguard the computer."

"Sir."

Noburu watched the younger man's back as Akiro scooted across the helipad. Yes. The computer. There were some things about it that even Takahara did not know. Aspects of the machine's capabilities that were known only to full generals and a handful of technicians back in Tokyo. The main military computer system, Noburu considered, resembled a wealthy man's beautiful wife — possessed of a secret that could destroy the man whose bed she shared.

Suddenly the chanting stopped. The silence was painful. Dizzying. Then Noburu registered the aural detritus of the attack — the unmistakable sound of badly wounded men who had not had the good fortune to lose consciousness.

An enormous howl erupted from the world beyond the wall. The chanting was over — this was simply a huge, wordless wail. It was the biggest sound Noburu had ever heard.

"Here they come," Kloete screamed.

A section of the perimeter wall disappeared in fire and dust. The blast wave tipped Noburu backward with the force of a typhoon wind.

"Fire into the smoke, fire into the smoke."

A smaller blast shook the floor beneath them. Grenade launcher, Noburu realized. Either they had stolen it, or rebel regulars had joined the mob's ranks.

The first shrieking figures left the pall of smoke. Someone inside the compound ignited a crossfire of headlamps and spotlights to help the machine gunners, and more flares lit the sky. But the flares were perceptibly fewer this time, and most of the light was provided by the section of the city that had begun to bum in the background.

Waves of dark figures swarmed through the gate and rushed through the broken wall. The volume of defending fire seemed to hush under the weight of the storm, overcome by the screaming energy of the mob. More banners trailed, falling and then rising again, as the attackers clambered over the ridges of the dead.

Kloete raised himself so that he could angle the machine gun into the oncoming tide.

The South African NCO to Noburu's side crumpled and stretched himself back across the helipad. In falling, his fingertips just grazed Noburu's cheek, drawing the general's attention after them. The South African lay with his face shot away, lower jaw tom nearly all the way off. He somehow continued to give off moans that were almost words.

Kloete wheeled about, eyes demonic. He took one close, hard look at his subordinate, unceremoniously drew his pistol, and shot the man where once the bridge of his nose must have been. The NCO twitched and then lay still.

The South African colonel met Noburu's eyes and evidently mistook what he saw there for disapproval.

"It's that kind of situation," Kloete said.

Noburu nodded, then automatically took up the dead man's rifle and leaned over the ledge. As he took aim, he saw the first hint of individual features on the darting shadows. They were very close. The war was coming to him.

Noburu opened fire. The kick of the weapon was instantly familiar, even after decades of wielding only a ceremonial pistol. He aimed carefully, remaining in the singleshot mode, trying to buy value for each round spent.

The Azeris fell in waves. But each next wave splashed closer.

A ripple of close-in blasts caught the forwardmost attackers. Noburu felt a blow on the side of his head. But, whatever it was, it was of no consequence. He remained upright, sentient, firing.

"Banzai."

A wave of high-pitched Japanese shouts broke over the cries of the attackers. The sound of close automatic weapons increased to a blurred roar.

"Banzai."

In the dying firelight, Noburu saw his men charging into the oncoming mass of Azeris. The Japanese fired as they ran, and Noburu caught the glint of fixed bayonets. A miniature sun lit up in the courtyard. Noburu recognized Colonel Takahara at the forward edge of the charge, samurai sword raised overhead, its blade wielding the power of light. With his left hand, Takahara fired a sidearm.

"Banzai."

The leading tentacles of the mob began to retract at the unexpected counterattack. Noburu fired beyond the ragged line of his men, helping as best he could. He knew his days of gallant charges were behind him. But he would do what remained to him.

"Fucking Japs," he heard the surviving South African NCO say. It was half a complaint, half admiration. "They're just as crazy as the wogs."

Noburu saw a fallen Azeri rise suddenly and fire point-blank into Takahara's stomach. The staff officer fell backward, staggering. It seemed to Noburu that Takahara was less concerned with staying on his feet than he was with holding the sword aloft. Its blade shone unblooded. Then another burst punched Takahara to the ground. The sword shimmered and disappeared amid the litter of corpses. Noburu held his rifle up to fire, but another Japanese beat him to his prey, bayoneting the man who had shot Takahara. The soldier remembered his bayonet drill well enough, planting a foot on his victim’s back and twisting out his rifle.

The assault faded away, leaving two-dozen Japanese upright in the courtyard, firing across the parade ground toward the main gate and the breach in the wall. A last flare helped them, and Noburu realized that he had never seen so much death so close at hand. The broad space between the headquarters building and the main gate writhed like a snake pit with the wounded. But, when you looked closely, you saw a great ragged stillness around the hurt, waiting to accept them all. A man could have walked from the headquarters entrance to the main gate by stepping from corpse to corpse, without ever touching concrete or cobbles.

A Japanese voice commanded a return to the headquarters building defenses. On the way, the men pawed over the fallen, checking for ammunition with which to continue the fight. The smell of gunpowder burned in Noburu’s nose like dried pepper.

"Jesus Christ," a voice said. Noburu turned and saw the ammunition handler bent over the cavity of his comrade’s skull.

Kloete lit another cigarette, then offered the open pack to Noburu.

"I don’t smoke," Noburu said.

The South African nodded as though he understood perfectly.

"Good show, that," Kloete said. He spoke the anglicized phrase with his mudlike accent. "Your boys, I mean."

"Yes."

"Christ. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig."

Noburu did not understand.

"The side of your head," Kloete said, raising a hand partway to indicate the location of the wound. The man’s fingers stank of spent cartridges.

Noburu remembered the blow on the side of his head. And now, magically, he could feel the blood oozing warmlyfrom the wound, losing temperature as it wandered down his neck. He did not need to test the wound with his land.

"It's of no consequence," he said.

"You'll need to have that seen to," Kloete said firmly.

But Noburu no longer cared. He realized that he had been relieved, almost overjoyed by the attack. Toward the end he had not needed to think of anything else. The dream warrior was smiling.

"It's of no consequence whatsoever," Noburu said truthfully.

Colonel Johnny Tooth, United States Air Force, was a happy man. The four big WHITE LIGHT electronic warfare birds under his immediate control were on station and functioning perfectly, exactly twenty-four hours late.

But lateness was a relative thing. The goddamned nearsighted Army ground-pounders didn't understand that you could not risk expensive aircraft and their crews in hopelessly bad weather. Technically speaking, of course, he was a little behind schedule — but his aircraft had made it into the war after a direct supersonic flight from the States and they were performing flawlessly, jamming an enormous swathe from the Caucasus east across Soviet Central Asia and northern Iran. There wasn't going to be any chitchat down on the ground tonight.

The WHITE LIGHT aircraft had the capabilities of flying at speeds above Mach 3 or of slowing to a near hover. In either case, they were invisible to any of the air defense systems known to be deployed in-theater. A long association with the WHITE LIGHT program gave Tooth the sort of warm, safe feeling a man had when he held good investments while the economy was going to shit for everyone else. Personally, Tooth had put his money into select real estate during the plague years, and he had no retirement worries.

"Don't you think we should try to contact the Army guys?" his copilot asked over the intercom.

Tooth could hardly believe his ears. "You nuts, Chubbs?"

"Well," Chubbs said more carefully, "I just thought we ought to let them know we're onstation. You know?"

Tooth sighed. So few people understood the interrelationships. "Maybe on the way out," he said, always ready to compromise. "But first we're going to run a complete mission. Nobody's going to be able to say the U.S. Air Force didn't do its part." Tooth shuddered inwardly, picturing some rough-handed, semiliterate Army officer testifying before a congressional subcommittee, claiming that the weight of military operations had been borne by the Army alone. The Air Force didn't need that kind of heartache, with budgets as tight as they were. Tooth understood clearly that the primary mission of the U.S. Army was to siphon off funding from vital Air Force programs.

The Air Force had gone through a run of bad luck. It began in Zaire, where the South Africans had cheated and attacked the B-2 fleet on the ground — now that had been a royal mess, and a man could only be thankful that nobody in the press had ever been able to sort out the real unit cost of the stealth bomber. Then the Army had started grabbing all the glory, whether from their dirty little police duties during the plague or from their primitive rough-necking down in the Latin American mud. Why, you could have hired off-duty policemen to do the Army's job and you would have saved the country billions. And, all the while, it had been embarrassingly difficult to find appropriate missions for the state-of-the-art manned bombers, which Congress had finally come around to funding in the nineteen nineties — thanks to contractor programs that spread the wealth across congressional districts in practically every state in the Union. The minor action the Air Force had seen had shown, to widespread horror, that the oldest, slowest planes in the inventory were the best-suited to joint requirements. The underdeveloped countries simply refused to buy first-class air defense systems for stealth bombers to evade. Worse, they refused to provide clear-cut high-payoff targets. Then there was the humiliation with the Military Airlift Command's transport fleet. Naturally, lift capability had been put on the back burner in the quest to acquire sufficient numbers of high-tech combat aircraft to keep fighter jocks and bomber crews in uniform.

And the transport fleet had bluntly failed in its initial attempts to ferry the Army in and out of Africa and Latin America. The government had been reduced to requisitioning heavy transports and passenger aircraft from the private sector.

So the opportunity to show what the WHITE LIGHT aircraft could do was a welcome one. The birds had come in just at nine billion dollars a copy in 2015, and the program had required fall-on-your-sword efforts by congressmen whose districts included major defense contractors in order to force it through Appropriations. It would have been nice, of course, if everything could have been synchronized with the Army operation, in accordance with the original plan. But, ultimately, the thing was just to get the birds into action. His superiors had made the decision to launch the mission twenty-four hours late without consulting the other services. There was always the chance that the Army would try to block the Air Force activities with some whining to the effect that there was no further need for the jamming support, or that it would interfere with ground ops. You could never trust a grunt. They never understood the big picture, and they thought at the speed of the human foot. Absolutely no grasp of strategic imperatives. And they died broke.

"How's everything going back there, Pete?" Tooth called to his weapons officer, who was currently sending streaks of man-made lightning through the heavens, destroying billions of dollars worth of enemy electronics.

"Just fine, sir. We're putting out so much juice we'll fry pretty near every transmitter between here and the Indian Ocean. They'll be talking with tin cans and pieces of string when the sun comes up. Tokyo's going to shit."

"Well, you just keep up the good work," Tooth said. Then he called the navigator. "Jimmy-boy, you put us back in friendly airspace by dawn, understand?"

"Got it, sir."

Colonel Johnny Tooth was fully aware that stealth technology and fifth-generation electronic defenses had rendered his aircraft as invisible in the daylight hours as at night. But Tooth nonetheless preferred flying in the darkness. It might be unreasonable, but the ability to wrap himself in the ancient cloak of night just made him feel that much more secure. Besides, he wanted to be back on the ground by lunch, since he had to place a very important phone call. Supporting the Army was one thing, but a real estate transaction was serious.

23

They crucified the men during the night and left the crosses standing just outside the gate. Akiro, who had found it difficult enough to follow Noburu across the sea of bodies, began to gag. The wind flapped the blood-soaked uniforms of the Japanese officers like wet canvas.

The Azeris had not gotten it exactly right, Noburu noted. Here a spike had been driven through the hand instead of a wrist, while on another cross a leg dangled free. Noburu recognized two of the three men as officers from the airfield. Perhaps the third man was a recent arrival he did not know. Noburu looked up at the lolling faces with their expressions of torment and wonder. Behind him, Akiro finished his dry retching.

"At least they killed them," Noburu said, lowering his eyes to look down between the ranks of burned buildings, across the human flotsam the mob had left in its wake. "Why?" Akiro begged. "Why did they do this?" Noburu smiled. "They think we're Christians. All foreigners are Christians, you see. I'm afraid our allies are not as enlightened as Tokyo might wish."

Back inside the gates, the bulldozer resumed its grunting. Moving the bodies, clearing an entryway for the relief column that must eventually come. Otherwise, the city was very quiet. The morning light seemed crippled, misshapen by twisting columns of smoke and the smell of death. The bulldozer added to the stink, disturbing the settling filth that had been a man, its blade wrenching open another corpse's bowels. Underneath the reek of mortality the familiar smell of the oil works came sharply up from the coast. A thousand years after they shut down the derricks and refineries, Baku would still stink of oil. And death.

They were waiting, Noburu realized. Down in the labyrinth of the old city. On the waterfront. Or, farther out, in the apartment blocks built to give the workers a foretaste of paradise, and in the disease-culled slums, where families lived under worse conditions than had their most distant ancestors. The streets were empty now. The population had been driven indoors by the light of day, by defeat, plague, and exhaustion. But they were still there. Waiting.

Until the darkness returned. They would come again in the night. Noburu could feel it.

The communications center was a ruin. The intelligence officer speculated that the Americans had employed aircraft from their WHITE LIGHT program. But it was impossible to know with any certainty. The world was so full of surprises. The only thing that was definite was the burned-out stasis of the magical talking machines that directed warfare in the twenty-first century. When the interference finally stopped, only two systems remained functional: an ancient vacuum tube radio set inherited from the Soviets — with which the staff had been able to contact a loyal garrison to the north — and the main computer system. The computer was Japan's pride. It had been built to withstand any imaginable interference. The computer was the castle of the new age, wherein the modern warrior sought his last refuge. Certainly, it was more important than any number of brave Takaharas or subordinates nailed up on crosses.

A black bird flittered down onto one of the foreign dead in the street. Noburu feared some further atrocity. But the bird merely twitched its head back and forth a few times, judging the world, then settled down into the pile of rags as if nesting.

A low humming arose in the distance. The two living, standing men looked at each other.

"The relief column?" Akiro asked.

"Too soon."

The younger man looked back down at the street with its frozen traffic of papers, glass, and death.

The humming stopped. Another detail of events that would never be explained.

It would be hours before any relief column could arrive. Perhaps even a day or more. Everything was so unsettled. Rough, relayed messages indicated that fundamentalist elements in Iran had called for a holy war against the Japanese in the liberated territories as well as against the Russians. The Azeris were fellow Shi'as, and they had obeyed the call. Perhaps the Sunni populations of central Asia would make common cause in this, as they had in the war against the Soviets. Noburu did not know. Without communications, the world was simply a question mark. But even if they made common cause now, it would not be too long before the Shi'as and Sunnis began killing one another. It was the natural way of this world, as inevitable as the seasons.

Of course, it made no logical sense. But these people lived on a spiritual frontier where the logic of other races or religions had little value. Faith was all.

The masses had responded to the green call of their god, as had some of the rebel units and formations. But others had kept faith with Japan and her military technology. Now there was a civil war within a civil war, and a fractured world was fracturing again into ever smaller, ever more uncontrollable parts. He had known it all in advance. The dream warrior had whispered to him, smiling at Noburu's folly as he attempted to reason with Iranian generals, Arab generals, central Asian generals, each of whom was only waiting for the day when he would fight the other once again, waiting for the day when the Slavs and Japanese would be gone so that the children of God could return their attention to more exclusive massacres.

A relief column had been organized to fight its way into the city from the nearest loyal garrison, according to a message received over the old HF radio. But no one knew what obstacles and ambushes were out there waiting. Ideally, the helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft would have provided reconnaissance as well as quicker relief, ferrying in troops and ammunition and lifting out the wounded.

But the jamming attack during the night had destroyed the electronics on virtually all of the tactical aircraft in the vicinity. The only option remaining was the dispatch of an armored relief convoy — which would have to drive blindly over mountain roads. There would be plenty of time to wait and worry.

Ammunition. Above all, they needed ammunition. If the mob returned now, they could virtually stroll into the compound.

Noburu had been forced to allow the rear command post to continue to control combat operations. His shrunken staff labored to repair at least a few of the communications systems by cannibalizing others. He could have run the war through the master computer, but he recognized that such an action would be sheer vanity. He needed a functioning headquarters around him. For the moment, the rear had a broader capacity to sort out the damage and revitalize allied efforts. Given the present state of his headquarters, Noburu would have been shooting into the darkness. As it was, he could not even communicate with the rear command post by voice. So he elected to wait. To try to think clearly. He had transmitted only one firm order through the master computer: the Scramblers were not to be employed again without his personal authorization. Beyond that, there was only an emptiness, inability.

Behind him, he heard the indestructible computer singing. A quiet song of electricity and perfection. The computer was ready to do his will. The brilliant machine wanted to do his bidding. It was only the man, feeble and unsure, who could not respond.

The black bird rose abruptly from its human nest and sailed up to the head of one of the crucified officers. Again, the bird made no attempt to disturb the flesh. It simply perched, fluffing its black feathers over the dead man's hair.

Akiro drew his pistol.

"No," Noburu said.

But the younger man fired. He missed the bird, which rose skyward with a baffled cry. Under the black wings the dead officer's skull exploded, coming back to life for an instant before its wreckage lolled back down on the officer's chest.

Akiro was shaking. He looked as though he had been abandoned on an ice floe. He held the pistol in his hand, struggling with its purpose.

"Organize a detail," Noburu said calmly. "It's time to cut them down."

At 12:57 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, President Jonathan Waters suffered a massive heart attack. He had slept little over the previous four days, and it had felt wonderful and a little bit strange to slip into the bedclothes beside the steady warmth of his wife. He lost consciousness quickly, descending into a tumult of dreams. His last dream was of his father. President Waters was only a boy, and red-eyed dogs chased him. Up ahead, his father receded in a mist as thick as wet concrete. The boy ran harder and harder, making ever less progress, calling out to the safe, strong man. But his father did not hear him. And the dogs were all around him. He ran as hard as he could, lifting his hands away from the relentless snouts, shouting for his father to come back.

He woke in mortal pain. He called out, "Dad," then remembered a whole life and spoke his wife's name once before he died.

The Americans came down from the meager hills that had been elevated with the name Ural Mountains. Their war machines sailed south over the wastes, registering here and there the passing of a village better-suited as a museum of poverty and premodernity than as a habitat for contemporary man. The war had not yet reached these hamlets, and smoke rose from chimneys instead of from ruins. The M-100s' on-board sensors registered defunct tractors in place of tanks. The snow had covered the last traces of the roads. The isolated settlements appeared as gray islands in an arctic sea. The sagging houses looked so thoroughly lost that it seemed certain the war would continue to pass them by as surely as had indoor plumbing.

It struck Taylor that this was no land over which to fight a war. It was merely a place of passage, through which the great forgotten warriors of the East had passed, illiterate geniuses whose people wove the record of their triumphs into rugs or nicked out their chronicles in silver and brass. Then the white-bloused Russians had marched from west to east, for God and the Czar, bringing the tribesmen alphabets and artillery.

Objectively speaking, this was no land over which to fight a war. And yet, Taylor had seen enough of war to know that a man would always love the barren plains or hills where he was born, and that he would pass that love on to his sons with his blood, even in captivity. Anyway, men never really needed much of an excuse to fight.

Taylor felt weary. The excitement of planning was over, the thrill of designing the impossible in such a way that it came to seem inevitable. For the present, there was only a long, dull route to fly, and he felt the big physical tiredness in his limbs, made heavier by the hard usage of a lifetime.

Hours to fly. Until the refueling stop. Then an even greater distance until they reached the objective. Taylor glanced out over the frozen wastes. It was a long way from Africa, the touchstone of his life.

He slumped back in his seat.

"Flapper," he said to his copilot, "you've got the wheel. I need a little rest."

Vice President Maddox looked warily from face to face. The new chair did not feel very comfortable.

"The Chief Justice is on her way, sir," the White House Chief of Staff said. There was a totally new tone of respect in his voice.

Maddox considered the man. Nope. He would not do. He was irredeemably a Waters man, and he had been carelessly inattentive of the Vice President, whom he had rather too publicly termed a "hick with a college degree." Nope. A new White House Chief of Staff would be one of the first appointees.

"Martin," Maddox said to the man whose fate had just been decided, "would you mind looking in on Mrs. Waters one more time? See if she isn't feeling just a tad more in possession of herself." He thought of the famous old pictures of Jackie Kennedy in pink by a new president's side. "I do think the public would be reassured if she felt up to putting in an appearance at the swearing-in."

"Yes, sir." And he was gone.

Maddox looked around the table. Serious bunch. Nobody you'd want to take along to the hunting cabin for a weekend.

"About that other thing," he said.

"Yes, sir," the secretary of state jumped in. It was obvious to Maddox that the man had been waiting impatiently for an opportunity to continue his earlier tutorial. Damned Yankees, Maddox thought. Never do learn. "We cannot afford to waste any more time," the whitehaired diplomat continued. "You must understand, sir. President Waters was ill, and probably in physical pain, when he made his decision. Why, the stress alone was enough to unbalance a man. And remember Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. Bad health makes for bad decisions."

"I don't know," Maddox said slowly. "I'm a fighting kind of guy. I don't know whether the American people want a president" — the word had an entirely new feel on the tongue—"who's afraid to put up his dukes."

"It isn't a matter of fighting," the secretary of state continued. "It's a matter of losing. And I'm certain the American people do not want to suffer pointless, unnecessary losses. The entire affair… is sheer madness. God only knows what sort of retaliation it might bring. As well as making a hash out of all our diplomatic efforts."

Maddox scanned beyond the secretary of state. Didn't see a face in the room he could trust. He had nurtured a kind of liking for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but that was only because the man resembled an old hunting dog he'd had as a boy.

"What do you have to say there, General?"

The chairman alerted to the scent. "Mr. Vice President," he said in the bluff voice that generals like to wear in Washington, "I want to be perfectly honest with you. I'm an old soldier. I don't mind a good dustup. But, frankly, this mission has only the slightest chance of success — and it may well prove a great embarrassment." Maddox narrowed his eyes. Sometimes a dog just got so old and tired it couldn't hunt no more. And you had to put it down.

Maddox smiled. "Well, you all have to give me your best advice on this matter. My only experience with this sort of thing was a year in military school. My daddy sent me there to put some manners on me." His smile ripened into a grin. ''Not sure it took. Anyhow, I'm afraid I'm just wandering around in the dark on all this. I do need good advice." He waved his shake-hands grin like a bright little flag. "Why. I've been out there in California, for God's sake."

"Mr. President." the secretary of state resumed, "while you were on the Coast, the President was under a great deal of pressure. He began to make—"

The door opened. Mrs. Waters stepped into the room, eyes dead. She was followed by the Chief Justice, the White House Chief of Staff, and a staff photographer. Maddox jumped to his feet.

"Sir," the secretary of state hissed, "there's very little time. We've got to stop—"

"Just hold your horses," Maddox snapped. Then he set his face in an expression of sympathy as perfect as a black silk tie and walked open-armed toward the President's widow.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Taylor asked. Kozlov noted that the American was trying to maintain a professional demeanor, but the undertones of impatience and disgust in his voice were unmistakable. "Is there any chance we've got the wrong coordinates?"

Kozlov looked down at the monitor displaying a visual survey of the designated refueling site. The steppe was embarrassingly empty. Where Soviet refueling vehicles should have been waiting, there was only the gray earth, naked and cold, between the Caspian Sea just to the south and the sea of snow to the north. Pressed to give the place a name, Kozlov would have called it "No-man's-land." He looked back up. Into Taylor's disfigured, disapproving face.

"I don't understand it," Kozlov said honestly. "I spoke with General Ivanov himself… with the Sian… and they all assured me…"

"We've got the right grids," Meredith declared. "This is the place."

Kozlov watched the parade of expressions crossing the American commander's face: disgust, then hard concern, a brief retreat into disappointment, followed by a return to the stony look Taylor usually wore.

"Shit," Taylor said.

The operations compartment went silent. each man thinking the problem through for himself. The air turbulence rolled the deck beneath their boots, while automated systems flashed and pinged softly. The filtration system simply recycled old odors.

Kozlov felt ashamed. More and more, he felt committed to these Americans, these warriors who were ready to carry on a fight not entirely their own, despite the morbid cost. The Americans had spirit, above all, even in their black and weary moments. And spirit was a thing that had long been in short supply in his country. The spirit had been battered, tormented, starved, and dulled out of his fellow countrymen. Inheritors of failure, his people had forgotten how to hope, and hope was at least as necessary to the health of the human animal as were vitamins.

Still, he had kept his pride. Through it all. The pride of being Russian, even in the sharpest hour of adversity. But now… it seemed as though his country had conspired yet again to humiliate him, to shame him. The military machine to which he had given the whole of his adult life could not even deliver the fuel with which other men might carry on Great Russia's war.

So many lies, half-truths, promises forgotten as soon as they were spoken. Why hadn't General Ivanov been honest this one time?

Perhaps it was simply incompetence. Perhaps, even with the best will, the fuelers could not reach the designated site on time.

"'It could be," Kozlov said hopefully, "that there has only been a delay. Because of the war. Perhaps the fuel carriers are coming soon."

Taylor turned cold eyes in Kozlov's direction. All of the other Americans crammed into the small compartment followed Taylor's gaze. Then the American colonel broke off the stare and turned to his black subordinate and the white operations captain.

"We're going to have to put down," Taylor said. "Hank, call the other birds. We'll go to ground and wait. All we're doing up here is burning fuel."

"Yes, sir," the captain said. Kozlov glanced again at the man's name tape: PARKER. They had been introduced the night before. But there were so many new names to remember. Ryder, for instance, the scared young man with the briefcase, sitting quietly at the back of the compartment. And there were so many unfamiliar details. It occurred to Kozlov that the cardinal feeling of men at war was not fear or excitement, neither cowardice nor courage, but simply weariness. It seemed to him that he had been tired for as long as he could remember. Perhaps that was why commanders were able to drive their men to achieve results at such suicidal costs: the men simply grew too tired to care what became of them.

"I want good dispersion on the ground," Taylor said. "The refuelers can shuttle around when they get here. And everybody deploys their camouflage before they so much as take a piss."

"Just the autocamouflage?" Meredith asked.

Taylor pursed his lips, then agreed. "Yeah. It's a tradeoff. But we need to be ready to move fast. And let's put these babies down a few clicks to the south so we don't have those fat boys coming in right on top of us. We'll guide them to the birds after we get them under positive control."

The captain named Parker was already transmitting orders to the troop of five M-l00s accompanying the American commander on his raid. They were marvelous fighting machines. Kozlov knew he should be making more of an effort to note the details of their operation so he would be able to file a complete report upon his return. But he was just so tired.

Colonel Taylor turned his back and squeezed into the passageway that led forward to the pilot's cabin. Kozlov was relieved, both because of the temporary respite from further questions and embarrassments, and because he still found it hard to look at the man. The stress of the past few days had etched the remnants of disease ever more deeply into the American's skin, further exaggerating his deformity, until Taylor reminded Kozlov of a devil.

Muffled engines shrieked beyond the walls of the control compartment and the fighting machine began its descent toward the Russian earth.

The wind blew from the south, but it was cold. Racing down from the high Iranian desert, then chilling itself as it skimmed over the Caspian Sea, the wind struck land with a force that narrowed the eyes. The M-l00s were so well stabilized that you did not get a proper sense of the intensity of the gusts when you were inside. But here, where the dead, colorless grass stretched from horizon to horizon, there was nothing to interfere with the wind's progress. It was a worthless, defenseless place, no matter which way you pointed yourself.

Taylor looked at his watch, then looked at the sky.

Nothing.

The afternoon continued to wither.

He could not bear the thought that it might end like this. After all the years of longing for a chance to strike back at the enemy who always lurked behind his country's enemies. After the fighting and the losses, the frantic planning and the experience of seeing a president backed against the wall, it was unbearable to think that it would all simply sputter out in a wasteland, for want of fuel.

He knew this would be the end, and he could not understand why none of the others seemed to grasp it. A failure now, on this day, in this place, would settle the order of the world for a generation. Or longer. His country would withdraw into its tattered hemisphere, and the Japanese would get what they had wanted for so long.

He tried to keep his personal prejudices out of the equation. But it was very hard. He blamed the Japanese. He could not help it. He wanted more than anything else in the world to face them one last time with a weapon in his hand.

He took off his helmet, and the wind pried at his matted hair. He thought of Daisy and smiled bitterly. He could not believe he had been so foolish as to imagine that there was anything real there. No woman, no matter her tarnish, was about to bind her life to his. No, he was good for one thing and one thing only: soldiering. The rest of it was an idle dream.

Surely, it could not end here. When they had come so close. He scanned the empty sky.

A voice feinted at his ear before the wind carried it off. He turned. Merry Meredith was coming toward him. Behind the intelligence officer, the M-100 merely looked like a natural blemish on the landscape. The automatic camouflage system had unfolded its fans, and the sensors read the tones of the earth, coloring the upper plates to match. The system was effective in every environment except snow. The plates could not go white and had to compromise on a mottled gray. But here, where the withered steppe remained naked to the wind, the camouflage worked magically. An enemy would have needed to know exactly where to look to find him and his men.

All this. The technology and the trying. The magic. And the sacrifice. Surely, it could not just end like this.

Meredith closed the distance. His skin was taut with cold, but his eyes had the old fire.

"Sir?" Meredith asked.

"What's up, Merry?"

"I've got an idea. Maybe you won't like it. But it's all I can come up with."

"About what?"

"The mission. There's a way we can still do it. Without the extra fuel."

"How?"

"Well, given that we don't have enough fuel to hit Baku and make it back to secure Soviet territory…"

"Given," Taylor agreed.

"Okay. Then where else could we go? After we hit Baku?"

Taylor looked questioningly at the younger man. Meredith's expression was that of an excited boy.

"What about Turkey?" the S-2 asked. "Okay, we don't have the legs to get back. So we just keep going. I've calculated the distance. We can just barely make it. Head west out of Baku, right across Armenia, and put down inside the Turkish border. Turkey's remained neutral— the fundamentalist movement's an old nightmare there— and the Turks will obey international law. We'll have to scuttle the ships as soon as we set down. But at least we can accomplish the mission. They'll intern us until the end of hostilities — but so what? We'll at least get to strike a blow instead of going home with our tails between our legs…"

It was beautiful. And so simple. Taylor realized he would never have thought of it himself. He was too old, too well-conditioned. You had to bring your unit back to friendly lines. No matter what. Yet, history was full of examples of forces that had been thrust by circumstances onto neutral territory. The procedures were regulated by international codes.

And if he and his men missed the rest of the war? Well, if they didn't do it, there wouldn't be any war left to fight.

Taylor stared off to the south, imagining the sea rolling just beyond the horizon and the rest of the world beyond the sea.

"The State Department's going to hate it," Taylor said softly, as if a credentialed ambassador might be within earshot. But he was smiling. "What the hell. I've always wanted to see Turkey."

He held out his hand to the younger man.

Suddenly, a massive explosion colored the near horizon. The blast wave did not take long to reach them. Hot, rushing air pushed the southern wind aside. The noise, despite the distance of several kilometers, was deafening. The impact had been to the north, exactly where the Soviet fuelers had been designated to link up with the M-l00s.

A second blast quickly followed the first.

"Ambush," Taylor shouted. "It's a fucking ambush. The Russians sold us out."

The two men ran for the M-100.

Ryder had been standing just outside the rear ramp of the aircraft, relieving himself. As Taylor and Meredith ran toward him, the young man stood dumbfounded, watching the inferno spread across the rear horizon, penis in hand as though he intended to use it to put the fire out.

"Mount up, mount up," Taylor shouted, waving the helmet he still held in his hand.

Flapper Krebs had been quicker to grasp the situation than any of them. The M-l00's engines were already whining to life.

"Merry," Taylor yelled, "get on the horn. Get everybody up in the air."

The large camouflage fans began to withdraw into the M-l00's fuselage.

Taylor shoved Ryder up into the control compartment behind Meredith. He threw his helmet down on the floor, counting heads as he hustled toward the front of the aircraft. Behind him, Parker was already drawing up the ramp.

Taylor glanced furiously at Kozlov, whose face was utterly blank. He almost drew his pistol and shot the Russian on the spot. But he did not have the time to waste.

Taylor shoved the Soviet out of the way and ducked through the hatch that led toward the cockpit.

He jumped into his seat, grabbing his headset as he moved. He gave Krebs a thumb's up.

"Let's go."

The M-100 began to lift into the sky.

Across the horizon two big bursts colored the steppe bright orange, yellow, red. A border of black smoke began to expand above the fires. In quick succession, half a dozen more blasts erupted. Each one came closer to the ship as it struggled to gain altitude.

"Fucking Russians," Taylor growled into his headset. "Fucking goddamned Russians. They fucking set us up."

"Foxtrot one-four. Airborne. Over," the first of the other M-l00s reported in. Then another ship called in, the voice of its pilot reflecting how badly shaken everyone had been by the surprise attack.

A ripple of explosions chased the M-100 into the sky.

"Rockets," the copilot reported drily. "Standoff, air-launched, looks like. Compact conventional explosives and fuel-airs. Couldn't have had too good a fix on us. We'd never have got off the ground."

The goddamned Russians, Taylor thought. They had never had the least intention of sending out refuelers. Instead, they had tipped off the Japanese or the Iranians as to the designated site. But for what? A better deal at the peace talks? For what?

Taylor thought of Kozlov and his mind whitened with anger.

"We've got a bird down." Parker's voice. Through the intercom.

"All stations, report in sequence," Taylor ordered.

"Bird down."

"It's One-five," another crew reported. "He's gone. Fireball."

Underneath the ship, a cushion of explosions buoyed them upward, rocking the cabin. Taylor had to clutch the sides of his seat.

"Altitude," he shouted, jamming his safety harness buckles together.

"I'm giving it all she's got," Krebs shouted back.

Merry's voice came through the intercom, struggling to remain calm. "Verify the loss of One-five. Too slow getting off the ground. She disappeared in the flames."

"All stations," Taylor barked into the mike, "report, goddamnit."

The other M-l00s reported in sequence. Only One-five was missing. Everyone else was above the carpet of fire now.

"Merry," Taylor ordered, "start working on the new exfiltration route. Forget everything else. Hank," he called to the assistant S-3, "let's get back on the flight path. We're heading for Baku."

Krebs looked over at Taylor in doubt.

"Don't worry, Rapper. We've got a new plan."

The warrant officer shook his head.

Behind them, powerful explosions chased their tails with shock waves, bucking the speeding aircraft.

"Hank," Taylor called. "Try to call up some imagery of the spot where One-five went down. See if there's anything left."

"Roger."

Suddenly, the gray sky parted. Ahead of them a scudding green-gray sea stretched toward distant shores. The sight seemed to promise safety.

"You know," Taylor mused bitterly to Krebs, "their system must be in godawful shape. We must've really hurt them yesterday. By all rights, they should've gotten us back there." He could feel the sweat beginning to chill on his forehead. He stared out over the sea. It looked like steel mesh come to life. "The strike was too ragged. They should have hit us with everything at once."

"Imagery up," Parker's voice interrupted.

Taylor looked down at his central monitor. An X-ray radar image erased the flames and smoke to show the wreckage of an M-100 spread across several acres.

"Jesus," a voice whispered through the intercom.

Taylor touched the button that canceled the image.

"Forget it," he said in his coldest voice. "We got off lucky."

Nothing was going to stop him now. Not friendly losses. Not the Iranians or the rebels. Not the Japanese. Not even the Russians.

He slipped off his headset to rise from his seat. He wanted to talk to Kozlov. The sonofabitch had questions to answer.

The sound of Krebs's voice stopped him.

"Oh, fuck me," the old warrant said in disgust. He glanced over at Taylor. But Taylor did not need any further explanation. The flashing monitor made the situation very clear.

"I guess they wanted to make sure," Krebs said.

"Bandits," Taylor called into the command net. "Nine o'clock high."

Krebs began to bank the ship upward to the left.

"I'll fly," Taylor said, grasping the manual controls. "You do the shooting."

Taylor's ops indicator showed the remaining four ships of his raiding force following his lead. But the formation was too neat, too predictable.

"One-one, One-two, this is Foxtrot one-zero. Go high. Work a sandwich on them. One-three, One-four, stay with me. Out."

Meredith's voice came over the intercom. "Good fix.

I've even got voice on them." Then he hesitated for a moment.

"What is it?" Taylor demanded.

"Japanese gunships. The latest Toshiba variant."

"Roger. Execute countermeasures program." The opposing formations were closing rapidly. Forty miles. Thirty-nine. "What else, Merry?"

Again, there was a slight hesitation.

"The voices," Meredith said, "sound like South Africans."

Taylor gripped the controls. Time playing tricks. Above the Caspian Sea.

So be it, he thought.

"Confirm activation of full countermeasures suite," Taylor said. He was determined not to let it shake him. There was nothing special about the South Africans. But he could not entirely resist the flashing images. A cocky young captain winging over the African scrub. Transformed into a terrified young captain. A pistol lifted to the head of a broken-necked boy. Ants at a man's eyes and a river journey through the heart of a dying continent.

Yes. Taylor remembered the South Africans. Suddenly, his battle monitor fuzzed.

"The sonsofbitches," Krebs said. "They've got some new kind of shit on board."

"Merry," Taylor half-shouted, struggling to maintain control. "Hank. Hit them with full power. Jam the fuck out of them."

"Twenty-eight miles," Krebs said. "And closing."

The target-acquisition monitor distorted, multiplying and misreading images.

"Going full automatic on the weapons suite," Krebs said. "Let's hope this works."

Taylor felt sweat prickling all over his body. Frantically, he punched override buttons, trying to clear the monitors. "Twenty-five…"

Taylor strained to see through the windscreen. The battle overlays were little help now. He struggled to pick out the enemy aircraft with his eyes.

"I've got them," Merry called forward. "Clear image."

"Transfer data to the weapons suite," Taylor ordered.

Other ships called in their sudden difficulties with their own electronics.

Remember, Taylor told himself, you're doing the same thing to the other guy. He's as frightened as you are. Stay cool, stay cool.

"Negative," Merry reported. "The weapons program won't accept the transfer."

"Range: twenty miles," Krebs told them all.

Abruptly, the M-100 bucked and began to pulse under Taylor's seat. The main gun was firing.

What does my enemy see? Taylor wondered. If the systems were functioning correctly, his opposite number was reading hundreds of blurred, identical targets, a swarm of ghost images in the midst of which the real M-l00s were hiding. Or, depending on the parameters of his system, he might only be receiving static and fuzz.

Taylor slapped the eyeshield down from atop the headset.

"Laser alert," he said over the command net. Beside him, Krebs slid down his own shield.

The protective lenses darkened the sky, and the bucking of the M-100 as it maneuvered forward made it even harder to focus. Nonetheless, Taylor believed he could pick out the tiny black spots that marked the enemy.

He took full manual control of the aircraft and pointed it straight at the enemy.

"Full combat speed," he ordered. "Let's get them."

" 'Garry Owen,' " a voice replied from a sister ship.

"Thirteen miles," Krebs said. "We're not hitting a damned thing."

"Neither are they," Taylor said. Below the insulated cockpit, the main gun continued to pump out precious rounds, its accuracy deteriorating with every shot.

"I've still got good voice on them," Merry called. "They're going crazy. They've lost us. They're firing everything they've got."

"Ten miles."

Taylor looked out at the black dots. He counted ten. But he could not see the slightest trace of hostile action. The sky was full of high-velocity projectiles and lasers, but the M-l00's rounds were far quicker than the human eye, while the enemy's current lasers were not tuned to the spectrum of visible light. Around the lethal balls and beams, the heavens pulsed with electronic violence. Yet all that was visible was the gray sky, and a line of swelling black dots on a collision course with his outnumbered element.

"Seven miles. Jesus Christ."

"Steady," Taylor said, his fear forgotten now.

Dark tubular fuselages, the blur of rotors and propellers.

It was, Taylor thought, like a battle between knights so heavily armored they did not possess the offensive technology to hurt each other. New magic shields deflected the other man's blows.

"Four miles" Krebs said. "Jesus, sir, we got to climb. We're on a collision course."

No, Taylor thought. If they haven't hit us yet at this angle, they won't. But the first man to flinch, to reveal a vulnerable angle, was going to lose.

The M-100 threw another series of rounds toward the closing enemy.

"All stations," Taylor said. "Steady on course."

"Two miles…"

The Toshiba gunships were unmistakable now. Their contours had not changed much over the years. A mongrelized forward aspect, a helicopter with turboprops on the sides. Or a plane with rotors. Take your pick.

"Hold course," Taylor shouted.

The M-l00's cannon pummeled the sky. To no effect.

"One mile and closing…"

Where once horsemen rode at each other with sabers drawn, their descendants rode the sky in a long metal line, jousting with lightning.

Hit, goddamn it, hit, Taylor told the main gun.

He could see every detail on the enemy gunships now. The mock Iranian markings, the mottled camouflage. The low-slung laser pod.

"We're going to collide."

Taylor froze his hand on the joystick. Straight ahead.

In a buffeting wash of air and noise, the M-100 shot past the enemy's line.

"All stations," Taylor said. "Follow my lead. We've got a tighter turning radius than they do."

He felt far more confident now. The M-l00's airframe was of a design over a decade fresher than the Toshiba gunships. The M-100 had all of the maneuvering advantages.

"Everybody with me?" Taylor demanded.

The other four ships reported in quick succession.

"Complete the turn. We're only vulnerable from the back."

He looked at his monitor. The fuzz cloud that marked the enemy had begun to turn too. But they were slower. He could feel it.

"Flapper," Taylor said. "Turn off the auto-systems. They're just canceling each other out. Take manual control of the main gun. And use a little Kentucky windage."

"The accuracy's breaking down," Krebs said. "We're just about shot out."

"You can do it, Flapper. Come on. We didn't have all this fancy shit when you and I started out."

Krebs nodded, doubt on the lower portion of his face left visible by the laser shield.

"All stations," Taylor said. "Open order. Go to manual target acquisition and manual fire control."

The tight steepness of the turn tugged his harness. But they were almost out of it. And the enemy were still in midturn. There wouldn't be much time. But there would be a window of opportunity.

As nearly as he could remember, the Japanese gunships did not have a manual weapons override.

The sin of pride.

"Fire at will," Taylor said.

He guided the ship around as though he were reining a spirited horse. Soon he could visually track the black specks of the enemy formation describing a long arc across the sky. They looked clean. Very disciplined fliers.

Every one of his crews would be flying for themselves now. The American formation hardly existed as such. Instead, five M-l00s speckled the sky, each seeking the best possible angle of attack.

Taylor applied full throttle, trying to get into his enemy's flank before the Japanese gunships could bring their weapons to bear.

"I don't know," Krebs said, hanging on the weapons control stick.

"Fuck you don't know," Taylor said. "I know. Take those fuckers out."

Krebs fired.

Nothing.

"Just getting a feel for the deflection," he excused himself. He sounded calmer now that he was committed to action.

Taylor flew straight for the center of the enemy formation. He watched the increasingly clear gunships coming into the last segment of their turns.

"Come on, baby," Krebs said. He fired again.

Instantaneously, a black gunship erupted in flames and left the enemy formation, its component parts hurtling through the sky in multiple directions.

Taylor howled with delight, eternally the wild young captain who had sailed dreamily into Africa.

"Well, fuck me," Krebs said in wonder. He fired again, pulsing out rounds.

Another Japanese gunship broke apart in the sky.

Remember me, Taylor told his enemy. Remember me.

In quick succession, two more Japanese gunships blazed and broke up. The other American ships were hitting.

There was very little time. The enemy systems defined themselves with greater clarity with each passing second. Taylor was afraid they would be able to come around at their own angle and sweep the sky with lasers in a crossfire effect.

Taylor stared hard at the enemy formation, trying to read the pattern.

"Flapper," he yelled suddenly. "Get the number three ship. That's the flight leader."

"Roger." Krebs had put his gruff old soldier voice back on. But, bubbling under the gray tones was the same unmistakable exhilaration that Taylor felt. The indescribable joy of destruction.

The old warrant officer followed the turn of the aircraft with his optics. He let go one round, then another.

The enemy's flight leader disappeared in a hot white flash. When the dazzle faded there were only black chunks of waste dropping into the sea.

Another of the enemy's aircraft exploded.

The remaining gunships began to abort their turns. Instead of trying to close with their tormentors, they were trying to escape.

Wrong decision, Taylor thought coldly. "All stations, right wheel," he called, slipping unconsciously into an old cavalry command.

Two of the enemy's surviving gunships exploded in tandem, as though they had been taken out by a doublebarreled shotgun.

Only two enemy ships remained. Taylor knew what they were feeling. The terror. The recognition that it was all over battling with the human tendency to hope against hope. And the frantic uncertainty that interfered with those functions it did not completely paralyze. But the knowledge did not move him.

They were on the enemy's rear hemisphere now. The attempt to flee was hopeless, since the American aircraft were faster. But the enemy pilots would not know that. At this point, the only thing they would know with any certainty was that they were still alive.

Taylor felt Krebs tense mercilessly beside him. The warrant sent off another succession of rounds.

A gunship spun around like a weathervane in a storm, breaking up even before the fire from its fuel tanks could engulf it. Then the familiar cloud of flames swelled outward, spitting odd aircraft parts.

A lone enemy survivor strained off to the southeast. Taylor could feel the pilot pushing for each last ounce of thrust, aching to go faster than physical laws allowed.

The lone black ship flared and fell away in a sputtering rain of components.

For a long moment no one spoke. The M-l00s automatically slipped back into formation, conditioned by drill. But no drill had given them the language to express what they felt.

The sky was eerily clean.

"All stations," Taylor said finally. "Return to automatic flight controls. Next stop: Objective Blackjack."

Baku.

He took a deep breath.

"Flapper," he said, "I'm going back to have a little talk with our Russian friend."

"I swear," Kozlov said. His mouth was bleeding from Taylor's blow. "I swear I didn't know."

Taylor looked at him grimly. He wanted to open a hatch and push the Russian out into the sky. He did not know whether or not there were sharks in the Caspian Sea, but he hoped nature had not missed the opportunity to put some there.

Taylor felt another rush of fury, and he raised his fist.

"Don't," Meredith said suddenly. "I believe him."

Taylor looked at the S-2 in surprise, fist suspended in midair.

"Look at him," Meredith went on, with as little regard as if Kozlov could not hear a word that passed between them. "He's scared shitless. He's been that way since the refueling site. He didn't have a clue." Meredith made a spitting gesture with his lips. "The poor bastard's just a staff officer with a toothache, not some kind of suicide volunteer. Ivanov set him up too."

Taylor lowered his fist. But he did not unclench it. He glowered. "Goddamnit," he said to Kozlov, "I just want to know one thing. Give me one straight goddamned answer, if you fucking Russians are biologically capable of it. All that shit about the layout of the headquarters in Baku — were you telling the truth? Was that sketch accurate? Or were you just making it all up?"

Kozlov opened his mouth to speak. Two of the bad front teeth had disappeared. The mouth wavered and shut, blood streaming out onto the Russian's chin, streaking down into his uniform. He spit into his sleeve, then tried a second time to squeeze out the words. "Everything… everything is true. You see? I am here with you. I, too, believed."

Taylor shook his head, turning away in disgust.

"I trust him too," Ryder said. It was the first time Ryder had spoken in Taylor's presence since the flight began. Taylor almost snapped at him. But Hank Parker spoke first:

"He's straight, sir. I'd bet my bars."

Taylor suddenly felt like a big cat in a small cage. "Goddamnit," he said, turning back to Kozlov, "your country gets at least as much out of this operation as mine does."

"I understand," Kozlov said cautiously, sick gums still bleeding.

"Then why? Why did Ivanov do it?"

"I don't know."

"Why sell out your only friends? Christ, nobody in the world has any sympathy for you except us. Who else tried to save your asses?"

Kozlov looked down at the deck in shame. "I do not understand." He wiped his chin on his sleeve again. "Perhaps there was a mistake. I don't know."

Taylor punched his blistered hand against a side panel. It hurt. In anger, he tore off the fresh bandage that had been applied before the mission lifted off.

The pain felt right. Good. None of it made sense anymore.

"I don't know, either," Taylor said wearily.

"We need him," Meredith said. "We're going to need him on the ground."

Taylor nodded. "All right." He turned to Kozlov. "But one false step, and I'll shoot you myself."

Kozlov nodded solemnly. He was very pale and the blood smeared over the bottom of his face was very red. He seemed physically smaller now, as if shame had crumpled him, and Taylor felt almost as though he had struck a child.

"And no gun," Taylor added. "You do the guiding. We'll handle the fireworks."

Kozlov nodded again, accepting this further humiliation. Taylor turned to Hank Parker, dismissing the Russian from his immediate concern. He leaned in over the battle control console. Then he straightened abruptly.

"Viktor," he said, facing Kozlov across the small cell. The Russian was feeling in his mouth with his fingers. "I want you to tell me one more thing honestly. Did you…did your people know anything about the Scramblers? Did you choose not to warn us?"

Kozlov wiped his bloody fingers on the side of his trousers. He coughed and his throat sounded crowded with waste. "I didn't know. I knew nothing personally…" He hesitated. Then he continued with a new resolution: "General Ivanov knew something. Honestly, I do not know how much he knew. He said nothing to me until… afterward."

"You people," Taylor said, shaking his head in disgust. The tone of his voice reached an odd pitch between fury and resignation. "Does anybody in your country remember how to tell the truth?"

Kozlov shrugged slightly, drawing his shoulders together as if trying to disappear into himself. He could not meet Taylor's eyes.

Unexpectedly, the strategic communications set sparked to life: a totally unwelcome interruption. A tired voice fumbled through the call signs at the distant end. Even Washington was growing weary.

Meredith acknowledged.

"Is Colonel Taylor at your location?" the communications officer asked from the other side of the world.

"Roger. Standing by."

"Going to visual relay."

"Check."

"Hold for the President of the United States."

Oh, shit, Taylor thought, longing for the days when monarchs were weeks or months away from the soldier's camp.

To everyone's surprise, the familiar face of President Waters did not fill the monitor. Instead, the Vice President appeared, looking handsomely tanned and healthy, except for some tiredness around the eyes. When Taylor stepped in front of the monitor, the Vice President winced. The two men had never met.

Vice President Maddox recovered smoothly and leaned forward again, body language suggesting a generous intimacy.

"Colonel Taylor?" he asked.

"Yes, Mr. Vice President."

An odd expression passed across the distant man's face. Then he said: "Colonel Taylor, I'm the President now. As of about an hour ago, as a matter of fact. President Waters suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep this morning."

"Yes, sir," Taylor said flatly, calculating as swiftly as he could the implications for his mission. Nothing else mattered now.

"Colonel Taylor, it sounds as though you're not alone."

"That's correct, sir. Several members of my staff are present."

The new President glanced off to the side. It seemed as though he was about to speak to another party off-camera. Then he faced the screen again and said:

"Could you clear the room or whatever it is you're in? I'd like to talk to you privately."

Bad sign. The only question was: how bad? Another time Taylor might have stated that his staff needed to continue at their posts. But he sensed it would be a fatal move at this junction.

"Merry," he said, turning from the monitor for a moment.

"Yes, sir," Meredith said. He quickly began shepherding the others into the narrow passageway that led to the cockpit. Hank Parker went first, heading for the cockpit itself, since he was flight-qualified and could reasonably lay a claim to the comfort of Taylor's forward seat.

After a few awkward seconds, the compartment was clear and the internal hatch had been shut.

"I'm alone now, Mr. President."

Maddox nodded, chewing slightly at his lower lip. It was evident that he was trying to get past the shock of Taylor's scars, to size up the total package.

"Colonel Taylor," he began in a voice that belonged on a veranda in the Deep South, "I did not want to embarrass you in front of your subordinates… however, it appears to me that the mission upon which you are presently embarked… may be ill-advised."

Taylor didn't blink. He had been preparing himself for this.

"Why, Mr. President?"

Maddox looked surprised. Taylor heard an off-camera voice say:

"You don't need to explain anything to him, Mr. President. All you have to do is tell him to turn his ass around and he'll by God do it."

"Colonel Taylor," Maddox picked up, "I'm afraid there may be insufficient time to explain all of our… considerations. I am directing you to terminate your mission immediately."

"Mr. President," Taylor said desperately, struggling not to sound as desperate as he felt, "we're almost at the objective area. In one hour—"

"Colonel, I don't intend to argue with you. The best minds in Washington have advised me to put a halt to whatever it is you're up to over there. So just turn yourself around and head on back to wherever it is you started from. You've done a fine job up until now, and, I can assure you, your country's grateful to you."

"No," Taylor said.

Maddox looked at him in disbelief. "What did you say?"

"No, Mr. President. I will not abort this mission. I believe you are receiving bad advice from men who do not understand the situation here in-theater. I have never before disobeyed an order, least of all from my president. But I believe my duty is clear. I intend to execute this mission, as directed by President Waters."

"By God, Colonel, you're going to do what—"

Taylor switched off the strategic link. Then he unlatched the encryption insert, withdrew it, swung it with all his strength against the deck, and inserted it again, doing up the latch as if nothing had happened. Farewell to Washington.

He went forward and opened the internal hatch that led to the cockpit passageway.

In the faint light, the crammed officers looked ridiculous, huddled against each other like college students playing some prank. Taylor could smell Kozlov's decayed, bloody breath bathing them all.

"Gentlemen," Taylor said, "the President of the United States died this morning, of natural causes. The Vice President has been sworn in and has assumed the presidency. There have been no difficulties with the transition process. Now," he bent to help Ryder up out of the tangle of limbs and torsos, "we've got a mission to run."

Maddox sat bolt upright. He was angry. He could not recall the last time he had been so angry, but he knew it had been a matter of years, if not decades.

"Well." He looked around the room, disgusted by the extent of the mess he had inherited. "You heard him. Now what in the hell are you all going to do about it?" He looked at the secretary of state, then at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The old general just shook his head in amazement. He'll definitely have to go, Maddox thought. In good time. Couldn't stage an immediate massacre of all Waters's appointees.

"Mr. President," the secretary of state began, "perhaps we could alert the Japanese. Make it clear to them that this is a maverick action."

Absolutely worthless, Maddox thought. How did Waters ever manage with such a hopeless bunch?

"Mr. Secretary," Maddox began, stretching out the syllables as though he were speaking on the hottest of summer afternoons, "you might talk me into a lot of things. But you are not about to talk me into selling out American soldiers to our enemies. And I don't care how crazy this ugly sonofabitch of a colonel is. Hasn't anybody got any sensible ideas?"

"Court-martial?" the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said meekly.

Maddox glared at him. "General" — he pronounced the title with only two syllables—"I had something a bit more immediate in mind."

The chairman shook his head. "Too late, sir. We couldn't even begin to intercept them. And I know Colonel Taylor. He'll have everybody restricted to one net, and he'll hide that with skip frequencies. From a military standpoint… I'm afraid there's nothing we can do but watch. And hope for the best."

Maddox was appalled. "Hellfire," he said. "You-all just tell me one thing, and I want a straight answer. Has this sonofabitch got a chance in hell of pulling this caper off?"

"Oh, he's got a chance," the chairman said. "About one chance in hell, exactly. Maybe two chances in hell, considering that it's George Taylor."

President Maddox was unhappy. This did not strike him as an auspicious start to his presidency, and even if that presidency was only going to last until the swearing in of the other party's candidate in January, he did not intend to smear himself with any avoidable shame.

"You boys," he said disgustedly. "I swear to God, I just don't know." He faced the secretary of state, but he spoke to the room at large. "I'll tell you what we're going to do. If this fellow screws it all up and lives to tell about it, we're going to court-martial him and everybody in uniform who can so much as spell his name." Maddox sat back. For the first time all day, he felt as though he were actually in charge. "On the other hand, if the sonofabitch pulls it off and kicks him some ass, everyone in this room is going to forget that this conversation took place." He looked methodically from face to face. "You-all understand me?"

Valya entered the hotel bar alone. Clutching her purse to steady her hands, she scanned the musty interior as she made her way through the clutter of early drinkers and women for sale. The Americans were in uniform now, and they stood a bit straighter. Sudden laughter splashed out of the gloom, but it sounded formal and forced to her ears. She saw no one whom she recognized.

It was impossible. She could not do it.

She settled herself on a barstool, trying to project a graceful sexuality. But it was terribly difficult. Her buttocks ached where she had been kicked by her interrogator, and there was no comfort left in the small saddle of flesh beneath her dress.

She tried to adjust her eyes to the brown air, still searching the profiles grouped around back tables. The Russian women smoked heavily, and the dreary lighting barely penetrated the depths of the room. But that was all right. Valya touched her face anxiously. She had layered herself with far more makeup than was her custom in an attempt to disguise her bruises. Thankfully, most of the swelling had gone down. Only the discoloration remained.

She had kept herself on course with the faint hope that her American boy would be here after all, her lover of a single night, and that he would smile and wave, coming anxiously toward her, wondering only why she had been unable to meet him as promised the night before, offering salvation.

But her boy was not there. No one was going to magically rescue her. Ignored by the bartender, she leaned onto the counter, struggling to see. Her boy was not there. And neither was the man to whom her tormentors had consigned her.

Then she saw him. With his back three-quarters to her. He swung his jaw back over a heavy shoulder to bark at a waiter in English. A silver ornament and colored device decorated his shoulder strap.

She could not do it. She did not have the strength.

She rose carefully from her barstool, avoiding as much of the pain in her rump as she could. It was hard to imagine bearing the weight of a man on top of her now. She felt bruised to the bone. But, she reminded herself, there were worse things in the world, as the security officers had been glad to point out.

There were no women at the man's table. It was still early, and the man and his comrades were drinking brown bottles of beer and talking. Valya hunted her way between the tables, catching an already-sore hip on the jut of a chair. She tried to walk with dignity, while her insides sickened. The big man turned and called to the waiter again, with less patience this time.

She could not do it. She had no idea where the words would come from.

She paused for a moment, aching for an excuse not to continue. She would have been glad of an incontestable physical illness, one so fierce it would give her tormentors pause. She thought again of the darkened room, the single lamp, of questions and irresistible blows. She remembered the threats, and how it felt to lie soaking on a concrete floor.

One foot in front of the other, she told herself. Just like a soldier. It won't be anything. You've been through far worse.

She stopped behind the man's chair, waiting for him to notice her. But he was speaking rapidly to the two other men at the table. Finally one of his listeners looked up in Valya's direction. A moment later, the big man's head turned to seek out the new attraction, twisting coils of fat over his collar.

"Hello," Valya said.

The big man looked up at her with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. He said nothing.

"We have met," Valya went on.

The big man nodded. "I know that."

"The other night," Valya said, fighting to remain calm. She wanted to cry and run away. Instead, she tried to outfit her voice with the easy sexuality of a woman in a film. "I was with my friend. Her name is Tanya."

"I know," the big man said. "I never forget a woman who walks away from me with a full drink on the table." Their eyes met fully for the first time. Valya saw hatred in the dark pupils.

I cannot do this, she told herself.

She laid a hand on the man's shoulder, resting her fingers over a cold colored shield. She felt as though she had been forced to touch a snake. But she kept her hand in place.

She smiled as richly as she could manage. "Oh," she said, laughing, "this is such a misunderstanding. But I thought you did not find me to be attractive. I thought you wanted me to go away. I believed you to be in love with Tanya."

The big American's eyes softened just a little. Then his face widened with a smile full of big white American teeth. Meant to devour their American steaks, Valya thought.

"Me?" the man laughed. "Me? In love with old Tanya?" His drinking companions joined in the laughter. "Wouldn't that be the day?"

"You hurt my feelings," Valya lied. "I thought you wanted for me to go away." She tried to remember a few colloquial English phrases of the sort not taught in the Soviet school system. "You made such eyes for Tanya."

"I didn't know you had the hots for old Tanya, Bill," one of the other drinkers said. "Didn't know she was your type."

The big man laughed again, but less forcefully this time. "Old Tanyer," he said. "Now that gal's been drove hard and put away wet. Wouldn't nobody but Jimbo take that mare for a ride."

The third man shook his head as if he had tasted something foul. "Old Jim's blind as a bat."

"I think Jimbo just likes a lot of bacon on his gals," the big man said. His accent made it hard to catch all of his words. He still had not moved to shake off Valya's hand, and she warmed it back and forth on the heavy shoulder. "Christ," the big man said, "I remember him way back when at Huachuca. Sonofabitch was always over in Naco or Agua Prieta jumping some big Mex gal. Almost lost his clearance."

"Those were the days," the third man agreed. "At least them Mex gals had sense enough to wash every so often." He looked up at Valya, then down along the trace of her figure, then back into her eyes. His face bore an expression of incomparable insolence.

The big man turned out from under Valya's hand. She thought he was going to send her away. She nearly panicked. She was ready to do anything, to get down on her knees. She saw the huge, soft-faced interrogator standing over her again. And the younger, handsome officer, telling her that they merely wanted her to befriend someone for them, saying it in an easy tone that threatened the end of the world.

The big man kicked a chair back from under the table. "Have a seat," he told Valya. "What are you drinking?"

Valya half-tripped down into the chair. Her backside hit with force, and her backbone shook with a presentiment of age. It took her a moment to relax into the pain.

"Anything," she said. "It does not matter. Something strong."

Suddenly the big man leaned in close to Valya, inspecting her. She cringed back into the bad light.

The big man whistled. "Jeez. Your boyfriend give you that shiner, honey-pie?"

Valya could feel her face swelling with the blood of embarrassment. "An accident," she said. "I have fallen down the stairs."

The big man smiled slightly and sat back. "Yeah, I guess fell down them stairs a couple times myself."

He reached around behind Valya and jerked her chair next to his. He settled a big hand on her far shoulder, then railed it down her side before halting it on the swell of her bottom.

He nodded, figuring. "You're a skinny little gal," he aid, "but I guess you'll do." He leaned in close so that his friends could not hear. His lips brushed Valya's hair. He smelled like a puddle of stale beer.

"One hundred American dollars," he said, "and not a penny more."

24

Noburu dreamed of a yellow horse by a salt lake. He approached the horse, but the animal paid him no attention. Browsing over tufts of stunted grass, the animal appeared weary beyond description, and its back was so badly bowed that a child's weight might have broken it. Noburu himself wore a fine English suit, but he had come away without his cuff links. He was searching for his cuff links on the sandy waste, and he feared that the horse might devour them by mistake. He called out to the animal. He knew its name. And the horse raised its head, swiveling dully in Noburu's direction. The yellow horse was blind. Disease had whitened its eyes. It soon turned its nose back to the dying grass.

Brown men came. Out of nowhere. Coming from all sides. They rushed slim-legged from the sea, wailing in a foreign language. Noburu assumed they had come to slaughter the horse. He ran toward the uninterested animal, determined to shield it in his arms. But the brown men were not immediately concerned with the horse. Noburu had been mistaken. They were coming for him.

Countless hands slithered over him, catching his limbs in small firm grips. They had made a cross of light from antique headlamps, and they intended to crucify him. He struggled, for he sensed that hanging from that cross of light would be the most painful of tortures. But the mob had him in its power. Their hands grew in strength, clamping him. He smelled the foreign spice of their breath. He tried to reason with them, explaining that he could not possibly be crucified without his cuff links. It was impossible to think that he might end like that, badly dressed in public.

Then the dragon came out of the sky. The world burned. He could see the profile of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, dark against the flames. He could not quite see the dragon. It was dark and shapeless. But he knew it was there. He could feel the wash of wind slapped earthward by its wings. The brown men were gone. In their place, the dead approached him, in moldering uniforms. Crippled by plague, with white skulls showing beneath old flesh, they limped hungrily toward him. And he knew them. He had known them for a long, long time. They were old acquaintances from his personal darkness. But they had never come so close before. The most terrible one of them all lunged forward, reaching for Noburu with fingers of light.

"They're coming back," Akiro said.

Noburu set his nose to the wind. The scent of death. He had tried to nap, to rest a little. But it would have been far better to remain awake. His dreams were on a collision course with reality. Hungover with visions, he had staggered back to his vantage point atop the headquarters roof.

Yes. You could hear them now. Climbing back up the hill in the retreating light. The brown men. Singing.

"I cannot understand it," Akiro said. "I cannot understand it." He was not speaking to Noburu now, but to himself, in the vacant tone of a man confronted with the collapse of all his certainties — and with the simultaneous prospect of death.

"Has the ammunition been cross-leveled?" Noburu asked. He touched the silly skullcap bandage on his head. It had loosened during his nap. His mind was still unsure of what was real. The dream warrior danced on a ragged carpet of facts. Noburu felt drugged after his healthless sleep, and the unearthly singing and chanting out in the streets seemed to weave the world of dreams into the pattern of common existence.

"Sir," Akiro answered, glad to busy himself with a concrete matter. "The redistribution is complete. The men have an average of eighteen rounds per automatic rifle. We have also brought in a number of irregular weapons taken from enemy casualties. There are approximately seventy rounds per machine gun. One grenade for every two men."

Yes. So much had been unforeseen. The mob climbed steadily up through the streets, preceded by its medieval wail. The ammunition might suffice to beat off the first rush, if they were lucky.

"Still no direct communications with the rear, or with Tokyo?" Noburu asked.

Akiro hung his head. "The situation seemed to be improving. Then, an hour ago, the interference began again."

"The same parameters as last night?"

"No. Different. The communications officer says that last night's attack was barrage jamming. He calls the present effort leech-and-spike."

What could it mean? In the course of his military career, Noburu had never been so utterly cut off from information. He had come to take ease of communication for granted. Now, at too old an age, he had been transported back through the centuries, to fight his last battle in darkness.

Well, he thought, it did not make so great a difference now. Even had the communications leapt suddenly back to life, it would have been too late. The friendly forces were too far away. He had scoured the map, analyzing the undeveloped road network from the standpoint of both a relief column and an interdiction effort. And the advantage was all on the side of his enemies. In an hour, perhaps sooner, the foreign, foreign faces would come over the walls for the last time, blowing in the doors, clambering through the windows. It was finished.

He wanted to say something to cheer up Akiro, to buoy him to the last. But the words would not come. Even his language had failed him in the end.

"Come on," Noburu said. "We'll try a last broadcast. For form's sake."

They went down through the arteries of the headquarters building, stepping between the lines of wounded men lying in the hallways. Here and there, a conscious soldier tried to rise at the passage of his commanding officer. But each attempt failed. Two officers and an enlisted helper shuffled boxes of documents into the room where the paper shredder was kept. You could smell the heat of the machine as you passed by, and Noburu caught a glimpse of disembodied hands dealing papers into the device's gullet. The days of careful document control and neatly logged numbers were over.

They negotiated a stretch of hallway cluttered with bureaucratic tools but no men, and Noburu halted Akiro by grasping his arm.

"Someone," Noburu said, "has been designated to… look after the wounded? Just in case?"

"Sir," Akiro said sadly. "The necessary ammunition has been set aside. Two NCOs have received the task."

"Reliable men?" Noburu asked.

Akiro hesitated for a moment. In the space of little more than a day, his armor of selfassurance had been reduced to a coat of rags.

"The best we could find," the aide finally replied.

It was a terrible waste, Noburu thought. For the first time, he began to feel a measure of real affection toward the younger man. Akiro was learning to empathize with his fellow man at last. But the development had come too late.

But that was eternally true, Noburu realized. Understanding always came too late. It certainly had come too late in his own case.

They passed the room where the master computer culled through its electronic dreams, unperturbed. The computer had been left running, but its consoles were locked so that no outsider could enter it without possessing an unbreakable complex of codes. For the mob the machine would be a useless prize. But if the Azeris did not physically destroy it, the computer would be invaluable after its recapture by the relief column.

And the relief column would come. Eventually. It just was not going to come in time to save the defenders of the compound. Noburu could feel that much in his old soldier's bones.

He stopped, then backtracked a few steps and opened the door to the computer room. The machine glowed in the soft light, unattended. Looking in on it, Noburu felt as one of his ancestors might have felt in saying goodbye to a favorite horse in its stall. Noburu had ridden the magical horses of a new age to an unanticipated end. In the final hour there was no warm coat to stroke, no eyes asked affection, there was no wet nuzzling. The machine simply moaned to itself, ticked, and sailed off into its galaxies of numbers.

Noburu, who still imagined himself to have been hardened by the years, found it uncharacteristically bitter to reflect that this machine was worth far more to his country than any combination of men. He himself, along with all of his principal officers, down to the assistant of the helper's helper, meant nothing beside the power and splendor of this machine. The machines made war now, while the men involved simply meandered through a waking dream of bygone glories.

No. He knew that, even now, it was not true. The glib formula was as false as everything else in his life had been.

He closed the door on the bright machine, leaving its fate for other men to determine. Tokyo could still send an electronic self-destruct message, should they so choose. It was not up to him. It would have embarrassed him, even under the present circumstances, to reveal to Akiro that he, the senior officer in the theater of war, did not have sufficient personal authority to order the destruction of a master computer.

They entered the operations center. The room was astonishingly calm. The well-staffed excitement of modem warfare had given way to a watch consisting of a single officer and NCO, while the rest of the logisticians and programmers, technical advisers and fire support specialists, were up above ground, manning a thin line of final defensive positions.

"The radio set is over here," Akiro said, leading the way. Noburu followed him to an antique Soviet-built radio, something he might reasonably have expected to see only in a military museum.

"And this… seems to work?" Noburu asked.

"It's the only way we were able to establish contact with anyone," Akiro answered. "It's an old VHF set. The loyal garrisons are using them. But the jamming is very bad."

How he had laughed at the ancient gear with which the Soviets had been equipped. It seemed there would be no end to his lessons in humility.

No. That was wrong. There would be an end soon enough.

"It works… the same way?" Noburu asked. Even as a lieutenant, he had never handled anything so crude.

"The same way. You press this, then speak into the microphone."

"But no one has answered?"

"Not for hours."

Noburu picked up the chipped microphone. He looked at the younger man to ensure he was doing everything correctly.

"We have the call sign Castle," Akiro added.

Noburu pressed the button to transmit. "Any listening station, this is Castle… this is Castle. We are under siege by indigenous elements… and require immediate support." These old sets were not secure, of course. It was impossible to enumerate the concerns he felt required to address as a professional soldier. There was as much chance now that his enemies were listening in as that his own side would monitor the broadcast."… Let it be recorded that the subordinate officers and men of this command served the Emperor honorably… and fought to the last man." The words felt wooden in his mouth. But he owed his men at least that. The final tribute of their commander. But he could not bring himself to end on a note of false enthusiasm. "This is Castle. End of transmission."

The two men stood over the old radio in the big quiet. The operations center held the silence of a theater after a performance, when even the janitors had gone home. Each man, in his different way, hoped that the radio would crackle to life on its own, bringing them words of hope, news of an approaching relief column, or at least the acknowledgment that some distant station knew they were still alive. But there was nothing.

Noburu looked at the younger man. Despite the marks of weariness on his face, Akiro looked impossibly young. Noburu wished he could send the boy back to a safe office in the General Staff complex or to some overheated academy classroom. And to the young wife Akiro had neglected, as all ambitious young officers neglected their wives. Simply, he wished he could send Akiro back to the world where grown men played at being soldiers and still had their lives ahead of them.

Noburu took the younger man by the arm, a little surprised that Akiro was every bit as warm to the touch as were other men. This little staff tiger.

"Come," he told the younger man. "We'd better go back upstairs."

They made their way back to the helipad on the roof. Colonel Kloete was still on guard, with the stump of a cigarette in one hand and his other hand holding fast to his light machine gun. Beside him, the surviving South African NCO slumped with his eyes closed. It was impossible to tell whether the man was merely resting or deep in sleep. Noburu had to admire the arrogantly casual attitude of the South Africans toward their impending deaths. But each culture faced the inevitable in its own way.

And the inevitable was approaching. The enormous chanting of the mob had virtually surrounded the headquarters complex, although the bulk of the Azeris remained out of sight, hidden in buildings, alleyways, behind rubble, walls, and wreckage. Only a few stray figures could be seen, scuttling through the twilight. The mob was marshaling its strength, just below the crest of the hill. Beyond the no-man's-land of burned-out ruins.

Kloete sucked down a last dose of smoke and flicked the butt over the wall. His features remained hard and clear in the deserting light.

"Noisy bunch," he said. "Aren't they, General?"

Noburu nodded. Kloete had never been too anxious to pay a full measure of military courtesy to Noburu, and he made no move to rise or salute. His attitude seemed to say, "We're all equal now and we'll be even more equal before the sun comes up again."

"You have ammunition?" Noburu asked, touching the bandage layered over his scalp. It had begun to itch.

Kloete grinned. "Enough to make the little buggers angry. After that, I can just take this thing apart" — he slapped his weapon—"and throw the bloody pieces at them."

The chanting stopped. Initially, a few ragged voices continued, but they soon faltered into the gathering darkness. In the absence of the vast wailing, the racket of a later age was clearly audible: heavy machines on the move.

"The relief column," Akiro declared, his voice sweet with wonder.

Noburu caught him by the shoulder. "No. If it were the relief column, they'd be shooting."

Above the mechanical growling, a single high voice sang out. It sounded like a Moslem call to prayer.

In reply, the crowd howled so loudly that the concrete shivered beneath Noburu's boots.

Kloete reared up, staring into the fresh pale night settling over the courtyard and the walls.

"Tanks!" he shouted. "The bastards have tanks."

In agreement, the first main gun sounded. The round hit the far wing of the headquarters complex, sending a shock wave through the air.

"Here they come," a Japanese voice screamed from a lateral position.

With a wave of noise, the crowd surged out of the shadows. Off in the distance, on the fringe of the city, the slums were burning, cordoning off the city with fire. Why was it, Noburu wondered, that in times of disruption the poor burned themselves out first? Despair? A desire to be clean of their scavenged lives?

A single Japanese weapon opened up nearby, then stopped firing after expending a few rounds. His men were holding their fire, waiting until they could get the highest return on each bullet paid out. They did not need orders now. Every man understood.

Noburu could see three tanks crawling toward the gate and the breaches in the wall. It was hard to listen past the thunder of the crowd, but it sounded as if even more tanks were following the first machines.

That was it, then. There were no antitank weapons. No one had imagined a need for them here.

The tanks fired above the crowd, hammering the headquarters building with their guns. The shots seemed random and undisciplined. But they could not help having an effect.

The quickest members of the mob dashed through the gate and scrambled over the breaches in the wall. They stumbled across mounds of shattered masonry, firing wildly and shrieking.

The Japanese held their fire.

Kloete drew out a lean commando knife and teased it twice over the broken stucco that lipped the roof before returning it to its sheath.

"Sir," Akiro cried, "you must take cover."

Noburu turned to the younger man. Akiro stood upright beside him, unwilling to go to ground before his superior did so. But the aide's eyes glowed with fear in the dusk.

"In a moment," Noburu said. He wanted to look his death in the face.

Akiro began to speak again, then choked and staggered against Noburu, grasping the general with uncustomary rudeness. Noburu had felt the warm wet of the young man's blood peck at his own face.

The aide clutched Noburu's arm, astonished. He remained on his feet, with his insides slipping out of his ripped trousers. He looked at Noburu with the innocence of an abused pet dog.

"Akiro," Noburu said.

The aide relaxed his grip on his master and collapsed onto the cement. Freed from the constraints of muscles and tight flesh, the young man's lower internal organs flowed out of him as though fleeing his death and attempting to survive on their own.

Akiro's eyes remained open, and his head moved slightly on the intact axis of his spine. He looked at Noburu with a hopefulness the older man could not bear, as though Akiro expected the wise old general to fix him and make everything right again.

"Akiro," Noburu said, reaching out to steady the boy's witchings, which continued to expel the contents of his torso.

The aide's lips made a word that Noburu could not decipher.

"Akiro," Noburu repeated.

The tension went out of the boy's body, and the terrible vibrancy left his eyes.

Kloete opened up with the light machine gun, firing short bursts and cursing. The other machine guns kicked in, as did a few automatic rifles. Noburu kept waiting for the rest of his men to open fire. Then he realized that there were no others.

He picked up Akiro's automatic rifle, wiped off the wet mortality on his trousers, and knelt beside Kloete and the South African NCO. The three men fired over the edge of the roof. Noburu had stopped thinking now. He gave himself up to the trance of action, trying to fire as calmly as if he were on range.

The lead tank surged ahead of the crowd. It shot point-blank into the headquarters, following the main gun round with bright tracers from its machine gun. Tides of bodies fell to the Japanese weaponry, but there seemed to be no end to the mob. The space between the headquarters and the wall grew dense with the living and the dead.

In the blaze of the firefight, Noburu saw one of his men lash from a side door, charging without a rifle. In the last seconds before the man threw himself on top of the tank, Noburu recognized the swell of the grenade in the man's hand.

The explosion drove the nearest members of the mob to their knees. But it did not stop the tank.

"Sonofabitch," Kloete spat. The machine gun had licked empty.

The tank fired again. The building shook beneath them.

The South African NCO fixed a bayonet to his rifle. Kloete drew out his sidearm. He stood up carelessly, cursing and leading his targets, one by one. Noburu fired and watched a dark form tumble.

The line of machine gun tracers crisscrossed down below as the remaining Japanese fired their final protective fires.

Noburu heard a noise that did not fit.

Something was wrong. There was a great hissing, a new noise for which he could not account. Up in the sky. As though enormous winged snakes were descending from the heavens. Dragons.

The lead tank disappeared in a huge white flash that dazzled Noburu's eyes. A stunning bell-like sound was followed by an explosion. His vision of the world crazed into a disorderly mosaic. But he could see the tank burning.

"I can't see," the South African NCO howled. "I can't see."

The explosion had been as bright as a sun come to earth. The tremendous force of the impact made Noburu's head throb under its disordered bandage. He tried to see into the sky.

Two more explosions drew his eyes back to the earth.

Thank God, he thought, sinking down into himself. Oh, thank God. He found the thought that he was going to live unexpectedly pleasant.

The hissing and sizzling grew louder. The drone of engines began to emerge from under the cowls of their noise suppressors.

Someone had heard. Someone had monitored one of the radio transmissions. Someone had managed to muster an air-mobile relief force.

Kloete glanced over at Noburu between shots.

"Looks like your mates came through," he said. Then he straight-armed his pistol down at the mob.

The massed attackers wavered at the destruction of their armored support. The tanks had promised them a magic victory. Now the tanks were gone. In the midst of the swarm, high voices sang out prayerlike encouragements.

Noburu still could not see the relief aircraft in the darkened sky. He tried to place them by the sound of their engines. But his ears were ringing. The blast had shocked his senses. And his hearing was half-gone at the best of times.

Nonetheless, it annoyed him that he could not identify the hissing, descending ships.

Whatever kind they were, they were welcome.

As if at an invisible signal, the mob surged forward again. In the suddenness of the rush, the lead figures gained the building. Noburu rose to his full height to spend his last bullets where they were most needed. But he could already hear the distinct echo of fighting inside the headquarters.

Perhaps the relief force would be too late after all. By minutes.

He followed a running figure through the firelight, leading him carefully with his sights. When he was certain he had the man, he squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

He drew out his pistol. But the man he had targeted had already made his way to the shelter of the building. Down in the belly of the headquarters, something exploded.

"Your boys are fucking slow," Kloete screamed. "They're too fucking slow."

Noburu fired and dropped a running man. The figure rolled over, clutching his knee.

There were too many of them. The attackers were already swinging themselves up to enter the building's second floor windows, leaving no point of entry untried. The last Japanese gun had been silenced.

The noise of the aircraft loomed in heavily. A pillar of fire descended from the heavens, followed by another, then a third. Noburu recognized the accompanying noise: Gatling guns.

Heavy bullets rinsed over the packed courtyard. The rounds were so powerful that they did not merely fell their victims but shredded them and threw the remnants great distances.

Kloete ducked, hugging the roof. Noburu followed his example. The South African was laughing like a wild man, his behavior insanely inconstant.

Beyond the lip of the wall, the fury of the crowd turned to wails of despair. Noburu could feel the intruders scrambling to avoid the godlike weapons, and he could picture the oversize rounds rinsing back and forth across the courtyard. Sometimes the old weapons were the best.

Noburu went cold. Underneath him, the sounds of combat within the headquarters building punctuated his horror.

He had realized that none of the new Japanese systems in the theater of war mounted Gatling guns.

Behind him, the dream warrior laughed and laughed and laughed.

The sound of the aircraft was deafeningly close now. He could begin to make out their swollen black forms against the deep blue sky. Each time one of the ships unleashed another burst from its Gatling gun, the cone of fire was shorter, closer. The Gatling rounds made a sharp crackling sound as they split the cobblestones amid the dead and the dying.

"Americans," Noburu said to Kloete.

Perhaps the noise was too much. The South African merely stared at him in incomprehension.

"The Americans," Noburu shouted, cupping a hand beside his mouth.

Kloete looked at him as if the general had gone mad.

The rotor wash began tearing at their clothes. The big ships were settling, hunting for places to nest.

The dream warrior howled with glee, goading Noburu to laugh along.

No. He was not giving up so easily. He pushed the phantom away.

One of the descending aircraft was heading directly for the helipad.

"Come on," Noburu shouted, already moving. "We've got to let somebody know about—"

The noise was too great. He scrambled toward the passageway that led to the elevator and the stairwell. It would take too long to route a message through the computer with the system locked down. The only hope was the old radio.

It had to work. Tokyo had to be informed.

He turned his head to hurry Kloete and the NCO along. But the roof erupted in a holiday of sparks. One moment he was watching the scrambling forms of the two South Africans. An instant later, their bodies disintegrated as the approaching gunship's Gatling cleared the rooftop helipad.

Noburu threw himself into the deepest corner of the passageway until the drilling noise of the gunnery stopped. He felt as though he had been stung by dozens of wasps. Masonry splinters, he calculated, glad that he could still function. He threw himself into the shelter of the stairwell, just as an enormous black monster settled onto the roof.

"This way," Kozlov shouted. Taylor followed the Russian across the helipad, ducking under the flank rotor of the M-100. The roof was slick with the spread remains of several corpses so badly shot up they were barely recognizable as human.

Meredith moved up past Taylor, weapon at the ready, determinedly shielding the older man. Hank Parker followed, lugging a man-pack radio over his left shoulder and shepherding the young warrant officer who held the magic keys in his briefcase.

A few surviving members of the mob who had been stranded in the courtyard fired up at the spectacle on the roof, but they seemed to be too dazed or shaken to make their efforts tell. Meanwhile, other M-l00s settled across the parade ground, their Gatling guns sweeping the living and the dead across their chosen landing zones. American soldiers leapt from the lowering ramps and hatches, their short automatic rifles clearing each fire team's path toward the headquarters building. Protected by lightweight body armor and face shields, here and there an American fell backward, knocked down by the force of a bullet, only to rise from the dead and follow his comrades into the fight.

Taylor scanned the scene just long enough to make sure that the three birds designated for the assault had put down safely. In the low heavens, a last M-100 patrolled above the near streets, now and then issuing a spike of fire that warned the rest of the world to keep away.

There wasn't much time. Even as the raiding force approached Baku, enemy relief columns had been shooting their way into the city from multiple directions. The lone M-100 flying cover shifted its fire from axis to axis in the ultimate economy of force effort, striking the long columns selectively, blocking as many streets as possible with burning combat vehicles. But all of the main guns desperately needed recalibration now and the Gatlings, too, were down to their last reserves of ammunition. Here and there, the combat vehicles from the relief columns snaked their way inevitably into the labyrinth of streets. Worse still, the strategic down-links feeding the M-l00's on-board computers showed a fleet of enemy aircraft over the Caspian Sea, flying on an axis whose aim was unmistakable.

Taylor followed the others into a passageway littered with chipped masonry. Kozlov yanked open a steel door and was about to rush headlong into the stairwell. But Meredith caught him, knocking the unarmed man out of the way. Kozlov tripped back against a wall just as Meredith hurled a grenade into the darkness. The S-2 turned and pulled Kozlov to the ground with him.

The explosion rang so loudly from the concrete stairwell that it sounded as though the entire building would collapse.

"Let's go," Taylor shouted.

But, once again, Meredith was quicker. He took the lead, spraying short bursts into the smoke and crunching over litter splintered off the walls. Taylor threw a compact flare past him into the recesses of the stairwell.

No one fired at the light, which was little more than a pale glow in the shroud of smoke left by the grenade. It was very hard to see.

But there was no time to waste.

Standard drill, learned in L.A., perfected in Mexico. Taylor slapped Meredith on the shoulder.

"Go."

Meredith pounded down the stairs, laying down a burst as he made each corner. The bullets punched at the walls, rebounding, making quick spiderwebs of light.

"One flight clear," Meredith shouted.

Taylor turned back to Hank Parker and threw a hand in the direction of Kozlov and Ryder. "Keep those two here until I blow the whistle. Then get down those stairs as fast as you can."

The colonel hustled after Meredith.

"Three floors," Kozlov called after him. "It is three floors of stairs."

Taylor caught up with Meredith, then pushed past him, taking his turn in the two-man drill. Meredith covered him. The smoke bothered Taylor's lungs, and he felt faintly dizzy. He realized that he still had not recovered completely from the futile rescue attempt of the day before. The smoke had eaten into him.

But he kept going, holding his short-barreled automatic rifle tight against his side. He had entirely forgotten the pain in his hand.

Beyond the stairwell, the building echoed with rifle fire and shouts in three distinct languages. On the ground and upper floors, the Japanese defenders were battling the Azeris hand-to-hand, with the Americans slashing in behind, fighting everybody.

But the other American efforts were only distracters. Supporting strikes. Everything depended on getting Ryder down to the computer room before somebody blew the machine apart.

"Clear," Taylor yelled. He crouched against a wall on the next landing. Meredith's boots clambered down the concrete steps, closing on him. The younger officer slapped Taylor's shoulder and moved past him like a shadow. It was the best they could do. An emergency drill. There was no time for a careful, completely thorough clearing operation.

This time Meredith went all the way down the stairs without firing his weapon. The earlier bursts had met with no response. And the bullets had nowhere to go from the bottom of the stairwell except back up toward the firer.

Speed, speed. All risks were justified now.

"Clear to the bottom," Meredith shouted. "I'm at the door."

Taylor pulled a sports whistle from under his blouse, drawing it up by the lanyard. He blew two blasts, then scrambled down toward Meredith. From above, the rest of the party made a terrific racket stumbling down the stairs. Taylor popped another of the disposable mini-lights to guide them. It was hard to believe that the Japanese had not yet alerted to their presence. The fighting out in the corridors had not lost any of its intensity, and Taylor figured that the defenders had their hands full and probably could not do anything even if they were aware of the new threat posed by his ragged team.

He drew up beside Meredith, hacking in the dense smoke. Once, his lungs could have withstood everything. But you got old, did foolish things.

Meredith held the handle of the basement door in his left hand, autorifle ready in his right, poised off his hip. In the chemical glow of the mini-light he looked like a beautiful animal, taut and deadly.

Taylor readied another grenade. The smoke had thinned just enough so that the two men could look each other in the eyes. Both knew that this was it. If the Japanese, or anyone else, were waiting to ambush them, they would have to do it now.

Taylor had already made up his mind. He was going to be the first one through the door this time. If anything happened, Merry would know what to do.

The younger man's eyes were sharp, his nostrils flared.

Kozlov, Parker, and Ryder joined them at the bottom of the stairwell.

"To the left now," Kozlov said. "Three doors down, I think. The operations center is at the end of the hallway. The computer room is the last doorway on the left before you reach the operations center. It's very easy."

Taylor nodded, not at all certain how easy it was going to be! "We'll have to clear the ops center first." He glanced at Parker and Kozlov. "All right. I clear the ops center. Merry covers to the right down the hallway. You two get golden boy into the computer room. Then you relieve Merry. Everybody got it?"

Each man mumbled his assent.

"All right," Taylor said. "Everybody back against the wall." He pointed to where he wanted them. Then he turned to Merry. "Ready?"

Meredith's hand tensed on the door handle.

"Do it," Taylor said.

Meredith ripped open the door. Taylor lobbed the grenade out into the corridor. Then Meredith slammed the door shut again, and both men hunkered down away from the door's swing radius.

The blast tore the door right off its hinges. It popped from its frame and fell at a cant across the stairwell.

Instantly, Taylor hurled himself into the hallway, diving flat to the left and firing burst after burst. Meredith mirrored his actions, rolling to the right and shooting into the smoke.

"Come on" Taylor shouted.

A foreign automatic weapon coughed in the artificial fog. Merry fired again and again, hunting the sudden jewels of light. Taylor rolled over to help him with a burst, then rose and began to run in the direction of the operations center.

So close, he thought, so close. Please, God, no fuck-ups now.

He heard the others hurrying along behind him.

The door at the end of the corridor was shut. Taylor increased the force of his movement and struck it with all his weight, knocking it open. He rolled into a sudden clarity of light, into the coolness of an artificially controlled climate.

Behind him, the others had turned to their own mission of locating the computer room. Taylor was alone. He came up fast from the carpet, rifle ready. Everything happened in parts of seconds. A standing figure fired at him, missed, and Taylor knocked the man back over a bank of consoles with a short burst. Another man raised a pistol, but Taylor was quicker, putting a full burst into him at waist level. Then his rifle's magazine went dry.

Standing almost on the other side of the big room, a Japanese officer held a microphone in one hand and a pistol in the other. His scalp was swathed in loose, bloodstained bandages, giving him the appearance of a renegade sheik. The layout of the room was such that there was no cover between the officer and Taylor, not a single obstacle. The Japanese lowered the microphone and raised his pistol.

Taylor did not try to run. He stared at the man with a lifetime's worth of hatred. His lips curled in a snarl. He kept his eyes locked on those of his opponent, as if staring down an animal. And he methodically ejected his empty magazine and reached into his ammo pouch for another.

The Japanese officer aimed his pistol at arm's length. There was no way he could miss at such a range, Taylor felt the pistol reaching out to him with invisible lines of power, searching into him, testing the softness of his body. But he did not break the stare.

He continued to reload.

He waited. And waited. Growing hideously angry at the Japanese officer's delay, at this teasing. He almost wanted to bark a command at his opponent: Shoot. Goddamn you.

With a chill, Taylor recognized the man under the dirty bandages and bloodstains. It was General Noburu Kabata. The Japanese theater commander.

Why didn't the bastard fire?

The Japanese stared into him with a look that Taylor could not comprehend. The eyes made no sense, the facial expression did not come from Taylor's catalog. Its closest relative was fear. But that was crazy. The Japanese was the one who held the power of life and death between the two of them.

The Japanese general's eyes began to weaken, eyelids twitching. He looked beyond Taylor now, through him, as if he had seen a ghost.

Noburu's pistol began to waver. He thrust it harder in Taylor's direction, as if warning him, trying to frighten him off. Taylor could see the finger straining at the trigger. He could feel it as though the hand were his own.

Their eyes met in a perfect line.

Taylor jammed the fresh magazine into his weapon and put a burst into the Japanese without an instant's hesitation. Noburu twisted, firing his pistol into the carpet at Taylor's feet. The general stepped backward with the disjointed movements of modem dance. Taylor shot him again. And again.

"Fuck you," he told his enemy. "Fuck you, you bastard. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you."

He was breathing as though he had just run the race of his life. Half sick, clutching his weapon against his side with the desperation of a terrified private, he walked over to where Noburu lay.

The Japanese lay absolutely still, eyes wide. Taylor stopped just short of the body, shaking with old wordless tears. As though Noburu might suddenly spring back to life, reaching for him, biting.

Taylor emptied his weapon into the torso of the corpse, then spit into Noburu's face. He kicked the body in the side, then kicked it again, harder.

"You bastard," he said. "You filthy bastard."

A burst of automatic weapons fire out in the corridor ailed him back to the present. He reloaded another magazine and took off at a run.

The smoke had partly cleared. He could see Merry lying at the elbow of the hallway, shielding himself behind an overturned file cabinet. As he watched, Meredith sent two shots into the distance.

Taylor scrambled down the corridor to the S-2, covering each doorway as he passed. In the last office, two Japanese lay sprawled before a shredding machine. Another lay just behind Meredith.

A grenade explosion on the upper floor shook the ceiling and sifted dust over them like a curtain of rain.

Taylor tucked himself in behind the corner where Meredith was on guard.

"Need help?" he asked, surprised at the normalcy in his voice.

"Sonofabitch," Meredith said, voice quivering. "I almost missed the sonofabitch."

Taylor noticed that the younger man was bleeding from the neck.

"Merry, you all right?"

"The sonofabitch," Meredith repeated, panting. His breathing was quick, but healthy. The wound was very light, of the sort that misses taking a life by half an inch. "I didn't see the sonofabitch. He came at me from behind. With a goddamned knife."

Taylor glanced at the dead Japanese. There was no knife in his hand, only a scissors. But, in Meredith's mind, it would always be a knife. That was how men remembered combat, part hyperreality and part imagination. That was how they remembered it when they wrote up their reports, which historians would later cite as indisputable eyewitness accounts. Taylor had learned how history was sculpted years before. He knew it could never be fully trusted. Yet he had never stopped reading it. Searching for a truth deeper than his own life could offer.

There was a noise in the hallway behind them. Taylor swung his weapon around. It was Parker. With Kozlov, who was still unarmed.

"Colonel Taylor," Parker called. His voice was agitated. "Sir, the warrant officer needs to see you."

Taylor felt on the verge of illness. What was wrong now?

"What's the matter?" Taylor demanded.

"Nothing," Parker said. Then Taylor noticed that the captain was grinning. As though he had just won a blue ribbon at the county fair. "He just needs you. You're not going to believe this. He wants you to make a decision."

Taylor got up angrily. The plan was clear. The kid, Ryder, had his instructions, and there wasn't a second to waste playing games. The relief columns could shoot their way into the compound at any time. Or some lunatic or fanatic could blow the entire headquarters to hell. Upstairs, the fighting stormed on, with screams and shouts underscored by resounding gunfire.

Taylor tossed his automatic rifle to Kozlov, who caught it awkwardly. "You might need it," Taylor said. "I want you two to take over from Major Meredith. Merry, you come with me."

Taylor did not wait to see his orders carried out. He ran down the hallway in a fury, anxious to see what kind of bullshit Ryder was up to. The mission was as clear as could be.

Taylor burst into the computer room. Ryder jumped, then calmed when he saw who it was. He sat before the central workstation of a large computer. Smiling.

"What the hell's going on here?" Taylor barked.

Ryder ignored his tone of voice, grinning like a fool. "Look at this here, sir," he said. "Just look. It's incredible."

Jesus Christ, Taylor thought. What now? He walked over to the workstation in a rage that the boy was not already putting all of his energy into destroying Japanese combat systems. Ryder gave the appearance of just playing with the great machine.

Taylor wanted to scream at him. But he was not certain that would be the best approach. The important thing, he reminded himself, was to accomplish the mission. Even if one of your key players turned out to be an incompetent nut.

"What's the problem?" Taylor asked, straining to keep his voice calm. Meredith came up beside him.

Ryder looked up brightly. "There's no problem, sir. This is great. Just look."

Taylor bent over the computer. But he could not read he arcane symbols of the Japanese computer language. "All right," he said. "Tell me what it means."

"That column of numbers on the right side?" Ryder said. "See?"

Taylor mumbled. "Yes."

"Those are control nodes for the Japanese space defense system, the what-do-you-call-it? Satsee or something?"

"SAD-C," Taylor corrected automatically. "Okay, so what does it mean?" No sooner had he spoken the words than he began to realize why the warrant officer was so excited.

"Well," Ryder said happily, "we knew the Japanese had programmed all their tactical stuff so it could be ordered to self-destruct. But we never dreamed—"

Taylor put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, anchoring them both to reality.

"You're telling me," Taylor said, "that this computer can order the Japanese space defenses to self-destruct? The home islands shield?"

"Well," Ryder said, "they probably won't blow up or anything like that. The self-destruct order will probably just destroy the electronic circuits. The satellites will still be up there and all. They just won't be able to do anything."

Taylor tightened his grip on the boy's shoulder. "Are you absolutely certain? There's no possibility of a mistake?"

Ryder shrugged as though it were really a minor matter.

"No way," he said. "It's clear as day. Just look over here. See, I told the computer I was that Japanese general and—"

Taylor listened. Yes. General Noburu Kabata. Meredith interrupted. "Do it," he begged. "Stick it to the bastards while there's still time. If we take out the space defenses, Japan won't be able to defend itself against shit. It changes everything."

Yes.

It changed everything.

"Is it hard to do?" Taylor asked Ryder.

"Piece of cake," the warrant officer said, as though he had been surprised at the question. "You want me to do it then, sir?"

Taylor listened to the sounds of battle above their heads. "Absolutely. How long will it take?"

Ryder didn't answer. He began to punch keys. The screen changed, and the warrant officer began to sort his way through a parade of numbers. Heavy footsteps pounded overhead. The fighting intensified again.

While waiting for Ryder to set up the program, Taylor turned to Meredith. The S-2 was putting pressure on his neck with a handkerchief. There was a lot of blood. "Merry? Are you sure you're all right?"

The intelligence officer nodded heavily. "Just messy. Slash wound. Doesn't even hurt. Christ, I thought my number was up."

"Merry, the general's dead."

The S-2 looked at him.

"General Noburu Kabata," Taylor went on. "I killed him. It was a fluke. The bastard had me cold. And he didn't fire." Taylor shook his head, still unable to understand it. A shiver passed over him at the remembrance. "He had me cold."

"You're sure? You're sure it was him?"

"Yeah. You can report it as a confirmed kill. He's in the ops center, if you want to see. Not very pretty, I'm afraid." Taylor lowered his eyes. "I got carried away. Flashing on Lucky Dave. And Manny."

Meredith lifted the handkerchief from his neck, testing. Taylor tugged at his first aid pack, letting the bandage drop into his hand. "Here. Use this. And where's your goddamned aid pack? I ought to give you an Article Fifteen."

"When we get out of this," Meredith said, "you're welcome to give me anything you want, sir."

"I still don't understand it," Taylor said. "All he had to do was pull the damned trigger."

Out in the hallway Parker or Kozlov fired a burst down the corridor. Then another.

Ryder slapped at the keyboard one last time, then swiveled around to face Taylor and Meredith.

"Ready to do it, Chief?" Taylor asked.

"It's already done," Ryder said nonchalantly. "No more Japanese space defenses."

Taylor looked at the warrant officer, unsure whether he was joking or not, unable to quite believe that things could be this easy, after all the years of struggle, of failure, of dreaming of a better day.

"Chief," Meredith said, speaking for Taylor, "this is no joke. Are you absolutely certain the Japanese space defense system has been… incapacitated?"

Ryder shrugged. "Unless the computer's lying."

"Jesus," Meredith said.

"All right," Taylor said, businesslike again. He had commanded himself not to think of anything but the matters at hand. History and greater decisions could wait. There was more shooting out in the hallway.

"Chief," Taylor said urgently, "we've still got to take out the systems in-theater. Can you find the Scramblers?" He almost added that there was no time to waste. But Ryder was doing just fine. In his own little world. Taylor did not want to make him nervous at this point.

The warrant officer was easily the least troubled of the three men in the room. He was an expert, doing what he had been trained to do. If anything, the boy seemed blithely happy.

Ryder's fingers worked over the keyboard as though he were a master pianist playing scales and arpeggios. Taylor, who had worked with computers for so many years, who had even forced himself to study them, despite the fact that his natural interests lay far afield, admired Ryder's confidence and dexterity. Taylor knew enough to understand the complexity of the formulae with which the warrant officer was working, but the boy made it look like the easiest thing on earth.

Such a man could have made a far better living out of uniform. Taylor wondered briefly what story lay behind the warrant officer's boyish features, what had called him so irresistibly to military service. It was one of the wonders of the world that the Army always seemed to come up with the men it needed in a desperate hour.

"Chief?" Taylor said. He could not help interrupting. "Are we going to make it?"

Ryder brushed away the colonel's concern with a slight gesture. His fingers continued to dance over the keys. "The tactical stuffs in a different file. They didn't set this program up to be user friendly. I mean, it's a totally different logic system. And I guess they didn't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry destroying their aircraft and tanks and stuff."

"Chief, if you can only find one thing, find the Scramblers."

Ryder nodded. Then he paid his full attention back to his labors.

Three heavy explosions sounded in the distance. Taylor and Meredith looked at each other.

"Those were outside," Meredith said, putting their mutual knowledge into words.

A moment later, Hank Parker came into the room. His face was grimed and he was no longer smiling.

He held out the pork-chop microphone from the radio slung over his shoulder. "Sir, it's Captain Zwack up in the overwatch bird. The relief columns are all over the city. He can't hold them anymore. His main gun system's gone to shit. He's trying to slow them down with his Gatling gun, but he's almost out of ammunition."

"What's Nowak say?" Taylor asked, referencing the commander of the diversion force fighting in the building overhead and in the courtyard. "How's the situation on the ground?"

"They all say the same thing," Parker answered. "It's a matter of minutes. If that. If we don't get everybody back up in the air, they'll be able to take us out on the ground."

Taylor turned to Ryder. "Come on, Chief.

Suddenly, Ryder pushed back from the console. It was a gesture of triumph. The boy was grinning, and the screen ran from top to bottom with fields of numbers.

"Got them," Ryder cried. "We got them. We're into the program."

"Good work," Taylor said. "Let's take them out and get the hell out of here. Merry, you—"

"No," Ryder wailed. "Oh, shit."

Taylor turned. In the background, Parker's radio crackled with another message from the officer who was flying the rear guard M-100, announcing that he was out of Gatling gun ammunition and begging the raiding force on the ground to hurry before the enemy vanguard reached them. Taylor knew the officer well, a born cavalryman who was in the Army because he loved it, who could have led a life of leisure but chose instead to serve his country in black times. Taylor also knew that, despite the uselessness of his empty weapons, the officer would remain onstation until his comrades joined him in the sky. Taylor knew he would get the same sort of performance from the hardheaded raid commander slugging it out above their heads or somewhere out in the compound. That officer was an all-American ethnic Pole with a sense of honor beautifully out of place in the new century. Every man would remain at his station until the job was done.

Ryder's face had turned pale. He looked up at Taylor with an expression of helpless loss.

"What's the matter?" Taylor said calmly.

"I… I can't tell which system is which," Ryder said. "I don't have the right key."

"Fuck it. Just destroy them all," Taylor said, beginning to lose his patience.

Ryder shook his head. "Sir… the way the program's set up… you have to destroy each system individually." He half-turned back to the console. A flashing star identified an alphanumeric. Ryder tapped a key. The alphanumeric disappeared and the blinking star moved down to the next number.

"See?" Ryder said. "All you have to do to destroy something is tap the control key. Right here. But you might be destroying anything. Maybe a tank. Or just a radio set. Or one of the scramblers. I can't tell. But you have to hit the key for every single number. And there are thousands in the data base." Ryder tapped the key again, erasing another number, destroying another unidentified system out on the distant battlefield. "It's going to take a while," he said. And he hit the key again.

More explosions sounded from the world beyond the building. A closer blast shook the ceiling. The overhead lights blinked. But the computer had its own miniaturized power source — it was an independent world.

Ryder shifted his full attention back to the computer, striking the control key again each time the star moved down. It seemed to take two to three seconds to destroy each system. So easy. And yet.

"Give me the microphone," Taylor ordered Parker. "And get Kozlov in here."

Parker handed over the mike. Meredith dashed into the hallway to fetch the Russian.

Taylor had forgotten the day's call signs. He had forgotten everything but the business at hand. "Nowak," he called the ground force commander, "can you hear me?" He waited. Hoping. And then the familiar voice came heavily over the comms set. "Bravo four-five. Over."

"I want you to disengage. Start pulling out. Get your men loaded up as fast as you can and get into the air. Do it now. Over."

"Wilco. You need help?"

"Negative. Just get in the air. Zwack's out of bullets. Your ships can do us more good in the air now than your men can do on the ground. We're almost done," Taylor lied. "Break. Zwack, you sonofabitch, don't do anything crazy. As soon as Nowak's in the air, I want your ass on the way to Turkey. We're going to exfiltrate individually, and you won't do anybody any good dead. The war's not over yet. You read me?"

"Lima Charlie." It was the voice of a man who had chosen hard service over the safest life money could buy.

"Don't screw around," Taylor said. "Regard my transmission as a lawful order. Out."

Ryder continued to punch the control key, deleting line after line. But his mood of playful competence was long gone.

Meredith brought Kozlov in from the hallway. Taylor tossed the mike back to Parker.

"Want me to cover the hallway again?" Parker asked.

Taylor considered this officer he had only recently gotten to know. They were all so brave, so fine. What a lucky, lucky country to have such men.

"No," Taylor said. "I want everybody to listen to me. Chief, you keep punching that keyboard with your ears open." Taylor looked at the faces. Meredith, so handsome and bright. Kozlov, with his bad teeth and naive honesty. Parker, a little bulldog of a man. And Ryder. Time had begun to collapse for Taylor. Since he and Noburu had looked into each other's eyes. Ryder blurred into another young warrant officer, a boy hardly known, suffering in a wreck in the African grasslands. It was only a moment before that Taylor had raised his pistol, with ants chewing at his hand, to shoot a boy through the forehead. Then he had blinked his eyes and found himself here.

Ryder sat at the computer, while Taylor raised an invisible hand with an invisible pistol.

No. Never again.

Taylor settled his eyes back on Meredith. A tormented boy growing up late in the streets of a diseased city. An earnest lieutenant, standing stiffly before his commander's desk, while outside combat helicopters churned the night air above Los Angeles.

Manny was there too. And Lucky Dave. But they stood apart from Meredith and the rest of the men, forming a distinctly different group. Taylor knew to which group he belonged. He was overdue for membership.

"Merry," Taylor said, "you are now acting force commander. Your mission is to extricate the raiding force and get every ship and every man across the Turkish border. I'm staying."

"No," Meredith said. The word of complaint had none of the pompous formality of duty perceived but unfelt. It was a cry. "No," Meredith repeated. "Sir… you're too valuable. I can stay."

Taylor briefly closed his eyes and shook his head. "Goddamnit," he said softly, "you're a soldier, Merry. And soldiers take orders." Outside, the thumping and sputter of battle underlined each word. "There's no more time. And there's no point in all of us…"

Meredith set his jaw. His facial expression had grown so serious it almost made Taylor laugh. "I'm staying with you," Meredith said adamantly. "The others can go." Taylor dropped a hand onto Ryder's shoulder, steadying himself. He could feel the young man trembling. But the warrant's fingers never stopped working the control key.

An enormous blast shook the building. The lights went out and the only illumination in the room was the cool colored glow off the computer monitors. Then the ceiling lights flickered back on.

No one had moved. The officers in the room simply looked at him. Taylor saw his last hopes for any decency in the affair's conclusion slipping away. And he could not bear it.

"Please," he said, offering them the strangest of words. He carefully chose his language to include them all. But his eyes remained on Meredith as he spoke.

"Listen to me," Taylor said. "You're all I have. I have nothing else. No children. No life. You're my children. Don't you understand that?" He stared hard at Meredith. He wanted to take the younger man in his arms, to protect him now and forever. "You're the only sons I'll ever have. And no man wants to watch his sons die." Then he narrowed his focus. "Merry. Please. Get out of here. Take them all with you. For Manny and Lucky Dave." Meredith opened his mouth. His lips formed the word, "No." But he never spoke it.

The sounds of battle ruptured something in the building above their heads.

The tiny voice of the radio squawked, barely audible.

"Where are you? Everybody's in the air. Your ship's exposed. Where are you?"

"Go now," Taylor said. "It's time."

Hurriedly, Taylor reached down inside his tunic to an inner pocket. He drew out a worn cavalry guidon. The tiny flag unrolled from his fingertips. The cloth had grown very thin. The red flash was a faded pink, the white had gone yellow. The numbers were shriveled and bent like old men. He held it out to Meredith.

"There's a woman," Taylor said. "Back in Washington. You'll find her name and address in my gear." He briefly broke eye contact. "It won't mean much to her. If anything at all. But I want her to have it."

Meredith accepted the rag, his fingers briefly grazing Taylor's with a last warmth.

"Get out of here," Taylor said. He could no longer look at any of them. He roughly pulled Ryder from his chair before the computer and took his place. He turned his back to them all.

They left. In a local silence. With the lulls and sudden eruptions of combat shaking the building above their heads. They moved slowly as they exited the room. Then Taylor could hear them running down the corridor, with Meredith shouting at them to move, move, move. Taylor smiled. Meredith sounded like a merciless old drill sergeant. Then Taylor lost the sound of them in the clamor of battle.

He pressed the code key. Again and again.

In a little while, he imagined that he heard the sound of an aircraft lifting off. The building trembled. But it might only have been from the increasingly frequent shell impacts.

Taylor chose to believe it was his M-100, taking Meredith and the others home.

The door opened behind his back.

Taylor did not sway. He continued to press the control key at the required cadence. Fighting to the last, as best he knew how.

"Colonel Taylor, sir?"

Taylor whipped around in shock and fury.

It was Kozlov. Cradling an automatic rifle. The staff officer looked awkward and uncomfortable with the killing tool.

"I told you to go," Taylor said coldly. He turned his attention back to the computer, immeasurably relieved that he had not found Meredith standing in the doorway.

"They're all gone," Kozlov said. "I watched them take off. All of your men are safe."

"I told you to go, goddamnit," Taylor said. "You're a soldier. Soldiers obey orders." He pressed the magic key again.

"This is my fight," Kozlov said to Taylor's back, his words competing with the racket of combat. There wasn't much time now. Not much time at all. "This is my country. It's more my fight than yours."

"You're a fool," Taylor said. But his voice was not so fierce. He wasn't sorry for this bit of company, after all. The selfishness never ends, he told himself.

"And you, too, are a fool," Kozlov said. "We are both fools. But sometimes… I think it is better to be a fool." I should say something kind, Taylor thought. Something decent. To reach out to the poor bastard. But he could not make the words. There was only the screen and the key and a lengthening shadow.

"Anyway," Kozlov said, "I will guard you. Perhaps I can make some extra minutes for us."

Taylor's finger punched the wonderful key again. And again. Hundreds more systems had been destroyed. It was impossible to keep count. Perhaps the Scramblers were already gone.

I am the destroyer, he said to himself, recalling the disembodied quote but not its source. Poetry? An Indian religious text? It was all the same.

I am the destroyer.

"I am going to the hallway now," Kozlov said. His voice was almost feminine in its sadness. "Goodbye to you, Colonel Taylor."

And that was the end. Kozlov never reached the corridor. He died in the doorway. A burst of automatic weapons fire sounded loud and close. The Russian made a single weak sound and dropped to the floor.

Taylor swiveled around in his chair. With one hand he reached for the deadly fruit hanging from his carrying harness. The other hand remained on the keyboard, tapping away in the acquired rhythm.

Kozlov lay on the floor, his face pointed away from Taylor's field of vision. Above the body, a wiry Japanese commando stood with his legs spread, weapon at the ready. He looked at Taylor, then at the computer. He shouted a single word in Japanese.

Taylor drew the pin from the grenade without removing it from his harness. In the seconds before it exploded, he had time to appreciate his opponent, who was young, lean-featured, and obviously well-trained. The commando stood helplessly in the doorway, frozen by the instability of the moment. Unable to fire, as long as Taylor sat framed by the precious computer. The commando had the look of a healthy, magnificent animal. Ready to kill, but restrained by a higher authority. With his dark, hyberalert eyes and the feel of brutally conditioned muscles beneath the fabric of his uniform, he was a perfect example of what a soldier should be. Taylor pitied him, understanding him as well as any man could ever understand another.

Taylor felt wonderfully peaceful as he waited and waited for the grenade to do its work. He even smiled at the recognition that his opponent's face was, after all, identical to his own, and that it had always been his own face on the other end of the gun.

25

"We're not going to make it," Krebs told Meredith. The S-2 sat in Taylor's old seat in the cockpit, watching the frozen landscape scream by. The M-100 was following the terrain as closely as possible on its exfiltration route. And the terrain of Armenia was rugged and wild.

"You can do it, Flapper," Meredith said. "It's not much further." And, in truth, it was not far. The Turkish border lay just beyond the next line of mountains.

"Major," the old warrant said, "you can kiss my ass and suck my dick, if it makes you feel good. But we ain't going to make it, I done my best. But the sonsofbitches put so many holes in us you could run the Mississippi River in one side of this ship and out the other. We're falling apart. And we're running on fumes. I can either put her down now, or we can just wait until we fall out of the sky."

They were so close. Each of the other M-l00s in the raiding force had sent the code word hours before to indicate that they had crossed the border into neutral airspace and safety. But the command ship had waited too long to lift off from the rooftop helipad. Its armored sides had been battered and pierced. Barely half an hour out of Baku, Krebs had found it necessary to put down in the hills so that he could try to carry out whatever immediate repairs were possible. With Meredith trying clumsily to help and the others standing guard with their popguns in the darkness, they had struggled to slap enough mechanical Band-aids on the ship to get her back into the air before dawn brought about their inevitable discovery by the enemy. With the first light sweeping over the barren hills, Krebs had miraculously managed to get the M-100 airborne again. It sounded like a sick old used car. But it flew. And they climbed up above the snow line into high Armenia.

Meredith stared obstinately forward, across the gray and white landscape, as though he could will the ailing machine to continue over these last critical miles. The broken earth beneath them was terra incognita. The situation in Armenia was so chaotic, with so many factions and occupation forces engaged in butchering each other, that a landing would bring completely unpredictable consequences. If the Islamic Union occupation forces got to them first, they would be shot out of hand. If the wrong partisans got them, their fate might be considerably worse.

"Major," Krebs cried in exasperation. "Look at the goddamned controls. We're fucked. I've got to land this baby. Now. "

Meredith refused to look at the control panel. He stared at the line of white mountains that meant freedom. And life. They had to make it now. For Taylor. So that it would not end as a bad joke after all.

"How far is it?" Meredith asked.

In response, the engines began to choke.

"So much for the decision-making process," Krebs said.

"Mayday, mayday," Meredith shouted, working the radio and intercom simultaneously. "Prepare for uncontrolled impact."

The engines were finished. Krebs struggled with the manual controls, trying to bully the autorotation system to perform at the top of his voice. But the threats didn't help. They were too low for the autorotation to fully activate, and before Meredith could call any further warnings or instructions to the men in the rear compartment, the M-100 began to slice its way through a stand of evergreen trees in a shallow valley.

The machine crashed through the forest, splintering tall conifers. The armored sides and underbelly screamed as the M-100 scraped through the boughs. The ship bucked badly, tilting over on its side. Meredith could hear the sound of man-made materials wrenching apart in the last instant before the fuselage slammed into the ground, and he thought of Taylor. His wife, his parents — they all deserved him now. Only Taylor remained. With his ruined face and haunted eyes. Taylor wanted him to live.

What was left of the ship ploughed into a snow field amid the trees and came to rest on its side.

To his astonishment, Meredith found that he was still alive. The slash wound on his neck had torn open again from the strain, and his spine and joints felt as though he had made a very bad parachute landing. But his seat harness still held him in place And he was unmistakably, incredibly, deliciously alive.

"Sonofabitch," Krebs said with spectacular emphasis. "That's it. I've had it. I'm going to retire."

"You all right, Chief?" Meredith asked. He could hear his own voice shaking.

"Sonofabitch," the warrant officer repeated. His voice, too, had begun to tremble.

Meredith moved to try the intercom. But the mike had been torn from his headset in the crash. In any case, all of the electronic systems appeared to be utterly inert.

He tested his limbs, then carefully undid his safety harness, lowering himself until his feet caught the edge of the copilot's seat. The M-l00 had settled almost perfectly at ninety degrees, its right wing and rotor torn away. Awkward and stiff, Meredith clambered back through the passageway that led to the ops compartment, crawling in a sideward world, under the surreal glow of the emergency lights.

Parker and Ryder were both bloody and unconscious. The ops-and-intel NCO was awake but dazed, the lower half of his face covered in blood. At the sight of Meredith, the NCO's eyes gave a flicker of recognition, but he immediately sank back into himself.

Parker was in the worst shape. The seats in the ops cell had safety belts, but the overall ergonomics were not nearly as developed as the cockpit seats. Parker's chair had ripped free of its pedestal, throwing him forward-His arm was badly twisted and there was blood seeping through his uniform sleeve where an unnatural jut against the doth announced a compound fracture. His face was misshapen on one side, and it appeared as though both the jaw and cheekbone might have been broken Parker snored blood out of his nose and mouth.

Ryder came to. The young warrant officer was bruised and stiff, but far luckier than the others. Hardly a minute after waking, he was moving tentatively about the cabin, trying to assist Meredith.

"What happened?" Ryder asked.

"We crashed."

Ryder thought for a moment. It was evident that his head was not yet completely dear "We in Turkey?"

"No. Somewhere in Armenia. Indian country."

"Oh." The younger man thought for a moment. "So what do we do now?"

Parker groaned. Meredith had repositioned him for maximum comfort. But he had not yet managed to scavenge material for a splint, Shock, too, might be a problem.

Parker groaned again. It was the noise of a man waking after an ungodly drunk.

"First." Meredith said, "we zero out all of the electronics, Then we collect whatever we can carry and use. Then we rig the grenades in here and in the cockpit. Then we start walking."

Krebs slipped into the compartment from the canted passageway. His face looked deadly serious.

"Major," he said, "we got company."

Working frantically, the men wiped out the codes on the electronics that had not been destroyed in the crash Krebs rigged a splint for Parker's arm with the same casual dexterity he displayed working on an engine or a control panel. Parker had an ever greater perception of the pain he was undergoing, and he bobbed just above and below the surface of consciousness Working together. Meredith, Krebs, Ryder, and the NCO, who had largely regained his senses, carefully lowered Parker out into the snow. Parker came up from his dreams just long enough to say:

"You can leave me, guys. Don't let me hold you up. You can leave me."

And he swooned back into his pain.

Their visitors could not see them at the rear of the M-100. Only the machine's snout and cockpit protruded from the treeline, and the dense evergreens offered good concealment with their impenetrable blankets of snow. But every man waited for the sound of movement in the deep snow. Or of gunfire.

Krebs had spotted the first intruders through the windscreen: men in ragtag winter clothing, but heavily armed. In the moments before he crawled back to inform Meredith, the old warrant had watched the entire visible rim of the little valley fill with armed men.

It was very cold outside of the shelter of the M-100.

"They make any gestures?" Meredith asked. "Did it seem like they were looking for trouble?"

Krebs threw him a bitter laugh. "I'm not sure we're in a position to be much trouble to them," he said. "Anyway, they were just standing there. Probably trying to figure out who the dumb shits were who just crashed their asses out in the middle of nowhere."

Meredith nodded. "I'm going to blow the cockpit and the ops cabin."

Krebs shook his head, as if in sorrow.

"Won't they, like, think it's a hostile act or something?" Ryder asked.

Meredith answered him as honestly as he could. "Probably. But we don't have any choice. This baby's loaded with top secret gear." He shivered with the sharp mountain cold. "All I can do at this point is toss in a couple of grenades. Before these characters, whoever they are, start closing in. It may not do a hell of a lot of good. But we've got to do everything we can to make it hard for the enemy's technical intelligence boys."

Krebs raised his head sharply.

Meredith followed the turn of the old warrant's attention.

"You hear something, Flapper?"

"I don't know," Krebs whispered.

Parker moaned.

"What the hell," Meredith said. And he pulled himself back up into the belly of the M-100. "Get your asses over behind those fallen trees," he ordered. And his boots disappeared.

He had to stand on a monitor worth several million dollars to reach the compartment where the extra ammunition was stored. Despite the fact that he was about to do his best to blow the furnishings of the cabin to hell, he still felt awkward planting his boots on the state-of-the-art equipment.

Boxes of ammunition came crashing down, starting his work for him. He had to duck out of the way.

He retrieved the box of high explosive grenades from the fallen clutter, ripping open the top of what resembled a very special egg carton. He filled the blousy lower pockets of his tunic.

He didn't waste any time. Popping his head into the cockpit, he could just make out the line of armed men up on the valley's rim. There were hundreds of them now. Standing in a dark, still line.

He primed two grenades, tossed them at the control panel and scrambled back to the ops cell, banging his knees and elbows without caring a damn. He just managed to slam shut the compartment door when the twin blasts blew it open again. But the door had absorbed most of the force, and except for a huge ringing in his ears, Meredith was untouched.

Smoke.

Meredith scrambled out through the hatch. As soon as his boots hit the snow, he primed three grenades in succession, lobbing them forward into the ops compartment. Then he flattened himself on the ground along the armored side of the M-100.

The machine's belly shook and groaned under the blasts. But the armor and insulation contained the power. The design was so good that there were not even any secondary explosions from the stored ammunition. The machine had been far more reliable than its human masters. And that, Meredith figured, was that.

He hustled over to the remainder of the crew. Krebs and the NCO were rigging a litter for Parker, stripping down branches the M-100 had sheared off during its crash. Ryder knelt behind a fluff of evergreen boughs, on guard.

Krebs looked up. "I don't figure those guys just went away, by any chance?"

Meredith shook his head.

"Why don't they come for us?" Ryder asked nervously. "Why don't they make a move?"

Meredith did not know. They had crossed into a world where the best analysts found their knowledge to be spotty. Behavior and allegiances did not fit the sensible, predictable patterns that gave bureaucrats a chance to get their forecasts right. There were countless armed factions in Armenia, representing indigenous nationalists, occupiers, sectarian Moslems, obscure irredentists, and splinter groups more closely aligned with a particular family or valley than with any coherent platform. The only thing of which Meredith was reasonably certain was that the men who lined the valley's rim were not Islamic Union forces, since they would have been in uniform.

What would Taylor have done in such a situation? Meredith wondered. Would the old man have made one last valiant stand? That sounded like the obvious thing, but Meredith didn't really think so. Taylor always found a way out of spots like this — really, this was minor stuff, by the old man's standards. He remembered Taylor in Mexico, bluffing his way through situations where the odds were impossibly against him.

"I'm going out there," Meredith said suddenly. "I'm going to try to talk to them. There's a good chance they speak some Russian."

Krebs looked at him sadly, without any of his usual "grizzled old warrant" banter. The NCO simply carried on with the construction of the litter. And Parker's eyes wandered ineffectually from one man to the other, propelled by misery.

Unexpectedly, Ryder spoke up. "I'll go with you, sir. You shouldn't go out there alone."

"It isn't necessary," Meredith said.

"I want to go," Ryder said adamantly. But he looked frightened.

Meredith shrugged. It was an hour for every man to make his own decisions. Anyway, it might be better to have a white face out there beside his own. There was no telling how these partisans or whatever they were might react.

Suddenly Parker arched from the bed of evergreen boughs where his comrades had laid him while they prepared the litter. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and his eyes looked through Meredith.

"Get the colonel, get the colonel," he cried. "We've got to go back for the colonel."

Krebs gently pressed the captain back down on his green bed.

"It's all right," the old warrant said. "The colonel's just fine, don't you worry." The old soldier's voice managed a tenderness Meredith could hardly credit. "Don't you worry," he repeated. "The colonel can take care of himself." Meredith noticed that Krebs's eyes were glistening. "You just lay down and keep still now. The colonel said he wants you to keep still."

"No time like the present," Meredith said. He dropped his pistol belt in the snow and emptied the last grenades from his pocket. He left his rifle where Krebs had propped it against a tree trunk.

He began to trudge up through the trees.

Ryder followed, jogging through the snow with his knees high like an old-fashioned runner.

It was very beautiful to Meredith in the little strip of forest. The boughs were heavy and white, and as he moved away from the wreckage of the M-100 the world seemed a pure, clear place. It was not a bad place to finish up, if it came to that. Far better than many of the other places where he had spent time.

And he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had done good work. The strategic communications set had been on the blink, for some reason, but he had been able to relay the results of their mission by conventional means — including the brilliant surprise about the Japanese homeland space shield. If he had to die, he was going to die in a world he had already changed for the better. His nation and his people would prosper.

He thought of his wife, suddenly and luxuriously. He owed her so many debts on promises unkept. Hard to be a soldiers wife. Maureen. But she would get over him. She was a handsome, handsome woman, still young and so full of life that life would not be able to resist her. He was sorry that he would not hold her again, sorry that he had not done better by her.

"Sir," Ryder called after him, panting heavily at the burden of climbing up through the snow. "Maybe we ought to call out or something. To let them know we're coming. In case they're jumpy or something. "

Yes. The kid was right.

Meredith began to whistle. Then he smiled, and it bothered the whistling, so he forcibly tightened his lips. Taylor would appreciate it, he thought. Proudly. And he marched up toward his fate, whistling "Garry Owen" and remembering the guidon in his pocket.

The trees came to an abrupt end. Up across a smooth low slope of the sort richer cultures used to teach their children to ski. a skirmish line of armed men stood silhouetted against the winter sky. The valley was very small, a matter of just a few contour lines on a map. The sort of place easily overlooked during a planning session, or perhaps noticed, then rapidly forgotten. Its only distinguishing feature was transient — the hundred or so armed warriors standing slightly hunched against the wind, many of them bearded, all of them with the hard look of men who had been fighting for a long, long time.

Meredith stopped whistling. He continued to walk up the slope until he was within easy calling distance of the line of men. The guerrillas watched without a trace of emotion.

When Meredith sensed that the distance was right, he stopped. Ryder's footsteps came to a crunching halt in the snow beside him. Cold wind rinsed down the slope.

As good a time and place as any.

"Hello," he called out in Russian. "We're service members in—"

Dozens of the men raised their weapons in unison.

"Don't shoot," Ryder shouted in English. "Don't hoot."

A man in a black kid hat barked an order, and the men lowered their weapons partway. Obviously a leader, he stepped forward, his bearing proud, and came a little way down the slope toward Meredith and Ryder. Another man followed, and Meredith pegged that one as a bodyguard.

The two guerrillas halted about ten yards up the slope from Meredith and Ryder. The bodyguard's trigger finger looked naked through a woolen glove, tickling the old Kalashnikov automatic rifle in his hands.

"Who are you guys?" the leader asked in the English of a stumped cab driver.

Meredith was so surprised that Ryder had to answer for him.

"We're Americans. From the United States Army," the warrant officer said. "Who are you?"

The guerrilla leader drew himself up to his full height.

"We are members of the Armenian Christian Liberation Front," he declared. Then he smiled broadly, revealing strong white teeth in the frame of his black beard. Hey, maybe you know my Uncle Abel in Chicago?"