Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

It took another day to drive to Guadalajara; two hours crawling through the sprawl of Guadalajara itself. All the streets that were not under repair seemed not to have been repaired since the twentieth century. They finally found the clinic, though, and left the bus and truck in its underground lot, guarded by an old man with a submachine gun. Mendez stayed with the truck and kept an eye on the guard.

Spencer had everything prepared, including the rental of a nearby guest house, la Florida, for the busload. No questions, except to verify their needs. Marty had Jefferson and Ingram installed in the clinic, along with a couple of the Twenty.

They began setting up the Portobello phase from la Florida. Assuming the local phones weren't secure, they had a scrambled military line bounced off a satellite and routed through General Roser.

It was easy enough to get Julian assigned to Building 31 as a kind of middle-management trainee, since he was no longer a factor in the company's strategic plans. But the other part of it-a request to extend his platoon's time in the soldierboys an additional week-was turned down at the battalion level, with the terse explanation that the "boys" had already gone through too much stress the past couple of cycles.

That was true enough. They had had three weeks, un-jacked, to dwell on the Liberia disaster, and some had not been in good soldierly shape when they came back. Then there was the new stress of retraining with Eileen Zakim, Julian's replacement. For nine days they would be confined to Portobello – "Pedroville" – doing the same maneuvers over and over, until their performance with Eileen was close enough to what it had been with Julian.

(It would turn out that Eileen did have one pleasant surprise. She had expected resentment, that the new platoon leader had come from outside, rather than being promoted from the ranks. It was quite the opposite: they all had known Julian's job intimately, and none of them wanted it.)

It was fortunate, but not exactly unusual, that the colonel who brusquely turned down the extension request had himself a request for change of assignment in the works. Many of the officers in Building 31 would rather be assigned someplace with more action, or with less; this colonel suddenly had orders delivered that sent him to a relief compound in Botswana, a totally pacified place where the Alliance presence was considered a godsend.

The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser's Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he'd settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor's policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian's old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they'd be brought in for testing and evaluation.

Brought in to Building 31.

Roser's OFMP couldn't directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.

The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.

To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended "pacification" of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.

One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: "Everyone has been under so much stress." It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades' worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.

So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.

"I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn't a big mistake." She nodded at the porter. "Tell this nice boy where to put my things."

"Uh... habitacion dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?"

"Enough," he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.

"I know Asher's coming in this afternoon," she said. It was not quite twelve. "What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin."

"Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight."

"I'll be there. Get some sleep yourself. You look terrible." She pulled herself up the stairs with cane and banister.

Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of "the caper," as McLaughlin called it. He'd be on his own most of the time.

There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all of the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn't like jacking with them anyhow.

After two weeks, starting right after Julian's platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs' humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.

Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.

How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn't take so long. But there was no way around it.

Or so he thought.

I'D BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn't have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.

We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.

Reza poured us each a cup of red wine from an un-labeled jug. "Let me see your ID, soldier." He shook his head, drank half the cup and refilled it. "I'm emigrating," he said.

"Better bring lots of money," Amelia said. There were no jobs for Nortes in Mexico. .

"You guys really have your own personal nano-forge?"