Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“Fuck you!” Walker said.

“They’re definitely the enemy’s this time! They’re exchanging fire with the French!”

Walker perked up at that. He steered toward the new target and saw that the enemy force was primarily infantry without much armored-vehicle strength. This did support Haney’s assessment. Walker launched his last four Hellfire missiles, then set his double-barreled Gatling gun to 1,500 rpm and started shooting. He felt the comfortable vibration of the machine gun through the chassis, watching as it scattered snow and powder like ground white pepper over the enemy skirmish line on the ground. But the intuition of a veteran armed helicopter pilot warned him of danger. He turned, only to see a soldier standing on a jeep fire a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to his left. Walker frantically shot off magnesium heat pellets as lures and swung backward for evasive maneuvers, but too late. The missile, trailing cobwebs of white smoke, had punched into the Comanche right under the nose.

When Walker woke from his brief explosion-induced concussion, he found that the helicopter had crashed in the snow. Walker scrambled desperately from the smoke-filled interior, bracing himself against a tree that had been severed neatly at waist height by the propeller. When he looked back, he could see the remains of Captain Haney in the front seat, blasted into a pulp by the explosion. When he looked forward, he saw a band of soldiers running toward him with submachine guns raised, their Slavic features clear.

Shaking, Walker dug out his handgun and set it on the snow in front of him. He dug out his Russian phrase book and began to clumsily read out his surrender.

“Y-ya postavil svoye oruzhiye. Ya voyennoplennym. V Zhenevskoy konventsii—”

Walker took a gun butt to the back of his head, then a boot to his belly. But as he collapsed into the snow, he was laughing. They might beat him half to death, but only half. He’d seen the eagle insignia of the Polish army on the soldiers’ collars.

“Get that goddamn doctor over here!” General Tony Baker roared.

The gangly military doctor ran over.

“What the hell went wrong?” Baker demanded. “You’ve messed with my dentures twice and they’re still buzzing!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it, General. Maybe it’s your nervous system. How about I give you a shot of local anesthetic?”

“Give me the dentures, sir,” said a major on the staff, walking over. “I know how to fix them.” Baker took out his dentures and set them on the major’s proffered paper towel.

According to the media, the general lost his two front teeth when his tank was hit during the Gulf War. Only Baker himself knew that this wasn’t true. That time he’d broken his lower jaw; he’d lost the teeth earlier.

It had been at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, during the Mount Pinatubo eruption, when the world around seemed to be volcanic ash and nothing else. The sky was ash, the ground was ash, the air was ash, too. Even the C-130 Hercules that he and the last of the base personnel were about to board was coated with a thick layer of white. The dim red of magma glimmered intermittently in the gray distance.

Elena, the Filipina office worker he had been sleeping with, tracked him down after all this. The base was gone, she said, and she’d lost her job. Her house was buried under ash. How were she and the child in her belly supposed to live? She pulled at his hand and begged him to take her to America. He told her it was impossible. So she took off a high-heeled shoe and whacked him in the face, knocking out two of his teeth.

Where are you now, my child? Baker wondered, gazing at the gray ocean. Are you living out your days with your mother in the slums of Manila? In a way, your father is fighting for your sake. Once the democratic government takes over in Russia after the war, NATO’s vanguard will be at China’s borders, and Subic Bay and Clark will once again become America’s Pacific naval and air bases, even more prosperous than they were last century. You’ll find work there! But most importantly, under NATO’s pressure, those Chinese just might give you folks what you’ve wanted for so long: those beautiful islands in the South China Sea. I’ve seen them from the air: snow-white coral surrounding the brown sand, like eyes in the blue sea. Child, those are your father’s eyes….

The major returned, cutting short the general’s woolgathering. Baker accepted the dentures on the paper towel, put them in, and after a few seconds, looked at the major in astonishment. “How did you do that?”

“Sir, your dentures were buzzing because of electromagnetic resonance.”

Baker stared at the major in clear disbelief.

“Sir, it’s true! Maybe you’ve been exposed to strong EM waves before, for example near radar equipment, but the frequency of those waves must have been different from your dentures’ resonant frequency. But now, the air is filled with powerful EM waves at all frequencies, which caused this condition. I’ve modified the dentures to make their resonant frequency much higher. They’re still vibrating, but you can’t feel it anymore.”

After the major left, General Baker’s gaze fell onto the clock standing beside the digital battle map. Its base was a sculpture of Hannibal riding an elephant, engraved with the caption EVER VICTORIOUS. The clock had originally inhabited the Blue Room of the White House; when the president saw his gaze straying again and again in its direction, he’d personally picked up the clock from its century-old resting place and gifted it to him.

“God save America, General. You’re God to us now!”

Baker pondered for a long time, then slowly said, “Tell all forces to halt the offensive. Use all our available airpower to find and destroy the source of the Russian jamming.”

“The enemy has disengaged, but you don’t seem happy,” Marshal Levchenko said to the commander of the Western Military District, newly returned from the front line.

“I don’t have reason to be happy. NATO has concentrated all their airpower on destroying our jamming units. It’s really proving an effective countertactic.”

“It’s no more than we expected,” Marshal Levchenko said evenly. “Our strategy would catch the enemy unprepared at first, but they’d come up with a way to counter eventually. Barrage-type jammers emitting strong EM waves at all frequencies wouldn’t be hard to find and destroy. But fortunately, we’ve managed to stall for a considerable length of time. All our hopes now rest on the reinforcement armies’ swift arrival.”

“The situation might be worse than we predicted,” said the district commander. “We might not be able to give the Caucasus Army enough time to move into position before we lose the upper hand in the electronic battle.”

After the district commander had left, Marshal Levchenko turned to the digital map display of the frontline terrain and thought of Kalina, right now under the enemy’s massed fire, and as a result thought again of Misha.

That one day, Misha had returned home with his face bruised blue and purple. Marshal Levchenko had heard the gossip already: his son, the only anti-war factionist at the college, had been beaten up by students.

“I only said that we shouldn’t speak of war lightly,” Misha explained to his father. “Is it really impossible to reach a reasonable peace with the West?”

The marshal replied, his tone harsher than it had ever been toward his son, “You know your position. You can choose to stay silent, but you will not say things like that in the future.”