John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The consoles hummed. The lights overhead buzzed. It was almost midnight, he was alone except for his bodyguard, of course—and his eyes were aching from staring into monitors. The facts were beginning to lose their meaning; he had to repeat them to himself mentally.

Forty thousand fresh Second Alliance troops from the training camps had successfully deployed in four European capitals. Another four hundred Partisans had been arrested in Rome, three hundred more in Athens. All of them tagged for execution. Jews and Moslems in Dresden and Rouen impregnated with radio-traceable IDs and remanded to isolated sections of town. Reports from the NATO front, New-Soviets moving back across the Warsaw Pact borders, one last push, especially in Germany, piercing through Belgium and into northern France. Significant deployment of tactical nukes but none in use yet. Speculation from observers that this was the New-Soviet’s last-ditch effort. If this failed, they’d surrender. Or turn to nuclear weapons.

But the NATO lines were frayed from sheer attrition. Maybe the New-Soviets wouldn’t fail.

Watson’s mind wandered. He found himself thinking about Crandall, wondering, How long before Crandall becomes confident of his own safety? Supposing it happened, supposing there was a way to get an assassin through to Crandall—what about Crandall’s extractor team? They routinely rifled the brains of anyone who was to come physically near Crandall.

But there was a new technique the bloody damn albino had just developed—a technique that would make it possible to lay down a smoke screen in a man’s brain. The extractor team would search the three layers of the man’s mind. But what if you added a fourth layer? A false bottom to the wetware; a neurological subconscious, an access point at which a man could be programmed, without his own knowledge, to kill Rick Crandall when the moment came; a moment Crandall wouldn’t know about till it arrived.

Watson would need an American, martially trained. Someone he could have access to here, where his own extractor team was. Better if it weren’t someone established here. The camouflaging layer would change him, and his old cronies would know something was wrong. It would have to be someone else.

An American soldier, Watson thought. One who would be thought MIA if he disappeared. And a lot of them were in northern France now.

Very well. He’d go to Rouen. He was overdue for inspecting facilities there, anyway. Oh, there was a great deal he could do there.

Crandall had ordered him to remain in Sicily. The trip would be risky. But he was committed to taking risks now. One had to risk all to win all.

Waiting in the Bullshit Belly.

Torrence was sitting on a metal bench in the half-darkness, smelling rusting metal and raw petroleum, watching Karakos.

There were forty of them in the hold of the tanker Daniella, in a gymnasium-sized compartment with a thin metal ceiling beneath a camouflaging layer of oil. Against the back wall of the compartment, roped down, was a two-man minicopter, on wheels.

The ship’s engine droned in the background. Danco and Willow sat near Torrence, their faces picked out eerily in the yellow of electric lanterns near their feet; Carmen was sitting close to Willow.

She wore only fatigues, boots, and, over her bare breasts, a flak vest; she was nervously reassembling her Enfield. It was a “light support weapon,” the combination of a rifle and a light machine gun she’d found on a British corpse in an overturned armored car, outside Paris. Standard NATO 5.56 ammo, lightweight, semi- and full-automatic firing modes, less recoil than most LMGs. Torrence envied it. He was carrying an ancient FN-FAL assault rifle, and an old Smith & Wesson .45 pistol. Danco and Willow were talking softly, their voices echoing tinnily in the great blank spaces of the hold.

“This Bullshit Belly,” Danco said, “it’s like that story en la Biblia. Jonah in the big fish.” He said Jonah Ho-nah. He set his old, slender Sterling 9-mm submachine gun on the floor; the clack echoed like the snap of a whale’s jaws.

“Jonah right enough, I’m bloody digesting in ’ere,” Willow said. “What’s it been? Seven hours, then?”

“More like five,” Torrence muttered. “We’ll be there in about half an hour.” Across from him sat Lila and, lined up along the wall, a couple dozen more guerrillas. He found himself watching a pale blond guy, Farks, no more than nineteen, who was talking uneasily with Helmut Kelheim, an experienced German mercenary. He was big, dark, and confident; Farks was slim, pale, and clearly scared. Scared of not measuring up, scared of getting killed, scared he’d made the wrong decision in joining the NR. A decision made out of idealistic impulse, without the gristle of real anger—and anger was an important component of dedication. Kelheim had personal reasons for hating the SA.

Too late now, kid, Torrence thought. Your pride won’t let you turn back, and we need fighters too badly to just up and send you home.

Torrence wondered what Claire was doing now. He hoped she was scared for him. As soon as he hoped it, he felt like a jerk for hoping it. But he kept on hoping.

He glanced at the steel door that would open out onto the sea when the time came.

The eight black-rubber zodiacs were stacked, inflated, beside the door, each with its small noise-suppression engine, no bigger than a lawn mower’s. Coiled up beside the rafts was the magnetic climbing gear, the grapples and fiberlon rope ladders.

All neat and prepared over there, Torrence thought. And it worked on the training hulk. But the training hulk had been undefended…

And there was Karakos. Sitting with his face in the darkness thinking anything, God knows, anything at all.

“I think he’s a risk,” Torrence had told Steinfeld and Levassier. “I can’t prove anything, but we shouldn’t let him go if there’s even a…”

“I’ve known Karakos for more years than you’ve had hair on your balls,” Levassier told him, in French, the stump of his missing arm lifting as if he wanted to shake the vanished fist at Torrence in anger.

“If we get too paranoid, follow every little feeling up,” Steinfeld had said, “we’ll get lost, we’ll splinter with the pressure. Karakos has had experience assaulting ships. We need him on the Her. ”

“We’re making a mistake taking him along,” Torrence had said.

“You’re crazy from jealousy,” Levassier had snorted, saying what everyone thought.

And now Karakos was sitting over there with his face in the darkness.

Willow caught Torrence staring at Karakos. “Chasin’ ghosts again, ’ard-Eyes?”

Torrence ignored him. He didn’t answer to the monicker.

“I think I’m getting another fucking bladder infection,” Carmen said, pressing her knees together. “No fucking place to pee in here.”

“Pee in Willow’s ears, there’s room where his brains oughta be,” Torrence told her.

Nobody laughed.

The ship’s engines coughed, sputtered, fell silent. The ship was coasting along in a current, angling to intercept the Hermes’ Grandson.

Fuck it, Torrence thought.

He slapped a clip into his assault rifle.

A Trojan horse, the Daniella drifted, wallowing slowly, in a current that would carry it west, toward the Hermes’ Grandson. The Second Alliance ship, coming from their base in the Spanish Mediterranean port of Málaga, was steaming steadily east. At 0110, an hour and ten minutes after midnight, the radar of the Hermes’ Grandson took note of the approaching bulk of the Daniella. Radar watch informed the duty officer, who radioed the Daniella and asked for its ID number. The Daniella gave an ID number, which checked out with a registered oil tanker. According to the computer’s registration search the tanker was American-made but now owned by a Spanish company that imported oil from the Persian Gulf.