John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Some of the rounds hit and some did not,” Father Lespere replied. “Enough for now. Come on.” His cassock whisked softly on the stone floor as he switched off the floodlights, plunging the bullet-crucified target into darkness. He picked up a chemlantern and led the way from the room.

Torrence tossed the gun to Roseland, who caught it clumsily and followed them down a damp, dark, low-ceilinged corridor of irregular stone blocks. There was a faint smell of sewage, with dissolving minerals. And gunpowder.

Lespere bent near Torrence to speak softly, probably intending that Roseland not hear him; but the whisper carried with eerie lucidity along the echoey stone shaft. “The news for you is not good. Apparently you have been identified. They do not know where to find you, but they know who you are. What you look like. They have connected you with the Le Pen assassination. Perhaps it’s time you…” He hesitated.

“I can’t leave,” Torrence said. “If I do, people like Pasolini…” He didn’t finish it, merely shook his head.

“I was not going to suggest you leave. We cannot spare you. I suggest, instead, that you change your face.”

“Those kinds of surgeons are in short supply.”

“It is your decision, but… you need not use those kinds of surgeons.”

Roseland felt his gut contract at the suggestion. This Lespere was one hardassed priest. Christ! Basically, telling Torrence that disfigurement was a viable option…

Torrence said, “If it comes to that.” His voice very flat.

Lespere shrugged. “Do you really suppose it matters how pretty you are? None of us are likely to live a year.”

Hearing that, now, didn’t bother Roseland at all. It was perfectly, entirely appropriate. (A flash of memory: the Jægernaut arching over Processing Center 12… )

Lespere went on, “You must understand: Klaus is sending The Thirst after you. He will do things. This man The Thirst is a German, raised in Argentina and Guatemala—his great uncle was an SS officer. His grandfather a Hitler Youth. His name is Giessen, but they call him The Thirst, and he will do things…”

Open space swelled around them. They were in a vast, dimly lit room. Their footsteps took on a different sound here. The room was big, very long, two stories up to the pipe-clustered ceiling; it was subterranean but not a cavern; its walls were hidden by strips of exposed insulation, veined with wire; its floors were piled with plastic crates, and cryptic machinery: old-time dynamos and factory presses. The insulation and metal surfaces and crates were sloppily starburst with red and yellow. Paint splashes, splattered with impact bursts. “What’s all this?” Roseland asked.

Torrence gestured vaguely, perhaps thinking, Roseland guessed, about the kind of man who could earn a nickname like The Thirst. “Underground storage for the downtown system of fallout shelters,” Torrence said. “The crates are mostly filled with loose plumbing parts. They’ve forgotten all about it.”

“Please, take a little stroll, look at this place,” Lespere told Roseland gently.

Why? Roseland wondered. But he took a few steps farther into the chilly, shadowy room, looking around. He strolled into the maze of junk, peered into the shadow-wrapped dimness. It reminded him of a big train station in a way, “What are we going to do with this place?” Roseland asked. “Some kind of, um, hideout or—”

Men sprang into view all around him, rifles clicking smartly. Aiming at his chest, or head. They’d been hidden behind crates and machinery, not more than six feet away.

Roseland was paralyzed, impotently clutching the rifle.

“To answer your question,” Torrence said, walking up behind him, “we use it for training.” He nodded at the guerrillas. They lowered their weapons. “You’re going to train with these people.”

“Someone at the State Department fumbled the ball,” Witcher said. Smoke had difficulty hearing him over the whine of the jet. “They couldn’t know Hand is with you. They must know that if they bomb an installation with a hotshot American TV journalist in it, it’s going to look pretty bad.”

“Not necessarily,” Smoke said. He was sitting beside a very nervous Norman Hand in the cargo plane’s little passenger compartment, talking to Witcher on a fone. He kept the fone screen on the seatback blanked, so Hand couldn’t see who he was talking to. “They’ll pull some strings, whitewash it, say that Hand was covering this imaginary ‘Puerto Rican Communist guerrilla air attack.’ Same old bullshit. It’ll be worth it to them, to get us.” There was a staticky pause before Witcher’s reply. He was talking via satellite, a continent and an ocean away, safe in his Kauai estate. “Suppose you’re right. We’ll try to call them on this one… But it’ll be too late to—Whoa… A trace. Got to go.”

Smoke glanced at Hand, saw the reporter’s knuckles were white on the arms of his seat. Hand peered out the scratched window; Smoke looked over his shoulder. The airfield was near the beach, and out to sea the picket of American destroyers was visible, gray notches against the horizon. “Why don’t we take off? I should’ve called that damn chopper back—”

“It wouldn’t have come,” Smoke told him, not for the first time. “They’re… civilian. They won’t ignore the aircraft advisory.”

He was thinking of Alouette, glad he had gotten her out ahead of the others. He worried about the islanders. They’d gone into hurricane shelters, a long way from the NR base, but American naval artillery was notoriously inaccurate; its smart missiles so poorly made—by the contractors who routinely ripped off the Pentagon—they weren’t so smart…

“Why don’t we take off ?” Hand demanded again, his voice a little shrill. Across the aisle, his technicki smiled in quiet satisfaction.

As if in answer, the plane lurched into movement.

The pilot’s voice crackled from the fone. “We’re getting a stay-down warning, Jack. They claim we can surrender peaceably.”

“Accept!” Hand burst out.

Smoke shook his head. “It’s a lie. This isn’t a military operation, this is CIA. They might or might not take us alive, but eventually we’d all die in their hands.”

You they might just put under an extractor and erase your memories of the whole thing, Smoke thought.

He wasn’t going to tell Hand that. It would be an acceptable option to Hand. Unacceptable to Smoke.

“See if you can stall them, tell them we’re thinking about it,” Smoke told the pilot. Feeling sweat stick his back to the seat; hearing his heart hammering in his ears.

There were seventy others with them in the passenger compartment. A few were muttering; no one crying, no one panicking. Every one of them NR; every one of them ready to die.

Their silence touched Smoke, made his throat contract with emotion.

The plane took to the air; two others, almost simultaneously, took off in other parts of the field, carrying the entire NR base. The island was at the end of its usefulness to the NR anyway, Smoke reflected. Most of their work was in Europe now. And on FirStep. They’d divide their operations between the space base and, probably, Israel. A springboard to Europe.

On some level, he was conscious that he was thinking of these things, making these mental preparations, to cover the fact that he was scared as a son of a bitch. He was trying to convince himself he had a future to plan for.

The US Navy, lied to by the CIA, was going to try to shoot them out of the sky.

Of course, Smoke had tried to talk to the ships on radio. He was presumed to be an American radical sympathizer, lying to protect Puerto Rican Commie compadres.