Storch craned his neck to see around Bangs and the spotter, but there was only textured darkness and the sawtooth wave of mountains on the horizon. The cloud cover was starting to tear itself apart in the upper atmosphere. There was no moon, but he could make out glistering beds of naked stars in the darkening sky. In minutes, they would be laid bare to satellite imagery, which would be a damn sight harder to fool than radar. He wondered about the escape plan, and then, looking at the faces of the men around him, wondered if there was any such thing.
Then they crested a hill and pivoted, frozen over a bowl of light.
Storch struggled with the others to get a view of the objective. He saw a circular community of tract homes with a blocky, fortress-like four-story tower in the center. Arc-sodium streetlamps cast golden circles on street corners and an open field with tennis courts and a swimming pool.
This is right.
The Hind appeared over the far ridge and dove into the bowl like a greedy fly, overripe with inflammable eggs. As the Black Hawk closed up the last quarter mile to the edge of the community, Storch averted his eyes from a flash of light like a hole in the material world. Missiles stabbed the ground in a widening arc as the Hind traversed the diameter of the community, picking and annihilating targets according to a program too fast for a human co-pilot to follow. The first strike knocked out the lights: the grid went out in one big wave on the heels of the deafening boom of the impact. The second took out a garage complex. The others hit targets invisible to Storch's eyes, but probably no less important: phone switchers, satellite dishes, back-up generators.
"They're cut off. You've got about thirty minutes before we can expect formal resistance."
"Damn fine shooting, Ivan. Back up for insertion. Troops, get ready to jump."
The Hind ceased fire and hovered in place over the tennis courts, resplendent in the glow of the burning village. The soldiers aboard the Black Hawk seized handholds as the helicopter banked and took a straight course for the tower, just like Medina had said they would.
"This isn't right," Storch said to himself. There was no antiaircraft fire, not even small weapons resistance, and the Mission didn't seem to expect any. If not for the precision with which the Hind had cut off the community from the outside world, Storch would've concluded that they'd come to the wrong place. He shouldered past Bangs and hung out the door. The wind was already foul with burning. Then he saw the people running out of their houses and looking up at the sky with wide black mouths, the way people would in any suburb in America in the event of a bombing raid. Some of them were children.
This is just.
"We're over the target, Ivan," Bangs said into his headset. Commence perimeter saturation bombing."
"Major, what the hell are we doing?" Storch shouted, forgetting the headset, and banging his visor against the Major's for emphasis. "Those are normal fucking people down there. There're kids down there! What is this, really?"
Bangs grabbed the sides of his helmet and wrenched him off balance before he could steady himself on a handhold, and dangled him out the doorway. "Look again, Sergeant. Is that normal?"
Below him, Storch could see the roof of the tower, a featureless deck with a pillbox-shaped staircase and a hatch that might admit an elevator car, if it had the telescoping lift shaft design. Beyond and below, he could see people running down the street from the far edge of Radiant Dawn, where the Hind was starting to drop napalm. They ran in an orderly single-file line like participants in a fire drill, seemingly oblivious to the fact that each and every one of them was on fire. Like cartoon candles, their little legs carried them on when the very air around them was burning hot enough to crack most tempered metals.
"IS THAT NORMAL?"
A blob of flames rolled out of the maelstrom in pursuit of the flaming refugees, like a runaway bouncing betty. As the flames lost their intensity, Storch could make out that it was a mob of people clinging to a golfcart. The burning cart collapsed a block away from the tower, and the burning people leapt off and joined the rest on foot. They were converging on the tower. He didn't know whether to be relieved or horrified further when they began, finally, one by one and with agonizing slowness for people who were mostly ash, to lie down and die.
This is the natural order.
Bangs dragged Storch back in and leaned back outside himself. "Take us down, Joe. Team chiefs sound off!"
"A-Team, good to go."
"B-Team, good to go."
"C-Team, good to go."
"D-Team, good to go," Medina called out.
The Black Hawk settled on the rooftop and the soldiers poured out and scattered like army ants on a dinner plate, fanning out to the corners and surveying the street below, securing the stairs and ripping the hatch off the elevator shaft. The Black Hawk sprang back up into the air and almost immediately vanished into the ceiling of smoke covering Radiant Dawn.
Storch followed Medina to the staircase and covered him as he ran down to the bottom and back, reported all clear. Several men at the edges took potshots at the refugees below, but their chiefs told them to save it. They dropped charges down the shaft and ran back to the edge. Two seconds later, a plume of white fire shot out of the hole. Bangs waved A, B and C down the stairs and turned to face Wittrock and his team. "Let's go in. Tarnell, Draper, maintain this position and cover the exterior entrances. Maintain contact and be prepared to get downstairs in a hurry."
They barked yessirs and ran to the edges with grenade launchers at port arms. Bangs strode off to the stairs. Medina sprinted ahead of him and took up point, Wittrock followed, looking like a prisoner of martial astronauts, with Storch bringing up the rear. The stairway was dark, but the assault teams had dropped lo-glow flares on the landings as they swept the building. Storch followed Wittrock's stooped shoulders down the stairs and into a corridor with white tiles on the walls and ceiling, as well as the floor. It looked like a hospital, or another computer clean room. Medina signed all clear again, and they advanced to a heavy steel door with red and green lights above it, like a TV studio, or a radiology lab. The green light was on.
Wittrock set to unlocking the door with his laptop, while Medina and Storch circled the floor without finding a soul. He saw more than a few bullet holes in doors, and a shattered water cooler which had spilled water and icy glass shards out into the corridor.
"These guys spook easy," Storch whispered.
"Have you ever fought room-to-room against people who don't curl up and die when you pour nape on them, Storch?" Medina asked. Storch shut up.
When they came back around, they found the door open and Wittrock and Bangs inside. He walked into the room and looked around at the banks of computers and the console in the center at which Wittrock sat, connecting his laptop to a bank of sockets in a recess in the desk. All the computers were still aglow and humming, presumably fed on a separate emergency generator somewhere in the tower.
Bangs sat on the edge of the desk with his arms crossed. From the haunted look in his eyes, Storch could tell he was starting to think about what he'd done.
I'm afraid there is no right side—
"There's nobody," Storch reported. "No resistance at all." his last was not a report, but an accusation.
Bangs rolled his eyes. "I pray you're right, Sergeant."
Storch thought of Spike Team Texas. Would he be here, doing this, up to his neck in cold-blooded death, if he hadn't thought they'd be here? They had to be here. "They had a SWAT team last week."
"Ordinary citizens. They were asleep in their beds. Their imitation of humans is their defense, but it is also their weakness, Sergeant. They're not like you or me. They become what their environment demands to survive, and to reproduce."
"Why are you on the ground, Major?" Storch asked. "If the Mission's gonna have a prayer of getting out of here, shouldn't you be running things from the air?"
"Don't ask stupid questions, Sergeant."
"Major! A-1 in the lobby! We have a situation! Please advise!" the voice crackled from a speaker built into the desk, into which Bangs had connected his headset. The reception sounded bad, but the distortion was the muffled barking of gunfire.
Bangs stood up and began pacing. "Go ahead, A-1."
"We got the motherfucker! The primary! The goddamn primary!"
"Repeat that," Bangs and Wittrock both said. They looked like expectant fathers.
"It's Keitel! He came running in with his ass on fire and we pinned him down!"
Wittrock looked cautiously elated as he looked up from his work. "Is this confirmable?" At the same time, Bangs blurted, "Is he dead?"
"Not yet, not yet, but he's all fucked up. Burn him again, Jack! Burn him—"
Wittrock rocked back in his chair and let out a breath that he'd been holding for over a decade. "Then it's done," he said.
"B-2, Major, on level two, with an urgent situation! Goddamit, goddam—"
"Where's B-1, Bobby? Where's El Rey? El Rey, speak!"
"El Rey's gone, Major! The primary got him!"
"What? What primary?"
"Keitel, or Keogh, whatever his fucking name is! He's pinned down in a corner office. He's—he's got El Rey, and he's—he was eating him alive, sir, and I didn't, I wasn't gonna—Oh, god, man, I'm sorry…But he won't fucking die!"
"He's wrong, Major," A-1 broke in. "No disrespect to El Rey, man, but you're wrong. We nailed his ass down here."
"Shut up, Dicky," Bangs barked, then his voice went all cool to take the panic out of the new chief of B-Team. "Bobby, listen to me. Have you been listening to the all channels frequency?"
"Shit, Major, I wasn't listening to shit on the radio, I had—"
"OK, OK, where did you first encounter the primary?"
"We cleared the floor, and then we caught the motherfucker climbing in a window. He was burned so bad we didn't think he'd—put up much of a fight—shit—but his face was—I've seen the primary's picture enough times to know it was him."
"He's wrong, major," A-1 shot back. "I'm looking at the motherfucker right now. I was there, Bobby. I was a green SF warrant officer on the goddamned boat when they tested RADIANT. He borrowed my binoculars! This is him. Major, he said my goddamned name!"
"Clearly, this is another defense mechanism," Wittrock said calmly. "We will have to assume that none of them is the primary."
Bangs nodded, asked, "Bobby, Dicky, assume none of them is the primary. It's some kind of camouflage. You look outside, you'll probably see more of them."
They're all his children
, Storch thought.
And now, maybe all of them are him
.
"Bobby, lay claymores and barricades at all the windows, then fall back to the staircase. Dicky, hold those fucking doors until I call you back up. You still awake, Storch?" Bangs shouted. He snapped to attention.
"Sir, yes, sir."
"Good, you and Medina do the perimeter again. Check the windows. These fuckers can probably jump pretty high, to get out of a fire."
"Yes sir." He turned to leave, when a new voice squelched out of the speaker. Storch kept running, but switched his headset link to all-channels, and steadied his rifle on his armbrace. The seemingly airtight security they'd established in the tower had been punctured and they'd begun to take casualties. As impossible as it seemed, Storch now began to function as he hadn't a few minutes before, indeed, as he hadn't in nearly ten years. He was in a war, again.
"Major, I'm dodging SAMs out here!" The pilot sounded almost giddy. "They finally started fighting back!"
Medina met Storch in the corridor and flanked him as they walked the halls.
"Are you in imminent peril, Ivan?" Bangs's voice rasped in their ears.
"No, Major, we're too close for the dumb shits to lock on, and they're firing blind through smoke. I think I put one of them out, but there's another one out there. They're just shoulder-held shit, I don't think— Jesus, what was that?"
Storch turned a corner and brought his rifle up. A man-shaped silhouette approached him down the corridor. He steadied himself and saw it was just his own shadow, cast by a flashlight Medina had attached to his rifle barrel. His foot slipped out from under him in a puddle of water and he skidded a few feet, his unwieldy Jackhammer slipped down on his brace and went off with a brutal stutter that carved a jagged S into the opposite wall. Medina came up alongside him and crouched, pointing his flashlight down the hall. "Spook easy?" he asked.
Storch went to a window and looked out. The outer eighty percent of Radiant Dawn was an Old Testament lake of fire. The inner island around the tower was merely burning and overrun by little dancing points of light that one had to work real hard to reconcile as people. He settled down and listened to the channel chatter, listened to the mission come apart at the seams.
"Major, D-3 on the roof, something just ran up the side of the goddamned buildin', and it's up here and it's burning, but it won't die, and it's really fuckin' pissed—"
"Fall back, Tarnell, fall back—"
"Shit no, Major, this bitch is toast. Draper, get him—holy shit, didja see that?"
"See what?" Bangs demanded. "Tarnell? Answer me!"
"Major, Ivan here, you won't believe this, somebody just jumped off the roof of the tower, and they're—shit, Timbob, heel off, he's—Jesus Christ, fall down! He's fucking flying! Oh shit—He's on the outside—"
Screaming over the pilot, Tarnell reporting on the same event from the roof. "Major, the shitbird jumped off the roof, like a goddamn rocket, he's on the Hind, I repeat, there's a burnin' fucker on the Hind, and he's inside it, now—"
"Timbob, where's he at? Take the sidearm, go back and—where's Edgeworth? What? Major, we're pretty sure he's still on the outside of the chopper, we're trying to maneuver so Joe can pick him off—"