“TOW?” queried Nick. It sounded and felt like a prayer.
Sato shook his head. “This kind of battle tank”—he jerked his left thumb toward the monitor showing a tank from an aerial drone’s point of view—has antimissile countermeasures. We have no chance against any of them.”
“Air cover?” asked Nick. “Some sort of armed drone or a jet from Colorado or…” Or any sort of deus ex machina? thought Nick. He’d learned that literary term from Dara. A god from a machine. Being lowered, often in a basket, to rescues the heroes and heroines from a situation they couldn’t get themselves out of. Bad form in fiction and theater, Dara had taught him. But Nick thought it was definitely time for a deus ex machina. Maybe two or three.
“No air support, Bottom-san,” said Mutsumi ta as he drove the Oshkosh back toward the southern riverbank. Back toward the enemy troops and tanks.
“Surrender?” gasped Nick. It wasn’t so much a question as it was a very, very strong suggestion.
“Leave the one mini-drone in place and use all three of its lasers to light up the tanks,” Sato said softly to the man sitting in the crash chair that Nick was leaning against so he wouldn’t fall down. “Bring the others back out of range.”
“Hai, Sato-san,” said Shinta Ishii. He was rapidly typing commands on the keyboard.
Nick peeked at the screen, but all the words were in kanji or hiragana or whatever they called their script.
“Super lasers?” asked Nick, his voice sounding pathetic even to himself. “Weapons lasers on your mini-drones?”
“Oh, no, Bottom-san,” said Mutsumi ta as he brought the Oshkosh to a stop against the steep south bank and parked it there. “Just regular lasers. Would not hurt a fly.”
“Final coordinates in?” asked Sato.
“Hai,” barked Shinta Ishii. “Do no kid ga kanry moe te i masu. J kid wo nokoshi kuma.”
Nick, who’d taken twelve weeks of instruction in conversational Japanese with Dara during his push for detective first grade nine years ago, didn’t understand a word of what he’d just heard.
“Gee-bear t chaku jikan?” barked Sato.
Gee-bear? thought Nick.
“Thirty-eight seconds,” said Shinta Ishii, obviously using English for Nick’s benefit.
Above them, the turret whirred and Daigorou Okada’s mini-gun opened up again and hot, spent cartridges started raining down on the steel floor. Nick could see through four of the monitors that the line of infantry was almost to the south riverbank, the tanks less than a hundred meters behind. The tanks were also accompanied by infantry. The figures in the front were visibly firing on the single mini-drone video feed and now Nick could hear the bullets pinging against the Oshkosh’s outer skin. Slugs hitting the turret above had a slightly more resonant sound.
“Shouldn’t we at least go out and… I don’t know…,” said Nick. “Fight?”
Sato put his strong left hand on Nick’s wrist and said nothing. The pinging on the outer hull became a solid roar. Nick thought of a time when he was a kid and he and his father had run to a farmer’s tin-roofed shed during a violent downpour. This was louder.
The mini-gun above them fell silent. “Out of ammunition, Sato-san,” announced Daigorou Okada.
“Ten seconds,” Shinta Ishii said softly from in front of Nick. The man sat back deeper in his crash chair and tugged at the already tight five-point harnesses holding him in. Okada dropped down from his perch and Nick heard and saw a metal panel sealing off the top gun bubble. Okada pulled down a jump seat and harnessed himself into it.
Are we going somewhere? wondered Nick with a child’s sense of hope. He watched on the single working monitor as six or eight of the infantry jumped from the riverbank to the top of the Oshkosh, weapons firing as they sought out any aperture. Fifty more were rushing to join them. The enemy tanks rumbled closer.
Suddenly Sato moved up behind Nick as if to hug him, despite the shattered arm hanging limp at his side, and the big man shoved his huge and armored body tight, pressing Nick against the crash-couch ahead of him.
Later, Nick swore that he’d caught a glimpse of them via the single drone monitor and the last working Oshkosh external cam. Six slim shapes—about the size and configuration of telephone poles—hurtling down from orbit at eight times the speed of sound.
The mini-drone turning on a widening gyre a thousand feet above them that was painting the three tanks with its laser beams was vaporized in the first seconds of the blast, but the more distant drones opened their channels and sent images—recorded for later study—of the three mushroom clouds rising and converging into one great mushroom cloud that folded and unfolded and then refolded itself toward the stratosphere.
The tanks were vaporized in an instant. The hundreds of infantrymen and -women, anyone standing within a radius of two kilometers of the three targeted and simultaneously struck tanks, were caught up in the shockwave and blast front of disturbed air and thrown a hundred meters or more through the dust-filled sky. None appeared to have survived.
The riverbank collapsed in on and completely buried the Oshkosh.
“On one hundred percent internal air,” came a computer voice that Nick hadn’t heard before.
The vibrations and tremors were very strong. If it hadn’t been for Sato pressing him against the crash-couch, it was quite possible that he would have rattled around the inside of the truck like a BB in a shaken steel can.
“Holy shit,” whispered Nick when the up-and-down oscillations had stopped and Mutsumi ta had fired up the Oshkosh’s big twin turbines and driven them out of the landslide.
ta guided them up the rough ramp onto the scorched area atop the bank and stopped, engines idling. Daigorou Okada had opened the top turret and clambered back up, carrying heavy magazines for the mini-gun, but there was no firing.
Nick stared at the monitors as more of the mini-drones moved back within range. The scorched area was an almost perfect circle extending across the riverbed and another mile or so to the north and up the river valley cliffs almost two miles to the south.
The doors opened and the driver, Mutsumi ta, and Shinta Ishii had attached their PEAPs and climbed out, heading back down the bank toward the still-burning first Oshkosh.
“Please to lower visor and activate PEAP,” Sato said softly. “The air is very full of particles. We must retrieve Joe’s body from our vehicle. His real name was Genshirou It and though there will not be much left after the fire, we must find what we can. We shall send others back for a more complete job before sending It-san’s ashes back to Nippon for a hero’s burial. We honor our dead.”
Nick nodded and closed his visor with a shaking hand. His hands were too unsteady to activate the PEAP comm, so Sato helped. Then the security chief pushed a button and the big rear door swung out and clanged down. Nick followed Sato down the ramp onto earth so fried that it snapped and crackled under their boots. Not even a blade of grass had survived the flames.
“Nukes?” managed Nick.
“Ahh, no,” said Sato over their personal comm. “A purely hyperkinetic weapon. From orbit, you see. Many hundreds waiting for the call. Six used here. No warheads. No radioactivity, of course. Merely speed turned into energy. Much energy.”
“I didn’t know such things existed,” whispered Nick. They were walking toward the first Oshkosh now. ta and Ishii were using large foam fire extinguishers from the surviving Oshkosh to fight the flames. Behind Sato and Nick, the bubble turret whirred as Daigorou Okada covered them.
“No,” agreed Sato, using his good arm to pull another fire extinguisher from an outside locker and handing it one-handed to Nick before he took another for himself.
“That arm’s in terrible shape,” said Nick. “You’ll need to get airlifted to a surgeon. Soon.”
Sato smiled and shook his head. “Okada-san is a very good medic, as was Genshirou It. There are adequate painkillers and medical materials aboard this Oshkosh for Okada-san to set the worst of the break and to allow me to trav
el the last three or four hours to Santa Fe in relative comfort.”
Before they went down the bank into the riverbed, Nick looked south and then all around again at the miles of devastation. Ten thousand small fires still burned. It seemed as if the ground were on fire.
“What do you call this weapon?” he asked.
Sato smiled. “The man who came up with the idea for such an enhanced, self-guided kinetic kill weapon—especially designed to penetrate deep bunkers—called them OWL.”
“Owl?” repeated Nick.
“Orbital Warhead Lancet. Very simple. Very useful for such small-unit fighting when regular air support is not available. It is used occasionally in China, not often. It is very expensive.”
“And these six OWLs came from Mr. Nakamura’s private stock.”
“Hai.” Sato grinned, although Nick was certain that the man must be in terrible pain. “We do not call these kinetic weapons OWLs, you see. But, rather, gee-bears.”
Nick remembered hearing the odd word. “ ‘Gee’ as in gravity, high-boost, acceleration, that sort of thing?”
“Yes,” nodded Sato, as if enjoying some private joke. “But also ‘Gee’ as in the first letter of the first name of the American skiffy writer who came up with the idea for this particular technology. We like to honor creators when we can.”
“Skiffy writer,” repeated Nick. S-c-i-hyphen-f-i.
Sato quit smiling. “It was important, Bottom-san, that we get you to your interview tomorrow with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. I promised Mr. Nakamura that you would be there.”
As they began walking down the crumbled riverbank toward the burning Oshkosh, Nick was wondering how they were going to get the pieces of Joe’s charred and crumbling body out of that mess. Or if they’d find his head.
“This Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev had better be worth it,” he muttered.
“Yes,” Sato agreed grimly. “He had better be worth it.”
2.03
I-70 West of Denver—Friday, Sept. 24
VAL FELT THAT he was being held high on some invisible cable, dangling between Heaven and Hell. Sometimes he rose until he could see light. More often, he dropped precipitously until the loose cable snagged on something and brought him up just short of black crags, sulfurous pits. But, dangled there in darkness, he never reached either place. Val had come to welcome either destination just so long as he could arrive. This Friday night, he was near Heaven.
The irony, of course, amusing only to himself, was that Val Bottom didn’t believe in either Heaven or Hell and never had.
Utah was a sort of Heaven. It was one of the few states left in what was laughably still called the Union that actually repaired and policed its highways, even the Interstates that had once been under federal control and maintenance. Once the twenty-nine-mile gauntlet of the Virgin River Diagonal was successfully run—bandits had fired on them from the cliffs for two-thirds of the way, but their security SUVs had returned fire until the convoy could pass with no real casualties—the drive north in Utah on I-15 and then east on I-70 toward Colorado was more like an easy, high-speed excursion from the days of the Old Man’s childhood than anything Val had ever experienced.
Eastern Utah from the tiny town of Richfield not far past the junction of I-15 and I-70 for the two hundred miles or so to the Colorado state line was the most magnificently empty upthrust of ancient mountains, sandstone ridges, and high plateaus that Val had ever seen. He’d never even imagined such a place.
For the last two days, Val had spent most of his days and nights riding in the cabs with two of the solo drivers—the black man Gauge Devereaux and the Navajo Henry Big Horse Begay.
The previous night, driving down from the Utah high country, Devereaux had seen the bulge in Val’s jacket where he kept the Beretta tucked in his belt behind his back and had asked to see the gun. Discombobulated, Val had finally pulled the weapon from his belt, slid the magazine out, and handed the semiautomatic to the driver.
“You left one in the spout,” said Devereaux. Taking his left hand from the steering wheel for a moment, the big man ratcheted the slide, caught the cartridge in midair, and handed it to the boy. Val thumbed it into the magazine.
Devereaux sniffed the muzzle and breach. Val knew that even after several days, the stink of cordite was in the weapon.
“Been shooting somebody?” said the driver.
Val remembered Billy grunting “Ugh” and the blotching red circle expanding above Vladimir Putin’s face on the T-shirt. He remembered the sound of Coyne’s front teeth hitting the concrete after the second, killing shot, and flinched despite himself.
“Target practice,” he said.
Devereaux nodded. “Nice gun. You need to keep it clean.”
They rode in silence for a while. I-Seventy had been dropping out of the mountains since sunset back near Richfield an hour or two earlier, and as they approached the exit to the abandoned city of Green River, starlight and moonlight now painted more high desert than the tortured sandstone and granite they’d been descending through.
Val tried not to think of Billy Coyne. It had been with him constantly, mostly at night, when it kept him awake, and much of the emotion had been encysted in the single thought—I’ve killed a human being. The thought and images made him almost sick at times, especially toward dawn, but there was also something darkly exciting—almost ecstatic—in the memories of those minutes in the tunnel. Part of Val wished he could go back and live it again just to feel the sense of power and release that had flowed through him when he’d put those two bullets into Billy Coyne’s chest and throat.
But so far, Val hadn’t used one of his vials of flashback to relive it. Doing that seemed… dirty… for some reason.
He was watching the convoy lights and highway stripes ahead of them and drifting into sleep when Devereaux’s voice startled him awake.
“You really thinking of trying to be an independent trucker?”
“Yeah,” said Val. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Yeah, that’s the way I was when I was thinking about it. But it’s doable, if you decide to try. About one fucking kid in a thousand who says he can be an independent driver actually makes it. But it’ll take some money up front.”
Here it comes, thought Val. Somehow Devereaux was going to offer him some lameshit path to trucking, if he handed x amount of cash over to Gauge Devereaux. The world’s bullshit just keeps on coming.
But no, the driver was talking about something else.
“I’m not talking about the fortune it takes to buy your own rig. That comes years later.”
“How’d you get the money for this cab?” asked Val.
“Luck,” said Devereaux, shifting the toothpick that he was always chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. “And with the way the price of rigs is going up, you’ll need even more luck… and balls… than I had. But I’m just talking about getting started. You know, riding shotgun as relief driver for a good solo long-distance guy those first few years. That’s possible… if…”
Here it comes, thought Val.
“If what?” he said.
“If you got a decent fake National Identity and Credit Card with a passable name and background and a decent fake Teamsters Union holo in it,” said Devereaux. The black man shot a glance sideways at Val. “My guess is that you wouldn’t want to use your own card for personal reasons… right?”
Val hesitated, then nodded.
“So you’ll need the best sort of fake card… the kind that can get you through all the various highway patrol and weigh station and militia roadblocks. But it’ll cost you about two hundred bucks… old bucks.”
“Let me guess,” Val said tiredly. “You can get one for me.”
Devereaux took his eyes off the road for a long moment as he glared at Val. “Fuck you, kid. I’m not saying I can get you shit and it’s not like you have two hundred old bucks. You or that loony professor of a granddad you got riding back there with Perdita and Julio
. I’m not offering nothing but advice, and it was going to be for free. But fuck you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Val. And he meant it. “I’m… tired. Sorta worn out. I haven’t been sleeping and… I mean, yeah, I’d love to get a new NICC. But how? Where?”
Devereaux drove in silence for several minutes. Finally, shifting down to get up a rare rising grade in the long descent to flatness, he growled, “There’s a guy in Denver. A lot of new solos use him to get their Teamsters NICC. The last I heard, he charged two hundred old bucks. It’s probably gone up.”
“You’re right,” said Val. “I don’t have the money. Neither does Leonard.”
Devereaux shrugged. “Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“But I’d still like his name,” said Val, sitting up straight and rubbing his face to wake up more. “If I got a Teamsters NICC, could I ride shotgun with you?”
“I’m a real solo,” grunted Devereaux. “I don’t haul no snot-nosed apprentices with me. But there’s a lot of guys who do.”
“Like who?”
“Like Henry Big Horse Begay. He’s got a kid riding and learning from him about half the time. Doesn’t charge them much, either.” Devereaux shot Val another glance. “Henry’s not queer, either. He likes teenage girls and younger, but none of them seem to want to be solo long-distance truckers. So old Begay takes punks like you under his wing.”
“How much of a charge would ‘not much’ be?” asked Val.
Devereaux shrugged again. “Beer money for the old fart. But in terms of learning trucking, riding a few months or a year with Henry Big Horse Begay is like going to Harvard or Princeton or one of those schools for… you know… someone like a young version of your granddad.”
Val licked his chapped, broken lips. “Do you think he’d let me hook up with him east out of Denver?”
The driver shook his head. “This convoy is getting into Denver tomorrow and laying over there about twelve hours, kid. Long enough to deliver our Denver shit, get a new trailer filled with shit headed east, get some sleep, and then we’ll be rolling toward Kansas City on I-Seventy by two a.m. Sunday. That wouldn’t give you enough time to find this fucking guy who does the NICCs. And it takes a while for those cards to get made up—usually about two weeks. That’s assuming you got the cash to pay this guy with up front.”