Something in his CO's quietly anguished voice silenced Frisco's protests. He glanced at Staunton once more, then nodded and moved away, his expression troubled. The commander watched him go, then turned his eyes back to his plane as the ordnance team finished its job and withdrew. The innocent, white-painted shapes under his wings seemed to whisper to him through the rain, promising him the power of life and death itself.
He turned his back, handing his cup to a passing seaman, and went to find his pilots for their final—and accurate—briefing.
Behind him, rainwater beaded the surface of the two B83 "special weapons" slung under his aircraft. Between them, they represented just over two megatons of destruction.
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, fell behind as the C-17s rumbled westward at four hundred miles per hour. The slower attack helicopters had gotten off earlier, in order to link up with them as soon as they reached their objective, and the dim caverns of their bellies were quieter than usual as the elite paratroopers of First Brigade, Eighty-Second Airborne Division headed into combat. They'd prepared themselves mentally to fight in many places, but western North Carolina wasn't one of them.
Colonel Sam Tyson and his staff rode the lead plane in night-camouflage and blackface. Tyson knew the division's other two brigades were ready to follow his if needed, as was the 101st Airborne, their sister division in the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. He also knew that if they needed that much firepower, they might as well just hand the state over to the crazies and move away.
He sighed and tried to get comfortable. Whoever had designed these canvas-and-metal seats had to be a sadist, he thought for perhaps the ten-thousandth time in his career, but at least they shouldn't have to jump in. At last report, Asheville Airport was still clear of the violence.
Dick Aston leaned back against the Osprey's vibrating fuselage, eyes closed, feeling Ludmilla beside him. She wore her flight suit under her camouflaged BDUs and body armor, and her hair was tucked up under her helmet, her face blackened like his own.
The Ospreys were a vast improvement on the clattering helos he'd used so often before, he thought distantly. Twice as fast, too. His mind filled with their swift passage through the night sky, leaving the light rain which had enveloped Lejeune behind as they sped west toward Spruce Pine. Almost three hundred miles from Lejeune, Spruce Pine was where the final leg would begin.
He visualized it in his mind. They would fly low, using the mountains to hide from whatever sensors the Troll might have. From Spruce Pine, the Ospreys would head for Relief, North Carolina, then down into the valley of the Nolichucky River, directly over the site of the plutonium raid, to River Hill, Tennessee. Then they would turn down Tennessee 81, overfly the town of Carmen, North Carolina, and swoop east up the side of Sugarloaf into combat.
At the same time, MAG-200's C-130 Hercules transports would bore straight west from Spruce Pine, down the line of US 19, then lift up and over the ridges to the southern face of Sugarloaf to drop Company T's vehicles. The Herky-birds were a bit faster than the Ospreys and had a shorter route, but Colonel Dickle had planned the coordination between the two insertions with clockwork precision. It was what came after that worried Aston.
He was too old for this. The thought beat in his brain. He should stay home and let Dan run the operation, but he couldn't. He trusted Abernathy's ability completely, but he just couldn't.
Partly, he knew, it was what had lured him into the special forces in the first place. Pride. Call it arrogance or the need to excel; by any name, it was a driving compulsion to be the best, to do something that mattered with the best men in the world, and beside this mission, anything he'd ever done was insignificant. He supposed it was much the same compulsion that sent overaged matadors into the bullring to find their deaths.
But he knew that was only one reason, and perhaps the least of them. The real reason sat quietly beside him, her darkened face serene, while the hope of his planet rode on her hip.
The plane bored on into the darkness, and Richard Aston was afraid. For himself. For his planet. And, most of all, for Ludmilla Leonovna.
* * *
Ludmilla glanced at Dick, taking in the closed eyes and calm expression. She'd known many warriors in her time—indeed, for fifty subjective years she'd known little else—but none had impressed her more.
Perhaps it was because she hadn't let herself come this close to any of the others, for deep inside her, something railed against his mortality—railed as it had not in many years. Ludmilla Leonovna was no hothouse flower, but she knew how much she owed to him. He'd saved her life and, even more importantly, believed her and made others believe.
He was hard and deadly, as much a killer as she, yet within his armor he was gentle and vulnerable. She remembered his eyes when she first offered herself to him—the look of disbelief, the fear of rejection, the determination not to "take advantage of her." She'd meant only to thank him, to seal their friendship with a brief affair, for Thuselahs had learned the hard way not to give their hearts to Normals.
But she'd forgotten that lesson, and it would cost her dear. Even if they both survived this night—and it was very likely they would not—she would lose him, and then she would be alone again. Alone in this alien world, this universe not even her own, with the aching sorrow of her loss.
She knew he sensed her feelings, and she also knew how hard it was for him to accept her presence in combat. In her own time and place, women had soldiered for centuries; in his, they were only starting to feel their way into those roles. And he came from an even earlier military, one in which it was still unquestioningly accepted that women were to be protected, shielded from the brutality of war. How many men of his time, she wondered, could have accepted her not just as an equal but as a warrior in her own right? That she'd seen even more years of combat than he meant nothing beside the emotional gulf he'd made himself cross.
Which was why she hadn't told him that the Troll could detect and track her blaster the instant the touch of her hand brought it to life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Asheville was dying.
Jeremiah Willis winced as the crackle of small arms and machine guns battered his ears. The flaming town of Woodfin painted the sky crimson to the north, and General Evans's Guardsmen had been driven back along the east bank of the French Broad River to the line of I-240. His men had stopped every push towards the Beaucatcher Mountain cut, and they still held a rectangle of North Asheville from Merrimon Avenue east, but the entire area between Merrimon and the river billowed flame and smoke.
The remnants of the Asheville City Police were acting as guides for National Guard fire teams struggling to stem the tide surging in along Patton Avenue and West I-40, and no one was worrying about rioter casualties now. The Guardsmen were fighting to cover the police as they evacuated civilians from the path of the madness, and they were in no mood for gentleness.
Neither was Willis. His worst nightmares had never prepared him for this. This was no demonstration gone berserk, no simple riot. He didn't know what it was, but it wasn't that. There was a malevolence to it, a sheer, wanton compulsion to wreck and destroy—a terrible insanity so consuming it was like a guiding force.
He touched the M16 slung over his shoulder. It was decades since he'd worn a uniform, but he intended to be ready if the vandals wrecking his city got this far.
He almost hoped they would.
Lieutenant Curtis Spillers, NCNG, ducked as slugs whined off his M113's aluminum armor. He remembered something from a training manual; "No organized force is ever outnumbered by a mob," the writer had said. Under most circumstances, that might have been true—but not tonight. There was too much ferocity abroad in this flame-shot darkness.
More fire raked his armored personnel carrier. That was an M60, he thought grimly, wondering which of his comrades it had been taken from. Unless, of course, it was one of the Guardsmen who'd freaked out.
He poked his head up cautiously. More fire whined and cracked, b
ut his disembarked infantry squad had spotted the muzzle flash on the second floor of an office building. Their fire was ineffectual against the sturdy art-deco facade, but it showed Spillers where it was.
He waited for a lull, then sprang up behind the M2 HB Browning machine gun. Unlike the Bradley M2s and M3s the regular Army and some of the other Guard units boasted, Spillers's brigade was still equipped with the old, reliable, but turretless M113 APC originally designed over fifty years ago. Unlike later designs, the M113 had been intended primarily as a troop taxi, not a fighting vehicle in its own right, and there was no armor for its gunner. But the .50 caliber weapon was a form of protection in itself, and Spillers grabbed the machine gun's spade grips and sprayed the building with steel-jacketed slugs bigger than his thumb that reached their target traveling at better than twenty-nine hundred feet per second.
Some of the brigade's other APCs had replaced their machineguns with Mk 19 automatic grenade launchers. A weapon like that would probably have been even more effective, but Spillers had no complaints. The big Browning vibrated like a jackhammer as his thumbs depressed the butterfly trigger, and the window frame blew apart. The wall shredded, vomiting dust and fist-sized chunks of brick and mortar, and he hosed it down, firing the short bursts his instructors had always insisted upon, while the infantry closed in and fired forty-millimeter grenades of their own. Explosions racked the room behind the window, and then sudden smoke billowed, fueled by the glare of burning gasoline. So the bastards had stockpiled Molotov cocktails up there, had they? Spillers smiled with savage satisfaction as a flaming figure flung itself through the window, screaming. It hit the street and bounced once, then lay still, but Spillers depressed his weapon and gave the body a burst just to make sure.
MAG-200 swept westward through the night, hugging the ground, and Spruce Pine's lights blinked at Lieutenant Colonel Dickle from the darkness. Their calm tranquility seemed utterly incongruous, given what she had learned during "Captain Ross's" briefing, but she kept her attention on her route, doggedly ignoring the scarlet heavens above Asheville.
"We've got General Evans, Sir." Colonel Tyson held out his hand, and the signals lieutenant handed him a headset with attached boom microphone.
"General, Colonel Tyson here. What's your situation, Sir?"
"Not good, Colonel." Tyson understood the fatigue and worry in the Guardsman's voice. An infantry brigade was a powerful formation, even when composed of reservists, but street-fighting had a voracious appetite. Large maneuver units were useless; it came down to junior officers at the platoon and squad level, alone in the howling madness. There were too many potential ambushes, too much cover for attackers, too little room to deploy. Indeed, Tyson felt a surge of admiration for the Guardsmen in Asheville. They'd done far better in an impossible tactical position than he would have believed possible.
"We've lost the extreme western part of the city, and it looks like they're trying to split us in half down the line of the French Broad," the National Guard general went on. "We're holding, but we're losing ground. We've got isolated incidents all over the city—small groups with firebombs and small arms, nothing like what's coming at us from the northwest—but the southern perimeter's been quiet so far." Evans coughed out a harsh laugh. "I don't expect that to last long. The crowd coming up I-26 is at least as bad as the one we've already got. They just punched a company of Guardsmen out of Hendersonville; they're burning it to the ground now."
"Understood, General. What's the status at the airport?"
"The tower crew pulled out with most of the airline employees, but the lights are on and I've got one platoon out there, along with a few state troopers and the airport security force. It's not much, but so far they've only been hit by isolated bands. That won't last much longer."
"It won't have to, General," Tyson said grimly. "Our Apaches are over the field now, and the transports will be on the ground in ten minutes."
"Thank God."
"We'll secure the airport and block I-26 at Airport Road, then move north up Twenty-Six. I'm going to try to swing west around the edge of the city. If I can keep anybody else from getting in, we should be able to squeeze out the trouble spots between us."
"It sounds good, Colonel," Evans said. "We'll be waiting for you."
"Luck, General," Tyson said, tightening his straps as the C-17 headed for the landing strip.
"And to you, Colonel."
"Romeo One, Pax Control. You are cleared, Romeo One. Be advised that Backstop is airborne at Virginia Beach. Good luck."
"Pax Control, Romeo One. Understood and thanks. Romeo Team, Romeo One. All right, children, let's go."
Commander Staunton released the brakes and felt his Hornet start to roll. Twenty-three more attack planes waited to join him, but none were as lethal as his. He tried not to think about that.
His speed hit a hundred twenty-five knots. He held her down a moment longer—he had plenty of runway . . . and those two white shapes under his wings—then eased back on the stick, and the attack fighter leapt into the rainy night.
To the south, the two F-14 squadrons of CVW-18 were already forming up. Theodore Roosevelt's aircraft had a score to settle.
Blake Taggart trembled, hands over his eyes, fighting to separate his fragile remaining self from his master's fiery ecstasy. The carnage the Troll had wrought frightened the ex-preacher—not because of what it was, but because of what it threatened to become. The tiny bit of him which was still himself recognized what was happening but saw no way to stop it.
The Troll exulted in the devastation like an addict in the grip of his drug, drinking in the destruction and bloodshed through thousands upon thousands of eyes and minds. The visceral hatred he had unleashed hung above the blazing city like a second pall of smoke, and it was the sweet incense of his vengeance.
He'd forgotten that this was only a test. He had decreed the destruction of Asheville, but his lust for murder and hunger for vengeance demanded more, flogging his puppets beyond themselves. Asheville blazed, but another swath of destruction burned against the night, marking the route of I-26 from the South Carolina line north. His creatures swept onward, killing, burning, and raping without the least awareness that they were only tools, and the perverse delight of cruelty possessed him like a demon.
Taggart managed to break free of the maelstrom at last and staggered out of the Troll's cavern. He slid down a tree, resting his forehead on his knees and breathing deeply. He could almost smell the smoke, even here, and it seemed to clog his brain with fire. He understood only too well, for he tasted the hot, sweet blood in his own mouth and knew the truth. Whatever else had happened, however much he had always longed for power of his own, he had been made over in the Troll's image. He was no longer an individual, could no longer even pretend that he belonged only to himself. Yet a fragment of selfhood remained still, urging him to separate himself from the frenzy which possessed his master.
Someone had to keep a grip on himself, he thought, and pushed himself to his feet. He managed to walk down the path almost normally, grateful that he had convinced his master to exclude the men from his mental link.
Taggart didn't like to think about what would happen if the Apocalypse Brigade caught the same blood lust which drove the mobs.
"Coming up on River Hill, Admiral," Colonel Dickle announced, and Aston poked his head into the cockpit. The sky above the crouching mountains to the southeast was bloody. "The Herky-birds are right on schedule. Your vehicles will be going in in about one minute."
The ready lights above the hatches lit, and the men of First Platoon, Company T, gathered themselves internally.
Colonel Tyson felt cold satisfaction. It had turned into a race, after all, and First Brigade had won it.
Tentacles of madmen had flooded up I-26, brushing aside the county and state roadblocks, and one rampaging column had curled out for the airport. But the first C-17s had landed twenty minutes before, and his paratroopers had moved into positions selected before leavi
ng Bragg. The rattle of treads had cut through the clamor of the approaching mob as Bradley fighting vehicles and the LPM8 AGS—technically the "Armored Gun System," but for all intents and purposes light tanks—which had finally replaced the old, unsatisfactory Sheridans with which the Eighty-Second had been equipped for decades, headed for the perimeter. They were in their firing positions and the Apache gunships were waiting overhead when the glaring headlights swept down Airport Road.
Tyson wasted no time calling on the mob to surrender. When the first rounds of blind fire spattered his men, they raked the packed civilian vehicles and captured National Guard trucks with a tornado of automatic fire. The Apaches' thirty-millimeter chainguns and the twenty-five-millimeter chainguns and co-ax machine guns of the Bradleys had been particularly effective, he thought grimly, but the high-explosive and white-phosphorous rounds from the M35 105-millimeter main guns of the LPM8s had been even more spectacular.
The bloodied survivors had broken and run, abandoning their dead, and the night sky behind the colonel reverberated with the whine of jet engines as his brigade's second echelon came in.
He gestured to his clerk for his map case and bent over the cards, rechecking his planned route. It was time, he thought, to kick some ass.
Jeremiah Willis crouched behind the charred hulk of an M113. No one knew how the small party of rioters had gotten that close, but their Molotov cocktails and the LAWs and AT4s they'd taken from dead Guardsmen had cost General Evans dozens of APCs and trucks. Every raider had been killed, though, and Willis had shot two of them himself. He was shocked by the satisfaction he'd felt, but he could not—would not—deny it.
The rioters had smashed switching stations, transformers, and power lines as they rampaged through his city, but the flames backlit them as they came in. Willis popped up and ripped off a long burst at a dimly seen figure sniping at a Guard machine gun team. He had no idea if he'd hit the sniper, but the shape disappeared.