In June of '95, the Air Force had lost a scout pilot in NATO's no-fly zone, near the Croat border. The Serbs had made a very big deal of Captain Tommy Callahan's plane, and would have made an even bigger one of Callahan himself, if they caught him; the brass, haunted by images of the North Vietnamese gleefully parading brainwashed pilots before the international press, made recovering Tommy Callahan a priority.
The searchers had been about to give up when Callahan contacted them on a low-frequency radio band. His high-school girlfriend gave them a good ID marker, and when the man on the ground was queried, he confirmed it, telling them his friends had started calling him The Pukester following a truly memorable night of drinking in his junior year.
Kurtz's boys went in to get Callahan in a couple of helicopters much smaller than any of the ones they were using today. Owen Underhill, already tabbed by most (including himself, Owen supposed) as Kurtz's successor, had been in charge. Callahan's job was to pop some smoke when he saw the birds, then stand by. Underhill's job--the phooka part of it--had been to yank Callahan without being seen. This was not strictly necessary, so far as Owen could see, but was simply the way Kurtz liked it: his men were invisible, his men rode the Irish horse.
The extraction had worked perfectly. There were some SAMs fired, but nothing even close--Milosevic had shit, for the most part. It was as they were taking Callahan on board that Owen had seen his only Bosnians: five or six children, the oldest no more than ten, watching them with solemn faces. The idea that Kurtz's directive to make sure there were no witnesses might apply to a group of dirtyface kids had never crossed Owen's mind. And Kurtz had never said anything about it.
Until today, that was.
That Kurtz was a terrible man Owen had no doubt. Yet there were many terrible men in the service, more devils than saints, most certainly, and many were in love with secrecy. What made Kurtz different Owen had no idea--Kurtz, that long and melancholy man with his white eyelashes and still eyes. Meeting those was hard because there was nothing in them--no love, no laughter, and absolutely no curiosity. That lack of curiosity was somehow the worst.
A battered Subaru pulled up at the store, and two old men got carefully out. One clutched a black cane in a weather-chapped hand. Both wore red-and-black-checked hunting overshirts. Both wore faded caps, one with CASE above the bill and the other with DEERE. They looked wonderingly at the contingent of soldiers that descended upon them. Soldiers at Gosselin's? What in the tarnal? They were in their eighties, by the look of them, but they had the curiosity Kurtz lacked. You could see it in the set of their bodies, the tilt of their heads.
All the questions Kurtz had not voiced. What do they want? Do they really mean us harm? Will doing this bring the harm? Is it the wind we sow to bring the whirlwind? What was there in all the previous encounters--the flaps, the flashlights, the falls of angel hair and red dust, the abductions that began in the late sixties--that has made the powers that be so afraid? Has there been any real effort to communicate with these creatures?
And the last question, the most important question: Were the grayboys like us? Were they by any definition human? Was this murder, pure and simple?
No question in Kurtz's eyes about that, either.
5
The snow lightened, the day brightened, and exactly thirty-three minutes after ordering the stand-down, Kurtz gave them a go. Owen relayed it to Conklin and the Chinnies revved hard again, pulling up gauzy veils of snow and turning themselves into momentary ghosts. Then they rose to treetop level, aligned themselves on Underhill--Blue Boy Leader--and flew west in the direction of Kineo. Kurtz's Kiowa 58 flew below them and slightly to starboard, and Owen thought briefly of a troop of soldiers in a John Wayne movie, bluelegs with a single Indian scout riding his pony bareback off to one side. He couldn't see, but guessed Kurtz would still be reading the paper. Maybe his horoscope. "Pisces, this is your day of infamy. Stay in bed."
The pines and spruces below appeared and disappeared in vapors of white. Snow flew against the Chinook's two front windows, danced, disappeared. The ride was extremely rough--like a ride in a washing machine--and Owen wouldn't have had it any other way. He clapped the cans back on his head. Some other group, maybe Matchbox Twenty. Not great, but better than Pearl Jam. What Owen dreaded was the Squad Anthem. But he would listen. Yes indeed, he would listen.
In and out of the low clouds, vapory glimpses of an apparently endless forest, west west west.
"Blue Boy Leader, this is Blue Two."
"Roger, Two."
"I have visual contact with Blue Boy. Confirm?"
For a moment Owen couldn't, and then he could. What he saw took his breath away. A photograph, an image inside a border, a thing you could hold in your hand, that was one thing. This was something else entirely.
"Confirm, Two. Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Hold your current positions. I say again, hold your current positions."
One by one the other copters rogered. Only Kurtz did not, but he also stayed put. The Chinooks and the Kiowa hung in the air perhaps three quarters of a mile from the downed spacecraft. Leading up to it was an enormous swath of trees that had been whacked off in a slanted lane, as if by an enormous hedge-clipper. At the end of this lane was a swampy area. Dead trees clutched at the white sky, as if to snatch the clouds open. There were zig-zags of melting snow, some of it turning yellow where it was oozing into the damp ground. In other places there were veins and capillaries of open black water.
The ship, an enormous gray plate nearly a quarter of a mile across, had torn through the dead trees at the center of the swamp, exploding them and casting the splintery fragments in every direction. The Blue Boy (it was not blue at all, not a bit blue) had come to rest at the swamp's far end, where a rocky ridge rose at a steep angle. A long arc of its curved edge had disappeared into the watery, unstable earth. Dirt and bits of broken trees had sprayed up and littered the ship's smooth hull.
The surviving grayboys were standing around it, most on snow-covered hummocks under the upward-tilted end of their ship; if the sun had been shining, they would have been standing in the crashed ship's shadow. Well . . . clearly there was someone who thought it was more Trojan Horse than crashed ship, but the surviving grayboys, naked and unarmed, didn't look like much of a threat. About a hundred, Kurtz had said, but there were fewer than that now; Owen put the number at sixty. He saw at least a dozen corpses, in greater or lesser states of red-tinged decay, lying on the snow-covered hummocks. Some were facedown in the shallow black water. Here and there, startlingly bright against the snow, were reddish-gold patches of the so-called Ripley fungus . . . except not all of the patches were bright, Owen realized as he raised his binoculars and looked through them. Several had begun to gray out, victims of the cold or the atmosphere or both. No, they didn't survive well here--not the grayboys, not the fungus they had brought with them.
Could this stuff actually spread? He just didn't believe it.
"Blue Boy Leader?" Conk asked. "You there, boy?"
"I'm here, shut up a minute."
Owen leaned forward, reached under the pilot's elbow (Tony Edwards, a good man), and flicked the radio switch to the common channel. Kurtz's mention of Bosanski Novi never crossed his mind; the idea that he was making a terrible mistake never crossed his mind; the idea that he might have seriously underestimated Kurtz's lunacy never crossed his mind. In fact, he did what he did with almost no conscious thought at all. So it seemed to him later, when he cast his mind back and re-examined the incident not just once but again and again. Only a flip of the switch. That was all it took to change the course of a man's life, it seemed.
And there it was, loud and clear, a voice none of Kurtz's laddie-bucks would recognize. They knew Eddie Vedder; Walter Cronkite was a different deal. "--here. Il n'y a pas d'infection ici." Two seconds, and then a voice that might have belonged to Barbra Streisand: "One hundred and thirteen. One hundred and nineteen."
At some point, Owen realized, they had starte
d over counting primes from one. On the way up to Gosselin's in the bus, the various voices had reached primes in the high four figures.
"We are dying," said the voice of Barbra Streisand. "On se meurt, on creve." A pause, then the voice of David Letterman: "One hundred--"
"Belay that!" Kurtz cried. For the only time in the years Owen had known him, Kurtz sounded really upset. Almost shocked. "Owen, why do you want to run that filth into the ears of my boys? You come back and tell me, and right now."
"Just wanted to hear if any of it had changed, boss," Owen said. That was a lie, and of course Kurtz knew it and at some point would undoubtedly make him pay for it. It was failing to shoot the kids all over again, maybe even worse. Owen didn't care. Fuck the phooka horse. If they were going to do this, he wanted Kurtz's boys (Skyhook in Bosnia, Blue Group this time, some other name next time, but it always came back to the same hard young faces) to hear the grayboys one last time. Travellers from another star system, perhaps even another universe or time-stream, knowers of things their hosts would never know (not that Kurtz would care). Let them hear the grayboys one last time instead of Pearl Jam or Jar of Flies or Rage Against the Machine; the grayboys appealing to what they had foolishly hoped was some better nature.
"And has it changed?" Kurtz's voice crackled back. The green Kiowa was still down there, just below the hanging line of gunships, its rotors beating at the split top of a tall old pine just under it, making it ruffle and sway. "Has it, Owen?"
"No," he said. "Not at all, boss."
"Then belay that chatter. Daylight's wasting, praise Jesus."
Owen paused, then said, with careful deliberation: "Yes, sir."
6
Kurtz sat bolt-upright in the Kiowa's right seat--"ramrod-straight" was how they always put it in the books and movies. He had donned his sunglasses in spite of the day's mild gray light, but Freddy, his pilot, still only dared to look at him from the corners of his eyes. The sunglasses were wraparounds, hipster-hodaddy shades, and now that they were on, you couldn't tell where the boss was looking. You certainly couldn't trust the way his head was pointing.
The Derry News lay on Kurtz's lap (MYSTERIOUS SKYLIGHTS, MISSING HUNTERS SPARK PANIC IN JEFFERSON TRACT, read the headline). Now he picked up the paper and folded it carefully. He was good at this, and soon the Derry News would be folded into what Owen Underhill's career had just become: a cocked hat. Underhill no doubt thought he would face some sort of disciplinary action--Kurtz's own, since this was a black-ops deal, at least so far--followed by a second chance. What he didn't seem to realize (and that was probably good; unwarned usually meant unarmed) was that this had been his second chance. Which was one more than Kurtz had ever given anyone else, and one he now regretted. Bitterly regretted. For Owen to go and pull a trick like that after their conversation in the office of the store . . . after he had been specifically warned . . .
"Who gives the order?" Underhill's voice crackled in Kurtz's private comlink.
Kurtz was surprised and a little dismayed by the depth of his rage. Most of it was caused by no more than surprise, the simplest emotion, the one babies registered before any other. Owen had zinged him a good one, putting the grayboys on the squad channel like that; just wanted to hear if any of it had changed indeed, that was one you could roll tight and stick up your ass. Owen was probably the best second Kurtz had ever had in a long and complicated career that stretched all the way back to Cambodia in the early seventies, but Kurtz was going to break him, just the same. For the trick with the radio; because Owen hadn't learned. It wasn't about kids in Bosanski Novi, or a bunch of babbling voices now. It wasn't about following orders, or even the principle of the matter. It was about the line. His line. The Kurtz Line.
Also, there was that sir.
That damned snotty sir.
"Boss?" Owen sounding just a tad nervous now, and he was right to sound nervous, Jesus love him. "Who gives--"
"Common channel, Freddy," Kurtz said. "Key me in."
The Kiowa, much lighter than the gunships, caught a gust of wind and took a giddy bounce. Kurtz and Freddy ignored it. Freddy keyed him wide.
"Listen up, boys," Kurtz said, looking at the four gunships hanging in a line, glass dragonflies above the trees and beneath the clouds. Just ahead of them was the swamp and the vast pearlescent tilted dish with its surviving crew--or whatever they were--standing beneath its aft lip.
"Listen now, boys, Daddy's gonna sermonize. Are you listening? Answer up."
Yes, yes, affirmative, affirm, roger that (with an occasional sir thrown in, but that was all right; there was a difference between forgetfulness and insolence).
"I'm not a talker, boys, talking's not what I do, but I want you to know that this is not repeat not a case of what you see is what you get. What you see is about six dozen gray, apparently unsexed humanoids standing around naked as a loving God made them and you say, some would say anyway, 'Why, those poor folks, all naked and unarmed, not a cock or a cunt to share among em, pleading for mercy there by their crashed intergalactic Trailways, and what kind of a dog, what kind of a monster could hear those pleading voices and go in just the same?' And I have to tell you, boys, that I am that dog, I am that monster, I am that post-industrial post-modern crypto-fascist politically incorrect male cocka-rocka warpig, praise Jesus, and for anyone listening in I am Abraham Peter Kurtz, USAF Retired, serial number 241771699, and I am leading this charge, I'm the Lieutenant Calley in charge of this particular Alice's Restaurant Massacree."
He took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the hovering helicopters.
"But fellows, I'm here to tell you that the grayboys have been messing with us since the late nineteen-for-ties, and I have been messing with them since the late nineteen-seventies, and I can tell you that just because a fellow comes walking toward you with his hands raised saying I surrender, that doesn't mean, praise Jesus, that he doesn't have a pint of nitroglycerine shoved up his ass. Now the big old smart goldfish who go swimming around in the think-tanks, most of those guys say the grayboys came when we started lighting off atomic and hydrogen bombs, that they came to that the way bugs come to a buglight. I don't know about that, I am not a thinker, I leave the thinking to others, leave it to the cabbage, cabbage got the head on him, as the saying goes, but there's nothing wrong with my eyes, fellows, and I tell you those grayboy sons of bitches are as harmless as a wolf in a henhouse. We have taken a good many of them over the years, but not one has lived. When they die, their corpses decompose rapidly and turn into exactly the sort of stuff you see down there, what you lads call Ripley fungus. Sometimes they explode. Got that? They explode. The fungus they carry--or maybe it's the fungus that's in charge, some of the think-tank goldfish believe that might be the case--dies easily enough unless it gets on a living host, I say again living host, and the host it seems to like the best, fellows, praise Jesus, is good old homo sap. Once you've got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it's Katie bar the door and Homer run for home."
This was not precisely the truth--not precisely anywhere near the truth, as a matter of fact--but nobody fought for you as ferociously as a scared soldier. This Kurtz knew from experience.
"Boys, our little gray buddies are telepathic, and they seem to pass this ability on to us through the air. We catch it even when we don't catch the fungus, and while you might think a little mind-reading could be fun, the sort of thing that would make you the life of the party, I can tell you what lies a little farther down that road: schizophrenia, paranoia, separation from reality, and total I say again TOTAL FUCKING INSANITY. The think-tank boys, God bless em, believe that this telepathy is relatively short-acting right now, but I don't have to tell you what could happen in that regard if the grayboys are allowed to settle in and be comfortable. I want you fellows to listen to what I'm going to say now very carefully. I want you to listen as if your lives depended on it, all right? When they take us, boys--say again, when they take us--and you all know there have been abductions, most peopl
e who claim to have been abducted by aliens are lying through their asshole neurotic teeth, but not all--those who are let go have often undergone implants. Some are nothing but instruments--transmitters, perhaps, or monitors of some sort--but some are living things which eat their hosts, grow fat, and then tear them apart. These implants have been put in place by the very creatures you see down there, milling around all naked and innocent. They claim there's no infection among them even though we know they are infected right up the ying-yang and the old wazoo and everywhere else. I have seen these things at work for twenty-five years or more, and I tell you this is it, this is the invasion, this is the Super Bowl of Super Bowls, and you fellows are on defense. They are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England Tel phone card so they can phone home, they are a disease. They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we're one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?"
No affirmatives this time. No rogers, no I-copy-thats. Raw cheers, nervous and neurotic, jigging with eagerness. The comlink bulged with them.
"Cancer, boys. They are cancer. That's the best I can put it, although as you know, I'm no talker. Owen, do you copy?"
"Copy, boss." Flat. Flat and calm, damn him. Well, let him be cool. Let him be cool while he still could. Owen Underhill was all finished. Kurtz raised the paper hat and looked at it admiringly. Owen Underhill was over.