FIVE
Outbound
Nothing had changed since my earlier experiences in Bangkok, which felt like they’d happened yesterday: the Royal Army never hurried unless it was to panic. We waited. Then waited some more. The Thais took their time in preparing for the trip to the front, and we’d be heading northwest toward the Thai-Burma border with a supply column that consisted of six-wheeled trucks in a thousand different forms—cargo, troop carriers, but more than anything, alcohol tankers and armored personnel carriers. Every fourth vehicle was an APC. The Thai version was smaller than the American one, suited to the vile roads we’d have to travel, and if they hadn’t improved any since I had last visited (the mountain passages were more like goat trails and were wide enough for only one vehicle) then God help us if someone came in the opposite direction. I wouldn’t go inside any of the vehicles, not even the APCs, and Jihoon looked up at me from the assembly field.
“You’re riding on top?” he asked. “Why not inside? Are you that claustrophobic?”
I lit another cigarette and grinned from the deck of an APC. “It’s not claustrophobia. You didn’t learn this one in the tanks?”
He shrugged. “Learn what?”
“These types of APCs have one large compartment, so when they get hit by a rocket, the overpressure liquefies everyone inside at the same time it cooks them. Ride on top, and you’ll get blown into the air but maybe survive. I’ve seen about five guys live because they made that decision, to sit on the top instead of inside. I was one of ’em.”
Ji glanced at the loading ramp and then looked back at me again before he sighed and grabbed hold of a tie-down, lifting himself using the nearest tire as a ladder. He had just settled when Colonel O’Steen jogged up. The colonel handed me a computer chit and shook his head.
“Priority transmission from your CO at SOCOM, Momson. For your eyes only.”
“Thanks, Colonel,” I said.
He nodded and crossed his arms. “You boys see any trouble down in Khlong Toei yesterday? Maybe a group of Koreans with clubs?”
Ji and I looked at each other, and I smiled.
“No. Why?”
“Witnesses said that a Japanese guy and an American shot three Koreans and then ran yesterday. The Koreans had passports and visas, but there’s nothing on them in foreign ministry databases.”
“Wasn’t us,” I said. “And besides, Chong here is Korean, not Japanese.”
“Well, it’s funny because they also caught the guy who took a shot at you in the hotel, and he was Korean too. Found him near one of the Khlong Toei gates, and he still had his Maxwell. They’re interrogating him now.”
I shook my head, worried, but then again not; once we hit the bush, it wasn’t like they’d be able to send anyone to arrest us. “It’s a hell of a world. Strange things happening every day.”
O’Steen stared at me and frowned, the seconds ticking off. He nodded. “Well, whatever’s on that chit, the Thai Army is treating you like special cargo to be delivered at any cost, the highest priority. Good luck up there,” he said and left.
I made a mental note of the fact that our pursuers had been Korean, not sure of what to make of it, then settled back into the wait. Then we waited some more. The Thai soldiers laughed and smoked, half of them wearing ancient surplus armor—the only stuff we sold them and which didn’t have chameleon skins—and the other half dressed in even more ancient tiger-striped battle suits. Battle suits were basic rubberlike undersuits that had been equipped with cooling units and that were one-piece garments that zipped up the front and had a hood with a clear plastic face; the hoods sealed over the suits’ shoulders and would protect their wearers from chemical or biological attacks. Each had backpack power and air filtration. I took a drag and exhaled, thinking how much they’d need the gear where we were going, my cigarette smoke sinking the same way I’d once seen clouds of gas blown over my trench in the bush so that the image made me break out in a cold sweat; gas was the worst. You had to stay buttoned in your suit after they hit because armor was the one thing keeping you alive. Decontamination could take days or weeks—if they got around to it at all—and by then you’d be so crazy from smelling your own sweat that it was almost better to let the stuff take you down in the first place. The mission was getting to me, I decided. The computer chit glinted in my hand, and I turned it over, wondering if I wanted to see it until finally Ji grabbed the thing and slid it into my forearm slot. It took a moment to slip on my vision hood.
It was Colonel Momson. His face flickered onto my heads-up display, and I barely heard him when the camera zoomed out to show Phillip, smiling as he held a Popsicle. The kid’s hair hadn’t been cut. I grinned at that and almost started crying because it meant the bastards hadn’t gotten into his head yet, hadn’t corrupted it with the same filth I’d had to endure by choice. He was out, and it was all that mattered for now; I’d worry about getting him later.
The image faded then, and it switched to an audio track with Momson’s voice. “There have been new developments since that last time we met. A week ago we sent a team into Wonsan, Unified Korea, to recon the area and see if they could get any information based on the names and addresses you provided us with from the Madrid operation. Unified Korean operatives picked them up within a few days. They held the men in isolation and tortured them until finally one of our guys escaped, barely making it to the US embassy in Pusan, where he told our liaison that the Koreans had been asking about the American in Spain, Stan Resnick—who he was and what the operation was all about. It’s no surprise. By now the Koreans have a holo image of you and will be on the lookout for your biometrics, so our analysts advise that if you’re still in Bangkok, you should change your appearance as soon as possible. Already Unified Korea has lodged a formal complaint with the State Department, and we’re getting a lot of heat from POTUS, who hasn’t been briefed yet on the Spain op. Pusan is pissed that you killed all their people, Bug; be careful.
“There’s something else. We didn’t tell you about a crucial component of your mission because at the time there wasn’t a need for you to know, but all the mothballed Germline ateliers are being reactivated, and construction of new ones began just before you left for Madrid. In two weeks, State will announce that we’re formally withdrawing from the Genetic Weapons Convention. China just finished taking the western districts in Russia, and reports are coming in from all over that they’re repositioning forces, moving troops toward India and Burma. The Indians, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians are screaming for help, and three carrier groups are already prepping to move out.
“As part of the new training regime for genetics, we’re going to include a manual called the Book of Catherine—the same sato who was with Margaret when the two escaped from Russia and traveled through North Korea. She’s someone that the Joint Chiefs spent a lot of money to capture, a perfect killer. We debriefed her as best we could, but once in our custody Catherine just gave us basic information and then demanded discharge. But one thing came through during the sessions: she considered herself to be in direct communication with God. We don’t consider this insanity because it’s what they’re trained to believe, and it made her totally fearless. Deadly. What was odd was that at over three years past expiration, she was in better mental form than when she was first fielded; totally fearless instead of being a mental basket case. Margaret likely absorbed some of Catherine’s ideas, and from the little information we have, she’s more than just a sato to the other escaped genetics in Thailand, and considering the shit that’s about to rain down over southeast Asia, we’re canceling your kill order; the higher-ups want Margaret alive. In the coming months we may need those satos to slow down a Chinese advance if they decide to invade Thailand because we’re not ready yet and production will take time. Get the word to Margaret; convince her any way you can that we’re on the same team and that she needs to slow down a Chinese invasion force if one should cross the Thai border; only then proceed with the plan to find Chen, whose voice and physical biometrics are now uploaded to your system. Your mission just got bumped up to priority one. End of message.”
“Real special,” I muttered and then worked my forearm controls to delete the video portion of the chit; there was no reason for Ji to see Phillip, but whether the message was for me alone or not, he needed to hear Momson. I yanked the chit out and handed it to him. “You gotta freakin’ hear this.”
“It said for your eyes only.”
I pulled my vision hood off and picked up the cigarette I’d placed on the APC deck, taking one last drag before tossing the butt away. “Yeah, but you’re not going to freaking believe this one.”
“I was looking at your backpack computer unit,” Ji said. He inserted the chit into his slot. “It’s bigger than any I’ve seen. You have a semi-aware in that thing?”
“Yep.”
“How do you keep it juiced? Those things suck power.”
I pointed to my helmet and shoulders. “The chameleon skin polymer is also doped with a photovoltaic material, and the suit’s inside is coated with a piezoelectric nanocoating. So anytime I’m in sunlight or moving, my batteries and fuel cells get a little extra charge.”
He laughed. “I never would have guessed it—that you, of all people, would have a semi-aware.”
“This one’s different,” I said. “This one is female and has a really sexy voice and promised not to tell anyone my secrets. She’s the only girl for me.”
Jihoon slid his vision hood on. A few minutes later he yanked it off and slid the chit out, snapping the paper-thin plastic between his fingers. “Looks like a mission.”
“Yep.” Thai officers blew whistles, and everyone loaded up at the same time the APC engine ground to life beneath me. “But it’s some mission.”
There was no forgetting that road. The highway took us over a bridge to the far side of the Chao Phraya River, in an endless line of vehicles that downshifted and ground their gears as the gaps between them shrunk and expanded so that from above the convoy must have resembled a spring. Seven years hadn’t changed anything. My mind had altered the memories and played tricks, the kind where I swore that a particular fuel-alcohol station had been on one side of the road but was actually on the other, and some places had been torn down to be replaced by new buildings, but it didn’t take long to repair the image in my mind. It wouldn’t be long, I thought. Not much farther until we hit the endless rice paddies and fish farms, beyond which the jungle would form a dark green scar on the horizon.
Jihoon had laid out his equipment on the bouncing APC deck. He checked and double-checked the Maxwell carbine, its long barrel a dull black and formed by bands of ceramic under which coils of superconducting wire would juice themselves into magnets at the squeeze of a button. Unlike the smaller police models I’d seen in Spain or used in Sydney, these ones were for combat. A long flexi-belt fed thousands of fléchettes from the carbine’s breach to a hopper that would perch on the left shoulder, the weight a comforting reminder of the power in one’s hands.
“Seven years,” I said.
Jihoon yelled over the noise. “What?”
“Seven years. Seven years since I’ve been back in this awful country.”
“What’s wrong with Thailand?”
Jihoon could have his equipment. I searched my pack for one of the bottles I’d brought and uncapped it, offering him some but he declined. “There’s a different way of doing things out here, Chong. Not like in the simulators. We’ll see if it makes you sick.”
“You think I can’t hack it?” he asked.
“I think after the BAI you did your time in the regular Army, just enough to find your way into Special Forces. I also think you’re a good Korean American who salutes the flag every day and jerks off while reciting the pledge of allegiance.”
Ji started packing his kit, making sure that everything went in the proper place. “You really can’t stand Asians, can you? Not just me, I mean anyone who even resembles one.”
“That’s not true. I love Asians. Bangkok has some of the best hookers around; it’s a real shame there wasn’t time to try one or two while we were there.” The bourbon went in smoothly and took the edge off, but you couldn’t mess around in this heat, even with the suit’s climate control; I reminded myself to drink plenty of water once I’d finished.
“All right. If you won’t tell me why you’re such a bigoted prick, how about you tell me why you hate satos so much?”
I thought about that one. It was a good question, one that warranted another drink because it was the second time he’d asked it and the guy wouldn’t give up. But even then the answer wouldn’t come, and several responses swirled in the cesspool of my brain, each of them almost right but none of them close to the whole truth.
“You were there, in Khlong Toei,” I said. “Didn’t you see that betty?”
Ji nodded. “Yeah. I saw her. She looked exactly like the pictures I’ve seen, but nothing there to hate so much.”
“Give it time. Maybe one of them will shove her hand through your best friend’s stomach and snap his spine while quoting their bible. You ever read their combat manual, Chong?” I didn’t bother to look if he nodded since it was likely he hadn’t read it. “It’s not about small unit tactics; it’s about how to get closer to God through killing. None of them should be breathing the same air as you or me. And some asshole like you and me made them.” Assholes like Phillip’s father.
The convoy slowed, and ahead of us the lead vehicles took an exit ramp off the highway so they could turn onto a two-lane road, heading northwest into haze. It was late morning. We had our hoods and helmets off so the hot wind blew across my face, and the trucks’ exhaust made the air wetter, their alcohol-burning engines screaming as they shifted into low gear to slow down. When it was our turn, we took the ramp slowly, spiraling around until facing the right direction again and in front of us saw nothing but green. Rice paddies lined each side of a small country road, and I wondered how many armies had taken this route north. You almost smelled the leftovers of war in this place, and thinking about it didn’t help because the more you thought about it, the more you wanted to pick up your Maxwell and hold it close, keep it ready. Paddy dikes could conceal anything. The trees topping them would make good cover, and before I could catch myself, I’d started to reach for my vision hood to take a closer look, scan the road ahead for signs of ambush, but the rough canvas was like sandpaper and made me laugh at the thought, so instead I took another drink.
Thailand made me feel old, I decided, but then it didn’t take much to make me feel old these days and Wheezer should have been there, not Jihoon. Wheezer would have gotten everything, could have said something to pull me out of the gloom. It was funny how dark everything had become despite the fact that the sun couldn’t have been more brilliant on its climb upward from the horizon, and the thought occurred to me that it had been years since I’d seen the ocean—really saw it, not just flew over or drove by. The last time had been with Phillip when he was two. In Beaufort. It had been a strange place where the forest went almost all the way to the ocean and where the surf pounded in booms so loud they drowned out the noise from the naval air station and its constant, roaring fighters. And there it was, the entry of another memory, one that I wanted least of all because it threatened to ruin the focus I’d need to complete the task at hand. Old age rode the APC next to me, laughing not at my jokes but at me, poking its finger in my eye because it knew that there wasn’t anything a guy like me could do and that the cracks had started to show, cracks into which it could push its fingers and work to wedge them even wider. Old age and a rube named Jihoon were the APC’s only other riders.
“They took Phillip out of the academy.” The words left my mouth before I’d thought about it, and after they did I wanted them back, but it was too late.
Ji glanced at me. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” I whispered before chugging the rest of the bottle. “And here I am.” Wondering why it is that I care about another guy’s kid.
We spent the rest of the morning cruising northwest along narrow paved roads, forcing oncoming traffic to pull off to the side or risk getting crushed under the ceramic-armored APCs, and people stopped to stare with quiet curiosity. We had jumped back in time. Despite the progress of the last two centuries, here were old men walking behind water buffalo, their feet protected by nothing except sandals as they guided plows through the clay. There were women in conical hats; they stooped over in a dry field, yanking rice from the ground with hands that were darker than the clay itself, the sun having baked everything to well-done. Some wore white turbanlike things on their heads. But they all stood when the convoy roared up, holding both hands to their eyes, shielding them from the sun. Jihoon pulled an item from his kit, a tiny rectangle, and placed it against his face. It took me a second to realize that the guy was taking pictures.
I was about to laugh and give him hell for it when something else caught my eye. We were moving out of one farming area into another, and there were no fences to delineate separate areas, but I sensed it from the tree line and the fact that the new area hadn’t been tended as nicely; huge weeds and brush had overgrown much of its fields. To our front, a narrow concrete bridge spanned a canal. From where I sat, it looked like something was on the bridge so I yanked my vision hood on and stood, grabbing hold of the APC’s turret rear so I could see over the forward vehicles while zooming in. A truck had broken down. It looked like an ancient vehicle, rusted out in spots, and the engine hood had been propped up as if the truck had stopped and been abandoned when its owner couldn’t fix the thing. I looked back. Jihoon was still taking pictures, but the farmers had stopped staring and were moving in the opposite direction, some of them sprinting away once they climbed the dike and made it to the road.
“Chong!” I yelled, dropping back to the deck to grab my helmet. “Ambush. Get your hood and lid on, and let the Thais know that the vehicle ahead is part of a trap.”
He didn’t even pause, and I had to give the guy credit. Jihoon slipped the camera into a pouch and geared up in under ten seconds, calling over our radio in twangy Thai that crackled in my ears. But it was already too late. Our road ran along the top of a dike, with steep dirt and gravel sides that dropped about ten feet into the fields on either flank; although the APCs could make it down such a slope, the trucks would have to stay put.
I had just grabbed my carbine, which had been slung over a shoulder, when the first rocket streaked out of the tree line ahead of us, clanging into the lead APC after a loud whoosh. Time stopped. I don’t remember deciding what to do or telling Jihoon to follow, but we leaped from our APC as it screeched to a stop, and both of us rolled down the sides of the dike after an impact that snapped my jaws together; I tasted blood from having bit the inside of my cheek. Jihoon rolled to a stop beside me. We stood in a crouch and jogged toward the trees where the rocket had come from but kept to the area where the fields met the dike, our feet sucking in and out of thick mud in a shallow ditch. We had made it about ten meters when daisy-chained geysers of asphalt and clay leaped up to our left. At first it didn’t register. Then I noticed that my speakers had cut off to shield my ears, and shadows appeared where none had been before, so there was just enough time to look left and see the line of explosions work their way down the road, hitting the APC on which we had just ridden. The vehicle leaped up. A fraction of a second later the fusion reactor went and small jets of plasma shot out from cracks in the hull. The vehicle broke in two, already burning before the separate pieces landed. A few seconds later my hearing came back as bits of uniforms, armor, and ceramic chunks from the vehicles either floated down around me or thudded into the brush, along with, miraculously, our packs; they hadn’t even been singed.
“Mines,” I said over the radio.
Jihoon sounded shocked. “What?”
“Mines. They mined the road. Look sharp, and move up quickly. Whatever you do, don’t stop until we hit the tree line.”
Things were clicking again, making me smile with the feeling of being in my element. The APCs that survived whined as they turned off the road, crashing down the dike face in front of us at the same time their autocannons and plasma guns opened up. Jihoon and I sprinted behind them, trying our best to use their hulls as cover. The vehicles blocked our view of much of the way ahead, but between them we saw the flashes of expanding plasma, which ignited dangling tree branches into long torches and crisped anything on the ground. Tracers from the APCs also rocketed downrange, chewing up the dirt in small puffs. It was hard to keep track of time during that advance, but when the APCs reached the far dike, they stopped, and by then I noticed that sweat had soaked through my undersuit, suggesting we’d been running for at least a few minutes.
The embankment, on top of which the trees burned, was steeper than the one supporting the road, and the APCs couldn’t climb it. They idled there—a pack of frustrated tigers.
“Tell them we’re moving up,” I said to Jihoon; there was no way I’d sit in the open for another second. “And make sure those asshats don’t shoot at us.” And I started up the slope, not waiting for Jihoon to let me know it was OK.
The trees crackled overhead, and one of them fell next to me, crashing to the ground and sending up a cloud of sparks. Two bodies had been charred. At first it was difficult to tell the difference between them and the scorched grass, but the remains of a rocket launcher rested between them, suggesting the Thai APC gunners had targeted the right location. I stayed down. Jihoon crawled up next to me, pointed right, and I nodded; we split up, moving in separate directions through the smoldering underbrush.
A figure jumped up in front of me but then vanished into the brush. I’d chosen to head back in the direction of the road and had passed out of the burning zone into an area of dense grass, so by the time I lurched to my knees, he was gone and only the sound of crashing brush came from the far slope. I stood and ran. The adrenaline was kicking in now, and I heard the sound of my breathing as my feet slipped over the edge, sending me into a downslope slide to land in the far field. From there I saw the bridge to my left about ten meters away. It was quiet again. I moved toward the road, and stands of sawgrass swayed in a stiff breeze as my carbine rose so I could tuck it into my shoulder, the sighting reticle flashing onto my goggles, and a sense of satisfaction crept through my gut; the guy couldn’t be far. At the same instant, a group of men broke cover to my right; I reported the contact and fired as they fled, not stopping until the last one dropped in a spray of blood, my fléchettes kicking sparks when they passed through ceramic armor. The whole thing took a few seconds from start to finish.
After an action ended, you sensed it—a letting out of pressure as if you were an overinflated balloon that had been on the verge of popping but now could relax, and you didn’t know the pressure had been there until it was gone. My legs burned from all the running, and when Jihoon showed up, sliding down the bank to my right, they felt on the verge of giving out. Killing had filled my head with fog, and I sensed rather than heard him say something until I had to shake my head clear, waiting for the buzzing to leave.
“I said,” Ji was yelling, “are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Six KIA. Come on.”
We followed the beaten grass until we had found and counted all the bodies. Jihoon radioed it in. We couldn’t see them, but behind us we heard the APCs resume their drive, turning around and climbing back up the dike and onto the road.
Ji stood over one of the dead. “You shot him through the head. Clean.”
I nodded. “Burmese.”
“How can you tell?”
“Chinese armor. This is the stuff they used in the Asian Wars, way obsolete, and no chameleon skin. Burmese infiltrators.”
Ji stooped and removed the guy’s helmet but dropped it when brains and blood slid out, spilling over the ground and making the grass bright red. He turned, fumbling for his locking ring. By the time he got his own helmet off, Ji was heaving and threw up into the bush to leave a little of himself in Thailand, and I understood because it was a normal reaction that everyone had when faced with the reality of what lived inside their skulls. When he finished, I picked up his helmet for him.
“Different from the simulators, I guess, and let me warn you; that won’t be the last time you puke. Come on. We have to see how many vehicles are left on the road and get our packs.”
Jihoon caught up with me and pushed his hood off, so it hung from the back by its wires. “Where’d you get your armor, Bug?”
“I had it custom made. Once you get the rhythm of all this, you should do the same. Think about what features might help you do your job, and get the armorers to put it all together.”
“Why does your helmet look that way, all elongated?”
I reached up, running my gauntlet along the extended snout, wondering why I hadn’t just asked to have a standard suit sent since there wouldn’t be any reason to use my add-ons, and told him what it was for.
“Jesus,” he said. “Now I know why they call you Bug.”
“Now you know it all, Chong.”
We got back to the road to find a crowd of pissed-off Thais. Jihoon spoke for about five minutes with the convoy commander while I walked through the wreckage, staring at the two-meter craters that had appeared where once there was blacktop. It could have been worse. When I’d seen the mines go off, it looked as though the entire line of vehicles had blown, but in reality the Burmese got about ten trucks and three APCs, which the Thais were now pushing off the road and down into the fields. A couple of the men cried; soot covered their faces, and the tears cleaned off narrow lines from their cheeks so that it looked as if the Thais, in reality, had black faces and had smeared on thin, ruddy lines of makeup. Their presence made everything surreal—a troop of crazy clowns that had popped into the war for a pantomime.
Jihoon tapped me on the shoulder, yanking me from my thoughts while handing me my pack. “The Thais are going after the locals.”
“Good.”
“Good? What if they kill them all?”
I shook my head and ran a gauntlet through my hair, which had matted with sweat, and when I pulled my hand off saw that water had mixed with soot from the burning vehicles to turn the gauntlet gray.
“How do you think the Burmese operated here, Chong, this far inside Thailand? We’re barely outside the Bangkok urban zone. I don’t know, maybe the whole area is sympathetic to the Burmese. Maybe they’re all Chinese immigrants from the war or Japanese. Maybe they’re Korean.”
“That’s a load of crap,” Jihoon said. “We have to do something. These guys are ready to go round up every person in town and execute them.”
This was getting out of hand, and if Ji had taken the time to look around, he’d have seen that we were the only two Americans for miles. “Shut up and listen. You will do nothing. Just stand there, and let the Thais do whatever it is angry soldiers do in this crappy little country because you don’t know shit. I do. I’ve been here. If you get in the way and try to be some kind of hero, these guys will take your head off and piss into your neck before you’re half-dead. They don’t fight like we do, Chong.”
Ji clenched his carbine in both fists and turned around to watch as the soldiers in the convoy, escorted by one of the APCs, jogged toward the town. The APC pushed the broken-down truck off the bridge. When they reached the other side, the road sloped downward and we lost sight of them, the last thing visible a radio antenna that swayed with the motion of its vehicle.
“This is shit,” Ji said.
“Yeah. But you signed up for it. Sometimes, in this job all you can do is stand back and watch, stand back and take it because the mission is what matters and you never do anything to jeopardize it. We’re all alone here, Chong, and nobody will help you if these guys decide you’re a liability. Think about that.”
I was sorry for him. He didn’t realize that from here on out it would get worse and that the closer we got to the mountains and their jungle it would get crazier, the insanity ramping upward until he’d have to accept the fact that there wasn’t any limit to what could happen in the bush. The jungle’s canopy was impenetrable. Dark. It gave men the feeling that no matter what they did, nobody would ever see a thing, but I knew that idea was wrong; the jungle saw it. The bush had its own mind and marked the players, put an indelible stamp on their souls so they’d wake up in the night and swear that the shadows were out to get them. Now that we had moved out of the city, it was on the wind, and I broke into a sweat, hating the fact that we were headed to another place I swore never to see again and that soon, whether he wanted it or not, Ji would change forever. The funny thing was that he wanted this life and had volunteered for it; we all had. There were no saints on the road that day, no saints in all of Thailand maybe, and if he wanted to make it out alive, Jihoon would have to armor his brain with an excess dose of the fuck its so that none of it would make any difference. And he’d have to do it soon.
Maybe that’s why I cared so much about Phillip; they’d tried to steal his right to choose: saint or anti-saint.
The sun nailed itself overhead when we passed through the town. I refused to look at the signs on buildings because I didn’t want to remember the place’s name, and that was because the Thais had snatched the mayor and his wife and strung them up by their necks. We passed them along the main road, a pair of corpses that swung in the breeze, their empty eyes looking through me, and already the heat had started the swelling so their faces were bloated and gray. Although they couldn’t have stunk yet, I held my nose shut until the APC turned a corner. Finally they were out of sight. But you knew that they saw through the walls of the town’s buildings and followed you with the X-ray vision of the dead, a stare that ripped your skin off until they saw your heart and laughed without twitching a muscle.
Jihoon wasn’t talking. That was fine with me because there was a lot to think about, and after we cruised through the town, the convoy made good speed, driving for at least two hours until we hit a city, the first one outside Bangkok that we’d seen. The convoy slowed and pulled over into a huge bus station. One by one the remaining tankers lined up, and the other trucks and APCs refueled while a platoon of Thai soldiers formed a perimeter to stand guard.
“I’m hungry,” said Jihoon. We had jumped off the vehicle to stretch our legs, and I rested the carbine behind my neck, hanging both hands over either end like a yoke.
“Don’t eat the local food. Stick to your ration packs, or you’ll have problems pushing solid waste out your port.”
“Don’t remind me.”
Ji looked uncomfortable and pale, and I started laughing. “When was the last time you wore a suit?”
“This is the first time in a few months. Does your ass always itch like this?”
“Always.” I nodded. “It takes awhile to get used to the waste tubes. Drink plenty of water, and do yourself a favor and give yourself the trots.”
“How?”
I unsnapped a pouch and pulled out a plastic bottle, tossing it to him. “Take a swig of this. In an hour, take another swig.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Trooper’s best friend: castor oil. I got a bunch from the motor pool back in Florida a while ago and never travel without it. The problem is that I can’t take a solid dump anymore.”
“You didn’t need to explain all of that.”
His expression made it look as though Jihoon would vomit again, but he swallowed a dose and then sat beneath the shade of a palm tree, laying his carbine down and pulling both knees up to his chest. It didn’t matter how tough you were. The suits reduced even the hardest to crying babies during their first couple of days—from feeling confined and not being able to itch the hundreds of spots that you’d forgotten existed. Claustrophobia came later. The helmet wrapped you in its ceramic, and once you couldn’t run a hand through your hair, it started to make you wonder if the world existed, and the fact that you couldn’t see in your periphery or turn to look behind you stuck a pin in some guys. Most people would look at me in the States and wonder how I could stand the fighting—the chance of dying. But those weren’t the toughest things for me. Things like having to deal with the suit made them pale in comparison because you saw combat every once in a while, but the suit was with you every day, even when you slept.
“What’s the longest you’ve gone in a suit?” Jihoon asked.
“Without a break?”
“Yeah.”
“Four months.” I’d pulled out my bourbon and drank some, wishing that I could get drunk, but I wasn’t that stupid. Out there, I might need to be wired at any minute. “It was early in the Subterrene War in Kazakhstan, when they weren’t sure how to use us, so I got attached as a forward artillery observer to some line outfit.”
Ji nodded. “How many fire missions did you call in?”
“None.”
“None. For Christ’s sake, we were over a kilometer underground in a freaking tunnel near the main mining area, so what was there to observe? That’s logic for you. Put me in as a forward observer to call in artillery for an underground unit.”
The whistles blew, and Jihoon picked himself up. He walked bent over, like an old man, and I grabbed his weapon for him, removing the fléchette hopper from his shoulder when something started bothering me; my antennae were up. Over the noise of the vehicles, I heard Thai soldiers speaking loudly, hurriedly, and then noticed that some pointed down the road to the north where a line of vehicles approached from the opposite direction.
“Put your hood and helmet on,” I said.
Jihoon moved slowly, and I tossed our weapons onto the APC so I could free my hands to put my helmet on too. We had just finished when the first vehicle crept by.
Four satos sat in an open scout car. All wore Thai combat armor, which they had painted in different patterns with bright colors, and one of them had put black-and-yellow stripes on her gear to channel some kind of construction warning sign, but it got your attention. These ones didn’t want to blend in with the jungle. All of them had short hair dyed in crazy colors as if someone had replaced the hair fibers with tiny neon tubes that glowed even in the daytime, and it was all so distracting, I almost failed to notice that the girls didn’t even bother to glance our way, leaving me with the sense they had already judged our column as insignificant. It made me angry; they didn’t know who I was or what I’d been doing for the last several years. I put my hand on my carbine as I climbed back onto the APC deck, wishing I could lift it and open fire, get a clean shot at them from the back as they lumbered away.
Behind the scout car was a string of four trucks, each one filled with soldiers who had made themselves up in ways similar to the girls, but these were men. Some of them looked Thai. Others had the paler features of Japanese and stared at me blankly, and one had a white bandage wrapped around his head with red blood that had seeped down his face while he smoked. The man smiled. A few of them shouted things at our convoy, and I nudged Jihoon.
“They’re insulting us,” he explained. “Loosely translated, they’re calling the regular Thai Army a bunch of lost little girls.”
“I’ve heard worse,” I said.
“They’re speaking Japanese. I’d say most of those guys were Japanese.”
“Gra Jaai. Looks like we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Yeah,” said Jihoon. “Right.”
The trucks wound their way through the town and disappeared in a cloud of exhaust that blended into the day’s haze at the same time our APC lurched forward. Jihoon lay down on his back, not bothering to take his helmet off.
“How much farther to the mountains?” he asked.
I pulled my helmet and hood off, sticking a cigarette in my mouth but was too tired to light it. “Tomorrow. We should get there by tomorrow.”
The convoy crawled northward at about thirty kilometers an hour, just fast enough to get a nice breeze but slow enough that we knew we’d be spending the night on the road. We passed towns that were so poor that at some point I stopped looking; there were only so many crumbling structures and water buffalo that you could notice without yawning. Then the towns disappeared for a while, to be replaced by tiny villages dwarfed by huge fields that stretched from horizon to horizon, the green of their crops making me grin with the realization that I was free. Out here there was no Assurance, no microphones hidden in the rice paddies, and it had been some time since I’d seen any surveillance cameras. Progress, I decided, was overrated. Although the average Thai farmer would trade places with me for a chance to live in the States, how long would it be before he got sick of having the government watch his every move and how long would it take him to go crazy wondering if tomorrow he’d do something wrong and bring the full focus of the BAI on his life, their sole mission to build a case against him—whether one existed or not? It hadn’t been reasonable to blame Ji for the Assurance program or the semi-awares; but the hatred returned nonetheless, and I shook my head, trying to clear it.
A gray hair clung to the inside of my vision hood. I pinched it between two fingers and stared at the thing, wondering how it had gotten there and where it had come from, the recognition of what it was making me feel older and giving me phantom pains in my back until I sucked at the bottle, draining it of bourbon and throwing it from the APC into an empty field. To be in my thirties shouldn’t be this horrific, I figured; how many people my age could point at all the things I’d done and come close to measuring up with their life? Then again, how many people could I tell about what I’d done? None. The depression of having now seen my life from the perspective of near middle age slammed into my brain with the force of a pickup truck, machine-gunning me with questions and doubt, and at the top of my list was the fact that I had no idea what I was doing there. This was a young man’s job for guys like Jihoon. The Asian Wars had lit up when North Korea and China teamed against South Korea, at which point mutual defense treaties kicked in to force Japan, Russia, America, and about half of Taiwan to Seoul’s defense, just to have more nukes than we could stomach tossed our way. Japan was gone. Taiwan was half-radioactive, the other half cratered beyond recognition when China used its space-based kinetics. So what did we do? We repopulated and went straight to war again in Kazakhstan, this time for rhenium and every other trace metal we could find, this time against our former allies, the Russians, who also had a thirst for resources. And now China was back. We were down in population, not reconstituted for war, and yet war had reconstituted for us whether we wanted it or not.
Old age was a hell of a thing, I thought, because it made you see—not what you hoped or what you wanted, but how it was. The US wouldn’t be coming to Thailand’s aid any time soon. Moscow now belonged to the Chinese, who had attacked Russia en masse after we weakened them in Kaz, and what Japanese were left had decided to follow a bunch of psychopathic genetic soldiers trying to make their own death wish come true via the Gra Jaai. And the Koreans? Well, I figured, that’s what we are here for—to find out what the hell they are doing. It was funny, though, that we had to go to Thailand to find out what Unified Korea had up its sleeve. It all stunk to hell, and I was too old for any of it.
Jihoon raised himself on his elbows at the same instant I smelled something foul, the sign that his waste port had opened and sent its filth to spill on the APC deck. I moved away and waved the air in front of my nose.
“Jesus, Chong. Next time ask for a bathroom break.”
He pulled his helmet off, grinning. “I feel a hell of a lot better; the castor oil worked. What time is it?”
“I have no idea.” The sun had started to approach the mountains in the west, and the eastern horizon had turned a deep purplish color that I had forgotten about; it had been so long that the sight left me speechless for a second, hypnotized by the colors. “I’d say almost five, but I’m too tired to put my hood on and check the chronometer.”
Jihoon nodded and gestured for a cigarette. I lit it for him.
“What’s it going to be like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Out there.” He gestured toward the northwest, and my gut churned when I realized that I hadn’t factored in their significance when I’d looked at the sun: mountains. We were getting closer now, and tomorrow I’d be back inside. Hidden from the scrutiny of civilization under a green blanket, where death and I had become first cousins.
“It’s going to be rough. You know as much as I do, though, and I have no idea if the Thais have borers. Don’t know if we’ll be above-or belowground.”
We ducked at the sound of an explosion and had to look around since it wasn’t clear where the blast had come from. A small black cloud rose from far in front of us. Then a second detonation made the APC vibrate, and those damned whistles sounded until the convoy ground to a halt so all the Thai soldiers could jump down and spread out, and we got clear of our vehicle before it veered off the road, repeating the maneuver it had made at the ambush. It crashed down an embankment and disappeared.
Jihoon was about to sprint after them, but I grabbed his arm. “Stay put for this one. Have a cigarette.”
“There’s a lot of chatter over the radio. Another group of infiltrators; Thai troops from the town ahead of us have encircled Burmese saboteurs and are asking us for the convoy’s help.”
“So?” I asked. “Then the Thai boys can handle it, and we’ll stay here with the trucks. We’re close to the mountains here, Chong.” I pointed west. “Out there is the bush. You’ll get plenty of action once we’re in, and I bet you can’t even feel it yet.”
“Feel what?”
“Eyes. The jungle has ’em, sure as shit. And right now they’re watching us, waiting for a taste of our spines, so you don’t want to go and get killed or wounded now because it wouldn’t do to leave the bush hungry. That wouldn’t do at all.”
Jihoon just stared at me, probably thinking I was crazy. And maybe I was. But as the sun winked out of sight, you saw the mountains outlined, a long jagged line of black with a tinge of green at the edges that fooled you into thinking they were the only mountains around, but they weren’t. These were part of a network—a wide and branching web of the earth’s veins, with its heart in the Himalayas—a silent organism with the patience of an entire planet and that hated us, hated me. And we’d be in its grip soon enough.
To our north the explosions continued, punctuated by plasma flashes and crackling fléchettes, until they died out so we could hear the bugs. They filled the air with a humming kind of music. Mosquitoes buzzed my ears, and I pulled on my vision hood, then buckled my helmet around my skull, finishing by sliding the locking ring in place to get a seal before I powered up my girl’s systems one at a time.
“Kristen.”
The computer hummed to life. “It’s been several months since last we spoke, Lieutenant. Congratulations on your promotion. Systems are all nominal, and records indicate that I had routine maintenance less than one week ago. New hardware detected.”
“What?” I asked. Nothing should have changed. “What new hardware?”
“Standard tracking device, burst transmitting on random frequencies.”
“Can you deactivate it?”
She sounded amused. “Of course, Lieutenant.”
“Call me Bug, Kristen. Do it. Deactivate the hardware.”
A second later she chimed, “Hardware deactivated. Was there anything else, Bug?”
“Yeah.” Jihoon had started talking, and I held up my hand to shut him up for a second. “Geography. Given our current location, I’ll need to know how long it will take to get to a place called Nu Poe, near the Burmese border to our west.”
“One moment.” Kristen went silent and then came back immediately, a light green map opening on my heads-up with a red line tracing a path. “Your current location is the town of Mae Poen, and straight line distance to Nu Poe is approximately fifty-three miles. Road distance is 133 miles, which factors in elevation changes in the Thai Highlands.”
“Thanks, Kristen. And can you do real-time translation of Thai and Burmese into English?”
“Of course, Bug. And as we did in Kazakhstan with Russian, I can route my voice to output speakers and relay your English answers into those languages.”
I sighed, grateful that on the line I wouldn’t have to rely on Jihoon to understand what people were saying. “One last thing: scan the guy wearing type-ninety-seven armor next to me, look for tracking devices or any anomalous transmissions.”
“Of course.” She did it and chimed back in, “An identical tracking device located at the base of his backpack unit in the fuel cell compartment.”
“Thanks. Go ahead and power down. And Kristen?”
“Yes, Bug?”
“You are so damn sexy.”
“Thank you.”
I nearly lost it while ripping my helmet off and then yanked the hood from my head, spitting once my mouth had cleared. “Assholes.”
“What’s wrong?” Ji asked.
“Data. Information. It’s all those pencil-necked bean counters care about, Chong, all they freakin’ know, and so it’s not enough that they bug our houses. Now they have to bug our suits.” He said he still didn’t get it, and I explained what Kristen had told me, making him turn so I could dig the thing from his backpack and toss it into the field.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jihoon. “I don’t care if they know where we are or not, and besides”—he pointed northward—“it sounds like the APCs are on their way back, and it’s getting dark.”
He was right. I’d forgotten so many things about Thailand that it made me wonder if my mind really was starting to slip because once the sun dipped under the mountains that was it. Night came almost immediately afterward. Ahead we saw the flickering lights of a town, which lit the valley in a yellow glow and glittered with the colors of neon signs. It was almost surreal. A moment ago, a firefight had raged to the town’s south, and even now the fires still burned in fields, with flames that leaped upward in orange flashes. But the neon made everything happy.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’d see whether I was too old for this kind of op or not.
We drove toward the jungle just before sunrise. A dirt road wound its way through the hills outside town, where we saw a long line of Thai observation bunkers spaced a few hundred meters apart and strung together with multiple rows of bots whose autocannons pointed northwest toward the Highlands. The bots were ruthless. Concrete mushroom caps equipped with infrared cameras, motion sensors, and shape detectors, they would pop up at the first sign of a living organism and check for a friendly response from anyone or anything approaching. If you were supposed to be there, your suit computer would ping the appropriate encrypted response. If you weren’t supposed to be there, they’d open fire. Their presence meant that somewhere below us were underground tunnels where the bots’ ammunition was stored and where Thai soldiers would live, in tunnel fortifications that had been prepared as a second line of defense against invasion from Burma, and I was glad to not be going down into the deep.
When we reached the checkpoints through the bunker line, a group of Thai boys scurried around the vehicles and yelled at the troops or drivers, until they caught sight of me and Jihoon; then the entire lot converged around the slow-moving APC, so reckless that I thought one or two might get sucked under one of the huge wheels. They laughed and pointed.
“Hey, American, got money?” one cried. This set off a chorus of different efforts.
“Candy? You got candy?”
One of them slapped two fingers against his lips. “Smoke?”
“Sure,” I said. I dug a pack from my pouches and ripped it open so the cigarettes spilled into my hand, then threw them as hard as I could, watching the kids run up to the edge of the safe zone, which had been marked by a series of yellow stakes. Some of the cigarettes landed beyond. You saw their little minds working at the problem, thinking that if they moved fast enough or slow enough or stayed low or jumped high, maybe they could get the cigarettes and dash back to safety before any bots opened fire.
“Number one,” I yelled. “American cigarette, number one. Burmese, number ten, right?”
And we were through the checkpoint without even having to stop, without having even seen anyone manning the guard stations. Only those kids existed. And to them, a few cigarettes were just as good as bhat and could make anything happen, would give them something to trade back in town and render everything greasy and paved, so that within ten minutes, after the bunkers spat us onto the other side, I smiled. In that moment I was happy; the kids had reminded me of Phillip, and Ji scowled at me—either for giving cigarettes to the kids or for sending them so close to the bot field—but I figured to hell with him, because those kids didn’t care that they weren’t old enough to smoke, and if they decided not to trade them, but to light up for themselves, so what? Smoking was the least harmful thing to them in this place, and maybe they needed cigarettes more than I did.
But the happiness didn’t last long. Our line of vehicles crept upward along the road, weaving its way through boulders and elephant grass, and then we climbed a steep hill. Once we crested it, the jungle spread out before us, an endless rampart of dark and light greens so that it made me wonder if my goggles had somehow been filtered, letting nothing in except green, a color that made my stomach churn and wish we were back in Bangkok. Each moment brought me closer, the jungle looming larger. I looked for signs of life, like birds or monkeys, and then listened for any sounds that might suggest the jungle wasn’t a crypt and that at least some animals could exist in such a place, but the one sound I heard was of engines growling, struggling to make it up the road, which had gotten steeper.
Jihoon pulled his camera out again and started snapping pictures.
“Amazing,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I opened another bottle. “I have.”
“How do you even fight in that stuff, Bug? I mean we simulated jungle warfare, but this is insane. It’s so thick you can’t see ten feet.”
“It’s so thick,” I started, but the first bourbon of the morning burned my throat and mouth, making me pause before finishing my thought. “That you can’t see the guy walking in front of you, even if you’re marching crotch to ass.”
“What are those?” Jihoon asked.
I looked where he pointed and saw a series of poles arranged in random fashion on either side of the road but couldn’t bring them into focus until I’d pulled my vision hood on. The goggles zoomed in. Each pole held a corpse in varying stages of decomposition, some new and some already bare skeletons that had started to fall apart at their joints, and at the top of each, a sign in Thai had been painted on a wooden plank.
Jihoon had also pulled his hood on. “The signs say that ‘no man or woman can come further unless their souls are prepared.’ ”
I shook my head and took another drink. “Satos.”
“What’s it supposed to mean?”
“That we’re getting close. But not close enough to button up. I’m not sure if we’ll get there by tonight or not, but I’d hate to have to spend a night in the open, in the jungle, and I’d bet these guys feel the same way. I just hope they don’t drive off the road in a hurry to get us to Nu Poe before sunset.”
Jihoon lifted his carbine and checked its power level. “I’m beginning to see what you meant, Bug. About the jungle.”
“What about it?”
“It’s spooky.”
“That it is, Chong,” I said, taking another swig. “That it is.”
The road snaked toward the bush through the rows of bodies until at last it hit the first trees and took us inside, and I glanced once over my shoulder, back into Thailand, to see the hole we had entered disappear around a bend at the same time the light dimmed, huge trees blocking every part of the sky. The bush made you feel abandoned, cut off, like someone had just slammed and locked the door behind you. It was dead quiet. Leaves absorbed the engine sounds and made it feel as though everything was muffled, and the air became heavier now that the trees blocked any breeze, so that climate control could barely keep the heat out, and I began to feel as though there wasn’t any air, that we had just entered an underwater nightmare. I lifted my carbine and shook it, making sure the fléchettes ran free in their flexi. Then I adjusted my hood to make sure it was snug and buckled my helmet on. Jihoon noticed and did the same. The troop truck in front of us had been packed with Thai soldiers, and without having seen us, the Thais also helmeted up or sealed their battle suits’ hoods tight around their shoulders before they all rested their weapons on the truck sides, pointing them outward.
“Is anything wrong?” Jihoon asked, his voice sounding loud in my helmet speakers.
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“We’re in the jungle.”
“So what?” he asked.
“So now everything’s wrong. Shut up. We’re not that far from the Burmese border, and I need to concentrate.”