The Descent Part 15

Branch sat shaking his head in brotherly disgust.

'The man doesn't belong out there,' Ike said. 'He got one boy mangled on a wrong call. I saw no reason to keep feeding the lieutenant's version of reality. I finally got him to see reason.'

Jump fumed as frames dropped on the computer. He finally said, 'I thought it was a cleared region. This was supposed to be a shakedown cruise for Meadows. You're telling me you ran into hadals?'

'b.o.o.by traps,' Ike said. 'Old. Centuries old. I doubt there's been traffic through there since the Ice Age.' He didn't bother addressing the issue of being sent to baby-sit a shake-and-bake ROTC student.

The computer image turned to a wall map. 'Where have they all gone?' Jump wondered. 'We haven't made physical contact with the enemy in months.'

'Don't worry,' Ike said. 'They're down there somewhere.'

'I'm not so sure. Some days I mink they really are on the run. Or they've died off from disease or something.'

Branch grabbed at the interlude. 'It looks like a stalemate to me,' he said to Jump. 'My clown cancels out yours. I think we're agreed.' The two majors knew Meadows was a disaster. And it was certain they'd never send him out with Ike again. That was good enough for Ike.

'f.u.c.k it, then,' Jump said. 'I'm going to bury the report. This time.'

Branch went on glaring at Ike. 'I don't know, Jump,' he said. 'Maybe we ought to quit coddling him.'

'Elias, I know he's a special project of yours,' Jump said. 'But I've told you before, don't get attached. There's a reason we treat the Dixie cups with such caution. I'm telling ya, they're heartbreakers.'

'Thanks for the burial. I owe you.' Branch punched the computer's off b.u.t.ton and turned to Ike. 'Nice work,' he said. 'Tell me, are you trying to hang yourself?'

If it was contrition he wanted, Ike offered none. Ike helped himself to some boxes and made a seat. 'Dixie cups,' he said. 'That's a new one. More Army slang?'

'Spook, if you must know. It means 'use once, throw away.' The CIA used it to refer to their indigenous guerrilla ops. Now it includes the cowboys like you that we haul in from the deep and use for scout work.'

Ike said, 'It kind of grows on ya.'

Branch's mood stayed foul. 'Your sense of timing is unbelievable. Congress is closing the base on us. Selling it. To another pack of corporate hyenas. Every time you turn around, the government's caving in to another cartel. We do the dirty work, then the multinationals move in with their commercial militias and land developers and mining equipment. We bleed, they profit. I've been given three weeks to transfer the entire unit to temporary quarters two thousand feet below Camp Alison. I don't have a lot of time, Ike. I'm busting nuts to keep you alive down here. And you go and threaten an officer in the field?'

Ike raised two fingers and spread them. 'Peace, dad.'

Branch exhaled. He glanced around his tiny office s.p.a.ce in disgust. Country-western loped in mega-decibels nearby. 'Look at us,' Branch said. 'Pitiful. We bleed. The corporations profit. Where's the honor in it?'

'Honor?'

'Don't hand me that. Yeah, the honor. Not the money. Not the power. Not the possession. Just the bottom line for being true to the code. This.' He pointed at his heart.

'Maybe you believe too much,' Ike suggested.

'And you don't?'

'I'm not a lifer. You are.'

'You're not anything,' Branch said, and his shoulders sagged. 'They've gone ahead with your court-martial up top. In absentia. While you were still in the field. One AWOL turns into a desertion-under-fire charge.'

Ike was not particularly devastated. 'So now I appeal.'

'This was the appeal.'

Ike didn't show the slightest distress.

'There's a ray of hope, Ike. You've been ordered to go up for the sentencing. I talked with JAG, and they think you can throw yourself on the mercy of the court. I've pulled all the strings I can up there. I told them what you did behind the lines. Some important people have promised to put a good word in for you. No promises, but it sounds to me like the court will show leniency. They by G.o.d ought to.'

'That's my ray of hope?'

Branch didn't rise to it. 'You can do worse, you know.'

They'd argued this one into knots. Ike didn't retort. The Army had been less a family than a holding pen. It wasn't the Army that had broken his slavery and dragged him back to his own humanity and seen to it that his wounds were cleaned and shackles cut. It was Branch. Ike would never forget that.

'You could try anyway,' Branch said.

'I don't need it,' Ike softly replied. 'I don't need ever to go up again.'

'It's a dangerous place down here.'

'It's worse up there.'

'You can't be alone and survive.'

'I can always join some outfit.'

'What are you talking about? You're facing a dishonorable discharge, with possible brig time. You'll be an untouchable.'

'There's other action.'

'A soldier of fortune?' Branch looked sick. 'You?'

Ike dropped it.

Both men fell silent. Finally Branch got it out, barely a whisper. 'For me,' he swallowed.

If it wasn't so obviously hard for him to have said it, Ike would have refused. He would have set his rifle in one corner and shoved his ruck into the room and stripped his encrusted ninjas off and walked naked from the Rangers and their Army forever. But Branch had just done what Branch never did. And because this man who had saved his life and nurtured him back to sanity and been like a father to him had laid his pride in the dirt before Ike's feet, Ike did what he had sworn never to do again. He submitted.

'So where do I go?' he asked.

Both of them tried to ignore Branch's happiness.

'You won't regret it,' Branch promised.

'Sounds like a hanging,' Ike cracked without a smile.

Was.h.i.+ngton DC

Midway up the escalator as steep as an Aztec staircase, Ike could take no more. It was not just the unbearable light. His journey from the earth's bowels had become a gruesome siege. His senses were in havoc. The world seemed inside out.

Now as the stainless-steel escalator rose to ground zero and the howl of traffic poured down, Ike clung to the rubber handrail. At the top, he was belched onto a city sidewalk. The crowd jostled and drove him farther away from the Metro entrance. Ike was carried by noises and accidental nudges into the middle of Independence Avenue.

Ike had known vertigo in his day, but never anything like this. The sky plummeted overhead. The boulevard spilled every which way. Nauseated, he staggered into a blare of car horns. He fought the terrifying sense of open s.p.a.ce. Through a tiny aperture of tunnel vision, he struggled to a wall bathed in sunlight.

'Get off, you,' a Hindi accent scolded him. Then the shopkeeper saw his face and retreated back inside.

Ike laid his cheek against the brick. 'Eighteenth and C streets,' he begged a pa.s.serby. It was a woman in heels. Her staccato abruptly hurried in a wide arc around him. Ike forced himself away from the wall.

Across the street, he began the awful climb up a hillock girdled by American flags at full mast. He lifted his head to find the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument gutting the sheer blue belly of day. It was the cherry blossom season, that was evident. He could barely breathe for the pollen.

A flock of clouds drifted overhead, gave mercy, then vanished. The sunlight was terrible. He moved on, flesh hot. Tulips shattered his vision with their musket fire of brilliant colors. The gym bag in his hand - his sole luggage - grew heavy. He was panting for air, and that stung his old pride, a Himalayan mountaineer in such a state at sea level.

Eyes squeezed tight behind his dark glacier gla.s.ses, Ike retreated to an alley with shade. At last the sun sank. His nausea lifted. He could bare his eyes. He roamed the darkest parts of the city by moonlight, urgent as a fugitive.

No prowling for him. He raced pell-mell. This was his first night aboveground since he was s...o...b..und in Tibet long ago. No time to eat. Sleep could wait. There was everything to see.

Like a tourist with the thighs of an Olympic sprinter, he plunged tirelessly. There were ghettos and Parisian boulevards and bright restaurant districts and august gated emba.s.sies. Those he dodged, holding to the emptier places.

The night was gorgeous. Even dimmed by urban lights, the stars sprayed overhead. He breathed the brackish tidal air. Trees were budding.

It was April, all right. And yet, as he hurtled across the gra.s.s and pavement and leaped over fences and dodged cars, Ike felt only November in his soul. The night's very mercy condemned him. He was not long for this world, he knew. And so he memorized the moon and the marshes and the ganged oaks and the braid of currents on the slow Potomac.

He did not mean to, but he came upon the National Cathedral atop a lawned hill. It was like falling into the Dark Ages. An entrenched mob of thousands of faithful occupied the grounds, their squalid tent city unlit except for candles or lanterns. Ike hesitated, then went forward. It was obvious that families and whole congregations had come here and were living side by side with the poor and insane and sick and addicted.

Flying b.u.t.tresses dangled huge Crusade-like banners with a red cross, and the twin Gothic towers flickered in the cast of great bonfires. There wasn't a cop in sight. It was as if the cathedral had been relinquished to the true believers. Peddlers hawked crucifixes, New Age angels, blue-green algae pills, Native American jewelry, animal parts, bullets sprinkled with holy water, and round-trip air travel to Jerusalem on charter jets.

A militia was signing up volunteers - 'muscular Christians' for guerrilla strikes on h.e.l.l. The muster table was piled with literature and Soldier of Fortune magazines, and manned by frauds with Gold's Gym biceps and expensive guns. A cheap training video showed Sunday-school flames and actors made up as d.a.m.ned souls pleading for help.

Right beside the TV stood a woman missing one arm and both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, naked to the waist, daring them with her scars like glory. Her accent was Pentecostal, maybe Louisiana, and in her one hand she held a poisonous snake. 'I was a captive of the devils,' she was testifying. 'But I was rescued. Only me, though, not my poor children, nor all the other good Christians down deeper in the House. Good Christians in need of righteous salvation. Go down, you brothers with strong arms. Bring up the weak. Carry the light of the Lord into that Stygian dark. Take the spirit of Jesus, and of the Father, and the Holy Spirit...'

Ike backed away. How much was that snake woman being paid to show her flesh and proselytize and recruit these gullible men? Her wounds looked suspiciously like surgery scars, possibly from a double mastectomy. Regardless, she did not speak like a former captive. She was too certain of herself.

To be sure, there were human captives among the hadals. But they were not necessarily in need of rescue. The ones Ike had seen, the ones who had survived for any length of time among the hadals, tended to sound like a sum of zero. But once you'd been there, limbo could mean a kind of asylum from your own responsibilities. It was heresy to speak aloud, especially among liberty-preaching patriots like these tonight, but Ike himself had felt the forbidden rapture of losing himself to another creature's authority.

Ike made his way up the steps dense with humanity and entered the medieval transept. There were touches of the twentieth century: the floor was inlaid with state seals, and one stained-gla.s.s window bore the image of astronauts on the moon. Otherwise he might have been pa.s.sing through the crest of a Black Plague. The air was filled with smoke and incense and the smell of unwashed bodies and rotten fruit, and the stone walls echoed with prayers. Ike heard the Confiteor blend with the Kaddish. Appeals to Allah mixed with Appalachian hymns. Preachers railed about the Second Coming, the Age of Aquarius, the One True G.o.d, angels. The pet.i.tion was general. The millennium wasn't turning out to be much fun, it seemed.

Before dawn, mindful of his debt to Branch, he returned to 18th and C streets, Northwest, where he had been told to report. He sat at one end of the granite steps and waited for nine o'clock. Despite his premonitions, Ike told himself there could be no turning back. His honor had come down to a matter of the mercy of strangers.

The sun arrived slowly, advancing down the canyon of office buildings like an imperial march. Ike watched his footprints melt in the lawn's frost. His heart sank at the erasure.

An overwhelming sadness swept him, a sense of deep betrayal. What right did he have to come back into the World? What right did the World have to come back into him? Suddenly his being here, trying to explain himself to strangers, seemed like a terrible indiscretion. Why give himself away? What if they judged him guilty?

For an instant, in his mind a small lifetime, he was returned to his captivity. It had no single image. A great howl. The feel of a mortally exhausted man's bones hard against his shoulder. The odor of minerals. And chains... like the edge of music, never quite in rhythm, never quite song. Would they do that to him again? Run, he thought.

'I didn't think you'd be here,' a voice spoke to him. 'I thought they would need to hunt you down.'

Ike glanced up. A very wide man, perhaps fifty years old, was standing on the sidewalk in front of him. Despite the neat jeans and a designer parka, his carriage said military. Ike squinted left and right, but they were alone. 'You're the lawyer?' he asked.

'Lawyer?'

Ike was confused. Did the man know him or not? 'For the court-martial. I don't know what you're called. My advocate?'

The man nodded, understanding now. 'Sure, you might call me that.'

Ike stood. 'Let's get it over with, then,' he said. He was full of dread, but saw no alternative to what was in motion.

The man seemed bemused. 'Haven't you noticed the empty streets? There's no one around. The buildings are all closed. It's Sunday.'

'Then what are we doing here?' he asked. It sounded foolish to him. Lost.

'Taking care of business.'

Ike coiled inside himself. Something wasn't right. Branch had told him to report here, at this time. 'You're not my lawyer.'

'My name is Sandwell.'

Ike could not fill the man's pause with any recognition. When the man realized Ike had never heard of him, he smiled with something like sympathy.

'I commanded your friend Branch for a time,' Sandwell said. 'It was in Bosnia, before his accident, before he changed. He was a decent man.' He added, 'I doubt that changed.'

Ike agreed. Some things did not change.

'I heard about your troubles,' Sandwell said. 'I've read your file. You've served us well over the past three years. Everyone sings your praises. Tracker. Scout. Hunter-killer. Once Branch got you tamed, we've made good use of you. And you've made good use of us, gotten your pound of flesh back from Haddie, haven't you?'

Ike waited. Sandwell's 'us' gave an impression that he was still active with the military. But something about him - not his country laird's clothes, but something in his manner - suggested he had other meat on his plate, too.

Ike's silences were starting to annoy Sandwell. Ike could tell, because the next question was meant to put him on the spot. 'You were piloting slaves when Branch found you. Isn't that correct? You were a kapo. A warder. You were one of them.'

'Whatever you want to call it,' Ike said. It was like slapping a rock to accuse him of his past.

'Your answer matters. Did you cross over to the hadals, or didn't you?'

Sandwell was wrong. It didn't matter what Ike said. In his experience, people made their own judgments, regardless of the truth, even when the truth was clear.

'This is why people can never trust you recaptures,' Sandwell said. 'I've read enough psych evaluations. You're like twilight animals. You live between worlds, between light and darkness. No right or wrong. Mildly psychotic at best. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, it would have been folly for the military to rely on people like you in the field.'

Ike knew the fear and contempt. Precious few humans had been repossessed from hadal captivity, and most went straight into padded cells. A few dozen had been rehabbed and put to work, mostly as seeing-eye dogs for miners and religious colonies.

'I don't like you, is my point,' Sandwell continued. 'But I don't believe you went AWOL eighteen months ago. I read Branch's report of the siege at Albuquerque 10. I believe you went behind enemy lines. But it wasn't some grand act, to save your comrades in the camp. It was to kill the ones that did this to you.' Sandwell gestured at the markings and scars on Ike's face and hands. 'Hate makes sense to me.'

Since Sandwell appeared so satisfied, Ike did not contradict him. It was the automatic a.s.sumption that he led soldiers against his former captor for the revenge. Ike had quit trying to explain that to him the Army was a captor, too. Hate didn't enter the equation at all. It couldn't, or he would have destroyed himself long ago. Curiosity, that was his fire.

Unawares, Ike had edged from the creep of sunbeams. He saw Sandwell looking. Ike caught himself, stopped.

'You don't belong up here.' Sandwell smiled. 'I think you know that.'

This guy was a regular Welcome Wagon. 'I'll leave the minute they let me. I came to clear my name. Then it's back to work.'