“Audio!” Koestler demanded.
Shouts, singing, and an occasional gunshot welled up around them.
“Closer!” the unseen scientist named Metz urged. The Fort Lewis team was seeing the same thing they were. “Take a right through that parking lot.”
The picture veered, tilted, and bounced as the machine went over a curb and out into an open, grassy area in front of the shopping mall.
The place was full of people! Moore sent Magellan scurrying back into an alley.
The crowd was a mix of civilians and soldiers. The former were young and Latin-looking: a gang of barrio youths. The uniforms of the latter were Mexican Army. A handful of women, mostly Latins by the look of them, completed the ensemble: fiesta night in Old Tijuana. Those closest to the fire were feasting on something out of a huge cauldron.
In the dark, ruined buildings behind the firelight further figures were visible. More soldiers? Magellan switched over to infrared vision to find out.
Lessing wished he hadn’t looked. In one roofless shop two soldiers stood guard over a score of naked Anglo women who sat or knelt on the bare, concrete floor, their hands bound behind them. They were blindfolded and roped together like cattle. He glimpsed bruises, dirt, and dried blood.
Liese burrowed against his throat and made a tiny mewling sound. He held her close.
God damn the human race! He disagreed with Goddard: people never did learn. They kept doing the same dumb, ugly, cruel, vicious, brutal things, no matter what century it was and no matter what they preached or who was in power! Rapine and murder were not to be wondered at; the wonder was that they didn’t happen more often!
“The price the lib-rebs are willing to pay for Mexican help!” Moore grated.
Mulder edged forward to peer up at the screen. “If only that were all! Our information is that the lib-rebs have made a deaclass="underline" Mexico gets Arizona, New Mexico, and half of Texas. Cuba and other Caribbean nations willing to join them will receive parts of Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. They’ve made a deal, all right!”
Lessing touched Koestler’s arm. “What the hell is going on, colonel?” Mulder’s mansion was like Ponape: total isolation unless you yourself went out looking for news. Lessing had not. Now he wanted to know.
“Right now?” Koestler looked over at Mulder, who nodded: the people in this room were security-safe. “A temporary standoff. We can’t get past the Sierras without major casualties, and the lib-rebs are digging in. At the moment we’re probing at Redding and Red
Bluff, with another push coming down through Lassen Volcanic Park. Our patrols have reached Oroville, but the valley’s too strong for us yet. We’re staging for one godawful battle around Sacramento, but first we’re thinking of a para-drop south of there to cut off their communications with Stockton, Fresno, and Bakersfield. Their big stuff is protected in L.A. and San Diego, though, including depots and camps for their Mexican allies. California’s got great natural defenses for a land war: the ocean on the west, the Sierras to the east, rough and forested terrain to the north. Oh, we could paste their cities from the air, but nobody really wants that… too many friendly people still live there.”
“What can the lib-rebs gain?” Lessing mused. “They can’t hope to win with the land area and population they control.”
“They’re expecting a groundswell of opposition against Outram’s policies. They’ve lost their strongholds in the big, Eastern cities, but they think Mr. and Mrs. North America will still join ‘em if given a chance. At least they’re hoping for the secession and independence of California.”
“Sixty-one per cent in California against,” Liese said. She had recovered enough to turn around in Lessing’s embrace. “Lib-rebs are wrong. Majority blames old government for weakness, for failure, for Pacov.”
“Defections? Population shifts?” Lessing queried.
Koestler shrugged. “As soon as Outram started chopping at the ‘civil rights’ laws, folks lit out in both directions: Blacks, Chicanos, Jews, gays, the left-wing college types, and all the fuzz-brains in the country to the lib-rebs; a lot of Whites and some Orientals over to us. Hell, we even picked up some friendly Blacks: support the lawful, constitutional government… and get airlifted to a paradise in Africa afterwards. Most of the Pacific fleet is ours too, moored at Pearl in Hawaii, but the lib-rebs have some vessels in San Diego. Much of the Navy’s scattered all over the globe, though, wherever the fleets happened to be when Pacov and Starak hit. Some made it home, others stayed abroad to help… or to settle in. Some were massacred by unfriendly locals when they were cut off. ” The colonel hesitated. “Both we and the lib-rebs have enough nuclear weapons to pop the world like a zit three times over. Sooner or later we’ll also have problems with what’s left of the Izzies, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the crazy mere generals in Russia who’ve inherited the Soviets’ hardware.”
Lessing thought of Copley, running freckled hands over his maps and chirping lovingly to himself about Ufa and Kuybyshev and Gorki and maybe, one day, New Moscow itself. Peter the Great, no less!
“We have more nerve gases, missiles, and special weapons than we’ll ever need,” Moore interjected.
“Pacov?” Liese snapped. “Starak? Bio-warfare agents?”
No one replied. The room was silent. Then Mulder spoke: “The formulae are gone, Liese. Deliberately and permanently lost. Eighty-Five knows them but has stored them in an oubliette file from which they can never be retrieved. That’s over. Never again!”
“If you want them, I’ll bet I can get them! ” Moore’s uneven teeth flashed tarnished silver in the light from the screen. “The computer hasn’t been built that I can’t hack my way into or out of!”
This time the silence lasted longer.
It was broken by Jennifer Caw. She gasped: “Look! There’s something coming… there, in the street!”
“Get Magellan out of danger!” ordered Koestlcr.
Moore maneuvered the device backward, under the wheels of a truck, and into a puddle of darkness behind a battered dumpster. Magellan was almost noiseless, its soft humming drowned out by the crowd noise.
An armored personnel carrier had just pulled up in the street outside the shopping mall. A crude, red “X” was daubed on its side, and the soldiers who jumped down from the rear hatch wore red armbands: lib-rebs. They were well equipped with camo uniforms, helmets, packs, and M-25 assault rifles. Two carried lasers, two more had rocket launchers, and one poor doggie walked spraddle-legged under the back-breaking weight of an ITRAC: Individual Tactical Recoilless Armor-piercing Cannon. They deployed quickly in front of their vehicle.
Two civilians crawled out of the driver’s compartment and approached the fire: a short, tubby White man and a jaunty-looking young Black. A pair of Mexicans— officers by their insignia, though Lessing couldn’t read them — emerged to meet them.
“Sound, goddamit!” Koestler hissed at Moore. “Directional!”
“Trying, sir.”
The crackle of the fire became deafening; then a Mexican belched with a roar loud enough to make them flinch, followed by a Spanish expletive that rattled their teeth. Moore mumbled apologies and got Magellan’s sensors homed in on the opfoes’ tete-a-tete.
“…Pues,” the dapper Mexican commander was saying. “If that is how you wish it “
“I do fuckin’-A want it that way,” the White civilian drawled. “Look at the map and tell me I’m right. Jack. These guys’re not s posed to bivouac here tonight. Their orders was to keep goin’ till they get past Richmond, then make Sacramento tomorrow. ‘N’ here they are, fuckin’ off, Iootin,’ eatin,’ ‘n’ what-all!” A pencil-flash-light danced over a crumpled map.