Hell, none of the rumored emergencies seemed to justify calling in peach-fuzz recruits. It must be real bad trouble. Or else something he didn’t understand yet.
Roland watched the jouncing backpack of Corporal Wu. The compact Chinese noncom carried twice the weight any of them did, yet he obviously held himself back for the sluggish recruits. Roland found himself wishing Wu would pass out the ammo now. What if they were ambushed? What if …?
You don’t know anything yet, box-head. Better pray they don’t pass out ammo. Half those mama’s boys runnin’ behind you don’t know their rifles from their assholes.
In fairness, Roland figured they probably felt exactly the same way about him.
The squad hustled round the hedge onto a gravel driveway, puffing uphill toward the glaring lanterns. Officers milled about, poring over clipboards and casting long shadows across a close-cropped lawn that had been ripped and scraped by copters and magnus zeps. A grand mansion stood farther upslope, dominating the richly landscaped grounds. Silhouettes hastened past brightly lit windows.
Roland saw no foxholes. No signs of enemy fire. So, maybe ammo wouldn’t be needed after all.
Corporal Wu brought the squad to a disorderly halt as the massive, gruff figure of Sergeant Kleinerman appeared out of nowhere.
“Have the weenies stack weapons over by the flower bed,” Kleinerman told Wu in flat-toned Standard Military English. “Wipe their noses, then take them around back. UNEPA has work for ’em that’s simple enough for infants to handle.”
Any recruit who took that kind of talk personally was a fool. Roland just took advantage of the pause to catch his breath. “No weapons,” Takka groused as they stacked their rifles amid trampled marigolds. “What we supposed to use, our hands?”
Roland shrugged. The casual postures of the officers told him this was no terrorist site. “Prob’ly,” he guessed. “Them and our backs.”
“This way, weenies,” Wu said, with no malice and only a little carefully tailored contempt. “Come on. It’s time to save the world again.”
Through the bright windows Roland glimpsed rich men, rich women, dressed in shimmering fabrics. Nearly all looked like Han-Formosans. For the first time since arriving at Camp Pérez de Cuellar, Roland really felt he was in Taiwan, almost China, thousands of miles from Indiana.
Servants still carried trays of refreshments, their darker Bengali or Tamil complexions contrasting with the pale Taiwanese. Unlike the agitated party guests, the attendants seemed undisturbed to have in their midst all these soldiers and green-clad marshals from UNEPA. In fact, Roland saw one waiter smile when she thought no one was looking, and help herself to a glass of champagne.
UNEPA … Roland thought on spying the green uniforms. That means eco-crimes.
Wu hustled the squad past where some real soldiers stood guard in blurry combat camouflage, their eyes hooded by multisensor goggles which seemed to dart and flash as their pulse-rifles glittered darkly. The guards dismissed the recruits with barely a flicker of attention, which irked Roland far worse than the insults of Wu and Kleinerman.
I’ll make them notice me, he vowed. Though he knew better than to expect it soon. You didn’t get to be like those guys overnight.
Behind the mansion a ramp dropped steeply into the earth. Smoke rose from a blasted steel door that now lay curled and twisted to one side. A woman marshal met them by the opening. Even darker than her chocolate skin was the cast of her features—as if they were carved from basalt. “This way,” she said tersely and led them down the ramp—a trip of more than fifty meters—into a reinforced concrete bunker. When they reached the bottom, however, it wasn’t at all what Roland had expected—some squat armored slab. Instead, he found himself in a place straight out of the Arabian Nights.
The recruits gasped. “Shee-it!” Takka commented concisely, showing how well he’d picked up the essentials of Military English. Kanakoa, the Hawaiian, expressed amazement even more eloquently. “Welcome to the elephant’s graveyard, Tarzan.”
Roland only stared. Tiny, multicolored spotlights illuminated the arched chamber, subtly emphasizing the shine of ivory and fur and crystal. From wall to wall, the spoils of five continents were piled high. More illicit wealth than Roland had ever seen. More than he could ever have imagined.
From racks in all directions hung spotted leopard pelts, shimmering beaver skins, white winter fox stoles. And shoes! Endless stacks of them, made from dead reptiles, obviously, though Roland couldn’t begin to conceive which species had given its all for which pair.
“Hey, Senterius.” Takka nudged him in the ribs and Roland looked down where the Japanese recruit pointed.
Near his left foot lay a luxurious white carpet … the splayed form of a flayed polar bear whose snarling expression looked really angry. Roland jerked away from those glittering teeth, backing up until something pointy and hard rammed his spine. He whirled, only to goggle in amazement at a stack of elephant tusks, each bearing a golden tip guard.
“Gaia!” he breathed.
“You said it,” Kanakoa commented. “Boy, I’ll bet Her Holy Nibs is completely pissed off over this.”
Roland wished he hadn’t spoken the Earth Mother’s name aloud. Hers wasn’t a soldierly faith, after all. But Kanakoa and Takka seemed as stunned as he was. “What is all this?” Takka asked, waving at the heaped stacks of animal remains. “Who in the world would want these things?”
Roland shrugged. “Used to be, rich folks liked to wear gnomish crap like this.”
Takka sneered. “I knew that. But why now? It is not just illegal. It’s … it’s—”
“Sick? Is that what you were going to say, Private?”
They turned to see the UNEPA marshal standing close by, looking past them at the piled ivory. She couldn’t be over forty years old, but right now the tendons in her neck were taut as bowstrings and she looked quite ancient.
“Come with me, I want to show you soldiers something.”
They followed her past cases filled with pinned, iridescent butterflies, with gorilla-hand ashtrays and stools made from elephants’ feet, with petrified wood and glittering coral no doubt stolen from nature preserves … all the way to the back wall of the artificial cave, where two truly immense tusks formed a standing arch. Tiger skins draped a shrine of sorts—a case crafted in dark hardwood and glass, containing dozens of earthenware jars.
Roland saw veins pulse on the backs of her hands. The recruits fell mute, awed by such hatred as she radiated now. Nothing down here impressed them half as much.
Roland found the courage to ask, “What’s in the jars, ma’am?”
Watching her face, he realized what an effort it took for her to speak right now, and found himself wondering if he’d ever be able to exert such mastery over his own body.
“Rhinoceros … horn,” she said hoarsely. “Powdered narwhal tusk … whale semen …”
Roland nodded. He’d heard of such things. Ancient legends held they could prolong life, or heighten sexual prowess, or drive women into writhing heat. And neither morality nor law nor scientific disproof deterred some men from chasing hope.
“So much. There must be a hundred kilos in there!” Takka commented. But he stepped back when the UNEPA official whirled to glare at him, her expression one of bleak despair.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I hoped we’d find so much more.”
Roland soon discovered just what use recruits were on a mission like this.
Sure enough, he thought, resigned that he had only begun plumbing the depths of exhaustion the peacekeeping forces had in store for him. Hauling sixty-kilo tusks up the steep ramp, he and Private Schmidt knew they were important pieces in a well-tuned, highly efficient, rapid-deployment force whose worldwide duties stretched from pole to pole. Their part was less glamorous than the on-site inspectors prowling Siberia and Sinkiang and Wyoming, enforcing arms-control pacts. Or the brave few keeping angry militias in Brazil and Argentina from each other’s throats. Or even the of
ficers tagging and inventorying tonight’s booty. But after all, as Corporal Wu told them repeatedly, they also serve who only grunt and sweat.
Roland tried not to show any discomfort working with Schmidt. After all, the tall, skinny alpine boy hadn’t even been born yet when the Helvetian War laid waste to much of Central Europe, and anyway you couldn’t exactly choose your background. Roland made an effort to accept him as a native of “West Austria” and forget the past.
One thing, Schmidt sure spoke English well. Better, in fact, than most of Roland’s old gang back in Bloomington. “Where are they hauling this stuff?” his partner asked the pilot of one of the minizeps as they took a two-minute breather outside.
“They’ve got warehouses all over the world,” the Swedish noncom said. “If I told you about them, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try us,” Roland prompted.
The flier’s blue eyes seemed to look far away. “Take what you found in that tomb and multiply it a thousandfold.”
“Shee-it,” Schmidt sighed. “But …”
“Oh, some of this stuff here won’t go into storage. The ivory, for instance. They’ll implant label isotopes so each piece is chemically unique, then they’ll sell it. The zoo arks harvest elephant tusks nowadays anyway, as do the African parks, so the beasts won’t tear up trees or attract poachers. That policy came too late to save this fellow.” He patted the tusk beside him. “Alas.”
“But what about the other stuff? The furs. The shoes. All that powdered horn shit?”
The pilot shrugged. “Can’t sell it. That’d just legitimize wearing or using the stuff. Create demand, you see.
“Can’t destroy it, either. Could you burn billions worth of beautiful things? Sometimes they take school groups through the warehouses, to show kids what real evil is. But mostly it all just sits there, piling up higher and higher.”
The pilot looked left and right. “I do have a theory, though. I think I know the real reason for the warehouses.”
“Yes?” Roland and Schmidt leaned forward, ready to accept his confidence.
The pilot spoke behind a shielding hand. “Aliens. They’re going to sell it all to aliens from outer space.”
Roland groaned. Schmidt spat on the ground in disgust. Of course real soldiers were going to treat them this way. But it was embarrassing to have been sucked in so openly.
“You think I’m kidding?” the pilot asked.
“No, we think you’re crazy.”
That brought a wry grin. “Likely enough, boy. But think about it! It’s only a matter of time till we’re contacted, no? They’ve been searching the sky for a hundred years now. And we’ve been filling space with our radio and TV and Data Net noise all that time. Sooner or later a starship has to stop by. It only makes sense, no?”
Roland decided the only safe reply was a silent stare. He watched the noncom warily.
“So I figure it’s like this. That starship is very likely to be a trading vessel … out on a long, long cruise, like those clipper ships of olden times. They’ll stop here and want to buy stuff, but not just any stuff. It will have to be light, portable, beautiful, and totally unique to Earth. Otherwise, why bother?”
“But this stuff’s dumpit contraband!” Roland said, pointing to the goods stacked in the cargo bay.
“Hey! You two! Break’s over!” It was Corporal Wu, calling from the ramp. He jerked his thumb then swiveled and strode back into the catacomb. Roland and his partner stood up.
“But that’s the beauty of it!” the pilot continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “You see, the CITES rules make all these things illegal so there won’t be any economic market for killing endangered species.
“But fobbing it all off on alien traders won’t create a market! It’s a one-stop deal, you see? They come once, then they are gone again, forever. We empty the warehouses and spend the profits buying up land for new game preserves.” He spread his hands as if to ask what could be more reasonable.
Schmidt spat again, muttering a curse in Schweitzer-Deutsch. “Come on Senterius, let’s go.” Roland followed quickly, glancing only once over his shoulder at the grinning pilot, wondering if the guy was crazy, brilliant, or simply a terrific sculptor of bullshit.
Probably all three, he figured at last, and double-timed the rest of the way. After all, fairy tales were fairy tales, while Corporal Wu was palpable reality.
As he worked, Roland recalled the days not so long ago when he and his pals Remi and Crat used to sit in the park listening to old Joseph tell them about the awful battles of the Helvetian War. The war that finally did end war.
Each of them had reacted differently to Joseph’s eventual betrayal—Remi by turning tragically cynical, and Crat by declaring void anything spoken by anyone over thirty. To Roland, however, what lasted were the veteran’s tales of combat—of comrades fighting shoulder to shoulder, hauling each other through mountain passes clogged with germ-laden, radioactive mud, struggling together to overcome a wily, desperate foe.…
Of course he didn’t actually wish for a real war to fight. Not a big one on the vast, impersonal scale the old vet described. He knew battle sounded a lot more attractive far away, in stories, than it would seem in person.
Still, was this to be the way of it from now on? Hauling off contraband seized from CITES violators? Manning tedious observer posts separating surly, bickering nations too poor and tired to fight anyway? Checking the bilges of rusting freighters for hidden caches of flight capital?
Oh, there were real warriors in the peacekeeping forces. Takka and some of the others might get to join the elite units quelling fierce little water wars like the one going on now in Ghana. But as an American he’d have little chance of joining any of the active units. The Guarantor Powers were still too big, too powerful. No little country would stand for Russian or American or Chinese troops stationed on their soil.
Well, at least I can learn how to be a warrior. I’ll be trained, ready, in case the world ever needs me.
So he worked doggedly, doing as he was told. Hauling and lifting, lifting and hauling, Roland also tried to listen to the UNEPA officials, especially the dark woman. Had she really wished they had found more of the grisly contraband?
“… thought we’d traced the Pretoria poaching ring all the way here,” she said at one point as he passed by laden with aromatic lion skins. “I thought we’d finally tracked down the main depot. But there’s so little white rhino powder, or—”
“Could Chang have already sold the rest?” one of the others asked.
She shook her head. “Chang’s a hoarder. He sells only to maintain operating capital.”
“Well, we’ll find out when we finally catch him, the slippery eel.”
Roland was still awed by the UNEPA woman, and a bit jealous. What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.
According to the recruitment tapes, training was supposed to give him strong feelings of his own. Over months of exhaustion and discipline, he’d come to see his squadmates as family. Closer than that. They would learn almost to read each other’s thoughts, to depend on each other utterly. If necessary, to die for one another.
That was how it was supposed to work. Glancing at Takka and Schmidt and the other strangers in his squad, Roland wondered how the sergeants and instructors could accomplish such a thing. Frankly, it sounded awfully unlikely.
But hell, guys like Kleinerman and Wu have been soldiering for five thousand years or so. I guess they know what they’re doing.
How ironic, then, that they finally made a science of it at the very end, just as the profession was trying to phase itself out of existence forever. From the looks given them by the UNEPA marshals, that day could come none too soon. Necessity allied the two groups in the cause of saving the planet. But clearly the eco-officers would rather do without the military altogether.
Just be patient, Roland thought as he worked. We’re doing th
e best we can as fast as we can.
He and another recruit disassembled the shrine at the back of the cavernous treasure room, carefully unwinding snakeskin ropes binding the two huge archway tusks. They were lowering one of the ivory trophies to the floor when Roland’s nostrils flared at a familiar smell. He stopped and sniffed.
“Come on,” the Russian private groused in thickly accented Standard. “Now other one.”
“Do you smell something?” Roland asked.
The other youth laughed. “I smell dead animals! What you think? It stink worse here than Tashkent brothels!”
But Roland shook his head. “That’s not it.” He turned left, following the scent.
Naturally, soldiers weren’t allowed tobacco, which would sap their wind and stamina. But he’d been quite a smoker back in Indiana, puffing homegrown with Remi and Crat—as many as eight or ten hand-rolled cigs a week. Could a noncom or UNEPA be sneaking weed behind a corner? It had better not be a recruit, or there’d be latrine duty for the entire squad!
But no, there weren’t any hiding places nearby. So where was it coming from?
Corporal Wu’s whistle blew, signaling another short break. “Hey, Yank,” the Russian said. “Don’t be a pizdyuk. Come on.”
Roland waved him to silence. He pushed aside one of the tiger skins, still sniffing, and then crouched where he had first picked up the scent. It was strongest near the floor beside the glass case—now emptied of its brown jars of macabre powder. His fingers touched a warm breeze.
“Hey, give me a hand,” he asked, bracing a shoulder against the wood. But the other recruit flipped two fingers as he walked away, muttering. “Amerikanskee kakanee zassixa …”
Roland checked his footing and strained. The heavy case rocked a bit before settling again.
This can’t be right. The guy who owned this place wouldn’t want to sweat. He’d never sweat.
Roland felt along the carved basework, working his way around to the back before finding what he sought—a spring-loaded catch. “Aha!” he said. With a click the entire case slid forward to jam against one of the huge, toppled tusks. Roland peered down steep stairs with a hint of light at the bottom.