A war of shadows, p.12
A War of Shadows, page 12
Life in the camp pretty much resembled all those movies he’d seen on Army basic training. A lot of lectures, many political in nature, and a lot of physical training—running, jumping, doing obstacle courses and the like. Some of the old-timers were having a really rough time of it, and several simply gave up along the way, refusing to get out of their hammocks in the morning. No one said anything to them about it, but when the group returned at the end of the day they and their effects were gone.
There was something wrong with the base, too, although it took him a while to figure it out. Occasionally there’d be jet contrails overhead, and billowing trails to mark their progress—far more than there should have been, with no one apparently minding or nervous about any detection. More, people seemed to come and go very frequently, particularly some of the upper level people. Jeep tracks went off into the desert, and occasionally helicopters of short-range type with nondescript markings would land or take off. He couldn’t help wondering where in this waste they could be going.
At the end of the second week things got more serious but the pressure eased up. The extremely tough and demanding regimen, he realized, was to weed out the weaklings. Now the winnowing was done; those who remained were deemed qualified and fit, and classes went from being basically polemic to the practical.
Tactician One Thirty was a case in point. A black man with a heavy English-African accent, he finally got them down to specifics.
“The plan, you see, is really simple,” he told them. “We will organize you into small teams. Each of these teams will have a major city as its target. Under the new rules of overtly fascist America, you will have to move undetected to a rendezvous point, there to get both your target and your weapons. On one glorious day we will strike—simply, silently, but not without a great deal of personal danger and risk. Three days after that, the major cities of America will crumble from an enemy long since through and gone, and fully protected in any event. Our ultimatums will be everywhere; the alternative to the bulk of the American people will be revolution or death. They will chart their own revolution, of course; we shall simply be there to provide the leadership when it comes.”
“But what about the Soviets?” somebody asked. “Or the Chinese?”
The tactician smiled. “Right now both of those countries are straining to demonstrate that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks. At all times the leadership of the United States, whether in present hands or ours, will have control of the nuclear arsenal. The Chinese are not postured for a first-strike iniative on the United States in any event. The Soviets have finally managed to get two generations by without war. We feel they will welcome the revolution as an alternative to nuclear confrontation. At first they will see us as friends and allies. We will welcome them as such, and send home with them little delayed-action presents, again not attributable to us. We feel that if we can accomplish internal revolution in America, it will be that much easier in the U.S.S.R.”
Cornish saw what he meant, although he sincerely doubted the end result. No matter what the risk of nuclear confrontation, though, there was the specter of horrible plagues marching, first on the great cities of the United States, then across densely populated Europe and the Western Soviet Union. The leaders of Camp Liberty were fanatics, that was for certain. The kind of people so committed to the idea of total revolution that they would never even dare permit the hard questions to be asked.
And willing to massacre half the human race in the name of the Cause, a cause they could only vaguely define.
The man on the plane had been wrong; it was not like the old days. It was the same blind, mindless devotion to undefined revolutionary principles, yes, but where ten could only dream themselves a threat to power, this network of who-knew-how-many thousands could cause the massive death and chaos that revolutionaries of the old days only dreamed about.
And, in further lectures, they unfolded their long-range plans. Massive liquidations of the middle and upper classes; a return of the citizens of the world to a controlled subsistence economy, a world of happy peasants with none above.
Somehow, he thought, it all sounded like a return to the New Stone Age.
Ten days after he first saw Suzanne Martine on that podium she came to him. He was just lying there in his hammock, looking over a manual on a new Czech sniper rifle they were going to be issued, when she walked in.
“Hi, Sam,” she said softly.
The book fell slowly. “Hello, Suzy,” he managed.
She smiled and looked him over approvingly. “You haven’t changed all that much. A little older, a little more hair on the face and a little less on the body, but that’s about all.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he echoed her. “You haven’t changed a bit. How long have you known I was here?”
“I saw you the first lecture,” she told him. “I couldn’t believe it was you at first, so I checked and checked and kept sneaking peeks to see if it really was. Then, as soon as the indoctrination was over, I got here as quickly as I could.” She stared at him again unbelievingly. “What the hell are you doing here, Sam?” she asked.
So many emotions jumped up and down in him that he didn’t know what to say or do. There she was, standing there, and he wanted her again, even after all this time, even though he’d walked out on her before. Wanted her, and feared her, too.
Suddenly he had it. “Penance,” he said dryly.
She chuckled, then suddenly grew serious once again. “Why did you walk out, Sam? Where’d you go and what did you do? And why?” She sat down on the canvas floor of the tent, looking up at him.
Honesty, to a point, was the best policy, he decided. “I had a crisis of faith,” he said slowly. “I really believed in us, in our group, in our ultimate motives. I never once minded ripping off a bank or an insurance company or like that. We were fighting for those people who never had any money to put into a bank or buy insurance. Hell, I wouldn’t have minded if we’d knocked off Congress. But—we knocked off 386 innocent, ordinary folks and Congress and the President and Wall Street just went on and laughed at us. It was like, well, going out to assassinate the President and winding up snatching purses from little old ladies on Social Security. It blew my mind, and I had to get myself back together again. I had a —a breakdown, I guess. Like the kid who finds out there’s no Santa Claus right on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t handle it.”
He could see in her face that she was trying to understand but couldn’t, quite.
“You knew what terrorism was all about,” she said, not accusingly but questioningly. “To achieve the greatest goals for the greatest number of people, some have to perish. The innocents were martyrs to the Cause; they died so that their children and neighbors and their children could have better lives. That’s the principle of terrorism. That’s how a very small group becomes a force huge enough to topple governments.”
He nodded. “I know, I know. But, Christ! There were sixty-four kids on that plane! Children! It blew me away.”
“And yet you’re here,” she noted.
He nodded again. “Yes, I’m here. I’m here for a lot of reasons, Suzy. I’m here because I’ve spent ten years rotting in a commune in New England not thinking or accomplishing anything. I’m here, too, I guess, because there’s a goal in sight. What did we accomplish by knocking over the stuff we did? Federal fugitives, exile, death, that’s all. No rocking the corporate boat, nothing. This time we can accomplish something. This time it’s make-or-break. We’ll see the results or we’ll die. That’s something I can get a handle on, work for. I never lost my dreams, Suzy, only my feeling of doing something worthwhile.”
She seemed to accept that, although he still was certain she hadn’t understood the logic. It was a good story, a convincing story to explain his presence here—one he and a number of experts had worked long and hard on.
One that was very close to the truth.
For the first time, lying there, looking at Suzy and seeing the organization of Camp Liberty and the enormity of their plan, he began to wonder whether or not he didn’t really want to be reconverted. He yearned for the comradeship, felt thrilled by being an instrument of history.
And he wanted her. Just sitting here, after all these years, with Suzy this close, he was totally turned on.
She seemed to sense it; she softened. “Come on, Sam. You’re not due for anything else today. Come with me over to my quarters. Get some air conditioning and some decent food.”
He went with her, although air conditioning and food were not really on his mind at all.
She lived in one of the quonset hut structures. This one had small but comfortable individual rooms, air conditioning, and storage space.
“How did you wind up here?” he asked her.
She flopped on the too-narrow bed and sighed. “After the big bang, they caught Knapp and shot Crowder to death. You walked out and vanished, and the rest of the group panicked. We split, saying we’d get together at such-and-so, but we never did. I took the pipeline to Havana first, then to Iraq, finally to Thailand—mostly training guerrillas, recruiting and organizing women’s brigades, things like that. When this came up and the word went out, well, hell, of course I volunteered.” She paused, and her voice lowered. “But I missed you, Sam.”
She was undressing slowly now, and he followed suit. He wanted her, wanted her badly; it was the only thing in his mind.
And hers.
And yet, when the preliminaries were finished, he couldn’t do it. He wanted to, but something just went out of him. He couldn’t follow through, make himself stay in that aroused state.
It’d been like that for years. He’d always told himself that it was because of Suzy. Now he found that, even with her once again, he was emotionally short. It upset him, disturbed him.
He wasn’t impotent; he knew that, deep inside. All those other girls, they had been Suzy-surrogates. He’d acted with them as if they were Suzy, imagining them as Suzy.
It was that barrier that still stood now that she was reality and not fantasy.
He loved her, yet there was a gulf there. They were of two different minds, from two different worlds, alien creatures deep inside. This same kind, loving Suzy had cheerfully killed 386 people she didn’t even know and had thought nothing of it, and this same Suzy, who reacted to him as a loving human being, saw all other humans as ciphers, statistics, somehow unreal.
He could not cross that barrier. He had to be one or the other, with Suzy or with humanity, and his subconscious was making that choice.
She was disturbed, but not angry.
“If not now, tomorrow or the next day,” she said philosophically. “We’ll have plenty of chances, Sam, like old times.”
He looked at her strangely. “What do you mean?”
“I arranged for you to be with my team,” she told him. “You and me, Sam, again! Back home and back in action! The Liberation Army rides again, back from the dead past to haunt them!” Her enthusiasm was genuine. She shifted, looked at him, doubt and hesitation creeping into her eyes. “Isn’t that what you want, too, Sam?”
“Yes, Suzy, it is,” he told her, and cursed himself inwardly because he was telling the absolute truth.
FIFTEEN
The four-year-old mentality of Sandy O’Connell, fortified by the addition of a teddy bear called Mr. Jinks, fell into the routine very easily. The floor she was on was devoted almost entirely to cases such as hers; people who were hot and needed to be put on ice for a while, and were expediently regressed. The drug-induced hypnosis was useful in many ways; those under it could also be persuaded for fairly long periods to see others differently. All in all, there were fourteen “children,” nine males and five females, in the wing. Their average age was forty-four.
This technique allowed a close but relaxed watch on all of their activities. Like most drug-induced things, there were no certainties here, and the human biochemistry differed from individual to individual, making dosages tricky and occasioning a few times when reality began to peer through at inopportune moments. For the most part, though, they saw themselves and each other as children, and they laughed together and cried together and played together. The one drawback to regression was the necessity of keeping their section on the ground floor, since they needed to be outdoors regularly. A playground had been established, and a fence built to prevent wandering, but from the playground could be seen rolling hills and thick green trees, and not too far away a small stream on the other side of which passed a road down which occasional trucks and official cars passed.
There were no ordinary patients at Martha’s Lake Veterans Hospital, as the place was called. There had been, once, before the emergency, but not now. Many of the people there were there without a lot of medical hypnosis; they were there because wives, children, others they were close to were hostage to their willing self-commitments. They, on the other hand, had no reason to believe that this venerable government sanitarium did not contain some real patients, and the impression that it did was reinforced by the staff. The old fellow who insisted that he was Secretary of the Army under Millard might well have been—but he might also have thought he was Napoleon last week. And who remembers the name, let alone the looks, of even current, let alone former, Secretaries of the Army?
So, too, it was unsettling to see the childish adults in the yard over there beyond the fence. Whether they were truly retarded or insane, or whether they were made that way, was not for the others to say. If the latter, those poor people were a reminder of what could happen to those who made trouble or got out of line.
But the drug only made you think you were four; these regressed adults were still in possession of their reasoning faculties under it all, although filtered through their delusion. That fact was becoming an interesting and unforeseen reality to the warders, who found themselves the victims of devilishly sophisticated childish jokes and games, and also caused still greater problems.
Hospitals were fun, Sandy O’Connell thought, but she missed her Mommy and Daddy and her big brother and sister. The longer things went on, the more she thought of them and the more she missed them. They hadn’t come to visit her once, and she was beginning to fear that they had abandoned her here, didn’t want or love her any more.
It was an oversight for the strained technicians at Martha’s Lake; a parental visit could have been easily programmed in. They were simply too busy and too pressed to think of everything.
Finally, Sandy started to stare at the green fields and trees and road beyond the fences. Down that road, maybe, was home, her home and her friends, and her Mommy and Daddy. Maybe they couldn’t come to see her, maybe the doctors wouldn’t let them.
She decided to go to them.
It became one more game, but this time with a purpose. She snuck around, Mr. Jinks in tow, watching how the attendants in their white jackets walked and worked, how closely they watched everybody and how sloppy they sometimes were.
She also found that where the big, tall fence met the brick side of the building, there was a narrow gap. The fence hadn’t been put in with a prison in mind; it was part of the original establishment, and the fence post was prevented by its design and mooring from being too close to the building. Even so, there were roughly twenty centimeters between wall and fence. A terribly tight squeeze, but very inviting to the four-year-old child who discovered it.
Like most children’s plots, though, this one was only partly thought out and not deeply considered. The idea was simply there, and when the opportunity came along it was available.
That opportunity came when a big fellow named Mike suggested hide-and-seek with the seekers to be the warders. The other “children” thought it a tremendous joke for all of them to hide in and around the ward and make the hospital people find them.
There was only one of the white-coated attendants watching them, half-heartedly, his bored mind on a lot of other things than this.
And now it was on. With a yell from Mike a bunch of them started running for the door where the attendant sat, leaning back on the rear legs of a folding chair. They caught him completely by surprise, deliberately bowling him over as they rushed to their hiding places.
He yelled, picked himself up, and ran through the entryway after them, screaming bloody murder. He ran right past Sandy O’Connell, not very well hidden behind some large metal cabinets stuck in the hall just inside the door. When he swept past and she saw she wasn’t discovered, she crept outside, looking for a new and better hiding place. Her eyes went to the fence and that telltale opening she’d discovered but shared with no one except Mr. Jinks. She headed for it, made it, and started trying to squeeze through.
For a while it was tough going; the jagged ends of the fence snared her flimsy hospital gown, which tore when she pulled the material away, and it hurt and scratched when she pressed on. She began to be afraid now, began to be afraid first that the attendant would come and see her and her secret would be lost, afraid, too, that she wasn’t going to make it, that she was going to be stuck between the fence and wall forever. She started to cry and tears welled up,but she kept at it, and suddenly, with a ripping sound, she was through and falling on her side, rolling down a grassy meadow.
She stopped at the bottom and lay still for a minute. A lot of little cuts stung, and she was still afraid, looking back up at the fence. There was no one in sight.
Finally she picked herself up and ran off toward the trees. Once there, she picked a big tree near the edge of the glade and looked back, fearfully. She could see the whole playground now, and still there was no one.
Now, suddenly, a couple of white-clad adult figures emerged and stalked around, looking over the sliding board and other kid’s apparatus. Satisfied that none of the “children” were hiding there, they took one last glance around and went back inside. Sandy O’Connell pressed back into the recesses of the tree as the men seemed to look her way, but when she peeked out again they were gone.
