A Rage for Revenge

58 The Theatre of War

I climbed the ramp and stopped, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

There was a man with a clipboard at the top. He peered at my name badge with a pocket-light. "McCarthy," he said. "You're late." He looked annoyed.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

He ignored the apology. "Sit there." He pointed at a rear row. I nodded and went. The theatre was round and shaped like a wide bowl resting on a forty-five degree angle; there were seats mounted up its entire face. My row was high on the upper curve. A second and larger bowl enveloped the first-that was the screen. The audience would be peering into a 360 degree bubble of light and sound. Up, down, right, left; the entire field of human vision would be filled.

Right now, though, it was muted to a dim pearlescent glow. It had just enough luminance to delineate itself as a screen, but not cnough to illuminate the theatre itself. The effect was like twilight. There was light above us, but we remained in the dark. As I climbed I glanced to the rows of seats above me, but I wouldn't make out any faces.

My row was empty, so I moved to a center seat. The chair was high-backed and comfortable looking. As I sat down it adjusted to my body. I leaned back and the chair leaned with me. It could both rock and swivel. The occupant could turn to look at any part of the screen, including the ceiling, and do it comfortably. I let myself relax into it and a soft voice began to whisper in my ear, "Here is the agenda for today's briefing. First we will see the tapes of this morning's Colorado overrflight, with commentary by the pilot, Colonel Elizabeth Tirelli. That will be followed by . . ."

"Cancel," I said. The voice shut up.

I leaned forward, surveying the seats below me in the bowl. Some were empty. Most were filled with grim military types. Too many brass buttons. I didn't see anyone I recognized. I leaned back again.

Five people were filing down to the center of the room to fill up the last empty seats there. One of them was Colonel Tirelli. Another was the Japanese lady I had met on my first trip to Denver. Who was she anyway? I didn't see the dark fellow with her, the one from the same trip. I recognized two of the others with her though. The tall man was the secretary of defense. And, of course, I recognized the president.

Lizard had been right. This was serious business. I wondered why I was here.

As soon as everyone was settled, the Japanese lady signalled to the officer with the clipboard. The theatre doors were closed and the screen came to life.

First we heard the sound of the chopper. It was so realistic I looked up. Overhead was the outline of the gunship. Those cameras were wide-angle! We were looking up at the underside of the cockpit.

I looked forward and we were in the air. The theatre had disappeared. We were sitting in an airborne bowl, hanging beneath a camouflage-painted Valkyrie. I could see the strop of the rotors, the tunnels of burned air pouring backward from the jets. To either side were the Colorado foothills. Ahead, the ground was rising toward a familiar red ridge. My stomach churned. I knew what lay ahead.

We crested the ridge-I wanted to close my eyes-and dropped into that blue-hazed valley again. I was clutching the arms of my seat.

Lizard's voice said, "First, we'll go through the mission in real time, so you'll have a sense of the actual combat situation. We were over the worm camp for less than thirty seconds." We were already bouncing across the landscape. I leaned forward in my seat, studying the ground directly beneath us. The shadow of the chopper rippled across the huts. We looked close enough to some of those igloos to touch them. I saw the worms come boiling out of the ground, scores of them, hundreds of them! They reared up in fury, chirruping and waving their arms backward and forward in that peculiar double-jointed shoulder motion I had come to be so familiar with. I could hear their purple screaming over the roar of the chopper's engines.

I saw humans too! One of them was pointing a rifle straight at me-I could see the red laser beam angled through the mist-and then he dropped away behind. We jerked and zigzagged through the sky above the camp.

Then the big dome exploded ahead of us and we were pulling up into the clouds.

The screen went blank.

You could hear the simultaneous exhalations all over the theatre.

Lizard's voice said, "Now, we're going to look at the rear view. We'll be running this at one-fifth real time. This is what you would have seen if you had been facing backward."

The screen lit up again. The strop of the rotors was slower now. The roar of the jets was more drawn out. Somewhere a logic circuit was adjusting the sound to the rate of the imagery on the screen.

Again, we were hanging beneath the chopper, but this time facing rearward. We were looking back across a bloody landscape. It was painted in shades of red and orange, blue and purple, pink and yellow. It looked alien-but the distant range of black mountain peaks was too familiar, too much a part of Earth.

We were dropping down a slope now, and there were worm huts IaIling back behind us. Again the worms came boiling out of the ground, but this time in a slow and stately ballet.

Directly behind us, silvery particles began to appear in the air, the radar chaff. To either side, streaks of yellow smoke spread out across the sky-the bug spray. The missiles dropped on either side wl us. They came apart in the air, sending needles in all directions. The napalm sprayed in smoky jets. Clusters of madballs were falling away from the bomb bays above. They hit the ground and scattered, bounced and splattered, bounced and splattered flame and smoke.

Below us the worms were wreathed in flame, churning and writhing across the ground. Explosions tore the domes apart, sending pieces of flame and wall skittering high into the sky. Bodies too were hurled before the blast. Again, I saw human beings come running out of domes. I saw the man with the rifle again aiming his beam toward the chopper. The napalm was already spraying. He disappeared in a ribbon of flame.

The image shuddered slowly then. We started pulling upward. The angle shifted to show the huge dome we had destroyed just before pulling away-it was still boiling outward, more worms pouring out of it than we had ever seen in one place. For just one brief instant, I was looking straight down into that structure and all I could see was a bowl of crimson fur. Could there possibly be a worm that huge?

And then the missiles went off and the dome became a fiery hell.

The angle of the image shifted again and we were looking at four streaks of crimson smoke rising from the ground and angling directly up toward us. I heard oaths in the theatre and the words, "Vipers! How did they get Vipers?"

The first of the missiles puffed out, then two more. The last one kept on coming for just a second longer, then it too exploded brightly

The screen went dead.

"That was when we lost the rear camera," said Lizard quietly. The silence in the room was terrifying.

Directly beneath me, a general leaned over to his aide. "I want to know the location of every goddamned Viper missile on the planet. I want that information by 18:00 hours."

"That's not possible, sir-"

"Make it possible!" His tone was lethal.

"Yes, sir!" The aide was already on his way.

Lizard's voice came back again. She said, "That should give you some idea of what we were up against. We weren't over that camp fifteen seconds before the Vipers were tracking us. I had no choice but to abort the mission. I dropped all remaining ordnance and went to high-gee evasion.

"I was supposed to fly across the entire camp, cutting it in half. I made it less than a tenth of the way in before I was forced to abort. The scanners showed there was just too much ordnance in that infestation. We wouldn't have made it. It was more important to bring these pictures back.

"You'll see in a moment. Now, I'm going to show you the scary parts."

The scary parts? I was already terrified.

The screen lit up again. We were coasting sideways across the camp. The image slid by so slowly, we could examine every detail of the huts below. "This is being shown at one-tenth real time," Lizard said. "I want you to notice this-"

A section of the screen became brighter. We saw the man with the laser rifle again. His beam was tracking straight toward us. "And this-"

Another part of the screen-I hadn't seen that before! Three men in a Land Rover; it was armed with a tactical P-beam cannon! The vehicle was bouncing across the rough terrain trying to catch up with the chopper before the chopper's napalm caught up with them.

"And this-"

A cluster of children was running away from the screen, screaming in terror. Some of them were running for igloos. I saw a worm scoop up two of them and dive into a burrow before the flames washed the rest away.

"And this-"

A woman with a baby carriage, frozen in the act of looking up at us! It was a still frame. The bomb was already going off behind her.

"And this-"

A thousand worms boiled up out of the seemingly solid ground. Holes kept opening up, releasing more and more of the crimson horrors. They were all sizes and all colors.

"And this-"

The big dome we had annihilated. Once again, I saw its walls fly apart as the worms inside exploded outward. Once again I peered down into it. But this time the image expanded to fill the screen, and I could see quite clearly the face of a worm the size of a blimp! It was trying to lift itself up

"And finally, this-"

The ground was tilting at an angle. It fell away into the distance and we could see the way the infestation stretched out toward the western horizon. There were domes everywhere-for a moment I thought I could almost see a pattern-some of them were even bigger than the one we had destroyed.

"And this is when I blew up every piece of ordnance in the camp-"

The ground continued to tilt awry as we pulled away. Puffs of brightness began to dot the landscape, sparkling through the purple haze. Two here, three there-then a scattering of smaller sparks in the distance. They began to expand into fireballs-and Ihcn more explosions appeared, large ones, more violent. Their fireballs began to rise into the air. And then the whole landscape was on fire---everywhere there were explosions of fire and smoke. They were popping off like fireworks on the Fourth of July. They stretched from here to the horizon. You could hear the sounds of them as muffled thumps and booms against the crackling roar of the growing flames.

There were gasps in the auditorium. And quiet cursing too. The lights came up and the President's voice said, "Thank you, Colonel Tirelli." Then, in a louder tone, "We will reconvene in the War Room in fifteen minutes."

I stood up. Around me, I could hear the beginnings of angry conversations. Snatches of words floated past me. I didn't listen. I was watching the President and her group as they headed for the door. Lizard was moving with them.

The President stopped at the exit to talk to a broad man in a naval uniform. She looked upset. She looked as if she were giving him orders. He was nodding his head up and down. "Yes, Madam President. Yes, Ma'am."

Lizard caught my eye then. She held up her phone meaningfully.

I unclipped mine from my belt and flipped it open. "Yes, Colonel?"

"This briefing includes you too. As of thirty minutes ago, you're part of my staff." Then she added, "But the paperwork is backdated to the moment you first helped yourself to army equipment. I'm covering your tail, buster. You'd better cover mine."

"Huh?"

"Never mind that now. Just get your ass downstairs. I want you sitting behind me."

"Yes, sir!" I moved.