A War of Shadows

SEVEN

The great airliner rose slowly and majestically like a giant silver bird, looking too impossibly huge and bulky ever to become airborne. But its nose went up, and suddenly, painfully, it started to climb.

Suzy laughed and rubbed her hands. It would pass almost directly over their position in the woods just beyond the end of the runway. With George and Alicia holding the mortar steady, Suzy held the shell just over the mouth of the round, squat mortar until the plane was almost on top of them, then dropped it in the hole and fell back.

There was a whump, a swirl of smoke, and some-thing shot upward, catching the great plane amidships. There was a tremendous explosion, and the huge silver bird started to collapse, almost to fall apart in a ball of flame.

He swore he could hear the screams of the dying passengers, 386 ordinary men, women, and children burning, falling to their deaths. He was only superficially aware of Suzy and the others dancing and cheering as the plane came down. He was up there, screaming with the dying innocents, no longer sure as to why they were dying.

Someone was grabbing him, poking him. “Come on, Joe! Wake up!” a deep, throaty voice urged.

He awoke with a cry stifled in mid-utterance as he realized where he was and that it had been a dream once again.

Doug Courtland looked at him in concern. “You oughta see a shrink or somethin’ about this, man,” he told the other. “My lord! This is the third time this month!”

He sighed and wiped the perspiration from his face. “I’ll be okay, Doug, thanks,” he assured the other. “Just a nightmare. Nothing more.”

Courtland looked uncertain, but finally nodded, shrugged, and walked back to his own bed.

He sat up, holding his head in his hands, trying to stop the shaking, to get a grip on himself.

A nightmare, yes. Just a dream. A bad dream. Only once, almost ten years ago, it’d been real.

There was a Hell, he told himself, and he was in it. He got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door and switched on the light. He steadied himself on the sink and looked into the mirror.

It was a strong face on a strong body; a Caucasian complexion but strong Negroid features and a bush of thick, wiry hair now tinged prematurely with gray. The face was lined, etched in with experiences he could not forget; his brown eyes looked old, empty, hollow.

When would it let him alone, this past that haunted him? What did it want? What sort of penance would sponge away the guilt?

Look what’s happened to you, Sam Cornish, he thought bitterly. Ten years older than your age of thirty-four and growing older at twice the clip every night. A hundred years in Hell already served—how many more to go?

How young and bright and starry-eyed Sam Cornish was when he was alive, he thought. Black power and the Revolution and all that. Black power! He snorted in derision. Too white for the Blacks, too black for the whites, but just right for the Revolution. Read Marx and Mao and protest march and all that shit.

But to most of his contemporaries that was passe, lip service. Hedonism replaced the Revolution before he’d gotten there. Blow pot, disco dance, go all night in bed with Suzy, blue jeans and bennies…

Suzy. There she was again. The Revolution would sweep away decadence. Come the Revolution and all would be perfect. Society was rotten, capitalism was poison, they’d drugged the world into submission. They had to be awakened.

He’d believed it, all of it. He’d drunk it in like an alcoholic in a liquor store.

Seven or eight committed “patriots,” a tight little cell. Hit a bank here, a bank there for money. It was easy. Just pass a note. Pick small banks, never be ambitious. George with his chemicals. Steal some weapons here, some explosives there. Even that damned mortar from a National Guard unit in summer camp. Easy. Fun.

Some notes to the papers, a fancy name, the Synergistic Commune Action Brigade, some bombs in harmless places. Everybody so sure of the Revolution nobody even stopped for a moment to ask what the Revolution was, who would run it, and other things like that. It was “us” against “them,” kiddies playing revolutionaries against the fascists.

Until that plane. Three hundred eighty-six dead innocent people, and the SCAB celebrated a great victory.

Somehow, deep down, he’d kidded himself.

Somehow he’d rationalized, told himself that the Revolution was real, the Revolution would come, that what he was doing was building a better world.

Three hundred eighty-six dead people. And they danced and laughed in their joy.

Three hundred eighty-six dead people.

Building a better world for who? And what sort of world?

There’d been 387 casualties in that plane crash, the extra one being Sam Cornish.

He’d run and run and still it pursued him. Here, at Sky Forest, he’d stopped physically, and in the strong-man work of the commune and its unquestioning ways he’d worked it off, put it away from him, become Joe Conway, tapped maple trees in these beautiful Vermont mountains, cut cordwood, built buildings and dug post holes for fences, and he’d dropped out.

Except now, except in the night, when the ghost of Sam Cornish still haunted him. Dope didn’t work, pills didn’t work, nothing worked.

He was checking out the site they’d picked for a new stable for the horses, farther away from the main buildings, deciding how much wood would be needed, how construction would have to proceed, when the man came out of the trees toward him. He turned and looked at the stranger curiously; unknowns were rare up here, and this fellow seemed particularly out of place in suit and tie and tailored overcoat.

He waited, wondering, for the newcomer to reach him.

The man stopped a little away from where he stood and looked him over. “Hello, Mr. Cornish,” he said in a soft southern accent that was as out of place here as the man himself.

Sam Cornish froze, ice shooting through him. He’d been here so many years that he no longer feared capture or exposure, never even thought of it any more—and here it was.

“Joe Conway’s the name,” he responded nervously.

The man smiled. “Don’t worry, Mr. Cornish. I’m not here to arrest you. We could have done that years ago.”

Something twisted within him; he wasn’t certain whether to attack or run, so he stood where he was. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“Mr. Cornish, we deal in the public safety. We try and remove threats to it. If they cease to be threats, well, there’s a lot of other folks still menacing the public who need attention. Some of your old buddies, for example, got to Cuba. They sat there on their fannies in shacks cutting sugar cane and singing revolutionary songs in Spanish. Well and good. Let them stay in their own self-imposed prison. It’s cheaper. You came here. We traced you here inside of a few months, and let you be first because we hoped that some of your lovable friends would join you. After a while it was pretty clear that you had had second thoughts about the revolution, and were in your own version of a Cuban sugar cane field. We picked up Granger, as you probably know. He told us you tried to stop the plane attack, and left when they carried it out. So we left you here. Cheaper and convenient. Of course, we keep an eye on you and hundreds of others like you just in case, or in case some of your more dangerous friends decide to renew old friendships, but that’s all.”

His emotions were in turmoil, jumbled and confused. Somehow what the man said made sense, but it was, in its own way, more depressing than being a hounded fugitive.

“So why tell me this now?” he asked. “Or are you finally getting around to the leftovers?”

The other man shrugged. “I told you I wasn’t here to arrest you. I want to make a proposition to you. If you say no, well, then, that’s that. Business as usual. Stick to this commune and this lifestyle and you’ll never see us again.”

This was more confusing than before. “What sort of a proposition?” he asked suspiciously, not trusting anything the man was saying.

“You’re pretty cut off here,” the man noted. “Do you know about the Wilderness Organism?”

He nodded slowly. “We get the papers. Lots of talk about it, naturally. There are a lot of small towns in Vermont.”

“And you’ve heard that the thing is a laboratory-created disease? That someone is planting it?”

“I heard,” he said, not sure where this was leading.

“Suppose I said that we just shot Jim Foley trying to plant the disease?” the man continued.

Cornish’s mouth dropped. “Foley!” Suddenly his mind raced. “Any other—”

“No, no Suzanne Martine yet,” the man replied, guessing his question. “Wouldn’t be surprised, though.”

He relaxed a bit, strangely relieved but unable to figure out why.

“Mr. Cornish, I’d like you to come down to the village with me,” the man told him. “I want to show you a couple of movies, that’s all. At the end I’ll explain all this, and you can say no, no thanks, and walk out of there and back here. No hassles, no conditions, no blackmail. Will you do it for me? Just to humor me?”

The old suspicions were back. “You’re not just looking for an easy arrest, are you?”

The man sighed. “Mr. Cornish, I wouldn’t have to trick you and you know it. Come on. I promise nothing else will happen.”

He gave in, his curiosity overcoming his massive doubts. “Why not?” he said, resigned.

They used the back of the sheriffs office, which was cleared. An FBI badge and a call from the governor did wonders.

The films were a horror story. Hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people, men, women, children, all in some way horribly stricken. The blind, the feeble-minded, the palsied and the paralyzed, and those haunted faces of those who’d lost their pasts.

And then the big show, a tape of Operation Wilderness itself.

“It was dumb luck we caught them,” the agent, who never had given his name, told him. “Sheriff of a ski town not far from the cabin was an ex-Bureau man who’d been on your case. Foley came into town for supplies, and he made him, even after all these years, even with the beard and dyed hair. He’d worked sixteen solid weeks on the plane sabotage case, and our artists had portrayed you all in every way we could think of to disguise you. The pictures were just burned into his brain. So he followed Foley back to the cabin, got a make on two others through the Bureau telex, caught sight of a sub-machine gun, and we set it up.”

He watched the whole operation from start to finish, saw the bodies, the dead face of Foley. He’d have recognized him anywhere, like the man said. There was a sense of satisfaction in seeing that lifeless form; Foley had dreamed up the airplane job, Foley had planned it.

And now the blue cylinders, and some tape-to-film of the Wilderness Organism itself.

“There’s no question that the perpetrators are former radicals, fugitives from dozens of places over the past few years. They’ve been stagnating, waiting for a cause, a charge to action again, and this is providing it,” the FBI man explained.

Sam Cornish felt violently ill. All those faces, all those innocent people. The agent seemed to understand.

“You can’t run away from that plane crash, Mr. Cornish,” he said as gently as he could. “And they’re doing it again. You’ve tried to run and it’s no good, it’s inside you.”

“What’s the bottom line on all this?” Cornish asked brusquely. “Get to the point.”

“They’re your old people, Mr. Cornish,” the agent explained. “They know you and you know them. They’re recruiting. The word’s out. You probably heard it yourself.”

Yes he had, he thought. Not what for, just that they wanted old pros for a new and massive operation.

“We want your help in making sure there are no more crippled and hollow innocents,” the man continued. “We can’t seal the borders. We can try, but any good pro can get in and out. We’ll catch some now, of course, now that we know what we’re dealing with, and who. But not all. Not most. Their toll is already in the thousands, all innocent men, women, and children. Not even soldiers or cops or big-shot capitalist leaders. Just random mass-mutilation. We need you, Mr. Cornish. We need you to help us save those people.”

He was sick, disgusted, and not a little scared. “What would you have me do?”

“Put the word out you want to get active again. Let them recruit you. Get in with them, join them. Find out who’s behind this if you can, and what the object is. Find out where this terror will strike next. Get the information to us if you can. We want you to save lives, Mr. Cornish. Nothing less.”

He shook his head. “I—I can’t,” he protested. “Damn it! I just can’t!”

The agent looked at him squarely, a grim expression on his face. “There are still over nine hundred cylinders unused. Nine hundred.”

He thought of the faces he’d seen, the small children and babies cheated, cheated of life not merely by senseless violence but by Jim Foley.

“They’ll never accept me,” he protested. “I ran out on them. Left them, deserted them. I wouldn’t even help in the plane thing. I just couldn’t do it.”

The agent smiled. “We’ll take care of some of that. Don’t worry so much. Remember only one thing—remember that, in a worst-case situation, it’ll be you there with a blue cylinder, or helping others with them. It’ll be the plane thing all over again.”

He nodded glumly. “I been thinking of that. I guess it’s what I’m scaredest of.” He stared at the FBI man with haunted eyes. “I could have stopped them, you know. I could have stopped them but I didn’t.”

The other man returned the nod. “That’s why we nicked you,” he said softly.