Flashback

1.12 North of Las Vegas, New Mexico—Wednesday, Sept. 15

For nick there was only an instantaneous sensation of great heat, then a terrible pressure as a solid wall of darkness surrounded him and pressed in on him, and then nothing.

In the second Oshkosh–Land Cruiser M-ATV thirty meters behind them, the driver Willy—whose real name was Mutsumi Ōta—saw Sato’s vehicle get hit. The gun bubble on top shot two hundred feet into the air with a pillar of flame seemingly supporting it. Sato’s Oshkosh flipped, hit the left edge of the bridge it was crossing, and dropped down into the empty riverbed, trailing guard rail and concrete rebar behind it and rolling a dozen or so times. Pieces of flaming metal had flown off the leading Oshkosh upon impact of the tank or artillery shell and now the large back hatch sliced the air toward Ōta’s vehicle like a 300-pound piece of shrapnel, missing by ten inches. In the riverbed below, more geysers of flame erupted from every sprung hatch, air vent, and the entire rear of Sato and Nick’s burning, tumbling truck.

Ōta jerked his Oshkosh off the highway to the right so hard that the huge vehicle actually teetered on its right wheels for a few seconds before crashing all wheels back to the earth. The patch of Interstate thirty meters behind where he’d been an instant before exploded upward and outward as a second HEAT round slammed into the pavement. A third exploded just to the left of Ōta’s Oshkosh where it had been tilting seconds earlier.

There were at least two tanks firing.

Toby shouted in Japanese from the right seat, “I saw the flashes! Two tanks, hull down, just at the base of the hill about one klick ahead.”

Ōta reached the steep bank of the riverbed and drove straight off, all 25,000 pounds of the Oshkosh seeming to hang in air for an eternity before it fell below the level of the riverbanks, all the wheels compacting fully on the TAK-7 independent suspensions.

The north bank of the riverbed exploded behind them.

“Three tanks!” shouted Bill in Japanese from the gun bubble. “Saw the third flash.”

Ōta’s M-ATV crashed through willows and fallen cottonwoods before skidding to a teetering stop in the sand near the south bank. They should be out of direct-fire view and range of the tanks, Ōta knew, although mortars or artillery could get them easily through indirect fire.

“Infantry!” shouted Bill from above. Bill’s real name was Daigorou Okada. “Saw them just before we dropped. Several hundred, I think. Carrying small arms and RPGs and TOWs.”

“Where?” asked Mutsumi Ōta in his slow, calm voice. He’d have to find out if his boss, Sato, was alive, but that could wait a minute until they understood the tactical situation and could find a way to get into the fight.

“Coming out of holes due south about halfway to the tanks,” said Okada, his own voice more calm and professional now.

Toby, whose real name was Shinta Ishii, had been busy on the vehicle-to-vehicle comm lines, trying to raise Sato or Joe, real name Tai Okamoto, or the gai-jin with them. There was no answer.

“How did the drones and sats miss the tanks?” asked Shinta Ishii in Japanese when he broke off trying to raise Sato’s truck.

“Probably good cryocamo blankets covering the buried hull-down tanks and people in their holes,” said Ōta. “Keeping the temperature exactly that of the soil. Someone’s going to have to go out there to give us a look at what’s coming.”

“Hai!” said Shinta Ishii from the right seat. He disconnected his comm and other umbilicals, slapped the restraint release, pulled a PEAP temporary air-supply and comm system from the dash and clipped it in place on his helmet, took a video camera and 9mm pistol from the glove compartment, opened the passenger door, and rolled out.

A second later the image flowed to the Oshkosh’s monitors from Ishii’s camera as it was tentatively shoved above the edge of the south bank. Ishii did not raise his head.

About a hundred infantry in light armor were crossing the half kilometer or so between them and the riverbed. Behind them came three tanks.

Nick bottom returned to consciousness with the sound of gunshots popping all around him. It got his attention.

No, it wasn’t gunshots, he realized as his eyes began to focus. The front part of the truck’s cabin had filled almost instantly with solid foam. Now that foam was evaporating or deliquescing or whatever it was doing, one loud pop at a time.

Nick hit the big release button at the center of his harnesses and they snapped back even as his sarcophagus of a crash-couch hissed and pulled back. Nick fell headfirst onto the ceiling and almost broke his neck as his helmet met hot steel with a loud bang.

The Oshkosh was upside down at an angle. The driver’s side seemed to be buried in the dirt. Some sort of metal fire panel had slammed down behind his and Sato’s seats and now that panel was glowing cherry red with bright white spots. The heat threatened to make Nick swoon. The fire behind that panel, Nick knew, must be terrible. Unless Joe the top-gunner had gotten out another way, he was dead.

Remembering Sato’s advice, Nick unclipped his suit’s O-two and comm channels, removed the PEAP—Personal Egress Air Pack—bundle from the console, took two tries to clip it into place on his helmet and oxygen mask, and plugged the mobile PEAP comm links in.

“Sato?”

No response.

Heaps of loose items and metal debris had tumbled onto the truck’s ceiling where Nick now crouched, sliding down under Sato’s hanging body, but when he leaned over to look up at Sato in the driver’s seat he still couldn’t be sure if the security chief was alive or dead.

Sato’s eyes were closed; he looked dead. His body hung from the straps. The blast from behind had ripped most of the red samurai armor off Sato’s right arm and Nick could see with a single glance that the arm was broken. Some of Sato’s blood had spattered the dark windshield panels and other video monitors and more blood was now dripping from the arm onto the ceiling-turned-floor.

Nick tried to remember the names of the men in the second truck.

“Willy?” he called on comm. “Toby? Bill?”

No response. Not even static. Maybe the PEAP comm unit wasn’t working. Or maybe the second truck had also been hit and destroyed.

After making sure that his 9mm Glock was still clipped on the belt on his armored hip, Nick crawled across the seat, grabbed his heavy duffel bag from where it had dropped onto the ceiling, and kicked the passenger-side door open.

He threw the weapons-duffel out first and then followed. The right side of the Oshkosh was raised about four feet above sandy soil, a trickle of river, and a line of burning willow bushes. Nick wedged himself over the edge and dropped the four feet, grunting with pain when he hit. He didn’t think anything was broken, but his entire body felt bruised as if after a good beating. Sweat dripped out of the eye sockets of his mask.

He took a deep breath to get some fresh air, but he was still on the thirty-minute PEAP air supply. He left it in place.

Nick grabbed the duffel bag before the flames got to it and dragged it and himself twenty feet away from the burning Oshkosh along the steep, sandy riverbank. He saw now that the huge M-ATV had done a corkscrew off the bridge above, tumbled flaming across the floor of the riverbed, and dug its heavy snout and right side into the heaps of soft sand just short of the riverbank on this side. Whether “this side” was the north or south bank of the river, Nick had no idea.

Nick pulled the Glock from his hip, unzipped the duffel, and looked at the weapons he’d brought. They seemed all right. He looked back at the burning Oshkosh.

The rear of the big truck was totally engulfed in flames and those flames were working their way forward along the shattered outside of the vehicle. The steel tires were melting. Ammunition from somewhere, probably next to the absent top gun bubble, was cooking off at random and rounds were impacting in every direction.

“Well, fuck,” breathed Nick.

He staggered back to the truck.

This side was too damned high to get up onto while he was in armor so he scrambled as high as he could on the twelve-or fifteen-foot-high riverbank, clambered up onto a shattered, steaming wheel, and crawled along the passenger side of the truck. The door was open but he still had a clumsy time of it as he wedged himself into the black, smoking hole and let himself drop until his feet were on the center console.

“Sato!!”

No answer. He called for the others in the second truck: no response. Maybe he just didn’t know how to reset the comm frequency.

Sato still hung upside down from the straps, his body leaning a little toward the driver’s-side door. The heat in the front part of the cabin was much worse than it had been just a minute earlier and Nick could see white parts of the fire bulkhead beginning to melt.

He pulled himself under Sato’s hanging body, tried to keep the naked and broken arm to one side, braced himself and his shoulders and upper body under Sato like a crouching if underweight sumo-wrestler, and hit Sato’s harness release with his Kevlared fist.

The big man’s body fell on him, the dead weight of Sato’s three hundred pounds crushing Nick against the ceiling, breaking at least one of Nick’s ribs, and driving the air out of him.

“Oh… Jesus… fuck,” breathed Nick. “You… fat…”

He didn’t finish the thought. If Sato was as dead as he felt, limp as a slaughtered heifer, he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “Fat… fuck,” he breathed out despite himself.

Then he was shoving with his boots, grabbing with his gloves, putting all his energy into moving Sato’s huge, inert, unhelpful form up and toward the open door. Smoke had filled the cockpit. Sato’s body quit moving and Nick noticed various leads and wires running from the man’s blood-red samurai helmet back to the crash chair.

“Oh, PEAP, shit,” gasped Nick.

He had to brace Sato’s body in place while he crouched again and found the red-symboled section of the dashboard console in front of the driver’s seat. He hit the right spot and the PEAP unit came out. It took Nick forty-five seconds of cursing and struggling and uselessly trying to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes to get the PEAP unit in place and sending oxygen to Sato’s almost certainly dead brain. It took even longer to get the old comm leads unplugged and the new ones attached.

“Sato? Sato?”

No answer.

And no time to wait for one. Flames were licking through the partially melted blast shield and igniting the backs of both couches. Nick could smell something cooking and realized it was Sato’s bare and broken right arm.

“Ugghh!” screamed Nick and deadlifted the three hundred pounds and more of red-armored Jap. He felt like he was holding the whole armored mass over his head as he shoved Sato up through the smoke-obscured open door and left him balancing precariously on the edge of the Oshkosh.

Nick clambered up next to the body, gasping and blinking away sweat. If he hadn’t put his own PEAP on, he knew, he’d be unconscious from smoke inhalation and burning up below.

“Sorry.” Nick used both boots to push the red mass of Sato over the edge of the overturned truck. Sato fell the four feet and landed on his broken forearm without a word or sound through the earphones.

A round whizzed by Nick’s left earphone. The ammo on the lockers was cooking off now and it sounded like a firefight with automatic weapons. Nick knew that there were TOW missiles and other serious ordnance down there, waiting to go.

Nick jumped down, grabbed Sato by the armor handclasp set between his shoulders, and began dragging the body facedown through the sand and gravel and burning willows. When he got to the duffel, Nick lifted the heavy bag with his left hand and kept dragging Sato with his right. Adrenaline, he thought. Breakfast of champions.

Another hundred and fifty feet or so along the riverbank and he thought they might be safe when the truck exploded. They had come around a slight bend in the riverbank—more of a little alcove here—out of direct sight and range of the burning vehicle and igniting ammunition. Nick had no idea if the “radioactive-element-powered” fuel cells that drove the seven-hundred-horsepower Oshkosh turbines would explode when burned enough, but he assumed they would. Most things that powered big trucks would and did when set afire.

The thought of those “radioactive elements” beneath them in the breached and battered truck made Nick wonder if he’d already received a fatal or sterilizing dose of radiation. Or if he would as the truck kept burning or when it exploded.

“Fuck it,” he breathed.

Grunting like a pig, he rolled Sato over onto his back.

What would be the best plan here? To get Sato’s red helmet and other armor off? Check for a pulse and see what other wounds the big man had? If Sato was dead, it would mean a lot less work for…

Suddenly Nick realized that the sand and gravel around where he crouched over the big man were leaping up in the air as if there were giant sand fleas there.

Or like someone’s shooting at me.

Nick peeked around the bank at the burning truck and then looked in the opposite direction, toward the riverbank on their right.

Someone in light body armor, not one of Sato’s four ninjas, was firing an automatic weapon at Nick and Sato from about thirty-five feet away. The person was holding the weapon out at arm’s length and spraying back and forth, the way Nick had seen in videos of the hajjis in Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan. The Old Man had once said that this was the way untrained assholes fired their weapons. But sooner or later this mook might get lucky.

The soil on the bank a foot above Nick erupted, throwing sand over his helmet.

He removed the 9mm Glock from his hip, went to one knee while using his left arm and hand as a brace, and shot the guy three times center mass.

The shooter dropped the assault rifle and fell rolling down the riverbank. But the 9mm rounds hadn’t penetrated his cheap chest armor. The guy staggered to his own knees and started to rise, reaching for his rifle.

Standing now and walking slowly closer, Nick shot the figure again in the chest, once, this time from about twenty feet away.

The shooter went down, rolled, and got to his knees again, gauntleted hands flailing sand while trying to reach his weapon.

Every time the guy tried to get closer to his gun, Nick shot him in the chest again, slapping him rearwards onto his ass or back. The shooter’s last attempt had his gloves missing the stock of the rifle by just a few inches. Nick had been shot in such simple Kevlar-3 armor before and knew it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. But the shooter staggered to his knees again, arms reaching for his dropped rifle. The little fuck was tough.

But he wasn’t wearing a combat helmet, Nick saw now, only a sort of Kevlar motorcycle helmet with a regular Plexiglas visor.

Counting his shots—he’d fired six and had nine left in this magazine—Nick braced himself and put a bullet through that visor from seven feet away. Blood and broken plastic and the shooter went down, face-first this time.

Nick rolled the dead shooter over with his boot, saw through the sharded Plexiglas face shield that it was a woman, and, adrenaline surging, fought the daemon-urge to put another round into the bloodied face.

Nick felt the adrenaline peaking and knew he’d have the shakes in a few minutes. Before it hit, he clambered up the riverbank to get a look over the edge. The shooter, through her rolling and grabbing as she fell, had made a sort of rough stairway in the dirt for Nick. He gingerly poked his head above the roots and grass and weedy edge of the bank.

There were twenty or thirty more shooters—light infantry, maybe, but very irregular—just forty or fifty feet behind this first one he’d killed. In a long line behind them, scores more, all carrying weapons of some sort. Several started firing at Nick in the instant before he dropped down out of sight, allowing himself to slide until he came up against the young woman’s body.

Tanks. He’d seen at least two fucking tanks behind the skirmish line of fighters. Big fucking tanks with big fucking tank guns swiveling, hunting for a target. Hunting for him.

This isn’t right, thought Nick as he sprinted back toward Sato and his duffel bag of weapons. I am—was—a goddamned homicide detective, not some mercenary or soldier. I am—or was—a private detective, a flatfoot, a dick. I’m in my forties, for Chrissake! I’m too old for this shit. And I’m in the wrong movie!!

Nick stopped running and stood there vibrating in shock. Sato was alive and on his hands and knees, favoring his broken arm and crouching like a three-legged dog. His helmet visor was up and the big man was vomiting silently into the sand.

“No time for that,” said Nick, shoving his own visor up so Sato could hear him. “Infantry closing in. And tanks, Sato. Tanks!!”

“You’re welcome, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato and retched again.

Nick stared. Did this man have the stupidest sense of humor of anyone alive, or was he only semiconscious and a little bit nuts from the shelling?

It didn’t matter.

Four figures with guns appeared on the riverbank above the woman’s body and began firing at them. They were also members of the spray-’n-hope school of marksmanship. But with that many rounds hitting the bank and riverbed above them, below them, and next to them, one of the idiots was going to get lucky soon.

Nick crouched and fired, hitting two of them in the visors. He whirled before their bodies fell, threw his heavy duffel bag over his shoulder, and grabbed Sato with his free hand, dragging the big man back around the bend in the riverbank and out of direct line of sight of the two attackers behind them.

There were twenty or thirty more figures with guns between them and the burning vehicles, most watching the flames. But some noticed Nick and the red-armored giant—it was hard to miss seeing Sato in the early-afternoon sunlight—and that dozen or so turned and started firing.

Sato used his left hand to reach across his big belly, pull the heavy Browning Hi-Power MK IV semiautomatic pistol from his clip, and then crouched as he began firing. Nick shot three of the distant figures through their visors and dropped them before the others started throwing themselves down and scattering, still returning heavy fire. Left-handed, Sato dropped three who were slow in finding cover.

“Got any…?” gasped Nick. He turned and looked around the corner of the bank and immediately jerked his head back as automatic-weapons fire churned up the dirt and roots there. There were at least twenty-five hostiles with them in the riverbed now, approaching cautiously.

Nick threw himself on his belly, swung his head and both arms around the corner, and shot four of them. The others dropped to prone position or scattered, but most kept firing at him.

“… ideas?” finished Nick.

“Hai,” grunted Sato. The security chief’s face was blood-covered, although it seemed to be due to cuts from his head banging around in his helmet during the initial explosion.

That’s it? thought Nick. Hai? The dry riverbed was about a hundred feet across to the north side from which they’d come. There was no real cover out there except for one dead cottonwood trunk, washed downriver long ago, possibly in the spring when there’d been enough water here to wash things downriver. But it was a small-diameter tree trunk, rotten at its core, and Nick knew that slugs from the attackers’ assault rifles would go right through it.

Still, it would be harder to be flanked out there. Nick pointed to the fallen tree, grabbed the heavy duffel, and crouched in preparation for the sprint. Odds were excellent that he’d be hit before he got to the trunk.

“No,” grunted Sato. “Stay here, Bottom-san. Fight.”

“That’s the fucking plan?” demanded Nick. He’d meant to put a little irony in the statement—devil-may-care irony if possible, Beau Geste irony—but it came out as a pathetic combination of squeak and whine and squeal.

More infantry were dropping down in front of them, ignoring the last of the ammo cooking off from the burning Oshkosh. The attackers were aiming more carefully now, their slugs kicking up dirt all around Sato and Nick. For some reason, Nick found himself more worried about the guys behind him around the corner of the riverbank. Nick realized that it had always been the unseen that scared him most, not the obvious threat.

Nick handed an egg crate of grenades to Sato and then tugged the bulky Negev-Galil flechette sweeper from the duffel bag. It felt to Nick like it took him forever to rummage around in the bottom of the bag before he came up with the nylon strip holding the five heavy flechette mags. He tugged the first one out, slapped it in, and stood, leaning around the edge of the bank.

There were about two dozen armored men—or men and women—less than sixty feet from him with more unfriendlies milling on the bank above. All of them started shooting at him at once. One of the taller forms shot Nick square in the chest, but not before Nick triggered the ugly Negev-Galil.

About thirty thousand mini-flechettes swept the area clear, turning the walking figures into bloody rags, tatters, and shreds of armor and shattered visor. One pair of legs stood alone and separate, no longer connected to groin or hip. One of those legs fell over but the other remained standing.

Nick fell back against the bank. He couldn’t breathe.

“Are you all right, Bottom-san?” asked Sato. The chief had thrown the grenades Nick had handed him and was now firing—clumsily—the old M4A1, its archaic grenade launcher working hotly. When that was out, he dropped it into the dirt and lifted his Browning MK IV pistol and fired it left-handed. Running figures went down and most did not get back up.

“Urrrr,” gasped Nick. The round hadn’t penetrated his armor but he was pretty sure that he had a second broken rib somewhere around his breastbone. He slapped in the second flechette box, extended the ugly weapon around the edge of the bank hajji-style, and fired off another cloud of flechettes, moving the blocky muzzle even as he fired. It was like swinging a fire hose.

With his visor open now, he could hear the diesel throb and tread clank of an approaching tank. It struck Nick with something less than high humor that the tank was probably irrelevant—more infantry were dropping into the riverbed and firing down from the banks every second. Four of them ran for the very cottonwood trunk that Nick had lusted after. By the time the tank got here, Nick guessed, it’d all be over.

Sato shot two of the troopers but the other two made the cover and began returning fire. Two slugs hit Sato’s armor and knocked him back against the sandy bank where Nick had slapped in another magazine for his 9mm Glock and was firing it at someone peeking down at them from above. One of the bodies, shot under the chin up through the too-loose helmet, fell next to Sato.

With a sinking feeling, Nick realized that Sato was praying, his lips moving rapidly. Nick vaguely wondered if it was a Buddhist prayer. No, wait, Nakamura, Sato’s boss, was a rare Catholic, so maybe Sato’d had to convert to…

Who gives a damn? thought Nick as two brave figures came hurtling around the curve in the bank, assault rifles barking at their hips.

Nick shot both through the visor and then again when they’d gone down, but not before at least one slug caught him in the upper shoulder and spun him around and propelled him face-first into the sandy bank. That shoulder and part of his chest felt numb. Had the round penetrated?

“Lie down, Bottom-san!” shouted Sato.

“What!?”

Sato dropped his weapon, reached out as quickly as a cobra-strike with his working left hand, grabbed Nick by the loose ridge of armor above his numb chest, and dragged the taller man prone onto the riverbed. Dozens of the enemy infantry were rushing them from the east and Nick could hear footsteps and shouts coming from just around the bend in the bank.

Boxcar Two, the second Oshkosh, roared under the highway bridge and around the bend. Nick heard what sounded like a chainsaw working at high speed and knew it to be a mini-gun mounted in the top turret bubble. The line of impacting slugs was about three feet high and it literally cut openings through the infantry rushing at them from the east, raised and knocked down more of the enemy from atop the riverbank.

The two troopers who’d run for the cottonwood popped up and began firing at the Oshkosh. The turret whirred, the mini-gun chain-rattled, and both the fallen tree trunk and the standing troopers exploded into random chunks.

The Oshkosh roared past them, the turret whirred back, and Sato’s ninja called Bill began pouring volumes of fire into the troopers who’d bunched up in the sand cove. Nick peeked around the corner in time to see the survivors scrambling and clawing up and over the riverbank, running back toward the south.

Sato set his helmet against Nick’s. “The man you know as Bill is really Daigorou Okada, the man you know as Willy’s real name is Mutsumi Ōta, Toby’s real name is…”

“Introductions later!” shouted Nick. He grabbed the bulky duffel with one hand and Sato with the other, and the two men began staggering and limping toward the stopped Oshkosh. The big rear hatch opened and Toby stood there pouring out streams of flechettes from a Japanese-built assault sweeper as Nick threw the bag in first, then shoved Sato in, and then started clambering in himself.

A round caught him between the shoulder blades, driving him face-first into the piles of spent cartridges littering the metal floor of the Oshkosh.

Toby slammed the hatch shut and the rounds banging and pounding against it sounded like a hailstorm.

Sato was on his knees, inspecting Nick’s back. “Didn’t penetrate!” he shouted over the whine-howl of the M-ATV’s turbines. Nick caught a glimpse of the front monitors and realized that they were heading back the way the Oshkosh had come, east under the highway bridge and then a bend to the northeast.

“You weren’t praying,” Nick gasped to Sato. “You were calling in Boxcar Two.”

Sato stared at him without expression.

One of the video feeds was obviously from a camera set up on the south bank and others were from the mini-drones buzzing around. The three tanks were clearly visible and not more than a hundred meters from the south bank.

Nick followed Sato and staggered forward past gunner Daigorou Okada’s legs in the swiveling top mount. It was a dangerous place to linger with thousands of red-hot mini-gun cartridges flying out and down, not all of them landing in the asbestos spent-sack.

Nick leaned against the back of Toby’s passenger-side crash-couch.

“Shinta Ishii,” said Sato, completing introductions of the living.

Nick nodded recognition and thanks. Mutsumi Ōta behind the wheel—it was actually a console-mounted omni-controller of the kind found in hydrogen-powered Lexuses—was turning them toward the south riverbank, toward which, the monitors showed, were advancing two or three hundred infantry and the three tanks.

“Can this Oshkosh take those tanks?” Nick asked no one in particular. With broken ribs and impact bruises fore and aft, he had to gasp out each word as he exhaled painfully.

“No,” said Shinta Ishii from where he was busy tapping at a foldout dashboard keyboard that Nick hadn’t even noticed when he was in the right-hand seat. “Not even one of those.”

“TOW?” queried Nick. It sounded and felt like a prayer.

Sato shook his head. “This kind of battle tank”—he jerked his left thumb toward the monitor showing a tank from an aerial drone’s point of view—has antimissile countermeasures. We have no chance against any of them.”

“Air cover?” asked Nick. “Some sort of armed drone or a jet from Colorado or…” Or any sort of deus ex machina? thought Nick. He’d learned that literary term from Dara. A god from a machine. Being lowered, often in a basket, to rescues the heroes and heroines from a situation they couldn’t get themselves out of. Bad form in fiction and theater, Dara had taught him. But Nick thought it was definitely time for a deus ex machina. Maybe two or three.

“No air support, Bottom-san,” said Mutsumi Ōta as he drove the Oshkosh back toward the southern riverbank. Back toward the enemy troops and tanks.

“Surrender?” gasped Nick. It wasn’t so much a question as it was a very, very strong suggestion.

“Leave the one mini-drone in place and use all three of its lasers to light up the tanks,” Sato said softly to the man sitting in the crash chair that Nick was leaning against so he wouldn’t fall down. “Bring the others back out of range.”

“Hai, Sato-san,” said Shinta Ishii. He was rapidly typing commands on the keyboard.

Nick peeked at the screen, but all the words were in kanji or hiragana or whatever they called their script.

“Super lasers?” asked Nick, his voice sounding pathetic even to himself. “Weapons lasers on your mini-drones?”

“Oh, no, Bottom-san,” said Mutsumi Ōta as he brought the Oshkosh to a stop against the steep south bank and parked it there. “Just regular lasers. Would not hurt a fly.”

“Final coordinates in?” asked Sato.

“Hai,” barked Shinta Ishii. “Do no kid ga kanry moe te i masu. J kid wo nokoshi kuma.”

Nick, who’d taken twelve weeks of instruction in conversational Japanese with Dara during his push for detective first grade nine years ago, didn’t understand a word of what he’d just heard.

“Gee-bear t chaku jikan?” barked Sato.

Gee-bear? thought Nick.

“Thirty-eight seconds,” said Shinta Ishii, obviously using English for Nick’s benefit.

Above them, the turret whirred and Daigorou Okada’s mini-gun opened up again and hot, spent cartridges started raining down on the steel floor. Nick could see through four of the monitors that the line of infantry was almost to the south riverbank, the tanks less than a hundred meters behind. The tanks were also accompanied by infantry. The figures in the front were visibly firing on the single mini-drone video feed and now Nick could hear the bullets pinging against the Oshkosh’s outer skin. Slugs hitting the turret above had a slightly more resonant sound.

“Shouldn’t we at least go out and… I don’t know…,” said Nick. “Fight?”

Sato put his strong left hand on Nick’s wrist and said nothing. The pinging on the outer hull became a solid roar. Nick thought of a time when he was a kid and he and his father had run to a farmer’s tin-roofed shed during a violent downpour. This was louder.

The mini-gun above them fell silent. “Out of ammunition, Sato-san,” announced Daigorou Okada.

“Ten seconds,” Shinta Ishii said softly from in front of Nick. The man sat back deeper in his crash chair and tugged at the already tight five-point harnesses holding him in. Okada dropped down from his perch and Nick heard and saw a metal panel sealing off the top gun bubble. Okada pulled down a jump seat and harnessed himself into it.

Are we going somewhere? wondered Nick with a child’s sense of hope. He watched on the single working monitor as six or eight of the infantry jumped from the riverbank to the top of the Oshkosh, weapons firing as they sought out any aperture. Fifty more were rushing to join them. The enemy tanks rumbled closer.

Suddenly Sato moved up behind Nick as if to hug him, despite the shattered arm hanging limp at his side, and the big man shoved his huge and armored body tight, pressing Nick against the crash-couch ahead of him.

Later, Nick swore that he’d caught a glimpse of them via the single drone monitor and the last working Oshkosh external cam. Six slim shapes—about the size and configuration of telephone poles—hurtling down from orbit at eight times the speed of sound.

The mini-drone turning on a widening gyre a thousand feet above them that was painting the three tanks with its laser beams was vaporized in the first seconds of the blast, but the more distant drones opened their channels and sent images—recorded for later study—of the three mushroom clouds rising and converging into one great mushroom cloud that folded and unfolded and then refolded itself toward the stratosphere.

The tanks were vaporized in an instant. The hundreds of infantrymen and -women, anyone standing within a radius of two kilometers of the three targeted and simultaneously struck tanks, were caught up in the shockwave and blast front of disturbed air and thrown a hundred meters or more through the dust-filled sky. None appeared to have survived.

The riverbank collapsed in on and completely buried the Oshkosh.

“On one hundred percent internal air,” came a computer voice that Nick hadn’t heard before.

The vibrations and tremors were very strong. If it hadn’t been for Sato pressing him against the crash-couch, it was quite possible that he would have rattled around the inside of the truck like a BB in a shaken steel can.

“Holy shit,” whispered Nick when the up-and-down oscillations had stopped and Mutsumi Ōta had fired up the Oshkosh’s big twin turbines and driven them out of the landslide.

Ōta guided them up the rough ramp onto the scorched area atop the bank and stopped, engines idling. Daigorou Okada had opened the top turret and clambered back up, carrying heavy magazines for the mini-gun, but there was no firing.

Nick stared at the monitors as more of the mini-drones moved back within range. The scorched area was an almost perfect circle extending across the riverbed and another mile or so to the north and up the river valley cliffs almost two miles to the south.

The doors opened and the driver, Mutsumi Ōta, and Shinta Ishii had attached their PEAPs and climbed out, heading back down the bank toward the still-burning first Oshkosh.

“Please to lower visor and activate PEAP,” Sato said softly. “The air is very full of particles. We must retrieve Joe’s body from our vehicle. His real name was Genshirou Itō and though there will not be much left after the fire, we must find what we can. We shall send others back for a more complete job before sending Itō-san’s ashes back to Nippon for a hero’s burial. We honor our dead.”

Nick nodded and closed his visor with a shaking hand. His hands were too unsteady to activate the PEAP comm, so Sato helped. Then the security chief pushed a button and the big rear door swung out and clanged down. Nick followed Sato down the ramp onto earth so fried that it snapped and crackled under their boots. Not even a blade of grass had survived the flames.

“Nukes?” managed Nick.

“Ahh, no,” said Sato over their personal comm. “A purely hyperkinetic weapon. From orbit, you see. Many hundreds waiting for the call. Six used here. No warheads. No radioactivity, of course. Merely speed turned into energy. Much energy.”

“I didn’t know such things existed,” whispered Nick. They were walking toward the first Oshkosh now. Ōta and Ishii were using large foam fire extinguishers from the surviving Oshkosh to fight the flames. Behind Sato and Nick, the bubble turret whirred as Daigorou Okada covered them.

“No,” agreed Sato, using his good arm to pull another fire extinguisher from an outside locker and handing it one-handed to Nick before he took another for himself.

“That arm’s in terrible shape,” said Nick. “You’ll need to get airlifted to a surgeon. Soon.”

Sato smiled and shook his head. “Okada-san is a very good medic, as was Genshirou Itō. There are adequate painkillers and medical materials aboard this Oshkosh for Okada-san to set the worst of the break and to allow me to travel the last three or four hours to Santa Fe in relative comfort.”

Before they went down the bank into the riverbed, Nick looked south and then all around again at the miles of devastation. Ten thousand small fires still burned. It seemed as if the ground were on fire.

“What do you call this weapon?” he asked.

Sato smiled. “The man who came up with the idea for such an enhanced, self-guided kinetic kill weapon—especially designed to penetrate deep bunkers—called them OWL.”

“Owl?” repeated Nick.

“Orbital Warhead Lancet. Very simple. Very useful for such small-unit fighting when regular air support is not available. It is used occasionally in China, not often. It is very expensive.”

“And these six OWLs came from Mr. Nakamura’s private stock.”

“Hai.” Sato grinned, although Nick was certain that the man must be in terrible pain. “We do not call these kinetic weapons OWLs, you see. But, rather, gee-bears.”

Nick remembered hearing the odd word. “ ‘Gee’ as in gravity, high-boost, acceleration, that sort of thing?”

“Yes,” nodded Sato, as if enjoying some private joke. “But also ‘Gee’ as in the first letter of the first name of the American skiffy writer who came up with the idea for this particular technology. We like to honor creators when we can.”

“Skiffy writer,” repeated Nick. S-c-i-hyphen-f-i.

Sato quit smiling. “It was important, Bottom-san, that we get you to your interview tomorrow with Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev. I promised Mr. Nakamura that you would be there.”

As they began walking down the crumbled riverbank toward the burning Oshkosh, Nick was wondering how they were going to get the pieces of Joe’s charred and crumbling body out of that mess. Or if they’d find his head.

“This Don Khozh-Ahmed Noukhaev had better be worth it,” he muttered.

“Yes,” Sato agreed grimly. “He had better be worth it.”