The boy stared at Meredith in utter incomprehension, as though the lieutenant had begun speaking in a foreign language.
Meredith did not know what to do. No one had prepared him for this. Even at the worst of times in his earlier experience, he had been able to maintain control of the situation. But now nothing that he did seemed to make a difference. He low-crawled forward around the carryall, to where his driver lay. The man was dead. Punctured by a gratuitous number of rounds, as though one of the snipers had been using him for target practice. Meredith tried to drag the torso back behind the vehicle. But the action only brought a welter of bullets in response. Meredith threw himself back into the tiny safety zone behind the carryall and between the trucks.
He caught an infuriating mental glimpse of himself. Trapped. Cowering. While street punks made a fool of him. In his anger, he raised himself and fired several rounds in the approximate direction from which the last wave of bullets had come. But the action only made him feel more foolish and impotent.
When he looked around, the rifleman who had been weeping under the truck was gone. In the right direction, Meredith hoped. He already had enough of his men on his conscience.
The quality of his anger changed. The bluster disappeared, and he felt very cold. His fear, too, seemed to change, turning almost into a positive force, into an energy that could be directed by a strong will.
Without making a conscious decision, he began to maneuver. Forward. Working up the far side of the trucks, from tire to tire.
At the first truck cab, he reached up and yanked at the door.
Locked.
"For God's sake, get out of there. Come on," Meredith yelled.
A muffled voice from within the cab told Meredith very graphically what he could do with himself.
Meredith ran for the next truck. He could hear the sound of his own men firing to his rear now, coming up in support, making the drill work.
A flash of colored clothing. Weapon. Weapon. A boy with a machine pistol. His destination was the same as Meredith's — the cab of the truck. There was an instant's startled pause as the enemies took stock of each other.
Meredith saw his enemy with superb clarity, in unforgettable detail. A red, green, and black knitted beret. Flash jacket and jewelry. Dark satin pants. And a short, angular weapon, its muzzle climbing toward a target. Vivid, living, complex, intelligent eyes.
Meredith fired first. By an instant. He hit his target this time, and he kept on firing as the boy went down. His enemy's fire buried itself in a pair of tires, ripping them up, exploding them. The boy fell awkwardly, hitting the ground in a position that looked more painful than the gunshots could have been. Unsure of himself, Meredith huddled by a fender, breathing like an excited animal.
The huge, unmistakable sound of helicopters swelled over the broken city. The closer sound of his men working their way forward, seizing control of the street, began to dominate the scene. He could even hear them shouting now, calling out orders, employing the urban combat drills whose repetitive practice they so hated.
The firing and hubbub of voices from the front of the column dropped off distinctly. The gang members were going to ground.
Pistol extended before him, Meredith began to step toward the twisted, restless figure of the boy he had just shot. His opponent's automatic weapon lay safely out of reach now, but Meredith's trigger finger had molded to his pistol. He could not seem to get enough breath, and he felt his nostrils flaring.
He guessed the boy's age at somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. It was hard to tell through the grimacing that twisted the boy's features.
As Meredith approached, his opponent seemed to calm. The skin around his eyes relaxed slightly, and he stared up at the tall man in uniform who had just shattered the order of his body. At first Meredith did not think that the eyes were fully sentient. But they slowly focused. On the winner in the two-man contest.
The boy glared up into Meredith's face, breathing pink spittle. Then he narrowed his focus, locking his eyes on Meredith's own, holding them prisoner even as his chest heaved and his limbs seized up, then failed.
"Tool," he said to Meredith, in a voice of undamaged clarity. "You… think you're a big man…" His lips curled in disgust. "You're… nothing but a fucking tool."
Meredith lowered his pistol, ashamed of his fear, watching as the boy's chain-covered chest dueled with gravity. There were no words. Only the hard physical reality of asphalt, concrete, steel, broken glass.
Flesh and blood.
The boy's chest filled massively, as though he were readying himself to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Then the air escaped, accompanied by a sound more animal than human. The lungs did not fill up again.
"Medic," Meredith screamed. "Medic."
The final tally was six soldiers dead and three wounded, five civilians dead and a dozen wounded, and four identifiable gang members killed in the firefight. The Army cordon-and-sweep operation rounded up another fourteen suspected gang members in building-to-building searches — a task the soldiers hated not only because of the danger of an ambush but also because they were as likely to discover rotting corpses as fugitives from the law. Few of the supposed gang members would survive. They would all go to the internment camp at Fort Irwin, to await a hearing. But the judicial calendar was hopelessly backlogged, and waves of disease broke over the crowded camp, preempting the rule of law.
That night Meredith went to see Major Taylor. The acting commander was never very hard to find. When he was not out on a mission, he literally lived in his office. Behind the desk, beside the national and unit flags, stood an old Army cot, with a sleeping bag rolled up tightly at one end. The closest the room came to disorder was the ever-present stack of books on the floor beside the cot. Whenever he had to see the commander, Meredith's eyes habitually went to the litter of books, curious as to what this hard, unusual man might read.
Meredith knocked on the door more briskly than usual, and at the command to enter, he marched firmly forward, relishing the ache in his banged-up knee, and stopped three paces in front of Taylor's desk. He came to attention, saluted, and said:
"Sir, First Lieutenant Meredith requests permission to speak with the squadron commander."
Taylor looked up from the computer over which he had been laboring, surprised at the formality of tone. For a few seconds, his eyes considered the artificially erect young man in front of his desk. Then he spoke, in a disappointingly casual tone:
"Relax for a minute, Merry. Let me work my way out of this program."
With no further acknowledgment of Meredith's presence, of the lieutenant's swollen intensity, Taylor turned back to his screen and keyboard.
Meredith moved to a solemn parade-rest position. But the stiffness of it only made him feel absurd now. He soon softened into a routine at-ease posture, eyes wandering.
He felt angry that Taylor had not automatically intuited the seriousness of his intent, that the commander had not paid him the proper attention.
Taylor's desk was unusually cluttered today. Meredith noticed that a stack of mail remained to be opened. The squadron S-3 had been evacuated, sick with RD, and the executive officer's position had gone unfilled for months. Meredith felt, in passing, that he might not have a right to take up any more of Taylor's time. As it was, the man slept little, and even the scars on his face could not hide the chronic black circles the major wore.