The U.S. received the blame for everything, including the spread of Runciman's disease. Smug at America's humiliation, the European Union quickly forgot its initial support for the U.S. intervention. There was a sense that the Americans were finally getting what they deserved, and the Europeans congratulated themselves on having effectively dismantled the North Atlantic alliance back in the nineties. War, the Europeans declared, would no longer solve anything, and they pointed to their own miniaturized military establishments — barely large enough for a good parade — as cost effective in a world where the crippled giants of both East and West were equally condemned as failures. The fundamental thrust of Euro-diplomacy seemed to be to reach a market partition of the world with Japan and the less-powerful Pacific economies, even if appeasing the Japanese required significant concessions. After all, the Europeans rationalized, their home market would remain untouched by the agreements, and, at heart, the European Community had become almost as introspective as China.
The only thing for which the Europeans were not ready was Runciman's disease — and the crippling effect it had on the world economy, as well as on indigenous European production. Only the Japanese managed to initiate truly effective quarantine measures, sealing off the home islands but continuing their export trade through a vast clearing house on the island of Okinawa.
Taylor paged through the casualty lists, unwilling to look at them too closely yet. And he could not bring himself to study the accounts of lost engagements in detail. Even as he read, his resistance was growing. He had survived— and his country would emerge from all of this as surely as he had emerged from the jungle.
He finally tossed the dog-eared papers aside when one headline summed up the depressing jumble of reports:
THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
He remembered little of the Azores. Just the monotony of the tent city where every evacuee had to remain for ninety days, moving from one "sterile" subsection to another, and his surprise to find that he had been presumed dead and that he had been posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on the strength of his last radio messages, which had been recorded by a U.S. Military Intelligence outfit. He remembered listening to the ranting of a fellow captain, a Military Intelligence officer named
Tucker Williams, who swore that he was going to live for sheer spite just so he could beat the service back into shape. Taylor half-listened to the man's tales of how Military Intelligence had corrupted itself in the quest for promotions—"We stressed the jobs that brought tangible rewards in peacetime, command, XO, operations officer, everything except the hard MI skills. And when the country needed us. we went to Africa with more commanders and XOs and S-3s than you could count, but without the analysts and collection managers and electronic warfare officers it takes to fight a war… and I swear to God I'm going to fix it, if I have to pistol whip my way up to the Chief of Staff…" Taylor was not certain what his own future would hold. He suspected he would remain in the military, although he was not sure now that he was the right man for it, in view of his battlefield failure. But he wanted, above all, a chance to prove himself, to get it right. To atone.
He did not worry about Runciman's disease, even when two other officers in his tent came down with it. He was convinced that he had some sort of natural resistance. If Africa had not cut him down, the Azores certainly were not going to get him. Then he briefly awoke to his own screams and abdominal pains of unimaginable ferocity. For the first few moments he managed to tell himself it was simply the multiple parasites for which the Army doctors were treating him. Then the truth bore down upon him, just before he lost consciousness.
Beyond the initial shock, he remembered virtually nothing of the disease. It was merely a long sleep from which he awoke with the face of a monster, where once the mirror had reflected an overgrown boy.
He was lucky, at least to the extent that his faculties were not impaired. The battery of tests given to all survivors revealed no deterioration in his mental capabilities whatsoever. Later the Army even offered him plastic surgery, as they did to every soldier who contracted RD in the line of duty. In the wake of the plague years, plastic surgeons developed fine techniques for repairing disease-damaged skin. The results were never perfect, but the work allowed you to sit in a restaurant without disturbing those around you.
Taylor never submitted to the treatment. In the years of our troubles he wore a lengthening personal history of medals and campaign ribbons on his chest. But when he was alone in front of the mirror, it was his face that was the true badge of his service, and of his failure on a clear morning in Africa.
2
First Lieutenant Howard "Merry" Meredith, child of privilege, stood among the dead. The medics had moved on, shrugging their shoulders, leaving him alone with the boy he had just killed. There were plenty of casualties, on both sides, although he did not yet know the exact number. Voices called out orders, as the Army began to put the street back in working order. But for Meredith the familiar commands and complaints were only background noise. Another helicopter thundered overhead, drawing its shadow over the scene, while a mounted loudspeaker instructed the local residents to remain indoors. The wash of air from the rotors picked over the loose fabric of the dead boy's clothing, as though sifting through his pockets. Well, there would be time for that too.
The color of blood was far softer than the tones of the boy's costume. The garish rejectionist uniform of the streets. Meredith would not even have worn those mock satins and gilt chains to a costume party. They were almost as foreign to him as the lush, loose prints worn by the Zairean women had been. He wanted no part of them.
And yet, they were a part of him. In a way that he could not understand, in a manner intellectually suspect, perhaps only learned, imagined, imposed. The dead boy's eyes appeared swollen and very white in their setting of black and deep maroon. Far from achieving any dignity in death, the boy looked like something out of an old, vulgar cartoon. The moronic minstrel who chanced upon a ghost.
No connection, Meredith insisted. It's bullshit.
It occurred to him that the light was very good. It was an off-season light, soft, yet very clear. The smoke of the firefight had withered away, and there was almost no smog in a city come to standstill. The slum was almost picturesque, when you discarded the baggage of your preconceptions. A poor neighborhood in some handsome southern place. Drowsing, in a very good light. It seemed unreasonable to Meredith that he could not see his way more clearly in a light of such quality.
Merry Meredith, child of privilege, born to confidence, handsome and markedly intelligent, fumbled to put his pistol back in its holster. He turned away from the boy he had killed and began to call out orders to his men. His voice had the brilliant confidence of an actor stepping back out onto the stage while his life crumbles behind the curtains.