The Descent Read online

  “My condition?” Beyond suffering and loss, he didn’t know. Human? “Never mind.”

  “Major.” Mac paused awkwardly. “What’s with the voice, Major?” They could hear it, too?

  Christie Chambers, M.D., was listening back at Base. “It’s the nitrogen,” she diagnosed. Of course, thought Branch. “Is there any way you can get back on oxygen, Elias? You must.”

  Feebly, Branch rummaged for Ramada’s oxygen mask, but it must have been torn away in the crash. “Up front,” he said dully.

  “Go up there,” Chambers told him.

  “Can’t,” said Branch. It meant moving again. Worse, it meant giving up Ramada’s helmet and losing his contact with the outside world. No, he would take the radio link over oxygen. Communication was information. Information was duty. Duty was salvation.

  “Are you injured?”

  He looked down at his limbs. Strange darts of electric color were scribbling along his thighs, and he realized that the beams of light were lasers. His gunships were painting the region, defining targets for their weapons systems.

  “Must find Ramada,” he said. “Can’t you see him on your scan?”

  Mac was fixed on him. “Are you mobile, sir?”

  What were they saying? Branch leaned against the ship, exhausted.

  “Are you able to walk, Major? Can you evacuate yourself from the region?”

  Branch judged himself. He judged the night. “Negative.”

  “Rest, Major. Stay put. A bio-chem team is on its way from Molly. We will insert them by cable. Help is on the way, sir.”

  “But Ramada …”

  “Not your concern, Major. We’ll find him. Maybe you should just sit down.”

  How could a man just disappear? Even dead, his body would go on emitting a heat signature for hours more. Branch raised his eyes and tried to find Ramada wedged in the trees. Maybe he’d been thrown into the funeral waters.

  Now another voice entered. “Echo Tango One, this is Base.” It was Master Sergeant Jefferson; Branch wanted to lay his head against that resonant bosom.

  “You are not alone,” Jefferson said. “Please be advised, Major. The KH-12 is showing unidentified movement to your north-northwest.”

  North-northwest? His instruments were dead. He had no compass, even. But Branch did not complain. “It’s Ramada,” he predicted confidently. Who else could it be out there? His navigator was alive after all.

  “Major,” cautioned Jefferson, “the image carries no combat tag. This is not confirmed friendly. Repeat, we have no idea who is approaching you.”

  “It’s Ramada,” Branch insisted. The navigator must have climbed from the broken craft to do what navigators do: orient.

  “Major.” Jefferson’s tone had changed. With all the world listening, this was just for him. “Get out of there.”

  Branch hung to the side of the wreckage. Get out of here? He could barely stand.

  Mac came on. “I’m picking it up now, too. Fifteen yards out. Coming straight for you. But where the fuck did he come from?”

  Branch looked over his shoulder.

  The dense atmosphere opened like a mirage. The interloper staggered out from the brush and trees.

  Lasers twitched frenetically across the figure’s chest, shoulders, and legs. The intruder looked netted with modern art.

  “I’ve got a lock,” Mac clipped.

  “Me too.” Teague’s monotone.

  “Roger that,” Schulbe said. It was like listening to sharks speak.

  “Say go, Major, he’s smoke.”

  “Disengage,” Branch radioed urgently, aghast at their lights. So this is how it is to be my enemy. “It’s Ramada. Don’t shoot.”

  “I’m vectoring more presence,” Master Sergeant Jefferson reported. “Two, four, five more heat images, two hundred meters southeast, coordinates Charlie Mike eight three …”

  Mac cut through. “You sure, Major? Be sure.”

  The lasers did not desist. They went on scrawling twitchy designs on the lost soldier. Even with the help of their neurotic doodles, even with the stark clarity of his nearness, Branch was not sure he wanted to be sure this was his navigator.

  He ascertained the man by what was left of him. His rejoicing died.

  “It’s him,” Branch said mournfully. “It is.”

  Except for his boots, Ramada was naked and bleeding from head to foot. He looked like a runaway slave, freshly flayed. Flesh trailed in rags from his ankles. Serbs? Branch wondered in awe.

  He remembered the mob in Mogadishu, the dead Rangers dragged behind Technicals. But that kind of savagery took time, and they couldn’t have crashed more than ten or fifteen minutes ago. The crash, he considered, perhaps the Plexiglas. What else could have shredded him like this?

  “Bobby,” he called softly.

  Roberto Ramada lifted his head.

  “No,” whispered Branch.

  “What’s going on down there, Major? Over.”

  “His eyes,” said Branch.

  They had taken his eyes.

  “You’re breaking up … Tango …”

  “Say again, say again …”

  “His eyes are gone.”

  “Say again, eyes are …”

  “The bastards took his eyes.”

  Schulbe: “His eyes?”

  Teague: “But why?”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  Then Base registered. “… new sighting, Echo Tango One. Do you copy …”

  Mac came on with his cyber-voice. “We’re picking up a new set of bogeys, Major. Five thermal shapes. On foot. They are closing on your position.”

  Branch barely heard him.

  Ramada stumbled as if burdened by their laser beams. Branch realized the truth.

  Ramada had tried to flee through the forest. But it was not Serbs who had turned him back. The forest itself had refused to let him pass.

  “Animals,” Branch murmured.

  “Say again, Major.”

  Wild animals. On the edge of the twenty-first century, Branch’s navigator had just been eaten by wild animals.

  The war had created wild animals out of domestic pets. It had freed beasts from zoos and circuses and sent them into the wilderness. Branch was not shocked by the presence of animals. The abandoned coal tunnels would have made an ideal niche for them. But what kind of animal took your eyes? Crows, perhaps, though not at night, not that Branch had ever heard of. Owls, maybe? But surely not while the prey was still alive?

  “Echo Tango One …”

  “Bobby,” Branch said again.

  Ramada turned toward his name and opened his mouth in reply. What emerged was more blood than vowel. His tongue, too, was gone.

  And now Branch saw the arm. Ramada’s left arm had been stripped of all flesh below the elbow. The forearm was fresh bone.

  The blinded navigator beseeched his savior. All that emerged was a mewl.

  “Echo Tango One, please be apprised …”

  Branch shucked the helmet and let it hang by the cord outside the cockpit. Mac and Master Sergeant Jefferson and Christie Chambers would have to wait. He had mercy to perform. If he did not bring Ramada in, the man would blunder on into the wilderness. He would drown in the mass grave, or the carnivores would take him down for good.

  Summoning all his Appalachian strength, Branch forced himself upright and pressed away from the ship. He stepped toward his poor navigator.

  “Everything will be okay,” he spoke to his friend. “Can you come closer to me?”

  Ramada was at the far edge of his sanity. But he responded. He turned in Branch’s direction. Forgetful, the hideous bone lifted to take Branch’s hand, even though it lacked a hand itself.

  Branch avoided the amputation and got one arm around Ramada’s waist and hoisted him closer. They both collapsed against the ruins of their helicopter.

  It was a blessing of sorts, Ramada’s horrible condition. Branch felt freed by comparison. Now he could dwell on wounds far worse than hi
s own. He laid the navigator across his lap and palmed away the gore and mud on his face.

  While he held his friend, Branch listened to the dangling helmet.

  “… One, Echo Tango One …” The mantra went on.

  He sat in the mud with his back against the ship, clutching his fallen angel: Pietà in the mire. Ramada’s limbs fell mercifully limp.

  “Major,” Jefferson sang in the near silence. “You are in danger. Do you copy?”

  “Branch.” Mac sounded violent and exhausted and full of worries high above. “They’re coming for you. If you can hear me, take cover. You must take cover.”

  They didn’t understand. Everything was okay now. He wanted to sleep.

  Mac went on yelling. “… thirty yards out. Can you see them?”

  If he could have reached the helmet radio, Branch would have asked them to calm down. Their commotion was agitating Ramada. He could hear them, obviously. The more they yelled, the more poor Ramada moaned and howled.

  “Hush, Bobby.” Branch stroked his bloody head.

  “Twenty yards out. Dead ahead, Major. Do you see them? Do you copy?”

  Branch indulged Mac. He squinted into the nitrous mirage enveloping them. It was little different from looking through a glass of water. Visibility was twenty feet, not yards, beyond which the forest stood warped and dreamlike. It made his head ache. He nearly gave up. Then he caught a movement.

  The motion was peripheral. It pronounced the depths, a bit of pallor in the dark woods. He glanced to the side, but it was gone.

  “They’re fanning out, Major. Hunter-killer style. If you copy, get away. Repeat, begin escape and evasion.”

  Ramada was grunting idiotically. Branch tried to quiet him, but the navigator was in a panic. He pushed Branch’s hand away and hooted fearfully at the dead forest.

  “Be quiet,” Branch whispered.

  “We see you on the infrared, Major. Presume you are unable to move. If you copy, get your ass down.”

  Ramada was going to give them away with his noise.

  Branch looked around and there, close at hand, his oxygen mask was dangling against the ship. Branch took it. He held it to Ramada’s face.

  It worked. Ramada quit hooting. He took several unabated pulls at the oxygen.

  Seizures followed a moment later.

  Later, people would not blame Branch for the death. Even after Army coroners determined that Ramada’s death was accidental, few believed Branch had not meant to kill him. Some felt it showed his compassion toward this mutilated victim. Others said it demonstrated a warrior’s self-preservation, that Branch had no choice under the circumstances.

  Ramada writhed in Branch’s embrace. The oxygen mask was ripped away. Ramada’s agony burst out in a howl.

  “It will be okay,” Branch told him, and pushed the mask back into place.

  Ramada’s spine arched. His cheeks sucked in and out. He clawed at Branch.

  Branch held on. He forced the oxygen into Ramada like it was morphine.

  Slowly, Ramada quit fighting. Branch was sure it signified sleep.

  Rain pattered against the Apache. Ramada went limp.

  Branch heard footsteps. The sound faded. He lifted the mask.

  Ramada was dead.

  In shock, Branch felt for a pulse.

  He shook the body, no longer in torment.

  “What have I done?” Branch asked aloud. He rocked the navigator in his arms.

  The helmet spoke in tongues. “… down … all around …”

  “Locked. Ready on …”

  “Major, forgive me … cover … on my command …”

  Master Sergeant Jefferson delivered last rites. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son …”

  The footsteps returned, too heavy for human, too fast.

  Branch looked up barely in time. The nitrous screen gashed open.

  He was wrong. What sprang from the mirage were not animals like any on earth. And yet he recognized them.

  “God,” he uttered, eyes wide.

  “Fire,” spoke Mac.

  Branch had known battle, but never like this. This was not combat. It was the end of time.

  The rain turned to metal. Their electric miniguns harrowed the earth, chopped under the rich soil, evaporated the leaves and mushrooms and roots. Trees fell in columns, like a castle breaking to pieces. His enemy turned to roadkill.

  The gunships drifted invisibly a kilometer out, and so for the first few seconds Branch saw the world turn inside out in complete silence. The ground boiled with bullets.

  The thunder caught up just as their rockets reached in.

  Darkness vanished utterly.

  No man was meant to survive such light.

  It went on for eternity.

  They found Branch still sitting against his shipwreck, holding his navigator across his lap. The metal skin was scorched black and hot to the touch. Like a shadow in reverse, the aluminum behind his back bore his pale outline. The metal was immaculate, protected by his flesh and spirit.

  After that, Branch was never the same.

  It is therefore necessary for

  us to marke diligently, and

  to espie out this felowe …

  beware of him, that he

  begyle us not.

  —RUDOLPH WALTHER,

  “Antichrist, that is to saye:

  A true report …” (1576)

  4

  PERINDE AC CADAVER

  JAVA

  1998

  It was a lovers’ meal, raspberries plucked from the summit slopes of Gunung Merapi, a lush volcano towering beneath the crescent moon. You would not know the old blind man was dying, his enthusiasm for the raspberries was so complete. No sugar, certainly not, or cream. De l’Orme’s joy in the ripe berries was a thing to see. Berry by berry, Santos kept replenishing the old man’s bowl from his own.

  De l’Orme paused, turned his head. “That would be him,” he said.

  Santos had heard nothing, but cleaned his fingers with a napkin. “Excuse me,” he said, and rose swiftly to open the door.

  He peered into the night. The electricity was out, and he had ordered a brazier to be lit upon the path. Seeing no one, he thought de l’Orme’s keen ears were wrong for a change. Then he saw the traveler.

  The man was bent before him on one knee in the darkness, wiping mud from his black shoes with a fistful of leaves. He had the large hands of a stonemason. His hair was white.

  “Please, come in,” Santos said. “Let me help.” But he did not offer a hand to assist.

  The old Jesuit noticed such things, the chasm between a word and a deed. He quit swabbing at the mud. “Ah, well,” he said, “I’m not done walking tonight anyway.”

  “Leave your shoes outside,” Santos insisted, then tried to change his scold into a generosity. “I will wake the boy to clean them.”

  The Jesuit said nothing, judging him. It made the young man more awkward. “He is a good boy.”

  “As you wish,” the Jesuit said. He gave his shoelace a tug, and the knot let go with a pop. He undid the other and stood.

  Santos stepped back, not expecting such height, or bones so raw and sturdy. With his rough angles and boxer’s jaw, the Jesuit looked built by a shipwright to withstand long voyages.

  “Thomas.” De l’Orme was standing in the penumbra of a whaler’s lamp, eyes shrouded behind small blackened spectacles. “You’re late. I was beginning to think the leopards must have gotten you. And now look, we’ve finished dinner without you.”

  Thomas advanced upon the spare banquet of fruits and vegetables and saw the tiny bones of a dove, the local delicacy. “My taxi broke down,” he explained. “The walk was longer than I expected.”

  “You must be exhausted. I would have sent Santos to the city for you, but you told me you knew Java.”

  Candles upon the sill backlit his bald skull with a buttery halo. Thomas heard a small, rattling noise at the window, like rupiah coins being thrown against the glass. Clos
er, he saw giant moths and sticklike insects, working furiously to get at the light.

  “It’s been a long time,” Thomas said.

  “A very long time.” De l’Orme smiled. “How many years? But now we are reunited.”

  Thomas looked about. It was a large room for a rural pastoran—the Dutch Catholic equivalent of a rectory—to offer a guest, even one as distinguished as de l’Orme. Thomas guessed one wall had been demolished to double de l’Orme’s workspace. Mildly surprised, he noted the charts and tools and books. Except for a well-polished colonial-era secretary desk bursting with papers, the room did not look like de l’Orme at all.

  There was the usual aggregation of temple statuary, fossils, and artifacts that every field ethnologist decorates “home” with. But beneath that, anchoring these bits and pieces of daily finds, was an organizing principle that displayed de l’Orme, the genius, as much as his subject matter. De l’Orme was not particularly self-effacing, but neither was he the sort to occupy one entire shelf with his published poems and two-volume memoir and another with his yardage of monographs on kinship, paleoteleology, ethnic medicine, botany, comparative religions, et cetera. Nor would he have arranged, shrinelike and alone upon the uppermost shelf, his infamous La Matière de le Coeur (The Matter of the Heart), his Marxist defense of Teilhard de Chardin’s Socialist Le Coeur de la Matière. At the Pope’s express demand, de Chardin had recanted, thus destroying his reputation among fellow scientists. De l’Orme had not recanted, forcing the Pope to expel his prodigal son into darkness. There could be only one explanation for this prideful show of works, Thomas decided: the lover. De l’Orme possibly did not know the books were set out.

  “Of course I would find you here, a heretic among priests,” Thomas chastised his old friend. He waved a hand toward Santos. “And in a state of sin. Or, tell me, is he one of us?”

  “You see?” de l’Orme addressed Santos with a laugh. “Blunt as pig iron, didn’t I say? But don’t let that fool you.”

  Santos was not mollified. “One of whom, if you please? One of you? Certainly not. I am a scientist.”

  So, thought Thomas, this proud fellow was not just another seeing-eye dog. De l’Orme had finally decided to take on a protégé. He searched the young man for a second impression, and it was little better than the first. He wore long hair and a goatee and a fresh white peasant shirt. There was not even dirt beneath his nails.