the airdrop, but there was nobody to unload them. The helicopters were ready for the attack, but there was nobody to fly them. It was no place to make a stand against the upcoming Arab attack.
If only a few more men were left! He’d done what he could with the few he had. He’d used the bulldozers to push a wall of earth around the encampment. That would slow them down a little. If only their preemptive attack had gone as planned! But who could have predicted the plague that had struck, out of nowhere, the night before the raid? No fatalities, yet—but the men were too weak to fight. Dizzy and disoriented, even the ones whose duties were flying computer screens were barely able to sit up, and the few who did were making mistakes that would be far too costly to allow them to strike as planned.
And of the few that seemed immune, his friend David had deserted, running off to hide in the desert. That was worst of all. He hated to think of David as a coward. David, who had been as brave as any man he’d known whey they’d both done their service. But David had lived too long in America, where enemies didn’t press in from every side, and time changes people. The strain of coming battle tells on all men.
In that hour after the devastating plague struck, when he realized that their attack would never happen, he’d sent a coded message back to headquarters, telling them to prepare plan Gabriel, the final defense of the homeland. Back in the heart of Israel, in a site so secret even he didn’t know its location, nuclear technicians would be putting together components prepared long ago. If the Arabs insisted on driving them into the sea, they would find that the price was high.
He nibbled on a cold ham sandwich. Army food was Kosher, but nobody inspected his personal pack, and the sandwich was his personal act of independence.
He checked for the hundredth time that the rocket launcher and grenades were ready. At his feet, in easy reach, were laid out the cartridge belts for the machine gun and two Galil automatics, his regular gun and a spare, with extra clips. When the attack came, he would at least take some of them with him, and save just one bullet for the end. Soon. He waited.
And waited.
The attack never came. The sun rose, and the day was clear and hot. By noon he knew that the attack would never come. By the will of a god he didn’t believe in, the plague—whatever it was—had hit the Arabs too.
Jake greeted David at the airport. There was no need to ask him how it had gone; they could both read it in the newspaper headlines. Emergency medical assistance was being rushed to both Saudi Arabia and Israel from all over the world, and a quarantine had been set up to prevent the mystery plague from spreading. David had exited just in time.
“Any problems?”
“A couple. It was tricky there for a while.” He shrugged. “Nothing major.”
“Was it really bad, out there?”
“Bad? Jake, you just couldn’t imagine! They thought it was doomsday! Everybody was certain that if virus nineteen didn’t kill them, the Arab attack would. I just wish I could have seen them when they finally found out that the Arabs had it, too.”
“I bet. Well, they’ll recover. After all, it’s only a reengineered version of the common cold, debilitating, but hardly fatal. Hey, don’t look gloomy—we did it! You know what? As of today, we’re the secret masters of the world. We should be celebrating.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t the one who had to betray his friends.”
“Betray, hell. We saved their lives and you know it.” Jake looked at his watch. “Half an hour at the earliest before Asim’s flight comes in.”
It would be good to see his grad student and swap some stories. Asim must have had just as hard a time of it, but he seemed to have succeeded in his mission as well as David had.
“So anyway,” Jake said, “how was your flight? Are you hungry? Maybe we should stop for a nice ham sandwich while we wait?”
Dave looked disgusted. “God no! I’ve been eating nothing but pork for the last week.”
Jake looked at him. “That seems rather over-overdoing it. Once a month is plenty.”
“Yeah, so you said. But I kept having nightmares that my immunity would fail.” Dave paused for a second and looked across at Jake. “Still, you know, it was rather a clever idea of yours to manufacture a virus whose growth is inhibited by a protein found only in pigs.”
Jake shrugged. “It’s my job to be clever. In a day or so some bright doctor will figure out the connection, and they’ll start synthesizing the protein. But what with both countries absolutely infested with reporters and doctors and International Red Cross teams, I doubt that either one will quite have the nerve to start a war. Not for a couple of years, anyway.”
“Still,” said Dave, “I don’t care if it is the only thing that gives immunity to number nineteen, I’d be happy if I never ate pork again in my life.”
“Suit yourself,” said Jake.
ROCKET BOY
Rocket Boy lived under the knot of ferroconcrete ribbons where the road from the spaceport joined the beltway that girdled the city. He’d made a kind of nest in a high ledge beneath the slope of an on-ramp, and although traffic rumbled overhead day and night, it was as cozy and safe as anywhere on the street because it could be reached only by squeezing through a kind of picket fence of squat, close-set columns. Even so, Rocket Boy clutched a knife improvised from the neck of a broken bottle while he slept in his nest of packing excelsior, charity blankets and cardboard. The first lesson he’d learned on the street was that you needed to carry a weapon with you at all times.
The ledge was divided into two by expansion rollers at the joint between ramp and road. The old man who lived on the other side of them had been a senior civil servant before the war. He’d been arrested and tortured after the enemy had taken the city, serving two years in solitary confinement before being released and discovering that his family had been killed when a rogue cruise missile had levelled their neighborhood. He and Rocket Boy had quickly come to an accommodation. The old man guarded Rocket Boys nest while he was out on the street selling cigarettes; Rocket Boy brought the old man hot dogs and soup from the charity workers who visited the intersection every night, distributing free food and blankets to the people who lived there.
More than two hundred people lived amongst the support columns and steep concrete slopes under the intersection, in old cars, cardboard boxes, and crude huts built from dead shopping carts and pallets and sheets of plastic tied down with twine and electrical wire. Some were refugees and war orphans like Rocket Boy; some were the city’s orphans, hard-eyed, feral runaways; some were men and women turned old before their time by drink, drugs, and madness. There was a little flock of shopping carts and other small mechs too, on the run from the wrecking gangs that roved the bombed-out industrial sector to the west. They stood all day in sunlight, trying to recharge their rotting batteries, and at night rolled about trying to be helpful and mostly getting in the way, like sick pets no one had the heart to put down.
The perimeter of the spaceport was only a mile away from the intersection. Once or twice a week, a heavy lifter took off from one of the massive blast pits, shaking the ground and splitting the sky with a long peal of thunder. The crazy people ran about beating their heads and tearing at their clothes, and the carts and mechs were disturbed too, racing about in circles like bugs suddenly exposed to light. At night, Rocket Boy liked to sit on an embankment that overlooked the spaceport, watching ordinary jets and ground-to-orbit shuttles glide through the white columns of searchlights towards runways outlined by mile-long traceries of red and green lights.
Occasionally, there was a night launch, the spacecraft small and sharp in crossing beams as it brewed clouds of steam and clouds of fire, rising achingly slowly at first, and then accelerating away in a rising curve, a spear of flame dwindling into the starry sky. Rocket Boy watched it go with a raw longing that ached like a fresh wound, the earth beneath him throbbing with the thunder of its engines.
Rocket Boy was sixteen. When he’d first come to live under the intersection, he’d called himself Vigo, the
