is because of a presidential order. Ain't that a kick in the ass? Everybody was just ready to let Joe Snuffy die like a dog in a ditch. I guess they figured there weren't going to be any medals and promotions out of this one.'
'You're kidding. How the hell did they expect us to evacuate?'
The master sergeant laughed, and the sound of it echoed through the concrete shelter. 'The Air Force weenies… wanted us to book charter flights. They said it would be more cost effective. Of course, I guess they were a little gun-shy after losing twenty billion dollars worth of B-2s to a handful of cowboys. Like the Navy guys said, you got to protect and preserve the force.'
Consciously steadying his hand, Taylor turned off the flow of water. As he stepped out of the narrow booth, rubbing himself hard with the towel, trying to wipe away the past four months in their entirety, the master sergeant looked him up and down and shook his head.
'Looks like you could use a good meal, Captain.'
Taylor left for the Azores quarantine site on an evac run for those not yet ill with RD. Sitting in an ill-fitting special-issue uniform, with the freshly sterilized cavalry guidon in his breast pocket, he felt the greatest relief of his life as the shrieking Air Force plane lifted away from the African continent. He scanned old copies of
In the poorly lit belly of the transport, he learned that the nuclear strike on Pretoria had been sufficient to force a South African withdrawal. The South Africans had overplayed their hand, after all. But the U.S. had lost far more than it gained. The world condemned the U.S. action. There was no sympathy, even from the nation's closest allies. Instead, the event gave furious impetus to the movement to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Japanese used the strike as a pretext to launch a trade war of unprecedented scale. Over the decades, the Japanese had slowly forced the United States and even the European Union out of key markets, such as electronics and high- grade machine tools, and now they announced that they would no longer trade with any nation that continued to trade with the United States. It was, Tokyo said, a moral issue. The Japanese did allow that they would continue to sell
The American government found itself helpless. There were no made-in-the-U.S. A. replacements for many of the items that made a neotechnological society function, and without Japanese spare parts, large sectors of the U.S. economy would have ground to a halt within weeks. Warfare suddenly had parameters that the military could not penetrate with radar-evading bombers or vast fleets. Even the military machine itself had come to rely on crucial components originally designed in the U.S.A. but improved and produced more efficiently in Japan.
The news media blustered about an economic Pearl Harbor, running their newspapers on state-of-the-art presses built in Yokohama, or broadcasting their commentaries over Japanese hardware to high-definition television sets made by Panasonic, Toshiba, and Hitachi. There seemed little hope for a second Battle of Midway in the near future. Certainly, even a strategic military response was out of the question, not only due to the debacle suffered by U.S. arms in Africa and the anti-U.S. sentiment prevailing worldwide, but also because the Japanese home islands' Space and Atmospheric Defense Complex — SAD-C — was far more sophisticated than were the partially deployed U.S. space defenses, which had both inspired and provided the initial technology for the Japanese effort.
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
