my KIA list.
Pain and fatigue racked my body. My blood pumped slow as lead.
This was getting old. Counting my dream, this was the second time I’d endured this particular session of PT. Not just PT, iso push-ups. In training they taught us that even when you’re in excruciating pain- especially when you’re in pain-the best thing to do was to find some sort of distraction, something else to focus on other than the burning in your muscles and the sweat streaking down your forehead. Careful not to move my head, I looked around out of the corner of one eye.
The American journalist was snapping pictures, a visitor’s pass dangling from his neck. Say cheese! He was a brawny fellow. You could line him up with any of those U.S. Special Forces guys and you’d never know the difference. He’d look more at home on a battlefield than I would, that’s for sure.
I got the same vibe from those Special Forces guys that I got from Sergeant Ferrell. Pain and suffering were old friends to men like them. They walked up to the face of danger, smiled, and asked what took him so long to get there. They were in a whole ’nother league from a recruit like me.
In the middle of the testosterone display, the lone woman stuck out like a sore pinky. She was a tiny little thing standing off by herself a short distance from the rest of the squad. Seeing her there beside the rest of her super-sized squad, something seemed out of whack.
Anne of Green Gables Goes to War.
I figure the book would be a spin-off set around World War I. Mongolia makes a land grab, and there’s Anne, machine gun tucked daintily under one arm. Her hair was the color of rusted steel, faded to a dull red. Some redheads conjured up images of blood, fire, deeds of valor. Not her. If it weren’t for the sand-colored shirt she was wearing, she’d have looked like some kid who’d come to the base on a field trip and gotten herself lost.
The others were fanned out around this girl who barely came up to their chests like awed, medieval peasants gawking at nobility.
Suddenly it hit me. That’s Rita!
It had to be. It was the only way to explain how this woman, who couldn’t have looked less like a Jacket jockey if she had been wearing a ball gown, was in the company of the spec ops. Most women who suited up looked like some sort of cross between a gorilla and an uglier gorilla. They were the only ones who could cut it on the front lines in the Armored Infantry.
Rita Vrataski was the most famous soldier in the world. Back when I signed up for the UDF, you couldn’t go a day without seeing the news feeds sing her praises. Stories titled “A Legendary Commando,” “Valkyrie Incarnate,” that sort of thing. I’d even heard Hollywood was gonna make a movie about her, but I was already in the UDF by the time it came out, so I never saw it.
About half of all the Mimic kills humanity had ever made could be attributed to battles her squad had fought in. In less than three years, they’d slaughtered as many Mimics as the whole UDF put together had in the twenty years before. Rita was a savior descended from on high to help turn the odds in this endless, losing battle.
That’s what they said, anyway.
We all figured she was part of some propaganda squad they were using to make inroads into enemy territory. A front for some secret weapon or new strategy that really deserved the credit. Sixty percent of soldiers were men. That figure shot up to 85 percent when you started talking about the Jacket jockeys who were out bleeding on the front lines. After twenty years fighting an enemy whose identity we didn’t even know, losing ground day by day, we grunts didn’t need another muscle-bound savior who grunted and sweat and had hamburger for brains just like we did. Yeah, if it were me calling the shots in the General Staff Office, I’d have picked a woman too.
Wherever the U.S. Spec Ops were deployed, morale soared. The UDF had been beaten to the cliff’s edge, but they were finally able to start moving back from the brink. After finishing the war in North America, they moved on to Europe and then North Africa. Now they’d come to Japan, where the enemy was knocking on the door of the main island of Honshu.
The Americans called Rita the Full Metal Bitch, or sometimes just Queen Bitch. When no one was listening, we called her Mad Wargarita.
Rita’s Jacket was as red as the rising sun. She thumbed her nose at the lab coats who’d spent sleepless months refining the Jackets’ polymer paint to absorb every last radar wave possible. Her suit was gunmetal red- no, more than that, it glowed. In the dark it would catch the faintest light, smoldering crimson. Was she crazy? Probably.
Behind her back they said she painted her suit with the blood of her squad. When you stand out like that on the battlefield, you tend to draw more than your share of enemy fire. Others said she’d stop at nothing to make her squad look good, that she even took cover behind a fellow soldier once. If she had a bad headache, she’d go apeshit, killing friend and foe alike. And yet not a single enemy round had ever so much as grazed her Jacket. She could walk into any hell and come back unscathed. They had a million stories.
Your rank and file soldier ended up with a lot of time on his hands, and listening to that sort of talk, passing it on, embellishing it-that was just the sort of thing he needed to kill time and to keep the subject off dead comrades. Rita had been a Jacket jockey eating and sleeping on the same base as me, but I’d never seen her face until that moment. We might have resented the special treatment she got, if we’d had the chance to think about it.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the line of her hair-she wore it short-as it bobbed in the wind. There was a graceful balance to her features. You might even have called her beautiful. She had a thin nose, a sharp chin. Her neck was long and white where most Jacket jockeys didn’t even have necks. Her chest, however, was completely flat, at odds with the images of Caucasian women you saw plastered on the walls of every barracks cell. Not that it bothered me.
Whoever had looked at her and thought up the name Full Metal Bitch needed to have his head checked. She was closer to a puppy than a bitch. I suppose even in a litter of pit bulls there’s room for one sweet one in the bunch.
If, in my dream, the shell of that red Jacket had popped open and she’d climbed out, I would have shit my bunk. I’d seen her face and Jacket plenty on the news feeds, but they never gave you a good idea of what she really looked like in person. I had always pictured Rita Vrataski as tall and ruthless, with a knockout body and an air of total self-confidence.
Then our eyes met.
I looked away immediately, but it was already too late. She started walking toward me. She moved with purpose, one foot planted firmly on the ground before the other moved-a relentless, unstoppable force. But her steps were small, the net result being a harried, flustered gait. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone walk quite like that before.
C’mon, don’t do this to me. I can’t even move. Give a guy a break and get lost, would ya? Go on. Get!
Rita stopped.
The muscles in my arms started to tremble. Then, purposefully, she walked away. Somehow she’d heard my prayer, making a ninety-degree turn right in front of me and heading toward the brigadier general where he sat under the tent. She snapped a perfunctory salute. Not so sloppy as to be insulting, but not so stiff you could hear anything cracking, either. A fitting salute for the Full Metal Bitch.
The brigadier general cast a doubtful glance at Rita. Rita was a sergeant major. In the military hierarchy, the difference between a brigadier general and a sergeant major was about the same as the difference between a four-course meal at a snooty restaurant and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Recruits like me were strictly fast food, complete with an oversized side of fries. But it wasn’t that simple. It never was. Rita was U.S. military, the linchpin of the upcoming operation, and one of the most important soldiers on the face of the planet. Rank aside, it was hard to say which one of them really held more power.
Rita stood in silence. The brigadier general was the first to speak.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Sir, would it be possible for me to join the PT, sir.”
The same high voice from my dream, speaking in perfectly intoned Burst.
“You have a major operation coming up tomorrow.”
“So do they, sir. My squad has never participated in this form of PT, sir. I believe my participation could be
