how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he'd imagined himself in, inevitably, he'd arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car's engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn't that Davis hadn't discharged his weapon; he'd served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he'd sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn't the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.
That was how the lieutenant had described their role. 'Our friends in the United States Marine Corps are going to play the Hammer,' he had said the day before. 'They will sweep into Fallujah from east and west and they will drive what hostiles they do not kill outright south, where we will be waiting to act as the Anvil. The poet Goethe said that you must be either hammer or anvil. We will be both, and we are going to crush the hostiles between us.'
After the lieutenant's presentation, Han had said, 'Great-so the jarheads have all the fun,' with what Davis judged a passable imitation of regret, a false sentiment fairly widely held. Davis had been sure, however, the certainty a ball of lead weighting his gut, that this time was going to be different. Part of it was that the lieutenant had known one of the contractors who'd been killed, incinerated, and strung up at the Saddam Bridge last April. Davis wasn't clear exactly how the men had been acquainted, or how well, but the lieutenant had made no secret of his displeasure at not being part of the first effort to (re)take the city in the weeks following the men's deaths. He had been-you couldn't say happy, exactly, at the failure of that campaign-but he was eager for what was shaping up to be a larger-scale operation. Though seven months gone, the deaths and dishonorings of his acquaintances had left the lieutenant an appetite for this mission. Enough to cause him to disobey his orders and charge into Fallujah's southern section? Davis didn't think so, but there was a reason the man still held the rank of lieutenant when his classmates and colleagues were well into their Captaincies.
The other reason for Davis 's conviction that, this time, something was on its way to him was a simple matter of odds. It wasn't possible-it was not possible that you could rack up this much good luck and not have a shitload of the bad bearing down on you like a SCUD on an anthill. A former altar boy, he was surprised at the variety of prayers he remembered-not just the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but the Apostles' Creed, the Memorare, and the Hail, Holy Queen. As he disembarked the Bradley and ran for the shelter of a desert-colored house, the sky an enormous, pale blue dome above him, Davis mumbled his way through his prayers with a fervency that would have pleased his mother and father no end. But even as his lips shaped the words, he had the strong sense that this was out of God's hands, under the control of one of those medieval demigoddesses, Dame Fortune or something.
Later, recovering first in Germany, then at Walter Reed, Davis had thought that walking patrol, riding convoy, standing checkpoint, he must have been saved from something truly awful each and every time, for the balance to be this steep.
III
10:01pm
'I take it stakes are out,' the lieutenant said.
'Sir,' Lee said, 'I unloaded half a clip easy into that sonovabitch, and I was as close to him as I am to you.'
'Closer,' Han said.
'The point is, he took a half-step backwards-maybe-before he tore my weapon out of my hands and fractured my skull with it.'
'That's what I'm saying,' the lieutenant said. 'I figure it has to be…what? Did you get your hands on some kind of major ordnance, Davis? An RPG? A Stinger? I'll love you like a son-hell, I'll adopt you as my own if you tell me you have a case of Stingers concealed under a bush somewhere. Those'll give the fucker a welcome he won't soon forget.'
'Fucking-A,' Han said.
'Nah,' Lee said. 'A crate of Willy Pete oughta just about do it. Serve his ass crispy-fried!'
Davis shook his head. 'No Stingers and no white phosphorous. Fire isn't going to do us any good.'
'How come?' Lee said.
'Yeah,' Han said.
'If I'm right about this thing spending its nights in low-Earth orbit-in its 'coffin'-and then leaving that refuge to descend into the atmosphere so it can hunt, its skin has to be able to withstand considerable extremes of temperature.'
'Like the Space Shuttle,' the lieutenant said. 'Huh. For all intents and purposes, it's fireproof.'
'Oh,' Lee said.
'Given that it spends some of its time in the upper atmosphere, as well as actual outer space, I'm guessing substantial cold wouldn't have much effect, either.'
'We can't shoot it, can't burn it, can't freeze it,' Lee said. 'Tell me why we're here, again?' He waved at the trees fringing the clearing. 'Aside from the scenery, of course.'
'Pipe down,' the lieutenant said.
'When we shot at it,' Davis said, 'I'm betting half our fire missed it.' He held up his hand to the beginning of Lee's protest. 'That's no reflection on anyone. The thing was fast, cheetah-taking-down-a-gazelle fast. Not to mention, it's so Goddamned
thin… Anyway, of the shots that connected with it, most of them were flesh wounds.' He raised his hand to Lee, again. 'Those who connected with it,' a nod to Lee, 'were so close their fire passed clean through it.'
'Which is what I was saying,' Lee said.
'There's a lot of crazy shit floating around space,' Davis said, 'little particles of sand, rock, ice, metal. Some of them get to moving pretty fast. If you're doing repairs to the Space Station and one of those things hits you, it could ruin your whole day. Anything that's going to survive up there is going to have to be able to deal with something that can punch a hole right through you.'
'It's got a self-sealing mechanism,' the lieutenant said. 'When Lee fired into it, its body treated the bullets as so many dust-particles.'
'And closed right up,' Davis said. 'Like some kind of super-clotting-factor. Maybe that's what it uses the blood for.'
'You're saying it's bulletproof, too?' Lee said.
'Shit,' Han said.
'Not-more like, bullet-resistant.'
'Think of it as a mutant healing ability,' the lieutenant said, 'like Wolverine.'
'Oh,' Han said.
'Those claws it has,' Lee said, 'I guess Wolverine isn't too far off the mark.'
'No,' Han said. 'Sabertooth.'
'What?' Lee said. 'The fuck're you going on about?'
'Sabertooth's claws.' Han held up his right hand, fingers splayed. He curled his fingers into a fist. 'Wolverine's claws.'
'Man has a point,' the lieutenant said.
'Whatever,' Lee said.
'Here's the thing,' Davis said, 'it's bullet-resistant, but it can still feel pain. Think about how it reacted when Lee shot it. It didn't tear his throat open: it took the instrument that had hurt it and used that to hurt Lee. You see what I'm saying?'
'Kind of,' Lee said.
'Think about what drove it off,' Davis said. 'Remember?'
'Of course,' the lieutenant said. He nodded at Han. 'It was Han sticking his bayonet in the thing's side.'
For which it crushed his skull, Davis could not stop himself from thinking. He added his nod to the lieutenant's. 'Yes he did.'
'How is that different from shooting it?' Lee said.
'Your bullets went in one side and out the other,' Davis said. 'Han's bayonet stuck there. The thing's healing ability could deal with an in-and-out wound no problem; something like this, though: I think it panicked.'
'Panicked?' Lee said. 'It didn't look like it was panicking to me.'
'Then why did it take off right away?' Davis said.
'It was full; it heard more backup on the way; it had an appointment in fucking Samara. How the fuck should I know?'
'What's your theory?' the lieutenant said.
'The type of injury Han gave it would be very bad if you're in a vacuum. Something opening you up like that and leaving you exposed…'
'You could vent some or even all of the blood you worked so hard to collect,' the lieutenant said. 'You'd want to get out of a situation like that with all due haste.'
'Even if your healing factor could seal the wound's perimeter,' Davis said, 'there's still this piece of steel in you that has to come out and, when it does, will reopen the injury.'
'Costing you still more blood,' the lieutenant said.
'Most of the time,' Davis said, 'I mean, like, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, the thing would identify any such threats long before they came that close. You saw its ears, its eyes.'
'Black on black,' Lee said. 'Or, no-black over black, like the corneas had some kind of heavy tint and what was underneath was all pupil.'
'Han got lucky,' Davis said. 'The space we were in really wasn't that big. There was a lot of movement, a lot of noise-'
'Not to mention,' Lee said, 'all the shooting and screaming.'
'The right set of circumstances,' the lieutenant said.
'Saved our asses,' Lee said, reaching over to pound Han's shoulder. Han ducked to the side, grinning his hideous smile.
'If I can cut to the chase,' the lieutenant said. 'You're saying we need to find a way to open up this fucker and keep him open so that we can wreak merry havoc on his insides.'
