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Randolph D. Calverhall
SERPENT’S WALK
A NOVEL

   “And just how,” the mongoose demanded scornfully of the serpent, “do you propose to climb Mount Kailas, the home of Lord Siva? You who have neither arms nor hands, neither feet nor toes with which to grip the precipices?”
   “Very slowly,” the serpent replied. “Carefully. Coiling back and forth upon my belly, over a rock here, up through a crevice there. I shall get there in the end, you know.”
   The mongoose snorted in derision. But in his heart he suspected the serpent spoke truly.
—Indian fable

CHAPTER ONE

   Sunday, December 22, 2041
   There were two men in the dank, cluttered back-office of the lithographer’s shop. He who stood in front of the table wore faded workpants and a black, leather biker’s jacket. The jacket was old and frayed, its decals flaking, its once-angry motto now illegible.
   The other man sat in shadow. Posture hinted at a younger person, a sophisticated man, one who might be acceptable in the upper strata of society. The black-jacketed man could see little more than a thin tie upon a white shirt, a black ribbon painted down the middle of a dazzling highway that glowed blue-white behind the table’s one fluorescent work lamp. Two arms sheathed in lead-grey tweed extended out of the darkness that was the man’s torso, and pale fingers plucked at the dog-eared files heaped upon the table top, pallid spiders scuttling about amidst a moonscape of buff and white papers and scarred, chestnut-hued wood.
   “Best we could do on short notice,” the biker said. He was a diffident, ordinary sort. His face was raddled with pockmarks, and his complexion reminded the other of red-brick walls slathered over with graffiti.
   “Whatever.” The prissy, delicate fingers burrowed deeper into white paper. “Lesser, you said? Lessing?”
   “Lessing. Alan Lessing.” The older man gleaned a smidgin of secret amusement from the smear of black lithographer’s ink visible upon the other’s left sleeve. He’d have the devil’s own time getting that stain out of the expensive sport coat!
   “Lessing. Fought in Angola in 2030. Then in Syria during the Baalbek War. Then he came back here for a while.” His voice trailed off as he read. He looked down at the man behind the desk and finished, “A good enough man. A real mercenary.”
   “Reliable?”
   “How would I know? Never met him.” Leather creaked as the older man scraped thick fingers through his grizzled, grey-red hair. “It’s all in the file. American… high school, a year of college, a family that he don’t remember… and they don’t remember him.”
   “A mere, though.” Coming from the younger man, the term sounded self-conscious. “Did he… uh… see combat? Real combat?”
   “It’s all there. Read it for yourself.” The other’s voice took on a querulous tone as he dropped the file onto the desk. He moved to peer out the one grime-smeared window as the man behind the desk picked up the file. “God, it’s started to snow hard out there. I’ve got to get home.”
   “Politics? I don’t see anything about that in here.”
   “If it’s not written down, he don’t have any.”
   “Any religious or racial problems? Will he cooperate with other team members? Blacks? Jews? Arabs?”
   The older man snorted and wiped a stubby finger across his upper lip. “Lessing’s fought for… and against… every ethnic group there is.”
   “I have to know.”
   The older man turned back to the window, now an abstract study in black dirt and white snow. “He’s okay. Whatever you tell him. Come on “
   “One more minute. We can settle it all here and now.”
   “What more do you need? Take Lessing; he’s good. Then either you pick the team or let Lessing do it. You provide the stuff… uh, cars, weapons, whatever. I don’t want to know.”
   “You won’t. Just make the contacts and get him here. Where is he?”
   The finger strayed up to a surprisingly ugly, lumpy nose. “India, I think… beegeeing… uh, bodyguarding… for some American exec. Somebody who don’t want to get dead over there. India’s like most of the rest of the fuckin’ Third World now… open season on foreigners. Specially Westerners… and Saturday matinee special on Americans.”
   White teeth glimmered a pale crescent in the darkness. The chair squealed as the younger man pushed it back and stood up. “Good. Get Lessing. Who’ve you got in India? DaSilva? Gomez? One of them can give him the details, and he can send out for whatever help he wants. Then fly him to Mexico City. We’ll pick him up there. Have him there by the middle of next month… January fifteenth. Let my secretary know when he arrives. You’ll get your commission through the regular channels.”
   “No problem.” The older man reached for the leather gauntlets lying on the table, fumbled, dropped one into the litter of paper on the floor, and bent over to pick it up. He sighed. “And a merry Christmas to you.”
   The other made no reply.
   Take nothing for granted in war. The commander who would live to return home is he who anticipates not only the unusual but the totally unexpected.
— Risalat-al-Harb, 11th-century Muslim military manual

CHAPTER TWO

   Thursday, January 30, 2042
   “Christ,” Doe grunted. He swung the binoculars left, then right “Come on, what is it?” Lessing wrested the glasses from the smaller man. Their four companions were somewhere behind them, hunkered down in the glazed, ankle-deep snow. Who would’ve thought there’d be so much snow in the American Southwest, even in January? People said the climate had changed since the Vietnamese-Chinese War back in 2010.
   Teen wriggled up beside them. The muzzle of his Riga-71 automatic rifle had been blackened with grease, but it still gleamed. Lessing pushed it down so no sentry could see it flash in the watery winter sunlight.
   The compound below was empty. A dilapidated truck stood beside the peeling, white, wooden wall of the main house. The garage in back was unpainted and ramshackle, and the boxy, little water-storage tower — the logical place for a sentry — was as dis-reputable an edifice as Lessing had ever seen. Even the Angolans built better than that!
   Doe gestured urgently. Panch and Cheh would be watching the rugged slope behind them while Char continued to scout, invisible somewhere in the grey-black rocks ahead. Lessing waggled two fingers at Teen, indicating that he should watch the rest of the white-shrouded terrain around the compound. Only when he was satisfied did he look through the glasses.
   A booted foot protruded from behind the dirt-caked back wheel of the ancient truck. The vehicle was a four-wheel-drive Hideyoshi, vintage about 2025.
   “He working on her?” Lessing whispered. He rested one thick forearm on his knee and adjusted the glasses.
   “Too quiet. Not moving.” Doe reached for the binoculars again, but Lessing held onto them. “Gate’s open, but nobody there.” Doe’s English was tinged with the remnants of a German — or maybe Belgian — accent. Lessing had worked with him before, fighting with the covert American-Israeli strike force in Syria during the Baalbek War in 2038.
   Lessing had only a hazy idea of Doe’s real name, or at least the name he used now. On temporary missions it was better this way: today’s comrade could become tomorrow’s foe. Such makeshift “units” often gave their members numbers, letters, or artificial names picked for easy comprehension in battle. When Gomez, Lessing’s Goanese contact in Bombay, had supplied him with this squad of five, Lessing had whimsically named them with Hindi numerals. He himself was Ek, “one”; the others were Doe, Teen, Char, Panch, and Cheh. Doe and Teen carried automatic rifles, as did Lessing; Char and Panch had light Israeli stitch-guns and grenades; the girl, Cheh, who came from Australia or New Zealand or some place “down under,” bore the heavy laser rifle.
   “Another one there,” Teen muttered. Indeed, a heap of discarded clothing beside the water tower resolved itself into a second body.
   The man was unmistakably dead. “Not in uniform,” Lessing murmured back. “But that’s to be expected. This isn’t a regular military installation. Not any more.”
   Char came up, picking his way carefully across the crunching snow. Like Lessing, he was an American. Both were big men, burly and muscular, but Char was moonfaced, with milky skin and a stocking-cap of coarse, black hair, while Lessing’s features were thinner, his nose longer, and his hair like wispy, grey-blond ash.
   “What’s keeping…?” Char began. Teen gestured at the visible bodies, and Char sucked in his breath and sat down. Lessing stuck up one hand to warn the rest to hold their positions.
   “Going in?” Teen asked.
   “S’what we’re paid to do.” Char thumbed one nostril.
   “Doe and me,” Lessing replied. “You two cover us. Get Cheh down here with her laser rifle. She comes in when I give the up-sign.”
   They distributed themselves amidst the boulders and gulleys of the forward slope. Lessing and Doe stripped off their camouflage suits to reveal quilled, orange hunters’ jackets and canvas pants. Doe pulled a red hunting hat out of his pack and straightened the jaunty, yellow feather in its band.
   “Maybe you should yodel,” Teen snickered. “You look Swiss.”
   Doe showed grey, uneven teeth, said something obscene in unintelligible Swiss-German dialect, and added a descriptive gesture.
   Teen made a face. “You and your monkey too!”
   Teen sounded vaguely British, but he shifted easily from one accent to another, and who could say? On this trip alone Lessing had heard him use Cockney, Chicano-American, and a somewhat shaky Texan. Hehad spoken Spanish with the pilot who had dropped them all into the United States, and Doe recalled him chattering in gutter Arabic in Syria. A useful man, though bitter-faced and given to sarcasm. Many mercenaries were like Teen.
   They picked their way down the slope, two lost hunters looking for directions, a cup of coffee, or maybe a telephone. Their own weapons were left behind with their packs, and both now carried hunting rifles, good but not fancy.
   “What the hell is this place?” Lessing called loudly, apparently to Doe. “Who lives way out here? Fire warden?”
   “University scientists? Geologists?” Doe wondered back.
   Lessing signalled him to shut up; Doe’s German accent would raise suspicions.
   They wandered through the open gate, then through the second, inner barrier. The ten meters of open ground between the two perimeter fences was sown with miniature land-mines, Lessing knew: enough to knock a person down and maybe take off a foot A TV surveillance camera was mounted above the outer gate, but it seemed to be out of order, its stained, metal lens-tube pointed down at the ground beneath it.
   They didn’t go around back. Not yet. Lessing clumped up onto the ramshackle front porch and knocked.
   “Hey! Anybody!”
   There was no reply. Doe prowled down to the end of the porch and squinted around the comer, along the far side of the house. He stuck out two fingers, parallel to the ground: two bodies there.
   Lessing straightened up, abandoning his “lost hunter” pose. He went to the top of the front steps and stuck up his right thumb. A figure detached itself from the snow-splashed boulders and began zigzagging down the slope toward him. The rest of the landscape was utterly silent, ominously so. No birds, no insects — but what insects were there in New Mexico this time of year anyway? He had no idea.
   Lessing yelled, “Hi! Anybody home?” Then he kicked the front door in.
   The front room was like a thousand others in backwoods America: two chairs, a couch, a couple of lamps, a bureau, a fireplace with kindling stacked beside it, and a coffee table cluttered with orange peels, magazines, and old newspapers. Snapshots of friends and kinfolk smiled fuzzily down from beside glass statues of retrievers and spaniels on a knickknack shelf on the rear wall. In the front comer stood a battered desk, heaped with brochures, papers, and outdoorsmen’s magazines. A metal sign there proclaimed: ARTHUR L. KOPPER Department of Wildlife Conservation State of New Mexico.
   Nothing was out of order. Everything was as it should be.
   And it was all as phony as a game-show host’s front teeth.
   They made a hurried search of the house. Off the hallway behind the parlor was a bathroom with yellow, chintz curtains, a woman’s doing. Back of that they came to a nondescript kitchen in which two blackened pots still stood on the propane stove. Somebody had turned off the fire, but the food inside — beef stew and boiled potatoes, Doe noted — was cold and greasy, maybe two days old.
   In the side bedroom that opened off the kitchen a dead woman lay sprawled on a double bed.
   Lessing eyed the room, saw nothing, and went to look at the body. The woman was in her forties, greying and bespectacled. A flame-pink, chenille spread was crumpled around her ample, pajama-clad hips, and a can of some cola drink stood on the nightstand beside her. The gaudy, blue cover of a paperback novel protruded from beneath her purpling left hand. She had been dead perhaps a day or two. The faint, sick-sweet smell told him that, yet she hadn’t a mark on her. Her tongue protruded, and her features were contorted, but there was no odor of chemicals, no blood, no violence. The pink coverlet had been tossed aside in the agony of her dying, and it now sagged down onto the threadbare, red carpet, a lurid lava-pool of middle-class tastelessness.
   “Died at night,” Lessing said. “Just before going to sleep.”
   “Either that or she took afternoon naps,” Doe suggested.
   A board creaked behind them, and they both jumped, rifles up and ready. It was only Cheh, her laser rifle cradled in stubby arms.
   “God, what happened?”
   “Damn it, you were supposed to wait for my signal!” The girl shrugged, and Lessing said, “No idea what killed her. Outside?”
   “Not a bloody soul alive. Four deaders, though.” Cheh was short, chunky, and as round-faced as a Dutch housewife. “Char ‘n’ Teen’ve searched. Somebody blew a great, gobby hole in the garage… took out the power plant. Don’t bother switchin’ on the lights.”
   “There’ll be an emergency generator. “Lessing rose, strode along the hallway behind the kitchen to the back bedroom, and slammed one booted foot into the door there.
   He almost let off a half dozen rounds into the figure that confronted him within: a huge, menacing, pale giant of a man in orange clothing.
   It was Lessing himself. The closet door had been left ajar, and he had almost blown away the full-length mirror! He let up on the trigger shakily, thinking how easy it would have been to kill himself with glass shards flying all over! He hadn’t realized how terrifying he looked — and how jumpy he was.
   “In here,” he called. The back of the closet was open, revealing the elevator cubicle beyond. So far the plan Gomez had given him in India had been completely accurate.
   What they hadn’t told him was that the current occupants would be cold meat when they arrived.
   “So. This is what we’re here for?” Doe spoke from behind him.
   “Deactivated base,” Lessing growled. It was lime to give his squad their need-to-know. “Secret, left over from before the Vienna Treaty. They didn’t know what to do with it. Just a storage depot now.” He gestured at the bunks that lined the walls. ‘The barracks and living quarters were torn down… just a few people left to guard this house and the underground installation below it. They doubled as wildlife wardens.”
   “What’s here?” Doe asked.
   “Atomic stuff? Radiation?” Cheh added.
   “Chemical warfare?” the German persisted.
   “Worse,” Lessing did not want to talk about it. “Come on, we’ve got to go down.”
   “Wait.” Cheh gnawed at her thin lower lip. “We have a right to know, mate. Who… what… killed these people, then?”
   Doe pawed at his cheek with one knobby finger. “Biological warfare!” He backed away, toward the front room.
   Lessing’s grimace told him he had hit the target dead on. “Damn it, there’s nothing here that’ll hurt us! If there was a leak we’d all be dead by now.”
   “But these people…?”
   “Somebody else was here just before us. I don’t know who, yet. Or why.”
   “Too bloody lovely,” Cheh peered into the silent elevator. ‘The Russians? The Israelis?”
   “The Jews wouldn’t have to kill anybody,” Doe sneered. His shaky voice belied his truculent tone. “Just ask President Rubin pretty-please for the key ya? More likely one of the American rebel factions. Bankrupt farmers? Black ghetto gangs? Tax protesters? Anti-war? Pro-war? Mexy immigrants?”
   “Or mothers against bleedin’ child abuse!” Cheh knitted her pale brows in thought. “At least the American Army probably has its hands too full to bother with us right away. How much time do we have?”
   “Who knows?” Lessing shrugged. “There must be alarms, even on this fallen-down chicken coop of a base.”
   “They’ll send somebody, eh? Eventually?”
   Lessing gestured toward the elevator. “That’s right. Let’s get it over with. Quick. Whatever happened here happened about a day and a half ago. Either we finish up and hide in the hills until our pickup, or else we abort.”
   “Abort, I say,” Doe blurted. “No killer germs for me!”
   “No mission, no money,” Lessing snarled back.
   “God damn it. You go. I stand watch.” “Fine. I’ll do it alone.”
   “No reason to get all exclusive and snobby, mate.” Cheh came over to stand beside him. “Two of us still. Just say what our chances are.”
   A companion was more welcome than Lessing wanted to admit. He said, “We’ve seen nobody alive so far. If they’re dead down inside too, we grab what we’re after and get back out within ten minutes. We can holler if we run into trouble.” He slapped the sleek communications box strapped to his belt. “You, Doe, find the others. Bring them up to search the yard, the bodies, the garage. Break radio silence only if you spot somebody coming this way.”
   “Look…,” Doe began lamely.
   Lessing let himself smile. “No problem. We’ll squawk if the party gets exciting.”
   “Right.” The German took a deep breath, then coughed into his fist. He was a good man in afire fight, but a black catacomb, possibly filled with invisible, miasmic death, might have daunted a stronger man.
   Doe’s footsteps clumped back through the house and down the steps. Cheh fidgeted while Lessing inspected the elevator. There were three buttons on the panel and no traps that he could detect He realized that he was stalling; he would lose his nerve if he waited too long. He jabbed the middle button quickly. The door closed, lights came on, and the car began to descend. The emergency power was indeed working.
   The door sighed aside to awaken shadowless, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling of a cream-colored anteroom. Lessing advanced, crouched, and advanced again, while Cheh covered him with her laser rifle. There was no one; the room held only sheeted furniture. An open door in the rear wall gave into a passage about ten meters long. This had two doors on either side, and a fifth at the far end upon which a stenciled sign proclaimed in letters the color of old, dried blood: SECURITY CLEARANCE 1-A ONLY.


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