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Chapter 13
Musicians, Mad Dogs, and Englishmen
Chords and arpeggios and glissandos washed over her in a transcendent wave, lifting her consciousness to somewhere beyond time and place, to a perfect world of interwoven sound and light and texture, to someplace where there was no Slayer, no death, no pain or loneliness.Buffy felt herself become lost in the poetry of her daughter’s piano, lost in that lone, dignified, beautiful woman in flowing black seated at the Steinway and pouring her heart and soul into music of nearly divine magnificence. In the impassioned phrasing and heartbreaking subtlety, Buffy understood her daughter, connected with her in a profound and spiritual way until the joy and regret and aching sense of time lost, never to be regained, rose with the swelling of the final movement into a commingled pain and happiness that she hadn’t felt in ages, not since her passion for Angel had flared into its most dramatic conflagration, destructive and redemptive at once. She felt the same now for Elisa, but in a different, purer, more ethereal way, as if everything good and right in her life had become distilled and focused on this one beautiful, magnificent woman, this black-garbed wraith of the keyboard, this fragile and powerful and graceful woman that was Elisa Summers, her daughter, by far her greatest accomplishment in life, by far the source of her greatest pride.
The final movement came to an end, and applause cascaded from the audience like storm-driven surf, and with the fading echoes of the piano, Buffy felt sudden sadness and guilt well up from within. The crowd around her receded in a detached daze, and a deep and inconsolable feeling of anxiety seized her. She couldn’t do it. She could face the Master, the Judge, the Avatar, the Elemental Abstract itself. But she couldn’t do this, couldn’t face her own flesh and blood.
She stood with the standing ovation and said to Angel, “I have to go. I’m sorry. I just … have to go.”
* * *
Pike gestured encompassingly toward the flats south, east, and west of Hill Tango. Hill Tango and its sister, Hill Yankee just to the southwest, divided the wide, flat valley into the Yucca Flat, the Papoose Lake gap, which was dominated by the dry bed of Papoose Lake, and the Emigrant Valley. To Aston’s eye, all three passes through the valley were choke points made in heaven.
“Operation Big Macho …” began Pike.
“Operation what?” asked Hudson.
“Big Macho.”
“I’m liking it already.”
“As I was saying,” Pike continued, “Operation Big Macho is designed to constrain the demons’ advance through either one of two of these gaps, preferably the Papoose Lake Gap. To that end we’ve pre-sighted and ranged our batteries on Hills Tango, Yankee, and Kilo to create artillery ‘boxes’. We’ll bracket the desired approaches, then walk a saturation barrage up and down the interior of the boxes to force the enemy to advance along the route of our choosing. Once inside the choke point, we will place another box overtop that route and support it with the gravity wave cannon and our air units, with infantry in support.”
Aston nodded his approval. “I’ll want to check the disposition of your artillery of course, but the theory is sound.”
Pike smiled.
“Two things I would guard against, however,” the Englishman added. “Watch out for small unit operations coming in over the ranges north and east of Groom Lake trying to take the firebase by stealth. Also, if you’ve got shotguns, equip anyone with a good eye for ducks or skeet with them. Use a mix of silver and iron buckshot. Last demon army I faced came equipped with some flyers, and they can get up and around your defenses if you’re not careful.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Pike.
“How are you fixed on ammunition?”
“We’ve got five thousand land mines emplaced to support Big Macho already. We’ve got ten thousand artillery shells with cold iron shrapnel for the Howitzers. As for small arms, we’re down to only about 90,000 rounds of silver jacketed ball, most of it in .223, some nines for the sidearms. The government appropriated all silver reserves and stores during the war, but still there’s only so much of the stuff to go around.
“The military found that iron had some good results on vampires and most demons, so they came up with an alloy they used on the regular full metal jacket rounds, but over the long term it’s hell on barrel rifling. We’ve got several million rounds of that, including quite an impressive supply of .50 caliber and .30 caliber belts for the fifties and the M-60s. About eight hundred thousand rounds are special. Some place called the DH Group came up with a way of laying some low-level demon-killing enchantments on the stuff in bulk, and those rounds are almost as good as the silver. Staggered two rounds iron, one round enchanted is our standard magazine loadout. We save the silver for our sharpshooters.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a hell of a lot for the helos and the A10s. At the rate those things burn through ammo, we’ll be lucky if we get two good sorties out of them. All in all, it sounds impressive, but when you factor in a half-million strong opposing force, the odds start to look a lot worse.”
Aston thought the information over, then said, “Well, that’s not really too shabby, actually. The odds are still just this side of hopeless, but you stand a much better chance of losing in style than I thought.”
Hudson scowled at his comrade in arms. “Man, you are just a world of encouragement, aren’t you? Remind me to explain the concept of ‘morale’ to you sometime.”
* * *
Angel found her sobbing quietly near the fountain, her eyes red. It had always amazed him how this woman who had time and time again shown such limitless depth of courage and spirit could at other times seem so fragile, so vulnerable. Maybe that was why he loved her so very much, why he’d never stopped loving her in the fifteen years she’d been lost to him, why he still loved her despite the gap of biological age and lost years.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She sniffed and looked up at him. Her green eyes, normally so fierce and full of life, seemed haunted behind her tears by something dark and terrible, a sadness not even a Slayer could defeat.
“Everything’s the matter, Angel. Everything,” she said. The words came softly, the chill whisper of a January wind.
“You’re back. We’re together. It’ll take time, but we can make this work again,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. Buffy had always had that effect on him.
She dried her eyes with a tissue. “I don’t know if we can. God, Angel, I’ve missed everything, everything that was most important to me. That girl is a stranger. I don’t know her. I don’t know Willow anymore, or Oz, or Xander … I don’t even know you. Fifteen years, Angel. Fifteen years I can never get back, not without destroying everything Elisa is and everything you two had without me.”
“We’ve always managed to find a way to stay together, you and I,” said Angel. “I don’t think a few years is going to change that if you don’t want it to, especially since I seem to be getting younger by the day.”
She looked at him, and her eyes were sharp. “Don’t you get it, Angel? There are no easy answers to this! There’s no spell that Willow can whip up to manufacture a happy ending for us. There’s no divine scriptwriter out there to undo everything and turn it into a fifteen-year dream that never happened. I’m not going to wake up next to you in Hawaii on our honeymoon in a few minutes. This is real, and it’s one thing I don’t know how to fight. I’m not the same person who left this world seventy five years ago, Angel. You don’t know me anymore. You don’t know the things I’ve done, the kind of person I became. I’m not the Buffy Summers you knew. I’m not sure if even I recognize what I am anymore, and there’s not a damn thing out there in this universe that I can slay to make it all better.”
Angel said nothing, knowing on some instinctive level that no words could help her at the moment. He drew her into an embrace, holding her tightly, feeling her warmth, the beat of her heart, her sobs as they shook her body.
He let her cry. It was all he could do for her.
* * *
The two men blended well with the crowd in their dark, conservative suits. The taller of the two was named Nicholas T. Spota. He’d once worked as a CIA black bag operative during the M-7 crisis, where he met the other individual, a sinewy Australopithecus of a man with dead eyes and a complete clinical lack of anything resembling a conscience. His name was Beaugard Lascombe, but no one had called him that in many years because that name had died in a car accident decades ago.
Nicholas T. Spota and the man once known as Beaugard Lascombe were very talented at their chosen profession. The CIA had trained them extremely well. The Company had taken mere sociopaths and crafted them into tools of cold and calculating precision.
It was while in the CIA’s employ during the M-7 crisis that the two had first come to the attention of Warren Pitts. Warren Pitts, as he once remarked to Colonel Marcus Cole, found that Spota and Lascombe exhibited “an elegance and aesthetic synthesis of sociopathology and native intelligence rarely seen even within the morally barren ranks of the intelligence community.” Pitts had meant the statement as a high compliment.
Nicholas T. Spota and Beaugard Lascombe enjoyed the work Warren Pitts provided to them, because it often involved killing or great physical harm inflicted on various individuals, which was really a tremendous job satisfaction factor.
Tonight’s job would give them less satisfaction, but it was compensated for by a very large paycheck.
Colonel Cade paid very well for quality work.
After what seemed like an eternal ovation, the performers on the stage made their last exit and the house lights came up in the theater. Spota nodded to Lascombe and the two began to thread their way to the stage, against the current of exiting concert patrons.
No one stopped them as they slipped backstage into the long corridor of dressing rooms.
* * *
Buffy’s cell phone rang and she pulled away from Angel, composing herself as much as she could before answering.
“Summers,” she said into it, her voice husky.
Lillith’s tone was urgent. “It’s Lillith … you okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Just a little congested. Allergies, I guess. What’s up?” she said.
“Listen, Buffy. I think I just found out what the key is. It’s not a what, it’s a who.”
Something in her voice froze her inside, and she felt as if she were perched on the edge of a bottomless, dark chasm, waiting for the push that would send her on the endless fall.
“You’ve got to get to Elisa. Fast,” said Lillith. “She’s the key, Buffy. Elisa’s sacrifice establishes the etheric conduit to Hell!”