Another stick guy was trying to come around from the left, but Sam held the line on that flank. The Englishman made no effort to match the attacker’s kung fu rocket science but just barreled in close, stuffing and stifling the other’s moves, forcing him to back up on the terrible ankle-spraining ground. Sam had a walking stick that he gripped in its middle, tucked along the bone of his forearm so that he could either block attacks while protecting his arm, or else deliver short elbow strikes intensified by the knob on the stick’s end.
When they and half a million of their closest friends watched the videos later, after Pippa had had time to cut it all together, it was clear that the fight was already over at this point. Gopinder engaged another Bonking Head and gave as good as he got. At one
point he got the tip of his short stick, in his left hand, under the guy’s oxygen tube and flicked it off.
Ravi pretty much got his ass kicked. He didn’t land a single good blow. He was forced to retreat. His opponent advanced to the end of his oxygen tube and faltered. This guy had put his outfit on after donning the nasal mask, so the tube was running under his clothes. He couldn’t just pull the thing off his face to get free.
Meanwhile, on the left flank, Sam had given his opponent a real gusher of a bloody nose by landing an elbow shot. The guy had retreated and sat down to go into shock.
He had to have been in shock not to see what Jay was doing right next to him. Jay during all of this had crept around to the oxygen tank. This began to peal like some exotic Tibetan gong as rocks struck it. For the rockers, standing off at a distance, had begun to zero in on his position. Jay used the dhal in his left hand to protect his bloody head. At the top of the oxygen tank was a round valve wheel—the main shutoff. Angling off to one side of that was a regulator with two dials. Sprouting from the low-pressure side of the regulator, then, was a Rube Goldbergian tangle of tees and wyes that had been kludged onto it so that it would feed something like a dozen separate oxygen tubes.
In a classic I’m-just-going-to-cut-this-fucking-Gordian-knot moment, Jay noticed that he was sitting on a big rock, flat and sort of triangular, like an arrowhead the size of a tabloid newspaper and a good six inches thick. It was heavy. He dropped the dhal, stood up, got his back into it, then his legs, and heaved it up off the ground. He cleaned and jerked the thing, got it above his head for one glorious moment, and then brought it down on the regulator.
On the video, Jay then disappeared in a huge cloud of oxygen-rich dust produced as high-pressure gas shrieked out of a crevice in the metal. That cloud moved away from him, though, as the cylinder began spinning and skidding across the moonscape like a pinwheel firework. The regulator and the tree of fittings were still hanging on. The tube attached to the guy who’d been fighting Ravi went tight, pulled him back onto his ass, and dragged him a short distance before his suit gave way at the seams and was stripped off his body.
The Bonking Heads retreated in disarray. The Fellowship advanced, reclaiming about a hundred meters of territory for India, but stopped and held their ground when other Chinese volunteer units began to converge. It might have gone badly for them then, but Indian crews, who’d seen this all happen from a distance, rushed forward to camp out along the new position of the Line of Actual Control.
PINA2BO
Rufus dug the silence of it. Oh, the sonic booms still crackled over the mountains every eight minutes. You had to get used to that. But the recovery was as peaceful as you could imagine. Suspended from their paragliders, the shells came gliding in over the Rio Grande. They didn’t cross the river until they were just a few hundred feet above the ground. By that point each was aiming for a specific net. There were four nets operational when Rufus first arrived, with four more getting their finishing touches. They were spaced up and down the length of a new road running along the top of a mesa that rose a few hundred feet above the river.
Each net was square, about half the size of a football field. It was suspended at each of its four corners from a steel pole that projected to a height of maybe fifty feet from a concrete footing in the ground. The setup couldn’t have been much simpler: At the top of each pole was a pulley with a steel cable running over it. One end of that cable was carabinered to a corner of the net. The other end ran down the pole to ground level where it disappeared into a winch. When all four cables were winched tight, the net stretched overhead like a roof, sagging a bit in the middle, but nowhere less than about thirty feet above the ground.
The empty shells coasted in from their sojourn in Mexican airspace, each vectored to a particular net. If the wind wasn’t blowing and you listened carefully, you might just be able to hear a faint flutter in the parasail, or singing in the shroud lines. When the shell sensed it was over the middle of the net it would actuate a mechanism that detached it from the parasail with a faintly audible mechanical snick, and it would drop, bounce once or twice, and come to rest at the bottom of a mesh funnel, so close to the ground you could almost touch it. The parasail would crumple