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Cassandra raised her voice in anger. “Daniel, you have done some crazy things before but this takes the cake. You’re going to get yourself killed!”
Chairman Markis held his hands up, palms out. “Not if you and Karl do your jobs. Senior leaders have been doing this type of thing for a hundred years.”
“Unannounced visits to friendly places, or bases, sure. Not flying straight into enemy territory!” So unusual, her voice became even more shrill. “Your judgment’s been clouded by your proximity to the suggestion.”
“You think I’ve been swayed just because the idea came from my wife and Larry? Cassie, the US is not the enemy anymore. In fact, it’s your country and mine, now that the Constitution reigns supreme again. President McKenna is a good man. We need him. We need him to order the US military to cooperate.”
“They might tell him to go pound sand, DJ. The SS, the military, and the Unionist Party were the unholy trinity of the United Governments, and two of the three have not changed!” She knew she was fighting a losing battle, but she was determined to make the best case she could.
“I have it on good authority – yours – that McKenna is going to disband the SS, roll them into a new Homeland Security department.”
“A change of name only,” she grumbled.
Markis pressed her. “The military backs the civilian bureaucracy, the civilians back the military, and both of them have outlawed the Unionists and are dismantling the SS. Now is the time to act.”
Cassandra sighed. “I never had a chance of talking you out of this, did I?”
“Nope. I just wanted you to get it out of your system. Because you’re coming along.” Markis’ grin of schadenfreude was infuriating, priceless. “And so is Jill Repeth.”
***
“Sergeant...Burstead, is it?”
The young Homeland Security trooper looked up lazily from his desk, and then did a comical double-take. He stumbled to his feet, nearly falling over his own chair, ending up using it for support. “Uhhh...Special Agent Adams! Sir!” He bolted the four steps to his boss’s door. “Sir, it’s CHAIRMAN MARKIS.”
“No shit?” Adams threw down the file he had been reading and pushed past Burstead to where Markis, Cassandra and Karl stood waiting, flanked by their security team. “Wow! I mean, sir, welcome to Pueblo, I didn’t know you were coming. What can I do for you?”
Markis’ voice was dry. “No one knew I was coming. Would you please notify President McKenna that I would like to see him at his earliest convenience? If he could send some Secret Service folks out to give us a ride, I would appreciate it.”
Adams entire body was animated, quivering. “Ha, no way, sir. If I do that, it will turn into a nutroll. I’ll take you in myself, me and my staff. Burstead, go commandeer a shuttle bus, chop chop!”
Twenty minutes later the bus, with Karl and the PSD nervously looking out the windows, rolled through the gate of the old Colorado State University campus, now the home of the provisional capital of the United States of America. They parked in a lot near the Executive Building. Secret Service vehicles and officers immediately surrounded the bus and cordoned off the area.
“Stay here, Karl. You can’t be running around with weapons, and you’re on their turf now. I’m going in alone. You just liaise with Adams here. I’ll be fine.” Markis touched his lapel, and Karl winked in return. Then he stepped out onto the hot asphalt.
Two secret service agents walked confidently up to Markis, at least until they saw who he was. Then they checked stride, stopping about twenty feet away. One spoke into a radio, listening for a reply. Then he walked up to Markis. “If you’ll come with me, sir, the President is waiting.”
“Outstanding.”
After a short walk and a lot of amazed stares, Markis was ushered into the august presence of President Nathan B. McKenna. His eyes were bloodshot above dark circles, and his hair was whiter than the media portrayed him.
“Good afternoon, Mister President.” Markis held out his hand.
“Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Chairman Markis. Did you ever think we’d be standing here like this?” McKenna held out his hand to shake firmly.
A kind of moan escaped the nearest Secret Service agent and he took a step forward as if to intervene.
“You stand fast there, Tompkins. The Eden Plague isn’t Ebola, you know. Besides, they say you can’t get it except by fluids, right? Markis, you plan on kissing me?”
“Not unless you really want me to. But I have to say, I think you could use a little Eden about now.”
McKenna shook his head. “Sometime, maybe when this is over. Even though the Unionists have been tossed out, their lies still linger. Americans won’t accept an Eden president yet.”
“Same old story of prejudice and bigotry.”
“There’s always enough of that to go around. Here, let’s sit down. You want anything?”
“I could use a beer, if you have one.” Markis rubbed his day-old stubble.
McKenna laughed. “Tompkins, go get us some beers.” His face turned serious. “Now, what the hell do you want?”
Markis looked around the office. “You know, I’m unarmed. I’m not going to try to infect anyone. And this conversation is very need-to-know.”
McKenna nodded at another agent, who evacuated the room except for herself, and Agent Tompkins with the beer. “All the agents are cleared but two should be enough to keep them from getting too nervous. Sandy, tell them to initiate security protocols.”
A red light came on above each door, and the two agents still there backed up to the far end of the room. “All right. You’re here, so what’s this all about?”
Markis took a drink from a longneck bottle, ignoring the glass. “It’s about Tiny Fortress.”
Color drained out of McKenna’s face, but he recovered quickly. “Sorry, not sure what you mean.”
“You know, Tiny Fortress, it’s like a big fortress only smaller. I hear you’re making them now, just in time for birthdays – my kids would love some...” Judging by McKenna’s frozen face, Markis’ attempt at humor fell flat. “You should know, we have proof. Samples of the nanobots.”
Eventually, the President stirred. “I think you need to leave now, Chairman. I can’t help you.” He gulped down his beer, turning away.
The two secret service agents moved forward, politely but firmly indicating Markis should go. He stared at McKenna for a long moment, then stood up. “All right. I guess I’ll be off. I have an alien to talk to.” As he walked out he kept hoping the man would call him back, like a car salesman caving to a negotiation ploy, but he didn’t.
Back at the bus, Markis came as close to a full-out bout of cursing as he had in a long, long time. He clamped down on his tongue and stared out the window, ignoring his team’s questioning looks. Finally he spoke so quietly that only his team could hear. “He didn’t go for it. Not only that, he didn’t even acknowledge TF’s existence. He threw me out, and he seemed terrified. What terrifies the President of the United States?”
Cassandra and Karl exchanged glances. She whispered back. “Someone else who’s really in charge, that’s who. I told you this was a bad idea. You’re too damn trusting. It almost got you killed in Geneva and it might get us killed here.”
“Not trusting, Cassie. I’m just willing to take a risk, a leap of faith. I’m sorry I got you into this but then again, you could have said no.”
She laughed bitterly. “Not likely. But maybe I should have. So what next, maestro?”
Markis kept his voice low. “You know what. Plan B. Right Karl? Always have a plan B.”
“Semper Fi, sir. The Corps will pull your nuts out of the fire again. Let’s get back to the plane. Driver!” He raised his voice. “Back to the airport, right away.”
The driver obediently stomped on the gas, hurrying out of the Presidential compound, off the campus, and through the streets of Pueblo. He turned on his emergency lights and ignored signals and traffic, pulling right up to their airplane.
“Thanks, son,” Karl said, clapping the young man on the shoulder. He hustled the rest off the bus and onto the aircraft.
Jill Repeth fidgeted inside the plane, looking a question at Karl once they had closed the doors.
He nodded at her. “Suit up, Gunny. Plan B is go.”
Markis put his head back in his seat and closed his eyes, taking himself out of the equation. He wasn’t operational military anymore; better to let her fellow Marine help her get ready.
Jill and Karl immediately headed to the back of the plane, ignoring the motion of taxiing. By the time she had the parachute on the jet was rolling down the runway.
“Do you think they’ll interfere with us leaving?” she asked as she rigged her combat equipment pack to her front rings.
“I hope not; the boss didn’t say it was a disaster, just that the President wouldn’t listen. Whatever is going on behind the scenes, let’s hope it takes a while to work out, and no one is stupid enough to think killing the Chairman is a good idea. Either way, you’re going to be gone before it happens.” He ran his hands under her vertical risers and leg straps, checking everything in a jumpmaster pre-inspection.
“Thanks for letting me do this, Karl.”
“Don’t thank me. You’re the only one that makes sense. You know the contact personally, you have the skills – you’re the perfect choice.” He slapped her shoulder. “Now get that helmet on.” He pulled on a set of headphones attached to the aircraft intercom.
She pulled on the headgear and got ready. It was only a few miles to the drop site, just minutes in the climbing jet.
Karl pulled up the manual release on the hatch in the tail floor, a modification specifically for covert drops. It popped upward, locked into a bracket. He used a long lever to shove it downward into the airstream. This created a blast barrier that allowed a jumper to clear the underside of the plane without difficulty.
Sound and rushing air filled the interior space. Jill’s heart hammered with adrenaline. She stood up, getting ready to step into the hole in the floor and drop straight through.
Karl clapped a hand to one side of the headphones, a look of concentration on his face. He held up a fist, then extended one finger, emphatic. “One minute!” he yelled.
She breathed deeply, checking her altimeter on her left wrist, pulling her goggles into place. They were coming up on five thousand feet, a very low sport jump but high enough for a combat drop. At about two hundred feet per second, she had twenty-five seconds before she augered in. The lower she opened, the less time she would have under canopy, so she planned to pull at twenty-four hundred. That gave her twelve seconds if she had a main chute malfunction, just enough time to deploy her reserve.
“Ten seconds!” Karl held up all ten digits and then yelled, “Get ready!”
She stepped forward to the edge of the hatch, her toes on the edge.
As soon as he heard the signal in his headset he slapped her thigh. “Go!”
One short step and she dropped through. The air rushing past at two hundred miles an hour snatched her like an enormous hand, seeming to fling her backward relative to the plane. She always loved this moment of a drop, the feeling of being out of the aircraft, bird-free in the open sky.
Arching hard, she forced her body into a configuration that caused her to fall face-downward and stable. She quickly oriented herself, using the airflow to turn like a top toward her landing zone. Checking her altimeter, she got ready, then threw out her pilot chute as she crossed 2400 feet.
Counting out loud to herself, “One thousand, two thousand, th – ” the chute opened perfectly with a sound like flapping canvas. A moment later she had the toggles out of their holders and pulled both down sharply, releasing the control lines from their stowage. The rear of the high-performance canopy swept back like flaps on an airplane, and now the ram-air parachute acted more like a wing than a drogue.
She flew.
At maximum speed this rig developed over fifty miles per hour of forward thrust; it was a very dangerous canopy for anyone but an expert, because that same speed advantage in the air had to be carefully controlled as she approached the ground.
Her landing zone was a treeless wash, sandy and she hoped free of big rocks, in the hills overlooking Teller Reservoir on Fort Carson. Their intelligence had concluded that the relatively new complex there, isolated from the main base, was the Tiny Fortress lab. Despite stringent security measures, nothing employing thousands of people could be hidden for long. Even the so-called Area 51, a hundred miles from anywhere, eventually became well known. This place was only twenty miles from downtown Pueblo.
She adjusted her equipment fastened tightly to the front of her torso. In a round-chute drop it would have been lowered on a line to hit the ground first, relieving her of its weight as she performed her parachute landing fall. With ram-air canopies, however, especially these fast ones, that arrangement simply would not work. Nothing could interfere with her airplane-like landing stall if she wanted to come through it unhurt.
Lower and lower she flew. She wasn’t at all sure of the winds, and she looked around desperately for some indication. On a prepared drop zone there would be smoke or a flag or wind sock; here there was nothing.
Her backup method was to quarter-box the compass, turning ninety degrees each time. At every heading, she held out her hand in front of her and found the spot where the ground did not seem to be moving up or down. This was, by definition, the horizontal axis where she would land. Then she watched for drift left and right. By doing this in all directions she got a rough idea of the effect the wind was having on her own movement, and was able to face into it. The lower she got, the more accurate her estimation became.
She lined up on her gully, the wind about five knots and slightly left to right. She compensated by aiming a bit to the left as the ground seem to accelerate. She carefully did not focus on the rushing rocks and dirt, instead choosing a spot about a hundred feet ahead of her.
Flaring, her speed bled off rapidly and a gust picked her up. She eased off on the toggles and plummeted, jerking downward on the handles to flare again and stall. It wasn’t a pretty landing and she ended up on her knees, thankful for the hard pads she wore, but she was down. She popped one shoulder release, allowing the canopy to collapse, then the other. Rapidly rolling up the chute, she buried the whole affair in some soft dirt and hefted several rocks on top of it.
Opening up the combat equipment bag and pulling out the civilian rucksack inside, she then stripped out of her jumpsuit and put on hiking gear. In a pinch she could play the lost backpacker; in either case a woman in shorts and a ball cap was less conspicuous than a camo-clad Marine. Making sure her PW5 was accessible but out of sight, she started trekking.
The sun beat down but the terrain was not too rugged, just hills varying in size by a couple of hundred feet. She followed game trails and dry washes until she found a motorcycle track heading the direction she wanted. Within a half hour she overlooked Teller Reservoir and the laboratory complex.
Sitting down in the shade of a scrubby cypress, she drank water and used her lightweight binoculars to examine the grounds from the distance of half a mile. It took her two hours of careful study but eventually she found what she needed.
As night fell she approached the fence. From this direction, away from the access roads and the edge of the base, security was less than stellar. A laboratory complex this size meant over two miles of fencing, and there were plenty of weak spots for a trained infiltrator. She found the place she had spotted earlier, where a flash flood had washed out some soft dirt at the bottom of the mesh, and slid under, erasing her tracks with a sage branch as she went.
Once inside, she accelerated, running flat out along the top of a concrete drainage canal until she came to an access road. If there were motion sensors or cameras, she wanted to give them the least possible time to see her. If she was gone when they came to investigate, she hoped they would think it was a coyote that tripped the sensor. Stars blazed overhead as the last of the day’s glow left the sky.
At the access road she slowed, jogging right up the middle of the asphalt toward the residential area. Typical Army housing had been easy to spot, especially when combined with the visible amenities – a gym with athletic fields, a gas station-convenience store combo, and an entertainment complex with an all-ranks club.
Slowing to a fast walk she headed for the club. It was the best place to pick up information, especially as everyone there would assume she was part of the community. Human beings simply couldn’t maintain tight security for long, especially among themselves. People talked, and she hoped to listen. And if she really got lucky, she would get a line on her contact.
Inside was surreal, music mingling with the sound of billiard balls cracking, the smell of bar food mixed with aromas of beer and bathroom disinfectant. She drifted through the rooms, glancing at the clientele, looking closely at any woman she saw. None matched her mental image from long ago.
She tossed her pack into a corner and took a table there, waving to a waitress. “A Bud and a hot dog, please. Yes, chips, plain. Thanks.”
She sat back, studying the crowd. Pretty good for a Thursday night, but unless you wanted to drive into Pueblo, there wasn’t much else to do. It was probably the only restaurant open in the evening; she saw a few families but mostly singles and clumps of friends. A group of extremely fit men with haircuts and demeanors that screamed “special ops” played Crud at the pool table.
She wolfed down her hot dog and picked up the half-full beer bottle and bag of chips, drifting over to the group. She saw a few glances of speculative interest; she knew she was no looker but she was tall and athletic and could be pretty when she smiled.
So she smiled.
“So...how do you play this game?” she asked the nearest, a heavily muscled man with a strong brow and an open, Irish face. He took the bait instantly. Half an hour later she was shrieking and having fun, only half of it faked. Crud was fun, a fast-moving game using just the cue ball, the eight ball, and hands. Each player took a turn for their team in rotation, trying to knock the black ball into a pocket, striking it with the white before it rolled to a stop.
Later as she sat at their table – clearly their table, so different were they from the scientists and bureaucrats sharing the big room – she bantered and dodged questions about herself, instead turning the queries back on the men. She didn’t push; they would have had plenty of operational security training and reminders. She just asked them about themselves and let them brag.
The Irishman, McCarthy, had obviously claimed her for himself, but she didn’t let him close the deal, maintaining her social space and elbowing him when he got too handsy. She wasn’t above sleeping with someone for the good of the mission but she thought she could string him along without going that far.
The one they called Huff was her worry. He laughed loudly but his eyes missed nothing and he played his comrades like a master fiddler, keeping peace, making jokes, telling and suggesting stories, never quite the center of attention but always the one the group keyed off of – natural leader and class clown combined.
She waited a long time for some conversational connection to her potential contact, something where she could credibly ask the questions she needed to ask, when serendipity bypassed Murphy and dropped a little luck in her lap.
“Did you see that Navy chaplain? Woo, she is hot!” Bill Holden, the speaker, reached for his beer but McCarthy rapped his own bottle onto the top of Bill’s causing an instant foaming effect, spilling it onto the table. “You dick!”
“Look at that foam spurt, just like what you were thinking about.” McCarthy laughed.
“Navy chaplain? What’s her name?” Jill asked.
“Commander!” laughed Huff, a little too loud.
“No, really, I knew a Navy chaplain when I was younger. I can’t remember her name...” Jill fished, trying not to seem too eager.
“It’s Forman,” cackled McCarthy, more than slightly drunk. “I wonder if she lives up to her name. Get it – for man?”
“Chill out, McCarthy,” warned Huff. “The general hears you talking like that – or were talking like that – and you might be out on the street. Not that I care, then I wouldn’t have to babysit your sorry ass through basic first aid class.”
“Ah, you PJs, you think you’re such hot shit with your medical shit, let’s see how shit-hot you are in some real shit.”
“You’re drunk, McCarthy, you said ‘shit’ four times in one sentence, you stupid shit.” Huff laughed heavily, tongue out, haa-haa-haa.
Jill wrapped her arm around McCarthy’s huge biceps and whispered in his ear, “Let’s get out of here.” Two minutes later they were leaving the club, Huff’s eyes on them all the way.
I wonder what he’s thinking. I’m not cut out for covert ops, play-acting and wondering what everyone knows or suspects.
They walked the hundred yards to McCarthy’s barracks block. Jill let him play some grabass to distract from her questioning, but she eventually got the approximate location of Forman’s room. She hoped he was too drunk to remember her inquiries in the morning. At his door he surprised her by going in for a sudden, violent kiss.
Jill pushed him and his tongue away, controlling her anger. She played her trump card. “So...you’ve never been with an Eden?”
He stared at her, bleary-eyed and swaying. “What do you mean?”
“An Eden Plague carrier. We’re all legal now. You don’t know what fun is until you been with one of us.”
Realization overcame him and he stumbled backward, scrabbling at his doorknob while spitting on the ground. “Uh...no...Jesus, bitch, go away!” The revulsion on his face was comical. His door slammed and she heard him lock it behind him.
She repressed a twinge, feeling insulted despite her understanding. It had been a long time since she had to deal with this kind of naked bigotry. It made her wonder what the US was really like these days.
Jogging quickly back to the club, she watched out for Huff and the rest of his jocks. Not seeing them, she retrieved her backpack and slipped back out, making her way through the near-deserted streets to the officer quarters McCarthy had indicated.
All she knew was that Forman had a room on the third floor. She was lucky someone as boneheaded and drunk as McCarthy had been able to tell her that much. Eight rooms – studio apartments really – on each level, from what she could see of the configuration. As she climbed the stairs she wondered how she was going to find the right one.
God bless the Army and its anal ways, name tags! Each door sported a small metal frame to hold a three-by-five card, with rank and name hand-printed on it. Twenty seconds later she was knocking quietly on Forman’s door. When it opened, the two women stared at each other across the threshold and across ten long years, stunned seconds ticking by. Jill, prepared, finally broke the tableau as she reached out to hug Christine. They clung together, tears of joy and reunion streaming down.
Inside, they caught up on ten years of war and peace.
Forman told of her work in the new Underground Railroad, smuggling Edens out of the UGNA, mostly through Canada, where the populace was more sympathetic to basic decency and unwilling to cooperate with the Unionists. The Edens would be sent by air or sea across to Greenland or Iceland or the British Isles to find asylum. She told how she was eventually caught, but as one of the wealthy and powerful Jenkins family, she was protected from the worst punishments, only having to endure grueling interrogations and a relatively humane prison cell, not the dungeons and torture chambers of the SS. She’d been clever – or wise – enough not to become infected with the Eden Plague back then, which spared her the concentration camp.
In her turn, Jill told of escaping from Bethesda and attempting to make it to Los Angeles to find her family, getting caught and put in an internment camp in Iowa, and then escaping to Mexico, eventually to link up with Spooky Nguyen and the newly formed Free Communities Armed Forces under Daniel Markis. She went on to tell of a life of raids into enemy territory to free imprisoned Edens and damage the mechanisms of repression; and finally, of her role in the launch of scores of nuclear weapons.
The guilt of that action, so recent but ruthlessly suppressed, poured out of her, and Christine Forman absorbed and accepted it, her arms wrapped around the younger woman, rocking her as Jill sobbed with remorse.
“I was so stupid! I had so many chances to head her off – if I’d showered at a different time, if I’d just seen what she was...Kelley and Harres and Doc would be alive, and so would all those other people.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” soothed the chaplain. “You weren’t in charge. Your colonel was, and he should have seen what was going on. He knew she was a Psycho but he left her with the run of the sub instead of locking her up. You can’t be responsible for bad command decisions.”
Jill shook her head, pulling away. “I know that...but now that you mention it, I didn’t think of the fact that he should have just locked her up. As soon as he was pretty sure she was a Psycho, why didn’t he neutralize her as a threat? He wasn’t the type to make that kind of mistake.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a mistake.”
Jill stared at Christine in horror. “You mean he wanted it to happen?”
Forman shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just saying I’ve always had a good nose for when something stinks, and something about what you told me seems off. So you can stop beating yourself up about it. You did the best you could, and God will be the final judge. We can only do our best in this life, accept His grace and forgiveness, even when we can’t forgive ourselves.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“You can, Jill. When you’re ready, just pray, and He will forgive you.”
Repeth looked down at her hands. “Okay, I’ll...I’ll think about it.”
Christine patted Jill’s hands. “Good. Now, why are you here?”
“We got your message. Our intel people put the clues together – you being brought here, the Tiny Fortress project – but we desperately need information. The Free Community bio-research program hasn’t been able to find a way to defend Edens from the Demon Plague. And the Eden Plague is incurable. The best we can do is suppress the immune system overreaction but there aren’t enough drugs and hospitals left in the Free Communities for widespread treatment. Millions died in the initial Demon Plague drop, before quarantine measures limited further damage. We have to have a cure, or some kind of treatment! Chairman Markis believes the nanobot technology will provide it – if the Americans will share it. But he just went to talk to President McKenna today and he denied all knowledge of the project. Markis is convinced he knew but he’s terrified of something or someone. We have to find out what, or who, and the key is somewhere here.”
Forman sat back, crossing her arms. “That’s a long chain of reasoning, assumptions and guesswork. But I’ll try to find something out. I can’t promise anything. I really wanted a new start here, without divided loyalties, now that the Unionists are gone.”
“They might not be gone – or something worse might be lurking under the surface. The US is weak and disorganized; people are fearful – fertile ground for another seizure of power. And if they get these nanobots really working, there’s no telling what they might do.”
“I know. Salvation or damnation.”
Jill nodded. “Either way, it’s a lot of power. In the wrong hands it might doom the human race.”
