by Bob Mayer
Eagle waited patiently, trying to ignore the two idiots above and trying to read a book on his phone. He loved his print books, but he’d been converted to the eBook a few years ago mainly by the convenience: His books were literally at hand as long as he had his phone with him and, as a Nightstalker, he always had his special phone at hand.
Eagle frowned as the screen flickered for a moment, the digital letters becoming hazy, then re-forming. He’d have to take the phone in to IT for a checkup. He’d never had to take a book book in to IT to get fixed, he thought with the grouchiness of the techno leery.
“Rock!” Kirk called out, and Eagle did as he’d been trained, tucking his chin in to his chest. Proper training, he thought as he waited for a boulder to splat him into oblivion. Most people very wrongly looked up at the alert.
Mac’s climbing shoe bounced off Eagle’s helmet.
“What the frak?” Eagle yelled. “Would you two idiots cut it out?”
Frak was still a buzzword on the team, even though the Battlestar Galactica marathon was long in the past. Moms frowned on cussing, so the team had picked up the word, and it had stuck for some of them.
“Sorry,” Kirk said as he tapped the worn wooden plank that indicated the top of the climb. Mac shoved in and also tapped the plank, and then they tried to beat each other back down.
“Be faster if you just let go and let gravity do the work,” Eagle observed before going back to his book, a history of ancient Rome.
“Funny guy,” Mac yelled out. He was the team engineer, more commonly referred to as the demo man, although he had built some things on occasion. He was movie-star handsome if one considered a young Tom Cruise handsome, and his humor was always on the edge of painful irony, masking some inner darkness, which did not make him unique on the Nightstalkers. One usually did not go into Special Operations and then the covert world of black ops unless you were outside the bell curve.
And one was not selected for the Nightstalkers unless you were “special,” and special didn’t necessarily mean on the plus side of the bell curve, as Eagle tried to point out to the other members of the team enough times that they didn’t listen to him anymore about it.
Kirk partially took Eagle’s advice and leapt off the rock face of the mineshaft for the safety line both had heretofore ignored. He grabbed it and slid down as fast as he could without burning the skin off his palms. He reached the bottom a couple of seconds before Mac.
“Pay up,” Kirk said. He was the Nightstalkers’ commo sergeant (although the Nightstalkers didn’t do rank, some things associated with the Special Forces A-Team stuck): a narrow man, all bones and lean muscle stretched over the skeleton. Hailing from Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666, he was a former Army Ranger whose expertise at cheating and willingness to do anything for a cause he believed in had caught Ms. Jones’s attention and brought him eventual assignment to the team. He was serious about money because he sent practically all of it back home to his younger siblings to “keep them on the farm,” according to Mac. Actually he was helping them keep the farm, since their father had blown himself up cooking meth.
“What’s wrong?” Kirk asked as Mac forked over the bills.
Eagle hadn’t been aware he was frowning as he looked at his phone’s screen. “Strange. Here it’s stating that the Lateran Obelisk is still in Egypt.”
“Oh, that’s bad,” Mac said with the sarcasm of the ignorant.
“But it’s in Rome,” Eagle said. He was sliding his finger on the screen, trying to find out why this mistake was in the text. “This author is very reliable on his history.”
“History is written by the winners,” Kirk said, nudging Mac.
“Funny guy,” Mac said.
“History is important,” Eagle said, looking up from the phone. “It’s the absolute of our past leading into the possibilities of our future. You can’t mess with history.”
“Right,” Mac said. “Your turn to climb, oh wise one.”
With a sigh, Eagle put the phone in his pocket. He moved to the rock wall and looked up. He was rescued from starting as his cell phone belted out a Warren Zevon tune: Nada’s personal one. Mac’s and Kirk’s phones joined the chorus.
“This isn’t good,” Eagle said.
Whether he meant the call or the burp in history or both remained to be seen.
It changed for Moms by figuratively traveling into her past, both in place and time. She was already in the place, having made the drive of tears back home. She was sitting on the front porch of the abandoned shotgun shack where she’d grown up in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Interstate 80 was to the south, across the flat plains, but so far away that no sound traveled from the eighteen-wheelers racing across the middle of the country.
There was no other house in sight, just miles and miles of slightly undulating fields, and despite all the years since she’d left, Moms still had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It had started when she’d entered Kansas and grown stronger every mile she drew closer to “home.” The house was empty, long deserted. Her younger brothers never came out here, smarter than she was, understanding some memories only brought pain.
It seemed Moms was a masochist, going back to her roots in order to remember.
But sometimes, going into the past is necessary in order to move forward.
There are variations on that, such as changing the present in order to move forward, which Moms was soon to discover.
She was not only back here in Kansas, she was back at the place where she’d begun. She dared not enter the house. Bad things had happened here. Sometimes, alone and off duty, with a half-empty bottle on the table next to her bunk, Moms had allowed herself to remember.
Moms had a cheap picture album on her knees, made of imitation leather, with gold lettering on the cover: OUR WEDDING.
This was her way of traveling back in time, but avoiding the one time and person she couldn’t face.
Moms’s mother had purchased the album with her employee discount at the Dollar Store in town. Things were so bad here in this part of the country, even that store had gone under during the last fiscal crunch.
With a deep sigh, Moms went back, flipping open to the last page of the album.
It was not about a wedding. It was a recording of futility, lost dreams, and broken lives. How Doctor Golden from the Cellar had tracked it down, Moms had no idea. The Cellar’s reach was long and deep and never stopped at personal boundaries.
The latter part of the book was filled with travel postcards. The last two were from Istanbul, and just before that terrible visit. Moms sighed, now seeing how futile and naïve it had been of her to send them to her mother. She’d picked them up on a layover, en route to a clandestine deployment to Afghanistan.
Moms flipped back in time, noting the postcards her mother had carefully pasted in the book, all from places Moms had traveled through en route.
Moms paused. Maybe that was the story of her own life: en route. Always to places where there was bad. She never sent the actual destinations. And all she’d ever done in the en route places was get the postcards because she’d been going to a destination to do a job, and there was no time for anything else.
Postcards from the edge, Hannah, the head of the Cellar, had called them.
Then Moms reached the part of the album where the postcards ended and there were the earlier pictures cut out by her mother from National Geographic magazines. Places her mother had dreams of visiting.
But never did.
Moms went further back, recognizing some of the places from when her mother had first cut them out and pinned them to the old, wheezing fridge with magnets boasting grain company emblems.
Then she got to the dreams her mother had had of a fancy wedding. Fancy by poor Kansas standards. Cut out from magazines: A white dress. A church. Most importantly, a groom.
None of it had come true.
Moms looked up from the album. A half-finished dollhouse, three feet high by six long, big eno
ugh for a child to crawl into, rotted on the end of the porch. Her father had started it for Moms one Christmas day, and then disappeared (the proverbial leaving to get a pack of cigarettes), never coming back, making the dollhouse a testament to abandonment.
At first Moms had thought it was some kind of forlorn monument to the failed marriage, but later in life, with the wisdom of age, she’d realized that her mother simply hadn’t cared enough to do anything about the dollhouse.
Which was worse.
What if he had stayed? Would things have turned out differently? Moms had no idea, because she really didn’t understand how her mother had turned out the way she had.
Moms flipped the page to the first one, the only one that featured something other than dreams of an event and places never traveled to.
Moms shook her head and sniffled, wondering for a moment if she were catching a cold.
The picture was of the family. Her mother standing in the center with both hands on a five-year-old version of Moms standing in front of her and the younger brothers flanking both of them.
The picture was blurry and, for a moment, Moms thought it was because her eyes were full of tears from the trip down a memory cul-de-sac.
It was all wrong. Moms wiped a sleeve across her eyes and squinted, not believing what she was seeing. The Polaroid picture was faded, more faded than she remembered, but it had been years since she’d last thumbed through it. But that wasn’t the issue.
Because now there was a man standing next to her mother where there had been no man before. A man she vaguely remembered from childhood but was certain had never been in this picture. And her mother was in a white dress, the dream wedding dress on the next page. And she was smiling.
Moms tried to remember her mother smiling, but all she could conjure up was her mother in a drunken stupor, face slack. That was the most peaceful she’d ever looked. The rest of the time her face had been full of rage and pain and darkness.
Moms flipped the pages.
The rest of the book was as she remembered.
Moms went back to the first page. The picture wasn’t as faded, as if the Polaroid film was slowly developing after more than thirty years.
Then her phone phone began to ring, a tone she’d only heard once before when Nada had played it for the team. His personal cry for help. Keep me in your heart . . .
Nada had never made such an appeal before.
Moms looked at the picture, at the happy family, and then slowly closed the album with a shaking hand.
It had changed for Foreman, closing in on seventy years of service, in February 1945 in an area called the Devil’s Sea, off the coast of Japan, in the waning days of World War II. The event was after he and his pilot were forced to ditch because of engine trouble. Minutes later, the rest of their squadron simply vanished into a strange mist in that enigmatic part of the world. No trace of the other planes or crews were ever found.
Then it was reinforced in December of that same year, the war finally over, on the other side of the world, when he begged off a mission because of the same premonition he’d had before the Devil’s Sea flight, and watched Flight 19 disappear from the radar in an area called the Bermuda Triangle.
He’d determined then and there that he had to know the Truth.
So he’d gone from the Marine Corps into the short-lived precursor to the CIA, the Central Intelligence Group, in 1946, then morphed with it into the CIA, where he moved upward, and, much more importantly inward, into the darkness of the most covert parts of various branches whose letters and designations changed over the years. But their missions grew more and more obscure, to the point where he’d outlived and outserved all his contemporaries so no one in the present was quite sure who exactly he worked for anymore or what his mission was.
If he worked for anyone at all.
Not that anyone really cared.
They should.
He was now known as the Crazy Old Man in the covert bowels of the Pentagon and by some other names, associated with bowel movements.
How crazy he was, some people were about to discover.
Foreman had to use a cane, a concession he’d made most reluctantly a year ago. He had to give the cane up at every security checkpoint he went through at the Pentagon as he worked his way further and further into the belly of the beast. He was dressed in a suit, only a decade out of fashion and, strangely, wore a small black porkpie hat, à la Breaking Bad. He’d enjoyed that show and had taken up wearing a hat similar to Walt’s because he liked it, he identified with Walt, and because it made him look crazier than usual. Besides, the fedora he’d worn for several decades had become passé with Mad Men. The changing of fashion with time was something that amused Foreman. What was old is new again and vice versa.
He’d found crazy kept people away, and Foreman didn’t particularly care for people.
World War II was history to the people in this building, ground having been broken on the building just a few months prior to Pearl Harbor. It was completed in the beginning of 1943, in time to see service during the conflict. Foreman’s first visit had been in 1946, at the beginning of his career in covert operations.
He felt his age as he limped up to a desk manned by two military police. It blocked the corridor on the supposed lowest level of the Pentagon. With a sigh, he pulled out his identification card and showed it to them.
It was one of those strange identification cards, designed for the handful of people who had the highest security level possible but were not formally affiliated with any agency that these guards would be aware of. Both MPs snapped to attention. One of them scanned the QR code on the ID and got a green light. Then he took another scanner.
“Your glasses, sir?”
Foreman removed his thick spectacles, another concession to age.
The guard checked both retinas and got two more green lights.
“Good to go, sir.”
Foreman put his glasses back on, retrieved his card and his cane. He walked past, aware that cameras were tracking him. With another sigh, this caused by the pain in his replaced knees, he took the stairs down to a sublevel of the Pentagon that wasn’t supposed to exist.
In stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of the corridors above, this level was eerily quiet. At the end of the corridor was an old metal desk. An old man, young to Foreman, sat behind it, doing a crossword puzzle. He peered up over his reading glasses.
“Good day, young fella,” he greeted Foreman.
“Same to you, old man.”
“Here to see anyone in particular or stopping by your office?”
“I need to chat with Mrs. Sanchez. Then go to my office and clean out the inbox. Perhaps nap for a bit.”
The last guard laughed. He didn’t pull out a folder with personal, obscure questions to ask Foreman as he did with everyone else who approached his desk, questions only someone who had lived the answers could correctly reply to. He was facing the only person who predated his position as the last check before entry into the covert world attached to, or, more accurately, underneath the Pentagon. While there were rules, there was also the reality that Foreman was an institution. Or at least he was to another human institution, of which there weren’t many left in an increasingly technical world.
“How are the knees?” the guard asked, looking down at something behind his desk.
“You tell me,” Foreman said.
The man looked up from the scanner. “They look good.” He reached underneath his desktop and hit a button. A door behind him swung open, revealing a telephone-booth-sized room.
Foreman got in and sat down in the chair, grateful for the relief of pressure off his knees. He’d had them replaced decades ago and the doctors had told him the replacements needed to be replaced; he’d worn out the metal and plastic.
But Foreman was realistic enough to know he didn’t have the energy, strength, or patience to go through two more surgeries. Plus he didn’t have the future.
Reality suck
s.
The door shut and with a slight jolt, the box moved sideways. It halted abruptly and then moved backwards, riding along a unique rail system, the only means by which someone could get to the buried offices of the denizens of the darkness underneath the Pentagon.
Foreman also understood another reality of the rail/booth system. Once seated inside one of the booths, the occupant was at the mercy of the system. Foreman had no doubt that there was a detour that ended with some grim folk on the other end who made sure the occupant was never seen again.
The booth came to another abrupt halt and the door opened, not at some executioners’ post, but at the comptroller’s office. Foreman slowly got to his feet, using his cane as a prop. He walked up to a chest-high counter, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a leather sack.
“Are you trying to get my agent killed?” Foreman demanded of Mrs. Sanchez. He held up the leather bag of coins and shook one out. “This is Amin-Zeus!” he exclaimed, shoving it in her face. He flipped it. “This says Ptolemy in Greek!”
The two might have been in the DMV. Mrs. Sanchez was on one side of the counter, and Foreman was on the other. She never allowed him on her side, as she did many other visitors who were more amiable and less apparently demented. And her daughter was at her desk, not pretending to be focused on her work as she usually was, but watching warily, one hand underneath the desktop on the alarm, which would bring a dozen heavily armed guards to the room.
She really wanted to press the button.
Mrs. Sanchez was the comptroller for the Black Budget, currently estimated to be 52.8 billion dollars. But it was so highly classified, who knew exactly how much it was?