“A puzzling mystery. We’ll try to gather more information, but right now back to you in the studio, Neil.”
The scene switched back to the anchor introducing yet another hurried-to-the-microphone expert. “We are joined now by our own head of technical operations, Phil Shimerhorn. Phil, what do you make of this?”
“From what I just heard, the field strength meter must have been reading an intense concentration of electromagnetic energy coming from the Wisticki household. The three PCs that the father lashed together would create that kind of intense hyperactive signature.”
“So they are looking for some kind of technological device?”
“From this report, it would appear to be so.”
The anchor then swiveled to a video monitor with a feed from the remote studio where Susan was stationed. He started talking to the monitor as if she were really inside it. “Susan, with the account we just heard of this search, my question to you is, is this legal?”
“It’s covered under posse comitatus, which authorizes the military to operate as a de facto police force. I heard nothing in that account over which the Wistickis could sue or have recourse, not under martial law.”
“Thank you, Susan. So the question for now is, just what is going on in New Mexico? We’ll be right back after this word.”
∞§∞
Hiccock and the major were listening to reports on the field radio. “Unit 2, nothing yet. Unit 3 is investigating an extremely strong electromagnetic field reading. Unit 9 is en route …”
“You know what I can’t understand?” Major Hanks said.
“What?”
“If they found us in the house and sent the truck and plane, how come they aren’t coming after us with guns blazing now?”
“Good point. What would you do if you were the bad guys, Major?”
“I’d get some intelligence, send out a scout, find our weakest point, then plan an attack.”
“What would be our weakest point?”
“Some hole in the defensive perimeter or some exposed asset that might be vulnerable to a strike. Then again, it could be some operational misstep, like us having all our planes lined up in neat little rows at Pearl Harbor for the Japanese to just pick off.”
Hiccock pondered this as Kronos walked over. “Look, I’m starving. Can we please get a pizza?”
Hiccock came up with an idea and pulled out his cell phone. “Maybe they have an operational weakness.” He spoke into his phone, “Hiccock for the president … of course I’ll hold.” He covered the phone with his hand, “Can I get a Jeep and a driver?”
“What’s on your mind?” the major asked.
“Maybe we’re looking for the wrong thing. Let me and Kronos here do a little scouting.”
“I’ll send you out with a squad. You are still my first priority. Fair enough?”
Hiccock nodded as the White House telecom officer came back on the line. “Sir, the president is in a meeting right now.”
“You know what? I’ll call him back.” He folded the phone. “President’s busy. C’mon, Kronos, lets see the countryside.”
“Just tell me there’s a pizza shop somewhere around here.”
They trotted over to a second lieutenant in front of three Hummers. He saluted as Hiccock and Kronos got into the lead vehicle.
“Can I ask you something?” Kronos said.
“What?”
“I checked up on you. You come from the Bronx.”
“Burke Avenue. So?”
“So how come I’m me and you’re you?”
“If it wasn’t for football, I would have been you. The game was my ticket out.”
“That’s the other wiggy thing about you. You had the world by the oysters as a QB and you didn’t go pro. What, no balls?”
“I played ball in college to repay my scholarship. But I wanted to use my head, not get it knocked off by some NFL linebacker.”
“Yeah, but the broads you coulda scored with!”
“Didn’t need them.” Hiccock watched two RVs pass on the other side of the highway. “I met my wife in college. She was head of a research project. My boss, actually. Brains, beauty, and a way of making me feel …”
“But you played for freaking Stanford. They were a no-bullshit football factory.”
“They also offer one of the best science programs in the country. I was good at football but I am better in science. I wanted to do what I was good at, and felt good doing.” Hiccock realized he might as well have been speaking Esperanto. “You can’t understand that, can you?” Hiccock was distracted as more recreational vehicles passed.
“What are you thinking?” Kronos asked, following Hiccock’s line of sight to the mobile homes passing by.
“Do you fish?”
“No.”
“Hunt, ski, rappel?”
“I program, pal.”
“So you haven’t noticed all these RVs that we’ve been passing all day. More than you’d expect during off-season. There is no campground close.”
“Food!” yelped Kronos like a hunting dog pointing at a bird.
Not being able to take it anymore, Hiccock relented. “Lieutenant, can we stop here?”
The column pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through.
∞§∞
“I need to get there now,” a determined Janice Tyler said to her new Air Force captain. Since the reinstatement of Hiccock’s authority under Operation Quarterback, she enjoyed a little more power. More than a captain, she figured, since he was snapping to it on her “order.” She now had a staff of FBI profilers. They would continue weeding through the psychological “mind field” that was being mapped by the cookies, worms, and replays of the subliminal computer screens. Computers had become the central focus of Janice’s work because they were the only evidence any of the homegrowns left behind to testify as to their state of mind. All except for those associated with the Sabot Society. There were no subliminal messages detected in their computers, although the FBI Electronic Crimes Lab did find an abundance of conventional e-mail and chat room evidence. The chasm created by this disparity of evidence reinforced the notion that the Sabot was an unfortunately unlucky, and spectacularly inept, copycat group.
“You’ll have to strap in, Ma’am,” her captain said, as the small Air Force VC-100, essentially a small corporate jet with “USAF” and stars and stripes painted on the fuselage, started to taxi. Two Air Force pilots flew it. One was female, she noticed with a little smile, made sweeter by the fact that her Air Force cabin attendant was a male.
∞§∞
Bags of hamburgers and fries were handed into each Humvee. The three Hummers, with their machine guns tied off, pulled into three spaces in the lot. As the burgers were distributed, Hiccock observed an amazing transformation. Before his eyes, these hard-core Army Rangers had turned into high school kids with smiling faces, munching on Big Macs and sipping Cokes. He walked inside the store to pay the bill and asked to see the manager. The oldest guy in a paper hat with a nametag on his shirt came forward and identified himself. “Welcome to McDonald’s, I’m Tim. Is there something I might do for you today?”
“Kinda busy, huh?” Hiccock spoke like he ran a Mickey D’s back home, trying to disarm the company-approved speech.
“Been that way for a few weeks now.”
“All those campers and Winnebagos?” Hiccock gestured to the passing parade of RVs.
“And minivans and backpackers from all over camping out at Leadfoot.”
“What’s going on at Leadfoot?”
“Some kind of New Age voodoo crap.”
“New Age what?”
“All these psychics, Ouija board weenies, crystal gazers, shakra-holics, vegetarians, libertarians, all of ’em. Say they’re being drawn to Leadfoot. Hooting and hollering at the moon for all I know.”
Hiccock handed over a hundred-dollar bill for the troops.
“Your turn to feed the Army?” the manager said with a chuckle.
�
��Can I get a receipt, please?”
Then it hit him.
He ran outside, his cell phone to his ear.
∞§∞
After being dressed down by the president for not interrupting the meeting the last time Quarterback called in, the orders were now crystal clear: send all calls from QB through immediately. As commanded, the telecom officer intrepidly interrupted the president mid-sentence, “Sir, call from Quarterback.”
Someone, maybe Reynolds, decided to use only Hiccock’s code name, in case one of the president’s men convened in the room was, in fact, a traitor or anarchist. He nodded to the telecom officer, and then picked up the handset.
“What is it, Bill?” Damn. He’d just blurted Hiccock’s name out in the open. He listened for a second, then reacted with lowered brows over squeezed eyes. “You’re serious? Well, I’m not going to start second-guessing you now. I’ll order it and call you back.” He put the phone down and addressed the telecom officer. “Jennifer, get me Paulsen at the GAO.”
∞§∞
Hiccock placed the phone back in his shirt pocket. The lieutenant had a map out on the hood of his Humvee. “No Leadfoot on this map.”
Hiccock grabbed the map. “Locals call it Leadfoot. It’s an old lead mine … here, right here, Cummings Peak.”
“It’s outside the perimeter that brain boy indicated.”
“Yes it is.” Hiccock cast his gaze to the far-off mountains. Focusing on the nearer foothills, he scanned the terrain as if he might find a sign shaped like an arrow reading “to the bad guys.”
“Kronos!”
Kronos came over wiping special sauce from his mouth. “Yeah, what’s up?”
Hiccock stabbed at the map. “Could this spot right here be the point of presence?”
“Sure, could be.”
“Could be?”
“Well, jeez, I only had an accuracy of fifteen decimal points, so it could have been twelve miles also … instead of eight.”
“Now you freaking tell me!”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Pineapples & Anchovies
WHEN JOHN F. KENNEDY was in the depth of the Missile Crisis, he mostly conducted the operations from the Oval Office. The majority of meetings Carter attended to plan the Iranian hostage rescue were held in Plains, Georgia. Obama spent a little more than a half-hour in the nerve center when the Navy Seals delivered final justice to Bin Laden. Presidents spend less time in the Situation Room under the White House than one would think. In fact, the actor Henry Fonda probably got more “Sitch-time” in the movie Fail-Safe than all the real presidents who served since that film was made. The current acting president—that’s how James Mitchell felt sometimes—was using the crisis center as an interrogation room. Far from peering eyes and electronic ears, he was able to speak his mind, which he found came easily with the momentum of 300 million American lives behind him.
Today, the situation was dire. President Mitchell was sweating his handpicked cabinet members, trying to weed out the traitor, or idiot, who had been inflicting these terrorist acts on America. “Sweating” was in fact part of his methodology. Mitchell had the air-conditioning turned off to make it as uncomfortable as possible. Like another Henry Fonda movie, 12 Angry Men, everyone was in shirtsleeves, although the president was the only angry man in this silent room. The one sound heard was his drumming fingers.
“C’mon. We’ve got it down to an eight-mile radius, fifty miles north of Carlsbad. One of you has got to have a clue.”
The phone next to him rang and he picked it up. “What do you have for me? Really! I’ll be damned. What’s this Kathleen Ronson doing there? Blacked out? For the love of God, it’s blacked out. What a way to run a government. What was that address again? Thanks, Paulsen, I’ll let you know if we need more … Oh, what’s the phone number?”
∞§∞
“Well, your hunch seems to have paid off, Bill.”
“Really?”
“123 Desert Trail, Mercado, New Mexico.”
Hiccock pulled out a pen and jotted the address down on a McDonald’s bag. He handed it to the driver.
“Get us there on the double!”
∞§∞
The three Humvees were now parked in front of the Domino’s Pizza in Mercado. The major, having arrived about a minute before, walked up to Hiccock. “Well, they say an army travels on its stomach.”
“And computer nerds on junk food,” Hiccock added. “Even though they may be working on an illegal, ultra secret, black op government project, they still need their fix.”
“I can’t believe the hole in their security was some bean counter handing in a receipt for pizza night to Uncle Sam.”
“Thank God for government forms and rigmarole.”
∞§∞
“Nice account. Sometimes 30 pies, 100 pizza sticks, and they love our chicken wings.” Chuck, the owner, was filling in the major and Hiccock.
“How often do they order?” Hiccock asked.
“Twice a week usually. In fact there’s a big order going out tonight.”
Kronos approached the counter beyond the major and Hiccock. “I’ll have a large pie with everything on it.” He turned and saw the two men looking at him. “What?”
They returned their attention to the owner. “And it’s always a delivery?” the major asked.
“Have to send two guys.”
“You ever make the delivery yourself?”
“Sometimes.”
∞§∞
“First squad, fall in,” the lieutenant barked as the soldiers scrambled and formed a line eighteen across. Hiccock and the major walked Chuck, the manager, down the line of troops. He looked at each as if he were trying to identify one of them to the police. He suddenly stopped, then back-stepped to a smaller, mustachioed Latino soldier, Fuentes.
“He looks like the kind of kids we get,” the owner pointed out.
Hiccock handed Fuentes the folded red-and-white striped uniform of a Domino’s delivery driver.
“Without the mustache, of course,” the owner added.
“Shave it, Ranger!” the major ordered.
“Yes, Sir!” They moved on out of earshot, and the dutiful GI muttered under his breath, “Ah, shit, Sir!”
∞§∞
Ten minutes later, Fuentes, in his delivery uniform and green hat, reported to the Domino’s delivery car and snapped a salute. It was a 1977 red-white-and-green-painted Gremlin hatchback. Hiccock, in a manager’s uniform that almost fit, saluted him back. The other hard-assed troops in the unit couldn’t help but crack up.
“All right! Settle down,” the major growled, without hiding his own grin. “Got your orders, Ranger?”
“Sir, the pizza is hot or it’s on us, Sir!” Fuentes barked as he crisply snapped to attention.
“Fuentes, maybe you should loosen up a little,” Hiccock said.
Fuentes smiled, and the kid from South Central came out. “No prob, Homes, it’s all good. Who gets the pepperoni?”
A car pulled up, causing Hiccock to turn his head. An Air Force captain got out from the driver’s side. To Hiccock’s surprise, Tyler got out of the other. She walked straight toward him. “Moonlighting on government time?” she said, taking in the silly costume.
“You always said I wasn’t utilizing my full potential. Fuentes and I are off to make the world safe for democracy and fast food.”
“Hey, Mr. Hiccock, you’re management, you shouldn’t be doing this,” Janice said.
“You’re trying to tell me I’m too old for this, aren’t you?”
“I just want you to know that you don’t have to do this to prove anything to me.”
“Oh, so that’s it! You think I’m doing this to impress you. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the only other guy here who has a shot at recognizing something high-tech is Kronos, and I just don’t think he has the right sensibility to be a pizza guy from around these here parts, missy.”
Janice adjusted his collar as if he was a little b
oy going out to play. “Don’t get hurt.”
Hiccock grabbed her hand and stared into her eyes. They both softened and simultaneously breathed in deep. “The only way I’ll get hurt is if I get between the pizza and the nerds at the other end.” He gave her hand one last reassuring squeeze then he and Fuentes got into the car and drove off.
Tyler walked over to Hanks. “What’s this all about, Major?”
“Professor Hiccock had a hunch that the bad-guy nerds were as much a pain in the butt about junk food as our Kronos nerd. He got the president to check with the GAO and, sure enough, some idiot compromised millions of dollars of secrecy and the security of the whole black op by handing in a bill for pizza so he could be reimbursed.”
“He’s finally getting it.” She smiled, peering off at the little car as it disappeared in the distance.
“Getting what?”
“The human factor.”
∞§∞
Cummings Peak was a mountain jutting right out of the flat New Mexican desert. Driving up the old truck route, it became obvious to Hiccock that the only destination on this mountain was the old lead mine. As Hiccock and Fuentes drove up to the entrance of the defunct mine shaft, they were surprised to see a glass-and-steel three-story office. The design gave the building the appearance of having been pushed into the rock, so that just the front and a little of the sides stuck out. Above the roof was a sign proclaiming “ALISON INDUSTRIES.” On the far side, off in the distance, parked on the flatlands encircling the mountain, were hundreds of RVs and camper vehicles.
A beefy guard in rent-a-cop blues halted the Gremlin hatchback delivery car at the gate. “Where’s Joe?”
“Joe’s kid got into some shit at school so he had to go in and see the teacher. I’m Bill, the assistant manager. This is Luis. We got 32 pies, 64 pizza sticks, and 23 salads. What do we do?” Hiccock wanted to make this the guard’s problem.
The Eighth Day Page 34