Rage & Fury

by Darryl Hadfield

  Apparently, the Intendancy had decided to ‘pin’ their rank to approximate military rank – and while I was more than a little disgusted by the whole Intendancy thing in the first place, I also wasn’t about to not take advantage of what I’d been handed. As a newly minted Major General, I was equivalent to a US17 or US18 Lead Intendant – and the structure, frankly, didn’t go much higher than that, if it did at all.

  Unlike other generals, I made a point of wearing my dark gray utility uniform and rank wherever I went, whether it was a social or professional destination. I made sure to also wear my Medal of Honor, two Distinguished Service Crosses (I’d won another one, but I don’t think I told that story yet), four Silver Stars (Yep, I’d gotten a few more of those, too, and while the first one was bullshit, the other three were quite legitimate), who knows how many purple hearts, and other goofy silly ribbons. The dress uniform I’d been cautioned by Major General Simmons (who was now retired, thank fuck!) to prepare and have available to use at any formal gathering looked like a damn fruit salad with all the color on my chest.

  It got me pretty much anywhere I wanted to go, and only once did someone question Rage, when they happened to see it on my belt.

  “Sir, you can’t… you can’t seriously think that that will be allowed in here!” The speaker was a lady who looked like she had leveraged more than her fair share of cosmetic surgery; she must have caught a glimpse of the hilt as my uniform’s top slide up while I bent over to pick up the file folder full of papers she’d knocked out of my hand when she pranced out of her rooms into the hallway, not watching where she was going.

  “Ma’am, I’m quite sure I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “You have… you have a KNIFE! A WEAPON!”

  Her shoulders had the single silver circle rank insignia of a an Under-Intendant, and her voice grated on my ears.

  “I think you really ought to consider more than what you think you saw, miss. It would be in your best interests.” I pointedly looked at her shoulders, then at the two golden stars on my chest’s rank tab.

  “Oh, you can’t get away with that, I’m an Under-Intendant! US11! You myrmidons think you can come prancing in here, acting all high and mighty, well, I just won’t have it!”

  I smiled as my implant had already identified her as Madeline Xynchi, US-11, Under-Intendant. “Miss, are you aware that the military has equivalency ranking, albeit not on a one for one basis, with the Intendancy?”

  “You think Mansplaining is going to help you? I’m not ignorant, I’m just as, if not more capable than any of you warmongering leeches on the government!”

  I’d learned a few tricks in the last dozen years or so. One of them was that you could temporarily change your profile picture in the national directory, to support various causes. The picture was updated on a permanent basis each time your rank – military or Intendancy – changed, but you could make short-term changes otherwise. I flashed mine to show the Intendancy ranks, alongside the military ranks, with a slider on each side showing her, and me. “Perhaps you haven’t checked the directory to see who I am. I will provide you no more than 15 seconds to do so before I have your next review opened, to input a video record of your insulting and arrogant commentary towards me.”

  She must have done so, because her face paled. Yep, she sure was US-11. I was O-7, or… US-17. Six full grades above her, and frankly, a word from me would get little more than a cursory review before she would be stripped of her Intendancy rank.

  “You may apologize to me now.”

  “S-s-s-s-ir, I’m so sorry I had no idea I wasn’t thinking and I just spoke out of turn…”

  “You also chose to disregard my ethnic heritage and history which grants me a waiver to possess the item I suspect you saw on my belt. If we ever cross paths again, Miss Xynchi, I fully expect you will not only treat me in a manner consummate with my rank, but you will remember that I retain a full audio-video copy of this exchange should your conduct ever become worthy of my attention again.”

  I turned and walked away. That was also the only time I ever yanked someone up like that, and while one part of me knew it was a calculated risk – I was military, after all, subject to the civilian authority, and I could have gotten reprimanded for speaking such to a civilian without good cause – however, the social justice heroes out there made it quite plain that it was never acceptable to not consider someone’s ethnic heritage (if they were not Caucasian – which I didn’t appear).

  I already hated this place, and the people in it. Encounters like that didn’t happen again – but at the same time, word must have gotten out that I was living there, and that anyone seen in uniform with that kind of rank should best be avoided.

  I made zero friends, and honestly didn’t care. The hyperloop would get me from DC directly to Fort Gibson (it *was* the largest base in the country – at one time, it had been the largest military base by population in the world), and I found myself heading back there every weekend to skydive. With my rank, I was able to get into transient officers’ quarters pretty easily. Being part of the staff of Special Forces Command. I wasn’t in planning, but I still knew exactly what unit Michael was working with, and I generally knew where he would be – so I planned my trips back to Gibson to generally (ha!) coincide with when he wasn’t around to make sure someone was watching out for his

  I haven’t mentioned much about my position, and that’s by intent. While I’m sure you’d like to know the details, I *was* the G3 (Operations and Planning, remember) of Special Forces – not a bad position for someone who’d flipflopped between Infantry and SF, for the majority of his career.

  I did, however, have a few things happen that were noteworthy, and something I should tell now because it matters to the rest of the story.

  As the guy who ran SF Ops&Plans, I had plenty of opportunity to review a lot of personnel files – for not only the army in general, but also people who were ostensibly not part of the military, but which were undercover. Why would the military have people who were released or otherwise removed from the military, still on the payroll? Deniability.

  As the guy handling operations and planning, I needed to know who those people were – I didn’t manage them, that was SFCOM G1’s job – so I could plan operations that might need to include them.

  Some of them were within the US… some weren’t. Here’s the curious thing: Every single one of them had a dark green microfiber cloth either around their collar, poking out of a shirt pocket, etc… Yes. One of those microfiber cloths. Curious, no?

  Those who were in uniform were fairly obviously carrying knives – which was authorized by SOP. Those who weren’t…. also tended to have knives around them. How would I know? Because they saw my little microfiber cloth tucked under my uniform collar, and made a point of pulling out their knives, when it wouldn’t be seen.

  I made a point of remembering this group, this subset, as I knew it wasn’t likely I would be in this position forever, and I wanted to be able to reach out to these people at some point in the future.

  It certainly didn’t hurt to be doing that, and at the age of 47, still very much combat effective, I finally got to go back to a real unit – that didn’t exist.

  25 DEC 2116

  In Re:Major General James Wolf

  S/N 20690401142857

  Pursuant to general orders of the Commander, subject soldier transferred to Army Special Operations Joint Task Force 6, to assume command.

  Location left to discretion of commander.

  …

  Happy Yule indeed!

  For as long as history has existed, there has always been some sort of “Joint Task Force.” The idea was that disparate teams had to work together, and when that became a necessity, they would form a joint task force for purposes of command and control. “Six” had also been used in the US Military forever, to indicate “command”.

  In this case, JTF was a nice innocuous team designation, and 6 was just to give it a
n easy way to distinguish both internally, as well as keep anyone else guessing if there was a JTF1 through JTF5. That suited me just fine.

  This was much smaller than the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Covert Ops Battalion – and, coincidentally, it had an even bigger “rank shift” – I had what effectively amounted to an oversized company of troops to work with. I had an impressive budget, with absolutely zero oversight – I had a limit, had the option to raise other funding from whatever sources I deemed viable and necessary,

  I spent the first few weeks familiarizing myself with the unit’s history (barely ten years old!), the people (Heyyyy there’s Sergeant Major Breshears… well shit, there’s Brice again – also Sergeant Major, go figure), and the available assets. (HOLY SHIT we have those?)

  It was both refreshing, and surprising, to see the extent to which my senior leadership trusted me. There was no way in hell that they’d have handed this unit to anyone who they didn’t trust.

  I also received a special surprise… A note from “Lead Intendant Watts”.

  3 JAN 2117, 213807h

  James! Sorry I couldn’t answer your last note; I didn’t see it until my out-processing had completed. By now, you’ve probably realized that you’ve inherited the unit I was running for the last little while; I hope you’ll enjoy the hard work I put into it.

  The people are good – but you already know that, because you already know a lot of them.

  I see your original request was in regard to professional development. If you’re still looking for that, perhaps we’ll have to get together sometime and talk about it more. Feel free to reach me anytime – as you can see, I’ve transferred to the civilian side and will be working in commercial coordination with spacer industry. US18 makes it about the same pay, but civilian instead of military.

  Drop me a note sometime, call, or let’s meet up for a discussion about things.

  Rick

  I was sent a rather unpleasant surprise, too – one that made me think seriously about McDirk’s complaints about my hobbies.

  Breshears had apparently run out of luck, and it nearly killed him.

  Apparently he’d decided to grab a ride on the sunset flight (the last skydive of the day), and since he’d jumped once already, his usual rig hadn’t been repacked yet – so he grabbed a student parachute. Everything was good to go, he’d jumped, but forgot that the student’s reserve chutes had an automatic opening device – in case they forgot to pull, it would make their parachute open safely. He was always a little wacko, and pushed the limits – and in this case, he’d pulled his primary, which opened up just fine – and then the reserve automatically deployed, and fouled his primary.

  He burned in hard, nearly killing himself – but his canopies just barely opened in time to catch air, albeit awkwardly. End result, he was the weight on the end of a string that bounced him off the ground a couple of times, breaking a lot of bones – including both wrists. Poor bastard couldn’t jerk off for six months – but then again, I figure that was just an excuse he used to get more women into his bedroom.

  Fortunately, he was back in the saddle so to speak, and he was doing training – although he seemed a little skittish and wanted to spend time diving into spreadsheets instead of clouds.

  That helped, later.

  Chapter 34: Jungle Bunnies

  On the advice of former-General Rick Watts, I (ab)used my rank equivalency to get a new apartment in Manhattan’s premier arkscraper, The America Building. I was nearly at the top on the 241st floor – that would have made anyone else jealous. It was sad, really, that I had all of that space, and nothing in it. I told McDirk to find someone to come and decorate for me, with special instructions to leave several thousand square feet in the corner as a special space that I had plans for.

  That special space became… I’m not even sure what to call it, but I intended for it to be my private armory, dojo, secure location, whatever you want to call it.

  The cute brunette that McDirk hired did a nice job – the place was decorated in muted colors, nothing overly dark, but not especially bright, either, other than lighting I could manipulate with my implant once I figured out the controls on the wall were nothing more than a remote control. The brunette was easily manipulated, too – and by the time she was done, she’d seen more of my bedroom than the rest of the apartment – in fact, she had a remote access code that meant I could call her and she could let herself in. I half suspected she had that anyway, but the space I’d set aside for myself was eventually finished off by industrial contractors and had no sensors, connectivity, nothing. The military, before the advent of implants, had used “SCIF” rooms – Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities – to handle anything sensitive. Those rooms were, in essence, entirely locked off from the outside world.

  Those same contractors handled the security systems I had them put around the rest of my apartment, but that had more access to the network at large.

  In my case, “the space” was secured to the point that I could walk in and even my own implant lost access to the general network. I was okay with that – and was even more okay with the other modifications I made to the room. You couldn’t get in, electronically… and you couldn’t get in physically, either, without either a lot of explosives, or the manual key that I kept in the hollow space inside Rage. There was one other, but I’m not about to share the location of that with someone who’s already read through all of my memoirs and knows as much about me as you do.

  I used my new place to accommodate senior staff meetings with my unit, and anything we needed to discuss in private – like the Oath of Blades – was done inside The Space. We were, to put it mildly, the most locked-down organization the country had ever seen, and short of someone breaking under torture, no-one but me would have a full picture of the unit’s activities, not even my subordinate commanders.

  We did our first mission planning there, all of the discussions surrounding our tasking in Africa. As it would turn out, the Chinese had expended a lot of their natural resources during the 8-day war, decades before, and were looking to find that wealth without having to do much work for it. We were supposed to get inland to South Africa through Madagascar, then start soaking up all the intel we could get our hands onto, as a precursor to an all-out invasion of US Forces that were ostensibly going to “free” the “underserved and underprivileged” people of that continent, and I shit you not, the orders actually read, “from the bottom up.”

  We did so, and quietly enough that I don’t think anyone ever really caught on. Nearly the entire JTF6 unit deployed; we were a very tightly knit unit and we all had contacts in the regular military and the civilian population back home.

  Why does that matter? Well, military pay being what it is, and us risking our asses to do things that frankly were of limited impact had made a lot of us very aware of the difference in need. That’s a pretty serious thing for the military – and were we doing this for something that we truly believed in, I don’t think anyone would have had an issue. Unfortunately, we found ourselves in a position of being used as the muscle for a country that was, to be blunt, taking advantage of another country’s ill fortune.

  We took air transport to Diego Garcia, and then split our group into four, each group getting it’s own company-sized aircraft for the upcoming airdrop into Africa. We planned on taking enough gear and supplies to cover us for a month, though, so those aircraft were packed solid.

  South Africa had expanded from the size it had once been; it had absorbed Namibia, Botswana, as well as most of Mozambique (which had already annexed part of Malawi). Lesotho and Swaziland had voluntarily joined the South African nation, as well. Essentially, the lower quarter of the continent was now “South Africa”. Further up into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and most of what used to be called “Central Africa” had devolved into smaller warlord states that engaged in constant battle for natural resources. Since my mandate was “learn”, we decided it was important to have a safe pl
ace to do that. We airdropped into approximately the center of the continent after several refueling stops in-flight, and we came to ground in what had been a national park in the southern part of the Congo.

  From there, it was a long trip, where we’d routinely expend ammo to strongly encourage some of the warlords we encountered to get down and not get up (well, dead is a pretty strong encouragement, don’t you think?). In most cases, I just smiled and told the overjoyed villagers we encountered, “Grace a la J.W.” For those of you who don’t speak it, that’s French for “Thank the J.W.”. For some odd reason, the first English speaking person we talked to read that as “jew” instead of “J.W.” (J…W? Jew? Oui, c’est la juif!”) That was funny to me, since I was pretty sure I had no jewish blood in my ancestry.

  As we rolled south, using up ammo and food, we occasionally collected more – no, really, we collected it, as in, picked it off the trees. Where we could trade with the locals, we did so; on occasion, some of the villagers we’d deprived of their oppressor gave us more. I’ve gotta say, the coffee was the best stimulant I’ve ever had. I later found out that these coffee beans had about four times as much caffeine in them as the Espresso energy drinks we’d brought along. That stuff was harvested, and we actually started sending it back, after we’d stabilized and gone to ground in South Africa proper.