Reckoning

by Mark Tufo

  The route looked fairly moderate, but nothing the Hummer couldn’t handle. Paul had to be trucking supplies up here to feed his army so this should be nothing for a Hummer. Off-roading at dusk wasn’t calming my nerves though. I should have expected it but I guess I just didn’t believe Paul was that organized. I drove straight into a checkpoint. And it was strategically placed around a bend, so that you couldn’t see it from a distance and by the time you did, you had nowhere to turn around. I was hoping they hadn’t received any reports from their comrades whom I encountered earlier. I had to admit these three men were much more polished and professional than their fellow compatriots. But they still didn’t conceal their disdain for my uniform very well.

  “Well, Captain, what can we do for you?” A sergeant came up to my window while the other two loosely leveled their weapons in my general direction. Not totally threatening, but certainly capable of being brought up and fired in a split second. The Hummer can do a lot of things, but speed is not one of them. If they opened fire, I was a goner.

  “Well, Sergeant, I have a message for Mr. Ginson, from General Burkhalter.”

  “First off, Captain, it’s Colonel Ginson. And second, we have no scheduled visits from any messenger of General Burkhalter.”

  “Sergeant, I don’t have time to debate the matter with you. Call your Colonel and have me authorized to pass.” The sergeant wasn’t thrilled with being ordered around but he had sense enough not to interfere with matters he wasn’t one hundred percent in control of.

  “Private, get on the horn to the major and check this out.”

  “Right away, Sergeant.” The private went into the hut and the third guardsman readied his weapon, now that he didn’t have back-up.

  “Sergeant, the major says let him up,” the private yelled from the booth.

  “Stand down your weapon, Lance Corporal Conner,” the sergeant said as he waved me through.

  “Have a good evening, Sergeant.” I said as I drove through. I couldn’t tell for sure because of the encroaching darkness, but I think he gave me the finger. It’s gotta suck to be on guard duty, in the dead of winter on the side of a mountain.

  I drove the rest of the mile and a half very slowly; the sheer drop visible on my side had me sweating rivulets. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. I had completely shut off my radio for fear of distractions. If I rolled off, they wouldn’t find me until spring, and that’s if they even bothered to look. I somehow felt that wouldn’t be on the top of their priority list.

  I was about to pull over and take a breather when I topped the last rise. I came out onto a flat expanse in front of me, which appeared to be the main encampment. Marking lights were on the roadway(?) pathway(?) That, at least, let me know in which direction I needed to travel. I hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when I came to my second checkpoint. I was waved to a stop and this time, a lieutenant hopped into my passenger seat.

  “Welcome to Camp Talbot, Captain. I will escort you directly to the command tent.”

  Camp Talbot, huh? That had a nice ring. I wonder what this lieutenant would think if I told him I was the namesake for this place. Most likely, he wouldn’t believe me. The lieutenant made small talk the remainder of the way, which suited me. I had nothing to say. He guided me to the tent and hopped out.

  “Have a good evening, Captain; it was a pleasure talking to you.” And that’s about what he did, talk to me.

  “Sir, Lieutenant Benson reporting. I have brought our guest, sir.”

  “Very well, Lieutenant.” I had half expected to see Paul but it appeared that his executive officer was going to perform as message receiver. I got out of the Hummer and approached the major.

  “Well, what’s your message, Captain? I don’t have all day,” he said, before looking up at the sky. “Or night for that matter,” he added.

  “With all due respect, sir, this message is for Colonel Ginson’s ears only.”

  “Captain,” the major began, visibly starting to get perturbed. “Let me assure you that whatever you tell the colonel will be relayed to me in a matter of seconds; so let’s just avoid the extra steps and be done with it.”

  “Again, sir, I have very explicit orders.”

  “Damn your ‘very explicit orders’!” The major was not used to having his demands ignored.

  “What is all this noise about, Major?” Paul asked, stepping from behind one of the partitions in the tent. Damn, he looked fit; nothing like the college roommate I remembered. His face was chiseled, he didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat on him. But the most noticeable difference was the character of his face. It was obvious to see that Paul was a commander of men. Confidence oozed out of him.

  “Sir, I didn’t mean to disturb you. General Burkhalter has sent another lackey with a message.”

  “Why didn’t he just radio it in?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but this captain,” he started. His disdain was visible, “Will not tell me, the lowly major.”

  “It’s alright, Major,” Paul said as he placed his hand on Frank's shoulder. “We shall find out what this important message is together. Captain, come in all the way so that we may hear your message clearly since you have traveled such a great distance to announce it in person.”

  I stepped all the way into the tent and stood directly under the light that hung in the center. Paul turned white as a sheet and had to grab hold of the table the major had been working on. The major turned to brace his leader. “Sir, are you alright? Sir?” Paul shrugged him off.

  “Mike, is that you?”

  “In the flesh, Paul.” The major didn’t know what was going on but the informality was making him flustered.

  “How is this possible?” Paul asked as he rounded the table to completely embrace me in a bear hug, which I gladly reciprocated. “We - I thought you were dead. I attended your funeral.”

  “How was it?”

  “Not bad, not enough beer though.” Ah, that’s the Paul I knew.

  “You might want to let me go now; you don’t want the men thinking anything about this.” Paul let go, tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh man, it’s so good to see you, you need to tell me what has been going on for all this time.”

  “And you the same for me, bud. But first, man, I’m hungry and thirsty.”

  “Major, this is Mike Talbot, this is the man that is responsible for all this.”

  “Captain, it is an honor and a pleasure to meet you. But I thought you were dead.”

  “In a manner of speaking I was, Major, and when I am finished eating, I will lay out my entire story for you. Do not be alarmed, but the need for this camp is even more dire than any of you could have expected.”

  That allayed the major's fears. When he realized I was alive, his first thought was that the need for the camp was completely useless. Relief flooded over his face. “You don’t play much poker, do you, Major?”

  “Huh?” He replied.

  “Frank's good at a lot of things but hiding his emotions isn’t one of them,” Paul said as he realized what was going through his X.O's mind. We laughed, ate and drank for hours. The major remarked how he had never seen the Paul so happy since… well, since ever. And that got us laughing all over. I tried to give Paul the story somewhere in between the debriefing, full-length version and the condensed, storytelling version. We all watched the sun come up over the horizon by the time I had recounted the whole thing. Paul could do little more than stare at me in amazement. He was as impressed with my new growth as I was with his.

  “So the Army right now has this Progerian in custody?” I nodded in agreement. “Funny, General Burkhalter never mentioned anything about that little fact. I’ll have to let him know what I think the next time I talk to him.”

  “He probably didn’t tell you, because then you’d ferret out of him that I was back; and I very much think that he wanted me to surprise the hell out of you.”

  “Well, that you did, Mike, that you did. So you’re
a Marine Corps officer now?”

  “That does seem to be the case.”

  “Where do they have you going after your visit here?”

  “Well, that’s just it, buddy, I’m staying here.”

  “Are you another one of Burkhalter’s plants?”

  “No, I think he already has that avenue covered.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve been feeding one of my newer captains disinformation since he got here. So what gives? Why is the good general allowing you to attach to my ‘militia’?”

  “Well, I think he was telling it to me straight, Paul. He doesn’t think that the entire combined military force has a chance of stopping the Progerians. We are his back-up plan and he wants the best on the bench, at least for now.”

  “Interesting, I was always under the impression that we were just some sort of plaything for the general and when he got tired of playing with us, he would discard us to the wings and the waiting arms of the FBI.”

  “So that’s the whole reason behind the Indian Hill project?”

  “How much do you know about that and who else knows?” Paul asked as the color drained out of his face.

  “Relax, my friend, Dennis came up to Maine while I was visiting my father and sister.” Paul was relieved but still not happy that Dennis had talked.

  “Paul, come on, man, he told me, nobody else, just me. I sure didn’t tell Burkhalter. I trusted enough in you for you to have your reasons to keep it secret. Now, trust in Dennis to do his part.” Paul relaxed a little more, but I knew the next time he talked to Dennis, a decent tongue lashing was going to be attached. “Paul, he’s got that place locked down better than the security here. I even tried the Stop and Shop roof to get a look with some binoculars and almost got my head bashed in for my efforts.”

  “Well, not to change the subject too radically, but how is your family doing? I’m sorry about your mom. I wanted to go to the services, but I had some things here that I had to take care of.”

  “Lyndsey’s great; she goes up to Maine every other weekend to spend some time with my dad. Ronny’s the same old Ronny, working his ass off. My dad has slipped a bit, my mom’s passing took him hard. I don’t know, I guess you just get so used to one way of living that when it’s taken away from you, you become lost. To be honest, Paul, that’s how I feel about the whole planet. We’re a few months away from possibly losing everything we know.”

  “That’s why we’re here, bud,” he replied as he placed an arm over my shoulder. It was going to take more than that to wring the chill from my bones.

  “When are you planning on moving these people to the new station?”

  “Well, we already started, we want it to look more like attrition than total abandonment. We were going to take our time and possibly have it done in six months and just make it look like nobody believed in the ‘cause’ and it fizzled out. That way, no suspicion would be aroused. But your story kind of puts a wrench in that scenario. We’ll have to do some mass moving in the next week or two. I definitely don’t want to be caught out here in the middle of nowhere with our pants down.”

  “Is the Hill going to be able to house that many people?”

  “This times two is the design, plus two year’s worth of rations.”

  “That had to have taken some serious green.”

  “I think the project is somewhere up in the billion range.”

  “How is the general allocating that kind of money?”

  “Beats me how he’s doing it, he’s pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing. I would imagine it has something to do with plausible deniability. Frank, could you see about finding Captain Talbot here some suitable quarters?” Paul turned back to me. “Hey Mike, why don’t you go get a few hours of shut eye and then I’ll show you around the place. You might be more than a little surprised.”

  I was attempting to stifle a yawn before I answered. “That sounds good to me, but don’t let me sleep past noon or I’ll never get to sleep tonight.”

  “Don’t worry, with all the noise we have going on up here, you’ll be lucky to make it past nine.”

  “Great,” I muttered sarcastically. “Just try to keep me as far away from the firing range as possible.”

  “Will do,” Paul smiled. “Bud, I can’t tell you how much good seeing you has done for me.”

  “Yeah, it feels pretty good for me too, my friend.” I headed out the door to check out my new digs. My new quarters were nothing if not sparse; and it appeared to me that it had been vacated only moments before by some now greatly disgruntled lieutenants. An Army standard issue cot dominated the room. I almost laughed when Major Salazar asked if these quarters would be sufficient. I wanted to tell him that my alien abductors had put me up in what was equivalent to the Ritz, at least, comparatively speaking. But I refrained. It was going to be hard enough getting along around here, especially when the henchmen from out of town returned to tell their tale. Well, at least the cot was off the cold, ice-packed ground. That gave me a little comfort but right now, I was pretty sure that I would have been able to sleep on that too.

  I awoke possibly a few hours later to the rumblings of a low flying jet. The thing flew so low it nearly uprooted my tent in the after wake. The jet passing by was closely followed by the shouts and curses of all the people it had disturbed. I walked out of my tent and tried to stretch my way to wakefulness. I asked the first passer by what the hell was going on.

  “They like to let us know occasionally that they are still watching,” the private said as he shuffled on by, bearing his load of what appeared to be munitions. I strolled on up to the command tent, where Paul and the major and a few of his other staff officers were discussing tactics. All conversation ceased as the other officers noticed the Marine insignia on my uniform.

  “It’s alright, gentlemen; we can talk in front of him,” Paul said to cut through the silence.

  “But sir,” one of the captains spoke out, he’s regular military. He’s exactly what we’re trying to keep our secrets from.”

  Paul looked squarely at me. “Captain, are your orders to report directly to me?”

  “No, Colonel, they are not,” I answered much to the amazement of Paul’s staff. I continued. “My orders are to report directly to General Burkhalter.” A couple of the junior officers looked like they were getting ready to throw me out of the command tent.

  “Relax,” Paul said as he commanded everyone to sit back down. “If you gentlemen had been scrutinizing his uniform more closely, and looking past his Marine emblems, you may have noticed his name tag.” The officers turned in unison. Recognition dawned on most of their faces. A few, however, were not able to piece the puzzle together quite so quickly. I remembered who those men were; they might just be a little too dim to be leading men into battle.

  “Captain Talbot, what an honor to meet you” said one of the first officers who had risen to throw me on my keester. I shook his hand; it felt like granite. This man had spent more than one summer out in the sun splitting logs, or rocks more likely. “Captain Dusty Davidson, at your service.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine, Captain.”

  “Why was that recon plane flying so low?” I asked no one in particular.

  Captain Davidson spoke up. “Ever since we hid everything under our camo netting, they’ve been flying lower and lower to try to get some good pictures of our encampment, but what they don’t know…” The captain turned to Paul to make sure that it was alright to release this information. Paul nodded his consent. “Well, what they don’t know is that we’re tapped into their radar systems down in Colorado Springs. We know the second their planes leave the runway.”

  “What about the satellites?”

  “Well, this special camo netting completely throws those cameras off. It’s infrared and radar scattering. They can’t tell if there is a mouse or a division under these things. And for those times when we do training out in the open, we know the fly overs of every possible spy sat in orbit.”

 
“Does that leave much time to do anything?”

  “It gives us roughly half an hour, each hour, to be safe. There have been times when we had to be out longer; so we’ve devised a system for that also. We try to use it sparingly because we don’t want them to catch on. When we’re out there with our pants down, and have something we definitely don’t want Big Brother to see, we can send a micro-burst of highly ionized particles into the satellite that completely scrambles the onboard computer. The machine has to reset and, by the time it boots back up, it’s long gone.”

  “You guys developed that?”

  “Don’t be so amazed, Captain. There are a lot of very smart people on this project who are not happy with the way the U.S. is preparing for this war. They want to be as prepared as possible to save their families, their lives, and their country.”

  “No, you misunderstood me, Colonel. I wasn’t in astonishment that this organization developed it, I’m in astonishment that anybody developed it. If the military knew, they’d be on you like flies on a shit storm.” I realized my error when almost everyone at the table looked at me. It suddenly dawned on me that I was that very military. “Present company excluded.” The men relaxed after my joke.

  I stood up. I knew the majority of the men still did not trust me and would not speak their minds while I was present. I did not want to disrupt their proceedings.

  “Colonel, if you could have one of your privates show me the way to the mess tent, I would greatly appreciate it.”

  “Sure thing, Captain, and when we are done here, I will join you for some of our fine cuisine. After that, I would like to show you around.”

  “That would be great. Gentlemen, it was a pleasure meeting you.” A few nodded their courteous greetings; but most just stared at me, waiting for my graceful exit.

  The militia adopted the old rule of two hots, meaning two hot meals a day. Lunchtime wasn’t included. But they had a huge variety of MRE’s. Even inedible food was better than no food. And, to be honest, it was pretty good. I was halfway through my meal, attempting to open my tube of peanut butter, when Paul joined me.