Savior

by Caplan, Anthony

  Here is an aerial view of the facility looking from the south. These are the crude supply tanks and the central chimneys. To the right are the pump houses and the cracking stills. This building here is the control room. We believe the LSM laboratories to be below the control room. We have no interior views as yet, but this is a drone shot of some components we believe to be tooling and sensors of a type used in large-scale resonance amplification processors being taken out of one of the storage houses, which are west of the control room and connected by this shipping platform, which also faces onto this building here, the benzene pump room.

  Ricky couldn't help but be impressed by the big man's command of the visuals and the presentation. He listened as Newman described various contingency plans for gaining access and extraction of the prisoners. It was hard to believe they would go to all this trouble just for his dad. But there were others captive in that place also. Later, in the dorm-style room he was staying in, Ricky asked Coppinger about other prisoners.

  Yeah, we think they might be the remaining survivors of the Air Force X138 that went down somewhere near Rio Branco in Brazil in 2005, said Coppinger.

  That's good.

  Why?

  He's not alone. I hated to think he was all alone somewhere with those sketchy bastards.

  Oh, no. This has been going on for a long time. We've been narrowing in on the Santos for some time now. Just that thanks to you and your dad we know now what they're up to and where.

  The transponders?

  Yup. Did the job.

  Do I still have one?

  I doubt it. All they are is nano-chips that get placed in your food. Eventually your body either shits them out or shuts them down by breaking through the blister pack and shorting them out. Anyway you don't need one anymore. We know where you are.

  You think I can do this?

  I know you can. With a little help you're going to bust it wide open. Just need you to get inside that place.

  Why me?

  You're motivated. And you're a kid. Gives you an edge in terms of evading their security.

  Coppinger, whose first name was Hector, took Ricky down to the gym after lending him a pair of shorts and a pair of the skateboard sneakers. Ricky ran on the treadmill and tried the rowing machine, but he got bored very quickly. He noticed the military honchos, guys in their twenties, in there looking at themselves as they did compound exercises, pushups and squats with barbells in each hand. They all looked tough, but a little too full of themselves, Ricky thought. Except for Coppinger. Hector was from Oklahoma and had become a Navy Seal at the age of eighteen. He had been in Afghanistan and run some missions in Somalia and Colombia before taking on his position with the staff of the Southern Joint Operations Command. Ricky was curious about the motivation of someone like Coppinger. He drank from his Gatorade bottle after handing one to Ricky.

  Courtesy of Uncle Sam. How do you feel, kid?

  I just miss my girlfriend.

  You have a girlfriend?

  Yeah.

  Where is she? What's her name?

  Lianne. She's at home. In my town. Plymouth Beach.

  Where's that?

  You know where Orlando is?

  Yeah, of course.

  A little north of there. It's just a small Florida beach town.

  Hey. The best places in America are small towns.

  I miss it.

  Well. Hell, I'll drive you up there. We don't have to tell nobody.

  Really?

  Yeah. We'll go tonight. Can you call her?

  Of course.

  Tell her you're coming by. Don't tell her where you are.

  I have no idea where I am.

  Later, Ricky was dripping wet in the bathroom next to the dorm room, holding onto a towel with one hand, when Coppinger flipped him a cell phone and laughed as Ricky managed to catch it. Ricky sat on the bed and texted Lianne. Out the window it was getting dark already. Next to him on the bed was a pile of clothes somebody had bought for him, some jeans and generic Fruit of the Loom tee shirts in a Wal-Mart bag, so he'd look like something out of the Wizard of Oz. He put on a pair of the jeans and a tee shirt and a sweatshirt and flipped the hoodie up. The phone rang.

  Hi there.

  Is it you?

  Yes.

  You're in Florida. How was it? You've been gone for weeks and weeks.

  Yeah. I can't really talk now.

  Why not?

  Coppinger stared out the window. Ricky put his thumb over the mouthpiece. What can I tell her?

  Just say you'll meet her in three hours. Outside her house. Take her for a ride.

  Okay. Can you go out for just a second?

  Two minutes. Coppinger went out the door and closed it behind him.

  Lianne, you'll never believe this. I'm in a top-secret military base. I guess it's in Florida.

  Eight six three area code. I guess so.

  I have to talk fast.

  Oh, no. That sounds really bad.

  It's even worse. Listen, I want to meet you in three hours. Can you do that?

  Where?

  Zapata's.

  Zapata's?

  Yeah.

  Why there?

  It's quiet. Nobody goes there. And Flora's your friend. She'll keep it quiet.

  Okay. Ten o'clock say?

  All right. Keep it a total secret. You've got to do that.

  Don't worry. But Ricky, what in the heck?

  I'll tell you everything. This isn't my phone. Bye.

  Bye.

  When Coppinger re-entered the room, Ricky was sitting on the bed flipping through the video games on the phone.

  You've got Spore. Sweet.

  You like that one. Check out this one. Call of Duty Four. Coppinger took the phone and brought up a video game that he handed back.

  What did she say?

  She said yeah.

  She's okay with it?

  Yeah.

  Good. Listen. I need the phone. But I've got another one you can have. I think it still's even signed up with Verizon. I'll bring it. I've got to run home.

  Coppinger lived somewhere off base.

  I'll come back in, say, an hour and we'll head out. I'll meet you by the West gate. Don't worry. Nobody's even going to check on you. Just say you're waiting for the bus if anyone asks.

  Okay.

  Ricky handed Coppinger the phone and watched him go out the door.

  He was alone in the room for several minutes, absorbing the silence on his floor of the dorm. The other people in the dorm seemed to be a visiting delegation of South Koreans. Coppinger said they had been taken out to dinner. The base was somewhere in Florida. He’d had no idea. And Coppinger lived off base. There were posters that said things like GOD WILL JUDGE OUR ENEMIES. . .WE'LL ARRANGE THE MEETING over a picture of some kind of hellhound with bared fangs. Ricky found it depressing to look at and now wanted badly to get out of there, knowing how close he was to home. He had a sudden need to get the tablet. He didn't know where it was, but the last place he'd seen it was the command center. If they felt he was slick enough to get into the Canadian oil refinery where the Santos Muertos had their laboratory, then he could probably get in to the command center on the base and get the tablet without getting caught. It was worth a try. He picked himself up off the bed, dumped the clothes out of the Wal-Mart bag, and stuffed the bag in the pocket of his jeans.

  The base was built around several artificial ponds lined with palm trees and walkways. Jogging military men and women wound their way along the paths in the twilight. Ricky slipped by them without arousing any notice. He approached the main building, which from outside appeared to be a low-slung concrete bulk surrounded by long black, bulletproof windows extending from below grade to a few feet above ground. Walking along the pathway by it, Ricky noticed the soldier at the metal door and the lights inside just visible through the tinted glass. He walked around the corner and about twenty feet out of eye line and cut across the grass until he reached the wall. H
e jumped down into the gravel-lined well that surrounded the building and counted the innumerable cigarette butts dumped down there. On his stomach, he waited a long time, maybe twenty minutes, as it grew noticeably darker. He listened to the fragments of conversations as joggers ran by.

  Yeah, that cat-scratch fever got chronic.

  He just wants to say you're fired.

  Their voices faded into the distance along with their rhythmic footfalls. Ricky thought of his father in a prison a thousand miles away. Harken Oil Sands. Sounded dismal and far-off. Who built a secret laboratory beneath an oil refinery? If Al were here they would laugh at the preposterousness of it together. The thought of his father's sardonic dismissiveness, usually stronger in times of stress, gave him an energy lift. It was dark. He crawled forward and around the building, peeking his head up to see where the soldier was. He was not in sight. He must have gone in the building. This was a good sign. Ricky hunched over and ran the last few yards to the wall where the ditch ended and scratched up the embankment on all fours. He got up next to the door, and it took an effort to keep from looking around. As he put his hands on the square metal knob to push, it swung open of its own accord, and he found himself facing a group of Korean naval officers, laughing and talking to each other and their American counterparts coming up behind. Ricky held the door open for them.

  Looks like they're having fun, he said to the two Americans. They grinned back at him. Then he slipped inside and let the door sweep shut on its own.

  The light inside was the timeless orange tone of dimmed tracking lights reflecting off the wood-paneled ceiling. Ricky walked purposefully along, hugging the wall to remain in shadow as much as possible. There were people still manning about half of the rows of computer terminals, talking among themselves, chatting, picking up pointers about the movements of the country's enemies. He passed several doors of offices and tried to remember which office could have been the one where the Mayan expert had sat him down to ask him questions about the tablet. He'd been unable to say very much to her other than recount the details of his meeting and befriending Coconut Juan to the point where he let them have the tablet, despite his misgivings about it getting into the wrong hands. Ricky was sure it was now in the wrong hands. Knowing what he knew, he thought it was best to keep the tablet's secrets out of circulation altogether until perhaps humanity had evolved a better way of coping with differences in ideology. Right now nobody knew for certain what was going on. Some people, his father for instance, believed there was some kind of transcendent good that was forever battling with the forces of evil and neither side was ever making much headway until the final hour when Jesus would ride in on the cloud horses and burn away all the chaff.

  One door had a plaque designating it as the SOJOC Conference Room. He thought that could have been it. The door opened and he slipped inside.

  The lights came on automatically. Motion sensors. There were probably closed circuit cameras firing, recording the image of a fuzzy young man in a hoodie. He thought that he had perhaps a couple of minutes before the world came tumbling down. There it was—on a table next to the podium on the small, raised stage. Calmly, Ricky walked up to the table, picked up the tablet, and looked at the old, reclining, helmeted god with the unsmiling face and the strange symbols aligned underneath and around it. He put the tablet in the Wal-Mart bag. Then he walked out of the command center and to the West Gate. The MP on duty nodded at him as he went out the pedestrian path. Cars drove by slowly in the Florida night, ignorant of the dangerous terrorist act he'd just committed. He calmed himself, and into his head popped some lines of something Al liked to quote from Longfellow:

  He has left the village and mounted the steep,

  And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,

  Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides. . .

  Eleven—Viva Zapata's

  Hector drove the east-west county roads from Tampa, using the GPS mounted between them on the Mazda’s dash. Ricky recognized the trailer parks and the ad for a law firm that had been on the road around Lakeland for at least a decade. The last time he’d been here must have been three years ago when he and his mother went to Busch Gardens on the eighth grade class trip and had taken this way on the drive back.

  Several cars swerved wildly on the two lanes, but Hector maneuvered expertly and calmly while he talked.

  Must be people coming back from the Indian casino, he said. You ever been hunting, Ricky?

  No. My Dad and I used to go fishing.

  I'll take you fishing in the spring for bonefish down in the Keys. That's some fishing. Surf casting. I just got to get me some decent reels. I have a cousin. Timmy Dyer, in Gulfport Louisiana. One of the best sports fishermen in the country. You ever see SFTV?

  No.

  He was on that show with Earl Frazier catching redfish in Venice, Louisiana. Caught a thirty-five pounder on television. A real beauty.

  What kind of boat did he catch it with?

  Boat? You talking boat? He’s got a twenty-foot Bay Ranger, with twin-mounted 300-horse Evinrudes. Mint condition. Loves that thing with his life. We go out and catch a mess of fish with that boat.

  Yeah.

  Fishing and hunting's God's way of making sure men stay men, Ricky, don't you agree? Keep you tuned and focused to the important things in life. I know you want some success in your life, am I right?

  Yeah.

  What are you thinking in terms a career?

  I don't know. Maybe a lawyer.

  A lawyer? You couldn't pay me enough money to be a lawyer.

  Yeah. Maybe a journalist.

  Now that's something. Some of those journalist boys got their heads screwed on right.

  The night streamed by outside in a cloudless torpor while Ricky listened to Coppinger talk. He wanted to remember the way Coppinger's hands shifted on the steering wheel, to listen for the stress in his voice that would come from noticing that he wasn't really listening. But then he realized that Hector didn't notice anything. He just kept driving and talking. When they got to Plymouth Beach, Ricky directed Coppinger down a cul de sac and told him to wait. He popped out of the car and walked twenty feet down a driveway and then jogged around the house, down a ditch and up to the back of a middle school parking lot. Then he jogged across Palisade Parkway thronged with nighttime traffic from Cape Canaveral and across the railroad tracks to Route 31. He checked the cell phone Coppinger had given him for the time and then tossed it into the stand of scrub pines next to a Mobil station.

  Zapata's was between a dry-cleaners and a nail care salon. It had Christmas lights in the window all year round and a cartoon image of a Mexican bandido with a huge moustache on the door along with an ad for Corona stamped on the glass. Inside, Lianne was waiting in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair undone, talking with Flora in the doorway to the kitchen. She could have been an off-duty waitress, and the patrons at the table noticed nothing out of the ordinary as Ricky came up and greeted the two girls. Flora's mother came out with a plate of food in one hand and two beers topped with glasses in the other. Flora grabbed the beers out of her mother's hand.

  Excuse me, guys, she said.

  Lianne smiled at her, turned to Ricky and sighed.

  You made it.

  Yeah.

  What's in the bag?

  Something for my mother.

  She's dead, Ricky. Don't be ghoulish.

  Kind of rhymes with foolish.

  Lianne laughed nervously.

  I need to know one thing, said Lianne.

  What?

  Do we have time to eat? Flora's got two plates of leftovers set up in the kitchen.

  Let's do it.

  They ate in the kitchen at a small table in the corner. Flora came over and asked how it was.

  It's great, Flora. Thanks.

  He and Flora had been in the same English class the year before with Ms. Moody. Flora had sat in the front and had taken extensive notes. She was determined to be the first of the Lopez girls to
go to college. Ricky had been honing a different skill set. Maybe he'd join the military. But now the thought hanging out with the likes of Coppinger was making him doubt that outcome. Anybody who could talk fishing for three straight hours without a pause was either a genius or an idiot.

  You coming back to school, Ricky? asked Flora.

  Maybe.

  Okay. She went away to serve some customers at the bar with quesadillas.

  This is great. I haven't eaten since breakfast. They kept me going at meetings all afternoon. They wanted me to infiltrate this plant.

  What are you talking about?

  There's a war, Lianne.

  Isn't there always?

  My father's a prisoner. We have to get him.

  Ricky. You sound crazy.

  I'm not. You have to trust me. We need to get up to Canada and get him back, and I need your car.

  My car wouldn't get us to Jacksonville. The tires need air and it needs an oil change. Bobby's been after me for months to do those things. He says the tires need to be rotated and it needs new brakes.

  Bobby was her older sister Cora's new boyfriend. He worked as a delivery route driver for a food distributor. He was Ricky's ace in the hole. Lianne hated him.

  It runs.

  Yeah, it runs okay.

  It's now or never. I just ditched the Navy. I've got the tablet. They'll be hunting me down and I know they don't care about my father. They'll put a bunker buster on him as soon as sneeze.

  What about school?

  What about it?

  You don't think it's important?

  Lianne, you know like sometimes you're in that situation where you've got to choose between jumping or staying put? Like where in that movie here come the flying baboons or do you trust the cloud of butterflies? If you stay still you'll get torn to shreds and if you jump you might die? It's like one of those times for me. I want you to come with me.

  Why?

  Because you've got more balls in your pinky than most people I know have you-know-where.

  Your pants usually.

  Lianne bent to her plate and finished off the burrito with two or three deft moves with her fork. She chewed carefully and stared off into space. Then she wiped her mouth and burped softly under her breath. She was a good-looking sixteen year-old going on twenty-five. She swept her hair back out of her face with one hand and looked up at him.