“It’s far better than anything I had hoped for,” Wattenbarger said breathlessly. “It looks like we’ll be able to make a run at this. It may actually work!”
“You think so?” Warren asked with a mounting enthusiasm.
Wattenbarger just nodded. Then he stopped and his face froze.
“What now?” Warren asked in a flat whisper.
“Look over there, in the trees. It’s a truck!”
Warren ’s eyes flashed over to the back end of a metallic orange pickup sticking out of the brush.
“Why walk when we can drive home?” Wattenbarger asked with a wide grin, striding over toward the truck.
“Stop it, Dale, right now!” Warren exploded.
Wattenbarger stopped, then turned to face him. “Now what’s eating you?”
“We should’ve been walkin’ out of here ten minutes ago,” Warren said. “We need to get back and stop all this screwin’ around.”
“I asked you before: why walk when we can drive?” Wattenbarger repeated in unconcealed anger. “I can go into Jared’s pockets and pop out the keys in five minutes or less, then we can be on our way. So, why can’t we drive home in relative comfort?”
“Plenty of reasons! We don’t know if the fifteen miles of roads and back-roads are still open between here and there. And, if we happen to make it that far, driving means goin’ around the face of both mountains then up the side. Then where are we gonna park when we get to the base? How do we negotiate the mountain in the dark under our cave when we haven’t hiked up that side for over 35 years? And once we park that truck on the road, we’ve now marked ourselves for an ambush when we return. And what if the gas is bad? What if the truck breaks down? What if she gets a flat? What if someone else is out for a drive tonight and on and on and so forth? If any of those things happen, we’re dead! It may be a long walk back, but at least we know all the answers to all the questions.”
Wattenbarger sighed deeply and stole a longing look back at the shiny orange pickup. “Well, it would’ve been nice.”
“Let’s move!” Warren said. “We need to double-time to make it as it is.”
61
Hours after lights-out , Commander Kevin Winsteed sat slouched in his chair, his feet propped on top of piles of paper laying in haphazard stacks atop of his desk that had long since passed the point of just messy. He twirled a yellow pencil in his fingers round and round, his eyes focused beyond the piles of paper chaos on that empty space somewhere between the front of his nose and infinity. He was deep in contemplation, his mind touching on and toying with thoughts of sleep that would not come, held off by the deep seated terrors and haunting questions that plagued him and everyone else at Dutch Harbor.
Winsteed played over and over in his mind the events of that awful dusk, weeks before, when Aaron Seven with little Luci and his wife Serea, her father, and the inscrutable man they called Commander, took off from runway 12 headed west toward Pacifica . Winsteed and his troops had stood and watched as the VTOL aircraft was attacked by two teams of missile wielding Russian insurgents from both sides of the runway. The scene had played itself over in his brain hundreds of times – the streaks of the missiles fired in the late evening sky – the all but impossible and astonishing maneuvers of the sleek little craft to avoid the hand-held rockets fired at the worst possible time during takeoff.
Over and over again, Winsteed tried to consider how he could have prevented the attack that ultimately cost the lives of Aaron Seven and the little girl who fell out of the heavily damaged craft and into the wild ocean during a nighttime storm. But no matter how he replayed the events, he could not rid himself of personal responsibility, or worse, determine what he could have done differently.
Winsteed thought about the insurgents who must have been sent out on a willing suicide mission, leaving in the full light of the quantum storms to position themselves and be ready at takeoff time to make the intercept – an ongoing nightmare he could not ever understand, much less have defended against. But he would never know the answer to that specific question because the insurgent’s bodies had been reduced by his troops’ counter attack to various, tiny chunks of charred meat in the blackened tundra where they had been hiding.
But that represented only one of the questions since the VTOLs departure that had been piling up in his mind day after interminable day. Why Seven did not return to Dutch Harbor even though his craft was heavily damaged was obvious – he clearly did not want to be attacked again and he must have thought he retained enough capability to make it all the way to Pacifica . Winsteed remembered waiting all through that terrible night, listening for word of their fate and hearing only a snippet of the last transmission they would ever receive from Pacifica, reporting the loss of Dr. Seven and the little girl en route, and the crash of the VTOL just short of the landing platform. Fortunately, the other three were saved, if only at the last possible moment. But that was all – it was the last word from Pacifica , their only hope of survival beyond the next handful of months.
Yet why had there been no further transmissions from Pacifica , even though Seven had given Winsteed their encrypted frequencies? Winsteed had established an automated broadcast on those frequencies which had dutifully requested a status and an update from Pacifica every hour for several weeks. After there had not been even a single response from the underwater city, he finally terminated the transmissions.
Why? Those questions and others like them were more than just troubling, they joined together in a swirl as they plagued and infected his mind.
Winsteed recalled that the older scientist, Dr. Desmond, had seemed angry for some unknown reasons. There had been a disagreement over whether Aaron Seven had the authority to make the rescue offer to Dutch Harbor, but Seven was the Director of the colony, and should he not have had that authority all along? And if his wife survived the crash, would she not remember their agreement? Or was she injured in the crash at Pacifica and had she and her father subsequently died? Had Pacifica itself succumbed to accident or attack and now no longer even existed? How much longer would they hope for and await rescue? To Winsteed, just the constant entertainment of this permanently convoluted thread of hope itself grew into a kind of futile madness all of its own.
With this thought, just at the edge of actual awareness, on the grey fringe of half-sleep, there came three sharp raps at his office door.
“Enter,” Winsteed replied lucidly, but he did not change his position at the desk.
The door opened and inside the office stepped Karl Leighter and Lieutenant Juanita Juarez. In the long weeks following the loss of Aaron Seven, they had become inseparable. Winsteed silently approved of the seemingly unlikely match, it was good that two condemned people were able to enjoy some kind of strong human companionship before the inevitable end.
To Winsteed, Leighter seemed the exact logical opposite of Juarez. Flying in with Professor Desmond from the deepest bowels of Middlearth, Leighter represented the ultimate techno-nerd, the geek whose clothing was perpetually too big, the noticeably languid, soft-spoken one content to spend all day at a computer terminal or talking himself endlessly into a kind of silicon based binary oblivion, one who seemed to not have a clue about anything real or tangible.
On the other hand, and standing just on his other side, stood his dynamic opposite. Lieutenant Juanita Juarez was the triple Type A personality with a Hispanic temperament and passion all fused into a constant, never ending flare of human energy. If they could just figure out a way to connect a wire into her body, the entire military contingent would never want for power again.
But somehow, together, they had forged this bizarre emotional bonding that had even developed into an obvious dual dependency on one another. Winsteed had briefly considered it to be romantic love, but this idea lay somewhat outside his own emotional wrappings and he dropped the idea as quickly as it emerged. Yet, when it came time for lights-out, they managed to contort themselves into a sleeping bag designed for one in the
middle of the barracks floor and would fall soundly asleep, tightly folded together in one another’s embrace. The world had become so desperate and bizarre that everyone else just politely stepped over and around them and actually paid them no mind.
And yet, while they were obviously nearly a walking example of a single mind and flesh, when it came to the discussion of Pacifica , they were polar opposites, as he fully expected this middle-of-the-night conversation to reveal, to no surprise of Winsteed.
“We have an idea,” Leighter began enthusiastically, gripping Juarez’s fingertips lightly in his right hand. His white teeth stood out sharply and brilliantly against his black, bushy beard and mustache which he had grown since his stay at Dutch Harbor began.
“Go on,” Winsteed said quietly, just above an intelligible whisper. He did not move an inch from his slouch and just barely blinked his tired eyes which appeared to be having trouble focusing on them in the dim light.
“Okay, here’s the plan, sir,” Leighter said in a fresh voice that only comes with youth, enthusiasm and the capacity to put off rest nearly indefinitely. “We fly out of here in the VTOL to Pacifica and we contact them on approach by line of sight, which they monitor all the time from their sea-buoy network. We circle while they raise the platform and then we land and convince the powers there to send a rescue, just like they promised they would!”
Winsteed blinked slowly and said nothing, just staring at them.
“Well?” Juarez asked, cocking her head to one side and looking at the deeply reclined form of Winsteed. “What about it?”
“What can I say?” Winsteed said with all the enthusiasm of the village undertaker. “It’s just absolutely remarkable…”
“Wow!” Leighter responded, his eyes positively blazing back at Juarez. “I told you he’d go for this plan!”
“I said it was absolutely remarkable,” Winsteed continued, his voice still absolutely flat. “I said nothing about going for anything.”
“What do you mean?” Juarez asked, quickly losing her smile.
Winsteed sat slowly upright in his chair, rubbing his bearded face with the flat palms of both hands. Then he placed his elbows on the piles across his desktop and said, looking them both in the eyes, “Okay, I know I’ve been catnapping here for the past few hours, but I really don’t think I’m as stupid as I may look. So, let’s stop, back up and start at the beginning by managing this conversation a little more effectively. “Let’s say, just for arguments sake, that I am, in fact, stupid. So we’ll call me, Ricky Retardo. And let’s say that you are so brilliant you can’t describe it to the simple minded and slow witted because it’s just so wonderfully complex. So then, you can be Lucy. And since we’ve encountered a sharp divergence of opinion here in the face of such obstinate stupidity on my part, I want you to slow down, back up and ‘splain it to me a little better. While it is remarkable that you two finally actually agree on something – no anything, having to do with Pacifica - it still doesn’t explain how this plan is any different than the last time you pitched this to me, Karl…”
“But it is!” Leighter interrupted. “See, that’s why it’s so important and so different! You see, this time we agree that it’s the right thing to do and this time we’re going to do it as a team!”
“No… no… no…” Winsteed said, shaking his head vigorously and waving his right hand in the air. “Remarkable team, granted, but same moronic mission… same stupid plan… forget it.”
“What do you mean stupid plan?” Leighter asked.
“Okay, okay. I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said stupid plan. I should’ve said stupid suicidal plan! Give me a break here, Karl. Before, you asked me to risk my best air asset and my best twidget. Now you’re asking me to risk all that, plus my best pilot. Forget it! It ain’t gonna happen!”
“Why not? Give me one good reason why not!”
“I just gave you three. So here are a few more: what makes you think Pacifica even still exists? And what if they do but they don’t want your company when you get there? And what if they’re really, really happy to see you but you run out of gas or get fried at sunrise flying in circles waiting for them to surface the platform? No matter what happens, the chances are really good you crash, drown, get nuked or all the above. No matter what, I lose assets that I need to keep all of us alive for one more day.
“Now I fully appreciate your courage and your undying faith in your friends - both of you - but the answer isn’t just no, but hell no, and stop asking the same question day after day. Come up with a better plan, will ya, like one that we need here right now to keep us alive and breathing for a little while longer. You two may not care if you die holding hands together in a big splash somewhere in the North Pacific, but I do, dammit!”
“But the VTOL aircraft isn’t one of your assets, sir,” Leighter responded in an uncharacteristic show of self assertion. “It belongs to Pacifica .”
“Fine, let them come and get it,” Winsteed snapped. “But they’re gonna owe me some back storage fees when they get here and they’ll have to explain their shameful breach of contract to you, me and everyone here. And if they can’t explain it to my complete satisfaction, they not only can’t have their asset back, but I’m gonna kick some ass, and I’m countin’ on you to help me do it.”
Leighter looked at Winsteed with his unblinking, moonish, boy eyes for long minutes and then replied, “Fine, then I want to kill the Russians - all of them – the day after tomorrow. And if I pull that off, then can I borrow the VTOL and fly to Pacifica?”
Winsteed had his turn at staring back at Leighter with unblinking eyes. Then he leaned back in his seat, placed his hands behind his head, yawned and smiled.
“You have a plan? I mean, like a real, honest to God plan?” he asked. “So far, it sounds to me like you’re asking my permission to go out and kill Fred and Ethel day after tomorrow so you can borrow the car and take your sweetheart out for a date.”
“That about sums it up,” Leighter responded with no trace of humor whatsoever.
“Go ahead Karl, I’m all ears…”
62
Two weeks after the Phoenix had departed Pacifica, Seven and Serea were sitting side by side on the balcony of their apartment, holding hands and enjoying the view of the grand, open sphere of the cavernous underwater city. It was mid-day and the sunlight lent its most gorgeous, dark blue hue to the interior of the city. While they were deep in the water column, on a sunlit noon, enough light filtered down the crystal clear depths to provide a feeling of sunlit warmth to the interior of the sphere.
Serea’s father had not seen or spoken to her in the two weeks since the scene in the Command Center . Seven had not inquired of the goings on about the city and an uneasy truce seemed to exist between him and Spencer. There was no posted guard at their door and no one stopped them when they came and went. To Seven it seemed almost too good to be true. He and Serea were enjoying their first real honeymoon. Unfortunately it was shattered by ringing alarms sending the colony to general quarters.
As the loud alarm rang on their balcony, Seven and Serea looked at one another in surprise.
“This doesn’t sound like a drill to me,” Seven quipped.
“Well, last time I checked, our place during general quarters is in the Command Center ,” Serea noted matter-of-factly. “Nothing has changed that.”
“Then let’s be off,” Seven said with a grin. “I’ll bet Frank’ll be happy to see us. Perhaps we can offer the Admiral some pointers.”
“Aaron, please be civil,” Serea said sincerely, rising from her chair and turning around to look her husband in the eye. “I’m not going to the Command Center to harass Frank. I miss my father; I want to speak to him, if he’ll allow it.”
Seven held his right hand high in surrender, still seated. “Not a word from my lips, I promise.”
Serea just stared back at him with a stern expression.
“Okay, I mean I promise, unless… unless I have no choice.”
/> “Just try hard, Aaron. I must reach my father before it’s too late, if it’s not already.”
Minutes later, the couple walked briskly into the crowded Command Center , passing waves of colonists heading toward their assigned posts.
“What are these people doing here?” Spencer asked to no one in particular, annoyed at the sudden intrusion of Seven, Serea, Twink and Edgar.
“We’re reporting to our assigned posts, Frank,” Serea replied, touching Seven’s hand with her fingers.
“Keep your mouths shut and stay out of my way,” Spencer barked with a red face, his eyes flashing about the Center.
Seven watched Serea’s eyes as they fixed themselves on her father sitting at a console. He looked gray and old; his hair shaggy and unkempt. His face appeared prematurely wrinkled and his eyes did not appear to focus well. Seven could clearly see he was either in a critically deep depression or he was drugged, perhaps both. As Serea saw him, her hand squeezed Seven’s tightly.
“Give me an update, right now!” Spencer barked.
“Bogie inbound. Collision course. Contact paints as a submarine. ETA eight minutes on its current heading.”
“Has the Leviathan identified the contact?”
“Negative.”
“Open the circuit to Commander Keefer,” Spencer snapped, referring to the officer he had replace Bill Harper.
“Keefer here,” reported a metallic voice seconds later.
“Nate, I need some information, right now!” Spencer barked.
“Got it, right here. Sonar reports it to be Chinese, probably Type 093 SSN.”
“Define that, you idiot!” Spencer bullied. “What do you think I am, a walking Janes reference book?”
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 57