by Jeff Seats
“I’m sure you have somewhere you need to be Henry.” “No doubt ma’am, but this is much more entertaining.” “I think the Action Teams are practicing fast roping out of an
Osprey in an hour. You’ve never done that have you?” Henry looked at his watch. “Oh, sorry! I didn’t notice the time. I’ve gotta . . . Um . . . Yeah, you know . . . check on the …” He said, inching his way out of the door.
“Yes, please see to that.” Henry slunk out of Cole’s office and closed the door quietly behind him.
Master Sergeant Terry smiled, “Still a fan of the smurf turf I see, Sam,” he said; referring to the “paperwork” she had been pretending to read when he entered the office.
“Tell me, JR, if you think the Ducks will do any better this year?”
“With their new coach, I think it’s possible.”
Cole shook her head sadly. “You never went there.”
“Hey! Have to support my friend from the hood. Mel Renfro lived down the street from us and went to my high school.”
Cole rolled her eyes.
“Graduated UO, 1960. College Football Hall of Fame running back? Pro Football Hall fame for the Cowboys? Well, he was a pretty big deal to us, and his brother too.”
“We all have to have our heroes.” Cole moved back to her chair and sat, indicating that Terry should take a seat as well, but he remained standing. “I was a bit surprised when I read the email informing me of your decision to return to the CSC. You’ve proved yourself. You could live out retirement as a normal human without all that crap about how the government owns your ass till the end of time.”
Terry wandered over to the glass wall of the office overlooking the control room. A lot had changed since he had last been here. The room was the same institutional shade of yuck. The desks and chairs looked similar, but the technology had been upgraded. It reminded him of a movie set of NASA mission control. Okay, it always had reminded him of NASA for that matter, albeit a smaller version. The CRT monitors on the desks had been replaced with LED flat screens and the room lighting had a high tech bright, LED cleanliness to it that the old fluorescents never did. The lack of human activity working in the room surprised him. Back in his day the place was packed and buzzing. Now it looked like the staff was down to just a skeleton crew of just a couple of techs monitoring the entire western operations. He turned back to Cole, concern on his face.
“And you wondered why I want to come back.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder back at the control room. “I see you appear to be a few hands short in there. I would think that you would want the extra help. And at no cost to you. I’ve got a great pension plan. Thanks to our Uncle Sam.” He winked. “I’m guessing the same situation holds true for the action teams and the field agents too.”
Cole looked down at her folded hands resting on the desktop, defeated—unable to even pretend to be happy about anything including seeing her old friend. “It started with the damned Congress dangling budget issues out in front of the last president to get concessions for the things they wanted. Of course, they knew nothing of the funding for this operation. Hell, none of them even know about us. But since our funding is hidden inside other budgets, and spending money in those departments seemed to be un-American, well, it doesn’t take long for some bean-counter to slash a percentage here and another there before it really starts to affect how one operates a secret program.”
“And I thought the lack of possible recruits for enhanced training over the last couple of years was due to not enough qualified candidates.” Terry said.
“Nope, we had to scale back across the board. Reevaluate how we even run the agency.”
“Then my being here doesn’t surprise you at all.”
“It was my idea to reach out to all the retired members of the CSC. Just surprised that the one to bite first was you.” Cole said.
“Hook, line and sinker.”
««« ‡ »»»
THE ODD THING for Samantha Cole was that she had pursued a military career. Her father Lynn, was a Vietnam-era Baby Boomer who turned 18 in 1968, the year before the first draft started. He was not from a military family, and there had been no tradition of signing up unless in a time of national emergency as his father, her grandfather, had done in World War II. Her dad was a comfortably situated high school student with better than average grades, attending a college prep school, which tended to help one get a better evaluation with college entrance officers. So, off to college and the protection it still afforded from the draft. The halls of the ivory tower offered the appearance of a freer life than the one he had left, so he fell into the routine of living as the others of his age. He protested the war, smoked some pot, wore beads, and grew his hair out longer than his mother’s. He also met Cole’s mother, Emily. Not being stupid, he also continued to study about as hard as he did in high school, which got him graduated and into the work world. He and Emily got married, settled down, and in 1976 out popped Samantha.
She supposed the idea of military service came through contact with her grandfather. He would never have encouraged or suggested she join the army. The army just was no place for women, certainly not his granddaughter. But over the years she became fascinated.
Her grandfather was of “The Greatest Generation” (a title coined by Tom Brokaw), a designation he never accepted, much less talked about. Samantha knew her gramps had been in the army and served in a war from the box she found hidden in the attic.
In it was a bunch of black-and-white photos, smiling men in various types of uniforms. But best was the colorfully embroidered pieces of fabric. Samantha would pull them out and stare at them, touching the edges, tracing the patterns with a finger, and turning them over in her hands. There were four of them: the red square with a blue ball the letters AA, a blue arch above with the word AIRBORNE in white thread, and a small round blue patch with a white ice cream cone, and one with three stacked arrows. But the things that she like the most were the pins: a tarnished brass ice cream cone with wings, and the ones that looked like a series of colored stripes that reminded her of Pippi Longstocking’s knee-high socks. One time she pinned them on her blouse and looked at her reflection in the old mirror, just as Grams called her for lunch. Samantha skipped down the stairs forgetting the pretty baubles she was wearing. When she sat down at the table, Gramps, already two bites into his grilled cheese, was about to pour a spoonful of tomato soup into his smiling mouth when he saw her. His face went dark, and he almost dropped the spoon into the bowl.
“Where’d you get those?” He asked her, knowing the answer. She touched the pretty pins on her chest, “Um, in the box in the attic.”
Gramps then closed his eyes and slowly took in a deep breath.
Her grandmother reached across the table and gently touched the top of his clenched hand.
Without opening his eyes, he said in a quiet, deliberate tone, “That box is private.”
“But . . .,”
“But, I never told you that. Never said you couldn’t look into it.” He sighed and opened his eyes now shimmering with moisture. “I wish that I had never saved that stuff.” Then he took an absent-minded bite of his sandwich.
With tears about to cascade down her cheeks, Samantha said, “I’m sorry Grandpa.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Grams told her. “That box holds a bunch of memories your grandpa doesn’t want to talk about, but he can’t—won’t—get rid of them either.”
Samantha looked down at the red soup and stirred the spoon around moving the bobbing oyster crackers like they were bumper cars.
“What you’re wearing are called battle ribbons. Pretty, huh?” Gramps finally said.
She nodded not looking up, afraid of the trouble she was in.
“You know what war is?”
Looking up from the colliding crackers, she answered, “Uh huh. It’s when countries are angry and fight each other.”
The smile returned to his face, and he chuckled. “Yeah, sort of. B
ut the fight can get pretty big. The war I was in covered the world. It was called World War Two.”
“Did you win?”
“Yes. WE won.”
From that point on her gramps encouraged her to ask him questions about the war. Cole learned that her grandfather was a staff sergeant in the Eighty-Second Airborne. The AA patch stood for All-Americans. He told her about the battles he was in, and what the pretty striped ribbons represented. And the ice cream cones? They weren’t ice cream at all. They were parachutes gramps and his buddies used when they jumped out of airplanes and into battle.
As she got a little older, the black-and-white photos piqued her curiosity. All were of soldiers taken at different times and locations. Smiling men at camp, out on the town, or in combat gear against burned-out buildings. Always smiling. Smiling as they leaned against a tank or standing by a jeep. Even smiling as one held a rifle pointing at a body laid out on the ground in front of him. Every so often she would bring a photo or two down from their crypt in the attic.
“Who’s this, grandpa?” she’d ask. He would take the picture, stare at it, and usually lose himself for a moment. She let him, and never pushed him, knowing that this was hard on him but also wanting to learn more.
“Him? Smitty. Smitty Smith. Don’t remember his first name. May have never known it. Always called him Smitty,” he paused. “Lost track of him in the Ardennes. Someone said he’d gotten captured and killed in the massacre at Malmedy. All those guys executed by the S.S.”
And so it continued between her and her grandfather. As she got older, they’d watch war movies together. Not the documentaries, they used actual footage and were too much for him to see. But the Hollywood depictions were usually okay. Except every so often something snuck in. Such as the scene in The Longest Day of an airborne unit (Eighty-Second) landing right on top of Sainte Mere Eglise. It was a massacre. And the depiction, while not super bloody as a film might show today, was still hard on him. By far their favorites were the ones that stepped out of reality—The Great Escape, Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen—but even those touched on subjects that could bring a tear to his eyes.
Samantha Cole’s interest in the war and American history continued throughout high school. The stories she learned about the men who served with Gramps inspired her to choose the army instead of going straight to college. Her determination to be as good as Gramps and his buddies led to her getting “noticed” and sent to a specialized, enhanced training program where she was instructed by one Master Sergeant Terry. Aside from knocking some practical sense into her, it was Terry who observed her intellect and her focus on history. This got her to college paid by the government, and upon graduation, posted to the Center for Specter Control where her assignment was as an Action Team member. Then she was moved into the slot of Field Agent, and then into tech, and analysis, and eventually became the commander.
And now that she was one of the buck stoppers, she found herself in charge at the most challenging time in the organization’s history. She hoped Vlad’s escape—not an escape, literally, since he wasn’t a prisoner, though he wasn’t necessarily in Vamp Town by his own choice either—was not the signal something momentous was about to happen, another type of world war? For the first time since she had joined the CSC, Cole could see how pathetically inadequate the unit was in being able to contain the immortals for as long as they had without the active help of their Khan, Vlad’s brother, Alex. But Vlad’s departure indicated that his brother’s control over his people might have come to an end.
She caught her reflection in a brass wall plaque and wondered who might be looking back at her—one of those smiling men from the black-and-white photos in the attic, her modest grandfather, or the strong and capable Master Sergeant Terry? She hoped for everyone’s sake that it was a combination of them all, because the coming conflict was going to need leaders like them to be able to stand up to what surely could be called an existential threat to the human race.
“FIRST WE’RE ASSIGNED to the night shift in the command center,” Ellie complained. “And then we get this detail.” She turned around looking at all the lockers in the room where the Action Team’s gear was kept. “As if I don’t know hazing when I experience it. And believe me, you don’t know hazing until you’ve been hazed by the other girls on the cheerleading squad.”
“Well, at least you got what you asked for,” Paul said as he reached deep into the smelly dark recesses of Sergeant St. Jean’s locker with a cleaning rag.
Ellie looked up from the large table in the middle of the locker room where she was cleaning one of the swords with an oiled cloth. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Ah, you know, when you asked if we would be assigned together.”
“Oh! That—”
“Yeah, that. But who thought we would be doing this grunt work instead of being out in the field going after Vlad? It’s been six months since we finished enhanced training. I was a goddamned fucking lieutenant in the god-damned U.S. Army. Got a purple heart in Durkadurkastan for Chrissake, and they got me doing this?” He pulled out an extremely dirty pair of undershorts from the interior of the locker and held it up in disgust with two fingers.
“Well, as you recall, your former rank holds no weight around here. You and I are lowest on the totem pole, and we need to prove ourselves.” She turned and replaced the sword on the wall at the end of the table. A handwritten sign above identified it as the Wall O’ Hurt.
“This shit reminds me too much of high school.” He flung his rag toward a bucket of sudsy water.
“When we first met on the bus I had no idea you were such a whiner,” she said with a grin.
“Sorry, I whine when I’m bored. And this bores the shit out of me.”
This section of the CSC they had been ‘burdened’ to clean was the locker-room/ready-room/equipment room for the Action Teams as well as agents. Before any of them headed out into the field, they would first gear-up here. Open-faced lockers, familiar to pro athletes, lined both sides of the space. Inside the lockers were all manners of body armor—various modified versions of Kevlar vests, silver chain mail to be worn around necks and wrists, and helmets. Not to mention clean ACUs, belts, pouches, boots, and other necessary items, the use of which depended on the monster du jour.
And as Paul had discovered, there were the occasional dirty undergarments tossed in the deep recesses awaiting discovery and cleaning. He felt especially lucky he had only found dirty underwear in St. Jean’s locker. This time. The disgusting possibilities of what else was lurking back inside were endless.
Down the center of the room ran several long tables lined with various types of chairs, stools, and benches. These surfaces were used for everything but never exclusively for any one thing. At times they were workbenches for cleaning weapons and repairing gear. Or, they became impromptu mess tables for last minute dinners as a team prepped to fly out. The room could take on the resemblance of a college study hall with laptops, stacks of research materials and paperwork scattered about, including letters home and updates to last wills. The flat surfaces even became conference tables for pre-action plans of attack—displaying support materials, such as maps and photos—or post-action reviews of how well things had gone. In some instances, how badly, with an emphasis on how not to fuck things up the same way next time. When time between actions was tight, the tables had been used as makeshift bunks. There was even a story of a one-time ‘thing’ happening on them between Ortega and Ellingson. But only a rumor, and never spoken of out loud. At least not around Ortega and Ellingson. Rounding out the furnishings was a large flat-screen TV on a rolling cart that usually played action movies or sporting events, but often displayed feeds from the control room.
At the end of the room where Ellie was standing was the Wall O’ Hurt. The wall held a multitude of weapons and the ammo required, ready for quick selection, based on whichever monster was in need of managing at any given time.
The lockers had a small chalkboard
placed at the top with handwritten names of the current users. A survey around the room showed several of these lockers had their names erased. Con West had the capabilities of fielding three action teams with seven members each. There were twenty-one lockers for them as well as six more for the three, two-person teams of field agents. By Paul’s count, there were eight empty lockers. Some of the users had retired out of the organization, though more had died in the line of duty. Four of these still displayed fallen warrior memorials, honoring those who had gone most recently.
The oldest of the four had been killed by a lycan escaping from RES-DELTA. Two others had had their tickets punched in Vamp Town (Susan Todd and Eugene Evers) trying to rescue the illfated bus passengers, of which Ellie and Paul represented the only human survivors out of a total of ten. And the most recent, Ben Saunders, having died a week earlier. Ellie and Paul had been with the CSC long enough to have gotten to know Agent Saunders, and they keenly felt his loss. Fresh flowers continued to be placed in the locker next to Saunders’ photograph, presumably by his best friend Craig.
“Who would have thought that less than a year ago we had to fight for our lives in a town full of USDA certified vampires,” Ellie said, then paused and became more reflective, “And we were the only ones to survive.”
Paul saw Ellie slipping back in to that night in Vamp Town, which was never a good thing. They both had the unpleasant experience of watching her boyfriend turning into pulp as several vampires feasted on his bloody remains. As much as Paul had come to hate the guy, he knew that a death sentence was not the appropriate punishment for being a dick.
Trying to distract her from the memory Paul said, “How about that cheesy film they showed during investiture? I mean, the guy who played Theodore Roosevelt may have been some oldtime Hollywood great, but it sure seemed liked he dialed in his performance for the government paycheck. That T.R. grin of his was a bit over the top. Don’t you think?”