Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Standing with a thousand other runners on the roadway before the start, he shivered and could feel his skin contracting into goose bumps. A stiff westerly breeze was coming through the Gate. The feeble morning sunshine of late April hardly warmed him. Coupled with the cold, he was feeling self-conscious. He knew people had seen him out on the public streets, or at least running along these wooded roads, wearing just a tee shirt and running shorts. But this was the first time he had put on a numbered bib and pretended to be a competitor.

  When the race started, he let the crowd sort itself out and adopted his own pace. After an initial lap around the field, the pack headed onto the service road that climbed through the trees below Doyle Drive. The crowd thinned even more as the grade took its toll. For Praxis, who ran from Sea Cliff uphill to the Légion d’Honneur and around the Presidio Golf Course every morning, the ascent was a simple matter of adjusting his pace and breathing.

  In a few minutes they passed through the parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge visitors center and out onto the roadway of the bridge itself. Praxis had assumed the race course would follow the pedestrian walkway, but with automobile traffic generally thinned out by the price of gasoline in a euro-dominated market, the race organizers were able to get three of the bridge lanes cleared and coned off. Surprisingly, after the thinning out on the grade, Praxis found himself running in a tight cluster near the front. He realized he was committed to reaching at least the end of the bridge, because if he slowed down here in midspan, stumbled to a stop, and bent over clutching his knees, he would block runners behind him—perhaps even cause a number of them to go down.

  The wind on the bridge deck, two hundred feet above the water, was even colder. Streamers of fog blew in from the ocean and threaded between the orange-painted suspension cables a hundred feet above his head. But Praxis found he was warmer, now that he was moving. He thought about what it would mean if he quit at the north end of the bridge. He would have to wait at the exposed overlook for someone to come pick him up. And who would that be? Even though he had a cell phone tucked into his shorts, he couldn’t call Adele. She hardly drove anywhere anymore. The only other person at the house, Miranda, didn’t drive. He couldn’t call either of the boys, because they would be off somewhere with their families. And Callie was in Denver on her project. He would have to call for a taxi, and they would take forever on a Sunday morning with a big race going on nearby.

  Praxis realized that he really had no choice but to turn around at the north end, come back with the pack, and finish the race. If he took his time and paced himself, he just might do it. He glanced at the heart monitor built into his fancy GPS watch, which read signals off a belt strapped around his chest. The display showed a steady 130 beats per minute. He kept his eyes on the number over the course of half a mile and it didn’t change. More than two beats per second, and his new heart was working like a well-oiled machine.

  He probably should have discussed entering this event with his cardiologist. But what was the doctor going to say? No? And would John Praxis have listened to him even then? At this point, it wasn’t his heart that was going to give out. Not unless it went spectacularly, blooey, like an overheated tire exploding. But so far he sensed no distress, nothing impending. If anything was going to fail, it would be his sixty-six-year-old ankles or knees. But in his chest he had the full-grown heart of a baby less than a year old, and he had toughened and trained it over the months since its creation with his morning runs.

  Praxis made the decision to take more time each morning, start earlier, and double or triple the length of his daily run. And then, if his legs could stand it, he might even try a marathon next.

  * * *

  Brandon Praxis was pulled out of his civil engineering class, CE436 Structural Steel Design, at Stanford University by a U.S. Army recruiting sergeant from Menlo Park. The sergeant wore his battle dress uniform, or BDUs, in urban-camouflage gray and didn’t bother to mention his own name, although the tag on his chest said “Roxbrough.” As they stood in the corridor outside the classroom, the man held up and read aloud Brandon’s commission as a second lieutenant, swore him in with the officer’s oath, and handed him a sealed envelope containing his orders. He then saluted Lieutenant Praxis and informed him he had two hours to pack his gear and get down to Moffett Field in Sunnyvale.

  “Excuse me, but what gear is that?” Brandon asked.

  “Your ROTC stuff. Better wear battle fatigues.”

  “But—but what’s all this about, Sergeant?”

  “The Army needs you, sir. Right now.”

  “But you don’t understand. I’m not a soldier. I’m a student. My dad runs one of the world’s foremost engineering companies, and he expects me to graduate in June and join him in the business.”

  “That’s nice, sir. But no, sir. You’ve had three years of military training. You’re a gear head. And your country assumes that, being a bright California boy of good family, you have the right attitude. This is a national emergency, and you’ve been called up to serve.”

  The sergeant saluted again, turned on his heel, and hurried off. He was already consulting a printed list and pulling another set of commission papers from his gray-camo messenger bag.

  Brandon stood with his mouth hanging open. He had started with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps during his sophomore year, primarily as a backup plan. He knew all along that his family—his father Leonard most of all—expected him to step right out of college and into a responsible position somewhere on the upper rungs at Praxis Engineering & Construction. Brandon felt he didn’t have the courage to refuse this future outright, and he’d majored in civil engineering as his father recommended. But still, he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the prospect. Joining the family company, becoming the “golden grandson” of the fifth generation, meant he would never have the opportunity to prove himself. It also meant everyone around him might be whispering secret doubts about his actual abilities. So he had hedged his bets by joining the Army ROTC.

  It wasn’t exactly a blind choice. He remembered his grandfather John once mentioning the good work the Corps of Engineers did in maintaining the country’s waterways and environmental resources, and how much he admired their public service when they could easily take home two or three times their military pay by joining the private sector. Brandon also liked the idea of playing around with the hydrology of big systems like the San Francisco Bay Delta or the Mississippi River. But he never took the program’s scholarship money, and it was always going to be his choice whether to finally accept the commission. He never expected the U.S. Army to just come and take him.

  Two and a half hours after being sworn in, Praxis and a dozen other military personnel were marched aboard a C-130J transport at Moffett. As the plane taxied for takeoff, he opened and read his orders. They told him he was being attached to the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps under the command of a Major Anthony Ruysdael. Their mission was to fly to Flagstaff, Arizona, relocate immediately to Camp Navajo, which was ten miles to the west, and secure any and all strategic materiel there. His orders noted that, although the camp was officially maintained by the Arizona Army National Guard, its munitions storage facility remained an inspectable site under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START.

  He held up the paper for the soldier, an older man, who was strapped into the webbing seat next to him. Praxis pointed out the reference to munitions storage. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means support for nukes, son.”

  “And we’re going to get them?”

  “Does seem to be the drill.”

  “With our bare hands?”

  “If necessary, yes.”

  But then the man waved at the cargo strapped to the deck just beyond their knees: two Humvees, each mounting a .50 caliber machine gun in its roof, and an eight-wheeled armored car with a blunt, boat-shaped nose, the Stryker Transport/Combat Vehicle.

  “Are we expecting hostilities?” Brandon asked.


  “We are expecting anything at this stage.”

  “I not going to be any good at this. I mean, they taught me to march and shoot a rifle. And I might be able to drive that jeep-thing, given some time to practice. But you understand I’m really just a student, civil engineering.”

  “That’s sweet, son, but no,” the soldier said, echoing the anonymous sergeant who’d sworn him in, what, three hours ago now? “We are anywhere from two months to two days away from a shooting war on this continent. We will need every able and committed soldier to make sure this thing goes down the right way. So … what’s you’re role? I guess you’d better stick close to me. You can take notes when we start inventorying the ordnance. And if we need to blow up a bridge or knock down a door or something, then your education might come in handy.”

  “Thank you, I guess. Um, what’s your name, soldier?”

  The man turned in his seat and pushed out his collar tab with a thumb. It had a splotch of brown thread sewn on in the shape of a leaf. “Ruysdael, son. You can stand up and salute me later.”

  * * *

  Late in the workday, the internet news services flashed a report that the federal government had ordered units of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force to move into any of the states that had signed on to that “Committee of Secession.” Their orders were, first, to disarm the local National Guard units and, second, to “establish a presence” in the state capitals. Some of the correspondents, and various members of Congress they were interviewing, were already calling the action a “coup.” But the official language described it as a “preventive measure” necessary to “maintain the peace.”

  Antigone Wells was with Ted Bridger when the news came up. He stared at the screen thoughtfully. “What are the legal ramifications of open warfare, I wonder?”

  “A lot of wrongful death suits,” Wells said. “Maybe.”

  “A whole lot of property damage, too, I would guess.”

  “Too bad we aren’t practicing in Texas or Oklahoma.”

  * * *

  Richard Praxis hardly blinked when Julia Schottlander, an analyst from the Accounting Department, brought him the report on a misplaced check for the Mile High project in Denver.

  “Why bring me this?” he asked. “You should take it up with my sister. She’s managing that project.”

  “I know, sir,” Schottlander said. “She tossed the problem over to my department in the first place.” The woman closed the door to his outer office, walked over to the chair in front of his desk, sat down, and slid a manila folder across his blotter. “Before going back to Ms. Praxis,” she went on, “I thought I should talk to someone higher-up first. I showed this to my manager, and he said I should come to you.”

  Richard opened the folder and saw on top several pages of data extracted from the company’s accounting software. In a couple of places, lines and entries were highlighted in yellow marker, including some conspicuous blanks. Further down in the folder were half a dozen pages of fax, including two of the company’s invoice forms and various images of checks, front and back, from the Denver Arts Commission. “So what’s going on?” he said. “Walk me through this.”

  “We believed—or rather, our accounting system believed—we were missing a progress payment on the project and issued a second invoice. The client called Callista, saying he was sure it had been paid the first time. He even had an image of their cancelled check—” Schottlander turned over the pages in front of him. “—there. But when Callista looked in the system, there was no record of it.”

  “Somebody stole the check and cashed it?” he suggested.

  “Well, sir, there’s the problem. We’ve got no record the check was ever received—and that triggered the second invoice. But two days later we do have a log entry that shows the accounts receivable clerk stamped our endorsement on the check, and another entry a day afterward shows it was sent in a batch for bank clearing.”

  “How can you have log entries for a check that doesn’t exist?”

  She shook her head. “Different parts of the database, apparently. They just enter the project account number, invoice number, check number, and date. The system doesn’t bother to verify original receipt of the check because … well, they’ve already got it, haven’t they?”

  “So, what are you telling me?” Richard pressed. “What’s the mystery?”

  “If we had never received the art commission’s check in the first place,” Schottlander said, “and it was someone else who cashed it, we’d have no record of it in the system at all. But this looks like someone tried to hide the check and didn’t think the whole thing through.”

  “That was clumsy of them,” he said dispassionately.

  “Yes. And it suggests this was the work of a person, a human being, not a simple software glitch.”

  “A glitch?” He tried to sound alarmed. “In my system? Is that possible?”

  “Well, we’ve never seen one before. So we did an audit of the entire system. And guess what we found?”

  “I hate guessing games. Just tell me.”

  “A duplicate amount, forty-three point six million, showed up in another account entirely—in Callista Praxis’s personal retirement account. It was not a valid entry, of course, because there’s no corresponding line item or entry code, no paycheck against which it might have been drawn. The money just appears there.”

  “Wouldn’t a transaction like that leave a trace—the perpetrator’s logon, or something?”

  “Yes, it would. And no, it didn’t.” Schottlander shook her head. “It’s almost as if a ghost—or the software itself—made the transfer from project account to retirement account.”

  “Well, now you can transfer the money right back out again,” Richard said. “We can’t ask the Denver people for another check, can we? Not when we know where their money went.”

  “No, sir. But that’s a problem for us. You see, the system is not designed just to shovel money around. It needs the paper trail, the proper entries in the proper sequence. We’ll need authorization to make the restoration without explaining how the money was moved in the first place.”

  “You’ve got it. I’ll sign whatever you need to square things.”

  “And then … there’s the matter of Ms. Praxis’s account.”

  “Oh? What does she say about it?” he asked casually.

  “As I said, we haven’t told anyone. Not even her.”

  “Well …” he waited three beats, as if considering. “If it really was a human being who made the transfer, and not a computer problem, then it’s a clear-cut case of attempted embezzlement. You should refer this to the Legal Department for their assessment before anyone talks to Callie.” He paused. “But I sure hope it’s just a system error. I’d hate to think that my sister …”

  “I know, sir,” Schottlander said. “Everyone in the company likes her, too.”

  * * *

  “Hello, Auntie,” Suleiman Mkubwa said as he appeared at her office door. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Oh, yes, Sully.” Wells put down her pen and put aside her notebook. “Yes, um … You may have noticed that things have slowed down around here lately.”

  “Oh, indeed!” the young attorney said brightly.

  “Our practice has reached a decision point.”

  “And are you about to let me go, Auntie?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said gravely.

  “Oh, thank God! I am so relieved!”

  “No, Sully. We’re laying you off.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Fully. I am released. But I am also relieved. I had feared you would let Carolyn go instead of me.”

  “Oh, and why were you afraid for her?”

  “Because this is her home, and she has no place else to go. I should not divulge a confidence, but she was afraid of losing her job. Whereas I have been thinking of going home to my family for a long time.”

  “Your family is in … Baltimore, isn’t it?”

  “Oh,
no. That’s just my mother. I mean my whole family. I have an uncle in Nairobi who for years has been asking me to join his firm of barristers. I’ll have to practice a different kind of law, of course. And also wear a horsehair wig. But it will be better for me.”

  “I’m sorry you want to leave America.”

  “Oh, America is fine. I am proud to be a citizen. But right now …”

  “This is just an economic downturn,” she said. “A rough patch. We’ve been through them before.”

  “Oh, yes? Well, frankly, I can buy more with a Kenyan shilling than I can with an American dollar. But that’s not why I want to go. We Kenyans have our revolution and civil war behind us. The country is good now. But you Americans have war ahead of you. It will not be so good.”

  “I’m sure that’s all just newspaper talk,” Wells said. “Just politics.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Von Clausewitz said war is politics by other means.”

  “It won’t come to an actual war. Not here. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “Not your life, Auntie. But bet your dollar against my shilling.”

  * * *

  Brandon Praxis figured he had heard wrong when Major Ruysdael said they were securing ‘nukes,’ because it turned out that all Camp Navajo had were the first-stage rocket engines for Minuteman III and Trident C4 and D5 missiles. And while those launch vehicles were designed to carry nuclear warheads, it would take a whole lot of tinkering, plus a truckload of parts, plus a factory—plus the warheads themselves—to turn the camp’s inventory into strategic weapons.

  What Ruysdael had neglected to tell him at first was that Camp Navajo was also a training facility for all the service branches. At any one time it could accommodate a battalion of troops and train them in mountain and airmobile operations, land navigation, and proficiency with squad-level infantry weapons like M4 carbines, M249 light machine guns, and hand grenades. Where people trained, there the government tended also to stockpile large amounts of resupply. So Camp Navajo was a major arsenal for any military operations in the Southwest.