Operation Zulu

by Ernest Dempsey

  “It means I basically stole a military vehicle under false pretenses. I also told you two about the mission, which is most likely a violation. I expect by the time we get back I will no longer have a job and I may be looking at jail time.”

  Zeke and Phoenix couldn’t keep the sense of guilt from sifting into their minds. The fact that she’d nearly sent them to their deaths helped stymie it, but it was still there, still creeping in through the cracks. Neither of them was given to holding a grudge, not for long anyway.

  “My life is over,” she added. Her voice lowered and her head dipped forward. There was no mistaking the disappointment.

  “Look,” Zeke said, stepping back toward her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “You screwed up. You thought you were doing the right thing and it turns out you were doing a horrible thing.”

  “Yeah, like sending us to our deaths so a bunch of missiles could be delivered to the border of China.”

  “Hey,” Zeke turned to his friend. “Take it easy.” He put out his left hand to calm him down. “We’ve already been over that. And look, she said we’re still welcome back at the base. That means that our jobs weren’t to die. Right?” He looked down at her and she peered up over the bottom of her eyelids.

  Jessica nodded.

  “Right? See? That’s good. We weren’t supposed to be executed.”

  “But they didn’t care if it happened,” Phoenix pointed out.

  “Well, maybe not, but Agent Benson cares.”

  “She sent us out.”

  “I know. I know, and that was wrong.” He stared at her, overdramatizing the chastising glare. “She should be punished, no doubt about it. She’s been a very naughty girl.” Her brow furrowed at the change of his tone. He realized what he’d done and quickly recovered. “So, I say we let bygones be bygones, take a ride back to Bagram, and get the heck out of this crap hole.”

  He realized Omar was staring out of the door again. He’d opened it to eavesdrop without them knowing.

  “Not this crap hole, Omar,” Zeke quickly corrected. “We love it here. Wish we could stay longer.”

  The man nodded happily, clearly unaware of what he’d just heard.

  Zeke widened his eyes in disbelief for a second and then looked back to Jessica. “Look, we all make mistakes. You were just following orders. I get it. People in your position do. And don’t worry about Major Paige. I’ll smooth things over with him.”

  She looked up now, searching him for the truth. “How are you going to do that? He hates you?”

  He nodded like an idiot. “Exactly.”

  They thanked Omar and the rest of the villagers for their hospitality and explained that they had to be going. The people were sad to see them leave but gave them more tea and bread to take on the journey.

  Dozens of hugs were given out. It seemed like every person in the village wanted to give a goodbye hug to the Americans. One particular young man held onto his hug with Phoenix for longer than everyone else. After about twenty seconds, Zeke noticed the embrace and smiled at the guy, giving a slight nod and a wink.

  “He likes you,” he mouthed over the shoulder of a woman he was hugging.

  The young man, probably in his early twenties, widened his eyes with hope. Zeke chuckled to himself.

  When all the goodbyes were said, and the hugs were gone, the four Americans made their way out of the village to the SUV. They climbed in, loaded up what little gear they had left, and Jessica started the engine.

  Zeke and Phoenix sat in the back, allowing Gary to take shotgun.

  The second the motor revved to life, the electronics in the vehicle flicked on. Suddenly, the radio in the center console started going crazy. A man’s voice crackled through the speaker. It sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Agent Benson, do you copy?”

  It was Major Paige. Everyone in the vehicle exchanged distraught looks.

  “Well,” Jessica said, “time to face the music.” She fully expected the major to go off about every possible way he was going to make her life miserable while ending her career in the process. Her mind raced with thousands of ideas as to how that would go down. She reached for the radio and picked it up, pressing on the side button.

  “This is Agent Benson. I copy. Over.”

  “Benson,” Paige nearly shouted. “Where in the Sam Hill are you?”

  “I went out to rescue Beta, sir. We believed they were in trouble. I forced Gary to come with me. He tried to stay back, but I threatened to beat him senseless. He didn’t feel like getting beat up by a girl, so he came against his will.”

  Gary slumped into the seat, looking ashamed.

  “That doesn’t matter now, Agent Benson,” Paige cut her off, foregoing any radio formality.

  “I know, sir. I will turn myself in once we’re back. I did manage to find Beta, sir. They’re alive and with us now. Not that you care.”

  “This isn’t about them, Agent. And it’s not about you stealing a military vehicle or disobeying my orders. We will deal with that later. Right now we have bigger problems.”

  She wrinkled her forehead as she frowned. “Bigger problems? What bigger problems?”

  18

  The major told them of the incident involving the other truck. He didn’t seem to care that his decoys, the ones he’d so callously sent out to their potential deaths, were listening in on the conversation.

  “Beta is safe?” he asked, only after replaying the events pertaining to Alpha.

  “Yes, sir. I have them here with me right now. We’re on our way back to base.”

  “No, wait,” he ordered.

  “Wait?” She’d started to accelerate away from the village, heading back up the mountain where she would veer right toward Bagram.

  “We…we can’t locate the truck, Agent Benson. It’s…it’s off the grid right now.”

  He let the words sink in.

  “Hold on a second. You lost the real truck, the one with the missiles…I mean, package, on it?” She couldn’t catch herself fast enough to cut off the word, but she pushed through.

  Meanwhile, in the back, Zeke and Phoenix turned their heads slowly in tandem until they were facing each other.

  The real truck was gone? They knew exactly what each other was thinking. How had this happened? If the terrorists had hit them and the other truck, that meant there were more bad guys out in these mountains than they’d first suspected. Not to mention the overwhelming sense of luck they must have been feeling at the moment. If the real agents hadn’t been able to hold off a band of terrorists, what chance did the two of them have?

  That thought led straight into Major Paige’s next comment.

  “We need your team, Agent Benson. We need you to get to the spot where Alpha was last seen. Investigate the scene, and see if you can track down the missing package.”

  “So you want us to clean up your mess. Why not have the other handler do it? Or send a team of choppers out there to search the area.”

  He sighed. “Weather won’t permit flying helos over there right now. It’s getting worse by the minute. Doesn’t look like there will be any more snow in the near future, but the wind is and would be, a problem if we tried to fly in. We’re sending ground teams out in the next few minutes, but your unit is closer. We need you.”

  “Oh, so you need us now?” Zeke interrupted from the back. “You sent us out to die, and now you want us to come in and save the day? I don’t think so, jerk. Figure it out yourself.”

  Phoenix nodded approvingly.

  Jessica arched one eyebrow as she turned her head slowly to face them. “He didn’t hear you,” she said. “I wasn’t pressing on the button.” Their eyes fell to the device in her hand and saw that she was telling the truth.

  “Oh.” Zeke felt a tad humiliated. “I felt like I nailed my emotions on that one.”

  “You did,” Gary said, nodding eagerly and wearing a ridiculous smile. “I got chills.”

  “Can you please just shut up for a second,” Jessi
ca said, cutting them off.

  She rolled her eyes and faced the windshield again. The men instantly fell silent. They looked like children who’d just been punished by their schoolmarm.

  “You still there, Agent Benson?” Paige asked.

  She gave it a second, milking the situation. The men all looked up, waiting to see what she would do.

  “Yes, Major, we’re here. Send us the last known coordinates of the truck, and we will check it out.”

  “Relaying them to your GPS unit now.”

  The truck was equipped with a satellite communications computer that allowed them to transmit information almost instantly across great distances. In this case, it was receiving the coordinates for the place the Alpha Team had last been seen. She looked at the screen and analyzed the map, locating the red pin that marked the waypoint.

  “That’s…only twenty clicks from here, give or take a few.”

  “Correct,” Paige confirmed. “You’ll need to go in the back way to get there faster. Press ahead in the same direction Beta was going initially. You’ll eventually find a narrow pass that connects the two roads. It’s doubtful that the pass will have been plowed so the going could be extremely treacherous. Be careful. If it gets too dangerous, get out of there. I don’t need to lose two units in one day.” Before the group in the truck could say “aww”, he quickly added, “That wouldn’t look good on my record.”

  “Understood, Major,” Jessica said. “We’ll be careful. This doesn’t change anything, though. When we get back, you and I are going to have a little chat.”

  She didn’t care if the rest of her team heard the threat in her words.

  Jessica angrily switched off the radio so he couldn’t say anything else, and if he did, it would fall on deaf ears.

  No one said anything for a minute. Then Jessica broke the silence by shifting the SUV back into drive and stepping on the gas.

  The engine whined. Snow and gravel crunched under the tires as they left the village behind and drove back up into the mountains.

  “So, listen,” Zeke said. “I understand, you know, that you were just following orders before. I’m not going to hold it against you.”

  “I am.” Phoenix put on a pouty face, like a child who’d just been told there were no more cookies.

  “Shut up. Come on. She said she was sorry.”

  “She,” he pointed at Jessica, “knew we were decoys. She sent us out on a fake mission. Now they just want everything to be okay? Hey guys, sorry we made you the sacrificial lambs, but now would you mind cleaning up the mess we made. Maybe they should have made us the real agents. Did you ever think of that, Agent Benson?”

  “Okay, first of all,” Zeke answered, “deep down inside, I think we both knew we were decoys. Be honest.”

  “What? Are you serious right now? Because I can’t tell if you’re kidding.”

  “Look at us, Phoenix. We’re a couple of losers. You’ve been stuck in the basement since you got to GIC and I’m nothing but a disappointment to the legacy my father left behind. They were right to send us in.” His voice took on a contemplative, melancholy feel as it drifted off.

  He looked out the window at the rocks passing by on the slopes.

  No one said anything. Gary looked out his window, staring to the west and the mountains beyond the valley they’d just left. Dark storm clouds were starting to gather in the sky over the high peaks.

  “Phoenix is right,” Jessica said. “I shouldn’t have sent you out here knowing that it was a fake mission, that you were just targets so we could deliver the real package without incident. It was wrong to do that. There should have been another way, another plan. Clearly, this one wasn’t a good one.”

  “Clearly,” Phoenix agreed, still sounding hurt.

  “Yeah,” Zeke jumped in, “I mean, both trucks got ambushed. No one saw that coming? Seems a bit sketchy to me.”

  Jessica bit her lower lip for a second, holding back the stuff she and Gary had discussed on the way here. Gary looked over at her, taking his eyes off the vistas to the west. He nodded, giving her the go-ahead, not that she needed his permission.

  “There’s something bigger going on here, guys,” Jessica said. “Did either of you happen to notice where Zulu Base is?”

  The two guys in the back glanced at each other and then nodded.

  “Um, Afghanistan?” Zeke said.

  “No...where in Afghanistan?” She held back the urge to call him an idiot.

  “The northeast,” Phoenix answered, still not connecting the dots.

  “Ugh. No. Gary, show them the map.”

  Gary pulled a tablet out of a black tactical bag at his feet and turned it on. Within seconds, a map of the region appeared on the screen. He pointed at a red dot in the top right corner. There was another blue dot blinking just to the southwest of it.

  “I assume we’re the blue dot,” Zeke said.

  “Yes, but that’s not the point,” Gary said. “That red dot is where Zulu Base is located. Notice where it is?”

  The two in the back stared at the screen. There were three countries surrounding their current location, with a fourth off to the southeast.

  “Oh,” Zeke said, realizing what Gary and Jessica were getting at. “China.”

  “Right. China,” Jessica confirmed.

  “So? I would expect we have other bases near the Chinese border,” Phoenix said, unimpressed. “That’s kind of our thing, keep our enemies closer.”

  “Yeah, except we aren’t enemies with the Chinese. We do a ton of business with them. Trillions of dollars in trade go back and forth between our country and theirs. We owe them trillions, too, but they continue to do business with us despite that fact.”

  “But what would happen if we were to piss them off?” Gary continued.

  The two in the back looked at each other. Zeke spoke first. “I guess they’d probably want their money back.”

  “Right. Which would mean what, since we can’t pay them?”

  “War?” Phoenix breathed the word.

  “Right. Wars stabilize the economic ship; at least they have historically. Almost every time the United States has been involved in a war, the economy gets better. People make money. And everyone ends up happy, except for those who lost loved ones in the conflict.”

  “But that doesn’t matter to the people in charge, does it?” Zeke said cynically. “As long as they get paid that’s all that matters to them.”

  “Right.”

  “So,” Phoenix cut in, “that’s what this is all about? The real mission was to send a bunch of high-dollar missiles to a secret military installation so they could pick a fight with the Chinese?”

  “No,” Jessica said. “I think the fight is already being picked. It’s only a matter of time and pressure. Pretty soon, the debt will be too big. China will ask for the money back, and we won’t be able to pay it. They’ll threaten us, try to bully us into repaying it. Some of the more extreme folks worry about an invasion. I don’t know that the Chinese could do that, even with their vast population. The logistics of something like that would be difficult to pull off, and even if they won a war like that, subduing the American people would be nearly impossible.”

  “So, what then?”

  “That’s just it. We’re not entirely sure, but we did a little more research on those missiles that Alpha Team was taking to Zulu. Those warheads are the next best thing to nuclear weapons. They can wipe out huge areas, which would be devastating in a densely populated city.”

  “Cities like the ones in China.”

  “Correct,” Gary said. “Most of China’s population is located in its cities, just like most nations. Except they have several prime targets.”

  “Targets?”

  “That’s how we have to qualify them,” Jessica said. “Huge population centers are prime targets during war. New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Philadelphia, are all huge targets for America’s enemies. Don’t think for a second that they wouldn�
�t try to strike one or all of those places, and more if it came down to it.”

  “So, what are you saying?” Zeke asked. “That the United States will launch those devastating weapons at civilian targets?”

  Her eyes flicked up to the mirror and she glanced back at him. It was a look that told him the answer was obvious enough. “We’ve done it before. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. We didn’t want to do it, but when you put the United States into a corner and give us no choice, we will do what we have to do.” The way she said it made her sound cold and callous as if killing millions of innocent people was no big deal.

  “Remind me not to get on her bad side,” Zeke joked with Phoenix.

  “You mean again?” His friend offered a mischievous smirk.

  “The point is,” Jessica continued, “we’ve done it before and we will do it again if necessary. Or if the people in charge think it’s necessary.”

  “Okay, so the missiles were going to Zulu to do what, be ready in case we got painted into a corner?” Phoenix asked.

  “We think those weapons were being sent there to finish a fight, not start one. Starting a fight is easy. It begins with insult, then a slap to the face, then fists, and then the knockout punch. Those missiles are the knockout punch. Sure, we will let things go on for a little while, after all, making guns, bullets, bombs, planes, tanks, and everything else the military needs costs money. Money that will go into a precious few pockets.”

  “The guys who own the armament manufacturers,” Zeke said in a whisper.

  “Yes. That’s all it is. And the entire time, our debt to China will continue to grow. We may not ever even fire a single shot at them. The mere threat of war will boost production of military supplies. That alone will impact the economy.”

  “Okay, so these things are just a fail-safe.”

  “Maybe, but now we don’t know where they are or who took them. We need to get to the spot where the truck was stopped before it disappeared. We’ll search the area for clues and see if we can figure out where they might have gone.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Zeke wondered. “They could be anywhere by now. There are a ton of places to hide out in these mountains.”