by James Cook
“Did you ever hear from Patricia again?”
Faraday shook his head. “No. Last year I checked the Archive in Colorado Springs and found her name on the M&D list.”
“The Outbreak?”
“No. Breast cancer. Can you believe it? To survive the end of the world only to succumb to such a dreadful disease. Truly there is no God, and I tell you that as a statement of fact.”
I sensed yet another philosophical minefield and chose to avoid it. “So what happened next?”
A shrug. “Life happened.” Faraday drained his glass and began reaching for the bottle, then stopped. “I’m afraid I’m being terribly rude. I should probably ask first.”
I picked up the bottle and poured. “You know, in Japan, it’s considered impolite not to pour your friend’s beer if you’re having drinks together.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that. Thankfully, we’re not drinking beer. A man can grow old trying to get drunk on that stuff. Especially these days.”
Faraday took another pull. He had reached the point where he wasn’t really tasting the liquor anymore, so I knew my time was running out.
“You were talking about life after Patricia,” I said.
“Oh, yes. I was terribly hurt, you know. Terribly hurt. For a while Patricia was all I thought about. I poured myself into my work trying to forget about her. And you know what? Eventually it worked. I moved up the ranks quickly. By the time the 9/11 attacks occurred, I was the head of my department. After the attacks, though, things got a bit…serious.”
“You said before when you first started working for the government you noticed things were odd. We kind of got off that topic.”
“Yes, I suppose we did. Well, the first odd thing was Patricia’s sudden rejection of me. The next happened a month later. I was distraught, you see. I had lost faith in myself, in my work, in everything. One night, after quite a bit of wine, I packed a bag and got in my car and decided I was going to drive west until I found someplace to stop, and there I would start my life over again. Silly, now that I think about it. But at the moment I was quite serious. Not that it mattered. I’d barely made it a mile out of town before they stopped me.”
“Who?”
Faraday looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair and beard were a frizzy cloud around his head. “The men in suits, of course. Two of them. One very tall and athletic looking, the other older and thin as a whip and entirely polite. The older man did all the talking. The tall one never said a word, just stood there staring at me. I think he would have been perfectly delighted to kill me.”
“How did they find you?”
“GPS locator on my car. I had no idea they’d put it there. One minute I was driving, the next I was looking at blue lights in my rearview. I thought to myself, ‘Well, you’ve done it now, Alex.’ I was as drunk as a fly in a barrel of gin. I thought I was in for another episode of DUI theatre, but that wasn’t what happened.”
He went quiet. I waited until I thought he might be fading and bumped the table. Faraday looked up with a start.
“What happened?” I said.
Faraday ran a hand through his hair and pushed himself straighter in his seat.
“They put me in their car and drove me back to my apartment. Put me down on my sofa and took off my shoes. The tall man stood by the door while the older fellow pulled a chair close so he could speak to me in confidence. I don’t remember everything he said, but the gist of it was clear—they owned me. I belonged to the government, and I would not be allowed to leave. If I needed a holiday, or a leave of absence, that could be arranged. They understood I was under a great deal of stress and were willing to make accommodations. But under no circumstances would I be allowed to leave my job and live life on my own. They needed me somewhere they could monitor me. My research was too important to allow me to quit in the manner I’d attempted. The implications of any further dalliances in that direction were absolutely clear, even in my inebriated state. When I woke up the next morning, there was a note on my door telling me to take the day off. I walked outside and my car was in its parking spot. That, oddly, was the most chilling thing. I never tried to leave again. My life became about my work after that.”
“What were you working on?”
“Isn’t it obvious? AIM-38. At least at first. After the World Trade Center came down, I was approached by agents of the newly formed DHS. This was in the early years, shortly after the passage of the erroneously titled Patriot Act. What a load of rubbish that was. I suppose the sitting president’s notion of patriotism was granting the government carte blanche to detain and imprison anyone they wanted, invade the entire nation’s privacy with impunity, and generally trample the constitution like a piece of trash in a dodgy neighborhood. But I digress. Anyway, the men in the ugly suits told me about the Phoenix Initiative and asked if I was interested in coming on board. I accepted immediately.”
“What did they want you to do?”
“A better question would be, what didn’t they? I had my fingers in dozens of projects over the years. Weaponizing AIM-38, engineering the inoculant thereof, organizing the building of new red facilities, field testing various biological agents. Nothing to tell the grandchildren about, I assure you.”
“You said ‘red facilities’. What are those?”
“Oh, of course. You don’t know about those, do you? How best to explain.” Faraday tapped his finger against his chin a few times. “You’re a soldier. You probably know a thing or two about setting up a security perimeter, yes?”
I nodded.
“What’s the key to setting up a good perimeter?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
“That’s an easy one. Layers.”
Faraday snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Exactly. Layers. The Initiative works the same way. Backup plans for backup plans for backup plans. Layers, in other words. Red facilities are one of those layers. For example, before the Outbreak, did you ever wonder where flu vaccines came from?”
“Not really, no.”
“Well, we did. It was one of the many questions the Initiative had to address. Namely, what to do if those facilities were no longer available. Where would we get vaccines from, then? What about antibiotics? Insulin? Pain killers? How would society cope without those things?”
I thought about the hardship and suffering I’d seen since the Outbreak. “Not well.”
“No. Not well at all. People dying of infections that would never have been lethal five years ago, diseases nearly eradicated making a comeback, infant mortality rates skyrocketing. And this is only the beginning. That’s what the red facilities were intended to address. Well, one of the issues, anyway. There were others.”
“Like what?”
Faraday flipped a hand around to indicate the room we were in. At some point he’d poured another drink without me noticing. The bottle was only a quarter full now.
“Like this,” Faraday said. “This place around us. It was built back in the 1950s and expanded over the years. This one and hundreds of others like it. There are at least three of these bunkers in every state. Not to mention the doomsday shelters and the vaults. My God, I hope you get a chance to see one of those someday. They make this place look like a cheap London flat.”
Faraday tried to take another drink, but only managed to spill half the contents of his glass down his shirt.
“Agh. Bloody hell.” He put the glass down and sighed. “Perhaps I should call it a night.”
I gently took his glass, set it on the counter, and helped him stand up. It took a great deal of effort, but I managed to dump him on his bed. He rolled over onto his back and asked if I would be a darling and take his shoes off for him. I did. Faraday’s eyes were closed and his breathing had grown slow and steady. I went back into the kitchen, cleaned the two glasses in the sink, dried them with a dish towel, and put them back in the cupboard. Then I slipped what was left of the booze into my assault pack and made my way t
o the door. Just before I opened it, I heard Faraday speak behind me.
“You know, it really was nice talking to you, Captain Hicks. It’s so rare I get to just sit down and have a normal conversation with someone these days. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.”
I stared at him for a long moment. He began to snore, and I felt a great swell of pity for the man. He was a much a victim as the people in the internment camps. Treated better, maybe, but no less a prisoner. I shut the door quietly, went back to my room, and lay awake long into the night thinking about what Faraday had told me.
The walls around me no longer brought a sense of comfort. I couldn’t help thinking about how my situation compared to Faraday’s. I wasn’t here entirely by choice, and I doubted things would go well for me if I decided to quit the mission. I had learned a great many secrets I highly doubted the government wanted made public knowledge, and looking at it from a purely utilitarian standpoint, it didn’t make much sense for General Jacobs, or whoever, to let me return to civilian life after I fulfilled the terms of my sentence. Jacobs was, above all, a pragmatist. To call him Machiavellian would not be an overstatement. He had let people die before to accomplish his goals. Lots of people. He had ordered assassinations. I knew this for a fact because I had carried out one of them. Something told me it would not be my last.
As I lay in the darkness, I remembered something my father once told me about assassins. He said it was a short-term line of work. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said, “The first rule of hiring an assassin is this: After the job’s done, you kill the assassin. Dead men tell no tales.”
The severity of my situation was beginning to set in. When offered this opportunity, I had jumped at it. I had let Jacobs play me like a violin. He’d known exactly what buttons to push, what leverage to use. Offered me rank, offered me autonomy, offered me better pay, better benefits, a chance to be closer to the real action, and, most importantly, a chance to have a life with Miranda. He’d struck all the right chords, and I’d danced to his tune like a good little monkey.
No more.
I’ve got your measure now, Jacobs, I thought to myself in the darkness. Come what may, one way or another, I’m getting my life back. And God help you if you try to stop me.
I closed my eyes, and after a few hours of fitful worrying, I slept.
THIRTY-FOUR
The morning after my conversation with Faraday, General Jacobs informed my team we would be getting support from a hand-picked JSOC team. Gabe asked who had done the hand picking. Jacobs said he and Grabovsky had made the selections. Gabe shook his head, but voiced no complaint. Jacobs gave him an impatient look, but there wasn’t much he could say. Gabe was not military. He was a civilian working on a contract basis, and as such, did not owe Jacobs the decorum of military discipline. Gabe’s obvious distrust for Jacobs’ leadership got under the general’s skin in a way I found immensely entertaining.
“Despite what he says, nobody works for the general voluntarily,” I said to Gabe after we’d left Jacobs’ office. “I’m willing to bet that includes this support detachment he’s assigning us.”
“Makes you wonder what he’s holding over their heads.”
“Yes, it does.”
Introductions were made later that day in the mess hall. There were six of them, all Navy SEALs and long-time JSOC veterans, which told me they were from a certain SEAL team that did not officially exist.
The SEALs had served together since before the Outbreak, and it showed. There was a casual familiarity and verbal shorthand between them that spoke of long association. They shared a bond of the impenetrable kind, forbidden to outsiders, forged by time and mutual hardship. Their hostile, walled-off comradery reminded me of a passage from an old Stephen King book:
You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself…
The SEALs were all NCOs, or the Navy equivalent. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if being an NCO was a thing in the Navy. From what Tyrel had explained to me over the years, it seemed as though E7 and above existed in a strata far beyond E6 and below. But then again, the Navy does everything differently than the other services. Instead of saying ‘copy’ or ‘roger’ they say ‘aye aye’, which sounds archaic as hell to me. And it gets worse. Left is port, right is starboard (unless you’re facing the back of a ship—aft or stern or whatever the hell it’s called—and then port and starboard are reversed), a rope is a line, candy is geedunk, a chow hall is a messdeck, a bunk is a rack, a toilet (or latrine, for die-hard Army types) is, for reasons I cannot explain, a head. And the list goes on.
During a meal together after our initial meeting, I asked one of the SEALs why a forecastle was pronounced FOK-sul, with the O being a long vowel sound, and not pronounced the way it was spelled. His response summed up the Navy’s reasoning for following its outlandish traditions more succinctly than anything I could have articulated:
“How the fuck should I know?” he said. “People been calling it that for like, two-hundred and fifty years. Why change?”
Enough said.
But that’s getting ahead of things.
The oldest of them was a master chief boatswain’s mate named Gellar (boatswain being pronounced ‘bosun’). He was tall, black, and possessed of about as much mercy as a pit viper. He was clearly the man in charge of his team, and would direct them when it came time to fight. Nonetheless, he was informed by Jacobs he would defer to Grabovsky as to our overall mission objectives. Meaning it was Grabovsky’s job to give the orders, and Gellar’s job to make sure his men carried them out.
The other SEALs were no less surly than their leader. The next in line introduced himself as Smith, electronics technician first class. I was later reminded by Tyrel that ‘first class’ meant petty officer first class, the equivalent rank of a staff sergeant in the Army. I also learned that in the regular Navy an electronics technician’s job was exactly what the title described. They were called ETs in the fleet, and normally worked on radar, radio, navigation, signal warfare, and other complex electronic devices, and the series of schools they had to go through to learn their jobs were intense and difficult and the failure rate was very high. In the SEALs, however, ETs killed people and blew shit up the same as any other operator. I told Tyrel it seemed to me like a waste of a perfectly good technical education. Tyrel said, “Yeah, well, that’s the Navy for you.”
Gunner’s Mate First Class Lowell (again, no first name given) was one of the most average looking people I’d ever met. Average height, average build, brown hair and eyes, no distinguishing marks, neither handsome nor repulsive. But according to Master Chief Gellar, he was to explosives what Mozart was to a piano. After introducing himself, Lowell simply stood and stared at us, his expression mildly neutral. There was something disconcerting about the man. I had the feeling he was one of those people who only showed emotion when engaged in an activity that aroused his interest. And in Lowell’s case, that involved blasting caps and detonation cord and the warm glow of bright orange fireballs.
Chief Engineman Miller reminded me very much of my old squad mate Isaac Cole. Big, black, and built like a fire truck. Unlike Cole, however, his demeanor was not affable and easygoing. Rather, he was stoic and cold and glowered at everyone in his field of vision as if they were targets to be eliminated.
The next man introduced himself simply as Petty Officer First Class Hemingway. That was it. No further comment. I detected a calmness about him that reminded me a lot of myself. Which is not to say I hold any immodest opinions regarding my personality. However, I have lived in my own skin long enough to understand how my general demeanor is perceived by others. Hemingway gave off the same vibe.
Last was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Chavez. About my height, lean, and where his skin was visible, covered in tattoos. By examining them, I discovered he was from one of the less desirable neighborhoods of Los Angeles. His face was narrow and angular and had a chipped look to it, and he had slight cauliflowering
around the edges his ears. I surmised he had seen more than his share of fist fights.
It was just after 1300 when our teams were introduced. General Jacobs informed us it was imperative we learn to work together, and as such, would be going out on patrol with a group of Resistance fighters at 1600 hours. Be ready. Dismissed.
We stood and stared at each other for a few awkward seconds. Finally I looked at my group and said, “We should get a bite to eat before we head out.”
“Good idea,” Grabovsky said.
“Our gear is still topside,” Master Chief Gellar said. “We’ll meet you there at 1530.”
Grabovsky nodded curtly. “Will do.”
*****
I expressed to Grabovsky some concerns about unit cohesiveness, being that we had never worked with Gellar and his team before.
“Don’t sweat it,” Grabovsky told me. “We all get trained pretty much the same. Pro is pro. You’ll see when the time comes. Just remember your training, and everything will be fine.”
It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but it was the only one I was going to get.
We met Gellar and his men at the appointed time. A small contingent of Resistance fighters were waiting as well. Grabovsky shook hands with their leader, who introduced himself as Hopper, no first name given. Hopper said he had been with Grabovsky’s company the night the Resistance crippled the ROC’s army. Grabovsky pointed a thumb at the young fighter and said, “Don’t worry about him. He’s good.”