Jennifer Pasco: Burka and Bikini
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“Why do you think they’re in the Navy?”
Jennifer felt herself sagging, resisted the temptation to collapse into the co-pilot’s seat. Adrenaline was long gone, and chemo had eliminated her stamina. Still, this would be over in an hour, or it wouldn’t matter.
She forced her attention back to Akeem.
“Three questions. Is the weapon onboard the ship?”
He nodded cautiously.
“How are they jamming communications?”
“Mechanical,” he said. When she looked blank, Akeem explained. “There are only nine transfer stations around Islamabad. We dropped field spammers at each one right after we hit them.”
Which means my implant is functional, Jennifer thought. I could have called for help anytime after I got into the saucer. It was your assumptions that invariably got you killed.
“Last question,” she said. “How badly do you want live out the next hour?”
* * *
Akeem made excuses to circle the Jimmie three more times while Jennifer powered up her implant again. She fed it a code stream, and punched past the first six security layers of the Defence Ministry. Within four minutes she had both the Crown Prince and the Defence Minister on the thread.
Crown Prince Abdullah was laughing when she finished her explanation.
“This isn’t too damn amusing from my perspective,” Jennifer said.
“It’s funny because it’s you,” he said. His voice turned serious. “How’s the chemo been?”
She said, “A bitch, not to mention the heroin addiction. But considering the alternatives, I’m not complaining. What in hell are you planning to do about all this?”
Minister Hairston’s voice was understandable, but distorted by static. “I’ve called a ‘Code Washington.’” She could almost hear him shrug. “Simpler to tell them the Americans are out of their cage than go into the details. Time of the essence, that sort of thing. Teheran loosed a flight of sub-orbitals forty-five seconds ago.”
“The problem, of course, is that they don’t have a lock on that carrier,” Abdullah said. “From your description, they aren’t going to achieve one until they’re less than ten seconds out.”
She knew what that meant. “They’re homing on my signal, and there’s not going to be enough time for me to get clear.”
“Sorry, that’s pretty much it,” he replied. “We can’t afford to take a chance on plague—or that weapon. You’ve about one minute to come up with something brilliant.”
* * *
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Jennifer said to Akeem. “Fly the damn UFO and don’t look.”
“If I don’t set down this time,” he whined, “they’ll target us.” On the flat screen the flight controller shambled across the deck. Below his blue helmet, his face was a mass of slack muscles and running sores.
“I know that,” she said, straddling Nigel’s corpse, feeling for the hard, subcutaneous ridge of his implant above the right ear. Only a bit of blood oozed out when Jennifer sliced open the skin and pried out an object resembling a metallic cockroach. “Bring us in exactly where the deck controller says, then pop the hatch. When I give you a shout, you take us straight up, hard as you can, or we’re both dead.”
It wasn’t a good feeling to have your life depend on the point of a stolen knife fitting into the reset hole of a foreign-made implant still partly covered with gristle.
They touched down. She heard the latch click and the servos strain to raise the hatch. Idly, as she fiddled with the knife, Jennifer wondered if the saucer could balance at all in flight with the door open.
She didn’t feel the click when the knifepoint touched the contact, but Abdullah abruptly said, “I’ve got a signal, Jenn. Switching the birds over. Get out of—”
“Now!” she shouted, tossing the implant toward the half-open hatch. It caromed off a hinge and bounced onto the carrier’s deck. Akeem screamed and punched buttons. The saucer shot sideways at almost a forty-five degree angle rather than heading up. Wind howled through the hatch; Jennifer went flying across the cabin.
She smashed against a storage locker as the UFO crashed into something metal. The saucer ricocheted off, dropped sharply for a second, and then started up again at a different angle. Jennifer didn’t bounce: she crumpled to the deck, losing consciousness less than a second before the entire world turned white.
* * *
She had to show her credentials three times before being allowed through Brighton Beach’s modesty wall. At the final checkpoint a woman in a burka told her in a cockney accent, “When the twelfth Imam returns, you’re goin’ ter wish you’d spent more time considerin’ the state of yer soul than lyin’ around like a whore on the sand.”
“You’re probably right,” Jennifer said. “At least that’s what the Crown Prince keeps telling me.” The matron’s eyes widened; she didn’t know whether to be outraged or afraid.
Jennifer limped carefully down the beach. It was a weekday, and late in the short summer season. Only a few families dotted the sand along the kilometer stretch reserved for unbelievers. Even here, she noted sourly, the women wore wraps that concealed their one-piece suits except when they actually dipped into the surf, and the men almost all wore shirts.
Spreading her towel on the coarse-grained sand was painful; stripping down to her bikini took nearly five minutes. From mid-calf to her shoulder blade the right side of Jennifer’s body showed the angry black, purple, and yellow of slowly healing bruises. Fortunately, the red streaks around her kidney representing the infection from seawater infiltrating her heroin pump had receded; a disapproving physician had released her from hospital only this morning.
As she tried to find a relaxing—or at least not inherently uncomfortable—sunning position, old habits re-asserted themselves, and Jennifer powered her implant to clear the buffer. There were two more congratulatory messages from the Ministry, a reminder of the Official Secrets’ Act, and the daily thread from Sylvia at Employment Empowerment.
“They’re going to trim back your benefits if you’re not actively pursuing employment,” the woman’s brassy voice insisted. “I’ve an offer for a Shari’a court stenographer, a medical transcriptionist, and even a reception post in the Crown Prince’s lower office suite. They all match your qualifications, and meet your medical restrictions. Please do call, otherwise we’re going to have to drop you soon.”
Islamabad had been struck by a devastating plague, in all probability some wind-borne mutation of an old American bio-weapon. Retaliatory strikes against Atlanta had failed against North America’s missile defenses.
The three injection sites on her arm itched.
She’d argued with Abdullah about executing Akeem—but not too hard.
About Steven H. Newton
A well-known military historian whose primary expertise is the American Civil War and World War Two (Russian front), Steven H. Newton has published nine books and dozens of articles in popular and academic journals of military history. He is the translator and editor of the popular Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Erhard Raus, a book that rivals memoirs like those of Heinz Guderian, Erich von Manstein, and F. W. von Mellenthin as essential for understanding German panzer operations.
Dr. Newton is also a long-time fan of science fiction and alternative history, and has recently published several SF shorts at Ray Gun Revival, Everyday Fiction, and Aoefe’s Kiss. His series, The Fortunes of War, of which MacArthur’s Luck is the first installment, easily represents a research effort on par with any of his prior non-fiction works.
Holding a Ph.D. in Military History from The College of William and Mary and having earned the rank of Master Sergeant (retired) from the US Army/Army National Guard, Dr. Newton is well qualified to sketch war on all levels, from the front-line trenches to the White House or Kremlin.
Since 1991, Dr. Newton has been Professor of History and Political Science at Delaware State University.
Other books
by Steven H. Newton
MacArthur’s Luck (The Fortunes of War #1), May 2014
War on the Cheap, forthcoming, June 2014
Jennifer Pasco: Going Down Under, forthcoming, Summer 2014
On World War Two:
German Battle Tactics on the Russian Front, 1941-1945 (1992)
Retreat from Leningrad: Army Group North, 1944-45 (1993)
Kursk: the German View (2002)
Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Erhard Raus (2004)
Hitler’s Commander: The Campaigns of Field Marshal Walther Model, Hitler’s Favorite Commander (2009)
On the American Civil War:
The Battle of Seven Pines, May 31-June 1, 1862 (1991)
Joseph E. Johnston and the Defense of Richmond (1996)
McPherson’s Ridge: First Fight for the High Ground at Gettysburg (1997)
Lost for the Cause: The Confederate Army in 1864 (2000)
Connect with Steven H. Newton