Lee set the new rank on the table with his oatmeal and then pushed the table out of the way.
“Yeah, I thought you would be all enthusiastic and giddy as a schoolgirl over the promotion.”
“Promoted for getting my agents shot all to hell? Getting a kid knifed in the belly? Yeah, I’m giddy as hell over that.”
“Felt you let them down, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, for your information, our young Mr. Hamilton stopped one murderous bastard in that Nazi general.” Donovan leaned over and looked Lee in his one good eye. “And you better damn well give that kid the respect he deserves for doing his job.”
Donovan turned and started for the door.
“I’m afraid I fell asleep before the end of the book. What in the hell was in those crates?” Lee asked as he reached for the box containing his new general’s stars.
Donovan turned and all humor and anger was absent from his face.
“By the time those Hoover boys got their tails back up, the crates were gone. We assume the German agents did what General Goetz couldn’t. They probably made their way back to Germany somehow.” Donovan looked down at his feet. “Anyway, we’ll talk later. Right now there’s someone who’s been waiting to see you.” He turned away as he buttoned his suit jacket and placed his hat on his head. “And try to use some of that etiquette you used to have when you were a senator. She’s a classy young woman.”
“Bill?”
“Yeah,” Donovan said as he turned back to face Lee. He flinched as he was almost hit by the small jeweler’s box Lee had thrown at him. He fumbled it and then caught it.
“Shove that star up your ass.”
Donovan at first smiled, and then he laughed out loud.
“That would hurt, General Lee.” Donovan turned and left as his laugh echoed back into the room. “By the way, I have another job planned for you, or rather the president has.”
As Garrison turned away, not dwelling on what Donovan or the president was cooking up, he heard the footfalls of high heels on the floor. When he looked up he saw a woman in a large hat standing at the doorway. She hesitated only a moment and then stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. She stood planted just inside the doorway. The hat hid her face and the small veil attached to it made her look mysterious, but Lee knew who she was. She was the same woman he had awakened to three days before.
“I understand you’ve been a constant companion of mine these last couple of months,” Lee said.
The woman pushed the veil up over her hat and centered her attention on the man in the bed for a few moments before approaching him.
“I just wanted to see if you’re as big a son of a bitch as Ben said you were.”
Garrison Lee looked for the longest time at the young, beautiful woman before him. Then he swallowed as the memory of their first meeting came into his mind. He had come to her parents’ farm a million years before wanting to talk with her young husband about patriotism and how he could best to serve his country. His remaining eye could not hold her image any longer and he looked down.
“Mrs. Hamilton,” was all he said.
She slowly sat on the edge of the bed where a moment before the man who was soon to be known as the father of the CIA, Wild Bill Donovan, had been. She removed a large hatpin and then her hat. Her hair was done up in a bun and her face was clean of makeup save for lipstick. Her face needed none as far as Lee was concerned.
“Tell me about Ben.” She saw the uncomfortable look cross Lee’s face. “Not about how he died, about how he lived. You knew him far better than I, you see.”
Lee looked up and took the woman in.
“He lived, Mrs. Hamilton. In the short time he had, that boy lived.”
The widow of Benjamin Hamilton looked down and saw Garrison Lee clearly for the first time. She knew him to be someone who cared about his people, but also a man who hid that attribute well. She felt she knew him immediately and far better than anyone else ever would. It was that single eye and its penetrating glow. She never shied away from it and would listen to him speak for hours.
“General, I think you can call me Alice.”
PART ONE
THE KILLING OF INNOCENCE
1
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, PRESENT DAY
Alice Hamilton watched Garrison Lee sleep. She leaned closer when he mumbled, trying to catch the words he was struggling to say. She couldn’t catch the soft words but she could tell he was distressed. He had been having nightmares of late and they were the first she had ever been aware of in their sixty-eight years together. Lately it seemed Garrison Lee, former senator from Maine, an OSS general during the war, and now the retired head of the most secret organization in the United States government-Department 5656, also known to a few as the Event Group-was having trouble with his conscience, rare for a man who never allowed anyone near his deepest thoughts. For sixty-eight years Alice had guessed at them, and on a few occasions had been right about his true feelings, but now she didn’t know what was going on inside Lee’s failing body and mind. The only thing Alice Hamilton ever really knew for sure was that Garrison Lee loved her, and she him.
She took Lee’s hand and squeezed it gently when he turned his head first left and then right. He mumbled something again and then fell silent. Alice allowed the tears to flow for the briefest of moments before swiping them away.
“Jump, Ben, jump!” Lee shouted as he tossed his head to the right.
Alice froze at the moment her long dead husband’s name was mentioned. It was a subject Lee and she had discussed on only one occasion and that was in the months after World War II had ended. It had never come up again and Alice never once asked him to repeat the story of how her husband had died.
“Oh, no, no, no-you bastard-you bastard!”
Lee sat up so fast that Alice had to lean back to keep from being knocked silly by the man’s still large frame. He sat up and his left eye opened and he had a look of murder on his face. The ugly scar ran under the eye patch covering his right eye and ran pink into the gray hairline. Gone were the dashing good looks of the Hollywood leading man that was once General Garrison Lee. Now all that remained was a dying man with a guilt-ridden memory and a woman who had fallen in love with him in only a few short years after the war.
“Garrison, wake up,” she said as she tried to gently push him back onto the bed.
Finally Lee took two large breaths and looked over at Alice, allowing his one eye to adjust to the faint light filtering into the bedroom. He blinked and then finally realized where he was. He slowly lay back, but not before taking Alice’s hand in his own.
“Dreaming,” he said as his eye closed.
“Yes, I know,” Alice said, leaning over and kissing his brow.
“It’s hell dying, old woman. All the ghosts start to pop open the tailgate to the welcome wagon.” He opened his eye and looked at Alice. He tried to smile and for the first time in her life she saw that Lee had a tear in his good eye that he didn’t try to swipe away.
“I tried to bring him home alive. I-”
“Stop, don’t even think about it. Ben will be there waiting for you. After all that we’ve been through and learned at the Group, you have to believe he’s there. Hell, he may even have a choice word or two for you about stealing his wife,” Alice said, smiling.
Lee returned the smile. “The only reason I regret going is that I have to leave you.” Lee half turned and lifted his free hand. He held her face. “You saved me. Every day you were in my life, you saved me from being that bleak man you met all those years ago.”
“You’re not gone yet and I’m still here, old man. You get some more rest.” She let his hand go and reached for several large files that were spread across his blanket. “And no more reading material for you,” she said, stacking the red-bordered files and then standing, but not before she leaned over and kissed the 103-year-old-man deeply. “If you get your rest, I’ll give these back to you.”<
br />
“You’re such a bully,” he said as his eye closed.
“Yeah, and you know where I got that training.” She turned for the doorway and then stopped and looked back him. “Jack called and asked if he and Sarah could stop by later tonight, I told them yes.”
“Always good to see Jack and his girl,” Lee said, without opening his good eye.
Alice watched as the senator went to sleep, then she turned and went through the door, leaving it cracked open by a foot as she expected his sleeping mind to bounce back on him again.
Senator Garrison Lee was near death, and there wasn’t anything Alice could do but watch him die.
SHACKLETON CRATER, LUNAR SURFACE
For the first time since Apollo 17 the United States had returned to the surface of the Moon. Peregrine, the code name for the package of four robotic lunar rovers, George, John, Paul, and Ringo, named for their resemblance to a large-tracked beetle, had landed safely with its air-cushioned (balloon) landing system that would eventually be used for all future lunar and Mars missions. The four rovers had deployed without incident. Their mission-find proof that the Moon had deposits of water embedded in its dead and lifeless soil and rock, possibly enough water to make the Moon a desirable launching platform for all future space travel.
Since the presidential order of 2010 to curtail NASA’s intention of a manned return to the lunar surface in the next decade, it was decided to combine the exploration budgets of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA to explore the possibilities of hidden water deposits on the Moon, left there by countless encounters with the frozen speeders of space, the comets, thus justifying a return to a place America knew well.
As the first landing spot chosen for the Peregrine program, Shackleton Crater was above all else a safe spot for the experimental rovers. Unlike the remote and preprogrammed rovers sent to Mars, John, Paul, George, and Ringo would actually be tasked to do heavy-duty work in drilling remotely from the safe plains surrounding Shackleton and operated by mission specialists from their distant confines in Pasadena and Houston. This program was a far cry from taking soil samples on Mars. Shackleton Crater was safe, soft, and conducive to success the first time out. And success was what the space program needed. Water equaled a cheaper way to get to Mars in 2025, the projected date of the first American attempt at gaining the high ground of the red planet.
Mission parameters called for the four rovers to explore the dips and valleys of the outer crater, never venturing down its steeply sloped sides and to its deep floor. They would measure and test for any moisture content in the soil surrounding the large rock formations. This fact was a running joke for the mission planners, as they knew they would find no water at Shackleton. That would be for a later mission at the southern pole when they had conquered the problems of deep-soil drilling.
As George, Paul, and John ran freely around the brim of the giant crater, Ringo was taking snapshots of the sky above Shackleton for GPS purposes. The programming for this had been completed at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and designed specifically for Ringo to skirt the outer rim and map the sky. The simple instructions for Ringo were to guarantee that the other three rovers stayed on mission, testing their sampling and drilling packages for telemetry relay back to Pasadena and Houston. The problem developed when a small glitch in the rover’s programming had gone undetected by a sixth-year grad student in Colorado. Ringo ’s design for traversing the lunar surface outside the brim of Shackleton was flawed and was off by a mere three feet. As the other three rovers were performing their remote-controlled tasks flawlessly, Ringo was off on its own and running dangerously close to the giant crater’s precipitous edge. As eyes 244,000 miles away watched the colorless broadcast coming from the small rover’s stationary camera atop its four-foot-wide boxed frame, the roving beetle started to slide off the powdered edge of Shackleton.
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
At 9:10 in the morning California time, the press room was full of reporters, not because of the excitement of America’s robotic return to the Moon, but simply because it was a very slow news day. As everyone watched the rovers on four different high-definition monitors arrayed around the large press room, they saw one view go askew. The press on hand had no idea that Ringo was in the midst of what Pasadena called “a hissy fit.” Inside the mission control room, a hundred men and women who had worked on the Peregrine mission for the past ten years watched as a problem they didn’t need with the press on hand started happening right before their eyes.
“Ooh, we have Ringo going off mission here,” said one of the men watching the telemetry board in front of him instead of the video being broadcast. “Jesus, according to my telemetry he’s… oh, there he goes.”
Stan Nathan, the director of the mission, switched his view to that being broadcast by George, the closest beetle to Ringo. As he watched, he saw the 450-pound rover slowly start sliding off the edge of the crater.
“Becky, stop that damn thing,” Nathan said, trying to be as calm as he could. “If it gets down inside of there, we’ll never be able to get its telemetry. Those crater walls will stop any signal from getting to it. Hurry up, because Houston’s going to start screaming in just about one minute.”
Dr. Becky Gilickson, remote operator and programming technician in charge of Ringo, turned to her six-person team and frowned. There was nothing she could do. She tried sending out a command to reverse its track and override its program, but with the one-and-a-half-minute delay in communication, all she could do was watch as Ringo started a head-first run down the steep incline inside Shackleton Crater. Instead of typing in the remote command, she turned toward Nathan, who was standing in the middle of the darkened room.
“Flight, our command just hit Ringo, but it’s too late, he’s starting to slide. We recommend we run with it. If he tries to reverse track now at that speed he may roll over.”
Nathan hurriedly turned to the live shot of Ringo as it traversed the slope of the crater. For the moment it was running straight; its large six-limbed arms with the tri-rubber tracks seemed to be handling the rough terrain with ease.
“I concur. Let him go. I want a command sent now that once it hits the bottom of the crater I want it to turn-”
“Stan, Hugh Evans is on the line from Houston,” his assistant said as he looked up from the large phone console.
“Put him on speaker.”
“Stan, Hugh here,” said the senior flight director calling from his personal console at the Johnson Space Center. “Look, this could be very embarrassing. Let Ringo run and do not, I repeat, do not order it out of the crater. It’ll be down there, so let the press know that we decided to explore the base of Shackleton. Tell them it was my decision to send Ringo off mission, clear?”
Nathan was relieved that the flight director for the Peregrine mission had taken control. With the press watching this, it was a potential public relations disaster in the making. If they couldn’t control their robots, how the hell could they keep men alive out there?
“Clear. Ringo ’s running free. It looks like he’s going to make the half mile journey pretty quickly.”
“Okay, get your press people out there and explain that we intentionally sent Ringo off on its own to explore the inside of the crater, nothing more. That ought to keep the dogs away until we can figure out how to recover the rover.”
The phone line went dead as Nathan turned his attention back to George ’s video. The descending rover just went past its line of sight as it slipped and slid down the steep slope.
“Switch main viewer to Ringo so we can see what it sees.” Nathan turned to his left at the last telemetry station in the long row. “REMCOM, start getting a communications relay established between George, John, and Paul. We have to align them so we can continue to receive telemetry from the little guy once it hits bottom, because it’ll never be able to broadcast out of the damn hole.”
The remote control communications station began sending
out signals interrupting the programming of the three remaining rovers. The scientists would introduce a “burp” in their existing program and send another order to span that gap. They would arrange the rovers around the edge of the crater to receive the telemetry signals from Ringo and then relay that signal to earth. It had never been done before, but that was the business they were in.
“Estimate thirty-five feet, plus or minus a foot, until Ringo hits bottom,” Communications called out. “Signal strength on telemetry is weak. Okay, signal lost at 0922 local time.”
“Come on people. Let’s get the rest of the Beatles in on this,” Nathan called out as he closed his eyes, hoping that Ringo didn’t go belly-up in the last thirty feet of its unscheduled walkabout.
“We have a patch through from Paul,” Communications said. “Okay, we now have video from Ringo… it stopped. It looks like-”
“The damn thing’s sideways-it’s hung up on something,” Nathan said angrily. He was trying his best not to take it out on his people.
On the monitor, the video streaming from Ringo showed the side of the crater. As they relayed a signal down into Shackleton from Paul, they ordered the camera to rotate 60 degrees. They wanted to see what they were hung up on before trying to extricate Ringo from its current 10 degree tilt position.
“Okay, at least we know it’s on the bottom and in one piece,” Nathan said as he stepped toward the large monitor, watching the area around the rover as it panned its view to accommodate its orders from Earth. “Goddamn big crater,” he mumbled as he looked at the darker than normal picture surrounding Ringo. “We must be in the lee of the crater’s northern wall.”
As the camera completed its 180-degree sweep, it stopped. Its lens was automatically trying to focus on something that would be oriented to its left side. It was obviously the obstacle that had arrested Ringo ’s run down the slope.
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