I said, “It works both ways. When was the last time you saw a body walking around without a head?”
“What about MacAvoy?” asked Hauser.
“He has a head.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s just his brain that’s missing.”
“You might want to give him a little credit,” I said. “He’s doing a hell of a job defending Washington, D.C. The Unifieds don’t know what to do with him.”
“Maybe so,” said Hauser, reluctantly conceding the point. He didn’t like MacAvoy, but he didn’t have a good reason for disliking him. I wondered if Hauser ever questioned himself about being a snob.
He said, “This guy, Nailor, he was the one who shot you on Mars. Ritz says you ran into him in the Territories.”
“He killed a lot of my men there,” I said.
“Yes. Yes, that’s what Ritz said as well. Look, Harris, you can’t turn this into your own personal war. That’s not a good course, not for you or the Enlisted Man’s Empire.
“I hear you’re a reading man, Harris. Have you ever read Moby-Dick?”
I’d read the novel, but I didn’t feel like giving Hauser the satisfaction. I didn’t answer the question.
He said, “Your job, General, is to win the war, not kill your own personal white whale.”
I left my seat and walked over to the desk. I stood over Hauser, not intentionally menacing him, but I communicated a certain amount of threat simply by standing so close. I said, “If you think I’m getting in the way, I’m happy to resign my commission, Admiral. I can do this on my own.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he said, then he thought about my offer, and asked, “Would you really resign your commission over a vendetta?”
“Hell, I’ve been ready to give up my commission since day one. I didn’t want to be a sergeant when they made me a sergeant. I didn’t want to be an officer when they bumped me to lieutenant. I hate this officer shit. I wasn’t designed for it.
“Killing Nailor, that’s another story. I’d cut off my hands and my nuts for a shot at that bastard.”
Hauser gave me a malicious smile as he asked, “Your hands and your nuts? You wouldn’t be much of a Marine . . . Oh well, lose one set, and I suppose the other’s worthless.”
“You think I’m joking?” I asked.
Calm, even though I had raised my voice, Hauser said, “No. I know you’re serious. You’re also narcissistic and vindictive. I know, he shot you on Mars, then he buried you in the Territories. He’s going to die if we sink those cities, General. I question the wisdom of committing so much effort to killing a single individual.”
“It depends on the individual,” I said.
“The Enlisted Man’s Empire needs you, Harris, and you’re talking about retirement and personal vendettas. I find that pretty sad. Maybe all those clones have overestimated you.”
I said, “Once I settle things with Nailor, I’ll get back to work.”
“Do you think so?” asked Hauser.
“Look, Admiral, I need to get him out of my system. Once I kill the bastard, I’ll have my head on straight.”
“Do you think so?” Hauser repeated in the exact same tone of voice.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“About Franklin Nailor? He isn’t worth this much effort. If that was Tobias Andropov down there, well, to capture the former head of the Linear Committee I’d be willing to do whatever it took. For Nailor? I wouldn’t hijack a submarine and dive to the bottom of the sea for a high-profile thug like him.”
“Andropov’s never shot me,” I muttered.
“Harris, this fight has become personal to you. It’s clouding your judgment. What do you really know about Nailor?”
I said, “I’ve read his file. He’s not a military man. He worked for the U.A.I.A.”
That was the Unified Authority Intelligence Agency. He was a spook, not a soldier.
“Do you know what he did at the agency?” asked Hauser.
I didn’t. All of his records had been deleted.
Hauser said, “He might have been a janitor for all we know.”
“What do you want to bet he did interrogations?” I asked.
“Maybe so. That would make him a bastard, but it also leaves him low in the chain of command,” Hauser pointed out. “I’m not ready to commit my fleet to settle your vendetta. You may not have noticed, General Harris, but we have a full-blown war on our hands, one I’m not convinced we’re winning.
“They marched right up to Sheridan and took back their war criminals. They killed our highest-ranking officer. They took over the Pentagon, and when we tried to stop them, they blew it up.”
Hauser and I glared at each other, neither of us willing to give the other what he wanted. I wanted an assassination; he wanted me to turn the other cheek.
“You know, I always heard that there were only three underwater cities; turns out there are eleven of them.” Hauser fiddled with a couple of buttons on his desktop, bringing up a three-dimensional globe with red dots marking the eleven locations. He said, “Now that we know where they’re hiding and how they’re communicating, we’ve been able to intercept their messages. That’s how we know that Nailor is here, he’s in this city,” Hauser said as he pointed to a city near the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. “The water around that city is several miles deep. Do you have a submarine that can take you down that far?”
“No,” I admitted. “I know where I can get one.”
“Really?” asked Hauser.
I nodded. “They have everything I need right here,” I said, giving the globe a controlled spin and pointing to another dot on the map, one in the Pacific Ocean, about an inch off the shores of the New Olympian Territories.
Hauser said, “Unless I am mistaken, that is another underwater city, which means that it is also on the bottom of the ocean. How do you plan to get to it?”
I said, “Ah, now, that’s the beautiful thing. We don’t need to go down to that city. They’ll send their submarines up to us.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Hauser.
I said, “Because we’re going to drop some bombs on their doorstep. They’re either going to need to surface or go down with their ship.” Trying to lighten the mood, I said, “Think of it as drowntown, instead of downtown.
He didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile. He said, “So you plan on dropping bombs to force them to the surface. What’s going to prevent them from sending a distress signal? What’s stopping them from warning all the other cities?
“Right now we have an advantage. We know where they are, and they don’t know we know it. We have the element of surprise on our side.”
When I pressed my finger to the red dot, the name of the city appeared. I looked at it, recognized it as gibberish, and tried to ignore it. I said, “This city is unique. This is the one Cousteau city that won’t warn the others. This one is at war with everybody else.”
Hauser looked at the dot, then looked at the name and sounded it out. A dubious expression on his face, he said, “What’s so special about Quetzalcoatl?”
“Is that how you pronounce it?” I asked. He spoke French. Maybe “Quetzalcoatl” was a French word.
“General Harris, you were about to explain to me why the people in that city won’t warn the other cities when we attack.”
I said, “Because the people in Ketsaalcoddle . . . in that city are no longer affiliated with the Unified Authority. The people in that city are reprogrammed clones.”
• • •
The man who had assassinated Admiral Cutter stood five feet ten inches tall. He had brown hair and brown eyes, but he wasn’t a clone. He looked like a clone at first glance, and he blended in with the crowd on the Churchill, but he had been a natural-born, as was Lenny Herman, the man who blew himself up in the Pentagon.
The men who attacked Sheridan were natural-borns as well. We didn’t have any blood samples because the guards had not so much as nicked a single one of them, but we ha
d the security feed. The men who entered the penitentiary were Unified Authority Marines in glowing orange uniforms. Ritz called them “glowboys.” A lot of officers did.
The Marines that went after Freeman in the New Olympian Territories had been U.A. Marines as well.
In every attack, the assailants were natural-borns, but there was one exception—the men who came after me. They were clones; we had the corpses to prove it.
While confessing his many sins, Brandon Pugh told me that the clones who had come to kill me were looking for an alliance. Nailor and his friends had formed an alliance with Ryan Petrie and his mountain tribe, so Pugh and his gang looked for friends in the sea. They turned to clones, clones who wanted to fight both us and the Unified Authority.
The Unifieds had converted our clones, but, apparently they hadn’t been able to keep them in the fold. Travis Watson wasn’t the only natural-born working at the Pentagon, maybe not even the most important; Howard Tasman worked in the big black cube as well. MacAvoy’s intelligence group said that he had probably escaped with Watson. I hoped he did. I wanted to ask him how converted clones could have turned on the Unified Authority.
I explained what little I knew to Hauser. I pointed out that the attacks on the Pentagon, Sheridan Penitentiary, and Cutter were all carried out by natural-borns. I finished by saying, “The clones who attacked me entered the hotel five minutes after the other attacks. They were five minutes late.”
“Maybe they ran into traffic,” Hauser joked.
“I think they knew that the other attacks were coming. I think they waited to make sure the Unified Authority was committed, and only then did they make their move.”
“But you don’t know anything,” said Hauser.
“I know that all of the other attacks were carried out by natural-borns,” I said, then added, “and that the Unifieds typically dump their dirty jobs on clones. If their clone-recruiting efforts were going so well, why didn’t they send clones to attack Sheridan? Ketzu . . . Ketzaqual . . . this city is the closest Cousteau city to the penitentiary, so why not send clones?”
“It’s a theory. It sounds good, but it’s still a theory,” Hauser said. His words were skeptical, but I could tell by his expression and the tone of his voice that he wanted me to make the sell.
“Fair enough,” I said, “It’s a theory, and let’s put it to the test. If I’m right, we capture an underwater city, a fleet of submarines, and we might just find a way to rehabilitate several thousand reprogrammed clones. If I’m wrong, what do we lose?”
Hauser said, “We lose the element of surprise.”
I said, “Now weigh that against what we get if I’m right about this. We get submarines. If we can take Kezukotal in one piece, we might recover some significant intelligence. Hell, we might learn enough to win the war.”
Hauser said, “I’ll make a deal with you, Harris. You want to go down for an assassination; that seems like an unnecessary risk to me. Add an intelligence angle to your operation, and I’m in.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
Location: Pacific Ocean, one thousand miles off the coast of Mexico
Date: August 12, 2519
An immaculate morning—ice blue sky, cobalt sea, clouds so thin they looked like fading steam. We flew in low, three feet above the water and six hundred miles from shore.
The Navy sent fighters and bombers, and the Marines supplied fifteen transports and nine amphibious personnel carriers, two-story hovering saucers that rode upon cushions of air. APCs worked well on deserts and oceans, but mountains and valleys caused them problems. They were too wide for city streets.
MacAvoy contributed an armada of gunships. The gunships would chase any submarines that tried to escape. Even at their slowest speeds, Tom Hauser’s fighters couldn’t shadow a submarine without falling from the sky.
Far overhead, unseen and outside the atmosphere, one fighter carrier, two destroyers, and three battleships oversaw the operation. If the Unifieds tried to intervene, Hauser’s capital ships would respond.
I rode to the show on one of the personnel carriers along with a battalion of Marines. The floating platform was big and clean, spotless as the day it first floated out of the factory. It hovered above the water, steady as a football stadium and just about as big. Eight hundred combat-armor-wearing Marines sat on padded benches on the bottom deck, waiting for orders.
Ritz and I stood in an office near the bridge. We stood beside a large, three-dimensional tactical display that showed the surface of the water and one hundred feet below it. For now, all it showed was a whole lot of blue and an invisible sky.
This was a Navy operation, run by Admiral Hauser. The Navy provided the bombers and the torpedoes. If the reprogrammed clones came up shooting, my Marines and I would calm them down. If the converts simply surrendered, we would board their ships and bring them home.
Hauser elected to fight this battle in open space from the bridge of the Churchill, thousands of miles above the action. I knew I was judging him harshly, writing him off as another scared sailor hiding inside his ship, but, really, he didn’t have much of a choice. His massive, heavy, and not particularly aerodynamic fighter carrier was not equipped to fly in the atmosphere, where Earth’s gravity would tug at it and wind currents would push it around.
Hauser said, “It’s not too late to change your mind, General. They won’t know we’re here until we drop the first torpedo. Are you sure this is how you want to proceed?”
I studied his face on the screen. He wore a determined expression. A slight smile played on his lips, probably from the excitement of the coming battle. The Unifieds had been hitting and hiding for so long, now that we knew the location of their mouseholes, euphoria had set in.
I said, “Let me know when your bomber arrives.”
A Navy bomber dropped out of the sky. An ugly, angular creation made out of a metal-ceramic composite, the AC-221 Hummingbird had a multifaceted face that looked like a poorly cut diamond. Her rusty black color stood out in the sky. She was an atmosphere-traveling jet with nonatmospheric flight capacity, a jack of all trades.
She positioned herself three hundred yards above the sea.
Hauser said, “Okay, she’s dropping the Observer.”
The Observer was a true antique, an underwater communications buoy that transmitted low-frequency electromagnetic waves, signals that could penetrate the thermocline—the thin layer of water that separates warmer surface waters from the colder depths.
In warm waters like these, the thermocline started about one hundred feet down. The Observer piloted itself through the layer to waters with less dramatic temperature shifts in which it could map and read the ocean floor without distortion. Standing on the APC, Ritz and I received its signals and charted the maps it sent back.
Hauser’s engineers had rigged space-Navy torpedoes for this operation. Apparently they swam underwater every bit as well as they flew in the grand vacuum. For the purposes of this exercise, Hauser’s engineers had armed most of the torpedoes with nuclear tips.
In the military vernacular, all flying machines were nicknamed “birds.” The Navy’s love of wildlife apparently extended undersea. Hauser looked away from the camera for a moment, and said, “Give me a status on those fish?”
He looked back at me, and said, “General, you might want to prepare your men.”
The first wave of torpedoes dropped out of the Hummingbird like a flock of penguins diving into the sea. Two feet long and sleek, they stabbed into the water as neatly as needles slip through cloth, then they formed into a tidy cluster that reminded me of a school of fish. I watched their water ballet in 3-D holographic detail on my virtual display.
While most of the cluster of torpedoes floated twenty feet under the surface of the water, one lone tactical-tipped torpedo sank down, past the thermocline and past the observer. The torpedo’s NERVA-based propulsion system ignited, and it dashed through the water as gracefully as a jet soars through the air.
>
The torpedo slowed to a mere fifty miles per hour as it neared the silty ocean floor.
“How deep is it down there?” I asked.
“Twenty thousand feet,” said Hauser.
“That’s pretty deep,” I said.
“The French built Cousteau cities in trenches with geothermal vents,” said Hauser. “I guess they wanted to save on heating bills. C’est la guerre.”
I didn’t understand that last comment and didn’t feel like asking what it meant. I got the feeling that we stroked Hauser’s ego when we asked him what this or that meant. I also had the feeling that he didn’t speak his dead languages as fluently as he wanted us believe.
The tactical display showed a holographic image of the ocean floor as the French had mapped it several hundred years ago. One of the screens on the side of that display showed the ocean floor as the Observer’s sonar mapped it today. Both displays showed a nearly flat ocean floor. If there was a trench down there, it was a wide one.
One of the screens showed the world through the eyes of the lead torpedo, a simplistic style of tracking that searched for obstructions and ignored other features. The image on the screen was blacker than space. From the torpedo’s perspective, the darkness of that ocean plain was as solid as granite. The torpedo relayed its feed to the Observer, which broadcast it for us to see.
As the torpedo cut through the dark water, it decelerated to twenty miles per hour, a nearly unmanageable pace for equipment designed to travel at two hundred times that speed.
That speed came into perspective when a tiny spot of light appeared on the torpedo’s eye display. It looked no bigger than a pixel, then a dot, and slowly grew into a spot, at which point the torpedo nearly came to a stop.
Hauser said, “The Observer has run sonar, radar, and light tracking. There’s no sign of movement. They’re either asleep down there . . . or they’re not down there at all.”
“Wake them up,” I said.
The Clone Assassin Page 35