by Joe Buff
One of Jeffrey’s former shipmates, stationed now at the Pentagon, came by. “Hey, Captain. Way to go!” The two of them talked for a couple of minutes, then the other man moved on.
Again, Jeffrey savored a fleeting sense of joy, a tingling in his chest, and a lightness in his gut. The Medal of Honor… He tried not to remember that winning a medal in battle usually meant that other good people hadn’t made it back.
All around Jeffrey wineglasses and cocktail glasses and soft-drink glasses clinked. Tuxedoed waiters circulated smoothly through the hundreds of guests, offering tidbits of snacks on silver trays. The offerings were meager, compared to all the events the hotel had hosted over the years, because of wartime austerity. It wasn’t lost on Jeffrey that all the wines were inexpensive labels, and every one of them was American made.
Jeffrey had had little appetite at lunch. Now his stomach rumbled, not that anyone else would notice in this din. As a waiter passed, he grabbed a bite to eat — a cracker with cheese spread.
Jeffrey realized that none of the hors d’oeuvres he’d seen all afternoon included seafood. This wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of nuclear waste and fallout built up by now in the Atlantic. Some scientists said the ecological damage wasn’t really that severe, that the ocean was very vast and so the toxins were hugely diluted. The relatively small tactical atomic warheads now — used by both sides hundreds of miles from land — weren’t much compared to the many megatons the U.S. and USSR and other nuclear powers had tested in the atmosphere or in the oceans in the early Cold War. But it was very different, at least psychologically, in an actual shooting war. No one was taking chances, which was too bad. Jeffrey loved seafood.
He quickly went from feeling fulfilled to feeling glum. Some of the atomic weapons detonated in the oceans had been set off by his ship, on his orders. Jeffrey wondered for the umpteenth time how many whales and dolphins he’d killed, collateral damage to the environment as he went after high-value enemy targets. He rationalized that the Germans and Boers had started it all, this limited tactical nuclear war at sea. Allied forces needed to use nukes in self-defense. High-explosive weapons just weren’t effective enough when the enemy was firing at you with fission bombs. And precision-guided high-explosive weapons weren’t the cure-all some pundits had thought they’d be before the war. The Axis had figured out how to distort the Global Positioning Satellite signals, and how to detect and jam or kill a ground or airborne laser-target-homing designator. Some defense analysts had warned about such things, before the war. Maybe they hadn’t been able to get the right people to listen.
Jeffrey was self-aware enough to witness his own mood swings. So here I am, in glamorous wartime Washington, D.C., wearing my country’s highest medal for valor, and I feel like crap. He grabbed for another hors d’oeuvre as a pretty young waitress went by. I need to raise my blood sugar. That should help. The waitress paused politely and Jeffrey took a dumpling filled with some sort of meat. Then he watched what he already called “the process” start again.
The waitress saw his star-shaped bronze medallion out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look at his face, to make sure it was really him. Of course it was him: Commander Jeffrey Fuller, United States Navy, captain of USS Challenger. War hero. The man of the hour. On national TV, and on the cover of every newsmagazine — the Internet was so plagued by Axis hackers and misguided hoaxes that most people used hard-copy newspapers to follow the war and the troubled economy.
“Um, sir, I…” the young lady stammered.
Jeffrey met her eyes and waited. Submariners were very good at waiting.
She smiled, and hesitated. Then she positively beamed, and leaned a few inches too close. “Congratulations, Captain.” There was a hunger, a wanting, in her eyes. A Medal of Honor groupie? Was there such a thing?
“Thanks,” Jeffrey said, friendly enough but distant and noncommittal. He had his mask of command to maintain, his professional demeanor — and he’d never felt comfortable flirting, whatever the context.
She controlled herself and switched to more of a daughter-father mode. “Thank you, Captain. For everything you’ve done, to help protect us.”
The woman hurried away, blushing. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to talk to the guests. Maybe she’d just felt nervous, suddenly talking to a battle-hardened nuclear submarine captain in his full dress blues. Flirting was natural when people felt nervous.
Jeffrey doubted if that young lady, if most of the civilians here, really knew what the medals on his jacket even meant, which one was which. He knew very few of them had any idea what a person had to suffer through to earn these medals. Today, on the theory that less was more, Jeffrey used only his major decorations: the Navy Cross, with gold star in lieu of a second award, for his first two combat missions in the recent conflict. The Presidential Unit Citation, awarded to Challenger’s whole crew by the Department of Defense, for what they did under Jeffrey’s leadership on their latest mission, their third, the mission for which he’d just received the Medal… And his Silver Star and Purple Heart, won years ago, in the mid-nineties. He’d been a freshly minted junior officer in the Navy SEALs in those days, on a black operation in Iraq, and the SEALs’ extraction went bad. Eventually recovered, but unfit for further commando duty, Jeffrey had chosen to transfer to submarines; wanting a career in the navy ever since he was a kid, he’d done Navy ROTC at Purdue, with a major in electrical engineering — good background for his move to the Silent Service.
I was about that waitress’s age when I got wounded, Jeffrey reflected. The thought made him feel very old. He was thirty-seven, and this coming summer would turn thirty-eight, if he survived the war that long. He wondered what the navy would order him to do next. He wondered if he really would survive the war.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jeffrey caught a glimpse of Ilse Reebeck. She was a Boer freedom fighter and had served as combat oceanographer on Jeffrey’s submarine during all of USS Challenger’s war patrols. Originally a civilian consultant, Ilse was now a lieutenant in the Free South African Navy. Jeffrey saw her talking to several African dignitaries, diplomats and generals who’d been invited to the party. Jeffrey was heartened to see that an ethnic Boer could talk with a group of black Africans without them all coming to blows. This boded well for the future. Jeffrey knew there were plenty of “good” Boers. Ilse’s family had all been good, and paid the ultimate price for resisting the reactionary takeover last year: They’d been hanged with so many others, on national TV, in Johannesburg, South Africa’s capital.
Jeffrey, standing in a corner of the ballroom now — to get breathing space from the increasing press of the crowd — looked steadily at Ilse, trying to make eye contact. He could tell that she could see him. But she ignored him and continued to talk to her fellow Africans. Some of them wore traditional tribal robes, and Jeffrey thought these men looked very powerful. Finally Ilse blinked and subtly shook her head, and still didn’t look at Jeffrey. He gave up and looked away.
Ilse was like that. He and she had been intimate, off and on. Ilse was very emotionally complex. Sometimes Jeffrey felt he was being used, since it was always Ilse who decided when it was time to be close or time to be detached. Today, she’d been altogether standoffish. She wore a new medal herself, the Free South African Legion of Merit, a gaudy embroidered sunburst over her heart, on a wide red sash. Jeffrey thought the whole thing looked overdone. But he’d hoped he and Ilse could share in the sense of celebration today. That wasn’t happening, and Jeffrey felt disappointed.
Jeffrey reminded himself that Ilse had personal needs he could barely fathom. What was it like to lose your whole family and your country in one blow? What was it like to be torn from teaching at the University of Cape Town and thrown into a bloody coup and then a bloodier war? If Ilse hadn’t been attending a marine biology conference in the U.S. when the trouble started, she might well be dead now too, strung up with her relatives. On top of everything else, she’d played a key role in several rec
ent nuclear demolitions, and must still be reeling mentally from hand-to-hand combat with kampfschwimmer at least as much as Jeffrey was. Kampfschwimmer terrified Jeffrey, and he was a former SEAL.
A senator wormed his way over, someone Jeffrey recognized from the newspapers. He chaired an important congressional subcommittee. The senator brought a staff photographer in his wake and quickly struck a dramatic pose, shaking the Medal of Honor winner’s hand in both of his own. Jeffrey tried not to blink when the flash went off. The senator disappeared in the crowd as quickly as he’d materialized.
“Son!”
Jeffrey recognized his father’s voice. He turned. His father came over from out of the crowd, accompanied by Jeffrey’s mother. Both were very well dressed, for the special occasion. Jeffrey’s dad, Michael Fuller, wore a gray pinstripe suit that fit him perfectly, even though, like many people, he’d lost a lot of weight since the start of the war. His red-, white-, and blue-striped tie’s Windsor knot was also perfect. Quite a switch from when I was a kid back in St. Louis, when my dad wore polyester clip-on ties and off-the-shelf sport jackets.
“How are you feeling now, Mom?” Jeffrey was naturally concerned. Her color was healthy, but Jeffrey knew this was mostly due to makeup.
“Good, Jeffrey. Today I’m feeling very good.” His mother grinned. When he’d first learned she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, he worried he might not even have a chance to say good-bye.
Jeffrey’s mom hugged him, and he hugged her back very hard.
“I won’t kiss you on the cheek this time,” she said puckishly. “I got enough lipstick on your face already, posing for all those cameramen.” Jeffrey’s mother had had emergency surgery less than two months before, and then a new chemotherapy protocol that specifically targeted cancer cells. The treatments were very effective, and were over so fast you hardly lost much of your hair. Her latest medical imagery scans showed her body free of all tumors.
“I managed to escape my various sycophants and camp followers,” Jeffrey’s father said. Michael Fuller chuckled; he had a biting sense of humor. He and Jeffrey’s mother had been right up front at the formal ceremony this morning, when the president of the United States presented the Medal of Honor to Jeffrey in the Rose Garden. Now, with the president off on other pressing duties, Michael Fuller was holding court himself. Since the war began he’d had a meteoric rise in the Department of Energy. Instead of being a local utility regulator, that middle-management bureaucrat Jeffrey remembered from his teen years, his dad had become a savvy political appointee in the nation’s capital, one of the dozen most senior people in the DOE.
“You look unhappy,” Michael said.
Jeffrey shrugged. “It all gets pretty wearing.” He gestured with his eyes toward the crowd, which kept churning and babbling nonstop. “How do you stand it?”
“It’s an important part of my job, the mingling,” Michael Fuller said. “You, in contrast, look rather uncomfortable.”
“This isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, Dad. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve had a microphone jammed in my face since lunchtime.”
“Most of the people in this town would kill to get the exposure you’re getting today.”
Jeffrey made a sour face. “They don’t need to kill. They can have it. Right now. Take it.”
“Jeffrey,” his mother tried to soothe. She touched him on the shoulder. “Your father and I both learned to enjoy meeting so many new people all the time. It’s a big game. Don’t take everything so seriously.”
“I don’t have entirely good memories from when I was stationed in Washington,” Jeffrey said. At the Pentagon, a few years before the war.
“Huh?” Michael said. He’d been distracted, giving an obviously phony smile as someone important-looking went by. The woman, whoever she was, gave him a pleasant but equally phony smile, then nodded at Jeffrey before she disappeared on the way to the bar, trailed by a retinue of followers of her own.
Jeffrey wanted to change the subject, but his father wouldn’t let him.
The man grew stern. “I think, in all honesty, you’ve taken enough of a break. Lord knows when you’ll have a chance to be with so many important people again. I want to see you out there, making contacts, not hiding in a corner like a scared little kid when the grown-ups have company.”
That made Jeffrey angry.
Michael Fuller chuckled. “See, son? I know how to push all your buttons. I sit in my office and push people’s buttons all day. You need to master the trade yourself if you expect your career to move up much further.” He pointed at Jeffrey’s Medal. “That thing might get you as far as full captain by pure momentum, but that could be as far as you ever go. If this war ends and we win it, and you don’t get killed or maimed, you’ll never make admiral once you get tagged as a wallflower.”
“Ouch,” Jeffrey said. Of course, his father was spot on. Jeffrey could see telling signs of why Michael had been chosen for Washington — and promoted again once he got here — amid major personnel shake-ups since the outbreak of the war.
“Listen to your father,” Jeffrey’s mother coaxed, but there was a hint of steel in her voice too, and this surprised Jeffrey.
“Speaking of which,” Michael said, “I need to get back to the fray myself. There are people I want to talk to, and people who want to see me…. There’s the deputy secretary of defense.” He pointed. “You only get the Medal of Honor once, presumably. Use it. I want to see you go up to the DepSec and make conversation.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything. Nothing. Two or three minutes is plenty. He knows who you are, believe me, but Washington people have very short memories. Make sure he remembers who you are.”
“Good-bye, dear.” Jeffrey’s mother gave Jeffrey an encouraging pat on the cheek, then walked away holding her husband’s arm — gliding across the ballroom floor, the perfect undersecretary’s spouse.
Jeffrey felt pretty small. He tried to build up the nerve to go talk to someone important.
It’s weird, how I’d rather be commanding my ship, out-thinking an enemy submarine captain in mortal combat, than attending a party.
Jeffrey was standing near a row of floor-to-ceiling windows, covered by plush maroon-and-white curtains drawn closed. Idly, he pulled back the edge of a curtain and peeked outside.
The panes of glass were crisscrossed with strips of tape to keep them from shattering in a blast. Right outside the windows, Jeffrey was confronted by a solid wall of sandbags.
Somebody isn’t taking any chances.
Jeffrey put his face closer to the window and peered as far as he could to the left. There was a sliver of a view, looking down into the wide ravine of scenic Rock Creek Park. He could barely make out part of the big stone archway bridge that carried Connecticut Avenue across the ravine. The sky was clear, not yet growing dark. Looking directly up, Jeffrey saw the high, fast-moving contrails of a pair of fighter jets, on combat air patrol over the capital.
Jeffrey pulled himself away from the window and pulled himself together. He stood up straighter and took a deep breath. He saw someone he’d been introduced to briefly before, the four-star admiral who was commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Jeffrey decided to follow his father’s advice now. He’d go chat the admiral up.
Before he got there, a murmur of surprise and interest rippled through the crowd. Heads all turned in unison to the entry doors to the ballroom. Even the TV floodlights focused that way.
Over the loudspeakers, someone announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”
CHAPTER 2
Northeastern Brazil, on the Edge of the Amazon Rain Forest
In absolute and enveloping darkness, Felix Estabo quietly went through the final stages of forming the nighttime defensive position. He lay flat in the stinking mud, embracing it, concealed under a fern bush festooned with big and very sharp leaves. His floppy-brimmed jungle hat and the insect net draped over his face and neck kept t
he hungry mosquitoes at bay. Arranged in a circle with him — each man facing outward so that their feet all met in the center — were the others in the eight-man team.
Silent hand-touch signals went around the group from man to man, status reports. All was well. Felix allowed himself a sense of proprietary satisfaction — times like this he felt like a mother hen, though he’d never in a million years say so out loud. Felix’s boots picked up a few of his teammates shifting an inch or two to get a little more comfortable. The four men who weren’t on watch tried to sleep.
Another bead of sweat formed on the tip of Felix’s nose as he lay there. It itched, but to move and scratch would violate noise and motion security; even if they were lucky and the slightest movement didn’t get everyone killed, Felix needed to set an example. Although the one thing they knew for sure was that no tribal Indians came near here, other humans might be hunting Felix and his men right now.
More sweat dripped and itched. The temperature was over ninety Fahrenheit — even at night — and the humidity topped 95 percent. The air was almost smotheringly thick.
Felix tried not to fight the relentless weight of his rucksack pressing down on his back. In this tactical situation, you always slept in full gear. He cradled his weapon in his arms, a specially modified Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun. The weapon fired nine millimeter bullets, semi-or full automatic, from detachable magazines that each held thirty rounds. Felix had a dozen magazines with him. But if he was forced to fire just one round, even with his weapon’s silencer, the entire mission would almost certainly fail. If it did fail, those dozen magazines would run out fast.