by Ward Larsen
DeBolt complied at first, but then stopped halfway to the house, fixed and immovable—his first resistance to any of her instructions.
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Besides you, does anyone know where I am?”
“No.”
“I’m in the service. A soldier who doesn’t report his whereabouts is considered AWOL. That’s a crime under military law.”
“I understand. Soon I’ll explain everything … I promise.”
After considering it for some time, he turned and went into the house.
That night she sat on the porch with a glass and a full bottle. She emptied both in silence, and sometime near midnight went unsteadily to her room. He heard her bed creak once, then nothing.
The weather was taking its first turn to winter. Before sunset, DeBolt had watched banks of slate-gray cloud whipping in fast and low, and he noticed that the ubiquitous flocks of seagulls had disappeared. The forest began to groan under a pulsating wind, and waves thundered ashore in a continuous announcement, absent the punctuating gaps of receding stillness.
After a lonely meal, DeBolt pulled a dog-eared novel from a bookshelf and went to the trundle bed, more inviting now since the monitors and IV pole had been pushed aside. As he crossed the room he looked through the open bedroom door and saw Chandler splayed awkwardly across her bed. He paused, studied her for a moment, then entered the room hesitantly. Her hair was stiff and matted, folded to one side, and her nightdress crumpled—completely still, she looked like a long-forgotten doll on a child’s closet shelf. He doubted she had moved since passing out. DeBolt guessed she might be attractive if she wanted to be, yet her focus on his recovery was so absolute, so single-minded, it seemed to preclude even her own upkeep. Not for the first time, he wondered what was driving her.
Her blanket had slipped to the floor, and he retrieved it and covered her. Other than a slight tremor in one hand, she didn’t move. He turned back to the main room, and his eye was caught by a file folder on the doorside table. It was plain manila stock, and on the title tag DeBolt saw his name written in pencil, sloppy block letters that were unsettlingly familiar. It was his own copy of his Coast Guard medical records—a folder that should have been in his apartment in Alaska.
How the hell did that get here?
It occurred to DeBolt then that for all the diagnostic tests Chandler had performed, she’d never once taken a note. When he’d last seen the folder it had held perhaps fifty pages of military-grade paperwork. Now it looked exceedingly thin, and one page edged out from a corner. The positioning of the file on the table could not have been more obvious. He also noted that beneath the script of his name someone had added in black ink, META PROJECT, and below that OPTION BRAVO.
His eyes went to Chandler, then back to the folder. He picked it up and found but two sheets of paper inside. He had never seen either. On top was a printout of a news article from the Alaska Dispatch News, a four-paragraph summary of the crash of a Coast Guard MH-60 in the Bering Sea six weeks earlier. Again he saw META PROJECT and OPTION BRAVO scrawled in a hurried hand that was not his own. He read the article once, took a deep breath, then read it again. His eyes settled on one sentence in the second paragraph.
Confirmed to be killed in the accident were aircraft commander Lt. Anthony Morgan, copilot LTJG Thomas Adams, AN Michael Schull, and rescue swimmer PO2 Trey DeBolt.
He stared at it for a full minute. Confirmed to be killed …
With gauged caution, he lifted the page to see what was beneath. The second paper was of thicker bond, and carried a stamp and signatures, everything about it implying official weight. It was a death certificate issued by the state of Alaska. There were a few lines of legalese, and in the center two fields of information that finalized the shock:
Name of Deceased: Trey Adam DeBolt
Cause of death: blunt trauma to head/aircraft accident
FIVE
DeBolt did not sleep like the dead man he supposedly was. In recent nights he’d stirred frequently as bolts of light and dark, post-traumatic he was sure, coursed through his battered head. Now he lay awake trying only for control, some logic to replace the encroaching madness. The accident, severe injuries, a hospital stay he barely remembered. Chandler bringing him here, caring for him, isolating him. Her self-destructive behavior. There was simply no solution—every way DeBolt painted the facts, something seemed wrong, a stroke of color that clashed with the rest. In the end, he drew but one conclusion. His time here was drawing to an end.
But what would take its place? Return to Alaska and the Coast Guard? A cheery hello to friends and coworkers who’d already attended his funeral? He wondered if he could walk into his station and claim amnesia. I have no idea what happened, but here I am. The full truth, he decided, was not an option, because he saw no way to present it without harming Joan Chandler. She had brought him here, put him into hiding. Taken on face value, she could be accused of endangering a gravely ill patient by keeping him outside a proper hospital environment. Yet DeBolt knew otherwise. He was convinced she’d saved his life, and put herself at professional risk by doing so. So he would protect her, in turn, by taking the most difficult path—that of patience.
He was sure there was more, circumstances his nurse had not yet explained. Details that would cause everything to make sense. A file, perhaps, he had not yet seen.
* * *
He rose at his customary hour of six a.m., and dressed quietly so as not to disturb Chandler—even though she hadn’t moved since last night. DeBolt was on the beach before the sun lifted, ready for his morning run. The storm was building, and in the pre-dawn darkness he stood at the water’s edge and watched a rising sea. An intemperate wind whipped his hair, which was increasingly out of regulation. Rain appeared imminent, and he briefly weighed it as an excuse to postpone his run. DeBolt looked up and down the beach. He’d seen no one since the young girl at the tide pools, and today was no different, only brown rock and sea and walls of evergreen forest. Staring at the desolate scene, he was reminded that Joan Chandler was the only person on earth who knew he was still alive. It seemed simultaneously comforting and troubling.
The sun cracked the horizon, a brilliant arc of red, and DeBolt realized he had not put on his Timex. Without actually speaking, and for no particular reason, he formed a very deliberate mental question: What time does the sun rise today?
He was debating whether to go back for his watch—in order to time his run, and then the swim he would also not forego—when an odd sensation swept over him. It came like a strobe in his head, a tiny flash amid darkness. DeBolt blinked and closed his eyes, fearing he was suffering some manifestation of the injuries to his brain. An omen of complications.
Then, suddenly, he acquired a strange manner of focus. Ghosting behind tightly closed eyes he saw a perfectly clear set of numbers.
6:37 a.m.
DeBolt snapped his eyes open.
The sea and the rocks were there, steady and ever-present. The sky was unerring, coming alive in subtle colors. The apparition disappeared as abruptly as it had come. With a thumb and forefinger he rubbed the orbits of his eyes, pressing and massaging until the last glimmer was gone. Christ, he thought, now I’m seeing things.
He took a single step back, turned, and struck out east on a determined sprint.
* * *
“I got a hit,” said a young man from his basement workstation.
The woman at the computer next to him said, “What?”
They were located sixteen miles outside Washington, D.C., in a remote outpost run by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The building in which they worked was as new as it was unremarkable. Indeed, should the word nondescript ever be translated into an architectural style, the place could be held as a masterpiece. It was rectangular in shape, although not perfectly so, one gentle portico at the front entrance, and a slightly larger blister behind at the supply dock. What lay inside, however, was anything but ordinary. The first floor wa
s dedicated to electronics and cooling, and twin diesel generators allowed independence from the local power grid. The second floor consisted of a few offices and conference rooms, all rarely occupied, and three banks of supercomputers that churned without rest. The roof was banded by a high concrete wall, inside of which lay over a dozen antennae, all sealed in radomes to give protection from the elements and, more to the point, from unwanted prying eyes. There was a road and a parking lot, both new, and enough surrounding acreage to put the nearest neighbor a comfortable two miles away. There had been one man, old and cantankerous, who’d lived less than a mile to the east, and who had held out for a ridiculous price during construction. In the end, he got it.
It was all built for what was in the basement.
“Really … I got a hit,” the young man repeated. “A primary response on node Bravo 7.”
She set down her Coke. “No, Chris, you did not get a hit. How could you?”
He leaned back and invited her to check his screen. She did, and saw the tiny warning flag and data bubble.
“Has to be a bug in the software,” she said.
“Could it be a test?” he ventured. “Do you think the general might input something like that to validate the system?” The general was the project director, Brigadier Karl Benefield.
“Could be,” she said. “That’s pretty much all we’re doing at this point, making sure everything works. You know our status—three months minimum before Phase II is active. There won’t be a valid flag like that until Phase V goes live, which is years away.”
“Should I report it?”
“Normally, I’d say yeah. But the general isn’t even around this week—I hear he’s buried in meetings to address software issues.”
“So what should I do?”
With no small degree of irritation, she leaned over and began typing on his keyboard. “There,” she said with finality, “all node interface alerts are disabled. We can bring it up at the next technical meeting, but for now just forget it.”
The young man looked at her questioningly, a Can we do that? expression.
The woman, who had been here for two years, since the project’s very beginning, ignored him and went back to her screen.
The two technicians had no way of knowing that the warning had also lit on a second computer thirteen miles away, in a much larger five-sided building. The reaction there was very different.
SIX
Over the course of that day, DeBolt said nothing about having seen the folder. Nurse Chandler didn’t ask if he had. The storm arrived in full gale, rain sheeting against the clapboard outer walls in what sounded like thousand-bullet volleys. Patient and caregiver hunkered down in the cottage, and shortly after dusk, as he cleaned up the remains of dinner, she caught him by surprise with, “You should go soon. You’re well enough.”
He weighed his response carefully, reflecting on what he’d learned last night. “Go where?”
“That’s up to you. But physically you’re ready—you’re getting stronger every day.” She was sitting at the counter, her nightly opener in hand.
“And what will you do? Stay here? Do that?”
She fell encased in a profound silence, and DeBolt let it run. The walls seemed to pull outward with each gust, then bend back in place—like the house itself was breathing, gasping as it fought the storm. Both were startled by what sounded like a gunshot, then a clatter as something struck the house. Moments later subdued scraping noises kept time with the wind.
“A big tree branch,” DeBolt said. “I should go outside and pull it away from the wall.”
She didn’t argue, which he took as agreement. DeBolt went to the door, ignoring an oversized slicker on a coatrack. As he reached for the handle, she said, “The surgery you had, Trey … it wasn’t only to make you well. It was to make you different.”
He paused where he was, staring at the door handle and waiting for more. Nothing came. He heard the empty glass hit the counter and the bottle slide. Heard the tree limb clawing at a windowpane. DeBolt went outside.
The wind hit him like a wall, and he leaned forward to make headway. Rain slapped his face and pelted his body. He found it at the southeast corner, a pine branch with a base as thick as his leg leaning against the cabin’s outer wall. He looked at the roof and a nearby window, saw no obvious damage, and began dragging the limb clear. DeBolt struggled mightily, the weight of the branch and the incessant wind conspiring against him. Feeling a stab of pain in his injured shoulder, he adjusted to a different grip until he had the limb far enough away. Out of breath from the exertion, he leaned against a tree and stared out at the sea. The night was black, no moon visible through the thick cloud cover, yet there was just enough ambient light to see whitecaps troweling the surface all the way to the horizon. Closer to shore he saw rows of massive breakers, and he watched them rise to height, poise in anticipation, then smash onto the beach, each stroke rearranging the shore in a roil of sand and foam.
DeBolt stood mesmerized. He’d been outside no more than five minutes, yet he was soaked to the core, his shirt sodden, hair matted to his head. He shouldered into the wind and walked toward the shoreline, drawn by some primal urge to witness nature’s fury up close. He was more familiar than most with the compulsion—that irrational human urge to test oneself, to step close to the edge and look fate in the eye. How many times had he seen it in Alaska? Fishermen and sailors who crossed the line of common sense, trying to lay one last longline or arrive home a day early. A few got lucky and beat the odds. The rest ended in one of three groups: those who were rescued, those whose bodies were recovered, and the rest who were never seen again.
His bare feet reached the surf, and the Atlantic swept in cold, gripping him up to his calves and then releasing in cycles. DeBolt looked up and down the beach, and in the faint light he saw nothing but the storm doing its work. Then, in his periphery, something else registered. Movement shoreward, near the cottage.
It was another talent DeBolt had acquired over the course of so many missions—the ability to separate the natural from the man-made. For thousands of hours his eyes had swept over open ocean searching for life rafts and boats, desolate shorelines for telltale wreckage. Objects made by man were more angular and symmetric that those occurring in nature. They moved against flows, with irregular motion, and created by-products of smoke and light. And that was what he saw at that moment—the smallest of lights, green and diffuse, moving counter to the wind near the cabin.
In a spill of illumination from the window he saw a dark figure rush onto the porch, followed by two more. Then a strobe of lightning captured everything momentarily, a frozen image DeBolt could barely comprehend: five men now, all wearing battle gear and carrying machine pistols, the barrels bulked by silencers. They worked without hesitation.
Two men battered through the cabin door. Chandler cried out. DeBolt heard shouting, a slammed door, followed by an explosion of crashing glass. He saw Chandler leap from the seaside bedroom window, glass shards bursting all around her. She landed in a heap, then scrambled to her feet and began to run. Within three steps she was cut down, muzzle flashes blinking from the window behind her, a matching clatter of mechanical pops. She dropped, a terrible leaden fall, and went completely still.
Seconds of silence followed, an agonizing stillness.
Without realizing it, DeBolt had sunk to one knee in the surf. He stared in horror, willing Chandler to move. Knowing she never would again. There was no time to wonder what was happening, or who they were. Three dark figures burst out of the house, weapons sweeping outward. DeBolt remained frozen, chill water sweeping over his legs. It was hopeless. The man in front, wearing some kind of night vision gear, looked directly at him.
DeBolt jumped to his feet and broke into a sprint. Only it wasn’t a sprint at all—the beach gripped him like quicksand, each footstep sucking in, holding him back. He heard a second volley of muffled pops, and the surf around him exploded. He was sixty yards from the cabi
n, but barely moving. The men behind him wore heavy gear. If he were fit, in prime condition, if he had a hard surface on which to run, he might be able to get away. As it was, wallowing through sodden sand, still recovering from severe injuries—DeBolt knew he didn’t have a chance. He angled higher up the beach, zigzagging as he went, and found more stable footing. He ran for his life.
The clatter behind him turned nearly constant, rounds striking left and right, chiseling rock and spraying sand. He glanced once over his shoulder and saw Chandler still there, unmoving, the squad of killers giving chase. DeBolt realized he had but one chance—the water. Long his adversary, it would have to become his refuge. He nearly turned toward it, but the idea of fighting the waves and the wind seemed overwhelming. Then he remembered, just a bit farther, in the lee of the natural jetty near the tide pools—the rip current.
He squinted against the rain and darkness, his bare feet flying over sand. He was trying to make out the flat outcropping when something struck his right leg. The pain was searing, but he didn’t slow down. DeBolt heard shouting behind him—they realized he was heading for the sea. Soon the voices were lost, drowned by the thunder of tons of water slamming ashore, enveloping him, stalling his progress. With his last stride he dove headlong into an oncoming monster.
The cold was paralyzing, but he kept moving, trying to keep his orientation in utter blackness. He had to stay submerged for as long as possible, pull himself seaward, but it felt as though he was tumbling in some massive agitator with no sense of up or down. Waves lifted him high, and then sent him crashing to the bottom. There was no way to tell if the rip even remained—DeBolt knew currents often altered during storm conditions. He rose for a breath, but didn’t chance a look back, and the instant he submerged again the sea was torn into a froth by arriving bullets. He dove for the bottom, found it with his hands, and felt that he was moving quickly. But in which direction?