Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  “Were you dead within five feet of the door?”

  Her reply was slower, “Yes, ma’am.” Double chest shot, right lung and heart. But they both knew she was the only one to be creative, waiting twelve heart-stopping seconds before diving through in hopes of throwing off the terrorist’s timing. Nice try even if it hadn’t worked, but she’d remember the tactic for use herself if she ever got truly desperate.

  “Anyone notice the light I left shining in the side window?”

  There was silence. It was hard to miss, especially in the darkened silo. It still lit up the wire cage surrounding the service elevator like a beacon in the night. She could see the question settle home on everyone, except the staff sergeant she’d leveled. Failing grade on day one, buddy boy, not a good start. And your superiors know to listen to me even if you don’t.

  “Assess first. The missile silo is circular. You could have come either direction around the house. The floor is sprung to dampen the shaking of near-miss atomic blasts and your shoes are padded. It would be easier than any of the walking lessons from this morning. All of you stamped to the door like buffalo. I could have heard you down to level four.”

  She grabbed the lapel of the sergeant. Screw being nice. She’d drive him for all he was worth and see if he got his shit together. The team would be better off without him if he couldn’t make muster. Shelley dragged him to the lit window in the side of the shoothouse. He resisted with all the effectiveness of a drunken Chihuahua.

  “What do you see?” She allowed him a full second and then pulled him back.

  “A room. The front door.”

  She shoved him aside so hard he’d have hit the floor again if he hadn’t run into the elevator cage. He bared his teeth but she ignored him. All show, little threat; just the testosterone talking. Though she’d be careful not to turn her back on him.

  She waved the female senior airman to her side. The airman looked to the staff sergeant for permission, but he was too busy being pissed.

  Shelley strode over and dragged the airman by the collar, time to be clear who was in charge here. She gave the young woman the same single second of time to look through the window before pulling her aside.

  “You?”

  “Rear entry,” the woman spoke slowly as she worked out what her eye had captured. “Door open and masking the back entry from the most likely hide for the terrorist. Hostage by the door tied to a chair.”

  They turned to look together at the mannequin as everyone except the glowering sergeant sidled in for a look.

  “Easy grab? Save the victim?” She wouldn’t mention that she hadn’t been in the obvious hide and had the back door covered as well, but they hadn’t even tried.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Assess, plan, act, Airman. Remember that just because you’re military police at a huge Air Force base is no reason to charge in like a bull with no testicles. There’s nothing more useless than not thinking first. Never let your emotions run you, that’s the man’s method of fighting. Though you should all know better by this stage of your careers.” The others finally met her gaze this time as she inspected them each in turn. Time to let them off the hook, a little.

  “Sometimes brute force and a frontal assault is needed, but high-security MPs aren’t all that far from Special Operations Forces. Think, feel your way into a site. We’ll work more on how to do that on days three and five. No matter how it feels, time is rarely the shortest commodity. Just a few seconds more study and you might have lived.” She pulled her Glock. Aiming through the window without turning to look, she shot Priscilla the mannequin in the dead center of her chest. The round ricocheted with a hard thwack of plastic on plastic. “And your hostage might still be alive.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The airman didn’t salute. It had taken her most of the day to beat saluting out of this squad. Clearly none of these people had ever done an overseas tour. Never let the enemy know who’s in charge, and a salute certainly does that. They knew that in the field, but bypassed it stateside. Pomp still mattered more than leadership, at least to the leaders. Stupid twits, but not the team’s fault.

  “Stand down. We start again at 0400 tomorrow.”

  Several hundred pushups and near enough a thousand crunches scattered throughout the day had taught them it was better not to groan while she was still in the room. They’d moan for sure when they realized they were trapped on this level of her training silo, nowhere near their food or barracks three stories below. They might whimper right until their six hours of sleep on a hard floor was interrupted two hours early with a simulated raid.

  She’d bet money they wouldn’t have a guard posted. That was a first night bet she’d never lost.

  It would take them three days to move down to the fourth story below ground. Three days until they saw the kitchen and barracks. The United States Air Force wasn’t paying her to be nice. It was decent of the sergeant to be such a shit to help keep her in the mood, though she’d better not thank him. His sense of humor probably hovered little above the gutter.

  CHAPTER 6

  Shelley trotted down the underground tunnel that connected the two renovated missile silos in this eighty-acre installation. The Titan missiles had been built in clusters of nine, with most of the area left as fields of hay. The other seven had been collapsed and filled in. The underground Launch Control Center had been filled in as well.

  Now there was just this pair of silos and an innocuous looking above-ground house that had been the missilers’ residence. Apparently no one had ever used it to sleep, they’d always preferred to sack out in the hardened subterranean bunkrooms.

  All the way to the main junction between the silos, she ran with pounding steps. Good to remind them that after fifteen hours, she was filled with more energy than they could muster at daybreak.

  The service tunnel to the right led to the other remaining silo. The tunnel connected level one in the training silo, intro, to level one in her personal silo which she’d made her home in this decommissioned and supposedly abandoned complex.

  Her body started bitching at her the instant she dropped to a walk. Her legs were shaky, her blood sugar had crashed about an hour ago, and her shoulder throbbed from where the sergeant had tried to knock her aside with the stock of his M4 at the last second.

  If it had been in defense rather than rage she’d give him partial credit for it, but it wasn’t and he still was one big black mark on her mental tally sheet.

  Once through the blast door of Silo Two, she spun the handle and dogged it down, secure against all intruders. They’d been lectured that exploring through the complex was strictly prohibited, part of the day-one rules. Anyone who left Silo One never came back to training and were relocated to hardship bases. She’d shown them the records to prove it before they’d in-processed, their last chance to turn back.

  No one ever refused the week-long program, though most eventually wished they had. Still, she’d learned many times over that security was her friend and she double-dogged the two-thousand-pound blast door guarding her home.

  She wrapped her arms and legs around the firepole and slid down to level two, kitchen and dining. Shedding gear onto the island counter, she moved to the toaster. Racking the training Glock in plain sight next to it, Shelley pulled the SIG P210 out from the shadowed bottom of the cupboard. She thumbed the release and dropped the magazine out: full, real ammo, live round in the chamber. She slammed the magazine back into place and stowed it back in the shadows.

  Everything was in place, not that anyone other than the men who’d built it five years ago had ever been here. At fifty feet across, the circular floor had room for a cozy dining nook, unused, a table for thirty she’d never sat at, and a kitchen that could service a half dozen chefs that had never been here. Nothing here but the SIG and a few, strategically hidden grenades.

  She opened the pantry. Stacks of large
cardboard boxes filled the floor of the space. The top one was slashed open. She reached in and pulled out the first packet that came to hand. “Meal-Ready-to-Eat, Chicken Salsa” was stamped across the muddy-brown plastic bag. She slit it open with the Bowie hunting knife from her thigh sheath, the only real weapon allowed in most of the training levels. The one she was never without.

  With another cut, she opened the “Chicken Salsa” and the “Mexican Rice” pouches. She dumped both in the main bag, because the foil pouches were too small to hold both, and stirred them up. Next she crumbled in the two “Crackers, Vegetable,” then dumped in the Tabasco sauce from the mini-bottle. The candy “II” package went straight into the trash, bad luck there.

  The shortbread cookies, cheese spread, Jalepeno this time, and instant coffee she tossed on the center of the island counter for an early morning snack. The FRH went into a drawer with all of the other flameless heaters. Who wanted to waste ten minutes to heat up a stupid meal? Jabbing the spoon into her dinner bag, she chucked the rest of the wrappings in the trash with the candy.

  Her mother would cringe.

  Good!

  Hell, Mom would probably shit neat little, civilian, pacifist poops like a stupid rabbit. She thought Shelley had turned into some sort of gung-ho military type. She’d never understood that no one could hate war as much as a warrior. No one who hadn’t laid it on the line knew what true hell it could be.

  Not allowed into far forward combat or Special Operations Forces because of her sex, Shelley had done her fair share of front-line work on HR teams. Hostage Rescue could be as hot as any forward combat landing zone, some of the most exciting and scary flying she’d ever done.

  Shelley started to chew on the MRE cold as she headed for the elevator.

  Supper was the only time they’d ever been together really. Every night like clockwork, Mom would stop work at six and serve dinner at seven. As often as not, by seven-thirty she’d disappear back into her office. Shelley’d done the dishes from a stool to reach the sink and was putting herself to bed since before she could remember.

  Fatigues landed in a pile heaped outside the closet boxed in beside the pantry. The outfits she’d shed the last few nights were piling up, somewhere under there was a laundry basket once upon a time. Have to do a couple loads soon, training session or no. Always important to look fresh and pressed for trainees, let them know it’s so much easier than they think it is. Even when it isn’t.

  Halfway to the elevator there was the slightest rumble, not in the air, not sound. Just a vague vibration through the environment. She leaned to the left. A bright green bowling ball flew out of a chute embedded in the ceiling. Without further sound it slashed across from the middle of the hallway into a hole in the right-hand wall continuing its never-ending traverse through the complex.

  Not asleep at the switch. Not this girl. The steel cage of the elevator rattled as she shoved the door aside.

  She finished the MRE by the time the elevator reached the tenth level, the bottom of the silo, two hundred feet below ground. She tossed the pouch and spoon into the nearly full can in the corner of the cage. Stripping down, Shelley kicked her underclothes into the other corner, and entered the lowest level of the old missile silo. Twenty feet deep of groundwater, fifty feet across, heated by a solar hot water system she’d installed up on the surface. One light hung above the pool, barely brighter than a crescent moon.

  Twenty-five laps and she’d be able to sleep for a few hours at least. She massaged her shoulder where the M4 had left its bruise. Maybe fifty to make sure it stayed strong.

  CHAPTER 7

  Twenty-seven years.

  Jeff Davis stared at his apartment door as if it were the thin burnt crust of a falling soufflé. At any moment, the crown would collapse and the drummer’s fist would pound through the mahogany door and force him to face the past.

  But if he didn’t answer, the solo would play all the way through. Then repeat. Endlessly. The only man he knew who used Iron Butterfly’s drum solo as a knock was also awe-inspiringly tenacious. He was also one of the few men alive who could breeze past this building’s high-level of security with a joke and a smile. Even by New York standards the doormen here were fierce, one of the main reasons he’d bought in. A lot of celebs had.

  Phillip Peterson. Knocking, bidda-bidda-bum.

  Definitely not a good thing. Please don’t let it be a portent of things to come. It had been a good year, at least until this moment. There were two parts of his past he couldn’t face. Thankfully Phillip wasn’t one of them. Close, but survivable.

  Maybe he’d just pretend he wasn’t home. I’m not here. I’m at the ballet or a punk concert or… Or he was dead. He winced at that thought. Maggie and Julio were and he wasn’t ready yet to descend into the dark Disposall of the soul. Not by a long shot.

  Hiding would only work if he could tolerate the relentless drum solo that was now really getting down to the hard core bass drum combo, knuckle, knuckle, palm slap, palm slap, fist, fist, fist. And who would they dig up next . . . Mandy? He absolutely wasn’t ready to face that, would never be ready. Better to face the lesser of two…

  He swung open the door a few notes before the end of the solo and Phillip hulked in the door. A little balder, a bigger beer belly, but still the same gigantic wall of a man broken adrift from his foundation. The six-foot-four slab of muscle leaned in and thumped the final few beats against Jeff’s forehead, then wrapped him in a bear hug with a fierceness that rocked him back on his heels now as hard as the day they’d met most of a lifetime ago. Phillip breezed into the apartment as if he’d visited a thousand times rather than, well, never.

  Oh God. It was worse than he imagined. Mandy Peterson had stood behind him, hidden from view. The gentle slip of a sailboat next to her brother the dreadnought. And Jeff always adrift somewhere in between. Now she and Jeff were left fluttering about in Phillip’s wake.

  Mandy.

  He was so screwed.

  “Hi, Mand.” His voice cracked like a teen’s, not a man of, well, more mature years. Many more years.

  “Hello, Jeffrey.” Always his full name. Their hug was a bit perfunctory, but his body remembered how sweet hers was. Decades washed away in the smell of her hair. He backed away as rapidly as possible without overt rudeness.

  Amanda Peterson was changed, and not. She looked fantastic. Age loved this woman even more than youth had. The flowing brunette hair down to her waist was now a perky salt-and-pepper Dorothy Hamill wedge. The clothes, simple and elegant as always. The dazzling smile, now a tentative question.

  He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The loss of her was his sole regret about leaving EMS and the one reason he’d looked back a thousand times. She was now from a different past, a different Jeffrey Davis. One he barely remembered and couldn’t forget though Lord knew he’d tried. They were separated by more than a sea of sauces and gravies. They were but a moment lived over half a lifetime ago.

  “I like the ponytail.”

  He reached back. The graying tail reached past his shoulders. He tried to shrug.

  “Flying my freak flag.” His hair had been military-short the three years they’d been together and he’d never been a freak. Well, not often. “You can take the man out of the sixties, but you can’t take the sixties out of the man.”

  “It’s good.” She appeared to mean it.

  “It’s good to see you, Mand. Really.” The smile doubted him, but the blue-gray eyes were very forgiving. She’d always been able to see all the way inside him.

  How did he look to her? In the mirror before each show he was just Jeff. Thirty years had thinned him out and he’d toughened up a bit. He liked to think of his reflection a bit like a good beef, aging well, long and lean, still thin faced and clean-shaven. He even sported a bit of a tan from a not too busy life. Yet with all his toughening up, his heart still went completely awry eve
ry time he thought of her. And now. In person…

  Mandy made a point of looking up and down the hall, even though there was nothing to see. He was being a lousy host but his words had dried up, powdered, and were stored in some unused spice jar he couldn’t find anywhere in his brain now that he finally needed them. She shifted her feet again. At least she was as uncomfortable at being here as he was. Phillip, however—

  “Okay, enough happy reunion bullpucky. C’mon, you blockhead. We got some serious as shit issues to hash out here and you gawking at a girl ain’t gonna answer a one of ‘em for me.” His Texas drawl mixed with college-roommate frankness had thickened rather than waned over the years until it was like swimming upstream through a language partly recognized but mostly eradicated from memory. “Eradicated with prejudice,” to quote the old wartime order to slaughter everything in an area.

  Phillip grabbed his arm and dragged him stumbling over to the kitchen until Jeff was facing his own open SubZero refrigerator. Mandy tagged along behind. He didn’t have to see her to know, he could feel where she was, always could. The kitchen was a spacious peninsula design. Large enough that he and Julio, the now dead Julio, had thrown large dinner parties from its counters with great success. Now, Phillip and Mandy made it so crowded he could barely breathe.

  “We got serious trouble here,” Phillip shook him by his arm as easily as a salad dressing. “This can’t be the only beer you have? This shit? After all these years and you can only offer me Tiger? And Biere 33? No, 333, they added a three. For luck or some stupid thing I bet.” Phillip let him go and Jeff dropped back against the stove, thankfully unlit. With his massive paw-hands, his college roommate and Vietnam compadre cracked open one Tiger and handed over another.

  Phillip slugged back half the bottle in a single swallow. “Damn, that was nasty. As awful as I remember when we were in-country. Domestic Viet beer on the upper west side of Manhattan. That’s weird as shit, Jeffie. You know that, don’t ya?”