Swap Out!

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Swap Out! Page 15

by M. L. Buchman


  “Beef Enchilada.” Even heat wasn’t going to help this meal. He tossed the entrée aside. The refried beans and cheese sauce had possibilities. There were cases of these things with two dozen other options.

  He started digging through, doing his best to ignore Shelley’s silent appraisal relegating him to the lowest tiers of bourgeois uselessness. The first one that came to hand was another Beef Enchilada. No way! He tossed it aside and dug deeper.

  “Tuna.” There was no tear-here notch on the pouch, probably afraid that someone not armed like an American soldier could open the damn thing. Worse than child proofing an aspirin bottle. There wasn’t even a knife in any of the kitchen drawers, he’d checked.

  As he crossed to Shelley, there was a soft click, just barely audible. He instantly froze in position until a blue-and-green striped bowling ball had shot up from the middle of the kitchen floor and disappeared into a hole in the ceiling that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  Shelley didn’t blink, or even turn to watch it. But he’d bet his Chagall she hadn’t missed its passage.

  When it was gone he reached over and pulled the big hunting knife from Shelley’s hip sheath.

  That got a reaction. She nearly crushed his wrist in her powerful grip before abruptly releasing him, the knife barely remained in his weakened fingers.

  CHAPTER 42

  “Sorry.”

  Jeff’s apology sounded perfunctory to Shelley as he slashed away at the MRE outer pouch. She was going to grab it back before he hurt himself, but then she noticed how he handled it. Most civilians were awkward when handling a big knife. She seen recruits cut themselves time after time during the long weeks of basic training, some severely.

  Jeff Davis handled it almost as well as Grim. His slice into the pack was clean, not a ragged slash.

  In moments Tuna, Beef Patty, Beef Ravioli, and Cheese Tortellini were spread across the counter. He rapidly arranged and stacked the various elements. Shuffled a few, set others aside.

  He made a small pile of the candy packets with toffee rolls in them.

  “Throw those out.”

  “What? The candy? Why? They look to be the best part of these things.” He picked them up.

  “Bad luck.”

  He looked at her as if she were a lost child.

  “There’s not a Special Operations Forces soldier worth his salt that will eat those. Toss ‘em. I’m not kidding.”

  He reluctantly dropped them into the garbage before returning to rearranging his boxes and foil packets.

  She turned her head so that she could see what he was doing, but he was already pulling the packets out of their boxes and now the labels were all mixed up. He slid a double pouch into one of the heaters, ran an inch of water into it, and held it horizontally for a minute.

  He patted the bottom and pulled back when he discovered it was hot. With a sharp nod he stuffed the heater and pouches into a cardboard box and propped it up exactly per the instructions. The ones she’d read so many times when stuck out in the field with nothing better to do. Every soldier in the US military could recite the complete directions from memory. The language experts would translate them into every language they spoke for practice. Some had even made it into a song, in Pig Latin. She’d met a third tour Gunnery Sergeant would could recite it backwards, flipping each word as well. He did it to the tune of Back in Black.

  In moments he had four heaters going, each letting out their little wisps of chemical reaction vapor.

  “They smell funny. Is it dangerous?”

  “Not unless you do something stupid.”

  “Such as?”

  “They release hydrogen gas. You can capture it in a bag as it heats. Nice bang when you touch it off. Give you second degree burns. Toss in a few pebbles for shrapnel and bored recruits can end up in the infirmary. Toss in the Tabasco sauce and it makes a close-range but effective pepper gas. Make you weep for ten minutes or so.” There were also nearly a dozen ways to use one to torture or kill a hostage but she’d keep those to herself. A couple of them were so nasty, it made even her appetite go AWOL when she taught those techniques.

  All the time he was busy with her knife, first slicing open the cardboard boxes. A few quick trims and he’d made them into a pair of placemats. Napkins and heavy-duty MRE spoon set to one side. He took two fresh water bottles from the fridge, dumped about a third out and poured “Dairy Shake” packets into both. Shaking them hard until the dried milk and flavor powder blended into the water and it reached a milky smoothness. He set those on the upper corners of the placemats.

  Once more with the knife, he began slicing up a couple of the brown outer bags. Then a couple of the napkins.

  Her stomach actually rumbled. When was the last time she’d had a sit-down meal? The night she’d brought Jeffrey to the bar. Before that? Three weeks ago at the Wright-Patterson base cafeteria while talking over the current training program with the colonel. Steak and eggs and hot chocolate.

  Jeff set aside his cutting to start tending the heaters. First, he set out “Crackers, Vegetable” and squeezed the heated refried beans on top of them. He topped it with heated “Cheese Spread, Jalapeno” and a tiny bottle of picante sauce.

  He took one of the large pouches and stirred in the cold Tuna, a heated Mexican Mac and Cheese, and two of the Tabasco miniature bottles. Once it was well mixed, he portioned it onto a couple of the pouches he’d laid flat as serving dishes. The topping was crumbled, “Pretzels, Nacho Cheese.” He set this in the center of her cardboard placemat as the main dish.

  “And for dessert . . .” He pulled out a heated pouch of “Apples, Spiced.” With a quick slash of the knife he split a pair of “Fudge Brownies” horizontally in half and poured the steaming apples down the middle. He placed a dozen chocolate chips from her private stash across the top of the apples. They were already melting when he replaced the top of the brownie.

  “Appetizer, cracker nachos. Main dish, spicy tuna, mac and cheese casserole. Dessert, fudge-apple brownie, sorry, but we appear to be out of ice cream for the à la mode.”

  He gathered the plastic and paper mess he been making, turned his back to her after offering a maniacal grin, and made a few final adjustments to it. Turning back to the counter, he placed his creation between their placemats, a little turret of curling plastic interlayered with the soft folds of napkin. A center-piece. A flower of plastic and paper, the white blooming forth from the brown leaves.

  “A missile flower. A rare breed, only blooms in underground silos.”

  He sat down across the island from her and toasted her with his bottle of dairy shake.

  She had to slough off her numbed apathy to return the toast. He had created a meal that looked and smelled wonderful from compressed, treated, sealed packets of mediocre ingredients. And he’d done it quickly and efficiently. He had skills. Not her skills. Not ones that would keep you alive or kill your enemies. But she wondered if being on assignment might not be more enjoyable if Jeffrey Davis were along for the ride.

  He knocked back a long swallow of the shake and grimaced sharply though he covered it quickly enough.

  She made a show of dumping half a packet of sugar into it and shaking her bottle before drinking.

  He did the same, tasted it, and still made an unhappy face.

  She laughed. It sounded strange here in the kitchen. A sound someone who lived alone wasn’t used to. A sound perhaps never heard in this silo before.

  “I know. The shake’s still nasty.”

  But the food wasn’t. It was the best meal she’d had in a long time.

  CHAPTER 43

  The dawn light was creeping into the backyard. First the silhouette of the forest separated itself from the night sky. The trees sought enough light to show their own boundaries and personalities, rocketing sugar maples, stout white oak, the old beech Amanda’s father had plante
d for the color of the dark red bark. In moments color would appear to adorn their outlines, but it was slow in coming. For the moment, the day was a thousand shades of gray.

  No matter how many times Amanda had watched, she always missed the moment when middle gray shifted to grass green. Dull gray to amber leaves. The darkest black, the last to emerge, to the dusky forest pine.

  Amanda huddled in the old Adirondack chair on the back porch. From here she looked down on Franconia Notch and up at the White Mountains. Clarice had wrapped an old quilt about her before finally going to bed, but it did nothing to cut the chill.

  Five hours they’d spent dissecting every available piece of video from all three shows.

  It wasn’t until the third hour she’d found what she was after.

  In the last minute and seven seconds of her life, Maggie Hadderly had not been looking at the camera. A woman with impeccable stage sense, one who knew how to use the camera to reach, to woo, and to wow her electronic audience had ignored it. She fueled her show’s energy and excitement from the in-house crowd, but never lost her connection with the at-home audience through the camera.

  In those last moments, her face changed. Not fear, nor sadness . . . Clarice had been the one to nail it.

  “David Beckham-level Rowr!”

  “David who?”

  Clarice had put her hand on her hip and glared at her like an idiot child.

  “The poster on my wall? Beckham. Mr. Perfect. Mr. Super Soccer Player? Married Victoria Adams? Posh Spice? Spice Girls? The only interesting Spice Girl? Hello, Amanda Peterson. What century are you living in?”

  “And what does this have to do with . . .?”

  “Maggie Hadderly is looking at something she wants as much as I want David Beckham’s body.”

  She’d glanced back at the video and considered Maggie Hadderly’s look. It was animal, aggressive—

  “And it has nothing to do with love.”

  “Lust.”

  “Yup. Plain and simple.”

  “But lust for what?”

  It took conjecture and sheer guesswork, and noticing that even as she burned, her gaze returned one last time to somewhere off-camera. High up. The back of the house.

  Audience shots. They’d gone hunting through audience shots, the different camera angles, and they found a seat with a handsome man. A man whose place was empty on the very last wayward pan of the crowd as a panicked camera operator retreated from the blaze.

  Once they knew what to look for, it was only a few minutes’ work to track down the operators at the other murders.

  Four faces. One each at Maggie and Julio’s shows, two in the back of Jeffrey’s audience. Six if you counted the two who’d grabbed Jeffrey.

  All had the same look as the men who’d raided the EMS offices in Maine. Nothing to make them stand out, they were more rugged than handsome and more fit than hugely muscled.

  Six faces that none of her usual resources would be able to identify.

  There was, however, one unusual resource. Did she dare to tap it twice?

  CHAPTER 44

  Clarice had warned her, but Amanda knew she was fast running out of options.

  The digital images of the six faces were sent to Master Sergeant Shelley Thomas with a three word query, “Any familiar? Urgent!”

  Then she’d sent Clarice to bed and come out to huddle on the porch chair as the chill morning took shape.

  One last task, one she’d been avoiding for hours. One last duty and then she could sleep. Or try to.

  She placed a phone call to another destination. Left a two word message in a dead end mailbox that had never been attached to any phone.

  CHAPTER 45

  Shelley sat before the control console and watched the remotes. The team was learning exfiltration today. The fine art of getting away alive after whatever you did was done.

  In many ways much harder than infiltration. You were tired, the climactic adrenal rush of the operation was ebbing, and the enemy probably knew you were there, somewhere. Actually, in one day, she could do little more than set their brains in motion. For some this would be enough to bump them to the next level of awareness. For others—

  The staff sergeant crouched behind a tree and cast a long shadow across the width of trail, a shadow that didn’t look the least bit bush or tree-like.

  Shelley selected the third switch down for sector eleven on her console. A remote-controlled gun fired some sim-rounds into the face of the fake foam tree above the sergeant’s head.

  He disappeared into the undergrowth which tinkled with a thousand little bells. Like fairy dust. Tinker Bell would approve. Hard to teach them how badly the leaves were rustling. So, much of the undergrowth in Level Six had bells tied to its fake fronds and branches.

  She flipped on the soundtrack of a half-dozen guards shouting in an incomprehensible growl. It was slurry of English and the rugged French-Canadian of upstate Maine. A harsh patois, a combo locally called Canuck, incomprehensible to both English and Canadian French speakers alike.

  The sergeant laid low beneath his tinkling bush as the voices traveled from speaker to speaker along the trail before passing him by. Too busy yelling to hear the racket he was making. Once they were gone, he stood and Grim slit his throat from behind.

  With a red line of magic marker across his throat, his fifth this morning, his neck was quite criss-crossed with them, the sergeant lay down on the trail and croaked for help. Grim slapped a timer on his chest. It was set for twenty minutes, counting down the window of time they had before the sergeant would “bleed-out” and die. He hadn’t survived yet.

  “Grim,” she whispered into her microphone.

  He tapped his mic once to show he was listening as he disappeared silently back into the bush without a single bell.

  “Kill all the others at least once or twice before you slash the sergeant again.”

  A long, sullen pause, then the double-tap of acknowledgment.

  Others in the squad arrived beside their magic marker-wounded comrade.

  “Shit, Sergeant. Again?”

  “Twenty minutes. Nineteen now.” Each trainee wore a mic that was always hot so that Shelley could monitor them in the control booth.

  “Christ, Sarge, you’re being a bloody pain in the ass today, you know that?”

  They all caucused for a moment over their wounded comrade. Despite the “leave no man behind” rule, they were clearly considering it.

  “Why don’t you just shoot them all and be done with it?”

  She barely managed to suppress the twitch. Jeff Davis. She’d forgotten about him, sitting right beside her and watching the monitors.

  “Then what would they learn?”

  “To not be such idiots in the first place.”

  “And what would you do, Mister Expert?”

  She fired one of the distant guns in the chamber. A warning to the group, they had all been staring down at the sergeant. There are trigger-happy natives about, time to get moving. Not to mention Grim and his knife.

  It wasn’t the senior airmen who took charge, but rather one of the male Airmen First Class. They rapidly bundled up their wounded comrade and with a point and tail guard, continued their exodus.

  “She set him up to lead.”

  “Who set who up?”

  “Penny. The pretty blond one with three stripes on her armpatch. She did it. Without Lawrence even knowing it, she put him in charge. Probably so that the Sergeant would listen.”

  She ran back the time mark on a couple of the cameras.

  “There, see?” Jeff pointed at a screen.

  Sure enough, there she was. Penny, she’d carefully not learned their names, mumbled something just loud enough for Lawrence to hear, but not even the mic picked it up. You could see the light-bulb go on as he took control and got the group mo
ving without a glance in her direction.

  And Jeff after one day as the outcast of the group, the pariah to whom no one would speak, he knew their names. Well, at least the prettiest one. He was male, that was probably as far as it went. No . . . he’d named the new leader as well.

  At dinner last night, he’d kept conversation alive, even elicited her participation. He’d had her laughing at stories of the New York cooking world, laughing with him until it was the most natural sound the kitchen in underground Level Four had probably ever heard. He had more skills than just cooking MREs. She’d relaxed more in that brief hour last night than any recent time she could recall.

  She checked back on the exfiltration proceedings as the point guard plunged from view. Disappeared into a false tiger pit, though no spears in the bottom, rather a foam pad to break his fall. Fifteen feet deep with perfectly smooth sides. No ladder. No handholds. No rope. Time to see what they did with that.

  “I’d change the scenario.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Right. Shelley had asked Jeff what he would do differently. What a TV show host would do better than this seven-person squad with accumulated service time of twenty-six years among them.

  “And?”

  “When the enemy sets the rules, you are caught in their trap. Right?”

  She nodded toward the video screen. Proof positive. One lay on the ground, looking more irritated than wounded, his chest timer down to sixteen minutes. Three were talking with the man down the hole. The last two remained attentive to their surroundings, Grim had slashed everyone’s throat at least once this morning. It made them a tad edgy.

  “So don’t play by the enemy’s rules.”

  “And you can do this, oh great warrior of the airwaves?”

  “Better than those fools.”

  The original message had said to rescue and guard Jeff. It didn’t say a word about not scaring the shit out of him. She reached across him and popped the handle on the control room door. With a quick shove, he fell off his chair and tumbled out into the Level Six simulation. She heard a slight thud as he landed in the sand ten feet below. The door swung shut behind him.

 

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