Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

Well, Mandy. You may be hurting, but your daughter is too. Maybe it was time he was finally strong for her.

  “We need to move these bodies out of here.”

  “Right.” Shelley’s voice was vague and distant.

  “We need to get them back to their base, but without a lot of awkward questions.”

  “I could…” Dwight started, then trailed off.

  “No. No, you can’t. What we need to do is get someone’s attention, but not anywhere around here. How did you guys get here?”

  The trainees started at someone paying attention to them. Finally Penny answered.

  “We, um, aren’t sure. They flew us out of Wright-Patterson, that’s our Air Force base, on a blacked-out Huey, no windows. We flew for three hours, placing us within four hundred miles of Wright-Pat. Now whether that’s straight-line or we’re ten miles from home, that I can’t tell you.” She looked speculatively at Shelley, who offered no reaction.

  “And this helicopter comes when you call it up?”

  Shelley shook her head. “It’s in the back barn at Dwight’s.”

  “No shit?” Sergeant Dave Lundgren was clearly impressed. “Who’s your crew?”

  “Yo.” Grim raised a hand, then Dwight followed suit.

  They stared at him.

  “I don’t fly ‘em,” Dwight growled. “Don’t trust a craft that glides like a brick. But I maintained the Angels of Mercy in Korea and Green Hornets in ‘Nam. She’s a little tired, but I keep her up good enough to move you folks around.”

  Jeff hobbled around the body bags, gave them as wide a berth as his aching feet would allow. He lifted the edge of the camouflage net. The area was a litter of transmissions, tires, screwed up sheet metal. Less than you’d expect for the end of four SUVs.

  He hobbled back to Dwight.

  “Okay. You have a back hoe or bulldozer in your collection of toys?”

  “Both. But these boys deserve better than that.” The old man’s countenance froze.

  “And they’ll get it,” he rested a hand on Dwight’s shoulder. “You’ll see. What I need is a bit of car burying. Don’t much like having Shelley’s front yard all littered.”

  Dwight smiled at him. Nod and a wink. “Now that, I think, is a fine idea. I never was fond of messy.” They shook hands on it. That iron grip, well, Jeff did his best to return it.

  “Mr. Flyboy Grim?”

  “Yo!”

  “Can you fly this one solo?”

  “Green Hornets are easy, if no one’s shooting at you that is. I can single the Huey.”

  “Good. I think that this crew passed their course with flying colors.”

  Shelley nodded vaguely.

  The trainees cheered and slapped each other on the shoulder. They were survivors and could feel it.

  Shelley was still out of it a bit, poor kid. He remembered the first time in ‘Nam he’d faced a row of body bags. Worst was that he knew most of them and knew them well. He and Phillip had been eating in the local Pho shop when the officer’s mess was hit with a mortar round. Half the lab crew was dead by the time they made it back to base. Men they’d been shooting the shit with an hour before were now a set of dog tags tied to the pulltab of a bodybag zipper.

  Phillip had remarked, with his typical graveyard humor, that “there but for the noodles go I.” Maybe he was sitting somewhere wishing that those were the last words he’d said in Jeff’s television studio.

  “Finished the course except for one last thing I believe.” The self-congratulations stopped dead. He waited. Waited for Shelley to lift her head. Waited for her to turn to him. Waited while her brain turned back on and caught up.

  “Level Seven.” Her voice was whisper.

  He nodded.

  “Level Seven.” She said it louder.

  Most of the trainees looked confused, but Jeff spotted Dave and Penny nodding at each other. They’d remembered.

  One level below exfiltration practice.

  Planning.

  CHAPTER 69

  Lindsey Grant missed lunch with her husband, not that he’d known she was coming, so her absence went unremarked.

  She spent the lunch hour riveted to her desk, one hand on the phone in her pocket, her eyes drifting every few seconds to the pen cup.

  At two o’clock she almost cried out at the soft knock on her office door. Simply glad to have some distraction from her worry.

  Betsy Johns appeared when told it was okay to come in. Her goddaughter, she was the older of Crazy Eddie’s girls and worked in communications.

  Betsy smiled at her. She didn’t say a word. Instead she crossed to Lindsey’s desk, turned the cup, stuck a small, blue sticky note on it, and grinned wickedly. She was the missing link in the chain. Lindsey had always suspected her secretary, Tina, but hadn’t wanted to pry. Good thing she hadn’t.

  Her goddaughter was almost out the door before she came to.

  “Thank you, Betsy.” A wave and the girl was gone.

  She reached for the note, rotated the cup back into place.

  “S. J. OK.”

  A thousand pounds fell from her shoulders. She crumpled the bit of paper and headed to the bathroom. Moments later it was flushed away along with most of her worries.

  By the time she’d returned to her office, the worries were back. New ones this time. Special Operations Forces had attacked Shelley’s home and Eddie hadn’t known about an operation involving his own outfit. An operation on US soil. How did someone order an operation in Edward Johns’ outfit without him knowing about it?

  Ha. There was a laugh. She’d bet that was a question Eddie was far more interested in answering than even she was.

  And where would that answer lead?

  She could make a few good guesses, but she had to be certain before she considered the right actions.

  She picked up the phone and punched Tina’s number.

  “Yes, Dearie?” Tina thought the First Lady needed a positive, mature role model, and she was four years older after all.

  “T. Could you get Betsy Johns back for me?”

  “Back? Was she here?”

  Okay. That was a little creepy. How did she do that? How much had she learned from her father?

  “You’re right. I’ve just been thinking about my goddaughter all day so it seemed as if she’d been here already. If you can clear any breakfast commitments for me, I think I’d like to eat with her. Can you track her down for me?”

  Two minutes later Betsy was in her office with Tina’s modified agenda on her desk. One hour free from six-thirty to seven-thirty.

  “Betsy, how would you like to do your godmother a favor?”

  “Sure. What’s up?” She pushed her dark hair back from her wide, friendly face. Not particularly beautiful, but an open, wholesome face. And she was a great kid.

  “Could you call up your dad and tell him that you’d like to meet him for breakfast tomorrow?”

  “He’s in Kentucky, or was when we talked a couple days ago.”

  Lindsey rolled a pencil back and forth between her finger tips.

  “Offer him some motivation. Tell him that you want him to meet your new boyfriend.”

  “It won’t work. He knows I haven’t hooked up with anyone since Johnny.”

  “Johnny’s loss, honey. His loss. You’ll find one far better. Okay, tell him you want him to meet your new girlfriend.”

  Betsy giggled. “That might get him moving, but I don’t have one of those either.”

  Lindsey slid the pencil into the pen cup and twisted it around.

  Betsy raised her eyebrows but kept her mouth shut. She always was a smart girl.

  “Tell him,” Lindsey considered carefully. It was a higher degree of trust than Amanda had placed with the girl, but she knew Betsy far better than Amanda did.

  “T
ell your dad that her name is Nell.”

  CHAPTER 70

  Before they could move back to the silo, Shelley’s phone rang again. She pulled it out, took one look at the caller, and passed the phone to Jeff.

  She wouldn’t even answer a call from her mother. What had happened between them to drive such a rift?

  He answered, “Hi, Mand. It’s Jeff.”

  “Oh, I, uh . . . I’m used to getting her voicemail. You surprised me a bit.” Her voice was still rough.

  It wouldn’t be polite to walk away from Shelley, to flaunt that he had a private relationship with her mother that she didn’t. So he stood beside her. Shoulder to shoulder before a row of dead men.

  “My question is really for you. Are you somewhere that can receive a fax?”

  “Receive a fax?” he asked Amanda and Shelley at the same time.

  Shelley nodded. So, despite her pretended indifference, she was listening intently.

  “I guess so. What is it?”

  “Phillip left some files for you. Plants and soils. He marked them with EMS’s highest priority.”

  Jeff sat down on the ground abruptly.

  “Files?” He couldn’t do more than croak it out. “On soils?”

  “Yes. Drought resistance, desertification, that sort of thing.”

  “And he left them to me?”

  “He made a shoddy last minute will and testament four weeks before he died. And he left all his files to you. He transmitted these files to me from his Blackberry while inside your studio. He knew he was in danger and didn’t tell me, the bastard.” She made a noise somewhere between a hiccup and a sob.

  “Don’t! Do not transmit those files to me!” Shit! How could he have been so stupid? Of course Phillip had known what he was doing. He’d clearly known why Jeff left EMS. Why he had to leave. All that noise Phillip had made last week in his apartment about EMS needing a new spokesman for a new world order had been a facade. Nothing but a game, a deadly one.

  “C’mon, buddy boy,” Phillip had cajoled in his thickest Texan accent. “Think of it. Jeffie the Cheffie gets to announce the greatest innovations of our age. Do you know the cool shit EMS is cranking out now? We are the baddest, meanest, idea engine on the planet. We’ve got teams working inside Bell Labs, CERN, Intel, and a whole mess of others and they don’t even know it. Not to mention our independent groups where the really hot stuff is cooking. Isn’t it time we told the world?”

  It had all been bullshit, some stupid Phillip-style trick. No. Better than that. It had been a swap out. Let me show me this, but I’m really talking about that. And he hadn’t been trading noodles and cold cheese for a finished lasagna. Phillip had taken swap out to a whole new level. This was a bait-and-switch on a masterful scale.

  “What? Why not? They don’t look like much to me.”

  He’d forgotten Mandy was on the phone. Looked up to see the others staring at him. He didn’t remember shouting. Calm voice, Jeff. Control. Control.

  “Do not. I repeat, do not let those files out of your personal possession until we get there. Do you have his Blackberry?”

  “Yes. It was returned to me with his wallet and other belongings.”

  “Good. Put it with the files. Do not turn it on. We’ll be there as fast as we can.”

  “Do you know where—”

  “Of course.”

  He hung up and pocketed the phone.

  He struggled to his feet, and Grim gave him a hand as the pain nearly sent him back to the ground.

  “We need to get you some shoes, old dude. And a whole mess of bandages.”

  Pushing off from Grim’s shoulder, he stumbled to Shelley. “How fast can you have the helicopter ready?”

  “Which one?”

  “Right. There’s two of them. The fast one. The nasty looking thing in there.” He pointed at the silo. The trainees followed the direction he was pointing then looked back at him. Clearly, they’d never seen Shelley’s toy.

  “Five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Go!” He shoved her shoulder to get her moving in that direction.

  “What about Level Seven?”

  “No time! Now run!” She glanced at him for an instant. In that moment he could read a thousand thoughts on her face. Who was he—really? He could think of a dozen answers to that, and he wasn’t sure if any of them were true.

  “Go!”

  She turned and ran.

  CHAPTER 71

  “Dwight, you’ll bury all this crap?” Jeff waved at the net covering all the car parts.

  The man considered the mess for a moment. Walked back and forth apparently inspecting the fields and the sky. But Jeff knew by now not to hurry him or he’d just get a stall.

  Dwight pointed to the far side of the netting, on the side away from the silos.

  “Strikes me as a fine spot for a swimming pond.”

  A swimming pond? Jeff kept his mouth shut, and tried to nod sagely about how it made sense to him. Most natural thing to do, stand in front of a camouflaged battlefield, over the bodies of the dead, and talk about swimming ponds.

  “I think she might enjoy that. Girl doesn’t get out in the sun enough.”

  “Good point,” Jeff agreed. “You’re right about that.”

  “There’s a clay layer about twenty feet down that holds water nicely. I’ll just dig down, nice and deep. It will fill itself in time. Set a nice berm all around it the way I did mine. Give a little break from the wind, make a grassy slope down to the water. Yup, a nice big mound of dirt. Put it right about . . .” He looked about the property as if surveying the whole area and then aimed a finger at the netting. “There.”

  Swimming pond. Perfect sense. Dwight might be silver-haired on top, but was sharp as could be underneath. Jeff thought he wouldn’t mind growing up to be just like him.

  “Good man!” He clapped him on the shoulder, didn’t want to risk that crushing handshake again.

  Dwight headed for his tractor.

  “Grim!”

  “Right here, old dude.” The young man leaned in close. “Never seen Shelley take an order from anyone like that. You’re bad!” He held up a fist aimed straight at Jeff’s chest, but didn’t punch.

  When Jeff didn’t respond, Grim took his hand. “Make a fist, old dude.”

  Jeff made a fist.

  Grim punched him knuckle to knuckle hard enough to hurt a bit then smiled.

  “What do you need?”

  “Hop on with Dwight. Go get the blacked-out Huey.” Then he called out to the group of trainees.

  “Sorry folks, you have a three-hour ride with a bundle of body bags. I know it sucks. Trust me, I know. I’ve done it and worse.” How many scorched remains of Napalm victims had he flown back to the lab? Little knowing that Agent Orange would leave a much more lasting scar on the human fauna. That was over thirty years gone. He needed to think about these kids now.

  “My apologies. But, the necessities of the moment. You will be dropping the bodies off earlier in your flight. If you don’t ever mention it to anybody, I expect you’ll live all the happier for it. Dave?”

  The staff sergeant snapped to attention.

  “Cut that shit out. Just get your team ready.”

  He laughed, back in command of his willing people, and they jogged away in perfect unison to the other silo to retrieve their gear.

  “Okay, Grim. You’ve got one stop to make on the way back to Wright-Patterson. I’ll write you a note. Best if you do it at dusk. So you’ll have to kill a couple hours. Fly them back the long way round.”

  CHAPTER 72

  The plane landed with a screech of tires and a huge roar of reversing engines. Even before it came to a stop, the back stairs were dropped.

  Mark Anders’ foot wasn’t off the last step before the plane was moving again. Moving fast. He was near
ly tumbled aside by the backwash of the engines.

  Once The Troll was airborne again, Mark strolled over to the terminal to rent a car. It felt good. Yes, he had a lot of ground to cover, but he wasn’t trying to do it from his tiny cubicle in the back of The Troll’s airplane. He’d started out as a field agent and it felt good to be on terra firma once again.

  He strode to the terminal: a small, ratty little place. Knox County Airport, Ohio, according to the sign above the door. Inside, not a burger joint or a car rental counter in sight. He went through the next door and was standing looking at the parking lot, which was completely empty. There was room for a couple dozen cars at most. There wasn’t even a divider between the dirt parking area and the narrow two-lane blacktop road.

  A loud bang sounded from the hangar next door. A beater Ford pickup was parked alongside. He followed the sound to a man in coveralls changing the oil on a small plane.

  “Hey there. Where can I rent a car?”

  “Did you just get off that big, fancy damn plane?”

  “I did.”

  “Whoo-ee. Didn’t know they could fit something that big on this little, bitty runway. Biggest one before that was Suderland’s Cessna Twin. Though Bill James is restoring a DC-3 down in hangar four. He was hoping for the field record before you came along. I didn’t see no markings on her. Boeing 737. Which model was that? The 300 or the 400?”

  “I, uh, don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? Shoot, that’s one for the gazette. No one’ll believe I was sober if I claim a Boeing jet slid in here pretty as a picture and slid out again, ‘specially if I can’t even give the model. You sure you don’t know?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “And they came down here just to let you off?”

  “They did.”

  “Aren’t you styling in your three-piece suit and your briefcase and all? Well, the joke’s on you, mister. Better call them back down ‘cause the nearest car rental I know of is over in Columbus, about fifty miles that way.” He pointed at the hangar wall and started laughing.

  Mark flipped open his cell phone, pushed a speed dial and nothing happened. “No service.” He moved out of the hangar.