Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  “Won’t help you none, mister,” the man called after him. “Nearest cell tower is about twenty miles t’other way.”

  If Mark ever got back on The Troll’s plane, he was going to murder the man with his bare hands.

  CHAPTER 73

  The trainees were below ground in Silo One gathering their gear when the top of Silo Two opened like a giant clam shell. Dwight and Grim were already motoring down the road to get the Huey. So, Jeff was the only witness as the Comanche rose into midday light. It looked even nastier in the daytime than it had at night.

  Now it was easy to see the foreignness of its shape. The harsh angles, the dull gray-brown of the fancy materials it was built from, the complete lack of markings, and that Shelley had taken time to attach a couple more nasty-looking missiles to the undercarriage. She wasn’t about to get surprised in the air again and that was fine by him. She took off from the elevator pad and shuffled sideways to land beside him.

  He did his best to climb in, every movement made his feet throb with agony. The narrow perches that worked as a ladder, barely big enough for his toes, were the worst. At last he was inside and had the canopy closed. This time Shelley let him fasten his seatbelt and helmet before they took off.

  “There’s a cord hanging from your helmet. Plug it into the front of your left armrest.”

  He did.

  “How’s that?”

  “Loud and clear.” He stared at the “mic” switch he’d spotted during his last time aboard. So what was that? Better not to ask.

  “And Shelley?”

  “Yes?” She spun the rotors up.

  “Could we take off—” He was thrown forward against his harness as the helicopter lifted back and away from the silos. “—forward? Never mind.”

  “Where to and why?”

  “New Hampshire, to the old farm. As fast as we can go.”

  Her silence was grim. They were going to visit her mother. She didn’t even pursue the second half of her question, just tipped them the other way so the nose pointed at the ground and she did something to the controls. He was slammed back against his seat as if a mighty hand were mashing him flat. The helicopter leapt like a scared cat. The silos and Dwight’s farm dwindled out of view in a matter of moments. Their altitude soared upward and in moments their speed stabilized around three hundred kilometers an hour. Faster than a locomotive or even Superman, that was for damn sure.

  As to why? How was he to explain his discovery of one of the most dangerous weapons in the history of mankind? How was he supposed to explain the equivalent of Vonnegut’s Ice Nine, the ability to destroy a town, a country, a planet, forever?

  Or explain how Phillip had known. Jeff had shredded then burned every last detail.

  Hadn’t he?

  CHAPTER 74

  Mark Anders sat in the shade of the hangar on an overturned apple crate and sipped a bottle of Coke that Jimmy had dredged up from somewhere. It seems that his wife, Ann Caruthers, would be driving into Columbus tomorrow morning to see her sister Kathy who’d married a big city doctor. Jimmy had offered to let him stay for the night.

  He’d tried to pay the man to fly him to Columbus this afternoon, but when he pulled out a credit card, Jimmy had just folded up with laughter. At least he was a source of endless amusement for someone.

  For a couple too many people. The Troll seemed to think he was pretty damn funny, too. Be even funnier if they’d dropped him off at twenty thousand feet. A shiver crawled up Mark’s spine. It was a little too easy to picture Richards doing exactly that. The man had no soul.

  It still didn’t make sense why he’d been dumped off the edge of the map. There had to be more point to it than a good laugh for The Troll. He wanted Mark out of the picture.

  Mark wanted to take down Jeff Davis on his own.

  Why was the chef so damned important anyway? He’d already lost two good agents in Chicago, a couple more in the back alley behind the chef’s TV studio—those SAS guys had been good—not to mention that whole stupid Alpha team at the silo. Weren’t these guys supposed to be hot? What did the chef have there underground? A bloody battalion?

  They should have been an easy mark. But they weren’t and the wrong men had died.

  He’d lost his fair share. Sold out by the government in Desert Storm when they’d stopped at the Iraqi border. They should have brought the hammer home and smeared the guy back then. But no, instead Dad Bush leaves Iraqis a decade and a half to dig in before his son tries to finish Dad’s sloppy work. Damned bureaucrats. They didn’t know squat about how it really worked. Mark had lost two cousins on the line during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  Try sitting President Grant’s butt out here on the blistering tarmac all afternoon and see how happy he felt about it. Or The Troll’s. Now there was a thought to get Mark through the afternoon. He took another hit off the Coke, warming rapidly in the heat, but still fizzy and scouring clean as it rolled down his throat.

  A single bird showed up on the horizon. He looked around. Not a lot of bird life here, at least not in mid-afternoon. They were all staying cool, lounging around in some convenient birdbath.

  That one bird was coming straight in and it was coming fast.

  Really fast.

  Not a bird, not unless they’d started running with jet engines.

  He had a bad, itchy feeling about it. The way his luck was running it would be some guy who’d fly in just to laugh at his business suit.

  Except it wasn’t moving like a small plane.

  It wasn’t a plane. It was a helicopter.

  He scrabbled for his phone and aimed it upward as the craft roared by not fifty feet overhead. It knocked him right back off the crate he’d been perched on.

  “What the hell was that?” Jimmy came running out of the hangar looking up at the sky much too late. “What’s goin’ on around here today?”

  Mark Anders accessed the camera function on the phone. Please. Please. Please.

  The image came up. It was perfect. Textbook. Well, not perfect, actually pretty damn sad. But it was clear enough to confirm what his eye had seen. It was a wholly unique helicopter. What was even better, he recognized it as the best helicopter never built. He’d wager there were very few photos in existence of this particular machine, even fuzzy ones. The Comanche RAH-66, combat version.

  It didn’t exist, and he had the picture to prove it.

  He knew right where it was coming from, too. Exactly. Not even Richards “The Troll” knew that. But where was it going in such a damn hurry?

  He sighted back along its path. It had come right over that little notch in the trees. The one to the left of the lighter tree. If he looked away, he’d lose it.

  “Hey, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah, Mark?”

  “Y’all got a compass and a map I can borrow? A big area map. Maybe cover a couple of states.” Though he’d bet he already knew the answer.

  “Sure. And I guess they don’t teach Southern at them fancy colleges?”

  Y’all. Okay. So sue me. He’d thought it sounded more country.

  CHAPTER 75

  “Hello, Frank? Ed Johns here.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  The Brigadier General Johns played with his letter opener. A slim, nasty little bit of work. Chinese steel, rough sharpened, pencil thin. As much chance as skill that it had finally landed in the belly of the Viet Cong who’d jumped him instead of his own.

  “We go back a long way, right?”

  A pause.

  “Embassy gates in ’75. What’s up?”

  Hell of a place. Choosing who passed through the gates and had a chance at life, and who stayed to be “reeducated.” It wasn’t the sort of thing you brought up. Not at parties, not with your family, not in the quiet backwaters of a late night watch. It wasn’t something you mentioned unless you were calling
in a favor, a damn big one.

  “I need something answered straight and plain. You got people up to something? People operating on US soil?”

  “That’s a damned weird question, Ed.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’m thinking in the Midwest. Ohio perhaps.”

  “Ohio? You know what you’re asking? That would be against every code. From the Insurrection Act of 1807 on up.”

  Ed Johns twirled the knife again. Studied the edge unblemished by time. One of his few external souvenirs from the war, the rest were horrors scorched into his brain.

  He let silence be his answer.

  “Christ. I’ll get back to you. And you damned well better be wrong.”

  He hung up the phone and stared at his jacket hanging on the coat peg by the door. Hell of a lot of rank on that sleeve to let something like this get by.

  Getting old, Crazy Eddie. Getting old.

  CHAPTER 76

  Shelley kept the engines just below redline the whole way in. She flew beeline straight without a wiggle, not a wasted yard.

  Why waste time if you’re going to face the gallows? The Comanche cried the whole way and she closed her heart to it. The turbines weren’t overheating, not quite, so screw them. Maybe if she pushed a little harder, she’d drive it to pieces. First a turbine blade would go, a little piece, ever so small. No bigger than the palm of her hand. It would bounce and rattle, cast about for two or three hundred revolutions. Perhaps as much as a tenth of a second. Then others would splinter against it, two, ten, thirty. Within five seconds the whole engine. Then shrapnel of a blowout would slice into the rotors, pierce a fuel tank, shred through the passenger seats. Maybe she could just fly them to pieces.

  It was tempting. But her passenger had put his trust in her. Jeff was relying on her. For something important enough to send a dozen of the best to attack her home to kill him.

  A dozen men. She’d done weapons training with four of them, SERE school with one of those and two others. That was half she knew by name and she’d only been able to tell by their dog tags. At least half she’d killed or mortally wounded when they invaded her home, death by bowling balls. Her trainees had killed the others by dumb luck.

  “War is not the answer.” Her mother’s voice was clear. The opening salvo of their last big fight. The one to top them all. The final head-on collision. The night before she’d reported to the US Air Force.

  She wanted to scream. To let it all burst out in one final cry of anguish, a cry no other person could understand.

  Instead she kept the hammer down and let the Comanche scream for her.

  Jeff had tried to speak with her a couple times, but it was easier to ignore him. She told him to shut up, she was too busy.

  Finally, he had.

  Sure, he’d done well at getting everyone moving, but he was just some television cooking guy. Some television cooking guy who called her mother Mandy. Who had knelt beside Uncle Phillip as he died on national television from the poison meant for the chef.

  Uncle Phillip was the only one who understood her. Why had this man lived and Uncle Phillip died? It wasn’t right. It was a crappy fucking trade.

  She twisted the Comanche left then right through Franconia Notch in upstate New Hampshire then yanked back on the cyclic and lowered the collective. They jerked from two hundred and three miles an hour to ten in a matter of seconds. The engines groaned at the huge shift in load. The whole craft shuddered.

  Jeff cursed in the back but otherwise kept his silence.

  They hovered.

  Not a thousand feet from where she was born and had lived the first five years of her life.

  And she was completely lost.

  She didn’t know the way home. She hadn’t been here since the age of five nor seen her mother since she was eighteen.

  “Over to the right.” Jeff’s voice was very soft. “About two o’clock low. Red barn with a shake roof. Brown house up the hill against the woods. If I remember, the flat spot by the garage should be big enough for you.”

  She was glad he couldn’t see her face as she maneuvered them down. This man, this stranger, knew her house: a home she couldn’t even remember.

  CHAPTER 77

  Lindsey Grant stared at the mirror. A woman stood there, one she no longer knew.

  Tommy had come to her. He always did before a big fundraiser. They hadn’t even bothered to undress. He’d lifted her skirt, shoved down her underwear and taken her right on top of the peach chenille bed cover. Still in his dark suit, the auburn tie she’d chosen for him, and polished leather shoes.

  Four minutes. Four minutes and he was zipping up as he headed for the door.

  “See you in thirty, babe.”

  And he was gone.

  Thirty minutes until the fundraiser. They didn’t need the money. The election was theirs, signed, sealed, and delivered, but the political machine was rolling and you couldn’t stop the funds now. A hundred other elections around the country were benefiting from the Grant money-making machine. The Royal Couple, just like John and Jackie. The papers had tried to stamp the Camelot tag on this administration as they had theirs, but it wasn’t quite sticking. It kept peeling off around the edges. If not in public, then definitely in private.

  But Tommy Grant was going to be President for another four years. There was no denying that.

  Was four minutes of her life every few days truly such a burden? As far as she knew, Tommy had never strayed, he wasn’t that excited by women. He just wanted the release, then on to the next power game. Especially before the big public events. Maybe so he could look at her and know what he’d just done. Maybe it simply made it all feel right in his head somehow. He’d never explained and she’d never asked for fear she wouldn’t like the answer in the slightest.

  She’d wanted more. A college-age Lindsey had thought she’d found more when she met him. When he courted her with an Old World propriety that the casual, California girl had never experienced. Now she could look back and see it. The girl raised in the San Francisco of the seventies, swept off her feet by a heritage that traced back to the Mayflower. He had Old World charm and Old World money. The luxury . . . and the complete lack of a heart she’d been too young to see.

  In the mirror a girl gazed back at her. A pale green dress, so soft it was almost white, with the elegant lines of simplicity that Audrey Hepburn had made famous and Jackie O. had anchored forever as the First Lady’s eminent domain. A single strand of pearls the strongest color of the outfit. She was still trim. Lindsey should have continued the modern dance classes, though. The girl looked back. Not the First Lady, nor the trim, mature woman.

  It was the eyes. The eyes still belonged to a younger woman, to a woman who had dragged her first-ever boy into her bed by dressing up as a character from a cult movie. How much longer would those eyes last? Not four years. Maybe not even forty-two more days. If she didn’t end this charade now, the girl might be lost forever.

  The girl in the mirror reached for the phone on the side table reflected in the mirror. She picked it up and dialed a number that hadn’t changed since the day the girl or the First Lady were born.

  “Linny!” Dad loved his caller id. Said it tickled him every time “The White House” showed up on the box.

  “Hi, Daddy. Do you have Uncle Henry’s number?” Dad’s best friend since the beginning of time, and maybe before that. It was only the fluke of having different parents that had kept them from being brothers.

  “He’s here for drinks and dinner. Let me go and get him.”

  She waited. The girl in the mirror was so calm and sure of herself.

  “And Linny?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Good girl. It’s about time.” Was she so transparent? That girl in the mirror? Perhaps she was. Only the one standing here, the flesh and blood one holding the phone, was foolish.
r />   No longer.

  “Hello there, Honey Child.” Sweet. Uncle Henry had always remarked how sweet she was. Too sweet. Too forgiving. Well, no longer.

  “Hello, Uncle. I need a favor.” She was calling in a lot of favors today. Well, she’d spent her whole life doing them for others, it was high time to collect a few.

  “Anything, Honey Child.”

  “How quietly can I file for divorce?” She didn’t want a big deal, no grand show. She and her parents had plenty of money. “No settlement. Just done.”

  Divorce, another first for the White House. She’d miss the ceremony. She’d miss the people most of all. And she’d miss having the power to do the good deeds. Maybe Amanda would give her a job. But she wouldn’t miss her husband or the well-dressed woman who barely recognized herself in the mirror.

  The mirror reflected back a different person. One with a straighter back. One with a spine. One with eyes that still thought they were young and the world was a good place.

  “And, as much as I hate to break up your plans for the evening, can we do it today? The California courts are still open for another hour or so.”

  CHAPTER 78

  Mandy watched the strange bird descend from the darkening sky. The last hint of light revealed no color on the helicopter. It was gray, darker than day but lighter than night. If she looked away, it might be hard to find again. She couldn’t look away. She didn’t even shield her eyes against the kicked-up dust and the fumes, in case they evaporated, some apparition come to tease her in the descending night.

  The blast of wind did not move her from where she stood at the edge of the front porch. The high whine of the engines dropped like a glissando scale. The rotors thumped their way to silence until there was nothing, nothing but the pounding of her heart.

  Two doors opened. Someone long and limber climbed out of the front. A girl had left her years before, she barely recognized the woman returned in her place. A different person had been slipped in her daughter’s place while she wasn’t watching. She moved with a strength and a confidence that Phillip had reported, but Mandy had not witnessed. Yet, she didn’t wave.