Standing the Final Watch

by William Alan Webb

  Bettison turned his head carefully. A killer in dark camo pressed the muzzle of an M16 against his temple. Three feet in front of him, the gory wraith of Nick Angriff extended a small handgun aimed at his chest. There was nowhere to run.

  “I guess you win after all.” Bettison reached into a jacket pocket.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Ghost said.

  Angriff wanted nothing more than to empty the magazine into Bettison’s chest, but the needs of his brigade came first. “You talk to us, you live.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Bettison reached into both jacket pockets.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them!” Ghost warned.

  “Or what? You going to kill me? Good, go ahead and do it. See what your fool commander has to say about that.”

  “You don’t have to die, Bettison. You know I’m not a liar. If I say I’ll spare your life, I will.”

  “You’re not a liar, you’re something worse, you’re an idiot. You still haven’t put it all together, and without me you never will… well, not in time, anyway.”

  He jerked his hands out of his pockets, holding something round and green in each one. The tops were red. Crossing his arms, he used the index finger of the opposite hand to pull the safety pins from each one, then let go of the lever.

  “Grenade!” Green Ghost lunged at Angriff. Fleming dove for the ground.

  Bettison raised his arms and flung the grenades. Fitted with electrical impact fuses, they detonated on the hard stone floor. The fragmentation explosives blew Bettison backward and shredded him, almost ripping off his lower jaw and spraying small red chunks of him in a circle. Angriff felt the stings of jagged metal slicing into his skin.

  Before the last shrapnel quit rattling against the distant stone floor, Angriff scrambled up and knelt beside the mangled body of Terry Bettison. Somehow the former FBI agent was still alive.

  Blood foamed on his lips. “You… have no idea… what’s headed your way.”

  “Tell me, Bettison. Get it off your chest before you go to meet God. It’s not too late.”

  “God…” He giggled, coughed blood, and died.

  At the loud whang of the grenades exploding, Morgan dashed into the hallway. She could still hear shrapnel ricocheting from the granite walls and floor. Acrid smoke hung over four prone figures. The closest, Bettison, was a gory mess. A second later the bulky figure of her father pushed to his feet, aided by the lean man in camo. As he knelt beside Bettison, she ran to his side.

  Angriff felt a hand on his back. He reached for her and pulled Morgan close. “I’m okay, princess. Any of them left alive?”

  “Mole Man,” she said. “The short one with the mole on his lip. I left him with that other woman.”

  “Other woman?” Angriff glanced at Green Ghost.

  “She means Nipple.” It took most of a second for Ghost to realize the flaw in that plan. “Shit…” He sprinted back into the room where his sister held Mole Man prisoner.

  She stood over his body, holding the knife. “Not me, bro. I didn't do it. The guy foamed at the mouth and started flopping around.”

  Angriff nudged the little man’s body with his boot. Something about the man triggered a feeling of familiarity… had he met him somewhere? It was too vague to recall.

  “Cyanide again.” Ghost crouched beside the corpse.

  “With a rag in his mouth?” Fleming said. “It’s nearly impossible to bite down hard enough to break a glass capsule with your mouth full of cotton.”

  Opening the man’s mouth, Green Ghost pulled out the rag and used a bright penlight to look for glass shards.

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself. He spoke louder to the group. “This wasn’t an ampule of cyanide. The guy had a false tooth.”

  Nobody spoke. Only professionals had false teeth filled with cyanide.

  “Assassin?” Fleming said.

  “Most likely,” Green Ghost said. “His tongue had to be able to trigger it; otherwise the gag would have stopped this just like it would an ampoule. This is sophisticated shit.”

  “Can you get those filled with absinthe instead of cyanide?” Nipple said.

  The acrid stench of blood and gunpowder filled the hallway.

  “We’re heading out,” Green Ghost said. “I’ve got Vapor and some of the others following those RSVS people, and me and Nipple are gonna follow that shaft and see where it goes.”

  “How long do you think you’ll be gone?” Angriff said. “I need you here. I’m making you head of security.”

  “I’ll only be gone a few days. I’m not worried about you now that you’re on alert. Then we can talk about this security thing.”

  “I owe you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I need one more favor. There’s supposed to be a switch down that shaft, maybe eighty or a hundred feet down. I need it turned on, but only for about twenty minutes. Then I need it turned off again. I know that’s a pain in the ass, but can you do it?”

  “Done.”

  Morgan, Fleming, and Angriff emerged from the elevator. Three of the headquarters sentries stood covering the octagon with weapons trained and ready to fire.

  Walling stood behind the guards and exhaled with relief. Although Angriff was drenched in red, which looked surprisingly similar to blood, Walling didn’t blink. “It worked?” There had been an uncomfortable chance that the decoy pouches filled with red paint would slip from their taped positions, especially once the two generals had begun moving and sweating.

  Angriff stalked off in the direction of Central Command. As he entered through the massive doors, some of the soldiers working the consoles stood and applauded, including Howard Wilson Dupree. The general had no time for such things and waved his hands for silence. He kept moving straight for Dupree’s station, and the young private’s expression reflected a flood of panic.

  “I need to get a message out,” Angriff said. “Now. There’s no time to waste.”

  “The system is still down, General.”

  “This is for whoever is reading our mail. Can we send a message to whoever tapped our mainframes? Is that possible?”

  “I suppose it is, sir. If they’re reading every keystroke, they should get it. Whether they notice it or not in the flood of data, I can’t say.”

  “Label it as critically important or something. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “Ready now, sir.”

  “Quote me verbatim… all right, here we go. From General of the Army Nicholas T. Angriff to whatever coward infiltrated my command and tried to have me assassinated. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your plan didn’t work. I’m not that easy to kill. I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to find out. And when I do, I’m coming for you. You fucked with the wrong guy this time, and when I find you — and I will find you — I’m going to kill you. That’s not a promise. That’s a fact. End of message.”

  “Done, General.”

  “Thank you, son. Let’s hope somebody just wet themselves.”

  June 21st, 0332 hours

  Angriff held up his hands, still caked with red. The crowded conference room fell to dead silence as his command staff digested the image of their commander covered in blood from head to toe. A few of the officers had seen Nick the A at his worst before. Most had not. The creases in his wide face were deeper and darker under the legendary scowl.

  “In the past three days,” Angriff snarled, “two assassins have tried to murder your commanding officer. Me. Our best helicopter gunship pilot is in the infirmary with a serious wound from an attempt on his life, while a lieutenant in the armored battalion was kidnapped and threatened with rape and death. The blood of those perpetrators is here, on my hands.” He displayed them as if holding his twin Desert Eagles. “This is the blood of Terry Bettison. He and all of the other would-be murderers are dead.”

  Nobody moved or cut their eyes away from Angriff’s measuring stare. The danger in the room was palpable and glancing away
might have been interpreted as a guilty plea.

  “This brigade exists for one purpose and one purpose only — to bring our country back to life. It is now obvious that others saw an opportunity to advance their own agendas, just as they did before The Collapse. I am now going to tell you, for the very last time, that is not going to happen.

  “We have crushed two plots centered on those selfish ends. We have killed the plotters, but we know there are more. So listen very closely. If you were in league with Terry Bettison, if you thought this brigade could be used for your own purposes, then you were wrong, and you have a choice.

  “From this moment forward, you can loyally serve the Seventh Cavalry and help us with our mission. If you do that, there will be no further repercussions. However, if you do not, if you choose to put yourself before the needs of your country, then I will by God shoot you myself. Is there anyone who does not understand this?”

  If possible, the silence was even more complete than before.

  “Dismissed.”

  Chapter 35

  After the dead have fallen,

  When the living have left the field;

  The Valkyries come calling,

  To harvest their grisly yield.

  Traditional Norse battle song

  June 23rd, 0722 hours

  The enormous window flooding Central Command with natural light had a metal mesh catwalk running its length, with flights of stairs at either end. On the far right, unseen in the shadows, a small door led into a series of three bulkheads. Each bulkhead, by itself, was enough to proof the portal against attacks by any known gasses or radiation.

  Passing through those bulkheads led to a private viewing platform high up the side of the mountain. Framed in titanium, the platform had its own large window, eight feet long and six feet high. This was manually raised or lowered to allow for an unobstructed view of the valley below, and allowed the viewer to breathe fresh air. A steel grate five feet high prevented anyone from falling off. Access was limited to the CO, XO, anyone with them, and critical maintenance personnel.

  “How’s your chest?” Angriff said.

  Norm Fleming stood upwind of Angriff’s cigar, although swirls of wind sometimes brought the smoke his way. “Better. It doesn’t hurt to breathe as much. What about you?”

  “Looks like I got kicked by a mule, but yeah, better. That’s some damned fine armor. I wish we had it for the entire command. But all these damned distractions… I wish I could shoot Bettison.”

  “You could, you know. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, but you could do it.”

  “Don’t be a smartass. We’re way behind where I hoped we’d be. If we knew who’d accessed our data I’d feel better about moving out. One of the computer techs, a kid named Dupree, thinks he can rig some sort of trap for whoever it was, but we can’t wait. We need to see what’s out there, Norm. Tompkins’ report was better intel than I dreamed we’d ever get, but it’s still just one small piece of a huge puzzle.

  “Green Ghost wants me to wait until he can scout the immediate areas, but he’s not back yet and I can’t risk waiting any longer. I’m thinking about ordering lurps to the west and north. We can put OPs on those mountains to the east and on the ridgeline north and south, but ground to the west doesn’t look good for that. That needs recon.”

  “Do you think it’s too soon? There’s no real unit cohesion yet, and we can’t be sure of who to trust and who not to.”

  “I know, but we’re going to have to take some chances. We’ll just have to be vigilant.”

  “Be quick but don’t hurry,” Fleming said.

  Angriff prided himself on both his knowledge of military history and leaders, but had not heard that one. “Clausewitz?”

  “John Wooden.”

  “Oh. Well, a good plan well executed now is better than a perfect plan later.”

  “Patton?”

  “I’m paraphrasing, but yes.”

  “Then why send a lurp north if we’re going to put an OP up there?”

  “I want to scout that plateau where we shot up that jimbang battalion, see if anybody’s been there, pick up whatever intel we can from the wreckage.”

  “What’s a jimbang?”

  “My son-in-law picked that up from his ground crew. It’s Malaysian for ugly fuckers, or something like that.”

  “I’ll stick with burps,” Fleming said. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s good. The doctor was afraid the garrote might have damaged his vocal cords, but he got lucky. Morgan got lucky, too. At least her jaw wasn’t broken, although she has to eat soft food for a few more days.”

  “Those bastards. Anyway, that’s a long way out for an OP right now. I think we should leave that for secondary expansion, maybe in a month. Let’s get some OPs closer in first. Maybe set up that plateau as a FOB.”

  “You’re the S3; whatever you think is best. I like that FOB idea. I was also thinking that plateau could be a landing pad for ferrying men or supplies, so a FOB might even be necessary and that seems like the perfect spot to fortify. But we need to know about lines of sight and local water supplies.”

  Taking a long pull on the cigar, Angriff lowered his voice to add gravitas to his words. “We don’t have endless supplies of anything, so the sooner we get going, the sooner we find out what is possible. I want to know who my enemies are, how strong they are, and the best way to kill them. I can’t do that by having my people sitting on their ass inside this mountain.”

  Fleming sighed. “Most of these people have never served together, never trained together. Most of them don’t even know each other’s names. They’ve just come out of Long Sleep in a world they don’t understand, and if we then go sending them into potential combat situations before they’ve had a chance to train with their units… I don’t know. That seems like asking for trouble to me.”

  “You may be right. Hell, you probably are right. That’s why I value you so much as my XO — you keep my more reckless impulses in check. But this time, I’ve got a gut feeling that something is coming our way, something we need to know about. I can’t explain it. But even if our lurps don’t find anything, the mission itself will be the best possible training. You know, if everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

  “Patton again?”

  “It’s not Gandhi. So thank you for making me think this through, but I want lurps out starting tomorrow.”

  “You’re the boss,” Fleming said. “Any directives on size, recon range, equipment?”

  “Ops are your department. There’s nobody better. But I’m thinking we need to at least go out a hundred clicks, maybe two hundred even, if we can support that far. And now that I think about it, since we’re going to do it, let’s go in all directions. OPs out as we discussed, lurps in all four directions. Have backup ready to go.”

  “What about an air component?”

  “Well, that’s up to you,” Angriff said. “But I think we’re better off holding the gunships in reserve. We can have reinforcements to any lurp within thirty minutes, an hour if they’re two hundred clicks out. No reason to burn fuel or tip off a potential enemy that we own the skies. Let’s kick off pre-dawn, have everybody back by dark.”

  “That’s moving, Nick. No need for FAOs, and I assume no Fisters?”

  “No need for artillery that I can see, not if it’s a lurp. The FAOs I’m not so sure. That’s your call.”

  “Maybe I will send one with each task force. They could use the experience. The OPs will have to be radio only, though, because we haven’t found much wire yet. There’s supposed to be hundreds of miles of it, but so far we can’t find it.”

  “Hmmm… I don’t like that. Let Walling know that I consider finding that wire a priority. No unnecessary chatter, then, and coded only. I want radio discipline enforced. Now that our network is up, I don’t want anybody listening in.”

  “Roger that.” Fleming patted Angriff’s shoulder.

  For several minutes Angriff smok
ed and stared at the landscape beneath him, lost in thought. Patches of agave, yellow sunflowers, and sedge carpeted the desert floor, interspersed with mesquite and ironwood trees. Pastel green saguaro cacti contrasted with red stones tinged with pink in the fading light, while low on the horizon the sky faded from cobalt blue to light purple. Such vibrant colors gave the panorama a fairy-tale feel, too perfect to be real.

  “How can anybody see that and deny there’s a God?” he said.

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Nick.”

  “How did it come to this?” Angriff mused. “How did the greatest civilization in the history of mankind crash into ruins?”

  Fleming answered as if it were an actual question, not a rhetorical one. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that very thing. How could this happen? And I think the answer is simpler than we might have guessed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was nobody to fire the warning shot.”

  Angriff drew in smoke. “Help me out.”

  “Think about it. Our society became so sensitive to every little detail of daily life that it fractured. Did you ever hear about micro-aggressions?”

  “Is that like a skirmish?”

  Fleming chuckled. “In a manner of speaking. Micro-aggressions were offensive messages built into everyday speech. Not overtly, but a slight or insult you probably weren’t even aware of. These were usually directed at some marginalized group with an axe to grind who got the attention of the media.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense. How can you insult somebody without intending to insult them?”

  “The offended party wanted a reason to complain, and our society had decayed to the point where the media paid attention to them. Anyway, the country became so fractured that our enemies poured through the cracks, and the few patriots who tried to warn everybody were shouted down.”

  “So they fired the warning shot, but nobody listened?”