McAuley and Newman have collaborated before, most notably while hosting the entertaining and imaginative 2005 Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony in Glasgow, for which they were subsequently nominated for the Hugo (Gernsback) Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. “Prisoners of the Action,” a novella, is somewhat more serious, but has its amusing moments.
Colonel Franklin Dice walked off the ramp of the transport plane on rubbery legs, kit-bag strap biting into his shoulder, and stamped the concrete to get feeling back into his feet. He had been in the air for over a day and a half—going around the world the wrong way to avoid trouble spots in Africa and the Middle East. His flight plan had comprised hops from DC to San Diego, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, some outcrop-with-an-airstrip-and-a-flag west of Sumatra, and, finally, Great James Island, an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and debatably part of the Chagos Archipelago.
Dice’s first view of the island was a simmering runway, a row of Black Hawk and Little Bird helicopters, and a green fire truck parked on a bone-white coral road. His second was Colonel Stanley Stock, the base commander, steaming toward him, tailed by an anxious knot of officers. A small, trim man in his fifties, pure white hair in a crew cut with high sidewalls, Colonel Stock gave Dice a karate-chop salute, brusquely welcomed him to Great James, and ignored a query about the whereabouts of Captain McAndrews, the officer-in-command of the military police on the island, and Dice’s point of contact.
“You may think your investigation is the most important legal action since they found presidential cum on Monica Lewinsky’s dress,” Stock said, “but I will absolutely not tolerate interference with the day-to-day running of this facility. Forget your letters of authority from that committee of easy-chair generals back in the Pentagon. Out here, my word is law. If you compromise island security in any way, I will have you arrested and put on the next transport out. Is that understood, soldier?”
The man was wound up tight, jaw muscles knotted like a bulldog’s, eyes narrowed in a cold, hard, death-ray stare. Dice understood why: In this man’s army, getting a rep as a bad commander was worse than being tagged a war criminal.
Stock kept staring, just the way he’d learned from assertiveness tapes. Dice took his time responding, letting a little warm wind pass between them.
“Colonel Stock,” he said, gently stressing their equivalent rank, “I understand you’re proud of your little kingdom and that around here your whim is law. However, as far as I’m concerned, it’s at the back end of my list of prime vacation spots. The only reason I’d make a stink if you were to order your vassals to frog-march me back onto this bird is that I’d have to explain to the oversight committee why I came back empty-handed. Let me assure you that it is my express intention to carry out the investigation with minimum fuss and get out of here as swiftly as I can. If that means keeping out of your way, it’ll be fine with me…”
Stock couldn’t suppress a smirk. It was obvious he believed Dice had just rolled over, when in fact Dice was deploying his favorite courtroom tactic. It was simple but effective: He let the hostile witness think he was dismissed and off the hook, then fired the killer question as the boob was halfway out of the box, with relief-sweat popping prematurely on his forehead.
“…But,” he continued, watching the word sink in like a hook, “it is in the nature of things that, sooner or later, we’re gonna have to have a conversation about what went down here.”
Colonel Stock bristled. “I’m in charge of perimeter security and day-to-day running, no more, no less. As I made it abundantly clear in my report, ‘what went down’ was nothing to do with me and everything to do with the Frank-Einsteins and their experiments. They supervise what goes on in the pits and they control access to the POTAs. If you want to minimize your time here, I suggest you begin and end your investigation with the bubblebrains.”
POTAs: Prisoners of the Action. The reason why Great James had been turned into a cross between a maximum-security prison and a summer camp for mad scientists; the reason why Dice had been sent halfway around the world.
Dice said, “Colonel, if I never had to talk with you again, I’d consider myself a fortunate man.”
Watching Stock process that was like watching a walrus try advanced algebra. The man eventually swallowed as if getting rid of a bad taste and said, “I hope we’re on the same page, Colonel.”
“We’re definitely in the same army. And it’s our mutual bad luck that the army needs to know what happened here.”
Dice was tempted to goose the base commander further by suggesting that an officer a tad more suspicious and a little less good-natured than himself might wonder why Stock had come at him hot and heavy so early in the day. He was straight off the plane and getting snarled at before the engines had stopped whining. But Colonel Stock was looking past Dice now—case closed!—moving on to greet Jubilee Bliss.
The senator came down the ramp among a posse of aides wearing black suits, shades, and earplugs with coiled flexes that snaked down the backs of the starched collars of their shirts. He’d changed from flight coveralls into a gray silk suit, string tie, and cowboy boots. Groomed, enormous, and slick, he was making an entrance, as if stepping out of a limo for a thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser rather than a transport plane on a godforsaken outcrop. Bliss folded both of his huge hands around Stock’s proffered paw, giving a movie-star grin while murmuring platitudes, holding his head up to emphasize his height and minimize his puffy chin while one of his aides crouched to get a heroic image, with the burning sky behind him, on Digi-Beta.
Bliss was Bible Beltway, famous for his world-class abilities in filibustering, pork barreling, and pandering to the unplumbed depths of fundamentalist prejudice. Using influence gained from his work on the president’s reelection campaign, he’d finessed himself onto the oversight committee with responsibility for Great James Island, but his visit was more of a scouting mission for the aerospace company located in his state and run by his brother-in-law than an investigation into means and practice. Joining him in the photo op was Rose-of-Mary, his twenty-four-year-old daughter. A Christian girl–rock singer and advocate of premarital virginity, she had backed her father’s last campaign with a triple-platinum album, Do What Daddy Says. She looked like an alarmingly thin white-blond angel and had given everyone on the flight silver armbands that signified support of her cause. Dice’s was in his pocket, but most of the crew had tied the things somewhere about their persons for the duration of the flight.
The Bliss Pack allowed themselves to be led around the side of the plane, to where a line of Humvees and Jeeps were waiting. As soon as the senator and Rose-of-Mary hove into their view, a small military band started to blow the hell out of something by Sousa, most of the notes snatched away in the fierce hot salt wind.
Dice wondered where Captain McAndrews had gotten to. Surely he couldn’t be the lone cyclist who’d just appeared out of the heat-haze, wobbling at a slow but steady pace across the concrete apron toward the plane. When a couple of the senator’s black suits broke away to intercept this possible kamikaze, the cyclist stood on his pedals and, with a surprising burst of speed, swerved around the aides, zoomed under the plane’s wing, and braked neatly in front of Dice.
Dice’s first thought was that the apparition was a Sikh, but what seemed like a turban was actually a puffed-up watch cap threaded through with shiny strands. With his ragged blue uniform, deep tan, gray beard, and over-regulation-length hair, the newcomer was a ringer for Ben Gunn. Dice considered telling him that he could come out of the jungle because World War Two was over and—guess what?—we won. The hermit straightened his back and snapped off a precise salute, then pulled a black lump from the wicker basket slung in front of his handlebars and thrust it into Dice’s hands.
“With the compliments of Her Most Ancient and Awful Majesty the Queen, may Gawd bless Her and keep Her, sah!”
It was another watch cap, layers of tinfoil lining the wool.
The man
leaned closer and said, in a confidential voice, “For the preservation of your precious brain waves.”
Dice guessed this must be one of the victims of the infamous Great James Syndrome: crazy as a soup sandwich, but no threat to life and limb.
“Who do I have to thank?” he asked.
“No thanks needed, American soldier-johnny,” the man said. “Wear it in good health, though. And think of England.”
His gaze was ice blue and keen, but fixed beyond Dice as if he were expecting a cavalry regiment to charge out of the sea in support of one lone attorney in uniform. Tendrils of his untrimmed beard wavered in the hot wind like sea anemone tentacles. He saluted again and pedaled off, making a wide, wobbling circle around the band.
The convoy of Humvees and Jeeps sped off, carrying away Colonel Stock, Senator Bliss, the virginal Rose-of-Mary, and all the aides and officers. The musicians halted in midmarch and began to pack up their instruments. Many were non-regulation-issue, soldered-together affairs of tubes, bells, and keys: Rube Goldberg devices more like amusing industrial sculpture than brass-band kit. There was a tired old joke that military justice—Dice’s field—was to the civilian variety as marching bands were to the New York Philharmonic. Dice had a chill premonition that on Great James, the gulf between anything at all and its counterpart in the ordinary world was vast, cool, and unsympathetic.
A loading crew in coveralls or shorts moved up the ramp past Dice, trampling a litter of discarded strips of silver cloth. A truck backed up, ready to receive the plane’s cargo. Two hundred yards away, a Little Bird helicopter lifted straight into the air, its downdraft sending white sand shooting across the runway as it turned and headed toward the sparkling blue sea. And a tall blond man, bareheaded in camouflage fatigues, drove up in a Jeep, jumped out, and saluted.
“Colonel Dice, sir,” he said, “Sergeant Timothy Haines, sir.”
Haines had a Chicago accent and a Boy Scout’s enthusiasm.
Dice sloughed his kit bag and returned the salute. “I arranged to be met by Captain McAndrews, Sergeant.”
“Captain McAndrews is currently indisposed, sir. Colonel Stock put me in charge of base security, pending his recovery.”
“When did this happen?”
Dice had talked to McAndrews on an encrypted satellite phone only twelve hours ago, while the plane was refueling at Manila. He had sounded sharp, focused, and cautious.
“Just this morning, sir. Captain Mac’s orderly found him painting equations on the walls of his room. With his own excrement.”
“You better take me to see him.”
“Sorry, sir, but that won’t be possible right now. Right now he’s in quarantine, and in any case far too…discomposed, to entertain visitors.”
“Really. How about I talk to one of his doctors?”
“Of course, sir. But they’ll all tell you the same thing: that he’s one sick bunny rabbit.”
Haines slung Dice’s kit bag into the back of the Jeep and asked if he had any other luggage.
“I plan to spend as little time here as possible,” Dice said, climbing into the shotgun seat.
Haines took the wheel and fired up the Jeep. “I hope your plan holds, sir.”
The sergeant noticed that Dice had the madman’s woolly hat in his lap.
“I see you got your welcome-to-paradise tea cozy from Bomber Brown.”
“That beachcomber is Peter Brown? Wing Commander Brown?”
Great James was sovereign British territory and officially an RAF base, commanded by a senior British officer who had nothing at all to do with running the place except signing off orders he wasn’t authorized to read.
“He’s mostly harmless, sir. Everything is relative, of course, especially here, but you can safely ignore him.”
“On this rock, with nothing to occupy his mind, I guess it’s little wonder he’s gone stir crazy. Especially given the, um, current attrition rate.”
“Sir, permission to speak frankly?”
“By all means, Sergeant.”
“If you’re worried about compromising security, I’m fully up to speed with every aspect of what you’re here to investigate. Plus, it’s hard to keep secrets in this place—even the lowliest hump has a good idea of what’s happening. Currently, we have two hundred thirty-eight persons, seven point three three percent of total base population, incapacitated by what you call GJS, Great James Syndrome, and we call Island Fever. Captain Mac is the latest victim, a very severe case, but well within the statistical spread. An unknown number of other personnel, possibly one hundred percent, suffer from minor effects but are able to carry out their duties. Affliction with full-blown Fever appears to follow a lunar cycle, peaking at each full moon.”
“Like the Wolf Man,” mused Dice.
“I have graphs I could show you,” said Haines, his gaze just a little too bright.
“The Pentagon has graphs, too, Sergeant. If I may speak frankly, I’m pleased we can speak plainly, because we have a lot to talk about. But first, I want you to drive me to the nearest shower.”
They passed Wing Commander Brown, yawing alarmingly on his old-fashioned bike. They passed the fire truck, its ladder extended at a forty-five-degree angle into the grove of palm trees. Swaying at the top was an enlisted man, picking coconuts and dropping them to the ground, where two other grunts collected them in a wheelbarrow under the watchful gaze of a female MP. The coconut handlers wore only footgear, khaki shorts, and huge, padded, elbow-length gauntlets.
Dice said, “Is that what passes for punishment detail here?”
“Not as crazy as it looks, sir. And supervision is necessary. The Brits did a lot of atmospheric testing here back in the 1950s. The coconuts are radioactive. They have to be harvested before they fall, in case someone is tempted to eat them.”
“I see. We wouldn’t want anyone getting a bellyful of radioactive coconut milk and becoming a superhero. ‘Blessed with the proportionate skull thickness of a coconut, young Billy Barker dons a hairy cape and fights crime as Coco-Man.’”
“I believe the army is more worried about men getting radiation poisoning and dying, sir.”
“All this and the POTAs, too. No wonder people are going crazy here.”
At the officers’ quarters, in the bleak, fiercely air-conditioned room he’d been allocated, Dice took advantage of the shower and the first plumbed-in latrine he’d seen in three continents. Refreshed, relieved, and shaved, with clean skivvies under his funky uniform, Dice found Haines leaning against the wall outside his room, reading a James Lee Burke novel. The sergeant shut the book and slipped it into his back pocket, muttering, “Page one twenty, third paragraph down, second sentence in, third word.”
Dice took that onboard. Haines definitely had a touch of Island Fever.
“I think I should visit the prisoner now,” said Dice.
“Of course, sir. Which one, sir?”
“Private Montori, unless you’ve caught her collaborators. In which case, I’ll gratefully shake your hand, recommend you for field promotion, and ask you to drive me back to the airstrip before that transport leaves.”
“I was thinking of the victim, sir. The POTA.”
“Take me to Montori, Sergeant. I’ll tell you who or what else I need to see after that.”
They had to drive halfway around the circumference of the island to reach the brig. Named in 1694 by explorers so far out from Portsmouth that Captain George Holland didn’t know James II had been deposed, Great James had once been an idyllic, textbook coral atoll, a scattering of islets, coconut palms, and white beaches in a rough circle about ten miles across, with reefs full of fish in the inner lagoon and a barricade of outer reefs stretching into the open ocean. Until the mid-1950s it had supported a small, indigenous population of Ilois, Creole-speaking descendants of escaped slaves from French Africa and seafaring Indians. The natives had been moved out when Prime Minister Anthony Eden decided to use their home as a test ground for prototypes of a battlefield nuclear weap
on. The program was abandoned a few years later when the British were persuaded to engage in joint UK–US ops, and Great James had become part of the Cold War front line, in everything but name a USAF base. Most of the islets were concreted over and joined by causeways and bridges. A runway two miles long was built to support long-range bombers, and a harbor blasted out of the reef. Silos were sunk and ICBMs pointed well to the north of Afghanistan, targeting military facilities in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, then pulled out and scrapped after one of the SALT agreements. B-52s had used the field as a staging post in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Now the island housed the Prisoners of the Action, POTAs, twenty enemy survivors of that nightmare remake of Invasion of the Saucer Men—a lot less funny than the original—which every media outlet in the States had to be dissuaded from calling an alien invasion or a War of the Worlds.
After fifty years of military rule, Great James was a stark place, miles of flat concrete blinding in tropical sun (Dice’s sunglasses were in the top drawer of the desk in the den of his house in Alexandria), studded with bunkers, laboratories, hangars, junkyards full of rusting vehicles, firing pits, and experimental kit. There was a recreation area, with baseball and basketball and tennis courts, and a miniature golf course. And there was the prison compound: not the facility where the POTAs were kept—those were the former missile silos two miles around the curve of the island—but the place where servicemen and -women accused of crimes against military discipline were penned, along with the 238 cases of severe Great James Syndrome. Neat ranks of open-sided tents were pitched inside a double fence of razor wire, with coils of barbed wire between, guard towers on each corner, and the original guardhouse, a long, low L-shaped building a little like a civilian motel, to one side.
Private Montori was at the far end of the guardhouse’s jail block, in the only occupied cell. Two MPs in white helmets, both hard-faced women, guarded her door. Chalked on the corridor wall nearby were designs that could have been theorems, a complicated tic-tac-toe variant, or a folk-art mural from a culture Dice didn’t recognize. Though the guards were as stock-still as the redcoats outside Buckingham Palace, Dice saw smudges of chalk on their pressed khakis and wondered if they had been taking turns to add to the design.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 34