by Rawlin Cash
“I know,” Hunter said.
“If it’s any consolation, you won’t remember any of this.”
“Fuck you,” Hunter said.
Someone had taken the precaution of tying the wrists of the seven other men behind their backs. The final act, the coup de grâce, was important to Hale. It was important that Hunter be the one to pull the trigger.
The Glock had a ten round magazine.
Hunter pulled each man up by the collar of his shirt. Their heads hung limp. He put a bullet in the base of the skull and the heads flopped and jerked like the final kick of a dying fish.
When he’d shot the last man, he turned the gun on himself, put it to his temple, and without looking at anyone or marking the occasion with any special ceremony, without even turning to face Hale who was still standing behind him, he pulled the trigger.
The magazine was empty.
He pulled it again but it only clicked.
Hale had taken the precaution of removing the final three bullets from the magazine.
And that was it. That was the end of the Mantis experiment.
To this day, Hunter didn’t know why Hale hadn’t killed him too. Of course the purpose of the program had been to find effective enhancement procedures, and evidently, whatever they’d done to Hunter had worked to a degree.
But the risk of keeping him alive was massive.
Hunter was quickly finding out that the memory wipes were not perfect. Hale must have known that. He must have known the memories would come back eventually. And that when they did, Hunter would come for him.
But Hale had kept him alive.
Why?
Hunter stared up at the sky, the smoke billowing from his mouth, and went over everything in his head. In a sense, he’d been going over that night for years, but it was so clouded, so shrouded in the layers of manipulation he’d been subjected to, that it had always been just a sense, an instinct, rather than a real memory.
Hunter knew that nothing the other operatives did could justify what happened. Maybe they’d plotted to break free of the program. Maybe the government had valid reasons for pulling the plug. But Hunter should never have been the executioner. He was one of them.
Those other operatives were by no means innocent. The seven of them had been up to something. There’d been surveillance. In the haze of his mind, he could remember that. He could remember Hale telling him of it. He could remember Hale showing it to him. They were doing something. They’d figured out how to take the kill switches out of their bodies. They’d broken the rules.
But they could hardly be blamed for that. Even though he hadn’t done it himself at that point, taking out the kill switch was so easy to do that it was almost senseless not to.
Maybe they’d figured out what the program was really about.
Maybe they knew they’d been lied to.
Maybe they’d learned the true purpose of Mantis.
Hunter couldn’t remember what they’d been plotting. It was all a haze. He didn’t even know if he’d been in on it.
There was only one thing he knew for certain. All of them had been fucked. They’d been fucked by the government, they’d been fucked by the agency, but most importantly, they’d been fucked by Jeff Hale.
When Hunter killed the others, the implant was still inside him.
It was still manipulating him. It was pushing him to do things he wouldn’t otherwise have done. And it could make him forget.
That was the key.
The CIA had figured out with Hunter what they hadn’t been able to figure out with any other soldier before. They’d figured out that the single biggest factor limiting his effectiveness wasn’t his capability, it wasn’t his skill, or his weapons, or his ability to survive in harsh conditions. It wasn’t his ability to hack computer networks, or his intelligence, or his courage, or tolerance for pain.
What limited a soldier, even the best trained and best equipped soldiers in the history of the planet, was something that could never be overcome through better training and better equipment.
It could never be overcome through more power.
In fact, the stronger they became, the worse it got.
And it all came down to a simple, kindergarten-level thing.
The soldier’s conscience.
An army was only as powerful as it was ruthless.
It would only ever be able to achieve the objectives its soldiers were willing to achieve.
The discrepancy between what the military should have been able to do, and what it was in fact able to do, was now known to be a morality gap.
That was the discovery Mantis had made.
It explained why men rescuing a fallen soldier were significantly more effective than those tasked with capturing an enemy.
Men preventing an attack were more effective than those avenging one.
And crucially, soldiers protecting their homeland and their own families were far more resilient, and more lethal, than those sent overseas to subdue foreigners for political ends.
The limiting factor of the US military had become the understanding ingrained in each soldier of the difference between right and wrong. A soldier from Atlanta, or Boise, or Albuquerque knew, in his bones, that a war in Syria, or Yemen, or Afghanistan was not his fight. He knew he didn’t have to be there. He knew his family wasn’t at risk.
You couldn’t trick that out of him.
He knew he was there for political reasons, for oil, or money, or votes, and no amount of additional equipment could make up for that.
Wars were getting bloodier. ISIS beheaded captured enemies. Try ordering a US unit to do that. The bloodier the fight got, the bloodier soldiers needed to become. And America couldn’t keep up. Its soldiers didn’t have the desperation.
ISIS killed thousands of civilians in reprisals when they reoccupied fallen towns. It was a tactic that wiped out all resistance. The US Command knew similar strategies would work in Kabul and Baghdad. Those were cities where years-long occupations had cost thousands of American lives. But they couldn’t do it. Those strategies weren’t on the table.
If they issued the orders they wouldn’t be carried out.
And more and more real scenarios, in which the willingness to get your hands dirty was the decisive factor, were coming up every day. Bashar al-Assad was using poison gas on his own citizens. There were areas in Syria, areas of real strategic value, where American soldiers held back for months because the civilian population was being used as a shield. The army had more than enough raw strength to take the positions, they should have been able to bash their way through, but the soldiers on the ground held back.
The army tested it.
They issued the orders.
They tried to shell strategic neighborhoods.
The results proved their worst fears. American soldiers were less effective and less lethal than weaker Syrian forces in situations where civilians were being used as shields.
It was a real issue.
Because there were civilians everywhere. Any foe could use them. It meant that unless Americans were fighting on home soil, in protection of their own people, they wouldn’t ever be fighting as hard as a more ruthless enemy.
The military needed to know it could overcome the gap. They knew if they could short circuit the wiring that made soldiers hold back, they would be unstoppable.
How long would resistance in Baghdad last if the US took on the tactics of ISIS, or the measures of a regime like Saddam Hussein’s?
Hunter was the closest they’d come.
There was little doubt he’d be willing to fight ISIS on their own terms.
He was the soldier who could attack another man’s country with the same fervor as he would defend his own.
And the military knew it would be on the attack far more than it would ever be on the defense.
They’d gotten to the point where Hunter’s body no longer reacted to moral stimulus. The hormones, the neurotransmitters and chemicals in the br
ain that helped the body tell what it believed in from what it opposed no longer worked. And afterwards, he could even be made to forget it had ever happened.
That was the type of soldier they needed. The gloves were coming off, everyone was throwing out the old rules, and America needed to keep pace.
Hunter combined the intelligence and skill set of an elite soldier with the singleness of purpose of an automated drone.
He was a killer as truly as there had ever been one.
And he now suspected that Hale had tasked him with executing his seven fellow operatives not just because their usefulness had come to an end, but as a way of testing him and his willingness to obey abhorrent commands.
Because what could be more abhorrent to a soldier than killing his own unit?
A soldier who would do that would do anything.
Hale had made him kill his fellow operatives as a test. A test of the degree to which his instincts had been overcome. A test of the control the implanted device had over him. And a test of the memory control technology.
Hale hadn’t just put Hunter under the microscope, he’d made himself part of the experiment. If Hunter ever remembered what he’d done, he’d come for Hale and he’d kill him. As long as Hale was still alive, the experiment was still working.
Hunter was a soldier who would do very bad things and then forget he’d ever done them. It was what the military wanted, and what Jeff Hale’s life signaled they’d found.
And so, Hunter decided to be the signal he was supposed to be.
He’d long ago taken the chip out of his body. He’d long ago broken the chains that controlled him.
But he could still do the government this one, final service. He could show them that Hale’s experiment had failed.
He would kill Jeff Hale.
Twenty-One
If Jeff Hale was anything, he was practical. He never let politics or sentiment or personal preference get in the way of what was expedient. If a soldier failed, he was expendable. If an ally defected, he was replaceable. And if a president was shot, you moved on to his successor.
Hale’s immediate impulse was to direct all his attention on the person next in the line of succession. That was Jennifer Blackmore. Until that very moment, she’d never been anything more than a minor annoyance to him, an irritant, a minuscule consideration in his plans and calculations.
Now, as suddenly as the bullet hit Walker, she became the center of gravity around which everything else revolved. As Speaker of the House, she was third in the line of succession. She was up next. She was president.
Walker’s helicopter was still in the air as Hale dashed across the pad toward Jennifer.
“Madam President,” he yelled. “Back in the elevator. Back in the elevator.”
She stared at him, completely uncomprehending what he was saying. The Secret Service hadn’t made the shift. To them, Walker was still president and she was Speaker of the House. She had a security detail of three agents, all of them still staring at the helicopter, and Hale was the only one who’d realized she was vulnerable.
“Is that a drone?” one of Jennifer’s guards said.
Hale turned to him and in that exact instant, the man was hit by a bullet. Again, Hale noted that he heard no gunshot.
Hale looked up at the sky in the direction the man had been pointing. There was a drone in the air, high above them, hundreds of yards out. He stared at it for a span of about four seconds before realizing the danger to all of them. He grabbed Jennifer’s arm and physically yanked her into the open elevator.
She still didn’t understand what he was doing.
The doors of the elevator closed and bang, the steel clanged with the impact of a bullet. Another second and it would have hit her chest.
The elevator descended to the tunnel and as it did, Jennifer turned to Hale.
“What’s going on?” she stammered.
“I’m protecting you.”
“Me?”
She still hadn’t put two and two together.
“You’ve got to regain your composure, Jennifer. You’re in shock.”
“I just saw a man’s head blown off.”
He stepped toward her and gripped her by the shoulders. She looked into his face. The fine lines around her eyes creased.
“You’re the president now,” he said. “The second those doors open, you’re no longer what you were. You’re president. You understand me, don’t you?”
The penny dropped. He could see the look on her face as everything clicked together. It was an eventuality she’d been briefed on numerous times, an event she’d been constitutionally obligated to plan for, and something that no one, least of all Jennifer herself, had ever expected to come into play.
“Yes,” she said.
Her voice was firm. The elevator had already stopped and the twenty second security delay had started.
Her strong jawline and dark eyes relaxed. It wasn’t a true relaxation. It was a tense, forced calm.
She stepped out of the elevator and walked straight for the first golf cart.
“With me,” she said to Hale, as she might have said to an obedient hound.
He followed her.
As the cart sped back to the lodge, he was glad to have a few moments alone with her before the rush of competing voices drowned him out.
“Walker was going to request my resignation,” he said.
Jennifer nodded but said, “You don’t know that for certain.”
They drove on a few more yards before Hale said, “Yes I do.”
Jennifer turned to him. “I was paying attention through the past few hours.”
Hale said, “What I’m saying is, if you want my resignation.”
“If Walker had listened to you, he’d still be alive.”
Hale nodded. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. He was relieved. He would live to see another day. “You don’t have someone in your own camp you’d rather replace me with?” he said.
“Can I count on you, Hale?”
“That depends on what you’re asking of me, Madam President.”
“Can I count on you to be honest with me?”
Hale hesitated only a second. The word honest had so many meanings. Truth had so many varieties. To a man like Hale, the word was almost meaningless.
“Absolutely, Madam President.”
She looked at him only slightly skeptically.
“Then you can keep your position, Hale. And I hope to God you can keep me alive.”
That kept Hale quiet for the rest of the ride. At the other end of the tunnel he had secret service agents scour the sky for the drone. They didn’t see it anywhere.
He hurried Jennifer back into the lodge and kept her away from windows. The safe house had been compromised. He suspected that the drone could lock targets and the sniper could take them out without requiring a line of sight. That was the goal of some of the US smart bullet prototypes.
With Jennifer safely in the building, he ordered the secret service to black out the windows.
“Draw blinds. Draw curtains. I don’t care what you do, just make sure there is zero visibility inside this building from outside.”
Then he called Fawn.
“Are you at Langley?”
“Just getting through security now.”
“I need you to go straight to the control room.”
“What’s happened?”
“Someone shot Walker.”
“What?”
“Taken out by sniper.”
“What? How?”
“We were at Phillips Airfield.”
“That’s a secret facility.”
“I know, and Fawn, it was an impossible shot.”
“It must have been.”
“I didn’t even hear it.”
“The range on a smart bullet is… ” she didn’t finish the sentence. They didn’t know the range because they’d never seen one. Whoever had this weapon was a step ahead of them in every way. It was unnerving,
and it shouldn’t have been possible.
“There’s only two ways to target a bullet without a line of sight,” Fawn said. “Either there are optics on the bullet itself, or a third party is designating the target.”
“There was a drone in the sky.”
“A target designator then?”
“That’s what I need you to find out,” Hale said.
He hung up and slumped into one of the chairs by the fire. The cigar Walker had been smoking earlier was sitting half-smoked in the ashtray. Hale picked it up and lit it. He wondered if there were any superstitions about finishing a dead man’s cigar.
Two presidents in two days, and on his watch.
“I hope you’re coming up with some sort of plan,” Jennifer said to him.
She was standing by the fire, looking down at him imperiously.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, “but I’m sure you’re not going to like it.”
“If I like it more than being dead, it’s got a chance,” she said.
Twenty-Two
It was only a few minutes before the blood-soaked secret service agents started pouring back into the lodge from the airfield.
“You did the right thing,” the head of Walker’s security detail said to Hale.
The man’s hands were covered in blood from where he’d struggled to provide first aid to the president.
“Where’s Nancy?” Jennifer said.
“The first lady is dead, Madam President,” the agent said.
Jennifer was hit by the shock like it was a punch. “What?”
“After Hale got you into the elevator, the bullets kept coming. They got the first lady, they got Harry Goldwater, they got two of my agents. The bullets didn’t stop until we got that drone to withdraw.”
“How did you get it to withdraw?” Hale said.
“We brought out all the fire power we had.”
“Did you take it down?”
“No. It got away.”
“In which direction?”
“Toward the town.”
The town of Aberdeen, Maryland was just a few miles away. Hale got on the phone to Fawn and told her where to start searching for the drone. The area would be crawling with CIA assets for weeks. It was a long shot but if there was any sign of it they’d find it.