“You get it now, huh? They played you. They fooled you. They baited you like a bluegill in the bayou. They hooked you and reeled you in. Don’t you see? You owe them nothing. Not a goddamn thing!”
“You’re lying,” Nick says, but he’s deflecting, trying to shelter his own fragile ego. Tears roll down his cheeks.
“Am I?” Buckley says, holding his arms out wide, inviting a response. “I’m the only one that’s being honest with you, Nicholas. You didn’t seriously think the Russians picked you because they liked you, now did you? They despise you, son.
“Oh, the idea of a jury sounds good on paper. Don’t let the elites hold power, right? Demand they convince the common folk. Pick people at random from each country in the UN Security Council. Only it’s not at random. The Russians and the Chinese were never going to let that happen. For that matter, neither were we. What? Do you think we chose Chinese academics or communist party members? Hell, no. We picked the dumbest peasant fucks we could find.
“I’ve read your file, Nicholas. The Russians profiled the shit out of you. They monitored your house, your internet accounts, your work. Hell, they even bugged your goddamn bowling alley.
“When your girlfriend took out a domestic violence firearms notice, they calculated a 68% chance you would commit a felony within five days. When you started drinking and arguing with her, the probability jumped to 98%, and they closed in. They simply could not get to your house quick enough. They thought you were going to kill her.
“Don’t you see? They needed you. They couldn’t take a felon, but they could take anyone that walked right up to that line. And you. You dumbass! You let them. You gave them a goddamn puppet.”
Jazz hangs her head. She’s sobbing. Even Bear has tears in his eyes.
The colonel walks around Nick, saying, “What did she tell you? That you were doing your duty to your country? Shit, patriotism is a strike lure to a big old fat swamp bass like you. People like you see the Stars and Stripes and go all gooey inside. God, guts and guns, right? You’ve got it all wrong. You’re being played for a fool. Patriotism isn’t taking a swig of beer while the anthem is being sung at the Super Bowl. Patriotism is actually serving your country. You’ve got to get off your ass and do something for her.
“Don’t you get it? They use that as bait because they think you’re a sucker. They know patriotism will blind you to reality. Oh, good old Uncle Sam. Do it for Uncle Sam. And all the while, you’re doing it for them!
“What do you think they say about you behind closed doors, Nicholas? They’re treating you like a fool—like a fucking idiot!”
Colonel Buckley moves around beside him, resting his arm on Nick’s shoulder, trying to be friendly.
“You can still be the hero, Nick. You can do this—for the right reasons—for all of us. You can do this for your country.”
Buckley’s right and yet he’s not. Nick swallows the lump in his throat. He may be a fool, but he’s determined not to be played. Not again. He’s got to find some weakness in the colonel’s argument. He looks at Buckley and asks, “Who’s Anni?”
Oh, that strikes a nerve. The colonel doesn’t like that question. He screws up his face in disgust. For the first time, Nick feels the balance of power shift. The colonel stiffens, stepping away from Nick, dropping all pretense.
“What gives you the right?” Buckley asks, pacing around him. “What makes you think you’re better than me? Do you really think a washed-up mechanic from Shit Hole, South Carolina, is in a position to question the decisions of a decorated colonel in the United States Marine Corps?”
“Where is she?” Nick asks, ignoring him. “She’s a juror, right? Why doesn’t she agree with you? She’s down there, isn’t she? She’s seen them. What does she know that we don’t? Let me talk to her.”
Nick might be a slow learner, but he does learn. Colonel Buckley has been peppering Nick with his distorted logic, denying Nick any breathing space. He hasn’t given him the opportunity to consider anything in detail, pestering him to fold and give in. Nick is more than happy to return the favor.
“You want to kill us to save the planet,” Nick says. “I get that. But you don’t even know if it’ll work.”
Nick knows he’s not the only one susceptible to reasoning. Like everyone at Vincennes, Colonel Buckley was caught in a trance. Like all of them, he’s still in shock. He must feel blindsided, robbed of his dignity. Decades of experience compel him to fight back, but how can he justify his behavior? The military uses the threat of force far more readily than it uses force itself. He must know he’s overstepped the mark. He’s got to feel that through the fog of his mind.
Nick steps forward, saying, “I understand. Sacrifice is noble for a warrior, but we need to be sure. We don’t even know if a nuke will dent the fender on this thing.”
Buckley steps back. Nick sees an opening. It’s subtle, but by moving toward the colonel instead of backing away, he gets the old man to hesitate.
Nick says, “If it thrives on energy, we could end up spreading radioactive contamination around the world. And for what? For nothing. If our nuke fails, we could provoke an all-out war.”
“Don’t,” the colonel says, pointing his gun at Nick.
With his hands out in front of him, appealing for calm, Nick says, “We have to be sure. You want to be sure of a kill, right? The only thing worse than a wild tiger is one that’s wounded. You don’t want to wound this thing.”
Colonel Buckley pulls back on the slide of the Glock, loading a round into the chamber. He stands beside Bear, pushing the barrel against his head.
“Do not fuck with me,” Buckley growls. “I will kill him. Do you understand? You need to execute that command or I will pull this goddamn trigger.”
“I don’t want to die,” Bear says. Tears stream down his cheeks. Snot drips from his nose.
Jazz is brutal. “Shut up.”
Like Nick, she can see the weakness forming in the colonel’s rationale. Nick holds his hands wide, inviting Buckley to shoot him instead.
“We’re all dead anyway, right? A bullet in the head, or a nuclear explosion? Which is it going to be?”
Colonel Buckley backhands Nick with a closed fist, raking his knuckles across Nick’s nose and cheeks. The sheer ferocity of his strike takes Nick by surprise, knocking him back. He staggers, falling into the computer console and onto the floor. A split second later, the barrel of the gun is pushed hard into his forehead.
“Give the command. Or I swear. I will pull this fucking trig—”
The door behind Sergeant Hillenbrand flies open, slamming into the wall. Although the operations center is shielded from the cold outside by a ready room, both doors are open. Snow billows within the command room. The temperature plunges below zero.
Dmitri stands there silhouetted by the spotlights lighting up the ice outside. Adrianna struggles to hold him. She crouches, with his left arm hoisted over her shoulder. She can barely keep him upright. Dmitri is holding a gun outstretched in his right hand. He’s aiming at Buckley.
“Colonel,” the burly Russian says. “You are relieved of command.”
Buckley turns, caught mid-sentence. He begins to say, “Wh—” as a shot rings out. The sudden burst of noise within the room is deafening, causing Nick to grimace.
Eight grams of military-grade hardball ammunition accelerates to over a thousand feet per second. At that speed, it’s traveling three times faster than the human nervous system. There’s literally no time to react. The bullet catches Buckley on the back of his head, just behind his ear, splitting his skull open as it rips through the rear of his brain. The round clips the side of his skull like a baseball bat striking a watermelon. Fragments of shattered bone, blood, and grey matter spray across the computer monitors.
The colonel’s lips move, but no sound comes out. For a second, he continues standing there with his eyes wide, unable to comprehend what has just happened. The shockwave rippling out from the bullet liquifies the remaining sof
t tissue in his brain, killing him before he can squeeze the trigger. His arms fall limp as he keels to one side. The gun clatters to the floor.
Adrianna loses her grip on Dmitri. The big Russian leans against the door jamb. He slides to the floor, saying, “Your services are—no longer required.”
Sergeant Hillenbrand draws his sidearm.
Dmitri is in no position to defend himself. He slumps to his knees. The gun falls from his bloody fingers.
Jazz crash tackles Hillenbrand before he can fire. Although her arms are pinned behind her back, she has her head down. She charges, screaming as she collides with his waist. His gun goes flying from his hand, sliding across the floor.
“You bitch,” Hillenbrand says, clambering back to his feet and pulling out a US Marine Corps fighting knife. Seven inches of hardened steel blade cut through the air in front of her.
Jazz faces him down, ready to fight, but without the use of her hands, the best she can hope for is a lucky kick. She dances, dodging the knife. Adrianna tries desperately to drag Dmitri back to his feet. Snow whips around inside the room.
Out of nowhere, three shots ring out in rapid succession.
The report from each shot is deafening. Bullets strike Hillenbrand in the upper thigh, waist, and lower ribs. They tear through his body like tissue paper. Hillenbrand grabs at the blood seeping from his clothing. He turns as another three shots thunder through the building, hitting him in the chest and shoulder. One last shot tears through his bicep, causing him to spin around. The knife falls from his grasp, and he collapses, slumping to the floor.
Hillenbrand lies crumpled on the linoleum, surrounded by a pool of blood.
“Easy,” Adrianna says in the deafening silence. She kneels beside Nick. “It’s okay. It’s over. It’s all over now. You can give me the gun.”
It’s only then Nick looks down at the Glock in his trembling hand. His finger is still on the trigger, poised to fire again. He can feel the metal grooves against his skin. Tension builds on the spring within the firing mechanism. His palms are sweaty.
“Just,” Adrianna says, slowly peeling his fingers from the pistol grip. “Breathe. Nice deep breaths.”
Suddenly, Nick can’t get rid of that accursed thing fast enough. His fingers spasm, releasing the Glock, and he shuffles backward away from it.
Adrianna rests the gun on the floor. Nick looks down at his trembling hands. He’s killed someone. His eyes focus on the fallen figure lying before him.
Blood soaks through the soldier’s clothing. Hillenbrand was alive and now he’s dead. He deserved it, Nick tells himself, but that doesn’t seem to provide any solace. Taking a life is easy—too goddamn easy. He’s always known that. Only now, he knows it’s terrifying. A tiny metal slug reveals how utterly frail the human body is. Nothing that is done can be undone. Although it was Hillenbrand at the end of the barrel, what scares Nick is that it was once Sandra.
Blood sticks to his fingers. He wipes his hands against his trousers, trying to compose himself, but nothing he does can clean away the mess. No matter how hard he tries, it’s always there. At best, he smears red blood over his palms. Nick is manic. He runs each of his fingers against his shirt, wanting to be clean but knowing he never will be. The best he can manage is to distract himself. He runs his hands up through his knotted hair. More blood sticks to them.
Adrianna cuts Jazz and Bear free with the knife.
Dmitri leans against the wall, sucking in air. He breathes in short bursts.
“Nick.”
Nick pulls himself across the floor toward Dmitri. He could get to his feet, but his legs feel like jelly.
“Buckley said—”
“I know. I know,” Dmitri says, gasping for breath. “One road. Two directions. Right?”
Nick nods. Although he’s in shock, he’s vaguely aware he needs to do something to help stop the bleeding. He reaches out, pushing his hand against Dmitri’s jacket, trying to prevent blood from seeping out. Warm, deep red goo oozes between his fingers. This time, he shuts out the sensation, ignoring it.
“Get his jacket off,” Jazz says, rushing over. She yells at Bear. “I need a major trauma kit. Now!”
“On it.”
Whereas Nick is trying to be gentle with a dying man, Jazz is brutish. She shoves Nick aside. With a burst of raw energy, she rips the jacket off Dmitri’s shoulders, peeling it from his arms. Dmitri slumps forward.
“Get his shirt off.”
Nick starts unbuttoning Dmitri’s shirt. Jazz throws the jacket behind her.
“Damn it,” she says through gritted teeth. She crouches, grabbing Dmitri’s shirt and wrenching it open. Buttons scatter over the bloodstained linoleum. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
For Nick, this might as well be a dream—a nightmare. He’s in a daze. Jazz shoves a scrunched-up rag into his hands. She looks him in the eye and reiterates her last point. “Stop the bleeding.”
Nick looks down at the torn material in his bloody hands.
“Get him on his side,” she says, getting to her feet. “One hand on his chest, the other pushing the rag against the exit wound.”
Jazz rocks Dmitri over, laying him on the floor. She makes sure Dmitri has one arm out in front of him and the other twisted behind his back.
“Exit?” Nick mumbles, kneeling behind Dmitri with the bunched-up rag.
He does as he’s told, leaning over and sandwiching Dmitri’s chest between his hands. Jazz was right. The small hole in Dmitri’s chest lines up with a gaping wound on his back. Nick pushes the rag hard against Dmitri’s shattered shoulder blade to reduce the bleeding.
“Where’s that goddamn trauma pack?” Jazz yells, scrambling for one of the internal doors. She slips on the bloody floor, but doesn’t fall. She looks back before disappearing into the next room. “Keep him talking.”
Adrianna helps, kneeling beside Dmitri’s head. She pushes the rag into the edge of the messy exit wound.
“Hang in there, buddy,” Nick says.
“Don’t look back,” Dmitri says between labored breaths. “Look where you’re going, Nick. Not where you came from.”
“I will.”
Dmitri grabs Nick’s wrist, squeezing as he says, “I—I believe in you, Nicholas James Ferrin.”
Dmitri’s strength fades. His eyes close. His head slumps against the floor as his body goes limp. The surge of blood coming from his wounds drops to a trickle.
Nick cries.
His lower lip trembles as he speaks.
“Thank you, my friend.”
Jazz comes running back into the room. She slides across the floor on her knees, pushing a heavy first aid kit in front of her. Adrianna is bawling. Jazz grabs a large gauze pad and tears it open. Nick hangs his head, and Jazz knows. She must know. Even so, she can’t stop until all hope is gone. Jazz pushes the thick pad against Dmitri’s chest wound, but the way the blood oozes rather than runs tells her he’s dead.
Jazz
Bodybags are carried out of the operations center and placed on bench seats in the ready room. A tractor pulls up outside, pushing a snowplow. Dozens of bodybags have already been stacked on a flatbed trailer hitched to the back of the Day-Glo orange chassis. Collecting the dead has become a job. Nick tries to count the bags, but they’re not neatly stacked. The driving snow makes it difficult to see through the window. Heavy-duty, black plastic bodybags lie limp on a frozen aluminum tray. At a guess, the other bodies are base staff recovered outside, like that poor bastard Lee Lao Chan.
How many people have died?
How many more will die before this is over?
Nick is regretting not taking up the offer of solitary confinement in a US prison. Three meager meals a day, a jumpsuit, and a metal bench for a bed would be St. Regis Hotel in New York by comparison.
Nick feels a dull ache in his chest. It hurts to think of Dmitri being stacked alongside Buckley and Hillenbrand. For all that separated them in life, they’re companions in death. Nick’s scalp stil
l aches, but the pain reminds him he’s alive. Death humbles all. Life should hold more meaning, and yet there lies Dmitri—his body hidden by a black bag.
“Hey,” Bear says, seeing Nick staring through the window as the bodies are loaded onto the flatbed. “How are you holding up?”
As much as Nick appreciates Bear’s concern, distracting him from the reality of death is poor comfort. Life itself is the great distraction. Nick’s never thought about his own death before. Somehow, there’s always been an underlying assumption that he’ll continue on. He won’t. Intellectually, he knows that, but it’s easier to bury that aspect of reality than face it. Seeing the snow and ice resting on those black bodybags is confronting and leaves him feeling uneasy. As the bags are stacked, he loses track of which bodies are hidden within the rugged plastic. Once, they were distinct people. Not any more. Now they’re just name tags. He turns away from the window. He has to.
Someone has wiped down the computer consoles and mopped the floor. Most of the blood is gone, but it’s impossible to clean everything thoroughly. Thin red lines have seeped into the cracks, staining the plastic. Humanity is good at whitewashing shit. Nick wonders about the alien beneath the ice. Does it understand what it has unleashed? How does it reconcile life with death? Or does it too live in the delusion of the moment?
“We’re going to be okay,” Bear says.
One lie deserves another. Nick responds with a forced smile. He sits with his back to the window. It’s all kinds of symbolism wrapped into a single act. Nick’s got to move on. He doesn’t want to, but there’s nothing he can do to change the way the past has unfolded into now. He wonders if there’s a body bag waiting for him in the near future.
“You okay?” Jazz asks, sitting next to him. She hands him a disposable cup of coffee. Bear leaves. Nick’s not dumb. They’re taking turns babysitting.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Liar.”
That gets a genuine smile.
“He was a good man,” Jazz says.
Nick sips at his coffee as a way of avoiding conversation.
Jury Duty (First Contact) Page 18
