by Mich Moore
right before noon. A medic had put a field dressing on Broussard's wound and given him a shot of morphine for the pain. Colleen lay beside him, her head resting on his thigh. Her eyes were open and active. Lieutenant Colonel Cohen sat across from them, eyes lowered.
The morphine made him woozy, but Broussard still felt amped and wanted to talk.
"Too bad about the corporal."
The soldier nodded. "It's a dangerous job. But the pay is good."
"Really?"
"No."
They both chuckled a little.
Cohen slowly exhaled. "He was a promising soldier. I hate losing good people." He suddenly extended his hand towards the engineer. "Dallas Cohen, high school physics teacher."
Broussard shook Cohen's hand with his uninjured arm. "Neal Broussard, engineer and convict."
Cohen's eyebrows lifted a fraction, but he did not comment. "Broussard. That French?"
"Yeah."
"You a Frenchy?"
"English on my mother's side. Scottish on my father's side. Nobody has any idea where the 'Broussard' came from."
Cohen fiddled with his tool belt. "Just one of those family mysteries, I guess." He sighed and stretched his long legs. "The robot handled itself real well out there. Maybe your little trick with her switch worked some, too?"
Broussard shrugged. "Hard to say."
"Now I'm gonna have to write up a report that nobody's gonna believe."
Broussard smiled. "Thanks."
"Thank you." He glanced at the DAT. "And thank you, Colleen. You saved a man's life today."
Colleen's comm board lit up. "You're welcome, Mr. Cohen."
Cohen was intrigued. "They're very polite."
"They're Southerners."
"Oh?"
One week later, on an overcast morning, the DATs and their handlers packed up their belongings and flew back to Huntsville. That evening, Colonel Higgins sat down to write his report on Operation Crucible to John Voode. It was a report that he would not have thought he would voluntarily make in a thousand years. In it, he praised the bravery of the men of the 104th Alpha Company 2nd Battalion who had helped make Crucible a resounding success. He noted the sacrifice of Patriot Corporal Anthony Butler, and recommended that the Army-Patriot relationship continue to gird the DAT program. Higgins expressed genuine remorse at having to disrupt the lives of so many American citizens, but he reaffirmed Washington's position that it was the only solution possible, no matter how untenable. He then closed his report by saying that the DAT program had his blessings now and that the Colleen DAT in particular had proven herself to be of significant value in a live theater by saving the lives of Lieutenant Dallas Cohen and her handler, Neal Broussard, under heavy automatic weapons fire and under great threat to her own personal safety. He then closed with these two postscripts:
1. Hope this doesn't rise up one day and bite us where the sun don't shine!
2. Kudos to Engrg. staff at Cummings.
10
Cummings Research Institute
Huntsville, Alabama
A bleary-eyed Frederick Kent Fields felt every day of his thirty-nine years of life on the last day of his work week. Restorative sleep had been elusive for the past two weeks, and he needed to grow two additional arms in order to juggle all of the crises on his desk. Actually, that was just his tired brain complaining again. Events at Redstone were sorting themselves out. Schedules were being kept, and staff was still relatively happy and productive. In fact, if he pulled back and took a long look at the DAT program as a whole, the situation seemed pretty good. But the paperwork was ghastly. And it kept growing. There were mountains of stuff piled on his desk—books, manuals, files, reports, hundreds of printed emails, binders, moldy candy jars, old mail for Charles White, new mail for Charles White. He was going to ask his assistant to come in tomorrow and sort through it all. Keep what would help him hang on to the job and burn the rest. That seemed like a good plan.
He did have one interesting item locked inside his desk drawer: a manila envelope with a typed draft of a letter to President Douglas Haverson asking that he consider granting Van Walters, Eric Powell, and Neal Broussard, three of the original designers of the MIT, presidential pardons for their crimes. Fields had no trouble seeking official redemption for the first two, but Broussard was a triple murderer, albeit a likable one. The thought of the man being legally forgiven for such egregious acts unnerved the usually unflappable Brit. He sighed because he could do nothing about the situation; there was simply too much energy being put into Broussard's request. He took out the draft and read it again. It was signed by himself; Allan Chang; Dina Hodges; Colonel Richard Higgins, US Army; and Major Robert Hillerman, (Ret.) US Army. It would have to go through two more channels for edits and approval before it could be mailed off to Washington.
His day dragged on until it came to an anticlimactic close at seven-thirty. By that time, he had only enough energy to pour himself into the backseat of his Crown Victoria and let his driver take him back to his apartment. Once there, he stripped down to his underwear, scarfed down all of the leftover Chinese food that he could find in the fridge, and then tumbled into bed. He was fast asleep even before his head hit the pillow....
It was the soft nudge to the back of his head that awoke him. "Huh?" he asked the silence. He turned over and checked the clock. It was three-sixteen in the morning. He whimpered in frustration. He had never done well with nights of broken sleep, and now his life was becoming an endless succession of them. He slapped a pillow over his head and fell into a dreamless state.
"Get up."
Fields moaned. "No, no, no."
"Get up now."
Fields opened his eyes. Now he was awake.
"Who is this?" he asked, still thinking himself somehow on the fringes of dreaming.
There was a pause. "That is not for you to know."
Fields took offense at that. "You're in MY bedroom. Now what the hell is going on here?"
Fields leapt out of bed and switched on the light. Like before, he was the only person in the room. He had definitely heard a man's voice, but it was muffled. As if the words were being spoken through layers of cotton batting. "Someone's messin' with you, Fields."
He retrieved his cell phone and woke the head of Cummings's security. "I apologize for calling at this hour, but I believe that someone has tapped into my room. Yes, a bug of some sort. Could you have someone come out first thing tomorrow and take a look? Right. Okay. Thank you."
Having taken concrete action, he felt better. In fact, he felt good enough to finish off the tin of apple pie that he had bought yesterday. He slipped on his robe, returned to the kitchen, and cut himself a sliver. As he ate, he turned on the television and watched CNN. It amazed him that even with America being cut open alive, the major news networks were still gorging themselves on the dalliances of its so-called celebrities. Well, that helped explain a lot, didn't it?
Fields grew sleepy again, and he headed back to bed. It was four-thirty. He decided that he would have to sleep in late or he just wasn't going to be coherent enough to get through the next workday. He stretched, climbed back into bed, and was fitfully asleep within seconds.
"Get up."
Fields groaned. "Oh, for chrissakes."
"I want you to open all mail addressed to Charles White."
Fields ignored the voice and fought to return to sleep. It then occurred to him that perhaps he was in the early stages of insanity. There had been numerous reports of people suddenly going crackers ... right in the middle of meetings or driving home from work ... . Instantaneous psychosis ... at times covering entire counties ... mass suicides ... mass marriages ... . His mind pondered the two. They were the same things, really.
The voice repeated itself. "I want you to open all mail addressed to Charles White."
"AND I WANT YOU TO BLOODY SHUT THE HELL UP!"
Something flew out from the darkness and thwacked him hard in the head. "OWWW!" He jerked his eyes around the room, from
corner to corner. Ugly shadows were gathering there.
He was struck in the head again, this time with much greater force. Real fear gripped him now. An involuntary whimper escaped him. "Please! Stop! Whoever you are! Please, stop this!"
"Get up." Pause. "Read all of Mr. White's mail very carefully. And then I will leave you alone."
"You're lying!"
There was a long pause.
"More than likely."
11
Granite City, Illinois
Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Palladino was well into his second hour of lazing by the beach in Chicago on a weekend pass courtesy of Colonel Higgins. Dino, as he was known to his family and friends, had been experiencing "inner conflict," as the psycho doc would have it. Sure, doctor. Anything your egg head can pull out of a textbook is fine and dandy and certainly right. What he was feeling was strangled by his new assignment. And as throughout his life, lolling on the white sands of a clean beach was the only way to beat back the blues. So he had driven up to Montrose Beach on the military's dime. Lucky for him, Chicago was still managing to stay neutral. Adherents to either side of the war could come and go freely within its borders, as long as they remained peaceful and unarmed. He considered that a very wise move on their part; the city had some of the best beaches left in the country. It was to everyone's advantage that they remained open and free to all.
Palladino had carefully placed a case of Budweiser on one side of his beach lounger and a boom box on the other. Frank Sinatra tunes lulled him into a delicious state of
