She stood and walked over to the Jeep, leaning against the sun-warmed front fender. “Or?”
He smiled, finally pulling off his shades. “I got a buddy down at MacDill in Tampa. I could pull some more strings, get you and the Panda reassigned. I hear Florida’s great this time of year. And, you know, winter’s coming. It’s especially good there in winter.”
“I didn’t know they still had a flight line. I thought that base had been decommissioned after Hurricane Gatsby a few years back.”
“Not a full squadron, but the runway’s maintained. They rebuilt the air support division and run some logistics from there, the hurricane hunter planes, maintenance for the Coasties, and a mod squad, shit like that. Strategic Air Command got moved to Texas, to Sheppard.”
She studied her shoes. “Wow. Sounds greeeat.” It was literally the flip side of the McChord coin, on the diagonally opposite corner of the lower forty-eight states. A backwater outpost.
Then again, it would likely mean a safer posting, compared to what was going on in other parts of the world.
“Come on, kiddo,” he said. “You’re no idiot. You really want to hang out around here? Maybe get your ass sent back to Manila? Shit’s getting hot and real. You’ve got, what, two years before you’re due to re-up? Lay low. At least in Florida, you might be able to get some leave and go up to see your parents.”
No, going back to Manila was the last thing she wanted.
And she had wanted to go home to Boston eight weeks earlier, for her brother’s funeral, but her parents had forbidden it. Their insane work ethic made them order her not to apply for compassionate leave, to stay there and do her duty.
“He’s dead, he’s not going to care,” her father had said. “And we want you to do your job, that’s how you can support us. Make us proud.”
Pigheaded man.
She wondered if there was more to their objections than he’d let on. She’d heard about things starting to get bad in the larger cities in the Northeast. She wouldn’t put it past her father to order her to stay out west not so much because of a sense of duty and honor, but because he didn’t want her coming back to Boston. And now they were moving out to New Hampshire with her mother’s older brother and his family, to his farm out on the edge of a state forest.
Away from the cities.
All Kyong knew about her brother’s death was it’d been classified a heroin-beta overdose. Whatever the hell that was.
Her brother, Tuan, had only been thirty-six. He’d lived and worked in New York for over five years, returning home to Boston by train at least once a month to visit their parents. He’d made a decent living as a computer programmer. His poor eyesight had made a career in the military impossible for him, but he’d excelled at what he did. The only thing lacking with his job was a decent health plan, but other than his eyesight he’d been okay.
She thought.
The last thing her brother had been was a drug addict. She knew this to the center of her core. He was too responsible, too dedicated. She couldn’t exactly go fight to see the autopsy results, either. Not when her ass was still owned by the US military and stuck out here in Bum Fuck, Washington.
She also still hoped for a miracle, that her crew might have made it and were simply lost in military bureaucracy somewhere.
“Give me a few more days to make up my mind,” she finally said.
He spit out that toothpick, popped a fresh one in, and started chewing. “Just let me know, okay?” He grinned, but she’d discovered his interest in her was fatherly, not lecherous. “I’ve been shuffling your paperwork around here. Trying to keep anyone from paying too close of attention to your presence. Can’t do that forever, but I can stall for a while longer. Just let me know what you want to do.”
“Yeah, I will. Thanks.”
She stepped away from the Jeep as he started it and headed back toward the hangar where his office was. She could have requested a rack in one of the officer’s quarters there at the base.
She didn’t want to.
As stupid and irrational as she knew it was, she would rather bunk in her plane. She didn’t know where her crew was, if they were still even alive.
The least she could do was stay there, keeping their memories alive for a little longer, if nothing else.
It was that, or have to admit she’d failed them.
And failure was something that neither came easily nor naturally to her.
Chapter Four
Four-star General Joseph Arliss knew he couldn’t refuse an invitation to the White House. Especially when the president herself issued it, worded in such a way that it amounted to an order without actually being one.
He would always serve the Commander in Chief, even if he thought she was a weak-spined shill. Charlotte Kennedy wasn’t the country’s first woman president, but she certainly didn’t have the backbone or brains of her female predecessors.
In fact, Arliss knew if it hadn’t been for Reverend Silo’s very exuberant campaign on her behalf among his parishioners, there was no way she would have edged ahead of the more liberal candidate.
Her veep wasn’t much better. He was a little toady who’d be a horrible president if Kennedy was taken out, but he’d had photogenic good looks and a winning smile and a knack for charming people in ways that helped garner them more votes despite his lack of substance.
Arliss took a moment to load a little insurance onto his tablet before meeting his driver downstairs and taking the ride over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The stifling hot afternoon tried to press through the windows into the sedan’s cool interior. He felt sorry for the poor bastards who had to walk or take public transportation in this shitty city. It was either hot and humid, or cold and humid. There didn’t appear to be any other conditions, each as miserable as the other.
And of course, the bullshit was always running hip-deep through the streets, or so it felt. Especially when Congress was in session.
Then again, lately it was like as many congressmen as possible had suddenly headed for the hills, citing as their excuse a pressing need to take care of their constituents.
More bullshit.
Arliss went through the usual procedures, took a stick test, and sat waiting alone in an isolation room until he was finally ushered into a private anteroom.
The Secret Service agents, to his surprise, left him in there alone.
He wasn’t sure if that should put him on guard or not. So he chose to sit in one of the two chairs and wait, removing his lid and balancing it on one knee, looking as relaxed as possible for the benefit of whoever was almost certainly watching him on surveillance cameras.
When President Kennedy entered the room, alone, a few minutes later through a door on the far side of the room, he stood, nodding, lid in his hand. “Madame President.”
She walked over, a warm yet tight, nervous smile creasing her worn features. “Joe, thank you for coming.” When she extended her hand, he shifted his hat under his arm and shook with her more by habit than by any true desire to shake hands with her.
This was all so far out of protocol they were in uncharted realms. Although he had his suspicions as to why.
He wasted no time. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but why am I here?”
She indicated two chairs in front of a nonworking fireplace, which would be perfectly angled toward each other for a photo op if there were any reporters in the room. As she sat, she lost the smile. “I need SOTIF1 brought in.”
Aaaand there we are. He only half listened as she continued to stammer her reasons as to why. Instead, he logged into the tablet he’d brought with him and started to pull up what he wanted to show her.
“Joe, things are bad and getting worse every day. I don’t need to tell you that.”
“Mm-hmm,” he agreed.
“I have people breathing down my neck. World leaders. We have to get any of the scientists that team of yours has located and put them in a secure lab where they can work—are you
even listening to me?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I am.” He turned the tablet around and held it up so she could see the surveillance picture of Reverend Hannibal Silo getting out of his car and walking into the visitor entrance at the White House a couple of weeks earlier.
“Guess what, Charlotte,” he said. “I know what Silo’s got on you. But I have something you should see about him.”
She blanched. He flipped the tablet around, swiped to the video app, and hit play, then turned it again so she could watch.
Her face transformed from confusion to horror and revulsion as she watched the replay of what the Drunk Monkeys found in Silo’s LA facility before they burned it to the ground. When the video ended, he quickly switched back to the photo app and started swiping through pictures of the corpses, in their body bags but after they’d been unzipped, their faces clearly visible.
“You know what your asshole buddy’s been up to, Charlotte?” he rhetorically asked. “He was behind this facility in Los Angeles. His church was. I’ve traced the account he used to another shill setup. That one was accessed from a computer controlled by one Jerald Arbeid. He’s the reverend’s right-hand man.”
This time, when her gaze met his, he read the fear in her eyes.
Good.
“What are you saying?” she whispered.
He knew the layout of the White House as well as anyone did. He also knew there was surveillance equipment recording them, audio and visual. She might have ordered the audio turned off, and not to record the video, but there were Secret Service agents monitoring his every move, ready to give the word to agents behind both the doors to pounce if they thought he was a threat to the president.
Arliss sat back, forcing his body into a more relaxed pose. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Charlotte,” he said, a friendly smile on his face. “Your family can absorb whatever bullshit gets thrown at you over your daughter’s abortion, like it or not.”
She went positively white over that, her right hand fluttering to her throat.
“The problem is, your administration will not survive—and I’m talking worldwide, not just in reelections—when it comes out that you were trying to lean on me to bring in scientists so a whackjob preacher—who is in the process of picking what amounts to child brides to repopulate the planet with—can have access to them. A man who had not one, but two traitorous moles in my command, and who possibly has even more. A jackass who was behind the explosion of Kite the virus in LA.”
“He was?”
“Well, he tried to spread it elsewhere. And that’s not all. Kite the drug in New York? That absolutely was him.” Well, Arliss wasn’t exactly sure of that yet, but the evidence Bubba had uncovered so far pointed to it. It was an educated guess Arliss would put money on if pressed to do so.
“I will also guarantee you that your party will not survive this exposure if you try to fuck with me,” he continued. “By the time I’m through releasing all this data to the public, anyone who ever dreamed about voting for you will vote against you and your entire party just so they can give you all a metaphorical middle finger. You will have every congressman out there condemning you and flipping party affiliations so fast it will make your head spin. And you will be forever known for the rest of history as not only bringing down your own administration, but your political party as well, and also for making women leaders look horrible, meaning you won’t even have a snowball’s chance of garnering sympathy votes from other women.” He chuckled. “Of course, that’s all going to happen before the indictments start.”
He gave her a moment to let that sink in. “And, FYI, if anything happens to me? That information—and a lot more—will go out across the world within hours of my death or mysterious disappearance. It is in your best interests to insure my health and safety and job security, Charlotte. As in you pass the word to the Secret Service, and anyone else, that I’d better not so much as catch a cold or get a paper cut. Otherwise, you might as well throw yourself on the sword before my own body’s cold.”
His hardened gaze focused on her. “So, would you like rethink and rescind the suggestion you just made to me, Madame President?”
She stared at him, jaw trembling.
He smiled, which would look friendly and caring on the video feed. “Because, see, here’s the thing. If I order SOTIF1 and their precious cargo in, you will be under impeachment by the end of the week, if not sooner. Then indictment. You and Silo both. Hell, you’ll probably be arrested for crimes against humanity and put on trial at the Hague. There will be riots in the streets, people will quit trusting the government, not that they trust it much right now to begin with. The stock markets will tank, of course, meaning you’ll lose all backing you had from the banking industry and big business. They’ll scurry from you like rats from a sinking ship.
“And I will make sure all this evidence gets to the networks. You’ll wish it was only your daughter’s abortion everyone was talking about. Which, as you can imagine, won’t be an issue at all when the video footage and details of what really happened in Barstow goes out across the world. And I have it all. The video feeds, the audio of the orders given to the pilots, the written orders—everything.”
Charlotte Kennedy, leader of what was left of the free world, pressed herself back into her chair and stared at him, speechless.
“Now, are we copacetic, Charlotte?” he asked. “Because you might be president, but I’ve been in the military a lot longer and have far more connections than you do. Honey, I was a well-respected intelligence officer while you were still doing stupid drunken sorority hazing parties in your panties.”
“How did you know about my daughter?” she whispered, finally.
“Really? That’s your question? How did I know about your daughter’s abortion? Oh, let’s see. It’s called paper trails. Medical record privacy laws only keep the average person out. It’s my job to know things. And I’m very good at my job. It’s why I’ve gotten paid the big bucks over the years and survived quite a few administrations unscathed. If you honestly think I’m going to sit back and let some batcrap crazy preacher take over this country just because he was lucky enough to get good at extortion? Honey, think again. Because I serve the Constitution of the United States. That’s what I took my oath to uphold and defend and pledged my allegiance to. Not you, not Reverend Silo, not anyone else. Got it?”
Her nostrils flared.
“We good?” he asked.
She barely nodded.
He stood, smiling. “Good. Because it would be a shame for the American people to find out their president signed a secret executive order authorizing the slaughter of over a million citizens on their own soil by their own military. Just keep that in mind.”
He turned, put his lid back on sooner than he normally would, just to remind her who was really in charge there, and headed for the door.
“Joe,” she weakly called out from where she was still seated.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Is there a way to…” She didn’t finish.
He cocked his head. “Remove your other obstacle?”
She nodded. That clued him in that no, the audio wasn’t running.
He turned fully back to face her but didn’t approach. “I’m already working on that. Believe me, I have the country’s best interests at heart, Madame President. While I cannot promise I can fix things in that department, I can assure you that the public will honestly not give a single rat’s ass about your personal issues once we get a vaccine for Kite and begin distributing it to the American public. You will look like a hero to the whole world. You stick with me, I will get you reelected, no matter what that huckster tries. But you have to trust me and not fuck me over.”
She looked a little hopeful, but didn’t react. He pressed on. “Oh, and I suggest you align yourself with a different spiritual advisor from now on. Someone a little more low-key and a little less megalomaniacal. Maybe go with a Methodist. They’r
e usually pretty levelheaded and compassionate. And, in the future? Take a hint from the past mistakes of others. Get your family garbage out in the world ahead of time so it becomes a nonissue and actually humanizes you to people. By keeping it a secret like you have, you’ve dug yourself a pretty deep hole I’m going to have a helluva time getting you out of. Rest assured, I will get you out of it, but for chrissake, put down the goddamned shovel and stop digging.”
She nodded.
“I’ll check in with you in a couple of days and schedule a private meeting in the Oval Office to go over structural personnel changes we need to institute as soon as possible. Make sure your chief of staff and private assistant all know that my calls are now on the top of your priority list. I don’t get put on hold, and I don’t get brushed off. If I want to see you in the middle of the night, I get escorted right in without delay. Understand?”
She nodded again.
“Good. Don’t worry, we’ll get this handled, and you’ll come out looking like a hero. But you have to listen to me, do what I say, and ignore Silo, no matter what he threatens you with. Got it? I am now your new best friend. You will report any and all contact he has with you to me.”
Another nod. She looked terrified now, which satisfied him. It meant she’d taken his words to heart. Maybe now she’d stay hands-off and he’d be free to clean house the way he needed to.
He left, brushing past the two Secret Service agents waiting outside the door and unable to contain the pleased smirk on his face. That had gone better than he’d planned.
When he settled back in his seat in his car, his driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Where to, General?”
He grinned. “I feel like a good, fancy cup of coffee before we go back to the office. I want to splurge. Is there a coffee shop nearby? I’m buying.”
Chapter Five
Reverend Hannibal Silo, head and founder of the Church of the Rising Sunset, stood in his Albuquerque penthouse office and stared out over the Sandia Mountains to the east.
Flying Monkeys Page 3
