by D. J. Molles
Carl evaluated Angela, and he didn’t see a whole lot of give.
Not a lot of room to maneuver.
The pinched eyes, and the tight lips told him what he needed to know.
So he nodded, and became very formal. “My apologies, Madam President. I—”
Angela swiped a hand through the air. “Cut the bullshit, Carl. Let’s just get it all out of the way right now, okay? Every time you say ‘Madam President,’ it’s like you’re telling a joke. I’m gonna call you Carl, and you’re gonna call me Angela, got it?”
Carl didn’t respond.
Angela didn’t need him to.
“You may not like the fact that I’m in charge, and guess what? Neither do I. But that is the cards that we’ve been dealt. I am the one in charge. I am also the one that is keeping approximately a thousand pissed off civilians from dragging you to some half-assed witch-hunt court martial for what you’ve been doing. So we may not like each other much, Carl, but we need each other. That’s just the way this is. And moving forward, you’re going to tell me when things like this are happening, whether or not you wanna be bothered. You don’t get to play it like that. That’s not how this is going to work. It can’t work like that.”
She stopped short of making an implicit threat.
She felt that was the wisest course of action.
Carl had been straining at the leash of her command for a long time now. Enough was enough. After discovering what had happened to the Hunter-Killer squads the previous night—and the fact that she hadn’t been told what was happening—she was livid.
But threatening Carl was pointless.
Carl was a smart man. He knew the consequences. He knew how the world worked. If Angela wanted to be a strong leader, she needed to simply let nature take its course. Strong leaders didn’t have to make threats. It was simply understood.
Carl bent his head in fractional obedience. “Fine. Angela.”
Angela held his stare. Those ice-cold eyes of his. But she was not cowed.
She raised a hand and pointed to Doc Trent. “Go ahead, Doc.”
“Oh. Right.” Doc Trent straightened up. “Ahh…so, the primals.”
Carl dragged his gaze off of Angela, and directed it at the doctor.
Angela did the same, though she was already aware of what he was going to say. She’d heard it first from Sam, and then from Doc Trent himself, and then she’d dragged the doctor into her office, and sent for Carl.
“Based upon Sergeant Loudermouth’s eyewitness account, as well as certain behavioral traits that we’ve observed in the primals, and how they’ve been evolving, I’ve come to certain conclusions that I think bear pretty substantial implications for—”
“Tell him about the breeding grounds,” Angela interrupted.
Doc Trent blinked, flustered and trying to find his train of thought again. “Yes. Right. The breeding grounds.” He reached up and adjusted his glasses. Seemed to settle himself. Straightened his back. Squared his shoulders. “I’ve developed a theory that I believe to be consistent with the behavior that we’ve observed in the primals—in particular, this relatively new phenomenon of the primals gathering in large numbers. A behavior they haven’t exhibited until recently.”
Carl and Angela continued to stare at him.
Doc Trent’s eyes went back and forth between them, and it seemed like he was realizing for the first time who he was talking to, and that this was not a group of people that really cared about how he’d come to his conclusions—at least not yet. They just cared about the conclusions themselves.
He swallowed.
“They’re gathering in large numbers to breed. That’s what happened to Fayetteville and Fort Bragg. And that’s what we stumbled on in Augusta. They’re breeding grounds. All these different packs are coming together, in order to mate their strongest with their smartest. Sergeant Loudermouth observed female primals that he described as being near-human in appearance, that showed clear intelligence markers far beyond what we’ve seen so far—”
“Like what?” Carl demanded.
“Like speaking.”
“Speaking?”
Doc Trent nodded. “The female—the near-human one—she spoke to Sergeant Loudermouth.”
“What did she say?”
“She said ‘Go.’”
“That’s one word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That could’ve been a grunt.”
Doc Trent nodded. “It could’ve been. However, you were in the TOC last night, weren’t you?”
Carl gave Angela a sidelong glance. “Yes, I was.”
“And you heard the voice over the radio, didn’t you?”
Carl frowned. “How did you know that?”
Doc Trent waved it off. “Don’t worry how I knew it. That wasn’t one of your men. And it clearly said a word, didn’t it?”
“Well, I’m not completely sure—”
“It said ‘Go,’ just like the female that spoke to Loudermouth.” Doc Trent seemed oddly confident now. He nodded at them, as though it wasn’t a question of the accuracy of his interpretation, but merely a question of when these two laypeople were going to understand what he was trying to explain. “The strongest leaders of the strongest packs, mating with the most intelligent, and human-like females. And given their rapid gestation. Not only is the population going to continue to skyrocket if we don’t do anything about them, but they’re going to continue to get stronger and smarter. It’s a breeding program, basically. The primals are breeding themselves to have the best possible chance of survival. And also, I believe these smarter females are…controlling things somehow. Using rudimentary strategy. As your squads have witnessed, recently.”
Through the glass front of the office, Angela’s eyes strayed to a young man in uniform, hurrying towards the door.
He stopped, made brief eye contact with her, and then knocked gently on the door.
Angela waved him in, wondering what the hell this knew emergency was going to be.
The young soldier—wearing corporal’s stripes—pushed open the door and then stood there. “Madam President. Master Sergeant. First Sergeant Hamrick sent me. We have visitors currently being detained at the front gate.”
By the look in the corporal’s eyes, Angela could tell that there was something more to it than just “visitors.”
She waited.
The corporal looked at her. “They claim to be an envoy from Canada, ma’am.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
─▬▬▬─
THE LAST HOUR
You want to die, don’t you?
Lee squinted out across the bright, dry landscape to the settlement a mile from him.
The sun baked his back.
I want you to tell me that you don’t have a death wish.
A slow throbbing had begun at the base of his neck and was now reaching its fingers up to the back of his head.
You can’t save everyone.
But did you even try?
Worst of all, his heart would not stop beating so rapidly.
It seemed that it would begin to slow, and then some other thought would enter his brain, some new way of looking at the situation he now found himself in, and then his heart would start to rocket again.
You’d run until you couldn’t run anymore. And we never did find out where you were trying to get to. Hell, I don’t think you ever reached it.
Daniels had not been bluffing.
Cornerstone held Triprock.
What he hadn’t mentioned, was that Nuevas Fronteras was also there. Between the two forces, which mostly kept separate from each other, Lee had been taking a count. Many of the Cornerstone men wore identical uniforms, which made them harder to separately identify. But as it stood, there were no less than forty armed hostiles in Triprock.
The bulk of these were cartel foot soldiers. They meandered about in small packs of men, strutting about the compound like they owned it and always had. And Lee wondered if any of them reme
mbered him from last time. He wondered if they remembered him taking them down and making them run for their lives.
They certainly didn’t act like it.
The Cornerstone operatives were more reserved, but no less confident.
Except for a few roving patrols around the perimeter of the ranch, the majority of the mercenaries stuck to the main house. The house where Lee had captured Joaquin Leyva.
Lee’s brain felt split and scattered and muddied. His thoughts were divided against themselves, and he could not make them reconcile. He wanted desperately to do something, but no matter what angle he addressed this problem from, there didn’t seem to be a solution.
And Menendez had been right.
The second that Lee had seen the civilians, he’d known in his gut that he couldn’t walk away from this.
And Lee felt positive that Mr. Daniels had meant what he’d said—that he would kill everyone if Lee didn’t submit himself by sundown.
It had felt somewhat academic before he sat in the dirt and looked through a scope and saw the civilians. Saw Sally. And Eric. And Catalina.
Now it was very real.
They would all be dead by sundown.
Unless Lee did something.
To submit seemed wrong. But the fight looked impossible.
Even if Lee had the time to go back to the bunker and organize Menendez and Breckenridge, and form a plan of attack, they’d still be outnumbered two-to-one against a fixed objective.
And they wouldn’t even have the element of surprise.
Cornerstone and Nuevas Fronteras were waiting for something like that. They were ready for it.
Lee swore under his breath, and spoke to an imaginary Abe. “I shouldn’t’ve let you take that tanker back.”
What he didn’t say, what he barely admitted to himself, was that he needed Abe to tell him what to do. To place his vote in one column or the other, and thereby push Lee’s deadlocked brain into a decision.
Either go and give yourself up to save the civilians.
Or leave, and never look back.
But as long as he was wishing for people he could not have…
He closed his eyes against the sun.
I wish you hadn’t gone. I wish we’d never left Fort Bragg. I wish we’d found a way to stay together.
I wish, I wish, I wish.
He opened his eyes again.
Stark, true reality.
You could not wish for things. They simply were, or were not. The only things that happened were the things that you made happen, and you could only work with what you’d been given.
Menendez’s parting words to him continued to echo around in his skull.
You want to die, don’t you?
But Menendez had only been half-right on that count.
I thought I’d be dead by now.
Lee would accept death…if it meant something.
If his life bought the lives of a settlement’s worth of civilians, that would mean something. He had no problem laying his life down for others. He’d been doing that very thing, more or less, his entire adult life.
But he could not simply submit himself if there was another way.
He would welcome death, but he wouldn’t kneel to it.
If there was a way, an opportunity, to keep fighting, he would always take that path.
But it seemed that path was no longer available to him.
And when you had no paths available, when you were out of options, then all you could do was play for time. All you could do was wait. Be patient. And keep watch.
And that’s what Lee did.
He lay on that dusty ridge, shrouded by clumps of grasses, and shaded by a copse of shinnery oak. And he watched. And he waited. For anything. Any path other than the one laid out before him.
Time went by, sometimes creeping, and sometimes disappearing in a flash. At times, the minutes stretched endlessly. And at other times he would glance at the progress of the sun and feel another jolt of his heart as he realized how close it had fallen towards the horizon.
He gave himself every last minute that he could.
For the situation to change.
For another option to present itself.
For the cloud of thoughts to suddenly clear, and an obvious idea that he had overlooked to smack him in the face…
But none of that happened.
He watched the sky turn from bright, hazy blue, to deeper and deeper shades. And when the sun was close to touching the horizon, Lee knew that his time was up.
And then Lee made a decision.
If there wasn’t another way, then he would walk his own damn self into death’s gates. And he’d do it willingly, not kicking and screaming for one more day.
It was a small distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.
Whatever was going to come, would come.
Lee would go willingly.
Keeping his eyes open, until death itself closed them for good.
***
It was an odd sensation for Daniels to know that, somewhere out there, Lee Harden was watching him.
He stood in the dark of the main ranch house in Triprock.
He’d ordered everyone to remain lights-out. He knew damn well the type of people he was dealing with. If he gave even the slightest shred of opportunity to Lee or his cronies, they would take it and hand Daniels his ass.
So the inside of the ranch house remained dark, because Daniels didn’t want to backlight himself to any snipers in the distance.
He stood back from the windows a good ways. He looked out the front. There was the deck, and on the deck, Tex stood, with his arms tied to the rafters of the overhanging porch roof. He was still gagged, but they’d removed the blindfold so that anyone watching them from the low ridges in the distance would see that they did indeed have Captain Terrence Lehy captive, and that he was alive.
Daniels wondered if Lee was going to do the smart but cold-hearted thing and walk away.
Or if he was going to do the honorable but stupid thing, and show up, as instructed.
Or if he might do the ballsy but foolhardy thing, and try to attack them.
Who are you, Lee?
What kind of man are you?
He got his answer only seconds later.
A shout reached Daniels’s ears. It sounded distant—probably one of his sniper/spotter teams in the wreckage of the main barn, which provided the best field of view, but appeared to have been partially blown up.
Daniels straightened, and reached up, touching the earpiece of his comms in the self-conscious way that men do when they’re not accustomed to things sticking in their ears.
A second later, a calm voice spoke on the radio. “We have contact. One male. East, southeast, about a mile out. Standby for confirmation on ID.”
Daniels drummed his fingers on the sides of his pants. He wore armor, and a sidearm. He thought about the rifle that he’d chosen not to carry, and wondered for the hundredth time if this was the beginning of a counter-trap set by Lee Harden.
It would be interesting to see how this played out.
The front door of the ranch house opened and Griesi stepped in. “Sir, you want the birds to come in now?”
Daniels flinched with irritation. “No, I don’t want the goddamned birds right now. If I wanted the birds I would have told you to bring them in. Keep them staged in the distance. Harden could have men with RPGs waiting to fire on them if they show up. Let’s wait and see.”
Griesi dipped his head, then slipped back through the door.
“Overwatch to Mr. Daniels,” the radio murmured in Daniels’s ear. “We have a positive ID. It’s definitely Lee Harden. He’s approaching the compound. He appears to be unarmed.”
Daniels tried to resist micromanaging his men—they were all tier one operators. But his anxiety was so strong right now, at the very edge of success, that he couldn’t help himself. “Roger that. Make sure everyone’s watching their lanes. Keep three-sixty coverage. Has anybody
spotted anything—anything at all—in any other direction?”
A slow, steady litany of responses filtered back through his earpiece. And was Daniels mistaken or did they sound a tad longsuffering, like they were humoring a worried mother?
Well, fuck all those cock-swinging commandos.
Someone had to do the worrying around here.
The last of the responses came in.
No one had seen anything, in any other direction.
Could it really be? Was Lee Harden actually turning himself in?
Daniels rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. Shook his head.
Nope. He wouldn’t relax. Not until he had Lee Harden hogtied and in the air on a fast-moving helo. Actually, he wouldn’t really relax until he had Lee back in Greeley, in a small, dark cell that was impossible to escape from.
Maybe he wouldn’t even relax then.
Maybe he wouldn’t really relax until he watched Lee’s body slump over after a firing squad had done their work and executed the most notorious traitor the country had known in the last century.
But before any of that could happen, before he could get Lee Harden to face justice in Greeley, he had one more stop to make.
He had one more loose end to tie up before this package was truly gift-wrapped.
***
Tex stared out from the porch of the main ranch house, and he groaned low in his belly, and thought, Don’t do it, you stupid sonofabitch! Don’t give up!
Dead ahead of him, there was open space, interrupted only by low cattle fencing. From his perspective on the raised porch, Tex had a clear view all the way out to where the lone figure strode toward Triprock.
To Tex’s left stood the other ranch houses. To his right, the big barn, from which the sniper team had first spotted Lee coming towards them.
Was it Lee?
Tex couldn’t tell. But the men around him seemed fairly sure of it.
This has to be part of a plan, Tex told himself. He’s got something up his sleeve. He always does.
But the closer that the figure in the distance drew, the more Tex began to fear that there wasn’t anything else.
