The Eighth Day

by Tom Avitabile

  The sentry’s eyes took in the two delivery jerks in their little uniforms, then gave a second look to Fuentes. “Hold on.” The guard went to the telephone in the shack.

  Fuentes talked under his breath without facing Hiccock, “I know that guy, Sir.”

  Hiccock quickly muted his surprised expression. “From where?”

  “Ranger School. He’s a mean motherfucker, Sir.”

  “Do you think he recognized you?”

  “I think he thinks I look familiar, but I’ve had my ’stache since I was sixteen, Sir.”

  “Do we bolt or play this out?”

  “I really don’t think he made me, but be ready to outrun that Mac-10 he’s got under his jacket.”

  Hiccock was stunned. He hadn’t noticed anything under the guard’s jacket.

  Fuentes continued, “I feel all naked and shit, Sir. He’s got an air-cooled, semiautomatic, recoilless machine pistol and all we can do is cream the fuck with pizza pies.”

  The guard returned. “Pull over there by the yellow lines. Someone will be up in a moment.”

  They pulled away. “Keep an eye on him,” Hiccock needlessly instructed.

  “Yes, Sir.” Fuentes had already angled the rearview mirror to afford himself a better look at his former classmate. A metal door on the side of the main entrance opened and three men, one wheeling a dolly, emerged. Hiccock and Fuentes got out of the Gremlin. Fuentes opened the hatchback and they, with the assistance of the three guards, started stacking pizza boxes on the dolly.

  Hiccock took a chance. “How many people work here?”

  The men stopped loading. The one who seemed like the leader moved into his face. “Why do you want to know?”

  Hiccock was caught by surprise. The three men tightened their ranks as they approached the two delivery “boys.”

  “I was wondering what the odds were, that out of how many people, there would be one guy who orders anchovies with pineapple … errrgh.” Hiccock sold the sourpuss expression like a trained actor.

  The leader relaxed his grimace. “That’s Malo. You don’t want to be around when he farts.”

  The other two chuckled and Hiccock and Fuentes followed suit.

  Hiccock returned to the car and reached in through the driver’s side window for the receipt stuck in the visor. “Here ya go. That’ll be $384, and the tip’s included.”

  The leader looked puzzled. “Don’t we run a tab or something?”

  Hiccock feigned checking the bill again. “No, no one mentioned that when they called it in. And it ain’t marked down here. See normally it would say ‘on account’ but …”

  “Enough! I’m just picking this stuff up. I ain’t got 400 on me.”

  “Well, who’s gonna pay for dinner, man?” Hiccock just stared. Suddenly he was in charge. He saw that the leader hated being in this situation. This guy probably wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet between Hiccock’s eyes if he made a run for the door, but present him with a socially uncomfortable scenario and the guy was reduced to a fumphering malcontent.

  “Ah, shit. Hold on. I don’t need this sh …” The leader pulled out a radio and keyed it twice. “Come back, Gold.”

  “Go blue,” the radio crackled.

  “Pizza guy says we owe him for the delivery.”

  “We ran a tab, I thought?”

  The leader raised his eyebrows to Hiccock as if to say, see, I told you we had a tab. Hiccock played it out. “Listen, maybe you do have a tab. And with Joe being out and all, maybe this got screwed up. Tell ya what, maybe someone can put this on their credit card so my ass is covered, and tomorrow, if Joe says there’s a tab, we tear it up.”

  The leader wasn’t going to make this decision, so he keyed the radio. “Gold, I’m going to bring this guy down to non-sec. Have someone meet us there to work this out.”

  “Roger.”

  Hiccock followed the leader into the building as the two guards with the dolly took up the rear.

  Fuentes started to follow but the leader stopped him, “Hold on! How many guys does it take to get a credit card? Wait here.”

  “I’m in training man. I’m supposed to go where he goes and follow him so I can learn. C’mon, Homes. I really need this job, bro.”

  The guard stared, assessed, and then acquiesced. Fuentes followed.

  The smell of the pizza quickly filled the small elevator as, contrary to Hiccock’s expectation, it descended. Hiccock and Fuentes emerged with the leader. They passed the back of two sliding glass doors with “aerA eruceS noN” stenciled across them. Hiccock reversed the letters in his mind. A woman in her late fifties came out of a sealed doorway that opened with a rush of air. The sound was reminiscent of those Hiccock heard in laboratories equipped with “clean rooms,” places where airborne contaminants were kept to one part in 100 million.

  The woman produced a credit card and offered it to Hiccock. He blankly glanced at Fuentes then back at her. She jutted it toward him one more time, but he didn’t know what to do with the card. She prompted him again by stretching the card out further.

  Fuentes jumped in and pulled a blank credit card form from his pocket, placed it over the card and, taking a pencil from the desk, rubbed it flat over the chemically treated, pressure sensitive paper, leaving an impression. “Cool. Thank you, Ma’am.” Fuentes handed it to her to sign, as Hiccock stood silently impressed that he had the presence of mind to bring the form. He must have done deliveries at one time.

  They were leaving when the leader suddenly called out, “Hold it. Wait a minute.”

  The two hesitated. Hiccock’s nerves tightened as he slowly pivoted, expecting to be looking down the barrel of a machine gun.

  “Did you say your tip was included?”

  Relieved, Hiccock smiled at Fuentes.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Rock-Knife-Scissors

  TWO FLOORS BELOW, a guard hung up a wall phone and announced, “Pizza time!”

  “Yeah, big deal,” Edmonds said.

  “Gee, what a sourpuss. Just ’cause you can’t have any.”

  “Go get your slice, ya pain in the ass.” As the guard headed off, Edmonds opened his shirt pocket and pulled out a bottle of diet pills. He popped one and took a drink from the water fountain. He hated the way these things made him feel, but he was carrying an extra sixteen pounds and his lieutenant was giving him shit over it. The one-bar-wonder even threatened to rotate him out if he didn’t shape up. The pills jazzed his system and took away the hunger, which helped him not eat as much. Especially when there were seductions like pizza around. Returning to his post, Edmonds’s metabolic rate started to climb, along with some of the negative side effects of Dihexemfemeral.

  ∞§∞

  Back at the pizza shop, Hiccock and Fuentes briefed the major while they changed back into their normal attire.

  “The facility is underground,” Hiccock said. “There is a doorway leading from the nonsecure area. It utilizes an airlock security system. Someone doesn’t want dust or contaminants past that point.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Want to add anything, Fuentes?”

  “Like the gentleman said, airlock … oh and a few other things. They’re using sat com radios, which means they have field operational mobility. One of the guards was with me in Ft. Benning Ranger School and, as I remember, a real predator. He didn’t make me, though, probably ’cause of my former mustache. The guardhouse has a false top, probably holding a grenade launcher. There appear to be vents along the way to the building, possibly an underground entrance. They were using Ranger speak. Definitely jumpers. Probably Delta out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or a Special Forces 10 group out of Fort Carson. We have two solid IDs, one named Malo and the other a woman whose credit card this is.” He produced the credit card receipt, now in a plastic bag in which knives, forks, and napkins came individually wrapped. He attempted to read it through the plastic. “Ronson.”

  Hiccock was stunn
ed by his own lack of military observational ability. “Well, yeah, the airlock and all that …”

  ∞§∞

  The brown recluse spider was indigenous to the American southwest. Like most spiders it liked dark tight spaces, all the better to avoid becoming bird food. A group of MPs sat under a tree awaiting orders. As they shot the breeze, one didn’t notice as the spider crawled up his pant leg. Although venomous, any arachnologist would tell you that the little eight-legged insect was rarely deadly to humans. Usually.

  ∞§∞

  “We’ll run those names and see if something connects,” the major said. “Anything on the commando you recognized?”

  Fuentes pulled out another plastic bag with the receipt in it. “No, but they all touched this register receipt, so we might get a clean print and make him that way.” Hiccock, realizing all the details he had missed, added, as a weak offering, “He had a Mac-10 under his coat.”

  Hiccock’s momentary respite from embarrassment was short-circuited by Private First Class Fuentes’s description: “A short stock, snub-barreled spray job, light clip. And I have been racking my brain since I saw him, but I can’t remember his name, just that he was DHG in our SFQC.

  That was Hiccock’s last straw, “He was what?”

  “Distinguished Honor Grad Special Forces Qualifications Course.”

  ∞§∞

  Press Secretary Naomi Spence was on her computer in the White House, conducting a Nexis/Lexis search for statutory regulations on agricultural price supports for wheat and grain. A press conference loomed in twenty minutes and she was researching a quote from the Secretary of Agriculture during the dust-bowl era. As the screen flickered, she scanned for any reference of price supports, not noticing her moments of total inactivity—seconds where she was frozen still.

  ∞§∞

  He had forgotten and deeply missed the pungent, sweet exhilaration of that first glorious sip of wine. Both as a constitutional issue befitting his status as a commanding officer as well as an accommodation to the religious Imans he suffered, wine became off-limits, but of course now that didn’t matter.

  What did matter? What about my life did matter? the man who sat waiting in the low back chair asked himself. The stars he wore on his uniform amounted to something, but the camel’s ass who ran the country childishly made sure he had more stars on his epaulets, whenever he wasn’t wearing a dress, the degenerate. Still his love for country amounted to something of which to be proud. As he sat waiting, sipping, and reflecting on his life, General Nandessera allowed a smile to cross his lips. Loose ends. He had cleaned up all the loose ends… all but two. Captain Falad, that canon soldier, fled realizing what was going to happen as soon as he heard the disastrous reports from the American media; that Samovar failed miserably to attain retribution for his country. Falad’s assistant, himself a loose end, reluctantly offered up the name and address of Falad’s brother-in-law, before he was allowed to die. The fugitive Captain’s relation was a businessman in America who would surely take in his wife’s brother and offer him shelter and a new identity. The General rolled his thumb over the piece of paper upon which was scrawled the American’s name and the address of his place of business.

  Maybe it was the gravity of the day, or simply the boredom of waiting, but for some reason Nandessera struck a wooden match, setting one end of the paper aflame and lit the tip of a contraband Cuban cigar. It was another “devilish” luxury, which he had harbored for a day like today. He placed the burning sheet in the bowl beside him as the last traces of “Mohammed Ghib - McDonalds Restaurant - Pasadena California” turned to ash.

  “Live a long life, Falad” was all he said out loud. And then he waited. And waited.

  He was in the middle of remembering a childhood romp, one which still set the old man’s heart aflutter to this day. Over the sound of the door to his darkened room opening, he still heard the sounds of Sareena, her squeals of laughter as he chased her. He longingly reached out for her in his mind, seeing her hair dangerously and shamelessly falling out of the young girl’s burka. He ignored the sound of the honed metal as it left the sheath. He squeezed his eyes tighter, to see her face as he touched her shoulder and she turned, in his mind, one last time, her big green eyes like saucers electrifying his soul. The whipping sound of the blade slicing through the air was muffled by her delightful taunt.

  The man wielding the sword was the best befitting the General’s rank. So clean was the cut, that Nandessra’s head slid right off and tumbled into his lap, looking up, with the smile of youth on the face of death.

  The last of the two loose ends had now been cut.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Time & Again

  Gleason Barr, petty officer in charge of the watch, was just finishing his 12-noon readings. The cesium regulated, chronographic intervalometer was outputting its consistent stream of 33.44 Ghz. The temperature and humidity were within a hundredth of a degree of nominal parameters. He duly noted these readings in his Naval Observatory logbook and went on to his other appointed hourly checkpoints.

  The atomic clock was Father Time itself. It was officially called the Master Clock and was the standard for dividing the rotation of the Earth into segments. Each segment, by international agreement, corresponding to one second of arc. That meant of the 360 degrees of Earth, each degree was roughly 60 miles across at the equator, each mile was called a minute, and one sixtieth of that distance became a second or, roughly, 100 feet. Any spot on the Earth could be located to within 100 feet by merely expressing it as so many degrees, so many minutes, and a few seconds of arc.

  The top of the Empire State Building in New York, for example, was 39 degrees, 15 minutes 22 seconds latitude, 44 degrees 17 minutes, and one second longitude. Of course, hardly anybody thought about it that way anymore, since the adoption of GPS, the global positioning system. It was based on the principle of a computerized receiver picking up a signal from satellites in stationary orbit and calculating down to the second (or millisecond in the case of military use) the position of the receiver. Because the whole concept was related to time, the cesium clock at the Naval Observatory became the signal heartbeat of the entire global positioning system around the world. If it were to vary by running slow or fast, airliners would land on freeways instead of airports. Rental car drivers, following their dashboard monitor, would be told to make left turns onto somebody’s front lawn instead of the street 100 feet further down the street. A cruise missile could possibly slam into a mountain that its terrain mapping software had detected, but its internal computer guidance believed was a mile to the left. That’s why Barr, who worked for the Navy, checked it every hour, even though the radioactive half-life of cesium was 500,000 years and computers on redundant power supplies controlled the temperature. In short, the entire world trusted, without question, that the Atomic Clock kept ticking to an accuracy of within one billionth of a second per millennium.

  As he left the area, due to a cross coding in the microchip, which processed the temperature information, a subtle shift in the temperature occurred. Like a thermostat in a house, it started to raise the ambient heat of the cesium containment crucible that accelerated the rate at which the cesium gave off electrons. The atomic collector of the electrons, which, when it counted a certain amount, declared that another millionth of a second had just passed for mankind, started reporting the event ever so much earlier.

  ∞§∞

  Up the East Coast, twelve degrees and 18 minutes of arc away, the four-striped shoulder boards of an American Airlines captain’s uniform were reflecting in the black screen of the cockpit computer. The 25-year veteran of airline flight was sitting in the left-hand seat of his 767-200ER as it was being readied for takeoff. After he made sure the Avionics ground crew had addressed the problem with an indicator on the Non-Directional Beacon, he had a moment to attend to an item from his personal checklist. From his iPad he was able to check his reservation for dinner in Milan that evening with Maria DeNardo,
the sexy assistant to Milan’s Minister of Commerce. The pilot had a twenty-seven hour layover. Appropriately named, he mused. The man didn’t notice as the screen he was reading from delivered more information than he was aware of.

  ∞§∞

  At the same time, Press Secretary Spence was on her computer in the White House, conducting a Nexus Lexus search for statutory regulations on agricultural price supports for wheat and grain. A press conference loomed in 20 minutes and she was researching a quote from the Secretary of Agriculture during the dust bowl era. As the screen flickered, she scanned for any reference of price supports, not noticing her moments of total inactivity--seconds where she was frozen, still.

  ∞§∞

  The captain’s 767, fully loaded with 181 passengers and 160,000 pounds of fuel, accelerated through 190 m.p.h. to V2, then rotated and lifted off runway two-two-right from JFK. At 300 feet, the standard hard right turn was executed to avoid the inbound traffic lanes in the New York Center area of control. The captain then relinquished his flying duties by flipping on the autopilot. The preprogrammed course would bring the plane up over the top of Manhattan out to the Atlantic. It would then traverse the North Atlantic Track. Five hours later it would cross the Scottish coast at Lockerbie, then into the European system of air lanes to his wheels-down point in Milan. As the plane banked hard over the Inwood Park section of Manhattan Island the sun rotated to dead ahead. Normally, transatlantic flights tracked along Long Island’s southern shore out to the Atlantic routes. On this day when the prevailing winds prevented planes taking off in that easterly direction, the flights were routed in a big turn over New York City. The flight plans for those airliners that flew over city took them down the Hudson River.