I Am the Mission

by Allen Zadoff

  “This is great!” I say.

  “She’s a beast,” Father says. “This is a domestic variation, but you should see the real thing in combat.”

  “I’d like to,” I say. A blur of speed, a flash of dark blue as a lake goes by, all of it accompanied by the whoop of rotors churning above us.

  I can’t help but smile. How many sixteen-year-olds get to fly a helicopter?

  A small mountain looms several miles ahead, high enough that we won’t clear it. I bank east, anticipating it with plenty of time to spare.

  “You didn’t think you could handle her, did you?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “But you can,” Father says. “You can do anything. You just have to remember your lessons.”

  Father is being kind, guiding and teaching me. This is how it was when I came to The Program. I lived and trained for two years at the house. I passed from normal life into this new life, a life most people only experience for a few hours when they’re watching a great movie.

  “I brought you up here so we could talk man-to-man,” Father says.

  I glance over to find him looking at me. I don’t like what I see. I grip the cyclic too hard, and the helicopter tilts left.

  Father notes it with an eyebrow raise.

  He reaches across my seat, puts his hand on top of mine, and adjusts the flight path. His touch surprises me, the sudden intimacy of his hand on mine in this small space. But his adjustment does the trick. The helicopter stabilizes.

  “Are you off the reservation?” Father says, his voice serious.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You went away.”

  “I took a break,” I say.

  The mountain has somehow returned to the center of my windscreen in the last adjustment. I bleed off power and angle the rotors to take us out of its path. But before I can complete the maneuver, Father reaches over and puts his hand on top of mine, clamping down and preventing a change of direction.

  That puts the mountain in front of us on a collision course.

  “I said a man-to-man talk. That means we tell each other the truth,” Father says.

  The test with the soldiers was not enough. I see now that there is another test.

  There’s always another test.

  Father is challenging me directly.

  Do not fight power with power. Flow and redirect it.

  That’s a principle of many martial arts, and it’s a lesson I have been taught over and over again by Mother.

  So I don’t argue with Father. Instead I tell him the truth. As much of it as I can.

  “I went away because I needed time to think,” I say.

  “We give you time between assignments.”

  “I needed my own time. In my own way.”

  Father puts more pressure on my hand. The craft angles forward and down, the mountain threatening before us.

  “We’re in danger,” I say.

  “Exactly. It’s a crisis of confidence,” Father says. “You in us. And us in you.”

  The mountain side comes into focus. What looked like a beautiful mosaic of green and brown from a distance becomes jagged rock peaks and sharply angled trees.

  “After the mission I was waiting in the hotel as instructed,” I say. “But the thinking started.”

  I hesitate, not knowing how much I can risk telling him.

  “The thinking?” Father says. “What is that?”

  I glance through the windscreen. Forty-five seconds until impact.

  “Sometimes it gets difficult for me between missions,” I say. “I start thinking about the past and the things I’ve done. I came here because I needed to clear my head.”

  “You weren’t hiding from us?”

  “No.”

  Collision sirens blare. Lights flash red across my instrument panel.

  “What can we do to help you?” Father says.

  “Get me back to work,” I say.

  Father watches me carefully, his hand never moving from the cyclic.

  Fifteen seconds before impact. My eyes scan the mountain side ahead. The density of the trees, the lack of a landing zone.

  “I need to know where your loyalties lie,” Father says. “Are you still with us?”

  Why is he asking me these questions?

  “Who else would I be loyal to?” I say.

  I note the square set of Father’s jaw as he searches my face for the truth.

  Then, suddenly, he removes his hand from the controls.

  But it’s too late.

  “Prepare for impact,” I say, bracing my back against the seat to protect my spine.

  “Listen and do exactly what I tell you,” Father says. “Pull the cyclic aft, reduce the collective, and give it hard right pedal.”

  I do it. I don’t ask questions.

  G-force pushes me forward as the helicopter rapidly decelerates.

  “Now gain altitude. Faster.”

  We rise and bank tightly, wind whipping by outside, the mountain coming up fast—

  And then as if by magic, the aircraft shudders and lightens, the angle increasing as we clear the mountain by no more than ten feet. I wait for the crunch of metal on stone, for the skids to catch on a tree branch and yank us down, for any one of a dozen things that could propel us into a fiery impact.

  But they don’t come.

  We are clear. We are safe.

  “What’s happening here?” I say. “The raid at camp, this flight, all of your questions—this is not about me going away for a few days.”

  Father pauses, taking time to choose his words carefully.

  “Someone went missing,” he says.

  “Someone?”

  “A soldier. Like you.”

  “Was it Mike?”

  Mike is the only Program soldier I know other than me.

  “It’s not Mike,” Father says. “Something like this would never happen to Mike.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Someone else.”

  There are others.

  That’s what Father’s telling me without saying it directly. There are other operatives in The Program besides Mike and me. I thought there might be, but I’ve never known for sure.

  “So you lost a man?” I say.

  “A boy,” Father says. “He was just a boy. He disappeared a few weeks ago, then you cut off communication. You can understand why we needed to be cautious in finding you.”

  This explains Father’s behavior, his testing me.

  “The soldier,” I say. “What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead,” Father says.

  Father’s voice is matter-of-fact, but his face is tense. When I glance at him, and he’s looking forward through the windscreen, refusing to make eye contact with me.

  “It’s happened before?” I ask.

  “Never.”

  I search his face for any sign of an emotional response to losing one of his soldiers, but I don’t detect any.

  “You’re wondering what I’m feeling,” Father says.

  “I am.”

  “My feelings are separate from the assignment. I don’t bring them to work.”

  Now it’s my turn to avoid Father’s look. There is an implied criticism here. I had feelings about my last mission, and it affected my behavior afterward. That was unprofessional of me.

  “We are at war,” Father says. “There are casualties. I mourn privately, then I move on.”

  I think of the girl from my last mission whose face I still see.

  She had a name.

  Samara.

  Father is right. It’s time for me to move on.

  “Tell me more about the soldier,” I say.

  “He was on a critical assignment when communication was severed,” Father says.

  “Do you know for sure he’s dead?”

  “We haven’t recovered a body. But he was inside for three months without a problem, and then he dropped off the map. It’s been over a month since we’ve heard
from him. There’s no other reason he could disappear for that length of time.”

  I try to think of a scenario where I would not be able to communicate on a mission. Not just for a few hours, but for weeks in a row.

  “Maybe he’s imprisoned?” I say.

  Father shakes his head. “We have protocols for that.”

  Father is referring to the prime objectives that govern my operations.

  Protect The Program.

  Survive.

  The issue is that objective one can negate objective two, because in the highly unlikely scenario where I am imprisoned and my identity is revealed, I must protect The Program first and foremost. If it is not possible to both survive and protect The Program, the organization comes first.

  I would have to sacrifice myself.

  I’ve never been put in that position, but I believe I have the courage to do it if the time ever comes.

  “Do you understand?” Father says.

  I nod. “There’s no way he could be alive.”

  “That’s right,” Father says.

  Whether the soldier was revealed, caught, or captured, he must be dead now.

  I think about what he might have faced on assignment, a situation grave enough to overcome both his training and the resources of The Program. I try to imagine what that might have been, but I cannot.

  “I’m sorry your soldier was killed,” I say, “but I don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

  “We lost the mission,” Father says.

  A lost mission. That’s Program parlance for a failed operation. It’s an expression I’ve never had to use before, one I’ve never even heard spoken out loud.

  “You’re saying the soldier was killed before he completed his assignment?”

  “Yes,” Father says. “And we need you to go in and finish the job.”

  FATHER INSTRUCTS ME TO HEAD DUE EAST IN THE HELICOPTER.

  We fly for a while, long enough that we eventually cross the Vermont–New Hampshire border and continue on a nearly straight line east.

  “Have you heard the name Eugene Moore?” Father asks.

  Something about the name disturbs me. I must have come across it at some point in the past. My memory works like that, memorizing salient facts and sorting them into rough categories so that I can access them later if need be.

  Eugene Moore equals violence/danger. That’s what comes up.

  “Eugene Moore runs a military camp for teens in rural New Hampshire,” Father says.

  That’s when I remember where I’ve heard the name. “It’s not a typical military camp,” I say. “It’s like a training facility for the children of right-wingers.”

  “Correct,” Father says. “It’s called Camp Liberty, and he refers to it as training for the ‘other’ army, the army of the people. Say your politics run to the far right—so far right you don’t trust the government—but you want your kid to know how to shoot a gun and run around in the woods. You don’t send him to a standard military academy. You send him to Eugene Moore.”

  Father points, suggesting a course correction to the south.

  “Wasn’t Moore in the army himself?” I ask.

  “He rose to lieutenant colonel before he was court-martialed for disobeying orders.”

  “Something political, right?”

  “He was holding political rallies in uniform during active duty. They began court-martial proceedings, but he sued and ended up with an administrative discharge. It’s a big point of pride for him. He considers himself a conscientious objector. You take his radical political beliefs, add them to a pile of money from wealthy supporters along with serious tech know-how, and you have a dangerous formula.”

  “This camp. Where is it?”

  “It’s set in a valley in the mountains north of Manchester, New Hampshire. This is no cabin in the woods. It’s a sophisticated, high-tech operation, nearly impenetrable by ground or air.”

  “You said the camp is made up of kids.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why does The Program care if kids want to play soldier in the woods?”

  Father pauses. “That’s an unusual question.”

  “It’s an unusual situation.”

  Normally I don’t ask the reason behind a mission. It’s unnecessary, even distracting. My job involves target acquisition, pure and simple. I concern myself with who, not why.

  But this time things are different.

  I say, “I’m being brought in to complete a lost mission, and that’s never happened before. I need as much information as I can get.”

  “I don’t disagree with you,” Father says. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here in person.”

  I usually receive my briefings remotely via social media, the assignment dossiers hidden in plain sight behind ever-changing Facebook profiles.

  “I’m going to answer your question,” Father says. “I just don’t want there to be any misunderstandings in the future. This is a one-time deal.”

  “I understand,” I say.

  Father nods. “We care about Camp Liberty because our assets have picked up indications of troubling activity online, emanating from the camp. They are probing infrastructure in the Northeast. Electrical plants, Department of Transportation computers, and the like. Individually, they’ve been mostly benign computer breeches, but taken as a whole, the portrait is troubling. Our algorithms suggest there’s something big coming, and we can’t wait for it to happen. We have to act now.”

  “When are you sending me in?”

  Father studies my face, trying to determine something. After a moment he says:

  “We’ve got to take care of a few things with you first.”

  Father points out the window to the right.

  “That’s Manchester up ahead,” Father says. “We’re going to that set of buildings just outside of town.”

  He indicates a sprawling structure set off from the highway, one roof marked with a large white cross with an H painted in the center.

  “A hospital?” I say.

  “That’s right. When’s the last time you had a physical?”

  Father knows when it was. Two years ago, when Mike stuck a knife in my chest during my final exam.

  I don’t bring that up. Instead I say, “It’s been a long time.”

  “We need you at full operating capacity before your mission.”

  On the rooftop, a man in an orange jumpsuit waves his arms at me.

  I say, “We’re not a hospital chopper. We’ll attract attention.”

  “We initiated a CDC emergency protocol. The hospital has prepped and cleared an entire floor for us. They won’t know who we really are.”

  The Program is invisible in the world. Like me, it can appear to be whatever it wants to be, but I have not seen it use resources to this degree—Homeland Security troops to find me, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regulations to take over hospital facilities. The fact that they’re using so many resources indicates how important this is to them.

  “We’ll get you looked at, then I’ll finish your briefing,” Father says.

  I note that Father didn’t answer my question about when I will go after Moore, but now is not the time to probe further.

  The man in orange is signaling using red flashlights to guide me in to the rooftop. The way he waves his arms, it almost looks like he’s warning me to stay away.

  FATHER STAYS BEHIND WHILE THE MAN LEADS ME DOWN A STAIRWAY INTO THE HOSPITAL.

  The floor is completely deserted, gurneys at the ready, machinery hooked up but unused. The man stops in front of an empty doorway, and without a word, he walks away.

  As I reach for the door, it opens.

  A beautiful young woman in a white lab coat is looking at me. She has long dark hair and intense eyes.

  “I’m Dr. Acosta. Father and Mother assigned me to take care of you today.”

  I examine her face, note the subtle hint of makeup around her eyes.

  “Lucky me,
” I say.

  “You haven’t heard what I’m going to do to you yet.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “You don’t look like a guy who worries much,” she says.

  “I’m more sensitive than I look.”

  “Maybe we should send you to the shrink instead of me.”

  “You’re not the shrink?”

  “I deal with the body only,” she says.

  “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

  I note the smile at her lips. It’s quickly wiped away and replaced with a physician’s countenance.

  “Let’s get started,” she says. “Take off your shirt.”

  She begins a lengthy physical exam followed by a stress test, lung and heart capacity measurements, ECG and EKG, and a full blood work-up. Dr. Acosta guides me through the process quickly and professionally with a minimum of conversation. She’s young, but she’s obviously very good at what she does.

  With the preliminaries completed, she guides me down the hall to an imaging laboratory. In the center of the room sits a high-tech diagnostic machine. It appears to be something like a CT scanner, but I don’t recognize some of the technology employed there.

  “What am I looking at?” I ask.

  “It’s a state-of-the art sixty-four-slice SabreLight PET/CT scanner with advanced assessment protocols. Any more questions?”

  “Will you hold my hand during the scan?”

  “No, but I’ll give you a lollipop after,” she says.

  “Deal.”

  “Okay, then. Lie back and enjoy the ride.”

  I lie down on the table. Dr. Acosta adjusts a few dials on the side of the device, makes sure I’m positioned correctly, then steps into the safety of an adjoining room, where she can watch me through the glass. It’s dark in her room, and I can just make out her outline hunched over a control panel.

  “Are you ready?” she says, her voice coming through a speaker on the side of the machine.

  I give her the thumbs-up.

  The machine starts to whir and move over me.

  I glance toward Dr. Acosta behind the glass. I notice a taller figure has joined her now. I recognize the stiffness to his posture.

  It’s Father.

  “Take a deep breath and relax,” Dr. Acosta says over the speaker. “Don’t move for a little bit.”