by Ian Douglas
She thought about what her father had always said, about the Marine Corps being like a family. She wondered what other members of that family would do when they found out about the takeover at Cydonia. Uncle Walt cared because he knew her dad, but what would his superiors think…and feel? Would they care…or was what happened to a few Marines a hundred million miles away not worth the risk of going to war?
She saw little of the actual landing—a sudden blur of city lights as the suborbital swept in over the coastline somewhere near San Jose, followed by a rapid descent and a final burst of power from the craft’s traditional ramjets as it maneuvered into the LAX landing pattern. By the time the suborbital touched down with a bump and a squeal she had worked herself into a real state. Kaitlin knew just how precarious the survival of the Marine Corps was right now. Damn it, nobody cared. Her father’s message would probably be ignored…or dismissed as a fake. It was a peculiarly helpless feeling, knowing that Dad was in trouble on another planet, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to help him.
As the aircraft came to a halt at the terminal, a warning sounded and display screens flashed in several languages, instructing all passengers to stay in their seats.
“Miss Garroway?”
She looked up at the flight attendant who’d just materialized by her seat. “Uh, yeah?”
He smiled politely. “Would you get your things and follow me, please?”
What? As she followed the attendant out the main door of the craft and into the transport tunnel, she heard rustlings behind her as the other passengers were at last allowed to move. Since when did she rate VIP treatment?
Then she wondered if her message to Uncle Walt had been intercepted by the Japanese government after all…but she was on American soil now. Surely, they couldn’t detain her here, no matter what the current UN situation might be.
Two Marines in khaki uniforms, a gunnery sergeant and a staff sergeant, were waiting for her in the terminal, and she felt a hot rush of relief. Marines she could handle.
“Miss Garroway?” the gunnery sergeant asked, and she nodded. “Please come with us, ma’am.”
As she sat down in the waiting transfer cart, she turned to the gunnery sergeant. “Colonel Fox sent you, didn’t he?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” was the uninformative reply.
“He didn’t? Well, who did? Where are you taking me? What’s going on here?” She was getting more than a little annoyed.
“Our orders come directly from Commandant Warhurst, ma’am. We’re taking you to Terminal E for transfer to a military Star Eagle transport.”
“The commandant! But why? What’s going on? Where am I going?”
The man finally turned and looked at her. She had the feeling that he was as puzzled about his orders as she was. “Ma’am,” he said apologetically, “we don’t exactly know what’s going on ourselves. But our orders are to take you by fastest available military transport to Andrews Aerospace Force Base and from there to the Pentagon. The commandant himself will be waiting for you.”
Suddenly he grinned. “Don’t know what you’ve done, ma’am, but I tell you, I haven’t seen the brass this worked up since the Colombian War…and believe you me, that takes some doing!”
TUESDAY, 29 MAY: 1830 HOURS GMT
National Security Council Conference Room,
Executive Building Basement,
Washington, DC
1430 hours EDT
I never thought an electronics specialist would be the one to start a damned war, General Warhurst thought, as he showed his special pass and ID to a grim-faced Army guard at yet another checkpoint. He followed Admiral Gray through the x-ray scanner and into the bustling subterranean labyrinth that was the Executive Building’s deepest basement levels. Still, given the high-tech nature of warfare these days, an electronics specialist and computer programmer was as likely to push the war initiate sequence button as anyone else, and maybe more so.
He thought about his son. He’d been thinking about Ted a lot, lately. It had been eighteen days since his death in Mexico, and eleven since the funeral at Arlington. Life, these past weeks, had become a vast and yawning emptiness…one that Montgomery Warhurst had been trying to fill with work.
He felt guilty about that. Stephanie seemed to be covering up her grief pretty well, but Janet was in a bad way; she and Jeff, Ted’s son, were staying at the house in Warrenton for a while, until things could settle out. At least he had work, something to occupy his mind.
The nights were rough, though. He hadn’t been sleeping much….
This new crisis on Mars was almost welcome. Any distraction was welcome now.
Admiral Gray led him down a long and gleaming passageway, guided him left into a comfortably appointed lobby, then ushered him between two more sentries and through an inner door that would have done a bank vault proud.
The room was lavish enough, with its rich oak paneling, thick carpet, and executive-style leather chairs, but it somehow didn’t match the mental image Warhurst had formed of the place when CJ had asked him to attend this morning’s meeting. He’d expected something larger and grander, frankly, a corner room, perhaps, with a splendid view of the White House grounds next door and the Capitol Building beyond. The room was large, with a low ceiling lit by fluorescents concealed behind plastic panels. One wall, the one opposite the room’s only door, was taken up by a floor-to-ceiling display screen which currently showed the NSC seal and was flanked by the American flag and a flag bearing the presidential seal.
There were no windows and, in fact, the entire room was a kind of vault more secure than any bank’s. It was easier to maintain security here, of course, four floors down from street level in the warren of tunnels, passageways, and rooms that honeycombed this part of the nation’s capital. For a good many years, now, the joke circulating through official Washington was that the city was like an iceberg; nine-tenths of the place was below ground, hidden where you couldn’t see it.
And beyond the reach of laser eavesdropping devices or cruise missiles or remote-piloted microdrone assassins. Even the president, these days, spent more of his time in the hardened bunkers of the old Situation Room Complex beneath the White House than he did upstairs in the exposed Oval Office. Especially these days, with a dozen terrorist groups sworn to strike at Satan America, with the threat of war looming so large and desperately close.
“Have a seat, Monty,” Gray said, gesturing. Other men were already filtering in and taking their places at the table. Admiral Gray had met Warhurst personally in the basement lobby and walked him through the security gates. Now, for the first time, he found himself inside the National Security Council’s main conference room, a place he’d heard of often enough but never seen.
Since 1989, the National Security Council had been organized into three subgroups; the NSC Principals Committee was the senior of these, tasked with coordinating and monitoring all national-security policy. Currently, it was chaired by Louis Carlton Harrel, the president’s national security advisor. Its regular members included John Matloff, secretary of state; Archibald Severin, secretary of defense; Arthur J. Kinsley, director of central intelligence; Charles Dockery, the president’s chief of staff; and Admiral Gray, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Other people might attend at the president’s invitation, and that was the case for Warhurst, who’d received a scrambled call from Harrel himself only two hours ago.
Harrel was the last to arrive, hurrying through the vault door with a wave to the guards to seal it off behind him. Warhurst didn’t know the man personally. He was a tall, kindly faced black man in his late fifties who had the reputation for being one of the sharper and more aggressive of President Markham’s personal advisors.
“General Warhurst,” Harrel said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “Allow me to express, for all of us, our sincere regrets about your son. We know how you must feel, and we appreciate your being with us this morning, despite your loss.”
Memories burned,
but Warhurst held them in check. “Thank you, sir. My son gave his life for his country and for his fellow Marines, and I’m proud of him for that.”
“We’ve asked you to come here,” Harrel went on, “because of this remarkable message we understand reached us through the daughter of one of the Marines with the MMEF.”
“Yes, sir. That would be Kaitlin Garroway.”
“You’ve seen the message?” Matloff demanded. He was a lean, white-haired, hawk of a man in his sixties. He touched a key on his wrist-top, and the display screen on the wall lit up with the Garroway message.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what do you make of it?”
“I’d say it’s legitimate, Mr. Secretary. My people have already checked it out, and I’ve spoken at length both with Colonel Fox and with Garroway’s daughter. Both are convinced that this is a genuine message.”
“Now, Colonel Fox is Garroway’s commanding officer, is he not?” Matloff said. “This, this first sentence of the message isn’t exactly the sort of thing a military officer writes to his superior, is it?”
“Major Garroway and Colonel Walter Fox are old friends, Mr. Secretary. They were both mustangs, and they were stationed together several times, in Japan, and at Camp Pendleton. According to Fox, they maintained a good-natured rivalry, especially after Fox passed Garroway up on the promotions list. The, ah, language of that first line was intended to convince Fox that it was, indeed, Garroway who was writing it.”
“Why all the damned cryptic gobbledygook, General?” Severin demanded. “It was my understanding that this message was transmitted in some kind of secret code.”
“A Beale code, Mr. Secretary,” Arthur Kinsley said with a smile. “I gather that Garroway used it to keep parts of his e-mail correspondence with his daughter private.”
“So why use indirect language? I don’t understand some of this stuff at all. Red Planet? We know he’s on Mars….”
“Beale codes,” Kinsley pointed out, “are among the most secure codes there are, since, to crack one, you have to know which book is being used to provide page, line, and character numbers for the correspondents. Even so, any code can be broken with enough information. Major Garroway might have been afraid that the wrong people would intercept this.”
“It’s my feeling, Mr. Secretary,” Warhurst added, “that the major was playing it safe. He’s a careful man with a high security clearance for the electronics and communications work he does, and he’s well aware of what codes can and cannot guarantee. The cryptic references are probably there just in case one of the UN security agencies had already cracked his code. He’d been using it throughout the cycler flight to Mars, after all, and it’s possible that someone had picked up on it. His use of circumlocutions is designed to sidestep any automated search program set up at Mars, something set to flag any transmissions of the words ‘Heinlein Station’ or ‘UN’ or ‘Candor Chasma.’ His use of ‘Red Planet’ doesn’t mean Mars, Mr. Secretary. That’s the title of a book written almost a century ago by a writer named Robert Heinlein. Heinlein Station. ‘Blue boys’ means the UN. ‘Complete openness’ is ‘candor,’ as in ‘Candor Chasma.’ He’s telling us exactly where he is going.”
“Can you tell us, General,” Harrel said, “what the devil ‘Derna’ might refer to? We’ve had our staff looking it up, and all they can find is the obvious geographical reference to the city in North Africa.”
“The shores of Tripoli, sir.” Warhurst managed a smile. “Any Marine would pick up on that right away.” He proceeded to tell them briefly about Presley O’Bannon and his 1805 march through the desert.
“Your conclusion, then,” Harrel said when Warhurst had finished the tale, “is that Garroway is marching from Heinlein Station across some…how far is it?”
“Almost four hundred miles,” Kinsley replied.
“He’s crossing four hundred miles of Martian desert to Mars Prime?”
“That is the way I would read it, sir,” Warhurst replied.
“The real question then,” Matloff said, “is what Garroway intends to do once he reaches Mars Prime. He doesn’t make any cryptic references to his plans in this message, does he, General?”
“I think that’s clear enough from the context, Mr. Secretary,” Warhurst replied. “He says he ‘capped’ the guards at Heinlein Station. That’s old-time infantry slang for ‘shot’ or ‘killed.’ The Derna reference suggests he plans on taking Mars Prime, the way O’Bannon took Derna.”
“Damn it, General!” Matloff exploded. “What kind of mad dog is this Garroway? We’re not at war!”
“It would appear that Major Garroway believes differently, John,” Harrel said gently. “What do you think, General?”
“He obviously couldn’t say much,” Warhurst replied. “But Garroway is not the sort of man who would run off half-cocked. The Pearl Harbor reference seems clear enough. The UN launched some sort of a coup and took over the base. I, ah, must point out that the MMEF was sent to Mars expressly to counter such a move on the UN’s part.”
“It seems they didn’t do the job they were sent to do, then,” the DCI suggested.
“It looks that way, sir. But I’d rather wait and hear what Major Garroway has to say about it. The Marines were probably not on full alert, and they were operating in a situation where their precise responsibilities and operational parameters were not clear. They were there in the hope that their mere presence would discourage any hostile activity by the UN military forces stationed there. And there is always the danger of mischance in war. You can’t prepare for every—”
“I repeat,” Matloff interrupted, “we are not at war! My people are negotiating with the UN right this moment at Geneva, trying to prevent this kind of mass insanity!”
“What have we heard officially from Mars?” Harrel wanted to know. “Last I heard there was some sort of communications problem.”
“Since Sunday morning,” Kinsley said, “there’s been nothing from either Mars Prime or Cydonia Prime but a COMMUNICATIONS DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAND BY message. This sort of thing happens sometimes, nothing unusual about it, but it does tend to corroborate Garroway’s message. If UN forces took over our facilities on Mars, they might drop a commo blackout for a time, while they get things organized. Maybe they’re preparing some sort of cover story.”
“Or preparing a parallel operation of some sort here on Earth,” Severin suggested.
“But why?” Matloff said. “Why would the United Nations want to do such a thing? Their people are on Mars purely as observers—”
“Including those fifty Foreign Legion troops?” Severin said, interrupting the SECSTATE. “It sounds to me like they’ve started doing a damned sight more than observing.”
“I must insist,” Matloff said, a bit stiffly, “that the peace process here be allowed to continue, that it be given a chance. We have the opportunity here to guarantee a lasting peace with the rest of the world!”
“For a moment there, John,” Harrel said, “I thought you were going to tell us that we were guaranteeing peace in our time.”
“I do not find that funny,” Matloff replied. “Perhaps you are not aware of just how serious our position is, vis-à-vis the United Nations. Their trade embargo against us has all but crippled our economy. Our only allies are Russia and Great Britain, and both of them are even worse off economically just now than we are. We are a nation of some five hundred million people, gentlemen, against a world of nearly eight billion. We cannot play games here. If we are to preserve any shred of our sovereignty as an independent nation, we must cooperate completely. We must work and we must compromise in order to establish a firm basis of mutual trust with the other nations of the world. If we fail, if we allow ourselves to be goaded into an ill-considered war, we cannot hope to survive.”
“I thought you said that there was no proof the United Nations was acting in a hostile manner,” Severin said.
“They have acted in a completely reasonable fashion so far. If
these rogue Marines on Mars drag us into a war, however, I don’t see how we can hope to survive as a nation. Do you all remember what happened to Brazil?”
Brazil had been the first of the world’s nations to feel the full brunt of the United Nations after the new UN charter had been adopted. Accused of continuing to cut down vast tracts of fast-dwindling rain forest in direct violation of several world treaties, Brazil had been invaded by UN forces in September of 2026. The rain forest, what was left of it, had been declared a “special world protectorate” and was now administered by a UN bureau operating out of Brasilia, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Rio.
The US had formally severed its long-unraveling ties with the UN in 2020 and was not involved in the takeover. Polls taken at the time had suggested that a large majority of Americans had disapproved of and mistrusted the UN’s high-handed—some said dictatorial—approach to curbing various global problems. Many though, in particular the Internationalists, were more concerned with the fact that something had to be done about global warming and the biosphere die-off, even if that something violated national sovereignty.
“The president is concerned,” Harrel said quietly, “with the demands the UN is making of us. Geneva has ordered us to hold a plebiscite within our Southwestern states on the Aztlan question, a plebiscite which, if held, might well result in the loss of a major portion of the American Southwest. They have threatened us over our space stations in orbit and our bases on Mars. They’ve threatened us over the whole question of technology gleaned from the Mars excavations. The president compromised on that one to the extent of allowing UN observers to travel to Mars. Their ‘observers’ turned out to be a few legitimate scientists and fifty armed men, a deliberate challenge to our control of the Martian excavations and our own facilities on the planet.
“Now, how long are we supposed to keep giving in and compromising and backpedaling before we find ourselves with our proverbial backs against the proverbial wall? I can tell you right now, Mr. Secretary, that the president is not going to yield on the Aztlan thing. He has already promised to share any alien technology that we find on Mars, and I can’t see what further concessions he could make there, either. And if it’s true that those UN thugs have just moved in and taken over our bases on Mars, lock, stock, and barrel, well, I can’t see any room there for compromise either, can you?”
