Harden

by D. J. Molles

Reassignment protocol.

  Captain Perry Griffin, the Coordinator for Alabama, was currently safe in the Greeley Green Zone. He was no longer in need of his GPS device, as Alabama had essentially just been bartered off to Nuevas Fronteras for oil.

  Not the choice that John would have made. But it wasn’t his choice to make.

  He turned the GPS device to Espinoza and indicated a small black square at the base of it. “You’re going to put your thumb there and take it off a couple of times so the system gets a positive link to your thumbprint. That’s what will allow you access to this GPS and the bunkers. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Espinoza frowned at the little device. “Is that all that’s protecting these supply bunkers? Just a fingerprint?”

  “There are other security measures. But we’ve deactivated them. For our purposes, it’s simply easiest to allow you access with a fingerprint. Is that a problem?” John smirked. “Or would you rather an autocannon chew you to shreds if you forget a mnemonic?”

  Espinoza smiled broadly. “No, I think a fingerprint will do just fine.”

  John nodded. “Then go ahead and put your thumb there.”

  Espinoza placed his thumb.

  John walked him through placing it on and taking it off, while the system calibrated the device to its new owner. When it was fully calibrated, he handed it to Espinoza. “It won’t fully activate until I’m in Greeley and can confirm that we have the first fuel shipment in hand.” He gave Espinoza a stern look. “Aviation and diesel fuel. That’s what we need. As soon as we have it, I will issue a remote command. Then you’ll have access to the bunkers.”

  Espinoza pocketed the device. “Well. Let’s get you back to your plane, then.”

  SIXTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  MPG

  Mitch sat in Carl’s office staring at the corkboard.

  On that board was a pattern of pictures and jumbled notes scrawled in a combination of hands from all the members of his team. The collage was familiar to him from his days working counter-terrorism in Delta. He usually wasn’t the one to create such boards back then, but he’d seen his fair share in briefing rooms.

  This one hit closer to home.

  The faces in the pictures were his neighbors.

  It was very hard to come by a solid connection amongst the Lincolnists. They knew that Elsie Foster was at the center of it, and she had her associates, but so far nothing had been proven, and Angela didn’t want to make a move until things could be proven.

  Her would-be assassin had only complicated the network on his whiteboard.

  More associates.

  More questions.

  Zero answers.

  He rubbed his beard with a tired sigh and thought for the umpteenth time how quick this could be resolved if Angela would just let them off the leash. Or if he simply decided to break free of that leash on his own…

  A knock at the office door broke him out of this tempting train of thought.

  He swiveled his seat back around to the desk. “Yeah. Come on.”

  The door opened and Rudy poked his hounddog face in. His normally placid eyes were crinkled up with concern. He was holding one of their satphones. “Mitch. We got a call from Butler, down in Georgia.” He crossed the room and held out the phone to Mitch. “I think it’s a message from Lee.”

  Mitch stood up from his desk, all thoughts of Lincolnists and diagrams and enhanced interrogation dissolving. This wasn’t a scheduled contact. Which meant that something was either really great…or something was really bad.

  And things were rarely great.

  He grabbed the satphone and put it to his ear. “This is Mitch.”

  A man’s voice. Older. Gravelly. Thick, southern accent. “Yeah, hi, this is Ed from Butler.”

  Mitch nodded in recognition. He’d only met the old man twice, but he made an impression. “Yes. Ed. This is Sergeant Mitch at Fort Bragg. We met a few times.”

  “Yeah,” Ed said, distracted. “Hey, look, I got this fella, showed up out of the blue, never seen him before, claims to know Lee.”

  “Does he check out?”

  “Well, he had the passcodes and all. So, I guess ‘yes.’” Hesitation. “He says he’s got a message from Lee.”

  Which meant that Lee wasn’t there himself.

  Mitch’s gut soured.

  Why send a messenger?

  “Is he there with you now?”

  “Yes, he’s—” the line broke apart in a wash of static.

  Mitch winced at it, squinted to try to hear through it. Goddamned satellites. Their orbits had been decaying for some time now, making satellite communications iffy. “I’m sorry, Ed, you broke up. Did you say that the guy is there with you?”

  Ed again, sounding flustered by the ratty connection. “Yeah. I have him here. You wanna speak to him?”

  “Yes. Put him on.”

  A pause.

  The line rattled and hissed in his ear.

  A new voice: “Uh. Yes? Hello?”

  Mitch frowned at his desk. Glanced up at Rudy, who was still standing there, watching Mitch carefully like he might glean the highlights of the conversation from the expressions of Mitch’s face. “Who is this?”

  “My name’s Braxton. I have a message from Lee Harden?”

  As though Mitch was supposed to know who the fuck Braxton was. He looked at Rudy again, motioned for him to close the office door. Rudy took a step back and gently swung it shut.

  “Yeah, Braxton,” Mitch said. “This is Fort Bragg. Go ahead with that message.”

  “Uh, yes, sir. You got a pen and paper?” Bashful. “He told me to tell you to write it down.”

  Shit.

  No one ever made you write down good news.

  Mitch scrambled about his desk for a pen and a scrap of paper. He found the paper. Made writing motions with his fingers. Rudy located a pen and shoved it at him. “Alright, Braxton. Go ahead with the message.”

  The stranger named Braxton spoke.

  Mitch wrote it down, feeling worse with every word.

  ***

  Angela was preparing to leave her own offices when Mitch entered, escorted by a stern-faced Kurt Barsch, and Claire Staley trailing behind.

  Claire gave Mitch the evil eye as she edged quickly around him into the room. “Tried to call ahead,” she said in a clipped tone. “But someone didn’t want to wait.”

  Kurt also didn’t seem terribly happy with Mitch, but then again, he’d been edgy since the assassination attempt.

  Mitch didn’t seem to care much about Claire or Kurt’s disapproval. He strode right up to the desk behind which Angela was standing. “Sorry to barge in, ma’am. We just got a call from Butler. It’s serious. And I need to speak to you in private.”

  Angela glanced in Kurt’s direction.

  She and Kurt both knew and trusted Mitch. But still, her guard looked hesitant to leave the room. She gave him a nod. “Thank you, Kurt. Claire. Give us the room, please.”

  Kurt and Claire silently exited.

  Kurt closed the door behind him.

  Mitch waited until he heard it latch, then produced a scrap of white paper, which he placed in front of Angela. “The message is from Lee, but it wasn’t him I spoke to. He sent a guy named Braxton. Some guy he just met in Alabama. That’s all we got right now.”

  Angela held to Mitch’s eyes for a second, trying to divine from him how bad it was. Trying to temper herself for what she was about to read.

  People are dead. That’s what it’s going to say. We lost more people.

  Finally, she grabbed the note from her desk and read it carefully.

  AMBUSHED IN HURTSBORO, AL.

  LOST NATE. CARL AND BRIAN CAPTURED.

  UNKNOWN AGGRESSORS.

  LEE, JULIA, ABE PURSUING.

  DISPATCH SMALL ELEMENT TO BUTLER. WAIT FOR COMMS FROM LEE. WILL COMM IN FIVE DAYS OR LESS. NO COMMS = ASSUME DEAD.

  Angela placed the note back down on the desk so carefully, you would think i
t was made of volatile explosives. The words ran laps in her head, and she was distantly surprised to see how still her hands were.

  Assume dead.

  “The guy said he received the message last night,” Mitch said.

  Angela felt her head buzzing. “How soon can we be in Butler?”

  “We can be there by tomorrow morning.”

  Her teeth were set on edge. Lips tight. “You and your team.”

  Mitch nodded. “Rudy’s prepping everyone now.”

  Angela pressed her fingertips down on the table, bending them until the knuckles were white and painful. “You take what you need. You do what you need to do. And you keep me in the loop. You understand? I want to know everything that’s happening. And I wanna know who the fuck hit our people, and how we can hit them back.”

  Mitch had nothing else to say, and neither did Angela. She’d given him the green light, and that was all he’d come for. He gave her one curt nod, left the note on her desk, and then left her office with an urgent clip to his step.

  Claire and Kurt, who had been waiting just outside the door, slipped in and closed the door behind them.

  “Is everything okay?” Claire asked.

  “I need Jeff in here.” Angela met Claire’s eyes. “And your father. ASAP.”

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, they met in Angela’s office.

  Colonel Staley, Claire’s father, was the commander of the Marine forces that had been relocated from Camp Lejeune to Fort Bragg. A consolidation of forces, you might say. It hadn’t been a completely seamless transition, but in the end, Fort Bragg had electricity from the local nuclear plant, and Camp Lejeune was dead, so most everyone appreciated the reasoning behind it.

  Angela didn’t rehash anything she didn’t need to. She let the message from Lee speak for itself, passing it first to Staley, and then to Jeff.

  They both read it in silence, and Jeff handed it back, obviously confused as to why he was present for this, since he was the Director of Agriculture and had nothing to do with military operations.

  “Our conversation doesn’t leave this room,” Angela opened, looking at each of them in turn.

  They nodded their assent.

  “Mitch and his boys are putting together a small team. They’re heading to Butler tonight. But Lee might need a bigger force than that, and if he requests it, I want the logistics already in motion.” She sat down at her desk. Felt nervous energy making her want to stand again, but she held herself down. “What I need to know is, given the fuel situation, if we suspended all farming operations, how much diesel would we have available, and how many Marines can we send to Butler with what we have?”

  Jeff’s eyes widened. “I, uh…well…” he looked at Staley as though hoping for rescue.

  Staley had remained calm the entire time. As though such things were a matter of course. He wore his desert digital BDUs with the silver eagles on his collar. His hands placed carefully in his lap. He essentially ignored Jeff, and spoke directly to Angela.

  “Ma’am, I can commit whatever you feel is necessary.” There was a caveat in his voice, and it followed quickly. “What you need to understand is that, while I can probably fuel up several trucks full of Marines and send them south, that’s probably not going to be the answer that we want.”

  Angela’s middle finger smarted. She looked at it. Realized that she’d been ruthlessly chewing at the nail. It had torn down to the quick and a bit of blood was welling up. She flicked the pain out of her finger, then interlaced them and placed them against her lips. From behind them, she said, “What do you mean?”

  Staley leaned forward. “What I mean is that a combat effective detachment is more than just Marines with rifles. It’s support, too. They need equipment, food, water. The more people you send, the more support has to go with them. And that support requires a lot of fuel. There’s a point of diminishing returns.” He held up his hand. “Ma’am, my Marines are the finest fighting force on this planet, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. If push comes to shove, and you give me the orders, I’ll send my boys down with what they got on their backs, and I know that they’ll make a good showing. But what you need to understand before you issue that type of order is that it heavily reduces their effectiveness and puts them at a serious disadvantage.”

  Angela had one of those moments where her mind seemed to depart from her body and take up residence somewhere around the ceiling, looking down at her and wondering, how the fuck did you get here? What are you doing, sitting behind this desk, playing with people’s lives?

  She’d read once that mentally disassociating yourself from reality was unhealthy.

  But it was about the only thing she could do in that moment to stay calm and collected.

  So she disassociated.

  This wasn’t real. These weren’t people’s lives she was discussing. This was all just a game.

  She took a long, bracing inhale. “Colonel, how many Marines can you send, with full support?”

  Finally, Staley turned and seemed to acknowledge the presence of Jeff, the Agricultural Director. “That depends on how much fuel we have left.”

  Jeff looked like a kid that hasn’t done their homework and then gets called on by the teacher. His shoulders scrunched up. He leaned forward, elbows on the arms of his chair. A slight panic in his eyes. “Uh. Well. Last I checked was last week. When we talked about the situation. And that was when we got to the halfway point on our last seven thousand gallon tank. Since then, we’ve continued our farming operations. If I was to take a guess, I’d say we were down in the neighborhood of two thousand gallons right now.”

  “Two thousand gallons then,” Angela said, turning back to Staley. “What does that buy us?”

  For the first time, Colonel Staley’s face betrayed uncertainty. “Well, ma’am. I’ll have to run the numbers on that. But…off the top of my head…not much.”

  “Not much,” Angela echoed.

  “Unfortunately, fuel efficiency was not high on the list of Uncle Sam’s requirements when he commissioned fighting vehicles for the Marine Corps.”

  Angela knew he was right. Half the damn vehicles they had topped out at five miles to the gallon. It was the reason that most of them were parked, and Lee and his team had been running their operations out of civilian pickup trucks.

  Pickup trucks that got a whole whopping fifteen miles a gallon.

  Unfortunately for their fuel conservancy efforts, hybrid sedans weren’t great for off-road capabilities, and with the derelict state of the roads, off-road capabilities were necessary. No one wanted to get bogged down in a washed-out road while primals were hot on their tail.

  Angela bit down on her sense of surrealism and laid her hands flat on the top of the desk. Take control. That’s what you were elected to do. So do it. “Here’s what we’re going to do, gentlemen. Jeff, you’re going to immediately suspend all farming operations. I don’t want a single tractor running by the end of the day, you understand?”

  Jeff nodded, eager to be of some use, but his face clouded. He was a farmer at heart and she saw that her order to stop farming made him uneasy.

  Angela looked at Staley. “Colonel, I need you to coordinate with Jeff to take control of whatever fuel we have left, if the need arises. And I want you to run the numbers for two possibilities. Number one, how many Marines can you send with full support. And number two, how many Marines can you send with just their rifles and whatever supplies they can carry.”

  Angela pushed herself up from her chair. “And in the meantime we’ll hope that Lee can make it back to Butler and tell us what the hell is happening down there.”

  ***

  When Claire looked up from her desk outside of Angela’s office, she saw that Doctor Trent was standing there in front of it.

  She jumped at the sight. She hadn’t heard anyone approach.

  Claire put her hand to her chest. “I’m sorry. You surprised me.”

  Doctor Trent stood there, hands li
mp at his sides, looking down at her like she hadn’t even spoken. Behind his glasses, his eyes were somewhere else.

  Then they blinked a few times, came back to the real world, and he straightened. Seemed to realize that he’d just been spoken to.

  “Right. Sorry about that. I need to speak with Miss Houston, please.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. “She’s in a meeting.”

  Doctor Trent gave her an inscrutable look. “It’s…important.”

  “Well. You can wait if you’d like.”

  Doctor Trent stared at her for a few beats longer, then simply chuffed through his nose. “No. I’ll come back. Just…tell her that I was trying to meet with her.” He turned as though to walk away, then stopped and turned back. “You can tell her it’s about the thing that Lee brought me. That might get her interested.”

  “Ooh-kay,” Claire said, then picked up a pen and wrote a big bold note so that Doctor Trent could see. Claire dictated to herself as she wrote it out: “Doc…Trent…About…the thing…from Lee.”

  Doctor Trent nodded.

  He turned and walked away, leaving Claire wondering what the hell Lee had brought him, and why the hell it would matter to Angela.

  SEVENTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  TIDES

  Julia pulled back the bandage that covered Lee’s chest tube.

  Lee refused to watch. He stared at the wall and grit his teeth. The fact that there was a foreign object protruding from his chest still made his stomach flutter.

  Paolo had been kind enough to give them the privacy of the room.

  Lee and Julia were seated on one of the cots in the room. Abe sat in a chair across from Lee, alternately watching Julia work, and watching Lee’s face for a reaction.

  “Does it hurt?” Julia asked.

  She was prodding around the tube. Lee felt it moving inside him, and while it didn’t exactly hurt, it was uncomfortable and he despised the sensation.

  “It’s fine,” he mumbled. “Do what you need to do.”

  “I’m gonna remove it,” Julia said. “Then I gotta tie off the sutures on the wound.”