The Generals of October

by John T. Cullen

  In the morning, because they were running late, they took separate cars--Tory to the convention center, David to the small back street that housed the I.G. office. He watched her, both waving, as she sped off in the half-mist, half-drizzle that threatened to be a rainy day. David shaved, donned his fatigue uniform and side arm, and drove to work.

  He met Colonel Jankowsky in the outer office. “Morning, Sir.”

  “Morning, David. You look rested.” Jankowsky had shadows around his eyes and a light beard stubble on his cheeks.

  “I am, Sir. Have you been here long?”

  “I stayed all night.”

  “Oh, no, I should have--”

  “No, no, it’s fine. You should get your sleep if you can. I don’t sleep so well lately. Miss Summers has been on the machine all night. I’m giving moral support.”

  Jankowsky put a finger to his lips, reminding David that the task force’s existence was unknown to most of the staff; and those who knew didn’t realize its true nature; most thought it was just a library unit. “C’mon, let’s walk over.”

  A light rain dripped in the alley as David and Jankowsky hurried to the task force office. Through the usual security checks, up the stairs they went, emerging in the odd atmosphere of chapel, library, and high-tech. The atmosphere was sepulchral. It looked like a place in which daylight had not shone for 100 years. Cipher clerks and other mystery persons walked about silently. Near a computer terminal in one of the larger rooms, which echoed when people spoke, were Summers and Tomasik. The blinds were drawn, and one of the fluorescent lights flickered steadily and jarringly. Tomasik was in fatigues, wearing an O.G. T-shirt. He sat on the edge of a desk, wagging his short legs back and forth, black jump boots looking shiny and massive. Nearby sat Tabitha Summers, swathed in sweaters and gaunt with concentration. At the sound of voices, she removed her headset and rubbed bleary eyes. “Hello, Colonel. Did you bring me some coffee and donuts?”

  Jankowsky looked perturbed. “I’m sorry, Miss Summers. I was on the other side, waiting for the receptionist to arrive. I would have gone, but I had to watch the store.”

  “Oh, never mind,” Tabitha said, “I need sleep more than I need donuts.”

  “We have cots up here. We can put you in an empty room,” Tony said.

  “We can send out for clothing, toiletries. Anything you need,” Jankowsky added.

  “Thanks,” Tabitha said. She yawned. “A cot sounds good right about now, but I don’t have time.”

  “You heard about Consiglio?” Tony asked David.

  David nodded. “I guess that eliminates one mystery candidate from the blank spot on top of the list.”

  “That leaves plenty of candidates,” Jankowsky said. “What do you think?” He turned to Tomasik with an unspoken part of his question.

  Tomasik shook his head. “That was no weekend patriot action, any more than Cardoza getting it. Our cabal in action. Ax dollars at work.”

  The list, David thought. A cabal. In the good old U.S.A.?

  Tabitha laid her goggles aside and tousled her hair with her fingers. “I’m going to stretch my legs a bit. That diner you mentioned sounds good. I’ll just go get a cup of coffee.”

  “Did you learn anything?” David asked Summers as she rose, reaching for her raincoat.

  Jankowsky spoke for her. “Did she! Huh! She broke through CloudMaster’s defenses. Made the machines at NSSO and the Atlantic think she was the third machine that sits at the White House. Brilliant, huh? She’s had full access to their net for hours.”

  David said: “What do you think, Miss Summers? Who’s using CloudMaster? Can they get on to you?”

  Tabitha regarded him with a smile that wasn’t a smile. “I’ve just had a few hours--twelve hours--to play with it. I’m not sure. I do know that they’re running some kind of enormous econometric program on two or three CloudMaster machines at once. Who is they? I’m not sure. They have their own top secret network, and it’s not tied to the Pentagon. The acronym is OIB, and I was able to figure out from context in the message traffic that it stands for Operation Ivory Baton.”

  “See here,” Tomasik said, stretching a digital display pad before David’s face. Tony read in a frustrated voice: “It’s just gobbledygook. OIB/H, OIB/A, OIB/17.”

  “Wait,” Tabitha said. She sat down at her terminal again and spoke to its controls without using the headwalking gear. Masses of program code streamed by until she stopped it. “There, look! I knew I’d seen those OIB’s embedded somewhere. OIB-FED-R ... Those are result codes. The machine chews off a humongous amount of data, swallows it, digests it, and spits up a result. They’ve managed to combine the weather modeling with an econometric model plus some code of their own. I can tell, because when I was in deep, I could see the data streams coming in from around the country, huge amounts, from cities all over--Cincinnati, Seattle, San Diego, you name it. And it’s all headed for their system in the Atlantic Hotel.”

  Jankowsky said: “I’d never have believed it, but it’s a clincher. This is not some vague and idle threat. We were looking for only one man, Robert Lee Hamilton, to try and interfere with the convention. Instead, it’s the 3045th, either working directly for Montclair, or else using him and CON2 as a Trojan Horse. This conspiracy has layers. Montclair may be working for Hamilton, or even someone else we don’t know about. CON2 is falling apart, and whoever these bastards are, they’re planning something. They’re probably getting ready to move soon. I’ve got to see General Billy Norcross again. He’ll go straight to the President. These people have to be stopped.”

  What if it’s the President? David thought. What about Norcross? Mattoon? We could start being afraid of our own shadows before this is over.

  “I’ll go to the Pentagon with you,” Tabitha said. “But first my coffee and donuts.”

  “Go ahead,” Tomasik said. He sat by the terminal, which she’d left in deep entry mode. “OIB-FED-H. OIB-FED-L. OIB-FED-A. They are result codes,” he mumbled thoughtfully, “of some conditions they have programmed in. From the way it looks, I’d say they have something running that they think will predict the fate of--something? the United States? their plot?--from one moment to the next, based on a million variables, not unlike the weather program or a modern econometric data modeler.”

  David said: “Everyone has OIB in it. That’s the name of their conspiracy. Each has FED in it. What’s FED?”

  “Damn!” Jankowsky said, at the situation in general. He started to put his scarf on. “I’ll go to see see Norcross at JCS immediately.”

  Tabitha’s hard heels could be heard, past the sentry at the door, clattering down the stairs. Steel-plated security doors and steel stairs made her footfalls echo.

  “Hey!” Jankowsky said, waving her umbrella. “She left without it.”

  “I’ll catch her,” David said. Jankowsky tossed the umbrella. David caught it and started after her. He had to wait a moment before the upstairs sentry could open the security door for him on its smoothly oiled steel hinges.

  As he went down the two flights of stairs, he heard Summers’ feet crunching on gravel already, gone from the building. Then he heard a car racing by. Then silence.

  He came to the last set of stairs and noticed the bulb was burned out. The lower stairwell was shrouded in darkness. There should have been another sentry--momentarily, blinded by rainy daylight shining through a door that was six inches ajar and shouldn’t have been, David stumbled and dropped the umbrella. Catching his balance, he looked.

  He glimpsed the sprawled Army private. He had a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, as though they’d shot him--silencer, David thought--just as he opened the door to peer. Then where was Tabitha Summers?

  David took his 9 mm. automatic out of its holster. He clicked the safety off, raised the gun so it rested on his shoulder, and stood with his back to the steel outer door. Rain beat down in sheets now, sending in cool air. Pushing lightly, flattening himself into the shadows as much as possible, he opened t
he door another inch.

  And another inch. There, sprawled in the gravel in the gusting rain, her legs bent at an unnatural angle, lay Tabitha Summers. From the broken limbs and the bloodied head, they’d run her down. It was no longer just ‘they’ now; it was Operation Ivory Baton; it was the 3045th and whoever else had brought that 1950s dinosaur back from extinction. He was about to rush out to the mangled body in hope of administering CPR, when the sound of a car engine racing caught his attention, just enough to make him freeze. He heard brakes, a squealing of tires. He managed to push enough of his face through the opening in the door, without opening it any further and giving himself away. He could see out with one eye, in the opposite direction, away from Tabitha’s body, toward the wide open parking lot. Framed by a backdrop of store windows, of red and blue neon, he saw a dark car. It was hard to see, with the downpour, but there was something familiar about that car. There. Two men sat in the front seat and looked toward the Task Force in anticipation. One was blond, preppy, with steel rims; the other dark, dark...oh yes, he’d seen those two before someplace, but where?

  David’s heart began to pound as an idea formed. It was a horrible idea and it caused him to remain frozen another moment, staring. He could make out the men in the car. It was the same car he’d encountered at the Naval Observatory the night Ib was kidnapped. One, the driver, had a dark complexion, with mud-colored eyes and a brownish tongue whose tip protruded like a lizard’s. Riding shotgun was the young blond man with the steel rimmed glasses and the friendly smile that began to look downright dangerous, maybe even insane, when you looked at it several times. Just now the blond man was beginning to smile broadly, his eyes lit up with anticipation.

  “Oh no!” David yelled. He turned inside to run upstairs. He slipped in a puddle of the sentry’s blood and fell on the body. Springless bones and rubbery meat cushioned his fall. He scrambled to his feet and, slithering again, made it to the stairway. “Hey!” he yelled.

  He made it up three or four steps when the blast caught him and threw him head over heels.

  The first blast exploded under the stairs. The massive wood stairwell tilted toward David, forcing the blast upward, and saving him from the main thrust of the explosion. Deafened, he was blown backwards. The blast swirled around and ahead of him, pushing the steel door open so he flew out onto the gravel in the driveway on his back. The building wall stopped the stairwell, preventing it from landing on him outside. A split second later, as he lay on his back, about to black out, he saw the force of the second blast. Unlike the first blast, which exploded vertically, the second went off horizontally and radially. It occurred on the upper floor, blowing the beautiful stained glass windows outward in a fireball, ripping the building’s structural walls, collapsing the roof inward. Bricks flew in all directions, twirling in slow motion.

  Then something hit David, and the snapshot faded. His last thought was of Tory.

  Chapter 24

  Maxie eased her gray Porsche through the early morning traffic and drizzle. Parking in the nurses’ parking lot at Walter Reed Army Hospital, she sprinted through the first rain drops to get to the entrance. She burst into the orderly room and stepped to the mailboxes. Rifling through a handful of memos and envelopes, she asked the duty NCO: “Are we flying anywhere special today for this alert?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I know of, Ma’am. But the choppers are feathering and you’re asked to--”

  “I know, I know,” she said pushing through the double doors to the pad area.

  “Oh, Captain Bodley?”

  She stopped with one door half closed on herself. “Yes?”

  “There was a call for you from a Doctor Van Meeuwen. He asked that you call him today. Says it’s urgent and you must call him immediately.”

  “Thanks.” She let the doors close behind her. And no thanks, she added mentally. She went to the check-through window, where she showed her I.D. and the orderly checked out her flight uniform from its locker. The pockets were stuffed with potent drugs from morphine to atropine, and a lot in-between, only to be used in a life and death emergency. She’d already begun to think of applying for the Nurse Practitioner program, which required a master’s degree in nursing, and which would allow her to be the lead nurse on her flight. She donned the flight suit, hanging her stethoscope around her neck and putting the pistol harness on over her suit. Then she went outside, where three of the 55th’s three choppers stood throttling low in a fine drizzle. They were three stories up on a concrete flight apron marked for the three aircraft--orange circles with an X in each circle. Climbing up into Flight 1, she saluted the flight commander, Major Fred Chavez, and his copilot, Major Tom Dash.

  She’d had her eyes on Tom Dash ever since Tory had yelled at her after Van Meeuwen had hurt her feelings again. Maybe she’d noticed Tom Dash even earlier, but suppressed her feelings with the usual Bodley parental censure software.

  Four other nurses were in the chopper’s roomy interior--a utilitarian, Army-flavored aircraft, more a pistachio green than O.G. outer hull, with black stenciled warning messages about bumping heads, Not A Step, and securing objects for flight. The nurses had grown close during their training and deployment, and they greeted Maxie as a team member, which always gave her a secret tingle. Only the head nurse, Major Nancy Ilitch, frowned slightly because Maxie was a few minutes late, though not enough for a verbal warning (her nth). “Good evening,” Ilitch said caustically, pulling in her double chin and puffing outraged red lipstick. “Thanks so much for joining us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maxie said, “I ran into some traffic.” Not quite true, but screw the old hen.

  “We are inventorying pharmacopia, Captain. Please do join us at your leisure, if it doesn’t inconvenience you.”

  One of the other nurses, Captain Irma Dagdagan, handed Maxie a small box of vials--adrenalin syringe packets, to inject directly into the heart of the cardiac arrested patient. Each nurse had to count hers, and match the numbers with the printout in the box. It was part of the ritual at the start of every twelve hour shift.

  Maxie started checking the packets one by one against the list, and Ilitch’s scathing attention went to other matters. Maxie caught a gleam in the edge of her vision. She glanced right, and found the gleam to be in the eyes of Major Tom Dash, who sat sideways in the copilot’s seat doing a preflight checkout with Major Chavez. Tom smiled at her, nodded, friendly, and she ignored him. Inwardly, however, she thought: Zap! A friendly, dark-haired man who looked lean and adorable in his snappy uniform. Secretly, she’d been jealous of Tory. Tory could snap up guys like this. Maxie looked up again, saw Tom staring, and smiled back at him. She’d been thinking--maybe Tory was right. Here she was liking this handsome pilot who seemed interested in her, and already all her ingrained instinct was kicking in to deny herself this affair because he wasn’t right for her or not good enough. Almost in tears, she was angry at her Mother and Father, who’d schooled her most rigorously in their Expectations of a Southern Lady and the Heir to a Fortune, Not To Mention a Legacy Centuries Old: Officers before and after the English Restoration; officers on both sides of the Revolutionary War, marching around with their little flutes and drums; colonels on both sides in the Civil War; and of course heroes in every war since. If she became a thorough bitch, tore up her pedigree, and mailed her gold credit card back to Father and her DAR membership to Mother, would they get the message? Would they still love her if she weren’t a marionette? Could she still love them, once she cut the puppet strings? If she had a serious relationship or even married a fellow like Tom Dash?

  Chapter 25

  Still burning, confused, and passionate from her night with David, Tory found a parking place two blocks from the Hotel. It was just beginning to rain, and she held a newspaper open over her head as she ran through the early morning twilight. She saw the National Guard checkpoint ahead and started to fish out her I.D. At that moment a pair of National Guard MP’s in rumpled fatigues, their white helmets scratched
and dirty, trod by. Judging by their dingy boots and footsore slog, they’d probably been on duty nonstop for days. They both saluted. “Morning, Ma’am,” one said. “You with the Regulars inside?”

  Lowering the newspaper, she returned the salute. “Yes, I am. But I’m not playing cop today. Computer jockey.”

  “Oh,” they said, impressed.

  “I see those boots,” she joked; “about due for retread.”

  “You said it, Ma’am.” “You got that right, Ma’am.”

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Virginia, Ma’am. He’s from Bristol. I’m from Roanoke.”

  “Tourists in Washington.”

  “Right. My mom runs a little store back home, and she needs me to help. Ol’ Snuffy here, he’s got three kids and a delivery route.”

  The other added: “We can’t wait to go back home.”

  The first added: “Nobody ever asked us our opinion. Hell, we’re just privates, Ma’am. We swore to uphold the real Constitution, not some new phony one.”

  “I hear you guys,” Tory said. The new Constitution would be a hard sell, whatever sort of mangled memorial to mammalian mischief it turned out to be. There would be no going back, and people wouldn’t understand that. The United States would no longer be the United States. Whether it nominally kept its name, or got some partisan new monicker, one might as well, henceforth, call it something like The Unindicted Disgrace of Extremia.