The Doodlebug War

by Andrew Updegrove

  Whatever. Decades-old memories, who knew how reliable, probably wouldn’t take him anywhere anyway. He took a sip of his drink and opened the envelope.

  A cascade of close to a hundred letters dropped into his lap, each one addressed in Clare’s tiny, precise script. The sight of the familiar hand and the small envelopes she favored brought him up short, giving him second thoughts again about the wisdom of the enterprise. Putting the letters back in chronological order, holding each one up close to his face to decipher the smudged date stamps next to the eight-cent postage, gave him time to regain his composure. Then he opened the first one.

  Hey, stranger!

  He immediately put the letter down again and stared out across the darkening prairie.

  When he resumed reading, he was reminded that he’d left for college ten days before Clare had, and she’d written to him every day before she left for school. Each letter ran to two or three pages of tiny, perfect penmanship. He found that these were wonderful letters to read.

  It was clear from them that falling in love for the first time had been a grand experience for Clare, and she’d plunged into it with the exuberance he now recalled she brought to every new adventure. The letters were perfectly reflective of her personality—witty, fun, affectionate, smart—all that anyone could ever want in someone who had come to occupy the biggest part of his life. He read each one slowly, pausing often to reflect on the memories streaming back of things he’d forgotten and puzzling over the references to those that did not.

  During that summer, he now recalled, it mostly hadn’t mattered what they did. They’d spent all the time they could enjoying each other’s company and, whenever possible, each other’s bodies. But as fall and their separation neared, she brought the topic of love up ever more frequently, expressing hers and waiting for an affirmation of his. A time-honored skirmish began with her advancing and him retreating.

  Perhaps back then, their thoughts were simply holding true to their age and gender-assigned roles. She was ready to fall in love and willing to err on the side of believing that she had; he was wary and unsure what love was and primed by literature to believe that only some overwhelming wave of emotion would signal that he’d fallen victim to its attack. By the time the summer ended, they were mightily attached and secretly confused over what they wanted to happen next.

  That last night before he left for college, after he had walked her home, after they had spent as long as possible making out on the front stoop of her building before she finally went upstairs to her parents’ apartment, he’d been in no hurry to go home. Sitting alone in a park, he’d stared at nothing at all in sadness, assuming the odds were poor that their relationship would survive.

  Staring now into the darkness that surrounded his fire, Frank yearned to experience once again what it was like to be swept along by the sensations of a first relationship, regretting that he had not appreciated it more at the time. He had taken that experience for granted, cavalier in the assumption that if this one didn’t work out, there would be another one to follow and another after that. But he never again experienced the easy, happy abandon of that first phase of that first relationship, with Clare or with anyone else, or the complete connection they had experienced before she left for college and decided that her new friends, experiences, and loves were more satisfying in the moment than was his steady devotion from afar.

  The campfire was almost burned out by the time he finished reading that first series of letters. He stared at the dying embers and gulped down the rest of his drink. That was enough reading for one night. He might not remember the details of what followed, but he knew all too well how the next act ended.

  * * *

  The next day he woke up tired and ornery. It had been a while since he’d slept on the ground, and he hadn’t paid much attention to how often he’d topped up his glass of scotch the night before. Indications were that it had been often. All that day he tried to focus on the next steps he’d need to take to thwart Foobar, and he decided to stay in a motel for the night.

  He found one in a dying town by a dead railroad and tarried over dinner at the only available restaurant for as long as possible. Returning to his room, he logged on to the Wi-Fi and caught up on the email that had accumulated that day. But there continued to be little for him to pay attention to back in Washington, and that took less time than he had hoped.

  Should he go back to the letters or not? He was wide-awake. And it was only 8:30.

  He brushed his teeth, poured himself a sensible measure of scotch, stacked a few pillows against the bedstead, and opened his laptop again after climbing in bed. But before long, he’d read as much of the day’s news as he had any interest in absorbing. And it was only 8:50.

  The hell with it. He got up, pulled the envelope of letters out of his backpack, and settled in again.

  He couldn’t recall what Clare’s letters had been like after she left for college, except that he thought they had been as similar from letter to letter as his had been, and therefore rather boring. He found now that this was both right and wrong. Largely, Clare’s letters were simply a daily diary of her experiences in an environment she was finding very much to her liking—the new people she met, updates on the ones she was growing most close to, and a seemingly endless round of keg parties, musical events, and swimming parties at the lake. But they were also as vivacious in text as she was in person and brought her back to life in ways he had not anticipated. And often enough they also confirmed how much she loved him or recounted how she would brag to her roommates about the wonderful boyfriend she’d left behind.

  Meanwhile, he was struggling with an awkward adjustment to life at a school that gave numbers rather than names to its buildings and tended to attract the socially challenged. Fool that he was, he wrote to Clare every day. New to letter writing and not knowing what else to cover the pages with, he described how demanding his course work was; how many incredible things there were to do on campus but he had no time to do; and how distant the people were that he met. In other words, he portrayed himself as a drudge surrounded by drudges who were more studious than alive.

  Toward the end of September, the mood of Clare’s letters changed abruptly between one and the next. She continued to say the same sorts of things about their relationship, but it didn’t ring true.

  Their first and last visit of his freshman year followed two weeks later. From the moment she stepped off the plane, it became clear that their old, easy connection had gone missing. And the mutual loss of their virginity that night proved to be an uncomfortable disaster rather than the consummation they’d anticipated for so long.

  After that, the daily letters came weekly for a while before becoming even less frequent. The weekend they had picked for his visit to her was now pronounced by Clare to be “not good” due to exams, as did the next date he suggested. Eventually, he received a letter in which she admitted that she’d been misleading him for weeks. She hadn’t intended to date when she left for college, she said, but when she arrived, it seemed silly to limit herself when there were so many interesting people to meet and experience. She also pointed out, in so many words, that he had become a studious boor who was failing to flourish in his new surroundings as she was in hers. She provided full details, including ones about a young man who had become a particular soul mate.

  He had just finished rereading that letter when the lights in the motel winked out and the ventilation unit along the wall shut down with a pronounced chunk. He opened a window and lay down, staring blankly into the dark, surprised to hear the faint, disembodied jazz that had been emanating unnoticed from the tiny speaker on his phone.

  He tried to fall asleep. But the air was stale, and his mind wouldn’t be still. He felt around on the night table until he found his phone, turned on the flashlight app, and went back to the letters. The battery ran down rapidly as he read awkwa
rdly on, holding his phone next to his ear with one hand and a letter just below his nose with the other.

  After that letter, he found that their relationship ceased to be a positive topic in the few letters that followed, when it was mentioned at all. The next week, a new very special male friend was mentioned. She really wished Frank would get out of the library and enjoy life more, the way she was.

  He decided that reading the letters was like shuffling the pages of one of those flipbooks that featured one slightly morphing, acrobatic picture per page, creating a motion picture effect when you shuffled the pages rapidly from front to back. His face flushed as he visualized his tormented dance as Clare’s marionette. And he was glad when he reached the last letter from his first college semester. The rest of the letters would have to wait to be read. Maybe forever.

  * * *

  15

  P.S. I Love You

  The next morning, he reached the data center. He slowed down as he approached the gate and took as much in as possible before turning onto a side street. He could have seen the same details using Google Earth and Street View without ever leaving Washington, but he wanted to get a more complete feel for the scene. Now that he was here, he was startled to see how insignificant the facility’s defenses were. The tiny guardhouse next to the gate couldn’t hold more than one person when it held anyone at all—which appeared to be never. Instead, only a video camera, a keypad, and a gate arm not much more substantial than you’d find at a tollbooth stood in the way of immediate access to the building. There weren’t any tire spikes or the kind of barrier that could be raised from the road that protected federal buildings in Washington. A truck, or even a car, could easily drive right through the gate. And a large truck traveling fast should be able to barrel through the razor-wire-topped chain link fence on either side without even slowing down.

  In any event, it would have been impossible to comprehend the enormity of the structure if he’d only viewed it online. It was one thing to read that a building was three stories tall and covered as much land as twenty football fields, but it was something else to see it rear up in front of you, with its cliff-like walls converging into points in perspective view far in the distance to the right and left. True, it was lightly defended. But it was also massive beyond his imagining. It would easily take ten truck bombs parked around the perimeter to hit just one building like this hard, and even then, only some of the servers around the sides of the building would be damaged.

  One reason he’d chosen this facility to visit was because it was bounded by hills on one side. Ten minutes later, he was motoring slowly along a road running along the top of one of those hills, looking for a good view of the server building from above. But there were houses and trees everywhere, blocking his view.

  Eventually, he found a small park and pulled over. He could clearly see the flat roof of the building in the distance, but it was almost a mile away.

  The scenario he had been imagining assumed two or three terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The world was awash with RPGs—more than nine million had been manufactured in various countries since 1961, and a picture of a terrorist was as likely to show him wielding an RPG launcher as an AK-47. He had to believe it wouldn’t be hard to set up a few dozen U.S.-bound cargo containers in such a way as to conceal one or two RPG launchers and some ammunition in each. At one thousand yards, that kind of weapon wouldn’t be very accurate, but it wouldn’t need to be, given the enormous size of the target.

  According to what he’d read, a small team of terrorists should be able to fire a hundred grenades in ten minutes, leaving plenty of time to make good their escape if they attacked in the middle of the night. That number of rounds ought to be enough to wreak some serious havoc, especially if they used incendiary grenades. But only if they could be fired from a location higher than their target, where the marksman could be sure to evenly distribute his fire across the entire roof of the target.

  Maybe a mortar would be a more likely weapon? After all, most of the data centers weren’t in hilly areas. With mortars, you lobbed your shells high up in the air and let them fall back down on the target. And instead of being fired free hand from the shoulder, a mortar was a piece of mobile artillery set up on the ground that could be precisely adjusted for direction and range. He put the car in gear and headed back down the hill toward the motels clustered around the highway exit, discouraged that a trip he had regarded as a simple confirmatory exercise had instead led to unexpected complications he would now need to resolve.

  * * *

  Frank set his Styrofoam plate on one of the empty tables in the “Free hot breakfast!” room of his motel. On the plate sat a yellow-white puck of microwaved scrambled eggs, two small cinnamon swirl rolls, and a tiny container containing something ominously identified as “buttery spread.” He hadn’t had the courage to try the biscuits and gravy; the latter had congealed into something that appeared primordial and life threatening. He went back for a cup of coffee and picked up a copy of the local paper next to the coffee urn.

  He scanned the front page with the same degree of interest as his eggs merited, preoccupied by his failure the night before to reach any sort of conclusion about the desirability and feasibility of using black market infantry field mortars to destroy data centers. Not surprisingly, nobody had seen fit to write about it online yet.

  In concept, a mortar seemed to be the perfect tool for the job he had in mind. Mortars were highly mobile, built in a variety of calibers, and could fire shells with varying payload weights and target ranges. But there didn’t seem to be any manufacturers in countries he could imagine selling to the Caliphate, and they didn’t appear to be as available on the black market as were RPG launchers and grenades.

  That didn’t mean mortars couldn’t be what the terrorists intended to use. But it did mean he’d need to rely on the CIA’s resources to evaluate their appropriateness for the kind of attack he had in mind. That could be a problem, since he wasn’t supposed to be investigating mortars—that was the Kinetic Tiger Team’s remit. It wouldn’t surprise him if his and Tim’s searches were being monitored, and it didn’t sound like a good idea to be seen wandering so far afield if that was the case.

  He flipped the front page of the paper over and scanned the second page with as little attention as the first, when an arresting picture caught his eye: it showed a close-up of the neck of a child with extraordinarily swollen lymph nodes. The brief story that accompanied the picture reported that the child also suffered from a high fever, muscle cramps, and vomiting. It was the second such case to appear in the local hospital, and the physicians were at a loss to diagnose what the children had contracted. Blood samples had been sent the day before to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta for analysis. Strange.

  He dumped his disposable plate and utensils in the trash, picked up his backpack, and went to the front desk to check out and move on. But move on to where? He’d envisioned visiting several data centers to get a firsthand impression of each. But after seeing one, he wasn’t sure what more there was to learn. Each would be enormous and barely defended. Some would be near cities, and some would be in the country.

  Maybe he was foolish trying to figure out exactly how the terrorists might attack, anyway. For all he knew, they might be planning to fly ultralight airplanes on suicide missions, carrying leftover Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in their laps. That would be a way to go out in style. Maybe all those devices hadn’t been accounted for after all. And you didn’t even need a pilot’s license to buy and fly an ultralight from a grassy field. Maybe that was too Hollywood to be realistic, but who knew? Maybe it wasn’t.

  He went back to the breakfast room to refill his coffee cup before leaving and noticed the newscast on the big television screen on the wall was showing a picture that looked very similar to the one he’d seen in the paper. He took a sip of his coffee and stopped t
o listen.

  In a surprising announcement, the Center for Disease Control announced this morning that at least two cases of bubonic plague have been reported in Oregon. Both of the victims are young children. As of now, neither the CDC nor the hospital where the children are being treated has any idea how the children could have been exposed to infection by a disease that has only very rarely been seen in the United States.

  Frank didn’t like the sound of that. He decided it was time to head home.

  * * *

  Frank tried to focus on news sites on his laptop as he flew from west to east. Below him, suspected new cases of bubonic plague were being reported everywhere now. But despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get Clare’s letters out of his mind on the long flight home. All he recalled about their relations during college was that after reconciling the summer after their freshman year, the same sad scenario had played out again. Being abandoned twice was a more than doubly painful and demoralizing experience.

  He wondered whether they had visited each other, and if so, whether he had traveled south or she north. Most of all, he wondered why Clare had dropped him once again. Somewhere over Minnesota, he gave up and retrieved the envelope from his backpack in the overhead bin. He opened it and found the place during their freshman year where he had left off. After four months, her correspondence suddenly resumed.

  Things were apparently not going so well for Clare; some of the female friends she’d bonded with most during her first semester now seemed less interesting. The two male soul mates she had mentioned most frequently during the fall had decided to remain true to their own long-distance heartthrobs. A best friend from high school was preoccupied with her own crises. Clare needed someone to share her qualms with regarding these new uncertainties, and she had evidently decided there was no one left to confide in but him.