Project Reunion

by Ginger Booth

  Adam’s finger tracked to New York harbor. “But we’ve got excellent water access straight to all five boroughs. There are islands we could secure and invest for staging areas and quarantines. Meanwhile, it looks like your land troops might be, um, not steady enough to handle civilians inside the border.”

  “I’m an idiot,” Emmett replied. “I’m sorry. In the Army, we usually think of D-Day and the impossible landing problem.”

  “There’s not much parallel here with D-Day,” Adam said politely. “You’re not trying to land an overwhelming force in the face of an entrenched defense. You want to extract controlled batches of civilians. There are small weapons inside the city. But not much that would trouble a ship. I spoke to the XO who inserted your SEAL team. He said they didn’t face any significant hostiles from shore.”

  “I’d expect more hostiles against a sustained effort,” Niedermeyer cautioned. “One ship visiting Battery Park was a fluke. No one on shore had time to gather forces and react.”

  “What kind of boats would you use?” Emmett asked.

  “The ferries,” Adam supplied. “Probably with destroyers as a defensive screen. I’ve checked – the Staten Island ferries are in dock at Staten Island. The New London ferry is right here. I haven’t tracked down the others yet. We wanted to pass this by you first.”

  “So, first we’d have to extract the ferries,” Emmett said, groping at the logistics. “Or rather, you’d extract the ferries. And get them operational, and fueled. You have fuel?”

  “Excuse me, I assumed you were more familiar with the ferries in New York.” Adam smiled. “There are ferry terminals. So, we’d probably start by securing the Staten Island terminal. Then our engineers could check over the ferries and the fueling facilities, and get those operational. Top the fuel storage up from our reserves. Sanitary facilities. Get the place ready for traffic. Repeat as needed at other ferry terminals, or excursion boat docks. The point is, all these facilities already exist in New York. Some of them were even built to process immigrants.”

  Niedermeyer interjected, “The ferry terminals have to be pacified before we send in engineers. With respect, Adam. Emmett, our engineers aren’t like the Army Corps of Engineers. They need protection.”

  “Hey, I can hit the side of a barn with a rifle,” Adam quipped.

  Niedermeyer patted him on the shoulder. “But you can get my boat guns to track just fine. And that’s what I need from you.”

  Adam sighed. “I’d rather play with a ferry. I’ve always wanted a crack at those engines.” The thought visibly cheered him.

  Emmett smiled at the by-play, but studied the map on the table, thinking. “So how many troops to secure a small island?”

  “Now you’re out of our depth,” said Niedermeyer. “The Coast Guard, and maybe the merchant marine reserves – we could pitch in and operate the ferries. But securing the docks is up the Marines’ alley. Maybe they’d want help from Cullen’s troops, maybe not. The Navy would be their main support.”

  “You’d still need a massive land operation,” Adam added, “for quarantine. The Hudson River is navigable up to the epidemic border. Long Island Sound is easy. We can move people around with just the ferries there. The Atlantic’s rougher. But with the hospital ship from Ark 7, we could transport people down to south Jersey, too. It’s up to you, whether to set up quarantines outside the borders. Or inside New York Harbor, before moving the refugees.”

  Emmett shook his head. “Triage at the most, in the harbor. Quarantine takes too many supplies and volunteers. I don’t want them in there. Could you transport refugees up to New Hampshire and Maine? The train lines all run through Boston-Prov.”

  “Probably,” said Niedermeyer. “The merchant marine reserves could.” Adam made a note of it. “So – are you interested enough for me to set up the meetings?”

  “Hell, yeah!” said Emmett. “This is far better than we can do on land. Thank you!” He frowned a little in puzzlement. “Why didn’t you bring it up in Q&A?”

  Niedermeyer shrugged. “Wrong invite list. The land end is crucial. Without the receivers, it wouldn’t matter if we could extract refugees for you. I’m impressed with how far you’ve come with that, so fast. Especially Cullen.”

  “Especially not Tolliver,” Adam suggested wryly.

  Niedermeyer tilted his head. “Might not be a bad idea, to proceed with a plan totally different from what you showed Tolliver, Emmett.”

  “And you really think the naval forces would play ball?” Emmett prodded.

  “I think the naval forces are dying to do something,” Niedermeyer assured him. “The Coast Guard most of all. We’d like all the borders dismantled in the Northeast, as soon as practical. We’re damned sick of enforcing them. The North Atlantic blockade has quieted down nicely. The Navy might have to leave the party if something blows up. But they haven’t seen any real action in months. Amatrudo’s Ark 7 resource ships are near mutiny, over being held in reserve so long.

  “But the land’s not up to us. Hence this meeting, to see if there was anything we could contribute to help matters along. We have ships, ammo, men, fuel. Too much fuel, in fact.” He cocked an eyebrow at Adam.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Adam, taking his cue. “Emmett – those fuel oil storage drums in New Haven. Any chance you have excess capacity? We’ve been, um, inflating our fuel requisitions out of Norfolk. By 15%. Because they neglected to deliver our reserves. Now we’re running out of storage.” Adam grinned.

  Emmett returned the grin. “Good problem. I believe I can secure you a drum. Let me get someone intelligent to talk to you about it. I can’t even imagine how many gallons are in one of those monsters.”

  “Barrels,” Adam corrected.

  “Barrels,” Emmett echoed agreeably. His tone was agreeable. The way his eyes flashed at Adam was not. The pair were competitively cooperating.

  “Well, we have much more to talk about, Emmett,” said Niedermeyer, rising. “But dinner is waiting down by the pool. Apologies for boring you, Dee.”

  “Not at all,” I assured him. Boring, no. Discouraging, yes. I’d hoped Emmett’s plan was ready for action. Instead it seemed like he’d won some key backing. But he needed to scrap and renegotiate a big swath of the plan. Yet I got the impression that Emmett was surprised to even land backing on this trip. Every time I thought I had a handle on how large this operation was, it seemed to grow bigger.

  “So, are you two...?” Niedermeyer prodded.

  “Dating,” I supplied. “Just a couple months now.”

  “We’ve been working together ever since I extracted her from HomeSec last February,” Emmett added. “She got together with one of my Cocos then. My best friend, Zack Harkonnen. Zack was KIA in June.”

  “Yes, I remember. I’m sorry for your loss, Dee. Yours as well, Emmett.”

  “Thank you, John. Any chance we’ll see General Cullen at this pool bash?” Emmett inquired.

  “No, all secured from the brass tonight. Amatrudo whisked them away to someplace 5-star.”

  “Well, thank God and Captain Amatrudo, then.”

  Emmett showed them out the door.

  Chapter 8

  Interesting fact: Officers in the U.S. armed services were well paid. Majors earned around $90,000 a year base pay – nearly double the national median household income – plus combat pay, and enormous benefits that included advanced degrees, health care, and housing.

  “Another woman! Eureka!” I cried, to greet the sole other woman in the motel’s pool area. Around 15 male Rescos kept her company. “Please tell me you’re with this party. Not just a random motel guest?”

  She laughed, and held out a hand to shake. “Pam Niedermeyer. You must be Dee Baker. John said you must be feeling like a fish out of water. So thank you! I got a night out with my husband! That doesn’t happen often.” She pulled me into the buffet line beside her. Pam looked fit and comfortably padded, her sun-drenched freckled complexion setting into laugh lines around deep dimples. Her short c
hestnut-brown hair was streaked with just a little grey. She looked the perfect happy soccer mom of teen-aged kids. I guessed both Niedermeyers to be in their mid-forties.

  “Granted, I haven’t seen my husband yet,” Pam added. She didn’t seem concerned.

  “Yes, sorry, John got hung up in our room. Emmett and mine.” I pointed for clarity, but Pam had already seen us come in together, before Emmett was waylaid by the pair of Massachusetts Rescos.

  “Pam, please tell me John didn’t make you put this buffet together.” It was a lovely spread of food, well picked over by the time Emmett and I got there. I nabbed a steamed lobster, drawn butter, more chowder, cornbread, home fried potatoes with onions, succotash and squash. “This looks wonderful. I’m starving.”

  Putting on my bathing suit, I saw that I’d lost more weight, or inches at least, just since I’d last worn it a month ago. That was a novel experience, checking myself in a bathing suit in a mirror and finding myself too skinny. Emmett insisted I looked great. But I was determined to overeat my way through the rest of this summit.

  “The buffet was catered,” Pam assured me. “Please, take more! I’ll enjoy it vicariously. Ever since I turned 40, I’ve gone stout.” She grinned, and loaded up on succotash and raw hothouse vegetables.

  We settled into lounge chairs by the poolside to munch and chat. The caterer had provided a small keg of local beer, which Pam and the Rescos were depleting as quickly as possible. Emmett and I weren’t the only ones to bring our own local alcohol to the summit either, though we’d left ours in the suite. We didn’t drink much.

  “Such lovely bodies,” Pam mused. “My favorite thing about being a military wife. Your Emmett has a very nice ass.”

  “Ah – yes,” I settled on. “John is, um, very trim for his age.” Her husband was a very attractive, athletic, virile man. He was also mostly bald, with the rest of his head shaved. He and Adam had wandered in by then.

  “He’ll do,” she dismissed him. “These are all O-4 and older, aren’t they? That’s a shame.”

  “O-4?” I repeated.

  Pam laughed. “Oh, you are a babe in the woods at this, aren’t you? O-4 means officer grade 4. The middle grades are four through six, the field grade officers. Above that is generals and admirals. Your Emmett’s an O-4. John’s an O-6.”

  “What does it take to go from O-4 to O-6?”

  “About 12 years,” Pam supplied. “They have to be competent, too, I suppose. But if they’re not on a promotion track, they resign. Emmett might be nearing O-5.”

  “You think he looks older than most of these?” He looked right about in the middle of the pack. Pam was making me study the wet athletic male bodies rather closely. On the whole, I was quite pleased with how Emmett stacked up. Though we both clearly needed to eat more. He’d lost weight this week with that stomach bug, too.

  “Not especially older. Emmett’s just second of the Connecticut Rescos.” Pam continued her body ratings. “That gay one’s the youngest. Gay, married, married, bitter, not sure, looking, and in love. The gay one’s in love, too. Adam wins the beauty contest tonight, but he always does that.”

  “You always dissect people like this, Pam?” I inquired. I was used to thinking such things, but not speaking them. So the analysis usually flitted in and out of my brain, quickly dismissed.

  “She does,” Adam supplied with a grin, and pulled up a lounge chair beside mine to eat his own plate of food. “Especially when she’s drunk.”

  Pam stuck her tongue out at him. Adam saluted her back with thumb planted on his nose, fingers waving. I laughed. Clearly these two had known each other a long time.

  Emmett and Niedermeyer finally made it off the buffet line and came to join us. The earlier arrivals were done with the food, and playing in the pool. Niedermeyer grabbed an upright chair on Pam’s other side. Emmett handed me his plate, pushed me forward, and clambered in behind me on my lounge chair.

  Pam’s dimples deepened to maximum upon him. “Possessive much?”

  “Uh-huh,” Emmett agreed happily. He traded introductions with Pam, then snatched a lobster claw left on my plate. “Teach me how to do this, darlin’?”

  “I couldn’t get that one without a nutcracker,” I said. I turned it in his hand. “That way.” He easily cracked the shell with his fingers. “Have you considered your own chair?”

  “I like this one,” he assured me, and planted a drawn-butter-and-lobster kiss on my hair.

  “You could force Adam to move,” Pam suggested. “Like this: Adam – move.”

  “You’re a real ball-breaker, Pam,” Emmett observed appreciatively. “You and Dee must be bonding nicely.”

  I attempted to straighten my spine. Emmett clutched me around the middle, forcing my back round again. Adam grinned at me. We were both a great deal more polite than Pam and Emmett.

  “She seems a little repressed so far,” Pam replied. “I like your cross, Emmett.” She reached across and fingered it. He wasn’t wearing anything above the waist except dog tags and a cross on a chain. It looked great on him. “Is that allowed?”

  “From my Dad’s dog tags. Old-style, but they’re grandfathered.”

  “You knew your Dad?” I asked. He’d never mentioned his father.

  “You just assumed I was a bastard? I think you’re making progress on her, Pam,” Emmett quipped. “Dad’s been dead since I was 12, Dee. Didn’t see any rush to fill you in on him. KIA, special ops.”

  “So you were an Army brat?”

  “Part-time, yeah. Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Dad was kind of a nasty drunk. When he hit Momma, we headed back to the Ozarks. When he hit me, she divorced him.”

  “So you didn’t really know him.”

  “Knew him fine. We got along great. Died four years sober. Fort Campbell was a lot more fun than the Ozarks. But he’ll still be dead when we get home, Dee. This is a party.”

  “He’s not the talkative kind, is he, Dee?” Pam observed.

  “Apparently not. What other secrets are you keeping?”

  “Has he told you about his divorce yet, Dee?” asked Adam.

  I craned my neck around to frown at Emmett. Pam threw a lima bean at Adam. She had a pile of ammunition, apparently her least favorite ingredient from the succotash.

  “He was just fishing,” Emmett said, with a scowl. “But yes, I’m divorced. What is it with women? Would it be better if a man my age never had a serious relationship?”

  “We want to know what you learned from the experience,” claimed Pam judiciously.

  “Let’s see,” said Emmett. “If I’m married, and deployed, I don’t want her cheating on me. Could have told her that before I married her. In fact, I did.”

  “Where is she?” I asked. That seemed more pertinent to me than what, if anything, he’d learned.

  “Abu Dhabi, last I knew. She worked for a big military contractor.”

  “Oh!” cried Pam in revulsion. “Emmett, that wasn’t the marrying kind!”

  Emmett barked a laugh. “You got that right. Hey, it was fun, until it wasn’t. And Adam is also a ball-breaker. So, John. Do you surround yourself with ball-breakers, so you don’t have to?”

  The captain just laughed, and turned back to his conversation with the senior New York Resco. A number of Rescos were standing around talking along the edge of the pool. Scenic wet lower bodies obstructed our view of the water.

  Pam got up, stretched languorously, and pushed the closest Resco into the pool. “I find it so entertaining how I can get away with this, Dee,” she explained. She pushed in another one before they caught on, and pushed her in.

  “Yes! Play-time,” Emmett announced in my ear.

  We dove in, raced to the far end of the pool, and generally splashed around playing, much as we did at home in Mangal’s pool next door, during the long summer evenings. The artificial not-a-girlfriend constraint was gone, I was glad to see. Pam got together a game of chicken for a while. I fought piggy-back from Emmett’s shoulders. We kept losing, since e
veryone else out-massed me by 50 pounds or more.

  The other men frequently eddied out from the water play to network and do business. Pam made it a point to get to know each Resco – probably her real assignment for the evening. Adam worked the room as well, focused on shoreline Rescos from New Jersey and New Hampshire. He shouted over once for Emmett to verify that yes, New Haven still had machine shops eager for business. But Emmett took the time to play with me, even while he got to know the other Rescos better.

  We were taking a snack break, standing at the edge of the pool, when Colonel Mora finally joined us, still in combat fatigues. The Connecticut Rescos all laughed and welcomed him.

  He lumbered straight up to Emmett beside me, and shoved Emmett – hard – backwards into the pool. Major Papadopoulos promptly pulled me away, and kept his body between me and Mora. Niedermeyer rose from his lounge chair and walked toward us, stopping 10 feet away, arms crossed and mouth pursed.

  Mora let out a blue streak, swearing down at Emmett in the pool. Emmett swished his hands around idly, just standing there taking the abuse.

  When Mora wound down, Emmett said cautiously, “So, Carlos. How did your dinner go with the brass?”

  “MacLaren, that is the last favor you get from me!” Mora’s renewed flood of invective carried more information this time. Apparently Emmett had set him on the brass, to find out what he could. General Cullen, the commander of the New York borders, had sent a decoy car back to New York, so he could hide out here for the night, and then attend the rest of the summit. The other brass would leave first thing in the morning.

  “The strategic reserves are in Pennsylvania,” Mora concluded. “All of them. That what you wanted to know, Emmett?”

  “All of them?” echoed Colonel Hoffman. He was the one from New Jersey, who presented the plan to supply New York instead of evacuate it. He was the only Army officer present who out-ranked Mora – an O-6 like Niedermeyer, as Pam had clued me in.