by Bob Mayer
He had reason to be extra vigilant that day. It was 1993 and the news was full of stories of the Battle of Mogadishu. Helicopters shot down, soldiers dead, bodies being dragged through the streets by angry mobs.
His role in that affair, he’d never been very clear on.
Neeley had paused, short of the entrance to the tunnel that would take her onto the plane. Gant had walked up to her, eyes hidden by dark aviator glasses. For such a hard man, his face lit up when he smiled.
She’d always remember that smile in Berlin, as much as she remembered the look on his face peering out at his waiting grave in Vermont.
And that was why she’d handed him the package and said: “It’s a bomb.”
Neeley realized she was staring at her hands. She shook her head, as if she could dislodge all those memories. The memories that she called “no do-over.” Where a decision was made, an event happened, a path was taken, and you could not go back.
Death was the ultimate no do-over. She’d knelt next to Gant’s grave after filling it, howling at the moon all night, shrieking and pounding the ground until her hands bled and the tears froze on her face.
“You all right?”
The crew chief was leaning over her, hanging on the straps as the plane banked hard, flying up a valley between high peaks.
Neeley blinked. She reached up and wiped her eyes and looked in confusion at the moisture on her fingers.
It was only then she accepted that she’d been crying. Just two tears but it was the most since that night.
This was not good.
The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Riggs, knew there was stuff going on that people were hiding from him. Not just here in the Pentagon, but throughout the government. The Clowns In Action over at Langley liked to act like they knew what they were doing, but really, ever since 9/11, the military had taken the lead not only in terms of covert action but also intelligence gathering.
But closer to home and heart, he’d known there was some secret around him, spreading from one person to another like a game of telephone and he wasn’t in the loop. No one was going to whisper it in his ear.
But this time, it was real bad.
He’d gotten the report on the Bent Spear in Nebraska. Cleaned up by the Nightstalkers. He could care less about that and more about the inquiries going on about how that damn nuke had been left there. Simple oversight, incompetent bureaucracy—all the usual excuses were going to have a hard time holding up on this one.
The general looked like a classic Roman senator. With hooked nose, silver hair, high brow, and tall, erect carriage, he exuded, “Don’t fuck with me, because you can’t, and pray I don’t fuck with you, because I can.”
He was also like a Roman senator in that he was overweight, his uniform jacket stretched to the limits. The upside of that was there was plenty of room for all the ribbons and badges that crowded the cloth. A smaller man would have had to leave some off.
He had a tingling in his fingers and in his toes that reminded him of that night sitting in a bunker, body armor strapped on, helmet cinched tight, waiting to die. His fingers twitched and he yearned for a weapon. His feet ached to run. It didn’t matter which way. They just wanted to move.
Nothing was right. Nobody was where they should be or doing what they ought to be doing.
Pinnacle was threatened. On top of the looming treaty, that was a double blow that the country simply couldn’t absorb. Those fuckers from Area 51 thought they were saving the day when actually they were sitting on top of a danger to the country as bad as the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, and definitely worse than those fools in North Korea.
Riggs leaned back in his chair and it squeaked loudly in protest. He considered how fat he’d gotten in the past year.
It was the first time he’d ever accepted the reality that everyone else could clearly see.
And he even accepted the obvious reason.
He was fat because he’d quit drinking and switched over to eating.
Odd. He’d never thought about how easy that explanation was. When he’d accepted there was a higher power, he’d accepted he’d have to give up the flask he’d kept in his top right drawer, and, when outside the office, inside his dress coat pocket, covered by all those colorful ribbons. It was surprising how many hoagies it had taken to replace the bottle, but who cared about that now?
He swiveled in the chair, the springs protesting. He’d have to get his aide to oil the damn thing, and why the hell hadn’t the man taken the initiative and done it the first time it started making noise? He looked at the saber in the frame on the wall, the one his parents had gotten him his Firstie year at West Point. Across the top of the blade were all the insignia of rank he’d earned over the years: butter bar of the second lieutenant, shifting to the silver of first lieutenant; captain’s bars; gold oak leaf of major, when he’d turned down the job of being the aide to the commanding general of the 101st and earned his Combat Infantry Badge; silver oak leaf of lieutenant colonel, when he’d commanded the Third Airborne of the 187th Infantry in the Screaming Eagles; full bird colonel and a brigade command of the 187th, the Rakkasans. First star. Second star and so on through three with his corps command and now he wore the fourth.
You couldn’t go higher, unless World War III broke out and they decided to bring back a general of army. Ulysses S. had been the first. Omar Bradley had been the last.
It had never occurred to Riggs before about attaining the fifth star.
Not consciously that is.
Riggs was rubbing his ring finger as he reflected on the saber and his career and rank, and that reminded him of what was missing on that finger.
His ring, the ring, was in the same drawer the flask used to rest in, next to a bag of chips. His finger had outgrown it and he’d had it cut off because he’d gotten fatter faster than he’d realized he needed to take off the ring. He’d never taken it off in thirty-plus years. Not in the shower, not in bed with his wife, not in combat. He slid the drawer open and stared at the gold ring adorned with diamond set in black hematite. The thin slice in the gold band. He’d had them press the ring back to size for now, an empty oval where his finger had once been.
He still had an indent on the finger that had once been adorned with the ring—Academy crest turned the heart, class crest out, done immediately upon graduation—and his wedding band. (He was damned if he could remember where that was.) He’d simply given up trying to put it on one day, and now that he considered it, that should have been his warning about the ring.
There was no point getting the ring resized until he finished expanding, and Riggs wasn’t quite sure that would ever happen. It just seemed that there was something bigger than him making him larger.
He frowned at that thought, then smiled, because he knew it was part of his destiny. He’d sensed it on the Plain at West Point so many years ago, right hand raised, getting sworn in, head shaved, head buzzing from the screams of upper-class hazing, ill-fitting uniform hastily thrown on.
Everything was destiny.
They could fix the ring after his hand finished expanding. Everything had to expand to its largest point until it could be fixed. And the president and his treaty was all for decreasing. Making everything smaller.
His army. His nukes. His defenses against all enemies, foreign and domestic and whatever the fuck Fireflies were and whatever else was on the other side of those Rifts.
Oh yeah, the top people at the Pentagon knew about all that Area 51 hush-hush bullshit. They’d known from the start.
It had to be fixed.
Soon. In one fell swoop. He could wipe the table clean for America.
Riggs smiled. Destiny. All great men believed in it. And the greatest of the great seized it when the opportunity presented itself.
The country was lucky to have him. Really. One might consider the United States blessed that General “Lightning Bolt” Riggs was in the right place at the right time.
H
e lifted the report from DORKA (Department of Research & Kinesthetic Application). Opportunity was here and he was the one to seize it.
As he thought these great thoughts, his left hand automatically went into a drawer and pulled out a Snickers bar. The big one. The one that sometimes made him a little sick before he finished it.
He took a big bite while he thought long and hard and dark about the future.
Hannah Masterson sat alone, as she almost always was, contemplating betrayal.
As she almost always did.
This combination was not unusual for this room, the office of the head of the Cellar.
The occupant of this position—Hannah being only the third since it was founded—spent considerable time searching the nooks and crannies of other people’s souls, often finding them lacking.
The office was devoid of all charm or comfort. It had been that way when she inherited it from her predecessor, Nero, and the only major change had been the addition of more lighting since she was not blind, like Nero. He had gone through considerable trouble to recruit the once-Mrs. Hannah Masterson to replace him, searching for a unique mixture of personality type and experiences, and then forged her in action with a form of assessment that included numerous bodies and betrayals.
Ms. Jones would have envied the exhaustiveness of Nero’s search methods. Of course, Nero had also found her and placed her in charge of the Nightstalkers, so there was more than just an organizational connection. In a way, Ms. Jones and the now-Ms. Masterson might be considered covert progeny of Nero. It was why there was an engineer from the former Soviet Union in charge of the Nightstalkers. And a former suburban housewife in charge of the Cellar. The person was much more important than the nationality. Those whom Nero sought out were very, very special and very, very rare, so one could not limit oneself to arbitrary borders set up by nations.
Unlike Ms. Jones though, Hannah disdained the formality of a title and went simply by her first name. The last name had been her husband’s and he was long dead. He had betrayed her, and she didn’t need the name to remember that betrayal. This was her new life and “Hannah” would do just fine, thank you.
The office lacked any feminine touch, which was a bit surprising considering Hannah had been that suburban housewife when recruited over a decade ago and teamed up with Neeley as they went through their “assessment” period.
They’d survived, which Nero had considered a passing grade.
Sometimes Hannah wondered if she had been Nero’s first choice or if there had been a long list of possibilities and none had passed before her.
The office was unlike the offices of most others in power as Hannah saw no need to impress and she very rarely ever met anyone here. There were no pictures with arms around persons of note, no plaques, no awards… nothing. Nothing but the drab gray of concrete walls.
This was a trait she shared with Ms. Jones.
But not because Hannah Masterson was ill and needed to project herself as a hologram. Indeed, now in her midforties, she would be considered attractive if she ever went out into the world and desired to present herself as such, as she once had. She had thick blonde hair, discovering the first gray just a year ago. It had not bothered her as she’d once feared it would when she had thought a normal life would be her fate. In fact, given the world she now lived in and the problems she dealt with, she thought her genetic code was working quite well in keeping the gray at bay.
The life she’d thought she’d have when she married as a very young woman—garden club, white picket fence, children, PTA, husband on golf trips while she flirted with the tennis instructor—all that had been torn asunder years ago by the secrets she had never suspected her husband held. Today, a lesser person’s hair would have turned white long ago with the knowledge now locked in her brain.
She had not been shocked at what she’d learned from Nero, her faith in mankind shattered well before by betrayal at a fundamental level, a trait she shared with Neeley. To accept betrayal as an integral part of the human race was a key attribute required of the head of the Cellar.
Beyond her hair, her eyes were the color of expensive chocolate. She had worry lines etched on her face, to be expected after a decade on the job. She hit the midway mark between five and six feet and still weighed what any self-conscious suburban housewife would weigh, but it was now the result of a desire to be healthy rather than look trim and keep up with the other wives in the homeowners’ association.
Like Nero, she kept her desk sparse. A wide space with just a secure phone and stacks of folders. She had added a computer, but like everyone else in the black world, preferred to deal in paper that could be shredded and contained. Since her office was three hundred feet below the “crystal palace” of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, her distrust of electronic communication was not paranoid but an acceptance of the modern world’s reality. She had no doubt those upstairs were very interested in what happened in her office. She was not of them, but separate, different, and in the world of government bureaucracy, such a thing was both dangerous and envied.
Some of the very few in the sort-of-know wondered if her organization drew its name from the location of the underground office, but of course it didn’t. The Cellar had been formed (although not mandated for another six years) in December 1941, as smoke still rose above Pearl Harbor and the last, desperate taps echoed out of the USS Oklahoma. (Some of the men trapped inside the capsized ship lasted two weeks before finally dying.) This was long before the NSA was founded and the building above her constructed. If the Nightstalkers could trace its lineage to Trinity, the Cellar could trace its heritage to Pearl Harbor.
Like the Nightstalkers, the Cellar had initially been housed where it was most needed: at the War Department in Washington, DC, in a basement office of the building that currently held the State Department. The years had brought many changes, one of them the founding of the NSA in 1952, growing out of and separating from its predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency.
The CIA have its Memorial Wall with a single star representing each of those who had fallen in service. The current total was 103. Many of the names those stars represented had still not been released and some would never be. The NSA had its National Cryptologic Memorial listing the names of those who had fallen in service, underneath an inscription which read: They Served In Silence. That current total was 163.
There were no stars or plaques or inscriptions or museums for Nightstalkers or Cellar employees who died in service.
What only Nero had known, and Hannah now knew, was that a handful of those stars and names had been the result of a Cellar Sanction, corralling in rogue agents.
Nothing was ever exactly as it appeared in the covert world.
The NSA had recently outgrown the facility above her. Interestingly the organization’s need for power had grown larger than the electrical infrastructure surrounding the facility, so an adjunct facility was being built in Utah. Hannah would remain here though. As the Nightstalkers needed to be near Area 51 because that’s where the initial problems they had to solve had originated, the Cellar needed to be near Washington, DC, because most of the problems Hannah had to deal with originated there.
The Cellar, the Nightstalkers, and other small but powerful secret agencies officially began sprouting like snakes on Medusa’s head in 1947 when President Harry S. Truman formed a committee named Majestic-12. That organization has long been cited by UFOlogists as having been started after the 1947 Roswell incident. Majestic-12 was accused of suppressing information of extraterrestrial visits and keeping aliens locked up in Area 51.
If only that were true.
Although it also wasn’t totally false. The opening of the first Rift at Area 51 in 1948 and the “invasion” of Fireflies had caused great concern throughout the highest echelons of the government. Scientists, working on the cutting edge of physics combined with the new field of nuclear power, had opened a Rift, best speculated as a tear in our universe. Fireflies
came through, beings of pure energy that took over animate and inanimate objects. Since 1948 there had been twenty-seven recorded openings of Rifts. Each had been shut, and the Fireflies annihilated (along with whatever they possessed), but it was a threat that no one knew the full scope or nature of.
Majestic-12 were the most powerful men in the United States intelligence and military communities. Truman gave them the mandate to bridge the gap between domestic and international security (and into whatever space a Rift consumed), in essence covering what the FBI and CIA couldn’t quite grasp and protecting the world from threats that might be, well, not human. Like Fireflies. Overall, Majestic-12 operations were meant to transcend petty bureaucratic infighting, and even national enmity, and look to the greater good. While the Nightstalkers focused on scientific mishaps, the Cellar was on top of all Majestic-12 groups, because any elite operative or organization can be a double-edged sword.
The secret cops for the secret agencies.
The ones who tracked down and took care of transgressions by highly trained operatives that no normal police force could capture. The specialists who could never see the inside of a courtroom because of the secrets they knew—thus producing stars on the wall at CIA headquarters, those who were now serving in eternal silence.
The Cellar operated outside of most laws because it had been formed directly by presidential decree, which made it legal for the operation to do the illegal.
Wrapping one’s brain around that was difficult, so Hannah Masterson believed in working with a light touch.
Until a sledgehammer was needed.
She had a feeling hammer time was approaching.
Hannah’s phone buzzed. She hit the speaker. “Yes?”
“Ms. Jones for you, ma’am,” said Lois Smith, the ancient secretary who had served Nero for decades and now served Hannah. Smith was no Miss Moneypenny. She was the type of old woman with a graying bun and functional clothes you’d walk by on the street and not give a second thought to. She was efficient and, most importantly, could keep secrets.
