“What about an arm?” Maxine asked. She took up his hand and placed it on the silk fabric of her pant leg and held it there. Carter stared at the contact.
Morgan sighed, his hand on the casing trembling now, “There was a body propped in a chair. I thought it was strange that it was clear of the rubble, but I only thought that for a moment. Then he started distracting me by pissing me off.”
“Are you trying to tell me–” Carter began, but Maxine cut him off.
“Mr. Roberts,” she said, not taking her eyes off Morgan, “our good friend here is not on trial. Why are you speaking to him as if he were?”
Carter could stand it no longer. “He failed utterly in his duty, and you are treating him as if he is a hero. He had five men, and all he had to do was go in and do a quick sweep and assure the area was clean.”
Maxine King jumped up from the bed with such speed that Carter did not get the idea through his head to move back. She slapped him across the face hard enough to bring on a stinging numbness. The coppery tang of blood bloomed in Carter’s mouth.
“How dare you,” she said. “Your incompetence created this situation. That freighter was supposed to burn up on re-entry, kill those three, and turn their bodies to ash. You recommended we kill off the scrap yard worker so we could have time to inspect the crash site, then you failed to finish him off.” She jabbed him in the chest with her fingernail, as she said, “This is your fault, Roberts. No one else’s.”
Carter shoved her hand aside and Maxine’s face flashed with rage. He should not have dared touch her.
He said, “We had no other choice. We couldn’t kill them on the Lacedaemon. There was no way to safely move the bodies away from the fleet without detection.”
She said through her clenched teeth, “You should have shot them in the head before the freighter was sent down.”
“A gunshot would have set off alarms and put everyone’s lives at risk.”
“Then you should have choked the life out of each one.”
“I–”
“Get out,” she said.
“I only–”
“Get out… now.”
Carter turned and walked back across the room, the heavy carpet swallowing his footfalls. The doors hushed open for him, he stepped through, and they slid closed. He turned into the empty, tiled hallway, blinding bright after the dim room.
…
Carter returned to his office. As he sat down, a female officer stepped into the doorway and knocked on the door frame. She smiled, but when Carter looked up, her smile faded.
“What?”
“I…” She hesitated. “I was asked to bring this transfer request to you.”
“Why me? That’s Abram Soltova’s responsibility.”
“He wanted you to review it because it regards the wounded soldier.”
Carter motioned for her to enter. He tapped two fingers on his desk, and she slid the paperwork over to him. He picked it up and looked it over.
As he reviewed the papers, the officer said, “He’s asking permission to leave his duty station in South Florida to come here and be near his brother.”
“How does he even know his brother’s injured?” Carter asked.
“It’s in the report, sir,” she said, pointing to the paperwork.
Carter looked over the document.
“God damn it,” Carter said and held the paperwork out for her. “I don’t need this right now. Find out who forwarded the call to the doctor.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, not reaching for the paperwork. “All you have to do is sign the back page, sir.”
“No. Brennan Morgan’s brother can rot in Florida for all I care.”
The officer only asked, “Sir?” but her expression said, ‘the man’s brother? Really?’
“This isn’t the goddamn Red Cross.” Carter stared at her, willing her to take the papers and get out of his office. She stared at him. He saw her digging deep for boldness, and finding it.
“Fine,” Carter said. He grabbed the sheet of paper, scratched his name across the signature line, and tossed it across the desk. It flipped off the desk and landed on the floor. She picked it up off the floor, said, “Thank you, sir,” smiled, and walked out.
Carter looked at the pen in his hand and threw it at the wall. He stared at the mark it left and then picked up a document and tried to put gutless Brennan Morgan out of his mind.
CHAPTER 21
Stacy and Leif sat in the rear area of the gunship when Jeffrey came walking up the ramp gripping Freisman by the back of the neck. Jeffrey shoved Freisman forward.
“Get into one of those chairs, and tell them what you just told me.”
Freisman lowered himself into the chair, wincing and pressing his hand into his ribs.
“Talk… now,” Jeffrey said.
Stacy asked, “What did he say?”
Jeffrey kicked Freisman’s shin. Freisman yelped.
“Talk.”
“Go on,” Leif said.
Freisman looked away from them to the corner. The sound of the river cascading over rocks filled the quiet cabin.
Freisman, still holding his ribs, began to speak in a defeated tone, “Maxine King took over United Aerospace last year when Reginald King died. She actually had control for many years before that. Reginald King was totally in love with her, and completely blinded by it. She is the most beautiful woman.” At this Freisman stopped. He let his ribs go, and leaned over, settling his elbows on his knees.
“Come back to us,” Jeffrey said, snapping his fingers in front of Freisman’s face, “I don’t have a lot of time.”
“She brought me into her group about five years ago to develop equipment to assist her. I have never met a more sincere or pleasant woman to be around.” He looked over at Stacy and smiled. “Please don’t tell my wife that part.”
“I’ll mail your wife your lower jaw if you don’t get on with it,” Jeffrey said.
Stacy turned to Jeffrey as if to say something to him, but he held up his hand and pointed to Freisman.
“She has so many connections now, you can’t stop her. Or ‘us’ rather. You can’t stop us. It doesn’t matter what I’ve told you. It’s so close, it can’t be stopped.”
“What can’t be stopped?” Stacy asked.
“The destruction of the entire military fleet.”
“What?” Leif asked, as if he had not heard the man correctly.
“Tell them why,” Jeffrey said.
“The military is no longer necessary. The human race no longer wars with itself.” A confident tone rose in Freisman’s voice. “The military realized this some fifty years ago. In order to preserve their way of life, top commanders fabricated a war with an alien race to justify their own existence. The war never came near Earth, which seems strange if you consider how fearsome the alien race was reported to have been.”
Jeffrey sat in the seat across from Freisman and asked him, “Do you know how many good men and women died keeping them from Earth?”
“Say what you want,” Freisman said. “You’re just one of the programmed.” Freisman turned to Stacy and Leif. “You see, many soldiers were put into psychotropic states and had detailed memories of war induced.” He looked back to Jeffrey. “It’s all an illusion. You’re just a victim of their plan.”
“I lived through six years of war and decades of dealing with those years.” Jeffrey said, balling up his fists.
Stacy moved over to sit beside Jeffrey and took hold of one of his hands, lowering it to her lap. “It’s all right, Jeffrey. He’s an idiot.”
“How will you destroy the fleet?” Leif asked, and Stacy looked at Leif and then to Jeffrey. She looked confused, and then the color faded from her face. She shook her head.
“Are you all right?” Leif asked, touching her shoulder.
“I remember it now,” she said. “It just came back to me, all at once. Oh, God.” She looked at Jeffrey, and he saw terror in her eyes.
Jeffrey put a h
and on her back.
“Nukes,” She said, and looked at Freisman. “She’s using nuclear warheads planted in each fusion reactor on the ships, isn’t she?”
Freisman nodded.
Jeffrey took hold of Stacy’s hand. “What do you remember?”
Stacy said, “I remember it all now. We found the device by mistake. Our objective was to infiltrate the Lacedaemon cruiser and get to the fusion reactor. We were on a training mission. Only the admiral commanding the ship and other key personnel knew we were coming aboard. We didn’t know who was informed of our presence, so we had to be extremely careful. I can only assume that’s why we found what we did.”
“When we came into the reactor room, we surprised two maintenance crew members installing a piece of equipment. We assumed it was part of the drill, so we restrained them. Then, when we looked over what they had been installing, we realized they weren’t maintenance. The device they had installed was small, but powerful enough.”
“We tried to report what we found, but our com signal was blocked. At that moment, someone knocked on the reactor room door. We opened the door and found four soldiers standing with weapons holstered. By the surprised look on their faces, I knew they had not expected us to be there. As they drew their weapons, Matt reacted first. He tossed a flash bang in among them. As the soldiers watched it roll between their legs, he ran. Dave followed. Being behind the other two, I didn’t have as much time, so I looked away from the flash bang and covered my ears. When I heard it go off, I ran through the group of soldiers. I saw Dave turn right around one of the cores and followed him. We reached the exit to the reactor area only to find another group of soldiers. They already had their weapons drawn. After they had disarmed us and beat the hell out of David and Matt, they moved us all to the freighter. They didn’t say a damn thing, just strapped us in and sent us down.”
She looked at Freisman, “So it wasn’t just the Lacedaemon was it? They have nukes on all the ships.”
“Yes,” Freisman said, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “We’ve been installing them for the last year, concealed in along with a series of upgrades to each reactor. The Lacedaemon was the last cruiser in the fleet.”
Leif asked, “So how do we stop this?”
“You don’t,” Freisman said. “There’s no way to shut them down. They’re hard-coded and sealed. The coding can’t be undone. If the charges that compress the plutonium cores receive any other information than a smooth countdown–any interruption at all–they’ll detonate. I was part of the team that designed the detonation control. It’s flawless.”
“Like your spider?” Jeffrey said.
Freisman met Jeffrey’s gaze. Jeffrey saw in Freisman’s eyes, not nervous defense, but surety.
“That spider’s a toy compared to the quality of the bombs we’ve built. The military’s done. We have contracts with enough nations that very few military ships will remain after the event. Those ships will be easily destroyed in a conventional manner. When they’re gone, we can move on to a peaceful world without the hate-mongers like you tearing it down.”
“You haven’t stopped to think about what the world is like without people like us to defend it,” Jeffrey said.
“People like you?” Freisman laughed so hard he winced and held his side. “You defend nothing. You only teach young men and women,” he indicated Stacy and Leif, “to hate and be violent.”
“I don’t know about you,” Stacy said to Leif, “but I learned to be violent long before I was in the military.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Freisman said. “Society is poisoned throughout by military actions. Violence is no longer innate in the human race. It’s an echo of the past, and only a world without weapons can foster real peace.”
Leif asked, “But what about the alien race that attacked us forty years ago? If we don’t have a military, we will be exposed–”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? It was all a lie. It never happened. There never was and never will be an alien invasion.”
“Okay,” Jeffrey said, “you claim that my memories are not real, but what about my wounds?”
“They were inflicted upon you to match the memories.”
“Convenient,” Jeffrey said.
“True.”
“I fought in a battle which the public was never made aware of. It happened just off the rim of Earth’s atmosphere. I crash landed in the South Pacific. Explain why they would implant me with that memory.” Jeffrey felt himself getting angry again.
“Just a flaw in their overall design I’m sure,” Freisman said. “Perhaps they had considered bringing the battle closer to Earth and then decided against it.
“This is insane,” Jeffrey said. “You–”
Stacy held up her hand. “It doesn’t matter one way or the other. You have no right to kill the thousands of innocent men and women who serve on those ships.”
“They’re not innocent,” Freisman said.
“Oh, that is it,” she said, stood, and brought the heel of her hand down on the bridge of Freisman’s nose. His head snapped back and a shocked look passed over his eyes before they went glassy. He fell forward. Stacy stepped back, allowing him to fall out of his chair, face-first, onto the decking, unconscious.
“That was totally appropriate,” Leif said, and looked to Jeffrey, “don’t you think?”
“Considering the circumstances, I think it was well timed,” Jeffrey said.
Freisman groaned, rolled over, and his eyes searched the ceiling. He sat up and looked at Stacy.
“You bitch,” he said, as he touched his nose.
Stacy shrugged her shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” Freisman said, still holding his face. “Do what you want to me. I don’t care.”
“Don’t forget why you’re talking,” Jeffrey said, and tapped the sat-phone in his shirt pocket. Freisman’s eyes darted from the phone to Jeffrey.
“You forget about the leverage?” Jeffrey asked. “How could you do that to your poor wife and daughter?”
“You gave me your word. If I told you what I know, you wouldn’t hurt them.”
“The deal may have changed,” Jeffrey said. “How do we shut off the nukes?”
Freisman sat up on his heels, knees on the deck. He kept his eyes down and tears began dripping off his nose and chin. He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice caught. He closed his eyes. He swallowed and then looked up at Jeffrey, his eyes red. With quiet grief, as if he had been told his wife and daughter were already dead, he said, “I knew there would be sacrifices, but I didn’t think it would be them.”
“There’s no need to sacrifice them,” Jeffrey said. “Just tell us how to shut down the nukes.”
“There’s no way to do it, I told you that. If my wife and daughter rest on shutting them down, then you’ll have to do what you want with them. The bombs are infallible.”
Jeffrey reached out and picked Freisman up off the deck. He pushed Freisman back into the seat, strapped down his legs, and then taped his arms. Then he motioned for Stacy and Leif to follow him outside. They walked away from the gunship. The moon had set to the west, its light still glowing along the treeline. The river rushed by now, unseen in the darkness.
“So what’s the next step?” Stacy asked.
“We need to find out if he’s telling the truth about those bombs,” Leif said. “We’ll have to push him more.”
“No,” Jeffrey said. “He’s at his limit. At this point, I believe we can take him at face value. We need to focus now on somehow getting in touch with the military and getting those ships emptied of as many crew members as possible, but I’m not sure how to get them to believe us.” Jeffrey looked back to the gunship and Freisman sitting in his seat, head back against the bulkhead. “We need to be rid of this guy. We’ll drop him here.”
“What if we need more information from him?” Leif asked.
“He’ll be stuck out here. No one will find him for a day or so. We can
have someone come back and get him, but I don’t want him with us now. He’s pissing me off too much.”
Jeffrey turned and walked back to the ship. Stacy and Leif followed him across the gravel and back up into the gunship. Jeffrey untied Freisman, walked him toward the ramp, let go of him, and pushed him forward. Freisman limped down the ramp.
Jeffrey said, “You’re trash, Freisman. If I live through this, I’ll see you in a federal prison.”
Freisman turned and smiled. The interior lights of the gunship threw his shadow out along the gravel bar. “When the military goes down, the only force of power will be Maxine King’s private army. She’ll take control and maintain peace through it, and you’ll be on the receiving end of our justice.”
“Will I?” Jeffrey said.
“Yes.”
Jeffrey pulled the sat-phone from his shirt pocket, dialed, and then held the phone up to his ear.
“Yes,” he said, then a pause, and then, “Yes,” another pause, “No, he’s a weasel and doesn’t deserve it. Do what you want with the woman and the girl. Just make sure their bodies aren’t found when you’re done.”
Freisman’s face went pale. Then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “You son of a bitch,” and he ran at Jeffrey, hands reaching out, his rage apparently over-riding the pain of his injuries. Jeffrey braced his feet and, when Freisman reached him, planted the palm of his left hand in Freisman’s chest. Freisman’s feet came off the ground, and he fell square onto his back on the ramp. He rolled over and fell off the side of the ramp to the gravel. After several seconds he drew a gasping breath.
“I’m taking off now,” Jeffrey said. “Get away from my gunship.” He pressed the switch to raise the ramp. Freisman reached out for the ramp and caught it, but his fingers slipped off as it lifted. Jeffrey watched the narrowing trapezoid of light close on the gravel. The ramp thumped shut.
Jeffrey turned and walked toward the cockpit saying, “That was almost too much.” The adrenaline fire had burned out, and he felt empty. Anger had muddied his mind.
I have to stay focused. I finally have something valuable: a target and a purpose. But not even a guess at how much time...
Hammerhead Page 17
