“What?” he asked. Even with his wife, he didn’t like to be looked at anymore.
She kissed him on the cheek. “You look great honey.”
He smiled, shocked. “Really?”
“Yes, you look strong and proud.”
The doorbell rang and downstairs Vanessa yelled, “I’ll get it.”
General Boen had been around thousands of wounded soldiers. Some of the injuries were unseen: a soldier with tinnitus unable to hear. Others were horrific. Soldiers disfigured from fire or a bomb. Their limbs torn, their faces melted into a smear of skin. Boen did the best thing anyone could when he interacted with them: he treated them like people. He acknowledged their disability, but only up front. He’d ask what happened and how they were managing. But after that it was a one-to-one conversation, no pandering, no sympathy. Around General Boen, the crippled and the unfortunate forgot they were.
When General Boen came in, his warmth filled the home. He knelt down and spoke with Vanessa. He had even brought her a toy. He hugged Tiffany and told her how she was more beautiful each time he saw her. He turned to Raimey and said nothing, they just looked at one another. The moment was long enough to make the hallway go silent, just the sound of an antique clock ticking time away. And then General Boen saluted Raimey, recognizing his service and his sacrifice. No words, those were fleeting, and they never come out as intended. A salute. Well deserved from a man who would never pander or wilt. From a man who understood that Raimey’s body was sacrificed for an ideal that was rarely met.
Raimey nodded and when Boen held the salute, he nodded some more, unable to speak. It wasn’t long, but it felt like time had slowed. Finally, Boen put his hand on John’s shoulder.
“I’m glad you made it, John.”
Raimey cleared his throat. “Thank you, sir.”
Boen caught up with the whole family over a quick breakfast of coffee and toast. He didn’t have much time and he wanted to speak with John alone.
“Can we go for a walk?” Boen asked. Tiffany understood this was directed to John. She cleared the table and asked Vanessa to help her clean up. They went to the kitchen.
“Sure.”
Boen followed Raimey out the door.
Two blocks away, talk of the weather turned to the tragic events from the last few months.
“Why do you think WarDon killed himself?” Raimey asked. He was so drugged on painkillers that for the first two weeks, he didn’t know what had happened. “He was a tough bird, that was unlike him.”
Boen had known Don for over thirty years and the suicide surprised him, too. “We’re not sure. But it was definitely a suicide. He wasn’t at the UN and he killed himself right afterwards. Maybe he blamed himself. He was in charge of the security.”
“So they un-un-un-retired you,” Raimey said. It was an old joke by now. Boen had been brought back three times since he officially got out of the game at sixty years old. Boen laughed.
“I was in a swimsuit when I got the call,” he said and laughed some more. “You wouldn’t recognize me in my retired life. I’m a whole different person.”
Boen had retired to a small ranch on the Brazos River just west of Fort Worth. He rode horses, hung out with a pack of dogs that had adopted his land as their own, fished, canoed, drank Coors Light and listened to Mexicali. His wife, Deb, had died five years earlier. He missed her, but life was full of death and many of the ones he loved had gone back to the earth. Debra wouldn’t have wanted him to stew. It was one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her.
“I never got to the ranch,” Raimey said, shaking his head. He had forgotten about his injuries, he was just thinking about travel. It was so difficult now to go anywhere rural.
“Maybe someday, even still,” Boen said.
“So what do they got you doing?” Raimey asked.
“Just helping with the transition, then getting back to drinking beer and catching some bass.”
“Have you met Dr. Lindo?” Raimey asked.
Boen paused and Raimey registered that he was deciding what he could or couldn’t say.
“You don’t hav—” Raimey started.
“I am working with him right now,” Boen said. “He’s my primary advisor for new military efforts.”
“I’ve met him.”
“I know.”
Of course he would, Raimey thought.
“What do you think?” Raimey asked. “I couldn’t get a bead on him.”
“He’s very smart. Awkward. I wouldn’t say he has a sense of humor but he has an energy about him like he’s in on his own private joke. The really smart ones are usually socially retarded. Comes with the territory.”
“You know he tested me and Janis?”
Boen’s pause was longer. “I’ve seen Eric since he left the hospital,” he said.
“Is he good?” Raimey asked.
“Yeah.” But Boen’s tone was uncertain.
It was apparent that he couldn’t say more. Since Boen’s original meeting with Evan, with each Tank Major progress report, Boen’s initial casualness to the concept had turned into astonishment. Boen liked weapons and he believed that the best way to avoid war was to carry the biggest stick. But this stick was a hammer. The Tank Major was vertically scalable on all levels: for peace keeping, for urban warfare, and for (heaven forbid) a war between nations.
Boen was in Chicago to see the finished project. The first Tank Major was going to be demonstrated for the new President and the top brass of the military today at 11:00 a.m. That was why he had to meet the Raimeys so early.
He had seen the preparation, video of the surgery, how they fused Janis’s spine to the inside of the battle chassis. It was permanent, there was no going back when a soldier gave a nod and signed the paper. You were a Tank Major for life.
Beyond his original disfigurement, they had cut Eric down further. He was a torso with a head. But Eric was fine with it. He understood what they were doing and he likened himself to the first astronauts. Someone had to do it and they had asked him. It was worth the sacrifice.
“John, I can’t get into it too much but I may be coming back some day in a professional capacity. They’re doing some amazing things right now and I could see you being a part of it.”
“Does it have to do with what they’re using Janis for?”
“Yes,” Boen said, almost dreamily. Like Evan, Boen could see a platoon of giants walking into a battlefield immune to the bullets ricocheting off their armored skin. Tank Majors would save so many lives.
Raimey looked across a small pond and watched a few of the geese shuffle around each other on the opposite side. “I need to find a purpose again, Earl. I’ve been through some tough shit but this takes it, hands down. Just tell me when and where and I’m there.”
“I know you feel that way, John,” Boen said. He knelt down. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through and I’m not going to pretend I can. But be careful and count your blessings. A lot of mistakes are compounded by further ones.”
“You told me that a lot back in the day,” Raimey said. “But what does that have to do with helping you?”
“I don’t know.” Boen got up with a crack of his knees. “Things aren’t what they used to be, including you, including me.”
“They sure as hell aren’t. I knew who I was before. I had goals. Do my duty. Get my pension. Hopefully have another kid. Get old with Tiff.”
“Most of that you can still do, John,” Boen said softly.
John turned like he had been slapped. “NO, I can’t. Not like this. I’d rather be dead. I tell Tiffany I’m fine, but I’m not. If the bomb had worked a little harder or I was a few feet closer, everyone would be better off. This is unacceptable.”
He looked into Boen’s eyes. Boen had never seen them so pleading. “If you got anything I can help with, I want it. I need to move forward.”
“Everyone needs that, John. But from where we stand, which way is it?”
John was silent. Boen st
uffed his hands in his pockets and watched the gaggle quack and play. He looked at the dirty blanket of clouds overhead and felt the chill in the air. Seeing his friend so desperate for validation depressed him. He pondered how the true castration of a man was taking away their purpose.
= = =
Boen left Raimey at the front of the house and his chaperone drove him to the Derik Building. Boen learned it was a military research center that specialized in bionics and that MindCorp was now heavily involved. Apparently, the Tank Major project had piqued Cynthia’s interest. Boen shook his head in disbelief. He had never liked government and private sector partnerships in the business of war. He felt it created looseness to a government service that needed to be monitored as gravely as life support.
He was old enough to remember when the military had outsourced manned operations during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in the early twenty-first century. As a young soldier, he had run into these men. They may have had a corporate headquarters, even a business card, but they held guns with live ammo. They were mercenaries.
The U.S. military had justified the outsourcing because they were used as security detail for high-level local figures in the Middle East. But the U.S. learned that while they may have outsourced the responsibility, they didn’t relinquish the culpability. Blood got spilled, accusations were made, and pointed fingers were stacked on fingers like Lincoln Logs. They hadn’t outsourced people; they had outsourced the conditional right to kill. And the rules of engagement were different for a uniformed soldier trained and commanded under a rigid structure, than for a mercenary who made six figures, had a 401k, and was saving up for a boat.
Now the largest corporation in the history of mankind was partnered with the United States, designing a soldier that was the equivalent of one hundred soldiers. Why? Boen wondered. Everything he’d read about Cynthia would have caused him to predict otherwise. It wasn’t that she was a hippy-dippy socialist, far from it. She was a true capitalist, providing a superior product, stomping out any competition, and reaping her just desserts without apology. But she sure as hell wasn’t a loyalist. MindCorp made more money overseas than it did here. Why do this?
“You’re caught up in the money. Money means nothing to me anymore. I have more than anyone could ever spend. It’s knowledge, nothing more. It’s the chill of learning something so new that I’m the only person in the world that knows it,” is what Cynthia would have said to Boen if she had been seated next to him. But she wasn’t. She was at the Derik Building, helping with the final diagnostic protocol of the first bionic soldier.
Boen suddenly felt old.
“We’re about ten minutes out, sir,” his driver announced.
“Help with the transition, get back to the ranch,” he whispered to himself. But he was curious too, just like the rest of them: running toward the wail of sirens when it could only be gunshots or fire.
They pulled up. General Boen got out and loitered for a minute mentally rolodexing through the men he’d see inside, many of them associates he’d known for forty years.
The Gray Hairs, he thought with a smile. When did I get so damn old? Looking back was like time-lapse photography. Boen remembered his twenties and flinched at all the stupid stuff he had done. Wonder he was alive. He felt he could rule the world at thirty. He held Jenny, his daughter, for the first time at forty-two. At sixty-four he gave her away to a man who would be unfaithful and make her hate herself. Two years later Debra had cancer. A year after that, he put her in the ground. And now at seventy, back in the fold. Strong for my age, but the knees can tell when a storm is coming, and the memory isn’t quite as sharp.
“What are you doing out here, Earl?” Jan Hedgegard, a Navy Admiral said from the window of his chauffeured car. “They didn’t demote you to valet did they?” Jan opened the door and the first thing that set down on the salt blasted asphalt was the foot of a cane.
Jan just made my point, Boen thought. Jan used to do pull-ups with weights strapped to his waist. Jan bent his knees inward, and with help from the driver, got to his feet. He hobbled over to Boen and turned to see what Boen was looking at. Just another building across the street.
“Anything I’m supposed to notice?” Jan asked.
“Nope. Just thinking about how damn old we all got. How’s Tom?”
“Still living at home, if you believe it,” Jan said. Boen was asking about his forty-year-old son.
“They couldn’t make it work, huh?” Boen said.
Jan shook his head. “Nope. Couldn’t get past it. It was too much for both of them. I don’t blame her though,” Jan said.
Boen nodded.
“I always thought your girl and my boy could have been fine together. They used to be friends,” Jan said.
“They were five, Jan. Hard to gauge the chemistry at that point,” Boen said. They both laughed.
“Are you coming inside or are you trying to get hypothermia?” Jan said. “Help a fellow geezer out, I don’t want these guys seeing me scuttling around.”
Boen put his arm around Jan. They hadn’t seen each other in years, but some friendships don’t need daily watering. “I’ll spot you.”
Inside, they were seated on bleachers that had been rolled into a large space roughly the size of a gymnasium. The bleachers were encased in a Plexiglas box, three inches thick on all sides.
“I feel like a hamster,” Jan said to Boen under his breath. They nodded at some of their peers.
Thirty yards to their left was an old tank. In front of them, about the same distance away, was a cement block twenty feet tall and fifteen feet wide. To its right was a decommissioned Humvee. There was also a shooting range. A .50 caliber machine gun was aimed at a hill of sand bags downrange.
“Are those RPGs?” Boen asked Jan. Next to the machine gun were a half a dozen tubes—hand held missile launchers, the same used by ninety-nine percent of the terrorists and fanatics they dealt with now.
“Looks like it,” Jan said.
“Suddenly I want our hamster cage to be a little thicker.”
“Or further away,” Jan added.
Hearing protection was handed out as they came in and now Boen understood why—they were going to use live fire and explosives in front of them. That was highly unusual in a closed environment.
There were fifty VIPs present. The former Vice President Wade Williams was the last to arrive. He smiled his pearly whites and shook the hands of half the folks in the bleachers before he sat down. Boen knew that Wade didn’t really know Joseph Michaels, the former President. They had been brought together to hit as many cross sections as possible. Wade’s smile was a bit too genuine for Boen’s taste so soon after the UN atrocity.
Evan Lindo walked into the hamster cage.
“Good morning,” Evan said to them from a small podium in front of the bleachers. Boen saw a small, fit redhead sneak in after Evan and sit in the front row. No one else seemed to notice her.
“Is that Cynthia Revo?” Boen asked Jan.
“Ayup.”
“It’s been only three months since the UN terrorist attack. Three months since we lost President Michaels, the fifth time we’ve lost a President in our nation’s history.” Lindo waited as the words sunk in. “And we all miss Donald Richards. He was a mentor of mine, he taught me most of what I know.”
Completely untrue, but oil them up.
“Don taught me a few phrases that he lived by. One, don’t bring a knife to a nuke fight.”
The crowd chuckled. Lindo had calculated it would.
“Two. Expect the best, prepare for the worst.”
The group of military heads nodded.
“Globalization of our economies and cyberspace have blurred the lines between nations, but we are still a distinct culture. We still have borders we protect and citizens that rely on us. And we still have interests specific to the nation and our military. We cannot protect everyone, but we must protect our own. That’s not callous. It’s not insensitive. The United St
ates is our family and sometimes you have to circle the wagons.
“Our President is dead. Our Secretary of Defense—regardless of how it happened—is no longer a pillar we can lean on.”
Lindo made eye contact with many of the officers in the room.
“We have to lead. With our new President Ward Williams,” Lindo put a hand out in his direction. Turd. Williams gave a wave that belonged in a parade. “And the men and women in this room. We are the ones in the watchtower.”
Lindo put on a big smile. “This isn’t a room of just military and political leaders. I’m proud and flattered to say that MindCorp and its founder, Cynthia Revo, has been integral to this project. While MindCorp is a global business, it’s distinctly American. Thank you Cynthia for understanding our nation’s needs.”
The men in uniform clapped. Cynthia acknowledged the room but Boen thought she looked sad and unkempt. She quickly turned back to the ground.
“Let’s acknowledge that our current military equipment doesn’t address today’s needs,” Lindo said. “We have terrorists imbedded like ticks in our cities. We need fuel to run our vehicles and our supply is dwindling. We aren’t fighting nations, but extremist groups. We need a military that is light and flexible. We need a military that is special forces.
“But we still need military might. We need a weapon—like the atomic bomb- that is a deterrent to both extremists and nations. I present to you the most devastating infantry weapon every built. The melding of man and machine into something better. I bring you the Tank Major.”
On the far wall, a large garage door slowly opened. White light bled through creating a silhouette of a gigantic humanoid shape. Tank Major Janis walked into the room.
A gasp went through the crowd. He was eleven feet tall and almost as wide at the shoulders. He weighed eight thousand pounds. The room shook as he ran. His body groaned and hissed and a pair of gigantic drive chains around his waist—together two feet tall—spun furiously, counter to the other. His body was painted in green and brown camouflage and stenciled with radiation symbols on his front and back.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 17
