Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  “Series?” Amanda could feel her brain clogging just being around Clarice. The young woman could be from another planet.

  “Just thirty-six volumes. Not that many.”

  “No. Thank you. I’m a bit, um, behind on my reading.”

  “Yeah, your desk sucks right now, doesn’t it. I’d move us too just to escape from that mess. There!” She punctuated the last word with a stab at the keyboard. “Admin is a-packin’. Remote sites notified that we’ll be dark for twelve of the next twenty-four hours. So, where to?”

  They had any number of prepared sites. The scientific teams were pretty well anchored, but the administrative branch was the only one who knew who and where they all were. The teams were safe as long as her section of the Enclave wasn’t breached.

  Then a thought struck her. An obscure one that made her smile for the first time in three days.

  “Site A-1.”

  Clarice’s eyes widened for a moment, then she nodded. “Cool!”

  No one would look for them there. Well, there was one man who might. Amanda wasn’t ready to think about her feelings on that.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Four more days. Infiltration, marksmanship, exfiltration, and planning.”

  They’d posted a guard this time, but the Airman Basic hadn’t been watching for Shelley’s descent down a rope from the a hatch in the center of the ceiling. They’d all been woken by training rounds in their backsides.

  Rude awakening, and, Shelley was forced to admit, she’d loved every second of it.

  “Planning comes last because planning before you know what skills you bring to the operation is a wasted and foolish effort. Normally, of course, research and planning come first.”

  Sleeping on the floor of level two hadn’t done much for their sense of humor, nor had they apparently enjoyed cooling their heels here for the extra day while she’d gone to fetch Jeffrey Davis. The staff sergeant glowered at her, but not with the dangerous edge she’d been waiting to come out. Instead of vicious he’d gone to pouting, which looked pretty damn funny on six-foot-two of muscle-bound soldier. Sad.

  “There are eight hatches spread around the perimeter of the room. We won’t be using the one I’m standing on for the first round.” More than one round folks, saddle up. “Please go and stand by the hatch of your choice, it will make no difference.”

  Three chose and moved to stand by their selection. Two of three she’d picked out for exceptional skills in the first two levels. Hadn’t much noticed the third one, have to keep an eye there.

  The other four milled about for long moments before sorting themselves out until they each stood at the four remaining hatches. She moved to the center of the room.

  “We’ll start easy. No load. No kit. No weapon. Just you. But by the end of the day, you’ll be doing this with a full field kit and a week of food on your backs.”

  “Food?” It was barely a whisper. Bitten off at the last second before she could spot its origin.

  She’d made them wait the whole day while she was off fetching Jeff Davis. A day without food and water, which was normal enough in special operations. The voice recorders had picked up a few fights, all just shouting. And a truly lousy attempt at a pass by Sergeant Blockhead for the cute Senior Airman, far too close to a hidden microphone, that was completely ignored. Nothing serious on either account.

  Today she’d brought them each a Snickers for breakfast and a pint of water. Two of the women and one of the men still had half of each stashed about their person. Only the Senior Airman of those three had also chosen her hatch decisively.

  Shelley let the comment go. They could eat themselves sick tonight for all she cared. Today was field craft, even if they were forty-feet underground.

  She clicked her remote control and the hatches opened. Good marks. Not one leapt right in, not even the sergeant. First positive point in the whole course, boyo.

  “Each of these hatches leads into a different tunnel. Different paths and obstacles leading to a common destination. The entire level below your feet is filled with a three-dimensional maze. That’s fifty feet in diameter and twenty feet high. Some of the passages are walking tall, others are crawling small. Roughly the same area as half of a football field cut up into twisting, three dimensional paths. And not one is as easy as the cakewalk the Chicago Bears make up and down the field each weekend.”

  Shelley paced around checking each person’s eyes. Some cautious. Some weary. Only the sergeant was angry. His mood should be interesting by the end of today.

  “There are traps along every path. Each time the system catches you, it costs a point. The worse the breach, the more points, up to five. No personal tallies, it only shows up on a common counter at the end. Even though you are separated, teamwork is the all.”

  She stood in the center and let her voice boom out.

  “You are a team. Your mission is to arrive at the destination undetected by the system with all members accounted for, all assets for the operation in place. You will repeat this exercise with successively heavier and, more importantly, larger loads until you can all do the course without a single trigger over a two. A two is the level that will make a good patrol stop and think about it, but probably not do more than a prolonged look-and-listen. A total of under ten points for your whole team is required.”

  The sergeant glared over at the slip of a senior airman. It was hard to miss his animosity that had replaced his grunting desire. When they arrived, she’d been simpering to please him, but now she was more independent, had taken the initiative several times in class and had far and away the best scores. She was slowly coming into her own and he didn’t seem to much care for that change.

  Good girl, finally learning.

  “There is no advantage on this course to size, or lack of it. Strength is also less of a factor though some is required. I will offer you one hint, one more than your enemies will ever give you, though it is equally true for them. This is a course best traversed by a sharp mind rather than a powerful body.”

  One beat to let it sink in, two, three . . . The staff sergeant’s eyes finally reacted. Not the sharpest tack, but he’d heard.

  “All the paths are different. But that doesn’t matter, you will be rotating through every one of them.” Let that sink in for one, two, three, four beats. Long day ahead, folks.

  “Probably several times around before you get it right.” Long, serious drag-ass kinda day.

  She made a show of holding up her wrist and flipping aside the cover on her watch. “There is a thirty minute limit per run. . . . and Go!”

  They dropped from view, each down their own hatch into the serpentine, three-dimensional maze of twilight, darkness, and obstacles that packed the third level of the silo.

  Fifteen seconds in, three triggered penalties, all fives. Two tripwires and a noise-level breach.

  A sharp “Fuck!” issued from the sergeant’s hatch as a fourth five-pointer showed up on the tally.

  Land mine.

  CHAPTER 28

  Amanda sat in the back of the Coast Guard turboprop. Well, the Beech King Air was painted like a Coast Guard aircraft. The registry number would confuse anyone with access to the USCG database, because it belonged to a never-built third prototype of the XV-15 tilt rotor aircraft. But in the FAA database, it was just another executive officer craft of the nation’s forces. Rigged for six, it was all Amanda needed to move the heart of EMS.

  Medical and Intelligence were passed out in the rear seats, it had been a long night. Communications was flying the aircraft and Engineering had already gone ahead with the bulk of the files and equipment in an old Chinook helicopter still painted army green. The universal passport to civilian airports.

  Clarice sat in the backwards-facing seat across the small table from her. Despite the rush, her assistant had clearly taken time to change into one of her studiously
casual outfits. Amanda had been pleased enough at finding jeans, a decent blouse, and clean underwear. Clarice wore a cowboy leather skirt complete with square cut fringes, a blue-and-black checked flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and electric red cowboy boots.

  One by one they worked through the files.

  First up, Tyler’s group report. The Chinese coal-fired generating plants were building the Chinese environmental crisis into a global crisis. Their greenhouse gas emissions were astonishing. Americans were slowly replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent and saving a couple hundred pounds of coal wastage with each one. The Chinese were burning and wasting a couple million kilograms every day with inefficient plants and non-existent emissions scrubbing. Spewing it all into the atmosphere. And India was close behind trying to power their way out of mass disease and starvation.

  Any scientist who really understood the global warming process would be terrified by Tyler’s data. EMS was tracking it. The solutions were easy, but they weren’t cheap. EMS had developed some cost-saving systems, but not enough. The Chinese government was listening, listening but not acting. With each week of inaction, another polluting plant was completed and put into operation. Every week. Fifty-two new coal-fired power plants a year. Every year. The US had just set a record by finishing eleven plants in the same year.

  Zack Tyler, one of the more rabid team leaders, had listed possible remedies. She skipped past his first dozen recommendations to find something reasonable. Even that far down the list it still wasn’t good.

  “A force needs to be fielded with sufficient power to ballistically decimate each individual operation.” As if she had ready access to a large collection of eleven-ton demolition MOABs. And that’s what it would take, the Mother of All Bombs. A new coal plant every week, all built with the worst technology. It was an environmental disaster beyond imagination, but blowing them up wasn’t the answer.

  She handed the file back to Clarice. “Tell him to get real.”

  Clarice keyed the note into her laptop and sent it off. There was a smile that wasn’t justified by the last three hours of sweat over the mess between them, or the nine hectic hours of bug out activities from the Maine offices.

  “What did you actually send?”

  Clarice shook her head, but her smile grew.

  “Okay, if you must.” She tucked the stray blond hair behind her multi-pierced ears. “I told him to go get laid then try again.”

  Amanda shook her head. Well, maybe it would work better than asking. But the smile wasn’t done yet.

  She waited.

  “And I told him I wanted proof.”

  “Proof? Of getting laid? Like a baby?”

  Clarice shrugged, “That’s his problem. I just want the juicy details. He is one delicious looking nerd after all.”

  “Next.” Amanda knew better than to dig any deeper.

  “Desalinization processors. Jacob and Morena.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “Last two.”

  Amanda wanted to cry she was so tired. How was she supposed to face these last two? The drone of the plane engine was going to tip her off the edge into madness.

  Clarice looked just as red-eyed and worried. The pretty blond hair, usually a source of constant cheerful mayhem, looked listless and hung forward covering half her face.

  She probably didn’t look much better herself. Face it, Mandy, you probably look much worse. Even Jeffrey wouldn’t call her pretty at the moment. Well, he might, but he was ridiculously biased. He still saw a pretty-enough twenty-year old when he looked at her.

  The last two files were Phillip’s.

  His team’s files were the only ones left. These were the ones she’d been dreading. Phillip had insisted that it was time for them to go “roust old Jeffie” based on the status of his projects. He’d been close-mouthed about the reasoning, as careful as he’d been in Jeffrey’s apartment the night before he died. Now it was left to her to puzzle out her brother’s final thoughts.

  The time stamp on the front was the first oddity.

  “Is this right?” She pointed it out to Clarice.

  She didn’t look up, very carefully didn’t look up.

  “One hour, nineteen minutes before his death. He had to be in the studio with you and Mr. Davis. He submitted it twenty-one minutes before show time.” Her voice was none too steady, hiding carefully behind the memorized facts.

  “I did some checking. He sent me the e-mail from his Blackberry. No note, just these attachments and the Crash Priority code. I printed them per standard and left them on your desk.” She shuffled her files a few more times, then folding her hands so tightly they turned white before looking up. Tears were forming in her clear, young eyes.

  “Creeped me out a bit when I heard the news. As if he knew he was in danger. Message from the grave almost.”

  Amanda shivered from the cold air blowing through the airplane’s vents. What had Phillip known that she hadn’t? And what had she ensnared Jeffrey into?

  “I need to contact Jeffrey. Get him somewhere safe.”

  Clarice didn’t reach for her laptop or her phone.

  “Are you sure you want to contact him? You remember where he is?”

  She did, and felt less sure.

  “And is there any place safer?” Clarice persisted.

  Someplace she could keep an eye on him.

  No, maybe not. He was a hundred feet underground in one of the least-known locations in the US military and intelligence communities. And he had Master Sergeant Thomas watching his every move. Once again the idea of the two of them together almost choked her. Later. Think about it later, Mandy.

  Mandy? Now she was calling herself by Jeffrey’s nickname. When she started calling herself Mand, she’d be in real trouble.

  “Leave them be.”

  But why had Phillip sent his notes from the grave? What had he known?

  The two men had talked long the night before he died. Were there any clues in the part of their conversation she’d understood?

  They’d started with reminiscences communicated in some language that must be private to their own weird versions of guy-speak reality. She’d watched Jeffrey as he rebonded with his old college roommate over tales of beer halls, wild rides across country for Spring Break, and Army labs.

  She’d laughed dutifully as Phillip retold the story of his sign collection. In college he’d illegally collected road signs. But they’d been puzzled about how to steal a “Stop. Pay toll here.” sign. For one thing it was at the off ramp to the New York State Thruway. For another, it was less than ten feet from a toll booth that was manned twenty-four hours a day.

  Jeffrey had figured it out, always the problem-solver. He rigged a kill switch on his van. They pulled up at two in the morning and hit the switch. The engine died. Phillip climbed out cussing and swearing. Convinced the toll guy to come out of his safe little booth and help him check the engine. Jeffrey had jumped out of the back with a lit cutting torch and sliced the sign right through the steel post in under thirty seconds. He’d jumped back inside and flipped the kill switch on. Phillip’s next attempt to start the van worked. He’d thanked the toll booth clerk and they’d driven away with the “untouchable” sign.

  The old Jeffrey was still there, she could see it in him, the way they interacted. He was still the Jeffrey who didn’t think much beyond himself. A good, kind man, but pretty preoccupied by the noise in his own head.

  Yet he’d grown into more. Jeff the Chef in the television studio was not the Jeffrey Davis she’d known, loved, and had ultimately—it really had been the right decision—rejected. He’d discovered a sense of quiet he hadn’t possessed before. Could thirty years actually change a man? “You learn something new every day, no matter how you try to avoid it.” Another Phillipism.

  With so little to anchor herself in Phillip and Je
ff’s conversation, she’d finally slept in her chair. Her chair. There was no question that it was indeed hers. It had fit her like a glove, or better yet, a slipper.

  And she’d woken in the guest bedroom. As far as she could tell, the two men hadn’t slept at all. She found them sipping vanilla French roast coffee in the pale sunrise light on the balcony. A moment of peace before the storm that took Phillip’s life.

  If only she’d stayed awake. But she hadn’t known it was the last night of her brother’s life. Clearly he’d thought it might be and yet never let on. If he were still alive, she’d kill him for not sharing his thoughts. Okay, hugged him first, then killed him. She could have protected him, somehow.

  The two other deaths. They’d spoken of the deaths of Jeff’s two colleagues, Julio and some girl. Perhaps Phillip had sent these last files because of something he spotted in Jeffrey’s television studio.

  Something he hadn’t bothered to mention to his sister.

  No, not something.

  Someone.

  “Clarice. Find out everything you can about those other cooking show hosts who died.”

  Clarice nodded and began pounding the keys on her laptop. Clearly relieved at having something constructive to do.

  Amanda opened Phillip’s files determined to finish them before the plane landed.

  CHAPTER 30

  The first of Phillip’s file Mandy opened was labeled “C4” but it was from an agricultural team, not an explosives division. Typical Phillip, he hadn’t bothered with the required executive summary or cover sheet. She flipped through the fifty-page report.

  Wheat. Barley. Rice.

  Even he had finally fallen victim to abusing the Crash Priority report code. And now he’d sent her fifty pages on genetically-altered drought resistant crops as his last act on Earth. The folder included pictures of desert corn and field rice. As if she cared. She read the first and last pages again. Not a single thing to make them a Crash Code. Not even enough to make them a little interesting. Useful perhaps, but not interesting. Is this what he had rushed to protect with his last act?