“Ifs nothing,” Joe waved a hand, “If we do snap him up, I’ll enjoy that action and whatever prestige comes from it. Besides, I owe Sampson lots of favors. My old man ran off when I was three, so he was a substitute father for me when I was growing up. He was the one who got me into police work.”
As Joe and Marcus finished up their casual meeting, Greg stood from the Gondwana tables held by the ASU contingent and, charged on the beer, excused himself for other plans. He had no intention of going to the show, and it was Lori’s turn to arch an eyebrow.
He walked back to campus for his car and drove to Margaret’s. Jazzed, he told her about the blockade as she laid out expensive beer and wine, Kajan grass and an eager body.
“Civil disobedience is roots cool, but I’m glad you didn’t get arrested,” she smiled, “Now lean back, you big bad revolutionary...”
She started with an enthusiastic blow job. Greg’s exhilaration from that day’s protest and challenge to authority proved an aphrodisiac and she came several times on his stamina. He remained hard after coming himself.
“Maybe you should stop the US mail more often,” she laughed.
TWENTY-ONE
BBC World Service Special Report
“Modern Counterinsurgency: The Weapons of War”
BBC Reporter: Nijal Thomas [1-13-2007]
(Electrostraca #: RNB/GM-113007-375-789-0376)
The ultimate weapon in any war is the human one. Mexico’s Zapatista’s rely upon “people’s war” and “the people armed” as the bulwark of their revolution, staking the defense of their “Liberated Territories” on a strategy of peoples militias and guerrilla warfare. Yet even the people, united, can be defeated if those in power make a routine out of “crimes against humanity.” A ruthless military dictatorship willing to engage in a thoroughly dirty war, along the lines of Uruguay in 1973-74 or Argentina in 1976-83, can defeat most any popular insurrection.
The U.S. counterinsurgency war in southern Mexico has not resorted to such extreme measures so far, though the same cannot be said of the Mexican government’s efforts to suppress indigenous insurrection. The official U.S./Mexican Combined Forces remain a model military organization; though their critics claim, with some justification, that the Combined Forces are mere window dressing. High-tech American and Mexican Army and Marine troops cruise rebel territory in sophisticated, air conditioned, computerized tanks and APVs. On ground solidly ZLF held they are scorned by peasants sympathetic to the guerrillas and consistently attacked. Snipers, mines and traps, boomerang biochemical attacks, rockets, mortars and drones, suicide car bombings, kamikaze guerrillas wired with explosives, lightning FAO commando-style hits, even the occasional pitched battle in the field with a militia column greet the Combined Forces in the core ZLF territories. In areas only under guerrilla influence, they are still scorned by peasants who support the ZLF, but they are not often attacked. Needless to say, and aside from occasional lightning ground forays and campaigns, the Combined Forces leave those regions held by the Zapatistas to the unmerciful pounding from a relentless U.S. air war. And, to military “special forces.”
Unfortunately, the Mexican “special forces” are the right-wing death squads and contra bands that operate mostly on the periphery, but occasionally into the heart of the Liberated Territories. This is strictly Mexican military-aided white terror; rounding up and massacring an entire village, indiscriminately castrating and then shooting boys between 11 and 16 in a targeted zone, torturing suspected guerrillas with their families, etc. Much like RENAMO in Mozambique and the Nicaraguan contras, their 21st century Mexican counterparts disrupt, destroy and terrorize southern Mexico’s ZLF-dominated society, hoping to make the cost of their revolution too high for people to endure. The U.S. military’s failure to control such elements, and the U.S. government’s failure to sufficiently pressure the Mexican government to curtail death squad activities has tarred the U.S. counterinsurgency effort with the brutal actions of Mexico’s renegade “white” terrorists.
The strategy of U.S. “special forces,” by contrast, is much more selective; targeting the structure of ZLF society in the Liberated Territories, and not southern Mexico’s peasant population as a whole. Whereas the Mexican death squads and contras are the out-of-control sledgehammer in this war, U.S. special forces are the pinpoint, surgical laser beam. Union militants, prominent cooperative representatives, and militia column leaders; hydroelectric projects, arms factories, railroad and truck stations; insurrectionary tendencies in neighboring countries as well as the ZLF’s international connections; U.S. blows against such targets are intended to be telling, striking at the social leadership, institutional cement and physical infrastructure holding the revolution together.
U.S special forces comprise elite military forces on the ground (Army Green Beret and Delta Force, Navy SEAL Team Six, Coast Guard special units, CIA Eagle Force, etc.), and the NSC, NSA and the CIA in Washington; all coordinated through the secret Presidential Sarasota Council. Rumors of shadowy British, Israeli or mercenary involvement have never been independently confirmed. The Sarasota Council promotes an interdisciplinary approach to special operations. Typically, a team of three agents is dropped over, say, the Sierra Madre; each member of this unit from a different military or intelligence branch, and all three having trained together for the past six months at an isolated military installation. Each is a walking arsenal, with enough fire power to take on a military company and enough explosives to crack a small dam, enough biochemical toxins to poison the water table for miles about and enough martial arts training to kick Bruce Lee’s butt. Virtual Reality enhancements allow the team to communicate out and pinpoint their position via satellite link, to easily move and attack by night, and to carry out complex maneuvers or operations in perfect synch. Extensive individual survival training, and team-skills-complimenting, round out a highly mobile, extremely deadly fighting unit as likely to carry out its mission and battle its way out to go on future missions.
Psychological Operations are a current rage of the Sarasota Council, which maintains an interest in the enigmatic San Cristobal Connection as well. The Council is not without its controversies or critics however. Two years before, it fielded a group of scientists funded by corporate, intelligence and military sources to research what has come to be known as the Omega Template Proposal.
The thesis of the super secret report produced by these scientists is that it is possible to create the perfect soldier, and perhaps the supreme warrior caste, by applying a precise socio-biological template in a clearly defined, total environment. Shades of science fiction. When the report was leaked to the New York Times in 2006, it inspired one critic to label it the Dorsai Template, after a famous series of 20th century science fiction novels. The report proposes an Omega Crucible, in which a sampling of genetically promising human beings would be isolated from birth on a remote island or region sealed off completely from the outside world, then subjected to rigorous physical and mental training, horrific tests of survival, even scientific modification, all within a social order charitably called Techno-Feudalism.
Long term biological and genetic engineering is key to the Omega Crucible in the report; from introducing new digestive symbiots into the human body so that a new soldier can, say, eat wood, to modifying a human allele structure in order to provide future warriors with eyesight edging well into the infrared and ultraviolet. The Omega Template and Crucible portend a secret warrior society, a clandestine government-run order of assassins, perhaps even a conquering master race. In the wake of public controversy, key members of the Sarasota Council, as well as the President himself, have disavowed the report, terming its proposals “irresponsible.”
TWENTY-TWO
Peregrine knocked off the ASU campus food coop, In The Raw, almost as an afterthought. Originally, he’d intended to investigate the Redwood Eatery, but a show there with bands had kept the cleanup crew well into the wee hours. Walking by the coop, he noticed that the slats covering the window screens
were simple to pry out, and that the door was right next to the slats. The opportunity screamed out, and he reached in, unlocked the deadbolt, then opened the doorknob. The lock box was stowed beneath a crate of yogurt in the cooler. He skulked off into the night, holding his breath, $430 odd richer. It rained.
***
Greg woke in a strange bed, a relatively strange, new lover at his side and the smell of their sex everywhere. Light for a new day was beginning to find its way through the bedroom’s parted curtains.
Having two lovers, and so close after having been dumped by Janet, certainly inflated his ego. He was attractive at least. Girls did want him. But that fact solved little. If he were desirable, why did Janet not desire him anymore? If he were desirable, how could he win her back? He did miss her familiarity and friendship. Even their sex had been for mutual pleasure, not merely for the excitement of having someone new, which Margaret did give him. In turn, Greg was realizing that sex was not just sex for him. At least with Margaret, he was starting to invest himself emotionally in her. He liked her, but he wanted more. And he suspected that sex for her was a lot easier, less attachment laden, than it was for him. He had, in fact, gotten pissed when she had not been there for his call.
“Mornin’,” she drowsed awake then.
“Morning,” he smiled at her, then made his excuse, “I gotta get up soon to help my dad clean the house. Do you have a shower?”
“Of course,” Margaret reached for his crotch, “But you’re not leaving quite so fast.”
She went down on him. It certainly was not Janet, but it was spirited. After he showered her, they showered together.
Greg finally remembered where he had seen Margaret before. It hit him as she stepped from the shower, towels wrapped around her body and her hair. Sophomore year in high school, when he was getting to know Janet better than just someone he had grown up with, she had been in Janet’s circle of friends. As he recalled, they had not stayed friends much beyond that year.
“You were Janet’s friend in high school,” he said, flatly, in the middle of dressing.
She glanced up at him in the bathroom mirror.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you start seeing me because you’d heard Janet and I broke up?” Greg asked, expecting it.
“I knew Janet was your girlfriend,” Margaret opened the medicine cabinet for her makeup, “But I didn’t know you’d broken up.”
“You wanted to see me even though you thought I was still going with Janet?”
She took a few moments to measure her response.
“Janet and I were once blood friends.” She began, working on her eyes. “We did a project together in English. It was to write our own mythology. Maybe I’m not as creative as Janet, but we both busted our butts on that project. It was great. The teacher wrote us a letter suggesting we look for a publisher for it. But as time went on, Janet got more and more of the credit for it. We both put in every spare minute we had on that thing, and I’d say we each did about half the work. But she was the one who wound up taking it as her project, and I became the help. I heard she even used that letter to help her get into Wellesley.”
“So I’m your way of getting back at her?” Greg frowned.
“Not at all,” she smiled from the mirror, her full smile warm and mirthful, “I liked you from the start, when we first met. I wanted to get to know you better. But so did Janet, and Janet always got what she wanted. Well, I wanted you too. I knew Janet was away at school in Boston. There’s no ring on your finger, and you never said no. So, I got what I wanted for a change.”
Greg blushed from that, as well as from Margaret’s take on Janet. He finished dressing. He remembered that mythology project and knew that Janet had gloried in its acclaim. Perhaps it was not so much that she had taken credit for the English project as that, in talking about it, Janet neglected to mention much about Margaret. With a kiss and a promise to call, he was out the door and in his car, driving for home and his morning’s mission.
“Morning,” Andre put down a coffee cup at the dining room table, dress casual and the morning paper opened to the sports section, “Long time no see.”
“Sorry Dad,” Greg smiled, “Peace demonstrations.”
“Figured as much. Got some time for a little breakfast? I’m working on some huevos rancheros. Letting the sauce simmer down right now. No problem to cook more.”
“Okay,” the son said, even though he had intended to get what he needed and go.
“Orange juice?” Andre said from the kitchen door as Greg took a seat and searched for the comics.
“Yeh, and some coffee.”
“How are things going?” his father asked, carrying both beverages to the table, “How’s school?”
“Good,” Greg gulped the coffee and sipped the o.j., “I’m a little behind in some of my classes because of this peace stuff, but its still early in the semester.”
“And Janet?”
“Still sad, I guess. I’m trying to keep busy, but it still hurts. A lot.”
“It’s only natural to be sad,” Andre said from the kitchen, “I’m sure you’re feeling that Janet’s done the worst thing one human can do to another.”
“Pretty much,” Greg could feel the bile of betrayal once more.
“Well,” Andre looked into his son’s hurt, angry eyes standing in the kitchen door, “I’m not going to dispute your emotions. Promise me that, if you start feeling really depressed about this breakup with Janet, you’ll talk to me about things. Even if I’m out of town, call. Before I leave again, I’ll arrange for a remote cellular hookup.”
“No problem,” Greg lost any of Andre’s concern for his son’s potential suicidal tendencies in his own anger.
The breakfast had been a good idea, Greg realized, when Andre brought out a heaping platter. The eggs were scrambled and laced with fried onions, bell pepper and diced chili relleno. The sauce was rich in onions, tomato chunks and cilantro. Everything was topped with cheese and sided with buttered toast. Greg ate his share.
“I might be going to the city this afternoon,” Andre chased down his breakfast with more coffee, “Around 2. Want to come? We could make an afternoon of it, just cruise around, see what we can see, do what we want.”
“Can we do that tomorrow dad?” Greg asked, “Got something I absolutely promised I’d do today. How about Sunday afternoon.”
“Sure,” the father said, after a little thought, “I’ll do some rearranging. Not a problem.”
“We’ll do it,” Greg said.
After the meal and some small talk, Greg excused himself. He read the fax accepting Greg’s bid on the engine rebuild work, as well as a bank authorization covering materials cost for the job. Then he headed for the basement, where he put his old Boy Scout collapsible shovel in one of the family’s backpacks, then loaded the pack down with the cased riemanium from its hiding place. He tried to appear inconspicuous lugging it out of the house, and succeeded. He settled the massive pack carefully in the passenger seat and drove off, jays diving after his tracks in the early morning.
Greg enjoyed driving in the morning, with fog still lingering on the land. At times, canyons and arroyos were so thick with white mist that their floors were entirely shrouded, while the surrounding higher land and ridges between were clear and partially sunny. As he drove the road alongside or across bridge over such a canyon, the solid white blanket enchanted him with thoughts of some hidden world beneath, a Shangri-La or Brigadoon cloaked in fog and mystery waiting to be discovered. If only the riemanium were as easy to hide.
***
Two things upset Rosanne so bad, she called in sick on her waitress-ing job, the one she had scraped together for Friday evening and Saturday days to replace Security Pacific in the pinch. Not good after only a night on the job. At noon, the detective, Dimapopulos had called with nothing new on her Mike, just the question as to whether he had contacted her. Mike’s phone at the SRO had been disconnected the day before. Her doubts gre
w. Had he, in fact, used her? Was he, in fact, the thief Peregrine that everybody hunted? Had she been the fool? It required more and more of her imagination to hold these thoughts at bay and explain, even justify why Mike had disappeared from her life without a word.
Around 1, the mail delivered a letter from the Chancellor’s office at UCSF, stating that the status of her grant was being reevaluated, and that while her fees could be paid out of it, her monthly living stipend would be suspended pending completion of the reevaluation. Mike, the Piccoli robbery, first the loss of her job, and now this letter; they were all linked. She knew it and exerted great effort to deny it. There must be some mistake, she thought and resolved to contact the President’s office Monday.
Rosanne had fallen in love with Mike in their brief time together. She realized it, and she was loathe to admit he had taken her for a fall without more concrete evidence. She rationalized. An emergency—last minute—had unexpectedly taken him out of town. She worried. Something bad, perhaps life threatening, had happened to her Mike. She hoped. Any day now, he would call. She would forgive him of anything, if only he would call.
***
Greg hiked in to his meadow, backpack on his back to carry the weight. Cloud peppered sky scrolled across the north bay. Three red winged blackbirds saluted the wind and flew away. He set the back-pack down on his stump and removed the shovel, snapping it into shape. He had paced the meadow so often that he knew it by heart. Human trails did not intersect the meadow, which was why he enjoyed this open space. The nearest was some one hundred yards to the northeast. The animal trails shifted from season to season, and year to year, though certain areas never seemed to be trammeled. Where the meadow’s southern edge raggedly grew up into forest he found an ideal spot, a cluster of evergreen bushes clumped with a knot of pines and firs.
He selected a piece of sod and ever so carefully spaded it up around the edges, first going around to inscribe the perimeter, then continuing to circle and to incrementally dig until he could peel up a unified hunk of earth rooted together by grass three feet circular and a half foot to a foot deep. He set this living camouflage off to one side and proceeded to dig the exposed earth, being careful to deposit each shovelful almost two yards away, on the bare ground beneath a pine. When he had the hole large enough, Greg returned for the pack and its contents. The riemanium and case, lid down, fit neatly into the hole. He carefully shoveled back earth into the hole around the case, taking time to pack the earth down after each round, until the riemanium was entirely hidden. Finally he carefully replaced the sod and tamped that down, making sure that there were no raw edges of his hiding place exposed. All that was needed was water to bind the earth, and rain was expect ed in days.
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