Standing at the Edge

by William Alan Webb

  “Where’s Bob?”

  “Headed south, looking for help.”

  “I hope he finds it.”

  “Back to the gadgets I brought,” she said. “You got your wish! They’re called M3E1s, upgrades of an earlier weapon called a Carl Gustav. Some people called them just Gustavs and others goose. Don’t ask me why. Colonel Lamar said the U.S. Army used them for decades and this model was a later upgrade. They fire high-explosive rounds, good against anything you can shoot at. The base has a lot of them in underground bunkers but four is all Midnight could carry.”

  “Are they sort of like an RPG?”

  “Same idea, but with better range and killing power. I only brought eight rounds, but they’re rocket-assisted, so they kill out to seven hundred yards. Or so Lamar told me.”

  “Eight’s better than nothing.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “It’s been a long five days. We’ve lost five besides Lissa. We blew up some junk in the middle of the highway and knocked out one of their APCs, along with seven or eight other guys. Two days ago, they sent a bunch of infantry up here to drive us out and it got hot, but we fought them off. They were young…” His voice trailed off to let Jane absorb the meaning of young.

  “So they’re putting non-Chinese into the field?”

  “Yes and no. Some were Chinese. We can’t know how many natives they’ve recruited, but we know there’s some. And they weren’t trained like regular Chinese soldiers, either; they were raw. But it doesn’t matter. They’re almost to the last bridge. Even with these Carl things, I don’t think we can hold them up much longer.”

  “You’ve slowed them up longer than I thought you could.”

  He shrugged and sat on a flat rock, hidden from the roadside by a dense stand of scrub pines. “Don’t give ’em a target; they’ve brought up snipers.”

  Artu passed out cold field bread. The recipe for that crisp, cracker-like food varied depending on what grains were available. Jane tasted barley and something else… oats?

  “It’s hard for me to give my people a reason to keep fighting,” Bear said a few minutes later. “They’ve seen their friends die. Billy lost his brother Jake, and it’s hard for me to tell him why. If the Chinese get those old tanks and stuff, so what? It won’t affect us, at least not for a while.”

  Some crumbs fell into Jane’s lap and she made sure to find them all. “I don’t know what to tell you, Bear. I’ve seen what those bastards do to the people under their control, so for me it’s time to live free or die. But for you? That’s gotta be your decision. But I’ll say this much — they’ll be up your way a lot faster than you think.”

  “Me you don’t have to worry about convincing. When they killed Lissa and the baby, they made me a blood enemy for life. It’s the rest of ’em I can’t beg to keep going.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Munching in silence, they stared through the bushes at the distant Chinese, busily working on the bridge. After a while, Jane sat up straight and slapped at a mosquito on her arm. “I’ve been wondering about something…”

  “Like what?”

  “Why the bridges? Why don’t they just cut cross-country to hit the base? Shit, they could come through this very spot and there wouldn’t be much we could do about it, not with those armored vehicles they have with them. I know there’re some deep ravines down there, but they could bridge those a lot faster than they can repair the highway. We could hurt ’em pretty bad, but eventually we’d be killed or scattered and they’d have a straight path into the base. It’s just over the mountain.”

  “Yeah, but the trucks can’t drive in the open desert. Too many boulders and ravines.”

  “Trucks for the soldiers?”

  “No, the tanker trucks. How else are they gonna fuel the tanks at the base?”

  Jane blinked. Her face went slack as the simple truth of Bear’s statement sank in. “Of course, tankers. They’re rebuilding the highway so they… they’re not just looting the base, they’re moving into it. They’re coming here to stay. Oh, shit…”

  “Sorry, I figured you knew that.”

  “I’m tired and my brain’s not working. Damn. And Jingle Bob’s only been gone five days, so even if there is some American military unit down there in Arizona, he won’t get there for another eight or ten days or more.”

  Bear had no response; there was nothing to say.

  “If we could steal some gas,” Jane said, rubbing her bottom lip as she thought, “maybe we could crank up a generator, or rig something to power the base’s radios. Then we could radio for help, or crank up a few tanks of our own.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs.”

  “We’ve gotta take chances, Bear. We’re running out of time. If they capture the base, we’re all screwed. All of you up along the coast won’t be able to move east any more. Not without going a lot farther north. You’ll be cut off up there.”

  “We can’t just go ask for some gas.”

  “Let’s go back down the highway ten or twenty miles. Maybe there’s a depot.”

  “What the fuck, why not? Let’s take a couple of those Carl things and see if we can raise some hell.”

  #

  SECTION THREE

  Friction

  Chapter 15

  A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

  Operation Overtime

  0801 hours, April 11

  Nick Angriff reclined his office chair and sipped coffee. A bandage covered the tip of his ear. After his best night’s sleep within memory, he felt refreshed. His mouth watered, knowing a breakfast of fresh eggs and hot bread was on the way. The day’s agenda was full, as always. But the sun dazzled him as it poured in the huge window facing east, washing both the Clam Shell and the Crystal Palace in the glory of a spring morning. Angriff treated himself to a few moments of enjoying the view. For commanding generals, such moments are gone almost before they’re noticed.

  Sergeant Schiller knocked on his doorframe and stepped inside. “Morning, General. Did you sleep well?”

  “By God, J.C., I did. I haven’t slept so well in months. There’s something about dodging bullets that wears a man out.”

  Schiller smiled, genuinely pleased that his boss was in a good mood. It made his life so much easier. “I hope you don’t plan to make it a habit, General; it makes the rest of us nervous. And I understand Mayor Parfist was very upset by the whole thing. Sir, it’s not on your schedule, but Corporal Dupree says he has important news about the project you gave him. Would you like to see him, or should I put him down for tomorrow?”

  “No, by all means, send him in.”

  Dupree entered and stood at rigid attention, giving his sharpest salute. Angriff appreciated the effort, even if it didn’t quite suit the corporal’s demeanor. Dupree was an electronic warrior, not a physical one.

  He returned the salute. “Good morning, Dupree. You have news for me?”

  “Yes, sir. Per your orders, we set the trap for our tapper and activated it, and we caught something.”

  “When did it go active?”

  “Early yesterday, General. I thought you knew.”

  “I did not, but never mind that now. You found something?”

  “They fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. The Trojan gave us access to their entire file system before it was discovered and shut down. We took the precaution of severing the connection on our end.”

  Angriff leaned forward in his chair, put his elbows on the desk, and intertwined his fingers under his chin, the pose he struck when receiving weighty news and concentrating on every word. “Are you telling me you captured the files of another active computer system? That there really is another entity out there, one that tapped our lines and stole our data? That we’re not alone?”

  “Well, yes, sir, but it’s not some unknown entity. We know its name, General. It’s called Operation Comeback.”

  #

  0900 hou
rs

  Seven people jammed the tiny conference room behind his office. Along with Norm Fleming and Dennis Tompkins were Morgan and Joe Randall. Standing in one corner was the grim figure of Green Ghost. Angriff sat at the head of the table and Dupree stood next to him.

  “Generals Fleming and Tompkins are already aware of our agenda,” Angriff said. “For the rest of you, you are here because you’re the only ones I know, without a doubt, that I can trust. Most of this command was put together by Tom Steeple and his cronies. You I can count on, but aside from you five, Sergeant Schiller is the only other one. What we’re going to discuss goes no further than this circle.”

  “What about him?” Green Ghost nodded at Dupree.

  “Dupree’s the reason we’re in here. And I would think it goes without saying that nothing we say leaves this room. Nothing to anyone.” He glanced at Green Ghost over his shoulder. “That includes your sister.” After pausing to make certain everyone understood, he nodded at Dupree. “The floor’s yours, Corporal.”

  Dupree trembled as all eyes turned to him. Everyone else in the room was an officer, except him and maybe Green Ghost, since nobody knew exactly who or what he was. After drinking some water, Dupree began. “When Overtime was first activated, we found anomalies in the power usage and the data flow,” he said in a shaky voice.

  “The corporal is being modest,” Angriff said. “There was no we to finding this anomaly; it was all Corporal Dupree’s work. He’s one of the best computer people I’ve ever met. Go on, please.”

  “Uh, yes, sir. Well, we found that when the base was built, a hidden shaft led from the upper levels down through the mountain and far underground. Within this shaft was a conduit containing a data line that was hardwired to our mainframes, with an on-off relay way down inside that shaft. We had no idea where it led, and it didn’t seem practical to start digging up the desert tracing it, so General Angriff approved a trap.

  “We shut down access to our mainframes right after we discovered this tapline, so what I did was take a dedicated mainframe and I loaded it with as much useless information as it could hold. Within that data, however, I wrote a Trojan for whoever might access it, with hopes they would just download our data without worrying about it. The Trojan would automatically send all of their data back to us, even as we were sending them our dummy data. And that’s what happened.”

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” Green Ghost said. “Somebody built a tap into our computers when this oversized cave was being built. That’s what that relay was you had me switch off, right?”

  “That’s it. Right after Bettison and that whole incident on sub-floor eleven,” Angriff said. “When you went down the shaft.”

  “So we turned their game back on them?”

  “Affirmative,” Angriff said. “Dupree here did all the heavy lifting.”

  “Damn good job, Corporal,” said Green Ghost.

  “Ummm… thank you…” There was no indication of rank anywhere on Green Ghost’s uniform and Dupree was unsure how to address him. “Thank you… sir,” seemed safe.

  “So we know who they are?”

  “We do,” Angriff said. “Dupree can correct me if I get something wrong.”

  Dupree said nothing, but could think of no circumstance when he would correct his commanding general, no matter how wrong he might be.

  “First, they’re definitely Americans. It’s called Operation Comeback, and appears to be more of a complement to Overtime than a duplicate. Second, Comeback is much smaller in scale than we are. We’ve got their roster and so far there’s only one Army Security Battalion and some smaller specialized units, mostly recon, as combat forces. Total personnel are about 5,000. Third, they have a lot of really interesting toys, including two squadrons of A-10s.”

  “Warthogs?”

  “Warthogs.”

  Tompkins whistled. “Hell, even I remember those. Bad mothers. We could use ’em if the Chinese come back.”

  “That’s for damned sure,” Angriff said. “But this cake has icing on it. Aside from some much-needed hardware, the total military personnel tops out at around seventeen hundred, although we don’t know how many of those are awake. There’s another two thousand specialist citizens, which leaves thirteen hundred people unaccounted for. Care to guess who they are?”

  When no one commented, Morgan spoke up. “Politicians?”

  Angriff pointed at his daughter. “Bingo. You obviously inherited more than just my good looks. There’s over a thousand politicians and their staffs. Including senators, members of the House of Representatives, federal judges, political appointees, a certain former Madam Secretary of State, and best of all, two of our beloved former presidents.”

  “Is it the two I’m thinking of?” Fleming asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Now I can truly say that I’ve heard it all.” Fleming said his first words of the meeting. “Nobody did more to cripple our defenses than those two. How dare they survive what they wrought.”

  “They dared, all right. Does that really surprise you, though? But the story of how Overtime and this other base, Comeback, came into existence makes a lot more sense if two presidents were running interference for it. Obviously the quid pro quo was them authorizing all of this just to protect their own sorry asses. But none of you have asked who’s running that show… aren’t you curious?”

  Green Ghost shrugged. “Seems obvious to me. Tom Steeple.”

  “Give that man a cigar. Tom Steeple is running that show over there. We can’t be sure what he wants from us, but I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  “He wants us to do the heavy lifting,” Joe Randall said, then realized he’d spoken out loud. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “It’s okay, Joe, this meeting’s a little different. I want to hear everybody’s opinion, and you’re right on the money. We’re obviously the combat arm. They see our job as liberating territory so they can come in behind us and organize it. Since they’re career politicians and bureaucrats, they no doubt believe this is the natural order of things.

  “And they will be sorely disabused to discover I have no intention of letting them run anything, much less the territory we liberate. They’re the ones who screwed it up the first time and I’m not about to let them do it again. But since we now know they’re out there, we have to assume they know we’re here, too. After all, Tom Steeple approved every one of us being here.”

  “Not all of us,” Green Ghost said.

  “Most of us,” Angriff amended. “Now our biggest problem is that we have no idea where Operation Comeback is located. So the question before us is, how do we play this?” Sipping some water, Angriff glanced around the room.

  It was Dennis Tompkins who broke the silence. “If I knew a cougar was stalking me, I’d go hunt him,” he said. “Maybe lay an ambush.”

  Everyone nodded, as if that made sense.

  “Wouldn’t most people try to put some distance between him and them?” Fleming said. “Why go looking for trouble?”

  “If a predator is trailing you, they’re expecting you to run,” said Green Ghost. “So turn the tables. Right, General Tompkins?”

  “Exactly so,” he said. “If that cougar wants you, he’s gonna catch up to you, but he’s gonna do it in his own sweet time, when you don’t expect it. If you go hunting him, sure, it’s dangerous. Maybe he’s lying in wait where you can’t see him. But he ain’t expecting you to come after him, so maybe he panics and makes a mistake.”

  “Do the unexpected,” Angriff said.

  “That’s what I’d do,” Tompkins said. “Mushroom theory.”

  “What’s that?” Morgan said.

  “Keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em a lot of shit,” Green Ghost answered.

  “Yep,” Tompkins said. “Throw ’em off guard, act like you’re damned glad to see ’em. General Steeple loves to hear his name, so tell him his shit don’t stink. Give us time to find out what they’re planning.”

  Behind t
hem, Dupree cleared his throat. “There is one other item, General Angriff. I don’t know if it’s important or not.”

  “Out with it, son.”

  “Well, you may have overlooked it, sir, but Operation Comeback has two unnamed people in Long Sleep. They’re only identified as J. Doe One and J. Doe Two. I don’t know why; I just know that’s how they’re listed on the manifest.”

  “I did overlook that, Dupree,” Angriff said. “Two John Does. Who the hell could they be? Thoughts, anyone?” When no one spoke, he moved on. “In that case, Dennis, I see your point about seizing the initiative. Based on everything we know, the smart play is to seek them out instead of waiting for them to contact us. Be all shits and giggles until we get the lowdown on what their intentions are. Anybody opposed? All right, let’s think of how we’re going to do this.”

  “A good first step is to find out where the hell they are,” Green Ghost said. “I want to get out there and see what I can find.”

  “You’re just tired of paperwork,” Angriff said.

  “Damn straight I am. Nothing like a lurp to get one’s mind refocused.”

  “You want to take a recon platoon?”

  “No, just me. And my sister.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Would you rather I left her here?” Green Ghost raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re right! Taking her is a great idea. You can go on one condition,” Angriff said.

  “Don’t get killed?”

  “Right again.”

  “I think we should send out more lurps than just Ghost,” Fleming said. “We need to lock down Sedona and Flagstaff; they’re both in our backyard. The Yuma Marine station needs to be checked out, we need an FOB in the direction of the Superstition Mountains, one over east of Holbrook… it’s time to get out there and probe.”

  “You’re the S3, Norm. That’s your department. Draw it up and let’s get it done.”

  #

  Chapter 16

  Do not tell strangers the season when the deer come.

  Translation of cave art inscription in Chauvet Cave, France