“Looks like you’ve managed to put on a few pounds, and even grow another inch or two. Remarkable under the circumstances.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t know why people complain about Army food. Mush is not bad. Warm and fills you up, anyway,” Luke managed to say with a straight face.
“I’m not even going to challenge you on that, son. I saw what you looked like before, so I guess you are on to something. How are you feeling?”
“Feel ready to fight, sir.”
Hotchkins nodded, as if he’d expected nothing else.
“Colonel Forshe informed me you were wounded in the fighting at McAlester,” General Hotchkins continued. “Are you fully recovered?”
“Yes, sir. Freak shot. Bounced off the body armor. I don’t even notice the scar anymore.”
“Right,” Hotchkins said, drawing out the word. “At least you aren’t telling me you’re ten feet tall and bulletproof.”
“Looks like you’ve got your own battle wounds, as well,” Luke ventured, glancing down at the general’s leg. Luke would never have said anything, but the general seemed to be drawing him out for some reason.
“Just got too close to the action and picked up a little shrapnel. My wife has been nagging at me to slow down,” he added with a sly grin before turning more serious. “But, well, you’ve seen how things stand. No rest for the wicked.”
“Yes, sir, I’ve seen how that can work,” Luke replied with a slight grin. Then it was his turn to grow more serious again. He dropped his voice, not to a whisper, but to a barely audible murmur.
“Sir, why am I even here? I mean, no offense, but I’m a buck sergeant. A nobody. I’m not a military mastermind, nor do I possess some key civilian skillset. Sure, I’ve made the Commies a bit uncomfortable, and we’ve managed to kill a few of their officers and blow some stuff up, but we’re nothing special. I get that I’m sort of a mascot to some of you, but if you’ve got some high-level mission coming up, what you really need is my dad.”
General Hotchkins made a point of looking the teenager over once again, then regarded Luke with a flinty stare that would have made weaker men crumble.
“See, that is why you are the perfect secret weapon,” the general replied, managing to keep the grin off his thin lips for nearly thirty seconds before he continued. Apparently, seeing Luke again did something to brighten the man’s day. “You don’t even see your own worth.”
“Uh, sir?”
“Son, have you ever seen that movie, Forrest Gump?”
“Sure, but I’m not a very good ping-pong player, sir.”
The general chuckled then and gestured for Luke to precede him, while they made their way to the conference room. The security cordon gave both men close looks, and Luke realized they were matching faces to something on their clipboards.
“That is true, Luke,” the general continued. “However, like Mr. Gump, you do seem to make an impression on folks, and you’ve managed to make some interesting contacts in just a short period of time. Me. Colonel Forshe. Major Vanderpool. Even General McMillan expressed an interest in meeting you.”
“Yes, sir. After I passed his psych eval.”
“Yes, there is that little matter,” General Hotchkins said, his mouth quirked into another sly grin.
“Like I said, the Regular Army brass might be a tad uncomfortable with your exploits, but you’ve also given us several important victories. Blowing up that arty park was just the start. Or giving us several hours advanced warning of the nuke attack. And finally, did you know that in the last two weeks, the food volunteer desertion rate has risen twenty-percent?”
“No, sir. That’s something I did not know.” Luke said, thinking about those figures.
General Hotchkins touched a finger to the side of his nose.
“We haven’t exactly been bandying that fact around. No reason to let the ears in the walls know everything. We have spies, and they have spies.”
General Hotchkins paused, as if trying to phrase his next words with care.
“However, the main reason we asked you to be here is because of the prisoner you forwarded to us from one of your trips. Mister Matthew Morgan, I believe his name is.”
Luke couldn’t help himself and he turned to stare at the general.
“Morgan? Seriously?”
“Oh, indeed. Mr. Morgan, as it turns out, was the director of the DHS Houston field office. Even more, he was charged by the Recovery Committee with ensuring the surviving Texas Army National Guard was kept occupied. Out of the war in Missouri. After your father swept up that group of drone terrorists, we found out he was running those missions up until his disappearance.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that, General.” Luke looked away, his eyes growing hard at the revelation.
“I was only involved with his initial interrogation in a limited fashion. I captured him, and I guess you could say, I encouraged him to share what he knew with our real interrogators. Once he confirmed the identity of the mole working against the Beaumont group, I sent him on with Lt. Gilbert. Otherwise, well, he still deserved a hangman’s noose for what he did. In fact, knowing what I know now, you might want to keep me far away from that…man.” Luke needed to self-censor, and bite back what he wanted to call Morgan.
“Indeed,” General Hotchkins agreed. As they paused in the doorway, the general continued, his voice lowered for more privacy.
“This morning’s first session was split into two groups. The staff and lower-ranked personnel got an overview. The generals, and a few select civilians, received more. Your father was with us, if for no other reason than his tour guarding the King’s Bay facility. I hope you realize your father’s value. He can be a critical asset in getting his part of the country back on the right path.”
“He’s a man of many skills, sir,” Luke replied.
“Like father, like son,” General Hotchkins agreed, and then Luke was relieved from more good-natured needling at the moment, when he entered the conference room and saw his father sitting next to Major Warren.
Obviously, Luke spotted his father and what he thought of as the command team from the ranch, sitting with a distracted-looking Major Warren. Next to them, he recognized Colonel Forshe and Major Vanderpool from the Oklahoma National Guard, but he also counted another dozen military officers in the room, including one old man in a Navy uniform that looked like he was in his late sixties. Come to think of it, several of these guys look like geezers, Luke decided. Must be other generals, Luke thought. Then he saw Captain Marino seated in one corner, away from the joined tables, and reassessed his initial conclusion.
“Luke, I think you know some of these gentlemen. We’ll hold off on the rest of the introductions until later, but first, I know you have questions. Let me say this up front: there’s a mission coming. One that may well shift the balance of this war. May even bring down Chambers and his whole regime. This mission is high risk, and I don’t want you committing to it until you hear everything, then I want you to talk to your family before making any decisions. Is that understood?”
Luke swallowed, his eyes moving over the gathered group.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right,” General Hotchkins intoned, then turned to the hard-faced soldier that had been trailing them the whole way. “Wally, get your boys to lock this place back down and initiate the signal jamming. Nothing in or out.”
“Yes, sir,” the staff sergeant replied, and marched for the door, his grim face never changing expression.
As the general took his seat, again favoring the injured leg, Luke caught a look of speculation from one of the men he didn’t know. Before the pulse, Luke might have pegged his age at fifty or so, but after seeing the changes in General Hotchkins, the teen decided not to even guess. Catching a glimpse of the two stars on his uniform, Luke knew this was one of the Regular Army generals. A quick survey told Luke, at least seven more men in the room also wore a star. Wow, that’s a lot of brass, but to his surprise, it was the man in the Navy u
niform who rose to speak first. This should be interesting.
“All right, gentlemen. Let’s get started…”
CHAPTER 56
The speaker turned out to be Captain Jack Gilbert, and Luke quickly realized that Captain Gilbert was probably one of the most well-informed men in the room. He might be U.S. Navy, but Luke also realized he was something else as well.
“We have two topics here, gentlemen. The first regards the nature of Chambers’ goals, and the second, our plan to eradicate the cancer that is the Recovery Committee and those renegade forces aligned with him. My name is Jack Gilbert, USN, and I retired from the United States Navy as a Captain. I’ve been tasked with providing this briefing because of my prior military service in the Navy and my later career, employed by the U.S. government, both with the Department of Defense and other agencies.”
When the man paused, Luke thought about what was left unsaid. What other agencies?
“When Chambers hit Joplin with what we knew was a nuclear device, we all went into reaction mode and waited for the other shoe to drop. It’s been three weeks now, so conventional wisdom has become that he only had the single SADM. As was discussed in the earlier session, I think that is incorrect.”
The news hit Luke like a bullet, but he kept his head down and listened while the captain continued.
“However, that has been discussed. Before we move on though, I’d like to stick my oar in the water as to motivation. All of you assumed the reason Chambers was so intent on securing Joplin, revolves around the single large-scale operating power plant just south of the city. A worthy target, but I think there is a second, perhaps equally important objective, and that is the mothballed facility known as Site 147.”
One of the generals cleared his throat before speaking up.
“Captain, I’m afraid I’m not familiar with this facility. Would you care to enlighten us?”
The question came from another of the unknown officers. This man had a shock of curly blonde hair, thinning on top, and the insignia of a colonel. He looked at the world through cold, analytical eyes, reminding Luke of the Special Forces operators he’d met before, and wore his sidearm in a drop leg holster. Luke didn’t care for them, not liking the way they tended to chafe, but he knew some liked the ease of access. I wonder if Captain Marino works for him, the teen thought to himself, and he decided to keep a closer eye on the man.
“Yes, sir,” Captain Gilbert replied, “very few know of the existence of this plant. Perhaps not through any great security plan, but because of the passage of time and its very obscurity. I apologize for the history lesson in advance, but it is relevant.
“Construction of Site 147 was completed under the auspices of the Defense Department during the second Nixon administration, and promptly mothballed when Carter was in office. But it was kept on standby, rather than demolished, and Site 147 might be at least a partial solution to one of the major stumbling blocks we will face in the post-pulse reconstruction. In simple terms, Site 147 is a power transformer plant.”
As the words leave the Captain’s mouth, Luke immediately grasped the critical nature. He stayed silent, but not everyone present felt the need.
“If this facility is so top secret, how did someone like Jeffrey Chambers come to know about it?” asked the same colonel who’d spoken up before.
“I said it was obscure, Colonel, not black. Chambers did serve two previous Presidents in the DoD, the last as an Undersecretary. I learned of its existence, and I was just a double-dipping bureaucrat.”
That was something Luke had never heard before, but then, he’d barely known of Jeffrey Chambers’ existence before the lights went out. Made sense the guy was a rich, well-connected asshole from way back. Now he was a wannabe warlord, so perhaps it was just a natural progression.
“So, if someone can get the plant up and running, they can start replacing the fried transformers?”
The officer who’d asked the obvious question seemed to flush at first, but when the other men at the table murmured their agreement, he sank back and smiled. Luke was surprised to see it was his former mentor, Major Keller, who’d asked the question.
“That is the idea, Major,” Captain Gilbert continued. “That does shed some additional light on Chambers’ goals, am I correct?”
Murmurs of assent spread through the room, and Gilbert continued with his briefing for the next ten minutes. He detailed Allied assets deployed in the field, and their areas of control, as well as the arrangement of forces commanded by the Committee. Seeing the detailed map projected on a whiteboard reinforced the analysis of Captain Gilbert. The enemy was building for another attack, and Luke saw the forces were poised to drive into the area where the transformer plant was located.
With this report, the teen also learned a few new tidbits regarding their own forces. For one thing, Luke was shocked to hear about Regular Army forces finally entering the fray on the side of President Dandridge.
Luke had speculated the continued use of the ‘Allied States’ tag, rather than ‘United States’ everyone knew so well, might have been a bad idea for the forces coming together under President Dandridge. We are the United States of America, not some Coalition of the Willing, he mused, remembering his father’s comments about the Gulf War. The Regular Army commanders who maintained loyalty to the flag might have reacted poorly to the name, but the various state guard units and their surviving state governments rallied around the idea, and these forces had formed the core of the resistance from the start.
“But will the machinery still work? It’s been mothballed for decades. Who’s to say any of the equipment in there is still operational? Plus, what about the pulse?”
All of these questions came from the officer who’d given Luke such intense scrutiny before.
“General McMillan, those are all excellent questions, and I don’t have definitive answers. However, during my employment with the DoD, I became aware of several contingency locations such as Site 147, and those we discussed in our earlier meeting.” Well, thought Luke wryly, that doesn’t sound scary at all. He wondered what they’d talked about, and decided he was probably better off not knowing. That asshole Chambers got his suitcase nuke from somewhere.
“Plus, thanks to our good friend Sam Messner, and his son Sergeant Luke Messner, we have something else. These worthies, along with their local defense forces, secured us a prisoner who was highly placed in the Chambers’ regime and privy to many secrets. That prisoner, with proper motivation, has provided us with considerable intel, including the Acting President’s interest in Site 147.”
Luke, like many of the other seated men, grinned at the retired officer’s reference to Chambers’ claimed office, using the same tone one might use when discussing genital warts.
“As we all know,” Captain Gilbert continued, his tone still mildly acerbic. “Some in our military hierarchy didn’t like putting all our nation’s eggs in one basket with Homeland. I ran across an inspection report for Site 147 back in ’06, I think it was, detailing the plant’s status. The biggest complaint I remember was the lack of updated electronics, since much of the automation relied on vacuum tube technology.”
That earned a chuckle from the gathering at the implications. If they had power, the plant might be resurrected using the older, more primitive technology that relied on mechanical controls, rather than those driven by computers. Computers and control systems which now were mainly useful as paperweights.
“Yes, gentlemen, if we can hold the power plant and get the transformer plant up and running, we have a chance. Mark my words, gentlemen, this country will never be the same. Think on your studies of history and recall the schism created in the hearts and minds of the citizenry by the Civil War. Magnify that a hundredfold, and that’s where I see this country. However, we will leave the philosophy for another day.
“Now, on to the second part of this meeting. As was discussed earlier today, we are facing an enemy who commands thousands of troops, has all mann
er of conventional and likely nuclear weapons in his arsenal, and who is completely committed to perform any acts of atrocity or terror necessary to carve out his own fiefdom in the heart of our country.
“General Hotchkins, General McMillan, General Rayburn,” Captain Gilbert intoned, nodding to each general in turn, “along with Colonel Reynolds and Lieutenant Colonel Vanderpool have formed a plan to deal with Chambers and his so-called Recovery Committee. A plan to take the fight to these creatures in their own lair. They plan to take Kansas City back from the Committee.”
Luke looked around the room to see who reacted to this announcement. He hadn’t noticed the Oklahoma Guardsman’s subdued rank insignia before, since he’d last been aware that Vanderpool had been a major, but Luke knew him to be a good officer and a steady man. Rayburn, with his pressing demands for diesel and kerosene stuck out in Luke’s mind though, and he didn’t exactly get a warm, fuzzy feeling from General McMillan either. Only Reynolds remained a complete unknown, and he’d make sure and keep an eye on that one.
None of the named individuals blinked, of course, but he was a little surprised when his father also showed no reaction. Must have been talked about in the top brass pow-wow, Luke reasoned.
As for the other ranks and the civilians, the reaction showed a mixture of shock and not a little trepidation. Going after Chambers in his stronghold was a bold move. Perhaps, even desperate. Luke waited impatiently to find out which. He didn’t have to wait long. Turned out, it was a little bit of both.
CHAPTER 57
“So, how is this going to work?”
Luke’s question broke through the hum of conversation while the newly reunited Texas contingent formed their own little knot of individuals in their corner of the hanger. Since the briefings at the resurrected hotel, all of the participants, whether they’d attended the briefing or not, remained under careful scrutiny. Luke didn’t like Amy being caught up in the net, but given the general’s comment about spies, and something Scott Keller said after the meeting about being burned by infiltrators, Luke agreed it was the only way to keep this a secret. Luke didn’t have time to get the details from Scott, but he could tell the big Marine had been thinking dark thoughts.
Midnight Skills Page 44
