Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero

by Taylor, Keith

  Message delivered

  He tapped through to his messages and selected the sent folder. When the words flashed across the screen a grin slipped onto his bruised face.

  “Well?” MacAuliffe turned back to the Jeep with a sigh. “I’m not waiting for your sorry ass all day. Are you coming or staying?”

  ΅

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WORLD WAR III

  KAREN SAT CLUTCHING Ted’s phone long after the call had disconnected, staring at the signal bars as they fell to zero, and when the final bar blinked out she felt her heart sink. She couldn't believe what she'd just heard.

  “He has no choice,” Krasinski eventually muttered, breaking the heavy silence. “He can’t let them drop the bomb.”

  “Jack said he’d stop him,” whispered Karen, her voice hoarse. “He said he’d save us.” She knew the idea was ridiculous. She knew Jack couldn't possibly stop the colonel from shooting down the plane, but she couldn't help but cling on to that last shred of hope, no matter how tenuous her grip.

  “There’s nothing he can do.” Krasinski shook his head sadly, his head slumped between his knees. “MacAuliffe will launch… well, I guess he’ll launch fighters. Beale’s mostly on UAVs now, but they’ve probably still got a few jets on standby. I’d say we’ve got…” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes, a half hour? Enough time to… you know, prepare ourselves, I guess. Get our heads right.”

  Karen stared at him through tear filled eyes, hugging Emily tight against her chest. “How can you be so calm about this? They’re going to…” She stopped when she noticed Emily looking up at her. “How are you not going crazy?”

  “Oh, I am,” replied Ted. “I’ve never been so scared, but at least…” He sighed. “Hell, at least we know it’s not all for nothing, right? I mean, think about it. They only know about the bomb because we told them. They bring this thing down and we save thousands of lives. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. And they get the bastard who’s running the show. That’s… I don’t know. I just never thought I’d get the chance to go out a hero, know what I mean?”

  Karen wiped her eyes. “I wish I had your outlook, Ted.”

  Krasinski gave her a weak smile. “Well, I’m an accountant. Pretty much the best case scenario for someone like me is a heart attack on a golf cart in Florida. At least this way I might get a Ted Krasinski Day or something. And you can have a Karen… sorry, I forgot your last name.”

  “Archer.” She sniffed. “It’s Karen Archer. And Emily Archer. We can share a day.”

  Emily looked up at Karen. “Mommy, you said it was Keane now. When Miss Jessop calls out the register she says Emily Keane.”

  Karen squeezed Emily tight. “Forget that, pumpkin. I was being stupid. You’re Emily Archer, just like daddy, OK?”

  “OK,” she smiled. “I always liked Archer better than Keane anyway. When I get back to school can I ask Miss Jessop to change the register?”

  Karen couldn’t help but let a sob escape her lips, and she pulled Emily close until she started to squirm in her arms.

  “Mommy, you’re squeezing my tummy.”

  “Sorry, pumpkin,” Karen managed to whisper, sniffing away her tears. “First thing when we get home we’ll go straight to Miss Jessop and ask her to change it, and daddy can come with us too. Does that sound good?”

  “Really?” Emily nodded, grinning. “Can I show daddy my new thing?” She grabbed the bright red tie Valerie had given her back at the bus.

  “I’m sure he’ll think it’s beautiful, pumpkin,” Karen smiled. She pulled Emily closer and looked back at Ted, lowering her voice. “Will it hurt?”

  He shook his head. “I don't think so. It’ll be over quick. If we’re lucky we won’t even know it happened. We’ll just… not be here any more.”

  It was clear from the tone of his voice that he didn't believe what he was saying, but Karen appreciated the lie. She squeezed Emily a little closer.

  “I don’t want her to feel anything.” She took a shuddering breath, closing her eyes for a few moments as she tried to calm herself, but she felt her fear give way to anger. “I just wish we knew why this was happening. Why are they doing this to us?”

  Krasinski nodded thoughtfully. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his pill case, popping a tablet from it and offering it to Karen. She shook her head, and he flicked the pill onto his tongue.

  “I think I may have an idea,” he said, swallowing the Xanax.

  “An idea about what?”

  “About why this is happening.” He paused, easing the pill down his dry throat. “It's just a theory. I could be way off, but that name…” He ruffled his fingers through what was left of his hair and leaned back against the wall of the truck, waiting for the pill to take effect. “The colonel said it was General Harlan Bailey, and unless there are two of them...”

  He shook his head. “Bailey was... well, he was a legend. Marine Corps pilot, decorated out the ass. This guy won the Medal of Honor back in Desert Storm, two weeks into his first tour of duty. He punched out over Basra when his Harrier got hit by a SAM, and the way I heard it he had a clear run back to safety. He could have made it to the border with a half day hike across friendly territory, but instead he turned and walked in the other direction. He got himself intentionally captured by the Republican Guard, then after two months chained to a wall in some godforsaken Iraqi jail he staged a prison break and took a half dozen British POWs over the border on foot. We’re talking about a serious badass here.”

  Karen shook her head, confused. “What does this have to do with anything, Ted?”

  “I’m just trying to tell you this guy was, y’know, a real Captain America type. He saw action in pretty every campaign for twenty years. The guy bled red, white and blue. Probably would have made it to general five years sooner if he’d sat his ass behind a desk and played the game, but he didn’t want to leave his men behind.” It was clear from Krasinski’s tone that he had a lot of admiration for the man.

  “Then about ten years ago they finally managed to chain him to a desk. I heard they made him Deputy Director of Ops at the US European Command or something.” He slid back against the wall of the truck as the Xanax finally kicked in, the lines melting from his face.

  “Apparently he went a little weird once he was staring an office in the face every day. Tried to get himself bumped down to lieutenant colonel a couple of times, hoping they might let him go back to the field, but they turned him down. I think they thought he’d seen too much, y’know? Like, maybe they were worried he’d end up going all Colonel Kurtz if they sent him back out into the world.”

  He paused, staring down at Karen’s phone beside her. The screen had lit up, and it hummed as it vibrated across the steel floor of the truck. “Is that a call?”

  Karen snatched up the phone and tapped the screen. “No, it’s a message. Looks like I got a bar again for a few seconds.”

  “Really? We must have caught another cell tower. Are you still getting a signal?”

  Karen didn’t answer. As the message appeared on the screen her brow knitted in confusion, and a moment later Krasinski jumped as she squealed with excitement.

  “Look!” She thrust the phone towards him. “It’s from Jack!”

  He squinted at the screen, and as they came into focus he slumped back against the wall of the truck, his muscles turning to jelly as the tension flowed from his body.

  Can’t launch pursuit. Up to you. Destroy bomb or take plane. Good luck.

  “Are you sure that’s from Jack? Sounds more like the colonel to me.” He waved away the thought. “What am I saying? Who gives a damn who sent it? They’re not shooting us down!” He suddenly leaped to his feet, energized by the news. “We’re not gonna die! OK. OK. We, ummm…” He hurried around the truck, flipping crate lids as he moved. “We need to come up with some kind of plan. We need weapons ready when this thing lands.”

  “Ted!” Karen hissed impatiently. “Maybe stop j
umping around so close to the nuclear weapon?” She lowered her voice and tried to speak in a calming tone. “Look, let’s… let’s just take our time. I don’t want to go off half cocked here. Sit down and let’s try to think calmly about it, OK?

  “Sorry, yeah.” Krasinski took a deep breath and forced himself to sit, struggling to focus. His eyes were so wide they seemed to pop from their sockets, as if he’d just shotgunned a keg of energy drinks. Karen felt the same way, but she knew that neither of them would be any good in this state. They’d make mistakes, and those mistakes would screw up the reprieve they’d just been given.

  “OK, why don’t you keep going with your story, Ted?” she suggested.

  “You can sit still and listen to a story now?” Krasinski was incredulous. “Seriously?”

  Karen closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing. “Doesn't matter if you tell the story or sing Jimmy Crack Corn. We just need to take a minute to clear our heads before we come up with a plan. It's the time that's important, not the words.”

  Krasinski shook his head in disbelief as Karen crossed her legs and began to take slow, deep breaths. “OK, fine,” he sighed. “Where was I?”

  Karen replied slowly, without opening her eyes. “Some hotshot general wanted to go back into the field, but they wouldn’t let him.”

  “Oh yeah, right. Well, in the end Bailey wrote this book. From the Ashes, I think it was called. A serving general would usually have his manuscript snapped up in minutes, but when he shopped it around the big publishers none of them bit, then the smaller houses turned him away. Apparently it was a little too off the wall for anyone to touch. Nobody wanted their name attached to this thing. Word got out that he'd written this weird, rambling manifesto full of lunatic ideas about the nature of war, and when a couple of chapters were leaked to the press people started talking about it so much that Bailey eventually self published the thing.”

  “Yeah,” Karen nodded, a faint memory creeping into her mind. “I think I read about that on Facebook. Wasn't there some big petition to get him fired?”

  “Yeah. Well, dishonorably discharged,” Krasinski corrected. “This book was… well, it was just weird. Five hundred pages of stream of consciousness nonsense and crazy rants about everything from the space program to GMOs to climate change. It read as if someone had transcribed the thoughts of a drunk lunatic. At first a lot of people thought some crazy conspiracy theorist was just using Bailey’s name, but then the general came out and claimed the thing as his own. Said he stood by every word.”

  Karen dredged through her memory. “Didn't he claim that vaccines were making our soldiers weaker? Something about how we were letting too many kids with weak immune systems survive to adulthood?”

  “Oh yeah, that one made a lot of people mad,” Krasinski nodded. “But most people only picked up on the really crazy fringe stuff he was talking about. They focused on the weird clickbait craziness about vaccines and chemicals in the water, because that stuff was so wrong it was funny, but they pretty much ignored his central thesis. That was the really crazy thing.”

  “What was it? I never read the book.”

  “No, neither did most people. If they had they may not have laughed at him so hard. See, Bailey fancied himself a bit of a historian. He never formally studied it, but he was obsessed with accounts of World War II. The book was riddled with quotes from US officers, British conscripts, German politicians, Japanese businessmen... He must have read every book ever written about the war, from every perspective, and when he came to write his own book he thought he’d got it all figured out.”

  Krasinski realized he’d been idly tapping the crate beside him, and when he remembered it contained the nuke he snatched his hand away as if he’d touched a hot plate.

  “What he decided was that the war was the best thing that ever happened to the human race. He thought there was nothing in the history of humanity that had driven us forward so far and so fast. No single event – no entire century, for that matter – in which we achieved as much as we did over those years.”

  Karen opened one eye. “That seems a little insensitive. I'm guessing he didn't have many Jewish friends.”

  Krasinski waved his hand dismissively. “Sure, but that’s not the crazy thing. Once you strip away all the death and terrible ideologies it's a pretty common belief among historians that the war was objectively positive, no matter how gruesome that may sound. As far as technology was concerned the war was the greatest leap forward we ever made. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. It drove the kind of innovation that took us to the moon a couple of decades later – hell, NASA hired a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists – and entire industries were created from advances made during the war. You wouldn’t have that phone in your hand if it hadn’t happened, and it’d probably still take two days to download a song from the Internet if we hadn’t made such massive strides in computing back then.”

  “Even so...”

  “And then there’s the economic surge of the war, along with its aftermath. You look at Japan and Germany, at the Marshall Plan and Japanese economic reform. You look at the rise of the American middle class on the back of industrial growth, the economy doubling, tripling in size in just a couple of decades. It can’t be denied that the war was the trigger for a great surge forward for humanity.”

  Karen frowned. “OK, fine. So if we're assuming that millions of deaths were a good trade for the moon landing and faster internet, what did he say that was so crazy?”

  “The crazy thing,” Krasinski replied, “was that General Bailey suggested we should do it again.”

  “Do what again? Have a war?”

  “Not just a war. We go to war all the time. No, he suggested we have another world war. Another massive global conflict that kills millions. What's more, he suggested that we should start it intentionally. He said that generations of peace had made us complacent and lazy. He said we'd lost our drive to innovate, to push ourselves forward, and he thought we needed the genuine threat of annihilation to spur us on. I remember he likened it to throwing a kid into a pool. He said if we weren't faced with that sink or swim test we'd never dare get our feet wet.”

  Now Karen opened both eyes. “That’s… that’s not just crazy. That’s stupid.”

  Krasinski nodded. “Well, yeah, I agree, and so did almost everyone else. That's why From the Ashes was pulled from sale. The Marine Corps didn't want one of their most respected generals within a million miles of the idea that we should start World War Three on purpose. That kinda talk would be catnip for the anti-war crowd, and since he was still in uniform they had the final say on whether he could publish. The book was pulled about two weeks after it went on sale, but by then it had already sold about twenty thousand copies.”

  “I never heard about any of the war stuff. Did it make the news?”

  Krasinski shook his head. “No, the Marine Corps were happy to keep the attention on the crazy clickbait. Word is they actually encouraged the weird stories about vaccines and climate change to keep people distracted from what Bailey was actually suggesting, because they figured it was better to have people think he was just a little crazy than actually evil.”

  “So how come they didn't just discharge him? Why keep him around if he was obviously insane?”

  Krasinski shrugged. “Bailey was a popular officer. He was a bona fide war hero with a Medal of Honor hanging around his neck. They didn’t want to stand by his beliefs but they didn't want to throw him to the dogs, so instead of discharging him they sideways promoted him to some do nothing admin post at Parris Island back in South Carolina. They figured he could keep his head down a couple of years. Y'know, just stay quiet until it was time for him to retire honorably.”

  “And now you’re thinking he wasn't just speaking hypothetically? You think he's actually trying to start a war? You think this is the guy sitting up in the cockpit right now?”

  Krasinski shrugged. “It's just a theory, but... well, it certainly looks t
hat way, yeah. Unless there are two generals named Harlan Bailey.”

  “But what about the people with him? Surely it’s not possible to pull off something like this with just a couple of guys, right?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Krasinski replied. “Once the rush to condemn Bailey started to die down something else took its place. Forums started to pop up all across the Internet full of people who thought the idea had merit. Turns out there’s this entire subculture of folks who think that what we really need is a good war. They see the country as hopelessly divided, bickering over petty grievances and nonsense identity politics. They think we’re stagnating and navel gazing while nations like China threaten to overtake us as the dominant global force.”

  A memory came to Karen, some half remembered post she’d seen in amongst the endless Minions memes that filled her Facebook feed. “Are you talking about the Year Zero thing?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Not really. I’ve seen a couple of friends post some stuff, but I don’t usually click on the political articles. I don’t have time to worry about that kind of thing.”

  “Well, yeah, that's it. Year Zero is what they called the movement. Well, I say movement, but I always assumed it was just a bunch of angry young men in their parents' basements. I guess they're kinda like an offshoot of the prepper movement, but these folks aren't just preparing for disasters but encouraging them.”

  “And you think Bailey managed to find people who believed in it so much they'd actually help him out?”

  Krasinski gestured to the crate beside him. “It damned sure looks like he did, yeah.”

  “But who could be so crazy they’d listen to this guy?”

  Krasinski shrugged. “People listen to all sorts of things we think are crazy. Hell, my neighbor back home tried to sell me on the flat earth theory a couple of months ago, and that’s insane. At least this thing has… well, at least there’s some logical consistency to it. Wanting to kill millions of people just so we can kickstart the economy and finally invent the technology behind a working hoverboard sounds dumb to me, but the thing is it would probably work. It’s God damned abhorrent, but I can understand why people might find it an attractive prospect.”