9
November 30th.
Thomas Richards:
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Hear me out, Colonel,” Henderson tries to sell me after his little science-fiction video presentation finishes. “There are a lot of people sold on this project. Powerful people. This goes far beyond the JIC, beyond the DOD, even beyond the United States and the current Coalition. That’s why we need you.”
Whatever he’s thinking, he apparently thought it was important enough to fly me back to the States and have an actual sit-down. He probably thought that here, at Langley, he’s got the next best thing to a captive audience. I actually think he’d try to keep me from leaving if I didn’t at least hear him out.
“You’re an asset, Colonel,” he tries the brown-nose route. “Top of your class at West Point, top scores through training. Decades of experience as a special operator and a commanding officer. Excellent record.”
“But bad at politics,” I get to the point.
“But professional,” he minimizes. “That’s a fine distinction. It hasn’t served you on the career-path, but it makes you appealing now.”
I try not to roll my eyes at his bullshit.
“We’ve been working towards this for a decade,” he keeps rolling. “We have the tools ready to go. Now we need the manpower.”
I have to shake my head.
“And it’s all a waste unless you can actually sell it all. Politically and practically. Besides wanting to turn SOCOM into some kind of computer-slaved puppet force, you’re asking for a completely coordinated multinational joint operation. Which means asking dozens of nations to buy into a central command authority—basically, a US command authority—and worse, to submit themselves to this experimental AI of yours. I can’t see any nation—including the US—buying this. And you’re sitting here expecting global cooperation?”
“We need to hurt the enemy, bad and everywhere, hard and fast—and we can: we have the tools. The test phases will prove us out, sell the product to enough players to give us one big coordinated hit; hundreds of clean, precise, surgical ops all over the world. We’ll have our first undeniably significant victory in the War on Terror. And it won’t be a US action—the whole world will stand up to these bastards, all at once. Visibly. All over the media.”
“Which means you’ll also have to sell it to the public, to the Press.”
“And that won’t be a problem.”
“Because your AI did the calculations and said so?” I need to drop him down several pegs. “What I’ve had a taste of is it jerking me and my teams around the Union while it ran the most Twilight Zone black op I’ve ever seen. And I’m still not sure why.”
And Henderson smiles at me, like he’s got it all in the bag. He gets up out of his plush chair and leans over his desk so I know he’s talking to his interface and not to me:
“Is ‘Gunter’ ready to run?”
“Five minutes,” someone answers him. “Makeup is just doing the finals.”
“Good timing,” he tells me. “Now let’s go downstairs and I’ll give you your ‘why,’ Colonel.”
I’m wondering if the taxpayers know just how big this facility has gotten as the secure elevator slides down and down below Virginia (at least ten floors, according to the visible readouts).
There are actually live guards at the landing when we get off, though they let the automated gear do their work for them, confirming our IDs yet again by palm, voice, FRS and I-scan.
The bunker-like corridors stretch far enough to tell me the place is impressively huge. Henderson leads the way with easy purpose. Two turns and three doors in, and I’m in a control booth that looks straight out of a media studio, looking in through Plexiglas on a set made up to look like any of a half-dozen stripped-down Wab hidey-holes I’ve had to clean out. They’ve even got an authentic-looking Wab banner on the back wall.
“Almost ready sir,” one of the techs tells Henderson when he sees him.
“Good,” he praises. “Let’s hope we get this in one take. The live effects aren’t cheap.”
“And they’re messy,” one of the other techs agrees. “It would take us hours to clean up and reset.”
“How did rehearsals go?” Henderson asks casually.
The second tech chuckles. “He’s going to be hurting in the morning. We had him drop on that floor a dozen times until he got the dead body look down.”
“Places!” someone shouts over the intercom. “Let’s get it done while the makeup’s fresh.”
“It’s showtime, folks,” the first tech sings. Henderson grins like he’s eating it up.
Two masked gunmen take up flanking positions on either side of the banner. Then the apparent “hostage” is led in. He’s bound, blindfolded, wearing the classic orange prison jumper the Rads have put their captives in since Abu Ghraib. What’s visible of his face is battered and bloodied—I can only assume (or hope) this is the makeup they were talking about. Despite this, I can’t help but recognize who it is.
Grayman.
“You have got to be kidding me…” I let it go out loud, and Henderson shushes me.
I hear someone come in behind me and stand over my shoulder. I glance back and almost wish I hadn’t: It’s Burke, only without his beard. He’s dressed in a black T-shirt and ACU pants and looks like he hasn’t slept in days. But he gives me a look that lets me know he agrees with me.
They kneel the “hostage” down in the middle of the set, half-facing an array of web-cams. Whatever they’re planning, they want multiple angles, maybe so they can pick-and-choose the best.
Then there’s another figure on-set: blonde, chiseled, German-looking, bare arms and legs bulging as all he’s wearing is a flak-vest and jungle shorts, his chopped hair bound up in a headband scrawled with pro-Chechen slogans. He doesn’t wear a mask. He wants the cameras to see his face. Confirming this, he glares at them and introduces himself in heavy German-accented English:
“My name is Gunter Gerhardt. In the name of those who died in our holy cause, for Chechnya and Bosnia, and for our brothers in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, England, Malaysia and Palestine, I make an example of this American, as I swear I will make an example of all of our enemies. God is great.”
He pulls a Beretta out of the small of his back, points it at the back of Grayman’s head, and pulls the trigger twice. And I catch myself jumping when blood splatters on the plexi. Grayman flops over as much like a dead man as any I’ve ever seen, and Gerhardt pops two more shells into his body.
“God is great,” he repeats into the camera, glazed bloodlust in his ice-blue eyes. He holds that position for a few seconds, posing. Then:
“Cut,” Henderson proclaims happily. “Check it. I think that was it.”
Gerhardt smiles and completely drops the stone-killer look. He pulls the Wab rag off his head and suddenly looks like corn-fed Kansas farmboy. The other gunmen pull off their masks and hoot praises to the performance.
“Damn, did you see how those bloodpacks flew? I almost got the shit in my eye!”
Gerhardt is down helping Grayman—who he’d just “killed”—back up to a sitting position and pulls the blindfold from his blood-soaked head. Gray blinks and forces a grin as Gerhardt pats him on the back and praises his convincing dead-drop topple-over. A tech comes in and snips him free of his bonds.
“Doo, that was perfect!” the tech fawns. “Max real. Scared the shit out of me, Bee…”
I look back at Burke just in time to see him shake his head, turn, and leave the room without a word.
“So what was that?” I ask Henderson on the elevator ride back up.
“That was us closing the file on Christian Michael Palmeri. We drop a grainy version on the web, sign off on his death certificate. That lets us make him a new life from scratch, and shakes off any Rads looking to ID the Grayman. It also lets us debut a new ‘terrorist’ to sink deep into Union HumInt: Captain Carl Schrader—now ‘Gunter Gerhardt.’ Hopefully he’ll be able to sl
ip into one of the holes Grayman left.”
“And then what?” is what’s worrying me.
“We do a little adjustment to Gray’s pretty face, give him a new name, complete his training so he’s up to speed with special operator standards, and sink him firmly into the project along with the rest of the prototype team.”
The elevator gets us back above ground, and I manage to hold my tongue until we’re back in Henderson’s office.
“You’re making him part of this?”
“More than just a part, Colonel. Grayman is an experiment. We were talking about selling this to the public. To do that, we need more than just anonymous grunts in fancy armor. We need a certain… well, attitude. Style. Personality. We need a small army of operatives that can work with the AI—not every soldier is cut out for that. But we also need a media-friendly presence. Most of your special operators present as pretty average Joes—not especially camera-friendly. And a lot of them have families, home lives—there’s a reason we keep them anonymous.”
He stops when he sees the look I’m giving him is only getting harder. He gets himself a cup of coffee and offers me one, but I shake my head and give him a “No, thank you.” And maybe his engaging my manners was intended, a way to make me polite again, because he immediately goes back on the sale:
“You saw Grayman work, Colonel. You were one of the few that did experience him, followed him in the field—and you felt it. We all did. That was what made Datascan lock on him: he had something. Presence. Drive. Classic Hollywood anti-hero shit. Complicated. Dark and fucked-up, but good, redeemable. And scary-smart. Adaptable. When Datascan made first contact, Gray jumped right in and ate it up like they were lifelong partners. They make a great team, Colonel. You should see the sims we’ve run…”
“Grayman is a nut-job,” I have to flat-out protest. “A massacre-machine. And he likes it.”
“No he doesn’t, Colonel,” Henderson defends. “We’ve been on him for a month: a nonstop mix of chemical VR debrief—hard interrogation—and high-stress combat training sims twenty hours a day. It’s given us a very clear picture of what drives him, what makes him what he is. He’s very unique, Colonel. And he’s been beyond-impressive in the training series.”
“He’s a monster,” I fight back, “a psychopath with no loyalties, who seems to exist only to murder whoever pisses him off. You think you can make him into a soldier?”
“You think you can put a better face on the War on Terror?” he stays cool, confident. “The public sees the generals, the politicians, but the actual guns in the fight are cyphers. They’ve had to be to protect their families. But the public doesn’t buy the high-level players because they’re just that: players. And they don’t do the actual work. It’s time we put faces on the fighters—the heroes—even if we have to make them up. And Gray’s ideal for the part: He’s cool, he’s sexy, smooth. And tragic. This shit hurts him, Colonel, but he has to do it. He can’t not do it.”
“Oh, good. A fanatic to fight fanatics.”
“Exactly,” Henderson rubs my nose in it. “Remember that old ‘Army of One’ crap the recruiters tried to sell a decade or so ago? This is it for real: Datascan will be running small, mobile strike teams—hot toys and hot attitudes. In-your-face hit-and-pose-for-the-cameras. We don’t need faceless troops or ‘quiet professionals.’ We need charismatic champions. Killers with personality. Classic movie-hero style. Iconic characters. Visible individuals regular folks can follow and cheer for. Why do you think I’ve got Burke down here?”
“You have got to be kidding me…” I moan again. “An Army of Attitude. This would be my worst nightmare. And you’re telling me you need a hundred more just like those two?”
“Thousands, by the time we’re done,” he doesn’t skip a beat. “Plus supports. And a visible command structure—a human one—so it’s not looking like just a scary-experimental AI in charge. For that, we need someone with good hard experience, someone who can keep us real. Hell, a lot of people are nervous about this accelerated VR immersion training—we need someone who’s been around long enough to honestly evaluate what comes out the other end for real-world effectiveness. And someone who can play the politics, be a bridge between our ‘stars’ and the politicians running them. Someone who knows how to hold a multinational joint-combined operation together in the worst political environment.”
I really don’t like the way he’s looking at me.
“You have got to be… No. No.”
He sits back and smiles at me in that way that makes me want to shoot him.
“Believe it or not, you fit. Even Datascan says so. I need an experienced and respected CT commander, one with strong multinational connections. But one who isn’t, shall we say, going in the right direction on the ol’ career ladder—that actually makes you more sellable: you’re nobody’s crony.”
He lets that sink in, lets me simmer awhile before continuing to insult me.
“I’d seriously consider this if I were you, Tom. You bet against this and you’re wrong, you’re obsolete. That’s why I jumped onboard: I saw it coming early and bought my seat. We’re talking a whole new way to fight war here. You think it won’t overwrite SOCOM? NATO? US Intel? Every branch of the military? I want to be a part in that, Tom. I want to help shape what comes. And given the shit you’ve had to eat over the years, I’d think you would, too.”
I don’t answer. I can’t even digest this bullshit fantasy.
He buzzes the door open and gives me my signal to exit gracefully.
“Time to think like science fiction, Tom,” he calls out after me. “Brave New World. As over-the-top and scary as you can imagine. It’ll be here inside of two years. You might want to get a running start.”
I can’t get out of Langley fast enough.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 26
