Total Empire, page 19
“Zoey. I’m sorry. I fell asleep.”
“I let you sleep,” she said. “I might have nodded off, too. But Evelyn and I have been having a chat.”
Champollion nodded and said, “I see why you came for her. She’s special.”
“I think we need a conversation about what we do with you,” I said to Champollion.
She held up a pistol and knife, which she or Zoey must have retrieved off me during my slumber. “We just had one about what to do with you,” Champollion said, smiling.
“What’s your mission here?” I asked, looking at Zoey, who shrugged as if she had no idea how the Frenchwoman had lifted weapons off her and me.
“I’m a simple archeologist interested in the history of the universe,” she said.
“So, DGSE?” I replied, referring to the French equivalent of the CIA.
She smiled and nodded. “I can neither confirm nor deny, but let’s just say that our interests overlap.”
“You’re after Sanson?” I asked.
“Not directly, no,” she replied. “Sanson is a cog, an important one, but still just a widget in the operation. The Dakhla Accords, as they are being called, are a ruse. All the machinations of Big Tech—your government, my government, and others, to be sure—are leading up to a naked attempt by some to actualize globalism. To collocate power in one organizational entity by providing China the opportunity to compete globally militarily and by intentionally reducing the influence of the United States, which many in your government see as a good thing.”
“That’s a little further than I’d suspected,” I said.
“Did you really think that everything happening with viruses, Afghanistan, terrorist attacks, social spending, and so on was random?”
“I focus on killing bad guys,” I said.
“You going to try to sell me a bridge, too?” she chuckled. “You’re Garrett Sinclair III, the son of Garrett Sinclair II, who was the son of Garrett Sinclair I, all famous Army Rangers and generals. Your grandfather climbed Pointe du Hoc as a Ranger colonel. Your father led an army division in Desert Storm. And here you are, an army of one with two women in the Sahara. You’re the Tom Brady of army generals. The Kimi Räikkönen. The Kazuyoshi Miura.”
“I’m not sure what I’ve got in common with an American football quarterback, a Finnish Formula One driver, and a Japanese soccer forward.”
“You’re fifty years old. Still in the game. You prefer the physical grind over the comforts of an office. You’re in the arena, not in the cheap seats, where most generals are. You’re an operator.”
I said nothing.
“And arguably, yours is the most important mission of them all. Your president has parlayed her friendship with you into using you as a front man, leveraging your inclination to roll your own, as some say, to keep someone between her and the problem as the situation develops.”
That Champollion so accurately described my affiliation with President Campbell was unnerving. I never much talked about my relationship with my grandfather or father, either. They were good relationships until they weren’t. The men in the Sinclair family were a competitive bunch, and when my grandfather passed several years ago, so did a tangible part of our family heritage. My grandfather was the epitome of a soldier, rough-hewn and straightforward. Some say he lacked a sense of humor, but I always found his dry wit and sardonic view of life fitting with my own personality and style.
“It’s a lot of weight to carry on the family name, Garrett. Your sister, Kat, is off flitting about somewhere in the name of do-goodery, but we all know that she is running from the premium-grade masculinity that is all things Sinclair. The world has no room for a female Sinclair as much as it needs you to be successful here. Times don’t define the man. The man defines the times. And more often than not, the woman, too. You are not here by accident, my friend.”
“I made decisions that put me and my team here,” I said. I knew, though, that she was right.
“Who fed Sly Morgan the information?”
“Sly was good. One of the best,” I said.
“I agree, and it’s obvious that Zoey got all his best characteristics, but still, that good? So good that he had full dossiers? The insights on your secretaries of defense and state defecting to the People’s Corporate Alliance?”
“That’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one. Sounds very Karl Marx. I thought it was the CUSP? The China-U.S. Partnership.”
“Same thing, different words. China changed that to make it more appealing to the West. If anyone bothered to look at the Dakhla Accords, they would see an obscure reference to the People’s Corporate Alliance in connection with China. That document Gambeau, Blankenship, McHenry, and others signed is a blank check for China to do as they please worldwide, but especially here. CUSP for the West but PCA for the Chinese.”
“Who else is in this?” I asked.
“Who else? France, Russia, China, the United States, some others. North Korea,” she replied.
“Why North Korea?”
“Every family needs a black sheep. The PCA, or CUSP, will do by proxy through North Korea what they don’t want attributed to themselves, much as Iran uses the Shia militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen.”
I paused. The intel had seemed a little too perfect, but rarely did we get something so tangible and actionable. We consumed the intelligence that in retrospect had been spoon-fed to us. Usually, these kinds of leads were synthetic and misdirection, but here, Champollion had apparently been involved in ensuring the intelligence got to me specifically. She couldn’t risk that it would go to the U.S. government, though she had gambled on my relationship with the president. She couldn’t be sure that Campbell would support me, but she could reasonably assume that Campbell would give me the rope to explore the situation, which was precisely what she was doing.
“How are the Dakhla Accords involved?” I asked.
“Just cover for a meeting, basically. The Chinese never recognized the Moroccan Southern Province. So, in their view, it’s still this ungoverned land of Western Sahara. The Mauritanian government is a shit show. The Polisario has been beating the war drum. Nobody cares. It’s West Africa and the Sahara Desert, by God. Who gives a shit what happens here? And I mean that in the most sarcastic and ironic way possible. And why worry about terrorists in ungoverned spaces when we have nations and corporations using them to create an alternate world order?”
“Who was in the meeting?” I asked.
“The principals from the member nations.”
I felt a vibration in the ground, like an earthquake.
“Wait, hear that?” Zoey said, placing her hands against our chests like a mother protecting a child in the front seat as she brakes.
A train rumbled along the ground less than a few hundred meters away. The ground shook with violence. Dirt spilled on our faces. The train brakes screeched loud and piercing. Helicopters buzzed in the near distance, swarming around the train, maybe as security for the cargo or in pursuit of us. Surely Sanson had passed the word that we had escaped.
“We’d better move to the next phase of the plan,” I said. “We’ll continue this conversation when and if necessary.”
“I just thought you should know the full picture because, you know, the weight of the free world rests on your shoulders.” She gave me that flicker of a smile with an upturned lip and slight crow’s-feet around the edges of her intelligent eyes. She wore her age, whatever it might be, well.
“So, I’m standing at the plate with a full count, bases loaded, and we are down by three runs in game seven of the World Series?”
“I prefer cricket, but essentially, yes, and I’m glad to see you have your grandfather’s trenchant wit,” she said.
I was uncertain how she might have known my grandfather, but she was French, and as she mentioned, my grandfather had climbed the cliffs of Normandy and points beyond in World War II.
“I see the question in your eyes. He saved my grandmother in Cherbourg where the second Ranger battalion moved after Pointe du Hoc. But that train is getting louder, and we have business to conduct. I will save the rest for another time.”
Zoey looked at Champollion, then at me, and rolled her eyes before saying, “I think the actual operation is a few miles away. Based on Dad’s maps, he thought it was due north of the Eye. They had four locations. Three fake ones and one real one. That’s why all the activity. They’re trying to keep us guessing to buy time.”
“What is the Chinese play with the hypersonic missiles in space right now? Blackmail the countries?”
“It’s a simple demonstration of power and unity. Everyone who signed the protocols in Dakhla knows about this and signed on,” Champollion said.
I nodded, refocusing on the mission and thinking about my scattered troops. Champollion’s easy mannerisms and soft voice were comforting in the unsteady seas in which we found ourselves. When pressing forward on a well-developed plan, there is a level of reassurance that coincides with every step. When following instincts and the traces of a few connected ideas, as we were here, the mind searches for affirmation and reassurance. Champollion was providing a level of confidence that I hadn’t felt until now. In retrospect, I probably should have thought more deeply about how she had come to be by our side in the middle of this mission.
We had deliberately separated to build in redundancy to our mission and to accomplish several critical tasks at once.
“I’m just concerned about the rest of the team and how we go from here,” I said.
“They’re your team, General. They’re the best. They’re fine, and we will be fine,” Zoey said.
“I agree,” Champollion said.
Zoey’s courage and strength were refreshing, especially after a season of loss. While I had lost my best male friend in Sly Morgan and my best female friend in my wife, Melissa, Zoey had lost her father. The grief was palpable, but she found this mission as a way to honor him and to channel the heartache into something meaningful. After all, he had started this mission with his reconnaissance in Africa. What he had uncovered was an unbelievable collusion between the highest levels of the U.S. government with the Chinese Communist Party to provide them partnership status in Africa that would cement their foreign policy reach into the Western Hemisphere. It was a mind-numbingly stupid move that allowed China access to the one thing they needed. They had every resource they could possibly require. A burgeoning economy. A billion people. Access to every rare earth element in their own backyard. Nuclear weapons of all varieties. Now, Champollion had added a new layer onto the scheme by indicating it went well beyond a simple U.S.-China bilateral scenario.
But still it came down to China with their massive economy and their need for American support and acquiescence in the Western Hemisphere. It seemed like they had navigated that hurdle.
The Dakhla Accords could provide China the forward presence to hold the world hostage by being able to attack with nuclear weapons, against which no nation was capable of defending.
And Sly Morgan, spoon-fed or not, had uncovered this on his first reconnaissance, confirmed it on his second, and was killed on our overlapping mission in the area on his third mission. In combat units, our service is all about those on our left and right flanks. Sly had wanted to live, for sure, but if he had to die in combat, he wanted it to be for a cause much more significant than any one life. I think we all felt that way, and the least I could do was submit a piece of paper to my chain of command telling them my plan without telling them my plan.
I just hoped we weren’t too late.
27
THE FIRST NEWS ARTICLE was jarring, written by a twenty-two-year-old operative from the online periodical Maxios. The ensuing hundreds of articles spun off this one seed, all seemingly choreographed and blasted across the universe without verification or follow up. It even included a rare photograph of me, bearded, long hair, camouflaged face, amid my troops on a remote Syrian hilltop after a completed mission.
Special Forces General Accused of Murdering Secretary of State Gone AWOL, Hid Gold Find, Anonymous Source Says
General Garrett Sinclair has lived a shadowy life filled with misdeeds and misappropriation of government equipment, according to a soon-to-be-released Department of Defense Inspector General report. Imminently, he stands to be accused of murder of the nation’s top diplomat and illegal pirating of Mauritanian gold.
Amid these allegations, Sinclair has now gone AWOL.
The senior commando in the military, Sinclair has a history of xenophobia centered on his heralded rival Dariush Parizad, the Iranian boxing icon who championed the Persian people in his every deed. Sinclair falsely claimed that Parizad had entered and prepared to attack the United States, despite there being no evidence that Parizad was ever in the country. Fact-checkers report that the beloved Iranian, nicknamed the “Lion of Tabas” by the Ayatollah Khomeini, had not entered the country at any air, sea, or land checkpoint and that the likelihood of Parizad’s presence on inauguration day in our nation’s capital is close to zero.
Conversely, sources place Sinclair at the crime scene where revered secretary of state Kyle Estes was found murdered. Witnesses also positively identified Sinclair at multiple crime scenes preceding President Campbell’s inauguration, lending credibility to some reports that it was Sinclair, not Parizad, who planned to attack the inauguration. The much-reported-upon and video-recorded scene of Sinclair leaping from a helicopter that he had ordered to violate capital airspace to capture a drone inbound to the Capitol steps now, in retrospect, appears mischaracterized. It is equally likely, according to these sources, that Sinclair was attempting to escort the drones into the inauguration and, when the United States Air Force damaged the drones, destroy the remaining bits of evidence of his plan to interdict the peaceful transition of power.
This mounting evidence perhaps led Sinclair to go into hiding, a specialty of the mysterious soldier.
The article was run in McClatchy, The Washington Post, The New York Times, HuffPost, and myriad other online and print outlets. It seemed obvious that Willard Ringley or someone in the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office had leaked the investigation arc and the media had created its own salacious narrative. All the major news networks and cable outlets carried the story until it reached a crescendo within twenty-four hours.
President Campbell sat in the Oval Office, staring at the ceiling, looking directly into one of the installed cameras of the Alexa monitoring system until Secretary of Defense Blankenship walked into the room and took a seat opposite her on the sofa.
“What is this fresh hell of media about Garrett?” Campbell asked. “Who’s leaking from your inspector general?”
“General Sinclair has been the subject of an inspector general investigation since the Parizad incident. That is well known, Madam President,” Blankenship said. She was dressed in a navy pantsuit with a crème-colored blouse beneath the jacket. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she appeared spry.
“Fuck with me,” Campbell said. “I put you in that job over ten other people because I thought you would serve the people, not yourself.”
“Ma’am? How am I not serving the people? There’s nothing untrue in the media. It’s unfortunate that it got out, but we can’t unring that bell, can we? What would you like for me to do?” Her voice was dispassionate and unbothered.
“He’s on a classified mission beyond anything this country has ever known, and you go out and play fucking politics with this man’s life? His team’s life? Our nation’s security?” Campbell was shouting.
“Madam President, I’m not playing politics with anyone. I understand that you are close with General Sinclair, but I’ve done nothing of the sort. We have leaks all the time. People right outside that door,” she said, pointing at the anteroom to the Oval Office, “leak all the time. I know you’re feeling this one more sharply than others because of your personal connection, however deep that might go,” Blankenship said.
Campbell snapped her eyes onto Blankenship’s face and said, “What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything, ma’am. I am simply the messenger here. I have no idea what your relationship with Sinclair is, nor can I stop the media from speculating. I know that you two got closer after the death of his wife, and there’s a rumor that she took a secret to the grave. You know how information management is today. It’s impossible.” She shrugged, and perhaps the slight upturn of her upper lip was a smile.
“His team is out there to stop the Chinese from being able to direct hypersonic nuclear missiles onto the United States. A threat that you made possible with McHenry and your stupid Dakhla Accords!”
“Madam President, you should have looped me into the mission. I could have resourced him.”
Campbell’s eyes remained fixed on Blankenship’s impassive face.
“You’d rather see this country burn and our soldiers die?”
“I know you don’t believe that, Kim. I’m a patriot. I don’t believe that China is doing anything more than testing some new technology with partner nations.”
“They have five hypersonic vessels in the air.”
“I’ve spoken with my counterpart there. They’ve assured me we have no concerns.”
“They’re not a partner nation. They’re an adversary.”
“Not according to the Dakhla Accords,” Blankenship said.
“What have you done?”
“We are advancing U.S. vital interests, ma’am. It would be nice, but not necessary, if you were on board.”
“How does allying with China and Russia do anything but give away our state secrets?”
“The idea of the nation-state is passé. We have no borders. We welcome all comers. It’s an international economy. The Great Reset is about the world, not just America. We are resetting the global economy. We thought you were on board.”
“This will never work. I appointed you to this position.”
“And the Senate confirmed me. I’m doing my job. If you feel it’s not consistent with your vision, fire me.”
