Allied Powers, page 21
And all that helped keep my mind off what was happening out there, what Julie was doing, what was happening with the Jambo. Things could easily go very, very wrong out there. I’d know soon, I thought. If things went poorly, I’d be stuck here for a while, after which they’d probably put me on trial. A show trial where they’d restrict who could record video and what was released on the news while they painted me as a mass-murdering traitor, followed pretty closely by a date with a firing squad.
If it went well, then it wouldn’t take very long at all before that door opened and someone very important walked in and they tried to make a deal.
The door opened and Tommy Caldwell walked through, flanked by a pair of guards. Vanir mercenaries, of course.
“Andy,” he said with a curt nod. “I’d like to get you out of this cell and take you someplace a bit more civilized. We need to talk.”
“Secretary Caldwell,” I replied, swinging my legs off the cot, a grin spreading across my face. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you.” I looked down at the hole in my right sock over my big toe. “I don’t suppose I could get some shoes?”
23
I took a deep swig of the Diet Coke and sighed with appreciation. I wasn’t sure whose office we were in, but I was sure they were a senior officer. Leather couch, artwork on the walls, their own personal refrigerator. Maybe the colonel in charge of the detention center. I’d probably put him out of a job.
Whoever’s desk it was, Tommy Caldwell had made himself comfortable on the other side of it. He watched me finish the drink with the strained patience of a man who had no other choice. He’d even left the German mercs outside, and I wondered what he’d do if I went after him. He’d been a Ranger in the Army a long time ago, somewhere around the invasion of Iraq, and now that he’d partaken of the Helta anti-aging treatments, maybe he thought he could take me. If so, he was sorely mistaken. There was more to being ready for a fight than being young, or having trained for it once, a lifetime ago.
“Andy,” Caldwell finally said, “I know things have been bad, but you have to understand, everyone’s scared shitless. This is the second alien race that’s threatened to attack Earth in the last year. People were looking for someone to blame.”
“Well, at least that someone wasn’t you, was it?” I pointed out, tossing the empty can into the garbage beside the desk. I offered the man a smile that was half a sneer. “How’d you manage that, anyway? You hand Crenshaw over to them?”
“This was going to happen with or without me.” He scowled in a way that told me I’d scored with that guess. “The alternative was, a shitload of people, dedicated soldiers, and Marines, and Secret Service agents, were going to die. I helped prevent that.”
“I guess that makes you a hero, then.” I mimed taking something off from around my neck and offered the phantom medal to him. “I officially hand over my Medal of Honor to you in recognition for all the lives you saved by making this coup relatively bloodless.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere, Clanton!” he snapped, pushing himself halfway out of the chair, as if the added height would intimidate me. “Do you want to know why you’re here, or should I just toss you back into that cell?”
“I already know why I’m here, Tommy. There’s only one reason you’d bother to talk to me. Olivera has control of the Jambo and you guys are fucked. You want me to talk him into taking some deal where he gets his command back and we all pretend that this whole jailbreak thing never happened in exchange for all of us signing on with Harrel and Vanlandingham and declaring this whole bullshit business legitimate.”
Caldwell sat back in his chair and regarded me coolly, as if the entire outburst had been a charade. Which it had.
“You’re such a smartass,” he said, with what might have been admiration. “It’s easy to forget you’re not an idiot. Yes, they took the Jambo.” Caldwell sighed. “Stuck Colonel Reitfeld in a lifepod and launched him into the atmosphere, then took out the Lunar laser with the Impulse Gun. The commanders of the other cruisers either threw in their lot with Olivera or promised to stay out of it.”
“He controls the high ground.” I shook my head. “According to George Lucas, that means this fight is over.”
Caldwell snorted a laugh.
“He does. But he has no ground troops. And unless he’s willing to fire on American targets, that makes this a standoff. He can run, of course, and he can destroy us all, but he can’t put boots on the dirt.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Marines and National Guard troops out there that will side with us.”
“They would,” he corrected me, wagging a finger as if he were lecturing to a classroom of students, “if you had a leader on the ground. There are governors refusing to allow their guard troops to be mobilized, sure, but they’re not going to fire the first shot in a civil war. Not without someone damned persuasive to convince them. Or to convince them not to.”
I rubbed at my eyes, feeling very tired.
“You know, Tommy, I might even be convinced to do it. After all, you’re right, no one’s going to win a civil war in this country, and it’s to be avoided at all costs.” I fixed him with a glare. “But. This wouldn’t really be a civil war, would it? Because you and Harrel and Vanlandingham brought in foreign troops onto US soil, and they killed American civilians.” I waved a hand at the door. “You’ve got fucking mercenaries working on a US Air Force base. Jesus Christ, Tommy! And don’t tell me you don’t know who’s behind all this rioting, who’s backing the VP. This has Russia written all over it. Russian networks and Chinese money.”
I hadn’t meant to get mad. It was counterproductive and wouldn’t accomplish anything, but the anger was roiling in my gut like a prison meal.
“You swore a fucking oath, man. You’ve sworn it three times, last I checked, to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and obey all lawful orders. Were you lying?” I spread my hands in invitation for him to answer, but he said nothing, merely glowering at me. “Tommy, you’re complicit in fucking treason, in handing this country over to the enemy. Do you think extenuating circumstances make that okay, somehow? That history will remember you kindly? Holy shit, man, do you think there’ll even be any humans around to write that history after the Bugs get done with us? Because that’s the only thing you fuckers have accomplished, making us totally unprepared to fight the Bugs when they come. You understand that, right? That you…you personally…may have guaranteed the extinction of the human race?”
That did it. I’d been hoping to set him off, to get him talking so I could find out more than he was willing to tell me, and if I was pissed off and venting while I did it, that was just gravy.
“What did you want me to do, Andy?” he demanded, slamming his palms on the desk. “Do you think I should have tried to shoot it out with the FBI agents who raided my office and hauled me in front of Gerry Vanlandingham? Should I have told him no, then sat in a cell and watched while the FBI SWAT team took down the Secret Service and maybe killed Crenshaw? Because that’s what would have happened! And if it didn’t, if the FBI lost that fight, do you think Harrel and the others would have just given up?”
I sucked in a breath, let it sit for a second, then blew it out, getting my temper under control before I showed Tommy all the unarmed combat moves I’d learned these last two years and change.
“What you’re saying is, you had no choice.”
“Exactly,” Caldwell agreed, sitting back like a man who’d just completed an impossible task. “Either way I chose, things were going to be horrible…this was just the least horrible solution.”
“But you have a choice now, Tommy,” I told him, nodding. “Right now. Mike’s got control of the cruisers. He’s got control of orbit, the Moon if he wants it, and the shipyards. The defense satellites wouldn’t last a day against the Jambo—he could sit back a light-hour away and blow them out of orbit with the Impulse Gun. The only thing keeping the military from freeing Crenshaw and restoring our constitutionally-elected government is the lack of someone to step forward and take the lead.” I motioned toward him. “You can do that. You’re the Secretary of Defense. You can have the military organized and lock down DC in a day.”
“Oh, my God, I wish.” Caldwell buried his face in his hands. “You don’t think I’d like to come out of this a hero, Andy? They have my family. The FBI swept them up before the raid, but now they’re supposedly under the guard of Vanir PMC troops.” He met my eyes. “I’ve seen the video. It’s not Vanir…it’s Chernobog.”
Ice-cold talons clenched at my chest. The Russian Chernobog mercenaries were nutcases, Slavic pagans who admired the Nazis. The Russians had used them for decades as plausibly deniable ways to enforce the will of the Kremlin. And the fuckers were here.
“It’s not just my family at stake, either.” Caldwell’s words were a funeral dirge. “They’re watching yours right now. Your ex-wife, your son. I’ve been told if you don’t agree to help bring Olivera into the fold, they’ll be arrested and brought up on conspiracy charges.”
This time, the rage was nearly too much to control, and the desk creaked as my fingers dug into the edges of it, just so ready to flip the damned thing over and trap Caldwell beneath it.
“Go fuck yourself. Put me back in my cell, because you won’t be getting one Goddamned bit of cooperation. You can tell your bosses that I don’t have to live through this because people who love me now have access to weapons that can lay waste to the fucking planet. And if they find out anything has happened to my son, you can bet your sweet ass, they won’t hold back.” I shrugged. “Maybe they won’t attack the US, but they know who’s behind this just as surely as you do. Try to imagine what an Impulse Gun round would do to the Kremlin. Or the various mountain shelters Popov and the rest of the Russian oligarchy believes are so safe and secret.”
Caldwell’s face went pale.
“That would start World War Three.”
“Yeah, it would,” I agreed. “And since the only people I care about who are still onplanet would be dead, ask me if I give a shit.”
Caldwell’s phone buzzed at him and he cursed, pulling it out of his pocket, looking as if he was ready to just ignore the call and concentrate on our little tete-a-tete, but then his eyes narrowed as he stared at the screen. He tapped his earpiece.
“Caldwell.” His breath caught in his throat and his mouth shaped a silent “o.” He said nothing for at least ten seconds, then licked his lips, and loosened his tie, as if he were having a hard time getting air. “Yes, I see. I understand.” His hand shook as he reached back up and tapped the earbud twice. He didn’t meet my eyes at first, slumping against the desk like it was the only thing keeping him from sinking to the floor.
“What?” I asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There were a thousand possibilities of what could have gone wrong now floating through my mind, and none of them were pleasant. The most obvious ones would be that whoever was holding Crenshaw had killed him, or that there’d been another incident with the foreign troops, this time with more than a few score casualties.
“We…we have to come to some sort of accommodation, now,” Caldwell declared, finally looking up at me. “There’s no choice.” He motioned upward. “That was Space Force Early Warning…we just got a report from the outsystem satellites. It’s the Bugs, Andy.”
He wiped a hand over his upper lip, brushing away beads of sweat.
“They’re here.”
I’d had dreams before of walking into my homeroom class naked in high school, and even in the worst of those dreams, I’d never been stared at harder than when I walked into the Operations Center at Andrews Air Force Base with Tommy Caldwell.
The crews were Air Force, not German mercenaries, for obvious reasons. Vanir was good at killing people who were poorly-armed and poorly-trained, but they couldn’t have operated a coffee machine without a tech to guide them. The Vanir guards did try to follow us into the Ops Center, but I turned on them just as they hit the threshold.
“You don’t need to be here,” I said to the senior of the two, a short, slightly-chubby NCO.
The German looked from me to Caldwell.
“I have orders.” He said it like ah haff awrders.
“I’m so sure you’re just following orders,” I said, stepping up nose-to-nose with him, as if I didn’t find his rifle or his body armor at all intimidating. And I didn’t. In fact, I was already making plans on how to kill the both of them within five seconds. “But you’re not coming in here. You know why? Because they need my help. If they don’t get it, you’re just as dead as everyone else. Get the fuck out of here.”
“Go,” Caldwell urged, his demeanor and his gesture impatient. “If your commander has a problem with it, tell him to call me personally.”
The NCO shrugged and the two of them stepped back outside and let the door close.
“Andy, this is Colonel Flagler,” Caldwell introduced, nodding to a tall, dark-haired woman with a severe bob and a glare hard enough to cut through steel. “She’s in charge of communications.”
“I have a station for you over here, Colonel Clanton,” she said, motioning to the center of the room.
“Why a station?” I wondered, following her. “It’s comms…couldn’t you just port it through to Secretary Caldwell’s phone?”
“Negative,” she tossed back over her shoulder. “These are air gapped systems. They can’t be hacked and they can’t be tapped. The line is purely physical right out to the satellite dish.”
“Don’t want any of this getting out, huh?” I asked Caldwell.
“Here you go, sir,” a younger technician said, offering me a headset that could have come from the last century, attached to the control panel by a long, rubber cord. Flagler handed Caldwell an identical one and I assumed he’d be listening in on the conversation. “We already sent the initial handshake signal. Just waiting on them.”
I didn’t have to wait long. The voice was familiar…I’d heard it in person not two days ago.
“This is General Michael Olivera, commander of the USS James Bowie. Who am I speaking to?”
“It’s me, Mike,” I told him. I wish I could have seen his face because I was sure his mouth dropped open. “Andy.”
“Glad you’re alive,” he said, sighing. “I was feeling pretty shitty thinking you’d gotten yourself killed breaking me out. I assume you being on the horn has something to do with the Bug armada in our outer system?”
“Got it in one. Look, they know you’ve got them by the short-hairs here. But they also know you’re not going to sit back and let the Bugs attack Earth. So, here’s the deal they’re giving me. They’re going to release all the officers they have under confinement here, put them back in charge for the time being, all under your command. Once the Bugs are defeated, then we all renegotiate.” I shrugged, snorting a humorless laugh. “If the Bugs win, we don’t have to worry about it.”
“What about you?” That was Julie, not Olivera.
I eyed Caldwell sidelong, not even trying to keep the cynical amusement out of my look or my next words.
“I’ll have you know,” I told her, “that you have the privilege of speaking with the supreme commander of all allied ground forces on this entire fucking planet, my dear. And since our beloved interim government happens to be a proxy for the Russians and the Chinese, well…I guess that includes them, too.”
“Oh, good God, as if you weren’t hard enough to live with before…”
“Andy,” Olivera broke in. “Are they on the up and up?”
I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see it.
“Do I look like a mind-reader to you? All I know is, we have to fight, and this is the only way they’ll let us do it. I’ve been told they’ve already released every single Hammerhead shuttle for immediate launch to rendezvous with you and the other cruisers in orbit.”
A pause.
“Yeah, I have confirmation from sensors. All right. I gotta say, I’d feel a lot more comfortable about this if Crenshaw were in charge.”
“Oh, you know, Mike,” I said, eyes fixed on Caldwell. “They’re just politicians. No matter who’s in charge, it’s people like you and me who’d be doing the fighting anyway.”
“Yeah. Good luck down there.”
“And to you, too. And if you have the chance…I wouldn’t mind getting Reaction Force One down here with me. Be nice to have some people around I knew I could trust.”
“They’ll be on their way soonest. Where do you want them to meet you?”
“If I know the Bugs,” I told him, “they’ll hit a central point, wherever they think we’re at our strongest, and work their way out from there. So, I’d say…” I looked out the window of the Ops Center at the jets taking off on the main runway. “Send ‘em right here.”
24
“No, I don’t give a damn what your brigade commander told you, Colonel,” I barked into the phone, hands on my hips and chin jutting out stubbornly as if the Ranger officer could see me and be impressed by my obstinance. “I need your battalion at Joint Base Edwards and I fucking need them yesterday! Did you not check the orders from the White House?”
“Umm, sir…I mean, Colonel…” The man was tripping over his own words, knowing we shared a rank but also knowing who I was. “I mean, yes, I did see the orders, but with everything that’s been happening with the government, I just wasn’t sure…”
“And I get that, Colonel Reynolds,” I assured him, pacing across the Ops Center, still getting stared at but growing used to it by now. At this point, I think it was because they were annoyed at how loud I talked on the phone while they were trying to do their work. But I hadn’t been offered an office, so they’d have to deal with it. “I get that more than anyone, trust me. But you’ve also seen the reports from the outer system, right? You’ve seen all those Bug ships out there? There’s about sixty of the Motherships, which means there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of the Bugs incoming, maybe a million. We’re going to kill as many as possible out in space, but even if we get nine out of ten, that’s a hundred thousand of them. Do you think they’re going to just kill the bad politicians in DC and not go after innocent people? We can hash all that shit out after we kill the Bugs. Now, are you going to get your battalion here or do I have to send a couple Delta boys out there to kick some ass for me?”
