Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“Ah,” said the professor. “A word of advice?”

“Shoot,” said Freeman.

“Be careful, General. Idaho can get cruelly cold.”

“The globe’s warming, Professor.”

“Not everywhere.”

Now that he had something definite, Freeman called Eleanor Prenty again from the 7-Eleven. She was in yet another meeting. He was persistent, insisting that his call was “most urgent,” a matter of “the highest national security,” and that he had information which, if it got out, could acutely embarrass the administration, particularly in this, its election year.

He was put on hold, his ears assaulted by the most discordant jazz he’d ever heard. Whoever was on the horn sounded as if he were playing underwater and the tape or disk was past its prime, probably scratched. To Freeman, it sounded little better than static. Being on hold was a damn insult. Here he was, able to prove that it had taken him less than twenty-four hours to discover that whichever security agency was trying to keep the lid on the B and E at Pend Oreille wasn’t quite up to the job, and what did they do? Put him on hold. It was what Aussie Lewis would call a “piss-poor start.”

“Douglas?” The national security adviser sounded polite, but was clearly under a lot of strain, her voice rough with fatigue.

“Eleanor, I’ve just earned that retainer you pay me and then some.”

“How?” she asked impatiently. No doubt he’d dragged her away from yet another of the endless chain of meetings with the president and other nonretirees .

“Eleanor, I have a rock-solid source in the press who confirms that a naval research base has been hit. I know where it is. It’s landlocked and its name refers to part of the anatomy.”

“I know,” she said.

“ What? Son of a—”

“Are you on a landline, Douglas?”

“I may be kept out of the loop,” he said testily, “but I’m not stupid. Of course I’m on a landline!”

“Douglas, calm down. I wasn’t lying to you when we spoke earlier. I mean, I wasn’t giving you the brush-off. The CIA, FBI, and DHS have been sitting on this. It’s so explosive they didn’t call it through until they thought they’d figured out exactly what had happened. I assume you know how much the president hates speculation. He wants hard facts from the agencies when they tell him something has fallen off the rails. Not first impressions, but solid facts. From what we can gather, a computer disk has been stolen, and U.S. forces from the Tenth Mountain Division were seen by some residents in the area riding down toward the base. Defense tells us that the Tenth Mountain Division shouldn’t have been anywhere near Pend Oreille.”

“Switcheroos!” said Freeman.

“What?”

“Switcheroos, terrorists, infiltrators, wearing the other guys’ uniforms. Hell, we’ve done the same thing in SpecOps for years.”

“Well, whatever happened, the disk is gone and apparently it contains highly sensitive data. I’m not even cleared to that level.”

It didn’t surprise Freeman, for while he knew that most people would find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand how someone as highly placed as the national security adviser might not be privy to such information, it was often the case. Indeed, in the new Office of Scientific Intelligence the distribution of DARPA files, Freeman knew, was obsessively controlled.

“Look,” Freeman advised the national security adviser, “even from what little you’ve told me and from what I’ve heard about Homeland Security or whoever it was killing the story after an initial blurb on CNN, this is clearly a no-wait situation. We don’t need a lot of suits from either the Intel agencies or Foggy Bottom discussing the options. There’s only one thing to do. Go find the pricks who stole the disk. With the right transport I can have my team rendezvous and be on the trail within eight hours.” He hurried on, “Hell, one of my men—” He was thinking of Choir Williams. “—lives in the area in question.” He said nothing about young Prince, Choir’s K-9 dog, who was one of the best trackers he’d ever seen, next to the team itself. “This is what we do , Eleanor.” Then he added, with some force, “I brought home the bacon from Korea, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” she agreed, he and his team had successfully carried out a predawn raid on the coast of North Korea, in one of the most hostile military areas in the world, and brought back vital intel. Freeman’s team had done precisely what the so-called “U.S. Paratroopers” had done at the DARPA installation on Pend Oreille, except that Freeman and his team hadn’t murdered civilians in cold blood. They had fought their own kind — warriors — in the North Korean raid.

Freeman, voice controlled but tight with the tension of expectation, said, “I say again, Eleanor, what we’ve got to do is go find these people before they get the disk out of the country, right?” Before she could answer, he was asking, “Have your people alerted all ports, airports and—?”

“We have. And we’ve got hundreds of DHS and FBI agents swarming through every airport in the Northwest. All border personnel have been alerted and are triple-checking every passport. The air force, coast guard, and navy on both coasts are also on alert. That means no plane or vessel is leaving the country until we say so.”

“ Time , Eleanor,” the general stressed. “By the time the top brass in the Pentagon get their heads around this, these jokers will be on the West Coast. For Heaven’s sake, give me the green light. Let my team go after ’em. We’re always ready to go on short notice, you know that. Send in the heavyweight battalions later if I don’t get them. But let’s go while the trail’s still hot. I checked the long-range forecast, and in a few days there’s going to be a big snowfall up there. That’s not going to help track ’em, Eleanor. It’s a wilderness up there — one of the last great wild places in America. And with our regular forces already stretched thin all across the world, what you need is a small, self-sufficient, well-trained ready-to-go group on the ground now . Dammit, we can smell a terrorist.”

Was her sigh one of disbelief or fatigue?

“You all right? he asked.

“Do you fight as fast as you talk, Douglas?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered good-naturedly, before he was back on the attack, telling her, “We’ve trained for it, Eleanor. It’s what we do ,” he repeated. “When my guys move through the kill house at Fort Bragg, they’re not only practicing close quarters combat, they get to use their noses, smell memory. People with different diets give off different-smelling perspiration. My guys use their noses or, by God, I don’t pass them.” He didn’t mention Prince; once that “puppy,” as Freeman sometimes called Choir’s fully grown dog, got onto a scent he was like a magnet to a fridge. Wouldn’t let go.

“Eleanor?”

“Yes?”

“How many of our people were killed up there?”

“I’m not certain as yet,” she replied, “but we think around a dozen. Not all the pix have come through from the FBI. It’s not like suicide bombers, Douglas. I mean, the sheriff who was first on the scene said nothing much seems disturbed, no butcher-shop massacre, not like the mess suicide bombers leave behind. First photos show one body slumped, sitting on the floor, back to a door. If you didn’t look closely and see the body, a man—” She needed a second to regain her composure. “Even the bullet holes aren’t messy, at least not in the pictures I saw. It’s so — so surreal, as if some of them’ve just gone to sleep on the floor, except for an older man slumped down by the door. He looks—” She couldn’t go on for several more moments.