Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“Bring it up or you’re a dead man!” Ramon told the next man in line.

The man tried to speak but couldn’t, mouth and tongue dry as parchment. He keyed in what Ramon hoped would bring up the file. A millisecond later and there it was, the Flow-In-Flight data, the latest test results. “You have a backup disk,” Ramon said. It was a statement more than a question.

The terrified scientist nodded vigorously.

“Put it in the computer and show me!” ordered Ramon.

The scientist did as he was told, Ramon watching closely over his shoulder, and there on the screen appeared the same “Flow-In-Flight Data.”

“Put it on the table,” Ramon ordered.

The scientist complied.

“Copies?” shouted Ramon.

The man shook his head and found his voice. “No, I swear. No copies.”

Ramon shot him dead and turned to the remaining two. “Copies?”

The man whom the lieutenant had knocked down and the remaining woman shook their heads. “No, no!” the woman cried. “I swear to God!”

“Grab the disk!” Ramon ordered his sergeant, and then in two bursts from his Heckler Koch shot the man and the woman.

Ramon’s sergeant picked up the disk, waving it triumphantly to the lieutenant. “We have it, Ramon. Allah is great!”

“Destroy the hard drive!” Ramon told him. “And get out of the U.S. uniforms. Civilian dress. Remember, no Arabic. English only till we’re home.”

“Yes, sir.”

In Monterey it was still dark, and in a modest bungalow’s bedroom, the phone rang — eight times before retired General Douglas Freeman finally relented. Half sitting up, careful not to disturb his wife, Margaret, he glanced at his watch. It was 5:00 A.M. What the hell—? He knew it had to be something wrong with his son Dan, who was posted in the Middle East, for anyone to be calling at this ungodly hour. The “crump” of high surf pounding the beach sounded to him like distant artillery, a creeping barrage. He fumbled sleepily for the phone. “Hello?” he growled, his voice gravelly and nasal in his sudden awakening. “Hello?”

“General Freeman?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Aussie Lewis,” came the jovial voice. In the background was the sound of either a Special Forces team checking weapons or metal crates banging together.

“Aussie? What’s wrong?”

“We clear fore and aft, mate?” came Aussie’s voice, his Australian twang still distinctive, though he’d been a U.S. Special Forces commando and a naturalized American for fifteen years.

“Yes,” said the general. “Clear fore and aft.”

“What is it?” pressed the general. Freeman was one of America’s legendary commanders but right now all he was was a rather grumpy, impatient retiree who needed his sleep.

“Well,” said Aussie Lewis, “there’s this old sailor who decides to have a last fling. So, he goes down to the waterfront and picks up this lady of the evening. Well, they’re goin’ at it and he says, ‘How’m I doin’?’ and she says, ‘You’re doin’ about three knots.’

“‘What d’you mean, three knots?’ he asks her and she says, ‘Well, you’re not hard, you’re not in, and you’re not gettin’ your money back!’”

This was followed by raucous laughter from what sounded like a football team. The metallic sound the general had heard earlier, he decided, must have been the rattle of beer cans.

“Son of a bitch!” said General Douglas Freeman. “You rang to tell me a joke — an old joke at that — at 0500?”

“Oh, shite!” came Aussie’s response. “I thought it was 0800 hours.”

“You must be on the East Coast,” said Freeman, “and pissed as usual.”

“Yes and no, General,” answered Aussie. “A few of the old team got together for an ad hoc reunion. We’re seeing the sights in Washington, D.C. Saw the World War II monument yesterday. See where all our friggin’ taxes go. The monument’s A-okay, though. We all like it. ’Bout time all those people had something to honor them. Anyway, I thought I’d give you a bell, see how you were, you being retired and all. Thought you could do with a bit of a laugh.”

Freeman smiled, relaxed, and sat back against the bed’s headboard, Margaret stirring sleepily beside him. “Well, thanks, Aussie. And you’re right. Ever since the yuppies in the Pentagon requested I take retirement because of my — well, what they said was—”

“Your penchant,” answered Aussie, “for ‘politically incorrect statements.’ You called those congressmen on the Appropriations Committee — let’s see, what was it? Oh yeah, ‘A bunch of broad-banging bureaucrats.’ Don’t think you can say ‘broad’ anymore,” continued Aussie. “Sexist.”

“Hmmm, I suppose,” the general conceded ruefully. “Never mind that it was the truth. That bunch on the Appropriations Committee should’ve voted more money for DARPA.”

“That’s what the team’s been talking about here.”

“Where’s ‘here’—a dive?”

“Of course not, General. We’re on top of the roof at the Willard Hotel. Breakfast. We can see the White House from here.”

“Hope they can’t see you guys. Who’s there?”

“In the White House? The president, I guess.”

“No, you dork. Who’s with you at the Willard?”

“Ah, lessee. Salvini, alias the Brooklyn Dodger, Choir Williams, the bloody Welsh tenor — he’s singing, God help us — and yours truly. Couldn’t get Eddie Mervyn or Gomez out here. After that Korean stint we did they went home to Mommy. They live on the West Coast.”

“I know,” said Freeman. He knew exactly where every member of his old team was located and how he could reach them — quickly, if needed — including Medal of Honor winner David Brentwood, who was laid up at the moment with a flare-up of an old shoulder wound.

“Oh,” added Aussie, “I’m getting crap for not mentioning Johnny Lee, our multilingual expert. He’s here too, pissed out of his mind. That DARPA outfit you were talking about?”

“What about it?” said the general.

“You know,” said Aussie. “This B and E at the naval facility.”

“Break and enter?” said the general, sitting up higher against the headboard, his face clouding over. He prided himself on being current, particularly in this long, hard war against terror which, as Bush had told the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, would be the “work of decades”—how history was once more witnessing a great clash like that of the Cold War. Only this war on terror was a damn sight hotter, and it was for that reason that the general had vociferously argued for more money to be allocated for DARPA’s black box stuff. DARPA needed all the funding it could get, even if it meant hiding it so deep within the GAO’s — the General Accounting Office’s — records that to locate it would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a bureaucratic haystack. The general was very up-to-date vis-à-vis DARPA, but he hadn’t heard anything about a B and E against any DARPA installation.

“What happened?” he asked Aussie.

“No details really,” said Aussie. “On the idiot box — breaking news. Oh, guess it must have been about an hour ago. Oh four hundred your time.”

“I didn’t see anything,” said the general. “I was watching a late movie. What channel?”

“CNN.”

“Huh,” said Freeman. “Those people know more than the CIA half the time.”

“Tell me about it,” answered Aussie, having to raise his voice against the sound of the beer cans.

“Which facility?” Freeman pressed; he could hear the usually quiet Welshman Choir Williams singing “Goodbye” from White Horse Inn.