Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

Margaret was rigid — glacial ice.

“Ah, dammit, I’ll call from here.”

“No, go. Go get the papers. Keep current . There might be a picture of her in the obituaries.”

Son of a bitch, this is getting out of control. All I said was I’m going to the 7-Eleven and, BOOM, I’m in a minefield!

Margaret turned abruptly, stormed out of the living room, and slammed the bedroom door.

“Shit!” said Freeman. I’m cut off for a week .

He put on his jogging suit, grabbed his old SF forage cap and his keys, along with his phone card and ID, and left, thinking again of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, the old imperialist’s advice to “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—” But he knew Margaret was going to need more than sixty seconds. Sixty hours, maybe? Dammit, he should have just called Marte Price from home, just do it in plain sight, with Admiral Horatio Nelson’s stratagem in mind: “Never mind maneuvers. Go straight at ’em!”

Well, he thought, this is what you get when you try to do things by stealth, but then again, as a virile, fit man in his sixties, feeling closer to a fit forty, he was hugely flattered by Margaret’s jealousy. When she got that cold look, the softer features of her face taking on a distinctively intimidating expression reminiscent of Julia Roberts’s in Erin Brockovich , she was dauntingly beautiful. He strode down to the 7-Eleven.

“No, Douglas,” Marte Price assured him. “I don’t know anything about an attack on a navy base. Who told you there was?”

“Aussie Lewis. You remember him. He’s one of my old team. You interviewed him after the team cleaned up those gangs of no-hopers on the Olympic Peninsula up in Washington state.”

“Oh — wait a minute.” Freeman could hear the rustle of papers at her end. “Yes,” Marte said, “there was a news feed from some affiliate, something about a breaking and entering caper, but it all proved bogus.” Marte laughed. “Embarrassing as hell, really. We had to run a retraction. I don’t think ,” she said, laughing, “that the stringer who phoned it in will be paid for anything he or she pitches at our newspeople now. Apparently it was just some rumor. Probably some blogger screwing with us.”

“Uh-huh,” said the general, wiping his forehead with the heel of his right hand as he held the phone in the other. “And my name, for the record, Marte, is Shirley, and I’ve got the biggest hooters in Monterey County.”

“Good for you, Shirley,” she quipped.

“Oh, come on, Marte. Give me a break. Don’t give me that stringer rumor crap. CNN has faster intel half the time than No Such Agency.” He meant the National Security Agency. “You don’t run anything unless it’s reliable, has to be fact-checked.”

“I’m sorry, Douglas, but I’m telling you the truth. I hate to say it, but sometimes we actually do make mistakes — like that kid in San Diego, remember? Back in forty-one, alone in the newsroom on the Sunday, December seventh? Couldn’t get any confirmation, but he was going to run the header ‘Japs Bomb San Francisco’ until they got it sorted out at the last moment.”

“Bad analogy, sweetheart,” said Freeman. “The Japanese —‘Japs’ is politically incorrect, Marte— did bomb us. The kid just thought it was ’Frisco instead of Pearl Harbor. But there was a bombing attack.”

“Douglas, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m busy. The story is there’s no story. Nothing happened. Nothing . Bad news source. Nada.” She paused. “I hear traffic. Why aren’t you calling from home? Afraid your new wife’ll find out?”

“Thanks, Marte,” he told her. “Take care.”

She hung up.

Bitch . Well, not really a bitch, but — a “ bad news source ”?

Douglas Freeman gleaned every headline in the 7-Eleven, including those in USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times , and La Opinión . Nada.

He went down to the beach and began his morning run. He hated jogging in sand but knew it increased his workout by a factor of two to three and tempered his calf muscles until they were as hard as the new hagfish and Kevlar bulletproof vests he’d championed. As he pounded up and down the dunes, he was confident he’d give any drill instructor anywhere a run for his money— with full modern combat pack of fifty to seventy pounds, which just happened to be the same amount of weight as the Roman legionnaires had carried on their twenty-mile-a-day marches. As usual when jogging, he imagined that he was in a history-making race, like Philippides who ran the twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians to hold fast, that their army under General Miltiades, who had just whipped the Persians, was now on its way back to save Athens itself, which it did. Of course Philippides had collapsed and died the second after he’d delivered the fateful message.

By the time he’d reached home, Freeman was in full sweat.

“Sweetie, I’m home.”

“I can smell.”

Ouch . Maybe she would cut him off for a month ?

“Sorry, I know I must pong.”

“Must what ?” she asked sharply.

“Pong.”

“Is that—” There was a pause, and he thought he heard a stifled laugh, and seized the opportunity.

“Yes, pong — means to really smell bad. An Aussie or Brit word. Not sure which. Aussie Lewis used to use it a lot. Guess I picked it up from him.” There was another long pause, and she appeared at the door in a smart fall suit of variegated autumnal tones: nothing too gauche but one that showed her ample bustline to best advantage.

“Where are you off to?” asked the general, a little cap-in-hand, a man who had once commanded thousands of men in the field, and the commander who had electrified America with his momentous “U-turn battle” against the Siberian Sixth Armored Corps during the U.S.-led U.N. “peacekeeping action” in the Transbaikal.

“I’m going out,” she said, checking her reflection in the hall mirror. “I told you last week. Linda Rushmein is giving a bridal shower for her niece, Julia.”

“Rushmein,” mused Freeman. “As in ‘rush mein dinner, mein Herr?’”

Margaret didn’t smile. “The shower will be later in the day but Linda’s asked me to help with the preparations. I won’t be back till late. She’s coming to pick me up.”

“That’s a long drive,” Freeman noted.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she said.

“Of course I will.”

“I can’t imagine why. I’ll be tired.”

“Then I’ll run you a hot bath,” Freeman said congenially.

She had put on gold, dolphin-shaped earrings. Freeman idly recalled that dolphins were the symbols of submariners. It got him thinking that perhaps this nonstory about a DARPA facility being attacked had to do with the new submarine base in Alaska. It might be a bit of a stretch, he thought, but a news source could say “West Coast” and still mean Alaska.

“You can stay up for me if you want,” said Margaret, “but I’m going straight to bed.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said cheekily, slipping off his jogging shoes. “I’ll be up !”

“Don’t be vulgar, Douglas.” She straightened her suit jacket, crimped her hair, then looked straight at him. “You’re famous, I’m told, for your commando raids and command of detail, meticulous planning, and concern for your troops. Well, through no fault of your own, you’ve been pushed into retirement by what Linda tells me is the iPod generation in the Pentagon. And I’m sorry for that, and I’ll try my best to be a good, loyal wife, but I’m serious, Douglas, I don’t want you flirting with other women. It’s something I abhor in men who are married and—”