David Bruns - Weapons of Mass Deception

Brendan shook his head, but he ended up leaving the store with a can of Dr. Pepper anyway.

He took his time on the drive to his grandparent’s cabin, letting the old Subaru coast along the dirt roads. The leaves were gone from the trees, and the bare branches overhead let patches of weak winter sunlight filter onto the road. Brendan turned at the crooked sign that read Sugar Lake. He smiled to himself. The sign was repainted every few years, but it had always been crooked for as long as Brendan could remember.

The driveway to their cabin was long, with wide turns that wound through the trees. He rolled down the window to hear the crunch of leaves under his tires. He stopped the car next to the porch he and his grandfather had built one summer and let the silence of the place settle over him. The mechanical chunk of the car door opening seemed foreign to such a natural setting.

Brendan walked to the lake edge and onto the dock. The shoreline was thick with ice, but the center of the lake was clear. His breath frosted the air in front of him, a tiny flicker of movement in an otherwise perfectly still setting.

He shook himself and started back to the car. The cabin was tiny: two small bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The original structure had been a one-room log cabin, and he braced a knee against the horizontal logs that made up the face of the building as he unlocked the front door.

He spent the next hour getting settled: stowing groceries, splitting firewood and starting a fire, making up a bed. When he was finished, he sat on the porch and drank his Dr. Pepper. He checked his mobile phone. No signal. Not surprising. The phone companies had promised better service out here for years, but nothing ever came of it.

Brendan grabbed his bag of Swedish fish and set off into the woods, heading for a rocky bluff that overlooked the lake. He walked slowly, chewing the candy and allowing the quiet to take him.

The trip to the cabin was just what he needed. It was time to do some thinking about his life, decide what he wanted. His service commitment would be up in another year and he hadn’t given one thought to what was next. Stay in? Get out and get a job? One thing was sure: the loneliness of San Diego was not for him. He needed something more.

Like Don Riley. He’d known Don would eventually find his niche, and it looked like the CIA was the right place for him. A kid that smart would do well with the spooks. Don knew what he wanted out of life.

“What about me? What do I want out of life?” A startled squirrel chattered at him from a high branch.

Brendan finished the last of the Swedish fish and crushed the bag in his hand. He stepped out onto the bare rock bluff and threw out his arms. “Brendan McHugh!” he yelled, laughing as the sound echoed back to him from across the lake. He and his brother used to scream out their names before they jumped off the ledge into the lake below. He peered over the edge to the ice-crusted water.

He found his jumbled thoughts turning to Liz. He hadn’t spoken to her since graduation. She’d left Marjorie’s early the next morning without even saying goodbye, off to Quantico to become a Marine.

He hadn’t called her. Call it pride, call it stubbornness. Whatever the reason, it seemed easier to just not try, and he’d let Liz slip out of his life.

Brendan pulled his phone from his pocket. Up this high, he had one bar of mobile signal. Just enough to make a call.

Maybe she was lonely, too. Maybe she was wondering what to do with her life. Maybe they could figure it out together…

He texted Don Riley. Do u have Liz mobile?

The squirrel he had disturbed earlier decided that Brendan’s presence near his tree was an invasion of his privacy. It settled on a nearby branch and heaped chattering abuse down on his head.

The phone beeped. Sure. 202-789-6578. Call her, Brendan.

Brendan’s fingers shook as he dialed the phone. It rang once… twice.

“Hello?” The male voice was a warm baritone, and it sounded like he had just been laughing.

Brendan’s heart sank when he heard Liz’s voice in the background saying, “Who is it?”

“Hello?” the male voice said again.

“Sorry. Wrong number.”

Rafiq leaned against the rail and breathed in the early morning air.

Jungle and river water. After the last three months, he almost missed the tang of sea salt in his nostrils. The muddy brown Uruguay River slid beneath the keel of the Lumba . The captain jabbered on the radio in a blend of broken English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Malay.

The ship heeled slightly as the captain made a broad turn around the final bend in the river, and the city of Fray Bentos came into sight. Rafiq studied the shoreline. This was as far as they could go with the ship; the river beyond was not deep enough to allow them to continue. They would meet their South American contact here, a man he knew only as Dean.

Rafiq had eventually gotten used to the never-ceasing motion of the ship, but it had taken about a week. A very long week. His hand went to the scar on his right bicep, a reminder of their encounter with the Somali pirates.

The first few days at sea found Rafiq barely able to stand, let alone take his turn guarding their cargo belowdecks. Just the thought of going back down into the hold made his stomach lurch.

So he slept, and slept. When the gonging noise sounded in his ears, Rafiq thought it was part of his dream. The ship’s cook had given him a dose of some horrendous-tasting home remedy for seasickness, and ever since he’d been wrapped in a series of fantastic dreams, each wilder than the last.

The gonging sound was just part of the dream, he told himself. The part where a giant monkey beat on a drum in perfect time with high, ringing peals.

Then came the gunshots.

Rafiq’s head snapped up. Gunshots were not part of his dream — they were real.

He staggered to his feet, the room wavering in his vision. He gripped the wall for support and peered out the window of his cabin. Blue sky, flat ocean, bright sun, no sign of anything amiss.

He leaned down to pick up his rifle. The gun had been sitting under an air conditioning vent and the cold metal chilled his clammy flesh. He slipped a Colt Commander into his belt at the small of his back, then eased the door open. The narrow passageway beyond was deserted, lit only by lights at knee level that shone down on the linoleum in glossy puddles.

Rafiq struggled to remember the layout of the ship. He’d spent almost the entire time since they’d left port passed out in his bunk. Think, dammit. He decided the bridge was to the right and one deck up from his current position. He moved down the hall, rifle at the ready. His feet seemed like they belonged to someone else, and his hands shook, not from fear, but from the seasickness. He gulped in the dense air, nearly gagging on the ever-present scent of diesel that seemed to pervade everything on this stupid ship.

He reached the ladder, and did a quick look upwards.

Clear. He crept up the metal rungs until his eyes were level with the deck above him.

He’d guessed correctly. The door ahead of him was labeled BRIDGE in bold letters, followed by AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in three different languages.

Rafiq crept to the door and pressed his ear against the faux wood. A muffled exchange of broken English was going on in loud tones a few feet away.

“How many crew? How many?” a voice asked. High-pitched, borderline screaming, in English with a flat East African accent.

The captain was pretending he didn’t understand, replying only in Malay, punctuated with the occasional, “No speak English, no speak!”