John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

By the time Leo was calmed, the dishes retrieved, and the briefing resumed, Quattro, the DC-3, and the mission were far out of earshot. Heather slipped the note into Leslie’s hand as she went, telling her to come back for a different conference in ninety minutes.

“Well,” Heather said, as the door closed behind Debbie Mensche, leaving just Arnie for the next session, “my little man here seems to be back to sleep.” She kissed Leo and settled him back into the crib. Sorry about that, kid. Probably not the last time you’ll lose some sleep because your country needs you.

“As long as I’ve got you alone, Arnie, let me explain that I’m partly compartmentalizing the missions this time. You’ve got to be in both compartments because you’ve got the radio direction-finding info our agents need to plan their approach to Bloomington, but I’d like you to pretend you’re two people and don’t let them talk to each other.”

“I figured as much. Who’s next?”

“Do you know Roger Jackson?”

“Barely.”

“Young guy. Everything I know about him is that he has an abundance of woodcraft and fighting experience and a lack of permanent assignments and family. We’re going to send him in along old I-64, a long way from where Deb’s going in. James Hendrix did some work on remaining resources in that area, so he’ll be the other briefer. I wish we had more than one briefer who knew the direction-finding data; nothing personal, Arn, but we could be much better compartmentalized.”

“I’ve been wanting to beef up our DF operations. If Tarantina Highbotham starts doing those for us, down in the Virgin Islands, the long baseline would let us zero in much more closely on the intermittent stations inside the Lost Quarter.”

“Ask her to start on that ASAP.”

A knock at the door announced James Hendrix. Because he was so quiet and self-possessed, Heather didn’t feel as attached to James, and if one of them had to be the traitor, she preferred him to Arnie, her friend from long before Daybreak, or to warm, funny, adventurous Leslie.

Roger came in while Arnie and James were still looking for something to make small talk about. To keep things consistent with the way she’d behaved in briefing Deb, Heather put an enormous amount of detail into a very simple mission: Roger was to cross the Wabash on the I-64 bridge, just south of Grayville, scout thoroughly before going over, return at the first sign that he was being watched, and otherwise hurry to Bloomington overland, where he would find out as much as he could about that transmitter.

At the end, she told James she had more material to go over with him about possibly re-opening some old coal mines on the Western Slope; since he was, among other things, their paper maps wizard, with a phenomenal memory for anything he had seen once, it was a logical reason for him to stick around. She had been afraid Arnie wouldn’t go, but instead, he seemed eager, if anything, to leave.

Arnie didn’t ask one question. When did that ever happen before? But he and Ecco were friends. I don’t want him to have sent Steve to his doom.

Ten minutes after Arnie left, Leslie returned, her backpack loaded with papers and books; Dan Samson was almost at her heels, unclipping his stringy gray hair and wiping his face with a rag. “We raced,” Samson explained. “This psychotic child not only runs like a bunny, she’s rough with the elbows when you try to pass.”

Neither sweating nor breathing hard, Leslie shrugged. “Part of any game is using your fouls—especially when there’s no ref.”

Once again Heather laid it out: Ecco’s death, the need to penetrate the Lost Quarter and find out what was going on, and the too-elaborate discussion of everything, in the hope that if either Leslie or James were the traitor, a telltale detail might make it into an intercepted enemy message. For a long time after Leslie and James departed, she stood by the window, holding Leo, trying to think.

I don’t want it to be Arnie, but I don’t want it to be Leslie, either. I keep hoping for time to go fishing, hiking, or climbing with her; I bet before Daybreak she was one of those Rocky Mountain woman athletes that barely ever slept under a roof.

Heather drew and re-drew the diagram in her head; each of the three agents had been set up with two of her potential traitors. One agent should get through without being intercepted; the two people who had briefed that agent would be cleared, the one who had not condemned.

The sun was already low in the sky. Leo woke and announced mealtime, and Heather did her best to stop thinking, but after Leo went back to sleep, and she stretched out on her bed, she lay awake for a long time. Her thoughts were cold, dark, and sad.

“Hey, I know I’m being a big sissy and all, but are you heading up to the 18th and Blake area?”

“We wish more people would be big sissies; it’s more fun to have company than to pick up bodies and run for medics when we find them in alleys.” Mandy, the watch sergeant, wore a not-quite-fitting steel-pot helmet. Wonder if she had that in the attic or picked it up from a museum? “Yeah, we’re headed that way, Doctor Yang, we’ll take you right to your door. Have they decided whether your place is going to be inside the walls yet?”

“Not yet,” Arnie said. “They really ought to settle on where the walls are going to be.”

“What I hear, arguments from all the retired officers here’s what holds it up. God knows why but a lotta ex-servicemen settled in Pueblo.” She pronounced it Pee Yeb Low , the way old natives were said to do; it was actually the first time Arnie had heard it that way. “So at every meeting there’s fifty guys who think they know the best way to lay out a defense.”

“Same at the national level,” Arnie said. “Everybody’s qualified to plan the train route and nobody’ll shovel coal.” He hadn’t actually found that to be the truth but he knew from past experience that ordinary people liked to hear it.

The lantern created a small pool of cheery light as they left the occupied streets.

Chatting with Mandy, he learned she’d been a kayaking guide, liked militia duty better than salvage work, approved of the new Pope’s move to Buenos Aires, and wanted to vote for General Phat. The warm chatter of the healthy young optimist distracted him, but not enough; most of his mind listened for a scrape or thud where there shouldn’t be one, told him he needed to strike at Aaron the moment he saw him, and knew he couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Oh, God. Ecco was my friend.

For tonight, he would not meet Aaron. From now on he would always walk with the watch—till he moved in closer to town, and he would, soon. He could…

Pauline said they blinded him with a hot screwdriver.

The empty city was so still. The watch would keep Aaron away for tonight. But Daybreak was there, always, in the dark voids of the windows, where nothing looked or saw.

“You wouldn’t think those guys would be able to sleep at all,” Bambi said quietly to Quattro. “Another shot of coffee?”

“Yeah, rank hath its privilege—but make sure we save enough to jumpstart the team.”

“We’re on our own thermos, Quatz. I’ve got a gallon of hot coffee in a thermos and a box of leftover wedding chow for them. They can have breakfast as soon as we dump them out.”

“So we’re going to deposit our friends there and run like bunnies.” Quattro sounded grumpy; probably the idea sat uneasy with his romantic view of himself.