John Barnes - Directive 51

The silence went well beyond awkward before Garren said, “We are working on that, sir.”

Pendano sank into his chair, hands on his head; he didn’t move as everything else went on around him.

Jason’s Goo-22 search had found an all-organic restaurant about an hour away, on a route that would take them back to I-25 eventually, so they headed east and south. “We’ll miss being able to find places like this so easily,” Jason said, as they pulled into the gravel parking lot, “but on the other hand, instead of having these little islands of spiritual meaning in an ocean of Big System, we’ll all make meaning where we are, till the whole world will have spiritual meaning.”

“Spiritual?”

Jason shrugged. “There’s more to spirit than just God.”

Once seated, with a big pot of coffee for the table to share, and a big meal ordered for each of them, Jason sighed. “It feels good not to be driving; thanks for giving me a ride clear back to Raton. The mountains are beautiful and the challenge is fun, but after a while, dude, it’s all ‘hand on the throttle, eye on the rail.’”

“Back to the spiritual already.”

“A bunch of us at the commune like to play traditional stuff, and traditional includes gospel. No offense, but when I’m singing ‘You Got to Walk with Your Lord Every Step,’ it doesn’t mean I believe what I’m singing.”

Zach grinned. “You look way too much like one of the original disciples to be a current one.”

Jason nearly shot the coffee through his nose, and said, “I thought Christian types were supposed to try to convert people and didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it.”

“That’s another outfit. They get all the…” Zach froze, staring.

When Jason turned, the television over the bar showed flat Gothic letters, blue on yellow: ATTACK IN THE DESERT. SPECIAL REPORT.

One of the waitresses, braids and big skirt flying, ran to the TV and turned the volume all the way up.

“—joining us, again, the plane carrying Vice President Samuelson on a confidential diplomatic mission was seized earlier today, and government sources confirm that the streaming video webcast that appeared about forty minutes ago was not a hoax. Here’s a clip of that webcast; we apologize for the poor quality of the video and remind you he was being held prisoner and threatened. You may want to take small children out of the room.”

Samuelson’s image appeared, too big, too grainy, and with the color uncorrected. They watched him speak the plane’s position, the terrorists wrestling him, the knife at his neck, Samuelson dragged off camera. The network helpfully supplied subtitles so that they knew someone had shouted in Arabic not to kill Samuelson on camera, and “read our statement, read it now, we may have no time,” over the sound of the vice president shouting Bullshit! and Barrels on the plane! , and that the thuds off camera must mean he was being beaten.

An announcer cut off Samuelson’s scream of Bullshit! “We’re taking you right away to live coverage from our San Diego affiliate where—excuse me, I’m not sure—” The man listened intently to his earpiece. “Should I?”

“That’s some last words,” Zach said.

Jason nodded. “How many vice presidents ever say anything that close to the truth?”

The announcer said, “We are going direct to live video from the traffic reporting plane from our network affiliate in San Diego. We have—”

A blink in the feed cut the anchor off; the picture stabilized into a military jet streaking across the blue sky, seen from beneath and behind.

“That’s an A-10,” Zach commented. “I built a model of that when I was a kid. Weird. It’s a ground-attack plane, basically a tank-buster, not a fighter. Maybe something is going on on the ground?”

The camera angle widened to show four streaking contrails around the A-10, then rotated down to include the empty, ridge-scarred desert below. Sound resumed: “—believe are US Air Force A-10 attack planes en route to intercept a terrorist attack aimed somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, which is apparently being delivered via the hijacked Air Force Two—the plane carrying Vice President John Samuelson. For those of you who just joined us—”

“Television is the medium for people who just got here,” Jason said.

Zach nodded. “That’s why children love it.” The planes flew on, parallel white streaks in the blue sky, two of them big enough to show as glints of metal. The voice-over commentator began to go through it all again. Very softly, he added, “And why we need Daybreak.”

Ysabel plunged down the stairs just slow enough to be silent; above her, she could hear Neil’s high old voice, like an unhappy child, over and over, asking if anyone knew what that sound was, and didn’t they smell smoke?

She popped through the ground-floor fire exit and walked quickly across the street, making herself not look back.

Stunned, exhilarated, scared, she held her cell phone to her ear and walked along the busy street, saying “unh-hunh, unh-hunh, yeah you’re right.” At the corner pay phone, she let herself look up and see the people staring over her head and behind her. Just like acting class back at the community college, “acting is re-acting,” nothing hard here.

She turned and gawped like everyone else. The aerostat was sinking slowly, a tangle of junk hanging from it, but it didn’t look like the diesel fuel had caught fire; good, less chance that anyone would be hurt. The Stinger had torn some big holes in the lower, air-filled part (to judge by the flapping bits of fabric) and small holes in the upper, helium-filled part (to judge by the way it was sinking).

Aaron had explained about the upper and lower parts, and it had been one of the few things he said about the aerostat that she could follow. She liked the way he tried so hard to be non-condescending and non-technical for her. That and his Latin-poet eyes.

Ysabel pictured campesino families, desperate for work, over the border in San Luis Rio Colorado. They would see the big balloon that had always been like a Yankee fist in their face sinking like a bad dream. She imagined them packing their few treasures from the old village and heading north tonight. Her face was aching for a chance to grin, but she kept it slack as she slumped heavily against the pay phone’s metal hood and slid her phone onto the little metal shelf. Someone looking to make a pay-phone call would be happy to find a prepaid cell phone with no security on it.

The aerostat sank faster in the late-afternoon sun. More people stopped to stare, point, and yell. Time to go.

“How the fuck did a local TV station plane get that close without permission?” Garren demanded.

I think a man can be allowed an f-bomb under the circumstances, Heather thought.

The radar balloon shot down in Yuma had pulled a whole flock of Air Force and ANG fighters too far west, and they were now out of the chase. Nonetheless, now we’ve got him . A Global Hawk had picked up the 787 as it flew northward, hopping over ridges in the empty desert east of San Diego and just north of the border—an area slashed by ridges and draws with no more apparent pattern than the folds in a crumpled sheet of newspaper, striped and blobbed in green and brown brush. Smart choice of approach, she thought, but we got you anyway. In the last few minutes they’d been able to pull Fullbacks, the A-10 Warthogs, off point defenses south of LA and send them on interception courses.