Edward Lee - Operator B

“You like it?”

“Well, yes, but—”

Farrington stuffed the cork back in it, put it in a bag. “Take it. Show off to your friends.”

“Well…thanks.” She was dumbfounded—by the entire night. Farrington guessed the barrack chiefs had already paid her a thousand dollars for this. It was only money.

“But I’m sorry, you know,” he said, “about the rest. Thanks for stopping by.”

The woman looked confused through tousles of wet chestnut hair. “They paid me to stay till morning.”

“Well then tonight’s your lucky night. You’re off early.”

She blinked, incomprehension in the slits of her eyes. “Is there something—”

“Nothing wrong with you at all,” he said. “I guess I’m having my period tonight.”

She spared a laugh.

“The CQ will have a driver take you home,” Farrington said.

She shrugged. “It’s your dime.”

Not really, it’s the taxpayers’. “I’m glad you like the wine. But let me ask you something.” Farrington’s jaw set. He looked at her, then held up his strangely mittened hands. “Aren’t you going to ask about…this?”

“They told me not to ask anything.”

“Of course.” What was he thinking? “Good night…and take care of yourself.”

He showed her out, locked the ornate double doors behind her. That’s right, honey. Tonight’s your lucky night…and tomorrow’s my lucky day.

He was staring into the mirror over a Hepplewhite dresser. An image flashed, and he saw himself a decade younger: firing up the grill on the patio of his Oxen Hill home. His smiling wife bringing out a bowl of potato salad to the picnic table. His perfect little daughter playing in the sandbox.

Then the image dissolved into the chisel-faced secret staring back at him.

The strange black mittens touched the dresser’s brass knobs. He slid open the drawer, releasing a cedary scent of old wood. The framed picture of his wife remained face-down, as it always would. He couldn’t look at it, but he couldn’t throw it away either. Beside it, though, face up, lay a photograph from the ‘70s: Farrington, a major, standing in his Marine Corp flight suit on the ladder ramp of his Harrier V8B. He was surprised they’d let him keep it; any photograph of him was classified now.

His face was classified. All files of his existence had been officially deleted.

I’m deleted, he thought.

“Esprit d’corp,” he whispered to himself. “Ain’t duty grand?”

He stared at the drawer’s remaining contents—trinkets. A Purple Heart, three Silver Stars, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Congressional Medal of Honor that Jimmy Carter had draped around his neck.

Only one more thing remained in the drawer…

««—»»

The compound loomed behind her, a quiet fortress in plumes of sodium light. She kept the bottle of wine tucked under her arm, her high heels ticking across cement as she approached the lit gatehouse.

Her name was Tina, not that names mattered. She’d joined the Army in 1993 at age eighteen, hoping to escape a drunk mother and abusive father. When she’d passed the polygraphs— Have you ever taken drugs? Do you gamble? Have you ever committed an act of theft? —INSCOM had plucked her out of Basic and launched her career as a restricted sexual surrogate. A whore by any other name. She didn’t care. She liked sex, and the money was good.

“Hello,” she said. She held up the bottle of wine. “He said I could have this.”

The young Air Force driver nodded at the gate. “One moment, please, ma’am,” and he took the bottle into the gatehouse where an SP in a white helmet inspected it. A drab-blue government van sat just past the gatehouse, a door open. The van had no windows in the back, a protocol Tina was used to. She wasn’t allowed to know where she was.

“Ma’am?”

Warm air swept past Tina’s face. Her gaze drifted back to the strange compound. “This is one off-the-wall place,” she commented. Then she remembered her “client’s” hands. Once she serviced a Russian demolition expert who’d defected with blueprints for a SAGGER IV firing-trigger. His hands had been all but blown away. She wondered how he jerked off.

Tina knew she’d receive no answer but she asked the driver anyway, “What’s wrong with that guy? He get burned or something?”

The driver stonily returned her bottle of wine. “Ma’am, I’m not authorized to disclose any information about your client, even if I was apprised of any such information, which I am not.”

Tina almost laughed. These guys were all stock-in-trade, military automatons. I’ll bet he fucks like he’s doing push-ups for a PT test…

But a final thought slipped back to the nameless man whose suite she’d just left, the easiest trick of her life.

“He seems so sad,” she said. “He seems afraid of something, terrified but trying to cover it up.”

The driver did not respond. He showed her into the van and closed the door and moments later was driving away from this secret place back to the world of normal people.

««—»»

Yes, one more object remained in the dresser drawer. Not a medal, not a commendation or combat pin.

Just a gun. Just an old Colt .45.

General Farrington stared into the mirror for the rest of the night, peering more at his life than his reflection. He saw it all, all that he’d been and all that he’d become.

Was it worth it?

Then he raised his black-mittened hands. He drew open each zipper in grueling slowness.

Was duty really worth this?

Every night now for nearly a month he’d put the pistol to his head, determined to end it all. And every night, he lost his nerve.

How would he fare tonight?

Unzipped now, he let the leather mittens fall to the floor. He raised his hands to the mirror in front of his face. The hands—

The hands deformed into things that no longer even appeared human. The hands laced with hundreds of intricate surgical scars and shiny with healed scar tissue.

Each of Farrington’s hands possessed only two fingers and a thumb.

Monster hands.

He stared at them, and at his face beyond…

“Semper Fi,” he whispered to himself. “Ooo-rah.”

Then he picked up the gun.

—

CHAPTER 2

“Romeo One, this is Scratch One. Do you read?”

“Five by five, Scratch One. Go ahead.”

“Request permission to land by vectored thrust option.”

“Roger, Scratch One. Land your victor by vectored thrust on designated flight line and coordinates.”

The plane dipped out of the sky, plummeting. Six hundred knots dropped to zero in 15.4 seconds. The engines groaned—not a promising sound—as the plane hovered as if levitating, then began to lower elegantly to the aluminum-treated asphalt.

When Colonel Jack Wentz landed the YF-61 on Runway 4 of Andrew’s Tango-Delta site, he fully expected to die. It was a mind-set, it was necessary. The VDU and temp gauges read normal—nevertheless, he expected to die. In fact, of the thousands of times he’d landed planes during his career, he expected to die every time.

That way, he reasoned, if he did die, he wouldn’t be surprised.

The wheel springs grated when he set down, then Wentz commenced with the proper system shut-downs. The Lockheed YF-61, though highly experimental (its turbines ran on hydrogen rather than conventional JP-6) looked just like an F-5E. Hence, there was no need to fly it at a black site.

Colonel Wentz was sick to death of black test sites.

The turbines wound down; Wentz popped the plex canopy and waited for Tech Sergeant Cole to wheel up the ladder.

How do you like that? Wentz said to himself. I didn’t die today.