Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

A disaster all around, and spinning words like a politician wouldn’t make the facts any different. Our job was to stop the catastrophe. Their job was to cloak how it was done, using their words to protect us. We each had our missions, and while theirs disgusted me, I understood the necessity of both.

After some pleasantries, I told Kurt the entire team was in the room, just to let him know who was listening. They were mostly off camera, and I didn’t want him to say something that was only meant for me.

He said, “I’m assuming since you’re all sitting here the meeting for the device is over. So, give me some good news. I have a council update in an hour.”

I told him what we had with the computer, then how we couldn’t affect the countdown.

He said, “And it’s going off in twelve hours?”

“Was. It was going off in twelve hours. It’s down to about seven now.”

“Seven. Great. Just perfect. That’s about the same time as Operation Gimlet.”

“Have them strike early. What’s the big deal with that?”

“We can’t penetrate the Syrian air defenses with a strike from a carrier group. It’s not like Afghanistan. We don’t own air superiority. Syria is one tough nut to crack, especially for a surgical attack. The strike package is a flight of B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. We need the stealth capability, but the trade-off is reaction time. The B-2s are the only ones that can accomplish the mission, and they’re already in the air. It’s a fifteen-hour flight, and they’re halfway to the target.”

Shit.

He continued. “Where’s the American? It’s his computer. Make him crack the code.”

“Sir, he escaped.”

I told him about the Ghost hitting the panic button, triggering early, and the meeting devolving into a nest of rabbits scattering at the sight of a hawk.

He heard the story, then asked the next obvious question. “And the Ghost? Where is he?”

I took a deep breath, then told that story as well. I saw him put his head into his hands on the screen. I said, “Sir, it had to be done. He was—”

He looked up and interrupted. “Was what? About to escape? What the hell is going on down there? Where’s Jennifer? How could she let him get away?”

From the side, away from the team and all by herself, Jennifer said, “I’m here, Kurt. I did what I thought was right. I made a bad call.”

She looked like she wanted to crawl into a hole. Completely ashamed to be in the room. It aggravated the hell out of me, but I knew if I said something, it would have no weight. Kurt understood we were close, even if he didn’t understand how close.

It turned out I didn’t have to say a word.

Kurt said, “Jennifer, I understand you’re a civilian and haven’t been in the military, but the repercussions of this are going to—”

That’s as far as he got. Blood stood up and moved into view of the camera, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sir, with all due respect, she made the right call. I’d have done the same thing.”

Kurt said, “But you don’t understand what the council is going to say. You don’t understand how this is going to affect our operations. We’ll be pulled—”

He was cut off by Decoy, who rose and crowded the camera as well. “Bullshit. You don’t get to pick what’s right based on what some council will think. It either is or it isn’t. And Jennifer’s call was right.”

Kurt leaned back in his chair, rocking and thinking. An operator now working solely in the shark tank of politics, trying to remember what he used to know. What it was like on the ground. He turned back to the camera and said, “Yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. Maybe I’ve been in DC too long. The call was right. I’m with you, but that doesn’t solve my problem. Pike, you there?”

I pushed through. “Yes, sir.”

“You know I’m going to have to pull her. I don’t want to, but I need a head. With the report I’m about to give, I need something to show we’re not all fuckups. She’s going to get flushed. Before you say anything, we’ve got too much at stake. I have to get Oversight Council approval to continue, and I can’t get that without their thinking we’re tracking and correcting. They’ll need something tangible with this disaster of a report. Jennifer’s it.”

I could see he didn’t believe in the decision. He’d been one of her biggest cheerleaders, against a he-man, woman-hating world within the Taskforce. He had wanted her to succeed. But, like me, he also understood the political dimensions of the fight. Jennifer was going to be sacrificed to allow Kurt to continue. To allow me to continue.

The irony was debilitating. My team, who had initially hated the thought of a woman in their world, now believed in her as much as they did any man in the Taskforce, and the commander who had fought to allow my experiment to continue, who had believed in her from the beginning, was going to fire her.

Knuckles stood up, squeezing into the group, now making us look like we were in some sort of carnival picture booth, with everyone trying to get in the frame. The one guy who was always calm, his face now radiated real anger.

He said, “Tell that pack of pussies if they want to question our decisions they need to kit up and come downrange. I’m with the team. Jennifer’s call was good. Not only that, but it was pretty fucking heroic. Any other organization would be giving her a medal, and those jerks want to cut her free?”

I glanced at Jennifer and saw her sitting against the wall slack jawed. Amazed at the support.

Kurt snarled, “I got it, Knuckles. I don’t like it either. That’s the world we live in. You want to find the assholes who are about to destroy our ability to wage war, not to mention our economy, or do you want to get called home? The Oversight Council doesn’t understand the world you live in. Some do, but most don’t. What they do understand is penalty, and I’m giving them Jennifer. It’s the price for playing, damn it. You know that better than most. End of story. Let’s move on to solving the damn problem. Pike?”

Nobody said anything. The team looked at me, waiting for me to tell Kurt to shove it up his ass. I really, really wanted to, but he was right. I’d dealt with the Oversight Council and had glimpsed into their world. Not lived within it, but had seen enough to realize what he said was true. I knew how they acted and what buttons Kurt could push to allow us to operate. To succeed. In truth, I respected him for putting up with the BS he did to get the job done.

In the end, I could fight Jennifer’s battle later. Right now, we had a much more serious concern. “Sir, this computer’s locked, so our first course of action is to get it open to shut off the GPS device.”

“Get it up here. Let’s get the hacking cell on it. See if we can crack that thing before it’s triggered.”

“I’m not sure you can do that in time. We’ve got seven hours, and this guy was a computer geek. The laptop’s probably got more booby traps than Indiana Jones. We need to find the American. He can open it. Haven’t you guys been able to do anything to neck it down? Who is he?”

“We’ve got nothing. The guy’s got to be someone on the inside, or he wouldn’t be able to access the GPS constellation, but we’ve looked at everyone in the Air Force, starting with the Second SOPS and moving all the way out to the Fiftieth Space Wing headquarters. Shit, we even looked at the guys manning the gates. Schriever is clean.”

I said, “We’re missing something. That guy is there. We’re overlooking the footprints. Maybe he isn’t in a uniform. Maybe he’s a contract janitor or something like that.”

“None of those guys would have clearance. They’d have no access. There’s only one civilian contractor allowed on the floor, and he checked out.”