Darpa Alpha

“I’m not certain as yet,” she replied, “but we think around a dozen. Not all the pix have come through from the FBI. It’s not like suicide bombers, Douglas. I mean, the sheriff who was first on the scene said nothing much seems disturbed, no butcher-shop massacre, not like the mess suicide bombers leave behind. First photos show one body slumped, sitting on the floor, back to a door. If you didn’t look closely and see the body, a man—” She needed a second to regain her composure. “Even the bullet holes aren’t messy, at least not in the pictures I saw. It’s so — so surreal, as if some of them’ve just gone to sleep on the floor, except for an older man slumped down by the door. He looks—” She couldn’t go on for several more moments.

“He—” began Eleanor, “—the older man, I mean, he — was no older than my dad. It was just so cruel, Douglas. They weren’t even soldiers, just civilians, scientists, doing their—”

Freeman spoke softly. “I know. These terrorist bastards. They’re not warriors. They’re vermin.” He paused, could hear her breathing. “Eleanor, for God’s sake, give me the green light.”

“Can you stay on hold for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” he answered, without a trace of annoyance. “I like jazz.”

While he waited, shifting the receiver from one hand to the other, the jazz static attacked again, this time murdering “Stranger on the Shore.” It was only now that Freeman saw the muscular youth, the one he’d seen before, silver stud in his tongue. He’d been waiting impatiently for the phone and was now moving menacingly toward the general. What bothered Freeman most was that he’d been so focused on talking with Eleanor that he’d missed seeing the youth. “I’m going to be awhile here,” Freeman told him cordially. “It’s an urgent call. You’d be better off to use the phone a couple of blocks from here.” What, wondered Freeman, was a kid, even a deadbeat, doing without a cellphone? Did he have anything to do with Pend Oreille or was he a wild card looking for trouble, courting it to fizz up his gray existence where the only certainty was uncertainty?

“Can’t use it,” said the kid sourly, his jaw jutting in the direction of the phone. “It’s busted.”

“Listen,” said Freeman as politely as time would allow, “I’m sorry, but this is an urgent call, so if you could give me a little space here—”

The youth, more sullen and unkempt up close than he’d appeared earlier in the day, came even closer. Freeman could smell him — sour body odor — and glimpsed soap dripping from a squeegee poking out from behind his waist. “Not much traffic around here,” the general commented, while wondering who in hell would use such a deadbeat as HUMINT? Then again…

Freeman took a pace toward the youth, who backed off. The phone was dangling.

“Sorry, Eleanor,” the general said, picking it up. “Had to get rid of a varmint.” But Eleanor wasn’t on the line, and he was still in no-man’s-land, on hold. He could see the youth returning with an older rube, the latter covered from head to hairy arms in alarming tattoos, his head clean shaven. He held a baseball bat in his right fist. There was more metal hanging from his neck, waist, and wrists than that hung on a Louisiana chain gang.

“You got a problem with muh boy?” the man bellowed.

“No problem,” said Freeman. “Just waiting on a long distance call. Federal business.”

“I don’t give a fuck what business it is,” growled the tattooed skinhead. “Now get away from that fucking phone. Let muh boy use it.”

The general knew that getting away from the phone was precisely what he should not do. The phone cubicle’s sides and top meant that the only way Mickey Mantle could get to him with the bat was head-on; either that or the rube would have to stoop low enough to try to get the general’s legs, which would put the rube at a momentary disadvantage.

“Get out of the fuckin’ booth! Now!” roared the bat-wielding tough. He made as if to get ready for a home run with the bat.

“You ever heard of DARPA?” asked the general.

“Drop that fuckin’ phone!!”

“DARPA makes good products,” the general said calmly, reaching up to his shirt pocket with his free hand, taking out what looked to the tough like a retractable pen, the general holding it toward the man’s gut, then clicking it as he would a ballpoint. The bang was so loud Freeman couldn’t hear anything for several seconds, his ears ringing, the man grunting, stumbling backward, an astonished look on his face as he fell flat on his butt, his legs jerking spasmodically on the sidewalk like a child’s in tantrum, the baseball bat spilling out noisily onto the road. The general unhurriedly retrieved the bat as the man, now flat on his back, groaning, brought his hands to his chest where the hard rubber bullet from the general’s nonlethal “pen” had struck him at point-blank range.

The general pointed the bat’s handle at the astonished son. “Now you take Daddy home to Mommy. He’s gonna need about three pounds of ice on his belly and a change of underpants. And call the police if you want. It’d be my pleasure. Now scram!”

As the tattooed man limped slowly off, touchingly assisted by his scruffy offspring, the general returned to the phone that had again been dangling free during the fracas.

“Douglas!” Eleanor was shouting in alarm. “Are you all right? Was that a shot I heard?”

“Car backfiring,” said Freeman. There was no point in worrying her. “So what does the Man say?”

“He says go. But there’s one thing. We’re going to have to release it to the media. That DARPA place is not too far from a little township; the story’s bound to get out and the president doesn’t want to be caught looking flat- footed. So we’re just going to say — if we’re asked — that the president has dispatched a Special Forces unit to track these terrorists down.” She paused. “When can you leave, Douglas?”

“Soon as you give me one of your High Tails.” It was the latest class of Honda Executive jet, small, fast, but big enough to carry the team, their combat backpacks, and Prince.

“Do we have any of those?” asked Eleanor. “In the armed services, I mean.”

“Four,” Freeman told her. “Two on the West Coast, two on the East.” It was obvious to Eleanor that he’d already thought it through. “Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and our multilingual expert, Johnny Lee, can get the Honda out of Andrews Air Force Base in D.C. The rest of us, on this side of the country — myself, Choir, Eddie “Shark” Mervyn, Gomez, and our new guy, Tony Ruth — he’s an ex-army Ranger — we can take one of the two Hondas DOD has on the West Coast, the eight of us rendezvousing at Fairchild Air Force Base.”

“The big base in Washington state,” she proffered.

“Affirmative,” answered Freeman. “Forty clicks west southwest of the Ear — I mean Pend Oreille.”

All that Eleanor had been told about the region was that it was beautiful and brutally rough terrain. “Be careful, Douglas. The Man will give you forty-eight hours. By then the guys at the Pentagon’ll be stirring their battalions and wanting to move in.”

“No sweat,” replied Freeman. “That’s all we need. This hunt was made for my team. Forty-eight hours? We’ll corner the bastards in half the time.”

“Good hunting then,” she said. “Remember, forty-eight hours, Douglas. That’s all the lead time we can give you. Any more will be politically as well as militarily untenable once the public starts pressuring whoever the congressperson is for northern Idaho. It could be the election issue of the year.”

“Rita Carlisle,” said Freeman.

“What?”

“The congresswoman for Idaho,” the general told Eleanor, “is Rita Carlisle. Fifty-two and a looker.”

“I’ll take your word for it but listen, we need to know one thing,” Eleanor said. “I’ve been so busy listening to you I almost forgot. We haven’t been briefed as to exactly what has been stolen, I mean what’s on the disk. All the Pentagon can tell us is that it’s Flow-in-Flight data and that the DARPA scientists at the Navy base were operating above Top Secret level, and Eyes Only. So when you get to the lake, you’d better check with the director of the DARPA installation — or what’s left of it. He’s on the daytime staff, and the White House’ll give him authority to discuss it in more detail with you. We can’t figure out what they’re going to do with the information they’ve stolen. After all, the terrorists don’t have a navy.”

Freeman was surprised by her remark. He put it down to fatigue, for wasn’t it obvious what the terrorists were going to do with it? Whatever it was DARPA had been testing at the naval base, the terrorists were sure to use it against the United States. “Damn terrorists didn’t need a navy to attack the USS Cole,” Freeman said. “Used a rigid inflatable packed with C4.”

“And Douglas?”

“Yes?”

“The Pentagon set up DARPA at Pend Oreille, but apparently not even the Joint Chiefs were told exactly what the scientists were working on. Right now, the Pentagon’s highly pissed with the civilian scientists for not