Darpa Alpha

you do now?”

He knew what Marte was up to. She was trying to get a good fight going between the guy who blew it and the administration, a quick, feisty sound bite that would rile the White House in an election year.

“I have no comment, Marte.”

“Okay, but off the record. Do you think we’re in trouble with this one?

“CNN?”

“No, us — you, me, America.”

Shit. Obviously she didn’t know about the pieces of melted black plastic in the Ziploc bag, the melted plastic that had been the DARPA ALPHA disk.

He was too slow to reply. With the intuition of a topnotch reporter, she sensed something was wrong, something was being held back.

“C’mon, Douglas. You know I’ve never violated a confidence. Tell me, is this big?”

“No comment.”

Replacing the receiver, Douglas met Margaret’s jealous stare full-on. “You can come with me if you like, but I’ve got to give her a more honest answer than that, Margaret.”

“Why didn’t you tell her—”

“Not here,” he cut in. “Not with the possibility of NSA and Homeland Security ears listening in. All the other stuff, the CNO, Aussie — that’s all right. NSA probably already knows all that, but they don’t know what I think.”

Margaret saw that his intensity wouldn’t brook her jealousy of the tart, not now. “I’ll get my coat. The fog’s bound to be chilly.”

And it was in the fog on the way to the 7-Eleven that she asked him just how bad he thought the situation was.

“For me? I’m in the doghouse.” Dog — he thought of Prince. You could see the wonderful devotion in a dog’s eyes. He liked cats too, but dogs better. They needed you.

“No,” Margaret said. “I know how bad it is for you. You look tortured tonight. I mean, tell me honestly, just how bad is it for the country?”

“It’s bad, Sweetheart.” He slipped his arm about her warmth, her perfume reminding him of the Hawaiian islands, the corny love songs he’d heard coming from around Fort DeRussy’s outside bar next to the Hilton, the pink flamingoes. “Hypersonic is unbelievably fast,” he told her. “A hypersonic torpedo, nuclear warhead, could be fired at a U.S. port from a trawler hundreds of miles offshore. We’d have no chance of an intercept.”

Margaret felt a shiver and leaned closer to him and very quietly asked him, “Who do you think sent those killers to steal it from us?”

“I don’t know. It could be any of half a dozen countries, from Iran to China.”

“Good Lord,” she said, her voice a whisper in the fog, the sound of the sea muffled behind its curtain. “Could we do anything if we knew?”

“Hell, yes. We’ve got carrier groups all over the globe. We could launch a—” He stopped, two figures emerging out of the thick fog no more than ten feet in front of them. They turned out to be young lovers, the man nodding at them. “Good evening.”

“Evening,” Freeman replied, and a few seconds later, said, “It’s killing me, Margaret.”

“I know,” she said. Every muscle in his body was tense. “What are you going to tell—”

“Marte? The truth. That if they, whoever they are, have time to tool up, we’ll be sitting ducks. So that if we do find out who they are, we’ll have to move fast. There’s nothing like getting the press behind you. Cuts a lot of red tape, really gets things moving.”

“Let’s pray,” she said.

“I already have.”

His conversation with Marte was devoid of warm-up, in part because he was tired and needed rest; in part because, as a matter of courtesy to Margaret, he didn’t want it to be a long, sit-down, old-times kind of conversation.

“What,” Marte asked, “might happen if we don’t contest this?”

“Catastrophe for world stability.”

“By which you mean all of us in the West? You don’t have to be politically correct with me, Douglas.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk. Most reporters are afraid to just come out and say that for all our faults, the West is still the best, and you and I know that as well as the Muslim terrorists. The runaway train coming at us is China.”

“You think Beijing’s behind these murders?”

“No, but anyone who hasn’t had their head in the toilet for the last ten years knows that there’s going to be an East-West war. When China’s insatiable appetite for oil, coal, bauxite, and so on can’t be satisfied by legitimate means, then push is shove, and the arms dealer is a kingmaker.”

“So the United States has to go wherever this leads us and get the technology back.”

“Right. Or if they have the machinery set up, ready to turn out prototype rounds, we’ll have to go in and destroy it.”

“Like Iran and the enriched uranium.”

“Yes, and here’s where I get blunt, Marte.”

“Gee, that’ll be a change.” He heard her laugh. “Shoot,” she said.

“We need the media to say what I’ve said, to stress the importance of us being willing to go where we have to to get it back.” He paused to look out at Margaret and give her a wave. She smiled, blew him a kiss — as if they were newlyweds. Marriage was the one good thing when your job has just run off the road.

“That’s a tough one, Douglas,” he heard Marte say. “I mean, the administration doesn’t want to look like it’s incompetent — dropped the — what is it, Flow-In-Flight?”

“Yes.”

“On the other hand,” said Marte, “the White House has to sell the truth, which I assume you’re telling me, to the public in order to win support for any unilateral kick-ass we might have to do, if we know where it is.”

“Exactly,” said the general. “Big problem, though, is — was — Iraq in ’05. No WMDs found, so why should anyone believe the government’s perceived need to go in — wherever — to stop them using what we shouldn’t have lost in the first place. Checkmate, right?”

“The bodies, Douglas.”

“Say again?”

“The Americans who were murdered. WMDs are concepts, apparitions. But here we have the pictures of the murdered scientists, and the old guy up by that lake, the name of which none of us can pronounce.”

Douglas pronounced it phonetically, as if it had been written in English. “Lake Pond-Oh-Ray. The worst,” he continued, “the absolute worst, were the children.”

“Children?”

“At the campsite.” Somehow she hadn’t heard all the details. He told her the essentials, of the bloody, indiscriminate trail that the terrorists had left from DARPA ALPHA to Priest Lake.

“That’s good; that’s better than any WMDs. Children — people hate that. They’ll want to go after the bastards, and never mind the ‘no extradition treaty’ bullshit. America will go anywhere after scum who murder children.” He could hear the soft tap of keys on a laptop.

“Any other details?” she asked. He hesitated. “One of the children was unrecognizable.” He told her about the wolves. He said he had to go, and told her it’d be nice if CNN could help the family survivors, if there were any.

When he came out of the booth, the ocean flooded his senses and he took a deep draft of sea air, something he’d always loved since the moment he’d first sniffed the sea a thousand years ago when his dad had taken him on camping trips. No campers then — just a small pup tent, a Coleman stove, condensed milk, two fishing rods, and the world was simple.

Margaret hadn’t said anything yet about the conversation with Marte Price, but felt she should say something to show it didn’t bother her, for it did bother her. “Say what you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”