‘Did you ever see that old British movie
Caitlin vaguely remembered the film. It had been a favourite of her dad’s, an air force man himself, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen the Murdoch jacket as her cover. She grew up on USAF bases and the culture was as familiar to her as family. She also vaguely knew of Musso, even before reading his bio in the mission brief. The former Marine Corps lawyer had gained some notoriety as the senior officer at Guantanamo Bay back on Wave Day, which, with the disappearance of everyone north of where he stood, made him the senior man in all of Northern Command. He’d quickly struck up an alliance of convenience with a Cuban military officer, who was later ‘eaten’ by the Wave when he strayed too close, but not before the two of them had sent back some of the first close-up images and reports on conditions at the event horizon.
Musso had a second shot at fame a few weeks later, when he led the defence of Guantanamo, and of a few thousand refugees who’d fled there, against an opportunistic attack by the then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. His bio claimed the Corps ‘let him go’ during the great downsizing of the next few years, but Culver had taken her aside in Seattle to explain otherwise. Musso had been ass fucked after ‘losing’ Guantanamo. He owed his role here to Culver’s patronage.
The general, who towered over her and retained a fighter’s physique, tossed Caitlin’s bag in the back of his Humvee as if they were empty. She hopped into the passenger seat with a thud, its grey-green seat pad being almost nonexistent. Musso joined her up front and immediately flipped the starter switch over, waiting for the dashboard light to go out. Once it had, he pulled the switch, firing up the vehicle. With the drop of the parking brake, the man universally known as Tusk put the automatic into drive and rolled out.
‘Not too shabby for a ride that sat in the open for two years. Hope you don’t mind a detour,’ he said. ‘There’s checkpoints all though Killeen and Fort Hood. Looking for infiltrators.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘But mostly, I think, looking to piss me off. I get stopped and searched at every single one. I ask you - Colonel, do I
‘No, sir,’ she replied with a grin, feeling better about this part of the mission already. ‘No, you do not.’
‘So, we’ll skirt around Killeen if you don’t mind, swing south of the lake and head back to the expressway just before we hit Salado. It hasn’t been cleared yet. Nor has most of Temple, where I’m holed up, but it’ll do.’
The names brought up a flickering montage of imagery from Caitlin’s briefing set. Musso had just described the southern limits of her so-called area of operation.
The day remained cool and grey as they motored away from the airfield, but mild compared to the deep freeze of the Midwest that she had recently left behind. She was glad of the leather jacket, though. It prevented the chill of the cab from getting through to her. Hummers weren’t the most comfortable of chariots.
‘I’d run the heater, but it isn’t working,’ Musso said. ‘Probably never will work again. I can’t seem to get parts, even though Blackstone is sitting on a mountain of them.’
‘Should I take that as an indication of your working relationship with the Governor, sir?’ she asked. The fact that the general here was headquartered a fair way east at Temple, and not in Fort Hood itself, made the question redundant, but it was worth getting his take.
‘Governor Blackstone has an open-door policy,’ explained Musso, having to speak loudly because of the engine’s roar. ‘When he needs something from us, his door is wide open. When he’s got what he wants, the door is still open - but only so’s he can slam it on my ass as I leave.’
The former Marine seemed inexplicably amused by what had to be a fairly fraught situation. But then, given his record in Gitmo, Tusk Musso was probably entitled to regard his latest posting as a milk run.
‘What’s he going to want out of me? Or rather, out of Colonel Murdoch?’ asked Caitlin as they sped away down the well-maintained blacktop of Clear Creek Road.
Regimented lines of shake’n’bake housing slipped by on Musso’s left, while the terrain outside of her own zipper-shut plastic window was wilder, more unkempt. All scrubby thornbush, trees and what looked like waist-high grass, broken up here and there by patches of sand and dirt. If it weren’t for the difference in temperature, this part of east-central Texas could easily have been mistaken for some of the wasteland around Kansas City. The orderly presentation of dormitory suburbs spoke well of the effort that had gone into reclamation down here. There was certainly no way of telling that Killeen had lain empty for so long until midway through ‘05 when the newly elected Governor Blackstone turned his energies towards Reconstruction. But the bleak wastes on the right-hand side of the road emphasised what a small, insignificant impact the return of humankind had really made to this part of Texas.
‘What will he want? From you, Colonel Murdoch?’ said Musso. A purely rhetorical question. ‘He’ll want what he’s been after for months now; a reassurance the President won’t leave him with his nuts swinging in the breeze if and when Roberto decides to come against him with full power, instead of sniping at the margins. He’s worked himself into quite a fucking tizz over this. It’s why he’s agreed to see you, as Jed Culver’s advance man. Or woman, sorry.’
Caitlin smiled. ‘Well, as you know, I’m not really a military genius,’ she admitted. ‘But Kipper would hardly be likely to let that happen, would he? Letting Roberto roll in here, I mean.’
Musso gave the impression of studying her question seriously as they turned southbound onto SH-195, a four-lane state highway that cut through long stretches of countryside gone back to brute creation. The road itself was clear, yet cracks could be seen in the tarmac, through which native grass and other plant life conspired to undo what humanity had wrought. Tusk worked the wheel around a scattering of potholes large enough to swallow the front tyres.
‘One of my drivers got caught in one of those last week and cracked the front axle,’ he said of the obstacle. ‘I had the truck towed back for spare parts, since I’ll probably never get it fixed.’
‘No working heater in that one either?’
‘Nope,’ the general replied. ‘That was missing before we got our hands on it, along with the roof and the doors.’
She saw more evidence of the Disappearance now, as they moved away from Governor Blackstone’s administrative heartland. The blackened hulks of car wrecks that had been pushed off the blacktop and left to rust among the weeds just off from the hard shoulder, or shoved into the brush-clotted median. A tangled pile of metal she recognised as a downed plane, blocking a side road about a hundred yards in from the intersection. Dense stands of scrub and trees growing right down to the roadside in some places, obscuring all but the rooflines of a few isolated buildings left to rot and collapse. She could barely see a northbound Hemmt as the eight-wheeler sped by on the opposite side of the highway.
‘Now, as for the South American Federation,’ said Musso, getting back on topic, ‘I don’t know what the President will do. You were in New York, you saw how hard-pressed we were up there. Blackstone could’ve made it much easier for us if he’d just released a couple of TDF battalions into the fight. But he didn’t. Said he was already overcommitted - securing the Panama Canal, dealing with his own pirate issues down in the Caribbean, the bandits on the frontier, and the southern flank against the Federation. All the best legal advice says the federal-state accords back him up. He wasn’t obliged to release one grunt to the battle in New York. But it left a sour taste in the mouth when he didn’t, whether all those other things were true or not, don’t you think?’
Caitlin didn’t answer immediately. Fact was, if she hadn’t had a personal investment in what had occurred in New York City, she would never have gone there. It would’ve been hypocritical therefore for her to judge Blackstone for having stayed out of it.
Or would it? she wondered. Her choices were personal. His were political. And arguably he had a responsibility that went well beyond his individual inclinations. A quarter of the post-Wave population of the United States was clustered around Mad Jack’s holdings in the Texas Administrative Division. One could argue that he had a duty, first and foremost, to see that they were protected.
Caitlin was glad of this opportunity to be free of the need to maintain her cover. It spoke well of Musso, she thought, that he’d given up his Sunday afternoon to come out and collect her. He could have sent a driver, or just left her to make her own way. In Caitlin’s experience, a lot of ambassadors - and that’s what he was, in all but name - didn’t much care to have undeclared agents spooking about on their turf, yet he seemed not at all concerned. He drove south for about ten klicks before turning off at the 2484 junction, where the ruins of Red’s BBQ were returning to the dust. The land out here seemed used up, leached of any real fecundity, and overrun by noxious weeds and creepers. Caitlin doubted whether she could’ve penetrated more than a few feet into the growth
