A Time for Patriots pm-17 Page 16

  “Will do.” She looked at the president, studying him carefully, then said, “I admire you for sticking to this severe austerity plan, Mr. President. But to be totally honest with you, sir, it looks like the pressure is grinding on you. Are you sleeping at all?”

  “A few hours a night is all I’ve ever needed, ever since my years in the Corps,” Phoenix said.

  “Try not to let the pressure get to you, sir,” Ann said. “The programs you put in place are working. Unemployment is still high, but it’s going down. There’s talk that Moody’s will restore the U.S.’s triple-A credit rating soon, and the balance-of-trade numbers look very good.”

  “That’s because the dollar is as low as it’s ever been in history, commodities are dirt cheap, and no one is buying anything from China and Russia as long as they’re continuing their military buildup,” the president said. He waved a hand at his vice president. “I know our plan will work, Ann, and I know the folks expect results unreasonably fast. But I see all the suffering out there, and I think if I just loosen the purse strings a little more, I can alleviate some of it. Reduce the cuts we made in Medicare and Social Security by a few percentage points; raise the income level of Medicaid applicants by a little bit; give the states a few more dollars to hire a few more cops and teachers—”

  “And we both know what will happen then, sir: they’ll scream for more, we’ll be forced to borrow and print more money, and the downward spiral will happen all over again,” Ann said. “We’re moving in the right direction, sir. There’s hardship now, but your plans will help everyone in the long run. We need to stay the course.”

  “Even if we create more of these Knights of the True Republic extremist groups?”

  “I would say that the recession helped to create the conditions for these extremists to grow, yes, sir,” Ann said, “but they already existed and will always exist, whether we’re in prosperity or recession. We need to show the American people that we’re not going to tolerate extremism in any form, for whatever reason. I’ll get busy right now, draft the legislative proposal for the Army, Air Force, and Sky Masters law enforcement assistance package in the next day or two, we’ll go over it, and I’ll take it to the congressional leadership right away. So soon after the attack in Reno, I don’t think we’ll get very much opposition, even from Gardner and his sycophants.”

  “Joseph Gardner,” Phoenix said with an exasperated sigh. “Whatever happened to the rule that former presidents aren’t allowed to criticize the current president?”

  “That went out with compact discs and free television, Mr. President,” Ann said with a wry smile. She turned serious; the smile disappeared, and she then said, “What we’re going to propose is a major counterterrorist offensive against fellow American citizens, sir. We’re talking about sending American-manned robots and unmanned aircraft against our own.”

  “I know that, Ann—”

  “I just want to be clear, sir,” Ann Page interjected. “We have to stay tough and united on this. It’s not going to be popular, not in the least . We’re laying ourselves open to a lot of criticism — some of it legitimate — that we’re creating a state in which the military is used to control and monitor the public. That’s not going to sit well with a lot of folks. But in order to guard against more Renos happening, I believe it has to be done.” She paused, looking carefully into Phoenix’s eyes, then added, “If you don’t believe that is true, Mr. President, you should say so now, and tell me to knock it off. We’ll quash this, and think of something else to do.”

  “Frankly, Ann,” Phoenix said, after several long moments of thought, “I’m not comfortable with this.”

  Ann Page’s shoulders slumped disappointedly, but moments later she straightened them and said, “Fine, sir. So let’s—”

  “No, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this,” Phoenix said. “I don’t like it, but I want to shut down the violent extremist groups, and do it now . I’m going to hunt those bastards down with all the tools at my disposal — even the military. Draft that legislative proposal and let’s get on it right away… before those other stolen radioactive casks end up inside another federal building.”

  The Arizona Border, Thirty Miles Southeast of Yuma, Arizona

  Days later

  “Freeze!” the U.S. Border Patrol agent shouted in Spanish through his van’s public-address loudspeakers. His partner shined a powerful searchlight into the faces of the migrants in front of them, instantly blinding them. “This is the United States Border Patrol. Drop all your belongings and raise your hands!”

  The group of about twenty illegal immigrants — they were about eight miles north of the border here in the Yuma Desert, with the closest legal border crossing twenty-five miles away in San Luis — did as they were told slowly and carefully, without a sense of fear or anger. No one panicked or ran — obviously a group experienced in getting caught, the officer thought.

  The economy might be in the tank, the U.S. Border Patrol agent thought, and a lot fewer Mexicans were illegally crossing the border because there were no jobs in the United States. But they were still coming, and although the Border Patrol’s budget had been cut and a lot of the technology they relied on was in disrepair or simply not deployed, they were still catching them. The Mexicans were all carrying several one-gallon jugs of water looped around their necks with rope, plus backpacks, trash bags, or whatever else they could find to carry their belongings. They ranged in age from the teens to sixties, both men and women, and most looked in fairly good health, which was necessary when making this dangerous border crossing in such hostile conditions, especially in summer.

  “Yuma, Unit Eighteen, intercepted a group of twenty,” the officer radioed. “Requesting additional transportation.”

  “Looks like we might finally be getting some decent intel again,” the second officer said. “They were exactly where we were briefed.”

  “Yeah, and remember, they briefed us that we might run into more OTMs,” the first officer said. “Let’s see if this was the group they talked about.” They had been seeing a lot more OTMs — Other Than Mexicans — on these intercepts lately — some were from as far away as China and Africa.

  With the van’s headlights and spotlight still shining in their faces, the agents had the migrants move away from their belongings except for one bottle of water each, then sit apart from one another. All complied silently. Since it was too dangerous for just two agents to try to handcuff and search twenty migrants, it was better if they just waited for their backup to arrive, so they took their shotguns and stood, walking up and down the line, keeping watch.

  The first officer stopped in front of one migrant. Most of them made occasional eye contact with the officers, but this one seemed to purposely look away all the time. Something about him didn’t seem right. He was in his midthirties, with several days’ beard growth, but somehow he looked out of place. Many migrants wore knit caps even in summertime — at night temperatures in the desert could drop sixty degrees from daytime highs — and many wore layers of clothing so they wouldn’t have to carry them. But this one looked… different, like a guy trying to make himself look like a migrant.

  “Jim, I’m going to have a chat with this one,” the first officer said.

  “What’s up?”

  “A feeling. Maybe an OTM.” He motioned to the man and said in Spanish, “Stand up, sir.” The man looked up and pointed at his chest, then did as he was told when he saw the officer nod his head. “Turn around, hands behind your back.”

  “Wait for backup, Pete.”

  “Just this one.” He was the more experienced officer, so the other agent demurred, but rattled the ammo bandolier on his shotgun to remind the others that he was covering them.

  The officer named Pete pulled out a set of plastic handcuffs and locked the migrant’s wrists together in a control hold. “Just relax, sir,” he said in Spanish. “What’s your—”

  All he saw was a blur of motion, and suddenly he felt a hand dr
ive into his face just below his nose. He tried to yell, but it came out a bloody gurgle. He then felt a knife-edge hand slam into his throat, then nothing.

  “Freeze!” the second officer shouted, and he whirled and leveled the shotgun at the migrant from his hip. But with amazing speed three other migrants shot to their feet, pulled the shotgun skyward, and knocked the officer to the ground. They quickly armed themselves with the officers’ sidearms and backup weapons…

  … then, at a nod from the first migrant, began shooting the officers and the migrants on the ground, one shot each to the head.

  “Twenty more miles to the pickup point,” the leader of the hit squad said in Russian. “I don’t know how far away the other Border Patrol vehicle is, but if they’re coming from Yuma, we should be good. At the pickup point we split up, then rendezvous as briefed. Let’s go.” The four assassins picked up their packs and piled into the Border Patrol vehicle. Before driving off, one of them activated a small device that would scramble the GPS tracking signal from the van.

  Joint Air Base Battle Mountain

  Days later

  It was truly an amazing thing to watch, Patrick thought: a five-hundred-thousand-pound aircraft that seemed to float through the air as gracefully as a blimp. The C-57 Skytrain II — named after the military version of the Douglas DC-3 from World War II fame — was a flying-wing transport plane, resembling the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber but with a thicker bulbous midsection and its three turbofan engines mounted on pylons atop the rear of the fuselage. Originally designed to be a stealthy cruise-missile launch aircraft and aerial refueling tanker, today it could be adapted to various missions by uploading different mission modules in its two large internal cargo bays.

  The Skytrain floated across the numbers on Battle Mountain’s shortest runway, stopped within two thousand feet, and turned off at the first taxiway. Thanks to its advanced engines and mission-adaptive wing technology, with which tiny computer-controlled micro-actuators could make almost the entire fuselage and wing skin a lift or drag device, the huge aircraft could fly close to the speed of sound at gross weight, as well as half as slow as any other aircraft of its size. The massive plane taxied directly into an empty hangar, and the doors closed behind it as soon as the engines shut down. Patrick parked at his assigned spot on the ramp beside the hangar and waited inside at the Skytrain’s belly entry hatch.

  “Patrick! Hey, long time no see!” Jonathan Masters exclaimed as he climbed down the entry ladder and emerged from the plane. Jon Masters was chief engineer of Sky Masters, Inc., a high-tech military-systems design firm that invented much of the technology used in the C-57. Just a few years younger than Patrick, Jon Masters still looked like a punkish twenty-year-old whiz kid — tall, skinny, with unkempt hair and gangly features. He shook hands with Patrick with the same limp “cold fish” handshake that always made Patrick smile — it was as if Jon purposely used that weak handshake just to make the other person uneasy, even a longtime associate. “How have you been, my friend?”

  “Not bad, not bad,” Patrick said. “How’s the biz?”

  “Believe it or not, hanging in there,” Jon said. “Bunch of canceled contracts, like everyone else, but we’re in negotiations on a few that might keep the company afloat.” He patted the C-57 on its smooth, seamless composite carbon-fiber side. “They gave us funds to finish building the two ‘Losers’ we had half assembled on the floor, and they might give us money to build a few more if we can demonstrate full mission capability of a few more mission modules.”

  “Then it’s not a ‘Loser’ anymore, is it?” Patrick said. Jon had called the C-57 the Loser because it had lost the Air Force’s Next Generation Bomber competition, which was eventually canceled anyway. “It survived because it’s a good multimission design.”

  “We could still use you down in Vegas, my friend,” Jon said. “You’d be flying, not sitting around on your ass in this dust bowl. This place is closing down in less than a year. The Air Force is actually talking about building bombers again, and I know you’re more than a little interested in those things. And I might even give you something you’ve probably had very little of in the past few years: something called money .”

  Before Patrick could respond, another person exited the C-57, and Patrick turned to greet him. “Welcome to Battle Mountain, Colonel,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jason Richter responded, shaking Patrick’s hand with a surprised look on his face. Richter was a full head taller and twenty years younger than Patrick, trim and athletic, with dark good looks and an air of supreme confidence… and an attitude to match. “I wasn’t told you would be part of this project.”

  “I’m not part of your project,” Patrick said, “but I’m granted access to the flight line when certain special air-mission aircraft come in, and the arrival of one of Jon’s monstrosities qualifies. Besides, the doc here and I go way back.”

  “Patrick!” a female voice shouted happily. A young, lithe, strawberry-blond woman sprang out of the Skytrain’s belly and fairly leaped into Patrick’s arms. “Oh my God, the pack is back! How lovely to see you again!”

  “Same here, Charlie,” Patrick said. Charlie Turlock — her real first name, not a nickname — was Jason Richter’s longtime assistant design engineer in the Army’s Infantry Transformational Battlelab, designing high-tech infantry-soldier enhancements, mostly in the field of robotics. Charlie had left the Army to work with Jon Masters, but Jason had elected to stay in the Army. “Have a nice flight?”

  “Very nice flight — until I wandered up to the cockpit and found no one flying the plane !” Charlie exclaimed. “A plane that size, with nobody flying it ? That’s insane! I need a little drinky-poo after that.”

  “That’s the wave of the future, Charlie,” Patrick said. “Transport, reconnaissance, surveillance, air-defense suppression, resupply, long-range strategic strike — all unmanned. Half the planes that fly in and out of here these days are unmanned, and the military graduates more unmanned-aircraft pilots than manned-aircraft pilots these days. They can’t keep up with the demand for pilots and sensor operators, especially with all the military budget cutbacks. Jon has led the way in designing unmanned systems for years, but the pace is definitely accelerating. Any new ideas you come up with, get them into the system as fast as you can. If you don’t do it, someone else will.”

  “Hey, we don’t need research or new-product counseling from some old retired guy,” Jon Masters quipped. “For some reason the great Patrick McLanahan has decided to check out of the real world and banish himself and his infinitely smarter son to the armpit of the world — which, I believe, used to be Battle Mountain’s unofficial designation, no?”

  “Don’t be bad-mouthing my town, Jon,” Patrick said.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” another voice said, and Wayne “Whack” Macomber emerged from the Skytrain. “The famous disappearing general.” A former college football star and Air Force special-operations commando, Whack towered over the others. His face still bore the scars of being held captive and brutally interrogated by the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU, the Russian military-intelligence bureau, the year before, and he walked with a bit of a limp.

  They shook hands. “How are you feeling, Whack?” Patrick asked.

  “Better,” Whack said. “Thanks for all the visits.” Whack had spent several months in a hospital recovering from his injuries, and Patrick had seen to it that he visited him at least once a week; his former private security firm paid for his hospital bills and rehabilitation. “Thought I’d tag along with Charlie and Richter on this deal — hangin’ around the house and doin’ nuthin’ but rehab was driving me batty.”

  “You bring one of the Tin Man units?”

  “Of course,” Whack said. “Masters still wants to sell a bunch of them to the government, so I’ll demo it if they want. Actually, I kinda like wearin’ the long undies these days — the exoskeleton is like a whole-body brace
.”

  “Glad to see you up and around,” Patrick said. He turned to Jason and Charlie. “You guys are all set in this hangar — everything you asked for is right here. If you need help with housing, just ask, but the trailers are the best we have right now. The base is shrinking every day. We once had over six thousand here — now we’re down to less than a thousand. But we’re still—”

  “I think I can take it from here now, General,” a voice said behind Patrick. He turned and found FBI special agents Chastain, Renaldo, and the other federal agents walking up behind him. “Thank you for parking the plane.”

  “That’s my job,” Patrick said. To Jon and the others he said, “I’m just a phone call away if you need me, and if you’d like to explore the town later—”

  “I think we may be very busy for the next few nights, General,” Chastain interjected. “Thanks for the offer.” His body language and tone definitely suggested that it was time for Patrick to depart, so he did. After he left, Chastain said to Masters and Richter, “He’s not to be hanging out around here except in his official capacity.”

  “He’s a good friend, Agent Chastain, but I know how to protect classified programs,” Jon said. “I assure you, if the general wanted to be attached to this project, he could do it with one phone call.”

  “I highly doubt that — at least, not with me in charge.”

  “Same for me,” Richter muttered acidly.

  “He would probably be the one in charge… if not your boss’s boss,” Jon said, giving Richter an exasperated expression. This was his first time working with the gifted Army engineer, who was all of his reputation and more: as irritating as he was brilliant. “How many times have you piloted a CID? Patrick’s been in combat inside one several times.”

  “Let’s take a look at one of your robots, Colonel,” Chastain said, ignoring Jon’s remarks. Jon went up inside the C-57, and a moment later the left cargo bay opened and a container was lowered outside. At the same time the landing-gear struts extended, allowing the container to be pulled directly out from underneath the plane.