Eagle one, p.17
Eagle One, page 17
part #2 of Bugging Out Series
“They doused themselves in something and set themselves on fire,” Elaine explained. “That’s a new one.”
“Yeah,” Burke agreed, the slightest hint of nerve showing about him.
“Was that you shooting?” I asked.
“It was Jeff and Ross,” Burke said. “We came to reinforce you.”
Elaine looked to Grace, then to me.
“Baptism by fire,” she said.
If the pun wasn’t intended, it still made an impact.
“That was pointless,” Grace said.
“No it wasn’t,” Burke challenged her.
“They were probing,” I said, taking Burke’s side.
“And now they know how we’d react to a headlong charge,” he said.
Elaine backed away from the front of the OP and slid to a sit against the side wall.
“That means they’re planning something,” she said.
Burke surveyed the smoldering carnage strewn across the bridge and nodded.
“Something big,” he said.
Thirty Four
“Hello.”
The boy’s voice drizzled down through the speaker mounted on the ceiling just this side of the clear barrier, and the child himself stood very properly just beyond it, regarding me with subdued appreciation. He did not smile, but I had the distinct feeling that, were the barrier not there to separate us, his hand would be outstretched, offering the greeting to me.
“Hello again, Micah.”
A chair was already placed for me on the ‘unclean’ side of the barrier. The same messenger who’s summoned me to duty on the wall the night before had come again to my house, in the afternoon this time, waking me, this time with a request from Micah. The child wanted to see me.
“Please, sit,” the boy said, taking a chair from his computer workstation and rolling it close on the ‘clean’ side.
I took the seat left for me, and he sat to face me.
“You’ve done an amazing thing here,” I said.
Micah glanced behind to the array of electronics he’d acquired and linked together.
“This?” he gently scoffed. “The real magic you can’t even see. Satellite dishes to intercept communications, antennas hidden on hilltops. I even have an antenna thirty miles away working off a hardwired repeater so anyone tracking my transmissions won’t be able to pinpoint the source.”
I... My...
He used the singular, claiming status over what had been accomplished. To be certain, I’d commended him just a moment before, but whatever electronic wizardry he’d performed still required others to manifest in some tangible way. In the old world, one might brand him just short of precocious. Now, in this time, I wasn’t sure how to classify him beyond boy genius.
“So, I have a few questions,” he said, opening a notebook on his lap and clicking a pen open. “Krista said when we talked the other day that a pilot you shot down spoke another language.”
“Yes. French.”
“French?” He made a series of notations in his notebook. “Interesting.”
“Why is that?”
Micah finished writing and looked up, pausing in thought for a moment.
“Three days after the Red Signal, I started picking up communications over secure satellite channels. Ones that our military used. All those communications were in French. It was both verbal and encrypted written messages.”
“Encrypted,” I said.
“Yes, but I broke that long ago. Or didn’t my father tell you what I’ve been able to do?”
“No, he told me. Most of it. Everything except where the food to keep all this going is coming from.”
Micah considered me for a moment through the barrier, the gentle ripple of its structure distorting his youthful features as air moved against the material. He was eleven, looked younger, but spoke of things beyond those who were twice his age.
“You were on the wall last night,” he said. “Right?”
“I was.”
“There was some excitement, I understand.”
If watching a woman and dozens of others self-immolate before being shot could be termed ‘exciting’, I supposed he wasn’t wrong. When I didn’t confirm or comment on his observation, he continued.
“There’s been an increase of activity from the Horde. My expectation is that they will try something major soon.”
“Your head of security seems to think so,” I told him.
“They will fail. I’ve seen to our intelligence and defense activities. The town is ready.”
I marveled quietly at the boy. The child. His short life had been filled with distress, illness, operations, confinement. Yet he had placed himself at the center of an effort of survival beyond what I had expected when imagining what Eagle One might be. Whatever shortcomings he might exhibit in terms of personal humility, I had to look past.
“Why did you ask if I’d been on the wall when I asked about the source of your food?”
“New arrivals always have wall duty before they get to guard the cache.”
His answer opened the door for yet another question. But I didn’t get the chance to voice it.
“Don’t ask what or where that is,” the boy told me. “You’ll find out tonight.”
“I see.”
I didn’t, really, but if an answer to that nagging question was but hours away, I could wait.
“You’re sure that this pilot was speaking French?” Micah pressed me.
“Absolutely.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
The boy shook his head a bit and opened his notebook, flipping back through pages, heavy notations everywhere, precision scribbles. Numbered. Connected.
“I’m a little surprised they’ve made it this far north in any appreciable number,” he said.
“Are these French military?” I asked, and Micah giggled.
“Please. Do you think France invaded under the cover of the blight?”
“I don’t know what to think about it,” I told him. “I’m just curious. I’d like to make sense of why French speaking troops are on our soil trying to kill people. I’d like to know why my government abandoned me. I’d like to know what the plan is to make the world whole again.”
“Beaucoup de questions,” Micah said, his accent feigned and overly dramatic. “Une seule réponse.”
I shrugged, letting the child be the master he wanted to be. And that he was. For the moment.
“Many questions, one answer,” he said.
“That’s very philosophical.”
“Is it?” Micah asked, genuinely unsure. “I thought it quite accurate. It all comes back to the blight, you see.”
“It does?”
Micah smiled at me, as if regarding a child who’d just expressed confusion in the most precious of ways.
“Thousands of lockers filled with food and supplies are buried across the country,” he said. “French speaking paramilitary forces are used to restrict civilian movement. The earth is scrubbed clean of all but the heartiest survivors.”
He stopped there, for a moment, letting his statements of assumed fact settle.
“You believe that the blight was just some random appearance of a biological nightmare?”
It had always been at least plausible that some form of bioweapon had gotten out, by accident or design. But what was Micah saying here?
“Those supply lockers were buried six months before the blight even appeared in Poland,” the boy said.
I eased back in my chair, studying the boy, wondering just how much of the surety he’d expressed in everything he’d said was real. How much of it was quantifiable. Provable. Like his father had at one time, I was finding it difficult to accept not the gist of what he was saying, but him as bearer of the information.
“My father told you how I hacked into our communications systems, correct?”
“You were upset at the spying the NSA had been doing on American citizens,” I recounted.
“And so I took action. I hacked them. What did I have to lose? What were they going to do with a sick child—throw me in jail? I was untouchable.”
“I imagine they were preoccupied,” I said. “Too busy with more pressing matters to make much of your intrusion.”
“I thought the same,” Micah said, accepting and complimenting my premise.
“You knew how bad the blight was going to be before it exploded.”
Now the boy shook his head, correcting me. Keeping me from going too far down a still tenuous road.
“I knew that something was coming,” he said. “There were signs. Those food lockers. Officials communicating about a small unit of former French Foreign Legion troops at a reunion in Colorado when the blight was taking off. Do you know what nationality makes up a large portion of the foreign nationals serving in the Legion?”
I didn’t.
“Poles,” he said. “Where did the blight first appear?”
Near Warsaw. He knew I knew this, but was asking for effect. To make certain his prowess as finder and keeper of a terrible knowledge was apparent.
“Do you know what those same former Legionnaires did when they were on active duty during the Gulf War in nineteen ninety?”
“What?”
“They captured Al Salman Airport in Iraq,” Micah explained, as a teacher would to a clueless student. “The very place an Iraqi biological warfare scientist named Al Siduq was trying to flee the country through. He was never seen after reports of his presence there.”
Iraq. Bioweapons. French troops gone rogue. Connections to the most fertile region in Europe. What the hell kind of operation, or conspiracy, was this?
“This is sounding...”
“Like a plan gone awry? You’re right.”
“So our government got in bed with all of these elements to do this?”
The question seemed to disappoint the child.
“Our government?” he scoffed. “The only thing they knew was they couldn’t stop it. So they tried to prepare. They buried food and supplies to help essential personnel have a chance to reach safe zones. Probably bunkers originally designed for survival during the cold war. Totally inappropriate for this sort of thing.”
“You think they’re all dead,” I said.
“The plans of theirs I saw were laughable. They were counting on the military to protect a civilian leadership that was writing off ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the nation. How many true soldiers do you believe would lay down their lives for people like that?”
I’d witnessed what bureaucratic control of a military operation could lead to, near Arlee in my home state. That had spun out of control. All Micah was proposing was the same, on a larger scale.
“So who the hell is actually behind this?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” the boy countered. “Shouldn’t you be asking ‘why’ instead?”
“All right, why?”
He stared at me, and for the first time I sensed a crack in the veneer of certainty the boy wore as if it were armor.
“I don’t have it down as provable fact, but I am comfortable with my analysis,” he began.
“Which is?”
“Someone wanted to start over. From as close to scratch as you can get.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I simply took in the horrific totality of that possibility.
But I did begin to think something. To wonder something.
“You didn’t ask me here to talk about the French pilot,” I said, the realization rising. “You already knew that. You knew they were targeting us when you told us to get off the radio.”
Micah closed his notebook and stood, taking it to the computer and communication tables. He placed it there, pen atop it, then turned back toward me.
I stood, too, eyeing the boy through the barrier. Looking down at him.
“What was this all about?” I asked.
He replied with his own question.
“What did the French pilot say to you?”
The child is a liar...
Could I say that to Micah? To the child? Or, was the question actually, could I not?
“He said you were a liar.”
Micah grinned, unsurprised. He turned and walked toward the door to his bedroom.
“Thank you for your time,” he said. “You should find tonight fairly interesting.”
He passed through the doorway and closed the door behind, leaving me beyond the barrier. Alone and wondering what this had all been about.
Thirty Five
I was able to catch a few more hours of sleep after the odd exchange with Micah. All that he’d told me, and what he’d withheld, had been in the back of my thoughts all night. The possibility, or likelihood as presented by the boy, that the blight had been an orchestrated act of global cleansing was hard to fathom. And, I had to remind myself, futile to dwell on. If it was that, if the world had been turned grey and dead by a madman, or collection of them, the deed was done. If the plan had gone awry, with survivors hanging on despite attempts to contain populations by force, and strike out at them if they had somehow survived, then the architects of the apocalypse could very well be among the billions and billions of dead.
‘Does it matter?’
That was Micah’s response when asked who had done this. And he was right. Even the why, as postulated by him, mattered not at all. I was here. We were here. Neil, Grace, Krista. We breathed the air of an earth not scrubbed clean. We had defied whatever plan had been set in motion. Life went one. And that was what mattered.
“Either of you get seasick?”
Burke’s question as we rode in the back of a pickup, Mikey Winthrop at the wheel, caught both Neil and me off guard. We’d been picked up just a few minutes earlier, told to arm up, and were now cruising through Bandon as the afternoon crept toward evening, heading to pull our first duty guarding the main cache of food that supplied the town.
“No,” Neil said.
I shook my head similarly, adding the question to the data points feeding my wondering as to the location of the food storage. Sea sick? That would hint at a boat trip. Were there islands off the coast of Oregon here? The geography I’d retained since high school didn’t offer any immediate answer to that question.
The pickup moved through town and stopped at the town’s small harbor, a sheltered port where the Coquille River spilled into the Pacific. A small collection of boats was maintained there, remnants of a fishing fleet that no longer had a bounty to pull from the ocean. The blight had sent its destructive tentacles from the top of the food chain to the bottom. It was possible that some creatures still lived in the deep waters off the coast. Would plankton still thrive? Would krill? Enough to feed baleen whales that would filter the tiny creatures and consume them as nutrients? I didn’t know, but it was clear from the lack of any netting visible that what the fishermen here had once found plentiful in the waters offshore had disappeared.
We climbed out of the pickup and, with a wave to Mikey as he drove off, followed Burke not to one of the wide wooden fishing vessels, but to a long, narrow skiff, the craft’s driver already aboard, readying it to cast off.
“Gentlemen, this is Jenny Martell,” Burke introduced.
The grizzled old woman, if a woman could be termed as such, nodded and fired up the boat’s big outboard, the exhaust blast tossing her wild white hair. Neil and I climbed aboard, Burke bringing up the rear, the three of us taking a position on the benches at the middle of the craft as we pulled away from the dock. We swung westward, dodging old pier pilings in the small harbor, and picked up speed. The bow of the skiff rose up, taking us over waves and swirling water where the Coquille and the Pacific jousted for supremacy.
“All right,” I said, my voice loud above the outboard. “How about you fill us in now?”
“No point in that,” Burke said. “You’ll see soon enough.”
He eased off the bench and slouched to a sit on the hull, back against the side, wind rushing past.
I looked to Neil, his own attention fixed forward as well. In the distance the sun was settling toward the horizon. He stared at it, letting his eyes close for a moment, soaking in the fading warmth, some peace seeming to fill him. Some contentment.
“I could get used to this, Fletch,” he said without prompting.
I could understand his feeling, even if I could not yet relate.
“Relax,” Burke told me. “You’re about to be handed keys to the kingdom.”
Behind, Jenny Martell laughed. I looked to her and saw a nearly toothless mouth open, bellowing with glee.
“See, Jenny agrees,” Burke said.
An hour we raced across the water, sun slipping below the defining line of the earth in the distance, the last of its yellow light beginning to reveal something in silhouette. A shape. Of a ship.
“What is that?” Neil asked.
“The supermarket,” Burke said.
“With no waiting on any register,” Jenny joked, her gummy laughter bellowing again.
The skiff leapt over the rising chop, nearing the hulking orange ship.
“She must be twenty miles from shore,” I said, hanging on, the hard wooden seat absorbing little of the impacts each time the boat came off the crest of a wave and slammed back onto the churning sea.
“Thirty,” Burke corrected.
“You want to provide some context here, Burke?” Neil asked.
Burke looked back to us. The rifle slung across his back swung back and forth with the motion of the skiff.
“The Groton Star, courtesy of Micah’s magic,” Burke said. “And the United States government.”
“The feds just parked this out here?” Neil asked, doubtful.
“Not willingly,” Burke answered, flashing a smile before looking again toward our destination. “The day before the Red Signal, Micah intercepted orders that the ship had received directing it to deliver its cargo to a naval base up in Washington where nuke subs are based. This was supposed to supply the boomers as things went to hell. At least that’s what Micah figured.”
What Micah figured...
It seemed that if Micah decided something, it was to be seen as gospel. Being bothered by the level of near worship afforded the boy would have been easier if he’d actually been wrong. But, as yet, I hadn’t learned of that happening.
