Commander Hume pulled a bulky package from his briefcase and punched a crudely affixed button on the roughly formed plastic case. A passing jogger cursed all things Japanese as the powerful electromagnetic pulse shut down his Walkman for all time.
“What about laser?” asked Jervic when the deed was done.
“Difficult at best under these circumstances, same with shotgun mikes, and the background noise is the same frequency as human voice.”
“Lip reading.”
“Keep moving your head around,” Hume said, turning to look across the pool as he sat. “Well?”
Although eighty percent of the personnel in “Operation Deep Look” were, in fact, high-grade morons, neither the project leader, who was a very, very good actor, nor his actual chief assistant fell into that category.
“Shouldn’t you have asked that before you crossed the Rubicon, so to speak?” Mark asked, gesturing languidly at the EMP generator. “They are watching us, you know.” The Mystic river accent flowed like its namesake.
“Of course I know; with my information we were across the Rubicon anyway. What do you have to add?” Hume asked sharply. He was willing to act the fool for the mission, but sometimes Dr. Jervic seemed to forget it was an act. After the two of them had battled it out in Boston for six long years, Mark should know by now who the brains of the outfit was.
“Well, the AID’s translation programs have some interesting subprotocols in them. Very interesting.” Jervic, the former Harvard professor, paused and cracked his knuckles.
“Skip the damn dramatics,” Hume snarled, “there is precisely no time.”
“Very well,” Jervic sighed, “the protocols are deliberately deceptive, primarily in areas related to genetics, biotechnics, programming and, strangely, socio-political analysis. The deception is more than mere switching of words, it has a thematic base. The programming side of it is out of my depth, but there is no question that the Darhel are deliberately causing us to move towards dead ends in those fields. I find the thematic approach in sociology to be both the strangest and the strongest. There are constant deliberate translation errors and modifications of data related to human sociology, prehistory and archetypes.”
“Archetypes,” mused Commander Hume. He glanced at Washington’s monument and wondered what George would have made of all of this. Probably not much; he would have foisted such underhanded shenanigans off on Benjamin Franklin.
“Any of several apparently innate images in the psyche, found throughout human…”
“I know what a damn archetype is, Mark,” David interrupted, angrily, drawn from his reverie. “That was ‘Archetypes,’ with an unspoken ‘Damn’ attached in the subjunctive case. Not ‘Archetypes? What the hell are archetypes?’ It happened to fit in with my data. Okay, it’s time to see if we really do have presidential access,” he continued, standing up. “You would not believe what I found in a Sanskrit translation…”
“Hey, man, you got a light?” One of the ubiquitous street people of the Washington Mall stumbled blearily towards them, fumbling a dog-end.
“Sorry, soldier,” said Commander Hume, noting the field jacket and scars, respectful to even this fallen soldier at the last. “Don’t smoke.”
“It don’ matter, man,” the unshaven bum muttered, “Don’ matter.” Four rapid huffs from a silenced .45 caliber Colt followed and the pair of scientists slumped into the reflecting pool staining the pure waters red. “Don’ matter,” the bum muttered again, as the screams began.
15
Camp McCall, NC Sol III
1123 May 6th, 2002 ad
“Move it! Move it! Get out! Off the bus! Move it!”
The young men in gray piled off the Greyhound bus, some in their haste tumbling to the ground. These unfortunates were unceremoniously yanked to their feet and hurled towards the group now milling into a half-assed formation. The three brawny young men and one brawny young woman doing the shouting had, four months before, gotten off the same kind of bus. Despite the corporal’s chevrons on their sleeves they were recently graduated privates chosen for their size, strength or fierceness as much as their motivated attitude. They broke the formation into four ragged groups and moved them, overloaded with duffel bags, to their respective assembly areas. The new recruits were chivvied into rough lines comprising three sides of a quad and then they got their first experience of a real drill sergeant. In second platoon’s unfortunate case it was Gunnery Sergeant Pappas. He was standing at parade rest in the center of the formation, apparently doing nothing but rocking backwards and forwards contemplating the pleasant spring day. What he was actually doing was applying his personal philosophy of life to a situation he found totally out of control.
He and the group recalled with him had been told that, thank you, we have all the senior NCOs we need for the Line and Strike formations. They were instead parceled out to Guard and training units as a leavening of experienced personnel. This was intended to “stiffen up” the units to which they were assigned. Gunny Pappas often considered the old adage that you cannot stiffen a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot.
But he was a Marine (or whatever they wanted to call him this week) and when given an order said “aye, aye, sir,” or “yes, sir,” or whatever, and performed it to the best of his ability. So when told he was going to be a DI, he naturally requested Pendleton, since that was right by his home of record. Ground Force Personnel naturally sent him to Camp McCall, North Carolina, three thousand miles away.
Being in McCall might have been for the best. The Galactics had started to come through on one of their promises and he was one of the first group offered rejuvenation. The rejuv program was being run on a matrix of age, rank and seniority. Since the military ran on a framework of both an officer Corp and an equivalent NCO Corp, senior NCOs were prioritized with “equivalent” officers. As one of the oldest NCOs in the second layer of enlisted rank, he had received rejuvenation ahead of many sergeant majors that were younger. Thus, after a month of truly unpleasant reaction and growth, he found himself a physical twenty-year-old with a sixty-year-old’s mind. He had forgotten what it was really like, the physical feeling of invincibility and energy, a coursing drive to do something, anything, all the time. Regular heavy-duty workouts were returning the musculature of his prime. They also served to occupy his other energies.
He had been a Marine for thirty years, twenty-seven of those married. During those twenty-seven years he had never strayed from the marriage bed. Not for him the phrase “I’m not divorced, just TDY.” He never thought less of the other NCOs, or officers, who took advantage of deployments to pick up some action; as long as it did not affect their performance he could care less. But he had made a wedding vow to “cleave unto no other” and he believed in keeping a promise. It was the same as “ ’til death do us part.” Now, however, he had a twenty-year-old’s body, and drives, and was married to a fifty-something wife. He was experiencing some difficulties with the situation. Fortunately or unfortunately, the pace of training the recalls and then using the recalls to train the new enlistees was so fierce he had not been able to get back to San Diego. The rejuv program was eventually supposed to be distributed to dependents of the military but he would believe it when he saw it. There were already rumors that the rejuv materials were running low, so who knew what to expect long term. He was really sweating his first meeting with Prissy.