“So I took his weapon and grabbed him by the collar and made for the door. One thing for sure — people really got the hell out of our way now. Surveillance had a car waiting for us and I threw Rolf in and we split.”
Turcotte took a drink of coffee. “I found out later that night that Rolf had killed four civilians, including a pregnant eighteen-year-old girl, and wounded three. The news was playing it up like an internal IRA hit and the whole country was in an uproar to catch the killers. But they couldn’t catch the killers, could they? Because the country was the killers.
“For a while I even thought they might give Rolf and me up as sacrificial lambs, but then common sense kicked in. I was stupid for even thinking that. If they gave us up, the whole counterterrorist operation would be out in the open and those in power certainly didn’t want that. Might lose a few votes at the polling booth. So you know what they did?” Turcotte looked at Kelly with red-rimmed eyes.
Kelly slowly shook her head.
“They held an inquest, of course. That’s proper form in the military. As a matter of fact the head man I met down in the Cube, General Gullick, he was one of those appointed to look into the whole thing. For security reasons we never saw those who questioned us, nor did we know their names. They talked to us and then talked to each other, and guess what they decided? They gave us fucking medals. Yeah, Rolf and me. Ain’t that great? A medal for killing a pregnant woman.”
“You didn’t kill her,” Kelly quietly remarked.
“Does it matter? I was part of it. I could have told Rolf to wait. I could have done a lot of things.”
“He was the commander. It was his responsibility,” Kelly argued, remembering what her father had told her about the army and covert operations.
“Yeah. I know. I was just following orders, right?”
Kelly had no answer for that.
“So that’s how my career in the regular army and Special Forces ended. I went to my American commander and told him where he could shove his medal, and they had me on the next thing smoking back to the States. But I had to stop in D.C. first. To meet someone.” He proceeded to tell her about meeting Dr. Duncan, her orders to him, and the phone line out of commission.
“Why were you chosen?”
“Right person, right time,” Turcotte said with a shrug.
“There aren’t that many high-speed dudes like me who have top-level clearances and can fire a gun.”
Kelly shook her head. “You were chosen because you told them to shove the medal. It showed somebody, someplace, that you had integrity. That’s even rarer than a top-level security clearance.” Kelly reached across the table and squeezed his hand, feeling the rough flesh in the palm.
“You got screwed, Turcotte.”
“No.” Turcotte shook his head. “I screwed myself the minute I started playing God with a gun. I thought I was in control, but I was just a pawn, and they used me up like one. And now you know why I turned on my commander out there in Nebraska and killed him and why I rescued Von Seeckt and I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or not. Because it’s between me and all these high-speed assholes who pull strings and cause people to die. Fuck me once, shame on me — fuck me twice, I fuck back.”
CHAPTER 18
“Give me a status,” Gullick ordered.
“Bouncer Three is ready for flight,” Quinn reported.
“Bouncer Eight is also prepped and ready. Aurora is on standby status. Our link to Cheyenne Mountain is live and secure. Anything moves, we’ll be able to track it, sir.”
“General Brown?” Gullick asked.
The Air Force deputy chief of staff frowned. His conversation with his boss in Washington had been anything but fun. “I talked to the chief of staff and he okayed the alerts, but he was not happy about it.”
“I don’t care if he was happy or not,” Gullick said. “I just care that the mission is a go.”
Brown looked down at his own computer screen. “We’ve got every base alerted and planes on standby for pursuit. The primary and alternate kill zones are a go.”
“Admiral Coakley?”
“The carrier Abraham Lincoln is steaming toward the sight where the foo fighter went down. It’s got planes on alert.”
“We’re all set, then,” Gullick said. “Let’s roll.”
The hangar doors slowly slid open. Inside Bouncer Three, Major Paul Terrent checked the control panel, which was a mixture of the original fixtures and added-on human technology, including a satellite communications link with General Gullick in the Cube.
“All set,” he announced.
“I don’t like being the bait,” his copilot, Captain Kevin Scheuler, remarked. They were both reclined in depressions in the floor of the disk. The cockpit was an oval, twelve feet in diameter. They could see out in all directions, the inner walls displaying what was outside of them as if the walls themselves were not there — another piece of technology they could use but still didn’t understand.
The effect, while useful, was extremely disorienting, and perhaps the second greatest hurdle Bouncer test pilots had to overcome. Most particularly, the view straight down when the craft was at altitude, as if the pilot were floating in the air, was quite a shock to the system until one got used to it. For this night’s mission both men were wearing night vision goggles on their flight helmets and the interior of the hangar was lit in red lights, meaning there was little difference in illumination for them between there and the outside night sky.
However, the greatest hurdle to flying the machine was the physical limitations of the pilots. The Bouncer was capable of maneuvers that the pilot’s physiology could not handle. In the early days of the program there had been blackouts, broken bones, and various other injuries, including one fatal crash — the disk staying intact, the unconscious pilots inside being turned into crushed protoplasm on impact with the earth. The disk had been recovered, cleaned out, and was still capable of flight. The two pilots had been buried with honors; their widows told they had died flying an experimental aircraft and given their posthumous medals at the funeral.
There was machinery surrounding the depressions that the scientists had yet to figure out. The project’s scientists believed that there was a built-in way for the pilot depressions/seats to be shielded from the effect of G-forces, but they had yet to discover it. It was as if a child who was capable of riding a tricycle were allowed into a car. He might understand what the steering wheel did, but he wouldn’t understand what the small opening on the steering wheel column was for, especially if the child had not been given the keys.
The best that they had been able to come up with was allowing the test pilots enough flight time so that they understood their own limitations and did not push the machine past what they could handle. Beyond that, the shoulder and waist harnesses bolted around the depressions would have to do.
“There’s nothing that can catch us,” Major Terrent said.
“Nothing human,” Scheuler noted. “But if this foo fighter thing was made by the same people who made this, or people like the people who made this, then—”
“Then nothing,” Terrent cut in. “This ship is at least ten thousand years old. The eggheads know that, at least. Whoever left it behind has been long gone. And they probably weren’t people.”