He had just finished cleaning the Peacemaker when he appeared on the news feed. His dress blues hadn’t been in disarray this morning, when he had betrayed every instinct he had, not to mention a number of regulations and outright laws. When he’d held his impromptu press conference at Arlington Cemetery.
The caption under the footage read: General Sherman Barclay blows the whistle on CELL’s control over Marines.
He hadn’t intended on being a soldier. Even as late as college he wasn’t sure what he had wanted to be. Football had secured him a partial scholarship, damned hard work on the part of his mother, father and older brother had made him the first person in his family to go to college. His father and brother were heating contractors. They had worked in downtown Manhattan a lot. His father had seen the lifestyle of the people who worked downtown, and he had wanted that for his son. Sherman had been less sure. Both his father and his brother had been in 7 World Trade Centre on the ninth of September 2001. He had joined the marines after he graduated the following year.
Then, like Susan had said, he had fallen in love. The United States Marine Corps was older than the country it served. It had fought in every significant conflict America had been involved in. From fighting for the country’s independence in the American Revolutionary War to going toe-to-toe with alien invaders in the streets of his hometown. He didn’t mind admitting that they’d had their arses kicked in New York, but he was proud of every last one of his men and women who had conducted a fighting retreat from alien war machines long enough to evacuate civilians from the ruined city.
The marines had made mistakes, no doubt about it. He’d witnessed atrocities, seen the shelling of civilian population centres. There were monsters and cowards in its ranks, though he had rooted those he could find out with ruthless efficiency when he had taken command. But he was more proud of the men and women who had served the Corps than anything else in a long, bloody, exciting, hard life.
Then the companies had come. He had watched the privatisation of war with disgust throughout his military career. In his opinion, the moment the focus went from duty and loyalty to the man next to you to a pay cheque, the coherence wrought by military discipline was gone. At best you got badly equipped individuals in way over their heads. At worst you got atrocity.
He wasn’t some peace-loving, anti-capitalist hippy protestor. He remembered when they had occupied Wall Street. Unlike many amongst his peers, he had had respect for them. Rightly or wrongly, they had taken a stand for what they believed in. He’d been furious when they’d started getting beaten and moved on, silenced. Their right to voice their opinions was one of the things he had thought he’d been fighting for. Nowadays they would just be branded as terrorists and mown down by corporate goons, like the so-called Resistor group that had been protesting outside a CELL facility in Tokyo. Barclay had read the intelligence briefings on them. They hadn’t been terrorists, that was spin bullshit. They’d just been kids.
He’d studied business in college. He had no problem with capitalism. His dad had made him believe that if you worked hard you should get rewarded for it. The double dip had proved that capitalism and corporations needed restraints. That compassion and responsibility had to be more important than the rapacious profiteering of a tiny minority. Some things just couldn’t be left to an institute whose primary concern was the generation of wealth, the wellbeing of the people of your country being one of them. Instead the world had gone the other way.
And now the same company who had come for his beloved hometown had come for his beloved Corps. He didn’t care that it had all been agreed in Washington, set up by bribe-welcoming politicians in shady backroom deals. CELL had control of the Corps now, and could use them for whatever they wanted.
‘Not on my watch,’ he muttered, only slurring a little bit.
He didn’t even flinch as the lockbuster shotgun rounds blew off the hinges of the door to his house. Little dramatic, he thought. He picked up the Peacemaker and stuffed it into the waistband of his dress trousers.
They sauntered into his office. They had checked first and seen a broken-down old man slumped in a leather chair with a whiskey in his hand. There were five of them. He could hear others moving around his house. Things were being loudly broken in other rooms. They wore sharp suits, carried piece-of-shit Feline SMGs and were dumb enough to wear sunglasses inside. Barclay didn’t think he would have liked them even if they hadn’t just damaged the door on a house more than a hundred years old.
‘Sherman Barclay,’ one of them started. He was stood in front of Barclay’s desk. He had the false confidence of someone with a gun facing a broken man. Though he did glance down at the M1911 lying on the blotting paper on Barclay’s mahogany desk.
‘General Barclay,’ he corrected the man.
‘Not any m…’
‘Are you wearing perfume, son?’ Barclay demanded.
‘Erm… What?’ the man was taken aback by the tone of command in the General’s voice. ‘It’s aftershave.’
‘Perfume. My marines don’t wear perfume, and neither would you if you had any goddamned self-respect. What the fuck are you and your little pantywaists doing in my house other than using up perfectly good oxygen?’
‘We’re here…’
‘You address me as sir, or General, or you can get out of my house, understand me, boy?’
The boy with a gun in front of him was starting to lose confidence in his ability to deal with this mean old man. He glanced down at the M1911 again. Barclay followed his gaze and then looked the gunman in the eyes. He just saw himself reflected in mirror shades, but he knew the other man looked away first.
‘Sir, we’re here to take you into custody…’
‘Under whose authority?’
‘The board of CELL…’
‘Who are a private company. This makes about as much sense as being arrested by Ronald McDonald. I don’t recognise their authority. What am I supposed to be charged with?’
‘Treason against…’
Barclay was on his feet. Five SMGs were suddenly pointed at him by very nervous corporate gunmen. He was pointing at the man in front of him. Whiskey or no whiskey, his hand was steady.
‘You listen to me, you failed abortion, my loyalty, my duty, my honour…’ one of the gunmen laughed, a sneer on his face. ‘… has been proven in fire and blood. You stand where thousands of men and women far better than you have stood and you have the gall to accuse me of treason. Your very presence here is a goddamned insult to every marine who died in some godforsaken shithole, from Tripoli to Okinawa, for your fucked up sense of entitlement and your disrespect. Get the fuck off my base now, before I beat you off it!’
‘… Against CELL ,’ the gunman finished. Barclay just stared at him. Then he started laughing.
‘What does that even mean, boy?’
‘It means you have to come with me.’
‘Or what?’
‘We’re authorised to use force in your apprehension.’
Barclay nodded.
‘You sure about that, son?’ he asked.
‘General, sir…’
If they had sent marines, even MPs, instead of these suited, pencil-neck, executive gunmen. If they had saluted him, shown respect to the rank, the Corps that he had been commandant of until this morning, a rank he had earned the hard way, he would have gone quietly, maybe.
He grabbed the M1911 from the desk. The first shot was one-handed and it was point blank range. He put the big hollow-point round between the gunman who’d been doing all the talking’s eyes. The back of his head came off as the hollow point mushroomed.