“Her name is Dr. Li,” said Mike to Parker. “You will address your betters by their titles.” He turned to Vern.
“You getting what you need, Dr. Li?” Mike said, drawing out the Doctor.
“We need more shielding on the power cables before we can run the live-fire test,” said Vern.
Mike looked at her and then turned to Parker. He stepped up so he was chest to chest with the sailor, unfazed by the younger man’s bulk. As big as Parker was, he lacked Mike’s ability to intimidate.
“Well, Parker here, he’s concerned about America and her fleet,” said Mike, speaking to Vern but looking the sailor directly in the eye, daring him to disagree. “So seeing that you are a fellow American — hell, a civilian working her ass off to help arm said fleet — Parker just volunteered to weld it in for you, since working with metal seems to be something he’s got a passion for,” said Mike, a backhanded compliment for a sailor who spent too much time in the weight room.
Vern pinched the bridge of her nose with obvious exasperation. “You can’t use metal welding. It is an electromagnetic gun. Needs to be welded with plastic, otherwise the electromagnetic energy will… You want to be the guy who blew up the ship because he didn’t understand the future? Let’s leave it at that.”
“All right, all right,” said Mike. “Parker, you have one job now: Find me more shielding and install it like she wants it. Just make sure you understand what she’s talking about. If you have to strip apart your beloved weight room to get it, you will. If you have to use all the plastic chow trays in the shipyard, you will. Understood? If you need to bribe, screw, or steal to get what Dr. Li needs, you will.”
He turned to the others. “I know I don’t have to tell Parker here, but if anybody questions one of his fellow crew members’ patriotism again, I’ll grind you up and feed you to the seagulls myself. Now get back to it.”
Pineapple Express Pizza, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
The Directorate marine was twice the size of the pizza-shop owner and he was not holding back. A desperate gasp followed each blow as Skip’s lungs emptied of air.
The translator on the marine’s belt was oblivious to the violence, stating the order in a digital monotone.
“Your daughter will come with us to a fancy party,” said the device.
Another marine held Sharon. He pinned her arms behind her back, forcing her to stick her chest out. Her head hung down, so her black hair veiled her face.
“She’s just fifteen,” said Skip, gasping for breath. “She stays here —”
Two more quick blows. The crack of Skip’s ribs made Sharon scream again.
“Shut it!” said the marine in English, tugging hard on her arms.
Conan ducked back into the stairwell.
A roundhouse kick from the giant marine sent Skip sliding through a cloud of flour and down behind the counter. With his brow covered in white powder, he looked up at Conan peeking through the stairway door.
Help, Skip mouthed. It looked like he couldn’t even get enough air in his lungs to speak.
Conan squeezed the riot gun’s pistol grip and ducked back out of sight.
A burst of Chinese among the marines followed.
Conan closed her eyes. There were four Directorate marines. She had eight rounds of ten-gauge street shot loaded. She could blow apart the restaurant in a matter of seconds.
Skip got up from his knees and charged the marines. The wet sound of his head hitting the hard yellow tile made Conan’s stomach turn.
Enough.
She raised the riot gun and flicked the safety off. She would have to get in close to make sure she didn’t cut down everyone in the restaurant with the gun’s wide arc of fire. She counted down.
Three. Two. One.
Exhale. Go.
And then she froze. This was not the mission. She clicked the safety back on.
Skip tried to get up from the floor but made it only to his hands and knees. He spat out a sticky crimson stream that mixed with the blood pooling from his split scalp. Then another kick landed with a thump on his temple.
Sharon wailed, “Don’t touch me!” Then muffled screams.
Conan dashed back down the stairs silently on bare feet.
“What the hell was going on up there?” asked Finn.
“You’re fine. I had you covered,” said Conan. “Just some customers getting rowdy. We gotta go out the back way, though.”
Finn put his hand on Conan’s arm. “What the hell is going on up there?” he asked again.
“I said let’s go. That’s an order,” snapped Conan.
Finn, Nicks, and Conan filed out the back of the restaurant into the alley and slunk out in the darkness, slowly working their way toward their extraction point, an eight-by-six-foot steel recycling bin a few blocks away. They climbed in and covered themselves in the wet and moldy cardboard and aluminum cans that would break up their bodies’ thermal signatures.
“Ten seconds to detonation,” whispered Finn, and he began to count it down.
“And contact,” he said.
Nothing.
“Well, at least the pizza was —” said Nicks.
An explosion detonated in the distance, the blast wave shaking the recycling bin a bit.
They waited the next hours for the morning pickup in silence broken only by the occasional siren going by. It was just reaching early morning when Finn finally decided to bring it up again.
“Conan, I’m serious,” Finn whispered. “What was all the noise upstairs about? Are Skip and Sharon okay?”
“Yeah, they’re fine,” Conan said quietly. “Let’s stay focused on the mission.”
Wal-Mart Headquarters, Bentonville, Arkansas
“The act is so questionable in law as to make it positively un-American.”
Jake Colby’s talking points had been produced by analytic software and then checked by Legal and Public Relations. Both had advised Colby, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, that the most effective approach was to flip the script and paint the White House’s proposal to use the old Defense Production Act from 1950 as something out of the Directorate playbook.
The act, passed at the start of the Korean War, gave the U.S. president the power to require any American company to sign any contract or fill any order deemed necessary for national defense. The CEO was now explaining to the shareholders that Wal-Mart was joining a coalition of leading multinational firms that, using both the courts and congressional lobbying, would attempt to block the act’s resurrection.
“Losing is un-American!” a seventy-year-old woman in a denim pantsuit shouted back at him. He knew not to ignore her. Lee-Ann Tilden was a multibillionaire who owned 4 percent of his outstanding shares, and yet she still worked as a greeter at the Tulsa store.
The CEO tried to repeat the talking points’ core premise, that a corporation’s status as a legally defined individual meant that the government couldn’t tell it what to do, even in a time of war.
“Legally defined individual?” Tilden retorted. “Mr. Colby, you know that’s bunk and you know that Sam would want to help the country any way he could.”