“Home game!” another voice shouted. That was the correct reply.
Home. Home. Where is that?
With his heart pounding, he keyed the mike. “India Zulu four four, this is Echo Foxtrot two one nine.” What? What? He keyed the mike not knowing what he would say. “Home game,” came his reply to himself. “I say again home game. Home game. Over.”
The Green Beret colonel responded quickly with orders. The first mission in a long, long time. “Proceed to map coordinates Echo Golf six three seven four, Kilo Alpha two niner seven three. Over.” Hart pulled the sleeping bag over his head, turned on his flashlight, and fumbled with his map. He found the grid coordinates, which were unique to his map for security reasons. The point on the map to which they directed Hart was on the Chinese-held Virginia bank of the Potomac River. There, the grounds of the captured U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory sat astride a state highway. The most prominent geographic feature was the Highway 301 bridge, which, while damaged and unusable to vehicular traffic, still stood. “Use caution,” the controller advised, “but use all possible haste. It is imperative that you be in position by 0400 hours the day after tomorrow.”
Hart was close, relatively speaking, to his objective. But fifteen miles of cross-country terrain should take two or three nights of forced march. He would have to do it in one.
“Roger, copy,” Hart replied. His skin tingled. This was it. Something big was up. He could feel it. “What are my orders upon arrival, over?”
He swallowed.
“You are to go to ground, reestablish communications, and await further instructions, over.” All of the excitement — and fear — drained out of Hart. Fuck that! came the chorus of insubordinate voices in his head. “Do you copy, Echo Foxtrot?” asked the Green Beret colonel.
With the greatest effort, Hart replied through teeth clenched in anger, “Copy.”
“Echo Foxtrot, this is India Zulu. One additional instruction. Take your long gun. Do you read, over?”
So that was it, Hart thought. Assassination. The long gun. A scope job. He might just possibly get away. Live.
“I read you five by five,” Hart replied. “Echo Foxtrot, out.”
“Bill!” Clarissa exclaimed. “You can’t do it!” Bill didn’t reply. “You’re the president! There’s a war on!”
“It’s done,” he muttered as he untied his shoes and prepared for bed.
“You can’t! You just…! You can’t! Please. Please.”
“Vice President Simon has a lot of good people to back him up. Loyal people.” He didn’t look at Clarissa as he climbed into bed.
She fell quiet. Her chin was tucked, and her loose hair curtained her face. “I love you,” she faintly whispered as if to keep her voice below microphone detection.
I love you too, Bill thought. I think.
He rolled to her and turned her to him. He took her face in both of his hands. With his lips three inches from hers, he stared into her eyes. “Say that again.”
She never blinked or turned. On her way to his lips, she said clearly, but softly, “I love you.”
He grabbed her face and held her lips almost touching his. “Then I love you too.”
Captain Jim Hart reached his objective just before day-break, drenched in sweat, legs and back aching. The predawn darkness around him was alive with noise but no light. Earth-movers growled in forward and then chirped in reverse. Trucks driven by IR-goggled troops rolled down the roads with headlights extinguished.
At the end of a fifteen-mile march, Hart had to do dash-and-drop maneuvering to get closer. His lungs were on fire with the frigid air. He heard hammering. Nails into wood. Like the Chinese were building gallows.
He was close. He needed to cough and cough and spit, but he got the tones in his ear buds. Enemy tactical net — a low emission radio system as good as the Americans’—was inside of a few hundred meters.
He had to assess the situation. He had to climb a hill. Climb this one, suggested an exhausted voice in his head. This one right here. Hart made his legs take him up. Everything began cramping at once, and all across the tops of both quadriceps, fire erupted from his thighs.
Hart had to stop halfway up and stretch. Everything hurt. He rolled on the ground, counting to thirty as his knotted muscles were smoothed. He was running on empty. He needed to eat, he decided. Despite the close proximity to the enemy, he washed down three bites of an iron-tasting power bar, touched his toes one last time to loosen his piano-wire hamstrings, and then hauled the long gun the final one hundred meters uphill.
At the crest, he saw nothing on the overcast night with light amplification other than the bright river. He switched to IR, and the cold water went dark. Hundreds of Chinese soldiers swarmed the near base of the bridge.
They were 400—maybe 500—meters away. Hart wasn’t the best shot, but he could do 500. He crested the ridge onto the forward slope so as not to present the enemy with a profile along the skyline. He moved fifty meters to his right where the reverse slope at his back was unscalable. He wanted no surprises from behind. Hart settled in among the rocks and brush and set up the microwave receiver.
The brief burst of static through his earbud alerted Hart that he had carrier. The microwave beam instantly tightened to Hart’s exact location and changed encoding systems. A beep instantly alerted Hart.
I’ve got mail, he thought, waiting expectantly.
“Echo Foxtrot two one nine, do you read, over?” came a voice that Hart didn’t recognize. Hart acknowledged. “Stand by for orders,” someone said to Hart from the other end of the transmission. It was to the north. Hart could eyeball it and see that it came from across the Potomac. From the American side. There was no possibility of a Chinese ruse.
For the next half hour, Hart received incredible, detailed orders from unrecognized voices. He requested for clarification of practically every aspect of his mission. This is un-fucking-believable! all the voices sung in harmony. Hart demanded time and again that they repeat the astounding instructions. But he never asked that they explain them. He asked what, when, how, where and who — especially who — but never why? That would have been improper.
The orders consisted of a dizzying series of, “If this happens, then do that, but if that happens, instead do this.” At each major juncture in the decision tree — at each moment in time at which Hart would have to make a critical, life-or-death choice in a fraction of a second — he was asked to repeat the orders. The series of conditional actions required of him to take. The half dozen voices scripted Hart’s orders wielding logic with mathematical precision. There was never any doubt as to what Hart should do. If A, then fire, otherwise do X. If B, then fire, otherwise do Y. The orders followed each branch to a certain and usually fatal conclusion.
But sometimes the result was otherwise. “Do nothing.” Sometimes, the unknown controllers went back to the trunk and followed another, radically different branch. It was up to Hart — the national strategic asset — to keep it all straight.
He repeated instructions, but Hart wasn’t yet satisfied. His mind reeled from it all.
Hart nearly forgot about the swirl of enemy activity around him and almost missed a patrol that passed within sixty meters of his well camouflaged position. Nearby movement occasionally interrupted his replies, and his controllers waited patiently without needing explanation.