“He does, in fact, think those events are connected,” said Church. “However, we have no proof of any kind that it is the same technology Dr. Erskine was working on at Gateway. Bug has not been able to find any records explaining what the Kill Switch project was.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I bellowed as I leapt to my feet, “it was called fucking Kill Switch!”
Church waited for me to sit down. I did. “First things first. I had our tech team go over all of your equipment and it is in working order, so that rules out an EMP. Dr. Hu’s electronics team is working up some theories on how this might have happened. He has been following a few promising leads and his report is pending. So, let’s table that part of it for now. For the moment we are left without photographic or telemetric reference. There is nothing, in fact, beyond your own testimony.”
I closed my eyes.
“If this is too much for you, Captain, I can have someone take you home,” said Church, gesturing toward the door.
“Don’t,” I warned him, and he nodded. We both knew that too much time had already passed. We had to get somewhere with this. I drank the tepid coffee and poured a fresh cup. “Okay, okay, then tell me what you think. Do you believe my account of what happened down there?”
“I have no way of knowing what to believe.”
“You can trust my word, for a start.”
“This isn’t a matter of trust, Captain. I believe that you are telling the truth as you know it. The same goes for your men. I do not now, nor have I at any time, believed you were lying to me. However, all three of you were exposed to a virus and other biological and chemical agents that have yet to be identified. You were also struck by some kind of energy wave from the machine you discovered. There is no way to theorize on how these things may have affected your perceptions. The lack of corroborating information did not wash well with the president.” He paused and sighed. “The subsequent failure of several other missions by DMS teams hasn’t helped.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? What failures?”
He briefly explained some of what had happened, and hearing it was like getting hit by a series of very hard punches.
Broadway Team had gone after Somali pirates who were doing some contract work for an ISIL group out of Nigeria. The pirates were planting limpet mines on ships. Broadway went after them in what should have been an easy hunt-and-kill mission. Instead they got lost at sea and wrecked their Zodiac on a sandbar. Two bombs went off and two ships went down.
Then Scorpion and Rattlesnake Teams signed on with an ATF squad to rip down a cartel that was using drug mules to smuggle military drone parts to a radical militia crew in San Antonio. One of the shooters from Rattlesnake accidentally discharged his weapon at exactly the wrong moment. The result? Nine dead, including three ATF agents. Sure, they got some of the bad guys, too, but not all of them. The drones made it to San Antonio and the FBI had to step in and stop the militia men from blowing up the Alamo.
In Florida the Tiger Shark Team commander, Glory Price, apparently lost her mind in the middle of an operation. She turned her gun on her team, killing two and wounding four before finally shooting herself in the heart. Glory was a friend of mine and that was hard to hear. Damned hard.
In Washington state Wolfpack Team fumbled a mission and let a semi loaded with stolen military ordnance slip right through their fingers. Within two days terrorist kill teams were firing rocket-propelled grenades at civilian targets in Seattle.
Like that.
It was insane. In all, out of the last seventeen DMS missions, there were only two that were successfully completed. The others failed in whole or part, and we were burying a lot of our friends. This is what had happened while I slept. It was so much. Too much. I sagged back against my chair, too heartsick to even throw something at Church to make him stop, but he told me all of it. Every case, every failure, every civilian death, every death or serious injury incurred.
I wanted to laugh this off with a snarky comment and defuse it and make it go away. I wanted to dismiss it as another one of my bad dreams. But you can’t do that. Not when it’s this real.
I gradually became aware that Church was staring at me with great intensity.
“What?” I asked, my tone belligerent and defensive.
“You have no comment? No observation?”
“What the hell do you expect me to say? I was in a coma and—”
“Stop,” he said, holding up a hand. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me reevaluate the decision to allow you to come back to work.”
“What are you talking about?”
Church laced his gloved fingers together and said one word. A name. He said, “Rudy.”
And then I got it. He saw me get it.
I said, “Glory…?”
“Something is happening, Captain. People we trust are acting in irrational and unpredictable ways. We don’t know why and we certainly don’t know how. I had asked Dr. Sanchez to study the recent reports to see if he could identify any pattern of behavior. Sadly he wasn’t able to complete that report. When possible I’ve had Dr. Hu perform a variety of medical tests on our people, including blood work from Glory Price and some of the others. So far there is nothing, no causation, no presence of chemicals or brain damage. We’re testing for parasites and other biological agents that might be affecting behavior. So far… nothing.”
We sat there and stared bleakly at each other across miles of hurt and confusion.
When I could talk, I said, “Six of those cases… they were against ISIL?”
“Six confirmed, with three others as possibles.”
“Since when are they players on this kind of scale?”
“Times have changed,” said Church. “They’ve stepped up their game by embracing other kinds of weapons. Our allies in the global counterterrorism community — notably Barrier in the UK — have been tracking ISIL involvement in computer hacking, the sale and transport of bioweapons, and even multiple attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. And they’ve been forming dangerous alliances with small and large extremist groups in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. They’ve even buried their differences with al-Qaeda. They are growing at an exponential rate.”
“How? I mean, how are they getting that kind of traction so damn fast?”
“Unknown. Aunt Sallie’s analysis suggests that they have managed to either place their people in our intelligence services or they’ve turned some of our people. Ours and our allies. They have made a series of strategic moves that have been so successful that we have to accept that they have people inside. Nothing else can explain it. They’ve avoided traps, vacated before carefully guided drone strikes, and surged into areas of weakness, and they’ve done this over and over again. They are, in fact, winning this war.” It looked like it hurt Church to say that. “And the DMS is not contributing to a response in any useful way. In fact, as the president has taken pains to point out to me on a daily basis, we are functioning at such a low level of effectiveness that we are helping our enemies. It is not unlikely that our charter may be revoked.”
“Can he do that?”
“He is the president.”
“Will he do it?”
“If this trend continues to slide downward, then yes.” He looked away. “Perhaps he should.”
I have never once heard Church say something like that. It scared the hell out of me. I expected my inner Killer to wake up and begin roaring for blood. He didn’t. For whatever reason that part of me was sleeping. Nice fucking timing.