Hiccock and the major were listening to reports on the field radio. “Unit 2, nothing yet. Unit 3 is investigating an extremely strong electromagnetic field reading. Unit 9 is en route …”
“You know what I can’t understand?” Major Hanks said.
“What?”
“If they found us in the house and sent the truck and plane, how come they aren’t coming after us with guns blazing now?”
“Good point. What would you do if you were the bad guys, Major?”
“I’d get some intelligence, send out a scout, find our weakest point, then plan an attack.”
“What would be our weakest point?”
“Some hole in the defensive perimeter or some exposed asset that might be vulnerable to a strike. Then again, it could be some operational misstep, like us having all our planes lined up in neat little rows at Pearl Harbor for the Japanese to just pick off.”
Hiccock pondered this as Kronos walked over. “Look, I’m starving. Can we please get a pizza?”
Hiccock came up with an idea and pulled out his cell phone. “Maybe they have an operational weakness.” He spoke into his phone, “Hiccock for the president … of course I’ll hold.” He covered the phone with his hand, “Can I get a Jeep and a driver?”
“What’s on your mind?” the major asked.
“Maybe we’re looking for the wrong thing. Let me and Kronos here do a little scouting.”
“I’ll send you out with a squad. You are still my first priority. Fair enough?”
Hiccock nodded as the White House telecom officer came back on the line. “Sir, the president is in a meeting right now.”
“You know what? I’ll call him back.” He folded the phone. “President’s busy. C’mon, Kronos, lets see the countryside.”
“Just tell me there’s a pizza shop somewhere around here.”
They trotted over to a second lieutenant in front of three Hummers. He saluted as Hiccock and Kronos got into the lead vehicle.
“Can I ask you something?” Kronos said.
“What?”
“I checked up on you. You come from the Bronx.”
“Burke Avenue. So?”
“So how come I’m me and you’re you?”
“If it wasn’t for football, I would have been you. The game was my ticket out.”
“That’s the other wiggy thing about you. You had the world by the oysters as a QB and you didn’t go pro. What, no balls?”
“I played ball in college to repay my scholarship. But I wanted to use my head, not get it knocked off by some NFL linebacker.”
“Yeah, but the broads you coulda scored with!”
“Didn’t need them.” Hiccock watched two RVs pass on the other side of the highway. “I met my wife in college. She was head of a research project. My boss, actually. Brains, beauty, and a way of making me feel …”
“But you played for freaking Stanford. They were a no-bullshit football factory.”
“They also offer one of the best science programs in the country. I was good at football but I am better in science. I wanted to do what I was good at, and felt good doing.” Hiccock realized he might as well have been speaking Esperanto. “You can’t understand that, can you?” Hiccock was distracted as more recreational vehicles passed.
“What are you thinking?” Kronos asked, following Hiccock’s line of sight to the mobile homes passing by.
“Do you fish?”
“No.”
“Hunt, ski, rappel?”
“I program, pal.”
“So you haven’t noticed all these RVs that we’ve been passing all day. More than you’d expect during off-season. There is no campground close.”
“Food!” yelped Kronos like a hunting dog pointing at a bird.
Not being able to take it anymore, Hiccock relented. “Lieutenant, can we stop here?”
The column pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through.
“I need to get there now,” a determined Janice Tyler said to her new Air Force captain. Since the reinstatement of Hiccock’s authority under Operation Quarterback, she enjoyed a little more power. More than a captain, she figured, since he was snapping to it on her “order.” She now had a staff of FBI profilers. They would continue weeding through the psychological “mind field” that was being mapped by the cookies, worms, and replays of the subliminal computer screens. Computers had become the central focus of Janice’s work because they were the only evidence any of the homegrowns left behind to testify as to their state of mind. All except for those associated with the Sabot Society. There were no subliminal messages detected in their computers, although the FBI Electronic Crimes Lab did find an abundance of conventional e-mail and chat room evidence. The chasm created by this disparity of evidence reinforced the notion that the Sabot was an unfortunately unlucky, and spectacularly inept, copycat group.
“You’ll have to strap in, Ma’am,” her captain said, as the small Air Force VC-100, essentially a small corporate jet with “USAF” and stars and stripes painted on the fuselage, started to taxi. Two Air Force pilots flew it. One was female, she noticed with a little smile, made sweeter by the fact that her Air Force cabin attendant was a male.
Bags of hamburgers and fries were handed into each Humvee. The three Hummers, with their machine guns tied off, pulled into three spaces in the lot. As the burgers were distributed, Hiccock observed an amazing transformation. Before his eyes, these hard-core Army Rangers had turned into high school kids with smiling faces, munching on Big Macs and sipping Cokes. He walked inside the store to pay the bill and asked to see the manager. The oldest guy in a paper hat with a nametag on his shirt came forward and identified himself. “Welcome to McDonald’s, I’m Tim. Is there something I might do for you today?”
“Kinda busy, huh?” Hiccock spoke like he ran a Mickey D’s back home, trying to disarm the company-approved speech.
“Been that way for a few weeks now.”
“All those campers and Winnebagos?” Hiccock gestured to the passing parade of RVs.
“And minivans and backpackers from all over camping out at Leadfoot.”
“What’s going on at Leadfoot?”
“Some kind of New Age voodoo crap.”
“New Age what?”
“All these psychics, Ouija board weenies, crystal gazers, shakra-holics, vegetarians, libertarians, all of ’em. Say they’re being drawn to Leadfoot. Hooting and hollering at the moon for all I know.”
Hiccock handed over a hundred-dollar bill for the troops.
“Your turn to feed the Army?” the manager said with a chuckle.
“Can I get a receipt, please?”
Then it hit him.
He ran outside, his cell phone to his ear.
After being dressed down by the president for not interrupting the meeting the last time Quarterback called in, the orders were now crystal clear: send all calls from QB through immediately. As commanded, the telecom officer intrepidly interrupted the president mid-sentence, “Sir, call from Quarterback.”
Someone, maybe Reynolds, decided to use only Hiccock’s code name, in case one of the president’s men convened in the room was, in fact, a traitor or anarchist. He nodded to the telecom officer, and then picked up the handset.
“What is it, Bill?” Damn. He’d just blurted Hiccock’s name out in the open. He listened for a second, then reacted with lowered brows over squeezed eyes. “You’re serious? Well, I’m not going to start second-guessing you now. I’ll order it and call you back.” He put the phone down and addressed the telecom officer. “Jennifer, get me Paulsen at the GAO.”
Hiccock placed the phone back in his shirt pocket. The lieutenant had a map out on the hood of his Humvee. “No Leadfoot on this map.”