Back at the pizza shop, Hiccock and Fuentes briefed the major while they changed back into their normal attire.
“The facility is underground,” Hiccock said. “There is a doorway leading from the nonsecure area. It utilizes an airlock security system. Someone doesn’t want dust or contaminants past that point.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s about it.”
“Want to add anything, Fuentes?”
“Like the gentleman said, airlock … oh and a few other things. They’re using sat com radios, which means they have field operational mobility. One of the guards was with me in Ft. Benning Ranger School and, as I remember, a real predator. He didn’t make me, though, probably ’cause of my former mustache. The guardhouse has a false top, probably holding a grenade launcher. There appear to be vents along the way to the building, possibly an underground entrance. They were using Ranger speak. Definitely jumpers. Probably Delta out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or a Special Forces 10 group out of Fort Carson. We have two solid IDs, one named Malo and the other a woman whose credit card this is.” He produced the credit card receipt, now in a plastic bag in which knives, forks, and napkins came individually wrapped. He attempted to read it through the plastic. “Ronson.”
Hiccock was stunned by his own lack of military observational ability. “Well, yeah, the airlock and all that …”
The brown recluse spider was indigenous to the American southwest. Like most spiders it liked dark tight spaces, all the better to avoid becoming bird food. A group of MPs sat under a tree awaiting orders. As they shot the breeze, one didn’t notice as the spider crawled up his pant leg. Although venomous, any arachnologist would tell you that the little eight-legged insect was rarely deadly to humans. Usually.
“We’ll run those names and see if something connects,” the major said. “Anything on the commando you recognized?”
Fuentes pulled out another plastic bag with the receipt in it. “No, but they all touched this register receipt, so we might get a clean print and make him that way.” Hiccock, realizing all the details he had missed, added, as a weak offering, “He had a Mac-10 under his coat.”
Hiccock’s momentary respite from embarrassment was short-circuited by Private First Class Fuentes’s description: “A short stock, snub-barreled spray job, light clip. And I have been racking my brain since I saw him, but I can’t remember his name, just that he was DHG in our SFQC.
That was Hiccock’s last straw, “He was what?”
“Distinguished Honor Grad Special Forces Qualifications Course.”
Press Secretary Naomi Spence was on her computer in the White House, conducting a Nexis/Lexis search for statutory regulations on agricultural price supports for wheat and grain. A press conference loomed in twenty minutes and she was researching a quote from the Secretary of Agriculture during the dust-bowl era. As the screen flickered, she scanned for any reference of price supports, not noticing her moments of total inactivity — seconds where she was frozen still.
He had forgotten and deeply missed the pungent, sweet exhilaration of that first glorious sip of wine. Both as a constitutional issue befitting his status as a commanding officer as well as an accommodation to the religious Imans he suffered, wine became off-limits, but of course now that didn’t matter.
What did matter? What about my life did matter? the man who sat waiting in the low back chair asked himself. The stars he wore on his uniform amounted to something, but the camel’s ass who ran the country childishly made sure he had more stars on his epaulets, whenever he wasn’t wearing a dress, the degenerate. Still his love for country amounted to something of which to be proud. As he sat waiting, sipping, and reflecting on his life, General Nandessera allowed a smile to cross his lips. Loose ends. He had cleaned up all the loose ends… all but two. Captain Falad, that canon soldier, fled realizing what was going to happen as soon as he heard the disastrous reports from the American media; that Samovar failed miserably to attain retribution for his country. Falad’s assistant, himself a loose end, reluctantly offered up the name and address of Falad’s brother-in-law, before he was allowed to die. The fugitive Captain’s relation was a businessman in America who would surely take in his wife’s brother and offer him shelter and a new identity. The General rolled his thumb over the piece of paper upon which was scrawled the American’s name and the address of his place of business.
Maybe it was the gravity of the day, or simply the boredom of waiting, but for some reason Nandessera struck a wooden match, setting one end of the paper aflame and lit the tip of a contraband Cuban cigar. It was another “devilish” luxury, which he had harbored for a day like today. He placed the burning sheet in the bowl beside him as the last traces of “Mohammed Ghib — McDonalds Restaurant — Pasadena California” turned to ash.
“Live a long life, Falad” was all he said out loud. And then he waited. And waited.
He was in the middle of remembering a childhood romp, one which still set the old man’s heart aflutter to this day. Over the sound of the door to his darkened room opening, he still heard the sounds of Sareena, her squeals of laughter as he chased her. He longingly reached out for her in his mind, seeing her hair dangerously and shamelessly falling out of the young girl’s burka. He ignored the sound of the honed metal as it left the sheath. He squeezed his eyes tighter, to see her face as he touched her shoulder and she turned, in his mind, one last time, her big green eyes like saucers electrifying his soul. The whipping sound of the blade slicing through the air was muffled by her delightful taunt.
The man wielding the sword was the best befitting the General’s rank. So clean was the cut, that Nandessra’s head slid right off and tumbled into his lap, looking up, with the smile of youth on the face of death.
The last of the two loose ends had now been cut.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Gleason Barr, petty officer in charge of the watch, was just finishing his 12-noon readings. The cesium regulated, chronographic intervalometer was outputting its consistent stream of 33.44 Ghz. The temperature and humidity were within a hundredth of a degree of nominal parameters. He duly noted these readings in his Naval Observatory logbook and went on to his other appointed hourly checkpoints.
The atomic clock was Father Time itself. It was officially called the Master Clock and was the standard for dividing the rotation of the Earth into segments. Each segment, by international agreement, corresponding to one second of arc. That meant of the 360 degrees of Earth, each degree was roughly 60 miles across at the equator, each mile was called a minute, and one sixtieth of that distance became a second or, roughly, 100 feet. Any spot on the Earth could be located to within 100 feet by merely expressing it as so many degrees, so many minutes, and a few seconds of arc.
The top of the Empire State Building in New York, for example, was 39 degrees, 15 minutes 22 seconds latitude, 44 degrees 17 minutes, and one second longitude. Of course, hardly anybody thought about it that way anymore, since the adoption of GPS, the global positioning system. It was based on the principle of a computerized receiver picking up a signal from satellites in stationary orbit and calculating down to the second (or millisecond in the case of military use) the position of the receiver. Because the whole concept was related to time, the cesium clock at the Naval Observatory became the signal heartbeat of the entire global positioning system around the world. If it were to vary by running slow or fast, airliners would land on freeways instead of airports. Rental car drivers, following their dashboard monitor, would be told to make left turns onto somebody’s front lawn instead of the street 100 feet further down the street. A cruise missile could possibly slam into a mountain that its terrain mapping software had detected, but its internal computer guidance believed was a mile to the left. That’s why Barr, who worked for the Navy, checked it every hour, even though the radioactive half-life of cesium was 500,000 years and computers on redundant power supplies controlled the temperature. In short, the entire world trusted, without question, that the Atomic Clock kept ticking to an accuracy of within one billionth of a second per millennium.