Hammerhead Resurrection (28 page)

Marco fell silent, obviously off in the memory. Jeffrey let him sit with it for some time before saying, “…and?”

“Yes, of course,” Marco smiled in that bashful way when drawn out of a private place. “I kissed her neck. I couldn’t help myself. It was as though I was outside of myself. I can still feel the skin of her neck, warm and soft on my lips.” He laughed now, shaking his head. “She pushed me away and slapped me so hard I lost my balance and fell against the fence.”

“Holy hell,” Jeffrey said. “That’s not a traditional end to a love story.”

Marco touched the temperature readouts for the reactors. “Thankfully that wasn’t the end.”

“I assumed as much.”

“I felt devastated as she returned to her house, but as she crossed the street, she showed me how she truly felt. She had her hands in fists, but she glanced back at me four times. I can still see each time as if I’m watching it happen. On the fourth, I felt the greatest and most beautiful hope of my life. Her anger had gone, and I saw only the nervousness I felt.”

“I knew then that she had slapped me, not because she hated me or I had done something she didn’t care for, but because it had scared her.”

“So what did you do?”

“I would walk her home from school every day. I did not try to kiss her again, not until I had been walking her home for a month. I was waiting for her to tell me when it was time, as a gentleman should. In early October, she turned down an alley, stopping behind
a wall where no one could see us. She put her arms around my neck, and I kissed her for the second time. It seemed as though my heart had never beat in my life until that moment.”

“I had fallen completely in love with her. So much so, I decided to risk telling my father about her. He became furious with me, forbidding me to see her. He had arranged a meeting with another rancher’s daughter.”

“Arranged marriages?”

“Not arranged as much as highly encouraged.”

“What was she like?”

“I would never know. When he forbade me, I agreed with everything he said, went to my room, packed a bag, took all the money I had to my name, which was very little due to the groceries, and went to her house. I tapped quietly on her bedroom window she shared with her sister until she showed herself. Then I asked her to run away with me.”

“And she did?”

“She wrote her mother a note, packed her bags, and we left town on the midnight bus to Mexico City. She also knew we had been destined to be together.”

“You joined the military for citizenship?” Jeffrey asked.

“Exactly, and they were glad to have me. Apparently I am good at flying.”

Jeffrey nodded, “Yes, you have very good flow on the controls.”

They flew on for awhile, Jeffrey thinking to himself. He liked what he saw in Marco’s flying. The man had a subtle touch, as if the craft were an extension of himself. Jeffrey wanted him for the project. But wanting him for the project was as good as wanting him dead. He thought of Marco and his wife, happy years from now.

She might already be dead.

Something in Marco’s eyes made Jeffrey think that he was having the same thought.

“Marco…”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want to bring you into the Hammerheads.”

Marco, nodded once. “I’ll do everything I can for you sir, live or die.”

“That’s exactly why I need you Lieutenant. I’ll discuss it with Commander Zack once we’re back to base.”

“Yes, sir.”

They flew on in silence for some time. When they reached the Caribbean Sea, Jeffrey took over, flying one hundred feet above the clear-blue water. An hour and a half later, Marco tapped the GPS screen and said, “We’re passing into the Gulf of Mexico now.”

In one hour, they crossed the pale-blue water of Texas’ Matagorda Bay, and now the broad, dry expanse of the United States blurred below. In the back, a discussion on baseball had turned somewhat ugly, sounding to Jeffrey as though Whitetip had no love of the Texas Rangers while Marmaduke had grown up in Arlington. As they crossed into New Mexico, Marmaduke had moved onto which barbeque restaurants he missed.

All the while, as they flew, they avoided population centers. They saw some cars left askew on the shoulders of the highways, but few people. At one point, as a ranch house blurred by, Jeffrey saw a woman waving a white bit of fabric. Her face was turned directly to him, but they were moving too fast to see her expression. He imagined one of desperation.

That one woman broke something free in him. He imagined shackles, bloody wrists, thousands starving. He let the image go, but understood all too well that the world was broken, farms ruined, transportation destroyed. Even if they stopped the Sthenos, millions more would die before the systems that supported the human race could be rebuilt. Right now there were no planes flying to the Arctic with supplies, no fuel coming from the algae farms, and no food coming out of farms. He wondered how the human spirit would cope. Most, he hoped, would come together, but some would turn to raids and warlording. If Jeffrey survived the initial resurgence, their next task would be to sort out those who had chosen the wrong path.

They reached Arizona as the sun touched the western Horizon. The speed of the plane chased it now, and it took thirty minutes to drop fully away. Marco took over, throttling down and turned the transport toward a broad runway among bleak mountains. Touching down next to large hangars which seemed untouched, Marco unlatched himself. Jeffrey did the same and walked into the back. The pilots were unbuckling from their jump seats and stretching their backs and legs.

“All right folks,” Jeffrey said, “There may be service personnel here, so let’s tread carefully. The last thing we need is to get shot by our own people.”

“Yes, sir,” they all said.

Kodiak flipped the side door latch, shoved the door open, and stepped out. Everyone followed him into the heat of the Arizona evening. Jeffrey found himself standing on a broad swath of old tarmac, and he felt at home there among the looming hangars with their hundreds of high, square-paned windows and towering, sliding-panel doors. None of the field lights had come on with the twilight. Jeffrey was glad of that as he listened to the airfield. The breeze caught in a windsock nearby flopping the nylon.

Jogging over to the nearest hangar, he heard one hundred and two boots beating the pavement behind him, which took him back to the good old days of service before the first war when he’d signed up for what should have been a quick four years before college. He’d get stronger, do something involving machines, and move on. But, the attack on Demos had changed everything.

Reaching the hangar, he looked to the tops of the towering doors and back down. The tracks for the massive doors were set in concrete. He gripped the handle and shoved. It shifted, but only just.

“Help me with this folks.”

The pilots, putting their palms on the door, shoved together. The door slid sideways with a deep resonation. When it had opened a few feet, Jeffrey walked into the dim light, motioning for everyone to follow him. The coming twilight cast a crosshatched shadow high up. Down low, all lay in darkness. There he saw the angled shapes of Lakota. He patted Whitetip on the back.

“Step one of phase one is done. Now let’s get some fuel and find the tankers.”

“Where do you think everyone is?” She asked.

“There are a lot of possibilities,” Jeffrey said as he walked over to the first Lakota, “They might have…” but he faded away as he caught a smell he knew all too well, burned hair with a rotten back-note. Taking out a flashlight, he played it around the aircraft. Each and every Lakota’s cockpit glass had been blown out, the edges melted away. Beyond that lay a dark pile. He walked past the ruined ships. The pile shown colorlessly in the light, grays, whites, and blacks. He saw long shapes with jointed ends and the half curve of a jaw bone. He played the flashlight over the expanse of bodies, the scent now overwhelming.

“Oh my God,” Whitetip said beside him.

Springbok said, “Now we know where the personnel are.”

Kodiak walked up beside Jeffrey, one of the few people Jeffrey actually looked straight across at, and said in his Viking heritage accent, “It would seem they were one step ahead of us.”

“Which means we’re jammed up,” Springbok said.

“So what now?” Whitetip asked.

“We keep looking,” Jeffrey said. “This hangar is destroyed, but that doesn’t mean they all are.” He looked around. “Our
intel was for a classified installation of Lakota, but this is a well-known base out in the open. I wonder if there is another location nearby. Someplace that would not be known, not findable.”

Jeffrey played his flashlight back over the corpses. “I want to check the administration offices. As they left the hangar for the cooling desert air, Jeffrey felt glad to be away from the stench of charred flesh.

He assigned three groups to search hangars. “Marco come with me to the admin building.”

The door of the building stood partially open and half bent with a scorch mark on the outside. Jeffrey pulled it open with a metal-on-metal screech that echoed across the airfield. He listened for some time. He had no idea if there were Sthenos nearby, or if they had some kind of sensors on the base, but his gut told him, with an entire planet to dominate, they’d moved on.

Jeffrey stepped into the pitch-black office area, playing his flashlight across overturned desks, broken chairs, and a shattered water cooler. A glitter caught the light. Jeffrey walked over and crouched down over a woman’s patent leather flat.

Marco said, “There’s no power for the computers.”

“No,” Jeffrey stood beside him, “and we wouldn’t want to fire them up if we could. That could bring the world down around our ears.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jeffrey had his head down in thought. “I have no idea.”

“There,” Marco said simply.

“Where?” Jeffrey said looking around the room.

“I think we should check that shed.”

“Shed?” Jeffrey looked to Marco who was pointing out the window. To the south of the admin building Jeffrey saw a simple sheet metal shed. Someone had spray painted the word ‘HERE’ on its side.

“That’s odd,” Jeffrey said.

“Exactly.”

Going to the shed, they pulled open the door to find grounds keeping equipment. The interior, smelling of cut grass and algal fuel, still held the heat of the day. Jeffrey played the flashlight inside. The hand tools lay in a jumble against the back wall as though someone had thrown them there in great haste. Through the crossed handles of a shovel and a rake, Jeffrey saw more red spray paint. They both began throwing tools aside. Shovel heads clattered and rubberized handles thumped on the asphalt floor.

When they’d cleared everything away, they found two sets of words, but they were gibberish. The pattern was the same. Two nonsensical words, a degree symbol, two more words, then a minute symbol. Two more words and a seconds symbol.

“They’re GPS coordinates,” Jeffrey said.

“Exactly,” Marco said, “Here you have ‘ereht’ and ‘rofu’ for the degrees. Anagrams. Three & four. Thirty-four.”

“The Sthenos have little to no knowledge of our language, so it’s a quick code to keep them from knowing what’s what.”

“Looks like they didn’t even find it.”

“So someone left us a location.”

“Must be important.”

“Let’s hope it has what we need.”

Marco played his flashlight down to the floor where a dark swath trailed away to the door. Jeffrey and Marco had been so focused on the interior of the shed, they hadn’t realized they’d walked through blood. “Looks like,” Marco said, “our code talker got caught.”

…

Out on the tarmac, the twilight had faded to night. With no moon, the milky way arched over the horizons. Each team returned in the cooling air with the same report. All aircraft had been destroyed in all hangars.

“The first hangar appears to have been where all the personnel were gathered before being executed,” Whitetip said. “No other structures held bodies.”

When Jeffrey heard that, he knew something was wrong.

“How many people served on this base?” he asked the group.

No one knew.

“Not enough bodies?” Marco asked him.

“Exactly, not nearly enough to account for a base this big, which means that a good amount were either taken or escaped.”

Springbok spoke up again, “The burned bodies are higher ranking officers. I saw no enlisted insignia.”

“Strange…” Jeffrey fell into thought. After a moment, he said, “That means they either didn’t understand our ranking structure, which is doubtful, or weren’t looking for hostages.”

“Maybe
they culled authority,” Marco said. “Don’t take anyone who’ll rally the troops.”

“Perhaps,” Jeffrey said, “but I’m thinking more about age. Higher ranks go with longer terms of service. My gut tells me they’re collecting the younger and killing off the older.”

“Which lends itself to your theory of slavery,” Whitetip said.

“Exactly.” Jeffrey walked toward Marco’s transport. “Let’s get rolling.”

“Where?” Whitetip asked as she jogged to catch up.

“To follow a treasure map.”

…

After they’d loaded up, Marco flew into the darkness, his face glowing with the light of the instruments. The coordinates led them east into the mountains. Hills worn low with age lay shadowy in the rising moon, mottled with dark patches of mesquite and sage. After Marco touched down in a canyon, they filed off the transport. The walls of the canyon framed the night sky.

Looking at the mountains, Marco said, “I feel as though, at any moment, Sthenos fighters could come over those ridges and go to guns on us.”

“They could,” Jeffrey said.

In the dim light, Marco nodded.

Jeffrey said, “Scan the area folks. Look for anything unnatural, any evidence of an aircraft facility.”

Fanning out, their shapes faded into the black. Deep-red flashlights came on one at a time and played through the scrub oak.

“We might have to wait for daylight to find it,” Jeffrey said.

“I thought you wanted to be back in South America before morning.”

“We work with what we have.” Jeffrey clicked on his flashlight. “Let’s take a walk.”

After an hour of searching, Jeffrey called them back to the transport. When they’d all come aboard, Jeffrey lifted the ramp a few feet off the ground.

“That will keep the scorpions and tarantulas out. Now get some sleep.”

After the pilots had settled down shoulder to shoulder, Jeffrey sat on the end of the ramp watching them. Some drifted off to sleep, others lay with the faint whites of their eyes glowing in the darkness. These were solid men and women, quick to settle down. Jeffrey stretched his shoulders as he considered that strength is as much the ability to stay calm internally, put emotions aside to find stillness, as it is the ability to drive forward and kill, perhaps more so. He lay down, drew his breath in through his nose, and let it filter out his mouth. His mind tried to draw him back to the Lakota, the Sthenos, Leif, Sarah, Stacy. Each time, he’d let his breath out and whatever it was on his mind with it. Soon he fell into a dreamless sleep.