The Clone Apocalypse (25 page)

FORTY-FIVE

Wearing goggles that scanned for electronics and heat signatures, Petty Officer Samuel Naens crouched between a bush and the stucco wall that separated Pugh’s mansion from the beach. He flipped his goggles to his forehead and rummaged through his backpack for the tiny Communications Disruption Device he’d packed before leaving New Copenhagen. CDDs “sludged” all open-air communications in a target area, blocking radio and phone signals alike.

Satisfied that the CDD would prevent Pugh’s men from coordinating, the diminutive SEAL pulled himself over the seven-foot outer wall in a single fluid motion, landing as silently and gracefully as a cat. He found himself in a shadow-filled corner of the yard, his dark skin blending in with the night.

With the CDD sludging the airwaves, Naens and Baker couldn’t communicate, but they had synchronized their responsibilities. Naens’s job was to enter the house through the back and disable any guards he located. If he ran into Pugh, he would disable him as well.

Having entered Pugh’s backyard, Naens paused behind a tree and searched for dogs. Moments passed, then three black and rust-colored Rottweilers charged around a corner of the house. Naens shot them with tranqs, hitting their necks, silencing them instantly.

One of the guards, a big heavy man, spotted the sleeping dogs and went to investigate. He tried to radio the other guards, but no one answered. Aiming his M27 into the yard, he headed down the hill, and Naens slipped behind him like a cat on the prowl, pressed a foot into the back of the big man’s knee, forcing it to buckle, then slipped an arm across his throat and choked him. Naens could have killed the man more quickly and easily, but Harmer had told him not to kill the guards unless absolutely necessary.

Naens dragged the unconscious guard under the deck at the back of the house. He found a door that led to a storage area, picked the lock, and tossed the limp guard and the sleeping dogs inside.

*   *   *

Petty Officer Jeff Baker watched the property from three houses away, hoping that more guards would enter the yard. Slipping past inattentive guards would be easier than subduing them inside the house. Watching the relaxed way in which these men guarded the property, occasionally glancing up and down the street as they chatted, irritated Baker.
Dereliction of duty,
he thought. They were imbeciles. They were dumb thugs who hadn’t been challenged for too long. They were ripe for the picking.

Baker stole through one lot, then another, approaching Pugh’s home from the south. The sky had the golden glow of the late-afternoon sun. The elongated shadows of the trees stretched the length of the lots he crossed.
A mountain beside a sea,
he thought.
How beautiful.

He heard the softest yelp and knew that Naens had squelched the dogs. He heard a quiet rustle and knew that Naens had squelched a guard as well. Baker leaped the wall that surrounded Pugh’s yard, slipped into the garage through a window, and entered the house from inside the garage.

He crouched and waited in the darkened entryway, blending into the shadows, watching a guard pour himself a glass of water just eight feet away. The man wore a shoulder holster from which hung a pistol.

He could have tranqed the man, but the glass of water posed a problem. Glasses falling on ceramic kitchen tiles made noise and attracted attention. The man was looking away, enjoying the view of the ocean as he drank. Baker waited, poised in the shadows, taking long, slow breaths.

Still staring out the back window, the man lowered his glass. Baker rose to his feet, watched and waited until the gangster placed his glass on the kitchen counter, then the SEAL sprang, covering the distance to target in a single second, reaching a hand over the man’s mouth and chin, holding his tranq pistol an inch from the man’s spine and squeezing the trigger. The unconscious guard went limp, and Baker gently lowered him to his knees, then scooped him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and left him curled on the pantry floor.

Killing him would have been easier,
he thought, but Baker always followed orders.

He moved over to the living room.

The house wasn’t quite a mansion, but it came close. Baker paused to admire the large chandelier that hung over the grand staircase leading to the second floor, then he scanned the living room and the main entrance. He was looking for guards but had enough presence of mind to appreciate the architecture.

The house had two main floors and a lower subfloor that opened onto the backyard.

Baker stole back toward the kitchen and down the dim hallway that led to the bedrooms. He heard a man yell, “What the speck! My phone ain’t working.

“Hey, Greg, let me see your phone. I want to see if it works.”

A woman stepped out of a doorway. She was skinny and blond with short hair. To Baker, who considered himself only marginally more attractive than most insects, the woman looked beautiful. He slid back, out of the doorway, and hid in the shadows. If the woman stepped into the room, he would “disable” her. He hoped she would stay clear.

The man started yelling again. He said, “Yo, Greg, are you out there?”

“It’s me,” said the woman. “Greg’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

She said, “I don’t know. Maybe he went outside,” as she walked past the door without peering into the room. Baker watched her, gave her a moment, then slipped into the hall. She might have turned into the kitchen or possibly gone up the stairs.

The man was probably Pugh, judging by the command in his tone. He headed down the stairs to the subfloor. That made him Naens’s problem.

Baker hid low, remained in the shadows, and waited. He heard the man say, “Hey! Who the speck are you?”

“Brandon, is everything okay?” The woman glided down the stairs, stepped into the hall, and Baker choked her into unconsciousness without leaving so much as a bruise. It only took a moment. He carried her into the pantry and lowered her beside the man . . . Greg.

Three of the men from the front entered the house. One yelled, “Hey, Brandon, are you having trouble with your phone? Brandon?”

Baker waited until they closed the door behind them, then he tranqed them and dragged them to the walk-in pantry. He thought,
This is a big pantry.
But the floor was filling up. He stacked the men on top of each other and left the pretty woman a respectable space, then he sprinted down the stairs leading to the lower part of the house. Pugh and Naens waited at the bottom of the stairs. Naens said, “Brandon here is an agreeable fellow. When I told him that Ray Freeman and Wayson Harris wanted a word with him, he even offered to drive.

“How did it go upstairs?”

Baker said, “About as expected.”

Pugh asked, “How many of my guards did you butcher?”

Baker said, “None.”

“You didn’t touch them?”

“Sorry, when you said ‘butcher,’ I thought you meant ‘kill.’ I knocked out four guards and a woman.”

“That would be my niece,” said Pugh. “Did you hurt her?”

“Not a scratch on her,” said Baker.

“Lucky you,” said Pugh. “She’s Harris’s girl. He wouldn’t have taken kindly if she showed up with a black eye.”

FORTY-SIX

“D’you find any uniforms?” Harmer asked when Naens reported.

They were in Pugh’s car, just leaving the neighborhood. The sun had finally set. The streetlights had switched on though the sky was too bright for them to matter. In the way of tropic skies, the horizon was filled with streaks of purple and orange against a glowing red background.

One of Pugh’s bodyguards drove. Pugh sat in the passenger seat. Naens and Baker sat in the back. Naens leaned forward, and said, “Excuse me, do you know if the Unified Authority has any installations here?”

“You kidding?” asked Pugh. “Last time Harris and Freeman came through, they massacred the Unifieds and all of their buddies. I ain’t seen so much as an ant wearing U.A. colors since.”

“Did you hear that? Even the ants are out of uniform,” Naens told Harmer.

“Not a problem; we’ll borrow a uniform from one of their guards when they arrive.”

“Which one of us is changing sides?” asked Baker.

“I am,” said Harmer.

Including the times when they’d had to hide, Naens and Baker spent forty minutes running from the airstrip to town. The drive back took ten. Naens identified himself and the car using his headset, and a couple of SEALs opened the gate and let them in.

Pugh asked, “You got guards watching the airstrip?”

“We have guards watching the road, too,” said Baker. “I spotted Warsol a half mile back.”

Pugh said, “My compliments to your sergeant; he runs a tight ship. So what would have happened if we didn’t identify ourselves?”

When neither SEAL answered, Pugh said, “That’s what I thought.”

They parked in the hangar. The man who met them as they climbed out of the car was neither SEAL nor natural-born. He stood five-two, and his fingers ended in claws, but he had pale skin, blue eyes, and a smooth but macrocephalic brow.

Naens said, “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Major Joseph Conlon, Unified Authority Army,” said Harmer.

“Who’s that?” asked Baker.

“Some guy Freeman killed back in D.C. I got his ID and papers,” said Harmer.

“Too bad you don’t have his uniform,” said Naens.

“Was Conlon’s head shaped like a mushroom?” asked Baker.

“I don’t know what he looked like,” Harmer admitted. “How do I look?”

“Your head’s shaped like a mushroom, and the Army doesn’t enlist midgets,” said Naens. “Other than that, you look good.”

“There’s nothing I can do about my forehead; I need to cover up my brow,” said Harmer. He sounded defensive.

“In that case, you look good,” said Naens.

While the SEALs spoke, Freeman and Watson emerged from the Explorer. They walked over to Pugh. Watson and Pugh were nearly the same height; Freeman had seven inches on both of them.

“Where’s Harris?” asked Pugh.

“He’s in the plane,” said Freeman. Freeman and Pugh knew each other well enough to have a healthy mistrust. Watson had never met Pugh, but he didn’t trust him, either.

“Waiting for me to come to him?” asked Pugh, who was both astute and crooked. “First, he sends his goons to grab me, now he’s too important to meet my car; things must be going well.” He lifted an eyebrow, and said, “Sounds like our boy is king of the world.”

Harmer and his SEALs never joined in on the conversation; they didn’t believe they had anything to add. Watson had Emily wait in the cockpit. If anything went wrong, he wanted to keep her hidden away and safe.

Pugh entered the ship and saw Harris stretched out on the floor with a drip line attached to his arm. He bobbed his head amiably, and said, “He looks peaceful.”

“He should,” said Freeman. “The mixture going in his arm is one-tenth morphine.”

“Morphine?” Watson asked. “I thought you were hydrating him.”

Pugh stared down at Harris, and said, “That explains the smile. Why are you trying to make him an addict?”

“Addiction isn’t the problem,” Freeman said as he told Pugh about the flu. “He wouldn’t have had the strength to fly here if he weren’t having a continuous combat reflex.

“You’ve heard of Volga and New Albatross,” said Freeman. Those were former U.A. colonies. New Albatross was a prison colony; Volga was an impoverished backwater world—the colony Howard Tasman once called home. When the inmates on New Albatross rioted, the Unified Authority sent Liberator clones to restore order. When the citizens of Volga tried to abandon their planet, Liberators were sent to guard the spaceport. Both incidents resulted in civilian massacres.

Pugh knew about both massacres. Everyone knew about them; they occupied a dark place in the public consciousness.

Freeman said, “Massacres happen when the combat reflex goes too long. If we keep him luded long enough, he might come out of this without paranoid delusions.”

Harris stirred. He turned his head but didn’t open his eyes.

Pugh knelt beside him and pried one of his eyelids up, a trick he had learned for dealing with overdosing lude jockeys. He asked, “Harris, you planning on dying?”

Harris mumbled something incoherent.

Watson said, “We need to get him to a hospital.”

“He’ll survive,” said Freeman.

Pugh said, “All we’re talking about is a head cold and a little dehydration here. For a guy like this, that ought to be a snap; I mean, he survived a bullet in his gut last time I saw him.”

“Are you going to help us?” asked Freeman.

Pugh answered, “Why would I put my money on a dead horse; there’s no percentage in it.”

“He’s not dead,” said Watson.

“What’s the difference? He doesn’t have his army, and you say the Unies are coming to get him,” said Pugh. “That makes him as good as dead.”

“Are you a fan of the Unified Authority?” asked Watson.

“Not especially,” said Pugh.

“From what I hear, the Unifieds like your enemies more than they like you,” said Watson.

“Something like that,” Pugh agreed as he rose to his feet.

“If Harris survives this
head cold
, he’ll have a score to settle with the Unifieds,” said Watson. “If he dies, you have a problem. If he lives, the Unified Authority has a problem.”

“He’s not the kind of guy who turns the other cheek,” Pugh agreed.

Freeman said, “He’ll be more effective if he’s sane. We need to keep him from having a combat reflex as long as possible.”

“I got drugs. I got plenty of drugs,” said Pugh. “You want me to set him up?”

“Set him up,” that sums it up perfectly,
thought Watson.

FORTY-SEVEN

Date: August 23, 2519

“There’s supposed to be a guy there named Franklin Nailor,” said Brandon Pugh. “Is he around?”

Pugh knew he wasn’t. Nailor was more than dead; he was profoundly dead. Wayson Harris had shot him and hidden him in a trash container in an undersea city that the Enlisted Man’s Navy destroyed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

“Who is this?” asked the officer on the other end of the line.

“The name’s Brandon Pugh; pleased to meet you,” said Pugh.

“What is this about?”

The conversation had reached the point when Pugh would draw most on his ability to lie. The Unified Authority had seized control of Washington, D.C., but they hadn’t yet declared their victory. Pugh, living in the New Olympian Territories, shouldn’t have known that the clones were dead.

“I got a clone I want to give you,” said Pugh.

“You wish to give Unified Authority Strategic Command a clone?” asked the officer. He sounded stiff and suspicious.

“Is that where I’m calling? I got this line address from Frank Nailor a few months ago. He told me he was U.A., but he didn’t tell me he worked in Strategic Command. I guess he’s an important guy.”

The officer didn’t seem interested in chatting. He said, “Are you calling to report a corpse?”

“No, this one’s still alive,” said Pugh.

The officer on the other end of the line wasn’t in the know. Sounding surprised, he said, “You still have a live one. Let me ask about that.”

*   *   *

The next call came ten minutes later. When Pugh answered, the officer on the other end said, “Mr. Pugh, this is Major General Trevor Ormonde. I understand you have a clone in your custody. Is that correct, sir?”

“Hey, General, I’m not exactly ‘the police,’”said Pugh. “I don’t keep people in my custody.”

“As I understand it, you’re not the territorial governor, either,” said the general, a certain note of dislike in his tone.

“Not me. I’m just a private citizen.”

“Okay, Private Citizen, how exactly did you come into the possession of a clone?”

“He came to me,” said Pugh. “He flew into my airport.”

Something Pugh said seemed to have tweaked the general’s imagination. He looked ready to jump out of his chair. “How much do you know about military clones, Mr. Pugh? Would you be able to identify if this clone is a Liberator?”

“I don’t know if he’s a Liberator, but he says his name is Wayson Harris. Are you boys looking for Wayson Harris?”

Having spent his entire life dealing in drugs and prostitution, Pugh knew when the fish were hooked and how to reel them in.

“Mr. Pugh, according to your files, you have . . . er, an organization,” said General Ormonde.

“Yeah, I got an organization; that’s how come I know Nailor.”

“Do you think your men can keep Harris locked up for the next few hours?”

“For the next few hours, for the next few days, for the rest of his synthetic life, no problem. The man’s dying, for crying out loud. We got him in a hospital bed. He wants me to help him hide.”

Ormonde said, “You’d better place armed guards around his room. Lock the door from the outside and place armed guards in the hall. Harris is a dangerous man, Mr. Pugh. Don’t underestimate him.”

Pugh smiled, and said, “He’s not causing any problems; we’ve got him on drugs. Come in a wig, and he’ll think you’re his mother.”

*   *   *

Ormonde sent two transports.

Freeman and Harmer watched from a blind outside the airfield. Freeman watched the scene through a sniper scope. Harmer used field goggles. He asked Freeman, “Did they need two transports to pick up one sick clone?”

Freeman didn’t answer.

They watched as fifty enlisted men, eight officers, two Jackals, one jeep, and an armored personnel carrier rolled off the transports. The soldiers organized quickly and boarded the vehicles.

A third transport arrived five minutes later, dropping out of the sky and landing beside them. This one brought soldiers and officers but no vehicles. After the third transport landed, one of the first transports took off.

“Ummmm, now they have an entire company,” said Harmer. “I hope they’re from different units. This will go a whole lot easier if they don’t all know each other.”

Harmer had the flesh-colored face of a natural-born and the gray-tinted body of a SEAL. He sat with his shirt off, waiting for the U.A. uniform in which he would change identities.

Most of the officers and a full platoon remained behind to guard the field. As one of the officers wandered off on his own, Warsol and Jorgensen crept up from behind and snapped his neck. They carried him behind the fuel depot, stripped off his clothes, and stuffed his body into a Dumpster. Baker handed his uniform to Petty Officer Libenson, whose skill set including forgery. Fifteen minutes later, Libenson delivered the uniform to Harmer, having resized it.

Harmer had the face of a natural-born and the uniform of a major in the Unified Authority Army. He wore thick white gloves to cover his fingers.

He asked Freeman, “How do I look?”

Freeman didn’t answer, but Naens did. He said, “You’re the ugliest natural-born I’ve ever seen.”

“But I do look natural-born,” said Harmer.

Naens agreed.

Disguised as Major Joseph Conlon, Harmer prepared to join the Unifieds. He asked Freeman, “Any last words of wisdom to give me?”

Freeman said, “Be careful around Harris; he does stupid things when he’s desperate.”

*   *   *

Major Conlon slipped through a hole in the fence and walked across the airfield. He approached a sergeant reclining in a jeep, lounging in the sun. “Well now, Sergeant, you look a tad bit too comfortable,” said the major. “How about you get your sunbathing ass in gear and drive me to the hospital?”

Woken from his revelry, the sergeant saluted, and apologized. He said, “Sir, my orders were to wait here in reserve.”

“Yeah, well, consider yourself called to active duty. I need to get to the hospital rapid, quick, and pronto.”

Conlon had beautifully forged orders from Major General Trevor Ormonde instructing him to oversee the transport of the prisoner, but he wouldn’t present those orders to the sergeant. He was a major. In the Unified Authority Army, majors didn’t explain themselves to sergeants.

The sergeant drove directly to the hospital, arriving ten minutes before the rest of the convoy, which had stopped to visit the capitol. When the transport team arrived at the hospital, Conlon strutted up to the captain in charge and presented his orders.

Having replaced the captain, Conlon led the transport team to Harris’s hospital room, where he checked to make sure Pugh had given Harris the special thermal pack that Warsol had built for the occasion. He threatened Pugh’s niece and ordered his squad to strap Harris into his traveling chair.

As they left the hospital room, Conlon made a show of inspecting the thermal pack. He took it, tossed it, removed the chemical stick, and added a note as he replaced the stick. The note landed safely on top of the temperature-absorbent marbles, but Conlon wondered if Harris would find it before it sank into the gel.

Even after they arrived at the Naval Consolidation Brig, Conlon oversaw Harris’s incarceration. He accompanied Harris to the infirmary, saw the fear in the Liberator’s eyes when he realized he was being prepped for an incapacitation cage. He recommended giving Harris “exercise periods” and “latrine privileges” to Reid, the NCB warden.

When Sunny showed up at the prison, Conlon admitted her into his cell. When Harris nearly sliced her in half, it was Harmer, still dressed as Major Joseph Conlon, who told Harris, “Freeman said you’d do something stupid.”