Authors: James Hunt,Roger Hayden
Samantha sat on her cot staring at her daughter, Annie, curled up next to her brother Jim’s cat, Tigs. She watched her little chest slowly rise and fall. The inside of the tent was grey with light as the sun outside struggled to break through the dawn. She rubbed her eyes with her palms, trying to remove the lost hours of sleep. Two weeks. It’d been two weeks since they arrived at the refugee camp. They had been plucked from their home in Phoenix and sent here. She had no idea where her husband Matt was and no idea when she would ever see him again.
Jim Farr poked his head through the tent door silently. “Hey.”
Samantha whipped her head around and threw her hand over her mouth, letting out a gasp. “Jesus, Jim.”
“Sorry.” Jim stepped inside and Tigs rushed over to him. He reached down, scooped her up, and scratched behind her ears. It was one of Tigs’s favorite spots. Jim placed her back down and glanced over to his sister, who was still watching Annie.
“We’ll find him, Sammy. Once the military gets their communications back up, they’ll be able to give us some more information,” Jim said.
“Yeah, because they were so willing to share things before everything went to shit,” she said.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to say that word,” Annie said. Her eyes opened slowly. She blinked away the sleep and stretched across the cot.
“You told Uncle Coyle he couldn’t say it,” Annie said.
“That’s because Uncle Coyle’s met his life quota for bad words. Your mom hasn’t,” Jim said.
“Have I met my quota?” Annie asked.
Samantha scooped Annie up from the cot.
“No, but that’s because you haven’t been given a quota yet,” Samantha replied.
Annie looked up at her mother and grinned, exposing her missing front tooth.
“When do I get mine?” Annie asked.
“When you’re thirty, and that’s also when you’re allowed to get married,” Jim said.
“Uncle Jim’s kidding. It’ll be when you’re forty,” Samantha said.
Coyle tore open the tent flaps and poked his head inside. His eyebrows were raised and his wild hair stood out in all directions. He looked like a mad scientist. “Breakfast line’s getting long,” he said. “I don’t want to have to wait thirty minutes like we did yesterday because somebody couldn’t get out of bed.” He looked accusingly at Annie, who giggled.
“What’s on the menu today?” Jim asked.
“Well, Monday was grey mush. Tuesday was white mush.” He rubbed his chin and then looked at Jim with over-exaggerated excitement on his face. “You think we’ll get the charcoal mush today?”
Jim led the group over to the breakfast line. They passed other families, loners, and soldiers crawling out of their army-issued relief tents and stretching their bodies in the morning sun.
Jim had seen more people arriving every day. They came from Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas; there wasn’t a major city in the southwest United States, or the entire country for that matter, that didn’t get hit by some sort of attack. He heard rumors of camps similar to their own on the outskirts of cities all around the country. Any time he asked what was going on, however, he was met with the calculated response of, “we’re working on it.” He just wasn’t sure what “it” was.
When Jim got to the front and held out his tray, the man in the hairnet slopped a pile of bland mush onto his plate. Coyle leaned over with a frown on his face. “Damn. And I was really hoping it’d be the charcoal mush.”
Before Jim could scout a table for everyone to sit at, two MPs slammed into him, knocking his tray to the floor. Jim watched them make a beeline for Samantha and Annie behind him, still in line for breakfast.
“Samantha Kearny?” the taller MP asked.
Samantha pushed Annie behind her. Her daughter wrapped her arms around her mother’s legs, peeking up at the MPs between her mom’s knees. “Yes?”
“We need you and your daughter to come with us,” the shorter MP said.
Jim wedged himself in between the two MPs and the girls. “What’s this about?”
“Sir, please stay back,” the shorter MP said.
The shorter MP reached for Jim’s shoulder, but Jim knocked the MP’s hand out of the way. The taller MP went straight for his pistol, and Jim kicked the side of his knee, collapsing him to the ground. Jim pulled the pistol out of the MP’s holster and clicked the safety off, pointing it at the shorter MP, who had his hand hovering over his pistol.
“Don’t,” Jim said.
The breakfast line had stopped moving. The crowd around Jim had spread out. People had their empty trays pressed against their chests like shields. The soldiers in hairnets behind the counter stood frozen over their vats of slimy meat. A rustling in the back of the crowd caught Jim’s attention.
“Out of the way, move!” a voice shouted.
A brash sergeant burst through the frontline of the crowd with a group of four soldiers with him. Jim kept the pistol aimed between the two MPs he disarmed. The sergeant and the rest of his men un-holstered their weapons. The sergeant inched closer, but Jim didn’t flinch. Not even when the barrel of the sergeant’s Smith and Wesson 9mm was jammed into the side of his temple.
“Drop it, fucker,” the sergeant said.
Jim glanced around the men circling him. He let the pistol go limp in his hand and handed it back to the MP he took it from. The sergeant grabbed Jim’s arms and threw them around his back, cuffed him, and slammed his face into the ground. Jim saw the other soldiers grab Samantha and Annie. The sergeant pointed a finger at Coyle.
“He comes, too,” he said.
The remaining solider lifted Coyle up between his armpits and dragged him from the breakfast line. “But I didn’t get to finish my mush!” Coyle said.
Jim was taken into a separate tent and shackled to a chair. The MP he disarmed made sure to give him a nice pop in the stomach before he left. Once the MP left, an officer in fatigues entered the tent. Jim could only make out Locke’s silhouette, the circling smoke that rose from the tip of his cigar, and the four stars shining on his hat from the sunlight at the entrance of the tent.
“Jim Farr, former officer and specialist in Navy Intelligence. Honorably discharged after twelve years of service and three combat tours during which he earned twenty commendations, two Purple Hearts, and the Navy Cross,” Locke stated.
Jim saw that Locke was reading from a file. He paced around Jim, puffing on his cigar and intently focused on the contents of the file in his hands.
“Now why the hell would someone who was awarded the Navy Cross attack two MPs at a military refugee camp?” Locke asked.
“The military and I haven’t really seen eye to eye over the past few years, General,” Jim answered.
Locke chewed on the end of the cigar. “I can see that.”
Locke’s assistant Chris dragged a chair inside the tent with him and handed Locke another file. Jim could hear the creaks of the chair stressing under Locke’s weight. “Goddamn, I’ve gotten fat,” Locke said.
Jim had never had patience for admirals, generals, or commanders. They had long left the trenches of battle where Jim had spent most of his career. Jim surveyed the heavyset man in front of him with the cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes finally came to rest on the nametag of the general’s fatigues.
“General Locke?” Jim asked.
“We can talk about your father later, Farr. We have other pressing issues to worry about.”
Locke motioned to Jim’s cuffs. “You can take those off,” he said.
“General, I highly suggest—” Chris said.
“Dammit, Chris, he’s not going to kill me. Take the cuffs off,” Locke said.
Chris hesitated for a moment, then walked over and set Jim’s hands free. Jim rubbed his wrists and Locke handed him a photograph.
“That’s your brother in-law, Matt Kearny. He was picked up during the evacuation of Phoenix two weeks ago. Do you know what he does?” asked Locke.
Jim looked at the photo of Matt in his hands. It had been taken somewhere in a downtown area. “He’s an engineer for some software company.”
“PamTech. They’re one of the military’s largest contractors. They handle a lot of our digital security platforms. Your brother-in-law was one of their lead engineers who handled a majority of our accounts. Our CIA boys picked him up and have him in a holding cell just east of Phoenix,” Locke replied.
“You think he has something to do with all of these attacks?”
“That’s something I was hoping you could help me with. Matt was in charge of all of PamTech’s digital security functions. He has a security clearance higher than anyone in the company, and we need him to grant us access to those files to see if they’ve been tampered with.”
“Why don’t you just break through their firewall? I know the military has enough resources to do it.”
“We tried, but the files aren’t on their network. We think they’re on a stand-alone hard drive. We need Matt to tell us where it is.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Jim, we’re running out of time. If we don’t get that data, then we could be open for more attacks. Hell, we still have riots happening all over the country. We need—”
“How long?” Jim repeated.
“Two weeks.”
Jim clenched his jaw. His hands curled into fists, crumpling the edges of the photo. He looked to Locke, but not before he noticed Chris’s hand at the firearm on his hip. “My sister has been asking about him since she got here, and each time you told us you didn’t know.”
“Well, depending on who you asked, that was true. Besides us, there are only a handful of people who know where he is and what this is about.”
“You want me to convince him to give you the hard drive,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
Jim’s hands relaxed. He smoothed out the edges of the photo he crumpled. “My sister and niece get to see him before I help you.”
“Done. You leave today.”
Jim extended the photo back to Locke.
“Jim, we need that drive,” Locke said.
Jim’s grip tightened on the photo when Locke tried to pull it away. “And my niece needs her father.”
Locke tapped his cigar with his finger. Bits of ash sprinkled to the floor. He gave a weary smile. “Let’s hope we both get what we want.”
Upon his release, Jim was met outside by Annie, Samantha, and Coyle. They each had a million questions, but mostly Coyle. Jim pulled Samantha to the side out of earshot from the others. “They have Matt,” Jim said.
“What? Where is he?” she asked.
“The military want something he was working on for his company. I think they were going to use you and Annie as leverage to get what they want.”
“They can’t do that!”
“Hey, we need to be smart.” The soldiers around the tents kept eyeing Jim suspiciously. “They want me to convince Matt to give them the information they’re looking for.”
“And what happens if you can’t convince him?”
Jim looked over at Annie, huddled next to Coyle. She had her arms wrapped around his leg and was glancing up at the soldiers around her. Jim saw Samantha follow his line of sight.
“Oh God,” she said.
“It won’t come to that.”
“It might,” a stern, cold voice said from behind him. When Jim turned around, he saw the same sergeant who had his gun against his temple no less than twenty minutes ago. “You give me any trouble on this trip and I’ll put a bullet in your head, right after I make you watch me put one in each of one of them,” the sergeant said.