ANOM: Awakening (The ANOM Series Book 1) (3 page)

Jeremy
reached the boy just before the bus. He bent down, grabbed him by the back of
the coat, and in one motion he jerked the boy up and threw him back toward the
sidewalk. But then Jeremy was out of time. He dropped to his knee, looked away,
and covered his head with both his hands, ready for the impact. He could hear
Kate start to scream, but then her voice was lost in the dull, sick crunch of
crushing metal. Then silence.

Jeremy
blinked open his eyes. Inches from his face he saw the front corner of the bus
cutting into the blue driver’s-side door of one of the parked cars, and he
thought for a second that the bus had missed him. At the last possible moment
it must have veered to the right and hit the car and missed him…only it didn’t.
He had felt it. The sudden impact of the bus and then the weight and the
pressure, like someone was trying to push him.

He
looked to his right. All he could see was the yellow radiator and black bumper
of the bus, the steel bent and warped around his body in a concave shell where
he knelt on the ground. He reached up and touched the metal next to his face.
Then he recoiled his hand.

Jeremy
staggered up to his feet and reeled back from the accident. He couldn’t catch
his breath. He was hyperventilating, gasping, fighting to take in air. He felt
someone grab his arm. It was Kate. She was saying something. He heard her
voice, but he couldn’t follow the words. Why couldn’t he breathe?

A
sudden thought; Jeremy looked down at his chest. Maybe he was cut, bleeding. He
saw red, but his coat was red. Was he bleeding? He slapped his hand up to his
chest. It was dry. No blood. Kate jerked on his arm again, and Jeremy turned
back to look at her. He could see her panic.

“I
can’t breathe,” he said between gasps. “Katie, I can’t breathe.” His vision
suddenly blurred into fuzzy gray, and he could feel his legs give out as he
collapsed back into the street. His ears were ringing. Jeremy squeezed his eyes
shut, and then opened them, forcing himself to focus. He could see Kate
kneeling next to him in the road. Her mouth was moving, and he knew she was
saying something, but all he could hear was the ringing.

Jeremy
swallowed hard and managed a last whispered word, “Kate,” but then his eyes
blurred again, and it was darkness.

Major
Stuart Ellison stood at ease near the back wall of the command center, his feet
spaced perfectly shoulder-width apart and his hands clasped tightly behind his
back. It was a posture adopted out of his own choice more than necessity. Years
of service had made the forced position of parade rest like second nature to him,
and now it was the only way Ellison could stand in the room and still feel some
measure of comfort.

 Certainly
no one had ordered Ellison to stand there. He was the most senior ranking
officer in the room, and the executive officer for the battalion. All 3,000 men
currently serving at Fort Blaney were directly under his command, and only one,
Colonel Edward McCann, had the authority to order him to “snap to,” but the
colonel had yet to arrive.

Like
the other men in the command center, Ellison wore gray camouflage, and like the
other men, he was young and fit. His haircut was standard issue: shaved to the
skin on the sides with a buzz of brown hair left on top. His dark-brown eyes
were unremarkable, and his height was only average. In fact, the only thing setting
Ellison apart from his men was the brown oak leaf sewn to his collar.

He
scanned the room. The command center at Fort Blaney was state of the art; it
had to be for their mission. At the center of the room, a long wooden
conference table with high-backed leather chairs dominated the floor. There was
enough seating for a dozen men, but currently only four of the chairs were
occupied. Each of these four men sat in front of an open laptop, quietly
tapping away at their keyboards. The side walls of the room were lined with
flat-screen monitors, four mounted on either side, and on the far wall,
opposite Ellison, there was another monitor dwarfing the rest; the men simply
called it “The Big Screen.”

The
command center served as the information lifeline for Fort Blaney. It was the
only room on site with access to the internet, live television, or outside
phone lines. There were no other connections between the command center and the
computer network on base; the men in the command center called it an air-wall,
and it was a simple solution to a complex problem: safeguarding information.
The command center was the only room on base that could be hacked from the
outside, and who cares if you get hacked if there’s no sensitive information to
find? Even the laptops used in the room got traded out and re-formatted every
five days.

As
for the command center’s purpose? If Ellison were pressed, he would have to
admit he wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked. He was told that a complex
algorithm cycled through all available media, searching everything from local
newscasts to hacked foreign spy satellites, always looking for some preordained
combination of words, images, and facial recognition markers. Whatever that
meant.

Four
teams of analysts monitored the command center every hour of every day. They
would check the search results, run research simulations, track down leads, and
filter out any false positives with old-fashioned common-sense. Ellison
considered it tedious work with little reward, and he was glad the job wasn’t
his. But on rare occasions, if the information warranted it, the analysts would
pass a result up the chain of command. Like today.

Ellison
looked at the officer seated in the chair to his right. “Lieutenant Brown, I
want the subject’s history profile in my hand in the next sixty seconds,
including his hospital admission record.”

Brown
snapped his reply without looking up from the laptop, “Yes, sir.”

“Sir,
do you want those documents up on the big screen?” The question came from
Ellison’s left, from Captain Reyes, the watch officer.

Ellison
turned. “Negative. Not necessary, Captain.”

“Sir.”
Lieutenant Brown stood at attention in front of the major, holding out an
electronic tablet. Ellison reached for it, glanced down quickly at the screen,
and then returned his hands behind his back. Lieutenant Brown turned on his
heels in a perfect “about, face” and went back to the table.

Ellison
watched him with a critical eye. Brown was a competent soldier, and in the end
it was that competence that mattered most, but still, somehow his “sir” came
out as too crisp, almost mocking. Besides, even if Ellison could fool himself
into believing the lieutenant’s “sir,” the “about, face” by Brown confirmed it.
No one marched in the command center. It was insubordination, subtle but
unmistakable, and Ellison would handle it. Later.

At
thirty-two years old, Stuart Ellison was considered young, maybe even too young
to be a major, but he also knew it was the rank he deserved—the rank he had
earned. Besides, he spent all his life being “too young.” He had graduated a
year early from high school at seventeen. He spent the next four years as a
cadet at the Citadel, and then, after graduation, he accepted his commission as
a second lieutenant in the US Army. He was twenty-one at the time. Three years
later, and he made captain.

Ellison
always knew he would be a captain, but even he was surprised at how quickly the
promotion came. It was Colonel McCann who recommended him for the rank. The two
of them were serving in Afghanistan.
Major
McCann was in charge of a
squadron then, and Ellison was one of his captains.

“Best
damn captain I’ve ever had.” That’s what McCann wrote on his first performance
evaluation, and it was the truth. Ellison earned a reputation for being tough
on his men, but fair. Quick with criticism, but quicker with praise. A natural
leader. So, when Major McCann received his promotion to lieutenant colonel, it
came as little surprise to Ellison that the colonel wanted him along for the
ride.

Still,
this last step proved more difficult. Years of tradition demanded majors be
older than thirty, but the colonel wouldn’t be dissuaded from his choice.
McCann had to cash in every chip he earned over his sixteen-year career, but in
the end he got his way, and Stuart Ellison became a major and the colonel’s
EX-O.

The
job turned out to be exactly what Ellison expected. They got a month under
their belts with the 5th Battalion at Fort Stewart, and then they received
their orders to deploy to Fort Blaney.

*****

“Fort
Blaney, sir? I’ve never heard of it.” Ellison stood inside McCann’s office at
Fort Stewart.

The
colonel stood up and walked around his desk. “No, Stuart. You wouldn’t have.”

Colonel
McCann was the only person who still called Ellison by his first name, and the
only person Ellison allowed the privilege.

McCann
continued, “Fort Blaney isn’t one of those bases we advertise to the world on
Wikipedia, but trust me, the people who need to know about it, they know.”

“Where
is it, sir?”

“Near
Morgantown, West Virginia. Just south of the Pennsylvania border.”

“A
domestic deployment, sir?”

McCann’s
jaw tightened. “Do you have a problem with those orders, major?”

Ellison
snapped to rigid attention. “No, sir.”

McCann
went on, his words spitting out in the short rhythm of a superior officer. “Our
orders are to deploy to Fort Blaney, and that’s what we’re going to do, without
question. That’s our mission, and I expect you to treat it as
a mission.
Understood, major?”

“Yes,
sir.”

McCann
paused, letting the silence fill the empty space between them. Then his voice
lost its rougher edge. “Go tell the men to pack their bags. We leave at 0900
tomorrow.”

*****

As
far as Ellison was concerned, his time at Fort Blaney was going just as he
imagined. It wasn’t perfect, not entirely. He could admit that much now. Two
years ago, when they arrived, he wasn’t ready for the mission specifics.
Honestly, how could he have been? But the routine, the day-to-day life on a
military base, Ellison lived for that. That part never changed, and he loved
that it never changed.

But
Ellison also knew that he was born for life in the Army, and routines could
affect the men in different ways. So Ellison wasn’t surprised when he noticed
the battalion start to change. That was part of the routine too. He was waiting
for it. He had seen it before at the Citadel. He saw it again in Afghanistan.
The same routine, over and over and over—it all had an impact.

It
always started simply enough. A late salute when walking past a superior
officer, or someone forgets the “sir” when answering a direct question. Little
things. Silly things, maybe. Details too small for other men to notice. All
symptoms of a bigger disease.

Ellison
understood why it happened—why it always happened. The mocking. The
second-guessing. And eventually, the outright insubordination, but knowing the
reasons couldn’t excuse the behavior.

Part
of the problem was his age. Ellison was barely older than the men he was asked
to lead. It didn’t help that he looked even younger. Ellison knew it was
difficult for any man to put his faith in someone who looked like their younger
brother. That’s what happened at the Citadel.

Ellison
was a senior, and one of the freshman knobs took to calling him Sergeant Stuey.
The kid didn’t even try to hide it. He said it right to Ellison’s face. So
Ellison warned the kid once, but the knob didn’t listen. He kept at it until
one day he “slipped” in the bathroom and broke his jaw. After that, it was hard
for him to say anything.

The
other problem was familiarity. If you spend enough time with a man, regardless
of rank, you start to think of yourselves as equals. Maybe even friends. The
trouble was friends get privileges that soldiers can’t afford.

When
Ellison was a first lieutenant in Afghanistan, his best friend was a guy named
Cordrey, another lieutenant in the same platoon. But when Ellison got his
promotion to captain, Cordrey made the mistake of thinking they could still be
friends. One night, out on patrol, Ellison gave an order. Cordrey questioned
it. So, when they got back to Bagram Airfield, Ellison had the man arrested for
insubordination. Problem solved.

And
now Ellison had Lieutenant Brown mocking him in the command center. He knew the
lax behavior in the men had been festering for weeks, but until now, no one had
been so obvious. In a way, Ellison was relieved that it finally happened. Now
Lieutenant Brown could serve as an example, and life at Blaney could get back
to normal—back to routine.

Ellison
caught a quick movement out of the corner of his eye. Instantly he snapped his
heels together, brought his hands to his sides, and stood at rigid attention.
In the next moment, the glass door separating the inner command center from the
observation lounge swung open, and Colonel McCann stepped into the room.
Ellison raised a quick salute.

McCann
walked briskly to the major, returned his salute, and then ordered the room,
“At ease.” Like the rest of the men, the colonel wore gray camouflage with his
sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He carried his black mug with him into the
room, an almost permanent fixture in his right hand, with the gold words “US
Army” stamped on the side and steam from his morning coffee still wafting into
the air.

Colonel
McCann was only ten years older than Ellison, but he looked more than twenty
years his senior. His short, dark hair was gray at both of his temples, and
thin lines of age creased his face.

Ellison
was always surprised by the colonel’s face, by the unexpected warmth he found
there and the hint of a smile always at the edge of his mouth. He reminded
Ellison of a favorite uncle inviting trust and confidence. The men of the
battalion saw it too, and they loved the colonel for it. So did Ellison.

But
there was another side of McCann too, a side that was easy to forget. Ellison
could only see it in the colonel’s quick, dark eyes. They were cold, detached,
calculating. In two years at Fort Blaney the men hadn’t seen that side of the
colonel, but Ellison had, and he respected the colonel for it. And he loved him
for that side, too.

McCann
raised his mug, ready to drink, as he addressed Ellison. “What do we have this
morning, Stuart?”

Ellison
handed him the tablet. “Sir, we have a possible contact at approximately 0800
in Philadelphia.”

McCann
took the tablet and looked down at the screen, but from the back corner of the
command center, still near the door, a new voice laughed, “
Possible
contact?
Approximately
0800? I’m surprised your men could narrow it down to just
one city.”

Ellison
glanced over his shoulder. He knew the voice—the thin Irish accent playing just
behind the words was unmistakable—and so it was no surprise to Ellison when he
turned and saw Special Agent Hayden leaning against the glass wall of the command
center, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

 He
looked painfully out of place amid the other soldiers in the room. For
starters, he was short. He stood half a foot shorter than Major Ellison, making
him the shortest person in the room and most likely the shortest man on base,
but his lack of height seemed all the more notable because of his slight frame.
Hayden’s arms and legs were sticks. His neck was a pencil, and the fancy
Italian suits he chose to wear every day seemed to sag around his shoulders and
fall over his body, as if they couldn’t take in enough fabric to fit the man.
Ellison once remarked to McCann that Hayden was the best-dressed scarecrow he
had ever seen.