Cadet 3 (6 page)

Colonel Bransom reached into an inside pocket
of his jacket and removed a sheaf of folded papers. “They got
one
original,” he told them, holding up the papers. “This is
another, with General Cafferson’s signature, notarized by two
witnesses. He gave it to me for safekeeping, in the event a
situation like this arose. This will be proof enough of his
intentions to satisfy any court.” He slid the papers back into his
jacket.

“Now, the next problem will be finding
someplace to stash you three wanted criminals,” he said. “If
Lieutenants Carroll and Swenson will assist you with disguises, I
will try to find a hole for you crawl into and pull in after
yourselves, until we’re ready to bring you out.”

Steph and Kate led Jodie, Robin and Merry
away to an upstairs bedroom, while Colonel Bransom huddled in an
urgent conference with Dick Murphy.

* * * * *

Twenty minutes later, the women returned to
the living room.

“So, Daddy, what do you think?” Merry asked
Colonel Bransom, when all three women were lined up for his
inspection.

He looked them over carefully, up and down,
then walked around to scrutinize at them from behind. Finally, he
shook his head in wonderment. “It is truly amazing. I would not
have recognized any of you on the street.”

The transformation was startling. Jodie was
now a redhead, with coppery waves running halfway down her back.
Her eyes, formerly sea green, were after the insertion of colored
contact lenses, black. She was three inches taller than she had
been, thanks to the lifts in her knee-length cowboy boots. Her
eyebrows were heavier and matched her new hair color, and her
cheekbones were now broad and prominent, giving her a distinctly
Slavic appearance. She was still very beautiful.

Robin was now a brunette, with her hair
clipped severely short and parted on one side. She wore round,
tortoiseshell glasses over her formerly blue, now brown eyes. Her
nose was straighter, her ears a different shape, and her figure had
changed. Robin was a lovely woman, with a trim physique and fine,
but far from enormous breasts that were just perfect size for her
slim frame. Now, she was carrying a stunning bosom that nearly
spilled out of the skin-tight dress she had apparently been poured
into. “You look like why the riot started, sweetie,” Colonel
Bransom told her. “But I’m not sure I want you walking around in
public looking like that.”

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” Robin answered. “As
soon as we get someplace safe, I’ll take the fake boobs off. Most
of the plastic and make-up won’t hold up for more than twelve
hours, anyway.”

“Too bad,” Jodie commented admiringly. “You
make one
hell
of a sex-bomb.”

Merry’s transformation was even more radical
than the others. Her hair was no longer long, straight and
chestnut-brown, but was now shorter, black and kinky. Her eyes were
violet rather than their natural green, and her skin had been dyed
the color of dark chocolate. Her lips now looked much bigger, and
were coated with fire engine red lipstick, and her eyelashes were
much longer and thicker. Most remarkably of all, her walk, a
distinctive, incredibly graceful movement like the stalk of a
jungle cat, was now changed beyond recognition. With each step she
took, Merry rolled her hips like a belly dancer, making her
shoulders and her greatly enhanced breasts and buttocks seem to
move in several directions at once.

“How do you like the new me, Daddy?” she
asked her open-mouthed father. “They put something in my shoes that
makes me walk like this.” She demonstrated a little more, obviously
enjoying the sensation.

“You shouldn’t… I mean, it isn’t right… Oh
Christ
!” Colonel Bransom stammered. “If you weren’t my
daughter, I would… oh, never mind,” he told the grinning Merry. He
shook his head, as if to dispel the image. “Captain Murphy and I
have come up with the perfect place for you to go to ground. Tell
them about it, Captain,” he said, waving his hand at the
intelligence man.

“General Cafferson had a vacation cabin for
his personal use,” Dick Murphy said. “It was his own private place,
completely off the books. He paid for everything out of his own
pocket. Nobody but me and two of his bodyguards even knows it
exists. It’s fully stocked with food, with well water, and its own
geothermal electric power, off the grid. It’s also about twenty
miles from nowhere, in the western Virginia mountains. The General
also bought up a big piece of land around the cabin, and his
property is bordered on three sides by the Jefferson National
Forest, so there are no neighbors for miles in any direction. It
should be a safe place to stash the three of you until we find out
what your enemies are up to, General Lawrence.”

“Any comments or questions?” Colonel Bransom
asked, looking around the room. “No? Good, then, let’s get moving
before the plotters decide to declare martial law and…” He stopped
suddenly. “General Lawrence, I want to apologize for my apparent
lack of deference for your rank. You may think I’m being
insubordinate, ordering you around this way. It may not seem that
way, but I do understand that you are the highest-ranking officer
in the entire country, and I have the greatest possible respect for
you. But I was assigned the duty of providing for your safety by
Bernard Cafferson himself, and the only way I can only perform that
duty effectively is…”

“Colonel Bransom,” Jodie said, holding up her
hand, “please don’t say another word about it. In fact, I want you
to consider that to be an order. Until this crisis has been
resolved, you may think of me as a piece of luggage, an animated
suitcase, to be moved when and where you want me. I would be no
more inclined to interfere with the way you do your job than you
would jog my elbow if I was working up a plan to meet a Chinese
invasion of Australia. You are the head of my security detail,
chosen by General Cafferson personally for the job, and that is
good enough for me. Just do what you have to do to carry out the
mission, and don’t worry about my tender feelings, OK?” She
smiled.

“Thank you, General Lawrence,” the Colonel
replied.

“Having just told you how I’m going to keep
my nose out of your business, I’m now going to stick it in. This is
a suggestion, not an order,” Jodie said, “but perhaps we should
start addressing each other by our first names right now, for
practice. We wouldn’t want anybody to slip when we’re out in
public, and call me ‘General Lawrence’…”

“Excellent point, Gen… uh, Jodie. We will
follow that procedure, starting immediately,” Colonel Bransom
responded. “Now let’s get… Jodie, Robin and Merry out of here
before they decide to set up checkpoints and stop every car leaving
town.”

“Yes, sir… I mean, yes, right away,” Kate
answered, freezing her arm in mid-salute. “I have a suggestion of
my own, if I may. I saw a pile of camping supplies in the garage:
sleeping bags, tents, freeze-dried food, everything, and I think we
should bring them along, just in case.”

“Not a bad idea,” agreed the Colonel. “It
would be a hell of a lot harder to find you out in the woods than
the cabin, if the location turns out not to be as secret as we
hope. Secure the camping supplies, and bring boots and hiking gear
for everybody. Then let’s get our fugitives out of here, on the
double.”

There was a flurry of activity. Jodie, Robin
and Merry were hustled back to the garage by Steph, and loaded into
a ridiculously luxurious Cadillac sport utility vehicle, while Dick
Murphy and Kate Swenson piled supplies in the rear cargo area and
under the seats. Ten minutes later, they were rolling through the
streets of the capital.

It looked to Jodie as if they were not
leaving any too soon. The outsized green personnel carriers of the
Military Police, the blue and white cruisers of the D.C. Police,
and swarms of unmarked vehicles containing grim-looking men in
business suits and wearing sunglasses, whom Jodie suspected were
not tourists in town to see the sights of the nation’s capital,
seemed to be everywhere. Uniformed soldiers were busily setting up
security checkpoints at every major intersection. It seemed that
either the cabal had learned of Jodie and Robin’s escape even more
quickly than Colonel Bransom had feared, or there had been a sudden
change of plans for some other reason and they had decided not to
move quietly behind the scenes by arresting and charging Jodie with
treason, but to openly stage a
coup d’etat
.

Dick Murphy followed smaller streets to avoid
the roadblocks as long as possible, while still continuing to head
toward the western side of the city. Eventually, however, in order
to cross the Potomac on the Pershing Bridge, he was obliged to use
a main road, and ran into a checkpoint on the east bank, covering
the approach to the bridge.

Murphy chatted with the soldiers as they
examined the driver’s licenses of the party, and checked them in
the DMV records. As all the new identities of the party had been
prepared in advance, and matching information inserted in the DMV
records and were as good as their real IDs, there was no danger
that the driver’s licenses would give them away. However, Jodie’s
retinal patterns were on file (as were those of all general
officers, as a routine security precaution), and her phony contact
lenses would not prevent her being identified if she was
scanned.

“What’s all the fuss about, Corporal?” Murphy
asked. “Looks like somebody really stirred up the ants’ nest this
time.”

“Who knows?” the soldier answered, shrugging,
as he waited for the private running their IDs and the car’s plates
through the DMV computers to return. “First there’s a rumor that
Red agents were plotting to blow up the Pentagon, then we’re told
it’s all just a drill to test the city’s security plan in case of
an invasion, and then… this one was really unbelievable… that
assassins had killed General Lawrence and replaced her with a
double, and were planning to use the fake to take over the country.
I mean, did you ever hear anything so ridiculous in your whole
life?”

Before he could answer, the private who had
taken their I.D. cards returned with them in his hand. “They’re all
clear, Johnny,” he told the Corporal, “and the plate is clean,
too.”

“So where are you off to, Mr. Carlton, with a
car full of lovely ladies?” the Corporal asked Murphy, casually. He
went on without waiting for an answer. “Wherever it is, it has to
be a lot better than what we have to look forward to. We’ll
probably be standing around out here like idiots the whole weekend,
and then they’ll tell us it was just a drill or a false alarm. But
that’s the Army for you. Go ahead and have a good time,” he said.
He signaled to his men to move the barricade aside for them, and
slapped the car to urge them on.

“So that’s the line they’re taking,” Jodie
said after they cleared the bridge. “I was replaced by a ChiCom
imposter. It sounds like something from a bad thriller. Who’s going
to believe anything so nonsensical?”

“The only other choice would be to try
convincing the Army you’re a traitor, and that would be an even
harder sell, is my guess,” Merry suggested. “Do you think that
Corporal back there would believe you had sold out to the
Reds?”

“I think you put your finger on it, sis,”
Robin agreed. “Now, I don’t believe they ever intended to bring
Jodie to trial. The charges were just an excuse to get her into
custody, and after that…”

“After that,” Jodie finished grimly. “I would
be taken down into to a nice, quiet basement somewhere, and I would
never come out again. If the admirals turn out to be behind this,
they are in for a serious housecleaning over at the Navy Department
after I take over.
Somebod
y is going to pay for this… in
blood.”

Chapter Four: Party

There were no roadblocks or security checks
after they left Washington and no other cause for delay, so they
drove west for three uninterrupted hours on the Virginia Turnpike,
not stopping until they exited at Front Royal. From there, they
went south, going from the four-lane Federal Highway to two-lane
state roads, to still smaller county roads, until at last they were
bumping down a dirt lane so heavily rutted that the maximum speed
was no more than thirty miles an hour.

“It’s unspoiled, I’ll say that for it,” Jodie
remarked when the vehicle came to a stop at a gate which barred
further progress on the dirt road they were following through the
middle of nowhere. They had been seeing fewer and fewer signs of
human habitation over the last two hours. Now they were in a
thickly forested valley that appeared to be unchanged since the
days when the only inhabitants of Virginia were deerskin-clad
Native Americans. “This road must be almost useless after a heavy
rain. How does anybody get in or out in bad weather?”

“This isn’t the main road,” Murphy explained.
“It’s an old logging road that cuts through the National Forest and
comes up behind the cabin. It’ll give us a chance to see if anybody
is waiting for us up by the front door before they see us. I’ll
just jump out and open the gate. Kate, drive through and I’ll close
the gate behind you.”

“Very clever,” Kate muttered, shifting over
to the driver’s seat, “but what if they’re waiting for us on
this
road?”

After it passed through the gate, the road
became narrower and ever rougher as it snaked its way to a higher
elevation. Murphy pulled off the road, which by now was really not
much more than a trail, into a thick patch of undergrowth. “The
cabin is just around that bend. I want to go ahead on foot to take
a look.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Kate. “Let’s take
something along in case the party gets unfriendly.” She jumped out,
went around to open the rear gate, reached under the seat and slid
out a green metal box. Inside were several deadly looking black
machine pistols. She handed one to Murphy, then tossed him a pair
of full magazines. She slid one into her weapon, locked it in place
with a
click
, and then stuffed two more into the hip pouches
of her pants. They moved silently off into the lengthening shadows
of the late afternoon, and soon disappeared in the thick stands of
white pine and spruce.