Defeat (2 page)

“
Bring up
NROL-273 on your display,” the Colonel said.

Christina’s hands had already been
flying across her keyboard, and just as she got the top secret spy
satellite’s orbital path up, she accidentally flipped her screen
down. She felt, rather than heard, the Colonel take his own deep
breath behind her.

She got the screen back up on the
big monitor and pointed out the location of NROL-273. She couldn’t
speak, but it was obvious.

“
Get this up on
the big monitor,” he said.

It is on the big monitor,
Christina thought, then realized he wanted it up on the big big
monitor, the one that stood at the front of the room. The one that
everyone could see and track. She felt the sweat pooling in her
armpits and on her palms.

“
Yessir,” she
squeaked.

“
And mark the
last known locations in yellow.”

She toggled a color on the screen,
and it became even more obvious how close the four silent
satellites were to the Hrwang location. A few more keystrokes and
she took over the main monitor at the front of the room, her screen
displayed up there.

“
Hey,” someone
complained, then looked around. He saw the Colonel standing behind
her and didn’t say anything else.

“
Sergeant
Celedina,” the Colonel called, and a dark haired, female NCO four
chairs down from Christina looked up. “Get a report from Captain
Owenby. Put everything in it she tells you and get it up to
headquarters ASAP. You have three minutes.”

“
Yessir,” the NCO
barked and moved her chair behind her neighbor’s, scooting it to
get next to Christina’s.

“
Good work,” the
Colonel muttered and Christina turned to look at him, but he was no
longer looking at her. He was already on the move, heading to where
the confident, male sergeant sat, the one who had reported the
silent spy satellite. She looked around and Sergeant Celedina had
reached her, laptop in hand. Christina began explaining what she
had found. It was a little bit easier to talk to a sergeant than a
colonel, but not by much.

Eva Gilliam crossed her legs,
changing from left over right to right over left, and the eyes of
every boy in front of her followed their motion. It was what she
expected. She was wearing the dress. The dress that hinted at
everything but revealed nothing except her beautifully tanned legs
from the knees down. It was her favorite recruiting
tool.

She had the boys from Utah firmly
in her grasp. They sat arrayed in a semicircle in front of her and
hung on every word, every motion, every movement of her dress, and
Eva knew they were already fantasizing about becoming super spies
and claiming her as their personal Bond girl.

The Agency loved the boys from
Utah, and the soon to graduate college seniors in front of her
demonstrated why. Eager to please, loyal to God and country, and
honest to a fault, the group of boys, most of whom had lived in
foreign countries for extended periods of time and spoke the
languages of those nations fluently, would be excellent candidates.
Most wouldn’t last longer than a year or two, the looser morals of
the hardened agents eventually wearing them down or chasing them
away, but the Utah boys looked good on paper.

Eva, nominally from Utah herself,
could always get into these college fairs, and every preening,
over-confident, spy wannabe sought her out and tried to impress
her. She explained the entrance exam requirements patiently,
turning some away, and giving the rest a chance to ask questions,
although she already knew what they would ask. It was what they
always asked.

“
What’s life as
an agent like?”

They all wanted her to describe
scenes from a movie, but this was the part where she told them the
truth. It wasn’t all fun and games, but a real job. Most enrollees
would end up as analysts, particularly those with superior foreign
language skills, but analysts were important. Every enrollee would
go through the same training, the top candidates culled out for
field work, while the rest of the graduates would receive other
assignments.

But then she emphasized how
important the work of the Agency was. To protect their country and
to keep their families safe, and this always struck the boys. They
would grow serious, some would tell her they’d have to pray about
it, but all of them would download enrollment applications to their
phones. Eva had one of the highest rates of completion of
downloaded applications, and so her boss continually sent her into
the field to recruit. She wished she could do something more, but
told herself recruiting was important also, and of the group in
front of her, one or two would make it. And who knows? Maybe one of
them would save the world some day.

She reflected on why she had
joined. It wasn’t to save the world.

She enjoyed the freedom and the
trust placed in her by the government. Plus, it had given her an
excuse to get away from squabbling parents who never recovered from
their divorce. The Agency always gave her an excuse to stay away at
holidays.

But being at college had
accomplished much the same. It was more than that.

The military impressed Eva but not
many women served in special forces. The Agency promised more
challenge, more opportunity, and more adventure than she thought
she could get from the military. She enjoyed taking on difficult
challenges and succeeding, even excelling. The training she
received suited her, she enjoyed it, and she thought she always
performed well.

Her fantasy though, unlike the
fantasies of the boys in front of her, was a posting to Athens or
Rome, Marseille or Barcelona, any place along the Mediterranean.
Such postings proved few and far between though, and she settled
for the occasional trip to a California beach.

Her phone buzzed and she looked at
it and it was just a number. But the number made her go cold
inside.

She faked a smile and waved her
phone at the boys. “I have to run,” she said. “You can download the
application forms off the web.” She normally pushed the forms from
her phone to theirs, which allowed the Agency to track who had
recruited whom, among other things, but the number on her phone
changed everything.

“
Spy stuff?”
someone asked and a few of the boys chuckled
nervously.

Eva broadened her smile and
nodded, trying not to run out of the conference center where the
career fair was being held. She couldn’t see anything around her,
and almost knocked over a display on her way out, catching it out
of reflex and not thought, and handing it back to the presenter
standing next to it without saying anything.

Or perhaps she had said she was
sorry. She wasn’t sure. The number on her phone consumed her
thoughts, tied up all the threads that processed around in her
brain, and she could focus on nothing else but what that number
meant.

Just a meaningless series of
digits to anyone else, including anyone else from the Agency, but
to Eva they were a specific set of instructions. Instructions she
had never received before, but had reviewed in her head every time
she went into the field, and now she processed all those reviews,
all those plans, so she would know exactly what to do and when to
do it.

She found her rental car and got
in, planning out how close she could take it to her destination and
where she would have to ditch it so no one could trace her location
from the car.

This is crazy, she thought in a
moment of clarity. What does it mean?

She shrugged and backed out of her
parking space. The mission is what mattered. And her mission was to
follow the instructions the number on the phone implied.

Get to a safe house.
Now.

“
Jayla, why are
you watching news?”

Jayla looked up at her younger
sister, then back at the monitor. She ran through a million
thoughts, trying to process what was happening.

“
Jayla!”

She looked back up. Jada stood in
the entryway to the den, already changed into hiking shorts, hiking
boots, carrying Dad’s hiking staff, and wearing a ridiculous
hat.

“
I’m ready,” she
said.

Jayla shook her head. “Give me a
minute.”

“
No.”

Younger sisters could be so
annoying.

“
Look. The alien
ship just disappeared. I mean, it was right there in front of the
United Nations, and it just disappeared. They have it on
video.”

“
Magic
trick.”

“
It’s on a lot of
videos. And phones. Look.”

Jayla flipped the monitor to
multi-screen, and scrolled through a variety of uploaded videos.
Scenes of the Hrwang shuttle simply vanishing were the first hits
on most sites.

“
Can you explain
that?” she asked her younger sister.

“
Who
cares?”

“
They’re aliens,
Jada. This happened over ten hours ago. We’ve been completely cut
off driving up here. We should’ve listened to the
radio.”

“
Do you know what
kind of hick music these people listen to? No
way.”

Jada had repeated several times
that drives up to the cabin were supposed to be accompanied by open
windows, arms and legs hanging out of them, and loud, thumping,
modern music. Jayla had finally given in, then had enjoyed the long
drive up the mountains to her father’s cabin. It was a beautiful
summer day.

“
Besides,” Jada
added, “up at Daddy’s cabin, we’re supposed to be cut off. It’s
called being in Nature.”

The cabin was well stocked with
non-perishable foods. They had brought the perishables, milk,
cheese, eggs, bread, and other items, up with them, filling their
four wheel drive SUV. Daddy had insisted they bring enough for two
weeks minimum, and they probably had enough food for four. They
were physically cut off from the rest of the world now, and
completely self-sufficient for at least a month.

Was that Daddy’s plan the whole
time?

Wolfgang Riebe knew the three
Americans in his German Alpine hiking club called him the Nazi and
he didn’t care. Today was too good of a day to let idiots bother
him.

Wolfgang wasn’t old enough to have
known any Nazis, but his grandfather had always told him that his
father, Wolfgang’s great grandfather, had been part of the
resistance, and Wolfgang had always been proud of that. Until he
studied history at the University. There he learned that most
Germans claimed to have resisted the Nazis in some form or another,
and that most of those claims were false.

It had been a depressing
day.

But today was
beautiful.

Steep terrain, a warm sun with an
occasional cool breeze, large trees, interesting rock formations,
and the odd castle ruin combined to make the perfect hike, and
everyone in his club had shown up. The renovation of the castle
restaurant at the top of the mountain had finally been completed
and everyone looked forward to an invigorating hike with a fine
lunch in the middle.

Some, especially the Americans,
grumbled because of his quick pace, but a quick pace did not make a
man a Nazi, did it? What had made men become Nazis and do such
things? he wondered for the millionth time. He knew he should
simply let it go. He wasn’t that man despite what they called
him.

He wondered why they grumbled
anyway. They were soldiers of some sort. Shouldn’t they be
fit?

He had selected a hike that took
the long way around to the castle ruins at the top, rather than the
short, little more than five kilometer hike most tourists took. A
tram to the top still existed, and he imagined all the old or
overweight tourists taking that route, getting the view for nothing
but a few hours time and a few euros. His club would earn their
mountaintop lunch and view. Even the American soldiers.

The rock at the top of the
mountain, and thus the castle that stood there, had been named,
supposedly, after a dragon that slept in caves they now passed. He
signaled a water break, both to allow some of the slower hikers to
catch up and to get a better view of the caves. He put his day pack
down and climbed up some rocks to see them. Several followed him,
including the shy Swiss girl who hardly spoke German even though
she had lived in ‘Slautern for almost a year. At least she was a
strong hiker if not a strong communicator.

The caves weren’t much, just tiny
holes in the rocks. Only one was large enough to enter. Wolfgang
was disappointed and quickly ready to move on, to get to the top of
the mountain. He told those that had followed him that they should
get going if they wanted a good table for lunch and, after some
chuckles, they followed him out.

The three American soldiers were
huddled together over their cell phones when Wolfgang and the
others rejoined the main group, and it annoyed him that they
couldn’t put the stupid things away for a few hours to enjoy
nature.