The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One (43 page)

“The other deaths were incidental and served to make killing Carter and Williams look like more fortunes of war,” the younger man said defensively. “At least Carter's wife is dead. I caused him pain."

In his younger days, Arthur Pope might have struck his son for making such an idiotic statement. "There was no reason to kill Carter's wife. Only fools kill for no reason, Richard," he said.

The younger man stiffened in his seat. "If I'd have killed Carter, and left her alive, she would have killed me on sight. I knew her; she wouldn't have filed charges or cared about proof. She would have acted."

The elder Pope let out a long breath that seemed to be comprised of physically incarnated disappointment in his son. "More fear," he said. "Carter is a career special warfare combat veteran, who may well be the best soldier of his generation. Until now, he was only seeking to avenge a betrayed friend. Now, thanks to this idiotic blunder of yours, he is also an avenging husband. Have I taught you nothing over the years?"

Richard Pope leaned toward his father. “I didn’t know about that C-190 gunship, Hicks and Carter went around me when they added it to the extraction force. If it weren’t for that, Carter and Williams would be dead along with Carter’s wife.”

“General Hicks and Colonel Carter are not idiots,” Pope’s father said. “They anticipated your move, and countered it.”

“What should I do, now?” the younger man asked.

“Stay away from Carter and the FIRE teams,” Arthur Pope replied. “Whatever you do, stay away from their telepaths. It was a risk for either of us to be near them at the celebration tonight, but all of the politicians and intelligence officials that were present had their own psychics there to prevent any unauthorized telepathic activity, so we should be safe.”

“Do you have your own psychics, Father?” the younger Pope asked.

Arthur Pope ignored the question. “Just stay away from the teams,” he admonished. “I’ll arrange to have you transferred away from Fort Reagan. We have to keep you out of sight while I plead your case to the group. You used their resources to contact the WCA and betray Carter. If your treason is linked to them the consequences will be catastrophic.”

The limousine pulled to a stop at a small helipad used exclusively by ranking VIPs. Four Department of Defense guards in long, black watch coats surrounded the vehicle brandishing sub-machine guns. The two black sedans that carried the rest of the Elder Pope’s entourage also stopped. A thin, ashen-faced aid scurried through the rain to open the limo’s door for his master.

“Pack and get ready to move,” Arthur Pope told his son. “I’ll protect you if I can.”

With that, the older man walked to a waiting helicopter under an umbrella held by his ashen faced aid and disappeared inside. The younger Pope watched sullenly as the helicopter rose and departed.

“Take me home,” he said into the car’s intercom.

‘Home’ was a white, three bedroom house just inside the city limits of Wilmington. Pope despised it. It was so much like the pathetic, mundane dwellings that most of the equally pathetic and mundane people in the country abided in. They were dwellings that were neither hovels nor mansions. They were for a person who could not decide rather he was a serf or a prince.

It was that so called middle class that Pope despised above all other things. One should give orders or one should obey them. The notion that anyone could live and do neither was the dangerously naïve notion that had plunged the world into chaos and disorder. The idea individuals could make decisions for themselves without dominating others was a delusion afflicting the followers of democracy. There were those that ruled and those they ruled over. One was either a serf or a prince. 

Pope knew that he was a prince. It was his birthright; guaranteed by blood and breeding. That he was forced into the façade of appearing to be equal with the products of the hopelessly polluted, diluted and randomized gene-pool never ceased to sicken him. The mongrel hybrids that had overrun the planet and struck down the old nobility and royal bloodlines and brought mankind to the edge of extinction with ridiculous notions of individualism and self determination needed to be brought to heel if human civilization was to continue.

In order to bring order from chaos, there had to rulers and there had to be subjects. The subjects had to know there place, and the rulers always had to be ready to remind the subject of their place with the lash. He took comfort in the fact that some of the old family bloodlines were still pure.

Carter, even with his para-gene and all the benefits it bestowed, was still a genetic accident; a random comingling of inferior strains of humanity. Paranormals would make useful subjects, but they were not bread to rule. Carter, for all his fighting skills and strength, had no true power and would not know what to do with it if he did.

Mao was only partly correct when he said that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Political power was based on controlling many guns, and the people who held them. That control was achieved through the control of resources; control of wealth. Politics, at its core, was economics. Any distinction between the two disciplines was an illusion. It was the inheritors of the thirteen ancient bloodlines that still controlled the majority of the world’s vital resources. Soon the earth would be such a hellish place that the weak-blooded masses would beg for those noble bloodlines to assume control again. There would be peace and progress.

Passing two private security guards he had recently retained, he unlocked his front door and tossed his keychain onto a door-side table. He passed by through the living room, climbed a short staircase, and entered what passed for the house’s master bedroom. Discarding his uniform jacket, he entered the adjacent bathroom and examined himself in the room’s slightly scratched mirror. He looked weary and disheveled; even to himself.

Having had more than a little wine at the night’s festivities, he felt the need to empty his bladder. He need not worry about Carter he assured himself as zipped his fly.
He plays by the rules
, he thought.
People like me make the rules
. Carter was just not of the thirteen, after all.

His bladder empty, he turned to back toward the sink. Douglas Carter stood inches away from him. Pope expelled a gasp that would have been a scream if had been able to take in sufficient air. He fell backward, striking his head on the bathroom’s wall; his left hand plunged into the toilet bowl. His legs spread wide as he tried to scramble away.

Carter stood above him, a temporary prosthetic limb attached to his left shoulder. An eight inch knife was in his gloved right hand.

“You can’t kill me,” Pope said. It was more of a plea that a statement. His voice was a panicked whine. “You can’t kill me now.”

Carter jammed his knife into the floor up to its hilt; inches from Pope’s groin. Carter stood, leaving the blade lodged in the floor. “No,’ Carter said; his voice calm and icy. “Not now,” he added, before turning to leave. Pope sat where he had fallen, paralyzed with fear with his arm in the toilet.

“Did you get what we need?” Carter asked Sains who had been waiting just outside the bathroom.

“Yeah, I pulled enough out of his pea brain to put us on the trail. We should just kill the prick now,” Sains declared limping slightly on temporary prosthetic foot.

“No,” Carter said as they left the Pope’s house and bypassed the oblivious guards at the front door. “He has more to answer for that just the deaths he’s responsible for. He’s disgraced the United States military from the day he put on his first uniform. What he did was treason and I want that to be known. I don’t just want to destroy him. I want to destroy his memory. I want him to live in fear until I decide to come for him.”

The two men had reached their car and Sains and slipped into the passenger’s seat. “Boss, you popped up behind him in his own bathroom while he was taking a piss. I don’t think he’ll ever feel safe again.” Carter started the car’s engine and pulled away from the curb.

“Boss, I’m good with putting Pope in the grave. His bad karma is bound to catch up to him.” Sains said. “But his dad is and Under Secretary of Defense. We could be opening up one bad-assed can of worms.

Carter kept his eyes on the road. “Karma can catch up with Under Secretaries of Defense too,” he said.

       Epilogue

The great metal cylinder rotated slowly within a framework lattice of beams formed from white carbon composites. The cylinder’s silver skin glinted in the sun; drinking the light and heat and converting it to electricity to power huge orbiting station. Two thousand feet long and half that in diameter; it appeared as a giant, silver and white tower looking down on the Earth. It kept those with the required financial means and social status to dwell within it far above the unpleasantness of the war raging on the planet below.

Below the shining refuge the continent of Europe was in the grip of that war. American forces and their allies had landed in Scandinavia and were driving east. Soon they would swing southward and threaten Brussels and, eventually, Strasbourg France: the two co-functioning nerve centers of the WCA. An even larger force had landed on the British Isles and had all but annihilated the WCA forces that had opposed them. Soon they would cross the English Channel, drive eastward and encircle the all but paralyzed WCA forces in Western Europe.

An old man looked down on the war ravaged planet. He had often been told of how people had spiritual epiphanies when they looked down on the Earth from space. He had had no such reaction. What he saw looking down on the Earth was chaos. So much could be accomplished if resources, including people, were properly managed. Chaos could not be managed.

The world turning beneath him had not known peace in thousands of years. Humanity had deluded itself into believing that it had fought one war after another over ideologies, religious philosophies, or the laughably abstract concepts of honor and patriotism but, in truth, wars were fought over resources; over
wealth
. Those that did not have wealth wanted it. Those that already possessed wealth wanted more and they wanted to keep what they already had. It was all very simple, really.

Mankind had begun by fighting with wild beasts to obtain food, and to keep from becoming food. As their numbers increased those early men fought one another for hunting grounds and mates. Later still, they fought to control the best land for agriculture. As humanity evolved a few primitive men found that trading among themselves was more productive and less dangerous than fighting; so men fought each other over the control of the best trading routes. Nothing had changed truly changed.

War, at its core, was always about economics. The churches, nations, and political movements wanted to control people. To control people you had to control the basic resources that they needed to live. If you could meet the people’s basic needs they would usually content, compliant, and happy with, or at least resigned to, whatever situation they found themselves in. Fail to meet those needs and you would see the veneer of civilization fall away and savagery would return. That was what was occurring on global scale below him on Earth.

Mankind needed to managed, not governed; it needed administrators, not leaders. Only the managers and administrators required leadership; the bulk of humanity required only management. Some would call such management slavery; the old man called it efficiency. An efficient civilization was a successful civilization. The best rulers had always been great managers.

The old man turned away from the viewing port and resumed his seat behind a massive, hardwood desk. The desk, like all of the dimly lit office’s furnishings was an antique. The décor was a mix of Victorian and American colonial styles and characterized by rich, dark, intricately carved furniture. Even the titanium bulkheads of the station had been covered with hardwood paneling. No computers or other electronic devices were permitted here; they were tools for either slave masters or slaves; the old man was neither. His tools were logic and the power of his will.

“Send him in,” the old man said; sensing the presence of his visitor in the outer office before the receptionist could activate the intercom and announce is arrival.

Nicholas Roderick stepped in the office but waited at the door’s threshold before approaching the man behind the desk. He felt a sense of reverence here; a reverence mixed disproportionately with fear. Fear was a tangible, real thing in this place; as real as the air he was breathing. In this place one lived and died at the sufferance of the old man behind the desk.

At a solid six feet in height and after a highly successful, if somewhat short, career as a Consortium intelligence operative, Roderick should not have been intimidated by the frail looking, elderly man. But he was; so much so that his scalp tingled with a primal sense of danger beneath his chestnut brown hair. His gray suit seemed to constrict around him as his breathing quickened in some prime evil reaction to lurking but certainly present danger.

The man wore a suit of a style that blended nicely in with the antiques in the room. It was darkly colored, made of silk, and seemed almost magically crease free. The man’s hair was thick and almost bone-white; his eyes were sunken into a face that was criss-crossed with deep wrinkles. His eyes were clear and black, actually black, in color. He moved with a fluid ease that belied his great age.