The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One (5 page)

              Khazanov’s cryptic warning still gnawed at his mind. Combined with Pope’s mere presence the warning told Carter that there were forces outside the military chain command that had plans for his new team and anyone else that had the para-gene. Pope’s father was an under-secretary of defense; a career bureaucrat who had a network of other career bureaucrats with access to the halls of power.

              Carter knew that, even in the state of emergency the United States was now in, it was the career bureaucrats and entrenched politicians that held the real power in government. Elected officials and their appointees were largely transient phenomenon. It was the under-secretaries and deputy directors that controlled things in the long term. They pulled the strings from behind closed doors, unseen by the public. Someone in that shadow government saw paranormals as a means of amassing more power. Carter resolved to protect his team from the betrayal that Khazanov warned them about. He was sure it would come. 

              Satisfied at his appearance, he drove to the base PX. The

shelves there were largely bare, stocked with only absolute necessities of life.  Carter, however found what he was looking for: a few small, three-by-five inch American Flags attached to a six-inch wooded sticks. Carter saw those flags, in that moment, as though he had never seen and American flag before.

              Despite serving in the military his entire adult life, and being from a family that had served for many generations, he thought that he, for the first time, comprehended the meaning behind the symbolism of the piece of colored fabric. To Carter, everything that was right and just was represented there. Bringing two of the small flags to the checkout he found Captain Winters paying for a purchase of her own.

              She brightened visibly at his approach. She had had her cut her hair to conform to regulations. It was short but feathered and highlighted so that it was in no way appeared boyish. It was worn so it ended half way down her neck and was styled so that strands fell diagonally across her forehead and called attention to her extraordinary eyes. The newer uniform that the general had provided fit her well, accenting her shape. Her makeup was flawless. Carter only just managed to stop looking at her before his attention could have been called a stare. 

              “Hello, Major,” she said, meeting his gaze with shining, green eyes. I’m glad we ran into each other; it will save me the trouble of tracking you down later.”

              “You were going to track me down, Captain?” Carter asked, handing the flags to the clerk.

              “I was hoping we could spend some time together,” she replied, smiling broadly while she studied his reaction to her boldness.

              Cater hesitated. There had been an attraction between the two of them since they had first met, but he had tried his best to ignore it; feelings of that sort were for a time when the enemy was defeated and his country was not in such imminent peril. In the weeks they had been training together he, despite his best efforts to restrain his emotions, had found her presence to be a source of strength and comfort. Now it seemed that there was no way to avoid those feelings.

              Looking at her face, he saw anticipation. For reasons he couldn’t fathom she really wanted to spend time with him. At that moment it seemed selfish and mean-spirited to deny her. It sounded egotistical, even to Carter himself, but Winters seemed to need him on a personal level. He could not find it in himself to say no to her invitation; finding that he liked being needed.

              He returned her smile. “Can you meet me at the Lincoln Memorial at fourteen hundred?” he asked as he paid the clerk for the flags. “I have something personal I need to take care of.”

              “I’ll be there,” she replied.

              They left the PX walking side-by-side. “I managed to get a car; can I drop you off anywhere?”Carter asked.

              Winters shook her head. “Sergeant Garba and I are sharing a ride into DC; I’m meeting her in a half an hour.”

              “Have a good time, Captain,” Carter told her, allowing himself another long look at her face.

              “Can you call me Monica when we’re alone?” she asked.

He smiled. “Monica,” he said, exhaling more than usual. That small reduction of formality seemed to relieve a tremendous amount of tension between them.

              She stepped closer, looking around to see if they were being observed. When she was sure that they were not, she took his hands in hers, guided his arms around her waist, and kissed him; coiling her arms around his neck. They held the kiss for several seconds. When they parted, Carter was stunned into wordlessness.

              “That was just to let you know what kind of evening I expect it to be tonight, Doug. We don’t have time for the usual preliminaries,” she said, still very close to him.

              “So,” Carter said when his head had cleared. “Are you and I going to be each other’s dying wish?” he asked.

              Winters touched his face softly. “If we do it right, we’ll be each other’s reason to live,” she half whispered into his ear.       

                    [][][]

              The sea of white monuments seemed endless. The grounds around them were still lovingly maintained by dedicated landscapers. As desperate as the United States’ situation was, Arlington Cemetery was still treated as a shrine. The men and women of the Third Infantry Regiment, the
Old Guard
, still watched over America’s war dead with respect and care.

              Two small, recently purchased, American flags moved in the slight breeze; it decorated the grave of Mathew Carter. Douglas Carter had placed the flags at the base of the marker an hour earlier. Carter always became contemplative when he came to Arlington. He did not contemplate death, however. At Arlington he found himself pondering his life: the life of a soldier.

              It had been a life of service. His parents were dead and he had no siblings. He had never owned a home, or lived in anything but military housing. The women in his life had been few; and his time with them short. He had few friends; partially because he was selective about his friendships, and partially because many of the friends had been taken by the war. Many of them were resting somewhere in the vast cemetery in which he currently stood. The one constant in his life had always been duty. Family and friends died or drifted away, lovers came and went, and places to live were temporary. Duty endured.

              Arlington, and places like it, were not monuments to death Carter decided; they were monuments to duty. His father, and all of those resting with him, had made duty their first calling; setting aside their own concerns so others could live long, uneventful lives. Carter nodded to himself. After visiting his father’s grave so many times over the years, he finally realized why he found Arlington Cemetery to be comforting instead of depressing. When duty called it had always been answered by dedicated, selfless people willing to give up everything for what they held dear. In a world so bleak and corrupt that it made Carter question humankind’s fitness to survive, this place was a reminder that there were always people, like his father, who would stand and fight for what was right.

              Carter had taken many lives over the years; he knew that many of those he had killed were lying in cemeteries much like Arlington. That did not affect the comfort that he felt when came to such monuments; those soldiers were doing their duty as they saw it. He had not killed them out of malice, but because of his duty, not only to his country, but to mankind as well. When he killed WCA soldiers, he did so with the conviction that he was trying make all people free. The enemy soldiers he had killed, and those he would kill in the future, were part of a military machine he was systematically trying to destroy, but sadly, they were also his brothers in arms. He fought and killed so that their comrades that survived the war and the generations that would come after them could be free.

              Carter heard footsteps behind him. He knew, without turning around, who it would be behind him. “How’s your old man?” General Hick’s voice asked.

              “Probably better off than we are, Sir,” Carter said, smiling slightly.

              “I knew you’d come here,” Hicks said, standing beside Carter. 

              “This might be the last time I get to come here,” Carter said. “Mom is in the family plot in Maryland, I’ll go visit her next.

              “You do know that I hated having to bring you into Seed Corn?” the general asked.

              Carter faced Hicks. “I’d been pissed if you hadn’t, Sir. This project is important; it may be our only chance of winning the war, or even to survive it.”

              “Do you think things are that bad?” Hicks inquired, studying Carter’s face intently.

              Carter’s face softened. “You wouldn’t be risking the team’s lives like this if it weren’t,” he answered. “I’m just a Major, and I don’t have the whole strategic picture, but I can see defeatism spreading through the ranks. It hasn’t hit everyone yet, but a lot of people have already given up. They still fight, but without any spirit; they just go through the motions. A blind man can see that morale is on the verge of collapse.”

              Hicks frowned. “What about your morale, Doug?” Hicks asked.

              “Sir, the enemy can cut of both my arms, and I’d still try to kick them to death,” Carter assured the general.

              Hicks took a step closer to Carter. “Doug, I’m going to tell you something that has to remain between the two of us,” he said. “Even if the enemy crosses the Mississippi and overruns the rest of the country, that won’t be the end. There is a plan in place to continue a guerilla-style resistance even if our conventional forces are defeated.”

              Carter nodded. “I figured as much. The enemy is still having trouble with large scale guerilla resistance in Australia, and there are underground resistance cells in almost all of the WCA occupied countries. Ruling the whole world means policing the whole world, and that could overtax their resources and their will as well.”

              “It still may not get that far,” Hicks assured Carter. “You, your team, and the other potential paranormals may turn it around before it does.”

              Carter panned his eyes over the long rows of grave stones. “How did it get this far, Sir?” he asked. “I know the history, the sequence of events, but I never really understood how the people let it get this far. I mean the conditions that caused the war didn’t develop overnight; someone had to see it coming.”

              Hicks chuckled. “Historians will write books by the hundreds trying to answer that question,” he said. “Personally, I think that we, the people of the United States, had lost track of what we are. The people who came over from Europe to colonize America were explorers and builders; they had vision and guts, and so did their offspring. They had drive and they used it to make the United States the greatest nation that ever existed. But, somewhere along the line, we lost our vision; we lost that drive to build and grow.”

              Carter looked at Hicks; his face asking him to continue.

              “Once the vision was gone, we stagnated,” Hicks elaborated.

              “After that, we started to question ourselves; question our greatness and morality. From there, it got worse; we started to be ashamed of our greatness. Somehow a whole generation, in the mid twentieth century, got convinced that the United States, and all it stood for, was corrupt and evil.”

              “That’s what I never understood,” Carter said. “How were Americans made to hate their country? How were they convinced to accept all the statist initiatives that congress past in the years before the war started? They pissed on the tenth amendment and state’s rights in general; destroyed our industry almost completely, and tried like hell to take away the most basic constitutional rights. As far I can tell, the people just stood for it. Right up until they saw foreign troops in the streets.”

              Hicks shrugged."There was a well planned program of social engineering,” he said. “I think it started in the universities back in the nineteen sixties and then got into the public schools. Students who lived in a capitalist country were taught that capitalism was bad; that the industries that fed them, clothed them, and kept them warm, were destroying the planet’s ecology. They were taught to hate the nation and the political and economic systems that created more prosperity than any such systems in history.”  

              Hicks stared out over the fields of monuments. “They were indoctrinated to believe that democracy; representative republics in particular, were corrupt and oppressive by their very nature. Once they believed that, socialism seemed like a good alternative. And this didn’t just happen in the United States; it happened in Briton, France, and all of the western democracies of the time.”    

              Hicks saw that Carter was still listening intently and went on. “People were taught that society owed them the basics of life and that they didn’t have to work for them. The governments subsidized housing, food, education and just about everything else. To fund all of these social programs, they raised taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on small businesses. But, eventually, the wealthy couldn’t pay the taxes anymore and the businesses were taxed and regulated out of existence. The factories closed, transportation stopped, and no one could find work. With no one working, there was no one to pay the taxes and governments went bankrupt and started dissolving. Everyone was so busy arguing about, democrat and republican, left or right, and liberalism or conservatism that no one bothered to try and fix the problems. It was like fighting over what color to paint a house that was in the process of burning down. And, when the WCA was formed, declared all national governments dissolved, and took on governing the old nations itself, no one really cared.”