"Time is a face on the water."
-Roland Deschain, Wizard and Glass
The clean-up and arrangement of facts after the matter wasn't precisely Major Patriot's strong suit. He wasn't exactly one of the great thinkers of his time. If he were, he might not have murdered the four HAC operatives he'd been riding with in a fit of rage after discovering that the LAV they'd taken down was empty and running on autopilot.
Shooting the first two had been quick and easy. Grabbing the third and crushing his skull between Patriot's superhuman-strengthened hands only took a couple of seconds more. By the time he turned to grab the final soldier, the HAC agent held his rifle aimed at his chest and squeezed the trigger without hesitation.
The Ultra-Soldier's armor absorbed the bullets without any trouble. What didn't absorb the force was the HAC agent's face when Major Patriot punched it. The Ultra-Soldier's arm exploded through the other man's face and skull in much the same way a Bradley tank would go through a small barricade made entirely of moistened marshmallows. If the marshmallows were filled with gray matter and bone and blood.
There would be no way to easily explain the damage here. Luckily for him, there would be no need to explain it. As standard orders, he'd been authorized by his superiors to utterly destroy the bodies left behind from this operation, both HAC soldiers and Tyrant's henchmen. Nobody would know what he'd done here.
Even in his worst moments of fury, Patriot had never before been so swept up in wholesale slaughter. As he sprayed a specially formulated accelerant over the corpses of his most recent victims, Major Patriot tried not to think of what he was going to do if he should lose control of himself again.
He'd been warned when he was being prepared for the Ultra-Soldier program that there might be unexpected side effects. Certainly he'd been an aggressive soldier before undergoing the experiment, but he'd never killed a comrade intentionally or without orders.
In a rare moment of complete lucidity untainted by his usual mental shortcomings (being blinding fits of violent compulsion and being near the lower end of only average intelligence), Major Patriot realized that he was suffering from the onset of psychosis as a result of the Ultra-Soldier experiments. "Well," he said aloud, popping a match alight. "Maybe not 'onset' per se. More like 'continued progression of'."
He dropped the match with a flick of the wrist, walking away from the piled bodies of his comrades and heading back for the Dymatech building, where the other members of his squadron would already be doing the same thing with the casualties there.
He certainly hoped that the Leader and the HAC high command would at least be pleased with his unit's success at keeping Dr. Tyrant's people from getting what they'd come for.
The Congressman slept sound most nights, but since the report from Major Patriot that Dr. Tyrant's forces had been repelled with only moderate losses, he couldn't help but feel that something had gone awry, something just out of sight. He lay in bed next to his wife, wide awake at three in the morning, unable to still his mind.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet by the time they hit thirty years of age, at the lastest. Bantor firmly believed that. He had a few of his own, and a few of these were the reasons he maintained his career and his ideals. For a lot of congressmen, the vice attached to these skeletons was sex. For others, drugs or alcohol.
For Bantor, it was lies. His first public office, as a city councilman for Amelia City in the midwest, had been won through bribes. His next public office, won after a much-needed move to Virginia, was as a member of the Virginia House of Representatives. He'd used voter fraud to win that seat.
And to obtain his post in D.C., he'd put together a frame job against his opponent that landed that man in jail on drug charges. He'd lied his way through his career. If anybody ever found out, he was done. There were worse things he could have lurking in the shadows of his past, but few would snowball on him and put an end to his career as quickly.
If he could just figure out what was bothering him, he thought all might yet be well. A small voice in his mind insisted that the problem was something to do with the Ultra Soldier himself, Major Patriot. The hulking superhero had been short and clipped in his report of the operation, which was not in itself surprising; Patriot had been a soldier prior to the experiments, and such was a soldier's way.
Bantor got quietly and smoothly out of bed, careful not to wake Molly, his wife, or Corwin, the big German Shepherd sleeping comfortably at the foot of their bed. He crept to the hallway, then down to his home office, flicking on the soft overhead light and sitting at his desk.
The typed transcript of his video report from Patriot, automatically generated by his computer, lay on the middle of his blotter. It was only two pages long, and he read through it twice before realizing what was wrong with it.
There was no mention anywhere in the report of an encounter with either Captain Righteous or Dr. Tyrant. It might not signify anything, but Bantor jotted down a note for himself before heading back to bed, where he finally found some rest.
Lester knew it was too early to celebrate, though he'd never seen Abe in higher spirits than he was presently in. When the troops returned to the Nevada base with the third component in hand, there had been mutual surprise and jubilation. Lester himself had felt deeply surprised that it hadn't been his unit that found the final Freeze Ray component, but he wasn't about to question their good fortune.
Big Three and his company had been rattled, but the burly, smiling soldier had shared a good amount of beer with his cohorts and a toast to their fallen comrades. They had lost sixteen men total, though nobody knew if there had been any survivors captured among that number.
As for Abe himself, Lester hadn't seen him since his return the evening before. Captain Righteous now sat in the mess hall at six in the morning, looking around at the handful of henchmen eating before going about their assigned tasks.
He spotted Kurtis Boe making a bee line for him seconds before the younger man sat down across from him. "Captain Righteous," Boe said with a slight bow of his head.
"Mr. Boe," Lester replied in kind.
"Dr. Tyrant has been in his lab all night, locked the rest of us out. I think he's testing the Freeze Ray."
"Quite likely."
"Sir, there's been an uncomforting question rolling around among the men that I think is only fair to ask."
"Well, if I can offer an answer, I will," said Lester, pushing scrambled eggs back and forth with a plastic fork.
"Well, what if the Freeze Ray doesn't work," Boe asked quietly. Dread turned like a vise upon Lester's guts. Here was a possibility he hadn't thought of, and really, was it any wonder he hadn't? Abe was no longer a spry young supervillain, and there might be parts of the device which he simply couldn't manipulate with his aged fingers anymore. Parts of the device might have corroded in storage too, an angle he'd not thought to consider.
"I hate to admit this, Mr. Boe, but I hadn't even considered that possibility," Lester said with a sigh. "I'll see if Abe will talk to me after I'm done here. And Mr. Boe?"
"Yes?"
"It's good to know we've got someone like you around," Lester said, tucking into his food.
"Sir?"
"You ask the right questions, the ones that make people actually stop and think. That's important in an operation like this." Lester quickly scarfed the rest of his food, then got up to leave. Boe reached over for his tray.
"I've got it, Captain," said Boe. "Go find us an answer."
The tunnel reeked of rotted meat, stagnant pools of water and slime comingled and shimmering with the mild vibrations of power running through the building. The Leader kept this place a secret from the HAC; only his Grays were allowed within.
Major Patriot had not been forced to burn all of the bodies, since two had actually been survivors. One lay on a hospital bed on the other side of a slotted steel door before him. The gray-suited man standing next to the door offered Patriot no greeting, only a hard, flat glare devoid of any emotion other than mild comtempt.
"Is he awake yet," Patriot asked in a whisper.
"Soon. Docs have patched him up just so," replied the suit in a heavy wiseguy accent. "Left me a hypo with something that'll bring him around in a hurry, if you want it."
"No, we'll let him come to naturally. Any word from your immediate superior?"
"Yeah, he's at Site Charlie, overseeing the Leader's number one guest," said the suit with a leering grin. "Time's growing short, ain't it?"
"Feels that way, yes," said Patriot. "Did Franco leave a line open?"
"Cellular three," the suit replied. "You want me to call him?"
"Yes, but only to tell him I might be calling soon," said Patriot. A low moan came from the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. "Other than that, don't mind any noise from inside." The suit used a small key to open the door, letting Major Patriot inside with the henchman within.
The Gray placed his call to Franco, and a couple of minutes later, he put his fingers in his ears to muffle the screams from behind the steel door.
Aberdeen Tyrannus, once the most feared man in all the free world, twitched and bolted upright in his chair when the heavy knocking came at his door. He balled his right hand into a fist and used it to wipe a line of drool from his cheek and chin, snuffling.
"Some scourge of humanity I am," he groused, groaning as he came up out of the swivel chair. His right hand went back to his lower back and rubbed absently, the smell of Bengay redolent in the air.
He undid the bolt holding the door shut and pulled it open. Lester stood before him, eyes full of worry. "Something I can help you with, Lester?"
"Um, you have something on your cheek." Abe ran his hand over his face and grunted at the single indentation a pen had made on his face when he'd passed out at his main computer terminal.
"Think nothing of it. Coffee? I always keep some on hand, even here," Abe said, turning and leading Lester within.
"Sure, I could use some," Lester said, stepping inside and shutting the door. "Abe, does the Freeze Ray work?" The aged super-scientist paused for just a moment before shuffling over to the coffee pot and pouring into two plain white mugs.
"Yes and no," Abe said, shaking his head. He popped open an overhead cabinet over the terminal keyboards and pulled down a sugar container and a box of creamer cups. "The device will work, but only in brief, ten-second bursts. Something went wrong with the power output device. I can recalibrate it, but there's one problem."
"What's that?" Lester poured sugar and creamer into his mug, stirring slowly as he waited for Abe's reply.
"The device is so fragile that doing the recalibration and testing could take days, maybe a week. In that time, the HAC will figure out that we have the Freeze Ray. They may not find this base, but you can be damned sure they'll send teams to the polar caps to wait for us."
Lester understood the precarious situation they were in. No matter what happened, they would be forced to face down an enormous contingent of HAC troops, along with the Ultra Soldier, Major Patriot. Even if they should win through the first encounter at one of the ice caps, they would be hard pressed to repeat such a victory.
And they only had one Freeze Ray. The technology couldn't be reproduced in time to use both in a single effort. "What are our options," Lester asked.
"Well, we can try to focus on a single pole and hope that the HAC realizes the necessity of what we're doing," Abe said. He took a long pull on his coffee and shook his head. "Or, we use the Tyrant-2 and try to go unnoticed."
"The Tyrant-2?" Lester shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had no idea what Abe was talking about.
"It's a submarine I had constructed during my last campaign before retirement," Abe said, easing himself down into his swivel chair. "Fully operational, hidden off the Alaskan coast. That dingbat Palin may not have seen Russians from her back yard, but she could have easily seen a threat if I'd ever used the thing."
"So how would using the Tyrant-2 work?"
"Simple. Mount the Freeze Ray to a force dome aperature atop the sub, navigate up under the caps, and use it to freeze solid large swatches of water and stabilize the current ice. They likely wouldn't know what was going on in time to try to stop us."
Lester thought about this plan for a moment, and accepted it as the only option that would allow them to use the Freeze Ray on both ice caps. "I think we go with that. Should I tell Boe to go get the sub ready?"
"Yes, that would be ideal," said Abe. "Tell him that he's to personally see to the preparations of the Tyrant-2. As for me, I'll get to work on the Freeze Ray after I catch some sleep in a real bed."
Lester left Abe's workstation and headed into the base to locate Kurtis Boe and relay the plan. He felt more rushed than he ever had before a major mission; time, it seemed, was growing short.
The hell of knowing vital information and not being able to share it without drawing unwanted attention was a concept not new to Colonel Brant Chambers, known to his men as The Leader. Maurice Franco, his top man in the field, had passed the information along to him after having received it from Major Patriot. How Patriot had gleaned the knowledge is best left unmentioned.
It involved broken glass, an apple peeler, a stapler, vinegar and salt. The rest can be left to one's imagination.
The Leader sat in his HAC office staring down at requisition forms, waiting for a fax to come in informing him that his agents at Area 51 had completed their task. It would be complicated from that end; his people weren't due to report to any of the infiltrated bunkers for days yet, but they would figure out a way to explain their presence to base command. The Leader didn't use idiots, with perhaps the exception of Major Patriot.
All of the reports concerning the Ultra-Soldier's likely mental deterioration had been expunged or redacted into blocks of black on white paper by the Colonel himself. He'd made no secret of his support of the program; his signature on numerous forms was therefor not suspect.
He knew full well that Patriot had probably slaughtered his own in the field in Texas. He was, in fact, counting on it.
What he hadn't been counting on was the break-in at Area 51 and the retrieval of the Freeze Ray device. It put a sudden need for expedience on the last facet of his plans, but Franco would not fail him there. Franco had been a veteran of what the Leader's father called 'the business'. Franco didn't fuck around; Franco got results.
Maurice Franco was currently babysitting a 'Freelance Super', a rare sort of superhuman who utilized their powers and abilities to turn a profit quietly. Most of their activities bordered on the illegal, though this one in particular was doing nothing wrong.
He simply wasn't allowed to take on other jobs while working for the Leader.
The superhuman in question was a man located in western Maine's woodland, a fellow going by the handle of Technoclone. His particular ability allowed him to create from thin air an exact duplicate of any piece of technology. Moreover, he could imbue these copied devices with enhanced strength and durability.
The complexity of a device determined how much time it took the lumberjack-looking superhuman to duplicate and enhance it. If the machine was composed of numerous independent but interlocked systems, like a car, the process took a couple of days and a lot of energy. Technoclone had put himself into a three-day coma duplicating a new Ferrari for a client the year before.
Maurice Franco poked his head into the kitchen once again, taking a long, measuring look at the superhuman. Legal name of Terry Block, Technoclone looked pale and tired as he ate ravenously of the eggs, bacon and pancakes Franco had prepared for him. The Leader had been very precise about how important it was that Block be able to finish his task. "Take greatest care of him, Franco," the Leader had said in his fax. "We're too close to the end to have him fall down on the job."
Franco left his post by the doorway to go out into the yard, then back through the trees to the small plane bay that had been erected for Block's current task. This project required total privacy; if any government agency saw what was within the hangar, the entire HAC would swoop in and questions would be raised. The questions would lead to the Leader and his Grays, and they couldn't have that.
Franco slipped into the hangar via its man-sized door, flipping on the lights and staring up at the construct being reproduced from the parts laying haphazardly against the walls. Four technicians slept in a cabin half a mile away, but they would be here later, continuing to work on finishing this behemoth.
Franco smiled. "The Tiger Tank reborn."
Congressman Bantor heard the other shoe drop as General Farat came barging into his office. Dressed in a sweat-plastered gray sweater and sweatpants, the red-faced general had apparently been on his morning run when he got word of whatever had brought him here.
"Bantor," the general rasped as the Congressman slowly rose out of his chair. "It's Area 51. They got hit. Army personnel found the bodies an hour ago."
"The device..."
"Taken," Farat shouted, pounding a fist on the desk. "They fucking got it! The whole Dynatech attack was a feint, and it worked! They fucking got it!"
On the other side of the HAC headquarters, the Leader was processing his own frustration. According to a faxed report from Major Patriot, every form of questioning had failed to produce a location for Tyrant's base. 'Powerful hypnotic suggestion likely keeping subject from relinquishing information. Requesting permission to terminate interview and move on to second candidate.'
The Leader had immediately replied with a go-ahead, adding that the second subject could be dealt with however Patriot saw fit, success or failure. He shuddered to think what the Ultra Soldier might do with that, but it was really not his concern.
All he needed right now was a little time. He would not be questioned if he left the HAC right now; he could simply explain his travel as part of preparations, and nobody would bat an eye. He was high enough up the chain of command to be known, but enough to one side that most people safely ignored him.
He had to get to Maine.
The remainder of that day passed in a blur for hundreds of people. Among the rushed were Aberdeen Tyrannus, Lester Collins, Kurtis Boe, Big Three, Congressman Bantor, Brant Chambers, Terry Block, Major Patriot and general Farat. Hundreds of HAC agents, several dozen Army Rangers, and every henchman assigned to Dr. Tyrant rushed hither and thither that day, with preparations underway.
The following morning, however, brought with it the almost crushing press of forced patience. Abe had to let the Freeze Ray's automated recalibration run itself. Boe and his crew had to board the remotely risen submersible and get it prepared, which mostly involved small, tedious tasks. Big Three ran through equipment inspections with little enthusiasm, while Lester made minute repairs to his armor suit.
The Leader and Maurice Franco played chess and watched movies while Technoclone and his four assigned technicians built slowly towards completing a stronger, more potent Tiger Tank. Congressman Bantor, in D.C., filed action notices for the Department of Defense.
The Grays throughout the country received their final sets of orders. Soon their organization would disband, at least temporarily. When the Leader gave the signal, they would form ranks once again.
General Farat had been dragged into a beauracratic pissing contest with his contemporaries from the other branches of the military, all of whom demanded to be read in on the current operations of the HAC. The whole business of dealing with them was tiresome; unfortunately for him, there was no avoiding it.
On the second day of preparations, Lester and Abe sat together in Lester's quarters, watching what they were surprised to discover was a mutual near-favorite film, 'My Fellow Americans'. The parallel between the film's premise and their own circumstances wasn't lost on them.
"Time," Abe said at one point, snickering.
"What about it?" Lester offered the bowl of popcorn to Abe, who grabbed a handful.
"Seems to stretch out when there's a whole lot of nothing going on. Then, in one sudden clap of the hands, hours or days fly by, almost without notice." The two men sat silently for a minute, pondering this observation, made almost without consideration by a man who had relied upon science and hard facts for most of his life. Lester broke the silence.
"Abe, you're the most brilliant scientific mind in the living world. Saying that time flows differently under different circumstances doesn't seem like a very solid theory."
"It isn't," said Abe, tossing the last piece of popcorn into his mouth. "Doesn't make it any less true though, does it?" In the long run, Lester could think of no reply, and they finished the movie in companionable silence.
It was simple, really. There weren't any options left, and everything had been set up long in advance, should the day come when Dr. Tyrant got hold of the Freeze Ray. In a way, the Leader had anticipated that the old supervillain would succeed.
He just hadn't expected the old man to pull it all off so quickly. That Area 51 would be infiltrated, he'd expected. But he had been certain that Tyrannus would be over-the-top about it, like he'd always been during his career as a supervillain. The Leader had erroneously assumed he'd had plenty of time to make preparations.
He had also assumed that Major Patriot's mental deterioration would take a while longer, but one of his men in Patriot's unit, bound for the North Pole, had just sent him a message that the Ultra Soldier had snapped in the transport and mauled one of his companions, accusing the HAC agent of being one of Tyrant's spies.
An order to keep him stationed seperately when they arrived at the pole went unquestioned.
The final unexpected development had been Captain Righteous siding with Tyrannus. This didn't spoil any of the Leader's plans, per se, but it certainly required some swift recalculations. Nothing that brought him to a stop, but it did give him pause.
For the time being, all he could really do was wait, and as the old axiom went, waiting was the hardest part.
I'm really losing it, Major Patriot thought. There's no way Gershwin is a traitor or a spy, so why did I go after him like that? Why was I so paranoid, yelling that he was a mole?
Sitting with his head tucked between his knees as the transport plane descended towards the icy plateau, the Ultra Soldier was not surprised to hear over his radio that keys would be left for him inside of a second snow crawler. He was to follow the primary transport to Echo Station, and from there, take himself out to sub-station three, alone. "General Farat's orders," someone had said over the radio, and he double-clicked his earpiece to indicate that he acknowledged the order.
Now following behind the main transport, Major Patriot simply nodded his agreement with the notion that he had to keep himself well away from his comrades until he felt he had himself under control once again. He wasn't the brightest man in the world, he knew that. He also possessed enough self-awareness, however, to plant himself in sub-station three alone and observe himself. If there were a way for him to determine when he was about to lose sight of the line between friend and foe, he would only discover it in isolation.
For Major Patriot, long days stood ahead.