A Learning Experience Read online

  Jürgen followed his gaze. All nine helicopters had crash-landed, their passengers spilling out onto the grassy field. Some of them were smoking slightly, their pilots ordering the men to run for their lives. Others seemed almost intact, utterly undamaged. It was impossible to tell what had happened to them. There had been no reason for all nine helicopters to suffer the same fault at the same time.

  “I don't know,” he answered. But he thought about the dongles and wondered, grimly, just what else might have been invented in secret. Something to take down helicopters? “I ...”

  “ATTENTION,” a voice boomed. Jürgen turned to see five men standing on a grassy knoll, holding unfamiliar-looking weapons in their hands. “Discard all weapons, then proceed away from the helicopters into the field behind you. I say again, discard all weapons and then proceed into the field behind you. Resistance will not be tolerated.”

  The team’s commander purpled rapidly. “You are under arrest,” he shouted, lifting his rifle. “Put down your guns and surrender, you ...”

  “Discard all weapons and proceed into the field behind you,” the speaker repeated. “There will be no further warnings.”

  “No,” the commander said. He lifted his rifle and fired, once. The bullet glanced off the speaker in a flash of blue light and vanished somewhere in the distance. “I ...”

  The speaker returned fire. There was a flash of blue-red light and the commander dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Jürgen stared, then leaned forward to examine the body. As far as he could tell, the man had simply been knocked out. There were certainly no physical wounds. Moments later, the speaker lifted his weapon and discharged a brighter shot into the ground in front of the DHS team. There was a colossal explosion, which cleared rapidly to reveal a small crater, smoking like a volcano. Jürgen gulped – just what the hell had they stumbled into? – and then obeyed orders. The rest of the team discarded their weapons and followed Jürgen into the next field.

  ***

  “Pussies,” Romford sneered. “Big and tough when it comes to picking on unarmed men and women, but useless when their target fights back.”

  Steve privately agreed. In his view, the view he’d been taught by his parents, the truly brave men went into the infantry, where they matched themselves against the enemy infantry. It was true that policemen were brave too, but it wasn't the same. And the sort of people who would crash in like stormtroopers when they thought they had a cause weren't worthy of any respect at all.

  “Keep them covered,” he ordered. The DHS team looked thoroughly cowed, but appearances could be deceiving. Steve had seen prisoners move from cooperative to riotous within seconds in Afghanistan. “Secure their weapons, then find out who’s in charge of this bunch of monkeys.”

  He examined the stormtroopers as his men moved to obey. They looked professional, too professional. Steve doubted his Marine platoon had looked anything like as good while they’d been in service, except perhaps when they’d been on parade. But, as Steve had been taught more than once, it was possible to look good or to be good. Few units managed both at once.

  Perhaps we should have let them rappel down to the ground, he thought, snidely. We could have seen just how well they fucked it up.

  He shook his head. There was no time for delay. The helicopters might not have managed to get off a distress signal before the screamers brought them down, but someone might well have noticed that all nine transponders had vanished. These weren’t the lax pre-9/11 days. The vanished transponders would bring some sort of reaction, probably fighter jets intent on searching for prospective terrorists. And they would probably have some ground forces in the area too. Steve had done the same in Afghanistan.

  Romford returned, marching a pair of men ahead of him. Neither of them looked particularly professional; one was clearly an analyst, while the other was a Washington suit. Steve saw the simmering anger, mixed with shock and terror, in the latter’s eyes and smiled inwardly. A shocked man was a man who could be drained of information, then used as a messenger.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, with mock politeness. “And who do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  The Washington man swallowed, then looked down at the grass. “Cyril Dorsey,” he said reluctantly. The man beside him let out a sound that sounded like a choked-off giggle. “I’m from the NSA.”

  Steve lifted his eyebrows. “The NSA?”

  “Yes,” Dorsey said. He railed, either through grim determination or through a sudden awareness of his companion’s amusement. “And you are in a boatload of trouble.”

  “Try saying a shitload,” Steve advised. “It sounds so much more dramatic.”

  He sighed, fighting down the temptation to start yelling at the damned bureaucrat. “What are you doing here?”

  The analyst glared at him. “What are you doing with the veterans?”

  Steve was momentarily nonplussed. The veterans? And then it clicked. Someone had noticed that a number of veterans were disappearing, then tracked it back to the ranch and realised that the trail ended there. Hell, he wouldn't have given the NSA the time of day, but perhaps the analyst had good reason to be concerned about the veterans. For all he knew, they could have been sacrificed to the dark gods.

  “The veterans are fine,” Steve assured him. He briefly considered introducing Romford, then decided against it. The veteran looked young enough to be his own son. “But you have trespassed on my property.”

  “We have a search warrant,” Dorsey insisted. “And you attacked us!”

  “Technically speaking, this is an embassy, which you attacked,” Steve said. Did it really count as an embassy if the host country didn't know about it? But it didn't matter. If nothing else, the mere suggestion that it was an embassy would cause no end of panic in the corridors of power. Storming a foreign embassy was pretty much an act of war. “However, we are prepared to forgive your trespass in exchange for a few minor considerations.”

  Cyril Dorsey started to splutter again, his words tumbling over themselves so fast that Steve couldn't even begin to follow them. Instead, he waited for the man to shut up and then continued.

  “You will go back to your superiors and inform them that this ranch is an embassy of another power,” he said. “Furthermore, you will tell them that we expect a meeting with the President one week from today, at a location of his choosing. He may bring one companion to the meeting, if he wishes. Until then, this ranch is to remain isolated. If any federal elements are sighted within ten miles of the ranch, they will be fired on without further warning.”

  “Now, look here, you son of a bitch,” Dorsey snapped. “You can't make threats like that!”

  “Oh, those poor bastards,” Steve said, looking over at the troopers. “What did they do to deserve having a fool like you in command?”

  He looked back at Dorsey, dropping his facade of politeness. “Let me be clear on this, you fucking idiot,” he snapped. “You are massively outgunned and you and your men are at my mercy. And, as you proposed to raid, with live ammunition, a ranch that holds my wife, children and relatives, I am not feeling very damn merciful! You could have knocked on the damn door and asked about the vets!”

  Resisting the temptation to shake the man, he instead leaned closer until their faces were almost touching. “You will go back to Washington and deliver the message I gave you,” he snapped. “And then you will resign, retire from federal work and go live somewhere else, somewhere where your stupidity won’t risk lives. Or I will fucking hunt you down and kill you!”

  The man cringed back. Steve was unsurprised – and unimpressed. He’d met too many paper-pushers who had no real awareness of the world surrounding them. Washington produced the idiots by the bucket load, then put them in charge of making government policy actually work. They never seemed to realise that they could push people too far and that, one day, their house of cards would crumble into dust. Or that their mistakes could cost lives.

  “There’s
one thing I want you to see,” Steve said, very quietly. “Turn around.”

  Dorsey obeyed. Steve smiled, then activated the interface and sent a single very specific command. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen ... and then a beam of red light struck down from high overhead, burning a hole into the ground. Dorsey let out a strangled cry as the ground shook, almost toppling over in horror, just before the beam snapped back out of existence, leaving a glowing crater. It was far worse, Steve knew, than the smaller weapon he’d used to make his earlier point. And it would be visible on every observation satellite in position to see it. Maybe Washington wouldn't believe Dorsey’s tale, but they’d believe the satellites.

  “Strip,” Steve ordered. He raised his voice, addressing the rest of the assault team. “All of you. Strip.”

  He waited until the team was naked, then pointed towards the road leading down to the nearest town. Naked as they were, it was quite possible that the team would be arrested for indecent exposure. By the time they managed to convince the local police of who they were – or make a phone call to Washington – they would have undergone one hell of a lot of humiliation. Steve felt a moment of grim satisfaction – he hated the regular humiliations at the hands of government bureaucracy – then turned his attention back to Dorsey. Somewhat to his surprise, the man had remained on his feet.

  “Remember the message,” Steve said. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card. “You can call me on that number, when you’re ready to let me know where you want to meet. Anywhere will do.”

  He paused, significantly. “And remember what I said about any federal forces near the ranch. Go.”

  The men fled. Steve took a look at the helicopters, then silently marked them for disassembly and conversion into something Heinlein Colony could use. If nothing else, now the secret was out, they could order whatever they wanted openly. But recruitment was going to be far harder in future. The government would try to slip a few of its own agents into the system.

  “You could have handled it better,” Kevin said, though the communicator. The intelligence agent sounded doubtful. In his world, there was no such thing as a dead enemy. “They’re going to be pissed.”

  “It had to be done,” Steve said, shortly. There was no way he would have passed up on the chance to humiliate the bureaucrats. “Washington is like a bull. Sometimes you have to hit the bastard in the nose just to make it pay attention.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “And how many idiots who try that get gored by an angry bull?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Washington DC, USA

  “Let me see if I have this straight,” the President said. “We have a high-tech militia in Montana that has declared itself a foreign power and has the technology to back it up?”

  Jürgen swallowed as the President’s gaze moved over and fixed on him. He’d never been to the White House before, certainly not as a participant in a very high-level meeting. His boss wouldn't have gone to the White House under normal circumstances. That would have been the responsibility of the DHS Director and his subordinates, not low-level analysts.

  “That appears to be the only explanation that fits the facts, Mr. President,” he said.

  The President nodded, very slowly, then moved his gaze to Dorsey. “There are times when I wish,” he said, “that I could just order someone hung. Might I ask what you were thinking when you encouraged DHS to launch a million-dollar raid on very scant evidence?”

  Dorsey looked, if anything, even worse than Jürgen felt. “I ... I believed that we had a serious problem that needed to be resolved,” he said. “I ...”

  “And now we have a far more serious problem,” the President said, cutting him off. “General?”

  Lieutenant General Alvin Houseman, Director of the USAF Foreign Technology Division, frowned. “We picked up the blast on satellites all over the area,” he said. “Our analysts worked the data and believe it was an immensely powerful directed energy weapon, fired from somewhere in low orbit. We don’t have a clue what actually fired the weapon.”

  “A high-tech militia,” the President said, softly. “What sort of militia could put an orbital weapons platform into orbit without being noticed?”

  Jürgen winced, inwardly. Getting something up into orbit without being noticed was pretty much impossible. American satellites monitored every inch of the planet, watching for the tell-tale heat signature that marked a rocket launch. No rogue state could hope to put something in orbit without it being detected and marked for destruction if necessary. And yet, there was no disputing the physical evidence. Somehow, Steve Stuart and his men had put an orbital weapons platform in position to fire on American soil.

  “I don’t know, Mr. President,” the General confessed. “The weapons system is years ahead of our best work, literally.”

  The same, Jürgen knew, could be said about the dongles ... and whatever they'd deployed to bring down the helicopters. And the weapons they’d used. Technology that was out of this world ... the thought caught at his mind, holding him still. What if the technology was literally out of this world? What if it was alien technology? But he knew that he would be committed to a mental hospital if he said that out loud.

  “So we seem to have a major problem,” the President observed. He looked over at the fourth man in the room. “Colonel? What can you tell us about Mr. Stuart?”

  Jürgen turned to look at Colonel Craig Henderson. He was a short black man, with hair cropped close to his skull, wearing a Marine uniform. From what Jürgen had heard, he’d been at Camp Pendleton when he’d been urgently summoned to Washington. It must have been alarming, Jürgen knew. What sort of offence called for a chewing out from the President personally, rather than his senior officers. But he’d been briefed and hadn't said a word since.

  The Colonel cleared his throat. “Steve ...”

  He swallowed, then started again. “I knew Steve when we were both going through Basic Training,” he said. “He is tough, determined and often very blunt. His family has a long tradition of military service and the honour code that goes with it. When he was sent out to war, he did as well as anyone and better than most. He might have been as fearful on the battlefield as I was, during my first engagement, but he sucked it up and kept going. By the time he was promoted, he looked certain to be a lifer in the Corps.”

  There was a pause. “And then came Afghanistan.

  “It’s hard to explain to a civilian, but I will do my best. The military code, Mr. President, can be summed up as you fighting for your buddies, rather than your country. You have to be able to rely, completely, on your buddies ... and, in a modern army, that can be far more than just your platoon. On deployment, you have to rely on air support, intelligence officers and the logistics officers in the rear to keep going. And you also have to trust that your political leaders won’t simply abandon you when it becomes embarrassing.

  “Steve and his men were caught in a Taliban ambush, Mr. President,” Henderson said. “They needed fire support to get out of it, so Steve called for help. Instead of immediate assistance, they were told that the ROE prevented either long-range guns or air support from engaging the enemy. Steve was practically begging for assistance that wouldn't, not couldn't, come. In the end, he managed to lead his men out of the trap, leaving four bodies behind. We never recovered one of them. Steve retired soon afterwards and went back to the ranch.”

  The President leaned forward. “So ... what’s your impression of him now?”

  “I have no idea where he got his hands on advanced technology,” Henderson said. “And I have no idea if it is really him calling the shots. But if it is, I think we may be in some trouble. You would have someone with a good reason – several good reasons – to resent the federal government allied with technology that could do real damage. Steve’s attitude, the attitude of his whole family, is that of someone who wants to be left alone. You didn't leave them alone.”

  Dorsey was spurred to respond. “They were f
louting laws,” he snapped. “And ...”

  “And you sent more helicopters than we often had in Afghanistan to storm their ranch,” Henderson snapped back. “Tell me something, sir. What would you have said if Steve and his family had been accidentally killed by your people?”

  “I would have demanded a full investigation,” Dorsey said, weakly.

  “And would that investigation,” Henderson demanded, “actually have ensured that someone was punished?”

  He took a breath. “Over the last five decades, there have been a whole string of incidents where people have been harassed, arrested, injured or even killed by federal law enforcement agencies, often on very flimsy grounds,” he added. “And how many of those feds have been punished for it?”

  The President slapped the table. “Enough,” he said. His gaze moved to Dorsey, then to the DHS Director. “I shall expect your resignations ... no, you’re both fired. And if you leak, I’ll personally see to it that you spend the rest of your lives in jail.”