Cowboy Angels (2 page)

‘Nothing good, I bet.’

Tom’s ex-wife was employed by the analytical arm of the Company, turning raw data into finished intelligence, so she’d always had a pretty good idea about what his clandestine work in Special Ops had involved. Her attempts to persuade him to transfer to a safer position had sparked a series of spectacular and legendary rows that had eventually led to their divorce.

‘You still going out with that photographer?’ Tom said. ‘Nora what’s-her-name?’

‘It didn’t work out. I guess I’m kind of in between relationships at the moment.’

‘Sorry to hear it. I know I’m no advertisement for marriage, but I always thought you’d make the ideal all-American father. Clean-cut, hard-working, loyal . . . I guess we should drop “loyal”, given why you’re here.’

Stone let that one go.

Tom put his head to one side, listening to Dylan sing about naming animals in Eden. ‘I guess he does sound a little bit funky. But it doesn’t matter what the man chooses to do, he’s always cool. Always has been, always will be. He doesn’t care what other people think. He just does his own thing.’ He took a sip of Jack Daniel’s and said, ‘These poor guys are going to get slaughtered if they don’t have any backup.’

Suddenly sounding tired and sober and sad.

‘That’s not the idea,’ Stone said.

‘Maybe it isn’t. But that’s what going to happen.’

A horn blared outside, long and loud.

Tom checked his watch and said, ‘That’ll be the guy come to take you up the hill.’

Stone’s pang of relief was immediately tempered by guilt. ‘As soon as I’ve seen the general, I’ll come straight back here and have that drink with you.’

‘It stinks, Adam. Jimmy fucking Carter is going to let Baines’s men go back through the mirror and commit suicide because that’s easier than finding some way of standing down and repatriating five thousand soldiers. You know what this reminds me of? The Bay of Pigs.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘It’s part of the same history as “funky”, and this particular doppel of Bobby Dylan. Look it up. One thing I’ll tell you now, the only thing we’ve learnt from all the different Americas we found through the mirror is that we haven’t learnt anything at all.’ Tom Waverly screwed the top onto the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and stood up, saying, ‘Let’s go, compañero.’

Stone hesitated for a moment. On the one hand, he had a politically sensitive delivery to make, and didn’t really want to have Tom Waverly around when he made it in case Tom got it into his head to cause some kind of scene. On the other, he felt that he should keep his old friend under close watch in case he was working himself up to do something reckless . . .

He said, ‘If you want to ride along, be my guest.’

‘You bet. I’m all done here.’

 

Adam Stone’s escort, Captain Gene Lewis, was a muscular young man with lustrous black hair and dark, contemptuous eyes who drove his Jeep with reckless speed, overtaking a string of trucks lumbering toward the staging area, barely slowing when he swung onto the dirt track that climbed to the farmhouse where General Wendell Baines had his headquarters.

Tom had taken the shotgun seat. He turned to Stone, gestured at the wide valley spread below the ridge, and said, ‘Ain’t that something? ’

Two thirty-foot-diameter Turing gates - clones of the primary, which had been opened onto the Free America sheaf at Brookhaven in 1978 - stood under a raked steel canopy at one end of the huge concrete apron where trucks, half-tracks and light tanks were drawn up in neat rows like the audience for the world’s biggest drive-in cinema. The low winter sun glowered through a haze of diesel smoke, and in this apocalyptic light soldiers were lining up to receive ammunition and grenades from quartermasters, standing in front of a field altar where a military chaplain elevated the host, or sitting around oil-drum braziers amongst piles of equipment.

In the Free America sheaf’s version of history, the USA had fallen to a Communist revolution in 1929, and a cabal of disenfranchised politicians, bankers, and businessmen, backed by loyal elements of the army and navy, had occupied Cuba and Haiti and established a government-in-exile. Operation SWIFT SWORD, approved by President Floyd Davis just before he’d been defeated by Jimmy Carter in an election so close there had been recounts in fifteen states, had been set up to help the Free Americans strike at the Communist heartland. It had brought a division of Free American troops into the Real through a Turing gate at Guantánamo Bay and transported them to a camp a few miles outside Gettysburg, where they had been equipped with modern weaponry and trained in its use.

According to the original plan of campaign, the Free Americans would have re-entered their sheaf at Gettysburg, and the Real would have defended the Turing gates and built up resupply routes while the Free Americans staged a fast, hard march across Pennsylvania and Maryland to Washington, DC, destroying the seat of the Communist government, inciting a popular uprising, and bringing another version of America to the Pan-American Alliance. But because the centrepiece of Carter’s campaign had been a promise to end the so-called wars for freedom that Davis and three Republican presidents before him had fought across a dozen versions of America, and scaling down support for SWIFT SWORD was the first step in making good on that promise, the Free Americans would now either have to fight their war on their own, or return to their version of Cuba.

‘We do not give up,’ Captain Lewis told Stone, bellowing over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. He had a strong accent. ‘This is what we dream of for fifty years. You break your word, but we do not care. We fight anyway. We fight and we win.’

Tom clapped the young officer on the shoulder. ‘You believe the balls on this guy?’

‘If you don’t help us, we fight on our own,’ Captain Lewis said. ‘What else can we do?’

They passed through a security check into a compound where Jeeps and powder-blue sedans with military plates were parked in front of a fieldstone farmhouse. A line of soldiers carried stacks of accordion files and sacks of shredded paper out of the farmhouse to feed fires burning in a row of oil drums. Ashy curls and flecks sifted out of the cold air like snow. Off to one side, a small black helicopter squatted beneath its drooping rotor blades.

Tom Waverly told Stone that the helicopter had brought in the Old Man about an hour ago.

‘What’s Knightly doing here?’

The Old Man, Dick Knightly, had been in charge of the Central Intelligence Group’s Directorate of Special Operations ever since it had been set up in 1968. He’d lost his job two days ago, when President Carter had been sworn into office and his reorganisation of the CIG - the Company - had taken effect.

‘He delivered four helicopters to Baines,’ Tom said. ‘Crop dusters rigged with rocket launchers and machine guns.’

‘Jesus, Tom. They could put him in jail for a stunt like that.’

‘He has paperwork showing they were donated by a wealthy patriot. Watch out for him,’ Tom said, as Stone climbed out of the Jeep. ‘He might try to feed you a line about how us old-school guys will need to stick together because bad times are coming down. Don’t believe a word of it.’

‘I quit Special Ops, remember?’

‘Yeah, and the Old Man got himself fired. But he still thinks he can call on his cowboy angels whenever he needs some help.’

‘What kind of help? What is he into?’

Tom shook his head. ‘I’m giving you some friendly advice, Adam. Don’t try to take advantage.’

‘Why don’t you come inside with me? This thing I have to do won’t take long. Then we can talk—’

‘I have some business of my own,’ Tom said, and gave Stone a sloppy salute. Before Stone could say anything, Captain Lewis popped the handbrake and the Jeep sped off with a slippery squeal of tyres.

Stone pulled out his cell phone, called Bruce Ellis, and told him that he was worried that Tom was planning to do something spectacularly stupid. ‘He just rode away from Baines’s HQ with one of the Free American officers.’

‘I don’t have any jurisdiction inside the camp,’ Bruce said.

‘You have security camera coverage. Can you keep track of him for me? I want to talk to him again as soon as I’ve finished with Baines.’

General Baines’s aide was waiting on the porch of the farmhouse, flanked by two soldiers. He insisted on patting Stone down for concealed weapons, asked him to open the briefcase.

‘What’s in the briefcase is for General Baines’s eyes only,’ Stone said.

The aide stared at Stone and said with frosty disdain, ‘It is not necessary for me to see, because I know already what you bring.’

‘So how about letting me do my job,’ Stone said. ‘Or are we going to stand out here in the cold and keep your general waiting?’

With the soldiers at his back, he followed the aide into the farmhouse’s front parlour. Blinds pulled down over the windows glowed with the last of the sunlight. Lamps dropped pools of light at a table where men talked in low voices over a tiling of maps, on the desk where a sergeant was typing with two fingers on an IBM Selectric. A grey cumulus of cigarette and cigar smoke drifted under the sagging horsehair plaster ceiling. The air was hot and oppressive, stale with the weary sense of failed intrigue.

General Wendell Baines was sitting in an armchair in a corner of the crowded room. A short, straight-backed man with a lined and deeply tanned face and crew-cut white hair, dressed in neatly pressed camouflage fatigues, he studied Stone and said at last, ‘I’ve seen you before, son.’

‘We met at a briefing at the State Department, sir. Two weeks ago.’

Stone was sweating inside his overcoat, but he couldn’t take it off because his briefcase was cuffed to his wrist.

‘I remember now,’ Baines said. ‘You were with the incoming Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Turner. How do you like your new boss, by the way? Is he the right man for the job?’

‘It’s too early to say, sir.’

‘The impression I took away from our brief meeting is that he’s the kind of unimaginative martinet more interested in the state of the cutlery in the canteen than in the morale of his men. Well, I suppose we must get this thing done. In the last week I have many meetings with members of your government and armed forces, and I talked on the telephone to your Admiral Turner this morning. He confirmed his government’s position and told me to expect you. He told me what you would be carrying. Show me, please. Let us complete this formality.’

Everyone in the room was watching them. The sergeant had stopped typing, and Stone’s former boss, Dick Knightly, was standing in the doorway, lean and tough as whipcord in his trademark tweed suit and yellow waistcoat. He looked straight at Stone, then inclined his head and whispered something to the muscular man who stood just behind him.

Stone unlocked the handcuffs, set the briefcase on a side table, worked its combination locks, and took out a thick cream envelope printed with the Presidential seal. The aide intercepted the envelope and slit it open in a single fluid motion, extracted and unfolded the single sheet of paper, and with a click of his heels presented it to Baines.

The general glanced at it, then told Stone, ‘I have great respect for Floyd Davis. He is a man of vision and integrity. He sees an eternal chain of Americas connected to each other by your Turing gates, each freed of oppression, each spreading its democratic influence to other histories. This operation, which means everything to me and my men, was part of that vision. Your new President, I don’t know him too well, but I see that he is at least a man of his word. He promised that he would withdraw tactical support for this thing of ours if he was elected, and this letter confirms it.’

The men in the room gave a kind of murmuring sigh.

‘He requests that we consider standing down the entire operation, ’ General Baines said, raising his voice. He was speaking to everyone in the room now, but his gaze was still locked on Stone’s face. ‘He offers us repatriation. I say what I have been saying this past week. I say the hell with him. I say that we take orders from
our
President, not from this spineless upstart. And our President honoured me with the task of leading my men into war, not away from it.’

Several officers began to clap. The general silenced them with a raised hand.

‘Mr Stone, you may tell your new Director of Central Intelligence that we’ll strike at twenty hundred hours, as already agreed. I will not betray the loyalty of my men; nor will I throw away this opportunity. Besides, I already have guerrillas in place. They are preparing to knock out much of the local air force and military, and they are under a radio blackout. I can’t recall them.’

From the door, Knightly said, ‘The gates will be opened on schedule, General. Carter doesn’t have the guts to cancel the entire operation.’

‘Of course they’ll be opened,’ General Baines said. ‘We are unwelcome guests, and it is the easiest way to be rid of us.’

‘I’ll see that they’ll remain open as long as possible,’ Knightly said.

‘That’s very good of you, Dick, and I hope you won’t get into any trouble for it. But I do not intend to come back.’ General Baines looked at Stone and said, ‘I believe you have my answer. Go tell your boss.’

 

Knightly’s bodyguard intercepted Stone on his way out of the farmhouse and told him that Mr Knightly wanted to have a word.

‘Mr Knightly and I have nothing to say to each other.’

‘He told me to tell you that it’s about Tom Waverly.’ The bodyguard had about six inches and a hundred pounds on Stone, and wore a black suit and a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck.

Stone pictured the Jeep carrying Tom and the Free American captain speeding down the hill toward the Turing gates, and said to the bodyguard, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Flynn. Albert Flynn.’

‘Are you with the Company, Albert?’

‘No, sir. I resigned when they fired Mr Knightly.’