Resistance (27 page)

Zach shook his head, but confirmed the story.

‘I got lucky with a couple of grenades. Didn’t matter in the end. They got away somehow. Just sort of . . . disappeared. But Dave?’

‘Yes?’

‘None of that matters.’

The woman had stopped in her advance toward them. Dave could see the confusion and contending urges playing out on her face. Backing away from her, he had opened up a large gulf between Zach and himself. He stared across it at the young man he’d thought he could be friends with. He could think of nothing to say, except sorry, again, and he already knew that meant nothing.

‘What matters, Dave, is that we were counting on you and you let us down. It’s not the consequences, man. That’s just war. There’s always blood. There’s always consequence. But if we can’t count on each other, we got nothing.’

He opened his mouth to say something, to defend himself. But nothing came out, because he had nothing.

‘Where’s Heath?’ he said at last.

Zach checked his watch. ‘He’ll be in D-Tac. The new one.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the Countryside Suites. ‘Just got back from feeding the media in town.’

‘Okay,’ said Dave. ‘I guess I better go see him.’

‘Yeah,’ said Zach. ‘Whatever, man.’

Dave reached for Zach but the SEAL turned and walked away without saying anything further.

The air force woman was gone.

23

It had been quite the walk from the field where the Army was gathering, down the side road until he could make his way across I-80 to the motel. Yes, he told himself. He could fold space and time and be there in a second or two but for once in his new existence he decided to take his sweet-ass time getting to what was promising to be an epic ass-chewing. Soldiers gawked and pointed, but they did nothing to stop him. His bare feet were cut and shredded a dozen times over, healing after each injury, giving him time to reflect if not repent. In the surge of emotions – anger, guilt, annoyance and exasperation – he searched for any sense that he might be even just a touch repentant.

Nope. Nothing.

There were two Captain Heaths in the office of the Countryside motel, which had been taken over by the military and turned into a make-do command post after their first one was destroyed. Dave briefly forgot his many discomforts – his slight embarrassment at not being dressed, his guilt over the men who had died, and his anger, which was considerable, that nobody but Zach seemed to acknowledge he’d actually done a good thing in rescuing Emmeline and the other girl. Confronted by two Heaths, both of them glowering at him, Dave performed a double-take to make Daffy Duck proud, especially given his cartoonish outfit. And then he realised the real Heath was glaring at him, while a double on a big-ass TV screen was merely glaring at some reporter, sometime in the past. The other Heath was replaced by a talking head he didn’t recognise and little pop-up windows running footage of the battle a few hours earlier. The vision looked like it was all sourced from the military: black and white gun cameras, the slightly fuzzy green video of night-vision systems, and computer graphics. Lots of really bright, cheery CGI of high-tech weaponry falling on vast, slow-moving squares of monsters that appeared to have been copied from the art assets for
Gears of War
.

‘Motherfucker,’ said Heath through tightly pressed lips, the first time Dave could remember really hearing him curse. ‘And you still can’t do what you’re told. What the hell are you doing up and around? You’re supposed to be on a drip. Did you walk over here like that?’

‘Yeah,
I got better.’ Dave shrugged. ‘Thought I’d best come find you. Ashbury told me what happened.’

Heath said nothing. None of the military personnel in the small overcrowded office spoke. Dave could feel his face growing hot and for maybe the three or four hundredth time since he’d stormed out of the tent, he was made painfully aware of how he was dressed.

‘I’m, you know, sorry about Compton,’ he said when he could stand the silence no longer. The sound was turned down on the television where Heath had reappeared, looking less stern and even smiling as he answered questions from forty or fifty journalists at a press conference in a hotel function room. The Sheraton Omaha, according to the logo on the lectern. Dave wished they’d left the volume up, and he felt his hand involuntarily twitch for the remote.

‘Compton wasn’t the least of it,’ said Heath. His face seemed completely devoid of animation, as though the image of the man smiling and even joking on-screen was the real person, and this thin, stone-faced ogre in front of him an avatar awaiting some motive force to bring it fully to life.

‘I know,’ said Dave, struggling to keep the impatience out of his voice. Because that would be wrong, and inappropriate, he supposed. ‘I spoke to the others.’ He tried to reach for something to say, something that would set everything right, but all he could come up with was another, ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t even sound especially convincing. The words trailed off into nothing.

‘You sound more sorry for yourself,’ said Captain Heath.

As difficult as he found the exchange, Dave had more difficulty reining in a galloping need to explain himself, to justify what he had done, even to push back against the allegation that he’d fucked everything up. But he knew better than to argue with Michael Heath. And so he stood in front of a room full of uniforms, feeling hot shame creeping over him and hating it, biting back the angry bile that wanted to spill out of his mouth because he shouldn’t have been ashamed of doing the right thing, and a large part of him was still convinced that he had done exactly that.

And still, Heath just stared at him. Dave Hooper had never felt himself judged so harshly before, and that was saying something. He was not inexperienced with being judged and found wanting.

‘So they
. . .
they took Compton?’ he said, mostly to fill up the dead airspace that was pressing down upon him. ‘Is he still out there, you think? Because I could, you know, go and look for him or something.’

From the way the junior officers and enlisted men working at various screens and keyboards around the room stared fixedly at whatever was in front of them, this was almost as excruciating for them as it was for him.

Heath limped forward a few steps, and Dave saw they’d stuck his leg back on, or at least a workable replacement. The captain wasn’t moving anywhere near as freely as he once had, but he’d ditched the crutches he’d been using earlier that night. He hobbled all the way across the room, right up to Hooper, right into his personal space. His eyes were bloodshot and yellow with exhaustion. The collar of the fresh shirt he’d put on for the press conference was dark with grime.

‘Do you even care about how badly you screwed us?’

Not wanting to lie, Dave found himself unable to say anything at all. But even though his silence was an admission which pealed out like the ringing of a church bell, Heath would not let it go.

‘Well? Mister? Did you just decide at the last moment to go and do your own thing, or
were you going to fuck us in the ass all along?’

Dave felt a flicker of heat somewhere inside his head, and it didn’t matter whether the flame was lit by remorse or resentment, what mattered was the bonfire of ill feeling which quickly mounted from a slow burn to a white-hot rage.

When he spoke, however, his voice was soft, almost chilling.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m the guy who saved your ass on the bridge a couple of hours ago, after telling you not to go down there in the first –’

‘Don’t,’ Heath ground out between clenched teeth, as though he had been struck a physical blow. They were close enough that Hooper could see his lips change colour as he pressed them together, and watch the muscles in his jawline flex as Heath bit down on whatever he had been about to say. For his part, Hooper felt as though he’d become detached from the confrontation, indeed from himself, and that he was floating above them a few feet away watching everything unravel. From that abstract vantage point it was easy to just not care about the stupid, hurtful and unthinking words that began to spill out of his own mouth.

‘I don’t know whether you noticed or not, but I don’t wear a uniform. Hell, I’m not wearing anything at the moment, not even underpants. I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to take shit from you or anybody for doing the right fucking thing. And I did the right thing, Heath, even though you can’t bring yourself to admit it. You were going to let those women die. I asked whether you decided at the last moment that their lives counted for nothing, but we both know you had been planning to fuck them in the ass all along.’

‘It would be best if you kept your mouth shut now’ said Heath.

The other men and women in the room, all of them military, were staring openly.

‘Why? Is that an order? Because last time I checked I didn’t have to take orders. The last time I took orders I was a teenager flipping burger patties at McDonald’s. I’ve moved on since then. And I think I’ll be moving on now.’

Heath jutted his jaw out at Dave, as though it could somehow shoot bullets at him. But when he spoke his tone, although thick with strain, was almost conciliatory.

‘Dave,’ he said.

‘Hooper will do,’ said Dave.

Heath’s nostrils flared as he sucked in air and made an obvious effort to calm himself, much more of an effort than Dave was making.

‘I understand,’ he began, ‘that you are here of your own accord.’ Heath talked slowly, enunciating each word with the care of somebody who spoke perfect English, but only because they had studied it intently as a second language. ‘I understand you have no obligations to us other than an expectation that you will do the right thing.’

‘And I did it,’ Dave said, feeling himself falling back into his own body from that strange floating place. Heath stepped back a pace. Dave noticed the strain around the corners of his eyes.

‘I am trying to explain that I know you are a free agent,’ Heath said. ‘But I need you to understand that you do not have that freedom as a matter of course.’

‘What’d I wake up in North Korea or something?’

‘If Emmeline was here right now she’d tell you not to be stupid. You know that, don’t you?’

‘If she was here it’s because I saved her, and yes, telling me not to be stupid is her natural state of being.’

A keyboard clacked somewhere behind Heath, and a phone rang. The suspended moment with everyone staring at them had passed.

‘Trinder, the CIA, Fox News and all your new best friends, Dave, they all want a piece of you.’

‘I understand that. It doesn’t bother me.’

‘Fine. But none of them, not on their own at least, can
take
a piece of you.’

Dave frowned. He wasn’t sure what Heath was getting at.

‘But the state can.’

‘Nebraska?’

‘No, Dave. The state. The government.’

‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘Uncle Sam, Dave. Not just agents, or agencies, or departments or the military. The United States government, Dave. Not the one you vote for, the one that delivers your mail, or builds your roads, or takes the cream off your pay cheque. I mean more than that. I mean the vast, sentient entity that is the state. The state that reads your emails. The state that listens to your phone calls. The state that decides whether you live or die. Whether you disappear from history. That state that exists so far above the law it cannot break the law. It has detached itself from law, from morality, from what it is to be human. That state, Dave, which manifested the merest fraction of its power out on the Platte River this evening.’ He held his thumb and forefinger up, pinched together to make the point. ‘That state is watching you. It watches everyone, but it very particularly watches those it fears. And yes, it fears everyone, but some more than others.’

‘That’s bullshit, Heath. What’s to fear about –’

‘About a man they can’t kill, or control, or even hurt without going nuclear? What do you think, Dave? Would you fear someone like that?’

He had no answer for that. No answer he felt like giving anyway.

‘As long as they think you’re with us, Dave, as long as they think you’re on board for the big win, they’ll tolerate you. They’ll even celebrate you, make a hero of you. It’ll be all hookers and blow for good ol’ Super Dave. But be not mistaken in this, my friend, the moment they fear they cannot control you, they will lay plans to destroy you utterly, because they fear you would destroy them.’

‘I don’t think I understand,’ said Dave, even though he did, or was beginning to at least.

Heath leaned against the check-in counter, taking the weight off his leg stump.

‘You know that I have had to fight to maintain control of you, Dave.’

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he conceded. He’d even been amused by it back in Las Vegas.

‘Well controlling you doesn’t just mean keeping you topped up with Snickers bars and Gatorade. It doesn’t mean pulling you out of strip clubs before you bring the house down, literally. Controlling you, Dave, means calming and soothing the fears of the state that you might go rogue. It means showing them, every day, that you are working to serve their ends, to further their interests. The day I cannot convince them of that is the day they begin to lay plans against you. Oh, Hell, they’ve already got the plans, they’ll just take them out of the bottom drawer.’

But Dave was only half listening to him. He was distracted by the sight of his own face up on screen. Not the smiling heroic Dave of the media that came out of New Orleans, but the balding, tangle-headed Dave of his mugshot from a drunk-driving bust in Georgia about five years ago.

‘Hey, turn it up,’ he said and before anybody could stop her one of the young, uniformed women hurried to comply, bringing up the volume with a remote, beaming at him as though waiting for a reward.

‘Turn it down,’ said Heath, but without result. The woman stared at Dave with goo-goo eyes, while he stared at the TV with an increasingly thunderous expression.

‘Can you confirm then, Captain Heath, the number of men who were killed?’

‘I don’t intend to give a running body count,’ said TV Heath.

A babble of voices rose up attempting to question him, with one loud male winning out.

‘But you can confirm that it was Mr Hooper whose actions led to the casualties?’

TV Heath shook his head, frowning.

‘I can’t confirm anything at this stage
. . .’

‘What the fuck.’

It wasn’t a question, more of a snarl of outrage.

‘You can’t confirm that I didn’t kill anybody?’ Dave snapped, the hot rage which had been subsiding suddenly flaring up again. ‘At this stage? At this stage? What, you think you might get around to telling everybody it was my fault somewhere down the track? Is that the plan, Heath?’

His mugshot was back, leering stupidly, drunkenly out at the viewers. Yeah, you could totally see that asshole getting a bunch of brave, clean-shaven commandos killed because he ran off after his rock-hard cock. That wasn’t a thousand miles away from the truth of what’d happened just before his DUI arrest, in fact.

Heath was trying to say something, attempting to explain himself, but the red mist was down, and Dave could see nothing through the fog of his righteous fury. He turned away and stomped out of the room, almost knocking over a soldier who was coming in at the same time. He didn’t recall much of the next few minutes apart from raging around the parking lot of the Countryside cursing Heath and Ashbury and Igor and Annie and Baron’s and everybody who’d ever done him wrong or talked him down or made him out to be the asshole when all he was trying to do was the right thing.