Semper Mars (21 page)

Since 1989, the National Security Council had been organized into three subgroups; the NSC Principals Committee was the senior of these, tasked with coordinating and monitoring all national-security policy. Currently, it was chaired by Louis Carlton Harrel, the president’s national security advisor. Its regular members included John Matloff, secretary of state; Archibald Severin, secretary of defense; Arthur J. Kinsley, director of central intelligence; Charles Dockery, the president’s chief of staff; and Admiral Gray, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Other people might attend at the president’s invitation, and that was the case for Warhurst, who’d received a scrambled call from Harrel himself only two hours ago.

Harrel was the last to arrive, hurrying through the vault door with a wave to the guards to seal it off behind him. Warhurst didn’t know the man personally. He was a tall, kindly faced black man in his late fifties who had the reputation for being one of the sharper and more aggressive of President Markham’s personal advisors.

“General Warhurst,” Harrel said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “Allow me to express, for all of us, our sincere regrets about your son. We know how you must feel, and we appreciate your being with us this morning, despite your loss.”

Memories burned, but Warhurst held them in check. “Thank you, sir. My son gave his life for his country and for his fellow Marines, and I’m proud of him for that.”

“We’ve asked you to come here,” Harrel went on, “because of this remarkable message we understand reached us through the daughter of one of the Marines with the MMEF.”

“Yes, sir. That would be Kaitlin Garroway.”

“You’ve seen the message?” Matloff demanded. He was a lean, white-haired, hawk of a man in his sixties. He touched a key on his wrist-top, and the display screen on the wall lit up with the Garroway message.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what do you make of it?”

“I’d say it’s legitimate, Mr. Secretary. My people have already checked it out, and I’ve spoken at length both with Colonel Fox and with Garroway’s daughter. Both are convinced that this is a genuine message.”

“Now, Colonel Fox is Garroway’s commanding officer, is he not?” Matloff said. “This, this first sentence of the message isn’t exactly the sort of thing a military officer writes to his superior, is it?”

“Major Garroway and Colonel Walter Fox are old friends, Mr. Secretary. They were both mustangs, and they were stationed together several times, in Japan, and at Camp Pendleton. According to Fox, they maintained a good-natured rivalry, especially after Fox passed Garroway up on the promotions list. The, ah, language of that first line was intended to convince Fox that it was, indeed, Garroway who was writing it.”

“Why all the damned cryptic gobbledygook, General?” Severin demanded. “It was my understanding that this message was transmitted in some kind of secret code.”

“A Beale code, Mr. Secretary,” Arthur Kinsley said with a smile. “I gather that Garroway used it to keep parts of his e-mail correspondence with his daughter private.”

“So why use indirect language? I don’t understand some of this stuff at all. Red Planet? We know he’s on Mars…”

“Beale codes,” Kinsley pointed out, “are among the most secure codes there are, since, to crack one, you have to know which book is being used to provide page, line, and character numbers for the correspondents. Even so, any code can be broken with enough information. Major Garroway might have been afraid that the wrong people would intercept this.”

“It’s my feeling, Mr. Secretary,” Warhurst added, “that the major was playing it safe. He’s a careful man with a high security clearance for the electronics and communications work he does, and he’s well aware of what codes can and cannot guarantee. The cryptic references are probably there just in case one of the UN security agencies had already cracked his code. He’d been using it throughout the cycler flight to Mars, after all, and it’s possible that someone had picked up on it. His use of circumlocutions is designed to sidestep any automated search program set up at Mars, something set to flag any transmissions of the words ‘Heinlein Station’ or ‘UN’ or ‘Candor Chasma.’ His use of ‘Red Planet’ doesn’t mean Mars, Mr. Secretary. That’s the title of a book written almost a century ago by a writer named Robert Heinlein. Heinlein Station. ‘Blue boys’ means the UN. ‘Complete openness’ is ‘candor,’ as in ‘Candor Chasma.’ He’s telling us exactly where he is going.”

“Can you tell us, General,” Harrel said, “what the devil ‘Derna’ might refer to? We’ve had our staff looking it up, and all they can find is the obvious geographical reference to the city in North Africa.”

“The shores of Tripoli, sir.” Warhurst managed a smile. “Any Marine would pick up on that right away.” He proceeded to tell them briefly about Presley O’Bannon and his 1805 march through the desert.

“Your conclusion, then,” Harrel said when Warhurst had finished the tale, “is that Garroway is marching from Heinlein Station across some… how far is it?”

“Almost four hundred miles,” Kinsley replied.

“He’s crossing four hundred miles of Martian desert to Mars Prime?”

“That is the way I would read it, sir,” Warhurst replied.

“The real question then,” Matloff said, “is what Garroway intends to do once he reaches Mars Prime. He doesn’t make any cryptic references to his plans in this message, does he, General?”

“I think that’s clear enough from the context, Mr. Secretary,” Warhurst replied. “He says he ‘capped’ the guards at Heinlein Station. That’s old-time infantry slang for ‘shot’ or ‘killed.’ The Derna reference suggests he plans on taking Mars Prime, the way O’Bannon took Derna.”

“Damn it, General!” Matloff exploded. “What kind of mad dog is this Garroway? We’re not at war!”

“It would appear that Major Garroway believes differently, John,” Harrel said gently. “What do you think, General?”

“He obviously couldn’t say much,” Warhurst replied. “But Garroway is not the sort of man who would run off half-cocked. The Pearl Harbor reference seems clear enough. The UN launched some sort of a coup and took over the base. I, ah, must point out that the MMEF was sent to Mars expressly to counter such a move on the UN’s part.”

“It seems they didn’t do the job they were sent to do, then,” the DCI suggested.

“It looks that way, sir. But I’d rather wait and hear what Major Garroway has to say about it. The Marines were probably not on full alert, and they were operating in a situation where their precise responsibilities and operational parameters were not clear. They were there in the hope that their mere presence would discourage any hostile activity by the UN military forces stationed there. And there is always the danger of mischance in war. You can’t prepare for every—”

“I repeat,” Matloff interrupted, “we are not at war! My people are negotiating with the UN right this moment at Geneva, trying to prevent this kind of mass insanity!”

“What have we heard officially from Mars?” Harrel wanted to know. “Last I heard there was some sort of communications problem.”

“Since Sunday morning,” Kinsley said, “there’s been nothing from either Mars Prime or Cydonia Prime but a COMMUNICATIONS DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAND BY message. This sort of thing happens sometimes, nothing unusual about it, but it does tend to corroborate Garroway’s message. If UN forces took over our facilities on Mars, they might drop a commo blackout for a time, while they get things organized. Maybe they’re preparing some sort of cover story.”

“Or preparing a parallel operation of some sort here on Earth,” Severin suggested.

“But why?” Matloff said. “Why would the United Nations want to do such a thing? Their people are on Mars purely as observers—”

“Including those fifty Foreign Legion troops?” Severin said, interrupting the SECSTATE. “It sounds to me like they’ve started doing a damned sight more than observing.”

“I must insist,” Matloff said, a bit stiffly, “that the peace process here be allowed to continue, that it be given a chance. We have the opportunity here to guarantee a lasting peace with the rest of the world!”

“For a moment there, John,” Harrel said, “I thought you were going to tell us that we were guaranteeing peace in our time.”

“I do not find that funny,” Matloff replied. “Perhaps you are not aware of just how serious our position is, vis-à-vis the United Nations. Their trade embargo against us has all but crippled our economy. Our only allies are Russia and Great Britain, and both of them are even worse off economically just now than we are. We are a nation of some five hundred million people, gentlemen, against a world of nearly eight billion. We cannot play games here. If we are to preserve any shred of our sovereignty as an independent nation, we must cooperate completely. We must work and we must compromise in order to establish a firm basis of mutual trust with the other nations of the world. If we fail, if we allow ourselves to be goaded into an ill-considered war, we cannot hope to survive.”

“I thought you said that there was no proof the United Nations was acting in a hostile manner,” Severin said.

“They have acted in a completely reasonable fashion so far. If these rogue Marines on Mars drag us into a war, however, I don’t see how we can hope to survive as a nation. Do you all remember what happened to Brazil?”

Brazil had been the first of the world’s nations to feel the full brunt of the United Nations after the new UN charter had been adopted. Accused of continuing to cut down vast tracts of fast-dwindling rain forest in direct violation of several world treaties, Brazil had been invaded by UN forces in September of 2026. The rain forest, what was left of it, had been declared a “special world protectorate” and was now administered by a UN bureau operating out of Brasilia, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Rio.

The US had formally severed its long-unraveling ties with the UN in 2020 and was not involved in the takeover. Polls taken at the time had suggested that a large majority of Americans had disapproved of and mistrusted the UN’s high-handed—some said dictatorial—approach to curbing various global problems. Many though, in particular the Internationalists, were more concerned with the fact that something had to be done about global warming and the biosphere die-off, even if that something violated national sovereignty.

“The president is concerned,” Harrel said quietly, “with the demands the UN is making of us. Geneva has ordered us to hold a plebiscite within our Southwestern states on the Aztlan question, a plebiscite which, if held, might well result in the loss of a major portion of the American Southwest. They have threatened us over our space stations in orbit and our bases on Mars. They’ve threatened us over the whole question of technology gleaned from the Mars excavations. The president compromised on that one to the extent of allowing UN observers to travel to Mars. Their ‘observers’ turned out to be a few legitimate scientists and fifty armed men, a deliberate challenge to our control of the Martian excavations and our own facilities on the planet.

“Now, how long are we supposed to keep giving in and compromising and backpedaling before we find ourselves with our proverbial backs against the proverbial wall? I can tell you right now, Mr. Secretary, that the president is not going to yield on the Aztlan thing. He has already promised to share any alien technology that we find on Mars, and I can’t see what further concessions he could make there, either. And if it’s true that those UN thugs have just moved in and taken over our bases on Mars, lock, stock, and barrel, well, I can’t see any room there for compromise either, can you?”

“Well then, perhaps it’s time we started looking a little harder for compromise,” Matloff said, “for some means of surmounting the difficulties that have separated us from the member states of the United Nations for so long. We need a unified world, gentlemen, for the survival of mankind, and I, for one, will not stand still for loose-cannon opportunists who are risking everything we have built!”

“Mr. Secretary, there’s really very little we can do about Major Garroway at the moment,” Admiral Gray pointed out. “He’s something like a hundred million miles away, right now, and we don’t even have a secure communications link with the man.”

“I think we should concentrate our efforts on what we should be doing on this end,” Severin said. “Garroway’s actions could significantly impact the situation here.”

Warhurst looked sharply at Severin. The SECDEF might be the next step up the ladder from the Joint Chiefs, but he was not himself a military man. He was a civilian, a politician who’d started off with one of the big defense contractors, a man whose lobbying efforts and financial contributions had been rewarded by a succession of cabinet posts. It was, Warhurst mused, the way Washington worked, but it left him uneasy to think that the lives of people, his people, depended on decisions made by men who cared more about covering their asses than they did about the lives of men and women farther down the chain of command.

“General?” Harrel said, turning to him. “Just what are the chances of Garroway and his people getting our facilities on Mars back?”

Warhurst spread his hands. “I wish I could answer that, sir, but I can’t. The message seems to indicate that Colonel Lloyd is wounded or otherwise incapacitated, and we can’t know how many more Marines might have been killed or wounded at this point. We don’t know Garroway’s logistical situation—food, water, ammo… though chances are they have either no weapons at all or damned few. And, more to the point, perhaps, we don’t know what he’s up against. If the UN troops are split between Cydonia and Candor, he might, might have a chance of taking down one group before the other is alerted, but it seems like a damned slender chance to me. His best shot may be to grab something the UN needs at Candor and hold it hostage.”

“What?” Severin wanted to know.

“I don’t know. The food stores, maybe. O’Bannon’s Marines seized their expedition’s food supplies to put down a mutiny among the Arab rebels in the party. Maybe that’s his plan.”

“That might make sense,” Kinsley said. “Mars isn’t like Earth, where you can live off the land. They’ve got major, centralized stockpiles of the stuff they need. Food. Water. Air. That makes them vulnerable.”