Ellis said, “Overwatch? That’s rich. I call it babysitting. When your folks didn’t come back right away I went out to the mesh. To an old duck blind in the refuge. By the south pond. Near that big oak. I see you know the one I mean. The blind’s all but rotted away now. That’s where they were going to meet up. I got there and the blind was empty. Like they’d never been there. I thought maybe they’d covered their tracks and split to parts elsewhere for more elbow room. Regardless, I moved out here from Crisfield the next week. First free black man living on Smith Island in quite a while. I kept my word to your father. Of course, down the road you went off to war, but you were old enough to make your own decisions by then.”
Ben made another decision now. He smiled bleakly at Ellis, but did not reach for the knife again. Put his hand out instead. After a moment Ellis relaxed, and returned half a smile along with his hand. They shook. Ellis passed him the snapped blade.
The fatal moment receded. The sun was rising. This was new work. A new partnership. It would take two, at least two, to accomplish what lay before them.
The way one could sense a wild beast lurking in a dark room, Ben knew that in the corners of both their minds a single thought festered: the partnership could always be dissolved once the heavy lifting was done. Knocker Ellis may have said his piece, but it felt too pat to Ben. He was not going to let his guard down for a second. They walked out of the marsh toward Miss Dotsy.
Ben said, “We need to stop that bomb. Take it apart. There’s something about it. I can’t put my finger on it, but I have a feeling there’s a way we can do it.”
Ellis chuckled without smiling. “That’s rich. Twenty hours to Armageddon, and you’ve got a feeling.”
CHAPTER 13
Chalk sat quietly as the van crossed the eastbound span of the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bridge to the Eastern Shore. Cold, black Chesapeake water lay at the bottom of the hundred foot drop below the roadbed. He wondered how long it would take to fall that far. Hold it! Things weren’t that bad. Not by a long shot. Even so, Chalk had a fair idea why he was taking things so hard. He rummaged in his satchel. He found four prescription bottles, one labeled risperidone, another clozapine. And two more bottles for trifluoperazine, and lithium; potent antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia. The kicker? All four bottles were empty. And they’d been empty for at least a week. He wondered if there was a pharmacy on Smith Island where he could get refills, then dismissed the idea of even looking for it. For a long while, the drugs had left him feeling blunted, foggy. He wanted the crisp thinking he got when not under their influence. So what if noncompliance with his prescriptions made him mean, unpredictable, and a bit more psychedelic than the average doper.
Though the mission was not something to kill himself over, it was an undeniable mess. Not to mention, instead of losing a set of plans along with the gold, he had lost an actual nuke. Worse, he had allowed all of it to be stolen by this jerkwater skell, Dick Blackshaw.
Chalk also assumed Senator Morgan was laying for him, and not in the nice way. For all that grandmotherly manner, Lily Morgan was a diabolical, if lunatic, strategist. Ma Kettle was really more like Ma Barker, and she was gunning for him. But he could definitely get through this. He’d survived worse.
Lily. What a gal. When she couldn’t sleep, she did not sit up watching television, snarfing bon-bons. She read voraciously. Chalk admired this in her. She studied the methods of her nation’s terrorist enemies, including every battle report from Afghanistan, Iraq, and clandestine ops in Iran. She often regaled Chalk, launching rambling lectures on world politics. She had the balls to tell him all about wars in which he had fought, and even about wars he had personally started.
Now Chalk had to think back. He was sure that somewhere in all her yapping lay the key to extricating himself from this current untidiness. He wished he had listened more closely to her polemics instead of letting his mind drift. In these so-called debriefings, the Senator told him terrorists were engaged in something called 4GW, or Fourth Generation Warfare.
He remembered her saying, “4GW is all about fighting us, but by mixing it up in a way we’re clueless to understand. Also called Asymmetrical Warfare. They use politics, media, disinformation, suicide bombings, feints, IEDs, and car bombs. Coalition forces get suckered into ‘U’ shaped ambushes in streets and alleys in urban fighting, and that was a Japanese tactic in World War II! Our learning curve is flat, like a damn prairie! Insurgents are winning skirmishes at the same time they haul ass away from the Coalition! Think of that! It’s low. It’s cowardly.”
Thinking at the time it was all a tempest in a teapot, Chalk had enjoyed watching her get worked up over her topic. Yes, Senator Morgan could get good and mad. “I mean, us good guys are too damn slow to catch on!”
Personally, Chalk didn’t mind this intel deficit at all, because it kept military brass from tumbling to his lucrative cross-border side ventures.
Lily continued, “We’re losing because we fight by an outdated gentleman’s rulebook. Maynard, I’m telling you, the bottom-up control of the insurgency makes their attacks seem nearly random to our top-down Coalition leadership. In 4GW, what you see is never what you get.”
The same might be said of Senator Morgan, thought Chalk. This was all old news to him. Still, he believed something in her words could lead him out of his current straits. “Here’s where you come in, Maynard. Remember how Charlie Wilson stuck it to the Russians in Afghanistan? A Congressman! Well, I’m a Senator, and I’m going to take it to the militant Islamists the world over. And you’re going to help me do it.”
Like much of Senator Morgan’s peak activity, her eureka moment had come late one night. Not only did Lily read a great deal, she was also an avid gardener. It was not unheard of for her to abandon Chalk in her Washington office to tend prize-winning flowers in the walled garden of her townhouse. Anything that grew, blossomed or ripened was fascinating to her. Despite her name, roses were the Senator’s particular pleasure. The variety called Floribunda Morgana Le Fey had been nurtured in her greenhouse and named after her in 1987.
Chalk turned his mind back to another meeting on a damp night in her Madison home a few months before when the Senate was in recess. The talk over the chess board had already stretched for hours. He was sick of hearing about her latest grandiose satori. He dutifully pretended to be interested whenever this particular bee started buzzing in her bonnet. It was so stormy she’d stayed indoors rather than flounce out to tend her Wisconsin bed of roses; instead she fetched a book from her bowed-down shelves, one of her lovingly thumbed old horticulture volumes in which she discovered a reference to the theory of Brownian Motion.
As Chalk recalled from her prating, a long-dead kindred shrubophile, Robert Brown by name, observed bits of pollen knocking around in a drop of water under his microscope back in 1827. Senator Morgan had babbled, sounding downright fixated, saying, “At first Brown thought the pollen itself was alive. Later, when scientists saw that dust behaved the same way as pollen, they realized the unequal forces of water molecules themselves were bonking into the pollen, shoving it every which-way.”
Chalk shook his head at the memory. Lily didn’t care about the subsequent mathematical equations attempting to predict the pollen’s motion in water. To her, it mattered only that such theorems existed. She had no idea how inaccurate they were beyond microscopic scales of time and space. For his part, Chalk didn’t care to disabuse her of all her New Age pseudoscientific nonsense. Why burst her bubble? It was of no consequence to him at the time if her train of thought derailed.