He would ask the NSC for help.
Two days later, help arrived from the National Security Council. The President’s personal spooks had at last sent military reinforcements to the Collaboratory. Military aid took the form of a young Air Force lieutenant colonel from Colorado. He was the very man who had been on the graveyard shift when Oscar had been abducted, and when Kevin had made his frantic phone call. In fact, it was he who had ordered Oscar’s armed rescue effort.
The lieutenant colonel was erect, spit-polished, steely-eyed. He wore a full uniform with scarlet beret. He had brought three vehi-cles with him to Texas. The first contained a squadron of rapid-deployment ground troops, soldiers wearing combat gear of such astonishing weight and complexity that they seemed scarcely able to walk. The second and third trucks contained the lieutenant colonel’s media coverage.
The lieutenant enjoyed a glorious circuit of the Collaboratory, ostensibly to check it out for security purposes, but mostly in order to exhibit himself to the awestruck locals. Oscar tried to make himself useful. He introduced the lieutenant colonel to his local security ex-perts: Kevin, and Captain Burningboy.
During the briefing, Kevin said little — Kevin seemed rather em-barrassed. Burningboy proved most forthcoming. The Moderator cap-tain launched into a detailed and terrifying recitation of the Collaboratory’s strategic plight. Buna was a mere twenty kilometers from the highly porous border with Louisiana. The murky swamps of the Sabine River valley were swarming with vengeful Regulators. Though the armed helicopter attack against the Regulator comman-dos had never become official news, the assault had provoked them to fury.
The threat to Buna was immediate and serious. The Regulators had swarms of airborne drones surveilling the facility around the clock. Huey had given up his plans to co-opt the facility. He wanted it abandoned, ruined, destroyed. The Regulators were more than will-ing to carry out Huey’s aims. They were lethally furious that the Collaboratory was hosting Moderators.
This briefing enthralled the lieutenant colonel. Sickened by his desk job and embarrassed by the sordid cover-up of his glorious at-tack, the man was visibly itching for a fight. He had come fully pre-pared. His all-volunteer squad of forest ninjas were lugging whole arsenals of professional gear: body armor, silenced sniper rifles, human body-odor sniffers, mine-proofed boot soles, night-fighting video hel-mets, even ultraspecial, freeze-dried, self-heating, long-range patrol ra-tions.
The lieutenant colonel, having debriefed the locals on the ground, announced that it was time for a reconnaissance in force, out in the swamps. His media crew would not be neglected; their helicop-ters would serve as his comlink and impromptu air backup.
Oscar had some acquaintance with the lieutenant colonel through his NSC connections. Having finally met the man in person, he swiftly realized that the colonel was a clear and present danger to himself and every human being within firing range. He was young, zealous, and as dumb as a bag of hammers; he was an atavistic creature from the blood-soaked depths of the twentieth century.
Oscar nevertheless made his best professional effort.
“Colonel, sir, those flooded woods in the Sabine River valley are tougher than you might expect. We’re not just talking swamps here — we’re basically talking permanent disaster areas. There’s been a lot of severe flooding in the Sabine since the rain patterns changed, and a lot of the local farmland has gone back to wilderness. That’s not the forest primeval out there. Those are deserted, toxic locales of no eco-nomic value, where all the decent lumber is long gone and there are poisonous weeds and bushes half the size of trees. It would be a mis-take to underestimate those Regulators when they’re on their native ground. Those Cajun nomads are not just native hunters and fishers and swamp dwellers; they’re also very big on sylvan audio surveil-lance.”
It was, of course, of no use. The lieutenant colonel, and his men, and his impressionable, airborne war correspondents, left on dawn patrol the next morning. Not a single one of them was ever seen again.
Three days after this silent debacle, Captain Burningboy announced his own departure. He was now “General” Burningboy again, and having successfully retrieved his reputation, he felt it was time for him to leave.
Kevin threw a block party for the General, on the grounds of the police station. Greta and Oscar attended in full dress and, for the first time ever, as a public couple. They had of course been kidnapped as a couple, and rescued as a couple, so their appearance made perfect sense. It was also a boost for morale.
In point of sad fact, Greta and Oscar had very little to say to or do with one another at Burningboy’s farewell party. They were both hopelessly preoccupied with the exigencies of power. Besides, Kevin’s party featured a massive banquet of genuine food. After days on no-mad biotech rations, the scientists and proles flung themselves on it like wolverines.
Oscar was pained to see Burningboy abandoning him. It seemed so unnecessary. Burningboy, who had been drinking heavily, took Oscar aside and explained his motives in pitiless detail. It all had to do with social network structure.
“We used to handle these things the way the Regulators do,” Burningboy confided. “Promote the best, and segregate the rest. But they ended up with an aristocracy — the Sun Lords, the Nobles, the Respected, and down at the very bottom, all the lousy newbies. In the Moderators, we use balloting. So we have turnaround; people can spend their reputations, and lose them, and earn them back. Besides — and this is the killer point here — our technique prevents decapitation attacks. See, the feds are always after ‘the criminal kingpins.’ They always want ‘the top guy in the outfit,’ the so-called mastermind.”
“I’ll really miss these briefings of yours,” Oscar said. It had been a long time since he had appeared in public with his full regalia of spats, cummerbund, and proper hat. He felt a million miles away from Burningboy, as if he were receiving signals from a distant planet.
“Look, Oscar, after thirty years of American imperial informa-tion warfare, everybody in the goddamn world understands counter-insurgency and political subversion. We all know how to do it now, we all know how to wreck the dominant paradigm. We’re geniuses at screwing with ourselves and deconstructing all our institutions. We don’t have a single institution left that works.” Burningboy paused. “Am I getting too radical here? Am I scaring you?”
“No. It’s the truth.”
“Well, that’s why I’m going to jail now. We Moderators have a kinda pet state magistrate out in New Mexico. He’s willing to put me away on a completely irrelevant charge. So I’ll be spending two or three years in a minimum security state facility. I think that once they’ve got me nice and safe in the slammer, I may be able to survive this thing you’ve done here.”
“You’re not telling me that you’re actually going to prison, Burningboy. ”
“You should try it, amigo. It’s the ultimate invisible American population. Prisons have everything that interests you. People with a lot of spare time. Weird economics, based on drugs and homemade tattoos. There’s a lot of time to think seriously. You really do regret your old mistakes inside a penitentiary.” Burningboy had an impossi-bly remote look now. Oscar was losing him; it was as if he were bound on a flower-decked Valkyrie ship for the shores of Avalon. “Besides, some of those poor evil bastards are so far gone that they actually have bad teeth. I can practice dentistry again, when I’m in stir. Did I ever tell you I used to be a dentist? That was before the caries vaccine came in and destroyed my profession.”