Some general had taken over from Assad in Syria. He had promised that they were out of the WMD game and renounced terrorism, then started playing the Saddam game of denying that there ever was any WMD and they certainly weren’t sponsoring terrorism. All the while complaining largely of fall-out from the, remarkably clean, burst over their soil. All America’s fault, of course. The girls were never there. There was no proof. Show us the proof they were there.
Video footage by news media from the site certainly wasn’t proof. Oh, no. And all the networks but Fox were eating it up and constantly asking “where’s the proof?” Flipping idiots.
Some of the girls were on from time to time and he shook his head at the tenor of the questions. Bambi… Britney was interviewed on ABC. He’d made sure he stayed awake that evening, and the interviewer, some chick, was aghast that she would have actually tried to fight. That she wasn’t viewing herself as a victim. Bambi just about tore her a new asshole. “I’m not a victim. I fought to help all of us stay alive and I refuse to be called or characterized as a victim. I’m a fighter and a survivor. Ghost taught me that.”
The government had gone from giving updates on his health to refusing to speculate whether he was alive or dead. Since he was listening to that from inside a secure — he’d seen the guards outside — military hospital, it gave him a bit of a shiver. But he figured it was for his own safety. Various Islamic groups had pronounced jihad, personally, on the horrible person that would actually kill their Great Leader. Not, by the way, that the Great Leader was dead. Show us the proof. Pictures of a body are not proof. But the man called Ghost was going to be one when they got their hands on him.
He tracked his progress by the stuff that came out and what he could do. IV, drainage tubes, the day they let him walk to the bathroom and he found out how hard it was. He tried to play mental games, remember historical events; he got one of the nurses to get him some books and they all turned out to be romances. He read them anyway and came away wondering just how traumatic it really was for the girls in the bunker. If this was what women read for fun… ?
One day he was puzzling over a scene in one of the “historicals” that didn’t match any “history” he knew, when a colonel in undress greens walked in unannounced. One read of the nametag said it all.
“Good to finally meet you, Colonel Pierson,” Mike said, holding out his hand.
“Glad to see you’re going to make it,” Pierson replied, grinning.
“Am I?” Mike asked with a raised eyebrow. “The government doesn’t seem sure.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Pierson admitted, pulling up a chair. “One of the reasons. You want to be alive or dead?”
“Can we stick with ‘unsure’?” Mike asked.
“For the time being,” Pierson said. “This administration will be more than happy to stay with ‘unwilling to comment upon his mortality.’ But… administrations change. Honestly, you-know-who is probably going to run in ’08 and she’s got a good chance of winning. We both know that.”
“How hard would it be to classify it so the bitch can’t get it?” Mike asked. “The teams won’t talk.”
“Hard but not impossible,” Pierson admitted with a sigh. “Pretty hard to not say that you survived, but we can probably hide your identity.”
“Works for me,” Mike replied. “So what else do you have?”
“Well,” Pierson said solemnly, clearing his throat and picking up his briefcase. “There are a number of forms that I need you to sign. We’re handling the money through the Witness Protection Program…”
“Money?” Mike asked.
“Well, first there’s Osama,” Pierson said, his face cracking into a grin. “There was a Presidential Finding that the President’s words to the news media, ‘dead or alive’ meant that the reward could be paid…”
“Dead or alive,” Mike said and whistled. “How much?”
“Twenty-five million,” Pierson said and grinned again. “It’s being handled through the Witness Protection Program and they’re pretty damned secure, even from presidents. It’s split in various accounts so no one bank person sees a deposit of twenty-five million. But there’s another five million for ‘aid in disrupting a major terrorist operation.’ So your grand total is thirty. There was some quibbling about your medical expenses, which were sizeable, and I’m told that when the discussion reached presidential level it descended to four-letter words. So you don’t even have to pay the hospital bill.”
“Damn,” Mike said, his eyes wide. “What the hell am I going to do with twenty-five, thirty million dollars?”
“Uhm…” Pierson hummed. “Think, rather, what you can’t do. But spend it wisely — most lottery winners go broke. Another reason to spend it wisely is that you don’t want to become too visible.”
“Boat,” Mike said. “A yacht. That way I can move around. I’ll come up with a cover story, but it will look like I’m a drug dealer or former drug dealer spending his ill-gotten gains.”
“That works,” Pierson said. “Now, we don’t expect that you’ll have actual trouble from the terrorists or any future adventures. But there may be repercussions. There is a special program for certain categories of protectees, and you’re a good example, which gives them pseudo-police authority. Effectively, you’re made a special version of the Reserve Federal Marshall. What that means is you can carry anywhere in the U.S., and in a good bit of the rest of the world. And it acts as a Class III permit, so you can carry heavy if you wish. Illegal use is illegal use, but if you can carry it, you can carry it.”
“Good,” Mike said. “I’d been somewhat worried about the tangos finding out who I was before I found out they found out. But if I’m armed in an ambush, that’s a different story.”
“Don’t go Rambo,” Pierson said sternly.
“Don’t intend to,” Mike replied. “But it’s a comfort.”
“Also, in the same vein,” Pierson continued. “You don’t exactly have a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card. But some things may come up relating to your… special status. Part of this,” he said, holding up the briefcase, “besides instructions on what you can do with your status and what you can’t and how to handle it, is a number of the Office of Special Operations Liaison. Or, as we call it, Oh-so-SOL. It’s where I work. The phone is manned twenty-four hours a day. If you have problems or questions, call it. You’re also going to be on the military database as a ‘special contractor.’ That could mean anything from a contract weapons instructor to… well, you. However, if anyone brings up your record, all the salient information is Code Word classified, so they’ll probably put two and two together and get something near four. At the very least, if it’s a military or police situation, they’ll recognize you’re not just one of the narod. Don’t use it if you don’t have to.”