Chapters 34 through 36

Chapter Thirty-Four

The military could be extremely efficient when they had a plan in place.  At least in peacetime.  In war, plans seldom lasted past the first infantry engagement, but that never prevented generals and admirals from laying out several elaborate plans while they waited for the first shot to be fired.  And in this kind of “one and done” engagement, military plans could be very effective.

The men in the suits told me, well, at least the red headed one told me, the “suspects,” three men and one woman, were swept up quickly, two at home and one, the mayor, at city hall and the woman, Mrs. Vuitch, at the school site.  They had been placed in handcuffs and stuck in the back of the same kind of sedans that had transported me to the dispensary for my meeting with Navy Captain Singleton.

Before the military policeman could elaborate, we arrived at the dispensary.  The Captain was standing in the doorway waiting.

He had turned out to be an impressive man.  Tall, his posture was the definition of military bearing.  I speculated the bearing was always there.  I pictured him dressed in denim, a ragged work shirt, hands muddy from working in the yard, standing at attention under the command of his square faced wife whom I also met at the dispensary.  

She turned out to be the head nurse.  And she evinced even more military bearing than he.  I was told to sit on a gurney.  The gurney was covered with a white sheet faded yellow from a million washings.  Mrs. Singleton tended to my leg as I listened to the Commander.

Were it not for the glasses, Captain Singleton had the look of a Tank Commander.  With the glasses, military approved standard eyewear I was sure, he looked like a scientist furloughed to the military wing of the military industrial complex.

He had an unconscious habit of removing the glasses when he talked.  Perhaps the fitting process at the base PX hadn’t gone so well.  The Captain would then place the glasses back on the bridge of his nose as he waited for a reply and then remove them again to continue on with his part of the conversation.

He removed the glasses.

“Mr. Easley, I know you have a lot of questions.  You have some answers already.  But they need to be put in context for you to fully understand.  While the nurse works, I will brief you.  This is my wife by the way.  She will take good care of you.  We wanted to keep this, ah, operation as close as possible and limit it to the fewest personnel we could.  You know, for security purposes, if you will.”

“Captain,” I said, “what the hell does this all have to do with the military?”

He didn’t like being interrupted either.  And I had evidently interrupted his plan on how he would brief me.   I didn’t particularly care.  I was tired.  I needed a shower. I was irritated.  I needed a drink.  I needed to simplify my life.  I didn’t want to play anymore.

“Let’s start with the files you read at the F.B.I. office.”

I looked up at him, searching for answers in his strict countenance, just as his wife brutally swabbed my poor cut leg with what must have been hydrochloric acid.

“Sorry about that,” she muttered after I screamed.  She was smiling.  She roughly grabbed my leg and twisted it around for a better angle, pulled out a fine, sharp little needle and began stitching.  She pulled the stitches tight. Customer Service was evidently not a high priority on a military base.  Come to think of it, as it related to medical matters, customer service wasn’t a high priority anywhere.  But in the civilian world that was arrogance.  Here there was, in my view, a bit of sadism.

The Captain was watching his wife’s brutal manipulations of my wounded leg with interest.  His eyes were intense, and his mouth was suppressing a smile, and not one at the humor of my discomfiture. I was relatively sure he was enjoying this.  I wondered at the physical manifestations of their relationship behind closed doors. Since my amorous adventures with Wanda, I was beginning to wonder if a little good-natured twisting and turning, a bit of roughness, that good hurting stuff, was more widely practiced than I had previously thought.  

“Well?”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” replied my distracted Captain.

“These men, and the woman, you know her as Mrs. Vuitch, will be brought here for processing.  Our judge staff advocate filed the paperwork for a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court warrant.  You’ve met him, I believe.  You remember being introduced to an agent by the name of Lee?”

I remembered but didn’t say anything.  

“Well, anyway, he knows the processes, the operating procedures, but he can’t actually handle the case.  The new rules promulgated by Congress, require a civilian prosecutor in military tribunals where civilians are placed on trial.  Since a military panel is going to be passing on the evidence and a military judge will, well, assuming for the moment there is a conviction, sentence the offenders, the dicks, ah, well, the civilian reps in Congress thought it more fair to have an outside prosecutor in these kind of cases.  You know, prevent conflicts of interest and all.”

“Wait a minute.  What kind of court are you talking about?”

“Not well known.  After 9/11.  The FISA courts.  They are not public.  They are tribunals.  You probably won’t have to worry about a defense lawyer either.  Not required unless the Base Commander, and that’s me, orders it.”

He took his glasses off, but before I could say anything, he put them right back on.

“Well, the SecDef, uh, Secretary of Defense, could order it, but I doubt that would ever happen.”

He took his glasses off again.  I spoke up. 

“Yeah, okay.  I’ve heard of FISA courts.  What’s this got to do with that?”

“Military security.  These men and that woman stole secrets.  They are thieves.  They stole a secret process we’ve been developing since the Second World War.  You read about it a little in the files.  Well, it’s gone a long way since then. Only been used a few times.  It was restricted; all purely military necessity.  Need to know.  Until this group got a hold of it and made a mess.  We had experimented with it.  In a very limited way.  Used it to make a few select soldiers stronger, smarter, quicker, invincible really.  But the missing piece was personality, tendencies.  We had to change that in some of them.  Make them more aggressive sometimes, more patient other times.  We were working on that.  Looking for the right sequence.  And that’s what your group got on to.  We can’t get the genie back in the bottle, obviously, but we can remove these people and contain this for now, for a few more years.  For that time at least, until the rest of the world catches up.  Until they do, we will have the advantage.  That could be critical.”

“Advantage?”

“Over our enemies.” 

Chapter Thirty-Five

I wasn’t sure I understood all the Captain had said, but I felt the disparate pieces of a puzzle were starting to fit together.  It was like looking in a mirror and seeing multiple versions of the same person looking back at you.  The Captain’s wife patted my knee and smiled up at me like I had been a good boy under her cruel ministrations and could now go out and play other games.  

She was a square solid woman, and could no doubt be stern when she needed to be.  That was okay, but my tastes were more to the generous curvature of my big girl, Wanda.  My tastes were changing, evolving or something.  Little Tammy J. still had her appeal, but she was delicate.  She wouldn’t survive a collision between these two.

I dressed in loose green fatigue pants some enlisted man had produced from a locker somewhere and marched; well, I limped, behind the Captain down the hall of the dispensary and out the double doors to a waiting sedan.  

We both sat in the back and a Navy corpsman drove us across the base to the Captain’s administrative building.  Along the way, I looked out at the passing hangers and the fighter jets and enlisted men, climbing around on erector sets, doing their maintenance. It was the middle of the night, but the place was lit up like the middle of the day, with bright strobe lights everywhere and trucks and forklifts and vans, moving, traveling to and fro.  Readiness to fight and defeat our enemies was a twenty-four hour a day operation.  I was as patriotic as the next guy.  And seeing our men and women in arms working in the dead of night to keep us safe, warmed my soul.  Could I attribute any equivalency to my efforts on behalf of the nation?  No way.  Even I wasn’t that arrogant.

We walked into the administrative building and traversed a large bay of computers to get to the Captain’s office.  The men and women at the computers all stood at attention when the Captain entered the bay, but quickly resume their seating when a Lieutenant Commander, sitting at his desk, on a raised podium in the back shouted, “At Ease!”  

When we got to the Base Commander’s office, I was surprised to see Wanda sitting there with the inchoate Maurice.   Before I could even sit down to ease my wounded leg, Wanda was up, waving her hand, indicating for me to follow her.  She wasn’t smiling.  Maurice never moved.  Behind me I noted the Captain was taking his chair behind his large desk.  I followed Wanda out into the hall. She kept moving.

I couldn’t help it.  I watched her big behind.

“Where are we going? I thought you were going to nurse me a little?”

She looked back over her shoulder and smiled.  “What, you mean the Captain’s wifey didn’t treat you good?”

“She hurt me.”

“Poor baby, I bet she did.   We will get to that later, Counselor.  Right now, we are going to meet a couple of people. These are going to be your witnesses.”

“I’m tired.”

“I know.  Let’s just get this squared away so you know where this is going. Then we can slow down a little.  Get you taken care of.”

“Promises.”

“Always.”

“So, who are these witnesses?  Who we going to see?”

“You know them both.  Little Wanda and the guy you were going to prosecute.  You need to hear what they have to say.  And no, it can’t wait.’

She stopped at a large dark gray metal door.  She pressed a button on a small black box to the side of the door and I heard a click.  The door opened slightly.  She pushed it the rest of the way open. 

In the middle of the room was little Wanda.  She was sitting at a metal desk with a pen and a pad of yellow paper.  She was writing something.  She raised her face to me and smiled.  She was truly pretty.  I heard a scrape.  Big Wanda pulled a chair off the wall and dragged it across the cement floor and placed it next to little Wanda.  She heavily sat down.  

I stood in the doorway and stared at them sitting side by side for the first time. They both smiled at me.  They had the same smile.  

I was very tired. And I really needed a drink, but I had to admit, this was getting bizarre.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“The first thing I remember was a boy with a washcloth. The rag was cool, and he was wiping my face.  I was on a floor.  It was cold.  Tile.  It was so cold my back ached where it touched the floor.  I rolled over and started pushing myself up and the boy backed away from me.  He had been on his knees and he stood up and took a few steps away.  He left the washcloth lying on the floor next to where my head had been.  It was then I noticed other people in the room.”

“Where were you?”

“I didn’t know at the time, but I later found out it was a big warehouse.  Wanda knows.”

I looked at Big Wanda.  She nodded.  “That’s where they took me. That’s where I was when I got loose.”

I turned back to Little Wanda.  “Go on.  Who were those people?”

“They were some of the ones like me.  Duplicates.  The boy I told you about he handed me a robe, well, it was just a very large dress, like something you would get at a rescue mission.  I wrapped it around me.  Everybody was dressed haphazardly.  The clothes were old and torn and there weren’t enough to cover everybody.  Some of them were practically naked.”

“Tell him about your memory,” Big Wanda said.

“Well, that was one of the strange things, I had memories.  I didn’t really exist until then.  I mean right then I had physical form, but I didn’t think I even existed before that moment, but I had memories.  I found out later something of how that happened. But like I told Wanda, I knew I wasn’t the person, I mean, this is difficult to describe, but I had the memories, but I knew they weren’t me, you know, mine.  I mean they weren’t my memories.  I thought at first, I must have had memories, but these were gone, and I had these.  Something or someone had put them there in place of my own.”

I shook my head.  She looked at me like she was helpless. 

I felt the need to reassure her.  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you.”

Her eyes bore into me.  More aggressively than I had thought she could.

“I just don’t understand,” I added.

“I didn’t either, but I didn’t have long to figure it out.  Arnold took care of that.”

Big Wanda’s eyes told me that, indeed, it was the same Arnold.

“What did he do to you?” Wanda asked.  I could tell Wanda wanted to take over the questioning.  She wanted to take it in certain directions so I would hear what she wanted me to hear.  I thought that was a good idea and so I sat back and listened.

“He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me after him.”

“What did the others do?   The ones in the room.”

“I got afraid because I could tell they were afraid of him.  I mean he wasn’t alone.  There were two men with him, but everybody in the room got as far away from Arnold as they could get.  They pushed themselves up against the wall on the other side of the room. Nobody told them they had to do that.  They just did it, like they knew it was best for them to do that when Arnold was there.”

“Nobody helped you?  Nobody tried?”, I asked.

“It didn’t take me long to figure out why.”

She paused.  Remembering.  Wanda said, “Go on.”

“Well, I tried pulling my arm back.  I was scared.  I didn’t want to go with him.  I wasn’t trying to get away.  I just held back, resisted him.  And he doubled up his fist and hit me.  He just swung over the top and hit me on the back of the head.  It stunned me and I went down.  He never let go of my arm.  He reached down and just ripped off my dress.  Left me naked.  And then he dragged me toward the door.  He stopped a couple of times along the way and kicked me.  He was really mad, I remember thinking.  I was crying and yelling.  But nobody tried to help, and the crying just made him madder.  I learned never to do that.”

“Well, you will never have to worry about him anymore,” I said.

Wanda silently shook her head like she didn’t want me to say anything else.  I shut up though I saw a curious look in little Wanda’s eyes.

“I found out later that Arnold was one of us.  But the aggressive part they got wrong.  So, they just used it.  Used him on us.  I felt sorry for him after I learned that.  They never showed him how to control it.  That wasn’t fair.  I know what he was feeling.  We all do.  We feel it, but it can be controlled.  That’s the discipline part.”

I was a little stunned at what she was saying.   Big Wanda intervened.

“Never mind that.  Just tell him what happened.”

“Transfusion.  They gave me a blood transfusion.  That was the first thing they did.  I found myself on the table with stuff in my arms and they were changing my blood.  Or enhancing it or adding to it or something.”

“And what else?” Big Wanda asked.

“My legs were apart.  I had been pulled to the end of the table.  Arnold was between them.  While they pumped their blood in me, he raped me.” 

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