*/Third Person POV/*
The mission board still had twenty names on it.
And Colonel Reyes had been looking at that board on and off for fourteen hours, and he had not taken a single name down, because taking a name down was a decision, and nobody had given him anything to decide on.
Twenty names in grease pencil under a heading that read GHOSTBIRD / TWO-FOUR.
ROURKE. VOSS. HONCE. ASHBY. DEL. ELLISON.
BRANDT and his four technicians bracketed at the bottom.
Wheels up at zero-six. On the deck at Ferrow Point at zero-six-forty-one. Two clean comms checks on the approach, one after landing, logged in a corporal’s handwriting.
And then nothing, for fourteen hours.
The ops tent was quiet at this hour, four people at the desks and the generator humming outside the canvas, and the radio operator who had been running the recall sequence ever since noon.
"Ghostbird, Ghostbird, this is Harlan Base, radio check, over."
And yet nothing but static answered him.
Reyes had done twenty-six years in a uniform and eight days in whatever this was, and he knew exactly what fourteen hours of that meant, but he made the man keep trying to establish contact anyway.
At twenty-one hundred he went out and walked the wire, just like he had walked it every night since the fall, and he was not going to stop tonight of all nights.
And he saw them by the fence.
Even before stepping out, he had known they would be there. Nobody had told the fort anything, and that had been deliberate, and it had also been useless, because a fort is a small place and twenty people do not fail to come home quietly.
Ellison’s wife stood nearest the gate with a coat over her shoulders and both hands under her belly, seven months along, and she did not ask him anything as he came past, and that was worse than if she had.
Further down stood a woman with a girl of about six asleep in her hands, face buried in her mother’s neck, a fold of paper crushed in one small fist.
Reyes looked at that for slightly too long before he made himself keep walking. Every man in that unit had known about Del’s drawings.
Forty meters on, the comms shack door threw a stripe of light across the dirt, and a boy came out of it.
Twelve years old. Ears that stuck out, holding a handheld in both hands and the headphones hanging around his neck.
"Colonel." He gave Reyes a polite, small bow.
"Son."
"Mara said she’d call in on the way back," the boy said flatly, the way you state a fact that has been checked twice. "That was the arrangement... she calls in, and I’m first voice. So I’m staying on the net."
"Then you’re doing exactly what she told you to do," Reyes said, voice trembling ever so slightly, "... and that’s the whole job, and nobody’s moving you off it."
The boy nodded once, chewed the inside of his cheek, and went back in, and Reyes stood a moment in the dark with his hands behind his back before walking back to the ops tent, only to find it louder than he left it.
"Sir." His NBC sergeant stood at the desk with a clipboard, and his face had gone a color Reyes did not like at all. "We’ve got readings. Eastern instrument line’s climbing, all four posts, started ninety minutes ago and it hasn’t stopped... Post Two’s now reading eleven times background... Four sets don’t drift the same direction on the same night, sir. That’s a plume, coming out of the west-southwest, tracking east across our southern approaches."
Reyes put both hands on the map table and just exhaled, and the room went very quiet around him, because everyone in that tent had sat through the brief he’d given not a day ago, and watched a blue vein light up on a screen with towns strung down it like beads.
"Ferrow Point melted down," he said, not looking up.
Nobody argued. Because it meant Brandt had not gotten there. A man who had run plants like that for thirty years, who had walked into that building with four of his own people and fifteen rifles around him, had failed to throw the one switch he’d come to throw.
And that also meant they were dead. All twenty of them. And Reyes had put every one of them on that aircraft himself.
"Corridor logs," he said softly. "Every element that’s been east of the line since dawn. Anything anybody saw, heard, or thought they saw. Now."
It took eleven minutes.
The first came off a four-man observation element on high ground outside Halden, and it read like a man writing down something he did not believe.
Zero-nine-twelve. Rotary aircraft, medium, twin rotor, NH90 profile, overflying the city at low altitude, slow and loud over and over, for hours, dragging its noise across every street in Halden with the patience of a farmer working a field.
Reyes read that line four times.
"He was pulling them," he said, finger on the log. "That’s not a search... a search is a grid, and it moves on. That pilot was walking the city up and down, ringing a dinner bell... Then he stopped, and he went west... the plant is fifteen kilometers west... and four hours later my instruments start climbing."
He watched it land on every face at that table, one after another.
"He emptied Halden into Ferrow Point. And then he melted Ferrow Point down on top of it."
"That... is just evil," somebody whispered.
"It is..." Reyes said. "Plus the entire south of this country, plus my twenty. And I would very much like somebody in this tent to give me a reason a human being does that."
Nobody had one. He’d known nobody would, and he had asked anyway.
"Second report, sir." The operations sergeant already had the sheet. "Roadwatch element, ten-forty. NH90 transiting west at altitude, heading away. They had glass on it."
The man hesitated, which he never did before adding. "Side door was open, and there was a man sitting in it, sir. Feet hanging out the door. They said it looked like he was watching it happen... and that there was something small riding on his shoulder, but that’s four kilometers through a spotting scope."
Reyes stood very still.
He had spent the week building a place where people could stop running, and he had spent it all believing the enemy was a disease.
A disease has no reason. It’s just a thing. A slave to its existence. A disease does not sit in a doorway with its boots hanging out, and watch.
"Take the board down..." he said quietly. "All twenty into the book as killed in action. I’ll write the letters myself tonight, and the families hear it from me before they hear it from the wire."
He then turned to the map, to the river running down it in one long blue vein, and put a finger on the red dot that used to be a nuclear facility with a switch inside they just needed to flip off.
"And then I want MY aircraft. There is exactly one NH90 unaccounted for in this half of the country, and it is ours." Reyes said, his words slowly cutting through gritted teeth, "... the man flying it took my people, took my airframe, and used a nuclear plant as a weapon for whatever the fuck went inside his sick head... Description goes out on every channel we own... every element, every corridor, every group we trade with from here to the coast. Make sure the word reaches Bastion... Find it. Find him."
"And when we do..." He straightened off the table. "I want to look him in the eye and ask why."
The tent went to work around him, while Reyes stood in the middle of it, eyes calm, soft even, even as his heart both cried and roared in unison.
While outside, the wind kept coming over the eastern wire.
And in a comms shack forty meters down the line, a twelve-year-old boy sat with a handheld in both hands and the headphones half off one ear, watching a dial he’d been given a schedule for, waiting to be the first voice his sister heard on the way back.
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