Psychic Warrior (9 page)

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Authors: David Morehouse

BOOK: Psychic Warrior
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At one I came scrambling out of a command group meeting in the boss's office. I collected the files from my safe and headed down the hall to Barker's office. I knocked frantically at his door, but there was no answer. I checked my watch; I was fifteen minutes late. “Shit!” I muttered
to myself, still pounding on the door. “He'd better be here! I'm not that late.”
“Just a minute! I'll be there in a minute!” Barker shouted from inside.
I paced the hall, waiting for him to open the door. I must have looked anxious, or paranoid, or something. It seemed to me as if everyone walking by the office eyeballed me. Maybe they just wondered why I was visiting the shrink two days in a row.
The door jerked open. “Hey! Welcome, come on in. I was just talking to some friends about you.” Barker motioned me into my usual chair as he took his place behind the desk.
“Friends? About me?”
“Sure! Your experiences provoke a lot of interest in my line of work. You can understand that.”
“I guess I can understand that. It just concerns me—”
He cut me off. “Don't be concerned about anything. All this is confidential. I didn't mention you by name, only by your operative number, and they have no way of knowing who or what that means. Okay? Shall we get started?”
I sighed, looked briefly at the file folders, and handed them to him. “Those are quite interesting, to say the least.”
“Yeah, I thought so. How did they make you feel?”
“They scared the hell out of me, that's what. How did you think they would make me feel?”
“I assumed they would be a little shocking at first, but I also thought that you would find a resemblance to some of your experiences. I guess what I really wanted you to see was that this sort of thing, while being unusual, is in fact a reality. I was concerned that you might begin thinking yourself an anomaly.”
“I think I'm a goddamned freak, that's what I think!”
“That's precisely what I don't want you to think. The men you read about last night are not freaks. They are highly trained individuals who perform a very needed intelligence-collection service; they are a national intelligence asset. There is a great deal of information that only they
can provide, and they are very difficult people to come by.”
“What's that got to do with me? I can't do what they're doing in those files. Hell, I'm nothing but out of control, and those guys—well, they go where they want to go, see what they want to see. They're special.”
“They are
now …
but they didn't begin that way. Yes, some of them have grown up with some semblance of this ability, but not with the refined capability we're talking about. Some of them had encounters that frightened them, just as you've been frightened.”
“Have they been shot in the head?”
Barker stopped mid-sentence and smiled. “Come to think of it, no, no one has been shot in the head. Frankly, I don't see how that changes things much. I can't imagine what a blow to the head of that severity could or would have done to you. But it obviously did something, since you didn't have any inkling of this ability before. That fact alone sets you apart from the others. But that's immaterial. What's important are your options. And they are: I can arrange for clinical assistance. That is, I can either try and help you here in the office with this perceived problem. Or, I can arrange for you to see a psychiatrist at another facility. Those are two options.”
I was indignant. “And?”
Now Barker was serious. “There is no ‘and.' However, I can and will arrange an interview with some people. Some people who might be willing, if you qualify, to help you put this newfound ability to some use. The choice is yours.”
“No offense, Doctor, but those are pretty limiting options. If I read you right, you're saying that I can either end my career and seek clinical help for this ‘problem,' or I can try to join a group of people who define this ‘problem' as an ‘ability' and spend the rest of my life trying to harness it so it doesn't kill me someday. Is that it?”
“You've distorted what I'm saying a bit, but that's essentially right. You wouldn't be doing it the rest of your life.”
“How long?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how well you do, or whether you decide to stay with it, and on about a dozen other variables. But I'd say those are the most important. Dammit, David, I'm offering you a chance at a new life. Are you interested?”
I began to shake my legs nervously, thinking. Then I realized that Barker was watching me twitch and I forced myself to stop. “I'll have to give it some thought. Can I take a few days?”
“More like a few weeks would be better. I don't want you jumping into this; that wouldn't serve my purpose any more than it would yours.” He stood up from the desk and walked to the same file safe as yesterday. “I want you to look at some material.” He pulled a thick stack of papers from the drawer and handed them to me. “That should hold you for a while.”
“What is all this stuff?”
“It's documentation pertaining to the unit you read about yesterday—some historical stuff, branch programs, more session summaries, and so on. It should give you a fairly good overview of the program. We'll keep in touch, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about any of it. You know where I am.” He laughed, thinking his last comment was a joke. “Now let's break this up, shall we?”
“Sure, Doc … but we didn't discuss any of the files.”
“That's okay; I have a fairly good sense of what you thought. That's all I needed.” He raised his eyebrows, said,
“Thanks!”
and motioned me to the door of the office.
I said nothing else. Lost in thought, I quietly walked back to my office, my head low. I closed my door and sat at the desk, staring at the pile of documents.
I can't do it,
I thought.
I just can't do it.
I placed the documents in the safe, closed the drawer, and slowly spun the tumbler.
Several days passed and I never opened the drawer. I
refused to spend time worrying about the future. Instead, I concentrated on my family.
Debbie planned outings for the entire family. I'd never had the chance to be involved in those, back when I was in the Rangers, and I wanted to get to know my children. It was a struggle at first, trying to adapt to a quasi-civilian way of life. It seemed I was in the way more than anything else. I guess it's difficult for a family to contend with Dad being home so much, when for years they've barely seen him. I think I was cramping their style, but they were as tolerant of me as they could be.
Michael started taking skating lessons, which eventually led to his playing ice hockey at an arena near Alexandria. It was a lot of fun for me to take him to the arena for practices and games. His gear bag was bigger than he was at the time. On Saturdays and Sundays the entire family would go to his games in the arenas about the capital Beltway. It was a tremendous escape from the events of the office and a fair diversion from my nightly journeys into the unknown.
I was beginning to feel I was fitting into the family again, to feel that Debbie and I were gaining confidence in each other. We seldom talked about what went on in my head at night, but I knew it troubled her. She was the one who comforted me when I became frightened, who wiped the perspiration from me, and who often shook me awake from my screams. There was no avoiding it, I was slowly losing ground with her on this issue. She was concerned about me, and angry that I wasn't seeking professional help. The career didn't matter to her. All that mattered was for me to be rid of these nightmares—these visions.
 
It was Easter weekend, 1988. We attended church as we usually did and picked up my parents at National Airport immediately following the service. It was good to see them again. I always felt comfortable around Mom and Dad. They made me feel safe. We spent time together catching up on family and friends; we even looked up some of Dad's
old army buddies and spent an evening laughing over stories of World War II and Korea. It was without a doubt one of the most pleasant times I'd had in quite a while. Dad and I enjoyed a small glass of wine before retiring.
“How's the new job?”
I looked at him and grimaced. “It's interesting—and that's about it. No matter how good it gets, it'll never be as good as the infantry was. I'd give a month's pay just to see some dirty-faced troops for a week or so. I wouldn't call this the army, Dad; it's more like a highly paid, expensive boys' club. Some of the guys in this organization are drawing extra-duty payments of over eight hundred dollars a month.”
“For what? Being spooks?”
“It's a bit more criminal than that. The other day I was sitting in a meeting when the unit training officer informed the various commanders that there were still some people drawing demolition pay who hadn't yet completed their quarterly qualifications. If they didn't, they'd lose their pay for a month. The good part is this: the qualification involves detonating a simulated blasting device. Can you believe that? These guys are drawing demo pay for blowing up what amounts to an M-80 firecracker. It pisses me off to see it. I remember young Rangers who jumped in five gallons of fu-gas with a claymore mine taped to it to incinerate the objective. And hell, they did it every other week. I couldn't have gotten them demolitions pay for that if I'd tried. And these guys get it for lighting firecrackers. It's bullshit, Dad, pure bullshit.”
“I don't understand how they get away with it. Isn't somebody watching for that type of abuse?”
“I assume they are, but it's a big army, and we tend to concentrate on what we can see, not what's hidden from view under a cloak of secrecy. I saw a watch in a safe the other day that cost the taxpayers more than I made in three years. It was a prop that somebody in the unit used on a mission, as part of an alias. That would have bought me a lot of training ammunition when I was in the Rangers.”
Dad touched my shoulder. “I know, son. It's a pain in the ass when you see stuff like that. But I'm sure it has a purpose, somewhere. They're probably working with the Agency when they pull some of this stuff—aren't they?”
“I don't know. I doubt it. There seems to be a running battle between this unit and the CIA. If you were to ask me to vote, I'd vote to let the CIA do it. They know what they're doing when it comes to this stuff; we don't. Yeah, we've got some good people in the unit, but for the most part it's a bunch of guys trying to play James Bond, and they aren't any good at it. As a matter of fact they stink at it, and it's embarrassing to the army to own these guys. The damned secretary of the army doesn't like ‘em or trust 'em. But I told you that story already.” I glanced at my watch. “Look, it's getting late, and tomorrow's a workday. Let's hit the sack. Good night, Dad. I love you, and thanks for being here.”
He smiled and drained the last of his wine from the glass. “I love you, too. See you in the morning.”
I checked on the children and finally lay down beside Debbie. She moved closer to me in her sleep as I lay on top of the covers, my hands behind my neck. I watched the fan on the ceiling spin as I lost myself in thought and quietly drifted into sleep.
 
My eyes opened to the darkness of the room. Above me the fan stopped cold in its tracks. I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, trying to see the rest of the room with my peripheral vision. I couldn't feel Debbie next to me on the bed. I was alone. I tried to call her name, but nothing came from my mouth, as if some powerful thing refused to let air or sound escape from me. Again I tried to speak, but my throat only grew tighter.
I tried to raise myself, but the pressure of a dozen unseen hands pressed me back into the bed. I tried to scream, but couldn't make a sound. All that came from me was a gagging hiss of air. My arms wouldn't leave the position they were in, and I felt as though I were sinking into the bed,
deeper, deeper. I could see nothing but blackness, like the blackness I'd seen in the desert—a blackness that brought with it a light from an unseen source. It filled the room. In sheer terror, I rolled my head from side to side, desperately trying to free my body from whatever held it fast to the bed. I tried to sit up or move my legs or roll, but I could not move. My heart raced, pounding so hard it felt like a foreign object, attached to me but not
of
me. Suddenly, the sound of a harsh wind pierced my ears. As I watched in horror, the room and everything in it folded upon itself and me … and then there was utter darkness and silence. It lasted only a blink, and I found myself resting on all fours in some unknown place. The ground was crimson and magenta and it sparkled from every angle. Not moving my arms and legs I raised my head to the horizon to see a torn and broken landscape, everything washed in strange mixes of blue and crimson.
Everything in sight, even the sky, was a swirling mass of color and movement. A dull, hot wind touched my face and dragged across the landscape, bringing with it small crystals the size of coarse sand. They stung my exposed skin, and I raised my arm to protect my face. Peering through the crook of my arm, I squinted hard to survey my position. I was alone, as far as I could see. There were no structures, no mountains, no trees, nothing but the cracked surface beneath me, and the crystalline dust. I felt my body to see if it was real.

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