(Wrath-09)-Spiders From The Shadows (2013)
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Authors: Chris Stewart
Table of Contents
SPIDERS FROM THE SHADOWS
WRATH & RIGHTEOUSNESS
[Episode Nine]
CHRIS STEWART
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used factiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locals or persona, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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“Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever[.]”
Thomas Jefferson,
Notes of the State of Virginia
, Query 18
“We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth.”
Abraham Lincole mission depended on ll against his n,
Second Annual Message to Congress, Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
ONE
Offutt Air Force Base, Headquarters, U.S. Strategic Command, Eight Miles South of Omaha, Nebraska
The room was silent. They were alone the only surviving member. The eto. The two men stared at each other before one of them whistled quietly, a nervous habit he’d picked up as a kid, then swallowed and forced a smile. The air in the command center was cool but arid as the desert, the underground cooling systems pumping out purified, bone-dry atmosphere. The digital clocks on the wall behind them showed the local times in Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem, New York, Hawaii, and a handful of others.
It was 3:14 a.m., local time. A little less than four hours until sunrise. Above the underground complex, the night was dark. To conserve energy, but mostly to avoid highlighting their capabilities to the local population, the base commander had ordered all lights extinguished after sunset. There were already hundreds of civilians at the gates. No reason to make it thousands. The time for riots and gunfights along the base security perimeter would come soon enough without publicizing the fact that the military had electricity, water, communications, and pretty much everything else.
Not the kind of things they needed to advertise right now.
But in the end, it wouldn’t matter. If things didn’t change soon, the base would run out of energy and supplies just like the local population.
Brucius Marino, the Secretary of Defense and the actual President of the Republic, was exhausted. He hadn’t slept at all in almost thirty hours, and he’d had little more than a couple of hours of sleep during the two days before that. He knew he had to find some time to rest; his mind was slow as molasses and he found himself sometimes stumbling on his feet and over his words. Worse, he micro-slept for fifteen or thirty seconds at the most awkward times—while talking to a subordinate, shaving, eating or listening to a security brief. He couldn’t read a paragraph without nodding off.
What he needed was a shower, a hot meal, and twenty hours of sleep. But not right now. Not until he said good-bye. This was important. Maybe the most important thing they would do up to this point.
He looked across the table. There wasn’t a man in the world he trusted more than the man sitting opposite him, and this was the last time he would see him. Somehow they both knew.
James Davies, the FBI Director, kept his eyes low. He, too, was exhausted, his black eyes melting into the dark skin above his cheekbones, his curly hair cut to a stubble of black and gray. The portable table, mounted on rubber wheels, moved under the weight of the Secretary of Defense’s heavy arms. The military infirmary was all chrome, tile and white cement walls, causing their voices to echo, which created a stiff environment that magnified the awkwardness of it all.
“How does it feel?” Brucius asked.
James turned his head and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing at the strain. “Feels like I swallowed a tennis ball.”
Brucius flinched.
“If it hurt like that going down, I can’t imagine what it’s going to feel like coming back up again.”
Brucius winced again and subconsciously swallowed. “It’s going to be OK, though?”
James clenched his teeth, then rubbed his tongue across the new cap on his molar and nodded.
They were silent another moment.
“You don’t have to do this,” Brucius said.
“I know that, sir.”
Brucius shook his head. “I’m not
sir
to you, James. I never will be.”
“You@? ing the’re the president, sir.”
“Not right now. Not yet. We’ve been through this.”
“You are the president, sir. That isn’t in dispute. That’s why I’m doing this, you know. As much affection as I might have for you, this isn’t about you or me or friendship. This is something different. More important.” He nodded toward the hallway. “That’s why all of us are doing this. It’s about the presidency. The country. It’s about the Constitution versus chaos. It’s the only thing we can do.”
Brucius didn’t answer.
James broke into a smile. “I love you, Brucius, you know that, but this is much more important than a single man.”
There were footsteps in the hallway, the sound of clicking heels moving past, and they fell silent as they listened, both of them lost in their own thoughts.
“We made a mistake.” Brucius had a far-off look on his face as he spoke, his mind reflecting back. He had a sense of pain about him—a father reflecting on the passing of his child. He appeared to be racked with torment. What had happened to his country? What might he have done differently!
James sucked his teeth and waited.
“We should have seen it coming,” Brucius continued.
Again, James didn’t answer.
“We should have known.”
“What are you talking about, Mr. Secretary?”
“The president we elected. He was good, smooth and said all the right things. But he didn’t love his country, at least not like you and I do. Not like our fathers. Not like our grandfathers. He saw our country as not that much different from all the others, not much better, in some ways maybe worse. He saw our sins and determined they precluded us from any further greatness. It wasn’t that he had an evil heart, he just couldn’t see or didn’t choose to see the good that was our country.”
“Hmmm,” was all James offered.
Brucius leaned over and ran his hand over his head, then rested his elbows on his knees and looked up. “It allowed him to surround himself with men like he was, only worse. Men who didn’t trust their own people. Men with a lust for power, and power, like cocaine, left them unsatisfied, always lusting for more. But it was us as much as anyone. We’re the ones who elected him. We’re the ones who put him there.”
“He paid a price for his folly.”
Brucius thought of the nuclear attack over Washington, D.C., that had killed the president and answered, “Yes, he did.”
They fell silent another moment. Outside, a powerful storm was raging: enormous black clouds, billowing and boiling, dark and full. Thunderous rain. Constant spiderwebs of blue-white lightning. Something in the atmosphere had been thrown completely out of whack—whether from the EMP attack or the nuclear fallout, no one quite knew. Maybe it was from both. Maybe Mother Nature was just ticked off, but she was birthing storms now that billowed with more fury than they’d ever seen before. A particularly close bolt of lightning
CRAAACKED
and the thunder followed instantly, causing the air to sizzle with the smell of ozone. Both men stopped and looked out the window. It was almost as dark as midnight outside.
“You get in and get out,” Brucius said after the echoes from the frightening thunder had rolledHe could have come home.”
Do not get yourself killed!”
James Davies studied his hands, large, rough, and thick-fingered. His father’s hands. His grandfather’s hands. The inherited hands of a former slave. A sudden chill ran through him. A premonition? A warning? He didn’t know. He looked across the table at his best friend, his mind drifting back. “Do you remember the first time we ever met?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? I can’t remember anything that happened even a month ago. That was back in college. It seems like another world.”
James rubbed his hands across his eyes. “I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in a physics lab. There were, I don’t know, forty or fifty kids, all of them as arrogant and self-absorbed as we were, all of them certain they were going to be the next billionaire, president or power-crazy CEO. You don’t fill a classroom at Yale with the weak in intellect or ego. An hour into the lab I looked down the row and caught your eye. You looked at me, then motioned to the back door. We picked up our books and headed out—”
“There was a gym across the hallway,” Brucius remembered now. “We ended up shooting hoops.”
“Yeah. You were taller by four inches, but I could still dunk on you.”
“I was jealous of your money,” Brucius said.
“I was jealous of your determination,” James countered. “The fact you were making it on your own.”