The situation board showed the results of their efforts to clear out terrorists from the country. There was one large patch of green in Los Angeles, but it was isolated with a death zone surrounding it. There were a lot of little green patches left, but they were far apart and surrounded by the watchful eyes of Americans who didn't trust them. The support network was gone.
Mike looked at the board and said, "It looks to me like we've about worked ourselves out of a job."
Shirley looked up at the board and said, "I'd say you're right, but we're going to have individual radicals crop up from time to time."
"I fear that you're right," Mike said with a sigh. A line that shouldn't have been crossed had been crossed.
Jim shook his head and, while his fingers operated the keyboard in front of him, said, "Let me show you something interesting."
Little orange dots appeared on the situation board. All of them were in the small islands of Muslims. Curious, Mike asked, "What are the orange dots?"
Jim said, "Those are locations where non-Muslims have foiled attempts by calling law enforcement with their suspicions."
"Oh," Mike said.
Jim worked on the keyboard for another second and thousands of little red dots appeared on the screen. Smiling, he said, "Those red dots show where plots were foiled as a result of Muslims turning in radical elements of their neighborhoods."
There were far more red dots than orange dots. Mike sat back and studied the board. He asked, "What do you make of that?"
"I'd say that the moderate Muslims have gotten tired of Jihad. They are now working with us to end it," Jim said with a smile. After his conversation with Mike about the hope that moderate Muslims would turn against the radical elements of their communities, he had spent a lot of time seeing if there was any chance of that hope ever becoming a reality. He had been pleasantly surprised by what he had learned.
Cathy delivered a cup of coffee to Mike with a very nice smile. As she set the cup down, she said, "Here's your coffee, Mike. It is just like you like it."
"Thank you, Cathy," Mike answered giving her a smile.
Everyone in the room chuckled at the formality that existed between the pair and then turned to look innocently at their computers when Mike looked around. Mike took a sip of his coffee and turned back to look at the situation board. He had ten minutes to kill before it was time for the weekly teleconference with all of the sites that worked for him. Shaking his head, he asked, "What are we going to do when the situation in Los Angeles is finished?"
"I don't know. It sure is going to be boring around here," Shirley said. After the San Diego battle, things had been real quiet in the office.
Mike had six sites that had been monitoring radical Muslims within the states. Communications between individual enclaves had come to a halt. The chatter among supporting Muslims had dropped to nothing. Mike's teams were now sitting around watching monitors that showed nothing happening. The occasional flashes of activity along the border were routinely investigated by locals. America had turned xenophobic and that made it virtually impossible for foreigners to spy. He said, "I guess we just might be able to take a few days of vacation."
"That would be great," Jim said. The only time off he had taken since the rail gun attacks had been a medical leave after the Jersey City fiasco. Everyone there had been ordered at one time or another to take a week of medical leave by the psychologists so he didn't feel too embarrassed about that.
Mike penciled in a note on the agenda for the conference call to discuss vacations. He'd have to clear it with his boss, but he was pretty sure that it wouldn't be a problem. He glanced over at Cathy and wondered if he should ask her to schedule her vacation to coincide with his. He shook his head thinking that asking her to do that was moving too fast.
Sanjay reeled in another bass. It was his third of this particular fishing expedition. Tim scooped the fish up in the net and brought it into the boat. As he lifted it out of the net, he said, "That's a real beauty. I think it is the biggest one of the day."
Mike looked over at the fish. It was a beauty weighing in at around five pounds. Grinning, he said, "That's nothing. Earlier this year I caught a beautiful five inch bass. You should have seen it."
"We did," Tim said.
"So you know what I mean," Mike said in a deadpan voice. His comment sparked the appropriate laughs. Mike asked, "So what's the score?"
"Sanjay three, Tim one, and Mike zero," Tim answered while Sanjay waved his fists in the air saying, "And the crowd goes wild for Sanjay."
Mike reached down and popped the top on a can of beer watching Tim take care of the fish. Sanjay, his leg still in a cast, looked over his fish with a pleased smile on his face. Once Tim had deposited the fish in the live well, Mike asked, "Who is ready for a beer?"
When both of them answered in the affirmative, he tossed a beer each to them. There were the dual sounds of cans of cold beer being opened. After a sip of his beer, Sanjay said, "This is the life. The wind is gentle, the water is tranquil, the beer is cold, and the fish are hungry. You can't ask for a better day for fishing."
"You can say that again," Tim said.
Mike took a sip of his beer and said, "Well, it is going to be a couple of weeks before I'll be able to go fishing again."
"Taking a vacation?" Tim asked. He had heard that Mike had told all of the people working for him to take two weeks off over the next six weeks. A third of his people were going to be out of the office at a time.
"That's right," Mike said setting his beer down.
"Where are you going?" Tim asked.
"I was thinking about going to the Adirondacks," Mike answered.
"Are you taking Cathy with you?" Sanjay asked. He knew that if he didn't come home with that information that Teva would kill him.
"I don't know. I'm not sure about that kind of stuff," Mike answered.
Looking over at Mike with a smile, Tim asked, "What's there to know?"
"Well, we've only had three dates. Don't you think that taking a two week vacation together after three dates is kind of rushing it?" Mike asked. He had taken Cathy out the night before to a nice dinner and a movie. He wasn't even sure if he was supposed to take Kim Sung along. She deserved a vacation as well.
"I suppose," Sanjay said. He cast his line and then added, "Of course, don't tell Teva that I said that. She'll kill me."
Tim laughed before thinking about Mike's problem. Being an old married man, he didn't know that much about the dating scene. He said, "I suppose it is a little early in the relationship to go on a two week trip with a woman."
Mike cast his line. Almost as soon as it hit the water, he had a strike. He reeled the fish to the boat. Tim grabbed the net and went to scoop it out of the water. Mike lifted the little fish out of the water and said, "I caught that little fellow again. I think he grew a half an inch since our last trip out here."
Laughing, Tim took the hook out of the fish's mouth. He held the fish up for everyone to admire. He said, "Another beauty."
Sanjay was laughing at the little fish. Mike just shook his head and said, "Throw it back. At this rate, it'll be a keeper about twenty fishing trips from now."
Tim released the fish back into the river. As it swam off, he said, "Grow little fellow, grow."
Mike sat back and said, "Why don't you fish for a while Tim? I'll just sit here and enjoy the sun."
"Thank you, sir. I think I will," Tim said picking up his rod.
"Sanjay, should I take Kim Sung with me on my vacation?" Mike asked.
"No. Just give her the time off," Sanjay answered. He knew from experience that if Mike took her along that she would continue to take care of him. He and Teva had made that mistake once. Kim had stayed in the hotel room the entire time taking care of their clothes and keeping the room neat and clean.
Mike was scheduled to go on his vacation three days after the Los Angeles sweep had taken place. This would allow him to watch the event and prepare the after action briefing. The Los Angeles action was a repeat of what had happened in San Diego. There was massive fighting as the terrorists resisted. American forces took the area one block at a time. Mike watched the entire thing, taking short naps when the forces finished one block and prepared to enter the next one. Watching the action, Mike was once again impressed by the discipline and quality of training the terrorists exhibited.
Everyone who had watched the action were teleconferenced together to come up with the after action assessment. Mike led off the discussion when he said, "Los Angeles was the last large urban enclave of radical Islamists. Although we may not have to face that again in this country, I'm pretty sure that we'll have to do this overseas at some point in time. I think we should leave a report that helps future operations of this kind. I know that we all observed different things. Did anyone notice anything really exceptional or unusual?"
For a long moment no one said anything and Mike was about to go on when one of the analysts from another site said, "There is one little thing that caught my attention. The weapons were basically stored in the homes of people who didn't fight. Before the battle started, some middle ranking person ran there and distributed the weapons to the lower ranks. It seems to me that if we can identify the places and hit them at the right time, we'd take out a lot of them."
Listening to the description of what happened, Mike said, "Let's go back to the San Diego raid for a moment. Is it possible that some of the people who we observed not fighting had stored weapons in their homes?"
"I suppose that's possible," Shirley said frowning. The layouts of the two areas were very different. One was track houses while the other was apartments. Shaking her head, she said, "We were watching them pretty closely."
One of the men said, "That's what Hezbollah does in Lebanon. They pay people to store weapons in their houses. When the terrorists need something, they go over and get it."
Mike asked, "Do we have any sensors that can track down weapon stores?"
"No. Finding caches of weapons is a real bitch," someone else answered.
Someone else said, "Almost as soon as they realized they were isolated, they started trying to tunnel out. In fact, most of the houses had partial tunnels already in place."
Mike knew about that, but asked, "Did they complete any tunnels?"
"Yes, but our troops were waiting for them when they came out," Jim answered.
Mike had not been aware of that. Looking at the screens, Mike asked, "I've got one question and it is a big one. Who escaped?"
One of the analysts at a remote site pulled up a file and sent it to the display. She said, "Here's the list of people who are unaccounted for. The ones with stars beside their names were individuals we were sure wouldn't be there. They had jobs that would have them out of the area when it was isolated. The others were probably caught outside the death zone."
The list held two hundred and seventy names. Mike took a moment to remember the woman's name. He asked, "What kind of damage can they do, Linda?"
"Lots," Linda answered, "The third man on that list is a planner and a couple more are highly trained commandos. We need to find them as soon as possible."
"And you thought you were going to be bored," Mike said with a chuckle. Everyone on the conference call rolled their eyes. He let the reaction to his comment pass and then said, "That brings us to what we'll be doing for the next little while. We've got a list of known terrorists who are free. We need to find them all before they have a chance to do anything."
"They could be anywhere," Linda said with a frown.
Chuck Adams asked, "Do we have any intelligence about safe houses?"
Mike shook his head and answered, "Not really. We've closed down the support network that allowed them to move freely around the country. The technical types are still going through the computers to extract what information they can from them. Until then, I suggest that we look at some of the Chinese strongholds. The last attack on us was a mixture of Chinese and Arab."
"I don't know anything about the Chinese communities here in America," Chuck said.
"I'll try to get a political analyst who specializes in that area to come here and talk to everyone. It is my understanding that the political situation in China is pretty bad and OPEC has it over a barrel," Mike said. He had meant to say that OPEC had China by the short hairs, but realized that some of the people on the call might not have appreciated it.
There were groans over the unintentional pun. Shaking his head, Jim said, "It all comes down to oil."
Mike's father and mother stopped by the house to see him before he left on his vacation. After greeting them at the door, Mike led them to the living room and invited them to have seats. Kim followed them in the room and asked, "May I get you anything?"
"No thank you. We won't be here long," Robert answered with a smile.
"I'm fine. Thank you, Kim," Louise answered. Initially, she hadn't approved of her son having a live-in housekeeper, but with time she had come to appreciate what Kim did for him. She relied upon Kim to keep her informed of how her son was doing.
When Kim had left, Mike looked at his father and asked, "What brings you out here?"
"I'm getting shipped overseas. My orders came through yesterday afternoon," Robert answered.
"Where are you going?" Mike asked.
"My men will be on a ship in the Pacific. It looks like we're going to be doing a little island hopping," Robert answered.
"That doesn't sound good," Mike said thinking about the experiences of World War II. He didn't know much about what was happening in that part of the world, but he could bet that they had dug in and would resist with the same level of fanaticism as the Japanese.
"Well, we're trying something new. The guys in the labs have come up with what they call proxy-soldiers. We'll be in the ships and these robots will go ashore," Robert answered. He didn't like the idea of fighting by proxy, but he did like the idea of being able to retire one day. Considering the tactics used by the terrorists, he'd use whatever advantage he could find.
"Is that like the smart bomb?" Mike asked.
"No. It is a robot that we control. We get into these suits and it is just like being there. The experience is so real that you forget that you're back in a special facility," Robert said. He'd been killed in one of the suits during a training exercise and it had really done a number on his head. The sudden transition from a hundred miles away back to where his body was located had made him ill. He hoped that it didn't happen again, but he had a feeling that before this war was over that he'd be used to it.
Louise said, "We didn't come here to talk about the war."
"You're right, dear," Robert said winking at Mike.
Louise ignored Robert's behavior. Knowing the answer to her question, she asked, "Are you taking Cathy with you on your vacation?"
Mike chuckled at the interest in his love life. He decided to have a little fun with it and answered, "Cathy? Who is Cathy?"
"The girl you are dating," Louise said rolling her eyes. This wasn't going to be easy and she knew it.
"Oh, her," Mike said. Plastering a puzzled expression on his face, he asked, "So, how do you know Cathy?"
Louise looked at Mike and wondered if she could bluff her way out of having to explain. The expression on his face let her know that she didn't stand a chance. She would have to steer the conversation to what she wanted to discuss. She answered, "So are you taking her with you?"
"No," Mike answered.
"Why not?"
After giving a little gesture that could have meant anything, he answered, "You know."
"No, I don't know," Louise replied feeling more than a little frustrated.
Apparently the people involved in the plot to fix him up with Cathy did not include those few with whom he had discussed the propriety of taking her with him. A grin flashed across his face at the thought that Sanjay hadn't told Teva his reasons. The poor guy must have stood up to a major grilling. Getting a little more serious, he said, "I thought it would be too forward to ask a young lady on a two week vacation after we've only had three dates."
Robert nodded his head in agreement, but Louise asked, "What if she is hoping that you'll ask her?"
"Uh, I don't know," Mike answered. He hadn't considered that possibility.
"Men," Louise said shaking her head.
Winking at Mike, Robert mouthed, "Women."
"Stop that, Robert," she said knowing what he had done even though he hadn't said a word and she hadn't been looking at him.
"Yes, ma'am," Robert said giving her a salute. He agreed with Mike on the reason for not asking the girl to go with him. It was an awful big commitment to make after three dates.
Mike chuckled at the exchange. It did make him wonder how Cathy would feel if she had been expecting him to ask her to come with him. He was leaving in two days and could probably arrange for an extra room even at that late date. He asked, "So you think I should ask her?"
Louise answered, "It's too late now for you to ask her."
"Why?"
"Because you don't ask a girl to go on a trip with you at the last minute. She has to have enough time to go shopping," Louise answered. The tone of voice suggested that she was talking to a simpleton.
"Why would she need to go shopping?" Mike asked. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew it was a stupid question.
"She has to buy the appropriate clothes to take with her," Louise answered wondering how Mike had managed to be married to Karen for so long and not learn anything. Standing up, she said, "Why don't you talk to your father for a bit? I'm going to talk to Kim for a minute."
Mike and Robert watched Louise head out of the living room. Robert shook his head and, once she was out of earshot, said, "I would have loved to have her plan a few of our missions. That woman can be exceptionally single-minded when she wants something."
"I know," Mike said. He was pretty sure that his mother, Sally, and Teva were already planning the wedding. Maybe asking Cathy to go with him after three dates wasn't rushing her, but he felt like it was moving at the speed of light. He said, "I'm pretty sure she's already got me married to Cathy."
"You might not win this one, but you can prolong the war," Robert said with a grin. There was no way that he was going to interfere in this little project undertaken by his wife. That was a good way to spend the rest of the nights between now and getting shipped out on the couch.
"So tell me about this proxy-soldier thing," Mike said wanting to change the subject.
"We wear this special suit and helmet that allows us to see and hear the environment where the robot is located. It is based on the old Waldo concept of a mechanical arm and it moves like we move. There's about a twentieth of a second delay between making a movement and the robot repeating it, but you get kind of used to it," Robert said. A twentieth of a second might seem like a short time, but a lot could happen during it. More often then not the robot fell over when it got off balance. He imagined that it wasn't going to work as well as the engineers thought, but it would be worth the attempt to try it.
"So how does that work? Do you walk around in a room or something?" Mike asked unable to imagine how the system could possibly work. He could see advantages of robotics controlled using body movements over the old Talon robots that were controlled by joysticks.
"No, we're suspended in the air like a puppet," Robert answered. He chuckled and said, "Watching the soldiers practice with the proxy-soldier is a lot like watching a puppet show."
"Sort of like watching Mom dealing with you," Mike said with a wink.
"Exactly."
Lazlo Zalzac