The Awkward Squad: Part II

by Ian McDuff

This, of course, is for the ‘Hidden Talents: Smart Boys With Glasses’ Challenge, the last of the four Summer Challenges here.

It’s an AU. It’s about as A as an AU can be. (Which has allowed a few minor adjustments to chronology. I should also warn the reader that this portion deals with the events of 11 SEP 01. Don’t be alarmed: it’s all open-source material.)

But I like to think of it as an AH. Alternate History. A counterfactual.

It’s dedicated to all my friendslist at LJ, but particularly to BG, Doc, Cooper, Linc, Merc, Scotty, Megs, Karen, and the Ive. This part especially is for Kare, Velma, Jo, and Alexandria.

On 11 September 2001, the day dawned crisp and clear.

28 June 1914 had been a quiet morning in Sarajevo.

4 August 1914 was a splendid evening in London.

1 September 1939 was a fresh and lovely morning after a summer as bountiful, as unusually rich and pleasant, as that of 1914.

And 7 December 1941 was a pacific Sunday at Pearl, peaceful as a nun, and in Washington had dawned crisp and bracing when George Catlett Marshall had gone out for his morning ride ahorseback.

And all those dates now mean only horror and resolve and the start of titanic struggles against evil.

Chris Kirkpatrick, the small, now-gone-slightly-seedy former Marine, he of the unquenchable humor, energy, and hyperactivity, awoke in Chicago that morning, whence he had gone to have a heart to heart with the SAIC at the Fibbies’s Field Office. An insatiable news junkie, as all intelligence officers are, he turned on the news before he even got his glasses groped for.

For a long moment he could not process what was, obviously, a horrible case of pilot error, and for that moment, looking at the clock by his hotel bed, he forgot that he was on Central Time, and was thankful that this had happened so early in the morning, before any sane person would have arrived at work.

Then he snapped to reality, and tried feverishly to call in to Warrenton.

In Warrenton, it was time for ‘Morning Prayer,’ the day-start round table Lance had instituted for agendas, pooling of information, unburdening of worries, and threat assessments. It was a time for rumination and cross-pollination; and it was at a civilized breakfast hour, as the JTRRWG wasn’t, thankfully, tasked with preparing the morning’s threat reports for the break of day briefings, which would have meant somebody’s being up all night by necessity rather than, as someone always seemed to be, by choice, and would also have meant others trundling in at 0-Dark-30 to collate the data and try to make sense of it.

As always in the main wing’s conference room, multiple televisions were on, and multiple radios, so that, with the flick of a finger, breaking news, whether from CNN or the Beeb or al-Jazeera or FNC or NHK or Xinhua, could pour in to them in real time, and the bank of dedicated terminals against one wall scrolled and fed the news from Reuters to Agence France-Presse to the AP, from The Times of India to Asahi Shimbun to La Prensa. JC was chairing the meeting today: SecDef had wanted some information ready when he arrived at his desk, some analysis only the Awkward Squad could provide, and that meant that, in order to preserve compartmentalization, Lance had to go in to the District before dawn, meet with the DCI, and wait in the DCI’s office whilst the Agency rewrote the analysis, removed any sourcing indicators, and passed it on to SecDef as its own product.

Joseph Anthony Fatone, that master of disputed readings, sunny, Italian, earthy: ursine, fatherly Joe was on hand to offer his linguist’s input into the quarrel over what Arafat was saying and not saying when he two-timed the West with remarks in Arabic that differed, as the night from the day, from his promises in English. Joe was a New Yorker, with many Jewish friends, and was a firm believer in Israel’s right to exist in peace; but while he held no brief for Israel’s neighbors or insurgents, he prided himself on his comparative objectivity, and was a useful counterweight to Lance, especially, who always referred to Arafat by the acronym, TCC, which stood for That Chinless Cocksucker.

Howie Dorough, douce, kindly, compactly sexy, was there to speak to some worries he had: there was a hint that sometime, around December or January, the PLO / PA was perhaps going to receive an arms shipment, probably by sea, financed by Tehran, which was ill news on more fronts than he could well count. He was in hopes that Brian would go over the data and the intercepts with him.

Brian, in turn, seated next to Howie, his gilt poll at a level with Howie’s sleek darkness (irresistibly, AJ had hummed a few bars of Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ when he came in and saw them seated together), was most concerned with the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, which was quite as dangerous ‘cold’ as when it approached ‘hot.’ There were disturbing reports from Kashmir that he wanted JC’s input on.

His cousin Kevin had hoped that Lance would be back. The two bass-voiced, green-eyed Southern boys had too many shared characteristics for comfort, including a waspish tongue and a streak as stubborn as mean mule’s, but they both had the same goals at heart and in mind, and both were looking very carefully at the lunatic course of North Korea.

At that point, AJ, the wiry, ink-scrawled man always at the Sharp End of action, said a resounding, soldierly ‘Holy motherfuckin’ shit,’ and all heads swiveled to the bank of television screens.

In that moment, the Awkward Squad’s world changed, their mission altered, and each of them felt a sudden surge of rededication. Brian, the best historian among them, would later say that it was Pearl Harbor and 24 July 1914 rolled into one, that North Korea and the PA and Kashmir in that instant went the way of Irish boundary squabbles at the pivotal British Cabinet meeting before the Great War broke out, when, as Churchill said, ‘the parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately … to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.’

But that was an afterthought.

POTUS was in Florida, to read to schoolchildren.

The DCI had returned from his Pentagon trip – he and SecDef had been sufficiently concerned with the analysis that was the subject of Lance’s visit that the Director had taken it to DoD personally – and was briefing Lance on the concerns SecDef next wanted addressed.

It was 0845 Zulu.

‘Holy mother-chingin’ shit,’ AJ repeated.

Joey was ashen, silent. This was his city, his city, where this had happened.

Kevin had the same thought as most of the rest of them, recalling the time a USAAF plane had blundered into the Empire State Building. Some tin-pusher at JFK or LaGuardia may as well shoot himself now.

It was 0846 Zulu, and the DCI looked at Lance with blazing eyes. ‘You heard that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If that was an accident, there will be hell to pay and no pitch hot, but it won’t be our concern. If this is not an accident, however….’

‘It’d be like a bad movie, a loose adaptation of Clancy’s Executive Orders, sir. But we have to assume that it may not be an accident. In which case, is a decapitation strike imminent here?’

‘He’s in Florida, thank God. They’re alerting him now.’

‘Well, sir….’

‘Bass. Obviously I am now chained to this desk at least until the situation clears up. You had better go see SecDef yourself, not only so he can finish briefing you on what we were discussing, but in case – if this is not an accident, I have a feeling the Awkward Squad is going to have a whole new set of tasks coming up.’

‘Shall I tell SecDef who I am and whom I represent?’

The DCI made a snap decision, one he hoped POTUS would back. ‘Yes. I’d say he gets to know the hand that feeds him.’

If there were any doubt that the crash of American 11 into the North Tower of the WTC were not an accident, that doubt was cleared up and replaced with crystalline clarity at 0903 Zulu, when United 175 was flown into the South Tower. Watching it at Warrenton, the Awkward Squad were silent, grim. It was like a massive shaped charge being detonated. Hearing it on the radio as he was driven (holding a newly reissued CIA pass to show to security) to the Pentagon, Lance closed his eyes, and observed, mildly, to the driver that now would be a good time to ignore the speed limit. He resolved, as soon as he arrived, to use a secure landline to call JC and the rest of the Squad and apprise them of his whereabouts.

As GK Chesterton observed regarding the Great War, it is not love that unites us so much as it is hate, particularly when it is an honorable hatred, a hatred for what is hateful, as the civilized nations in 1914 united out of hatred of Prussian aggression and militarism and brutality.

By 0943, when American 77 was hammered into the Pentagon, shortly after Lance had called in to advise that he was there to meet with SecDef, everyone in Warrenton was steeled.

At 0940 Zulu, the same time as that at which the FAA’s permanent upper echelons (not the feckless Norm Minetta) had ordered the unprecedented grounding of all air traffic in the country, SecDef was on the phone with the DCI.

‘I don’t know, Don! Both of these are domestic flights! Thanks to Frank Church and Bill Colby, I’m not allowed under the Charter to know what happens inside the damn country! Call the Hoover Vacuum people!’

‘Okay, George, okay. Look, Treasury and the Secret Service need to know, I’ve asked DIA, what do you say, the President wants to come straight back here. Do we let him?’

‘You’ve got my best man sitting right there: ask him.’

‘Well, Mr Bass?’

It was a day for snap decisions. Lance made one. ‘No sir. Not under any circumstances. I’ll take full responsibility for this, to the President himself if necessary, and Mr Rove. If this is a decapitation strike –’

He found himself having to speak more loudly as a noise from outside increased. In that moment, he and SecDef both realized what the sound was and exchanged a grim glance, even as the DCI interrupted to shout, ‘Don, Jesus, there’s –’

The line went dead, the fabric of the Pentagon shook, and an explosion louder than any that the young ex-Navy man or the old fighter jock had ever heard rent the air.

Joey slumped in his chair, the surface of his mind still forcing itself to attend, dutifully, to the news as it came in. At another level, he was grateful that his wife and daughter were just a few yards away, safe in the house that was theirs. And he was dimly aware of JC’s falling into a chair beside him, the blood draining from his lips and face, leaving him looking pinched, dead, as the feed shifted to the gaping hole and roiling smoke of what had just been a section of the Pentagon. Mechanically, Joe reached a paw over and clasped JC’s nerveless hand, even as Howie came around to throw an arm around JC’s shoulders.

But the major portion of Joe’s mind was filled with incandescent rage and utter horror, detestation. He was here, working for the United States, because the government had made him an irresistible offer. The chance to flex his mental muscles, to supplement beyond his hopes the sort of money he could expect to make as an independent scholar, to enjoy generous benefits for Kel and for little Briahna, who was surely even now nibbling at chunks of banana in her highchair. The opportunity to do good while still having free range for his own work as a classicist and an urban scholar.

And that was what dominated his mind as the horrific images spewed across the screens. This was his city that had been so foully attacked. His ‘little platoon’ of a community, in Edmund Burke’s wise words, the next-most link to his own family in the ascending chain of his loyalties that stacked upwards from family to community all the way up to his employer, the United States of America. It wasn’t just that someone had attacked his country, but rather that they had also had the unholy gall to attack his city, The City. And they had attacked a city. Surely that was on Brian’s mind now also, but Brian thought as he was trained to think – just as Joe thought as he in turn was trained – and Brian’s thought doubtless ran in the categories of just war and civilians and illegitimate targets. But perhaps the military historian in Brian also had an inkling of what this meant to Joe: the Outside, the horde, the barbaric nomads, the Horse People of the dawn of human warfare attacking once again, as they always did, the City: as the Hsiung-nu and the Mongol and the Manchu had harried China, as the Vandals and Goths had striven to make Roma Invicta, eternal Rome herself, bleed. Always, always it was the same story, Bulgars at Constantinople, Assyrians at Jericho, the world’s first fortified town; the Mongols and the Huns at Novgorod or Krakow, and the Turks, too, at Vienna; and always was it the same irruption of the barbaric tribes against the cities. Cities and civilization, inseparable since the very origin of the words; and this was his city that was wounded. It wasn’t Rome or London, but it too had some claim to enshrine the title-deeds of civilization: New York, the main curator of millennia of human achievement in the Old World, its artifacts now in the New, and also the engine that drives the intellectual life of the world as the new millennium begins, its arts and artists, its writers and dramatists and actors and singers, from Off-Off-Broadway to the Met, being the pinnacle of all that had gone before and the creators of all that was newest and most exciting. The symbolism of the attack, an attack at once upon his city: his childhood streets, the manmade galaxies of its lights and the reflected galaxy of stars imprisoned in the mica of sidewalks, MOMA and the New York Public Library and cabbies and hotdog vendors and Katz’s Deli and Papaya King and the Yankees and the Mets: and upon cities, upon civilized life, itself.

City air makes men free, the Middle Ages had said; it was the cities, the burgesses, who had first defied emperors, prince-archbishops, kings and barons: those whom Marx and his followers, themselves the sons of the bourgeoisie, had derided as the mere bourgeois. But it had been the burghers, with their charters and their guilds and the trained bands of men at arms, who had set the world on the course to liberty. That was what was under attack, now.

Whoever was to emerge as responsible for this, Joe thought, his normally melting brown eyes as cold as the Alps above Lake Como, whoever did this was going down. He would spend his life helping to see to that.

Chris was grounded at O’Hare. Grounded, raging at the impotence, his inability to get back to where he was needed. The hell with it. The hell with trying to find a bus or a train, too. Chris had long since learned that baggage, in all senses, was a waste of time, and could and did travel with nothing he could not put in a duffel. He grabbed his duffel and tramped over to the FBI Field Office. They knew more or less who he was, though not of the existence of the JTRRWG, and they would establish his bona fides. Some way, somehow, some Air National Guard or Marine Reserve pilot was going to find himself ordered to fly Chris to Reagan, if it took Lance’s calling the DCI to issue the order.

His mind churning, his step purposeful, his eyes blazing, Chris strode through the hushed streets and the knots of shocked pedestrians with an air that brooked no interruption and invited no shared commiseration of the sort perfect strangers, united in calamity, offered one another all around him.

At 0945 Zulu, the White House was evacuated.

At USCG Group St Petersburg, a young Floridian, ENS Nick Carter of Group Opp/Comms, USCGA 2000 (he had majored in Government at the Academy with a minor in Operations Research and Computer Analysis), began writing code, and would continue to do so without sleep for thirty-five hours. The programs he created would later underlie the work of the National Vessel Movement Center when it was created on 15 October 2001; it would lead to a promotion and a commendation, and the award of the Coast Guard Achievement Medal. It would also, as soon as Lance Bass heard of it, lead ENS Carter out of the service and into the new, expanded JTRRWG that was being born in the ash and fire of 11 September 2001.

Meanwhile, however, Lance had other things on his mind. He stood beside SecDef as they surveyed the atrocity that had occurred so heart-stoppingly near to where they had just been sitting in his office.

‘Gee golly,’ SecDef said, forcefully, over the growing banshee chorus of sirens. Lance startled: the voice and the unexpectedly mild diction sounded uncannily like JC’s surely would in a few decades. ‘Darn.’ Squaring his shoulders and motioning for Lance to accompany him, SecDef strode forward and took charge of the SAR operations.

Brian couldn’t look at Joe. He could only imagine how the big bear of a New Yorker was suffering now. And he felt guilty that his own, first, fugitive thought – a thought he was right in suspecting he shared, between the first and second crashes into the WTC, with much of the South, the West, the Midwest, and not a little of rural New England – had been, At least it’s only New York. It had been the most fleeting of thoughts, from which he had recoiled, as the reflection that they’re Americans too had immediately displaced it, but he had thought that, as not a few people outside New York did that morning in the initial shock. Perhaps in Mencken’s day, that reaction would have been rooted in pious horror at New York’s fast living, its jazz and its sinful merriment, but not for him and not for most, now, but simply from resentment of New York’s abiding conviction that it was the country, the mindset reflected, at once mocked and celebrated, in one of The New Yorker’s most famous cartoons.

But the thought had been fleeting, and what followed was hard calculation. Just as Lance’s did, half an hour away, and as did the DCI’s in Langley and those of various counterparts of his across the Chain Bridge in the District, so did Brian’s keen mind turn immediately to the prospect of a decapitation attack upon, first, the nation’s financial center and symbol, and next – as the news from the Pentagon seemed to confirm – upon its military command structure and its political center of gravity, even perhaps upon the National Command Authority itself. He prayed, earnestly, that Lance was among the living, though the image of that hot crater in the side of the Pentagon certainly boded ill for that hope. If they lost their director thusly, they would probably lose their deputy director as well: JC was ashen, though there was no point in doing more than wafting sympathy his way: Howie had that situation well in hand. The question now was what to do in response, and how to make that response stick. Brian, the ultimate modern cavalryman, with the spirit of Stuart and of John Hunt Morgan in his heart and his small, cobby body machined to fit perfectly inside an Abrams, had an atavistic urge to Go Rolling, armored columns converging on whoever did this and blowing them to ragdolls; but his blue eyes were cool and his mind was trained and disciplined. He knew that first it was necessary to determine who the enemy was, and how best to defeat him: to do as VMI’s great icon, Stonewall Jackson, had always counseled, by mystifying, misleading, and surprising the enemy. And to do that, what was needed was intel, of the sort a Jeb Stuart could provide, superimposed upon such information as a Hotchkiss had mapped. That was his task, and theirs as a Working Group, clearly; and as far as he was concerned, ‘the Institute would be heard from today.’ Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics; and the winner was he who also best determined the other side’s Order of Battle, his force and its dispositions, in advance. That was their task; and it had to be undertaken clear-eyed, in keeping with Stonewall’s own maxim, Never take counsel of your fears.

At 1005 Zulu, the South Tower of the WTC collapsed, debris rising from its ruins in a cloud: the dunnest smoke of Hell.

At 1008 Zulu, the Secret Service, armed with automatic rifles, deployed into Lafayette Park.

And at 1010 Zulu, United 93 went down in Somerset County, in Chris’s own country near Pittsburgh, at the same instant as the wounded portion of the Pentagon failed and collapsed upon itself.

Tall – too tall, really, for fighter duty in any case – dark, broodingly handsome, obsessively fit, Kevin sat quietly, absorbed everything, tried to make the connections, and silently damned every second the fates that had first shunted him from flight duty and then brought him here. He should be in the air, now, enforcing the no-fly order and keeping things like the possible loss of Lance and the certain loss of hundreds of innocent civilians from happening.

One thing was certain, and if no one else was going to say it, he would. This was an irrational horror, but it was not unmotivated, and it was their job, stars and stripes notwithstanding, to ask what the US had done to motivate this: not justifying the action, but examining its root causes, so that it would never happen again.

But his colleagues were too wrapped in bunting for him to broach that now; and, he recognized, he himself was still too consumed with helpless rage.

At 1013 Zulu, the UN evacuated in New York.

At 1022 Zulu, DoS and DoJ evacuated, as did the World Bank. SecState was still stuck in Latin America on a mission the importance of which seemed increasingly moot.

At 1024 Zulu, the FAA announced that all inbound flights were being diverted to Canada.

At 1028 Zulu, the North Tower of the WTC failed catastrophically, ruining from Heav’n, sending up a cloud of dust, smoke, and debris like the smoke of some satanic sacrifice of innocents to Moloch.

And SecDef, coolly and with no apparent recognition of the danger even after the cave-in, continued to direct operations, dispatching Lance as a runner to all points of the compass.

Howie knew, intuitively, that he and Brian were on the same wavelength, and that so, in all likelihood, with all his street-bred cunning uncluttered by academic inhibitions, was AJ.

Surely Brian was thinking about the first attack on the WTC, in 1993, by truck-bomb, and about the USS Cole, and quite likely also about the precisely similar ANFO truck-bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in OKC: a bomb attributed to domestic malcontents. And Brian was quite certainly thinking about the tantalizing coincidences (a concept which they were paid to distrust) that swirled around Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh – who had returned from Desert Storm with a new hatred for his own government, a government many of his connections on the lunatic Right referred to as ‘ZOG,’ the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ – and Ramzi Youssef, his uncle Khalid Muhammed, the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman, and the ex-Iraqi Republican Guardsman Hussain al-Hussaini, from whom, incredibly, McVeigh hired the truck that was used to bomb the Federal Building.

It was that ‘Zionist’ that stuck in Howie’s craw. He knew, none better, that in the Golden Age of Granada and of Cordoba, Jews and Muslims had worked in amity, the learned of both communities being pillars of the state: philosophers, physicians, scientists. Ruy Bivar de Diaz, El Cid: a title originally Arabic in origin: had been one of thousands of Spaniards who learnt cultivation and wisdom from the caliphates in Spain. And while his Anglo friends and colleagues tended not to think about it, so much of what America, and all the New World, was, was the legacy of Spain: a legacy with no few roots in the high culture of Moorish Spain. The recent conflict between Islam and Jewry was to him as unnatural as it was dangerous, and he loathed the descent into barbarism that had already afflicted the Near East, and that might well, as the reports came interminably in, now be being exported to his country.

At 1045 Zulu, all federal buildings in the District were evacuated.

At 1046 Zulu, SecState began his journey back to the US from Latin America.

And at that moment, in Knoxville, Tennessee, a tall UT rising senior, a second-string basketball player, a Computer Science and Mathematics major whose minor in Music reflected a deep interest in techno, was one of hundreds of young men across the nation who walked into a recruiting office and volunteered to enlist in the Armed Forces. His name was Justin Timberlake, and he was destined never to report to his local MEPS for processing because of what happened in the next moment, one time zone to the east.

At 1047 Zulu, Lance and SecDef were sharing a thermos of coffee as the SAR operations continued in grim order about them, and crews fought to contain the flames. The air was heavy with the reek of aviation fuel and sickly-sweet with the carrion scents of death. ‘Well,’ SecDef said. ‘We will by gum be back in business tomorrow. They tell me kids are walking into recruiting stations all over the place and every service retiree under sixty is calling his old unit to ask about re-upping. Seems to me you’re going to have a heck of a lot of work to do after this. I thought I’d order that you get the pick of the litter.’

‘Sir. That’s. Thank you, sir. If you get any math or computer majors, logicians, music types, linguists, I’ll want a look at them.’

‘Done deal.’

And that is why, instead of finding himself at Benning and then deployed to Southwest Asia or the Gulf as a dogface EP, Justin Randall Timberlake was, all unknowing, destined to complete his degree from AMU, online, while daily working with several of his own adjunct professors in Warrenton, Virginia; to learn everything Nick Carter could teach him about computers; to learn about war and power in the raw, at the sharp end of reality; and, in time, to learn a few things about his own young self, and the infinite mutability of human passions, in an unsung unit of the US Government in which Bass and Chasez had sparked, unexpectedly, hidden fires in one another, and the former designated skirt-chaser of USCG Group St Pete had found his true destiny in the eyes and arms of Howard Dorough.

AJ was staring dry-eyed at the televised horrors. He understood, accepted, and did not despise JC’s open if silent tears: this was enough to make any man weep for the future of mankind. But he was incapable of tears. He was willing to bet that Lance, if he were still alive, was as steely-eyed. (He was right. In all that time, Lance would find his eyes cloud over only once, in a reaction he shared with numerous others of his stamp, from a sergeant in Alaska to a retired major of Artillery in the Mid-Atlantic: on 12 September 2001, when, by HM’s personal command, the bands at the Changing of the Guard at Buck House played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ That was the moment that pierced the defenses of many men and women, mostly military folk, who in that instant were overwhelmed with the whole burden of the memory of 1918 and D-Day 1944 and Winston addressing the Joint Session of Congress and all the long years of the Special Relationship.)

No, AJ was doing what was as instinctive to him as it was honed in Brian’s lawyerly mind: calculating the angles, and asking the lawyer’s old cui bono question: Who pulled this off? Who benefited? And how could they make the motherfucker bleed?

Had he known it, his thoughts were not far from Chris Kirkpatrick’s, as Chris bullied his way onto a C-140 headed for Langley AFB. This was AJ’s home, and some motherfuckin’ son of a bitch had stepped. America. It had not given him cradle to grave security: anything but. But it had given him something more precious. Liberty. The liberty, yeah, to fuck up. But the liberty, too, to try again. This was the home of second chances, and fifth, and twentieth if you had the balls and the resiliency, and needed one. Those nickel-and-dime countries that promised the moon weren’t doing much better as far as he could see with their promises; he’d bet his scrawny Latino ass that in some place like France or Germany or shit, for all their brag about their social welfare, there were a million fuckers, Arabs and North Africans in Marseilles, Turks in Dresden, who grew up as fucked over by the system and The Man as he and Kirkpatrick had. But in order to make that brag, those penny-ante places said a big fuck-you to any swinging dick who was determined to make his own opportunities or to start over. There weren’t any second chances there. Yeah, there was a fuckin’ lot about the system in the US of friggin’ A he didn’t like, but no goatfucker from East Buttfuckistan was going to change it for him. America was for Americans to reform and purify. And he knew one thing for fuck-sure. All those places that looked down on the happy barbarian Yanks didn’t have a fuckin’ clue. They would have done no better by him if he’d been born there into poverty and an ethnic minority, but they’d have shit all over his attempts to show some initiative and get out of the dead end streets. Because that showed a lack of faith in the fuckin’ bureaucrats makin’ it aaaaaall better; that dissed the Nanny State. But here, he could be whatever he fuckin’ wanted, and if he was free to fail he was also free to get back up and try again and maybe, just maybe, if his shit was strong, to fuckin’ fly.

So when the smart boys were through with the academic fumbuzzlin’-the-fuck-around, they could start talkin’ about what he knew: how to hit, hit dirty, and hit hard. Find the motherfuckers and cut their fuckin’ balls off, man.

‘Goodness gracious,’ said SecDef. ‘Here I am talking about all you’ll need to do now, and all the time I’m keeping you from doing it. You’d best get back there and get cracking.’

‘If you need me, sir –’

‘Oh, twaddle. I do, son, but not here. I have people for this. What the country needs is you doing your job. You’ve been a heck of a help, and I won’t forget that, but you go on and scoot now. No guff, now.’

Chris’s thoughts as he hurtled back to base, ignoring the curious, covert stares of his uniformed companions, were much like AJ’s.

He didn’t love America and hate her enemies because it was his country: he’d had nothing to do with where he was born. He had better reasons than mere accident for his fierce loyalties.

Over the past few months, with Lance and JC now rounding them out in areas in which they had been sorely lacking, the Awkward Squad had begun to make real progress at being something other than a dumping ground. To cohere. To produce. And finally to start living up to its potential, to start earning its pay. And he’d come to know and value, and to know he would never fully understand or be understood by, Lance and JC. A sudden, wolfish smile ambushed him: he could just imagine Lance right now back in Warrenton, playing Nelson at Trafalgar, playing Halsey or Nimitz.

But that was it, really: that was the root of it. At an age at which Lance was dreaming childhood dreams of space and peering at constellations through a backyard telescope in the security of a Southern childhood’s night, he had been manufacturing stars and imagined constellations from the bits of light, shed by moon or street lamp, that came through the holes in the roof of the clapped out car they slept in, homeless and hopeless.

Except that he had never been hopeless, even at the worst hour, even in juvie.

Because this was the place where the past cast no shadows on the future, this was the land in which the dead hand of the past had no weight to clamp upon the present or the future. He had been given a way out, memorably, into the Corps instead of adult prison. And before that mondo mistake, there had been the other opportunities. You could be too poor for lunch, but there was a public library on every street corner, and in addition to warmth or air conditioning and a surreptitious wash in the head, there were books, uncountable books, and you were encouraged to read them for hours even if you had no fixed address and so could not have a library card and take them home. Even if you had to leave school to work, you could educate yourself. And of course, his biggest fuck-up, in the end, when the piteous plight of his sisters and his hapless mother had driven him to steal, and, more foolishly still, to get caught, had ended up giving him his greatest opportunity: forcing him to get his GED in juvie, then being given the option of the Corps and an expunction of his juvie record, and the Corps in the end making him an officer, a gentleman, and a Penn alum.

Just the same way, even the sort of people who least sympathized with the fix Lance had gotten his ass into had had the decency and the foresight, and, yeah, the penny-pinching hatred of wasteful government spending, to find Lance and JC a dignified way out.

It wasn’t that he felt he owed the country: his patriotism wasn’t bought and paid for by his education. It was bigger than that. What it came to was that there was a fundamental human decency in the country for all its problems and faults. That the people as a whole had the power to change it and improve it at will. That each American had the power to change himself and his fate and his circumstances.

A place were people were as stupid and smug and self-satisfied as anywhere else, sure. But a place where there was a character, as well, that cared, that might tell dirty jokes about a certain class of person but where the guy who told them would stumble over himself to help a single person who was in trouble, regardless of his being a member of just that class he’d just mocked.

The place had all the cruelty and bigotry and prejudice and racism and hatred of anywhere else. People were as grindingly poor here, in relative terms, as anywhere.

But.

This was the place of transcendence. What made the place special, worthy of loyalty, worthy of being defended to the last ditch, was that here, these things only mattered if you let them. Anyone anywhere could transcend his own circumstances here, or rise unexpectedly above his own cracker, petty hates and do something breathtakingly brave and noble. Hell. The damn Republicans had given the country its first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs and its first Black SecState. In a rightwing Republican administration run by a Texas Yalie from a family of New England aristocrats, the National Security Advisor was a Black woman who as a girl growing up in Jim Crow Birmingham had lost acquaintances and neighbor children in the church bombings. We gathered evidence and tried terrorists; the French said haughty things about our barbarous legal system and then blew up Greenpeace boats.

And now some dickweed, some fucking True Believer asshole, foreign or domestic, who was convinced that whatever crackpot notion he had was better than what the American people had come up with but who apparently didn’t think enough of it to make it a platform in a race for dogcatcher, was waging war on innocent civilians? On stockbrokers and illegal alien busboys, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Buddhists, Catholics, and those snooty Anglicans like the Bass? If this asshole’s Brilliant, Superior Vision and Truth was so goddamn brilliant, why wasn’t it strong enough to talk about without killing little old ladies?

Because it wasn’t worth shit compared to what the American people had come up with: a place where you weren’t fated to be anything, where the national motto was, You can’t fire me, I quit. A place where you always had a choice not to kiss ass, but to beat the bastards at their own game and kick their asses instead.

Fly, plane, fly. The sooner they got this shitass and put his balls in the wringer, the better.

SecDef had assigned him a driver, with instructions to use ‘all prudent speed’ to get him back to Warrenton.

He should, he knew, be concentrating on what resources he would need to requisition, on what tasks the JTRRWG could usefully take on, and what their first move was.

But from that first moment in the DCI’s office, at 0846, this had been somehow personal: as if Providence had put him there, then, at that precise moment, for a purpose. And everything that had happened since, at DoD, with SecDef, had merely underlined that.

And he knew that he had to process his immediate emotions before he would be worth a damn. This drive was his uncovenanted opportunity.

He could only imagine what the others were thinking and doing right now; particularly JC. But not even for JC’s peace of mind, especially not for so personal a cause, would he breach the operational rules and call in on an unsecure line. In any case, commercial lines, cellular and land both, were overwhelmed, and it was his duty not to create nonessential traffic.

And Chris, stuck in Chicago, must be tearing his hair out….

Personal. It was personal. Quite likely, several of the others were thinking about that theme, perhaps all of them; and he expected that only he and Brian were as uncomplicated in their responses, having the Southerner’s sense of place that was so oddly lacking in Brian’s cousin Kevin.

This was his country. All of it. Even New York, even Pennsylvania: all of it. New York had given them Joe, with his wisdom and his wisecracks and his warmth. Pennsylvania had given them Chris, with his sharp wit and his well-filed tongue and his fierce protectiveness. And Joe’s dirty-water dogs and lasagna and reubens, and Chris’s scrapple and ring bologna, had the same place at the American table as grits and cornbread, or plantains and chicken-and-rice or burgoo or crabs boiled in Old Bay seasoning.

An attack upon New York and Washington was no different from an attack on Jackson and Meridian. He would always be a Mississippian. Goo-goo clusters and peanuts and Co’-Cola and ice-tea and Colonial is GOOD bread; cotton and Delta blues and hogs and textile mills; plantations and shacks, country clubs and the houses of the rural poor, usually Black, with swept-dirt yards and brave flowerbeds and trees with the bottom halves of their trunks whitewashed…. But these were all, all his people, all Americans were: the people he had sworn to defend.

And even now, it was up to him once again, it was as incumbent upon him as ever it was, to strive to achieve what was stated in his Letter of Commendation: to conduct himself and achieve results that ‘reflect the greatest credit upon himself and [are] in the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service.’

Well. The thing now was how to do that. He began revolving plans and requisitions in his mind.

Because some sumbitch had started a war, and soon as he knew who-all’d done done it, it was fixin’ to be Katy-bar-the-door.

JC was lost in his own thoughts, more deeply than ever before in all his life.

A part of his mind clung desperately to duty, feverishly gripped the need to absorb the raw data for later processing. Even. Even if.

But well before the attack on the Pentagon had come, hard upon the heels of Lance’s curt but chipper call, telling them that he was at DoD to meet with SecDef, JC had been bludgeoned with agony and horror. Architecture had always been an interest of us, like art, and while he was a dilettante, in the usual way in which his mind flitted from subject to subject, he at least knew enough, too much, enough to be able to visualize dimly the catastrophic failure of the towers. And he felt, imaginatively, far too deeply than was good for him, the pain and fear and agony of the dying and wounded, the appalling inhuman choice between being burnt and jumping, the darkness and choking smoke on the blocked stairwells….

Even if – especially if – he had lost Lance before ever he’d truly had him, he would dedicate his life, broken as he was, to proving, in the blood of whoever was responsible, that there are causes worth fighting for and causes worth dying for, but there is never a cause worth murdering for.

Whatever it took, these innocents would be avenged. Even if. Even if Lance were among –

The door opened, then snicked-to. Sooty, smelling of death and fuel, but whole, alive, the light of battle in his eyes, Lance walked firmly in. That moment was the true birth of the Awkward Squad.

‘JC. Gentlemen. A quick shower, if I may, and then let’s begin.’

END