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Chapter 145 – Bogged DownAlex was awake early on Saturday morning and practicing her martial arts and wishing she could still go over to Camp Atron for martial arts lessons. But Jack and Willow wanted to make sure the remaining NID creeps weren’t still a threat to Alex and Shar and everyone in Alex’s family.
Alex wanted to argue that Jack was being too paranoid, but she kept remembering that the other Batman in that other universe had been so incredibly paranoid and Selina said it had still turned out a bunch of times that he just wasn’t paranoid enough. At least Jo would be driving up to her house tomorrow afternoon, unless something came up.
And that was when her tPhone rang with the ‘Jaws’ ringtone, which meant Willow had messed with her phone again and switched her ringtones back the way Alex had them before. Well, at least one of the ringtones.
“Uh-oh.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Please don’t be something bad!”
But the ‘Jaws’ ringtone pretty much automatically meant badness.
She pulled the phone over to her with her TK and answered, “Terawatt here. What’s up?”
Willow asked, “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“No, I was already up and doing martial arts practice and stuff.”
Willow sighed. “Good. Because this is bad, but it’s an FYI right now, because we don’t know where to go.”
Alex let out a tense breath. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Willow explained, “Well, it could totally be of the bad, but it’s not like that. The FBI found the ‘hate plague’ factory in Minneapolis and they blocked the pipe and saved Minneapolis. We think.”
“We think?”
Willow went on, “Well, we’re pretty sure Minneapolis is all of the safety, because they got the factory and made sure stuff isn’t flowing into the city water mains and made sure stuff wasn’t running off into the Mississippi, and why does Mississippi look so weird when you write it down, and the FBI guys disarmed the bombs on the giant vats, and all that stuff, but the FBI started shooting when a big van tried to leave the factory, and maybe that was a good thing because the van was full of fifty-gallon drums of you-know-what, but the factory had a fake exterior wall that was totally out of the SMERSH interior design handbook, because at least one guy escaped in a little prop plane that could have hundreds of gallons of the stuff in it, or just a bunch of Orphans, or C: some of the above, we just don’t know, but Inspector Erskine who Jack was really snarky to on our phone call made this big sprint and totally went biathlon on ’em and put a couple bullets into the plane and it nearly crashed into a plastics factory nearby and then it went southwest, and the FBI called out everyone with a chopper or plane including TV news stations in the area, but the Air Force Reserve there just happened to be on maneuvers so they weren’t available, and the FBI’s helicopter had a fuel flow problem so it couldn’t take off and pursue, so it was horrible luck all the way around.”
Alex asked, “What about air traffic controllers at airports? Or AWACS? Or anything?”
Willow ran on, “Well, nothing turned up on any air traffic control, so they know the plane was flying stupidly low, like crop dusting low. And as soon as Top Banana called people, the Air Force scrambled jets from their closest active duty bases: Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota, Offutt in Nebraska, Whiteman in Missouri, and Scott in Illinois. And the Duluth National Guard and a couple of Guard bases in Wisconsin got jets into the air right away, too. So they’re pretty sure it had to land inside an hour, and it had to go west or southwest or south, because they got the other directions covered pretty fast with Minneapolis police helicopters and all that, but a prop plane like that can land on a straight road or even in a flat cornfield, and there’s tons and tons of both of those in the Minnesota-Iowa-South Dakota area. So they think they’re looking at a rough quarter-circle going out from Minnesota and going maybe as far south as Mason City, Iowa and going maybe as far west as Brookings, South Dakota.”
Alex grumbled, “I’ve never even heard of some of these places.”
Willow told her, “But they’re still talking about an area of maybe eighteen thousand square miles, so it’s not an SRI tasking yet. And at least they saved Minneapolis-Saint Paul. We figure the water would’ve gotten to maybe 390,000 people, but once they invaded the surrounding areas looking for enemies to kill, it would’ve gotten way of the worse, because the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area goes all the way over to like Pierce County in Wisconsin, and it’s over three point three million people, and if they had to nuke all of that, it would be totally of the grim. But that little plane could land pretty much anywhere and it could hide in pretty much any barn that has a thirty-five-foot-wide door, or even smaller than that if they broke off the wings. Or they could just throw camo nets over it. And if they have hundreds of gallons of hate plague onboard, they could still do really creepy stuff.”
Alex complained, “Why does Jack keep calling it ‘hate plague’ anyway?”
Willow admitted, “He got it from ‘Transformers’.”
“Transformers? Like the robots that turn into trucks and cars? Is Jack like five?”
“Eight,” Willow insisted. “Charlie says he’s still eight a lot of the time, even if some of the parts I like are still eighteen a lot of the time.”
Alex totally didn’t want to go there. She went back on topic. “So what are we supposed to do?”
Willow said, “Mainly, just know what’s going on. If something comes up, it may be really soon, and it may be in that area southwest of Minneapolis. Jack says the FBI didn’t do as bad as he expected, and he’s got Bill Lee’s team on-site already denaturing all the prion stuff with this really clever proteinase that denatures the prion part so the rest of the macromolecule is useless and breaks down into pretty harmless stuff, and Bill even listened to Grover’s idea on it, and it worked great, so Jack’s really happy with Bill and Grover, and because Grover’s idea starts out with papain and then tweaks the molecule a little, it turned out to be a lot cheaper than Jack was expecting, because basically Grover and Bill went out and bought two hundred pounds of bulk meat tenderizer, which is mostly papain, and so they ended up with hundreds of pounds of the anti-prion stuff, which is totally what they need for those vats, because Jack said the Orphans had three huge vats, and each one held about a hundred thousand gallons of the stuff Clare Tobias had.”
“Eww.” Alex had no idea how huge a one hundred thousand gallon vat would have to be, but it sounded immense. “How huge were those things?”
“Great big cylinders. About twenty feet high and thirty feet in diameter.”
Okay, that didn’t sound so bad. Alex was thinking a hundred thousand gallons had to be like a skyscraper full of stuff, but a cylinder thirty feet across and twenty feet high … Well, that was still totally huge. That would be a lot of poison to counteract. She was totally glad Grover and Dr. Lee were science brains, because otherwise she’d be calling her dad and Annie and crossing her fingers that they could fix things.
She totally needed to introduce her dad and Annie to Dr. Lee and Grover. And Lieutenant Marshall. Maybe Jack would set up a web conference for her.
Willow wrapped up, “So the FBI is canvassing small towns all over that sector, and I’m monitoring news reports and police reports for anything that might be hate plague-ish.”
“Can we not call it the hate plague?”
Willow said, “We could go with Bill Lee’s name for it, but it’s eight multi-syllabic medical words that don’t have a good acronym.”
She winced a little. “Okay, ‘hate plague’ it is.”
* * *
Alex did her TK exercises and managed to lift 260 pounds, even if it gave her a miserable headache. At least it wasn’t one of those ‘railroad spike driven into the top of her head’ headaches. After she finished her workout and her martial arts forms and her TK exercises, she showered and went downstairs to have brunch. Her mom was teaching Shar how to make beef stew in the slow cooker, and Shar was begging to get to try grilling the cubes of beef with her pyrokinesis instead of using the frying pan. It was really cute, except for the part about the blasting meat with fireballs.
Fortunately, Alex’s dad came to the rescue when he came in from yardwork. He took Shar out in the back yard, and he let Shar try it with a dozen pieces of beef on the grill.
While they were waiting, her mom asked, “How’d the morning workout go? Shar was complaining about not being able to do sit-ups with you.”
Alex rolled her eyes a little. “I hold myself upside-down with my feet near the ceiling and do sit-ups like that. She isn’t doing enough sit-ups to have stomach muscles strong enough to do them. She could just sit on the floor, but she wants to do them like me.”
Her mom’s eyes widened a little. “Upside-down? Really? Can I see your abs?”
Alex pulled up her shirt. She had a sports bra on, but she was still careful not to pull her shirt up higher than the band of her bra.
Her mom just gawked. Then her mom reached and touched Alex’s tummy with her fingertips. “Oh, holy crud, Alex! Those are … amazing. They’re like … Gisele Bundchen abs.” Her mom frowned. “I need to do more sit-ups every night.”
“Mom, I’m probably getting a lot of help from the GC-161. And I need really strong abs, for the ‘picture taking’ I do, and I get hit sometimes.” She looked at the unhappy expression on her mom’s face and decided she shouldn’t have mentioned that last bit. So she said, “Anyway, I just started out like you, and I kept adding more. When I got up so high it was taking a really long time, I switched to harder sit-ups but fewer reps. You could do it, too, if you wanted to put in the work.”
Her mom pursed her lips. “Maybe I could do sit-ups and leg lifts while your father’s on the exercycle.”
Alex’s dad and Shar came in, both of them smiling triumphantly. “Look what I did!” Shar beamed.
And the cubes of beef looked great. Way better than the time Alex let Shar roast three cubes on the stove. Alex’s mom cut into two with a knife and smiled. “Shar, this is very, very good. Maybe next time, we’ll try having you do all the cubes on the grill like that. With supervision, naturally.”
Shar just grinned and bounced on her toes excitedly. “Oh! I know what to say! Dattebayo!”
Alex snorted with laughter, because she knew Jack and Willow were responsible for this one. She saw the puzzled looks on her parents’ faces, and she explained, “It’s what Naruto says all the time. Jack and Willow sent Shar some Naruto DVDs and they’re in Japanese with subtitles.”
Shar grinned. “Believe it!”
Her dad looked puzzled as he asked, “Can you learn Japanese from watching subtitled anime?”
Alex shrugged. “I guess you can learn a few things. Even being able to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in Japanese would be neat.”
Her mom groaned. “And is this why Shar wanted ramen for lunch today?”
Alex made an effort not to giggle.
* * *
The pork ramen for lunch was really good. Her mom followed all the directions in this recipe Shar got off the internet, and even stirred in the raw egg at the end so it cooked into a beautifully decorated thing like egg flower soup.
Shar hopped up from the table, rinsed her bowl out in the sink, and then bowed like a Japanese girl. “Domo arigato gozaimasu!” Then she giggled and ran off into the living room.
Alex said, “I think she said ‘thank you very much’ but I’m not exactly Miss Foreign Language Person.”
Her dad began laughing, and dragged her into the home office so he could explain why he was laughing so hard. He showed her an old Mister Language Person column by Dave Barry that was in one of his Dave Barry books. Her dad started snickering again before he even got the book open. Then she started reading the column he pointed at.
Welcome to another episode of “Ask Mister Language Person,” the column written by the language expert who recently won the World Wrestling Federation Grammar Smackdown when he kneed William Safire right in the gerunds.
She laughed so hard she had to fly to the bathroom, and that was just the first sentence!
* * *
Alex was really tense about the prion poison thing, so she concentrated on homework for the afternoon. Shar could tell Alex was upset, so Alex got hugged every time Shar came into the bedroom. And Shar made chocolate chip cookies for Alex, too! With help, naturally. And Shar ate a bunch of them, too. Naturally.
Alex was reading ahead in chemistry when her mom brought some more still-hot chocolate chip cookies in. Shar carried the glass of milk to go with them. Her mom shooed Shar out of the room and carefully asked, “Alex? What’s wrong?”
She thought for a moment, but Jack had said he got clearance for her family to hear about this kind of stuff. So she spilled. “It’s another ‘evil Orphans’ thing. We were pretty sure they were making this — Jack calls it a ‘hate plague’ — this stuff that makes you go crazy. You think everyone you see is an enemy, and you lose all control over your aggressive impulses so all you want to do is kill every enemy you see. Which is everyone. We’re pretty sure this is what happened to Beirut. And Lanzhou in China. The FBI just stopped some Orphans who wanted to hit Minneapolis with the stuff, but one or two guys got away in a tiny plane, and we don’t know where they landed, or how much poison they have with them, or what they’re going to do with it. So I’m just sitting around waiting to hear some really horrible news so I have to rush off with no warning and try to deal with insane people who can never be fixed back to normal again. This stuff does permanent damage to your brain. These people will all have to be locked up in solitary confinement until they die!”
Her mom hugged her and said, “It sounds horrible, honey. But I know you’ll do your best. And really, that’s all you can do. You can’t solve all the world’s problems, and you can’t save everyone. Even the superheroes in the movies can’t. And you have people who want to help you, like Jack and Willow, so let them help. You’ve already done so many amazing things and saved so many people … You’re a really amazing young woman, and you should take more credit for the things you’ve done.”
Alex hugged her mom hard and whimpered, “You’re the best mom in the world.”
Her mom paused for a second. “Alex, sometimes I feel like I’m the worst mom in the world. I regularly let you run off and do horribly dangerous things. I didn’t even notice you had superpowers for four years and you were in real danger, and I had no idea. I let Shar go with Jack to Asia …”
Alex frowned. “Well, what else could you do? You can’t ground me when I have to go save Rome or wherever.”
Her mom murmured, “I keep telling myself that, but I worry so much … And you always come home, even if you’re all bruised, or horribly sick … But a lot of times when I watch you fly off, I’m just so scared …”
Alex just hugged her mom and told herself this was better than anything else. Having her mom love her and want to protect her had to be better than so many of the things she knew about or had heard about. Like other-Willow’s parents just not being home except when it was inconvenient for Willow. Or other-Buffy’s mom and dad locking her up in a nuthouse, and then her mom refusing to believe in the supernatural even after her mom got bitten by a vampire in her own kitchen. Or other-Jaime not being allowed by her agency to tell her folks. Or other-Selina losing her parents when she was younger and pretty much having to get by on her own. Or what other-Hermione did about her parents. Or what other-Willow said about Xander’s parents, and how Xander’s dad hit him until Xander got possessed by a hyena spirit and got strong enough and dangerous enough to stand up to his dad.
She admitted, “Most of the time I’m pretty scared, too. And worried. And I know it’s worse watching someone else go off to do something dangerous than it is to be the one going off to do the dangerous stuff. At least it is for me. And for Jack. He hates being a general because now he can’t go out on ops with his troops and fight to keep them safe. Willow’s thrilled, but she won’t say so because she knows Jack’s so unhappy about it.”
Her mom smiled a little. “Jack? Somehow I can’t see him as a general behind a big desk being stuffy.”
Alex grinned back. “Yeah, Jack’s not exactly sit-behind-a-desk material. He hates paperwork, and he hates not going out in the field with his people, and he hates stuffy bureaucrat types. I think the only way this could be worse is if he lost Walter, too.”
“Walter?”
“Oh, right. You haven’t met Sergeant Walter Harriman, Jack’s … well, I don’t know if he’s really an adjutant, but he’s Jack’s paperwork and bureaucracy specialist. Cindy and Grover say his daughter Wendy’s really nice, and she’s totally thrilled to have some other teenaged girls on the base who aren’t officers’ kids. She doesn’t have the clearance to know how … unusual Hanna and Cindy are. I mean, Hanna’s, well, Hanna, and Cindy’s boyfriend is Klar and Cindy even did the invisibility thing a couple times, and boy is she glad she didn’t try it a lot more.”
Her mom looked puzzled, so she realized she’d never explained all about Grover and his biochemical. “Grover invented this chemical that lets you go invisible for up to half an hour, but after maybe eight or ten exposures it suddenly goes permanent. And if you’re transparent in the visible wavelengths, you can’t see in those wavelengths either. He can only see in infrared. He’s not blind, but Cindy says it’s like being colorblind for every color so you only see in shades of gray.”
He mom looked horrified. “That sounds … horrible!”
Alex nodded. “Grover says Jack’s been awesome. He got the science guys to cook up some kind of weird LCD screen that’s all infrared outputs so Grover can see stuff, so he can watch movies and TV on it, and play videogames on it, and do computer work on it. And there’s plenty of books Grover can’t read because he can’t tell the black print from the white paper, but now you can get so many books electronically and he can read ’em on his special monitor. And he can’t do lots of chemistry like titration like he used to, so he has to use computerized systems with special screens he can read, because stuff like litmus paper’s pretty useless if you can’t see any colors.”
Her mom stroked Alex’s hair and murmured, “Jack has really been good for a lot of people. You, and Grover, and us, and Hanna, and Shar, and Willow … I’m sorry I didn’t trust him with Shar. And that thing in Japan was not his fault.”
Alex frowned. “Yeah, we all know whose fault it really was.”
A high-pitched voice yelled from the hallway, “That’s totally not fair! I had to!”
* * *
The black sedan pulled up in front of the small building. Jerry got out of the car, and his partner followed. This was pretty tiring, but he felt better checking every town personally, instead of just calling up a list of county sheriff’s offices.
A lanky guy in uniform scrambled out the door and trotted down to see them. He put out a hand. “Hi! I’m the deputy in charge right now. The sheriff’s got some time off with his wife. They’re gonna have a baby. Don’t know how we’re gonna manage while she’s out on maternity leave, ’cause she’s the town doc.”
Jerry shook hands and showed his badge. “FBI agent Jerry Cotton. This is my partner Phil Decker.”
“Oh! Sorry. I’m Russell. Russell Clank.”
Jerry knew how some people viewed the ‘Feds’, so he just smiled and said, “No problem. We’re just covering the area. You heard about the big gun battle up in Minneapolis?”
“Oh, yeah, we got a bulletin on that and everything.”
Jerry nodded. “Well, they managed to sneak at least one guy out in a little prop plane. We’re looking for anybody who might’ve seen a little prop plane flying really low overhead, or crashing, or maybe even landing. It ought to be pretty distinctive, since it’s got a couple bullet holes on the left side, and the pilot may have a couple bullet holes in him or her, too. Anybody report anything like that?”
The deputy grinned. “Heck no. We’ve got a few real characters around here, and most of ’em would be on the phone to us and the mayor and everybody else in about a second and a half.”
Jerry just said, “Okay, but if you hear anything, let us know right away, okay? Some of these people are very dangerous. And let the doctor know to be on the lookout for anyone who’s been shot.”
“Just how dangerous are we talkin’ here?”
Jerry admitted, “Whoever was piloting that plane might be … one of these Orphans like in the news.”
“Well, shit. This isn’t like that Umbrella Corp mess, is it?”
Jerry frowned. “It could get pretty bad, but hopefully it wouldn’t be that bad.”
The deputy scowled. “I got relatives over in the Quad Cities, and one of them was a security guard for Umbrella. As far as the family knows, he’s dead and buried in the Spencer building.”
Jerry told him, “I’m sorry for your loss. But I think you know everyone in that building was either dead or worse than dead well before that building collapsed.”
The deputy nodded unhappily. Then he said, “You wanna come in for a moment? We’ve got a big gallon jar of sun tea brewed up, and some clover honey if you like your tea sweet.”
Jerry smiled. “Thanks for the offer, but we’ve got to get going. We want to check on seven more towns today.”
The deputy nodded in understanding. “Well, thanks for dropping by. The next time you’re in Ogden’s Marsh, you swing by the diner and tell ’em Russell sent you. They have great food there.”
Jerry climbed back in the car, waited until Phil buckled his seat belt, and drove off.
Phil asked, “You’re really sure we can’t take anyone up on any of their offers?”
Jerry carefully drove out of the town. “Really. If there’s even a tiny chance these terrorists have gotten that toxin into the local water supply or food chain, having lunch or even a nice mug of sun tea could be the last sane thing you ever did.”
Phil grinned. “Hell, my wife says the last sane thing I ever did was when I said ‘I do’.”
* * *
Alex was exhausted by bedtime. Worrying about people was hard work. Worrying about people when you had to sit still and couldn’t go do anything was totally worse. She didn’t know how generals and admirals did it day in and day out. Maybe she needed to be nicer to guys like General Jackson and General Kremer.
Worrying about other people when you had to pretend you were concentrating on a big championship game was even harder, because you had to pretend you weren’t worrying and you were totally focused on the game, which was utterly awesome, and Ray made five out of six foul shots in the last two minutes when the other team was trying desperately to get back in the game, and so they won by six! They were the Central Section champions, and they were going to get one of the top eight seeds, and maybe even one of the top four seeds, which would be super-awesome! And Ray took her to a big celebration party at Tony’s house, and it was a really good thing she called her mom about it, because she got home over two hours past her regular curfew.
* * *
She got up the next morning and took a quick shower before getting Shar up for church. Her dad was already making pancakes when she got down to the kitchen, and he had a couple big stacks in the oven staying warm just for her. She added lots of real butter and plenty of the real maple syrup, because she’d found out that real maple syrup just tasted a lot better on stuff than the fake maple syrup she used to eat when she was little and she had a sweet tooth like Shar’s.
And then it was time for getting ready, and going to church, and singing the hymns. And during the silent prayer part after the sermon, she prayed that they would be able to stop The Collective yet again. She pretty much knew what The Collective wanted. The whole take-over-the-world thing pretty much went without saying. And the kill-almost-everyone-else deal was totally obvious. Maybe they really did believe what Clare Tobias had told Riley and Jo and Mark: that they were thinning out the humans to save the planet and that would pave the way for homo superior.
Alex figured that if you convinced yourself you weren’t even the same species, that it would be way easier to kill those lesser things. She hadn’t had any compunction about killing as many silicates as she could find. They were a threat, and they would keep growing in numbers until they wiped out everything. Was that it? Did these Orphans look at people the way she had looked at those creepy silicates? She shuddered in horror.
And did it make her a bad person that she had killed all those silicates without a second thought? That she had killed as many mutated Umbrella victims as she’d had to? She totally didn’t want to be like those Orphans and the other members of The Collective. She reminded herself — not for the first time in the past year — that Terawatt had to be the goodguy. Spiderman, not The Punisher. And definitely not Doctor Doom, despite what that jerkhead Bruce was worrying about.
Did other-Batman spend all his spare time worrying about how to stop Wonder Woman if she went evil, or that guy who could take a tactical nuke off his face? Superman, or whatever his name was? That seemed somewhere past ‘mega-prepared’ and well into ‘totally insano’.
She really needed to figure out how to stop Terawatt, just in case. Oh, she could think of tons of ways that Jack or Riley or Jo could do it right then, starting with a sniper rifle. But if she went nuts and stayed silvery, she might be a lot harder to take down than just a bullet from one of those huge rifles at half a mile. And what was Terawatt going to do about Danielle Atron? And Maggie Walsh? And whoever was actually running The Collective, because it was pretty clear to Alex that Maggie Walsh had gone to The Collective just in the last year, starting with Downingtown, and the people behind The Collective had been doing bad stuff for over thirty years.
Uh-oh. Everyone was getting up, and the organ was starting, and she had no idea what they were supposed to be singing.
Her mom held a hymnal over so Alex could see which song it was. Okay, she knew this one, so she didn’t need a hymnal. That was good. Obviously, her family could tell she was all distracted and not paying attention. She hoped she didn’t get chewed out on the way home.
When they got in the car, Shar piped up, “Alex is upset about stuff!”
Her dad said from the driver’s seat, “We all noticed, Shar. But thanks for worrying about Alex.” He looked in the rearview mirror and smiled. “At least you didn’t fall asleep during the sermon and snore, like Bob McCormack.”
Alex winced a little, because that had been really embarrassing even if she was two rows away from the McCormacks, and she was pretty sure Bob’s wife Patti elbowed him really hard.
She confessed, “I was praying about stuff, and I got really worried, and all distracted, and … Well, I wish I was out helping people instead of sitting here waiting to find out where I needed to go like yesterday because now there’s a disaster happening.”
Shar insisted, “Yeah! Me, too!”
Alex’s mom turned her head and firmly said, “Shar, we’ve talked about this. You did a bad thing — several bad things — in Japan and before you got on the plane, so it’s going to be a long time before Jack can trust you to be safe on another op.”
Shar pouted. “Aunt Willow said Uncle Jack loves me a lot, but that doesn’t mean he’ll let me do anything I want, ’specially if he thinks I’m using my powers to get my way, because then I’ll end up turning into Baron von Kreep. I don’t like him. I don’t wanna be like that. I wanna be like Kari Strong.”
Alex leaned over and gave Shar a one-armed hug. “You will be. And I bet Kari never blasted anything like Gojira.”
Shar whispered, “That was really scary. I was totally afraid you were gonna get killed. And then when I was there with you, I was totally afraid I was gonna get killed, too.”
Alex just turned so she could hug Shar with both arms. She whispered, “Me, too.”
* * *
After lunch, Alex called Jack on his cellphone.
“Yello!”
She could hear lots of noise in the background, so she checked. “Am I calling at a bad time? Are you in a meeting?”
“Nope, just lots of yelling at the TV screen because someone’s b-ball team is letting them down. Again.”
Alex distinctly heard Charlie O’Neill yelling, “You suck! My grandmother could make that shot!”
Jack smirked. “What I wouldn’t give to show up these overpaid choke artists with … oh, how about a five-woman basketball team? Maybe you, Hanna, Azure Crush, Lupo, and Valentine. That would be hilarious.”
That would be totally unfair, no matter how good the other team was. Alex knew she could steal the ball with her TK every time the other team inbounded the ball, and then she could just do an alley-oop to Az, who could jump fifteen feet in the air and catch the ball and then drop the ball through the net. The other team would never get across the half-court line.
Alex could hear Grover’s voice in the background yelling, “Oh, no! No no no! Play some goddamn defense!”
Jack groaned. “This game is hopeless. These guys are gonna lose by twenty. Maybe forty. So what can I do for you?”
She said, “I was hoping you’d help me set up a web conference call between my dad and my sister and your biochem people, and maybe you could get Annie a really awesome DHS internship so we could start using her skills sooner. And you should totally have people like my dad and the Paradise Valley Chemical plant as resources.”
“Your wish is my command! Eenie meenie chili beanie! The spirits are about to speak!” He stopped the silly voice and smirked, “There, it’s all done.”
“Jack …” she said in frustration.
He gave her more of the smirky tone. “Really, it’s already done. I was saving it as a big surprise until Top Banana told me MIT was good with it and I knew big sis would bite on the hook, but after Willow told me about your family not getting to see Annie for most of the summer, I had Marshall review Annie’s records, and so she’s getting the offer any week now. Try to act really surprised. Will thinks Annie should spend the whole summer in Paradise Valley with you guys, but I think we’ll have to have her here for some briefing and training, then in Roswell with Marshall’s team for half the summer, but I figure we can manage at least a month in Paradise Valley working at the plant, assuming George will go along.”
“Sure he will! He’d love to have Annie working on stuff with him at the plant! Or in our garage. Whatever they were working on while Mom and Shar and I were down in Roswell, they had to air out the garage a lot. Mom said she didn’t care, as long as they stuck to the rules and didn’t put anything over on the food-only shelves near the door.”
Jack went on, “So the big web confabs won’t start until after Annie signs on the dotted line. She just has no idea how fast the clearance process is going to go in her case, because we already cleared her and your whole family for SRI business, which mandates a Top Secret clearance as per DHS bureaucratic whininess.”
Alex couldn’t stop smiling. “Jack, you are the best.”
Jack complained, “Flattery will get you … anywhere, but if I was really the best, I’d have this Minneapolis problem wrapped up. The Feebs still haven’t found any trace of that plane, and the NSA and CIA haven’t had any luck with spy satellites, and we’ve run a bunch of spy planes across the area, with everyone from NSA camera geeks to CIA computer programs studying the films they took. Nada. Right now, Top Banana has NOAA and the EPA getting special aerial photography of every lake and pond and stream in southwest Minnesota, just in case the plane’s at the bottom of a lake. But there are thousands of barns and sheds that plane could be in, especially if they were smart enough to make those wings quickly removable with just hand tools.”
* * *
Dave adjusted his hip waders once more. The life of a county sheriff was not exactly glamorous at the best of times, and this was well into ‘really sucks’ territory. He had a pregnant wife he wanted to be home with, and instead he was wading in a swamp with a deputy.
There were a surprising number of swamps and waterholes and ‘prairie potholes’ and marshes all across Iowa and Minnesota and the surrounding area. Ogden’s Marsh was fairly large. The town was named for it, and it filtered a couple little streams that led into Ogden Lake, which was really just a big prairie pothole that the town and the farms around the lake all used as a reservoir. And it was a birdwatching area and hunting ground, because birds and animals loved these spots.
Russell apologized again. “Sheriff, I’m really sorry, but Rory was insisting a plane crashed in here a couple days ago, and his wife finally got around to telling him about it. And it’s not like she wouldn’t have a good view of it if it really happened.”
Dave just nodded. Rory’s farmstead was on a low rise just to the north of the lake and the marsh. He had one of the best views of the marsh of anyone in the county. He was also the biggest pain in the ass of anyone around the area when it came to getting permission to hunt on his land, or even to cross his land to get to the lake. Dave couldn’t begin to count the number of times Rory had called the county sheriff’s office to come out and arrest people. Not that Dave ever did, even when Rory threatened to run them down with his tractor or something else silly. It was always some kid with a fishing pole, or a couple of locals hunting birds, so Dave just warned them to stay off Rory’s land and avoid getting a shotgun full of rock salt in the ass, because Rory had certainly blasted teenagers sneaking into his pumpkin patch before. Rory was easily one of the three biggest pains in his ass in his entire job, even including the Iowa State Police guys who thought they were hot shit, even if they regularly got shoved around by the S.T.A.R.S. guys and the FBI guys.
Russell suddenly gasped, “Holy shit!”
Dave turned and looked where Russell was staring. A couple of trees were mangled where something had recently ripped its way through them and into a deeper spot in the marsh, pretty close to where the marsh opened up into the lake.
And there was a broken airplane wing just barely jutting up out of the water. Crap.
The plane had to be on its side, in maybe six feet of murky water. Dave carefully waded over toward it.
There were three bullet holes in the door, just a foot or two under the water, with a dead pilot and a co-pilot who looked like he had been frantically trying to get over the pilot’s body and out of the water-filled craft, but didn’t quite make it. And just under the water behind that was a crushed fuselage. Through the broken side windows, he could just make out a bunch of fifty-gallon drums.
The drums were all busted open from the impact of the crash.