Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 45

"Want a drink?" Jenna asked as she tossed her laptop and keys on the small table in her dining nook. "As I recall, an Ozark girl like yourself usually has a little Wild Turkey in the cupboard."

She poured two and nodded for him to take a seat as she flopped onto her couch and put her feet on a footstool.

"Obviously y'all weren't lost at sea like we thought," she began. "They searched a million square miles for a week. Never found a thing… where were you?"

"Storm blew in, blew the Shakuru back over land… I went down on a mountaintop. Just like Noah's ark. It was a couple of weeks before I figured out that I wasn't on an island somewhere."

"Where were you?"

"Nicaragua… but I didn't know that until about two weeks ago."

"How could…?"

"I broke my leg pretty bad… couldn't get around… it still hurts."

"Couldn't you make contact with us?" Jenna asked, almost angry that he hadn't tried to phone.

"There are still places in the world without Wi-Fi access." Troy smiled. "Still places with no cell service… besides, I didn't have a cell phone."

"How long have you been back?"

"Got to town this morning."

"Have you been to Firehawk yet?"

"Nope."

"I need to call them and let them know that you're—" Jenna said, reaching for her purse to get her phone.

"Please don't," Troy said, his voice so stern that it surprised Jenna.

"Why?"

"Because your boss, your CEO, Raymond Harris… tried to kill me."

"Kill you? When? Where?"

Jenna's astonishment was almost equal to what it had been when she first confronted Troy as a "ghost."

"In Shakuru, somewhere over California."

"How… I thought… I thought he managed to escape only after Shakuru was going down and you couldn't get out."

"He sabotaged everything," Troy said. "My parachute… the autopilot override… radio. He disconnected the lithium sulfur batteries."

"Are you sure?"

"What the hell do you mean, 'am I sure?' Of course I'm sure. I was there," Troy said angrily. "I screamed myself crazy trying to get out a distress signal… I watched the damned engines shut down when the solar panels were starved of sunlight… I felt myself start to freeze in the damned space suit as it shut down."

"But Harris?"

"And I heard him calmly tell me how I was going to die, just before he popped the canopy — and just after he told me why."

"Why?" Jenna asked. "Why did Harris want you dead?"

"The Transition," Troy said. "Because I found the documents… y'know, about The Transition."

"What's that?"

"It's what's been playing out in the news back here since I've been out of touch with reality," Troy said. "He's trying to overthrow the government — him and Kynelty and their crowd."

"But this has been in the news for weeks," Jenna said. "Firehawk and Cernavoda are only two of several PMCs that have submitted proposals to Congress—"

"But Harris is trying to overthrow the government!" Troy insisted. "Can't you see that?"

"Are y'all sure you're the real Troy Loensch?" Jenna laughed. "The Troy Loensch that I knew wasn't this interested in politics."

"Geez, Munrough, can't you see what's going on? Why am I the only one who sees this shit? Maybe I was in the jungle too long."

"Thought you said you were in the mountains."

"It was in Central America…. the mountains have jungles… but that's not the point. The point is that I go away for a few months and come back and it's like mass hypnosis back here. Everybody is going along with this. Nobody seems to see what lie's doing."

"You're just being paranoid," Jenna said with a dismissive toss of her hand. "It's all politics. What the hell do y'all care about politics?"

"Maybe it's just a matter of that oath we took when we joined the U. S. Air Force…. something about upholding the Constitution….. Was that all just a big pile of crap? I came here to see you, rather than going to see anybody else, because I thought you of all people would be able to see through this, see what Harris and Kynelty are doing for what it is."

"Look, Loensch, the politicians are fighting this out in rooms up there on Capitol Hill… it ain't guns in the streets."

"Is that what it's gonna take for you to see? Guns in the streets? Look at me… you're lookin' at the dude who was damned near the first casualty of this fuckin' revolution that Harris has up his slimy little sleeve."

"What exactly was in these 'documents' you found that you say he tried to kill you over?"

"That I say?" Troy asked angrily. "This was very, very damned unambiguous. He tried to kill me."

"Okay… I believe you," Jenna said, backing her tone off a few notches from the accusatory. She could feel the Wild Turkey starting to flutter its wings in her head and imagined that the same was true with Troy. "Just start from the beginning… tell me what you found… actually start with telling me how y'all found these documents."

"I found them in his office — his office at Cactus Flat." "What were you doing in his office?"

"I broke in to look for—"

"You broke into Harris's office?"

"Yeah," Troy said in a tone that implied, Of course.

"Shit, Loensch, if you'd broke into my office, I'd be pretty pissed, too. Why the hell did you do a thing like that?"

"Because the CIA asked me to," Troy admitted sheepishly.

"The C–I-friggin'-A?" Jenna said, rolling her eyes in disbelief "I guess you're paranoid, if you're seeing the CIA."

"You think I've gone around the bend?" Troy asked angrily.

"You're serious?" Jenna asked. "The CIA… Really? The CIA really asked you to spy on Raymond Harris?"

"They really asked me to spy on Raymond Harris."

"Why?"

"They came to me at the Marriott last time I was in town. They wanted to know whether Harris had ever said anything about PMCs being used to overthrow and control countries."

"We've all heard him talk about that." Jenna nodded. "That's just Harris being Harris."

"I agree. That's what I told them. I said I could name a half dozen countries that are already run by a PMC. But then they said that they suspected Harris wanted to overthrow the United States."

"What kind of proof did they have?" Jenna asked suspiciously.

"None."

"Great." She laughed. "So y'all agreed to spy on him, even though your CIA pals didn't have any proof"

"No. Not then. I told 'em that a lot of people say things about politicians, and that what they were saying was paranoid bullshit."

"Sure sounds like it to me." Jenna nodded.

"So they left, and I didn't think about it much until a few weeks or so after I got out to Cactus Flat. Harris showed up and started talking about exactly what they said he was going to do."

"That's when you decided to break into his office?" "No, I had another meeting with the spooks in Vegas."

"Then you decided to break into his office?"

"Yeah."

"Okay… so now we're back to the place where you were gonna tell me what you found."

"There was a blue folder that talked about something called The Transition, presumably because it's about a transition from an elected government to an outsourced management like they're doing right now."

"It's not something they're doing in secret," Jenna said. "It's not something that's being done in the dead of night. This is just about as fall-into-broad-daylight as you can get."

"I'm no student of history, but I think I remember that this is how Hitler got in," Troy said. "The German government got into such a fix that they just brought him in, and the people were okay with it."

"And they sure got 'it," " Jenna said. "But I can't see Harris—"

"This blue folder went on to say that if the politicians didn't give the PMCs what they wanted, they'd be ready to take it by force."

"How could they?"

"Think about it, Munrough," Troy insisted. "The PMCs have all the guns now. The armed forces out-sourced so much that they hardly have any assets. They're just management agencies. The generals are nothing but paper-pushers running PMC contracts. When the PMCs take over the government, the PMCs will be running the PMC contracts. This country won't have armed services anymore."

"The PMCs pay a lot better," Jenna reminded him. "It's better for the folks doing the work."

"This is not a joke," Troy insisted. "The PMCs could take over… they could walk over the United States armed services. Kynelty's Cernavoda has more, and newer APCs and main battle tanks than the U. S. Army. We both know that Firehawk is better equipped than the Air Force."

"Yeah," Jenna agreed. "I know that most of the F-22s and F-16s have been transferred to Firehawk squadrons, and there's that new plane that Las being tested by the HAWX Program out in Nevada. You must know about that one."

"Raven. I heard that it's called Raven, but I didn't have anything to do with it. It was kept under wraps. I'm surprised that you've heard about it. Most people at Cactus Flat didn't even know about it. What have you heard?"

"Not much." Jenna shrugged. "Just the usual prattle around the watercoolers at Firehawk. I heard it was very fast… And I heard that they brought a demonstrator in to Andrews Air Force Base last week."

"That can't be good," Troy said.

"There's a fine line between paranoia and—" "This ain't paranoia," Troy insisted.

"What do your CIA spook friends think of Harris trying to kill you?"

"I haven't told them."

"What? Why not?"

"I've been back in the United States for less than eight hours… I wanted to see you first."

"I'm touched." Jenna smiled.