White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

windburned man had somehow loosed the snarl in one elegant, spontaneous move of his hand. She would’ve laid a thousand-to-one bet against Mister Jeff having access to that depth of subtlety. To her, it smacked of a miracle.

Mister Jeff had checked on the orphanage upon returning to the Homestead from the front line of their looming battle. He’d only spoken one word to Jacquelyn, and he said it with the slightest smile.

“Pastor.”

In that one word, Jacquelyn finally understood the life-and-death contract she’d signed by accepting exile to the orphanage instead of death in the streets.

He’d granted her life. Now, she owed both Mister Jeff and the Homestead unwavering service. There would be no talk of her spiritual qualms or her professional misgivings about faith. Not ever again.

She would now and forever be the pastor.

Homestead Ham Radio Shack

Oakwood, Utah

President Thayer had done everything he could to de-escalate the coming war with the fundamentalists.

He spoke with Rex Burnham three times over radio in the last three days. Each time, President Thayer made it increasingly clear they would go to war against the fundamentalists as invaders. He’d marshaled every scintilla of skill he possessed to build a connection with his former colleague. He had literally done everything in his power to shake the power-drunk madman from the path of the coming Armageddon. But Burnham would not be turned.

President Thayer called a meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve, now numbering eleven, and begged them for help in striking the right spiritual cord that would inspire Rex Burnham to stay in Utah County, or at least commit to restricting troops to the southern half of the Salt Lake Valley. Any and every compromise was on the table.

All eleven apostles joined the next ham radio call. They pleaded restraint and exhorted Burnham to turn aside from war.

Every exhortation had been met with deflection and doublespeak. All their begging seemed to make Elder Burnham more aggressive in his claims, and more certain of his invasion. Richard feared their appearance of weakness had further emboldened him.

When he met with Jeff Kirkham to tell him of the failure of diplomacy, all Richard Thayer could counsel was prayer.

“Brother Kirkham, it breaks my heart to tell you this, but we can’t convince him. Burnham can’t be stopped with words. I have failed.”

15

“As students of history, we often think of war as a fire that sparks only when mankind can afford it. When populations exceed carrying capacity or when resources grow past a certain level, only then do men make war. We think of war as something mankind does after the basic needs of survival are met.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Given the slightest differential in power, religion or social status, mankind often forsakes feeding their children and fights instead.”

The American Dark Ages, by William Bellaher North American Textbooks, 2037

Barkley’s Sand & Gravel Pit

North Frontage Road

Chad sat on the edge of his cot at three in the morning, wide awake, toying with one of the IR strobes, pinching it between his fingers and spinning it, over and over again.

“Fifth Column,” Chad had said to Jeff Kirkham.

He hadn’t really thought much about it when the words came out his mouth, but at three a.m., on the eve of a fight, he thought about it a lot.

The idea of a fifth column had arisen during his time in Coronado, California; his first time with Audrey, when they were newly married and Samantha was only an infant. Chad had been gone so much on deployment with the SEALs that he hadn’t tired of being home yet. His leave rarely exceeded two weeks, between training gigs and oversea tours. His wife and daughter were forever new to him.

They’d been good times. Audrey and Baby Samantha had been so happy in Coronado; at peace with their daily stroller-and-latte routine, basking in the fresh seaside wind and eternal vacation magic on the Coronado peninsula.

Audrey had been blissfully oblivious to Chad’s life as a BUD/S candidate, then a SEAL, then a BUD/S instructor. He’d been a dashing ornament in her role as a military wife, wrapped in one of the highest-rent enclaves in America. It’d been a beautiful time for his family, maybe the only beautiful time.

In Coronado, Chad kept his finest library. He had a first edition of the only full-length play ever written by Ernest Hemingway, The Fifth Column. He read it at least a dozen times and he remembered it quite well.

Set in the Spanish Civil War, the blackguard journalist-cum-political operator, Phillip Rawlings floats about Madrid, an agent of death and destruction for the Loyalist Republican faction.

Chad had once read a review of the play, and they’d called it “a grotesque romance of the Republican terror, in which the protagonist was a swaggering American who specialized in political liquidation. Perhaps the ugliest American in all world literature.”

Years later, Chad remembered those phrases: “swaggering American” and “the ugliest American in all world literature.”

After his deployments, those phrases stuck, perhaps for good reason. Deployments with SEAL teams hadn’t been exactly tight and tidy—political liquidation in a foreign nation was frequently their stock-in-trade. He’d hated it then. And now, a lifetime later, he found himself deep inside a fifth column action, with a plan to assassinate a leader and generate a swath of political chaos. Was this the campaign God had chosen for him? Or was Chad the Phillip Rawlings in this tragedy? The swaggering American.

When he roared up to his old buddies from the Homestead on his motorcycle in the light of day, assassination sounded like a jolly good time—a nimble fifth column turnabout. Now, with the mute night wrapped around him, Chad pictured the two-hundred rounds of 30-06 that would shred the tent and the body of Rex Burnham. Like a metal hailstorm from a vengeful god, Burnham would be torn to bits.

He was an egotistical asshole, yes. But was Chad really that different? If he tossed the puck-sized strobe on the tent where Burnham slept, the