Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

The walk took five minutes; outside, across streets and intersecting pathways. There weren’t many people milling about in the Eastern end of Quantico on this Saturday afternoon. Those who were around chose to mind their own business and not wonder why a teenager in a concert-tee was leading around a decorated lieutenant colonel.

“I might have underestimated your ambition, but this should still wait until next month,” he said once en-route.

“And why is that?” I asked in return.

“Because then it would be less illegal.”

“You’re going to explain that one, too,” I said, shaking my head.

As the sound of the Potomac grew closer, we cut through a line of trees and found ourselves in a small park. There were some running paths weaving through the trees, a few park benches lined the edge of the fencing against the river’s edge. To my right in the distance I could see the airfield and the hangars where they kept Marine One, the President’s helicopter equivalent of Air Force One. I considered the existence of a Navy One; does the President have a personal aircraft carrier, perhaps? Maybe a submarine. Maybe one of those inflatable motorboats the SEALs use.

My mind wandered, for lack of caffeine. Getting back to business, I walked the both of us over to a metal-framed, wooden-slat park bench that sat on the well-maintained lawn and overlooked the Potomac. The white noise from the river was loud and variable, going from shrill to low at random as the water level and surf changed. I imagined this made the use of listening devices rather difficult, and I wondered how many wars and top-secret operations had been planned from this very park bench. Wandering again.

Schumer sighed, losing some tension as he sat down and leaned back against the bench. I sat beside him and for a moment watched the river roll. This point of the river was over a mile across. Maryland’s shore looked in the distance like a foreign country with an ocean between us.

“How well do you know your history, kid?” Schumer asked beside me, facing the waters too.

“I can tell you anything about the French Revolution you want to know,” I said.

The gun I’d slipped into my belt poked into my back, so I shifted in the seat a bit to ease the pain. The other gun was in my right pocket. I hadn’t taken the time to examine them, but I assumed they were Berettas.

“I mean recent history. Political,” Schumer went on. “The 1970s, the Cold War long gone, the military and its ancient tactics were beginning to show their age. Things like Iran-Contra and the hostages were cropping up all the time, terrorist groups posing more of a threat than entire armies.”

“Iran-Contra was in the 1980s,” I said.

“That’s just the one example,” Schumer said. “The point is during the mid-70s the military became aware that they would have to change their outlook on the world in order to survive in it. This is when the ‘black budget’ was invented. Each branch of the military found new and creative ways to skim billions of dollars from the defense budget for their own off-the-books projects. With this money, the Army and Navy built their black-ops counter-terrorism units like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and Red Cell; and the Air Force built and commissioned next-generation, highly secret aircraft like the stealth bomber and the F-117. It was a whole new age, Uncle Sam’s pocketbook was wide open and all we had to do was be clever about the bookkeeping and we could do or try whatever we wanted.”

“Slush funds, right, I’ve heard of all this,” I said.

“What you didn’t hear is what the Corps did with its share of the money,” Schumer went on, his voice a bit lower. “Aside from a few projects I don’t know about or won’t talk about, our primary concern wasn’t with new counter-terrorism units or invisible airplanes. Our concern was recruitment.”

“Recruitment?” I asked, glancing at him for the first time since I’d sat down.

“Yes. All across the military, enlistment was down. The sense of ‘join up and fight for your country’ diluted after Vietnam, we weren’t fighting for God and country anymore, almost every military maneuver in the past 25 years has been about politics or money. Even the simpletons at home on their couches could see that. Dropping your shovel and going to fight Hitler, that’s one thing. Sitting around a hole in the sand, polishing your gas mask and waiting for another bio-attack alarm, all to make sure we keep friendly parties on top of the oil reserves, it’s a whole different thing.

“The only people joining up were the wrong kind of people. People join the Army now because they flunked out of college and have nothing else to do. They join the Navy because their dad, or uncle, or neighbor, or barber was a Navy man. They join the Air Force so they can stand on, in, or near a ten million dollar jet fighter. The Marine Corps was always lucky enough to have the distinction of being the best, the warriors, but still that wasn’t enough. So, while the Army built black-ops death squads and the Air Force built black-ops planes, we formed black-ops enlistment strategies.”

“And what does this have to do with me?” I asked.

“This… has everything to do with you,” he said, “and I mean that in the most literal way possible.”

“Enlistment strategies? Posters and commercials?”

“No, not that. I’m talking about research, lots and lots of research. How to make the Marine Corps look better, how to make people want to join, and a few… more elaborate programs. I was put in charge of one of these back in the late 1970s. You have to understand the timing of all of this in the civilian sector, as well. It was a new medical renaissance, the first successful in-vitro fertilization was done in 1978, modern psychology was being re-invented, and the human genome was all but mapped. It was very exciting times for anybody paying attention.”

“This isn’t one very long lead-up to telling me I’m a clone, is it?” I asked.

Schumer turned his head slowly and looked me over. “No,” he said after a moment.

“My project was to look into a way to make enlistment seem like less of a major life decision and more of a matter of course. If your father was a Marine and he spends his whole life talking about it, it’s much more likely that you’ll enlist than if he was a farmer or a plumber. This is because, in a way, you feel like you’ve inherited it. Your destiny, or what-have-you. Of all the projects tasked with addressing that, mine was the most advanced.”

“Will you stop telling me about your stupid project and just tell me what you did already?”

Schumer grunted. “This is a complicated subject and there is no way to explain it without explaining every component.”

“Fine,” I said, “go on.”

“In essence, I was to use the newest medical and psychological techniques to significantly reduce the weight of one’s decision to enlist. We looked at currently available genetic and psychological possibilities and set ourselves the following hypothetical goal:

“A married couple has been unsuccessfully trying to conceive a child for years, they are candidates for in-vitro but cannot afford the several-thousand dollar procedure. They agree to let the government pay for the in-vitro fertilization, with the caveat that when the child turns 18 he will be given a presentation and offered the chance to join the Marines. Keep in mind that I said ‘offered,’ not ‘forced’.”

“We’ll give you a baby if you promise to give him to us when he grows up?” I said, actively choosing not to believe any of this.

“No. I said we can’t force anybody to enlist. In this hypothetical situation, we’re footing the cost of a very expensive procedure to allow a couple to have a baby, and all we’re asking is that the child be offered to serve his country. He would be free to decline, of course. This was the goal my team and I were given, my job was to make it realistic.

“The problem is that most parents don’t like the idea of their kids joining the military, because they’re afraid they’ll be killed. We can run advertisements proclaiming the extensive training we conduct, but to them it’s like sending their kids off to sleepaway camp where they’ll probably die. To reduce that anxiety, the only thing we could think of was to convince the potential parents that not only would their children do fine in the Marines, they’d do better than anybody else. Since we were doing in-vitro fertilization, and we had the capability of slightly altering genetic profiles to allow for growth in a technically foreign host, it wasn’t difficult to—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying your big idea was to screw around with fetal DNA or whatever to make it so their kid would be some kind of super soldier, aren’t you. Genetic super soldiers. I knew it, either you’re crazy or lying your ass off.”

“Stop getting ahead of yourself,” Schumer said, “this isn’t the movies, we can’t make people stronger or faster, all we can do is make sure that the right genes were there. When a person is conceived, many genetic traits are still left to chance. Things like metabolism, reflexes, cellular regeneration, these are all much more open to outside influences than inherited traits like hair and skin color. In the process of in-vitro fertilization, we had the ability to filter out any potential genetic defects for the highest possibility of a ‘perfectly able’ child. We weren’t ‘engineering’ anything.”

“It still sounds wrong,” I said.

“Now,” Schumer continued, “going back to our initial hypothetical, we can now say to a young couple who could get in-vitro but can’t afford it, ‘We’ll pay for the procedure and do everything we can to make sure your child is perfectly healthy and has the best possible reflexes, metabolism, blood-clotting time, etc. and when he turns 18 we’ll just give them a talk and see if he’d or she’d like to be the best Marine he or she could be.’ It’s still a tough sell.”

“Could you please drop the lead-in and just get down to it? What was the big stupid black ops project of fantastic unethical baby-making that you came up with?”

Schumer sighed again, and said, “After looking at our resources, the most enticing version to sell would-be parents goes like this: Young couple, can’t afford in-vitro. We tell them we’ll pay for the procedure, we’ll use genetic filtering to make sure he’s healthy and has the best traits available to him from each side of