Cold War

Chapter 6

General Philips sat at his desk and stared at the empty shot glass, rolling it back and forth in his hands, trying to decide whether to refill it.

There was a time when he would have sworn he would never drink on duty. He snorted quietly. He’d been a naive little punk back then.

And after all, was he really on duty? Oh, sure, they said he was. They said he was on call. They gave him this little space here, his own little cubbyhole of an office, with nothing in it but a desk and a phone and the shot glass and a bottle of bourbon, and said he was on call, that he’d be getting new orders any day.

They had lied to him, of course. He wasn’t on duty here; he was just out of the way. And nobody ever said a man shouldn’t drink when he’d been shoved aside because his superiors thought he’d screwed up.

And Philips didn’t doubt that his superiors thought he’d screwed up big time six months ago, when big-game hunters from outer space had been using New York City as their private preserve.

The brass had known for years that the aliens existed. They’d known that the monsters had been hunting humans in tropical jungles for decades, and they’d kept it all quiet-but you can’t keep it all quiet when people start getting butchered in the middle of an American city!

They’d done a damn good job covering it up; Philips had started it himself, before his “transfer.” Still, there were rumors, there were people who’d seen too much, and Philips was pretty sure that his superiors thought that those rumors and witnesses were his fault.

His superiors hadn’t been there, damn it. They hadn’t been there on the streets, watching a bunch of alien monsters shooting it out with cops and hoodlums. They’d been willing to write off a couple of dozen civilians gone for trophies if it meant avoiding trouble with the aliens, but they hadn’t been there, watching it happen, seeing innocent people slaughtered.

Philips had been there, and at the end he’d come in on the human side, fighting the monsters, in defiance of his orders. He’d had to.

But it hadn’t made any difference-the creatures had left because they got bored and the weather turned cool, not because they’d lost or gotten angry.

The big brass didn’t believe that. They thought Philips and those two cops, Schaefer and Rasche, had chased the aliens away. They’d wanted a piece of the aliens’ gadgetry to play with, and they thought Philips had screwed up in not getting them something.

But they hadn’t seen how careful those damned extraterrestrials were about making sure their precious technology didn’t fall into the hands of the people they preyed upon. There hadn’t been a chance to capture anything.

The brass didn’t know what it had been like. He hadn’t screwed up, damn it-he’d been handed a disaster, and he’d done everything he could to keep it from getting any worse than it already was. No one could have done better without just shooting Schaefer and Rasche-and no one could have known to do that until it was too late.

Of course, his superiors had never told him to his face that he’d screwed up-they’d probably been afraid that he’d go to the press if they booted him out or dressed him down. No, they’d just waited a couple of weeks, transferred him, given him this office, and told him to wait here until they called with his new orders.

He’d asked about the programs he’d started, whether he’d still be training Captain Lynch’s team, whether Smithers and the rest of the New York office would still be tracking down possible incidents, whether the Pentagon team would continue checking incoming electronic intelligence for signs of the aliens, and they’d said not to worry about any of that; it would all be taken care of. He was just to wait until they called.

That was almost six months ago, and the phone hadn’t rung yet.

He’d finished up all his paperwork the first month. Then he’d started bringing books he’d always wanted to read. Around the third month he started bringing a bottle of bourbon along with the books.

By the fifth month he was just bringing the bourbon. Another couple of weeks and he doubted he’d bother coming in at all. It had taken a while, but he’d gotten the hint. That phone was never going to ring. Lynch was probably training antiterrorist teams somewhere, and Smithers was probably training terrorists for the CIA. The whole thing was over.

He couldn’t go to the press now. The news wasn’t hot. The people in charge had had all the time they needed to cover everything up, to get all the stories to match, all the messes cleaned up, and all the evidence neatly tucked out of sight.

He could argue with them, of course. He could complain, he could demand something to do, he could go all the way to the president if he had to.

There wasn’t any point in it, though. If he made a stink, they might give him something to do, or they might just retire him, but one thing seemed pretty sure-they weren’t going to put him back on the assignment he’d had before, the one he really wanted, dealing with those things, those killers, those monsters from outer space.

That was what he really cared about. There was so much potential there. The technology to travel between stars, all those incredible weapons the things had, their invisibility screens-if the right people had all that, it would mean a whole new world, a whole new universe. If one of the starships those things used could be captured and reverse-engineered, the Apollo flights to the moon would look like a soapbox derby by comparison-people would go to the stars. Entire worlds might well be out there for the taking-resources and wealth beyond imagining! If there were other alien civilizations besides the hunters somewhere out there in the galaxy, friendlier ones, then humanity wouldn’t be alone anymore. That would change everything.

Even if that wasn’t possible, even if human beings didn’t get a stardrive out of it, at the very least those things had weapons and technologies that could put the U.S. so far ahead of the rest of the world that dealing with bozos like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi would be no more trouble than swatting a few flies.

This was the biggest thing anyone had ever been involved in-it had been his own private playground, and they had taken it away from him.

He hoped they hadn’t just abandoned everything. Maybe they had put someone else on it, someone they trusted more. Maybe someone like Lynch was in charge.

He hoped so.

Maybe, he told himself, it wasn’t as bleak as he thought. Maybe they really did intend to call him, and those things just hadn’t been back to Earth since the New York affair, so there hadn’t been any need for him. Maybe they’d get around to calling him eventually.

Or maybe the big brass honestly thought those things were gone for good.

Hell, maybe they were gone for good-that whole mess must’ve been embarrassing for them, too. They’d come to Earth looking for a good time, or maybe to avenge the hunter Dutch had killed all those years ago, and they’d wound up getting two or three of their boys notched; if they were an outfit running the equivalent of paid safaris, that wouldn’t have looked good in the ads back home. Or if they had some sort of noninterference rules, they’d blown those out of the water when they landed their ship in the middle of Third Avenue.

Hushing all that up must’ve been a bitch, Philips thought. Even on a Sunday morning, there must have been a hundred witnesses.

Maybe the top brass thought that the trouble had all happened because people had tried to interfere. Maybe they thought there was no way to get that technology, so they just wanted to ignore the aliens now. Even when Philips had been running the show he’d usually had orders to let the hunters have their fun, kill a few people, take a few trophies-don’t make ‘em mad. The brass had always been more worried than eager, more concerned that they not get the aliens mad enough to start an actual war than with having anyone learn anything from the spacefaring bastards.

And now they weren’t giving Philips a chance to interfere and maybe piss the creatures off. The big brass was keeping him waiting here, at an empty desk, staring at a phone that never rang…

The phone rang.

At first Philips didn’t even notice. He heard the sound, but it didn’t register. He didn’t recognize it as anything that concerned him; it was just more of the background noise that was always present.

Then it rang again, and that time it penetrated. He jerked as if he’d been shot, dropped the empty glass, and snatched up the receiver.

”Philips here,” he barked into the receiver.

He was trembling.