Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

arrived; he was a tall man, lean and with neatly cut brown curly hair. He wore a different uniform, one of a Marine. His face was angular, with strong brow and jaw, and his eyes darted around him with quick perceptiveness and clear intellect. Stepping off the plane, he stretched.

“Now, Jack,” said another man coming around the front of the plane, “it’s a short ways up this way.”

Jack nodded and followed his companion, trudging through the grasses of the sandy soil and watching as the birds soared overhead. It had been barely weeks since he had been pulled suddenly from his second deployment in Tehran, and received orders for Baker Island. A strange place, this was, he thought. So isolated and lonely. Still, he thought, beats Tehran. Recently, he had not been sleeping, plagued by persistent nightmares, images of his friends blown to pieces, his heart racing, hearing echoes of gunshots fired months before. The chaplain and the therapist hadn’t helped much. Not long after he had stopped going to the chaplain and the therapist, he was summoned to Baker Island, to oversee a classified operation on nuclear electromagnetic pulse testing. Jack assumed that they had chosen him due to his military experience in nuclear site inspection and development. After enlisting at eighteen years old, Jack had used his military benefits to complete an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in nuclear physics. Plus, although it was before his time, he knew a good deal about the nuclear testing in the 1960s above the Pacific.

“Down there,” he said to his companion, pointing southwards. “That’s where they tested them a while ago, Operation Fishbowl. Supposedly lit up the sky in all sorts of colors. They called it a rainbow bomb. Some people in Hawaii held parties to watch. It was like the northern lights but even more spectacular. Can you imagine?”

“Must have been incredible,” said his companion dispassionately, and turned back to the path.

Presently they arrived at the lighthouse, and walking to the back of it, Jack’s companion reached down and slid open an iron grate on the ground, about two and a half feet wide. A ladder stretched down into a tunnel below, which was lit with what seemed to be electrical wiring.

“After you,” said Jack, and his companion climbed down, and Jack followed.

They were in a small tunnel that led to a metal door with a wheel handle, almost like that which steers a ship. Jack grasped the cool steel, turned it, and pushed the door sideways. It slid slowly, heavily, soundlessly and as it did so, the adjoining room came into view.

It was a cramped computer laboratory. Seven individuals worked at various stations, intent on the tasks before them. Jack shut the door.

The others, turning from their work, snapped with rigidity into military form, their arms by their sides, facing the newcomers.

“Here is First Sergeant Jack Hoffman. Taking over now.”

For six months Jack worked on oversight and management of the project, but began to find that other factors were influencing his abilities. The nightmares worsened and became more frequent and he struggled with sleep deprivation, leaving his brain tired at best and delusional at worst. Although he strove to manage the project well, he found himself incapable at times of focusing or performing at the necessary levels. Deserts filled his mind, flashes of the sun, heat, gunfire. Bodies. Bombs. Smoke. Farsi.

After a while it was too much, and he was honorably discharged. At first, Jack behaved well, renting an apartment, working in a post office off and on, but then, he began to drink in the evenings, and then in the afternoons as well, and then all day. He lost his job, and his apartment, and found that his increasing misery would only subside after he drowned it in alcohol, feeling as if he were only a burden to mankind. Then, he lost the veteran stipend, because his addiction disqualified him according to a recent law passed, but his old friend continued to provide Jack with fifteen thousand per month and some drink as well, in secret. His old friend Rick, with whom he had been previously deployed in Iran and whose life Jack had once saved, had a stable job in the White House, working as an adviser for the Chief of Staff under President Gilman, who had been elected the previous fall.

 

8.    While the District Sleeps

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

―

George Orwell, 1984

 

The clear night sky stretched like a canopy over the marble city of Washington, D.C., high and dark above the pillars and terraces, domes and monuments. On 1st St. NE sat a particularly assuming building, a great white pillared behemoth commonly known as the Supreme Court, sprawled at the top of an ascending courtyard. It extended powerfully from side to side, seeming to reach out its arms as the final arbitrator, the guard of everlasting justice. It shone like a beacon in the starlight, daring the surrounding darkness to enter.

The steps of the Court building towered impressively above the street and the heavy columns reached up to support the engraved roof, which read “Equal Justice Under Law”. The courtyard in front of the building stretched wide with two still fountains on the left and the right. The fountains were bordered by another granite wall, only about two and a half feet high, that formed two opposite semicircles. Steps led up to the courtyard, and on the bottom step, lounging in an obviously drunken stupor, sat Jack. Jack no longer believed in Justice, and so deemed these steps just as appropriate for lounging as any others.

He looked very different than he had on the island.