7

Fisher woke up to his department cell phone. He noted that his wife didn’t seem to heed the ringing. After eight years he guessed she was used to it. “Fisher,” he answered gruffly.

“It’s Alvarez,” came the reply. “I’ve got movement on camera four.”

“And you confirmed it?”

“I confirmed it," said Alvarez. "It’s a wolf.”

“OK,” said Fisher. “Call Bocker. I’ll get Jebbins and Garcia. Five of us should be enough.”

“Roger,” said Alvarez, before hanging up.

Fisher got on his feet and pulled on a pair of jeans as he glared at his clock. He dialed another number into his cell phone, then listened as he pulled on his boots.

“Jebbins here.”

“It’s Fisher, I need you to come in. We have one on the cameras.”

Jebbins hesitated. “Well, I’d love to Sarge, but I’ve been drinking, so-”

“Jebbins don’t give me that crap. Now you get your lazy ass to the Airbase,” Fisher sharply ordered.

Thirty minutes later they all stood in front of him in the meeting area of the air station. Each man was clearly groggy and irritable, but this was their job. Fisher hid his own annoyance. He had long ago made peace with late night call outs, but the fact that his presence was requested by someone he considered subpar was insulting to his own self-image. “All right,” he began. “Alvarez says this thing is somewhere between Highway 31 and County Road 4. I realize that doesn’t tell us much but we do have the FLIR and our NVGs at least, so he shouldn’t be able to hide. That hasn’t meant much these last few weeks, I know, but the way I see it we don’t have a lot of options. Let’s just kill this bastard and go back to bed.”

Heads nodded agreement, and everyone headed for the armory to retrieve weapons while Garcia started the helicopter.

Fisher did not intend to come back empty handed this time.

The wind washed over them as they lifted off. It never hit as hard as one would think. They accelerated above the trees and sped out over a green sea of plains. Fisher could see the men tapping on the sides of their rifles. Each was disciplined enough not to touch the trigger, but he could still tell they were rearing to shoot, like Pavlov’s dogs.

Alvarez could see this too, and he worried. Not so much about himself and their views of him, he had made peace with being hated, but he still worried that they might shoot something non canine.

The issue of whether to tell anyone involved in this operation had not been brought up, and Alvarez hadn’t thought or cared to ask about it. It was the general consensus of the FBI, who had nominal as well as de-facto control over the operation that the trigger pullers should be kept in the dark as to the issue of their targets once being people. It made things work more smoothly. Alvarez was pragmatic enough not to feel any guilt over the matter. It wasn’t as though they could return to being human, and indeed, one of the werewolves, the werewolf that had destroyed his body and mind, had expressly asked him to kill every one of the damned things. That was as good a hunting license as he could ever hope for. And now the ACSD had given him the tools to collect on it, if they could only locate the pack.

They flew for perhaps thirty minutes before Garcia announced, “I’ve got something. Your 5’o clock, Fisher.”

“Ah, yeah, I see it,” said Fisher, switching to his thermal. Jebbins joined with his own scope, as Garcia put the helicopter in a circle around the suspected bandit. “Jebbins, you have anything?” Fisher asked.

“Negative, I- standby, I’ve got something.” Jebbins angled his rifle and fired twice.

Fisher was still searching with his scope. “I- oh 10-4, I’ve got him. Garcia, he’s running southwest.”

“Roger,” the pilot answered. The animal was running too quickly for either deputy to keep the sight on it, and the thick underbrush it was traversing only compounded their problem.

“Can we get lower?” Fisher asked.

“Negative.” Garcia shook his head. “Power lines.”

“Damn,” Fisher swore. “Just keep on him then.”

Again Jebbins fired, but it was obvious to all that he was wasting lead. The contact was gone. They stayed on their orbit for another twenty minutes, before Fisher, who was starting to nod off, ordered them home.

“I know I hit it,” Jebbins contended. “I guarantee you I hit it.”

“Then I hope it crawled away and died,” said Bocker.

“We can’t confirm it’s dead, that’s the issue,” lamented Fisher.

“Shit,” moaned Jebbins, who hated quibbling over details. Of course his profession dictated such details at times. A dying human could still pull a trigger, but destroying the brain or spinal connection could render a man dead before his body even hit the ground. Such a distinction could mean the difference in hostage situations, for instance. And these wolves were extremely hard to kill, as they had all found out, meaning the thing could still be a threat even if it bled for three days then died. So he could understand Fisher’s position, even if it annoyed him.

They landed, gathered their gear, and trudged into the base, dead tired to a man. “Everyone, come back in at 1800,” said Fisher, his eyes half closed. “Except you Alvarez.”

“What?” the agent demanded.

“You stay here and figure out a plan that doesn’t suck.”

Alvarez fumed, his fists balling up in anger. But, Fisher was his commander, like it or not. “Fine,” he groaned, relaxing his tense body.

“I’ll stay behind and help,” offered Bocker.

“All right, Matt,” said Fisher. “See you tonight. Let’s go by Waffle House before we go home guys,” he suggested as the rest walked out.

Alvarez sank into an office chair, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. “Shit,” he groaned.

“So,” said Bocker. “Just sit and watch?”

“Pretty much. Wait. Wait! I have an idea.” Alvarez pulled out his cellphone and hurriedly dialed a number.

Maxwell Michael Martin Murphy Gunter Dyson, PhD had one of his work boots propped against his desk as he studied a paper on the latest developments in phenomenological models of immediate post-Big Bang development of the fundamental forces. Dr. Dyson was dreaming of a Nobel Prize in physics in the near future, and his current work in pursuit of this goal involved the rapid accumulation of a very large and, quite frankly, unsafe amount of antimatter. The current paper he was scrutinizing was a roundabout way of arriving at a possible solution to one of the elements of his plan.

In the wake of the formation of the universe four so called fundamental forces of physics had emerged: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Dyson was mainly interested in electromagnetism, which he believed he could use to harness the antimatter he sought. Antimatter was difficult to study, let alone control, because any interaction between matter and antimatter resulted in the two annihilating each other. Dyson wanted to hold antimatter in stasis, allowing a thorough inspection of the stuff.

It was, to many, a ridiculous and fantastic proposal, but Dyson had no doubt he could make it work once he ascertained exactly how to do it. His days were filled with such wild ideas and the equally wild experiments that confirmed whether or not his plans could actually work. Maxwell Dyson was one of the leading experts in the field of theoretical astroparticle physics, and he had made it his mission to assemble as many like-minded individuals as possible at his company, Q-Ball Industries, in order to study the practical applications of his field and serve as a kind of for-profit think tank.

Dyson, cocooned in his advanced laboratory in the Sandia Mountains north of Albuquerque, let his mind run wild with hypotheses, theories, experiments, and inventions, and occasionally he succeeded in doing something truly groundbreaking, with his most advanced technological marvels standing as much as a century ahead of the wildest predictions of futurists. Unfortunately for Dyson and his few employees, most of these creations were either trapped in a permanent prototype phase, or simply couldn’t be made to catch on in the outside world. It was a big problem. Theoretical physics had never been a scientific field of seven figure salaries and massive grants. Physicists couldn’t even get the popularity that at least came with paleontology or archaeology, and with Dyson’s lab costing him in excess of one million dollars a year, something obviously had to be done.

His solution was pragmatic, if risky. Dyson had founded a subsidiary company: DysonCorp Defense, a weapons development and defense contracting firm. Initially they had simply resold bullets, but Dyson quickly began branching out, designing heavy weapons and light machine guns. Interest in these items from professional militaries and law enforcement agencies had been lukewarm at best, so Dyson had gone underground with his sales, purveying hyper advanced weapons to rogue nations, terrorist cells, and individuals who happened to be heavy on cash and light on ethics. If you had the money, Dyson had the guns. The results were predictable. The battlefields of the third world had gone from skirmishes to slaughter the like of which hadn’t been seen since the Second World War.

Fortunately for Dyson the mainstream media had little interest in failed nations’ brush wars. Unfortunately for Dyson, one person had caught on to his illegal arms dealing: Ray Alvarez. Dyson still wasn’t sure how the man had figured his financial game out, but figure it out he had, and, in an email to Dyson, he had demanded a meeting, in Mexico of all places! In that meeting Alvarez had made his demands clear and simple; provide him with whatever weapons and ammunition he wanted, free of charge, in exchange for him looking the other way on Dyson’s choice of revenue. Alvarez claimed to need the devices for fighting some supernatural foe or another, but whatever he wanted them for, the fact was Dyson was losing a lot of money kowtowing to the demands of an off the reservation Border Patrol Agent. The problem was he had nothing he could pin to Alvarez that proved the agent was acting irresponsibly, save revealing that he, one of the most decorated scientists alive, was providing Congo guerillas and the DPRK army with weapons the likes of which even NATO didn’t have. It was a jam, that was for sure, and Dyson was forced to do whatever Alvarez wanted. Blackmail was such a powerful weapon. But, after that one request Alvarez had gone silent. It had been several months since Dyson had been contacted, and he liked it that way. And Dyson thought nothing of Alvarez or his attempts to control him as he answered his phone. “Q-Ball Industries, this is Chief Scientist Dr. Dyson speaking,” he began regally. The image of his company was paramount for Dyson. He had always wondered if working out of a glorified cave made him seem more futuristic or less, but he wasn’t taking chances. Both he and his company were young, and he wanted to project a visage of being professional and put together.

“Dr. Dyson,” the voice began jovially. “How are things going?”

Oh no. Dyson knew that voice. “Mr. Alvarez,” he began, slowly and cautiously, “what do you want?”

“What makes you think I want anything other than to know how things are going?”

“You wouldn’t call otherwise.”

“Hmm, true,” said Alvarez. “But we don’t have to be hostile.”

Dyson was struggling to understand Alvarez, worried as he was about him. “You wouldn’t call unless you wanted something from me,” said Dyson.

“Well, now that you mention it, we have a problem in Texas,” Alvarez replied.

“What kind of problem?” Dyson assumed there was a point to this conversation.

“The kind that can only be solved with very big guns.” There it was.

“So, guns? That’s it, huh?”

“No, actually, I have all the guns I need, and it’s better that they be strictly legal for this. What I was really wondering was: what kind of space assets do you have?”

“What makes you think I have anything to do with space?”

“An article on a satellite you put up.”

Dyson was unsure how to respond. Alvarez knew more about him than he did his own self, but what did the cop want with a satellite? “Well, yeah,” he said. “I have a satellite.”

“Good, I need you to fly it over north Texas, I’ll send you coordinates. We’ll need multiple fly bys.”

“Well, I guess I can help with that.”

“I’ll need multi spectral imagery over a three county area, for a week.”

“I can get that done by tomorrow,” said Dyson. “Get the sat in position I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah I think that would work,” said Alvarez. “I’ll be emailing you the details. You always know just what I need.”

Dyson could practically hear the shit eating grin on the other end of the line. He couldn’t think of a good retort so he let Alvarez hang in awkward silence.

“Always a pleasure to do business,” he finally told the scientist, before hanging up without elaboration.

Dyson opened his computer to begin preparations. The Dyson Tactical Satellite Rapid Launch Demonstrator was intended to be a compact satellite that could be quickly launched. In an age when high altitude surveillance had, like so many things, gone space borne, satellites were still struggling to match multiple advantages aircraft possessed. Satellites followed a predictable route, and could not be launched on short notice, however there were efforts to change that. As with everything else in military affairs, “tactical” assets were being married to space surveillance. Dysons’s satellite was a proof of concept, rapidly launched mini satellite, with a full array of sensors and cameras. It could be quickly reprogrammed to fly over a specific area, or at least moved as quickly as was possible for a spacecraft. So it wasn’t a terrible inconvenience for Dyson to go out of his way to reroute his satellite for Alvarez. Why Alvarez needed such a thing was something Dyson could only guess at. He only knew that he disliked whatever the agent had going on more and more, and he considered, as he always did, whether there would be any paper trail at all as a result of all this. He couldn’t think of any. His employees wouldn’t think twice about his request to re-fly the satellite. He wanted them to have plausible deniability. He had no such defense, however. Unfortunately he was in too deep to turn back now. Dyson sighed as he resumed reading his article, trying to take his mind off the tangled world he now occupied.