The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(24)
Mitts glanced up but didn’t slow down in shoveling his scrambled eggs. Kim took note of the dark circles under his eyes. The part of her that had wanted to sleep with him and could imagine dating him under different circumstances felt bad, but the part of her that was adjusting to having command over her unit thought that she had to make sure he was on top of his game. If he f*cked up, at least in the eyes of their squad leader, it meant Kim had f*cked up too.
Elroy shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. “Heard a bunch of things. One of them is that it wasn’t an accident. The Chinese dropped a nuke on purpose.”
Kim felt her mouth drop open and snapped it shut. “Wild-ass guess?”
“Nope,” Elroy said. “Honky Joe, and if Honky Joe says it wasn’t an accident, I’m willing to believe it’s more than a WAG. Said he was online and there’s talk about the Chinese trying to cover something up. He said a lot of it sounds like the kind of stupid bullshit you’d expect, like a zombie outbreak, but he thinks it’s credible. Said it feels like there’s something real underneath it. He thinks it might have been something bio.”
Kim toyed with the eggs. Mostly they’d been getting real eggs, but these were rubbery and specked with something pink. She hated powdered eggs, but sometimes they were extra funky because of cheese. The pink specks were probably supposed to be some sort of meat. Ham? She put off taking a bite and nodded at Elroy. Honky Joe was a weird dude, but he was smart as shit. Too smart by half. He’d either wash out or end up wearing brass. Despite his name, Honky Joe was actually a black kid out of Washington, DC. His dad was some sort of something important up on the Hill—Honky Joe wouldn’t say what—and Honky Joe said that after he’d been busted hacking into the Pentagon, his father arranged to have him join the Marines instead of joining the fine folks at one of the federal penitentiaries. Early on in boot camp Honky Joe had started a gambling syndicate that pooled money on bets at a local racetrack, and before it was shut down, everybody involved had turned their initial hundred-dollar kick-ins into something closer to two grand. That’s the kind of kid he was, and even though he usually ended up getting his black ass handed to him in the end, they’d all figured out he was worth a listen when he decided to speak.
“Anything else?”
Elroy shook his head. “No official word beyond what you already know, but if I was a betting man, and you better believe I am, I’d put a ten-spot on us being on the move by nightfall.”
Kim offered her bacon to Duran and he pinched the greasy pieces off her tray. “Any idea where?”
“Outside the continental United States. Bet on that.”
Mitts put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He really did look like shit, Kim thought. She hoped that if Elroy was right about them getting shipped out, there’d be a chance for Mitts to get some sack time before they left. “I think they’re all freaked out over nothing,” Mitts said, then crumpled the napkin and put it on his tray. “Not that a nuclear explosion is nothing, but it’s not like they launched one on us. Maybe Honky Joe is right, that it’s something more than a training accident, but whatever it is, we’re not talking shots fired. Wherever they send us, we’ll be spending most of our time waiting for the brass and the general public to untwist their underwear. Same shit, different day.”
Kim saw Gunnery Sergeant McCullogh hurrying across the mess and stopping to huddle with the company staff sergeants. Whatever he said had the effect of making the staff sergeants hop to their feet.
“Might be you’re right, Mitts,” Kim said, nodding her head so that the three men looked across the mess to where she had been looking. “But judging from the way Gunny and the staff sergeants are starting to haul ass, it will be same shit, different day, and different country. I think Elroy’s right. We’re going OCONUS.”
Henderson Tech Falcon 7X, over Minneapolis, Minnesota
Henderson couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake. Since he’d stepped off the trail to take a shit in the jungle, everything had the gauzy quality of a dream. A bad dream. Neither of the pilots nor any of the flight attendants said anything to him to indicate that they thought he was acting funny, but then again, when you owned a Falcon 7X, you could expect a certain amount of discretion from your flight crew. At first, Henderson had felt guilty about spending more than $50 million to buy his own jet, plus another $27 million to customize it. It felt wasteful. But in the scheme of things, it just wasn’t that much money, and it was a lot easier to pay for it himself than to deal with the bullshit of doing it through the company. No matter that he’d founded the business, built it from the ground up to a market cap of more than $250 billion; once he’d gone public, he had to follow the rules. Not that he minded. Last year he’d been fourth on the list of wealthiest Americans, and with no wife, no kids, and no siblings, what the hell else was he going to do with his cash? Until recently he hadn’t given a shit about that sort of stuff, but he’d started the company when he was fifteen and had been going nonstop for more than thirty years. Now he wanted to spend some of his time and money not working. Until recently he’d just used one of the company’s jets, since all he did was business, but he figured if he was doing stuff for himself, one of the things he could do was buy his own plane. Frankly, though he’d been wildly successful for most of his adult life, he still thought it was cool that he could own one. He’d thoroughly enjoyed the process of customizing it, though he burned through five designers in the process, but the Falcon 7X was well worth the money he spent. The inside was gorgeous. At least, it was gorgeous when it wasn’t covered in spiders.