Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (146 page)
Abe looked at his friend. “I might just do that.” He paused a moment. “Can’t say I am much of a churchgoer, though.”
Howard looked at his beer, then at Kent. “Not proselytizing here, Abe, but didn’t you ever feel the need for prayer out there when the bullets were whistling past and calling your name?”
Kent smiled. “Every time. Prayer and pucker-factor go together better than peanut butter and jelly. You know what they say, John: There are no atheists in foxholes.”
“So you are a believer.”
Kent nodded. “Oh, yes. I believe in God. And I’ve got no arguments with Jesus being the Son and prophet. I don’t even have problems with Allah or Mohammed or Harry Rama, if it comes to that. Everybody has to be someplace. Not my job to tell ’em where.”
“I hear a ‘but’ there.”
Kent looked at his old friend, debating whether or not to tell him the story. It didn’t come up too often these days, but it wasn’t as if it was a big secret—he had told a few people along the way. And here they were, drinking good beer, shooting the bull. Why not?
He paused for another sip, then said, “Well. It goes back a long way. My maternal grandmother used to live down in Lafayette, Louisiana. Every other summer when my brother and I were kids—he was eight years older than I—my folks would ship us to Grandma’s for a few weeks to visit. After my brother turned into a teenager, he stopped going, but I still went. And he did wind up going to college down that way later.”
He sipped again, then pushed his glass a little ways away from him. “The summer I was ten, I stayed with Grandma. She lived on the bank of a bayou. I think it was the Vermilion River. Water came almost up to her back fence when it rained hard. She had a little dog, a Pomeranian named Dolly, and a parakeet named Pancho. I used to take my BB gun down to the banks of the muddy bayou and shoot at snakes and snapping turtles. For a while, my great-grandfather lived there. He was ninety-something, and he used to sit on the bank with me, fishing with a cane pole. We caught catfish, bream, even a gar, now and then. Had to throw them back. Grandma wouldn’t scale and cook them and she wouldn’t let me and Great-Grampa in her kitchen to try.”
Kent grinned, remembering those days. Great-Grampa Johnson smoked a pack of unfiltered Camels a day, and took nips from a bottle of Old Crow he kept hidden under the bathroom sink. He was a small man, compact, and had served in France in the Great War.
The cigarettes and liquor never did kill him—he died from pneumonia he picked up in the hospital after he fell and broke his hip, at age ninety-three.
Kent pulled his memories back to the present. “Grandma was a bridge player and a churchgoer. Grampa worked on the oil rigs out in the Gulf, he was an engineer, and mostly gone. They were Methodists, which is about as benign a Christian group as ever there was. The main difference between them and the Baptists, my grandfather used to say, was that the Methodists sprinkled, but the Baptists had to dunk, since their congregations needed more water to keep cool during the hellfire and brimstone preaching.”
Howard smiled.
“I went to Sunday school at home, and when I visited Grandma Ruth, I also stayed for the church service with her.”
Kent paused again, spinning his glass slowly on the table. “This was back in the early sixties, around ’61 or ’62. The civil rights movement was going on, and it was . . . turbulent . . . down South.”
Howard nodded. “My folks told me the stories of uncles who went down to Mississippi and Alabama to march. Terrible times.”
Kent said, “I was a kid, I didn’t have much of a clue about what all that meant. The schools were segregated, the bus stations had separate waiting areas for whites and ‘coloreds.’ I remember seeing bathrooms at a gas station on one of my visits once that had three doors on the side: Men, Women, and Colored. The churches were also segregated. Grandma’s church, Magnolia Methodist, was only a few blocks away from her house, in an upscale, all-white neighborhood. Grandma was well off—she drove a powder-blue Cadillac and had a mink stole.” Kent frowned and took another sip. “There had been some talk about demonstrations. Supposedly, some of the local black folks—called either ‘coloreds’ or ‘nigrahs,’ if you were polite. If you weren’t polite . . .”
Howard’s jaw muscles flexed. “I believe I know the impolite term.”
Kent nodded. “So, apparently, the story was, these agitators were planning on integrating some of the local churches on an upcoming Sunday. Nobody seemed to know exactly when, only that it would be soon.” He shrugged and went on. “I was probably a typical kid when it came to religion. I believed what my folks told me, I earned my own Bible by reading and memorizing chapter and verse. I wasn’t devout, but I liked the stories, and I felt comfortable knowing that the blue-eyed-blond-haired Jesus was up there watching over me.”
Howard shook his head but didn’t interrupt.
“So on this particular Sunday, the minister stood in front of the congregation and said, ‘You all have heard about the possibility that we might have a visit from our Negro brothers and sisters in the next week or two. I think it would be appropriate for us to discuss how we might deal with such a situation.’ ”
Abe paused again, his eyes staring over Howard’s shoulder, but he wasn’t seeing the sparse pub crowd. He was seeing that day long ago. “Now I was just a kid, John, but I knew what Christ’s message had been. Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and all that, and I expected that the congregation would hold to those principles. That they would, even if they were a little uncomfortable, welcome anybody who came in—even if they had to sit in the back—to worship in God’s house. I was young and unlearned in the ways of the world.”
“Let me guess,” Howard said. “It didn’t go down like that?”
“Fifty-odd years ago, and I still remember it vividly.”
The minister, a thirty-something balding man in a dark suit, standing up front, listening to his congregation.
“No way!” a tall, white-hair man in a blue suit had said. “If they want to worship, they have their own little church down the road!”
“I say we lock the door,” said a red-faced fat man. “We got enough men here to take care of anybody who tries to force their way in!”
“God doesn’t want the races to mix,” said a gray-haired woman in a black dress, wearing a little hat with a black veil.
Abe drew in a deep, ragged breath. “It went on like this for what seemed like a long time. Violent action was the predominant voice. If the coloreds came, they’d, by God, be sorry. Even at that age, I knew that this was where the minister was supposed to step up and deliver the lesson. What Christ would do in these circumstances. How a Christian should behave. He was supposed to be the sheriff with only a double-barreled shotgun standing against a lynch mob, do or die. But he didn’t. He just stood there, pale, listening, and let the congregation work itself up.”
Kent paused again, then gave a little half smile. “As it turned out, our little church wasn’t on the list. Nobody ever showed up, so it was all moot. But that’s when I stopped going to church. When my grandmother and my parents tried to make me, I refused. I was punished for it—they grounded me, my father took his belt to me, but I wouldn’t go. I didn’t know jack about integration, but I knew what was right, and this wasn’t. I didn’t want to belong to that group.”
Howard shook his head sadly. “That’s a terrible thing for a child to see and hear. But you know, there’s a difference between the message and the messenger. Sometimes the man carrying the Word misinterprets it. That doesn’t mean the Word itself is wrong.”
Kent nodded, frowning. “I know that, John. But look around. There are a lot of bad messengers. More people have been killed in holy wars, in God’s name, than for ambition or territory. Christianity against Islam; Islam against Hindu; even Catholics against Protestants. Yes, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, but he didn’t start a war with the Romans. He never killed anybody.”
He paused and sipped at his beer again. “It’s just that I don’t need somebody explaining things to me that I can read for myself, and I sure don’t need somebody getting it wrong. I think the churches have screwed up what was a fairly simple message. ‘Churchianity’ is a different thing, it has a life of its own. God isn’t about buildings and Sunday-go-to-meeting Christians.”
Howard started to speak, but Kent cut him off. “I expect you are about to say that it isn’t that way at your church. I believe you. But at my age, my connection to God is personal. I believe He hears my prayers just as well on the battlefield as he does in church, and I’m too old to put up with the other bullshit.”
Now it was Howard who paused and sipped at his beer, an uncomfortable look on his face. “Abe,” he said after a moment, “I appreciate you telling me that. I have the feeling it wasn’t easy for you, and that it’s a story few have heard.”
Kent nodded.
Howard tipped his glass at his friend in a small salute. “Which makes it my turn, I guess. I’m only ever going to say this to you once. What you do with it is up to you. The thing is, Abe, I’m very comfortable in my own faith, and I’m comfortable sharing that faith, but I’m not comfortable
preaching
it, if you know what I mean.”
preaching
it, if you know what I mean.”
Abe smiled and nodded but didn’t say anything.
“You say that you believe, my friend, and it makes me happy to hear that. But belief alone is not enough.”
Kent frowned at that. “But the Bible says—”
“I know,” Howard said. “John 3:16, ‘ . . . whosoever believeth in him shall have eternal life.’ ” He grinned. “I’ve always been partial to King James.”
Kent didn’t smile in return. “It also says that ‘not through acts shall a man enter the kingdom of heaven, but through faith alone,’ or words to that effect.”
Howard nodded again. “Yes, but the question is, what do those words, ‘believe’ and ‘faith,’ mean? You see, if that’s all it is, a belief alone, then it’s sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card, isn’t it? And that’s the way, I’m sorry to say, that a lot of Christians view it: ‘I believe in Jesus, I’m going to Heaven, so it doesn’t matter what I do here on earth,’ and that’s both true and false. You’re right that our acts here don’t earn us any points with God. On the other hand, if we do truly believe in him, if we truly believe in his Son and his Word, then we are compelled to do certain things, to live our life a certain way. We are compelled to acts of mercy and kindness. We are compelled to charity and to a Christian love for our fellow man, to ‘love one another as ourselves.’ And we are compelled to join others in worship, for as the Bible also says, ‘Whenever two or more gather in my name, I am with them.’ ”
Howard paused for a sip, draining his beer. “I won’t preach at you, my friend, and I won’t pressure you to come to church. But I will ask you to think about it. And while you’re thinking about it, you can still eat lunch with us, can’t you?”
Abe smiled and drained his own glass. “Oh, yeah, John. No problem there. As long as Nadine doesn’t sneak some widow in on me.”
The two smiled.
12
Net Force HQ
Chang was not impressed. Certainly not with the security at the facility, at any rate. Yes, there had been armed guards at a gate, who had come out and inspected Chang’s chauffeured car, looking into the trunk and opening the hood, with a dog sniffing about the tires, presumably one trained to detect bombs.
The guards had directed Chang’s driver to a lot several hundred meters away from the building, one surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
A small electric cart was waiting to take Chang to the building. The driver looked at Chang’s ID, and matched it to a handheld flatscreen before starting off.
At the entrance, more armed guards checked Chang’s identification again, and inspected his briefcase. They asked him if he had any kind of computer recording media with him. He did not. He knew that there were computers in this complex that were not connected to any network, inside or out, and that the only way material from those could be transferred was manually. He expected his case would be searched more thoroughly when he departed.
Still, the look into his case seemed cursory, and the guards did not pat him down.
He was issued an identity badge with his picture and a retinal scan pattern upon it. He guessed that if he went anywhere he was not supposed to go, an alarm keyed to his badge would trip.
An armed guard took him to an inner waiting area, where a receptionist placed a call. A few minutes later, a man arrived.
“Mr. Chang? I am Commander Thorn’s assistant, Dylan Lacey. Please come with me.”
Chang followed the man, looking around carefully as they walked. Yes, he saw carefully placed sensors mounted on the ceiling. No doubt there was some kind of reader there scanning his ID badge.
Still, they had not body-searched him, so he could have smuggled a weapon into the place. Even if there had been a hidden metal detector to ferret out guns, he might have a fiberglass or ceramic knife or pistol. Chang knew there were handguns that contained no more metal than a couple of teeth fillings, and even the cartridges were ceramic and plastic.
As if reading his mind, the assistant said, “Commander Thorn asked me to fill you in on our security systems. Aside from the guards and metal detector built into the door frame, we have IR card scanners in every and all rooms. Our house computer keeps track of everybody’s badge. If you remove the ID card and try to move around without it, a silent alarm goes off, and you will find yourself facing some edgy armed guards.”
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