A Bright Shore: The Eden Chronicles-Book One by S.M. Anderson

Author:S.M. Anderson [Anderson, S.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S.M. Anderson
Published: 2018-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Washington D.C.

Jason had never felt more invisible or more self-conscious. The strange juxtaposition of those two emotions wasn’t lost on him. He supposed he should feel honored to even be here. He was the only person in the room, beyond a few military techs running the A/V gear, who wasn’t known to everyone else in the room through political connections or out of necessity as a function of the military uniforms they wore. Most had enough brass on their shoulders to start a band. The Operations Room was one of a series of poorly-kept secrets in D.C. He had seen one just like this on a cable TV special a year ago. This particular facility was five hundred feet below the surface of the old FBI Headquarters, and he knew of at least two more just like it. In a few months’ time, this room and others like it would be conducting the Wagnerian opera of change flowing from the White House.

They were all here because of him. None of them knew that of course, this was Washington. He figured half of the people present hoped to catch a little credit for the operation if it was a success. They’d all been invited by Duane Rogers or the President himself to monitor the takedown of the site in Australia his own research for Rogers had uncovered. Jason had run his findings by Sir Geoff before even thinking of handing them to his erstwhile boss. Sir Geoffrey had surprised him and replied with a simple handwritten note, “Turn over the report, as is.”

He’d done just that. Rogers and the State Department had spent most of the previous week twisting Australia’s arm for permission to raid what the Aussies continued to insist was a legitimate commercial refurbishing center for shipping containers. Jason’s research, double-and triple-checked by Rogers’s staff, indicated that the containers, nearly three hundred thousand of them stacked like Legos in the Australian desert, held one hell of a lot of missing capital equipment and high-tech gear.

With great reluctance, the Australians had finally relented, but only if they had operational control of the joint US-Australian raid. Jason knew there were Australians flying the Osprey assault ships whose video take was being relayed by satellite to the massive flat screens covering three walls of the underground command center.

Rogers himself paced at the head of the room, back and forth in front of the screens, leaving no doubt whose operation this was. Jason struggled to keep the amusement he felt off his face, when he caught a Navy Rear Admiral and an Army Brigadier share a look of bored disgust at what they took to be his boss’s theatrics. Jason knew better, Rogers wasn’t acting. The man had almost no people skills and was enough of a tool to actually believe that’s where his strengths lay.

“What am I looking at?” Melanie Lee’s shrill voice cut through the room like a scalpel. The Secretary of State and former Ambassador to the UN was known for her ego and harsh management style.

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