The Stand

Starkey had never heard anyone talk so well before or since.

Now he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and fumbled out a thin blue folder bound with red tape. The legend written on the cover read: IF TAPE IS BROKEN NOTIFY ALL SECURITY DIVISIONS AT ONCE. Starkey broke the tape.

“Are you there, Blue Base One?” the voice was asking. “We do not copy you. Repeat, do not copy.”

“I’m here, Lion,” Starkey said. He had flipped to the last page of the book and now ran his finger down a column labeled EXTREME COVERT COUNTERMEASURES.

“Lion, do you read?”

“We read five-by, Blue Base One.”

“Troy,” Starkey said deliberately. “I repeat, Lion: Troy. Repeat back, please. Over to you.”

Silence. A faraway mumble of static. Starkey was fleetingly reminded of the walkie-talkies they made as kids, two tin Del Monte cans and twenty yards of waxed string.

“I say again—”

“Oh Jesus!” a very young voice in Sipe Springs gulped.

“Repeat back, son,” Starkey said.

“T-Troy,” the voice said. Then, more strongly: “Troy.”

“Very good,” Starkey said calmly. “God bless you, son. Over and out.”

“And you, sir. Over and out.”

A click, followed by heavy static, followed by another click, silence, and Len Creighton’s voice. “Billy?”

“Yes, Len.”

“I copied the whole thing.”

“That’s fine, Len,” Starkey said tiredly. “You make your report as you see fit. Of course.”

“You don’t understand, Billy,” Len said. “You did the right thing. Don’t you think I know that?”

Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. “God bless you, too, Len,” he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.

Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day’s drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bo

The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac’s nose first dipping down toward the road and then begi

“Holy Gawd!” the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.

The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bo

Baby, can you dig your man,

He’s a righteous man,

Baby, can you dig your man?

He tromped the brake again, and the Bo

“Listen,” the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn’t been in a fight since the ninth grade. “Listen, maybe we just better—”

He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.

He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.

“All right, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “You almost got us fucking killed and I want—”

He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A’s when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.

He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bo

The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer’s body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.

He slid across the Pontiac’s seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bo

Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Mado

The Ford swung around the Bo

Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac’s wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer’s head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.

Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger’s side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I’m going to make it, I can run forever —

He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.

Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.

There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.