Free Overlord by David Lynn Golemon Page B

of the top agencies in the country—the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the CIA. The memo directed the young agent to a meeting she never returned from. The key to the document was the small dash-dot system in the left-hand corner. Pete and Europa finally deciphered the code and broke it down to indicate the memo originated at the desk of someone at the CIA.
    The subject of the memo was the very man looking at the image supplied by Europa. It was a memo listing his name and day and dates of where he was at. It was a tracking report from a bug that had been planted covertly on his person, and the memo was an order to the contracted satellite company doing the tracking—Cassini Space-Based Systems—by the person or persons responsible for the young agent’s and another female’s death. The eyes scanned the document one last time and then Jack Collins shut off the monitor and turned his unshaven face toward the steel door of his quarters—or as he had come to think of it, his prison.
    “Come,” he said as he stood. He paced to the bathroom and splashed water on his face just as the door opened. Will Mendenhall stuck his head inside.
    “Feel like getting the hell out of here for a while, Colonel?” Will asked as his eyes studied the usually immaculate quarters. His eyes fell on the empty Jack Daniels bottle and several glasses that lined his desk. The room was a mess and so unlike Collins that Will shook his head.
    Jack came out of the bathroom drying his hands on a towel. When he was finished he allowed it to slip through his fingers and onto the carpeted floor.
    “What is it, you busting me out?” Jack started to slip into an olive-drab-colored T-shirt over his bare chest.
    “Something like that. We’re shorthanded on a routine detail and it should afford you to get a little air since it’s nowhere near the South Pole.”
    Collins looked at Will for the longest time.
    “Still nothing on the origins of Mr. Everett’s watch?”
    Mendenhall’s silence was enough of an answer. Jack angrily slipped into a wrinkled white dress shirt and started buttoning it. As long as he was restricted to base because of this archeological find in Antarctica he could not get out of the complex to find the killer of the young CIA agent—his sister, Lynn Simpson Collins. He knew the watch had to have been discovered in the efforts to free the largest part of Operation Overlord from the ice, a fact he couldn’t share with Will or anyone else who wasn’t in on the planned response to a possible Gray invasion.
    “Figure we could go out and see our little friend in the desert. It seems he’s up to deviltry and it’s freaking Doc Golding out.”
    “What doesn’t freak Pete out?” Jack said, feeling better just by talking about normal things again. “Why not,” he finally said. “And by the way, you know that anything our green friend wants, he gets, so Pete should just calm down.”
    Will held the door open for the colonel in silence.
    “What’s the latest on McIntire?” Jack asked as he gathered his things.
    “She’s still in Uzbekistan, checking on one of the target areas for the search.”
    “The supposed Soviet saucer encounter in 1972?” Jack retrieved his sunglasses from the desk and made his way to the door.
    “Yeah, looks like another dead end as no one wants to talk to our team or the Russians. Both we and the Ruskies aren’t real popular over there. She should be back in a few days. I think Dr. Compton has another search he wants her on.”
    “Matchstick has no theories on Everett’s watch and the Antarctica thing?” Jack knew the link between Operation Overlord and the captain’s watch had to be connected, but without telling the top-most secret in the world to Pete and the others they were at a dead end.
    “When asked, green boy just looks confused and then says there is no such science as time displacement, no matter what Albert Einstein says, and I guess he would know.”
    “Why? Most of the