Rainbow Over Sunnydale Chapter 2
Disclaimer: Red Storm and Tom Clancy own Rainbow and characters. Joss Whedon owns Buffy and characters. Anyone else belongs to me. I make no profit off the following except a little fun.
Spoilers: Buffy up to present, Rainbow up to Bear and the Dragon.
Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far. Constructive criticisms always welcome. Flames cheerfully ignored.
The White House
Washington DC
25 Oct 2002
2130 hours
John Patrick Ryan, President of the United States finished up with the last of the reports he needed to look at and tossed his glasses onto his desk. He then leaned back into his chair and went over the events of the day in his head one more time.
The day had started out normally enough. He was going over some budgets concerns with Ed and Mary Pat Foley the Director of the CIA and its Deputy Director, Operations when Tony Bretano the Secretary of Defense had called and said he needed to see Jack with the whole senior cabinet and that it should be a quiet meeting. Jack had called everyone in, fortunately Robby Jackson, the Vice President, and Arnie Van Damm were in the building and the Foleys were already there. Dan Murray, the Director of the FBI, came in with George Winston the Secretary of the Treasury, through the underground tunnel that connected his building with the White House. Pat Martin, the Attorney General, was scheduled later in the day so they just moved his appointment up so when Tony Bretano arrived with Pierre Alexander, the Surgeon General, and an unknown Colonel in tow they where ready to begin. Lieutenant General Mickey Moore, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came in a few moments later slightly out of breath. "Sorry I took the back way in so it didn't look like the whole Pentagon was coming for a meeting." He said as he took his seat.
"Sorry for the dramatics." Tony said, "But we have a real problem." He then motioned the Colonel forward and introduced him. "This is Colonel Joshua McCloud, he is the current commanding officer of a Special Forces unit called The Initiative."
Everyone in the room frowned because the name did not ring any bells. "I don't remember that one." Robby Jackson the VP said. "I don't think that one came over my desk when I was J-3."
"Uh it did not." Said Colonel McCloud. "We where handled strictly in shop by the DIA."
President Ryan looked the Colonel over. He was just over six feet tall, obviously had some Native American Blood in his lineage, with straight black hair and a long aquiline nose. "You did not know of this group Tony?"
"Not before today I didn't" the SecDef replied. "The unit was run by Brig. General Thomas Billingsly. They where apparently covered as an intelligence group that were supposed to be keeping track of intentions for the PRC. When they totally blew the call in the last war I had some people take a good look at their estimates and found out that everything that came out of their shop was just retread from other sources. Some of it was from quite deep but nothing original. So I fired the good General yesterday and got a team of auditors in there to find out where all the money went."
"And they found?" Ryan asked.
"Colonel McCloud and some really interesting files. I want everyone to look at something then we can pick up the story." Brentono said. So saying he watched as an assistant set up a video in the machine in the office and left. Once the assistant was out of the room Tony started the tape. It showed the same scene that Clark and Ding would watch some hours later. The silence in the room when it stopped playing was profound.
"People don't burn to death that way." Dr. Alexander said. "The amount of heat that would be required to do what we just saw probably could not be generated short of a nuclear explosion, I think we would have noticed that."
Colonel McCloud spoke up, "That's because that was not a person Dr. Alexander that was a vampire."
"A what?" Just about everyone in the room exclaimed. (The Secret Service agent in the corner of the room was the exception. He was watching the whole discussion with interest though.)
"A vampire," the Colonel replied, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world to watch a vampire spontaneously combust.
"I am afraid he is serious." Tony said, "and just wait, it gets better."
Ryan set back in his chair and let his advisors hack this one out as he thought about what the repercussions of this if this was true.
"Vampires can't be real," Alexander stated.
"Can't be?" Ryan asked looking at his Surgeon General.
"Alright lets assume for a minute that vampires are real," He began. "One vampire kills a person. Then that person becomes a vampire and raises from the dead. This new vampire then proceeds to go out and start eating people, I'm sorry drinking their blood, and this series of events would then go on for several generations. It becomes a geometric progression. Add in that according to legend these things are immortal, so even if they only have to feed a couple of times a year, eventually we would all be vampires. At the very least there would be so many of them that they would not be able to hide, so we would know about them."
"You are partially right sir." Colonel McCloud said. "Vampires are in fact immortal. The act of making another vampire, a process they call siring, is a strictly voluntary act on the part of the vampire. They are the top predators in their food chain and they don't want to over graze the food supply."
"Us." Dan Murray the head of the FBI said quietly obviously quite disturbed.
"Er yes." Replied the Colonel rather uncomfortable with notion himself.
"What was your unit tasked for Colonel McCloud?" President Ryan asked.
"Sir we where originally formed to investigate ways of neutralizing these creatures and others like them."
"There's more of them?" George Winston the SecTres asked.
"Well yes sir, most if not all of the classical monsters we have found to actually exist somewhere on the planet. Most are demons of one sort or another. Most of these are half or quarter breeds, some are more."
"We found that there are well over a thousand species of "demon" on the planet sir, we have not encountered that many but research bears that number out."
"Where do they hide?" Ed Foley the DCI asked. "I can't believe that they are so good at hiding that no clue of their existence ever leaked out!"
"With respect sir, it has. Its called legend and myth." The CO of the Initiative replied. "Today if someone spots a demon or something similar they just look the other way, they don't want to be labeled a nut. Some one who has dealings with these creatures don't usually take out ads about them. Finally most demons themselves take up a live and let live attitude so they do not go out of their way to make trouble. We humans outnumber them by a good bit so a low profile is often called for."
"What about the vampires?" The Director of the FBI could not seem to get off that subject.
"Some are very predatory, all will kill if a target presents itself, however most enter into an almost symbiotic relationship with humans who agree to become…. donors for them."
POTUS was repulsed. "You mean that people willing let themselves be drained by these things?"
"They are hardly drained Mr. President, a vampire need not kill its victim. In an attack the victim is usually killed, but I think this is as much for the vamps amusement as a need to hush up a witness. When a person voluntarily allows a vamp to feed on them then only as much blood, as the vamp needs is taken. I am told that it is an interesting experience."
"So is jumping off a bridge till you bounce." Replied the President.
"As you say," The Colonel agreed.
"Ah Jack I think we are getting a little off topic here." Tony said. "I understand, I went through a lot of this myself when the brought me this info but we got a real problem going on here."
"Hmm?" POTUS looked over at his SecDef.
"Billingsly has gone AWOL and it looks like he took most of the Initiative with him." Tony said.
"What?" Jack exclaimed, a little annoyed that Tony hadn't started with this little tidbit of information. "All right lets take this from the top." Looking at the Colonel who was looking more uncomfortable by the minute he says, "Why didn't General Billingsly come forward when The Secretary was firing him and explain all this himself?"
Looking like he would like to be anywhere else than where he was Colonel Joshua McCloud did the only thing he could do, he told the truth. "Well sir, the General was convinced with how you came to be President that you were the Anti-Christ."