Full Circle: 1980 - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter One

He's got his headphones on, and the greater world doesn't exist.

Instead, he is completely absorbed in a soundscape from half a world away. Slavic mutterings blend easily with searing hot street pans, static-soaked rain, and a continuous strand of muffled, melodic folk songs. His mind wanders back to the sights and smells—God, the smells—of Leningrad and his long evenings spent bargaining over peppers, and pickles, and potato soups worth waiting for. He remembers the stone at his feet and every nuanced inch of dialect. He remembers the stinging scent of iron statues after a long summer rain, and he remembers dancing well into the night. His time spent studying in the Soviet Union returns to him in waves, triggered by the sound of heavy voices.

In comparison, Virginia seems pale and flat. He spends his days in darkness, translating conversations that ain't got much meaning. He spends his nights split between a gym and a government-assigned studio apartment that ain't got much room. While his stomach yearns for the comfort of a freshly prepared stroganoff, he's absentmindedly downing M&Ms for lunch instead, bought from the nearby vending machine for the third day in a row.

He tells himself that the peanuts have protein, and does his best to ignore his mama's voice lecturing him in the back of his mind.

Just as he begins to debate which song would sound best through his specially designed, Army-funded headphones (a downright unbreakable tie held between Queen's Don't Stop Me Now and Pink Floyd's Welcome to the Machine), he catches a familiar voice through a bugged frequency. He'll auditorily observe the subject in question for another two hours or so as he continues to debate whether or not anyone can truly top Queen anyway.

He loses track of the time, dissolving into the looping, mindless effort of transmission and translation. It could be one hour or it could be four, but eventually, he feels the tap of two fingers on his shoulder, yanking him back into uniformly measured time. "You ready, son?"

Cooper seems to have aged five years in the past two. This war, however quiet, grinds at his very bones. "Yes sir," is all Matt has to say before the two of them are on the move.

The rare break in his usually predictable afternoon is when he's asked to take part in one of the half-dozen intelligence briefings that occupy the various conference rooms throughout the day. They're the kind of starkly boring meetings that are inevitably pushed back by the hour, as a result of the world's decidedly unboring events—tension in the Middle East, or advances between the Koreas, or battle carriers crossing over into waters that ought not to be crossed into. Before long, his 13:00 briefing becomes a 15:27 coffee break and he's written all of his notes for nothing.

And sure enough, the room smells of a stale dark roast as Cooper leads them in. He leaves Matt with a pat on the shoulder, then makes himself comfortable by the carafe. "Gentlemen," he says, pouring himself a cup. "If y'all are ready."

The general consensus of the room seems to be that, yes, they are ready and that, no, they will not be staying for very long. It's a handful of officers who rank well above him, each of them taking a seat around the great concrete table at the center of the room. Matt distributes an armful of identical manila envelopes, dodging chairs as they lean and spin and scooch. He lands at the head of the table in front of a chalkboard with long erased markings from a previous presentation. There's a headphone-fueled haze that still swims around his mind, so he sharpens up with a breath.

Finally, he flips open the first page of his folder and everyone else in the room follows suit. "Gentlemen," he says. "If you'll all join me on page three of the transcription report, I'd like to point out the suspected Soviet interference with the growing tension in Poland."