Air Battle Force

One

I apologize for holding this press conference in this kind of weather, with no shelter,” former president of the United States Kevin Martindale began. As he did, the early-morning downpour seemed to intensify. “Out of respect for this place, I chose not to set up any tents or shelters and add any more to the circuslike atmosphere I’m already creating here. It’s also why we’re out here in the visitors’ parking lot instead of on the grounds themselves, and why I requested that no cameras be aimed toward the cemetery itself. But I did come to Arlington for a reason.”

Despite the weather, Kevin Martindale, standing on the running board of his armored Suburban, looked as groomed and polished as if he were in a television studio. In his early fifties, tall and handsome, a former two-time vice president and one-term chief executive, Martindale still looked every inch the political pro and commander in chief. He kept himself in good shape; he still dressed impeccably; he had shaved his beard and cut his hair for this appearance. The famous “photographer’s dream” was still there, even in the rain — the two locks of silver hair that automatically mirrored his mood. If he was angry, they curled menacingly across his forehead, as they did right now; when he was contented, they swept gracefully back across his salt-and-pepper mane.

“I asked you to meet me out here today so I might make an observation and an announcement,” Martindale said. “The weather happens to match my mood pretty well.

“Today is a very solemn anniversary: the twelfth anniversary of the last postwar combat deaths of Operation Desert Storm. Two weeks after the Iraqi army was decimated and a cease-fire was declared, a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter went down in bad weather over Kuwait, and six brave soldiers were lost. Some of those heroes are interred here in Section H at Arlington National Cemetery. That these losses happened at all is a huge tragedy, but to suffer such a loss after such a great victory against the Iraqi army makes the loss even more grievous.

“Yet it was a great victory for freedom. The mission to release Kuwait from the clutches of Saddam Hussein took only six weeks to accomplish; Iraq surrendered just one hundred hours after the ground war began, after being pummeled into submission by forty days of continuous aerial bombardment. Coalition forces lost just five hundred brave soldiers, against nearly one hundred thousand Iraqi casualties. It was clearly one of the most lopsided wars in history. Those soldiers’ deaths were tragic, but it was a mission I feel the United States needed to accomplish. They did not die in vain.

“I bring all this to your attention today to point out an alarming fact: that the United States does not now have the capability to perform that same fight for freedom,” Martindale went on. “The United States mobilized two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen in six months to fight that last battle. Today it would take us years to mobilize and move the same number of troops and send them halfway across the world to fight. We have no ground forces stationed overseas—none. We have a total of fifty thousand Marines deployed aboard ships around the world with aircraft-carrier battle groups. Those are the only ground forces that can respond to an emergency. We also happen to have two fewer aircraft-carrier battle groups operational, which in essence leaves one-fifth of the world unpatrolled at any given time.

“In addition, the forty-first president managed to commit, organize, mobilize, and direct another two hundred and fifty thousand troops from fifty-seven nations in the war against Saddam Hussein, including those from six Arabic-speaking nations and another seventeen Islamic nations,” Martindale continued. “The current administration has managed to ignore, cancel, violate, and abrogate dozens of treaties; it has alienated most of our allies, created distrust among the nonaligned world, and angered our enemies.

“Thomas Thorn continues to cut the size of the United States military at a ridiculous rate, especially our Army,” Martindale said, his voice rising in anger. “The Army is now one-half the size it was just two years ago, and it continues to shrink. The size of the Reserves and National Guard has increased, but the overall force is still one-third smaller. We have abrogated numerous mutual-defense and cooperation treaties with dozens of nations, most important among them the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which in my opinion has ensured the safety and security of the entire world for almost half a century. Thanks to Thomas Thorn’s shortsightedness, the United States is a friendless, futureless desert island hopelessly lost and forgotten in the sea of global geopolitical affairs. We are not adrift — we are being purposely and maliciously steered around every tragedy, every responsibility, and every crisis, all in the name of splendid isolationism. It is time for that policy to end.

“Now for my announcement: I am hereby announcing the formation of an exploratory committee to become the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States.”

Even from this group of Washington reporters, who had been hearing rumors about such an announcement for weeks, there was a loud murmur of surprise. Martindale’s aide stepped toward the former president, whispering in his ear that several networks wanted to go live with this press conference. Martindale turned from the podium for several moments as if adjusting his trench coat, but he didn’t need to do so — everyone in attendance knew what was happening. Less than ten seconds later the networks gave the sign that they were ready.

“I realize that the phenomenon of a former president who was in office, was defeated, and then successfully ran for office again hasn’t happened since Grover Cleveland did it in the 1880s,” Martindale went on after repeating his announcement. “Former U.S. presidents, especially in the postwar era, are expected to retire gracefully, refrain from active politics, go on the lecture circuit at a million dollars a pop, build their libraries and write their memoirs, and quietly accept the tributes and criticisms aimed at them, until they die.

“Well, that’s not my style. Since I left Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, I have been speaking out in Republican forums around the country and in many venues around the world, blasting the unorthodox and, frankly, rather bizarre policies of Thomas Thorn. But I’ve begun to realize that retired presidents who criticize seated presidents, especially those defeated by the ones they’re criticizing, are at best labeled sore losers. The public politely listens, then promptly ignores them. I realized that if I want my voice to be heard, I have to get out of retirement and get back in the game.

“My qualifications and background speak for themselves. As a former state attorney general and U.S. senator from the great state of Texas, I stood on a policy of engagement and open dialogue in all aspects of life and politics in America. As secretary of defense I advocated a strong national defense and engagement with all our enemies and potential adversaries, whether they be a few dozen terrorists or an international superpower. As vice president, I advocated the use of America’s military might in support of many national and foreign-policy issues, from border security to drug control to nuclear proliferation to counterterrorism. As the former president, despite a shrinking defense budget, I fought to build the most high-tech, cutting-edge military force possible.

“I stand before you now committed to rebuild the American military into the greatest peacetime force in the world. Under my leadership America will not retreat from its obligations. America will not disengage. We will use our technological superiority, our diversity, our values, and our spirit to once again take our rightful place as the leader and defender of the free world. With the blessing of God and the support of the American people, if I am nominated and elected, I promise to fight to restore America’s greatness.”

Martindale motioned toward the cemetery before him. The rains had stopped, and, as he concluded his remarks, the sun actually appeared through breaks in the clouds. His handlers could not have hoped for a better outcome to this press conference. “The shades of the heroes who lie in Arlington expect nothing less than strength, leadership, courage, and honor from the commander in chief,” he said. “I ask for your help to begin the campaign to bring leadership and honor back to the White House. Thank you, and God bless America.”

Unbidden and completely out of character, the reporters started to applaud. Martindale’s silver locks were back — the former president was on the warpath once again.

“I seriously think you need to have your head examined, General,” Secretary of Defense Robert Goff said. He was busy packing a briefcase, stuffing it with papers with short, angry stabs. Short, white-haired, what some might call puckish, Robert Goff was one of the United States’ leading military and international-affairs experts. If he had not already been a close friend, campaign manager, and adviser to President Thomas Thorn, his name would still have been at the top of Thorn’s or any president’s short list of candidates for secretary of defense. “Just a few months on the job, and now I’ve got to go to the White House and explain what in hell you were doing over Turkmenistan and why you found it necessary to crash a B-1 bomber on Diego Garcia after you were specifically ordered to ditch it.”

Standing at attention in the middle of Goff’s office were Major General Patrick McLanahan and Brigadier General Rebecca Furness. Both were still in sweat-stained flight suits. There had not even been time to get fresh uniforms. They’d been on the ground less than thirty minutes in Diego Garcia before being whisked out of there on a military jet transport, and in less than eighteen hours they were back in Washington. Standing at parade rest off to Goff’s right was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Venti, with a passive and completely unreadable expression on his young fighter-pilot face.

“I went to bat for you over this, Patrick,” Goff continued disgustedly. “The president gives you the newest combat wing in the U.S. military, weeks after you almost start a nuclear war in Libya….” He didn’t press the events during that period of time — because Patrick had lost both his brother and his wife during those battles in North Africa. “With no forward bases in Central Asia, we trusted you to take your unmanned aircraft over Afghanistan — avoiding overflying any populated areas or doing anything that could draw attention — and hunt down the Taliban raiders that have been stirring up trouble. You assured me that none of your manned combat aircraft would violate sovereign airspace.

“Instead, not only do you violate Pakistani airspace, but you throw in Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan as well for good measure! Then, to make matters worse, you ignore a direct order from superior officers and me and crash-land your plane on an important active runway instead of ditching it. So tell me, McLanahan — what in hell do I say to the president?”

“Sir, tell him that our mission was accomplished, we brought all of our aircraft home or had them destroyed beyond traceability, and all crew members returned home with only minor damage and injuries,” McLanahan replied.

“Are you trying to be funny?” Goff retorted. “Are you trying to make me look like a fool? You really expect me to go in front of the National Security Council and tell that to the president of the United States? Do you think he’ll find the humor in my statement after he reads the entire report that the director of Central Intelligence will undoubtedly give him and finds out what really happened?” Goff stared at McLanahan, who had his eyes caged straight ahead. “Well? I’ve got two minutes before I go. You’d better start talking — and fast.”

“Sir, the mission was a success,” McLanahan said. “Our mission was to locate, identify, track, and if necessary interdict that group of Taliban raiders that has been killing United Nations aid workers and Afghan government security forces. We were successful, and the systems we employed worked perfectly, until we were hit by ground fire, went out of control, and were in danger of crash-landing almost intact in Turkmenistan. The only way to retrieve the aircraft was to switch to line-of-sight radio control.” He didn’t need to explain what that was — Robert Goff was an industrialist and engineer and knew almost as much as any aerospace scientist.

“It was supposed to recall itself if there was a problem,” Goff said. “It was supposed to come back if it sustained any damage or lost contact with you.”

“I have no excuse for that, sir — I haven’t had time to analyze the data we were able to retrieve from the UCAV’s flight-control computers,” Patrick responded. “We couldn’t recall it or self-destruct it, and I knew we couldn’t just let it crash-land in Turkmenistan — our most sophisticated unmanned combat aircraft would be in the hands of the Russians or sold on the black market. No special-ops forces were available to retrieve it. The only choice I had was to dash across Pakistan and Afghanistan, reach it before it ran out of fuel, and hope it responded to direct line-of-sight commands instead of satellite-relay commands. Flying over Iran was unavoidable as well. We were able to reach it and get it turned around, but at the same time we were attacked by Turkmen air defenses. The drone was shot down, and we sustained damage to our aerial-refueling system. I thought we had enough gas to safely reach the runway.” He paused, then added, “I was right.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me, mister,” Goff said. “You were ordered by me to ditch that plane. Why did you ignore that order?”

“Sir, I felt an ejection and ditching under those circumstances would be hazardous to my crew, pose a danger to vessels and aircraft in the area, subject the United States to unnecessary security and negative publicity exposure, and result in unnecessary loss of a valuable military asset,” Patrick McLanahan replied. “I made a decision as senior officer on board the aircraft to attempt a landing. I felt the risk was minimal compared to an uncontrolled crash-landing at sea.”

“I don’t care what you felt or what you decided — you violated a direct order from several superior officers,” Goff said. “You could have caused unmentionable damage to that airfield and the aircraft parked there. Both of you could have been killed.” Goff looked at Venti, who had remained silent during this entire meeting. “Well, General Venti? What do you think we ought to do to these two?”

“Sir, I recommend the Air Medal be awarded to both Generals McLanahan and Furness for successfully completing a dangerous mission over hostile airspace, for bringing their crippled aircraft home, and for preserving and protecting the secrecy of their mission, even at considerable risk to their own lives,” Venti responded, a broad smile spreading across his face.

“Make it the Airman’s Medal. We can award that in peacetime, can’t we, General?”

“We can indeed, sir,” Venti replied happily.

“Good,” Goff said. “I’d make it the Distinguished Flying Cross, but I know that can’t be awarded in peacetime.” He enthusiastically shook hands with McLanahan and Furness. “Stand at ease. Damn fine job, you two. If either that drone or your B-1 went down anywhere in Central Asia, even Afghanistan, the president would’ve been embarrassed enough to make him consider resigning. Not that he ever would, of course, but he’d consider it for the good of the country. That means I’d be the one forced to resign. The situation is so screwed up over there, who knows what would have happened? Good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“General Venti says you want to send in a team to look at the wreckage of the drone, recover the critical components, and destroy the rest?”

“Yes, sir. The team is already in place aboard a salvage vessel in the Arabian Sea—”

“The ones that went in over Pakistan to divert attention away from you so you could escape?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got the location of the wreckage pinpointed fairly accurately by satellite — about fifty-five miles southwest of Kerki, about twenty miles south of the Kara Kum Canal. It’s uninhabited, but close enough for a patrol to go out searching for the wreckage. We need to get there first.”

“How soon can you have the team in?”

“The recovery team is standing by, sir. We’re ready to go in immediately if our satellites spot any activity near the crash site,” Patrick replied. “The rest of the team will be in place within twenty-four hours.”

“You want to go back there in twenty-four hours? That’s impossible. From what the CIA tells me, the Iranians and Pakistanis are still on full air-defense alert — hell, even CNN still has reporters in the area. It’s too hot to try a recovery effort now. You’ll have to wait until things calm down.”

“Our plan has taken that into account, sir,” Patrick explained. “Our plan calls for three aircraft plus Air Force tanker support. Two aircraft will be CV-32 Pave Dasher tilt-jets, based off our salvage ship in the Arabian Sea. One of them will be used as an aerial-refueling tanker — it’ll go three hundred miles inland with the leader, refuel him, and return to the ship. The lead aircraft will carry the recovery team — Sergeant Major Chris Wohl and three commandos.”

“Four commandos? That’s all?”

“Four Tin Men, sir,” Venti pointed out.

Goff nodded — he knew what just one of the Tin Men was capable of. “Almost sounds like overkill now,” he quipped. “I’m afraid to ask, but… what’s the third aircraft?”

“An EB-1C Vampire missile-attack aircraft,” Patrick responded.

“A Vampire bomber? The same one that you almost got shot down in over Turkmenistan?” Goff asked incredulously.

“The Vampire can attack air, ground, and even surface targets with the right mix of weapons,” Patrick said. “It’ll stay at high altitude and keep watch over the entire recovery team from launch to landing. It’s stealthy enough to stay out of sight by search radars, and it can defend itself if any fighters manage to get a lock-on and approach it.”

“For Pete’s sake…,” Goff muttered. He looked at Patrick and said, “I suppose you already have this Vampire in the theater?”

“Not quite, sir,” Patrick replied. “I’ve launched one EB-52 Megafortress attack plane, which will go on alert on Diego Garcia in about twelve hours, ready to respond in case the salvage vessel is threatened. I want to launch the EB-1C Vampire attack aircraft within forty-eight hours to be ready to go into the recovery area in case someone goes looking for the wreckage.”

Goff looked at General Venti. “Any other assets we can use in the region, General?”

“The Twenty-sixth Marine Expeditionary Unit can be within range in forty-eight hours,” Venti replied. “But flying nine hundred miles across four hostile countries is a long haul for them, and their support is all nonstealthy fixed-wing planes. They would be able to execute the plan within forty-eight hours, but I wouldn’t give them the same chance for success as General McLanahan’s troops.”

Goff shook his head — but soon relented. “All right, the mission is authorized. But let me be perfectly clear, General McLanahan: That drone is not worth a scratch on one man or woman’s little finger. If it looks too hot, I want your troops out. No downed aircraft, no captured troops, no screw-ups for the president to admit to on the evening news. It gets done perfectly or you don’t do it. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“General Venti also says you have a project you want me to consider — some new force concept you want to establish out there at Battle Mountain,” Goff said. “Well, first things first. You pull this one off, General, and you’ll have your chance to make your pitch to me and the White House. We’re up against an enormous budget crunch, as you know, but you know what the president and I like: state-of-the-art, cutting-edge stuff. Stretch the limits. Build in lots of redundancy, make it reliable and powerful, make it a definite force multiplier, and — most important — dazzle us. If you can do that, you’ve got a chance.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Goff looked at his watch. “Catch up with me, General. Congratulations for bringing your cripple home, you two.” He headed toward the door, then stopped and turned. “I don’t need to tell you both that you have lots of enemies in the administration and on Capitol Hill,” he said. “Unfortunately, your crash-landing on Diego Garcia will be considered a major screw-up, not a success. Blowing this recovery mission will probably put an end to everything you want to accomplish and everything you’re being considered for. Can you handle that, Patrick?”

“Yes, sir,” McLanahan replied with a smile.

The secretary of defense was definitely not smiling. “Try real hard not to screw this up, General,” Goff said seriously, and he hurried off.

“I’ve got your Air Battle Force proposal,” Richard Venti said, tapping a folder under the crook of an arm. “I want my staff to look it over first — might take a few days. We’ll have to do it by video teleconference when you get back.”

“I’d like to show you what we’ve done, sir,” Patrick said. “Instead of a videoconference, come on out to Battle Mountain and see for yourself.”

“How much time do you need?”

“One month, sir.”

Venti raised Patrick’s briefing folder. “One month — for all this?”

“I’ve hit the ground running, sir,” Patrick said. “We’ll put on a show for you that you won’t believe. All I need is a few people, and we’ll dazzle you.”

“Where’s your money coming from?”

“Most of it will come from HAWC, sir,” Patrick replied. HAWC was the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Elliott Air Force Base, Nevada, which tested high-tech weapons prior to their becoming operational. “Most of the aircraft and weapons still belong to HAWC. Once I get a real budget, I’d like to find funding for my own unit.”

“Where’s the rest of it coming from?”

“I thought it would come from the One-eleventh Wing,” Patrick said, turning and looking at Rebecca Furness. “Her unit owns the EB-1C Vampires, and their base up in Battle Mountain has the space to accommodate us.”

“General Furness? Are you in on this plan, too?”

Rebecca looked at Patrick but managed to reply without too much hesitation, “Absolutely, sir. We’re ready to help any way we can.”

“O-kay, if you say so,” Venti said, shaking his head. “I’ll brief SECDEF later on in the week — assuming there won’t be a hue and cry for our scalps from the NSC. The vice president has some kind of big trip planned to the West Coast in a few weeks. I’ll see if he wants us to work your demo into his itinerary. I’m sure SECDEF won’t want to miss it. If you can convince the VP, you’re in.” Venti grabbed his briefcase; McLanahan and Furness snapped to attention as he departed the room, hot on the secretary of defense’s heels.

Rebecca Furness looked completely deflated. “Oh, shit, I thought we were goners — again,” she breathed. “Christ, McLanahan, how in the hell do you get me into shit storms like this? And what in hell is this new Air Battle Force thing all about? I’m the wing commander out there, remember? Those are my planes, my troops, my budget, and my ass on the line, and I don’t even know what this is about!”

“Do you want me to get you involved in another ‘shit storm,’ Rebecca,” Patrick asked, “or don’t you?”

“Maybe if you’d let me in on your plans before the shooting starts or before the brass calls us on the carpet, I could help you keep things from degrading into deep, dark shit storms.”

“Rebecca, if I bring you in on this, my objective will be to upgrade our situation into a major deep, dark shit storm,” Patrick said. “At least it’ll be a major one for the bad guys.”

“Well, if you put it that way,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes in disbelief — and maybe a little apprehension, “how can I possibly refuse?”

A short time later

Since its formation in 1947, every U.S. president had treated the National Security Council in a different way. Some presidents, like Kennedy and Johnson, largely ignored the NSC except in the direst emergencies; others, like Eisenhower, treated it as an extension of the military; other presidents used the NSC as a clearinghouse for data from all the different departments; still others used it as a leash to try to keep the executive departments in line. Many times the NSC ran the foreign-affairs show; other times it was seen as just another bureaucratic hunk of sludge, slowing down the government machinery.

In 1961 President Kennedy appointed the first national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, and set him up in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House to monitor the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Although the National Security Council met only forty-nine times in Kennedy’s administration and was soon obviated by Kennedy’s “whiz kids” and Johnson’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” at that point the position of national security adviser was crafted and remained fairly similar….

Until the turn of the twenty-first century and President Thomas Nathaniel Thorn. This president never appointed a national security adviser; the National Security Council staff was reduced from over two hundred staffers to just four dozen. The other statutory members of the NSC — the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of Central Intelligence — used their own staffs to collect, distill, and analyze the mountains of information that poured into the White House every hour.

The national security adviser was not the only cabinet-level position never filled by Thomas Thorn — not by a long shot. The vice president, Lester Busick, acted as the president’s chief of staff and press officer; the secretary of defense, Robert Goff, was director of Homeland Security and was considered the de facto national security adviser and the president’s closest counsel. Several cabinet departments had been combined: the Department of Health and Human Services now included the Departments of Education, Veterans Affairs, Labor, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy; the Treasury Department now included the Commerce Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and the U.S. Trade Representative; the Department of the Interior now included the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, plus the Environmental Protection Agency. Because of this organization and the extreme degree of cabinet-level involvement with day-to-day government operations, the president kept in very close contact with all his cabinet officers each and every day.

President Thomas Thorn was a young man, in his late forties, quiet and unassuming. Married, with five children, Thorn was a former governor of Vermont and, before that, an ex — U.S. Army Green Beret who had served during Desert Storm, leading platoons of troops deep into Iraq to laser-mark targets for the F-117 stealth bombers that struck the first blows against Baghdad. Thorn was the founder and leader of the Jeffersonian Party and the first third-party candidate to be elected to the White House since Abraham Lincoln — and that was only the beginning of what had to be the most unusual administration anyone could remember.

Thomas Thorn was a true “techie” who made great use of computers, e-mail, and wireless devices to gather, analyze, and disseminate information. His usual style was to gather daily briefs from the cabinet secretaries and the military via secure e-mail, fire back questions and requests, and then get follow-ups. The cabinet officials had access to the president at any time, but the administration was now greatly decentralized — the secretaries were expected to handle situations and make decisions on their own, with only general thematic guidance from the president himself. The president’s chief of staff was not nearly as powerful as past holders of that office — he was little more than an assistant, trying to manage the president’s busy schedule and his voracious appetite for information.

Thomas Thorn treated the office of president of the United States as a sacred trust, putting his duties only a millimeter under his devotion to his family. He never took vacations, played no sports, had no hobbies, and only rarely used the Camp David retreat. Since the Jeffersonian Party was little more than a philosophy, a way of thinking devised, managed, and practiced only by Thomas Thorn himself, he had virtually no political apparatus behind him, so he rarely made campaign speeches and never went on fund-raising trips.

The National Security Council members met every Thursday morning at 7:00 a.m., usually in the Oval Office for routine matters, in the Cabinet Room for larger briefings, or in the Situation Room for crisis-management meetings; today the meeting was in the Oval Office. The outer-office secretary admitted the cabinet members all at once, and Thorn greeted them with a smile as he made final notes on his wireless PDA. “Seats, everyone, please,” he said. “Welcome.” The NSC members took their usual places at the chairs and sofas in front of the president’s desk, and a butler brought in each person’s preferred beverage. Thorn usually paced the office while the meeting was under way — although he virtually carried his life in the personal digital assistant, he rarely referred to it during meetings.

“You see Martindale’s press conference today?” Secretary of State Edward Kercheval asked no one in particular. “They did a ‘breaking news’ thing — I thought we’d dropped a nuke on China or something.”

“Brutal,” Vice President Lester Busick said. “The guy’s a nut. He’ll be the laughingstock of Washington in no time.”

“I didn’t think you were allowed to use Arlington National Cemetery for political events,” Darrow Horton, the attorney general, said. “Maybe I should check into that.”

Robert Goff, the secretary of defense and the president’s de facto chief political adviser, nodded in agreement. “Good idea,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be too concerned about Martindale. When word about some of the things he’s been doing over the past couple years starts leaking, he’ll have no choice but to pull out. The American people won’t stand for an ex-president who uses his office to carry out secret mercenary missions.”

“Let’s get started, shall we?” the president began as he put away his PDA. “I saw the item in this morning’s news on the fighting in Chechnya. What’s the latest?”

“A bit more aggressive Russian response to what they view as escalating extremism in that region, sir,” Director of Central Intelligence Douglas Morgan responded. He knew enough to get his coffee with three sugars fast, sit down, and be ready to go right away, because he was usually the first to be called on. “We’ve been watching that for many weeks now, since the shake-up in Moscow following the imprisonment of General Zhurbenko and the implication of President Sen’kov in dealing with Russian mobsters. Bottom line: Sen’kov is cracking down on any kind of dissent in the Russian Federation, using more strong-arm tactics to gain maximum advantage for Russia.”

“Sen’kov has an election scheduled for 2005—it’s as if he’s already on the campaign trail,” Kercheval added.

“I just wish he’d be a little less bloodthirsty about it,” the vice president added. “The press said twenty-seven killed….”

“We believe the number is much higher — and that’s just in the past week,” Morgan said. “The death toll could be as high as fifty. The Chechens have an equally high body count — perhaps as many as forty Russian soldiers killed, as many as a hundred wounded in attacks. We can expect the Russian military to continue to crack down.”

“The question is where,” Busick said.

“Wherever and whenever they can,” Morgan surmised. “They have a vast, fractured empire that I think they would dearly like to take back.”

“I agree,” President Thorn said. He noticed the secretary of state make a quiet sigh and start examining his fingertips. “Comment, Edward?” Thorn asked.

“You know the question, Mr. President: What would we do about it even if we knew what the Russians were going to do?” he asked. It was no secret or surprise to anyone that Edward Kercheval was not a big fan of the president and his policies. What was the big surprise was that Thorn kept Kercheval around — or that Kercheval deigned to be around. Brash, opinionated, and considered one of the most knowledgeable secretaries of state in the past fifty years, Kercheval knew his stuff. Many speculated that Thorn had him in his cabinet simply to keep Kercheval from having enough time to mount a campaign against him come election time. “You didn’t intervene in the Libya-Egypt conflict, and your role in the Russia-Balkan conflict was barely noticed. Chechnya seems way outside your attention zone, sir.”

“You’re right — I wouldn’t intervene in Chechnya,” Thorn said. “I wouldn’t intervene in any conflict involving Russia’s trying to quell any sort of uprising or revolution within its federation.”

“That’s certainly your prerogative, sir.” It was obvious from Kercheval’s tone of voice both that he expected the president to say as much and that he did not approve of that position. “However, sir, if you’re concerned that Russian aggression against its ethnic minorities might spill over to other countries, a course of action might be advisable.”

“I know you don’t think I’m showing much of a leadership role in world affairs, Edward,” the president said. “But I think it doesn’t make much sense to attempt to support the Chechen rebels when we’ve been uncovering some of those very rebels hitting United Nations peacekeeping convoys in Central Asia. Those are exactly the kinds of cross-efforts that I wish to avoid if at all possible.” Thorn turned to Morgan and asked, “Speaking of Central Asia, Douglas, what’s the latest there? We still have a few surveillance and counterterrorist operations running there, don’t we?”

“We currently don’t have any military or intelligence operations running in Central Asia, sir,” Director Morgan replied. “The last was Operation Hilltop, which was a recon-and-interdiction operation using unmanned combat aircraft to counter some Taliban raiders operating in northern Afghanistan.”

“That was run by Air Force General McLanahan and General Rebecca Furness from her new unit at Battle Mountain, Nevada,” Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Venti interjected. “His force successfully uncovered and attacked a force of approximately two hundred Taliban fighters that attacked the convoy. It was an operation conducted solely from the air, with assets operated by a single unit.”

“So McLanahan finally decided to join the right team?” Busick asked. He glanced at the president, who did not react to the comment. Busick knew that the president had given McLanahan and many of his men their military rank and privileges back after a series of privately run and financed military missions. In the president’s eyes McLanahan was a leader — but in Busick’s eyes he was nothing but a loose cannon.

“General McLanahan has built a unit comprised mostly of long-range aircraft and unmanned armed drones,” General Venti went on. “Cutting-edge stuff.”

“I feel a ‘but’ coming, General Venti,” Busick said.

“McLanahan’s mission was a success, but the Taliban fighters weren’t completely out of the fight,” CIA Director Morgan said. “Apparently it was survivors from that attack that raided a border-crossing base in Turkmenistan, killed the base commander and a number of Turkmen soldiers, and captured weapons and vehicles.

“After that those fighters moved north, first taking on a Turkmen army patrol and then raiding a helicopter cavalry unit near the town of Kerki. Almost two thousand Turkmen soldiers deserted their posts and joined with the Taliban. The raiders then moved east, capturing another military post at Gaurdak, where they obtained large quantities of weapons, including heavy armor, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and more light weapons, plus as many as three to five thousand more recruits and deserters. They have captured several oil-pumping stations, power plants, and water-control facilities, all of which are vital to that region. The force is now moving west along the river, consolidating their gains and creating very effective supply lines. Their route of march primarily follows the TransCal oil and gas pipelines along the river.”

“That’s smart. Not only can they easily find supplies along the river, but they protect themselves from attack,” General Venti interjected. “Anyone attacking them risks blowing up the lines.”

“Maybe it’s time to lend our support to the Republic of Turkmenistan to help wipe out these Taliban fighters,” Vice President Busick suggested. “After all, we’re partly to blame for what this group of fighters is doing.”

“I don’t think we can rely on any cooperation from Turkmenistan,” Secretary of State Kercheval said. “I’ve received complaints from several nations — Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, even Afghanistan — claiming illegal overflight by American warplanes. All of those nations are demanding an explanation.”

Busick turned to Robert Goff. “We were assured this mission was going to be completely stealthy and foolproof, Robert. What went wrong?”

“According to his report,” Defense Secretary Goff responded, “McLanahan lost control of one of his unmanned combat aircraft for unexplained reasons. He could regain control of it only by flying in close proximity to it — unfortunately, that happened to be several miles inside Turkmenistan. He was fired upon by Turkmen air defenses and sustained some damage to his aircraft but managed to bring it back to Diego Garcia. Minor injuries, minor damage.”

“So why is Iran squawking?”

“In order to catch up to his drone, he had to overfly eastern Iran,” Goff replied. “He was briefly highlighted by Iranian and Pakistani air defenses but was not discovered or attacked.”

“Good God,” Busick moaned. “All that for a lousy drone?”

“That drone was a multimillion-dollar unmanned attack vehicle representing the absolute state-of-the-art in sensors, secure satellite communications, and weapons,” General Venti said. “General McLanahan felt that it might crash-land intact when it ran out of fuel, so he took the chance and tried to retrieve it.”

“ ‘Tried’?”

“The drone was shot down by Turkmen air defenses,” Venti said. “Apparently it was not completely destroyed.”

“McLanahan wants to insert a special-ops team to retrieve any surviving critical components, and blow up the rest,” Goff added. “I authorized the mission. It’ll get under way in the next few days.”

“Keep me advised, Robert,” the president said.

“This is insane,” Secretary of State Kercheval said angrily. “None of this was approved by us at all. Something needs to be done about this McLanahan. What do you intend to do with him, Robert?”

“I intend to give him a commendation, Edward,” Goff said. Kercheval’s eyes bugged out in disbelief, so Goff hurried on. “That crew risked their lives to retrieve an important piece of military hardware and keep it from falling into the wrong hands. They sustained battle damage but still managed to bring their crippled aircraft back with no casualties. The citation to accompany the award writes itself.”

“You will not reward that maniac with a medal for violating international law!” Kercheval retorted.

The president raised both hands. “Enough, enough,” he said. “The decision to give out commendations will be made at a later time. As far as the incident involving unapproved overflight of certain nations — I intend to admit everything.”

“My God, Mr. President,” Kercheval said. “You… you can’t do that…!”

“I can and I will,” Thorn said. “I will say that in an effort to prevent Taliban raiders from attacking and destroying United Nations peacekeeping units in northern Afghanistan, the United States launched unmanned aerial patrol-and-attack aircraft from the Arabian Sea. When one of the drones sustained damage, to avoid endangering innocent lives on the ground and to avoid losing a valuable piece of military hardware, the on-scene commander elected to violate sovereign airspace in order to retrieve the drone. He flew his unarmed control aircraft across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan in an effort to retrieve it.” He turned to Goff. “The control aircraft was unarmed, wasn’t it, Robert?”

“Yes, sir. Defensive electronic transmitters only.”

“No lasers, subatomic weapons, plasma bombs, any of that other cosmic stuff McLanahan plays with on a regular basis?”

“I believe it uses lasers to blind incoming antiaircraft missiles,” Venti said, “but no offensive weapons of any kind.”

“What kind of aircraft was it?” Kercheval asked.

“A modified B-1 Lancer bomber called a Vampire.”

“Oh, God,” Kercheval muttered. “The same aircraft we lost in Russia?” He closed his eyes in horror when Goff nodded in the affirmative, then turned to Thorn and said, “Surely you can’t admit that—”

“Yes, I will,” Thorn said evenly. “I’ll prepare a statement for the ambassadors or foreign ministries that want an explanation, and we’ll prepare talking points for the staff when the press starts to ask about the incident — but only after McLanahan’s retrieval mission is completed.” Kercheval shook his head in confusion but decided there was nothing he could say to change the president’s mind. “Let’s move on.” Thorn again turned to his director of Central Intelligence. “Douglas, you wrote in a message this past week about some factors that might warrant increased involvement in Central Asia, especially Turkmenistan. Give us a rundown.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgan responded, withdrawing a thin briefing file from an attaché case. “Turkmenistan can potentially be a big powder keg. Turkmenistan is very much like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Libya were shortly after the discovery of oil — Turkmenistan’s true wealth and strategic importance are only now beginning to be realized, and it could potentially become a battleground because of its location in the crossroads of several different religious, political, and ethnic factions. Turkmenistan’s mineral wealth is probably on a par with that of any Persian Gulf nation, and it could possibly be the richest oil-producing nation on earth in a few years.”

“Say again, Douglas?” Vice President Busick interjected. “More oil than Saudi? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“That’s the consensus from our analysts,” Morgan confirmed. “It is believed that Turkmenistan’s oil and gas wealth equals Saudi Arabia’s, but Saudi’s currently producing wells will be depleted in less than ten years — Turkmenistan’s haven’t even begun to be exploited. They could be producing petro products fifty years after Saudi Arabia runs out of oil. At least four-fifths of that nation’s oil and gas reserves are unexplored, let alone untapped.”

“The Russians must realize what they lost when the Soviet Union broke apart and Turkmenistan became independent.”

“I’d agree,” Morgan said. “The Russians still have a few fighter bases in Turkmenistan, and the Turkmen still use Russian officers on contract for their own military. But living and working in Turkmenistan was considered a hardship tour for the Russians — never more than ten percent of the population was Russian, and we know that the climate in Turkmenistan is so inhospitable that even the Russians had a hard time extracting oil and natural gas from there — and the Russians have developed oil fields in nasty places like Siberia.”

“But oil has a funny way of bringing out the worst in governments,” the president mused. “Go on, Douglas.”

“From 1985 to 2002, Saparmurad Niyazov was in charge of the country, initially as the Soviet first secretary and then as its president,” Morgan went on. “He played all sides and swung with the winds more than a weather vane in a tornado. He was a staunch Russian supporter when the Russians controlled the government; when the Soviet Union broke apart and nationalist forces started to gain in strength, Niyazov became a nationalist — replacing Russian with Turkmen as the official language, setting up Muslim religious schools, and so on. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan and threatened to take over some fundamentalist provinces in the east, Niyazov brought some pro-Taliban mullahs into his government. He ruled with an iron fist. Every member of the Turkmen parliament had to be approved by the president; the president appointed his own censors and editors in every media outlet in the country — the list goes on and on. It was Niyazov who inked the big TransCal oil deal, the first large-scale production deal in Turkmenistan and potentially one of the wealthiest oil deals in history.

“Niyazov finally retired in 2001 and held elections, but there was only one candidate: Kurban Gurizev, the leader of their parliament and deputy chairman of the Democratic Party, what used to be the Communist Party. Like Niyazov, he ruled with absolute authority. He continued to outlaw opposition parties, had to approve all candidates for public office, and created a virtual police state. He is strongly antiforeigner, anti-Muslim, and staunchly pro-Russian.”

“The military must hate Gurizev,” Goff observed.

“The Turkmen military is practically nonexistent,” Morgan said. “Maybe forty thousand troops in all, including paramilitary and reserves; four-fifths conscripts, lots of ex-Soviet equipment in very poor condition. Most of the officer corps is Russian — the officers who wanted to stay simply kept their posts and are being paid by the Turkmen government. Naturally, they have the best equipment.”

“I wonder who they take their orders from once the shit starts hitting the fan?” Busick asked.

“My bet would be with Russia,” Morgan said. “Kurban Gurizev was born and educated in Russia, not Turkmenistan — we think Kurban is not his real first name, but an adopted Turkmen name, part of Niyazov’s nationalist movement. He speaks no Turkmen. He had been known to butt heads with Niyazov on occasion in matters dealing with oil and gas development. Gurizev thought it best to maintain close ties between Russia’s oil infrastructure and Turkmenistan; Niyazov signed agreements with several different developers at the same time. Turkmenistan has deals with several Western companies to transport oil and gas across Afghanistan to Pakistan, with Azerbaijan to transport oil to the Black Sea, with Russia to transport oil to Russia, and even with Iran to transport oil to the Arabian Sea. On the face of it, it’s pretty smart. They get money from several sources and can supply oil to markets around the world regardless of geopolitical concerns. Although there are several development projects ongoing in Turkmenistan, in various states of progress, right now the country exports oil only to Russia, at cut-rate prices.”

“I think it would be a good idea to start monitoring events in Turkmenistan — perhaps put some intelligence assets on the ground,” Kercheval said. “My concern is the ongoing oil projects by Western, primarily American, companies — we don’t want them in the way if the Russians decide to move back in or, worse, if they storm on in, like they tried to do in the Balkans.” He turned to Franklin Sellers, the secretary of the treasury who served also as the secretary of commerce and the U.S. trade representative in the Thorn administration. “Can I get a briefing on the status of any approved projects in Central Asia, Franklin?”

“Sure, Edward.” Sellers, a former vice chairman of Nasdaq, was one of the youngest ever to hold that position; he was also, along with Secretary of Defense Robert Goff, one of the few members of Thorn’s Jeffersonian Party serving in the cabinet. “Just off the top of my head, the current project that I’m most familiar with is TransCal Petroleum’s proposed three-billion-dollar oil and natural-gas line that would pump and ship oil and gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to ports in Pakistan. With the elimination of the Taliban from Afghanistan, their project is back on. They also have a one-billion-dollar project to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Uzbekistan for the Central Asian and Indian markets — this one was designed to placate India, who was upset with the idea of the U.S. involved in a project that could make Pakistan rich.” He paused, then added, “From a political aspect, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to back TransCal’s projects either, sir. I think they could be very valuable financial supporters for the upcoming reelection campaign.”

“I’m not concerned about the reelection campaign, Franklin,” Thorn snapped. “My job is to do what’s best for the nation, not for TransCal.”

Sellers nodded and fell quiet, then glanced over at Robert Goff with an unspoken question. Robert Goff nodded that he understood Sellers’s query but indicated that he wanted to wait. “However,” Goff interjected, “I think the United States government has a duty to get involved if a foreign government reneges or interferes with the performance of a contract, or if that government is unable to protect the U.S. company from outside interference or from danger to American citizens working overseas. I think that’s what I’m hearing from State and Intelligence — that the Taliban’s actions and Russia’s possible reaction could threaten U.S. citizens and interests in Turkmenistan.”

“That’s a pretty long stretch, in my estimation,” Thorn said. “Companies like TransCal take a risk by investing in countries like Turkmenistan. I won’t automatically commit troops to action in Turkmenistan simply to protect an American company’s risky overseas investment. If Gurizev cancels the contract or Russian troops move into Turkmenistan on Gurizev’s invitation and shut down work on TransCal’s pipelines, I’m not going to send in the Marines to take it back. Let’s move on. Next I want to hear—”

“Excuse me, Mr. President, but is that going to be your official public position — that the U.S. won’t protect American interests in Turkmenistan or anywhere else in the world?” Secretary of State Kercheval asked incredulously. “With all due respect, sir — what kind of policy is that?”

“It’s a realistic one,” Thorn said. “It’s a responsible one. I’m not going to force any country to sell oil to the United States, and I’m not going to send American fighting men and women to protect a company’s right to make money overseas. If it’s too dangerous to be in the business of drilling and shipping oil in Turkmenistan, then perhaps we shouldn’t be over there doing it.”

“Sir, it’s dangerous only because terrorists or authoritarian governments are interfering,” Kercheval argued. “American companies spend billions of dollars developing business opportunities in countries like Turkmenistan — they expect and deserve a return on their investment, and they expect and deserve some protection from their government. It’s in the Constitution you so love to quote, Mr. President: ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… ‘ “

“That’s in the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Kercheval, not the Constitution,” Thorn corrected him.

“Whatever,” Kercheval said. Thorn blinked in surprise at the “whatever” thrown out so flippantly at him by his secretary of state — to Thorn, confusing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was a very big deal — but he did not interrupt. Kercheval knew that arguing the contents of American historical documents with Thomas Nathaniel Thorn was a losing battle. “The point, sir, is that the U.S. government has an obligation to protect its citizens and ensure stability and free enterprise.”

“We have had this discussion many times in the past, Edward,” the president said with a hint of exasperation. This surprised Robert Goff, the man who knew Thomas Thorn the best. Normally, Thorn was the most patient man he had ever known. He could debate any issue in any venue, day or night, and be assured of winning almost every point. Now, in a forum where discussion and consensus were most important, he seemed impatient and unwilling to talk. “As the commander in chief, I am not interested in sending U.S. troops overseas to force any leader or regime to do business with the United States. If Turkmenistan fails to live up to its obligations, TransCal should pull out—”

“ ‘Pull out’? Mr. President, TransCal has invested billions in building those oil and gas lines in Turkmenistan,” Kercheval argued. “They’d lose it all if the government there suddenly decides to renege—”

“Edward, let’s table this discussion for the time being,” the president said. “I’m ordering no action in Turkmenistan for now. If contracts between American companies and the Turkmen government are violated, I’ll have the attorney general’s office expedite handling of lawsuits and trade sanctions. Otherwise we do nothing. I would like position papers on this topic submitted to the vice president as soon as possible. End of discussion.”

“My objections are on the record, sir?” Kercheval asked.

“Yes. Next matter: Chinese intentions in the South China Sea. What do we have on this?”

The meeting lasted another hour, with the same pattern: the latest intelligence information, the usual lively, sometimes heated discussions, followed by a general policy statement from the president. Edward Kercheval grew quieter and quieter as the meeting went on.

And the president, vice president, and secretary of defense found out why, moments after everyone else had departed.

“Mr. President, I regret to inform you that I cannot any longer support your administration and your policies, and I intend to submit my resignation to you immediately,” Kercheval said formally, standing almost at attention in front of the president’s desk.

Busick and Goff wore completely stunned expressions. Finally Busick spluttered, “For Christ’s sake, Edward, what in hell do you want to do that for?”

“Edward, there’s no need to resign,” President Thorn said, holding up a hand to silence Busick. “I fully intend to do something to protect our interests in Central Asia — as soon as we reach a consensus about where our interests lie. For now my decision is to do nothing. I expect everyone to contribute to the discussion. Lester will put it all together for me, and I’ll make a decision. But I’m not going to act without careful deliberation.”

“Mr. President, I don’t expect you to act precipitously,” Kercheval said. “But I do expect you to issue some sort of statement declaring your support for American interests in Turkmenistan.”

“The president does support American interests, in Turkmenistan and everywhere in the world,” Robert Goff interjected. “Why issue such a statement just for Turkmenistan?”

“Goff’s right, Ed. There’s nothing going on in Turkmenistan yet,” Vice President Busick emphasized. “You heard Morgan — a few Taliban runnin’ around doesn’t mean all of TransCal’s investments go up in smoke. Relax, for Christ’s sake. Don’t get flustered here.”

Kercheval ignored them all. “Mr. President, I find I simply can’t support your foreign-policy decisions. It’s not just Turkmenistan; it’s your policy regarding our alliances, our treaty commitments, our military, and our overall guardianship of peace in the world. I was happy for the first few years to mouth your words in place of my own. I feel I can no longer do that.”

Thomas Thorn looked at Kercheval for a long moment, then nodded. “I understand, Edward,” he said.

“How do you wish me to depart, sir?”

“Nominate your replacement. Give us time to talk to him, check him out, and let him meet and greet the folks in Congress,” the president said. “Once we have a good solid core group of senators warming up to him, you can depart.”

“Yeah, you can tell the press you have some unexplained brain disorder,” Busick muttered.

“Mr. Busick—”

“It’s all right, Mr. President. I suppose I deserve that,” Kercheval said. He glared at Busick and added, “I expected nothing else.” Busick scowled at him but said nothing. “And I expected nothing less from you, sir. Even under adversity you are a gentleman. I intend to nominate Deputy Secretary of State Maureen Hershel as my replacement, and I will prepare a perfectly plausible and palatable explanation for my departure.” He shook hands with Thorn, nodded to Goff and Busick, and departed.

“Snake,” Busick said under his breath.

“Lester, have Miss Hershel come see me right away.” Busick nodded. He was familiar with her. Maureen Hershel was a career State Department official and an expert on many different facets of running the department, from administration to operations.

“What a damned prick,” Busick exclaimed as he picked up the telephone beside him.

“Those comments will cease immediately,” Thorn ordered. “Keep them to yourself. Edward Kercheval was a valuable and trusted member of this administration and is still a good friend and a great American. He follows his heart and his conscience, as we all do, but that doesn’t diminish his loyalty to his country or his service and dedication to this administration.”

“Mr. President, no one who takes an oath to serve the administration resigns except under extreme personal crisis,” Busick said as he waited to be put through to Hershel’s office. “In other words, he had better be on his deathbed or a convicted ax murderer if he wants to bail before the end of a term. He serves at the pleasure of the president, not at his own personal pleasure. He resigns only to save the administration the embarrassment of kicking him out or prosecuting him. Edward is an experienced Washington player — he knows what he’s doing. This will look bad for him, but it will look very, very bad for us.”

“Hershel is a good choice,” Goff said. “Former FBI, very good credentials, good background, lots of international experience.”

“She’s a babe, I know that,” Busick remarked. Goff nodded agreement, even though he knew that the president would not approve of such locker-room talk. “Well, at least Kercheval did something right. But Jesus — a year before the election, and Kercheval punches out. The only thing that’s going to save our political butts now is if he develops a brain tumor or rectal cancer or something.”

“Lester, let’s move on,” Thorn said. “Edward resigned. We’ve got a good and experienced replacement for him. I’m not concerned about the political fallout right now. Tonight, after the paperwork is cleared up and the phone stops ringing, I’ll start worrying about the politics.”

Robert Goff stayed behind after the vice president departed. He walked with the president to his study, adjacent to the Oval Office. “Mr. President, I think we need to sit down and have a talk with Kercheval,” Goff said. “Invite him to dinner in the residence. Feel him out, find out what he wants.”

“I think I know what he wants, Robert,” Thorn said. “He wants me to act more like a traditional president. He wants me to be engaged in world affairs, not passive. I respect that. But I can’t do it his way. He has every right to quit.”

“No, he doesn’t have a right to quit,” Goff insisted. “The vice president said it: Accepting a cabinet post is a position of trust and responsibility, not only to you but to the government. There are times and ways to leave the post — in case of illness or between terms. Resigning just because you disagree with a particular policy is not right.”

“I’m sorry he resigned, and I know it’ll be hard on us, especially with an election coming up,” Thorn said, “but it can’t be helped. Let’s get his replacement up to speed as soon as possible, and I’d like to speak with the leadership so we can get through the confirmation hearings quickly.”

“They’ll be waiting for you, that’s for sure,” Goff said. “Thomas, let me make a suggestion—”

“All right, Robert, I’ll call Edward and find out if he wants to meet and talk,” the president said resignedly. “But I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

“I was going to suggest something else,” Goff said. “Morgan seems pretty sure of something stirring over in Central Asia. I know you said you don’t feel that events in Turkmenistan warrant sending American troops….”

“That’s right. I don’t.” The president looked at Goff. “But you’re not talking about troops — you’re talking about something else. Robot planes, perhaps?”

It was scary, Robert Goff thought, to consider how intelligent Thomas Thorn was. A guy with a mind and a body as sharp as his would make a very, very dangerous adversary. “We’ve scheduled a campaign swing out west anyway for next week — that Lake Tahoe environmental forum speech, followed by appearances in Reno, San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and L.A. I suggest we make a stop prior to arriving in Reno.”

“Battle Mountain?”

Goff nodded. “General McLanahan did a great job standing up that unit so fast,” he said. “His first mission over Afghanistan was a success, despite what Morgan suggested. I authorized a mission to recover the drone shot down out there, and I predict that’ll be a success, too.”

“I agree, and I’m proud of McLanahan. He’s suffered a tremendous loss recently, he’s suddenly become a single parent, yet he’s worked hard and done well,” the president said.

“I know we’ve already got the travel schedule built,” Goff said, “but McLanahan might be able to give you some options in case we do need to conduct operations over there.”

“I don’t foresee conducting any military operations in any of the ‘Stans, Robert,” the president said. “But… you are considering McLanahan’s facility as an alternate national command center, correct? Battle Mountain is the underground air base, right?”

“It certainly is,” Goff replied, smiling. “And it does have a very sophisticated communications system — extensive satellite earth stations, microwave, extremely low frequency — for communications with their robot aircraft. It’s also far from any other major target complexes or population centers, and it has a twelve-thousand-foot-long runway — the facilities to handle the Airborne National Command Post as well as Air Force One. It would make an ideal alternate command center.”

“Then get together with Lester and build in a visit,” the president said. “I imagine you’ll get a briefing from him beforehand on his Afghanistan operation and his take on the situation in Central Asia. If you think I’ll need to hear his report, build that into the schedule, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Goff replied. He paused and then looked carefully at his friend. “You don’t need an excuse to go talk to your troops, Thomas.”

“I know.”

“You also don’t have to come up with excuses to visit a military base just so you don’t appear as if you’re placating Edward Kercheval.”

“Do you think that’s what I’m doing?”

“I think you’re more disappointed than you let on about losing him,” Goff observed. “It’s important to you to give your cabinet a lot of responsibility, but it’s also important to show you’re in charge.”

“Do you think I rein Kercheval in too much?”

“Kercheval is a type A, action-oriented guy, Thomas,” Goff replied. “He’s also accustomed to being in charge. Secretaries of state in recent years have been very powerful individuals. Kercheval probably wishes he were as powerful and influential as Madeleine Albright, James Baker—”

“Or Robert Goff.”

“Or Robert Goff,” he echoed. “I encourage you to talk with Kercheval, sir, even though I know you won’t. There are plenty of folks just as well qualified as he. I only wish we didn’t have to take the flak I think we’re going to get.”

Damn, it was good to be alive, Anatoliy Gryzlov thought happily. He clasped his copilot on the shoulder and headed aft to stretch, have a cigarette, and enjoy life a bit before things got busy again.

Air Force General Anatoliy Gryzlov liked to get out of the office at least once a month and fly. With training hours in short supply, it was a luxury even most Russian general officers could not manage. But Gryzlov was different: Because he was the deputy minister of defense for the Russian government and the chief of the general staff of the military forces of the Russian Federation, he got everything he wanted. The troops loved seeing the former bomber pilot, test pilot, and cosmonaut at their base, and they were absolutely thrilled to see the fifty-nine-year-old chief of the general staff take command of a mission.

Unlike many Russian military men, Gryzlov was slight of stature, slender, and quick, with light brown hair cut short — he actually looked good in a flight suit, even a bulky winter-weight one. He found it easy to maneuver inside his favorite aircraft, the famed Tupolev-160 long-range strategic bomber, the one the West called the “Blackjack” bomber. Originally designed to attack the United States of America with nuclear weapons, the Tu-160 was still by far the world’s largest attack aircraft. Capable of supersonic dash speeds in excess of two thousand kilometers per hour at midaltitude and near-supersonic speeds at terrain-following altitude, the Tupolev-160 could deliver as many as twelve cruise missiles or a total of more than forty thousand kilograms of weapons at unrefueled ranges of well over fourteen thousand kilometers. Only forty were built, but the little wing at Engels Air Base near Saratov, six hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow, was the pride of the Russian air force.

Gryzlov made his way back from the cockpit and sat in the instructor’s seat between the navigator/bombardier and defensive-systems officers, who sat side by side in their ejection seats behind the two pilots. Although the Tu-160 was a dream to fly, and the best seat in the house was definitely the cockpit — except during landing, when the long nose and very high approach and landing speeds made landing the Blackjack very, very hairy — all the action was back here. He stopped at the “honey bucket” in the rest area between the pilots’ and systems officers’ compartments and took a pee, glancing wryly at the toilet-paper holder hanging on a wire next to the bucket — the only piece of wood, it was said, carried aloft on a Russian attack plane.

The systems operators’ compartment was dark but spacious — there was even enough room for beach chairs and ice chests back here for very long flights, although they were not needed on this one. “How is it going, Major?” Gryzlov asked cross-cockpit.

“Very well, sir,” Major Boris Bolkeim, the navigator/bombardier, replied. He gave the DSO, or defensive systems officer, a swat on the shoulder, and the other man hurriedly safed his ejection seat and started to unstrap so Gryzlov could sit there. But Gryzlov shook his hand at the DSO to tell him to stay put and instead took the jump seat. “Twenty minutes to initial point. The system’s doing well.”

“Any warning broadcasts, Captain?”

“None, sir,” responded Captain Mikhail Osipov, the defensive systems officer. “All known frequencies are silent. I’m a little surprised.”

“Hopefully it means everyone’s done his job,” Gryzlov said. Bolkeim offered Gryzlov a Russian cigarette, but the chief of staff took out a pack of Marlboros, and both he and the DSO accepted hungrily. As they smoked, they chatted about the mission, the military, their families at home. It was just like old times, Gryzlov thought — taking a break before the action started, talking about everything and nothing in particular. This was the part of the job he really enjoyed, getting out into the field with the troops, having a little fun, and doing some serious business at the same time. Sure, he was showing his stars, too, but that wasn’t the main reason he did it.

It was not a particularly good time to be chief of the general staff. Anatoliy Gryzlov was unlucky enough to take over the position from the disgraced and imprisoned Valeriy Zhurbenko, who had tried to make a deal with a Russian mobster to force a number of Balkan states to agree to allow the mobster, Pavel Kazakov, to build a pipeline through their country. Gryzlov was nothing more than a politically expedient choice — he was a highly decorated and capable but profoundly unpolitical air force officer — just the way the Russian parliament wanted it.

Unfortunately, that also meant he was no friend of anyone in the Kremlin, especially the president, Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov. So far that didn’t seem to make too much difference. Sen’kov was lying low, reluctant to poke his nose out of the Kremlin too far for fear of its getting bitten off by some zealous — or jealous — politician. Things were just plain stagnant in Moscow these days. There was no money to do anything — which was fine with most folks, since no one really wanted to do much of anything anyway.

But Gryzlov wanted something more. Gryzlov was a former Russian air force interceptor pilot, flight test pilot, and astronaut. With his gymnast’s physique, he exuded energy — and he saw most of his energy going to waste in the eyes of his troops, everyone from generals to the lowliest clerks and cooks.

A perfect example of the lack of Russian determination: Chechnya. The little Russian enclave in southern Russia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, had already been granted limited autonomy by the Russian government, yet the Muslim separatists there still held considerable power and still performed acts of terrorism throughout Russia, especially in neighboring Dagestan province. The separatists were being openly supported by the pro-Muslim governments of nearby Azerbaijan, who in turn were funded and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

The place was still a Russian province, for God’s sake. And with just a few hundred thousand people in all of the province of Chechnya, most of whom lived in the major cities of Grozny and Gudermes, and very few resources except for the fertile farmlands in the east. It should be simple, Gryzlov thought, to crush the Chechen rebels no matter how much support they were getting from overseas. But the terrain was very rugged in the south, which made it easy for guerrillas and terrorists to covertly move out of the country into Dagestan and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

That’s why, when reliable intelligence information came in about rebel movements, it was important to react quickly. Sending in ground forces was almost always a waste of time — the rebels knew the mountains better than the military did. Helicopter gunships were effective, but the rebels had every known or suspected full- or part-time helicopter base within five hundred kilometers under constant surveillance. If a single helicopter moved, the rebels knew about it instantly.

The best way to deal with the rebels was by air from well outside the region. Anatoliy Gryzlov preferred the long-range bombers. Not because he was a former bomber pilot, but because they were the most effective weapon system for the job — as long as the political will to use them still existed. He was determined to spark that political will. He wanted nothing more than to begin an era of Russian military dominance in all of Central Asia and Europe — starting with the breakaway province of Chechnya.

“Ten minutes to initial point,” the bombardier announced.

“General?” the pilot called back on intercom.

“I’ll stay back here,” Gryzlov said. The spare pilot took the copilot’s seat, and Gryzlov tightened his shoulder straps in the jump seat and got ready for the action.

Large numbers of rebel forces had been detected moving north from the Republic of Georgia along the Caucasus Mountains between Dagestan and Chechnya. They had been untouchable and virtually untrackable until they were most likely forced to leave the protection of the mountains — driven out, no doubt, by the freezing temperatures and unbearable living conditions of the mountains — and moved into the small mining town of Vedeno, just sixteen kilometers north of the provincial border. The force was estimated at about two to three thousand — a very large force to be traveling together. Not all were fighters, perhaps four or five hundred; the rest were family members and support personnel.

“Initial point in one minute,” the navigator/bombardier announced. He checked his inertial navigation system’s drift rate — less than two miles per hour, pretty good for this system. He made the final radar update and zeroed out all of the system’s velocity errors, then dumped the latest alignment, heading, position, and velocity information to the twenty-four Kh-15 short-range attack missiles they carried in the bomber’s two huge bomb bays.

The plan was simple: first cut it off, then kill it.

At the initial point the bombardier began launching the missiles. One by one, each 1,200-kilogram missile dropped from its rotary launcher, ignited its solid-rocket motor, and shot off into space. A protective coating kept the missile safe as it flew at over twice the speed of sound up to fifteen thousand meters altitude, then started its terminal dive on its targets.

The first twelve missiles, carrying 150-kilogram high-explosive warheads, hit bridges and major intersections of the roads leading in and out of the rebels’ sanctuary at Vedeno. Since the missiles had a range of almost ninety kilometers, no one on the ground had any warning of the attack. Five other Tu-160 Blackjack bombers also launched their missiles around the outskirts of Vedeno from long range, blasting away at known vehicle-marshaling areas, storage facilities, hideouts, and encampments outside the town.

The second phase of the attack didn’t commence for ten minutes. The reason was simple: The rebels’ typical pattern when under attack was to leave their families behind in town and try to escape into the mountains. In ten minutes they should just be discovering that their escape routes had been cut off — leaving them out in the open. At that moment the Tu-160s opened up their aft bomb bays.

And the real carnage began.

All the aft bomb bays carried twelve more Kh-15 missiles on rotary launchers, but the warheads on these contained fuel-air explosive devices. Explosive fuel was dispensed in a large cloud about two hundred meters aboveground and then ignited, creating a massive fireball over three hundred meters in diameter that instantly incinerated anything it touched. And each missile was targeted not just for the outskirts of Vedeno but for the town itself.

Within moments the place that was once the city of Vedeno was completely engulfed in fire. Over four square kilometers were leveled and burned instantly, and the overpressure caused by the multiple fuel-air explosions destroyed anything within seven square kilometers. The only thing left standing was the Caucasus Mountains, completely denuded of all vegetation and wiped clean of snow, with immense blankets of smoke and steam rising into the night sky.

“Good job, everyone,” Gryzlov said. He shook hands with the systems officers, then returned to the copilot’s seat. The pilot was just checking in the rest of the formation — all aircraft in the green, all aircraft released live weapons, all aircraft returning to base. “Excellent job, everyone,” Gryzlov radioed on the secure command frequency to the other bombers in the formation. “I’m buying the first round back home.”

Air Force Colonel Daren Mace decided to drive his beat-up Ford pickup into town to look around before heading out to the base. The town of Battle Mountain was hardly more than a dusty bump in the road off Interstate 80 in northern Nevada. With the construction of the Air Reserve base, several civilian construction projects were also under way — a large chain hotel and casino, a sizable truck stop, several apartment buildings, and a small single-family-home subdivision — but even after three years since construction began on the base, the town had changed very little. It still had its old, isolated, mining-town rough edge.

Closing in on the big five-oh, Daren Mace had recently turned into the world’s biggest health freak, which for him was a complete one-eighty from his previous lifestyle. Not long before, his favorite hangout for everything from mission planning to dating to doing his taxes was in a tavern somewhere — he was such a fixture in some of his favorite places that he could often be seen serving drinks or repairing equipment in his spare time. But then he found himself needing glasses for reading, found his flight suits getting a little tight around the middle, so he started an exercise regime. Now every day started off with a run. His consumption of beer, cigarettes, and pizza also declined, as did his blood pressure and cholesterol count, so he was able to maintain the same lean, trim figure he’d had most of his adult life, even though he was getting more and more deskbound in his military career.

Sure, the hair was turning grayer, and he was popping aspirins almost every morning to counteract the unexpected little aches he’d encounter. But those were all signs of maturity — weren’t they?

Maturity was never one of his strong suits in the past. Born and raised in Jackpot, Nevada, several hours’ drive northeast of Battle Mountain, the younger Mace found that his main concerns usually involved staying one step ahead of his strict parents, the game wardens during his many illegal hunting trips in the high desert, the fathers of his various love interests, and — first on the list — getting the hell out of back-country Nevada. The Air Force was his ticket out.

His twenty-three-year Air Force career wasn’t all aches and pains. Because of his exceptional knowledge, his skills, and his ability to think, plan, and execute quickly and effectively, Mace was one of the youngest aviators ever chosen to fly the FB-111A “Aardvark” supersonic strategic bomber, at a time when there were only forty of the long-range nuclear-armed bombers in the Air Force inventory and only six navigators per year chosen from the entire force to serve on them. He didn’t disappoint. He was not only a knowledgeable and hardworking bombardier and crew member, but he took the time to study the aircraft, all its systems, and its incredible capabilities. Mace soon became known as the primary expert in all facets of the “Go-Fast” supersonic strike aircraft.

So in 1990, during Operation Desert Shield, Daren Mace was the natural choice for one of the most important and dangerous missions conceived as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the tensions created in the Middle East — the American response to an all-out nuclear, chemical, or biological attack by Iraq or one of the other hostile nations against U.S. forces in the region. Should such an attack take place, Mace’s mission was to take off in his FB-111A bomber from a secret air base in eastern Turkey and launch thermonuclear-tipped missiles at four of Iraq’s most important underground command-and-control centers, all in one mission.

On January 17, 1991, the Iraqis attacked Israel with a SCUD rocket armed with what was thought to be a chemical-weapon warhead, and several more SCUDs hit areas of Saudi Arabia, close to where American troops were garrisoned. Mace and his squadron commander took off from Batman Air Base in Turkey on their deadly mission to stop the Iraqi war machine from launching any more weapons of mass destruction. Loaded with four three-thousand-gallon fuel tanks and four AGM-69A short-range attack missiles tipped with three-hundred-kiloton thermonuclear warheads, they zoomed in at treetop level under cover of darkness, at full military power or greater the whole way. They received the execution order: It would be America’s first nuclear attack since World War II.

Except it hadn’t been a chemical-weapon attack. It was determined that the Iraqi warhead did not contain chemical or biological weapons — the rocket had hit a dry-cleaning facility, and the chemicals released from inside the building mimicked chemical weapons. Within minutes an abort code was sent to the strike aircraft.

Moments before launch, the crew received a coded message. There was no time to decode it before launch, and they already had a valid strike order authorizing them to launch their missiles — but Mace canceled the attack anyway. Legally, procedurally, he should have fired his nuclear missiles. Instead Mace used his common sense and his gut feeling and aborted.

Now deep inside enemy territory, flying right over Iraq’s most sensitive military areas, the crew had relied on the nuclear strike to help them escape. Without it they were in the fight of their lives. With no fighter protection, low on fuel, and heavily loaded with dangerous weapons, they were attacked mercilessly with every weapon in the Iraqi air-defense arsenal. Mace’s aircraft commander was badly injured and his plane shot up and flying on one engine. Mace managed to do an emergency refueling with a KC-10 aerial refueling tanker that had crossed the Iraqi border to do the rendezvous before the FB-111 flamed out, then crash-landed his plane on a highway in northern Saudi Arabia.

In anyone’s book, in any other situation, Mace would’ve been a hero. Instead he was ostracized as the bombardier who couldn’t follow orders and had lost his nerve. He was bounced from assignment to assignment, squirreled away in remote operational locations, and then finally offered a Reserve commission. His fitness reports were always “firewalled”—meaning he always got the highest marks on job performance — but he was never considered for any command assignments, never believed to have the right stuff to command a tactical unit. His last assignment was as a protocol officer in the secretary of defense’s office, where he’d been relegated to escorting VIPs and running errands for the honchos in the Pentagon.

Battle Mountain seemed to be the newest “squirrel’s nest” for him.

Daren always seemed to gravitate toward bars and taverns located on the wrong side of town, and he did so again that night. There were four very small casinos in Battle Mountain, one open-all-day restaurant and eight that were open part-time, eight motels, four gas stations, and one truck stop. The truck stop had billiard tables, friendly waitresses, good burgers… and, next door, a brothel.

Donatella’s looked nothing like the hundreds of antique stores, rock shops, or tourist traps that lined the highways. A flashing sign with a slinky black cat was the only visible advertisement. A long, wide ramp — the place was fully wheelchair-accessible — was enclosed and brilliantly lit, with a valet-parking attendant and buzzer-operated iron gate at the bottom and a doorman/bouncer and another buzzer-operated gate at the top of the ramp. It reminded Daren of entering an alert facility when he pulled nuclear duty in the FB-111s. There was even covered parking for motorcycles. Daren was impressed. He’d never been in a brothel before, so he decided to check it out.

Once buzzed inside, Daren found himself in a large, comfortable room, with two living-room areas to the right, a long mahogany bar in front, and a space to the right with several dining tables. His view of the bar, however, was blocked — by six lovely women in evening gowns standing before him. When the buzzer button at the bottom of the ramp was pressed, Daren assumed, it gave the otherwise unengaged ladies time to assemble at the front door for the “introductions.”

“Good evening, sir,” said the madam, who introduced herself as Miss Lacey. She extended a hand in a courtly, almost old southern manner. “How nice to see you.”

“Good evening, Miss Lacey,” Daren responded. He took a moment to make eye contact with each of the ladies arrayed before him. “How is everyone tonight?” They all murmured responses while maintaining their seductive poses and inviting smiles. He’d never seen anything like this before, not even growing up in Nevada. Brothels were strictly off-limits to kids under eighteen — his parents strictly enforced that rule, and Jackpot was too small to get away with much — and he was out of Nevada before he turned eighteen.

“I’d like to introduce you to the ladies.” Miss Lacey named them, one by one, using their “stage” names. “Please make yourself comfortable. If you’d like a tour, please feel free to ask at any time. Enjoy yourself tonight.” The ladies slowly departed, making eye contact again — the last sales pitch before working the room again.

Daren went to the bar. He automatically picked up a menu, just as he did at the truck stop, but was shocked to find it was a menu of sex selections, not food selections. A big guy behind the bar in a Hawaiian-print shirt stepped over to him. “Good evening, sir,” the bartender said. “I’m Tommy. What’ll you have?”

Daren put a ten on the bar. “Sparkling water. How’s it going tonight?”

“Not bad, not bad.” The bartender served him a bottle of Pellegrino and a chilled glass. “Are you military?” he asked as he poured.

“Yep.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“You a spy or something?” Daren asked, grinning over the rim of his glass as he drank.

“No. I just wanted to know if you knew how long they keep recruits incommunicado after they start basic training?”

“You have a kid in boot camp?”

“My oldest son. I only just heard he was going into the service. Me and his mother split up — she didn’t approve of me workin’ here at Donatella’s, even though the money’s good — and she moved off to Reno with the kids. I found out he’s in San Antonio.”

“The only phone recruits can normally use is in the orderly room,” Daren explained. “They can’t hang out in the orderly room until the weekends, and only if they’ve finished all their other duties, which they can rarely do. Most of the time, even if they’re all caught up, they’re too exhausted after the first week to do anything else but sleep and eat.”

“So what do I do?”

“Wait till next weekend. The drill sergeants are good about reminding recruits to call home often. In fact, most DIs withhold money from recruits’ pay for phone calls, postage, stationery, haircuts — that sort of thing.”

“Is that right? Thanks,” Tommy said. “He’s my oldest boy, and I hardly seen him at all since the old lady moved to Reno. I should’ve taken the time and gone to his high-school graduation — I didn’t know he enlisted and had to report right after graduation.”

“I can help you find out when basic training is over. You get the time off and go,” Daren suggested. “You won’t recognize him. He’ll have lost a bunch of weight, he’ll call you ‘sir’ until you’re sick of it, and he’ll be as hard as a rock.”

Tommy looked amazed, since he himself was six feet four and weighed more than three hundred pounds — no doubt his son was more than a chip off the old block. “No shit? That I gotta see. Thanks again.” He went about his business.

A few moments later one of the courtesans came up to Daren. “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Amber.”

“How are you tonight, Amber?”

“I’m fine, really fine.” Amber looked as if she was in her mid-twenties. Her blond hair was real, but the life had gone out of it, and she obviously overdosed on mousse to fluff it up. She was thin, verging on gaunt, but she was adorned with a fabulous set of breast implants that could have easily weighed more than the rest of her entire body.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Yes, thanks. Same as you is just fine.” While her drink was being served, she stepped around him, letting her fingertips trace a line across his chest, and started kneading his shoulders. She certainly had very strong hands — she might even have been a masseuse at one time, but Daren thought she’d probably earned those strong hands in a number of other pursuits. “Hard day at work, handsome?”

“Just got into town.”

“New job?”

“Yep.”

“New boss, new town — lots of tension, huh?”

“You know it.”

She waved her hand and snapped her fingers. “I can take away all that tension for you, just like that.”

“How?”

“How about a dip in the hot tub and a massage. Care to join me?”

“A hot tub, huh? That sounds like fun.” He’d never done anything like this before, and he had no idea what was in store — but he knew it involved copious amounts of money. “What does a dip in the hot tub and a massage with you go for?”

“Follow me and I’ll show you around first.” Daren believed that she had practically pushed him away from the bar and down a long hallway, but in fact he’d moved perfectly well on his own.

Amber led Daren into a room with a king-size bed, a pillow-backed couch, a bathroom with a large double-headed shower, and a TV with a VCR bolted to the ceiling, tuned to CNN. Somehow Tommy the bartender had already placed a large bottle of ice-cold Pellegrino with two chilled glasses on a coffee table in front of the couch, where Amber now led Daren.

Exactly when Amber poured him a glass of Pellegrino, Daren couldn’t tell, because she did it so seductively and so tantalizingly that he wasn’t watching the glass. “I want you to just sit back, relax, and unwind,” Amber said. She took a sip and sat next to him. “I’m here for whatever you’d like to do.” She gazed at him as she drank.

“First time in a brothel?”

“Definitely.”

“It’s simple: We’re here to make you feel good and make sure you have a good time,” Amber said.

“I saw the sex menu — nearly fell out of my chair.”

“Oh, that’s for the tourists mainly,” she said with a smile. She got up, walked behind him, and continued massaging his shoulders. “But don’t go by that. It’s whatever you want tonight. If it’s just a back rub, I’m pretty good at that. If you think you might want to try the hot tub or the shower or a full-body massage, we can do that. If you’d like the whole round-trip ticket, we can do that, too.”

“This back rub is good for starters. What do you get for a back rub?”

“I do this for tips,” Amber said. “But I specialize in massages — hands-free, whole-body massages.”

“ ‘Hands-free’ massages? What’s that?”

She crossed around in front of him, stepped between his knees; her hands went to the back of her gown at her neck, and she undid something. The gown fell away like a wisp of vapor.

“Ohhh…”

This had to be part of the sales pitch, the gab, the come-on. Okay, Daren figured, he’d let the pro do her thing.

Amber’s hips were swaying, her humongous breasts seemingly tracing their own separate orbits in front of him. “What do you say, baby?”

“I say that’s the best damned sales pitch I’ve ever seen.”

“Thank you.” She poured herself a glass of Pellegrino, took a sip, moved around behind him again, then continued her back rub, using her elbows on the knots she found. She brushed her bare breasts against the back of his neck while continuing with her massage. She was good, Daren thought, very damned good. “You’re a sweet guy”—Amber let her hands roam across his chest, delicately pinching his nipples under his shirt—“and you definitely got it goin’ on.”

“Thanks, Amber.”

“Are you in the military?”

“Yes.”

“A flier?”

He nodded.

“Things are getting busy out there at the base, but it still seems like an awfully lonely place.”

“Is that part of the sales pitch, too?”

“Anything I can do to keep you here a while longer, I’ll do.” She let her breasts touch his neck again. “Anything at all.” The law of diminishing returns said get him the hell out of there before she lost too much more money on him that evening. “What do you say, flyboy? A relaxing hot tub, my deluxe full-body, hands-free massage, a nice shower — one hour, two hundred dollars. Anything else you think you’d like, just tell me, and we’ll renegotiate.”

Her instincts were right. “Maybe some other time,” Daren said. He downed the last of the Pellegrino. “You could be a first-class masseuse in any hotel in San Francisco or Hawaii, Amber.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes glistened with humor. “I am first class, that’s for sure. You need to find out for yourself someday.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You don’t think highly of the world’s oldest profession?”

“I never thought about it before now.”

“It’s a job like any other — your attitude determines what you get out of it,” Amber said as she put her gown on again. “The reality is, I make a lot more money than you do, I work fewer hours, I live my life the way I want, and here in Nevada no one messes with me. I’m an independent contractor. There are thirty-seven legal brothels in the great state of Nevada, and if Battle Mountain bores me, I can pick up and work in any one of them tomorrow without a problem. I have lots of boyfriends and girlfriends, and I’m never alone if I don’t want to be. As long as I stay clean, off the booze and off the coke, I’ll be okay. Oh, and did I mention? I make a hell of a lot more money than you do.”

“Chasing the almighty dollar.”

“Damned right I am,” Amber said. “There will come a time when the money won’t matter, and then I’ll get out.”

“Hopefully before you catch some STD.”

“You fly military jets and drop bombs with thousands of guns, missiles, and fighters after your ass trying to blow you out of the sky — and you think my line of work is dangerous? Give me a break. Besides, I get more medical exams and blood tests in one month than you do in two years. And we don’t mess around with the DC here — I check my clients out very carefully, each and every time, or they don’t get to ride the pony. And everyone wears a raincoat — even my boyfriends, the ones I’ve known for years. How do you flyboys put it? ‘Managed risk’? That’s what I do. That’s what we all do.”

She gave him one more of her patented seductive looks. “Please don’t be judgmental, of me or of yourself. I’m happy — you should be happy, too. Learn to enjoy life. That’s why I’m here. If having sex with a pro bothers you… well, there’s lots of things I can do with you to please and entertain you, even if you don’t want the whole round trip. A nice hot tub, a massage, then… we’ll talk about what comes up?”

Daren laughed at the old joke despite himself. He certainly never expected to meet someone like her in a place like this.

“You look worried about something.”

“New job, new boss… old flame.”

“You mean your new boss in your new job is an old flame? Jeez, no wonder you’re tense, baby.” She continued to massage. “So who left whom?”

“She left me. Moved onward and upward. I kinda moved… sideways.”

“Now you work for her? Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

Amber moved her hands down over his shoulders and across his chest in a last-ditch effort before dumping this guy and moving on to the next prospect. “You have nothing to worry about, tiger. I have a feeling the wrong one got promoted. Now she realizes she needs you back. But she’s hoping you’ll drag the old luggage along with you, because then she’ll have emotional control as well as pull rank on you. Don’t do it. Don’t go in there carrying a torch.” She leaned over and nibbled on his ear. “Let Amber take some of that heat. Give it to me, tiger. Right now.”

Daren felt the serpent stir, but his mind was not on the task Amber had in mind. “You’re a sweetheart, Amber. Maybe some other time.” He got up and left a few twenty-dollar bills on the table.

“I hope to see more of you,” Amber said, giving him a head-to-toe appraisal and one more smile. Daren smiled in return, gave her a similar once-over, nodded in approval, then left.

It was not quite dark outside yet. Daren’s car was parked across the street at the truck stop. When he paused outside Donatella’s on the side of the dusty chip-and-seal road to wait for traffic to pass, he thought that this had to be one of the more interesting and yet otherworldly places he had ever visited in his Air Force career. He’d certainly been in more remote places, but…

When he finally snapped out of his musings, he noticed that the traffic he’d been waiting for still hadn’t passed by him. He looked up at the driver to see if whoever it was was waiting for him to cross.

And realized with surprise that he knew the person behind the wheel — it was none other than Rebecca Furness, his new wing commander. Oh, shit …

Nine years earlier both Mace and Furness had been assigned to the 394th Wing of the Air Force Reserve at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York, flying the RF-111G Vampire reconnaissance-strike aircraft. At the time Rebecca was a highly decorated major. Daren Mace was a lieutenant colonel, newly assigned as the bomb wing’s maintenance-group commander. As Reservists, they both had lives outside the Air Force — Rebecca ran a small air-delivery service, Daren did fix-it jobs for a biker bar in town. Somehow — perhaps because they were both loners who craved respect and recognition from their peers but could find it only in each other — the two developed a mutual attraction, and then a passion.

Just a few months after Daren joined the unit, the wing unexpectedly deployed to Turkey. Russia had invaded the Republic of Ukraine, a fledgling member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The president of the United States at the time distrusted the military and didn’t want to chance starting a war, no matter what the risk to the nation, so he decided to send a single reconnaissance unit to Turkey, simply to monitor the conflict and help Turkey keep an eye on its feuding neighbors. Rebecca and her fellow fliers weren’t supposed to do any fighting — they were there in Turkey simply for show, to try to prove that the United States was committed to helping its allies even though the president really didn’t want to get involved.

As it turned out, Rebecca and her squadron became the heroes of the war, leading a joint Ukrainian-American-Turkish air armada that managed to temporarily blind and deafen the entire command-and-control system in southwest Russia. Russia had no option but to stop its offensive and withdraw its military forces from Ukraine and other neighboring republics.

From then on, Rebecca Furness’s rising star became a shooting star that seemed unstoppable. She was given the choicest assignments available and promoted at every possible opportunity. It was Rebecca’s example that designed the shape of the United States Air Force’s structure for the next decade: drawing down the size of the active-duty force and giving more and more war-fighting responsibility to Reserve forces. She was quickly promoted to full colonel and became the first female wing commander of a combat strike unit, the 111th Bomb Wing of the Nevada Air National Guard, flying the B-1B Lancer supersonic bomber from Reno-Tahoe International Airport. Following successful action against Chinese and North Korean forces after the reunification of the Korean Peninsula, as well as her efforts over Russia and the Balkans, Rebecca was promoted to brigadier general.

Daren’s career wasn’t at all meteoric — in fact, it was virtually stagnant. Although he crewed with Rebecca in the RF-111G and was responsible for the successful planning and execution of the raid on the Domodedovo underground military command center south of Moscow, he kept his “black cloud” reputation for always being in the middle of the action when things went bad. When the RF-111G program was canceled a short time after the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Daren continued to be steered into quiet, out-of-the-way assignments. He was eventually promoted to full colonel without any fanfare. He did manage to complete all the service schools required for him to assume command of a flying unit, including the Air War College, the Joint Forces Warfighting College, and the Industrial College of the Air Force. But he still lacked operational command experience.

Now he stepped over to the passenger-side window of her GMC Yukon, and she rolled down the window. “Holy cow, Rebecca,” he said. “What a surprise.”

“Daren Mace. Yes, it is a surprise.” She glanced over his shoulder at the flashing black-cat sign in front of Donatella’s. “I see you’re not hanging out at biker bars anymore. Getting the ‘lay’ of the land?”

Daren suddenly realized what she meant, and he couldn’t stop his face from falling in shock. “I… no, I didn’t… I mean, I went in, but I didn’t—”

“It’s okay, Colonel,” she interrupted. “Paying money to have sex with strange women is perfectly legal in Lander County — pathetic and sad, but still legal.” She rolled up the window and sped off.

This assignment is starting off just great, he thought ruefully. Just great.

It was not far to the base from Donatella’s. Daren Mace liked to show up at a new assignment several days early and wander around anonymously to get the overall layout and a sense of the pace, the tone, and the mood of the place. But he quickly realized that this place didn’t have a pace, a tone, or a mood — in fact, it didn’t have very many paved roads, a front gate, or even very many human beings for that matter.

The government had been working on Battle Mountain Air National Guard Base, outside the town of Battle Mountain in north-central Nevada, for three years, and they had virtually nothing to show for it. All he could see were a few sterile-looking multistory buildings scattered across the high desert plain. There was a runway out there, of course: twelve thousand feet long, he knew, three hundred feet wide, stressed to take a million-pound aircraft, but he couldn’t see it at all. He remembered reading the Internet articles about the world’s biggest boondoggle — a twelve-thousand-foot-long runway in the middle of nowhere, with no air base around the monstrous strip of reinforced concrete. The control tower’s location didn’t give a clue as to where the runway was, because there was no control tower.

Further, it really didn’t look like very much work was being done now — he would’ve thought there’d be armies of construction workers swarming all over the place. What had they been doing here all that time? Was this base going to open or not? He did see a few aircraft hangars and decided that was the only place his new unit could be.

As it turned out, Battle Mountain Air Force Base did have a security force — a few minutes after driving onto the base, he was stopped by a patrol car. “Good evening, Colonel Mace,” the officer, an Air Force sergeant, greeted him, after stepping up to his car and snapping a salute. “I’m Sergeant Rollins, One-eleventh Attack Wing Security Forces. Welcome to Battle Mountain Air Force Base.”

Mace returned the salute. “How do you know who I am, Sergeant?”

“We’ve been monitoring your arrival, sir,” Rollins replied. “I’ve been asked to start your in-processing.”

“ ‘In-processing’?” Mace asked incredulously. He looked at his jogger’s Timex. “It’s seven p.m. Is the Support Group still open for business?”

“I just need your ID card and orders, sir,” Rollins said. After Mace fished out the paperwork from his briefcase, the sergeant held out a device and asked Mace to put both his thumbprints on it, like an electronic inkpad. “Thank you. Please stand by, sir,” the sergeant said, and he returned to his vehicle with Mace’s ID card and orders. Mace had to wait almost ten minutes and was just on the verge of getting out of the car to complain about the delay — but he was pleasantly surprised when the officer returned with a base decal, an updated ID card, a flight-line pass, and a restricted-area pass. Mace looked at all the documents in wonder. “Where did you get this photograph?” he asked, motioning to the new ID card.

“I took it, sir.”

“When?”

“The moment I walked up to your vehicle, sir,” the officer replied. Sure enough, the guy’s flashlight contained a tiny digital camera, because the face on the picture was him, sitting in his car.

“You can’t use that picture on my ID cards, Sergeant,” Mace protested. “I’m not in uniform. I haven’t even shaved yet.”

“Doesn’t matter, sir,” the officer responded. “We use biometric identification equipment now — you could have a month’s growth and we’d still be able to ID you. We’ve already taken your picture a dozen times since you’ve been driving around the base. We’ve registered your vehicle and correlated the registration with your identity, we’ve scanned you and your vehicles, and we’ve even noted that you’re carrying unloaded weapons in your trunk. If you’d like, I can register them for you right now.” Mace opened the trunk for the officer and took the guns out of their locked cases. The officer simply scanned the weapons with his flashlight again, and minutes later he had electronically added the registration information to Mace’s ID card. “You’re all in-processed,” he announced.

“I’m what?”

“Security Forces can network in with the wing’s computer system from our cars, so we can initiate in-processing when the newcomers arrive on base, sir,” Rollins said. “Everything’s been done — housing, pay and allowances, official records, medical, pass and ID, uniforms — even predeployment. You’ll be notified by e-mail if anyone needs to see you in person, such as the flight surgeon or base dentist. Orientation briefings are conducted by videoconference or by computer. Your unit duty section and the wing commander’s office have also been notified that you’re on base. Are there any questions I can answer for you, sir?”

“Is there a base gym?”

“Afraid not, sir. Each unit on base will probably set up its own facilities until the base builds one. Security Forces has a pretty good one, which you’re welcome to use until the Fifty-first builds its own.”

“The Fifty-first?”

“Your squadron, sir.” The Security Forces sergeant smiled mischievously. “That happens all the time, sir — my system knows more about you than you do. The duty officer will be able to direct you to motels in the area that can accept your PCS orders as payment until you find permanent quarters.”

“Already taken care of,” Daren said. “Mind if I just drive around a bit?”

“Not at all, sir,” the officer said. “Your duty officer will be able to direct you, and she’ll keep you away from any restricted areas. Call her using this.” He handed Mace a small plastic case. “This is your commlink. If you need anything, just call the duty officer. She’s expecting your call. Let me be the first to welcome you.” He shook Mace’s hand, then snapped him a salute. “Have a nice evening, sir.”

Daren Mace sat in his car and marveled at what had just happened. No one else around for what seemed like miles except him and a sky cop — and he was already in-processed into his new unit. Amazing. In-processing was normally a weeklong drudgery of meetings, briefings, and paperwork. He just completed it in ten minutes. He put the commlink away. Someone would have to explain how to use it later.

Instead of asking for directions, Daren thought he’d drive around a bit. Although there were very few buildings anywhere, the northeast side of the base seemed completely deserted, with only construction equipment and concrete-making stuff — Portland cement, gravel, sand, and stone — piled everywhere. He noticed a forty-foot steel trailer painted in desert camouflage sitting about a hundred meters off an access road, with a few cars and trucks parked nearby. He could see no evidence of the container’s having been dragged or trailered off the road — it must have been airlifted in, or brought in an awful long time ago.

Daren decided to check it out for himself, so he stepped out of his pickup truck and walked up the access road toward the big trailer. There was a power generator running — he could hear it, but he couldn’t yet see it. As he got closer, he could see a small satellite dish, a microwave antenna, and several smaller antennas on top. What in hell…?

He heard a loud fwooosh! and suddenly his path was blocked — by some kind of android-looking figure dressed in black. It had appeared out of nowhere. It wore a seamless dark suit, a full-head helmet with an opaque visor over the eyes, a thin backpack, and thick boots.

“This is a restricted area, sir,” the menacing figure said in an electronically synthesized voice. Daren stumbled backward in complete surprise, scrambled around, and started to run back to his car. “Hold on, Colonel Mace,” the figure said.

Daren didn’t stop running — in fact began running harder — until he ran headlong into what felt like a steel post. It turned out to be the android figure, again appearing right in front of him as if out of thin air.

“Relax, Colonel,” the android said. Daren thought about running again, but this time the figure clamped its right hand around his left forearm, and Daren could tell right away it was not letting go. “Let’s go, sir.”

The android led him toward the trailer. Daren hadn’t seen it from the road, but two camouflaged tents had been set up beyond the steel trailer, with two Humvees nearby. The android led him over to the smaller of the two tents, then released his arm. “He’s expecting you inside, sir,” the android said. It took three or four steps — then disappeared again after another loud, sharp fwooosh! sound stirred up a large cloud of desert dust.

Daren opened the tent flap and saw a man perhaps a few years younger than himself at a small camp table, typing on a laptop computer. Notebooks and computer printouts were scattered over the table. A small military field propane heater kept the tent reasonably warm, and on a small propane cookstove there were a pot of macaroni and cheese, half consumed, and another pot of water.

“C’mon in, Colonel,” the man said. “I didn’t know you’d be here on base so early. It’s my good luck you happened on us tonight.” He stood and extended a hand. “I’m—”

“I know who you are. Major General Patrick McLanahan,” Daren said. “I recognize you from the news reports — President Thorn’s first national security adviser.”

“I doubt that,” Patrick said tonelessly. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, sir,” Mace said. They shook hands. “You were involved in that Korean conflict a couple years ago — you developed a squadron of B-1 bombers that launched ballistic-missile-interceptor missiles.”

“That’s right.” What was left unsaid was the rest of the story: that McLanahan got himself kicked out of the Air Force as a result of the recent conflict with Russia over activities in the Balkans and the much-publicized crash of a B-1B Lancer bomber in Russia. Before that, his name had come up a few times: his experience with the now-defunct (but soon to be resurrected) Border Security Force and his work in defending Korea right after unification made him the front-runner in both the Martindale and now the Thorn administrations for national security adviser.

McLanahan’s was a strange career, Daren thought, most of it shrouded in secrecy, rumor, and legend. Whenever there was some explosive, fast-moving international crisis that threatened to expand into a nuclear conflict, his name started popping up. “I would guess you were involved in that recent incident in Central Asia. Iran is claiming that one of our bombers illegally attacked Muslim forces inside Turkmenistan — then, the same day, that B-1 crashes in Diego Garcia. Iran claims it was the one that violated their airspace.”

McLanahan shrugged. “I don’t care much what Iran claims,” he said dryly, taking a seat and busying himself on the laptop. Mace noticed it was not a denial, but he knew better than to quiz the guy who was probably his new boss, or at least a very high muck-a-muck. “What makes you think I had anything to do with something in Turkmenistan, Colonel?”

“Your reputation definitely precedes you, sir,” Mace said. McLanahan glanced up; Daren couldn’t tell if it was an irritated glare or an amused look. “If it makes any difference to you, sir, I think it’s the kind of reputation I’d like to have,” Daren added.

“If you care about working here and about your career in the military, Colonel, I wouldn’t recommend it,” McLanahan said. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then he went on, “I was impressed with your work with the Global Hawk wing at Beale Air Force Base. Those unmanned aerial vehicles had been in use for many years, but they still had some problems. You were able to overcome them and stood up the wing in very short time — the very first unmanned air wing. I thought you should have been given command of the wing — but their loss is my gain.”

“Thank you, sir. I had a lot of good folks working for me. Actually, I ripped off a lot of the technology I used to bring the Hawks online from Zen Stockard and you guys at HAWC — specifically, your ‘virtual cockpit’ technology.”

“Glad to be of help. We’ve done great improvements with the VC, and we’re building a state-of-the-art facility to exploit it. What we needed was someone with both operational and engineering experience. We’re going to ask you to do the same for us that you did with Beale’s Global Hawks — get our aircraft and organization up to speed as quickly as possible. Your job will be to work with the wing commander and the engineering staff from the Tonopah Test Range.”

Daren shook his head. “I’m confused, sir,” he said. “I thought this was a tanker unit.”

“We’ve got tankers here, yes.”

“What other aircraft do you have here?”

“You haven’t spoken with anyone from wing headquarters yet?”

“Well… I did run into General Furness in town a little while ago, but we didn’t really talk.”

Patrick’s eyebrows raised in question at that. “I thought you two knew each other.”

“It wasn’t a good time to chat,” Daren said, stumbling. He was thankful to see McLanahan nod, apparently willing to let it drop. “I just arrived tonight. My report date isn’t until next week, but I decided to show early. I didn’t imagine in-processing would only take ten minutes.”

“Now I see why you’re in the dark,” McLanahan said with a slight smile. “You haven’t had the nickel tour yet. I think I’ll leave that up to General Furness or Colonel Long.”

“What are you doing out here tonight, General?”

“Trying to nail down all the interface parameters between my virtual cockpit and my plane,” he replied, “but we’re missing something. We can’t find it in the VC, I can’t find it out here. It must be in the plane, but we still can’t isolate it.”

“What plane are you talking about, General?” Daren asked. “I haven’t seen any planes here yet. And why in hell are you—”

“Shh. Not so loud — and watch your French.” Patrick motioned with his head to his right, and Daren saw a small boy in a sleeping bag, lying on an inflatable mattress.

“Is… is that your son, General?” Daren whispered incredulously.

Patrick nodded. “Bradley James. I’ve been so busy the last several days, I haven’t been with him very much. I couldn’t stand being away from him any longer, so I told him we were going on a camping trip. I know it’s forecast to go below freezing tonight, and he’s got school, but I did it anyway. We cooked hot dogs and macaroni and cheese — his favorite comfort foods — we looked at the stars through a telescope, and he conked out.”

“You took your son out to the desert while you’re working on a project?”

“Couldn’t think of anything else to do,” Patrick said. He looked at his son and sighed. “I always wanted to take him out camping, but his mother didn’t relish the idea. He has a rough night if we do something that we used to do together, so camping seemed to kill two birds”—he swallowed a bit, then corrected himself—“I mean, it seemed to fit the bill nicely.”

Daren had heard something about some great tragedy in McLanahan’s life, but no one had laid it out for him, out of respect for the man. It obviously had something to do with his wife, Bradley’s mother. This was a very surreal scene: a young commanding general, personally monitoring a major project being conducted in his high-tech unit, but concerned — disturbed? — enough to bring his son out to the site in a sleeping bag. How weird was this?

“Anything I can help you with, sir?”

“I hope so. That’s why I got you assigned here from the Pentagon,” Patrick said. He ran his hands wearily over his face and his short-cropped hair. “This is not an official wing project, Daren. I’ve got no budget — not one dime. I’m stealing fuel and flight hours from the wing already as it is. But I promised the chief that I’d have something to show him.”

“I don’t get it, sir,” Daren commented. “Aren’t you the commanding officer here?”

“Officially, Daren, I don’t exist here,” McLanahan admitted. “The First Air Battle Force was stood up here, but we don’t have a mission. It’s my job to build one. The One-eleventh Wing is the only official unit here. My funding runs out September thirtieth of this year. I talked the chief and SECDEF into bringing them here to see if we can integrate them into a deployable force, but I don’t have a staff or a budget. When the money runs out, it closes down.”

“Excuse me, sir, but what exactly are you working on?” Daren asked.

McLanahan finished typing notes, got up, checked on Bradley to make sure he was warm enough, then motioned to Daren. “Come with me, Colonel.”

Daren followed McLanahan out of the tent. He immediately saw the tall, android-looking figure standing nearby, now carrying a huge futuristic-looking weapon. “Excuse me, sir, but what in hell is that?”

“You mean ‘who,’ “ Patrick corrected him. “Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Wilde, Air Battle Force ground operations,” Patrick replied.

“Ground operations? You mean, combat ground operations?”

“That’s the idea.”

“What’s he wearing? What’s he carrying?”

“He’s wearing electronic battle armor; he’s carrying an electromagnetic rail gun.”

“A what …?”

“I’ll explain later.” They stepped quickly over to the steel trailer. McLanahan unlocked the door by pressing his thumb on a pad; the door opened with a hiss of pressurized air. Inside the tightly packed trailer were two seats facing simple consoles with two hand controllers; on either side of the seats were computer terminals; on the leftmost side, facing the front of the trailer, was a fifth console with three computer monitors, manned by a technician furiously entering commands into a computer keyboard. The inside of the trailer was so loud from the sound of the air-conditioning that the tech had to wear hearing protectors. But all this occupied only about a third of the trailer. The rest was jam-packed with electronics, circuit-board racks, power supplies, communications equipment, and air-conditioning units.

Daren recognized it all instantly: “It’s a virtual-cockpit trailer,” he said, surprise in his voice. “It’s a lot bigger than I thought.”

“How much bigger?” Patrick McLanahan asked.

“Global Hawk’s entire control suite could fit in the back of a Humvee,” Daren said.

“This is definitely first generation,” McLanahan said. “We developed this trailer at Dreamland five years ago, and it was amazing that we fitted it all in here. I just flew the trailer out here today, but there’s some snafu in the satellite link.”

“The satellite link was the simplest part of the Global Hawk system,” Daren said. “It’s normally bulletproof. We had a simple satellite-phone hookup relaying instructions back and forth from the aircraft and control station.” He went over to the middle left seat. It was obviously the pilot’s seat, with a left-hand throttle control and a right-hand flight-control stick, but there were no other instruments visible — not even a computer screen. “What are you trying to control anyway?”

“Sit down and take a look,” Patrick said. After Daren was seated, Patrick handed him a headset; it looked like standard aviation issue except for some strange protuberances on the crossband. When Daren tried to adjust the small, sharp probes that dug into his scalp from those arms, Patrick said, “No, don’t touch those. You’ll get used to them.”

Daren sat with the strange-looking headset on his head and waited — and suddenly he was standing outside the tent, in the desert, in broad daylight, looking out across the runway! Superimposed on the image were all sorts of electronic data and symbology floating in space: magnetic heading, range readouts, a set of crosshairs, and flashing pointers. He whipped off the headset in complete shock, and the image instantly disappeared. “What in hell…? That was no projected image or hologram — I saw those images, just as clearly as I’m looking at you right now! How did you do that?”

“An outgrowth of the ANTARES technology we developed about seven years ago,” Patrick replied. “ANTARES stands for—”

“I know: Advanced Neural Transfer and Response System,” Daren interjected. “Zen Stockard is a good friend of mine. I know he was spearheading the resurrected program a few years back. I applied for it myself.” Jeff “Zen” Stockard was a flight test pilot at the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center; along with the man standing before him, Patrick McLanahan, Stockard was one of the few people alive who had fully mastered the ANTARES thought-control system. Daren had applied for the ANTARES research program at Dreamland several times, thinking that surely the Pentagon would relish the idea of squirreling him away at that supersecret desert facility — but, like most of his requests for choice assignments, it was denied.

“Zen was big on any program at Dreamland that could help skilled pilots become better aviators,” Patrick said. That was most evident in Zen’s own case — he’d lost the use of his legs in a training exercise at Dreamland. “The system sends neural images to the wearer’s brain, so he ‘sees’ all sorts of images transmitted to him — TV cameras, sensor images, text messages, computer data, any number of things — just as if the optic nerve were sending electrical signals from the eye to the brain.

“The problem we always had with ANTARES was we were trying to design a system that could control an entire aircraft by thought,” Patrick went on. “Piping visual, sensory, or data images to the brain is a relatively simple task — it doesn’t require any specialized theta-alpha training. So instead of using heads-up displays or fancy holograms to replicate an airplane cockpit, we just pipe datalinked images directly to the brain. The user can control which images he sees with ease — as quickly and easily as thinking about what you want to see. And everything stays simple if we eliminated the need to control the aircraft with ANTARES.”

Daren donned the special headset again, and a few moments later the images returned. He could swivel his head and look all around the airfield. When he centered the crosshairs on a target such as the hangars on the other side of the runway, he got an exact range and bearing readout. When he turned his head to follow the flashing pointers, he found himself looking at a wooden box about ten feet square, exactly 425 meters away. “What am I looking at?” Daren asked.

“Some targets we set up south of the field.”

“Where is the camera?”

“You’re looking at what Sergeant Wilde was looking at.”

“The big guy with the electronic armor and rail gun?”

McLanahan nodded. “The computer stores what he’s already looked at in image files; when you tap in to his visual system, you can look at the latest stored image files that he’s sent, as if you’re looking at them yourself. You can look at what he’s looking at in real time, too, but he can control that.”

“Cool. How do I stop it?” But as soon as he thought about not looking at the image, it stopped, and he was again looking at the interior of the virtual-cockpit trailer. “Hey, I switched it! Very cool!” Daren switched the image back and forth with ease. “That works great. But what’s the purpose?”

“Switch back to the virtual image.” Daren did it in an instant. “Look at the target box. Got it?”

“Yep.”

“Designate it as a target.”

“How do I…?” But again, as soon as he thought about doing it, the crosshairs blinked three times, and then a red triangle appeared superimposed on the box. “Aha! Got it.”

“You’ve got a FlightHawk airborne with mini-Mavericks on board,” Patrick told him. “Attack that target.” This time it was simple: He thought about attacking the target, and a voice in his head announced, “Attack ground target, stop attack.”

“Why did it say ‘stop attack’?”

“That’s the command you’d issue to stop the attack,” McLanahan explained. He turned to a computer terminal beside him and verified that the original problem still existed — and sure enough, it did. “But here’s where the problem comes in: The satellite datalink is messed up. The FlightHawk is either not receiving the command or receiving it but not executing it. We had the same problem with an operational test a few weeks ago. We couldn’t get it to respond until we established a direct UCAV-to-aircraft link.”

“Very cool — commanding a FlightHawk from guys on the ground using this virtual mind-link thing,” Daren commented. “It’s a pretty sophisticated routine — lots of data shooting back and forth over very long distances.”

“But you did it with Global Hawk all the time, right?”

“Well… we don’t actually fly a Global Hawk unmanned recon plane from the ground, sir,” Daren pointed out. “It has to have a flight plan loaded in memory first. We can make lots of changes to that flight plan, but it has to have the flight plan first.”

“I want to be able to fly the UCAV, Daren,” Patrick said. “I understand what you’re saying about Global Hawk, but the ability to keep the man in the loop is important to any attack mission. Besides, we still have to be able to manually control the plane for certain phases of flight.”

“Which phases, sir? Certainly not flying straight and level?”

“How about a rendezvous with another aircraft?”

“As in refuel a FlightHawk from a tanker?”

“How about fly one right up inside the bomb bay of a B-1 bomber?”

“A B-1 bomber!” Daren exclaimed. His eyes widened in surprise, but then he shrugged. “Why not? I think you have the technology to do that right now. A computer the size of my wristwatch can fly a B-1 better than any pilot I’ve ever known.” He paused for a moment, then said, “We can do it one better, sir.”

“How?”

“Why don’t you fly both the FlightHawk and the B-1 bomber—right from the VC.”

“Make the carrier aircraft and the attack aircraft unmanned?”

“Why not?” Daren Mace asked. “I know you can already monitor and control most every system aboard the B-1 from the virtual cockpit. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to make the Vampire fly itself.”

“But why are we interested in making the carrier aircraft unmanned?” Patrick asked. He already had some answers himself, but he wanted to hear Daren’s reasoning.

“I have a feeling I’m preaching to the choir, sir, but here goes,” Daren said. “First: cost savings. Conventional wisdom holds that the cost to train and keep crew members in an aircraft like the B-1 bomber exceeds the cost of the aircraft by a factor of ten over its service life. Make the planes unmanned, run by computers, and now you don’t need rated officers to fly them anymore — technicians can monitor the computer systems, and technicians and intelligence experts can pick targets to attack.

“Second: Removing the human-necessary systems in the plane would really create huge savings in weight, system complexity, performance, electrical load, and dozens of other areas,” Mace went on. “The weight of an ejection seat with all its associated systems and plumbing is five times the weight of the guy that sits in the seat. We wouldn’t need to sap bleed air from the engines for pressurizing the cockpit — that would boost available engine power by at least twenty percent, maybe more. We’d have enough surplus electrical power on board to install newer, faster computers just by not having to illuminate the crew compartment.

“Third: Missions wouldn’t be restricted by the humans,” Daren concluded. “Even with backup crews on board, you can’t simply keep refueling a plane and keep it aloft for days and days — eventually the crew has to land the plane and get out. You can keep a robot plane on station for days, even weeks. You do away with crew rest requirements, you don’t waste flight time by doing crew-proficiency tasks, and you don’t need to provide for flight crews on mobility or deployment. And obviously we’re not risking any human crew members in high-risk missions.”

“We just have to make it work, then sell the gear and those arguments to the Pentagon.”

“I worked at SECDEF’s office for over a year, sir,” Daren said with exasperation in his voice. “I saw perfectly outstanding projects killed on nothing more than a whim: The contractor was from the wrong state and wouldn’t relocate or open up an office in a certain congressional district. A three-hundred-page proposal was missing a few pages. Or some staffer didn’t get a luxury suite when he or she visited a base or plant. You can bust your butt and develop a great program, and they may still cancel it for reasons as stupid as they don’t like the color you painted it.

“Defense procurement is bullshit, sir. The best programs get killed all the time while the crummy ones get funded. Then, years later, the good program gets the green light, even though it costs twice as much as it did the first time.” Daren nodded toward McLanahan’s son sleeping on the ground just a few feet away. “If you pardon me for saying so, sir, there is no project I’ve seen in all my years in the Air Force that’s worth putting a child in a sleeping bag on the ground in the middle of winter so you can keep on working on it. Do you think anyone outside this base cares if you’re successful or not? I can tell you honestly, sir — no one does. It wouldn’t be worth a young boy getting even one sniffle.”

At that moment Daren saw something ignite in McLanahan’s eyes. Whoops, he thought, I just pissed the guy off.

Then McLanahan smiled a deadly-looking smile if Daren ever saw one. “You’re wrong, Colonel — and you’re right,” he said. “You’re wrong because I believe this project is that important. I can’t do anything about what the Pentagon thinks or if Congress will fund it or if the president will deploy it — all I can do is make it work, and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re right that this project is not worth having my son or any child get hurt by it. That’s why you’re going to make it work. Do you think we can get the system tweaked down enough to do complex maneuvers like air refueling?”

“Excuse me, sir, but we’re both navigators,” Daren pointed out. “We know damn well the Air Force can train chimpanzees to fly a B-1 bomber.”

Patrick laughed — and his laughter instantly seemed to brighten the dim, stifling, noisy interior of the little trailer. “You’ve given me a lot more to hope for in five minutes than anything I’ve heard in the past week, Colonel. Can you help me with this?”

“I’ll be glad to give it a try, sir.”

“Good.” He motioned to the fifth console, where the technician was struggling with a debugging program. “Take a look at this, Daren. We’ve been fighting with this routine all night.”

Daren took a quick look, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the readouts. “What program is this, sir? Where did you get it?”

“My guys at Dreamland wrote it several years ago.”

“With all due respect, sir, I think you’ve been hanging out at Dreamland too long,” Daren said. “That program is not only several years old — it’s a generation too old. I guess part of the problem of working at a supersecret research facility is that you never hear when a really good tool is fabricated in the field. My guys at Beale wrote a satellite datalink routine trace-and-synchronization setup program for Global Hawk that’ll knock your socks off. I’m sure we can adapt it for the FlightHawks and eventually the B-1.”

Patrick McLanahan clasped Daren Mace on the shoulder and said, “Outstanding, Daren. Get on it first thing in the morning.” He looked at his watch and added, “I mean, later on this morning. I know that John Long, the ops group commander, has a pretty tight checkout schedule drawn up for you. I’ll get you out of it as much as I can.”

“No problem, sir. There doesn’t seem to be a hell of a lot else to do around here.”

“Not even at Donatella’s?”

Daren smiled and felt himself blushing.

“We keep pretty close tabs on all our troops out here, Daren.”

“It was an interesting visit, sir, but I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon,” Daren said. “I’ll call the Pentagon and put in official requests for the software to be transmitted to us. It’ll be refused, of course, but then I’ll make a few more phone calls to my boys and girls in the computer labs at Beale, Palmdale, and Wright-Pat, and I’ll have the latest version of the software up and running here by noon. We’ll let the software set up a conversation between your ground station and the aircraft. It’ll tell us where the glitches are and what we need to do to fix them, and soon, in a day or two, we should either be up and running or begging for more money for parts and equipment. But from what I’ve seen in here tonight, you have all the basic stuff already in place — we just need to sort out and correct the bugs. I’ll get right on it.”

“Outstanding,” Patrick said. He motioned to the door and led Daren outside. “And I,” he went on, “will take my boy home with me, and I think we’ll both have a good night’s rest for a change.”

“It’s gotta be tough,” Daren said, “being a two-star general on active duty and a single dad.”

“I’ve got plenty of support — friends, family, nanny — but I never knew it could be so tough,” Patrick said. “But it’s even tougher to hear your own sisters and your mother arguing that it would be in Bradley’s best interest to let him stay with them. It tears me apart, and I work even harder to solve a problem to free up more time to be with him — and what I end up doing is only digging a deeper hole for myself.” He looked at Daren earnestly and said, “I wish I’d brought you in on this project the moment I set foot on base, Daren. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I knew your background with the Global Hawks — that was the reason I asked for you in the first place — but then I let Furness and Long schedule the usual wing-orientation stuff with you. I’ve been spinning my wheels out here for weeks.”

“I’m not guaranteeing results, sir,” Daren said, “but we’ll start looking at all the conversations between your systems and your aircraft, track down the breaks, and see what happens. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“I feel lucky already,” Patrick said, and he held out his hand. Daren shook it. “Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon, and you can bring me up to speed on your progress. And if you want anything, buzz me. You’ll get whatever you need.”

“Yes, sir.” Daren watched as Patrick McLanahan went inside the tent and a few moments later emerged with his son clasped tightly to his chest, still snuggled down in his sleeping bag. The big armored android McLanahan named Wilde appeared with the big rifle — did McLanahan call it an “electromagnetic rail gun”?—slung on his shoulder and offered to carry the boy for the general, but Patrick waved him off with a smile on his face.

This damned Air Force had its really shitty moments, Daren thought as he headed back to his pickup truck, but right now he felt like the happiest man in the entire U.S. military. For the first time in many, many years, he finally felt like a part of something special.

He couldn’t wait to get started. He seriously doubted that he was going to get much sleep that night. At first he thought he was going to be dreaming about Amber and what he once had with Rebecca Furness. Now maybe it was going to be about flying robot warplanes.