Price of Duty

TWO

The Iron Wolf Squadron CID piloted by Brad McLanahan strode into a huge darkened hangar. Behind him, two big doors rolled shut and overhead lights snapped back on, revealing ultramodern aircraft of various makes parked across a vast concrete expanse.

The locals believed the old Romanian air base’s absentee foreigner owners were content to let it rot. That was exactly what Scion, the private military corporation run by former U.S president Kevin Martindale, wanted them to believe. The Scion and Iron Wolf personnel stationed here called it the Scrapheap — reflecting its decaying, disused external appearance. But behind the peeling paint, rust, and piled-up rubbish was a fully equipped operating base jam-packed with sophisticated aircraft, drones, combat vehicles, weapons, communications gear, and sensors.

Near the far wall, a second CID already stood motionless. Still wiry and lithe in her midthirties, Charlie Turlock, dwarfed by the twelve-foot-tall machine, had her strawberry-blond head inside an open panel on one of its spindly-looking legs. Two harassed-looking technicians stood next to her.

Brad moved up beside them and ordered the robot to crouch down. With the main hatch clear, he climbed out and dropped lightly to the concrete floor.

“I don’t care what you’ve been told before,” he heard Charlie tell the techs. “But in my book there is no excuse for sending one of these machines out into the field with systems operating below spec. And right now this leg’s main hydraulic assembly is pegging out at ninety-four percent of its rated efficiency. That is not acceptable.”

“Ms. Turlock,” one of the techs said stiffly. “With all due respect, Major Macomber says—”

Scowling, Charlie whipped her head out of the open panel and turned on the tech. “Do I look anything like Whack Macomber to you?”

“Nope,” Brad said, coming up beside her with a quick grin. “He’s at least twice as big and four times as ugly.”

Charlie laughed. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere, McLanahan.” Her eyes gleamed with amusement. “Besides, I hear you already have a serious flame back in Warsaw. Which would explain those Polish phrases I hear you trying to rattle off so nonchalantly all the time.”

Brad nodded, feeling his face turn just the slightest bit red.

He and Major Nadia Rozek had been thrown together last year, when the newly formed Iron Wolf Squadron helped fight off a determined Russian attack on Poland. Since then, he’d realized that the beautiful young Polish Special Forces officer was a force of nature — tough-minded, fearless, and intensely passionate. Her current duties as a military aide to Poland’s president, Piotr Wilk, tied her to the capital more than she would like, especially when Brad’s own assignments took him farther afield. But whenever they could, they spent every waking and sleeping moment in each other’s company. And a relationship he’d first imagined was just a whirlwind “girl in every foreign port” kind of fling now showed every sign of turning into something a heck of a lot more serious.

Still smiling, Charlie took his arm. “C’mon, Brad, you can buy me a glass of wine at the canteen and then keep me company while I write up my report on tonight’s exercise.” She waggled a stern finger at him. “A report that will include a full and honest evaluation of that crazy-assed stunt you pulled off.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brad agreed, relieved that she was letting him off the hook.

She glanced back over her shoulder at the two technicians. “And in the meantime, you guys are going to bring that unit up to one hundred percent status ASAP — even if you have to pull the whole leg assembly and replace every power coupling and fluid line. Got it?” Glum-faced, they nodded.

Once they were out of earshot, Brad asked, “Kinda hard-assed, weren’t you?”

“Yep.” Charlie nodded. “But that’s one of the reasons I’m out here in the Romanian boonies instead of kicking back in my nice cushy Sky Masters lab.” She shook her head. “Look, Wayne Macomber’s a rocking, socking soldier and a damned fine tactician, but you and I both know he doesn’t much like CIDs. He’ll fight in them when he has to, but basically they give him the creeps.”

That was true, Brad knew. He’d often heard the big, powerfully built Iron Wolf ground forces commander bitching about feeling like a slave to the “damned unholy gadget” whenever he piloted a CID. “So?”

“So he’s got kind of a blind spot when it comes to their proper care and feeding,” Charlie said quietly. “The Russians may still be licking their wounds from last year, but they’ll be back — and probably sooner rather than later. And when they come, you’re going to need every CID and other piece of high-tech military hardware you can scrounge as a force multiplier. So you’re gonna want everything in tip-top fighting condition, not sidelined for repairs because someone figured ‘good enough’ would cut it. That’s why your dad wants me to tighten things up on the maintenance side.”

Surprised, Brad looked at her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, I know the general’s still alive and kicking.” She snorted. “I always knew Patrick McLanahan was a steely-eyed hard-ass. I just never figured that he’d find a way to make that literally true.” She shook her head in wonder. “Three years riding a robot full-time. Man, I wouldn’t have bet that was possible. Or sane.”

Brad nodded slowly. Very few people knew that his father, critically wounded during an unauthorized mission against the People’s Republic of China years ago, had actually survived. Fewer still knew that only a CID’s life-support systems kept him alive. Piloting one of the huge machines sustained his crippled body, but it could not heal him. Patrick McLanahan was trapped, forced to interact with the world entirely through the CID’s sensor arrays and computers.

Brad sighed, fighting down the painful blend of regret and relief and anger that hit home whenever he thought much about his father. It was always hard seeing the bold and daring man who’d raised him pushed off into the shadows — robbed of all normal human contact in an eerie world of binary 1’s and 0’s. But now it felt even worse.

During Russia’s recent attack against Poland, Patrick McLanahan had revealed himself to Gennadiy Gryzlov and to Stacy Anne Barbeau, the new American president. Both were horrified to learn that the man they considered an enemy and a threat to world order was still alive. But neither political leader had known his true condition.

Both Gryzlov and Barbeau were sure he was dead for real this time — shot down by American F-35 fighters along with the rest of the Iron Wolf bomber force flying back from an all-or-nothing strike against a Russian ballistic-missile force set to blast Poland off the map. That callous act of treachery had been the price demanded by Gryzlov for agreeing not to drag the United States into a war Stacy Anne Barbeau feared. It was a price she had been gullible enough and cowardly enough to pay, even at the cost of shattering the NATO alliance.

“Sorry, Brad,” he heard Charlie say softly. “I know it sucks.” She rested her hand lightly on his arm.

He forced himself to smile and squared his shoulders. “Now about that drink you wanted—”

“Captain McLanahan!” he heard someone call out.

He looked around, seeing a Scion staffer hurrying down the hall toward them.

“Yes?”

“You’re needed in the communications center, sir,” the man said tersely. “There’s a secure call for you from Mr. Martindale. He’s got President Wilk on the same line. Priority Alpha One. All Scion and Iron Wolf stations are going on full alert.”

Brad felt cold. Short of a surprise air or missile attack on Warsaw or some other allied population center, he couldn’t imagine much else that would trigger that kind of move.

“I’ll tag along, if you don’t mind,” Charlie said. Her mouth twisted in a sly grin. “You know I always hate to miss a party.”

“Tak, panie prezydencie. Yes, Mr. President,” Brad McLanahan said, speaking loud enough into the mic to be heard over the pounding roar of the Sparrowhawk’s huge propellers. “I’ll do my best.”

“Very good, Captain,” Piotr Wilk said gravely. “You should know that this appeal for our help comes from the very highest levels of the Romanian government. President Dumitru himself assures me they have no other hope of averting disaster. Unless someone can get inside Cernavodă and manually activate whatever shutdown and emergency cooling systems survive, his experts believe the reactor containment building will rupture—”

“Spewing radiation across Romania and a hell of a lot of central Europe,” Brad said impatiently. “With respect, sir, the situation’s pretty clear.”

“All normal and fucked up, yes?”

“As per usual,” Brad agreed. The Polish president’s grasp of American military slang kept growing by leaps and bounds.

The Sparrowhawk banked sharply, slowing fast as its propellers swiveled upward, turning into rotors. Through the cockpit windows, he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a large industrial complex, eerily bathed in spotlights. Flashing blue and red lights showed a sea of emergency vehicles — fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars — surrounding the power plant.

“We’re at the reactor site,” he reported. “I’ve got to go, Mr. President. It’s time to suit up.”

“Understood,” Wilk replied. “Good luck.” He paused, and then said carefully, “There is one more person here who wishes to speak to you. She is… most insistent.”

Brad swallowed hard. “Hi, Nadia,” he said, trying to sound casual.

“You will be careful,” Nadia Rozek said crisply.

“You realize that I’m planning on walking into a nuclear reactor that might already be melting down, right?” Brad asked.

“Yes,” she said huskily. “That is why you will be very careful, Brad McLanahan.”

“I’ll try,” he promised.

“Kocham cię. I love you,” Nadia murmured. “So I will be extremely angry if you get yourself killed unnecessarily. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brad said quickly, feeling a lump in his own throat.

The Sparrowhawk touched down in the middle of a hurriedly cleared field. Groups of nuclear plant technicians, policemen, and soldiers waited nervously at the edge of the landing zone, their faces lowered against the sudden rotor-blown hail of dust and dead grass.

Charlie Turlock tapped him on the shoulder. “Time’s up, smooth talker,” she said, with a grin. “But remind me later to give you some pro tips on soulful romantic chitchat.”

“If there is a later,” Brad said, unstrapping from his seat and moving back into the troop compartment, where the support crew was already prepping his CID.

“Well, yeah, there is that,” Charlie agreed. “But have a little faith, okay? That machine can take one heck of a lot of heat and radiation and keep on ticking just fine. Trust me.”

Brad nodded, knowing she was right. Five years before, Charlie herself had piloted a CID into a burning federal building gutted by a terrorist’s “dirty” bomb packed with iridium-192. Sighing, he climbed through the CID’s main hatch and squirmed into position in the cockpit, waiting patiently while the robot’s computers synched with his central nervous system.

The hatch sealed.

“Wolf One is up,” he said as status reports, data, and images gleaned by the CID’s sensors began pouring into his consciousness. His audio pickups immediately tamped down the otherwise overwhelming sounds of barely contained chaos — blaring klaxons, sirens, and frantic radio calls from emergency crews trying to cope with a disaster far beyond their training or ability to control.

“Shutting down thermal adaptive and chameleon camouflage systems,” he radioed. There was no point in wasting the limited power stored in his lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. He couldn’t expect to hide from impersonal forces of nature like radiation, heat, and pressure.

“Copy that, One,” he heard Charlie say. Wearing a headset, she stood at the edge of the Sparrowhawk’s lowered ramp, ready to guide him out of the aircraft. “Right, big guy, let’s go greet the puny earthlings. But now that you’re fully visible, try not to scare the shit out of too many of the locals, okay? We’re going to need all the help and technical advice we can get.”