Warrior Class

Zhukovsky Flight Research Center, near Bykovo, Russian Federation

Even with many high-intensity lights ringing the area, it was almost impossible to see the big transport plane through the darkness and driving snowstorm as it taxied over to its parking spot. Its port-side turboprop engines, the ones facing the terminal building, the honor guard, a small band, and a group of waiting people, had already been shut down, and as soon as the plane was stopped by ground crews with lighted wands, the other two engines were also shut down. The ramp suddenly became eerily quiet, the only sound that of a long line of hearses’ wheels crunching on snow. On one side of the transport plane’s tail, seventeen hearses waited; on the other side were seventeen limousines for the family members, plus several official-looking government vehicles. From the official vehicles, two men surrounded by security guards alighted and took places beside the honor guard.

The transport’s cargo ramp under the tall tail motored down, and the receiving detail marched over and stepped up the ramp, as the first limousine pulled out of line and maneuvered over to receive its passenger. The band began to play a solemn funeral march. A few moments later, the receiving detail slowly wheeled out the first casket, draped with the flag of the Russian Federation. As the honor guard and officials saluted and lowered flags in respect, a woman clothed all in black, wearing a black veil under her black beaver pelt hat, stepped forward from the line of limousines and reached out with both hands to gently touch the casket in silent greeting, as if wishing to not to disturb its occupant but to welcome him home.

Then, suddenly, her grief turned to anger. She cried aloud in anguish, piercing the frigid, snowy evening like a gunshot. She pushed the attendants aside, then grasped the Russian Federation flag in her gloved hands, pulled it off the casket, flung it to the ground, and rested her right cheek on the smooth gray surface of the casket’s lid, sobbing loudly. A young man, tall and clothed in black as well, held her shaking shoulders, eventually pulling her away from the casket as it was escorted to the waiting hearse. The young man tried to comfort and support the woman as he led her to her own waiting limousine, where other family members were waiting, but she pushed him away. The limousine drove off, leaving the young man behind. The commander of the escort detail picked the flag up off the snow-covered ramp, quickly folded it, and gave it to one of the limousine attendants, as if unsure of what to do with it now.

The young man remained behind. He watched silently as the remaining sixteen caskets were escorted out of the big transport plane and placed into their hearses, and he remained, ignoring the snow falling heavier and heavier, after all the limousines, the escort detail, and the color guard had departed. None of the other family members spoke to the officials, and they did not attempt to speak with the family members. The officials returned to their limousines as soon as the last hearse drove away.

The young man saw he was not alone. A tall, distinguished-looking older gentleman, also in a black fur beaver-pelt hat and rich-looking sealskin coat, stood nearby, tears running unabashedly down his cheeks. They looked at each other across the snow-obscured ramp. The older man approached the younger and nodded politely. “Spakoyniy nochyee, bratam, he said in greeting. “ K sazhalyeneeyoo. Kak deela?”

“I’ve been better,” the younger man replied. He did not offer his hand in greeting.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the older man said. “I am Dr. Pyotr Viktorievich Fursenko. I lost my son, Gennadi Piotrievich, in Kosovo.”

“I am sorry,” the young man murmured. There was a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

“Thank you. He was a lieutenant, one of the security officers. He had been in the army only eight months, and in Kosovo only two weeks.” No other comment from the young man, so Fursenko went on: “I assume the unit commander, Colonel Kazakov, was your father?” The young man nodded. Dr. Fursenko paused, looked at the younger man, waiting for an introduction, but none was forthcoming. “And that was your mother, I assume?” Again, nothing. “I am sorry for her as well. I must tell you, I can’t help but agree with her sentiments.”

“Her sentiments?”

“Her anger at Russia, at the Central Military Committee, at the general state of our country in general,” Fursenko said. “We can’t seem to do anything right, even help our comrades hold on to a tiny republic, in the backwaters of the Balkans.”

The younger man glanced over at Fursenko. “How do you know I’m not an internal security officer or MVD, Doctor?” he asked. The MVD, or Ministry of Internal Affairs, conducted most government intelligence, counterintelligence, and national police activities inside the Russian Federation. “You could be investigated for what you just said.”

“I don’t care — let them investigate me, imprison me, kill me,” Fursenko said, his voice filled with despair. “They are undoubtedly better at killing their own people than protecting their soldiers in Kosovo or Chechnya.” The young man smiled at that comment. “My research center was torn down, my industry that I have worked in for twenty-five years has all but closed down, my parents are gone, my wife died a few years ago, and my two daughters are somewhere in North America. My son was all I had left.” He paused, looking the younger man up and down. “I would say that you could be MVD or SVR as well.” The SVR was the new name for the KGB, which conducted most foreign intelligence activities for Russia but was free to act inside the country as well. “Except I think you are dressed a little too well.”

“You are a very observant man,” the young man said. He regarded Fursenko for a moment, then extended a hand, and Fursenko accepted it. “Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov.”

“Pleased to meet—” Fursenko stopped suddenly, then squinted his eyes. “Pavel Kazakov? The Pavel Kazakov?”

“I am very impressed by what you are doing at Metyor, Doctor Fursenko,” Kazakov remarked, his voice deep and insistent, as if silently urging Fursenko not to dwell on what he had just figured out.

“I … I…” Fursenko took a moment to regain his composure, then went on, “Thank you, sir. It is all due to you, of course.”

“Not at all, Doctor,” Kazakov said. “Metyor is a fine group.” Most large privatized companies in the Commonwealth of Independent States belonged to organizations called IIGs, or Industrial Investment Groups, similar to corporations in the United States. IIG members were usually banks, other IIGs, some foreign investors, and a few wealthy individuals, but the primary member of any IIG was the Russian government, which controlled at least twenty percent but sometimes as much as ninety percent of any venture, and therefore had ultimate control. Metyor was one of the lucky ones: only thirty percent of the HG was owned by the government. “And I am familiar with your old venture, the Soviet aircraft design bureau in Lithuania called Fisikous.”

It was Fursenko’s turn to look uncomfortable, which pleased and intrigued Kazakov. In conducting his due-diligence before investing in any new company, especially a troubled but high-tech concern like Metyor, Kazakov always put his extensive private intelligence operatives, most of them former KGB, to work learning all there was to learn about the previous holdings of the IIG, which in this case was a research and development institute called Fisikous. What he had found out was nothing short of astounding.

The Fisikous Institute of Technology had been an advanced aircraft and technology research facility in Vilnius, in what was then the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the independent Republic of Lithuania on the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Fisikous had been on the cutting edge of Soviet aircraft design, attracting the brightest engineers from all over the Soviet Union and the non-aligned nations. The big name at Fisikous had been a young scientist named Ivan Ozerov, who’d been the resident low observable technology — stealth — expert. No one knew anything about Ozerov, except that in a short time at Fisikous, under the direct supervision of the chief of the facility, Pyotr Fursenko, and another man who most suspected was KGB, he’d become the number-one design expert in all of the Soviet Union. Ozerov was brilliant, but weird and unpredictable, occasionally launching into wild tirades in English at the slightest provocation or agitation. Scientists there had long suspected Ozerov of being either on LSD or simply psychotic-he was far more than just eccentric. But there was no question that his work, especially on the incredible Fi-170 stealth bomber, had been nothing short of genius.

But there had been problems at Fisikous. The Baltic republic of Lithuania was driving toward independence from the Soviet Union, and Fisikous represented all that was bad about life under Soviet rule. Ivan Ozerov had disappeared during some kind of military action. Some said the American CIA or Special Forces had kidnapped Ozerov. Others said Ozerov had not been Russian but a captured American scientist, codenamed “Redtail Hawk,” brainwashed right there at Fisikous by the KGB, and that the military action had really been a rescue mission. Even the Fisikous-170 stealth bomber, a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand kilo warplane, had been stolen.

“When the Union collapsed, I went back to Russia to head up some other aerospace design bureaus,” Fursenko went on. “I was going to retire or emigrate to the West, because the industry had all but disappeared in the Commonwealth. But when my wife died, I … I stayed on … well, mostly just to have something to do.”

“I understand,” Kazakov said sincerely. “I think that’s important.”

“They had better kofte and romavaya babas in the labs than I could afford as a pensioner anyway,” Fursenko admitted with a faint smile. “There’s not much money in Metyor, but we’re doing important work, incredible things. I didn’t mind not getting paid as long as I could keep on working and get real coffee. No offense, sir. It is rewarding work, but the pay is terrible.”

“No offense taken. My mother made the best romavaya babas when I was a kid,” Kazakov said. He sighed. “Now I think she would use a handful of them to choke me if she had the chance.”

Fursenko didn’t know what to say or do — he was afraid to smile, nod, or even move. He was very surprised and a bit wary after hearing the apparent warmth in Kazakov’s voice — not something he had ever expected to hear at all. “I couldn’t help but notice, your mother… seemed rather upset at … well…”

“At me, yes,” Kazakov admitted. “She does not approve of what I do.”

“And at Russia also.”

“She blames the Russian government for the sloppy way it supports our troops overseas,” Kazakov said. “She blames me for everything else.”

Fursenko definitely did not feel comfortable discussing this man’s personal life — that was an area he had no desire whatsoever to explore. He extended his hand, and Kazakov took it warmly. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Gaspadeen—” Fursenko had used the more modern post-Union breakup, more “politically correct” term for “mister,” but he automatically stopped himself, then said, “Tovarisch Kazakov.” That was what most Russians had called each other back when there was a strong, fearsome, proud empire: Comrade.

Kazakov smiled and nodded approvingly. “My condolences for your loss, Tovarisch Fursenko.”

“And to you, sir.” Fursenko turned and quickly strode away, feeling very uncomfortable with that man knowing his name or even standing behind him.

Kazakov stood by himself on the ramp, reflecting on this very strange evening. First the death and return of his father in shame, without any honors; his mother’s outburst and her rejection; and then this chance meeting with one of the Cold War’s most famous and brilliant weapons designers. Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov didn’t believe in fate — he wielded too much power to believe that anyone else decided your future — but there had to be a reason, some definite path, that this chain of events signaled.

At one time, Doctor Pyotr Viktorievich Fursenko had been considered the finest and most imaginative aerospace and electromagnetodynamics engineer in all of Europe. Since the age of thirty, he had been the director of several Soviet aircraft and weapon design bureaus, building the most advanced military aircraft, missiles, bombs, avionics, and components imaginable …

At least, they had thought it was the best. Fursenko’s word had been considered physics law until Ivan Ozerov had shown up at Fisikous. When Ozerov had started working at Fisikous, completely shattering the old beliefs and understandings, the Soviet scientists had realized exactly how far behind the United States they were on advanced warplane technology, especially low observable airframe, devices, systems, and counter-stealth technology.

This had only spurred Fursenko to even greater heights of genius. Even though the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the collapse of big, super-secret, well-funded agencies like Fisikous, it had also meant that Fursenko could travel and attend classes and seminars all over the world to learn more about modern warplane technology. When Ozerov had disappeared, probably back to whatever planetoid or genetic-engineering incubation tank had spawned him, Fursenko had again taken the lead in Russian aircraft and weapons design.

And now Kazakov knew where he was, had met him, and could even be called his boss — because Kazakov owned over sixty percent of Metyor Industrial Investment Group. The genius Fursenko had been at his disposal all this time, and he hadn’t even known it! But how to take advantage of this development? His mind began racing….

Only when the cargo ramp was finally raised and the transport plane made ready to be towed back to its hangar did Kazakov finally turn toward the three government vehicles behind him, which had also remained.

The middle and left side cars suddenly started up and drove off, leaving one car behind. A guard in a dark suit, wearing a machine pistol on a strap, emerged from the remaining vehicle, a stretch limousine, and opened a door for the young man. Kazakov brushed snow off his shoulders, then removed and brushed snow off his hat, revealing a shaved head, and stepped inside. The door closed behind the young man with a heavy CHUNK! that revealed its heavily armored doors and windows. The limousine drove off.

Inside was one man, a military officer in his early sixties, seated on a side-facing seat. Before him was a communications console, complete with satellite transceivers and television and computer monitors. A very pretty uniformed female aide sat in the forward aft-facing seat, with a similar console before her. She glanced at the young man, gave him an approving half-smile, and returned to her work.

“You did not even try to pay your respects to my mother, General,” the young man said acidly, without any sort of formal greeting.

“I did not think it would have been wise to try to console her in her obvious hysterical grief.”

“So, who were in the other cars?” the young man asked. “The president? The defense minister?”

“The national security advisor, representing President Sen’kov, and the assistant minister of defense for European affairs, representing the government. I represent the military.”

“I had hoped the president would be courageous enough to attend,” the young man said. bitterly. “Not only does the commander-in-chief not attend, but he schedules the return flight for the dead of night in the middle of a snowstorm! What happened to your compassion, your responsibility to thank the families for their sacrifice?”

“We may have extended that courtesy, if your mother did not desecrate the flag so,” the old officer said. “That was a most disappointing display. Most regrettable.”

“She is the widow of a man who died in the line of duty, doing a job few officers wanted,” the younger man said. “She has given her life for the army. She is entitled to her grief — however she wishes to express it.” The young man looked over, but the officer did not respond. He took a breath, then reached behind the seat, lifted a crystal glass, and sniffed it, while at the same time checking out the aide over the rim of the glass. “I see you still prefer American whiskey and attractive aides, Colonel-General,” the young man said.

“Observant as always, Pavel Gregorievich,” Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko replied, with a smile. He reached into a compartment under the desk and withdrew a bottle of Jim Beam and two shot glasses. He poured, gave a glass to the young man, raised his own glass, then said, “To Gregor Mikhailevich, the bravest and finest officer — no, the finest man — I have ever known. My best friend, my confidant, a soldier’s soldier, and a hero to mother Russia.”

“To my father,” Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov said, raising his glass. As the general raised his glass, he quickly added, “Who was killed because of the gutless, cowardly, inept members of the Army of the Russian Federation and the Central Military Committee.”

Colonel-General Zhurbenko, deputy minister of defense and chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, paused with his glass a centimeter from his lips. He considered Kazakov’s words, shrugged, and downed his whiskey.

“At least you have the guts not to argue with me,” Kazakov said bitterly.

“Your words hurt and offend me, Pavel,” Zhurbenko said resignedly, as his aide refilled their glasses. “If they were said by anyone else, regardless of their rank or title, I would have him imprisoned, or executed.”

“My mother as well, General?” Kazakov asked.

Zhurbenko gave no response. He was accustomed to threatening political and military rivals — but Kazakov wasn’t a rival, he was a superior. Even if he didn’t carry the name of Russia’s most famous and beloved soldier, he would quite possibly be the most powerful man in Russia.

Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov had started out wanting nothing more than to be the privileged son of a dedicated, fast-rising officer of the Red Army. Thanks to his parents, he had enrolled in the Russian Military Academy in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, but found he had no love of the military — only for partying, smoking, drinking, and hell-raising, the wilder the better. To avoid embarrassment, his father had had him quietly transferred to Odessa Polytechnic University in the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, near their winter home. In a place where he was just another one of many spoiled sons of high-ranking Communist Party members attending school in the “Russian Riviera,” he had had to transform himself in order to stand out and start to build a future for himself.

Pavel couldn’t do it. Being comfortable and taking it easy was his style, not doing what others thought he should be doing. Free from the confines of Leningrad and his father’s watchful eye, he’d partied harder than ever. He’d experimented with every imaginable adventure: ice sailing on the Black Sea, parachuting, rock climbing, extreme sports like road luge and boulder biking, and pursuing the most beautiful women, single or married, on the Crimean Peninsula.

Drugs were everywhere, and Pavel tried them all. It was whispered that Pavel had burned all of the hair off his head and face while freebasing cocaine, which was why he kept his head shaved now, to remind him of how low he had once sunk. But before that time, nothing had been out of bounds. He’d quickly gained a reputation as a man’s man, and his fame and notoriety had grown in inverse exponential proportion to his grade point average. One day, Pavel had disappeared from the nightclub scene in Odessa. Most everyone had assumed he was dead, from either an accident during one of his daredevil extreme sports, an overdose, or a shoot-out with rival drug dealers.

When Pavel Kazakov had returned to Odessa years later, he had been a changed man. The head was still bald — he no longer needed to shave it — but everything else was different. He was off drugs, wealthy, and sophisticated. He’d bought one of the nicest homes on the Black Sea, began contributing to many cultural events, and became a respected financier, internationally known market-maker, and venture capitalist long before industrial investment groups and conglomerates were common in Russia. Of course, the rumors surfaced — he had KGB agents in his pocket, he transported thousands of kilos of drugs in diplomatic pouches, and he killed his competitors and adversaries with cold, ruthless detachment.

His biggest and most dramatic acquisition had been a nearly bankrupt oil and gas company in Odessa. The company had gone into a steep tailspin after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the drop in world oil prices, as had many oil companies, and Kazakov had acquired the company weeks before it folded completely. Many had speculated that Pavel Kazakov’s drug connections had led him to develop a legitimate, Soviet-sponsored and Soviet-secured company; some said that it was an attempt by Pavel’s father to use his status and influence to try to get his son cleaned up and into a legitimate line of work, but far enough in the hinterlands of the Soviet empire so that even if he did screw up, he wouldn’t be an embarrassment. In any case, Pavel had dropped out of school in Odessa and become the president and largest individual shareholder, owning just slightly less stock than the company’s largest shareholder, the Russian government itself.

Pavel’s strategy to make the company, which he called Metyorgaz, profitable, despite the downturn in the oil industry had been simple: find oil where no one else would even think or dare to go, and pump and transport it as cheaply as possible. His first choice had been to go to Kazakhstan, the second-largest of the former Soviet republics but one of the most sparsely populated and capitalized. The reason: the former Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic had been and still was the dumping ground of the Soviet Union.

The Communists had begun denuding the republic with the forced collectivization and relocation of millions of Kazakhs in the 1930s. They’d wasted billions of dollars and many years trying to grow wheat, cotton, and rice in one of the harshest climates in the world. Nuclear waste dumped throughout the republic, along with thousands of above-ground nuclear tests and accidents, had killed millions of persons over thirty years. Leaking radiation, pesticides, herbicides, raw sewage, and livestock waste had contaminated well water, livestock, and food, killing or injuring millions more. Spent ballistic missile and orbital rocket stages crashing downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia’s main space launch facility, had poisoned and killed thousands more. Local communist authorities, without consulting one expert, had built or enlarged several irrigation canals to plant cotton, completely draining the already heavily polluted Aral Sea, and creating one of the worst ecological disasters of the 1980s. The forty thousand square mile inland sea, the fourth largest in the world, had shrunk to more than sixty percent of its size, scattering contaminated and polluted salt across the once-fertile Kazakh plains.

Pavel Kazakov had continued with the Russian tradition of raping Kazakhstan. He’d chosen the easiest, cheapest, and highest-producing ways to pump oil, no matter how it hurt the land or how badly it polluted the Caspian Sea. Even after the required bribes to Kazak and Russian government officials to bypass what few environmental regulations were enforced, Kazakov had made immense profits. The gamble had paid off big, and Metyorgaz soon became the third-largest oil and gas producer in the Soviet Union, behind government-run Gazprorn and the richest semi-independent Russian oil producer, LUKoil. Metyorgaz became the largest Russian Caspian Sea oil producer by far.

He increased his wealth and prestige by taking another gamble. The Russian government had mandated that Caspian Sea oil flowing into Russia be transported to the huge oil distribution terminal in Samara, about seven hundred miles north along the Ural River near Kujbysev, through which all of the oil flowing from western Siberia passed. The existing pipeline had a capacity of only three hundred thousand barrels, per day, and Kazakov envisioned pumping six to seven times that volume in just a few short years. He had to find a better way.

The answer was clear: build his own pipeline. Neither the Russian Federation nor the newly independent Republic of Kazakhstan had money for this, so Kazakov took it upon himself to beg, borrow, and enlist the help of dozens of financiers around the world. He raised more than two and a half billion dollars and started the largest oil and gas pipeline project in the world, a nine-hundred-and-thirty-mile behemoth line from Tengiz, Kazakhstan, to Novorossiysk, Russia, on the Black Sea. Capable of transporting almost a million and a half barrels of oil a day, with expansion possibilities to almost two million barrels per day, the pipeline had opened up previously abandoned terminals and pipelines on the Black Sea in Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Although Kazakov had to pay huge sums in fees, taxes, leases, and bribes to the Russian and Kazakh governments, he still became one of the wealthiest individuals in Europe.

He used his newfound wealth and started investing in supertankers and refineries, shifting from the oil-producing and — pumping business to the shipment and refining business. The refineries in Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Turkey were happy to have him oversee operations, and they made Kazakov even wealthier. He modernized a half-dozen facilities in those three countries, making them far more efficient and cleaner than any yet developed in Eastern Europe.

But his core problem still remained: his main customer was still Russia or Russian client-states of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and their oil refining industry was one of the worst in the world, hopelessly outdated and inefficient. Kazakov could pump it profitably, but he lost money every time he sold product to the CIS, because they could not afford to pay very much for it and payments sometimes took a long time. The real money lay in shipping oil to Western European refineries, and that meant shipping oil through the Bosporus Straits into the Mediterranean. The problem was, the number of tankers transiting the Straits was already huge — an average of ten supertankers a day, added to all the other traffic in the Straits, meant wasted time and money, not to mention the tariffs Turkey extracted for each barrel of oil passing through its country. Despite his enormous wealth, Kazakov was a runt among giants when it came to competing with multinational Western oil producers.

Naturally, as Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov’s wealth and prestige grew, so did the rumors. Most claimed he was a Russian Mafia boss, with an organization more influential and powerful than the Russian government; others said he was a drug dealer, tapping into Kazakhstan’s other major export — heroin — and using his contacts in both the East and West to transport thousands of pounds of heroin per month throughout Europe; others said he was a spy for the Americans, or the Chinese, or the Japanese, or whoever happened to be the scapegoat of the month.

The bottom line for Colonel-General Zhurbenko was this: no one, not even he, with all his access to military and civilian intelligence resources, knew for sure. That made Pavel Kazakov a very, very dangerous man, and an even more dangerous adversary. Zhurbenko had too many children, grandchildren, dachas, mistresses, and foreign bank accounts to risk stirring up the mud trying to find out — he was sure Kazakov could take all of them for himself if he chose.

Which is why when Kazakov asked that question about his mother, Zhurbenko replied nervously, “Of course not, Pavel,” taking a deep sip of whiskey to calm his nerves. When he looked over at Kazakov again, he saw the young entrepreneur’s eyes shaded in the interior lights of the back of the limo, hooded — like a snake’s, he thought. “You know as well as 1, Pavel: the Army hasn’t been the same since our humiliation in Afghanistan. We could not even bring a bunch of ragtag goat herders to heel there. Afterward, we couldn’t defeat one rebel army in our own backyard, even if they were just some unemployed factory workers with a few black market guns. Vilnius, Tbilisi, Baku, Dushanbe, Tiraspol, Kiev, Lvov, Grozny twice — the once feared Red Army has become little more than a bump in the road for any two-bit revolutionary.”

“You let those Albanian peasants chop up my father like a suckling pig!” Kazakov said hotly. “What are you going to do about it? Nothing! What did I read in Interfax this morning? The Russian government is considering removing its peacekeeping forces from Kosovo? Seventeen soldiers are slaughtered by KLA marauders, and now the government wants to turn tail and run? I thought surely we would send a battalion of shock troops or a helicopter assault brigade into Albania and mow down every last one of the rebel bases!”

“We have only four thousand troops in Kosovo now, Pavel,” Zhurbenko argued. “We barely have enough operating funds to keep them minimally operational—”

“‘Minimally operational’? For God’s sake, General, our troops are having to forage for food! If I were in charge, I’d take one evening, send in an entire brigade to the last man, and blow every known or suspected KLA base to hell, capture their supplies, interrogate the prisoners, bum their homes, and to hell with world opinion! At the very least, it would give our soldiers something to do. At best, it would allow them to avenge the deaths of their brothers in arms.”

“I agree fully with your passion and your anger, young Pavel, but how little you know of politics or how to prosecute a war,” Zhurbenko said, trying to keep the tone of his voice lighthearted. Kazakov took an angry gulp of whiskey. Zhurbenko certainly did not want to get on this man’s evil side, he thought as he tried to appear as understanding and sympathetic as he could. “It takes time, planning, and most important, money, to execute an operation such as that.”

“My father invaded Pristina with less than twelve hours’ notice, with troops that were barely qualified to do the job.”

“Yes, he did,” Zhurbenko had to admit, although it was not the city of Pristina, just the little regional airport. “Your father was a true leader of men, a risk taker, a born warrior in the tradition of the Slavic kings.” That seemed to placate Kazakov.

But in the intervening silence, Zhurbenko turned over the question in his mind. Go into Kosovo with a brigade? It would take months, perhaps half a year, to mobilize twenty thousand troops to do anything, and the entire world would know about it long before the first regiment was loaded up. No. It was silly. Kosovo was a lose-lose situation. The murder of Colonel Kazakov and sixteen other soldiers in Kosovo only reinforced what Zhurbenko already knew — Russia needed to get out of Kosovo. Kazakov was certainly a brilliant businessman and engineer, but he knew nothing of the simplest mechanisms of modern warfare.

But perhaps a smaller force, one or two light armored battalions, even a Spetsnaz airborne regiment. Pavel Kazakov’s father had parachuted in an infantry company right onto Pristina Airport, right under NATO’s nose, and caught the world off guard. It hadn’t been a shock force, just a regular infantry unit — Zhurbenko was sure all its members hadn’t even been jump-qualified at the time. A well-trained Spetsnaz unit of similar size, perhaps reinforced by air, would be ten times more effective. Why couldn’t they do it again? NATO’s presence in Kosovo was only a bit smaller than it was in 1999, but now they were deeply entrenched in their own little sectors, in secure little compounds, not daring to roam around too much. The Kosovo Liberation Army had free rein. But they weren’t regulars — they were guerrilla fighters. Dangerous, even deadly in the right situation, but no match for a Russian special forces team on a search-and-destroy mission.

The general noticed something that he had almost missed in his effort not to anger this young industrialist: Pavel Kazakov was passionate about something — the welfare of Russian soldiers in Kosovo, the ones his murdered father had commanded. He spoke about “our” soldiers, as if he really cared about them. Was it just because his father had been one? Did he now feel some sort of kinship with the soldiers killed in Kosovo? Whatever it was, it was a sudden glimpse behind the eyes of one of the most inscrutable personalities in the world.

“This is very interesting, Pavel, very interesting,” Zhurbenko said. “You would advocate a much stronger, more forceful role in Kosovo?”

“Kosovo is just the beginning, General,” Kazakov replied acidly. “Chechnya was a good example of a conflict well fought — bomb the rebels into submission. Destroy their homes, their places of business, their mosques, their meeting places. Since when does the Russian government condone independence movements within the Federation? Never.

“Russia has interests outside our borders that need protecting as well,” Kazakov went on. Zhurbenko was fully attentive now — because he had been thinking along the very same lines. “The Americans are investing billions of dollars into developing pipelines to ship our oil, oil discovered and developed by Russian engineers, to the West. What do we get out of it? Nothing. A few rubles in transshipment fees, a fraction of what we’re entitled to. Why is this allowed to happen? Because we allowed Azerbaijan and Georgia to become independent. The same would have happened in Chechnya if we allowed it to happen.”

“But what about the West? Don’t we need their investment capital, their coordination, the cooperation of their oil industry?”

“Ridiculous. The Western world condemned our actions against Chechnya because it is politically popular to oppose Russia. The Americans are as two-faced as they can be. They condemned our antiterrorist security actions against one of our own republics, but NATO, a military alliance, attacks Serbia, a sovereign country and close ally, without a declaration of war, and ignores the indignation of the entire world!”

“But we did nothing because we needed Western financial aid, Western investments—”

“Rubbish,” Kazakov said, taking an angry gulp of whiskey. “We went along with NATO’s aggression against Serbia, remaining silent while our Slav brothers were being bombed, all to try to show support for the West. We were buffaloed into espousing the same rhetoric they were feeding the rest of the world — that opposing Slobodan Milosevic and so-called Serb ethnic cleansing would be more in line with the sentiment of the world community. So we remained silent and then joined the United Nations ‘peacekeeping’ efforts.

“So what has the West done for us in return? Nothing! They think of different reasons not to provide us assistance or restructure government loans to suit their own political agenda. First they blamed our actions in Chechnya, then they blamed the election of President Sen’kov and the formation of a coalition government with a few Communists in it, then they blamed so-called human rights abuses, then weapons sales to countries unfriendly to America, then drug dealers and organized crime. The fact is, they just want us to heel. They want us pliable, soft, and nonthreatening. They don’t want to invest in us.”

“You sound very much like your father, do you know that?” Zhurbenko said, nodding to his aide to refill the young man’s glass. Pavel Kazakov nodded and smiled slightly, the whiskey starting to warm his granite-hard features a bit. He still looked evil and dangerous, but now more like a satisfied crocodile with a fat duck in his mouth than a cobra ready to strike.

In fact, General Zhurbenko knew, Colonel Gregor Kazakov had never made a political comment in his entire life. He’d been a soldier, first, foremost, and ever. No one — very definitely including Zhurbenko — knew what the elder Kazakov’s opinions of his government or their policies had been, because he’d never volunteered his thoughts, no matter how casual the surroundings. But the fiction seemed to work, and the younger Kazakov seemed more animated than ever.

“So what do we do, Pavel?” Zhurbenko asked. “Attack? Resist? Ally with Germany? What can we do?”

Zhurbenko could see Kazakov’s mind racing furiously, lubricated and uninhibited by the alcohol. He even smiled a mischievous, somewhat malevolent grin. But then he shook his head. “No … no, General. I am not a military man. I have no idea what can be done. I cannot speak for the government or the president.”

“You’re speaking to me, Pavel,” Zhurbenko urged him. “No one else around to listen. What you say is not treasonous — in fact, it might be considered patriotic. And you may not be a military man, but your background in international finance and commerce combined with your brilliance and intelligence — not to mention your commendable upbringing as the son of a national military hero — certainly qualifies you to express an educated opinion. What would you do, Pavel Gregorievich? Bomb Kosovo? Bomb Albania? Invade the Balkans?”

“I am not a politician, General,” Kazakov repeated. “I’m just a businessman. But as a businessman, I believe this: a leader, whether a military commander, president, or company chairman, is supposed to take charge and be a leader, not a follower. Our government, our military commanders, must lead. Never let anyone dictate terms. Not the West, not rebels, no one.”

“No one can argue with that, Pavel,” Zhurbenko said. “But what would you have us do? Avenge your father’s death? Tear Kosovo, possibly Albania, apart looking for his murderers? Or don’t you care who the murderers are? Just avenge yourself on any available Muslims?”

“Damn you, General, why are you taunting me like this?” Kazakov asked. “Are you enjoying this?”

“I am trying to get through to you, young Gregorievich, that it is easy to point fingers and be the angry young man — what is hard is to come up with solutions, with answers,” Zhurbenko said. “Do you think it was easy for Secretary Yejsk and Deputy Minister Lianov to have to retreat to their cars without grieving with the families? Those men, the entire Kremlin, the entire high command, are suffering just as badly as you, as badly as your mother. Except the anguish you feel now is the anguish that we have been feeling for years, as we watch our great nation slip into disarray, powerless to do anything about it.”

“What would you have me say, General?” Kazakov asked. “Start a nuclear war? Go back to a communist empire? Engage the West in another Cold War? No. The world is much different now. Russia is different.”

“Different. How?”

“We have allowed our friends, our former client states, our former protectorates, to break away from us. We built those little republics into nations. We didn’t have to let them go. Now they turn on us and turn toward the West.” Kazakov sat silently for a moment, sipping whiskey, then said, “They voted for independence — let us compel them to join the Commonwealth again.”

“Now we are getting somewhere, Pavel Gregorievich,” Zhurbenko said. “Compel them — how?”

“Carrot and the stick — then plonzo o plata, lead or gold,” Kazakov said.

“Explain yourself.”

“Oil,” Kazakov said. “Look at all we have built over the years, all the places the Soviet Union invested to try to gain a foothold in Western commerce, only to lose it all. Oil terminals and refineries in Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia. We gave billions to Yugoslavia to help build terminals and refineries and pipelines in Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia. They are all going to waste, or they are going to bloodsucking Western conglomerates.”

“What are you talking about, Pavel?”

“General, I agreed with our participation, my father’s participation, in Kosovo, because I believe Russia has a vested interest in the Balkans — namely, to help bring Russian oil west.”

“What oil?”

“Caspian Sea oil,” Kazakov said.

“How much oil?”

“In ten years, with the proper infrastructure in place and under firm political and military control — five million barrels,” Kazakov said proudly. “Two and a half billion rubles — about one hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth.” Zhurbenko didn’t seem too impressed. He took another sip of whiskey — looking bored, until Kazakov added, “A day, General. One hundred and fifty million dollars a day, every day, for the next fifty years. And we pay not one ruble to anyone in duties, taxes, fees, or tariffs. The money is all ours.”

Zhurbenko nearly choked on the Jim Beam. He looked at Kazakov in complete shock, a dribble of whiskey running down his cheek. “Wha … how is that possible?” he gasped. “I didn’t know we had that kind of oil reserves anywhere, not even in the Persian Gulf.”

“General, there is oil in the Caspian Sea that hasn’t even been discovered yet — perhaps a hundred times more than we have discovered in the past twenty years,” Kazakov said. “It could be equivalent to the oil reserves in Siberia or the South China Sea. The problem is, it doesn’t all belong to Russia. Russia owns only one-fifth of the known reserves. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran own the rest. But Russian workers and Russian capital built most of those other nations’ petroleum industries, General. Now, we pay outlandish prices for limited leases from those same countries — so they can use our equipment and our know-how to pump oil that Russia discovered. We must pay millions in bribes and fees, plus a duty for every barrel we ship out of the country. We pay huge salaries for unskilled foreign laborers while Russian men, educated oilmen, and their families starve right here at home. We do this because Russia didn’t have the balls to hold on to what was rightfully theirs all along — the Soviet republics.”

“One hundred fifty million dollars … per day,” was all Zhurbenko could murmur.

“Instead of pumping oil, refining it, shipping it to the greedy West, and taking our rightful place as the world’s greatest nation,” Kazakov said, draining his glass, “we are welcoming our heroes home in caskets draped with the flag of a dying, gutless government. No wonder my mother wanted that flag off her husband’s casket. It is a disgrace. Tell that to the president when you see him.”

They fell silent for several minutes after that, with Zhurbenko exchanging only a few whispered words with his aide and Kazakov sipping on a couple more shots of whiskey until the bottle was empty. The limousine soon pulled up before an apartment building about ten blocks from the Kremlin, with unmarked security cars parked at each corner and across from the entrance. A security guard and a receptionist could be seen through the thick front windows.

Zhurbenko easily maneuvered around Kazakov and exited the limousine. “My driver will take you wherever you would like to go, Pavel,” the commander of the Russian Federation’s ground forces said. He extended a hand, and Kazakov took it. “Again, my deepest condolences for your loss. I will visit your mother in the morning, if she will see me.”

“I will see to it that she receives you, Colonel-General.”

“Good.” He placed his left hand over Pavel’s right, pulling the young man closer as if speaking in confidence. “And we must keep in touch, Pavel. Your ideas have much merit. I would like to hear more.”

“Perhaps, General.”

The limousine drove off and had gone for a couple blocks before Pavel realized the general’s aide was still in the car. “So,” Kazakov said, “what is your name … Colonel?”

“Major,” the woman replied. “Major Ivana Vasilyev, deputy chief of the general’s staff.” She shifted over to the general’s seat, then produced another bottle of Jim Beam and a glass. “May I pour you something more to drink?”

“No. But you may help yourself. I assume you are officially off duty now.”

“I am never really off-duty, but the colonel-general has dismissed me for the night.” Instead, she put the bottle and the glass away, then turned to face him. “Is there anything else I can offer you, Mr. Kazakov?” Pavel let his eyes roam across her body, and she reciprocated. Vasilyev smiled invitingly. “Anything at all?”

Kazakov chuckled, shaking his head. “The old bastard wants something from me, doesn’t he, Major?”

Vasilyev unbuttoned her tunic, revealing the swell of round, firm breasts beneath her white uniform blouse. “My orders were to escort you home and see to it that any wishes you have are taken care of immediately, Mr. Kazakov,” she said. She removed her neck tab and unbuttoned her blouse, and Kazakov noticed she wore a very unmilitary sheer black lace brassiere. “The general is interested in your ideas and suggestions, and he has ordered me to act as his liaison. I have been ordered to provide you with anything you wish — data, information, resources, assistance — anything.” She knelt before him on the rich blue carpeting, reached out to him, and began to stroke him through his pants. “If he wants something specific from you, he has not told me what it is.”

“So he orders you to undress before a strange man in his car, and you do it without question?”

“This was my idea, Mr. Kazakov,” she said, with a mischievous smile. “The general gives me a great deal of latitude in how I might carry out his orders.”

Kazakov smiled, reached to her, and expertly removed the front clasp from her brassiere with one hand. “I see,” he said.

She smiled in return, closed her eyes as his hands explored her breasts, and then said as she reached for his zipper, “I consider this one of the perquisites of my duties.”

The White House Oval Office, Washington, D.C.

“Mr. President, I know you meant to shake things up in Washington — but I’m afraid this bombshell is surely going to explode in your face when it gets out.”

President Thomas Thorn stopped typing into his computer and swiveled around to face his newly ratified Secretary of Defense, Robert G. Goff, who had marched into the Oval Office almost at a trot. Along with Goff was the Secretary of State, Edward F. Kercheval; the Vice President, Lester R. Busick, and Douglas R. Morgan, the Director of Central Intelligence. “Read the final draft of the executive order, did you, Bob?”

Goff held up his copy of the document in question as if it were covered in blood. “Read it? I’ve done nothing else but go over it for the past eighteen hours. I’ve been up all night, and I’ve kept most of my staff up all night, too, trying to find out if this is legal, feasible, or even right. This is completely astounding, Thomas.”

Robert Goff was known throughout Washington as a straight-talking, no-nonsense man. A retired U.S. Army veteran, three-term congressman from Arizona, and acknowledged military expert, at age fifty-one Goff was one of the new lions in Washington, not afraid to stir things up. But the President’s plan made even him gape in astonishment. Next to Goff was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard W. Venti. Tall, thin, and young-looking for a four-star general, Venti was a veteran fighter pilot and the former commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe before being appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Unlike Goff, Venti preferred to keep his emotions and his thoughts to himself.

Noticeably absent from the meeting was the President’s Special Advisor on National Security Affairs, known as the National Security Advisor — because President Thomas N. Thorn hadn’t appointed one. It was part of a major shakeup in the Executive Branch, a drastic downsizing that was designed to make Cabinet officials more responsive and responsible, both to the public and to the President. So far in the new Thorn administration, over three hundred White House and executive branch personnel slots had been eliminated simply because the President and his staff had refused to fill them. The functions of several White House offices, such as Drug Control Policy, Management and Budget, and several political liaison offices, would be reassigned to other departments or simply eliminated.

“I know we talked about what we might do to change things in the Department of Defense and in the entire government,” Goff went on excitedly, “but … this? You can’t possibly seriously intend to actually implement any of this.”

“I am going to do all of it, and I’m going to finish it by the end of this year,” the President said with a confident smile.

“Changing priorities as far as peacekeeping deployments — I don’t think you’ll get too much opposition,” Goff said. “Another few rounds of base realignments, with no closures — I think that will sell, too.” He motioned to the draft speech and the President’s staff’s attached comments. “But this …”

“Bob, remember when we first talked about the possibility of doing this?” Thorn asked, his ever-present smile warm with the memories. Robert Goff had been one of Jeffersonian Party candidate Thomas Thorn’s earliest and strongest supporters, giving up his seat in Congress during the campaign to help Thorn. They had been close friends ever since.

“Of course I remember,” Goff said, smiling in spite of himself. Thomas Thorn had this irritating way of disarming almost any agitated situation or person. “But we were young and stupid and naive as hell back then.”

“It was less than a year ago, funny man,” Thorn said with a smile. “We were in Abilene, Texas, at one of the first Jeffersonian Party rallies. It was cold, and I think it had snowed the night before. You and three of your volunteers had to stay in the same room at the Holiday Inn because we barely had enough money to keep going for another month; Amelia and I had three of the kids licking stamps for the mailers while they were watching cartoons. We didn’t even place in the Iowa caucuses, and we barely qualified for the ballot in the New Hampshire primary, so we decided to work on the Super Tuesday states. You hoped that a hundred folks would show. Our podium at the open house at the Army post was a real honest-to-goodness soapbox—”

“A bunch of cases of laundry detergent from the mess hall, covered over with a tablecloth.”

Thorn nodded. “But two thousand folks showed up, and we had to stand on top of a bus and use one of those big loudspeakers they use on firing ranges to make ourselves heard.”

“I remember, Thomas,” Goff said. “That was the beginning. The turning point. What a day. We ended up winning New Hampshire without hardly setting foot in the state.”

“But remember when we took that tour-of the base, and we saw all those hundreds of M I Abrams tanks lined up in the marshaling area?” Thorn went on. “Rows and rows and rows of them, as far as you could see, like furrows in a freshly plowed field. And they told us that none of those tanks had ever fired a shot in anger. They had second- and third-generation tanks there that had never even left the base except for training exercises. We saw artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers, mobile bridges, tents, vans, support vehicles, Humvees, rocket launchers, even radar systems and air defense missile batteries — all had not been used since Desert Storm, if they had ever been used at all.”

“I know, Thomas,” Goff said. “But we’ve been at peace since Desert Storm. It doesn’t mean they won’t ever be used. …”

“We talked about what an incredible waste of resources it all represented,” Thorn went on. “Unemployment in the United States is at an all-time low and has been for years. Companies are begging for qualified, trainable workers. Yet we are spending billions of dollars on weapon systems that may never be used in combat, weapons that were designed to fight yesterday wars. Someone has to operate that equipment, train others to use it, maintain it, train the maintainers, and someone has to keep track of all the stuff they need to operate and maintain it. It was a huge infrastructure, a massive investment in manpower and resources, and for what? What purpose did it serve? We said it was senseless, and we wondered what we could do about it. Well, this is what we’re going to do about it.” The President looked at General Venti. “What are your final thoughts, General?”

Venti thought about his response for a moment, then: “We can argue the merits of the numbers, sir,” he replied. “The Army spends five point three billion dollars a year on readiness and training for weapon systems that have never been used in war. The Navy spends ten billion dollars a year manning, equipping, and maintaining a fleet of nuclear attack submarines that have never fired a shot in combat. We spend another twenty billion dollars maintaining a nuclear deterrence force, and we hope to God we never have to use it, despite the threat from China and possibly Russia.”

“It’s the emotional factor that’ll be hard to counter, Mr. President,” Goff inteijected. “There are still lots of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam vets out there who will see this plan as a betrayal of trust. Your political opponents will use that. Several previous administrations made such drastic budget cuts that what you are about to do is inevitable, but you will still be blamed for it.

“There is still a great threat out there, Mr. President,” Goff went on. “China has already attacked American territory with nuclear weapons, and we think they will again. Although every prediction model and every analyst thinks it’s unlikely, former empires such as Japan, Germany, and Russia could rise up and threaten American interests. Nonaligned, theocratic, and rogue nations could threaten American interests at any time with attacks ranging from simple kidnappings to cyberforce to nuclear weapons. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has increased tenfold since the breakup of the Soviet Union.”

“I want to hear from the general, Bob,” the President said. He nodded, urging him to speak. Goff looked frustrated and a bit angry, but held his comments.

“Frankly, sir, I think it’s about time we start thinking about fighting future wars on our terms,” the Air Force general said. “In a time of relative peace, this is the time to prepare for twenty-first- and even twenty-second century wars. We must do away with the old equipment, the old tactics, and the old fears and prejudices.

“This nation also somehow got sidetracked in its thinking about the role of the military,” Venti concluded. “The military has always been a place to send kids that lacked discipline, but in more recent years the military has become a sort of extension of the welfare state. Fighting and possibly dying for your country took a back seat to learning a trade, getting an education, and providing someplace cool to go after high school. We are spending millions of dollars a year to recruit kids to join, but they’re joining for all the wrong reasons. The problem is not that we lack well-qualified recruits — the problem is, the military became too big, too bloated. We had a military looking for a reason for existence. We were dreaming up missions for the military that had little to do with national security and everything to do with political posturing. I think it’s time we stop that.”

“Spoken like a true Air Force officer, one whose career and retirement are secure,” the President said, with an inquisitive smile.

“And the Air Force makes out pretty well in the new plan, I’ve noticed,” Goff added. “The Air Force and Navy should be thrilled about their new status.”

“I’m speaking as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not just as an Air Force officer, sir,” Vend said to Goff. “I think the plan is a good beginning. It signals a positive change in military strategy for the twenty-first century. It’s a change that I feel is badly needed. I’m completely behind the President.”

“But what will your men say when the changes happen? What will your sister services say?”

“The true soldiers will do what they’re told,” Venti said honestly. “The rest will squawk. They’ll call you a traitor. They’ll call for your resignation, perhaps try to impeach you. That’s when you need to show them the strength of your convictions. Will the public outcry be louder than what your heart is telling your head? If you can listen to your heart while the storm of public and world opinion is beating down on you, everything will turn out okay. That’s your dilemma, sir, not mine.” Venti sighed, looked away for a moment, then added, “And as for my career and retirement: they may be secure, but I’ll still be forever known as the man who presided over the biggest shakeup in U.S. military history since the draft.”

“At least you’re okay with this,” Thorn said. Venti looked sternly at his commander-in-chief, even after the President gave him a wink. To the Secretary of State, Edward Kercheval, the President went on, “Okay, Ed, I know you’ve been waiting for a crack at me. Fire away.”

“You know how I feel about this plan, sir,” Kercheval said ominously. Unlike Goff and most others in Thorn’s administration, Edward Kercheval, former ambassador to Russia in the Martindale administration and a career State Department employee, was not a close friend of the President’s. But the President insisted on open dialogue and direct communication between the Cabinet officers and the Oval Office, and Kercheval had made it clear early on that he would take every opportunity to do so. “I’m afraid this plan will undermine our entire foreign policy structure. Hundreds, if not thousands, of programs, agreements, letters of understanding and memoranda on hundreds of issues and topics, from diplomatic agreements to aviation to intelligence listening posts to food shipments, rely in part on security guarantees put in place decades ago. Your plan threatens to destroy all of those protocols.”

“And we’re bound to abide by these agreements,” the President asked, “even if I feel they’re harmful to the nation?”

“Those agreements are contracts, Mr. President,” Kercheval said. “Unilaterally breaching a contract carries consequences — legal action, loss of prestige, loss of credit, loss of mutual cooperation, loss of trust. Maybe even more dire consequences.”

“So I’m stuck with agreements and commitments I never negotiated, I don’t understand, and no one in Washington can explain.”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, your job, and ours, is to make yourself familiar with all those treaties and agreements,” Kercheval insisted. “That’s why we have a government and a bureaucracy — to help keep track of all there is to know about government. Simply implementing your program isn’t the proper way to do it. The best way is to renegotiate the treaties and agreements you find objectionable. You don’t just knock over the first domino in the row, because then they’ll all fall over, one by one, and you may not be able to stop it once it starts. You take your time and remove one domino at a time, or you stack them differently, or you reinforce them so when another hits it, from any direction, it will still stand.”

“You forgot the other way, Ed: you get up off your chair, away from the table, and stay home,” the President said.

“Then none of the other kids on the block will want to come over to your house and play,” Kercheval suggested, reluctantly playing along with the awkward simile.

“I think they will,” the President said. “Because when some other bully comes along and knocks down those dominos, and they’re not strong enough to stop it from happening, they’ll come back to us.”

“So you want to play foreign policy blackmail with the rest of the world, sir?” Kercheval asked. “My way or the highway? That doesn’t sound like responsible government to me, sir. With all due respect.” It was obvious Kercheval accorded very little respect at all when he said, “With all due respect.”

“Responsible government starts with someone taking the responsibility, and that’s what I’m going to do,” the President said. “I made a promise to the American people to protect and defend the Constitution. I know exactly what that means.”

“Mr. President, I don’t question your motives or your sincerity, or else I never would have agreed to serve on your Cabinet,” Kercheval said. “I’m just trying to advise you on what’s in store for you and this government if you go ahead with this plan. A lot of nations, institutions, and individuals around the world owe their way of life — perhaps even their very life—to the perception of the peace, strength, and security of the United States of America. What you are proposing might erase a lot of that. That could cause a ripple effect that will wash over the entire world.”

“I’m well aware of that, Ed—”

“I don’t think you are, Mr. President,” Kercheval interjected.

The others in the Oval Office turned and looked at Kercheval with shock, then at the President. Even Kercheval expected an explosion. Although Thomas N. Thorn’s public persona was one of quiet, peaceful, dignified ease with the world, they all knew that the President had once been a trained professional killer — some powerful emotions bubbled just below the surface.

“Edward, the United States has been obsessed with dealing with these little rogue nation brushfires, ever since the Persian Gulf War,” the President said. “Somalia, Haiti, Iraq twice, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Korea — we seem to have peacekeeping forces in every corner of the planet. Then, when a major confrontation such as China flares up, we don’t have the resources to pull together to counter them. We have to rely on unconventional forces to do something that our regular forces should do, and I’m not comfortable with that.

“The way I see it, the problem is twofold: our forces are too big and unwieldy to respond quickly enough, and we’re spending too much time, resources, and attention on these little regional brushfires. Not one peacekeeping operation we’ve undertaken, with the possible exception of Haiti, has been successful. We’ve wasted billions of dollars and a lot of international prestige on operations that have not advanced American peace and security one bit. I’m tired of it, I think our military is tired of it, and the American people are tired of it.”

“These ‘brushfires,’ as you call them, could cause a much wider conflict, sir,” Kercheval maintained. “There was never any doubt about Iraq — they threatened the West’s primary oil supply. Other regions, such as the Balkans, are not as clear, but just as important. Ethnic violence in the Balkans has directly caused one world war and indirectly caused another. By intervening in these small conflicts, we’ve prevented them from escalating into much more serious, continentwide wars.”

“I wasn’t convinced during the campaign, and I’m not convinced now,” the President said. “We were assured by the previous administration that intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo was in our national interest. Now I’ve received all the data that the previous commanders-in-chief received, and I don’t see it. Either I’m not as smart as they were and I’m missing something, or there is nothing there that threatens our peace and security. Which is it, Edward?”

“I think it’s important to look beyond the present and look to the geopolitics of the region, sir,” Kercheval said by way of response. “Russia is cracking down on dissenters within its own borders. It wants to reestablish ties with Serbia and is threatening any Eastern European nation that wants to join the European Union or NATO. That’s enough provocation for me, Mr. President. That is very evident to me. Can I explain it any better?”

The last sentence caught everyone’s attention in the room, including the President’s. Instead of taking a return shot, however, the President nodded, politely terminating the discussion. “I appreciate your candor, Ed,” the President said, without a trace of malice — it sounded as if he really meant it, the Secretary of State thought. He turned to Douglas Morgan, the Director of Central Intelligence. “Doug? Comments?”

“How will this affect ongoing intelligence operations?” Morgan asked. “We have several dozen fully authorized and active field operations in progress, especially in the Balkans, Middle East, and Asia. You’re not going just to pull the plug on them, are you, sir?”

“Of course not,” the President replied. “In fact, I see no reason to change any aspect of intelligence operations. I think it’s just as important to maintain a strong and active intelligence and counterintelligence operation, perhaps even more so if my plan is fully implemented.”

“Perhaps because the world will see this plan as something like cowardice and think that every American governmental function will implode as well?” Kercheval interjected.

If the Secretary of State meant to stir up another argument with the President, it didn’t work. Thorn simply looked at Kercheval, nodded, and said with a smile, “Something like that, Ed, something like that.” To the others in the room, he offered, “Anything else?” When no one said anything, Thorn turned directly to Kercheval, hands outspread, eyes riveted on him as if saying, “C’mon, Ed, if you want another shot at me, go ahead and take it.”

Kercheval shook his head. That was all he could do. He had voiced his objections for weeks, had had all the input he was allowed and more, and now even challenged the President’s veracity. The man was obviously determined to do it.

“We’re going to implement the plan immediately, then,” the President said resolutely.’ Goff and Venti’s faces looked grim. Thorn added, “Let’s get it started, Bob.” He reached over, opened the folder before him, and signed the cover sheet of the executive order. “There you go, gentlemen. Let’s do it.”

Goff picked up the document and looked at it as if it were a copy of a death certificate. “I’m sure this is the most historic document I’ll ever hold in my hand.” He looked at Thorn with a mixture of awe and shock. “We’ll put it in motion right away, Mr. President. I have my first closed-door congressional hearing scheduled for next week, but when word leaks out about this, I’m sure that’ll be pushed up, more hearings will undoubtedly be scheduled, and some may even want to go unclassified. I’ll be sure to have the White House and Pentagon counsels set up the ground rules.”

“Good luck, Bob. I’ll be watching.”

“Are you going to mention it in the State of the Union address?”

“I do not intend to make a State of the Union address,” Thorn said.

“What?” the others exclaimed, almost in unison.

“Mr. President, you can’t be serious,” Kercheval said, his voice almost agitated. “Skipping the inaugural was bad enough—”

“I did not ‘skip’ the inaugural, Ed. I just chose not to attend.”

“It was political suicide, Mr. President,” Kercheval insisted. “It made you look like a laughingstock in front of the entire world!”

“I got my entire Cabinet confirmed in two weeks, and by the end of this month I’ll have every federal judge position filled,” the President said. “I don’t care if the world thought it was crazy, and I don’t care about political suicide, because there is virtually no political party behind me.”

“But not giving a speech before Congress—”

“Nothing mandates either an inaugural at the Capitol or a speech before Congress,” the President reminded him. “The Constitution mandates a swearing-in and an oath of office, which I did. The Constitution mandates an annual report to Congress on the state of the union and my legislative agenda, and that’s what I intend to do. I will deliver my budget to Congress at the same time.

“You think it’s political suicide — I say that it tells Congress and tells the American people I mean business. Congress knew I was serious about forming and running my government, and they helped me get my Cabinet confirmed in record time. My judges will be sworn in in months, and in some cases years, before the previous administration’s were.”

Kercheval still looked worried. Thorn stood, clasped him on the shoulder, and said seriously, “It looks suicidal to you, Ed, because you’ve been stained by Washington politics, which most times bears little resemblance to either the law or the Constitution.”

“Sir?” Kercheval asked, letting a bit more anger seep into his voice. “Surely you’re not implying …”

“I don’t know Washington politics,” the President went on, ignoring Kercheval’s rising anger. “All I know is the Constitution and a little bit of the law. But you know something? That’s all I need to know. That’s why I know I can choose not to show up for an inaugural or a State of the Union speech, and have complete confidence that I’m doing the right thing. That kind of confidence rubs off on others. I hope it’ll rub off on you.” He went back to his desk, sat down, and began to type again on the computer keyboard at his desk. “We meet with the congressional leadership this morning,” he said aloud, without looking again at Kercheval. “First conference call is scheduled for later this afternoon, isn’t it, Ed?”

“Yes, sir. The prime ministers of the NATO countries,” Kercheval replied, completely taken aback by the President’s words. “It’ll be a video teleconference from the Cabinet Room at three Pm. Tonight’s video teleconference is with the Asian allies, scheduled for eight Pm. Tomorrow will be the second round at ten A.M. with the nonaligned countries of Europe and Central and South America.”

“Any advance word?”

“The general assumption is that you’re going to announce the removal of peacekeeping forces from Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo,” Kercheval replied. “That rumor started last week. Already, France and Great Britain have announced their intention to pull out if we pull out. Russia has already hinted they will pull out of Kosovo, but our formal announcement might make them change their mind. Germany will likely stay in both Kosovo and Bosnia.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s right on Germany’s doorstep, and the Balkans have been of great German interest for centuries,” Kercheval said. “Unfortunately, most of the historical connections are negative ones, especially the more recent ones. The Third Reich received a lot of support from sympathizers in the Balkans in their quest to wipe out ‘unclean’ races like Jews and Gypsies. Germany has continued to be a close supporter of Croatia — they fully sponsored Croatia’s admittance into the United Nations, long before their break from Yugoslavia, and they have supported Croatia’s attempts to get land and citizen’s rights from Bosnia. Besides, Germany sees itself as the one and only counterbalance to Russian encroachments in the Balkans. They’ll stay.”

“I need to know for certain,” President Thorn said. “Let’s get Minister Schramm on the line before the teleconference. I’m committed to our plan, but I don’t want to leave our allies flat-footed.”

“Mr. President, this will simply not be taken any other way except as the United States withdrawing from an unwinnable situation in the Balkans,” Kercheval said. “It will absolutely throw U.S. foreign policy into chaos!”

“I disagree, Ed—”

“Our allies will see it as nothing but the United States turning tail and running away,” Kercheval went on angrily. “We have risked too many lives over there to just turn our backs now!”

“Enough, Mr. Kercheval,” the President said. The room was instantly quiet. Everyone in the Oval Office noticed it — that little bit of an edge to the President’s voice, the one many people knew was under the surface but had just not been seen before.

The President was an ex-Army Special Forces officer, well-trained in commando tactics and experienced in various methods of killing an enemy, and a man doesn’t live that kind of life without certain traits being indelibly ingrained into the psyche. Thorn’s political opponents saw this as an opportunity to try to portray the upstart as a potential mad dog and had exposed his military background in grisly, bloodcurdling detail. They had maintained, and the Pentagon finally confirmed, that as an Army Special Forces platoon leader, Thorn led over two dozen search-and-destroy missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and — secretly — into Iran, during Operation Desert Storm. Needless to say, the fact that U.S. forces had been secretly in Iran during the war, with America promising not to threaten Iran as long as it stayed neutral, did not sit well with Iran or with many nations in the Persian Gulf region.

As a first lieutenant, Thomas N. “TNT” Thorn had commanded a Special Forces platoon tasked with sneaking deep into various enemy-held territories and lazing targets for precision-guided bombing missions. He and his men were authorized to use any and all means necessary to get close enough to a target to shine it with a laser or mark it with a laser frequency generator so that the target could be hit by laser-guided bombs dropped from Army, Air Force, and Navy attack planes or helicopters.

His own accounts and those of his men told the story: he had pulled the trigger of a weapon or withdrawn a blade in combat over a hundred times, and had confirmed kills on over a hundred men. Most were from relatively short distances, less than fifteen yards, using a silenced pistol. Some were from almost a mile away, where the bullet reaches its target before the sound. A few had been from knife-fighting distance, close enough so Thorn could feel his victim’s final gush of breath on his hand as he drove a knife into an unprotected neck or brain stem. This didn’t include the countless number of enemy forces killed by the laser-guided bombs he and his team had sent to their targets — the estimated final “head count” was well into triple digits.

But rather than horrifying the voters, as the opposition candidates had hoped, it had drawn attention to him. At first, of course, it had been the spectacle — everyone wanted to see what a real-life assassin looked like. But if they had come to see the monster, they had stayed to hear the message. The message had soon become a campaign, which had become a race, which had become a president. But though most had never seen the monster, they assumed it still existed.

They had caught a glimpse of it just now.

“I’d like to speak with Minister Schramm after the meeting with the congressional leadership, but before the videoconference,” the President said, and this time it was an order, not a request or suggestion. “Set it up. Please.” At that, the meeting came to an abrupt and very uncomfortable end.

Office of the President, The Kremlin, Russian Federation

“It cannot be true,” the president said. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup back on its delicate china saucer and stared off through the window of his office into the cold rain outside. “It is amazing what a few weeks can do.

“The report has not yet been confirmed, Mr. President,” Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling his coffee cup. “It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security test, or a joke.” The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that he was. He downed the coffee, his third that morning, but craved more. “But the information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor’s reaction so strong, that I thought it best to pass it along.”

“Tell me what this means,” Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov, president of the Russian Federation, said. “Someone please tell me what in hell this means.” Sometimes, Sen’kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew, and he understood even less.

Fifty-two-year-old Valentin Gennadievich Sen’kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen’kov’s mentor and friend, President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia’s attempt to reunite its former empire by force, Sen’kov, a former KGB agent and former prime minister, had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been so tainted by Velichko’s failure that he’d had the name of his political party changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past failures. He’d held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian Parliament’s upper house, by his very fingernails.

When the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift Russia out of its economic, political, and morale doldrums, Sen’kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon to support the government and help restore the citizens’ confidence in it. Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen’kov, and with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian government. Sen’kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no longer an outcast, first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen’kov had been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament as acting president. His election, just four months before the U.S. elections, had been a landslide victory for the conservative NeoCommunist Party.

Sen’kov seemed to take over where Velichko had left off, but this time the Russian people had responded positively to his political views and actions. Sen’kov immediately crushed the rebellion in Chechnya; he pledged to modernize Russia’s nuclear arsenal; and he resigned his nation from membership in the Council of Europe, the judicial body formed to resolve conflicts between European nations, because the Council had denounced Russia’s actions in Chechnya but refused to speak out against the NATO bombing of Bosnia or Serbia. His brand of quiet toughness and conservative, nationalistic ideals resonated well with the Russian people, who were growing tired of seeing their country become nothing more than a very large third-world nation. In the national elections that soon followed, the Russia All-Fatherland Party under Valentin Sen’kov had captured a huge majority in both the Federation Council and the Duma, and he had been elected the new president.

“What is happening? What are they trying to do?” Sen’kov asked himself. “The Americans are actually going to leave Kosovo, leave Bosnia, leave the Balkans, leave NATO, leave Europe?”

“Sir, what it means, if true, is that the United States is imploding — literally as well as figuratively,” Stepashin said. Stepashin was the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He looked at the other members of the president’s Cabinet there for the impromptu meeting: retired Rocket Forces General Viktor Trubnikov, minister of defense; Ivan Filippov, the foreign minister; Sergey Yejsk, aide to the president on national security affairs and secretary of the Security Council; and Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko, the first deputy minister of defense and chief of the general staff. “For years, ever since their president’s foreign policy debacles, domestic stagnation — and personal indiscretions — the Americans have been like frightened children.”

“Is the tap in the German chancellor’s office reliable?” President Sen’kov asked.

“As reliable as any microwave tap set up over a week ago,” Stepashin replied noncommittally. “The Germans will undoubtedly find it and shut our tap down. They may already have discovered it and are feeding us crap, just so they can watch us have these early-morning meetings and chase our tails around for a day or two. We may spend a few weeks having to sift through mountains of data and thousands of pages of transcribed phone conversations and find out it is all garbage.” He thought for a moment, then added, “But usually when a tap is discovered, the chancellor and most of the members of the Cabinet retreat to alternate locations or go on a foreign trip until their offices can be swept. No one has left Bonn, except for the vice chancellor, and he had a meeting scheduled in Brazil for weeks. In fact, the Cabinet has had two unscheduled meetings since President Thorn’s call last night. I believe the information to be factual.”

“What are you talking about, General?” National Security Advisor Yejsk asked. “The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. Their economy is strong, their people are happy, it’s a good place to live and invest and emulate. Like Disneyland.” He chuckled, then added, “Apparently not like EuroDisney, though.”

“Nikki is right,” Foreign Minister Ivan Filippov said. “Besides, it’s a societal and anthropological fact: the wealthier the nation, the more they tend to withdraw.”

“The United States is not going to withdraw from anything,” Minister of Defense Trubnikov said. “Withdrawing from peacekeeping duties in Kosovo and Bosnia — what the hell, we were all considering it, even before the death. of Gregor Kazakov. Great Britain and Italy were looking for a graceful way out; the rest of NATO, the French, and the nonaligned nations will not remain behind if the others pull out.”

“That leaves Russia and Germany,” President Sen’kov said. “The question is, do we want to be in the Balkans? Sergey? What do you think?”

“We have discussed this many times, sir,” National Security Advisor Sergey Yejsk replied. “Despite your predecessor’s talk of unity between Slavic peoples, we have virtually nothing in common with the Serbs or any interest in the civil wars or the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs are nothing but murderous animals — they invented the word ‘vendetta,’ not the Sicilians. The Red Army proportionally lost more soldiers to Yugoslav guerrillas than we did to the Nazis. Marshal Tito was the biggest Thorn in Stalin’s side since that smug pig Churchill. We stood behind the Serbs because that stupid bigoted shit Milosevic opposed the Americans and NATO.” He paused, then said, “We should get out of the Balkans, too, Mr. President.”

“We should stay,” Trubnikov said immediately. “The Americans will not leave the Balkans. Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria — they want to make them members of NATO. If we leave, NATO will swarm into Eastern Europe. They’ll be knocking on the Kremlin doors before we know it.”

“Always the alarmist, eh, Viktor?” Foreign Minister Filippov said with a smile. “We should stay in the Balkans simply because the Americans are leaving. We milk the public relations value for all it’s worth, then depart when we can sell that to the world, too. We are staying to keep the warring factions apart; now we’re leaving because we have restored peace and stability to the Balkans.”

“The problem is, getting out before our forces lose any more soldiers like Gregor Kazakov,” Yejsk added. “If we sustain heavy guerrilla losses and then depart, we look like cowards.”

“Russia will not flee either Chechnya or the Balkans,” Sen’kov said resolutely. “I like the public relations idea best of all. If it is true, and the Americans leave the Balkans, it will be seen as a sign of weakness. We can exploit that. But remaining in the Balkans might be a waste of resources at best and dangerous at worst. After a few months, maybe a year, we depart.” He turned to General Zhurbenko. “What about you, Colonel-General? You have been rather quiet. These are your men we are talking about.”

“I met with Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov, the night the caskets returned to Moscow,” he said solemnly. “He was angry because you did not attend the return.”

“Pavel Gregorievich,” Sen’kov muttered bitterly. “A chip off the old block, except his piece flew in an entirely different direction. We did a profile of the families of the dead soldiers that could attend the service, General. I was advised that it would be politically unpopular for me to attend. The analysis proved correct: Gregor’s wife virtually spat on the flag, in front of the other families. It was a very ugly scene. It only heightened whatever power Pavel Gregorievich has in this country.”

“I spoke with him at length, and so did my aide,” Zhurbenko said. A few of the president’s advisors smiled at that — they were well familiar with some of Major Ivana Vasilev’s unique talents and appetites. “Pavel Gregorievich doesn’t want power, he wants wealth.”

“And he is getting it, I suppose — a hundred drug overdoses a day in Moscow, because of uncontrollable heroin imports by scum like Kazakov,” Stepashin said acidly. “A mother will sell her baby for a gram of heroin and a hypodermic syringe. Yet Kazakov jets around the world, to his homes in Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Venezuela, raking in money as fast as he can. He does not deserve to bear Gregor Mikhailievich’s name.”

“Did he threaten you? Did he threaten the president?” National Security Advisor Yejsk asked.

“No. He made us an offer,” Zhurbenko replied in a quiet voice. “A truly remarkable, unbelievable offer.” He had agonized over the decision to tell the president and the Security Council about Kazakov’s incredible proposals. He had harbored ideas about trying to manipulate events himself, but decided that was impossible. But if he had the full support of the government as well as the military, it might actually work.

“He says he can sell two and a half billion rubles’ worth of oil per day with a pipeline from the Black Sea to Albania.” He looked around at the stunned faces in the president’s office. “The plans for the pipeline exist, but it has not yet started because of all the political and domestic unrest in southern Europe, primarily Macedonia and Albania. But if the unrest ceased, or if the various governments turned in Russia’s favor, the pipeline project might be accelerated.”

“What was he offering, General?” Sen’kov asked in a low voice.

“More money than any of us have ever imagined,” Zhurbenko replied. “He wants to invest a quarter billion dollars to build the pipeline, plus another quarter billion in what he calls ‘dividends’ to investors. Hard currency, in foreign numbered accounts, untraceable. The pipeline can start flowing oil in about a year. And he offered more — he offered a way for Russia to once again become a great superpower, to regain its lost empire. He devised a way for Russia to earn untold millions of dollars a day in oil income, like a Middle East sheikhdom.”

“How can you believe anything that degenerate shit says?” Yejsk asked angrily. “He is a spoiled drug dealer who happened to get rich by stinking up half the Caspian Sea with his wildcat rigs. Where is Russia’s share of the wealth he has created? He shifts his money around in Kazakh, Asian, and Caribbean banks so fast no one can keep up with it, and yet he argues loud and long that his fees and tariffs from Moscow are too high. He should be reimbursing Russia for destroying the Caspian caviar trade, not to mention the thousands of lives he’s destroyed with his heroin imports.”

“Sir, I knew Gregor Mikhailievich Kazakov for thirty years, since before we graduated from the Academy together,” Zhurbenko said. “I’ve known Pavel Gregorievich since the day he was born. I was his best man at his wedding when his father could not attend because he was fighting in Afghanistan. He is genuinely angry because he feels the Russian government has let him down, broken the trust with him and the military. Russia and her military forces are dying, sir. Not just because of hard economic times, but from a lack of respect, of prestige around the world. Pavel knew this. And he offered a possible way to fix the problem.”

“It is doubtful to me that Kazakov cares one way or another about Russia or the army, Colonel-General, as long as he gets whatever he wants,” Foreign Intelligence Service director Nikolai Stepashin said to Zhurbenko. “I knew and respected Colonel Kazakov as well, but I never knew his son to be anything but a wild drug addict who could kill without hesitation if it meant more money or power for himself. The people like him because he is a colorful character, like Al Capone or Robin Hood — both criminals in their own countries. This ‘dividend,’ Colonel-General, was a polite term for a bribe. He wants you to use the army for his own purposes, and he is willing to pay you handsomely for it.”

Zhurbenko looked at the other men in the office sternly. “I know full well Kazakov was offering me a bribe. I’m not interested in Kazakov’s bribes — to him, it’s a normal way of doing business. I do not work that way,” he said. “And when it comes to killing, Nikolai, you and I are both trained to do it without hesitation or moral question. He does it for the money — we do it for the honor of serving Russia. He may be a gangster, but he also gets results.

“But forget about the bribe. Think about the opportunity to bring some nations back into our sphere of influence. We use the army or we use Kazakov’s money — it’s just a different form of power, a different tool of government and foreign relations. The outcome is the same — the enhancement of the power and security of mother Russia. I think it is worth a look.”

The Cabinet officials looked at the floor, quietly, for several very long moments; there were no outbursts of outrage or indignation, no protests, no denials. Finally, one by one, they looked at President Sen’kov.

“I am not going to soil my first elected term in office by getting involved with bloodthirsty gangsters like Kazakov,” President Sen’kov said. “He will not dictate foreign policy. Colonel-General Zhurbenko, stay away from that hoodlum.”

“But sir…”

“I understand his father was your friend, but it is obvious to me that even Colonel Kazakov wanted to stay as far away from his son as possible,” Sen’kov said. “He is a murderous animal, and we have our hands too full as it is with antigovernment terrorists to worry about dealing with underworld drug lords. That is all.”

The High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, Elliott APB, Groom Lake, Nevada

As she expected, there he was, and her heart sank. Better try one more time, she thought, although she already knew how the conversation would go.

“Hey, Dave,” Captain Annie Dewey said, as she activated the retina scan lock and entered the engineering lab. “The shuttle leaves in ten minutes. Are you ready?”

Colonel David Luger looked up from his computer terminal, looked at the clock, then looked at his watch and shook his head in surprise. “Oh, no. Man, is it that late already?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I lost track of time.”

“No problem,” Annie said, trying to sound cheerful. “But we’d better hurry.”

“Okay. This’ll work.” He furiously typed in more instructions, waited for a response, then waited some more. He glanced at Annie and gave her a sheepish smile, glanced at his watch again, and then at the screen. A few moments later, he shook his head. “Man, the mainframe is slow tonight.”

“Dave, we have to leave. It takes ten minutes just to get to the shuttle terminal.”

“I know, I know, but I can’t back out until this subroutine is finished. It’ll only take a second.” She walked over to him and massaged one of his shoulders. She took a peek at the screen. Just by reading the heading, she knew what project he was working on, and knew he’d never be able to leave it at this point. As if confirming what she already guessed, Dave shook his head, muttered an “Oh, no, don’t do this to me,” and punched in more instructions.

“Problem?”

“I hate to do this to you, Annie,” Luger said, “but I need to finish debugging this routine and upload it to the firmware lab tonight so they can get the processor ready to install on an LRU motherboard for its test flight. This is a new error code, and I have to track it down. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can go with you tonight.”

“C’mon, Dave,” Annie protested. “This is the third weekend in a row you’ll be stuck out here. We’ve had to excuse ourselves out of four events at the last minute. On Monday I head off to Ukraine to help bring in the bombers for the joint NATO exercises — I’ll be gone for a week.”

“I’m sorry, Annie, but this can’t be helped.”

“The test flight isn’t until Monday morning,” Annie reminded him. “This is Friday night. I know you’ll be back out here tomorrow and Sunday working. Why not take a break for just one night?”

“I would, Annie. You know that.” She knew of no such thing, but she let that one slip by. “But I’m right in the middle of this debug routine. If I finish this in the next half hour, I can knock off early and we can spend some time together at home.”

“But the next shuttle doesn’t leave here for two hours. We’ll miss the party.”

He raised his hands in surrender, but put them back down quickly to enter more instructions. “I can’t leave this routine now, Annie — I’ll lose all my work if I exit now, and I’ll have to start over. I’ll be on the next shuttle home, I promise.”

“That’s what you said when we missed the six o’clock shuttle.”

“I can’t help it,” he said. “Why don’t you go without me this time? You can spend some time at the party. I’ll get a car to take me home, and I’ll meet up with you there. Deal?”

Her pent-up anger and frustration let go at that moment. “David, this is silly. You have six programmers and technicians on your staff that can debug that routine for you in half the time Monday morning in plenty of time to load on the chip.” He turned toward the computer, his head bowed, his hands flat on the table beside the keyboard. “You have got to think about yourself once in a while. You need a break. You’re working yourself to exhaustion. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you don’t socialize.” He seemed frozen, staring blankly into the desk. “Don’t you want to be with me tonight, Dave?” No reply. “David? Are you listening to me?”

Still no reply — at least, no reply to her. When the computer beeped to let him know that it had found another problem, he responded instantly, punching in more code. One moment, he was seemingly immobile, staring into nothingness; the next, he was as animated and alert as ever. Weird.

“All right.” There was no use arguing or ranting at him. They weren’t married — they weren’t even an official “couple,” at least not in his eyes. If he wanted to stay, there was nothing she could do to change his mind. “I’m off. I’ll see you at home.”

“Okay, Annie,” David said cheerfully. He was typing away on the computer, his head bouncing up and down to some internal song or rhythm, blissfully going on as if she had not said a word. “Have fun. I’ll be on that next shuttle. Bye.”

Annie Dewey never felt as alone as she did when she stepped aboard the almost full Boeing 727 shuttle plane that would take her from Dreamland to Nellis Air Force Base. Another typical night — alone.

The trick had worked like an absolute charm since his days in high school back in Billings, Montana: the best way to meet women is to help your buddy’s girlfriend throw a party. Naturally, she wants to invite all of her girlfriends to the party, so she gives their names, addresses, and phone numbers to you. Voilá! Instant black-book update. During the party, he and his friends would find out more about the girls, then update the black book even more. Did they have a car? Their own place? Did they like the outdoors? Movies? Quiet dinners? Wild parties? Did they have money? Were they looking for a commitment, companionship, or just a good time? Then, whatever was planned for the weekend, they would invite the appropriate women to join them. Most important, they were sure to stay away from the ones that wanted a commitment.

Duane U. “Dev” Deverill, had certainly aged since high school, but in mind, body, and spirit he was still eighteen years old, and loving every minute of it. His entire life had been a study in taking advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves. He had never thought of himself as college material, but seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Air Force had been tempting young men and women with full four-year college scholarships to boost enrollment, so Dev had signed up. He’d never thought of himself as a flyer, but he’d accepted a navigator slot. He’d been the top graduate in his class and had had his choice of the best assignments right out of navigator training. He’d chosen the best assignment available: weapons systems officer aboard the then brand-new F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber. As a young captain, he’d been a flight commander during Operation Desert Storm in his F-15E squadron and racked up an impressive mission effectiveness rating and an Air Medal for his outstanding performance in combat.

Despite a meteoric career progression, he’d left the active-duty Air Force and joined the Kansas Air National Guard, flying the B-1B Lancer bomber. When the One-Eleventh Bomb Squadron of the Nevada Air National Guard had started recruiting for experienced crew members to form their new B-1B squadron in Reno, Deverill had joined immediately. He’d become one of the unit’s full-time Guardsmen, helping to turn the fledgling unit into one of the best combat units in the United States Air Force. Dev had remained the same ever since he’d left Montana: supremely confident without being too arrogant, knowledgeable without being tiresome, aggressive without being annoying. He knew he was good, and everyone else knew he was good. If they forgot that fact, he was right there to remind them, but otherwise he was content to stay just a head above everyone else around him without stepping on anyone on his way to the top.

While the One-Eleventh “Aces High” was on temporary duty at the Tonopah Test Range, and a few of their bombers were undergoing modification at Dreamland, Dev shared a two-bedroom apartment with another Air Force officer, a public affairs officer at the Fifty-seventh Wing at Nellis Air Force Base, outside of North Las Vegas. It was a classic “bachelor pad,” and they took full advantage of it every chance they had. The apartment complex had a nice clubhouse available for the tenants to use for parties, along with the required pool, spa, and fitness center. Right now, Dev was in “intelligence collection” mode at a party he was throwing for his roommate’s girlfriend’s birthday. Along with steering guests toward the drinks and food and making introductions, Dev was also gathering information on the women he didn’t recognize. He was a master at making each and every bachelorette feel special and welcome without alienating or favoring any of them.

He was in the middle of yet another introduction when a newcomer caught his eye — and he found his legendary cool suddenly fizzle.

What was it about Annie Dewey that excited him? he wondered. There were plenty of great looking women here, most of them not in the Air Force; many of them had successful entry-level or mid-level managerial careers, and a couple of them were better-looking than Annie. He couldn’t quite identify what it was that attracted him to her.

Annie was trim and athletic, bordering on thin — typical Air Force. Concerned that she would be discriminated against by other Air Force pilots because women did not have as much upper-body strength as men, Annie had changed her exercise regime to include more upper-body strength sports such as rock climbing and volleyball. The difference showed: Dev noticed well-defined shoulders, back, and arms, tapering down to a thin waist, tight butt, and shapely legs. She did not have very big breasts, but the rest of the package more than made up for that.

It was his opinion that other men saw her physique, her many female friends and far fewer male friends, and her profession, and assumed Annie was gay. Truthfully, Dev had thought so, too — or else he had never really thought too much about her at all. But then he’d started noticing her and the HAWC chief of aerospace engineering, Colonel David Luger, together all the time, and he’d noticed that little whatever-it-was about her come alive. That’s what had made whatever attracted him to her ignite.

And, he noticed, Luger wasn’t with her tonight. She was dressed nicely, in a silky form-fitting dress with thin spaghetti straps, sandals, and a little gold ankle bracelet on her right ankle. Her light brown hair was up, as usual, but in a Right suit it made her look a little butch — in that dress, it exposed her thin neck and well-defined shoulders, making her look even more attractive. He looked hard without trying to stare to see if she was wearing a brassiere, and realized with a faint shock that she wasn’t. She was so buff that very little beneath that silky dress jiggled at all.

What was it about her? It wasn’t pure sexuality, although she certainly was sexy. Allure, Dev thought, that’s what it was. Allure. She was alluring. She was obviously looking for something or someone in her life, but she was willing to stay out of the spotlight and wait until she found it. Dev definitely sensed a deep, smoldering passion inside her. Even if she had been gay, she still would’ve had that animal allure about her — now that he realized she probably wasn’t, it made him think even more about the possibilities of unleashing some of that passion in his direction.

He hoped to hell Luger wasn’t her type. To be honest, Dev had no idea whose type Luger could be. He seemed a nice enough guy, just a little detached, distracted, out of place. Annie had some kind of connection with him. Either she saw something in that weird engineer from Texas, or she was throwing a pity party for him. A romantic connection? Luger didn’t seem the type. Maybe he was the gay one.

“Heels!” Dev said, as their eyes met. Most everyone at the squadron knew everyone else by their call sign — it was unusual for someone to use their Christian names in casual conversation. He came over and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then reached up and squeezed her shoulders in his hands. Good God, he thought, I wish I had shoulders that tight. “Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for inviting us.”

She used the word “us,” Dev noticed, but she was alone. Her voice told him that she was disappointed at not being an us” at the party. “‘Where’s Colonel Luger?”

“Still out at the lake,” Annie said. They called Elliott Air Force Base, near dry Groom Lake, the “lake” when away from there. “Sorry he can’t make it.”

“I know he has a pretty important test coming up,” Dev said. “Those HAWC guys get obsessed when a big test is happening. They all seem to disappear into their little rabbit holes, afraid to do anything that might screw things up. Problem is, they’re always like that, even when they’ve done good.”

“They’re not exactly party animals,” Annie agreed. She looked around the room, then at him, then around to the pool area.

“I hope you brought your suit,” Dev said. “The pool is nice and cool, and the hot tub will be perfect once it starts to cool down outside.”

“I should have brought a suit, but I didn’t.”

Dev was going to give her his standard line, “Well, you know, around here, bathing suits are optional,” but for some reason he didn’t use it on Annie. Was he afraid of offending her, chasing her away? He was amazed at his own odd feelings. Since when did he care so much about what others, especially women, thought of him?

“We can get you a suit if you’d like to go swimming later,” Dev offered, “or just take a rain check.” She smiled at him — he was pleased to think he had said the right thing, caring and helpful without being too pushy. “Can I get you something to drink? I make a pretty good margarita. I’m doing mango and strawberry tonight.”

“I’m not into that stuff,” she said. That was the first hint of resistance from her, and his hopes sank. But then she suddenly stopped looking past him, took a deep breath as if she had just decided something, and said, “But if you’re making margaritas, I know you have tequila, and I see some Coronas around, so I’ll start with a shot and a Corona.” She looked directly at him with incredible liquid blue eyes that looked like they could stop a freight train in its tracks, and asked, “Care to join me?”

Dev smiled and nodded. “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he said.

The party had ended just before midnight, but for Dev and Annie’ it was only getting started.

They stayed and talked well after everyone else had gone. They both quit drinking shots before too long, but had nursed their Coronas and then white wine and San Pellegrino. After one A.M. the apartment complex residents stopped coming down to the pool and hot tub, so they decided to give the hot tub a try.

The pool deck was dark, illuminated only by a few sidewalk edge lights, step lights, and the parking lot lights several dozen yards away. Both Dev and Annie wore bathrobes, and carried plastic cups of Chardonnay to the spa. The hot, dry desert air cooled quickly after sunset, and there was a breeze blowing, so it felt much cooler now. “Man, I’ve been in the hot sun all day, but I’m ready for the hot tub,” Dev was saying. He turned on the bubble pumps, set his wine down on the concrete deck, shed the robe, revealing his black Nike bathing suit underneath, then sat on the edge of the spa and let his feet dangle in to test the water. “Perfect,” he said. He took a sip of wine. “I’m glad you could—”

He stopped and gulped. Annie took off her borrowed bathrobe — revealing only her birthday suit. Her breasts were indeed small, but larger than they appeared beneath her dress, and incredibly firm. Her shoulders and arms were not just well-toned — they were ripped, as were her stomach and thigh muscles, lean, taut, and striated. She watched him closely as she eased into the warm bubbly water with a confident, satisfied smile on her face.

“I–I hung a bathing suit on the doorknob for you,” he reminded her.

“I know. I saw it. Thank you,” she said. “That was a very considerate thing to do. You don’t mind I didn’t use it, do you, Dev?”

“Are you kid … I mean, no, not at all, Heels.” She leaned back, her elbows back on the edge of the spa with her breasts tantalizingly obscured within the bubbles on the water’s surface, and sipped her wine. He felt like a dork now, with a bathing suit on, so after he got into the hot tub, he slipped it off and placed it on the edge of the tub.

After several long moments, he stopped trying to get a look at her breasts and relaxed. As always, his attention drifted up to the sky. The nearby buildings and the lights from the parking lot washed out most of the sky, but he could still see a few stars shimmering overhead. “Finally starting to see the summertime constellations,” he said. “That’s Vega, in the constellation Lyra. You can just start to see the head of Scorpio down over the building.”

“Must be a navigator thing, having to learn all the stars and constellations,” Annie said. “They still taught celestial navigation in nav school when I went through,” Dev said, “although they phased it out shortly after I left. They taught us how to use a sextant, do a precomp — figure out what the star positions are supposed to be — shoot the stars, sun, and moon, and plot a celestial, pressure, and speed line of position. Get two good star shots with a small bubble and a steady autopilot, add in a good pressure LOP and a true airspeed line from a good air data system, and a good nav could plot your position within five to ten miles.”

“Five to ten miles?” Annie exclaimed.

“I know — ridiculous, huh?” Deverill agreed. “The absolute worst inertial nav system back then could keep you within a mile or two with an update every thirty minutes. Nowadays, the worst INS gets you within a quarter-mile with one update, and GPS can get us within six feet. But it was pretty amazing to think that nays throughout history fought wars across the oceans with little more than a star to guide them. It’s a lost art.”

“Show me what you’re looking at,” Annie said. She picked up her cup of wine and waded over to him, turned around, and sat beside him, then leaned back against his chest. It both shocked and pleased him at the same time. The damned bubbles still obscured her breasts. He put his left arm around her shoulder and across her neck, clasping her right shoulder, and he could feel her nipples against his arm. Stars, Dev, he shouted at himself, think of stars now, celestial navigation, precomps, star tables, air almanacs …

“Now, what were you looking at?” she murmured. Her head was tilted back against him, the back of her head in the water, but she wasn’t looking at the stars.

“I was trying to look at you,” he said softly, and he bent down to kiss her lips. A bolt of electricity shot through his body, the physiological responder he was trying hard to distract sprang to life, and he kissed her deeper, harder. She returned the kiss, then took his hand from her shoulder and placed it on her breast. “God, Annie, you are so sexy.” She said nothing, but her right hand drifted down to his stomach, then his thigh, and then to his fully attentive and waiting member. She stroked him a couple times. He moaned with pleasure … and then realized she had stopped. “Annie, please…”

“I can’t, Dev,” she whispered. She reluctantly twisted away from him, moved away from him-not to the other side of the spa out of reach, but definitely apart from him-and laid her head back on the edge of the spa and covered her face. “I’m sorry, Dev. It is not you, believe me … believe me.”

“Then what is it?” But he knew the answer the second he asked the question: “Luger. You’re in love with him or something.”

“Or something,” she said. “I wanted to, but … I don’t want this to turn into a retribution thing.”

“You mean, sleeping with me just to get back at Luger.”

Annie nodded. “I’m sorry, Dev. I mean, you’re great-looking, and you got a great bod, and you got the eyes, and the butt. …”

“Wow. Women really talk like that about guys?”

“Only certain guys,” she said, with a smile. He liked her wann, honest smile. He’d never thought of her as a friend before, only as a colleague and maybe a future conquests but now he was talking to her like a friend, and he enjoyed it. He still wanted to see her underneath him or on top of him, but it wasn’t an urgent need anymore.

“So what’s the story with you two?”

“What’s to tell?” she replied. “I fell for him, I thought he fell for me. But he’s got his work, and that’s pretty much his whole life right now.”

“You said ‘right now’ like you don’t really believe it.” She looked at Dev, angry that he’d said it — and angry that he was right. “Listen, Annie, if you say women talk about men like I know men talk about women, then men and women are more alike than they are different, right?” Annie said nothing. “So the only thing you can be certain about is that you can’t change a guy. Dave Luger will be the same as long as he wants to be, as long as whatever he gets out of work is more important or more pleasurable than what he gets from other people. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.”

“So what do I do about it?”

“Annie, everybody does the same thing,” Deverill said earnestly. “You’re here in this hot tub for the same reason that Colonel Luger is there in the lab — because whatever you’re looking for here, whatever you hoped to find here, is better than waiting alone in your apartment for a man who will probably never come.”

“If I want to be here, then why do I feel so bad about it?”

“Because you have feelings,” he replied. “You care about him. You care about what he might think. But you have to trust yourself. Trust your feelings.” He paused, regarding her thoughtfully, then asked softly, “You love him, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You probably haven’t slept with him, but you love him anyway.” She was going to say something angry at him, but she couldn’t — because, dammit, he was right. “Maybe it’s the real thing, then,” he went on. “Maybe you feel guilty because you don’t really want to be here.”

“I should follow my feelings, then.”

“Absolutely.” She rubbed her eyes, then hid them. It seemed as if she was embarrassed to be sitting there with him, afraid she was showing how stupid and naive she was. He drained his wine, then reached for his bathrobe, preparing to leave. “Shall we?”

“Yes.” But instead of leaving, Annie put her hand on his arm, firmly, forbidding him to move. She moved close to him, her face a little fearful but excited at the same time, and she reached under the surface of the bubbling water and found him. Despite their very serious, very nonsexual discussion, it sprang instantly back to life like the trouper it was.

“Annie?”

“You said follow my instincts,” she said. She crouched. above him, still holding him, then kissed him warmly, deeply, as she maneuvered herself onto him. “I’m following my instincts. This … is … where I want to be, right … now.”