by Drew Avera
Finally, after another few seconds, the colonel sighed and closed his eyes in resignation.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Anton, relax. You make me tired.”
“Sorry, sir. It’s been a long few…” He blinked, trying to figure out just how long it had been. “Weeks? Months? God, I can’t even remember.”
Vasyli rubbed at his eyes and took a drink from a bottle of water. If this had been in the afternoon, Anton knew, it might have been something much stronger.
“You’ve fucked this up royally, Anton. You got most of your team killed. How did you expect this to go?”
“Much as it has, I suppose,” Anton admitted. “That bastard Franklin has been ahead of us the whole time.” He snorted. “I can’t even say he’s been sitting back and laughing at us, because I doubt he’s even considered our existence, so little effect have we had on his plans.”
“I am of a mind to send you home,” Vasyli pronounced his judgement, the one Anton had feared. “To Russia,” he clarified, as if Anton might have forgotten where his home was.
And maybe I have.
“This is half a punishment,” the older man went on, “and half a mercy. You need to take some time away from a war zone and have something of a real life, Anton. You’ve been here far too long, been a major far too long. A nice, cushy staff assignment in Moscow will give you the opportunity to kiss ass and polish brass and you’ll be a lieutenant-colonel in a year.”
Anton sighed, knowing Vasyli’s heart was in the right place. He opened his mouth to argue, but the colonel went on.
“You need to meet a nice, Russian girl, not like the whores in these barter-towns, settle down, have a few children. Get assigned to Spetsnaz admission training or a military academy.” Vasyli’s face twisted with the pain of a father watching his son go down the wrong path. “If you stay here, you’ll wind up dead. I don’t see any other way out of this for you. You can’t win this war by yourself. It’s been dragging on for decades now and it shows little sign of ever ending completely.”
“Colonel,” Anton said, choosing his words carefully, “I do wish to go home, and I promise you that I will.” He cocked his head and regarded Vasyli sidelong. “After I kill Robert Franklin.”
Vasyli winced as if he’d expected the caveat.
“I know he’s headed west,” Anton continued. “And I know he’s getting close to the endgame, to Franklin’s ultimate goal. And I know you have intelligence as to what that goal is, Vasyli Pavlovich. If you want me to go home, to be able to move on with my life and put this place behind me forever, there is one way….” He shrugged admission. “Well, there are two ways, but only one of them does not involve sending me back in chains and throwing me into a military prison.” Even Vasyli had to snort dark amusement at that.
And it might still be a possibility.
“Please, Colonel Bakunin, let me finish this. I will play any part you wish in the operation. I need not lead it. But I have to be there for this. I have to finish this or everything I’ve done in this festering shithole will have meant nothing.”
“It is more complicated than you think, Anton.” Vasyli took another sip of water, as if delaying the delivery of the news. “You may have heard of the summit the Prime Minister has arranged with the American president.”
Anton shrugged. “I have heard rumors, of course. I didn’t believe they could be true. Not even Prime Minister Popov could be stupid enough to travel all the way to America and put his life in the hands of the US military.”
“Well, you would think so, but that turns out not to be the case. Popov agreed to meet with the US President at their capital at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.” He arched an eyebrow. “Soon.”
“Oh, fuck me,” Anton moaned, cradling his head in his hands. “That is where Franklin was heading. Does General Antonov know?”
“General Antonov knows these things before we do. Which is why he volunteered to take Popov’s place as the government representative for the meeting.”
“General Antonov is going himself?” Anton sat back in his chair, letting out a low whistle. “That takes some serious balls.”
“He is going himself to make the target even more appealing to Franklin. We want him to try something because we will be prepared for him.”
“You have something planned,” Anton deduced, excitement creeping into his voice. “You’re going to take down Franklin. But why wouldn’t you want to tell me this?”
“Because we’re not simply taking down Robert Franklin,” Vasyli confessed, a frown passing across his lined and weathered face. “We’re going to be taking down the US government as well, and possibly expanding the war west of the Mississippi.”
“We have the forces available to pursue such a campaign?” Anton asked, surprised.
“Probably not. But General Antonov has decided that we can’t simply leave the west coast to the Chinese. If he believed the Americans had a chance to maintain their hold on the Pacific coast, he wouldn’t chance this, but his sources indicate the Chinese are building up their forces in Hawaii to make a new push and he doesn’t think the Americans have a hope against them.”
“It’s a big risk. We are already fighting the Chinese in Asia. To take them on here in America as well, we chance an unlimited nuclear war.”
“General Antonov believes they will not risk it due to their lack of a substantial submarine force. Either way, orders are orders and the mission will go on. The question is, do you wish to be part of it?”
“I don’t care if we wind up in a war that destroys the whole damned planet,” Anton declared, “as long as I get to be there when we take down Franklin.”
Vasyli nodded, as if that was the answer he’d been expecting.
“Then you need to leave now.” He stood and Anton jumped to his feet as well, taking the man’s offered hand. “And you need to head north. Far north.”
Chapter Two
Sam Point stared down at the rows of Hellfire mechs lined up across the hangar floor, his hands pressed against the office window. From up here, they reminded him of the suits of medieval armor he’d seen in museums in Europe, but the production crew wandering between the machines running final quality checks on the output threw the whole scene into its proper scale, revealing the true size of the machines.
“You forget how damn big the things are,” he murmured.
“That’s what I was thinking last night,” Harriet Madsen whispered into his ear, her hand brushing against his thigh, warm even through the material of his uniform trousers. She followed the words with a teasing flick of her tongue before she stepped back and favored his uncomfortable flush with a sly grin. “What, Sam? You afraid someone down there is going to be able to see all the way up through this window and figure out the President is sleeping with the Chairman of her Joint Chiefs of Staff?” She rolled her eyes. “What a scandal…”
“No,” he insisted, taking her into his arms and kissing her with the same boldness he’d shown on a dozen battlefields in his youth. “I’m worried your advisory team is going to walk through the office door and find us en flagrante delicto on the conference table.”
“Oh, my,” she laughed, low and throaty. “Now that would be scandalous. But the table seems a bit uncomfortable. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
He snorted at that. She was in her mid-forties, damned young for the President, at least the way things had been. Nowadays, elections had more to do with who the remaining state governors favored than what the public wanted. Less than a quarter of the people bothered to vote, which made it easy to manipulate the ones who did. The fact she still looked pretty damned hot didn’t hurt her with voters…or with him.
“The thing is,” he went on, going back to his original statement, “I’m not sure who we’re supposed to be intimidating with all those Hellfires.” He motioned behind them. “Maybe we should rethink our strategy vis-à-vis the East Coast. We send these out to Virginia and Maryland, we could go a long way to taking control
of the coastal states back.”
“Come on, Sam,” she said, groaning in frustration. “We went over this last night. You should know better than anyone that you can’t just send the mechs and their pilots out there with a pat on the ass and a ‘go-get-em’ speech. They need a supply train, maintenance, warehouses for the supplies, barracks for the workers, troops to guard the barracks…it goes on and on and every bit of it costs money we don’t have.”
She brushed her fingertips against the window glass demonstratively. “The normal allotment will go to the mercenary crews who sign up, and everything else will be up to them. It’s not perfect, but it’s all we can do with our lines of communication so far west.”
“There’s still a shitload of people out there, Harriet,” he reminded her. “People who live without any sort of help from the US government, who when they get an infection or a ruptured appendix, they just die because there’s no hospitals, no clinics. There’s some independent settlements who still have power and water, but they don’t let people use their resources just because it happens to be life or death. They can’t, because then they’d all die.”
“And that’s the very same reason we can’t help them, either,” Harriet said, her tone growing a bit more strident, as if she didn’t care to have this argument again. “Because we’d all die. We aren’t the country we used to be, and if we try to take back the east, we’ll wind up losing everything we have left.”
“Aren’t we being a bit cold and calculating when we’re talking about millions of American lives?”
He shouldn’t have pushed it. He knew it, knew he was making a mistake not letting it go, but he’d joined the Army straight out of high school over thirty years ago because he’d been a patriotic young man, ready to defend his country from the invading Russian and Chinese and now that he actually had some authority, stars on his shoulder and the President’s ear—among other things, he was being told there was nothing they could do.
“General Point,” she snapped, “what the hell do you want from me?” She was angry now. He could see it in her eyes, hear the edge to her voice. “You are the chairman of the Goddamned Joint Chiefs. You know the numbers. That’s the only reason we’ve agreed to this summit, the only reason I’d ever sit down with the fucking Russians after what they’ve done to us. We can either negotiate a settlement, or this country will die the death of a thousand cuts, bleeding out one dollar at a time.”
She waved a hand around them.
“You don’t like being pushed back west of the Mississippi? How would you like the whole country to be pushed back to the Rocky Mountains? How would you like the battle lines to be in Kansas and Oklahoma, our food growing regions? Would you like that better than Virginia and Maryland? Hell, the only reason we aren’t fighting on the Colorado border is that not even the fucking Chinese want Nevada! If we…”
She stopped, closing her mouth in mid-word and controlling herself with a visible effort. She took in a deep breath and raised a hand in a placating gesture.
“I know, Sam.” Her voice was gentler now, less the President and more simply Harriet. “I know this is hard for you. I know you want to help people, it’s why you do what you do.” She touched a finger to his cheek. “It’s why I love you. But we can only do what we have the resources to do. Maybe if this summit goes well, we’ll be able to negotiate a way to bring our citizens still stuck out east back here to Colorado, or maybe settle them in Kansas or Nebraska.” She shook her head. “But that’s the best we can hope for now. I’m sorry.”
A knock on the office door brought her hand away from his face, pushed her back a step from her lover to make the distance between them seem more presentable and professional. The door was ancient, as old as the missile defense base at Cheyenne Mountain, and it swung inward with an antique gravity and a squeaking of hinges.
The first three through the door wore dress uniforms the same color as his own, the greens and pinks of the Army. Sometimes, he tried to feel gratified that the Army had won out in the end, the last service standing. Well, there was the Combined Coastal Defense, but that was mostly a joke, more for gathering intelligence than any real sort of interdiction, not when the enemies controlled most of both coasts. It was just the Army in charge now, but somehow, he couldn’t take much satisfaction from it. Rather than winning the fight, it seemed more as if the Army was the last guard at the gates, just waiting for the enemy to knock them down and finish off what was left.
God, I’m getting to be a depressing old bastard.
The leader of the group was General Andrew Waid, a one-star who’d become his adjutant when he’d been appointed to the Joint Chiefs. Actually a year older than Sam, he was, nonetheless, a very competent officer who Sam hoped would eventually grab a second star. The other two were bird-colonels, Yount and Grienke, who were along to take care of the VIPs and make them feel important. He fought back an amused snort at the idea. When he’d been a wet-behind-the-ears 2nd lieutenant, a full bird colonel had seemed fairly close to God Himself, yet these were basically gophers here in the rarified air of Cheyenne Mountain.
“Sir,” General Waid nodded to him, then turned to Harriet. “Madam President. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Robert Franklin.”
Sam’s lip curled instinctively in a sneer and he forced it back straight. This wasn’t about him, wasn’t about his opinion of Franklin’s reputation, it was about what the man could do for the United States of America. He thought he saw something in Franklin’s eyes, a flicker his way, perhaps a sign the man had noticed his expression. It disappeared behind a fake smile as Franklin stepped forward and offered a hand to Harriet.
“President Madsen,” he said with what sounded like carefully-practiced charm, “it is an honor and a pleasure to finally meet you. Let me say I am a great admirer of yours and of all you’ve accomplished for this country.”
Harriet took the hand with just a hint in her face of the doubt Sam knew she felt. She was too much the politician to let it show plainly, but he knew her better than almost anyone.
“Your work on the production of the new Hellfire Mark Three model has been impressive, Mr. Franklin,” she returned. “I understand you already have a dozen of them off the line and ready for deployment.”
“I could have more,” Franklin allowed, “if I’d been given more manufacturing capability and space on your production floor. I demonstrated the new Mark-XI missile for General Point here, but it’s not usable with the old launcher. If I could have the clearance to take the fabrication machinery for the current launcher offline for a few days…”
“As impressive as your improvements have been,” Harriet interrupted him, “I can’t allow those sorts of changes to fabricators vital to our national defense without an independent study and a cost analysis.” She smiled thinly, just at the edge between polite and hostile. “This is the government we’re talking about. No one takes a shit around here without a feasibility study and an environmental impact statement.”
“Yes, quite,” Franklin acknowledged. There was something bitter in the return smile. “I have some experience with that, but I’d hoped against hope that our current, rather dire circumstances might have oiled the wheels a bit with respect to government red tape.”
“Umm, perhaps we should all take a seat?” Sam suggested, beginning to feel uncomfortable with the awkward exchange. According to etiquette, the President should really have been the one to suggest they sit, but Harriett obviously had other ideas.
“I don’t believe I care to sit down,” she interrupted brusquely, “until Mr. Franklin explains to me why he requested this meeting basically on the eve of perhaps the most important peace summit in the history of this nation. Indeed, why he chose now to try to push a new weapons production initiative given how suspect this could make us appear to Prime Minister Popov when we are attempting to end this endless Goddamned war.”
“Well, you see, Madame President,” Franklin said smoothly, motioning out toward the production
line, “that’s exactly why I’m here, and exactly why I asked for this meeting. In my business, I have many ears to the ground and one of them has informed me that Prime Minister Popov won’t be attending this meeting in person. Instead, he’s sending his Minister of Defense, Sergei Antonov.”
Harriett reacted as if Franklin had slapped her in the face, taking a half-step backward as if from a physical blow. Sam thought for a moment she would stumble, but she caught herself with a hand on the back of a chair pulled up to the conference room table.
“Popov wouldn’t do that,” she insisted, and Sam winced at how impotent and naïve it made her sound. “He has to know how it would look if he sends Antonov in his place…”
“It will look exactly as it is, Madam President,” Franklin told her, his manner changing slightly, becoming much more commanding and in control. “It will look as if the Russians have no interest at all in ending this war just as long as they think they can still win it.” Another smile, this one less bitter, more knowing. “Perhaps we should sit down now and have that talk? Oh, where are my manners? This is my aid, Nathan Stout.”
He motioned back to the other civilian, a rather nondescript man of medium height and build, his dark hair cut short, his steel-blue eyes perhaps his only prepossessing feature.
“A pleasure, Madam President,” Nathan Stout said, shaking Harriet’s hand warmly. “I’m a big fan.”
Chapter Three
“I don’t need this damned wheelchair,” Nathan Stout insisted, waving a hand downward at the ratty, rusted piece of medical equipment. “Where the hell did you dig this thing up anyway, Roach?”
“This is a military base,” Rachel Mata reminded him, her voice calm, refusing to take the bait. “It has an infirmary. We’re just lucky no one had looted it yet.”