Sivarek snorted. “Pretty words ... to describe isolationism. Or cowardice.”
“I would call President Thom a lot of things, but not a coward,” Cheshire said. “He’s the first American president in the last hundred years not to rely on American military power to back up our foreign policy interests. Think about it. General— you’re arguing that America is withdrawing back inside its own borders, while at the same time you’re fearful that another country will march across yours. Do you want foreigners on Turkish soil or not?”
“You understand so little about life in my country, Major,” Sivarek said. “Turkey is surrounded by enemies. We chose to look to the West for the strength to survive. Now we feel the West has turned its back on us. It appears Germany has joined Russia in spreading its influence through Europe—who will join with the Republic of Turkey?”
“Ukraine will. General,” Smoliy said. “I think you are wrong about Thorn. If he wants to bring his troops home, so be it—I would not want Ukrainian troops stationed in any foreign country for any reason. But if you want an ally to stand squarely against the Russian Federation in the Black Sea region, Ukraine will stand with you.”
Sivarek looked at Smoliy with a shocked expression. “An alliance . . . between Turkey and Ukraine?” he asked. “Is it possible? Can we stand against the might of the Russian army?”
“I have served in the Soviet army and I have seen the Russian army at work, and they are not as imposing as they seem,” Smoliy said confidently. “Do not pay attention to all their propaganda. Besides, we do not think of it as having to take on the entire Russian army—we just need to exert our own influence in the Black Sea region. This gangster Kazakov wants to ship oil across the Black Sea to fill his trans-Balkan pipeline—he will have to do it with our blessing. Any problems from Russia or from this stealth warplane, and those Metyor oil terminals in Bulgaria and Georgia are smoking holes in the ground!” “What will keep Russia from decimating both our countries if we dare oppose them?”
“Let Russia worry about what they will do first,” Smoliy said. “They are acting very bold and think they are clever because they think no union of nations will oppose them. The only way we can hope to survive a confrontation is to stay together. One nation, even one as large as Ukraine or Turkey, can be swept aside with ease by Russia. But two such nations-—that is an entirely different situation.”
Sivarek nodded, looking at Smoliy with a growing realization in his eyes. He suddenly did not feel quite as alone as he had just moments before. He turned to Cheshire and asked, “And what of you. Major? What of the United States?”
“I’m not ready to completely count America out yet, sir,” Nancy replied. “President Thom is a man of deep personal beliefs and convictions, he’s intelligent, and he has the power of law on his side—he doesn’t play politics. But he’s a young president, too, and perhaps he can be convinced that not all foreign alliances are bad for the United States. Plus, he’s a military man. He understands military threats and military geopolitics.”
“Your confidence and loyalty to your hippie president does not inspire me in the least bit, young pilot,” Sivarek said, with a dark smile. “But he has left my country with very few alternatives.” He turned to Smoliy, straightened his shoulders, crisply bowed his head once, then extended a hand to the big Ukrainian general. “I will be pleased to convey your thoughts and wishes to my government. General. I pledge to you that I will do everything in my power to sec to it that both our countries act in complete friendship and mutual security interests. It would be my pleasure and honor to see an alliance between our countries become a reality.”
Smoliy took the Turkish general’s hand in his, then gave him a big bear hug and kissed him on both cheeks. “Zvelikim zadovolennyam! This gives me much hope and pleasure, sir! And if we are both wiped off the face of the earth, it is good to know we will bum together!” He turned to Nancy Cheshire. “I will notify the base commander that my forces will be departing soon. But I have a few requests of General Samson before we leave.”
“May I make a suggestion, sir?” Cheshire asked. “Let me give General McLanahan a call first.”
“Oh? A little dissension in the ranks, I see?” Smoliy chuckled. “Or is General McLanahan the real person in charge?”
“No, General Samson is definitely the man in charge,” Nancy said. “But for what you two are cooking up right now, I think Patrick will be the one to help you—as long as he survives his ordeal in Washington first.”
EIGHT
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
The next morning
He felt stupid at first, with everyone watching. The place was packed, and most of the people looked as if they had nothing better to do than to watch him. Or was it just because he was here to face the music, and he thought everyone here knew it?
The nearly six-hundrcd-acre Pentagon Reservation was like a little city unto itself, so it was generally easy to hide among the over twenty-six thousand military and civilian Department of Defense employees and three thousand staff persons there. You automatically felt anonymous when you walked into the place. The Pentagon building itself was an impressive, imposing structure encompassing thirty-four acres and almost four million square feet of office space, making it one of the largest office buildings in the world. Built in just sixteen months at the beginning of World War II over a former garbage dump and swamp, it was said that the building was designed so efficiently that anyone could walk from one end of it to the other in less thin ten minutes (although it could take as long as thirty minutes just to walk in from the parking lot). If you w ere one of the thousands of persons w alking into the North Parking entrance, you could easily feel insignificant indeed, like a tiny ant climbing into a huge anthill.
Even at six a.m., the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club at the end of Corridor Eiight was nearly full. Patrick McLanahan would have liked to use a treadmill or a recumbent bicycle— since there were so many of them, lined up three deep practically the entire width of the complex, he would have felt a lot less conspicuous. But every one of the dozens of machines was already taken, so he had to go with his trusty weight machines. Besides, some of the soldiers on the treadmills, even the older ones, were jogging or running on them at a pace that made Patrick cringe. The POAC did not have the newer weight machines, the ones that electronically set and varied the resistance, so Patrick did it the old-fashioned way—set a weight, tried it, adjusted it, then did three sets of ten reps with heavy weights. Once he got into the rhythm, he forgot about being the only guy in the entire facility lifting weights.
His body quickly shifted to automatic workout mode, freeing his mind to work on other problems—like what was going to happen to his career and his life now.
He was gone from the High-Technology Weapons Center, dismissed for security reasons pending court-martial, after twelve occasionally turbulent, oftentimes dangerous, most times thrilling off-and-on years. When he'd arrived there in 1988, HAWC—known then simply as Groom Lake Test Range—had been little more than a collection of old weatherbeaten Atomic Energy Commission wooden shacks and bird’s- nest-infested hangars surrounding an old World War II runway built on, then hidden on, the dry lake bed. with a few high-tech security updates added by Lieutenant-General Brad Elliott, its first full-time commander, in order to attract the attention of military scientists and Pentagon program managers. Over the years, under Brad Elliott, Dreamland had grown, expanded, modernized, and then finally taken the lead in futuristic weapons and aircraft research and development. Patrick had been there to see most of it.
With Brad gone. Patrick had hoped that he might someday take over the reins at Dreamland and take it to the next level of innovation and leadership. A command assignment at Dreamland was considered a sure ticket to a four-star billet. That was almost certainly true—if you could adapt to the strict security and compartmentalization and ignore the fact that for the entire time you were there and for some time after you departed, you became v
irtually invisible, even dead to the rest of the world.
You quickly had to learn to live with the fact that being part of the future of the U.S. military would forever alter your life.
Patrick had accepted that fact, and even learned to enjoy it. Having a wife who used to work there helped considerably. But it took a special mind-set to work at Dreamland, just as it surely took a special mind-set to work at the Five-Sided Potomac Puzzle Palace. Patrick preferred the hot. dry, wide-open skies of Groom Lake to the stifling, confining, prisonlike feel of this place.
In between sets, he w'as able to peek at the televisions throughout the POAC. They were filled with news stories about the recently declared war between Albania and Macedonia, the unraveling of the Dayton Peace Accords and the cease-fire in Kosovo, and the expansion of German and Russian peacekeeping forces in the Balkans to try to maintain order, on the heels of a rapid American withdrawal from the region. But mostly, the stories were about the dismantling of the American military and the American loss of prestige as the protector of world democracy.
Maybe it was good that I’m getting out now, Patrick thought grimly, as he started working on lat pull-downs. The U.S. military looked as if it was in the midst of a complete cultural and ideological meltdown—thanks to the new hippie president and his eighteenth-century ideas. They just had no place in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the United States was about to find this out the hard way.
More folks were looking at him again, and Patrick realized he was pumping away at the weight machines like a maniac. The more he watched the rapid, shocking dismantling and denigration of the military in which he had spent most of his adult life, the angrier he became. The workout was supposed to relax him before he went on to his Pentagon appointments, but they were unfortunately having the opposite effect. It was time to go and face his future.
Screw 'em, Patrick told himself. If they want to take my stars or court-martial me, let them try. I’ll fight them every last step of the way. The military is worth a fight... at least, the old military, the one Patrick thought he knew, was worth it.
He showered, then dressed in his Class A uniform. For the first time in many years, he studied himself in a full-length mirror. It wasn’t often he wore Class A’s, and the blue cotton- polyester outfit was shiny and oddly creased from disuse and improper storage. The single silver stars, given to him by the former president of the United States Kevin Martindale, and the shiny command navigator wings given to him by Brad Elliott, looked awfully good, but everything else seemed extraordinarily plain. Only two rows of ribbons, the same as he’d had as a junior captain—Brad Elliott didn’t believe in awards and decorations and prohibited the release of any information whatsoever from Dreamland that might reveal something about its activities.
A rather plain uniform, he thought. Like his uniform, maybe his career in the Air Force really didn’t amount to anything after all. Even though he had done a lot of very cool, very exciting things, in the end maybe it didn't matter, any more than he did among all the superstar military men and women in the Pentagon.
As he put the uniform on and prepared for his meetings, Patrick realized with surprise that it would possibly be the last time he would ever wear this uniform—except perhaps at his court-martial,
After dressing, Patrick went right to the H. H. “Hap” Arnold Executive Corridor and the Secretary of the Air Force’s and Air Staff offices. Although HAWC was “overtly” run by Headquarters Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio (the actual chain of command was classified, but if anyone did any checking that’s what they would find), the work at HAWC was so classified that the Secretary of the Air Force himself, Steven C. Bryant, oversaw most matters dealing with HAWC.
Patrick’s appointments stemmed from his court-martial—as Terrill Samson promised, formal charges against him and David Luger had been preferred at the close of business the day of their meeting—so his first stop was the offices of the Air Staff. At first the chief Area Defense Counsel from Air Force Materiel Command headquarters, a full colonel, had been assigned to his case, and he had been given all the preliminary briefings and paperwork. That was all window dressing, of course, because none of this would ever go through the normal legal channels. The matter stayed at Wright-Pat for less than twenty-four hours before being referred directly to the two- star Air Force Judge Advocate General (TJAG) at the Pentagon.
His 0730 appointment w ith TJAG lasted five minutes. The two-star's recommendation: request early retirement at current rank and time in serv ice and end this thing with an honorable discharge and an unblemished record. All the paperwork was ready, the chief Air Force Area Defense Counsel, a one-star general, standing by to answer any questions. The Area Defense Counsels were the Air Force’s “defense attorneys,” answerable to no one but the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Victor Hayes. He, too, recommended he request early retirement: he had reviewed the memoranda from the Secretary of Defense and found the offer of a clear record, full time in grade and service, and an honorable discharge complete and acceptable, even generous considering the seriousness of the charges.
Patrick's simple answer: “No, sir.”
Patrick’s next stop was the office of the three-star Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. Again behind closed doors, he was notified that his security clearance had been taken away, he no longer had a nuclear weapons security or surety authorization, was no longer authorized to fly as a crew member in military aircraft, and could not handle or employ any kinds of weapons, from an airborne laser all the way down to a handgun. Patrick was also notified that his Air Force Specialty Code had been changed from an XO. Commander and Director, to OX, or “Other”—“other" in this case meaning a defendant in a court-martial case, an officer with no specialty, no responsibilities, no unit, no team. The change in AFSC would be entered into his official personnel records for everyone to see, virtually guaranteeing that he would never be selected for another assignment, never selected for promotion, and never be given any awards or decorations. That record could also be made public, so any future employers would see it, too. guaranteeing that he would never be chosen to sit on a board of directors or be hired for any position, either home or abroad, that required a security clearance.
Each time Patrick was told of some new surprise, he was required to sign a form notifying him that he understood everything that had been said and all of the possible consequences of w hat was happening. At the same time, each time he was warned of some dire consequence or advised about some new potentially embarrassing or stressful step in the court-martial process, he was offered another chance to voluntarily retire with full rank, time in service, his records expunged, and a completely honorable discharge—definitely “carrot and stick’" tactics. Each time, his answer was the same: “No. sir,”
By the time he’d finished, Patrick felt like a gang of thugs had beaten him. His briefcase was stuffed with dozens of copies of all of the forms, letters, memos, and directives outlining the beginning of the end of his seventeen-year Air Force career.
When Patrick emerged from the meeting with the DCS/ Personnel office, a lieutenant colonel with gold piping on his shoulder was waiting just outside the door: “Sir. General Hayes would like to have a word with you.” he said simply, and led the way out. Well. Patrick thought, he couldn't get it any worse from the Chief of Staff than from all the other Air Staff officers he had already encountered. Might as well get it over with.
General Victor “Jester” Hayes’s office was large, with a twelve-person triangular videoconference table setup and a comfortable casual conversation pit in front of his desk, but it was simply decorated, with pictures and items celebrating the history and advancements of the U.S. Air Force rather than celebrating his own career. Although Jester’s undergraduate degree had been in engineering from the Air Force Academy, his first love was twentieth-century American history, especially as it related to aviation.
His office was like a small aviation museum: a copy of the Wright brothers’ patent for the first powered airplane: a machine gun from a Curtis-Jenny biplane flown during World War I; a Norden bomb sight; a control stick from his belov ed F-15 Eagle: and photographs galore of aviation pioneers, aces, and Air Force Medal of Honor recipients.
The history buff was right now seated at the base of the triangular conference table, facing the triangle’s apex and a bank of large video monitors along the wall. Seated beside him, Patrick recognized, was the deputy chief of staff. General Tom “Turbo” Muskoka. and the deputy chief of staff for operations, Lieutenant-General Wayne “Wombat" Falke. They were all three seated before computer terminals, making notes and reading e-mail messages and computer reports, Muskoka and Falke looked angrily at McLanahan as he was led over to them; Hayes did not look at him, but was studying the monitors and talking on the telephone.
As were most televisions in every military installation Patrick had ever visited in the last ten years, one of the large monitors on the wall was tuned to CNN. The "Breaking News” logo was all over the screen. It looked like a videotape archive of w reckage from a plane crash: then he gulped as he saw the caption “Near Moscow, Russian Federation." Patrick McLanahan had to struggle not to look at the big screen as he stood at attention before the conference table and the three Air Staff generals.
Hayes barked something into the phone, practically threw the receiver on its cradle, took a gulp of coffee, and then glanced at Patrick. “We found your Vampire, General,” he growled. He hit the enter button on his computer terminal with an angry slab to issue his directives, then motioned toward the screen. “Stand at ease. Take a look. Recognize anything?”
“Yes, sir. That’s Vampire One.”
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