This was indeed a very exciting place to be. Patrick thought. He certainly had had a very exciting, very unusual career. He thought back about all the missions and all the situations he had found himself involved in over the past twelve years: thought about how many times he had made that “Batphone” ring, how many times the chief of staff of the Air Force had stood before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense or even the President and had been unable to explain what was going on because Brad Elliott hadn’t informed him or anyone else what he was going to do before he did it. How many frantic limo rides had he been responsible for? How many sleepless nights, tirades, memos, confused phone calls, and lost careers had he and HAWC caused because of their own brand of warfighting?
No matter—it was all over now.
But as Patrick approached the limousine on his way to the taxi stand that would take him to his hotel, the Secret Service-looking agent approached him. “Excuse me. General McLanahan?”
“Yes?”
She removed her dark glasses and smiled at him. “I’m not wearing a disguise this time, Patrick.”
He stared at her harder, his mind finally returning to the here and now. “Marcia? Marcia Preston?” He shook her hand warmly, then gave her a hug. “You have this thing for always popping up unexpectedly, Marcia.” Marcia Preston had been one of the first U.S. Marine Corps combat fighter pilots, but she'd seen only limited duty in that capacity. Her knowledge and expertise in military affairs, foreign military capabilities, tactics, and both land and aerial combat had led her to be chosen as an advisor and aide to two successive National Security Advisors to the President. Patrick glanced into the limo’s windows, but of course could not see anything. “Who are you working for now. Colonel? Last I knew, you were working for General Freeman in the National Security Advisor's office.”
“It's not Colonel anymore, Patrick,” Marcia said. “And my new boss wants to speak with you. He’s waiting for you.”
“He’s waiting for me? In there?”
“Hey, General!” Patrick turned toward the familiar voice and was surprised to see none other than Hal Briggs emerging from the limousine.
“Hal? What are you doing here?”
Hal Briggs waved him over to the car so they could talk discreetly. “I got a deal I couldn’t refuse, sir.”
“I’m not a ‘sir’ anymore, Hal. Just Patrick.”
“That’s okay, because I’m just ‘Hal’ now, too,” he said with a smile. “Early retirement, same as you.”
“How did you know that?” Patrick asked. “And why in hell did you accept early retirement? You haven’t done anything wrong—in fact, after that rescue in Russia, you’re a genuine hero. I’m the one who screwed the pooch. You didn’t punch out because of me. did you?”
“With all due respect, old buddy,” Hal said, with a broad smile, “I don’t do shit for no one unless they give me some serious money or some serious humma-humma, if you catch my drift. But if I was going to trash my career for anyone, it would be for you. How’s that?”
“Sounds like bullshit to me. What is going on, Hal? How did you know where I was? How did you know what happened to me? I just found out ten minutes ago.”
“My new employer knows everything. Patrick,” Hal said. “He wants to talk with you, too.”
Patrick’s warning antennae were tingling like crazy. Having trusted friends like Marcia and Hal together helped, but this strong feeling of caution couldn’t be ignored. “You know this guy, Hal?” he asked. “Did you check him out first?”
“No.”
“No? You stepped into a car with a guy you don't know and you didn’t check him out first?”
“I said I didn’t check him out. and I’ve never met him—I know of him. But you definitely know him.”
Patrick looked at Hal suspiciously, but with a gleam of interest in his eyes now. Hal noticed it, stepped aside, and let him peek inside. He saw Chris Wohl inside, also in civilian clothes, looking moody and inconvenienced as always, and he wondered if the Marine Corps veteran had retired also. Then he looked in the very front of the passenger compartment—and his chin dropped open in sheer surprise.
“C’mon in, General McLanahan,” the man said, with a broad smile. “We need to talk.”
The Oval Office, The White House, Washington, D.C.
Several minutes later
“The Joint Chiefs are meeting right now at the Pentagon,” Secretary of Defense Robert Goff said, as he was ushered into the Oval Office. “They’ll be ready with some recommendations for you shortly. It’s pretty clear what happened: someone in Russia leaked the information about the downed bomber to the world press. The State Department tells me several world leaders have already called our embassies asking for an explanation. The press is going nuts. Every bit of information they’ve ever had about Dreamland is being trotted out and fitted together with the information the Russians are publicizing, and it’s all coming together. Dreamland has been blown wide open.”
President Thomas Thom put down the papers he was looking at, motioned to the sofa, and nodded. Goff took his usual place on the sofa; the President continued to pace the floor, looking thoughtful if not concerned. “It’ll still be a classified installation,” the President said. “Only now, everyone will know it’s classified.”
“If I didn't know you better, Thomas. I'd say you were just trying to make a funny,” Goff said. He knew, of course, that he wasn't. “Thomas?” Goff prompted, the concern evident in his voice. “What are we going to do?”
“Admit to it. of course,” Thom replied. “Admit that it was our bomber, our aircraft, on a spy mission inside Russia. We were trying to rescue a spy that had valuable information for us. We're going to do exactly what I told Sen'kov I'd do—go in front of the American people, in front of the world, and admit everything.”
“I disagree. I think we shouldn't say anything,” Goff said. “The Russians trumped us. Anything we say now will sound like we're making excuses.”
“We're not making excuses—we’re offering explanations,” the President said. “We can't deny any of it. Bob. We knew we were working off borrowed time anyway. Expecting the Russians to sit on the intelligence bonanza of the decade was too much to hope for. We had to face the music eventually. I’m surprised the Russians waited this long.”
“Then why in hell didn't we do something more?” Goff snapped.
“Because our objective always was to get our men and women back home,” the President said. “The Russians had their hands on two American aviators from a top-secret weapons research facility. They could have had the other bomber, too—they almost did. They could have sent a hundred planes after them. We made them hesitate with a half-baked threat that shouldn’t have worked but did. All we needed was Enough hesitation to get our people clear. I expected Sen’kov to renege on the deal the next morning. Nobody won, but the important thing was, we didn't lose." He punctuated the last sentence with an angry glare.
“Congress is going to roast us,” Goff said. “The media is going to chew on us for weeks, maybe months.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Goff asked incredulously. “Don’t you get it. Thomas? Don’t you understand? Congress, the American people, the world will think we are completely inept. They’ll think we don’t care about our allies, that we’re afraid, that we can’t protect ourselves. If we can’t protect our own people, how can we protect our friends and allies?”
“Our job is not to protect the rest of the world. Bob.” Thom said. “We are not the defenders of freedom. We are one nation among hundreds of other nations around the planet.”
“Are you joking. Thomas?” Goff asked. “You are the president of the United States. You are the leader of the free world. This office is the center of hope, freedom, and democracy for billions of people around the globe—
“I don’t buy any of that, Robert—I never did. and you know it,” the President said. “This office stands
for one thing and one thing only: the executive branch of the United States, one of three branches of the American government. The Constitution specifies exactly what this office is and what my responsibilities are, and I'm quite certain the Constitution does not authorize me to be the leader of the free world, defender of liberty, truth, justice, or of anything else except to faithfully uphold and defend the Constitution. I am the president, that’s it.”
“It’s not a Constitutional thing, Thomas. It's .. . it’s symbolic,” Goff said uncomfortably, irritated that he had to explain this concept to his friend. “The president of the United States is a symbol of democracy and freedom. It’s not legislated or conferred upon you—you’ve got it because people have come to believe it.”
“So I don’t have a choice? That’s nonsense. I have a choice, and I choose not to be a symbol of something like that.” But it was obvious he wanted to change the subject—and besides, he didn’t like arguing with his friend.
Thom motioned to the reports on the EB-1C aircraft coming in from intelligence analysts and experts. “All this stuff about how our country has been compromised by the Russians revealing information on the bomber? It’s all nonsense. These analysts put all that gloom-and-doom stuff in their report simply because if they underestimated the impact of the news, they’d be judged unreliable in their estimates. They’d rather be known for predicting the worst and hoping for the best than the other way around. The information reveals nothing. Robert. It s a sensational episode that in the end affects nothing.”
Robert Goff stared disbelievingly at his old friend, then shook his head. “What’s happened to you, Thomas?” he breathed.
“I was wondering the same about you, Robert,” Thom said, angry that he had decided not to engage his friend in a halfphilosophical, half-personal argument, but that Goff had come back wanting more anyway. “I thought we both believed in the same things—smaller government, fewer foreign entanglements, less reliance on military power. America first, foremost, and always—that was our vision. The office—yours and mine—seems to have diverted your attention.”
Goff ignored Thom’s observations. He chuckled and gave him a wry smile. “I remember when you got back from Desert Storm, when I brought Amelia to Dover to be there when you got off that plane with your unit. There you were, with your ‘chocolate chip’ battle dress uniform, beret, desert combat boots, still with your web gear on like you were getting ready to go into battle again. You looked like John Wayne and Superman rolled into one. You had several dozen confirmed kills to your credit, and regular folks treated you like the second coming of Elvis—twenty years earlier, they would have spit on you if they even thought you were military. You cried when those people cheered for you. You cried when the band started playing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and the crowds broke through the barricades and surrounded you.” Thom had stopped his pacing and was staring off into space as if reliving that moment.
“You were proud of your men and the Army,” Goff went on. “You went back and thanked every one of your men for their service You got down on your knees on the tarmac and thanked the ones who didn’t come back. You were a proud man, Thomas.”
“I’m still proud of our soldiers,” he shot back, almost defensively. “I’m proud enough of them that I refuse to send them away from home just so they can be ‘trip wires’ or so we can maintain a ‘presence’ in some foreign country. Soldiers are meant to fight and kill to defend their country, not to fight and die for someone else's country, or for the latest slogan or jingle or buzzword, or so we can police a country whose people want nothing more than to kill one another, or because the media saturates our senses with scenes of downtrodden people supposedly in need of liberation. I won't follow the pattern of past leaders and send troops overseas just because we can, or because someone believes we should because we’re the leaders of the free world,”
Goff’s half-smile was vanishing rapidly. “Now you’ve turned into a cynical reactionary. It’s like you hate everything you were back then, and you’re driven to see it all destroyed.”
“Not destroyed—changed,” Thom said. “Changed into what it was meant to be. Changed into what the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.”
“That was then, Thomas,” Goff argued. “That was the eighteenth-century world, where time was as much a barrier as a mountain range or an ocean. Now information travels at the speed of light into almost every home on the planet. The world is a far more dangerous place than ever before, and we need every advantage we can take.”
“You can’t convince me, Robert;” Thom said. “I’m not going to change my philosophy of how to run this government simply because a military plane gets shot down, an espionage operation is uncovered and exposed, or some country thinks they can get away with invading and occupying a smaller, weaker nation.”
“ ‘Think they can get away with it,' Thomas?” Goff asked. “Thomas, they’ve already ‘gotten away with it.’ It’s a done deal. Russia has sent over twenty thousand troops into the Balkans in the past two weeks alone. None of those nations can do or say anything against them. How are we going to deal with Russia now? They’ve taken over Macedonia, they are staging massive resupply missions and setting up huge hardware and ammunition depots in Bulgaria and Serbia, and they’re conducting cross-border raids into Albania that look suspiciously like another invasion operation—the Germans are virtually stepping aside, letting them cruise anywhere in the Balkans. We’ve implicated them in mass murder, surprise attacks, and even genocide. Someone has to stop them.”
“We're not going to deal militarily with Russia,” the President said.
“What?"
“If the Balkan countries want Russia to occupy them, let them go ahead and do so.” Thom said.
“What do you mean, ‘if they want them to occupy them’?” Goff asked. “Why would any country want Russia to occupy them?”
“Robert, have you heard of any opposition to Russia's new peacekeeping role in Macedonia?”
“We get briefings and see video of anti-Russian protests every day.”
“But there's no opposition from the government, the Macedonian parliament is still in session, there's no government in exile, and the Macedonian army is still intact,” the President observed. “Yes, we’ve heard from opposition leaders in their government asking for American troops to counterbalance the Russian troops, and we've heard dire predictions of a Russian invasion of Greece and Turkey. But it's all background noise, Robert.”
“ ‘Background noise.’ ” Goff's voice was intentionally monotone, as if he was too stunned to even react.
“It’s all rumor and possibility and threats and panic,” the President said. “It’s opposition groups in every country in Europe vying for position. It's ethnic and religious groups in this country vying for press and donations and influence. It’s congressional representatives vying for votes and donations. Everyone’s got an agenda. Robert, including you and me. But their agendas don’t have to influence my thinking.
“That goes double when it comes to deploying the armed forces of the United States,” the President went on. “I refuse to use the military as a hammer against anyone who happens to have thoughts, actions, or policies contrary to ours, no matter how horrific or dangerous they seem to be.”
“Then you're willing to sacrifice the peace, security, and freedom of every one of the democratic nations in Europe, just like that, in order to preserve your way of thinking?” Goff asked incredulously. “Even if Russia takes the Balkans, breaks up NATO, reoccupies the Baltic States, and re-erects the Iron Curtain, you’re still willing to stand aside and watch it all happen?”
“You are living in a fantasy world of someone else’s making, Robert,” the President retorted. “You’re starting to believe all the hype in the press. Yes, I believe Russia has hostile intentions toward the Balkans, and possibly elsewhere in Europe. But what’s the solution, Robert? Send troops to Macedonia or Albania or Bulgaria? Send in the Sixth Fleet? Then we'd be
the invaders. We’d turn the Balkans into a battleground, just like before the start of World War One—”
“To preserve freedom and democracy in Europe. I damn well think it’s worth our sacrifice!” Goff retorted. “Would you have stood aside and let Hitler take Europe or the British Isles, or let Mussolini take Greece ? Would you have let the Japanese island-hop their way to California without opposing them? Would you have let Israel defend itself against Egypt and Syria? Would you have allowed Saddam Hussein to keep Kuwait and then take Saudi Arabia?”
“I'm not going there, Robert,” Thom snapped. “I’m not going to rewrite history, for you or for anyone else. I’m only concerned about what I'm going to do here and now—”
“Which is nothing? Turn your back on our friends and allies?”
“I’m not going to engage Russia or China or any other nation unless the very existence of the United States of America is at stake. And I don’t mean losing a few markets for wheat or soybeans or soda pop—I mean threaten our shores, threaten our national security.”
“You're going to unravel decades of alliances, friendship, and trust between the free nations of the world. Thomas.”
“Am I? Do you think the German chancellor had this discussion when he decided to divide the Balkans between themselves and Russia? Did the Germans care about NATO? Did Russia care about maintaining years of mutual trust and friendship between us and them? Or do you think they were motivated by self-interest to do what they felt was right for their countries?”
“Or maybe they’re just in it for the money.”
“So what if they are?” the President argued. “What if Sen’kov is really getting billions of dollars from that Russian gangster Kazakov to invade the Balkans just so he can pul up his pipeline? Do you think the Russian people will stand idly by and watch him do this? Do you think the Russian military will happily march into Albania and risk another Afghanistan or Chechnya debacle just so Sen’kov can get rich and retire wealthy to the Caribbean?”
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