Revolution

by Dale Brown

  “General, sorry I was late. The President called me into a meeting.”

  “Yes,” said Samson, trying to hide his disappointment that he was dealing with a kid barely out of his teens instead of Freeman himself.

  “Do you have an update?”

  “I have the report from Colonel Bastian regarding the guerrilla attack,” said Samson. “The Dreamland units tracked the guerrillas and helped detain them. As a matter of fact, I have a presentation—”

  “Yes, sir. I was wondering if there was an update on the Russian aircraft. You’d told me about that earlier.”

  “There’s not much more to tell,” said Samson. “They had contacts at a very long distance. Bastian believes there are spies in Iasi that watch them take off.”

  “OK.”

  “I have images from the Flighthawk of the guerrillas exploding the house,” said Samson. “I had them prepared for the President. If you’d like to see it—”

  “We got some photos from the embassy an hour ago,” said Jed. “So I think we’re good. They came from the army. Pretty gruesome. That’s pretty much all we need.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m late,” said Jed. “If you want to upload the report, I can check it out when I get back.”

  Samson fumed. What was the kid late for? A date?

  “I’ll have my aide do it,” said Samson frostily.

  “Oh, there was something I wanted to mention to you,” added Jed. “Kind of on down low.”

  “Down low?”

  “Between us. There was a discussion today relating to the B-1 laser project. Apparently some members of Congress were asking the Pentagon what was going on with it.”

  “What questions?”

  “You’ll have to sweat the specifics through channels, General. I didn’t get the details myself, but the tone was, uh, um, hard-nosed. Like they wanted to kill the plane completely. Seems the B-1 has a bad reputation.”

  “Unjustly.”

  “Well, the reason I’m mentioning it is, the President was looking for an update.”

  “It’s right on schedule,” said Samson. Then he remembered that in fact it was a few weeks behind. “More or less on schedule. What is the President’s concern?”

  “I really can’t speak for him,” said Jed. “But, uh, you know with the way Congress is, um, funding…”

  Samson got the message. Well, at least Jed was good for something. And maybe Freeman had purposely had the kid talk to him, so his “fingerprints” weren’t on the warning.

  “I just thought you’d like the heads-up before someone from the Pentagon calls,” added Jed.

  “Yes, yes, actually—thank you, Jed. Good information. I owe you one.”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” Jed signed off.

  “Where the hell is Mack Smith?” Samson thundered.

  MACK SMITH STARED AT THE MOUNTAIN OF FOLDERS ON HIS desk for a moment, then picked up the phone.

  “Mack Smith.”

  “Is this General Samson’s chief of staff?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I figured you’d be working late. This is Robbie Denton. Colonel Denton.”

  “Oh yes, Colonel Denton.”

  The name was vaguely familiar. Mack quickly flipped through the folders. Darby, Denton…ah, Denton was the man General Samson had tapped to take over Combined Air Wing 1, the new designation for the Megafortresses and other aircraft and personnel when on a Whiplash deployment.

  “Colonel, good to hear from you,” bellowed Mack. “All right. Glad I happened to be working late tonight. A real fluke. Now, as far as security procedures go, I’m afraid we’re a little anal about the process. The first thing you need to do—”

  “Listen, Major, I’m going to save you a little time here. I’ve had second thoughts on the job.”

  “S-Second thoughts, Colonel?”

  “Actually, I never really wanted to take it in the first place. I love what I do now. It’s the best job in the world. I just had a hard time telling Terrill that the other day.”

  “Um—”

  “He’s a force of nature,” Denton told Mack. “That’s why they call him Earthmover.”

  “Colonel, you really want to tell him this yourself.”

  “No, no, that’s why I asked for you. I was his chief of staff back when he was in Strategic Air Command,” added Denton. “I don’t envy you.”

  “Oh.”

  Mack dropped the handset on the cradle. Samson wasn’t going to be happy; by Mack’s count, Denton was the third person he’d offered the job to. Part of the problem was that Samson only wanted proven overachievers, all of whom already had high-profile jobs to begin with. But they were also men he knew personally, which meant they’d served time under him…and therefore knew that working for Samson wasn’t exactly a holiday.

  As he could testify firsthand.

  He got up from his desk. There was no question of going home—he had a week’s worth of work that had to be finished by the morning. But he was hungry and could use a break.

  The phone rang again. He started to leave anyway, thinking he’d let it roll over to voice mail, then saw that the light indicated it was an internal call.

  “Mack Smith,” he said, picking it up.

  “General wants you down in Dreamland Command ASAP,” said Lieutenant Stephens, the com specialist on duty there. “Actually, faster than ASAP.”

  “Tell him I’m on my way,” said Mack.

  Maybe he’s going to compliment me on my PowerPoint presentation, he thought as he walked briskly down the hall to the elevator.

  Perhaps. But “good” and “job” were two words that Samson rarely put together, except as a preface to an order for more work. If Samson did like the report, he would probably tell him to make a hundred copies each with personalized comments and have them sent out by midnight to everyone in the Pentagon.

  The ride down to the secure command center was so quick Mack felt a little light-headed; he regretted not grabbing something to eat earlier. He nodded at the security sergeant standing in front of the door, then pressed his palm against the reader. The doors opened.

  “Where have you been, Mack?” growled Samson from down near the center screen.

  “Going through some reports, General. How’d the White House briefing go?”

  “Fine,” said Samson in a voice that suggested the opposite. “What’s the status of the B-1 program?”

  “Pretty much what it was the other day. Program head is due sometime next week and—”

  “What are we doing in the meantime to get it back on schedule?”

  “It’s not really that far off, General. In some respects—”

  Mack stopped short. Samson’s eyebrows furled and his cheeks puffed out. Had he opened his mouth just then, he would have looked like a grizzly bear.

  And not a particularly happy one.

  “What I mean, General, is we’re moving it right back to schedule, as you directed,” said Mack quickly. “We do have the pilot shortage to deal with.”

  “Why don’t we have pilots, Major?”

  “Well we do, but in terms of being checked out—”

  “That’s your solution?”

  “I’m working on it, General.”

  “That’s not a good enough answer, Major. You’ve been working on this for days.”

  Hours at least, thought Mack.

  “General, I can’t just shanghai pilots from other projects or units. Even once the budget line—”

  “Why not shanghai them?”

  Mack blinked.

  “I don’t care what you do, Major. Find a solution. Get the program back on schedule. I want the B-1s on line. I want to tell the White House tomorrow that they’re ready to go operational. I want to tell them to gear up the production line.”

  “Well, they are ready to fly, General, that’s not—”

  Mack stopped speaking as General Samson walked up toward him. It wasn’t just his face that looked like a grizzly bear now.<
br />
  “There’s one thing you have to understand when you work for me, Major,” said Samson, his voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t like excuses. I don’t like explanations. Results. That’s what I like.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get it done, Mack.” Samson’s voice was almost inaudible. “Get it done.”

  “I’m on it right now, General.”

  Los Angeles Forum, Los Angeles

  2132

  THE LAKERS WERE DOWN BY TWO WITH EIGHT SECONDS TO go when Kobe Bryant took the ball in bounds. He looked across court, saw that Rick Fox was covered, then turned down toward the key.

  Shaquille O’Neal had just drawn double coverage. Kobe hesitated just a second, as if he was going to scoop the ball up for O’Neal anyway. And then in a flash he was running toward the foul line. As he reached the paint, he jumped high in the air. The ball twirled off his fingertips as the buzzer sounded.

  Rimming the hoop, the ball fell into the basket with a swish.

  A referee ran from the scrum near the backboard, his hand in the air. Kobe had been fouled.

  “Oh my God,” said Breanna. She’d spent practically the whole fourth period on her feet, as the Lakers had mounted a stop-and-start comeback after trailing by fifteen. And her knee felt fine.

  “Great game, huh?” said Sleek Top, next to her.

  “Fantastic.”

  Kobe went to the line for the point that would win the game. He bounced the ball a few times, bent his knees, then bounced it again. Finally, he lifted it, raised it toward the basket, and let it go. The ball spun sharply, hit the glass and slapped in. The crowd shouted at the top of their lungs. Sleek Top grabbed Breanna and hugged her.

  “What a game!” he yelled in her ear. “What a game!”

  The fans were slow to leave the arena, but once in the hallway there was a mad rush for the exits and the cars. Sleek Top led Breanna around a line of cars to a row of men holding signs for private taxis. Recognizing one of the drivers, he pointed at him and then started to follow, ushering Breanna along.

  Breanna was still in the glow of the game when they got into the back of the Lincoln. She was thinking how jealous Zen was going to be that he’d missed it.

  “Great seats,” she said to Sleek Top.

  “Yeah. I don’t know what happens next year when they open the Staples Center. I may go to the back of the line. But for now, gotta enjoy it.”

  The driver eased into the line of cars waiting to get out.

  “Want to go and get a drink?” said Sleek Top. “A little nightcap?”

  “How are you going to fly home?” said Breanna.

  “We could stay over and leave in the morning,” he said, putting his hand on her knee.

  His touch brought a dozen other hints into focus.

  Oh no, she thought. How did she miss this? How could she be so stupid?

  She took his hand off her knee. Gently, but firmly.

  “I think you have the wrong idea,” she told him.

  “Really? You sure?”

  “Very.”

  “Doesn’t have to be anything serious.”

  “You’re a nice guy, Sleek, but no. No thanks.”

  He gave her a brave smile, the sort she hadn’t seen since well before she got married. She felt a pang in her heart. But she wasn’t about to cheat on Zen.

  “No hard feelings?” he asked.

  “Never happened.”

  “Hawthorne Airport, same as usual,” he told the driver.

  “I’ll get you right around to the hangars.”

  “Great,” said Sleek Top, still wincing a bit.

  Bucharest, Romania

  26 January 1998

  0732

  STONER HAD TO POUND ON THE DOOR BEFORE SORINA Viorica answered.

  “Stoner?” she called from inside.

  “Open up.”

  She worked the locks and pulled the door open. She was wearing a sweatshirt over a thin cotton nightgown.

  “You need to get dressed,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “Come on. We have to go.”

  She took it the way he thought she would—as a warning that she had been found. Her sleepy expression changed instantly. Quietly, she turned and went inside, changed and started to throw her things into a bag.

  “You won’t need a bag,” said Stoner. “We have to move quickly.”

  She came out wearing the dark clothes he had first seen her in.

  “You should look a little less…” He searched for the word. “Militant.”

  Without saying anything, she turned and went back inside. She came out a few moments later wearing a thick brown sweater over the dark pants, along with a red patterned scarf. It softened her look and made her look prettier, though Stoner tried not to notice.

  He found a cab within a block of the apartment.

  “Train station,” he said in English.

  The man said in Romanian that he didn’t understand.

  “Which train station, Mark?” Sorina asked.

  She told the driver; when they reached the station, she bought the tickets. They made the train just as it was boarding.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as it pulled out.

  “You bought the tickets.”

  “Yes, but the town—”

  “You’ll see,” Stoner said, and refused to tell her anything else.

  Sorina became more nervous at each stop as they headed north. “Are you giving me up?” she asked finally.

  He looked at her, looked into her pretty eyes, then shook his head.

  “What then?”

  “You’ll see,” was all he would say.

  Bacau, Romania

  0750

  DOG GAVE HIS CREW THE MORNING AND EARLY AFTERNOON off, but the long night mission he’d just completed didn’t earn him any extra rest; he had to report to a meeting of the local Romanian army commanders with the defense minister in Bacau at 0800. Fortunately, the base commander was going there as well, and Dog was able to hitch a ride, slumping in the backseat and half sleeping during the thirty minute drive.

  Word of his pending Medal of Honor had apparently been making the rounds, and his overnight e-mail included a number of congratulations from people he hadn’t heard from in years. With each message, he felt more and more phony.

  No, phony was too strong a word, but he certainly didn’t feel as if he merited the award—less now even than before. He’d done what he had to do—there was no choice involved, as far as he was concerned.

  Was that what made you a hero?

  No, he thought. But pointing that out to people would make him sound even worse.

  The meeting was held in a former school building near the center of town, a brown-brick structure that dated from the mid-nineteenth century and had first been used as a music academy. The original builder had created a mosaic of musical notes and instruments on the foyer and hallway floor, and the ceiling’s chipped plaster sconces were in the shape of musical scrolls.

  Armed soldiers guarded the entrance and stood in bunches along the halls; they wore combat fatigues and their guns showed signs of wear, the wood furniture scraped and dented. This made the soldiers also seem like part of the past, and Dog felt as if he were walking through a newsreel of World War II.

  Danny Freah had beaten him to the meeting room and was standing near the front of the room, arms folded, staring down at a map unfurled over the table. The large-scale topo map showed not only where the guerrillas had hit the night before, but where they’d made raids in the past. Dog noticed that the attacks clustered south of the highway, and that most of them formed a rough arrow pointing from Moldova; there were more attacks near the border, the cluster narrowing as it moved eastward. There were a few attacks outside the cluster, most notably the attack on the pipeline, which was well to the north.

  “How you doing, Danny?” Dog asked. “Get any sleep?”

  Danny shook his head. “You should have seen what they took out of
the house, Colonel. Parts of bodies. It was pretty awful. Worse than Bosnia.”

  Danny looked at him as if expecting him to say something, but Dog didn’t know how to answer. It sucked, plain and simple. Some of the younger guys had a saying. “Embrace the suck,” meaning that you had to somehow find a way to deal with it. But the more horror you saw, the harder it became to come up with any sort of saying that put it to rest.

  “They’re still not sure how many guerrillas were involved,” said Danny. “Body parts were all mixed up together.”

  Dog shook his head.

  “They know there are camps over the border,” said Danny. “They ought to attack them there.”

  “I agree,” said Dog.

  “Maybe you should suggest it. They aren’t listening to me.”

  Everyone around them snapped to attention. Dog turned in time to see General Locusta and two of his aides enter the room. Locusta also looked like he hadn’t slept; there were deep purple rings around his eyes, making his face look almost like a hound dog’s.

  Locusta had barely reached the front of the room when the defense minister, Fane Cazacul, arrived. A tall, aristocratic-looking man in his thirties, he wore a finely tailored black suit and smelled vaguely of aftershave. He nodded at Locusta; it was clear from their body language that the two men could barely stand each other.

  The general opened the meeting without any preliminaries, talking in rapid Romanian about the evening’s events. He was clearly angry, though since he wasn’t speaking English, Dog could only guess what he was saying. Several of the men in the room shifted uncomfortably as the speech continued; they seemed to be singled out by the general for criticism. After twenty minutes of this, the general ran out of steam. He glanced around the room, gesturing as if to ask whether anyone had anything to say. When no one spoke up, he looked at Dog.

  “This is Colonel Bastian, of the U.S. Air Force,” he said, speaking first in English for Dog’s benefit, and then in his native Romanian. “His men assisted last night, though they were not able to stop the attack. Perhaps next time.”

  The general sat down. The defense minister looked at Dog, apparently waiting for him to say something.

  “I am sorry about the deaths last night,” Dog said. “I see what monsters you are up against. Anyone who would kill innocent children—there can be no mercy.”