by Dale Brown
Who didn't? That was the best part of your career. Though it was a rare officer who understood it at the time.
"This airborne tactical laser can change a lot of things," said Dog. "It'll revolutionize ground support. With some more work, the laser will do a credible job as an antifighter weapon as well. And to do all that, it needs a pretty powerful computer to help the pilots fly and target the enemy."
"I don't need a sales pitch," said Samson sharply. Then he added, in a tone somewhat less gruff, "We've gotten off to a bad start, you and I. But I don't think it's necessary that we be enemies. In a way — in a lot of ways — you remind me of myself when I was your age. Ambitious. Tough. A bit strong willed — but that's a plus."
Dog didn't say anything. He knew that Samson was trying to be magnanimous, though to his ears the general sounded like an ass.
"Congratulations on your Medal of Honor," added Samson. "You've heard about it, I understand. You earned it, Bastian. You and the others did a hell of a job. Hell of a job. Made us all proud."
"Thank you, sir."
"The President is coming. Or at least, I hope he can squeeze us into his schedule. I have made a request — I'm sure I'm going to get him here. Maybe as early as tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
Samson waved his hand as if brushing away a fly. "I still have to do some paperwork — you know, there are going to be hoops with this medal thing, so don't expect too much too quickly. But I thought it would be nice for the President to show his respect, and admiration."
"You don't have to go to any trouble. I don't— Medals don't really mean that much."
"The hell they don't!" Samson practically shouted. "They mean everything. They remind us how we should carry ourselves. What we're about!"
Out of the corner of his eye, Dog saw that some of the aircraft maintainers were staring at them.
"So, Colonel, as I said, we've gotten off to a bad start, you and I," added Samson.
"Yes, sir."
"Is there anything you'd like to say?"
Dog wasn't exactly sure what Samson was expecting, though he was clearly expecting something.
"Lieutenant colonel?" said Samson. "Is there anything you'd like to say?"
In normal conversation, a lieutenant colonel was always called a colonel; as far as Dog was concerned, the only reason Samson would use his full rank now was to put him in his place — which was made all the more obvious by the emphasis he put on the word.
"Not really, General."
"Excuse me?" said Samson, raising his voice. "I have nothing I want to say. Thank you. I didn't expect a medal, but I'm very honored. Flattered. Humbled, really." "You don't want to apologize for anything?" "For getting off on the wrong foot?" "For not showing respect."
Dog stiffened. He didn't have anything to apologize for. Samson was just playing bs games, throwing his weight around.
"If the general feels an apology is warranted for anything," he said coldly, "then I apologize."
Samson scowled, pressing his lips together and furling his eyebrows out.
"I was wondering when you'd want me to run down the main projects and personnel with you," said Dog, trying to move the conversation past its sticking point. "I can make myself available at any—"
"That won't be necessary," snapped Samson, stalking back up the ramp toward the exit.
General Samson wassoangry, his lower lip started to tremble by the time he reached his waiting SUV. He'd offered the idiot the chance to apologize, to start fresh, and the jerk had all but spat in his face.
A cowboy, out of control, with no respect for anyone. From first to last.
Last, as far as Samson was concerned. Medal of Honor or not, the sooner Bastian was gone from Dreamland, the better.
Northwestern Moldova,
near the Romania border
23 January 1998
0155
Mark Stoner had heard several explosions in his life, but none quite like this.
The grenade the gunman had thrown blew up with the sound a pumpkin makes when it hits the pavement. Part of the explosive packed beneath the hard metal shell failed to explode, whether because of manufacturing defects or poor storage during the fifty-some years since. But more than enough explosive did ignite to shred the metal canister and send splinters hurtling through the air in every direction, red hot metal spat from a dragon's mouth.
Stoner caught a small piece in his right side. There was no pain at first, just a light flick as if someone had tapped him there with a pen or a ruler. And then it began to burn. This was a fire on the inside of his skin, a flame that stayed in place rather than spreading, and was all the more intense because of it. His body twisted away from the pain. He couldn't breathe for a second. He lost his grip on his rifle.
The man who'd thrown the grenade came down the hill toward him, his flashlight waving over the ground.
Stoner reached for his gun but couldn't find it. He grabbed to the left, reached farther, found the barrel and began pulling it over. The flashlight's beam moved closer to him. He slid his hand along the rifle, trying to reach the trigger, but it was too late — the guerrilla's light hit him.
An assault rifle barked — a long, sustained burst, a thick run of death.
But the bullets didn't hit Stoner. They hadn't been aimed at him. They struck the man with the flashlight, cutting a dotted line across his back. The holes the bullets made were so close together, he was nearly severed in two.
A minute later the woman he'd come to meet stood over him, AK-47 in hand.
"You are the man who answered the message," she said.
"Yes."
"Where did they hit you?" He rolled over and showed her.
She knelt down. "It's shrapnel only. It has to be taken out. The wound can be cauterized."
"Yeah." He unsheathed his knife. "Do it." "It will hurt very much." "No shit."
She frowned. "There is blood all over this knife." "I killed one of them near the road." "Well then, let us get someplace where I can clean it and start a fire."
"No one's going to be looking for them?" Stoner asked as she helped him up. "They may. It will be best to do this quickly."
* * *
Her name was Sorina Viorica. She was Romanian. She called herself a freedom fighter. Stoner tried not to scoff.
A good idea, considering she had his knife in her hands and was poking out the grenade shard as she spoke.
"This government has done very little for the people, the poor people," she insisted, slipping the tip of the knife into his side as they sat on the floor of the house. She'd started a small fire nearby, and smoke curled in his nose. "The people are left to fend like animals as the fat get fatter. Hold still. You must hold still."
The tip of knife blade struck something underneath the metal, and a sharp pain ran through his abdomen, all the way to his fingers and toes. He felt faint.
"Out," she said, turning to the fire. "Now for the part that will hurt."
Stoner pulled his T-shirt up into his mouth and bit down, waiting as Sorina Viorica heated the knife in the fire. It was an old method of dealing with a wound — cauterizing it, basically burning the flesh so it would no longer bleed or spread an infection.
Effective, but extremely painful.
Stoner dug his fingers into his face as the pain wracked his body. His heart pumped fiercely; his head felt as if it would explode. His whole body writhed in agony. He swam in it, awash in pain.
"Are you still with me?" she asked.
"Oh yeah." The words were a relief. He pushed up.
"I have to wrap it."
"Yeah, yeah."
She stood up and took off the heavy coat she was wearing, removed a thick shirt and then stripped off a T-shirt. She had another beneath it, but he could see the outline of her breasts, loose against her body.
"This is just to keep dirt away from it," she said as she wrapped it around his torso. "There shouldn't be further problems. But you'll have to have it seen to."
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"Yeah."
Stoner took a long, deep breath, trying to pull his thoughts back to the present, trying to push his mind past the pain.
"We should go," he told her. "This isn't safe."
Sorina looked up suddenly, as if she'd heard something outside. "Yes," she told him.
"I brought two men with me, as guides over the border. They're with the man who showed me here."
"Let's go, then."
Stoner got up slowly and followed her out of the cottage. He was in a kind of shock, his mind pushed back behind a wall of thick foam. It had separated itself from the rest of his body, from some, though not all, of the pain. He felt like he had a hole in his side; though the grenade fragment was gone, it felt as if it was still there, and on fire. He told himself he was lucky — absurdly lucky — to be hit by only a splinter and not the full force of the grenade, to be nabbed lightly in a part of his body where he could still walk, still use his arms, his head, his eyes. He told himself he was lucky and that he had to use that luck — that if he didn't move, he was a dead man.
Stoner went out into the night like an animal, his only instinct survival. He followed Sorina Viorica down the opposite side of the hill, holding his gun in his left hand, breathing hard. His midsection seemed to be twisting away from the rest of his body, a tourniquet that squeezed itself. The pain lessened ever so slightly and began to feel… not good, but familiar in a way that told him he could survive it.
When they reached a small stream, they turned left, back toward the road. After a hundred yards or so, Sorina stopped.
"I'm sorry I'm moving so fast. Catch your breath."
"I'm OK," said Stoner, though he was thankful for the rest.
"They were after me, not you," she said as he leaned back against the tree. "They have been trying to kill me for several days."
"Who are they?"
"Russians. Are you ready?" "Sure."
Stoner pushed off from the tree. Russians. He wanted to know more, suspected that they were to blame for the deaths, thought for sure they were pulling the strings. But he couldn't ask the questions he needed to ask. He had to walk first, had to get back over the border, away.
"Those were Russians that shot at us?" he managed.
Sorina was too far ahead even to hear. The pain flared. Stoner hooked his thumb into his T-shirt and stuffed the end into his mouth, biting hard. He tried thinking of her breasts, tried thinking of anything but the pain. He knew he was going to make it, but he had to push through, keep his legs moving and his lungs breathing.
Sorina Viorica stopped about fifty feet from the road. Stoner remembered his night goggles, but they were gone, along with his backpack. He rubbed his eyes, staring at the darkness across the road.
"You left them there?" Sorina said, pointing.
"Yeah."
"What was your code?" "There was none."
Stoner gathered his strength, then whistled. There was no answer. He tried again.
"Maybe I'm not loud enough," he said.
Sorina didn't answer. She started to the right, trotting toward a small copse of trees that bordered the road. Stoner fell steadily behind.
"Wait here," she said when he reached her.
"You can't go alone."
"I'll be fine. You just wait."
He slumped against one of the trees, too weak to protest. Sorina ran to the right, starting to slide around the spot where he'd left his escorts, flanking them carefully.
Was it possible this was all an elaborate setup? But if so, to what end?
Blame the Russians, not the guerrillas.
That made no sense.
So the Russians were involved.
Stoner had a satellite phone with him, a "clean" device that couldn't be traced to the CIA. He took it out and waited as it powered up. A single number was programmed in: a voice mail box that the Agency could check for emergency messages. Otherwise there were no presets to give him away if captured.
He pressed the combination. The phone dialed itself. A voice in Spanish told him no one was home but that he was free to leave a message.
"This is Stoner. I'm over the border. There was an ambush. I'm OK. I'm coming back. The Russians are involved somehow. My contact is a woman. Her name is Sorina Viorica."
The words came out as a series of croaks, like a hoarse frog. He needed water. He pressed the End Transmit button and put the phone away.
A few minutes later a shadow appeared before him. He started to raise his rifle, then realized it was Sorina Viorica.
"They're dead," she said.
"Who?"
"Your men. And Claude. Come."
Stoner followed her across the road. Claude, the guide who had met him at the barn, lay near the water. A bullet had shattered his temple. The two Romanian soldiers had fallen together a few yards away. Their bodies were riddled with bullets. Both of their guns were still loaded; they'd never had a chance to fire.
Or maybe they'd tried to surrender and the bastards killed them anyway.
Sorina was looking through the woods, examining the ground.
"There may be more than the three we killed. It's hard to tell," she said. "They usually work in three-man teams, but two together, so there would be six together."
"Spetsnaz?" said Stoner.
"I don't know the name, just that they're Russian."
"OK."
"If there is another team tracking us, they will be vicious. Where's your car?"
"On the other side of the border."
"That far? You walked?"
"I didn't want to get stopped." "You couldn't bribe the guards?"
"It didn't seem like a good idea at the time. Especially if I was coming back with you." She frowned at him.
"You wanted to talk. It's not safe to do it here." "You think I'm going to let you turn me into the military?"
"I'm not going to turn you into the military." She was holding her rifle on him.
Stoner kept talking. "If I was going to do something stupid like that, I wouldn't have come back to the house for you," he said. "Your message said that you had mutually beneficial information, and that we could work out a deal. That's why I came."
"With two soldiers."
"I needed guides over the border. I don't speak the language. I left them here — if I was going to ambush you, I would have."
"I don't know."
"Your people killed two Americans," added Stoner. "Maybe you killed them yourself."
"We haven't killed any Americans. Not even spies. It is the Russians. They have taken over the movement."
Stoner stared at the barrel of the AK-47. The moonlight turned the rifle's black metal silver, as if it were a ghost's gun, as if he were imagining everything happening.
"You didn't patch me up to shoot me now," he said.
"How do you know?"
"You've already made your decision to help," Stoner told her. "They're after you. It's all you can do." "I can do many things." "You have to trust me." "I trust no one."
Stoner nodded. "But you take chances." "Like you?" "Like me."
She lowered her weapon. "I will go," she told him. "But I will talk only to you, not the army, or to the government. They are all corrupt."
Stoner rose slowly. "What about them?"
She shook her head.
"You want to just leave them on the ground?" "Of course." "Even your man?"
"Very possibly he was the one who betrayed me."
Dreamland
22 January 1998
1700
All that remained was to test the MESSKIT the way it was meant to be used — from an airplane.
A C-130 configured for airborne training and recertifica-tion was used as the test plane. Danny joked that they ought to requisition an office chair with casters and use it to launch Zen into the air: They'd push him off the plane's ramp and see what happened.
Zen didn't think the joke was particularly funny, but the actual jump was nearly that informal: He put one arm
around Danny and the other around Boston, and the next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, propelled with the others as they leaped off the ramp.
Within seconds he was free. It didn't feel as if he was fall ing, exactly, nor with the MESSKIT not yet deployed could he say that he was flying. He was skydiving, something he'd never really done, even before he lost the use of his legs. His head seemed to be moving through a wind tunnel, with his arms and the rest of his body playing catch-up.
His heart was bringing up the rear, pumping furiously to keep pace.
A small light blinked at the left-hand side of his helmet's visor. Activated by the abrupt change in altitude, the MESSKIT's system monitor was sensing the external conditions. Zen had ten seconds to take control either by voice or manually, or the system would assume that its pilot had been knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection and would then automatically fly him to the ground.
"Zen zero one, MESSKIT override to manual," he said.
The light stopped blinking. In its place, a ghosted grid appeared in front of his eyes. Numbers floated at the left, a compass and GPS coordinate points appeared on the right.
He was at 21,135 feet, and falling.
"Deploy wing kit at two-zero angels," Zen said.
The computer had to calculate whether this was practical before answering. It was another safety measure to prevent the MESSKIT from opening in unsafe conditions. Zen was also wearing a reserve parachute with an automated activation device set to open if his rate of fall exceeded eighty-three feet per second. deployment in 17.39 seconds flashed on the screen.
Zen pushed forward, doing his best to get into the traditional frog posture used by a skydiver. He spread his arms, as if trying to fly.
Unlike a parachute, the MESSKIT's wing deployment did not jerk him up by the shoulders or torso. Instead of a tug, he felt as if the wind had suddenly filled in below him, holding him up. He reached his hands up, the handlelike holders springing open below his wrists.
And now he was a bird — a very, very high flying one, but a bird nonetheless. He could steer by shifting his weight, or by pushing hard against the tabs at the ends of each handle.
