Battle Born

face intently, reading the thoughts and emotions that seemed to cross it — and not liking what she was sensing. “It’s not that you don’t want to be around me, Rinc,” she said in a quiet, strained voice, “is it? You don’t want to be around the Air Guard. Why?” Still no response. “Rinc, you gotta tell me. It’s about the accident, right?”

“No.”

“Tell me, Rinc. Get it off your chest. It’s all history now, lover.”

“Forget about it. It’s nothing.”

“I can’t forget about it until you do,” Rebecca said. “It’s obvious that whatever is bugging you is standing between us. I need to know. Please.”

Rinc started to pace the office. Every step he took seemed to cause him immense pain, but Rebecca knew the true pain was in his soul. “You lost it that day, didn’t you, Rinc?”

Rinc’s eyes were fixed on the floor. “Yes,” he said in a low, barely audible voice. “It was nuts on that plane, Beck. It wasn’t recovering. We were practically upside down. I thought I could recover it. Mad Dog had his fingers on the PREPARE TO EJECT switch, and I told him no. I kept on saying, ‘I got it, I got it.’ I suddenly realized I was going to fly it all the way into the ground, and I didn’t issue a command — I just went.”

“Rinc, it’s all right,” Rebecca said, going to him and taking his hand. “The important thing is, you got out alive…”

“Like hell it is!” John Long shouted. He was standing in the doorway of Rebecca’s office, his eyes bulging in fury. “So you finally admit it — you did screw up!”

“John, get out,” Rebecca said. “This is between him and me.”

But Long had already sped into the office and he shoved Seaver back against Rebecca’s desk. Rinc made no attempt to resist. Long pinned him against the desk and started pummeling him with his right fist. “You bastard!” he shouted. “You cowardly bastard! You caused that accident! You caused that crash! You killed those men! My friends are dead because of you!”

Furness had no choice — she jabbed her right elbow back into Long’s face, then pushed him away. He flew backward, blood spurting from his nose.

“So that’s why you’ve been protecting him — you two have been screwing each other all this time,” Long said, holding his nose to try to stop the bleeding. “God damn you…”

“That’s enough, Colonel!”

“I’m not your subordinate anymore, bitch!” Long snapped. “And even if I was, I call ’em like I see ’em. You covered up for him even though you suspected something was wrong. How can you do that, Furness? How can you cover up for a piece of shit like that, over the rest of your unit? There’s no dick or piece of ass good enough for anyone to turn on their own!”

“Shut up!” Rebecca shouted. “Just shut the fuck up, Long!” He finally stopped and glared at them both. Seaver picked himself up off the desk, not bothering to cover up a cut lip and bruised cheek. “Both of you, knock it off. This is getting us nowhere. What’s done is done.”

“Not for me it isn’t,” Long shot back. “Not until Seaver admits what he did in front of the squadron and to the adjutant general. Then I want to see him drummed out of the Guard.”

“Go to hell, Long,” Seaver said, his voice defiant but his eyes and expression showing the pain and hurt he was feeling. “Yes, I jumped out without giving a command. Yes, I was too aggressive down low while TF’ing. Yes, I relied on the automatic system to punch everyone out. But my crew didn’t die because of me! Those smoky SAMs hit us, we couldn’t recover…”

“You piece of shit!” Long shouted. “You’re still blaming something else for what you did.” Long took a threatening step toward Seaver.

Rebecca got up to block Long’s path again. “I said, knock it off!” Then she realized that someone else was standing in the doorway to her office. It was none other than Lieutenant Colonel Hal Briggs and another lieutenant colonel whom Rebecca recognized as General McLanahan’s deputy and one of the members of his inspection team. The way Briggs’s field jacket bulged, it was obvious he was still wearing the little submachine gun she remembered seeing at Dreamland.

“We interrupting something here, Colonel?” Briggs asked with his seemingly ever-present smile. He nodded at John Long and added, “Looks like you got blood on you again, Colonel Long, except this time it’s your own blood.”

“As a matter of fact, you are interrupting something,” Rebecca replied testily. “Can you guys wait for us downstairs?”

“No, we can’t,” the other man said. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel David Luger, General McLanahan’s deputy. We’d like you all to come with us right away. We’ve already got Captain Dewey with us downstairs.”

“It’s going to have to wait a few minutes,” Rebecca said. “We have something—”

“You don’t understand, Rebecca,” Dave Luger said. “You’re coming with us right now. General McLanahan’s orders.”

“McLanahan doesn’t have any authority over us,” Long said irritably, his anger from being elbowed in the face by his ex-boss welling up to the surface.

“You’re wrong, Colonel Long,” Luger said. “Those wristbands mean he has total authority over you.”

“What’s he going to do if we tell him to go piss up a rope?” Long asked. “Kidnap us?”

As if he were talking only to the cool alpine air, Dave Luger said, “Lieutenant Colonel Luger for Gunnery Sergeant Wohl…” There was a brief pause; then: “Chris, come give us a hand upstairs, please.”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” Rebecca asked.

Luger did not reply. Moments later the biggest, meanest-looking man any of them had ever seen came into Furness’s office. He was the archetypical commando — square jaw, piercing eyes, huge hands, tight, muscular frame, some broken bones in his face and nose that made him look even meaner. He looked at the three guardsmen with undisguised hostility, as if he had been personally insulted or inconvenienced by them.

“This is Gunnery Sergeant Chris Wohl, guys,” Luger said. “He’s our noncommissioned officer in charge of ass-kicking at HAWC.” As he said that, Chris Wohl reached inside his field jacket, grasped the pistol grip of his MP5K submachine gun, and gave it a tug. The little weapon snapped free of its harness, and in the blink of an eye the stock had extended and the big ex-marine had it at port arms. In another instant he had withdrawn and attached a sound suppressor.

“What are you going to do, asshole?” Long sneered. “Shoot us?”

“Yes, sir,” Wohl said, smiling. And at that, to the complete astonishment of the three guardsmen, he leveled the MP5K and fired a round right into John Long’s chest from less than twenty feet away.

“Jesus! Are you nuts?” Rebecca screamed. Long fell backward, his eyes staring straight ahead, clutching his chest. He went down so fast that Rinc and Rebecca had to scramble to catch him. There was no blood. They quickly found that he was not dead because there was no hole in his chest — just a patch of light brown dust on his shirt. But Long was out of it. One moment he was awake and wondering why his legs and arms wouldn’t work — the next instant, his eyes rolled up into his head and he was fast asleep. “What in hell did you shoot him with?”

“A very mild nerve agent crystalline needle,” Hal Briggs explained. “The needle is about the size of a human hair and can penetrate several layers of clothing, very much like a bullet but with none of the tissue trauma. It contains a nerve agent that paralyzes all voluntary motor functions. He can breathe, blink, his heart will work okay — he just can’t move. He’ll be out for about an hour or so.” He motioned to Long’s crotch and added with a grin, “He can’t keep from peeing and shitting on himself either.”

“Are you absolutely insane?” Rebecca cried. She checked for a pulse and breathing and found both were normal — but Long was indeed out. Not just asleep, but completely limp, his limbs as mushy as a half-filled water balloon. She got the first whiff of relieved bowels and bladder too, which made her even angrier. “You can’t just drag us out of here like criminals…”

“We can and we will,” Hal Briggs said calmly. “Rather, you two will drag Colonel Long downstairs and into our waiting car, which will take us over to our waiting jet, which will take us to Elliott Air Force Base. If you give Gunnery Sergeant Wohl any more grief, he will shoot both of you, and he and his men will drag you however way they find most convenient to the van.”

“By accepting those bracelets, guys, you agreed to be part of Dreamland and HAWC as long as they exist and