Corps master sergeant to the smiling, animated one-star general that brought him here, to the infamous three-star general leading this group — and liked what she saw. The Army was always so serious and regimented, and these guys were a definite departure from that. “Let me see the CID units, sir,” she said, “and I’ll tell you how soon I can get them ready for action.”
“Excellent,” Patrick said. He shook Charlie’s hand again. “Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll need volunteers to pilot the CIDs.”
“Count me out,” Chris Wohl growled.
“You’re too tall anyway, Master Sergeant,” Charlie said. Wohl nodded imperceptibly — that seemed to suit him just fine.
“I’ll be the first volunteer,” Hal said. “I’ve wanted to check one out ever since I saw ’em on TV. I think we’ll have plenty of volunteers for the other units. BERP is good, but I think CIDs are way cooler.”
“On your way, Captain,” Patrick said. “Hal, report back in one hour and let me know what we’re looking at. Let Dave know if you’re having any trouble detaching Charlie from the Guard.”
“You got it.”
Patrick could see Charlie shaking her head in amazement and excitement at the whirlwind of activity and the close personal camaraderie that existed in this place — he knew that she knew she was signing onto something truly extraordinary. “
“Sorry I didn’t brief you on her, Muck,” Dave said. “I should have known Hal wouldn’t have told you — he’d want to see your expression.” He noticed Patrick looking in the direction she and Hal had gone. “What do you think, Muck?”
“‘Think’? About what? About Turlock? She hasn’t done anything yet. Her record is impressive, and if that robot thing is half of what it’s cracked up to be…”
“No, I mean…”
“Mean what, Dave?” Patrick admonished his friend, perhaps a little more harshly than he wanted. He scowled first at Dave, then at himself when he realized he was still standing and still turned in the direction she had left. “We’ll need to get those robot things ready to go ASAP,” he said gruffly as he took his seat again. “From what Hal said, those robots take up a lot of room, even folded up, and they’re way too big to be worn while inside the Black Stallion’s passenger module. We’ll need spacesuits for whoever rides in the passenger modules that will be piloting the CIDs. We’ll need those right away.”
“No problem,” Dave said. “But we may not get clearance to go in to look for missiles for a few days.”
“I want to go in tomorrow, as soon as we’ve installed the thermal blanketing in the modules.”
“I thought you just told the captain that we always want things done tomorrow!” Patrick said with a smile. “Well, you were absolutely right.”
“Where do you want to take the Black Stallions, Muck?”
“I want a ground force to go into Turkmenistan, rescue this princess, turn her over to her followers, then travel into Iran with her and stand by to move against the Iranian missile sites.”
“Why waste time with this princess, Muck?” Dave asked, his head shaking in confusion. “If our mission is to find and neutralize the Iranian missiles, let’s send the entire ground force out there.”
“I can’t explain it any further, Dave, but I think that princess…”
“If she’s who Turabi says she is!”
“…is an important key to whatever happens in Iran — even as much as Buzhazi. If we can track her, I want to try to rescue her. If we lose contact for whatever reason, we’ll send the entire force after the Iranian missiles.”
“I think it’s pretty damned risky to send a squad after this unknown person, Muck,” Dave said seriously. “I’d be very surprised if the President authorizes it.”
“Until we find those Iranian missiles and plan a way to neutralize them,” Patrick said, “I think the only way we’ll get any Battle Force ground units into the region is through Turkmenistan. Once Jalaluddin gives us a location, we swoop in, snatch the girl, and get out.”
“To tell you the truth, Muck, I don’t trust your friend Turabi,” Dave said. “He may be a swashbuckling hero to the Turkmenis, but to me he’s just an opportunistic Taliban fighter who does whatever he needs to do to survive. I find it a little suspicious when a guy who has ambushed and disrupted the Russians as much as he has in the past few years is still surviving in that country, literally surrounded shoulder-to-shoulder by Russians and Iranians.”
“He’s our best contact inside the country, Dave,” Patrick said. “We have pretty good eyes over Turkmenistan now, so if he comes through we can be on the lookout for trouble when we move in. Besides, he owes us for saving his neck — twice.”
The concern on Dave Luger’s face bothered him, but Patrick held firm. “I need Hal to draw up a plan to infiltrate into Turkmenistan with a Black Stallion and a combined CID and Tin Man squad,” he said, “assault wherever Jalaluddin manages to transfer this Qagev princess to, spring her, take her to wherever she was going to contact her underground network, set her on the path, and follow her in to Iran.”
“You’re making an awful lot of assumptions here, Muck,” Dave said, trying one more time to dissuade his old friend from this plan. “My recommendation would be to go to the National Security Council and the President with a plan to assault the most likely locations of Iran’s medium- and long-range missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction. The list will be refined as we move in. Once we nail down the locations, we attack with everything we’ve got — orbital weapons, ground forces, and air-launched weapons from the Megafortresses. We punch Iran’s missile threat off the board in one night. The Revolutionary Guards now need to deal with threats on multiple fronts — Buzhazi’s insurgency, us, and possible action from the regular army. We’ll have them back on their heels.”
Patrick thought for a moment. “Dave, yours is a good plan,” Patrick said, “but my gut still tells me that this princess is important. I don’t know how I know, but I think she’s the key to a non-Islamist future for Iran. But I’ll pitch your plan as well. Either way, we’ll get our forces moving in the right direction. I think they’ll buy my plan only because it doesn’t immediately put the Battle Force on the ground in Iran.”
“But you have to trust Turabi.”
Patrick hesitated again, but shook his head. “I know, but I think the reward is worth the risk,” he said. “Help Hal and Chris draw up both plans and have them ready for me as soon as possible.”
“Roger that,” Dave said. “What about Buzhazi? Are we done trying to help him?”
“We’ll re-evaluate once he surfaces or makes contact with us,” Patrick said, “but Buzhazi has to sink or swim on his own. He should be enlisting the help of the regular army if they have any hope for stopping the Pasdaran — otherwise a hundred squads of Tin Men or CIDs won’t do much good against a hundred thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
Dave sat down at his console in the command center and began to outline his thoughts for the mission into Turkmenistan. They were very familiar with the military situation in Turkmenistan. Most of the country’s small police and self-defense forces were used for just one thing: maintaining a strong government presence in the capital city of Ashkhabad to control the spread and growth of radical Islamist groups. The Russian military and private security firms handled security for their own oil executives, refineries, storage facilities, and pipelines — and they did so with such utter brutality that attacks were rare. Border security was almost nonexistent — in fact, the country generally encouraged foreign workers to come to work in the arid, barren country, documented or not.
About an hour later, Hal Briggs rejoined them in the battle staff area. “I think Turlock’s in,” he told Patrick and Dave. “We impressed the hell out of her with having all her CID gear in a lab ready for her. She even activated one of the robots and had me get inside.”
“What’s it like?” Patrick asked.
“Awesome!” Hal exclaimed. “The thing unfolds itself in less than thirty seconds and it stands about nine feet tall, like an Erector Set — looking robot with skin. It sort of crouches down, and you climb up the legs and slide inside, and you’re wrapped in this snug scratchy Neoprene-like stuff. The back closes up and you feel like you’re going to suffocate for a few seconds…and then you feel like you’re standing naked in the middle of the room. You have absolutely no sensation that you’re inside a machine. The hydraulics actuate a hundred times faster than the Tin Man exoskeleton, and they’re far stronger.”
“Downsides?”
