Shadow Command

“He wasn’t ready to help me — he was standing by ready to punch my ticket to a medical retirement,” Patrick said. “I need to handle this in my own way.”

“I’m worried about how much time you have to make this decision, Patrick,” Dave said. “You heard the doc: most patients who have this condition either start continual monitoring and drugs or get an ICD installed, right away. The others die. I don’t see what other research you need to do on this.”

“I don’t know either, Dave, but it’s the way I always do things: I check them out for myself, using my own sources and methods,” Patrick said. “Summers may be the best heart doc in the military, maybe even the country, but if that’s so, then my own research will tell me that too. But riddle me this, bro: What do guys like Summers do with active-duty cardiac victims who are still alive?”

“They retire them, of course.”

“They retire them,” Patrick echoed, “and then they’re cared for by the Veterans Administration or private doctors paid for in part by the government. Summers is doing what he always does: discharging sick guys and pushing them off to the VA. Most of his patients are so thankful to be alive that they never give retirement a second thought.”

“Aren’t you glad to still be alive, Muck?”

“Of course I am, Dave,” Patrick said, giving his longtime friend a scowl, “but if I’m going to punch out, I’m doing it on my terms, not Summers’. In the meantime, maybe I’ll learn something more about the condition and possible treatments that these docs don’t know, something that will let me keep my flying status. Maybe I’ll—”

“Patrick, I understand flying is important to you,” Luger said sincerely, “but it’s not worth risking your life to —”

“Dave, I risk my life just about every time I go up in a warplane,” Patrick interrupted. “I’m not afraid of losing my life to—”

“The enemy…the outside enemy,” Dave said. “Hey, Patrick, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here — I’m not arguing with you. You do what you want. And I agree: it’s worth risking your life using your skills, training, and instincts to battle an adversary who’s out to destroy the United States of America. But the enemy we’re talking about here is you. You can’t outfly, outguess, or outsmart yourself. You’re not equipped or trained to handle your own body trying to kill you. You should approach this battle like any battle you’ve ever prepared for…”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do, Dave,” Patrick said flatly. “I’m going to study it, analyze it, consult with experts, gather information, and devise a strategy.”

“Fine. But take yourself off flight status and check into the hospital for round-the-clock monitoring while you do it. Don’t be stupid.”

That last comment took Patrick aback, and he blinked in surprise. “You think I’m being stupid?”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, man,” Luger said. He knew Patrick wasn’t stupid, and he was sorry he said it, but the one thing that his longtime friend had taught him was to speak his mind. Patrick was scared, and this was his response to fear, just as it had been in the cockpit of a strategic bomber all these many years: Fight the fear, focus on the objective, and never stop fighting no matter how awful the situation appears.

“Look at it from the doc’s point of view, Muck,” Luger went on. “I heard the doctors tell you that this thing is like a ticking time bomb with a hair trigger. It might not go off at all, but the odds are it could go off in the next ten seconds as we’re standing here arguing. Hell, I’m afraid you could vapor-lock on me as I’m arguing with you right now, and there’s not a damned thing I could do from down here but watch you die.”

“My chances of dying up here in Earth orbit are just a little bit greater than average with this heart thing — we can be blasted wide open and sucked out into space by a hypersonic piece of debris the size of a pea at any friggin’ time, and we’d never know it,” Patrick said.

“If you’re not sure about an ICD, then go ahead and research it; talk to Jon Masters or the dozen or so brainiacs on our list, and think it over,” Dave said. “But do it from the safety of a private hospital room where the docs can keep an eye on you.” Patrick’s eyes and features remained determined, stoic, impassive. “C’mon, Muck. Think about Bradley. If you continue to fly without the ICD, you might die. If you don’t stress yourself out, you’ll probably live on. What’s the question?”

“I’m not going to give in, Dave, and that’s it. I’m up here to do an important job, and I’m—”

“A job? Muck, do you want to risk hurting yourself over a job? It’s important, sure, but dozens of younger, stronger guys can do it. Give the job to Boomer, or Raydon, or even Lukas — anyone else. You haven’t figured it out yet, Patrick?”

“Figure what out?”

“We’re expendable, General McLanahan. We’re all disposable. We’re nothing but ‘politics by other means.’ When it comes right down to it, we’re just hard-core hard-assed type-A gung-ho military prima donnas in ill-fitting monkey suits, and nobody in Washington cares if we live or die. If you blow a gasket tomorrow there’ll be twenty other hard-asses waiting to take your place — or, more likely, Gardner could just as easily order us shut down the day after you croaked and spend the money on more aircraft carriers. But there are those of us who do care, your son being at the top of the list, but you’re not paying attention to us because you’re focusing on the job—the job that doesn’t care one whit about you.”

Luger took a deep breath. “I know you, man. You always say that you do it because you don’t want to order another flyer to do something you haven’t done yourself, even if the flyers are trained test crewmembers, the best of the best. I’ve always known that’s bullshit. You do it because you love it, because you want to be the one to pull the trigger to take down the bad guys. I understand that. But I don’t think you should be doing it anymore, Muck. You’re unnecessarily risking your life — not by flying a mostly untested machine, but by exposing yourself to stresses that can kill you long before you reach the target area.”

Patrick was silent for a long time; then he looked at his old friend. “I guess you do know what it’s like to face your own mortality, don’t you, Dave?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Luger said. As a young navigator-bombardier flying a secret mission to destroy the old Soviet Union’s Kavaznya ground-based laser site, Dave Luger had been captured by the Russians, interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned for several years, then brainwashed into believing he was a Russian aerospace engineer. The effects of that treatment affected him emotionally and psychologically — stress would cause him to unexpectedly enter a detached fugue state that left him nearly incapacitated with fear for minutes, sometimes hours — and he voluntarily took himself off active flight status years ago. “It was a hell of a ride…but there are other rides out there.”

“Don’t you miss flying?” Patrick asked.

“Hell no,” Dave said. “When I want to fly, I pilot one of the unmanned combat air vehicles or my radio- controlled model planes. But I have enough things going on where I don’t have the desire anymore.”

“I’m just not sure how it would affect me,” Patrick said honestly. “I think I’d be okay — no, I’m sure I would — but would I always be demanding one more flight, one more mission?”

“Muck, you and me both know that manned aircraft are going the way of the dinosaur,” Dave said. “Are you all of a sudden getting some kind of romantic notion about aviation, some kind of weird ‘slip the surly bonds’ idea that somehow makes you forget everything else? Since when did flying ever become anything more than ‘plan the flight, then fly the plan’ for you? Man, if I didn’t know you, I’d swear you cared more about flying than you did about Bradley. That’s not the Patrick Shane McLanahan I know.”

“Let’s drop it, okay?” Patrick asked irritably. He hated it when Luger (or his former girlfriend, Vice President Maureen Hershel) brought up his twelve-year-old son Bradley, believing it was a too-oft-used argument to try to get Patrick to change his mind about something. “Everyone’s all worried about my heart, but no one stops arguing with me.” He made sure to give Luger a smile when he added, “Maybe you’re all trying to make me crash. Change the damned subject, Texas. What’s going on at the Lake?”

“The rumor mill is churning, Muck,” Dave said. “Guess who might be back at HAWC?”

“Martin Tehama,” Patrick responded. Dave blinked in surprise — this was a guy who was rarely surprised. “I saw a strange e-mail address on a CC from SECDEF and checked to see who was in that office. I think he’s going to