Shadow Command

Macomber was suddenly and violently thrust back into the here and now. No simulator could prepare you for the shove — it felt like hitting a football tackle training sled except it was completely unexpected, the sled was hitting you instead of the other way around, and the force was not only sustained but increasing every second. Soon it felt like the entire offensive line had piled on top of him, being joined shortly by the defensive line as well. Whack knew he could call up data readouts about their altitude, speed, and G-force levels, but it was all he could do just to concentrate on his breath control to fight off the G-force effects and keep from blacking out.

The G-forces seemed to last an hour, although he knew the boost into orbit only took seven or eight minutes. When the pressure finally eased, he felt exhausted, as if he had just finished running the stadium stairs at the Academy before football season, or jogging across the Iraqi desert with a hundred-pound pack.

Obviously his labored breathing was loud enough to be heard on the intercom, because a few moments later Charlie Turlock asked, “Still feel like farting around with your knitting needles, Macomber?”

“Bite me.”

“Get your barf bag ready, Major,” Charlie continued gaily, “because I’m not cleaning up after you if you spew in the module. I’ll bet the macho commando didn’t take his anti-motion-sickness medication.”

“Cut the chatter and run your ‘After Orbital Insertion Burn’ checklists,” Moulain said.

Macomber’s breathing quickly returned to normal — more from embarrassment than by will. Damn, he thought, that hit him too suddenly, and a lot harder than he’d expected. Getting back into a routine would surely take his mind off his queasiness, and the Air Battle Force was nothing if not driven by checklists and routine. He used his eye-pointing system to call up the proper checklist by looking at a tiny icon in the upper left corner of his electronic visor and speaking…

…but instead of issuing a command, all he could manage was a throatful of bile. Scanning the electronic visor with his eyes suddenly gave him the worst case of vertigo he had ever experienced — he felt as if he was being swung upside down by the ankles on a rope, suspended a hundred feet aboveground. He couldn’t stop the spinning sensation; he lost all sense of up and down. His stomach churned as the spinning intensified, a thousand times worse than the worst case of the spins and leans he had ever had on the worst all-night party in his life…

“Better clear the major off-helmet, Frenchy,” Charlie said, “’cause it sounds like he’s ready to blow lunch.”

“Screw you, Turlock,” Macomber meant to say, but all that came out was a gurgle.

“You’re cleared off-helmet, S-One, module pressurization in the green,” Moulain said. “I hope you kept a barf bag handy — vomit in free fall is the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen in your life, and you might be too sick to do your job.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Macomber said through gritted teeth, trying to hold back the inevitable until he got the damned Tin Man helmet off. Somehow he managed to unfasten his helmet — he had no idea where it floated off to. Unfortunately the first bag he could reach was not a motion sickness bag — it was the personal bag containing his knitting stuff. To his shock and dismay, he quickly found that vomit in free fall didn’t behave as he expected: instead of filling the bottom of his bag in a disgusting but controllable clump, it curled back into a smelly, chunky cloud right back up into his face, eyes, and nose.

“Don’t let it out, Whack!” he heard Turlock yell from behind him. “We’ll spend the next hour Dustbustering globs of barf out of the module.” That bit of imagery didn’t help to settle his stomach one bit, nor did the awful smell and feel of warm vomit wafting across his face inside the bag.

“Relax, big guy,” he heard a voice say. It was Turlock. She had unstrapped and was holding his shoulders, steadying his convulsions and helping seal the bag around his head. He tried to shrug her hands off, but she resisted. “I said relax, Whack. It happens to everyone, drugs or no drugs.”

“Get away from me, bitch!”

“Shut up and listen to me, asshole,” Charlie insisted. “Ignore the smell. The smell is the trigger. Remove it from your consciousness. Do it, or you’ll be a vegetable for the next three hours minimum. I know you bad-ass commando types know how to control your senses, your breathing, and even your involuntary muscles so you can endure days of discomfort in the field. Hal Briggs fought on for several minutes after being shot up by the Iranians…”

“Screw Briggs, and screw you, too!”

“Pay attention, Macomber. I know you can do this. Now is the time to turn whatever you got on. Concentrate on the smell, isolate it, and eliminate it from your consciousness.”

“You don’t know shit…”

“Just do it, Wayne. You know what I’m telling you. Just shut up and do it, or you’ll be as wasted as if you’ve been on a three-day bender.”

Macomber was still blindingly angry at Turlock for being right there with him at this most vulnerable moment, taking advantage of him, but what she said made sense — she obviously knew something about the agony he was experiencing. The smell, huh? He never thought about smell that much — he was trained to be hypersensitive to sight, sound, and the indefinable sixth sense that always warned of nearby danger. Smell was usually a confusing factor, something to be disregarded. Shut it down, Whack. Shut it off.

Somehow, it worked. He knew that breathing through his mouth cut off the sense of smell, and when he did that a lot of the nausea went away. His stomach was still doing painful knots and waves of roiling convulsions, as bad as if he had been stabbed in the gut, but now the trigger of those awful spasms was gone, and he was back in control. Sickness was not allowable. He had a team counting on him, a mission to perform — his damned weak stomach was not going to be the thing that let his team and his mission down. A few pounds of muscle and nerve endings were not going to control him. The mind is the master, he reminded himself, and he was the master of the mind.

A few moments later, with his stomach empty and the aroma erased from his consciousness, his stomach quickly started to return to normal. “You okay?” Charlie asked, offering him a towelette.

“Yeah.” He accepted the wipe and began to clean up, but stopped and nodded. “Thanks, Turlock.”

“Sorry about the shit I gave you about the knitting.”

“I get it all the time.”

“And you usually bust somebody’s head for ragging on you, except it was me and you weren’t going to bust my head?”

“I would have if I could’ve reached you,” Whack said. Charlie thought he meant it until he smiled and chuckled. “Knitting relaxes me, and it gives me a chance to see who gets in my shit and who leaves me be.”

“Sounds like a screwed-up way to live, boss, if you don’t mind me sayin’,” Charlie said. He shrugged. “If you’re okay, drink some water and stay on pure oxygen for a while. Use the vacuum to clean up any pieces of vomit you see before we re-enter, or we’ll never find them and they’ll become projectiles. If they stick on our gear the bad guys will smell it yards away.”

“You’re right, Tur — Charlie,” Whack said. As she headed back to her seat, he added, “You’re all right, Turlock.”

“Yes, I am, boss,” she replied. She found his helmet lodged somewhere in the cargo section in the back of the passenger module and handed it back to him. “Just don’t you forget it.” She then detached the cleanup vacuum from its recharging station and floated it over to him as well. “Now you really look like Martha Stewart, boss.”

“Don’t push it, Captain,” he growled, but he smiled and took the vacuum.

“Yes, sir.” She smiled, nodded, and returned to her seat.

PRESIDENT’S RETREAT, BOLTINO, RUSSIA

A SHORT TIME LATER

They didn’t always meet like this to make love. Both Russian president Leonid Zevitin and minister of foreign affairs Alexandra Hedrov loved classic black-and-white movies from all over the world, Italian food, and rich red wine, so after a long day of work, especially with a long upcoming trip ready to begin, they often stayed after the rest of the staff had been dismissed and shared some time together. They had become lovers not long after they first met at an international banking conference in Switzerland almost ten years earlier, and even as their responsibilities and public visibility increased they still managed to find the time and opportunity to get together.

If either of them was concerned about the whispered rumors of their affair, they showed no sign of it. Only