pistol around to shoot Hassam but couldn’t manage it. Then there were others — someone stomping on his arm, kicking. Sattari’s finger squeezed on the trigger. The loud pop of the pistol so close to his ear took his hearing away for a moment, and with his hearing went the last of his strength. The others continued to wrestle with him, but he was done, drained — angry and humiliated, a failure, a man who could not even get justice for his son.
“Wait! He has been injured!” yelled Hassam. “Careful! Take the gun.”
Sattari’s body had become a sack of bones. The gun was taken from him. Hassam got up; one of the men who’d come to his aid pushed the general onto his back.
“Gently,” said Hassam. “He is a general.”
Sattari could not see who he was speaking to. His eyes were focused on the face that appeared above him: Kerman.
In the darkness, he looked like his son, gazing down on him from Paradise.
“I will not fail you, Uncle.”
“You said he would not be hurt,” Kerman told Hassam after Sattari had been carried to one of the cars. “Your thugs knocked him unconscious.”
“He’s not unconscious,” said Hassam. “A few bruises.”
“He wasn’t talking.”
“Don’t worry so much about your uncle. Worry about yourself.”
Kerman felt a surge of anger. But who was he really mad at — the spy or himself? He had told the ayatollah what Sattari was up to, knowing what the result would be.
“Nothing more to say, young man?” Hassam sounded almost as if he was jeering.
“Give me the papers.”
“Can you be trusted? Ayatollah Mohtaj says yes, but I am not sure.”
Kerman took the documents with the false IDs.
“You’ll find out in less than twenty-four hours,” he said, jogging toward the airplane’s ladder.
X. The Long Ride Home
Danny Freah struggled to shut out the noise from the ship as he continued reviewing the mission with Major Catsman back at Dreamland. The Dreamland people had reviewed the available satellite and aerial reconnaissance data, looking for whoever might have been to the final warhead site before the Whiplash team. There were gaps of several hours in the records, but Catsman seemed fairly confident that the photo analysts would have been able to spot a Pakistani task force somewhere in the mountains. Trucks just couldn’t move that quickly on the roads.
“There were tribespeople through the area on horseback two days before,” said Catsman. “Then we think there was a Chinese reconnaissance flight, though we can’t be sure it went over that area.”
It still wasn’t clear that the Chinese were actually working with the guerrillas Danny had encountered, or were competing with them to recover the weapon — a claim the Chinese ambassador to the UN had made when pressed about encounters in the area.
The politics didn’t concern Danny much; he wanted results.
“The specialists have gone back and analyzed the satellite imagery,” said Catsman. “They think the warhead was removed sometime after 1600 yesterday. They’re going by some changes in the shadows on the ground. There is some debate on it — a lot of debate. They’re comparing the satellite image to the Global Hawk image, and there’s a large margin of error. The warhead itself was obscured; it was the missile’s engines it focused on.”
“Maybe some of the guerrillas got away while we were fighting,” said Danny. “Maybe I missed them.”
“We’ve gone over all the data, the Global Hawk feed, the video from the Flighthawk — none of them got away.”
“I want to check it out anyway,” said Danny.
“Fine. We’ll stream it all back to you.”
Danny moved the rolling chair he’d borrowed back against the wall of the communications compartment, watching the footage after it finished loading. In the earliest images it looked as if the guerrillas were just arriving, securing lookout positions and then moving down toward the warhead.
The rest of the video showed the battle. He saw his people come under fire, and could even make out himself in a few frames. It was odd to watch a replay of something that had been so intense — the tape seemed several times faster than real life, cold and quick, without any of the real emotion. Or fear.
“You have anything earlier than this?” he asked.
“We have the satellite shots. I’ll download them.”
“Instead of looking at the site, what if we looked at the major roads through the area?”
“The major road is a cow path,” said Catsman.
“Well, any truck on it would be significant.”
“Sure. We’ve checked the area,” added Catsman. “And the photo interpreters at the CIA and Air-Space Command have been all over it.”
“What if you look at the grids around it?”
“Just because we see a truck on the road doesn’t mean it was at the site. The CIA has taken over the search—”
“Look, I’ll do it. I don’t have anything better to do anyway.”
“We’ll look at it and get back to you.”
Mack Smith had been to Germany exactly three times, and each time it had been far less than exciting. It was the
Evacked to Germany for medical observation, Mack had no trouble convincing the doctors that he was fine. Or rather, he would have convinced them if he’d stayed around long enough to listen to their excuses about why someone in perfect health needed to take umpteen tests. He checked himself out — more precisely, he waved at the people at the desk as he strode into the lobby — and found himself the first flight back to the States, and from there, to Dreamland.
His bad experiences in Germany were only part of his motivation. He had surmised from the paperwork that changes in the Dreamland Command structure were afoot. A call back to the base informed him that the changes were even broader than he had thought, and he decided that the sooner he shook the new commander’s hand, the higher up on the food chain he’d find himself when the dust settled.
Mack was so anxious to get back that he even accepted a C-130 flight into Nellis, sitting in steerage — that is, on the floor in the cargo hold of the notoriously loud aircraft. By contrast, the Dauphin helicopter that took him from Nellis to Dreamland was a sleek limo, and he found himself bantering with the pilots, telling them how great a place Diego Garcia was, with the sun always shining and girls fawning over him 24/7.
Half of the story was true, after all; how much more could they expect?
As he made his way over from the landing “dock” to the Taj, he developed a cocky spring in his step. Dreamland’s new commander wasn’t a fighter jock; he flew Boners, as the go-fast community disparagingly called the B-1B Lancer. But he was a general, and as such, Terrill Samson would have a lot more muscle than Lieutenant Colonel Bastian — a decent guy and a fellow fighter pilot, but when all was said and done, a lightweight in the political department. And politics was the name of the game these days.
Mack sailed into the base commander’s outer office, gave a quick wave to the cute secretary at the far desk, ignored the bruiser at the close one, and stuck his head into the open door, where Samson’s name had replaced Colonel Bastian’s.
“Hey, General,” he said. “Got a minute?”
“Thanks for the promotion,” said Chief Master Sergeant Terence “Ax” Gibbs, who was arranging folders on
