Balance of Power

August didn’t answer. There was no point. Soldiers didn’t have philosophies; they couldn’t afford to. They had targets. And the failure to achieve them meant death, capture, or dishonor. There was no irony. At least, not in that.

The officer headed toward the commissary, where his team was waiting. When he arrived, he turned on the computerized “playbook” he carried. He indicated the plan McCaskey had presented, then he polled the team to make sure everyone was willing to be on the field, ready to play.

They were.

August thanked them, after which the team hung loose. All except for Prementine and Pupshaw, who figured out where and how hard to hit the soda machine so it would dispense free cans.

August accepted a 7-Up and then sat back in the plastic chair. He drank the soda to wash away the bitter coffee taste. As he did, he thought about what had happened over the past day. The fact that the politicians in Spain had turned to Amadori to stop a war. Instead, he used it as a primer to start a bigger war. Now the politicians were turning to more soldiers to stop that war.

August was a soldier, not a philosopher. But if there were an irony in all this, he was pretty sure he’d find it in there.

Written in blood and bound in suffering.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Tuesday, 1:35 A.M. Washington, D.C.

Hood awoke with a jolt.

He had returned from the White House and immediately called Darrell McCaskey to relay the President’s orders. McCaskey had been silent and accepting. What else could he be? Then, knowing he’d want to be awake whenever the Striker operation commenced, Hood shut the lights off and lay down on his office couch to try to rest.

He started to think about Op-Center’s unprecedented two-tiered involvement in the operation. First there was the elimination of Amadori. Then there was the aftermath, helping to manage chaos. With Amadori gone many politicians, businesspeople, and military officers would fight to fill the power vacuum. They would do that by seizing individual regions: Catalonia, Castile, Andalusia, the Basque Country, Galicia. Bob Herbert’s office was compiling a list for the White House. So far, there were at least two dozen viable contenders for a piece of the power. Two dozen. At best, what used to be Spain would become a loose confederation of states similar to the former Soviet Union. At worst, those states would turn on each other like the former republics of Yugoslavia.

His eyes were heavy and his thoughts became disjointed and Hood drifted off quickly. But his sleep was troubled. He didn’t dream about Spain. He dreamt about his family. They were all driving together and laughing. Then they parked and walked down an anonymous Main Street somewhere. The kids and Sharon were eating ice cream cones. They continued laughing. The ice cream was melting fast and the more it dripped over their fists and clothes the more they laughed. Hood sulked beside them, feeling sad and then angry. Suddenly he stopped behind a parked car and slammed his fists on the trunk. His family continued to laugh, not at him but at the mess the ice cream was making. The three of them were ignoring him and he started to scream. His eyes snapped open—

Hood looked around. Then his eyes settled on the illuminated clock on the coffee table beside the couch. It had been only about twenty minutes since he’d shut his eyes. He lay back down, his head on the cushioned armrest. He closed his eyes again.

There was nothing quite like waking from a bad dream. He always felt a tremendous relief because that world wasn’t real. But the emotions it aroused were genuine and that kept the sense of well-being from seeping deep inside. Then there were the people he dreamt about. Dreams always made them more real, more desirable.

Hood had had enough. He needed to talk to Sharon. He got up, turned on the desk light, and sat down. He ground the heels of his palms into his eyes then punched in her cell phone number. She answered quickly.

“Hello?”

Her voice was strong. She hadn’t been sleeping.

“Hi,” Hood said. “It’s me.”

“I know,” Sharon said. “It’s kind of late for anyone else to be calling.”

“I guess it is,” Hood said. “How are the kids?”

“Good.”

“And how are you?”

“Not so good,” Sharon told him. “How about you?”

“The same.”

“Is it work,” she asked pointedly, “or us?”

That pinched. Why did women always assume the worst about men, that they were always preoccupied and upset about their jobs?

Because we usually are, Hood told himself. Somehow, when it was this late and this dark and this quiet, you just had to be honest with yourself.

“Work is what it always is,” he answered. “We’ve got a crisis. Even with that, what I’m most upset about is you. About us.”

“I’m only upset about you,” Sharon replied.

“All right, hon,” Hood said calmly. “You win that one.”

“I don’t want to ‘win’ anything,” she said. “I just want to be honest. 1 want to figure out what we’re going to do about this. Things can’t continue the way they are. They just can’t.”

“I agree,” Hood said. “That’s why I’ve decided to resign.”

Sharon was silent for a long moment. “You’d leave Op-Center?”

“What choice do I have?”

“The truth?” Sharon asked.

“Of course.”

“You don’t need to resign,” she said. “What you need to do is spend less time there.”

Hood was really annoyed. He’d been sincere. He’d played his hole card — a big one. And instead of giving her husband a big wet kiss, Sharon was telling him how he’d done that all wrong.

“How am I supposed to do that?” Hood asked. “Nobody can predict what’s going to happen here.”

“No, but you have backups,” Sharon said. “There’s Mike Rodgers. There’s the night team.”

“They’re all very capable,” Hood replied, “but they’re here for when things are running smoothly. I have to be on top of a situation like this one, or like the one we had last time—”

“Where you were nearly killed!” she snapped.

“Yes, where I was nearly killed, Sharon,” Hood said. He stayed calm. His wife was already getting angry and his own temper would just fuel that. “Sometimes there’s danger. But there’s danger right here in Washington.”

“Oh, please, Paul. It isn’t the same.”

“All right. It is different,” Hood admitted. “But there are also rewards from what I do. Not just a good home but experiences. The kids have gone overseas with us, been exposed to things other people never get to do or see. How do you break that all out? How do you decide, ?This trip to a world capital wasn’t worth missing ten dinners with Paul.’ Or, ‘Okay, we got to a single green one offshore. Apparently, the change in Administration policy did not include sending American land troops to the region. The offshore marker was most likely for a carrier to airlift U.S. officials if it became necessary.

No one had had a chance to do more than say hello to Hood before the President arrived.

President Michael Lawrence stood a broad-shouldered six-foot-four. He both looked and sounded presidential. Whatever combination of the three Cs — charisma, charm, and calm — created that impression, Lawrence had them. His longish silver hair was swept back dramatically and his voice still resonated as though he were Mark Antony on the steps of the Roman Senate. But President Lawrence also looked a great deal wearier than he had when he took office. The eyes were puffier, the cheeks more drawn. The hair looked silver because it was more