“And you are?”
“Listen to me, Preach. I’m trying to level with you. My wife and kid died years ago. I’m single. I’ve got nothing in this world. If I get zapped over Russia, no one is going to miss me. No one. The same with that crowd down there. I can order them in!combat. When they die I won’t lose any sleep over them…, and no one else will either.”
“What makes you think I am different from them?”
Cassidy was embarrassed. “You’re different because I know you. And someone will miss you — Isabelle, the kids.”
Fain didn’t reply.
Cassidy growled, “I’ll miss you, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to take that chance. Go home to Isabelle.”
“No. I volunteered for this fight. Somebody has to be willing to lay his precious neck on the line or the ruthless bastards are always going to keep coming out on top. When God wants me, he can take me. That’s always been the case, Bob, and Isabelle can live with it. She has faith in me, and faith in God.”
Cassidy went over to the window and looked out at the summer evening. Clouds were rolling in. Soon the rain should come. “I guess I don’t have faith,” he mused. “Not that kind, anyway. The ruthless, implacable bastards always seem to come out winners.” He found this whole discussion irritating. Preacher Fain should have stayed at home. “People live, and then they die. That’s the way of the world. I don’t want to lose any more friends. I’ve lost too many people I care about already.”
“I have enough faith for both of us, Colonel.”
Cassidy didn’t know what to say. Fain was cool as ice, as usual. “Okay, Preach. I give up. You want in, you’re in. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. How about sending in Dick Guelich?”
“Thanks, Bob.”
“You’re my admin officer. We’ve got a long night of paperwork ahead of us, so get some pencils and paper and a beer from the fridge, then come on back here.”
“Okay.”
Lee Foy found Aaron Hudek in the entertainment room playing a holographic video game. “Hey, Fur Ball.”
Hudek didn’t look around. He kept squirting energy balls at alien space fighters, who were addicted to head- on attacks. “Toy Sauce. What are you doing here?”
“Same as you.”
Hudek eventually ran out of energy balls. As he fed more coins into the machine, he said, “Couldn’t resist a chance at those Jap fighter jocks, eh? Gonna pop a few. If they don’t get you first.”
“Mr. Personality. Gonna be great having you on this expedition.”
“Suck it, Sauce.”
“The road might be rocky, but fortunately we have a world-class diplomat along to impress the locals.”
Hudek was using both hands on the video game’s controls, tapping them, massaging them, caressing them while he moaned with pleasure. The suicidal aliens kept ripping in to get fried, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Foy giggled. “Still the magic touch with machinery, huh, Fur Ball?”
“Wanta make a bet? A grand to the guy who gets the first kill?”
Hudek kept his eyes glued on those incoming alien idiots. Foy took his time answering. “The difficulty is collecting from a dead man. When I win, you’ll probably be long gone to a better, cleaner world.”
“God, the camaraderie! The male bonding rituals!” Hudek exclaimed ecstatically. “What a fool I was to think I could live without it.”
Hudek shot down several hundred more aliens; then the game ended abruptly, a few points shy of a free game. He studied the score, then muttered, “Damn.” He glanced around as he dug in his pocket for more quarters. “You still here? Stay out of my space, Sauce. I don’t have time to wet-nurse you.”
“You’re my executive officer,” Bob Cassidy told Dick Guelich. “You got operations,” he said to Joe Malan. “We’ll land in Germany at the Rhein-Main Air Base. A squadron of F-22’s there will transfer all their planes to us and we’ll ask for volunteers from the maintenance troops. We should get enough mechanics and specialists to keep the planes flying, at least for a while. “Our problem is training. I demanded at least a week before we go to Russia. We may get more time, but don’t count on it. “One week. It’s nowhere near enough. We don’t have time to train them; they are going in!combat knowing just what they know now. What we can do is make them think about combat, shake off the peacetime complacency, key them up, get them sharp.”
“A week isn’t enough time,” Guelich said. “Two months, maybe, but a week?”
“We got seven days.”
“That’ll be enough,” Joe Malan said. “I think everybody has trained to combat ready at one time or another. If we put them in the simulator, concentrate on the systems, refresh on tactics, and talk about what they can expect in the air over Siberia, they’ll be at seventy-five or eighty percent. The first Zero they see, they’ll get pumped the rest of the way.”
“That’s your job, Joe.”
“I have to get transitioned to this plane,” Malan objected. “I never flew an F-22.”
“Piece of cake,” Guelich told him. “We’ll put you in the magic box first. It’s easier than an F-16 or F-18. Very straightforward airframe. You’ll pick up the system quickly.”
“What I want to know,” Joe Malan said, “is how we are going to do all the paperwork. Air Force squadrons have staffs of clerks and ground-pounders doing this stuff, and we don’t.”
“What paperwork?”
“A standardization program, evaluations, records; a safety program, lectures, inspections; training records; sexual harassment prevention, counseling, investigations, all of that.”
“Who says we have to do that stuff?”
Malan pulled a message from the Air Force chief of staff from the pile waiting for Cassidy’s attention. “Right here, in black and white.”
He began to read from the message. Bob Cassidy reached for the document, removed it from Malan’s hands, and methodically tore it into tiny pieces. He dribbled the pieces into a wastebasket. “Any questions?”
The others laughed. An hour later, they had hashed out a plan. Cassidy felt relieved— both Guelich and Malan were professionals. Guelich had given his first impression that the job was impossible, yet when told that they were going to do it anyway, he had jumped in with both feet. Malan immediately started planning how to do it. Cassidy ran them out finally, so he could get some sleep. He was exhausted. When the door closed, he fell into bed still dressed.
10
When he was maneuvering to consolidate his power, Aleksandr Kalugin dwelled for a dark moment on Marshal Ivan Samsonov, the army chief of staff. The two men were opposites in every way. Kalugin loved money above all things, had no scruples that anyone had ever been able to detect, and never told the truth if a lie would serve, even for a little while. Samsonov, on the other hand, had spent his adult life in uniform and seemed to embody the military virtues. He was honest, courageous, patriotic, and, amazingly, embedded as he was in a bureaucracy that fed on half-truths and innuendo, boldly frank. Ivan Sam-sonov was universally regarded as a soldier’s soldier. Pondering these things, Kalugin decided he would sleep better at night if Samsonov did not have the armed forces at his beck and call. He had Samsonov quietly arrested, shot, and buried. With that unpleasantness behind him, Kalugin faced his next problem: whom to put in Samsonov’s place. The invasion of Siberia had certainly been a grand political opportunity for Kalugin, but he knew that even a dictator must have military victories in order to survive. He needed an accomplished soldier to win those victories, one who could and would save Russia, yet a man in debt to Kalugin for his place. After the nation was saved, well, if necessary, the hero could go into the ground beside Samsonov. Until then … Kalugin pretended to fret the choice for days while the Japanese army marched ever deeper into Siberia. He had already decided to name the man whom Samsonov had replaced, Marshal Oleg Stolypin, but the outpouring of raw patriotism occurring in Russia just then made it seem politic to remain quiet. Since the collapse of communism in 1991, the national scene had too often reflected the
