that she probably could not completely mask her own expression from him.
“Not that I’m asking what you might know,” she clarified, careful to back away from a confrontation. “There are probably some considerations I’m not aware of.”
It had been. Of that she was completely certain. And why would he not tell her? They had enough history together that there should be no question of her trustworthiness, of her loyalty to his administration.
No matter. She wouldn’t get any answers by pressing the point now, even though the urgency beat inside her like a drum. No, all she had to do right now was make the point, put the idea of history into motion in his head, and let time do its work.
If they had any time at all.
The president stood, indicating the meeting was over. He held out his hand and said, “Thank you for your advice. I’d like you to talk to Defense and make sure they know about the Chinese ambassador’s warning…if that’s what it was.”
Her heart sank at that. She had never been more certain of anything than she was of this — T’ing
“Using aircraft alone was a mistake,” he said finally, his face now completely controlled. “Next time, we go in the way we were trained to fight, with an all-platform attack. Ships, bombers, satellite intelligence, the whole nine yards.” He gazed at her levelly. “The problem this time was that we weren’t committed. To correct that, I’m placing additional resources at the UN force’s disposal. They’ll constitute the heart of UNFORGREECE.”
“Under UN command,” she said.
He nodded. “This is the way of the future, Sarah. And you and I are going to forge the way.”
FIFTEEN
Tombstone skimmed quickly through the preliminaries in the message, running his finger down the margin as he read the standard words of most OPORDS. Timing, targets… important, but not his major concern.
There it was. His finger paused over the offending paragraph. Command relationships—
He looked up into Arkady’s genial face and scowled. “Just what is this second strike supposed to accomplish?” he said quietly.
“What the first did not. To cut the throat of the Macedonian command and control forces. Had your pilots done as they were ordered, this second strike would not be necessary,” Arkady said in the same tone of voice, his words intended for Tombstone alone.
Arkady turned away to face the rest of the assembled forces. In addition to the pilot commanders from previous briefings, the commanding officers and their weapons officers from the two cruisers were there. “My staff — the UNFORGREECE staff — will discuss with you the details of your particular roles in the next twenty-four hours. As you can see from your packages, this will be the single decisive blow against the rebel forces. I am pleased to welcome you to UNFORGREECE and look forward to working with you.”
Arkady nodded in the direction of Admiral Magruder. Looking at him, Tombstone could never have guessed that just days earlier Arkady had been agitating to have Tombstone removed from the theater of operations.
Arkady was speaking now, his voice warm and congenial. “As you can see, we have a wealth of talent here to advise us on the best use of UN forces. However, I also direct your attention to paragraph four. All mission decision will be made by UNFORGREECE in order to deconflict disposition of forces. Any questions regarding that provision should be addressed to my staff immediately.”
No one moved. All eyes were fixed on Tombstone. While the habit of obedience was deeply ingrained, so was the loyalty they felt to this one man, the one who’d brought them safely home from so many other battles.
Tombstone sat immobile and considered his options. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Right now, right here, Arkady was challenging him. And in front of his own people.
Yet not his people, not this time. He felt the cheap paper of the message slide between his fingers, negating anything he could possibly say about the procedures Arkady had outlined. As wrong as it felt, and terribly wrong — Arkady was right.
Tombstone gave a small nod, an almost imperceptible inclination of his head. He felt the tension in the room break as each officer realized that while they might some day be called to choose sides, to make hard decisions, it wouldn’t be just now. That moment was postponed — not finally settled, but at least held in abeyance while they occupied themselves with matters that they knew better.
Arkady beamed in triumph. “Well, then.” He turned to Colonel Zentos, who was standing off to one side. “My chief of staff will conduct the remainder of the briefing. I will see you in battle, my comrades.” He turned and left the room, leaving a deeply worried Tombstone behind him.
The noise of forty aircraft in various stages of startup flooded across the tarmac, warm and welcome to Thor’s ears. There was nothing like it, not even on the flight deck of a carrier. This was a real strike.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” The Marine Corps lieutenant colonel assigned to the detachment was blunt. “They blow the SAR effort last mission and expect us to roger up on following them in again.” He pulled his shoulders back and stuck his chest out. “At least there’s some serious SAR planning this time. And better intelligence on the SAM sites.”
“We asked for that last time,” Thor said. Maybe the bird colonel could extract more information from Arkady’s staff than Thor had been able to, but he doubted it. Their orders were clear — regardless of how they personally felt about the mission that had been laid out for them, the president had made his wishes clear.
Not that there was much to complain about in the mission planning. On the face of it, it seemed competently done. A wave of Tomahawk missiles to soften up the area, specially targeted to seek out suspected command and control points. Then electronics birds with HARM missiles leading the charge, taking out any remaining radar sites to avoid a repetition of the disaster of the first strike. Two waves of fighters again, the first composed of Greek aircraft, the second a mixed bag of U.S. and other forces. A final sweep through by a couple of Tomcats, one loaded with TARPS, the other with dumb bombs and orders to pick up any targets that the more structured waves had missed. A couple of drones for BDA, some of the high-tech ones that had been flooding the fleet since Hong Kong. He wondered a little at that, exposing that much advanced technology to possible compromise.
Five SAR helos, all with fighter protection. The Americans had drawn four of those assignments in addition to their attack tasking. Special forces on standby for any hostile extractions. Even the Marines hadn’t been able to find much fault with that part of the plan.
The only real problem was the attack itself. The whole thing was starting to remind Thor entirely too much of Vietnam. Telling who was a civilian and who was a combatant was the first problem. The second was that rebel forces such as the Macedonians rarely operated out of fixed positions. Sure, there’d be some structures that could be identified as command centers. But if the Macedonians had any sense, their actual commanders would be somewhere else.
