Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (64 page)

 
          
“And
come to work for you, Jon, and Helen?"

 
          
“You’d
be a vice president of a major high-tech firm again, getting paid twice what
you earn as a one-star general, with better benefits, and with stock options
that would double in value every two years," Wendy said. "Jon tells
me six times a day he wants you back—he’s got an office, a car, a plane, your
e-mail mailbox, and a locker in the gym ready for you. He’s even given you a
staff and projects to get started on, in anticipation. Yes, I’d say he wants
you back in the worst way.” Wendy lowered her eyes, as if considering her words
carefully, then looked at her husband again. “I know you’re not a prideful man,
Patrick, but I can’t help feeling that part of this has to do w ith you feeling
you were
right
to turn around and fly back to Russia to protect Annie
and Dev, that you shouldn’t be getting punished for doing what you did. I think
you’re fighting this to protect your principles.”

 
          
"Do
you think I was wrong?”

 
          
"Don’t
you see, Patrick?” Wendy asked, almost pleading. "It doesn’t matter. You
did it and saved your friends. That’s all that matters. You tell me a dozen
times a year that Congress or the Air Force could close down Dreamland at any
time and give all of you involuntary retirements. You tell me one slip-up, one
crash, one more security breach, and you’d all be gone. Half of our salary goes
into mutual funds and money market accounts every month because you anticipate
everything ending suddenly. When Thomas Thom got into the White House, you
thought your dismissal was imminent.”

 
          
"So?”

 
          
"So
all that time, you were emotionally and mentally prepared for a sudden, perhaps
unhappy end. Now, all of a sudden, you’re not ready. You’re fighting it. Why?
It’s not your family— you’ve prepared us well for the day you'd leave the
service, or the day you would never come home from a mission. Now, you’re not
ready. What changed?” Patrick took another sip of wine, then angrily drained
the glass and got to his feet. Wendy saw the stem look in his face, and knew
she had hit on the source of his anger. "Terrill Samson, right? You feel
betrayed by him. He was a student of Brad Elliott, just like you, and he’s in
charge of HAWC. and you thought you’d be more ideologically in sync. That’s it,
isn’t it?”

 
          
"Maybe
a little,” Patrick said. "I knew from the beginning Terrill didn’t have
the fire in his gut that Brad did—hell, who does?”

           
“You do.”

 
          
‘But
they didn’t make me commander of HAWC—they made
him
commander,” Patrick
said bitterly. “But that’s not who betrayed me.”

 
          
“Who
is it, then ?”

 
          
“Thom—Thomas
Nathaniel Thom, the damned President of the
United States
,” Patrick replied angrily. “TNT, the Young
Turk, the New Age president, the assassin from Desert Storm turned peacenik
isolationist. He doesn't bother to show himself to the American people. Doesn’t
show up for his inauguration, doesn’t show for the State of the Union speech.
All this crap about doing away w ith the Army, with not having any troops
stationed overseas, with not guaranteeing the security of any foreign
nation—it's driving me crazy. I feel like my country’s going down the toilet
and 1 can’t do a thing about it. Thom is the one who encourages commanders like
Terrill Samson to turn their backs on their friends and get rid of their
warriors, just like he’s turning his back on our allies and kicking our soldiers
out onto the street.”

 
          
“So
you think you’re going to
Washington
to fight the President of the
United States
?” Wendy asked incredulously. “Patrick, you
have got to think a little clearer right now. You can't go to
Washington
with a chip on your shoulder. There are too
many folks there, wearing too many stars, ready—some eager—to knock that chip
off for you, long before you ever reach Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.
Even Brad Elliott never had the nerve to take on the White House.”

 
          
She
stood with him, took his hands, and looked deeply into his eyes. “I'm being
selfish now, Patrick, but I think I’ve earned the right to say this: think
about your family before you say one word there tomorrow. Whatever the reasons
you feel right now. I’m telling you, forget your feelings and your anger and
think about your son and me. If you lose, you’ll go to prison. Your son will
visit you in
Leavenworth
, along with all the other wrecked military lives, and he’ll see you
like he’ll see them. How will you explain that what you were fighting for was
right? How long will it take even our intelligent son to understand? You may be
justified and you may even truly be right, but you’ll be in prison as surely as
if you were wrong.
Julius Caesar
is a fine heroic play, but it’s still a
tragedy, because the hero is destroyed at the end,”

 
          
Patrick
could not look at her. but he didn’t have to. She embraced him tightly, warmly,
then kissed his lips. “‘You’d better get going,” she said simply, and turned
and left for the bedroom.

Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas, Nevada

That same time

           
“Shto bi khaoteeteye?
What in
hell do you want?” David Luger exclaimed over the phone. “I can’t believe you
called me here. Are you trying to make me jump in front of a train or
something?”

 
          
“Calm
yourself. Colonel,” Colonel-General Roman Smoliy, chief of the Ukrainian Air
Force, said from his Distinguished Visitors suite at Nellis Air Force Base.
“This is important and has nothing to do with you.” He was calling on a secure
line set up in his room—if it was tapped by the Americans, it was tapped, and
there was nothing he could do about it.

 
          
“So
what is it?” Luger asked. He plopped down on his bed, almost unable to move but
not daring to miss a word either. Luger was in a visiting officers’ room at
Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, undergoing a three-day series of
tests by the Aeromedical Consultation Services, as a prelude to a full workup
by the Aviation Neuropsychiatry Department of the Air Force Hospital, to
discover exactly what had caused his sudden paralysis episode.
“Shto eta
znachyeet?”

 
          
“Stop
talking Russian to me, damn you. Colonel,” Smoliy snapped. “You are no longer a
Soviet prisoner, and I am no longer working for a Soviet research laboratory. I
am Ukrainian, and you are American.”

 
          
Luger
took a deep breath, silently chastising himself for his strange and
unexplainable confusion in time and space. “What do you want?”

 
          
“I
need information,” Smoliy said. “The Turks are hurrying out of here as fast as
they can pack up, but I cannot find out a thing. General McLanahan is gone,
home I think, and General Samson is not saying a word. This whole place is
going upside-down. You are the only high-ranking person I could find.”

 
          
“I’m
not exactly in the loop right now either. General,” Luger admitted.

 
          
“Where
are you? Why are you not here?”

 
          
Luger
was about to tell Smoliy to stuff his questions and his fake concern up his
ass. but he was too busy thinking about the situation he had left at Dreamland:
Samson on the warpath, Patrick and Rebecca probably on their way to be court-
martialed—things were going to hell in a handbasket.

 
          
To
his own surprise, Luger began running it all down to the Ukrainian general: the
spy in Russia, the stealth warplane shed uncovered, the rescue missions, the
charges leveled against them, the court-martial, and Luger’s psychoparalytic
reaction. “It’s this stealth fighter. General, I know it.” Luger concluded.
“Someone is directing these attacks against
Albania
and
Macedonia
. The NATO AWACS plane just got in the way.
The question is, why?”

 
          
To
Luger's double shock, the first thing Smoliy asked was “And how are you doing.
Colonel?”

 
          
Luger
was thunderstruck. Out of all the questions a Ukrainian general could have
asked about possible Russian stealth air strikes in
Europe
, Smoliy asked about
him.
“I’m doing
okay,” Luger heard himself say.

 
          
“What
do the doctors say? What are they doing?”

 
          
“Just
a bunch of tests,” Luger replied. “It’s a standard battery, and a physical exam
to start the medical exploratory process. All the usual stuff, along with a
shitload of psychiatric tests.”

 
          
“Ah.
Psychiatric tests. When I saw you the other night, I thought I noticed a sort
of dissociation. I never truly believed you might be suffering from a psychotic
condition. Could it be related to what happened at Fisikous and then seeing me
again?”

 
          
“Possibly.”
A strange sensation began to creep into Luger’s brain, starting in a spot in
the back of his head. What Smoliy said made more sense than anything else he
had heard in years of therapy or hours of tests and questioning here at Brooks.
But it made sense—because no one at Brooks knew, or ever would know, of the
Fisikous episode, because that might reveal details about the Kavaznya mission,
which in turn would reveal details about Dreamland. Smoliy did not know a lot
about Dreamland, but he knew everything about Fisikous, and he could certainly
make the connection now. The key to whatever was going on inside Luger’s head
would be locked away forever. The government would rather have him locked away
in a loony bin for the rest of his life than reveal anything about Dreamland.

 
          
“Could
it be,” Smoliy’s voice caught, cracked, then went on, “that it was what I
did
to you that has caused this to happen?”

 
          
Luger
instantly felt sorrow for him—and it was a strange feeling, because it seemed
like an eternity since David Luger had felt
anything
for
anyone
else. In fact, not since being rescued from Fisikous had David Luger been able
to connect on an emotional level with another human being. He had tried to do
so with Annie Dewey—but then he had to remind himself that it was Annie who had
been trying to connect with
him.
He had never really contributed much to
the relationship.

 
          
Annie.

 
          
It
was as if a thick fog had just lifted from inside his brain. All this time,
Annie had been trying to get closer to him— holding his hand, inviting him to
meals, spending time with him while he worked on the flight line or in the
labs. It was as if he was watching himself on television. He had been ignoring
her all this time. Had he ever tried to return her kindness, her warmth? Did he
even know
how
to do it? All this time, he’d been pushing her away with
his emotionless attitude. Now Deverill wanted her, and David was watching her
depart his life. Why? Did he think that’s what he deserved? Did he want to be
alone because he thought he only deserved to be alone, that being alone was the
only way he could hide the pain and humiliation of being tortured at Fisikous?

 
          
Funny—it
finally took one of his chief tormentors talking about his internal pain to
show him the source of his own loneliness. Someone else was experiencing the
same detachment.

           
“I... I don't... no, I don't think
so,” David said. When moments before he had hated this man, wanted to kill him
with his bare hands—now he found himself not only feeling sorry for him. but
actually apologizing to him! “That was too long ago. General. I’ve been through
a lot of stuff since then. Don’t blame yourself.”

 
          
“I
could not bear to think I have hurt another human being on that level,” Smoliy
said. “I am trained to kill the enemy with speed and efficiency, but I would
never have thought I could ever mentally hurt someone, cause them mental pain.
It is too horrible to comprehend, like trying to think what it was like for a
prison guard to exterminate a Jewish prisoner during the Holocaust.”