Dale Brown, Jim DeFelice
Black Wolf
Whiplash: Duty Roster
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Harold Magnus
Magnus once supervised Dreamland from afar. With Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian as its on-the-scene commander, the organization succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Now as deputy secretary of defense, Magnus hopes to repeat those successes with Whiplash. His handpicked commander: Bastian’s daughter, Breanna Stockard.
Breanna Stockard
After retiring from the U.S. Air Force to raise her daughter and help her husband’s political career, Breanna found herself bored with home life. She was lured back to a job supervising the development of high-tech wizardry under a combined CIA and Pentagon program. But will she be happy behind a desk when her agents are in trouble?
Jonathon Reid
Reid’s official title is Special Assistant to the Deputy Director Operations, CIA. Unofficially, he’s the go-to-guy for all black projects, the dirtier the better. He knows how to get around Agency politics. More importantly, he knows where all the Agency’s bodies are buried — he buried half of them himself.
Colonel Danny Freah
Fifteen years ago Danny Freah won the Medal of Honor for service far beyond the call of duty. Thrust back into action as the head of a reconstituted and reshaped Whiplash team, he wonders if he still has what it takes to lead men and women into battle.
Nuri Abaajmed Lupo
Top CIA operative Nuri Lupo is used to working on his own. Now the young CIA officer has to adjust to working with a quasimilitary team — at least half of whom he can’t stand.
Chief Master Sergeant Ben “Boston” Rockland
Boston finds himself shepherding a group of young CIA officers and special operations warriors across three continents. To do it successfully, he has to be part crusty old dog and part father figure.
Hera Scokas
Despite her ability with languages and the black arts of special operations, Hera Scokas hasn’t been able to climb the CIA career ladder as quickly as she wished. Now that she’s been given her greatest opportunity, she faces her greatest challenge: taming her personality to get the job done.
Captain Turk Mako
An Air Force pilot on special assignment to the Pentagon, Turk Mako thinks of himself as the last of a breed. Real live fighter jocks are being rapidly replaced by “back home boys”—pilots who control unmanned aircraft from hangars in the States. Mako is out to prove neither he nor his profession is — obsolete.
Al “Greasy Hands” Parsons
Once responsible for the teams that kept Dreamland’s top aircraft in shape, the former chief master sergeant is now Breanna Stockard’s right-hand graybeard and fixer.
Flashback: Revolution
1
Mark Stoner ran for the Aerospatiale helicopter, trailing the rest of the commando team as it headed for the last of the four helos.
We made it, he thought. We’re OK. We’re good.
Good, good, good.
The CIA officer jumped into the helicopter just as it started to lift off the ground. He lost his balance, spinning toward the floor as the helo shuddered against a sudden buffet of wind. One of the Romanian commandos he was with grabbed him, easing his fall.
Stoner looked back toward the door just in time to see the chopper clear a row of trees by bare inches, the angled tops of the evergreens like sharp black spikes in the night. As the helicopter banked around the woods to set a course westward, a large slash appeared in the sky, a sword that seemed to swing up from the ground
But this was an optical illusion. The black shape was the spire of the church they had struck, the haven for rebel guerrillas who had nearly succeeded in destroying Romania’s gas pipeline network. Aided by Russia, the rebels had come perilously close to plunging Western Europe into a very cold winter. That wasn’t going to happen now.
But Stoner hadn’t come just to prevent that. The CIA agent had been after evidence proving Russia had helped the guerrillas as part of a bid to raise its prices for natural gas, and to keep Eastern Europe under its thumb. Stoner had grabbed a computer and disks from the church basement that proved just that. The colonel who had led the men was already transmitting some of the files back to his headquarters via a data link Stoner provided, courtesy of the Dreamland Whiplash deployment team.
No matter what happened now, the operation had been a success. A big success — one more win in a résumé filled with wins.
But to Mark Stoner, the mission was a loss — a deep pit of blackness that drilled into his chest. To get the information for the raid, he had tracked down one of the guerrillas’ key leaders, a woman named Sorina Viorica. He’d gone behind the lines, met her, and helped her escape when other rebels turned against her.
Along the way, he fell in love with her.
It didn’t change their arrangement: she gave him the information he needed for the raid, he helped her escape Romania.
Yet it changed it profoundly. He could count on one hand the times he’d been in love, and not use half the fingers.
“Great mission!” shouted Colonel Brasov, the Romanian commander.
“Yeah,” said Stoner.
Brasov began thanking him for saving his men from an ambush.
“You are hero for us,” the colonel told him in his unsteady English. “Real hero.”
He added something in Romanian. His men nodded, adding their own words of praise.
Stoner shrugged them off. What was a hero?
The soldiers looked at him as if he was superhuman, as if he was part of a different race. But he wasn’t. He was just like them — he was flesh and blood, creaky bones and cramped muscles. There were moments when he hesitated, seconds ticking away under fire, times when he felt fear.
Fear in his gut. Paralysis that filled him like a damp wind collecting over a bog.
People didn’t understand how much it really took. The bosses back home didn’t know the price of each mission, of each instance where someone looking from the distance could say, “Good job. Good mission. Way to go.”
Another star in the folder, eh, Mark?
He died a little bit every moment on those missions. He felt dead now — heart pumping, lungs filling, but just as certainly dead inside.
Stoner’s sat phone began to ring. He pulled it out but had trouble hearing.
“Stoner, this is Dog.”
It was Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, the leader of Dreamland himself, miles away, over the border, circling in an EB–52 Megafortress to provide radar coverage.
“This is Stoner!” Stoner yelled into the sat phone, trying to make himself heard over the helo’s turbines.
“Stoner, tell your pilot and Colonel Brasov there are four MiGs headed in your direction,” said Colonel Bastian. “They’re about ten minutes away from the helicopters.”
“Four what?”
“Four MiGs. Russian fighters. Get the hell out of there. Get over the border.”
“We’re working on it, Colonel.”
Stoner turned to Colonel Brasov and tugged on his arm.
“There are fighter jets headed in our direction,” he said. “They’re about ten minutes away.”
Brasov’s face blanched — he’d said on takeoff that it would take the helicopters roughly thirty minutes to reach the border — then went forward to the cockpit to tell the pilots.