He was dead, he knew he was dead.
Gradually he realized that the bullets were landing well behind him, back at the road. The gunfire stopped abruptly, the Osprey whipping around overhead, now behind him, now on the side, once more in front. McIntyre, his eyes filled with dust and his whole body vibrating, got to his feet. The plane stuttered in the air in front of him, then dipped forward.
Shit, the bastards got him! Shit!
McIntyre felt himself pulled forward. He was running; the aircraft was there, intact and unharmed. One of the crewmen was alongside, someone helped him in, they were moving, moving, whipping upward into a surreal swirl, his mind and body twisting in a frenetic mélange.
For a while he seemed to lose consciousness. Not that he blacked out — his brain just couldn’t process information. Then McIntyre found himself sitting along the wall of the aircraft, next to a man in a wrinkled business suit.
“I’d give you a cigarette,” said the man, “but this is the nonsmoking section.”
McIntyre blinked. He knew the man, though the part of his brain that would have connected his face to his name was temporarily out of order.
Andy Fisher.
“So, what do you know about Jolice Missile Systems, anyway?” asked Fisher, smiling and giving him a cigarette despite what he’d said earlier.
Chapter 24
Howe took a pass over the road as the Osprey cleared. The SF contingent was already set for a pickup near the building. The Indians, somewhat confused about what was going on, were rushing down the road toward the BMP Timmy had splashed, bypassing the building.
Howe cleared through the pass, then circled back as the MV-22 rendezvoused with the ground team.
Two more Indian troop trucks were coming out from the village. Howe saw them stopping, men pouring from the back.
The lead truck was in the middle of his tactical screen. He hesitated for a second, but it was no contest: A shoulder-launched missile from there could easily splash the Osprey, and even an automatic rifle could do enough damage to take it down.
The small-diameter bomb spun out from his belly, zooming toward the truck. He dished a second one into the other vehicle, at the same time telling the Osprey what was going on. The MV-22 pilot thanked him; ten seconds after the second one exploded, he was airborne.
The Pakistani radar had turned itself off.
“Do we take out the MiGs?” asked Timmy, referring to the Indian planes coming north to help in what they thought was a firefight with Pakistani guerrillas.
“They’re not a threat. Hold off,” said Howe.
“Damn.”
“I love you, Timmy, but sometimes you’re a bit much,” said Howe, snapping his Talk button off.
Part Five
HEROES AND VILLAINS
Chapter 1
Howe listened to the windshield wipers slap as the driver made his way through the security checkpoint at the entrance to the Pentagon. The rain came in wind-driven sheets, as if it were pieces of plywood thrown down from the clouds. Like everything else around him for the last forty-eight hours, it seemed completely surreal.
The cease-fire that had been declared between India and Pakistan was holding, and both countries had corralled, at least temporarily, the radical elements that had driven them to the brink of nuclear winter. India’s army had booted out what the spokesmen called “a parcel of radicals”; Pakistan was talking about elections. Meanwhile a committee of diplomats from both sides was discussing Kashmir.
That was just the start. Israel and the Palestinians had scheduled a conference to focus on Jerusalem’s future, and there were rumors that the president of South Korea was planning a visit to North Korea to discuss unification.
To hear the talking heads on TV speak — and Howe had spent yesterday in a hotel room doing almost nothing but — the world was entering a new reality, a place where permanent peace was possible. America had stopped a war. That had never happened before. There was awe in people’s voices, deservedly so.
Howe, who’d been there — who’d not merely seen the results but actually was responsible for them — couldn’t quite process it. He thought of Megan, dead in Cyclops One: Why hadn’t she shot down the missile targeting her? It would have been child’s play, an easy shot.
Easy, maybe, if you weren’t there.
Why had she taken the plane in the first place? Why was she a traitor, a liar?
The questions were a numbness now; he didn’t really ask them, didn’t ponder them. At the moment no one was really sure she’d even been in the wreck; DNA analyses of the recovered remains had not been finished.
The car stopped. There were umbrellas outside. Howe saw the umbrellas but not the men holding them. He got out of the car; people were smiling at him, congratulating him. He started to walk with them. He forced himself to smile, laughed at a joke about being escorted into the Pentagon, not out. An admiral met him just inside the door, began pumping his hand. Howe fell into place, walking down the corridor. He’d been in the building many times before, but this was different, very, very different; it was almost like being plucked from the stands of a football game, hustled down to the locker room, and suited up to play quarterback.
Or rather, it was as though he’d already done that, and thrown the game-winning pass. He was a hero.
Hero.People actually used that word. Real people, not giddy girls. Admirals and generals and captains and majors and real people.
To Howe, a hero was somebody who jumped out of a foxhole and ran through a jungle as machine guns were firing and mortars exploding, picked up a guy on the ground, and hunkered back to the lines with him. A hero was a Marine, or a grunt, or maybe one of the Air Force Special Tactics guys, or the SF soldiers who’d snatched McIntyre from the ground fight.
A pilot who shot down ten or twelve or even one or two fighters, or went down against enemy ground fire to save a bunch of guys pinned down — who held his breath and his bowels while all hell broke loose — those guys were heroes.
He’d done that, he reminded himself.
“I want to thank you again, Colonel, for saving me.”
Howe smiled at the man standing before him, then belatedly realized that it was McIntyre.
Somehow, in new clothes and smelling like he’d just stepped from the shower, the NSC official seemed in worse shape than when they’d reached the base. He seemed to have shrunk, and clearly he’d lost weight, considerable weight, just in the past two days.
“You doing all right?” Howe asked.
McIntyre barely moved his head as he nodded, and pulled his arms tight to his body, forearms pitched outward as if they were the tucked wings of a bird. “Hard to get sleep.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Others pressed in behind McIntyre, trying to say hello, trying to add their personal congratulations.
“I’m glad we got you out,” said Howe.
“If I can do anything for you, I will,” said McIntyre.
Howe watched him recede into the background of the room as the knot of people swelled. They began moving from the reception to a small auditorium.
Megan would have eaten this sort of thing up in her sleek black dress, with her VIP smile. She was used to dealing with these kinds of people, movers and shakers. Why had she fallen in love with him, anyway? Just to use him?
No. He couldn’t let himself believe that — couldn’t let go of that last strand of respect maybe.