“Finally,” said Sattari. The “fisherman” was one of their spies. “But why did he not send word directly to me?”
Pevars grimaced. “The submarine was captured. Two men were taken prisoner. All the others perished.”
“Which others?”
Pevars did not answer.
“The fisherman said all this?”
Pevars nodded.
Was that possible? The fisherman worked for him, not Pevars.
“You’re lying,” said Sattari.
“No. He was afraid to tell you because it involved your son.”
“You’re working with the Americans, aren’t you?”
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“General, take hold of yourself. I know the loss of your son is a great blow. But surely he is in paradise now.”
General Sattari had realized this as soon as Pevars mentioned the submarine, but the words severed the last threads of restraint on his emotions. He threw himself at Pevars, launching his body at the other man as if it were a missile.
Pevars was slight, barely over 120 pounds, and much of that weight was concentrated in a potbelly. The general weighed twice what he did, and while no longer young, his daily regi-men of exercise, along with the hardships he’d endured with his soldiers over the past decade, had kept his body tough and fit. He began pummeling the oil minister, smashing his head against the thick rug and lashing it again and again with his fists. If Pevars offered any resistance, it had little impact on Sattari. He punched the oil minister over and over, beating him as a hurricane beats the shore.
Blackness filled the room. It was not darkness but the opposite—a light so harsh that it blinded Sattari. He continued to flail at Pevars, emptying decades worth of rage from his body.
When the rage lifted, Sattari found himself sitting in the hallway, his hands and clothes covered with red blood.
“The Americans did this to me.” Sattari’s words echoed through the marble hall. “The Americans.”
He would find them, and take his revenge.
IV
New Sheriff in Town
Dreamland
1600, 16 January 1998
EVEN FOR A MAJOR GENERAL, GETTING TO DREAMLAND WAS
not an easy task. General Samson had to first fly to Nellis Air Base, and from there arrange for a helicopter to ferry him several miles to the north. A pair of Dolphin helicopters—
Americanized versions of the Aerospatiale Dauphin—were tasked as Dreamland “ferries” and used regularly by personnel trekking to the base. But Samson couldn’t make the trip with the assortment of engineers and other riffraff who used the Dolphins. So a helicopter had to be found for him and the three staff members traveling with him. The chopper, in turn, needed a crew. Much to Samson’s surprise, it turned out that not just any crew could be used to fly to the base; Dreamland’s security arrangements were so tight that only personnel with a code-word clearance were allowed to land at the base’s
“dock.”
The official reason for this was that planes had to cross two highly classified testing areas to get to the dock. But since clearance came from the colonel’s office at Dreamland, Samson was convinced that the actual reason had to do with a personal power play on Lieutenant Colonel Bastian’s part.
He simmered while a crew with the proper clearance and training were found.
The idea that a lieutenant colonel—a mere lieutenant colonel—could effectively hold up a major general fried Samson’s gizzard. He knew Bastian wasn’t at the base, of course, but that was irrelevant. The lieutenant colonel undoubtedly knew 140
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that he had a good thing going here and had instituted a series of bureaucratic hurdles and practices to keep anyone from getting too close a look.
Samson’s mood deepened when the helicopter ferrying him to the base was ordered to halt about fifty meters over the perimeter. And halt meant halt, not hover—the helo pilot was told to put his chopper down on the desert floor and await further instructions.
“What the hell is going on?” demanded Samson as the old Huey touched down.
“Orders, sir.”
Samson was about to express his opinion concerning the validity of the order with several expletives when he spotted a jet making what looked like a bombing run in the distance.
At first he thought the aircraft was very far away. Then he realized it was actually a miniature aircraft. It carried diminutive bombs—125-pound so-called “mini-munis” being developed to help ground soldiers in urban settings where larger bombs might cause civilian casualties.
The attack aircraft was a sleek, wedge-shaped affair, with air intakes on the top of the body and what looked like fangs at the front. These were apparently some sort of forward wing or control surface, and Samson guessed that they accounted for the airplane’s twisting maneuver after the bombs were dropped—the jet veered almost straight up, dropped suddenly, and ended up backtracking on the path it had taken to the target area.
Remarkably, it seemed to do this without a noticeable loss of speed. Samson knew this was probably mostly an optical illusion—the laws of physics and aerodynamics made it impossible to completely change direction like that without losing speed—but even allowing for that, the airplane was several times more nimble than anything he had ever seen.
“General?”
Samson turned his attention back to the front of the Huey just as a mechanical voice broke into the helicopter’s interphone system.
RETRIBUTION
141
“Huey 39, you are ordered to follow Whiplash Osprey 5.
No deviation from your flight path will be tolerated.”
“What the hell?” said Samson. “I thought we were cleared.”
“We were, but it’s the way they do things,” said the pilot.
“Security is tight.”
“Tight security is one thing—” Samson began, but before he could say anything else, a shadow descended over the front of the aircraft and their path was blocked by a black Osprey.
This was Whiplash Osprey 5, which differed from standard-issue Ospreys in several respects. Besides the black paint scheme, most noteworthy were the twin cannons mounted under the rear of the fuselage, pointed ominously at the Huey’s cockpit.
A second Osprey zipped in from the rear, pulling alongside the Huey just long enough for Samson to see that it had heat-seeking missiles on its wing rails.
“Follow him,” snapped Samson, folding his arms angrily.
Base Camp One,
Great Indian Desert
0600, 17 January 1998
DANNY FREAH PUSHED BACK THE SOFT CAMPAIGN CAP THE
Marines had loaned him and surveyed the base area. In less than twenty-four hours the makeshift camp had swelled from a few tents in the rocky hills to a small city. Six Ospreys sat in formation on the nearby plain. Across from them, three sideless tents housed the fifteen warheads that had been recovered thus far. Two different teams of scientists and military experts were going over the weapons, examining them before crating them for transport to the USS Poughkeepsie.
The ship was still a good distance away, but making decent speed. Present plans were to start shipping the warheads around midnight, though there were contingencies for an earlier evac if necessary.
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The nuclear devices represented a variety of technologies.
Pakistan’s eight were all of similar design; according to the experts, they were relatively straightforward and not large, as nukes went, though fully capable of leveling a city.
The rest of the weapons were Indian, with warheads ranging in yield from five kilotons—very small, as nukes went—to 160 kilotons, roughly the same class of explosive power as the W62 on the U.S. Minuteman III ICBM. The discovery of the latter surprised the experts; until then, it was believed that India’s biggest warhead was in the fifty to sixty kiloton range.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Lieutenant Dancer as Danny contemplated how many lives the warheads would have claimed had they gone off.
“I usually get a whole dollar,” he told her.
“Have to wait for payday for that.” Dancer smiled at him, then shaded her eyes from the sun. Her skin looked as soft as a rose petal’s. “We have the last two Pakistani warheads secured. The Ospreys are en route. Any sign of activity to the south?”