He took Julian with him, carrying the boy about thirty more yards up the slope, picking his way through the dense trees. Below them more troops had arrived. There were shouted orders.
It wouldn't be long before they saw the door at the cave, or followed the cistern and discovered where they had been. Then they'd use the dogs to track them in the woods.
Voda felt an odd vibration in his pocket, then heard a soft buzzing noise. It was the cell phone, ringing.
He pulled it out quickly, hitting the Talk button to take the call. But it wasn't a call — the device had come back to life, alerting him to a missed call that had gone to voice mail.
The phone was working now.
He fumbled with it for a moment, then dialed Sergi's number.
There was no answer.
He hit End Transmit button.
Who else could he call?
The defense minister — but he didn't know his number. Those sorts of details were things he left to Sergi and his other aides.
Voda hit the device's phone book. Most of the people on the list were friends of Oana Mitca, but she also had Sergi's number, and that of his deputy schedule keeper, Petra Ozera. He tried Sergi again, hoping he had misdialed, but there was still no answer, not even a forward to voice mail. Then he tried Petra.
She answered on the third ring.
"Hello?"
"Petra, this is Alin."
"Mr. President! You're alive!"
"Yes, I'm alive."
"We've just heard from the army there was a guerrilla attack."
"Yes. There has been. What else did you hear?" "The soldier said they were dealing with a large-scale attack. I rushed to the office. I'm just opening the door." "Who called you?" "The name was not familiar." "From which command?"
"General Locusta's. They had just received word from their battalion."
Voda wondered more than ever which side the army was on.
"I want you to speak to the defense secretary," said Voda. "Call Fane Cazacul and tell him I must speak to him immediately. Tell him I will call him. Get a number where he can be reached."
"Yes, sir."
If the defense secretary was involved, he'd be able to track down the phone number. But the dogs would be able to find him soon anyway. Voda told Petra to call several of his allies in the parliament and tell them he was alive. He tried to make himself think of a strategy, but his mind wasn't clear; the thoughts wouldn't jell.
"The phone is ringing," said Petra.
"Answer it."
Voda waited. He heard rustling in the bush to his right — it was Mircea. Julian looked in her direction but didn't leave his father's side.
"It's the American ambassador," said Petra. "He's just heard a report that one of helicopters was shot down over the border and—"
"Get me his phone number. I want to talk to him as well," said Voda.
Jed Barclay rubbed his knuckle against his forehead, trying to concentrate as the call from the American ambassador to Romanian came through. "This is Jed Barclay."
"Jed, I need to speak to the President immediately. They tell me that Secretary Hartman can't be disturbed."
"The Secretary and the President are on their way back to the White House," said Jed. "We don't have new information but we do have an idea of where the helicopter crashed and—"
"This is something different. I've just spoken with President Voda."
"You have?" Jed turned to the monitor on his right. "Yes. He's under attack. Possibly by his own army."
The Romanians scrambled two helicopters in an attempt to mount a recovery option on the one that had gone down over the border in Moldova, but as soon as the radar aboard the Bennett showed that the Moldovans had trucks at the site, they aborted it. From the Romanian point of view, the loss of the colonel and the soldiers who'd been with him were a regrettable but acceptable trade-off for smashing the rebel strongholds and carrying away important data about the guerrilla operations.
With the mission scratched, fatigue mixed with an unspoken malaise aboard the Megafortress. Dog's crew did their jobs dutifully, but they were clearly disappointed in the outcome of the mission.
And with the decision not to attack over the border to support the Romanians.
"Romanians are shutting down," said Sullivan. "All troops are back over the border. Except for those in the helicopter."
"Thanks," said Dog. "Set a course for Iasi."
Sullivan worked quickly and without his usual wisecracks. They landed a short time later, and after securing the plane, headed to the Dreamland Command trailer for a postflight debriefing.
Though he'd already informed Jed Barclay at the NSC about the MiGs and helicopter, Dog retreated to the com room to give a written brief. He knocked out a few sentences, inserted the location of the helicopter as well as the MiGs, then joined the others to review what had happened.
Ordinarily, the debrief would devolve into a bit of a bull session after fifteen or twenty minutes, with Sullivan making jokes and cracking everyone up. But tonight no one joked at all. Each of the men typed quietly on laptops, recapping the mission from their perspective.
Sullivan was usually the last to leave — he was a notoriously poor speller and could puzzle for hours over his punctuation — but he was done in five minutes, his report the barest of bare prose. As soon as he was finished typing his summary into the laptop computer, he rose and asked to be excused.
"You can go, Sully, if you're done," Dog told him. "You don't have to ask for permission."
The normally cheerful Sullivan nodded, rubbed his eyes, and left Dog and Zen alone in the front of the trailer.
As Zen hunt-and-pecked his report on the laptop's flat keyboard, Dog cracked open the small refrigerator.
"Beer?" he asked.
Zen didn't answer.
"Zen?"
The pilot pretended he was absorbed in his work. Dog popped the top on his beer, closed the refrigerator and sat down in the seat farthest from the one where Zen was working. Though still angry at the way the major had snapped at him during the flight, Dog decided it was a product of fatigue and anger at losing Stoner, and that it wasn't worth making an issue of it, especially given the fact that his stay with Dreamland was coming to an end.
Dog leaned back in the seat, gazing at the trailer ceiling and the wall of cabinets at the side. It was a silly place to grow nostalgic over, yet he felt the pangs growing. He'd spent a lot of time here — difficult time, mostly, but in the end what he and his people had accomplished had been worth the effort.
"How's it coming?" he asked Zen after a while.
"What do you care?" snapped Zen, without looking up.
"What's wrong with you, Zen?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what the hell is wrong with you? You're not like that."
"Like what?" "A jerk."
Zen put his hands on the wheels of his chair and spun to the side to confront Dog. His face was shaded red.
"Maybe I think you did the wrong thing," Zen said. "Maybe I know you did the wrong thing."
"By not disobeying an order from the President?"
"Sometimes… "
"Sometimes what, Jeff? It was a lawful order."
"It was a stupid order. It killed two dozen men, one of them a friend of ours. A guy that saved your daughter, my wife, a year ago. You don't remember that?"
"We have to do our duty," said Dog softly.
"Our duty is saving people, especially our people. You could have. A month ago, you would have."
"I have never disobeyed a direct order," said Dog.
Zen smirked.
"I have never disobeyed a direct, lawful order," repeated Dog. He felt his own anger starting to rise.