Somberly, Martindale nodded. “We’re damned if they are, and probably damned in any case. If we abort the mission, we give Gryzlov free rein to wreak havoc inside the United States.” His expression was bleak. “And if we don’t, and Brad and his team are spotted and identified, there’s a serious risk Barbeau might go off half-cocked. Which would pretty much guarantee that Poland gets crushed between the world’s two most powerful nations.”
Twenty
Barbeau swiveled in her chair to look at Luke Cohen. Her chief of staff had changed out of his torn and singed clothes, donning an Air Force flight suit that was at least a couple of inches too small for his lanky frame. “Well?”
“Wilk was lying.”
She nodded. “Through his teeth. Dithering like that when I asked him to confirm the locations of those robots was the tell. So there’s our confirmation… we were hit by Iron Wolf CIDs.” She frowned. “The circle I can’t square is why Wilk would take a risk like this. Why allow his paid soldiers to attack us? Let’s say their plan worked perfectly and I’d been killed. Even a buffoon like Ray Summers would have to retaliate against Poland big-time once he took the oath of office. Wilk has everything to lose and nothing to gain from letting Martindale run wild.”
“Maybe the Poles really are as much in the dark about this as we are,” Cohen suggested. “That would explain a lot.”
“You think those Iron Wolf mercs have gone totally off the reservation?” Barbeau asked. “That they’re acting without Warsaw’s approval?”
Cohen nodded.
“Then why not just admit that right off the bat?”
“Figure it like this: You go out and buy a big mean pit bull as a guard dog. And then one day, the damn dog breaks out of your yard, runs off, and mauls some kid to death. And when a cop shows up at your door, you say…?”
“That’s not my dog, Officer,” Barbeau said automatically.
“Exactly. That may not be the smartest reaction, but it’s natural.”
She pondered that. All along, she’d been sure that Piotr Wilk would someday learn, the hard way, what the head of Scion was really like. She’d certainly never bought the notion that Martindale would genuinely subordinate his own will to that of anyone else. Why would he take orders from some rinky-dink leader like Poland’s president? His ego was too big. Right from the beginning, the former American president would have seen Wilk and his country as tools to be used and then cast aside when necessary.
Barbeau grimaced. It was a good enough working theory, but she was getting tired of operating on the basis of half-formed and maybe half-baked guesses.
“Okay, so it’s possible the Poles were blindsided by this like we were. But something else still bugs me,” Cohen went on slowly. The tall New Yorker looked down at his lap, deliberately not meeting her eyes — which was a sure sign that he was about to say something he was afraid might piss her off.
She sighed. “Go on, Luke. I won’t bite.”
Cohen forced a nervous half smile. “I understand what you’re saying about Martindale and how he wants someone like Farrell in the White House who’ll do things more his way.”
“Not to mention letting Scion and Sky Masters shove their snouts in a trough full of juicy, big-money Pentagon contracts,” she muttered.
“Yes, Madam President.” Distractedly, Cohen ran his hands through his disheveled hair. “But what I don’t get is why Martindale would do something so obvious.” He dropped his hands back into his lap. “I mean, why not use Scion’s capabilities for something slicker? Say, like sabotaging that B-21 prototype instead? Making sure our fancy new bomber crashed right in front of the TV cameras would have done more political damage to your campaign — without nearly as much fallout.”
Barbeau considered that. Jesus, she thought, Cohen is right. Something about this just didn’t fit. Martindale might be a sneaky, ruthless, corrupt son of a bitch, but he’d also always been a clever, calculating son of a bitch. Screwing around with the B-21’s avionics or even bribing its crew to fake an in-flight emergency would have been a lot easier and safer stunt for him to pull. The kind of pulverizing, direct, all-out assault that hammered Barksdale into smoldering ruins wasn’t his style.
In fact, it was more like something that swaggering, shoot-from-the-hip, militaristic cowboy Patrick McLanahan would have thought was brilliant. But McLanahan was dead…
She shivered suddenly, caught up in a memory that was three years old but that still had the power to give her nightmares. To persuade Gennadiy Gryzlov that the U.S. wasn’t covertly supporting Poland in its war with Russia, she’d ordered Army Rangers and Air Force special operations commandos to assault the Iron Wolf base. Their orders were to stop the mercenaries from carrying out a bombing raid on Russian missile bases near Kaliningrad.
But the assault failed. And then the lethal-looking combat robot piloted by McLanahan had looked straight into a camera carried by one of her captured soldiers… looked straight at her. “You are a traitor to your country, Barbeau,” the machine had growled in its menacing, electronically synthesized voice. “If we get out of this alive, I’ll make you pay. I promise.”
Barbeau had believed him. That was one of the reasons, besides Gryzlov’s threats that he would launch a wider war, that had prompted her to order American F-35s to shoot down every Iron Wolf plane that survived the attack on Kaliningrad. She’d been determined to make sure that Patrick McLanahan really was dead this time. It was the only way she could think of to stop him from fulfilling the terrifying promise he’d made. Her pilots had obeyed their orders — blowing the last two Iron Wolf XF-111 SuperVarks out of the sky.
No one had heard anything from the retired Air Force general since then.
Until now, maybe, she thought in growing horror. Could McLanahan somehow have survived… again? It seemed impossible. For all his skills, he had been a man, as mortal as any other human being. He wasn’t a machine. No, she thought desperately, Patrick McLanahan is dead. He had to be dead. Because otherwise, he’d be coming for her—
Involuntarily, Barbeau’s hands tightened on her chair’s armrests. Her face felt numb, as though it were carved from stone.
“Madam President?” Cohen said uncertainly. He looked worried.
She forced herself to let go of the chair. “I need you to get in touch with Ed Rauch right away,” she said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, as if it was coming from millions of miles away. “Tell him I want the NSA and the other agencies to reexamine every piece of intelligence that led them to conclude Patrick McLanahan was killed when his XF-111 went down over Poland three years ago.”
Her chief of staff stared back at her. “Do you think—?”
“I don’t know what to think!” Barbeau countered harshly. “But if there’s a chance… any chance at all… that psychotic bastard is still alive, I need to know about it!”
Perched high in the cab of his FXR Trucking — registered eighteen-wheeler, Kirill Aristov checked his side-view mirror. He could make out the unit’s two other big rigs stuck in the traffic jammed up behind him. They were all separated by at least ten to fifteen other vehicles, which made it less obvious that they were traveling in a convoy. Not that any of us are going much of anywhere right now, the former Spetsnaz captain thought irritably. A long line of cars and trucks bottlenecked this stretch of single-lane highway looping around Texarkana. They were stopped dead.