Patrick could not look at her, but he didn’t have to. She embraced him tightly, warmly, then kissed his lips. “You’d better get going,” she said simply, and turned and left for the bedroom.
Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas, Nevada
“Shto bi khaoteeteye? What in hell do you want?” David Luger exclaimed over the phone. “I can’t believe you called me here. Are you trying to make me jump in front of a train or something?”
“Calm yourself, Colonel,” Colonel-General Roman Smoliy, chief of the Ukrainian Air Force, said from his Distinguished Visitors suite at Nellis Air Force Base. “This is important and has nothing to do with you.” He was calling on a secure line set up in his room — if it was tapped by the Americans, it was tapped, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“So what is it?” Luger asked. He plopped down on his bed, almost unable to move but not daring to miss a word either. Luger was in a visiting officers’ room at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, undergoing a three-day series of tests by the Aeromedical Consultation Services, as a prelude to a full workup by the Aviation Neuropsychiatry Department of the Air Force Hospital, to discover exactly what had caused his sudden paralysis episode. “Shto eta znachyeet?”
“Stop talking Russian to me, damn you, Colonel,” Smoliy snapped. “You are no longer a Soviet prisoner, and I am no longer working for a Soviet research laboratory. I am Ukrainian, and you are American.”
Luger took a deep breath, silently chastising himself for his strange and unexplainable confusion in time and space. “What do you want?”
“I need information,” Smoliy said. “The Turks are hurrying out of here as fast as they can pack up, but I cannot find out a thing. General McLanahan is gone, home I think, and General Samson is not saying a word. This whole place is going upside-down. You are the only high-ranking person I could find.”
“I’m not exactly in the loop right now either, General,” Luger admitted.
“Where are you? Why are you not here?”
Luger was about to tell Smoliy to stuff his questions and his fake concern up his ass, but he was too busy thinking about the situation he had left at Dreamland: Samson on the warpath, Patrick and Rebecca probably on their way to be court-martialed — things were going to hell in a handbasket.
To his own surprise, Luger began running it all down to the Ukrainian generaclass="underline" the spy in Russia, the stealth warplane shed uncovered, the rescue missions, the charges leveled against them, the court-martial, and Luger’s psychoparalytic reaction. “It’s this stealth fighter, General, I know it,” Luger concluded. “Someone is directing these attacks against Albania and Macedonia. The NATO AWACS plane just got in the way. The question is, why?”
To Luger’s double shock, the first thing Smoliy asked was “And how are you doing, Colonel?”
Luger was thunderstruck. Out of all the questions a Ukrainian general could have asked about possible Russian stealth air strikes in Europe, Smoliy asked about him. “I … I’m doing okay,” Luger heard himself say.
“What do the doctors say? What are they doing?”
“Just a bunch of tests,” Luger replied. “It’s a standard battery, and a physical exam to start the medical exploratory process. All the usual stuff, along with a shitload of psychiatric tests.”
“Ah. Psychiatric tests. When I saw you the other night, I thought I noticed a sort of dissociation. I never truly believed you might be suffering from a psychotic condition. Could it be related to what happened at Fisikous and then seeing me again?”
“Possibly.” A strange sensation began to creep into Luger’s brain, starting in a spot in the back of his head. What Smoliy said made more sense than anything else he had heard in years of therapy or hours of tests and questioning here at Brooks. But it made sense-because no one at Brooks knew, or ever would know, of the Fisikous episode, because that might reveal details about the Kavaznya mission, which in turn would reveal details about Dreamland. Smoliy did not know a lot about Dreamland, but he knew everything about Fisikous, and he could certainly make the connection now. The key to whatever was going on inside Luger’s head would be locked away forever. The government would rather have him locked away in a loony bin for the rest of his life than reveal anything about Dreamland.
“Could it be,” Smoliy’s voice caught, cracked, then went on, “that it was what I did to you that has caused this to happen?”
Luger instantly felt sorrow for him — and it was a strange feeling, because it seemed like an eternity since David Luger had felt anything for anyone else. In fact, not since being rescued from Fisikous had David Luger been able to connect on an emotional level with another human being. He had tried to do so with Annie Dewey — but then he had to remind himself that it was Annie who had been trying to connect with him. He had never really contributed much to the relationship.
Annie.
It was as if a thick fog had just lifted from inside his brain. All this time, Annie had been trying to get closer to him — holding his hand, inviting him to meals, spending time with him while he worked on the flight line or in the labs. It was as if he was watching himself on television. He had been ignoring her all this time. Had he ever tried to return her kindness, her warmth? Did he even know how to do it? All this time, he’d been pushing her away with his emotionless attitude. Now Deverill wanted her, and David was watching her depart his life. Why? Did he think that’s what he deserved? Did he want to be alone because he thought he only deserved to be alone, that being alone was the only way he could hide the pain and humiliation of being tortured at Fisikous?
Funny — it finally took one of his chief tormentors talking about his internal pain to show him the source of his own loneliness. Someone else was experiencing the same detachment.
“I … I don’t … no, I don’t think so,” David said. When moments before he had hated this man, wanted to kill him with his bare hands — now he found himself not only feeling sorry for him, but actually apologizing to him! “That was too long ago, General. I’ve been through a lot of stuff since then. Don’t blame yourself.”
“I could not bear to think I have hurt another human being on that level,” Smoliy said. “I am trained to kill the enemy with speed and efficiency, but I would never have thought I could ever mentally hurt someone, cause them mental pain. It is too horrible to comprehend, like trying to think what it was like for a prison guard to exterminate a Jewish prisoner during the Holocaust.”
“Forget it, General … Roman,” Luger said. “I’m the wacko in this group, remember.”
He heard the Ukrainian chuckle, then he had to move the receiver away from his ear to avoid the general’s big, booming laugh. “You Americans, you surprise me,” he said. “You are in a mental hospital, and you make jokes.”
“General, you’ve got to find out what happened out there, find out why the Turks are leaving,” Luger said.
“Things are exploding in the Balkans….”
“I heard that,” Luger said. “Albania declared war on Macedonia. Some kind of border skirmish set them off.”
“But there’s more than that. Russian and German peacekeepers are swarming into Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. KFOR has all but disbanded. The British and French are still in Kosovo, but the other major powers are sweeping south. NATO seems to be handing the fate of the Balkans over to Russia and Germany.”