Sivarek nodded, looking at Smoliy with a growing realization in his eyes. He suddenly did not feel quite as alone as he had just moments before. He turned to Cheshire and asked, “And what of you, Major? What of the United States?”
“I’m not ready to completely count America out yet, sir,” Nancy replied. “President Thorn is a man of deep personal beliefs and convictions, he’s intelligent, and he has the power of law on his side — he doesn’t play politics. But he’s a young president, too, and perhaps he can be convinced that not all foreign alliances are bad for the United States. Plus, he’s a military man. He understands military threats and military geopolitics.”
“Your confidence and loyalty to your hippie president does not inspire me in the least bit, young pilot,” Sivarek said, with a dark smile. “But he has left my country with very few alternatives.” He turned to Smoliy, straightened his shoulders, crisply bowed his head once, then extended a hand to the big Ukrainian general. “I will be pleased to convey your thoughts and wishes to my government, General. I pledge to you that I will do everything in my power to see to it that both our countries act in complete friendship and mutual security interests. It would be my pleasure and honor to see an alliance between our countries become a reality.”
Smoliy took the Turkish general’s hand in his, then gave him a big bear hug and kissed him on both cheeks. “Z velikim zadovolennyam! This gives me much hope and pleasure, sir! And if we are both wiped off the face of the earth, it is good to know we will bum together!” He turned to Nancy Cheshire. “I will notify the base commander that my forces will be departing soon. But I have a few requests of General Samson before we leave.”
“May I make a suggestion, sir?” Cheshire asked. “Let me give General McLanahan a call first.”
“Oh? A little dissension in the ranks, I see?” Smoliy chuckled. “Or is General McLanahan the real person in charge?”
“No, General Samson is definitely the man in charge,” Nancy said. “But for what you two are cooking up right now, I think Patrick will be the one to help you — as long as he survives his ordeal in Washington first.”
EIGHT
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
He felt stupid at first, with everyone watching. The place was packed, and most of the people looked as if they had nothing better to do than to watch him. Or was it just because he was here to face the music, and he thought everyone here knew it?
The nearly six-hundred-acre Pentagon Reservation was like a little city unto itself, so it was generally easy to hide among the over twenty-six thousand military and civilian Department of Defense employees and three thousand staff persons there. You automatically felt anonymous when you walked into the place. The Pentagon building itself was an impressive, imposing structure encompassing thirty-four acres and almost four million square feet of office space, making it one of the largest office buildings in the world. Built in just sixteen months at the beginning of World War II over a former garbage dump and swamp, it was said that the building was designed so efficiently that anyone could walk from one end of it to the other in less than ten minutes (although it could take as long as thirty minutes just to walk in from the parking lot). If you were one of the thousands of persons walking into the North Parking entrance, you could easily feel insignificant indeed, like a tiny ant climbing into a huge anthill.
Even at Six A.M., the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club at the end of Corridor Eight was nearly full. Patrick McLanahan would have liked to use a treadmill or a recumbent bicycle — since there were so many of them, lined up three deep practically the entire width of the complex, he would have felt a lot less conspicuous. But every one of the dozens of machines was already taken, so he had to go with his trusty weight machines. Besides, some of the soldiers on the treadmills, even the older ones, were jogging or running on them at a pace that made Patrick cringe. The POAC did not have the newer weight machines, the ones that electronically set and varied the resistance, so Patrick did it the old-fashioned way — set a weight, tried it, adjusted it, then did three sets of ten reps with heavy weights. Once he got into the rhythm, he forgot about being the only guy in the entire facility lifting weights.
His body quickly shifted to automatic workout mode, freeing his mind to work on other problems — like what was going to happen to his career and his life now.
He was gone from the High-Technology Weapons Center, dismissed for security reasons pending court-martial, after twelve occasionally turbulent, oftentimes dangerous, most times thrilling off-and-on years. When he’d arrived there in 1988, HAWC — known then simply as Groom Lake Test Range — had been little more than a collection of old weather-beaten Atomic Energy Commission wooden shacks and bird’s-nest-infested hangars surrounding an old World War U runway built on, then hidden on, the dry lake bed, with a few high-tech security updates added by Lieutenant-General Brad Elliott, its first full-time commander, in order to attract the attention of military scientists and Pentagon program managers. Over the years, under Brad Elliott, Dreamland had grown, expanded, modernized, and then finally taken the lead in futuristic weapons and aircraft research and development. Patrick had been there to see most of it.
With Brad gone, Patrick had hoped that he might someday take over the reins at Dreamland and take it to the next level of innovation and leadership. A command assignment at Dreamland was considered a sure ticket to a four-star billet. That was almost certainly true — if you could adapt to the strict security and compartmentalization and ignore the fact that for the entire time you were there and for some time after you departed, you became virtually invisible, even dead to the rest of the world. You quickly had to learn to live with the fact that being part of the future of the U.S. military would forever alter your life.
Patrick had accepted that fact, and even learned to enjoy it. Having a wife who used to work there helped considerably. But it took a special mind-set to work at Dreamland, just as it surely took a special mind-set to work at the Five-Sided Potomac Puzzle Palace. Patrick preferred the hot, dry, wide-open skies of Groom Lake to the stifling, confining, prisonlike feel of this place.
In between sets, he was able to peek at the televisions throughout the POAC. They were filled with news stories about the recently declared war between Albania and Macedonia, the unraveling of the Dayton Peace Accords and the cease-fire in Kosovo, and the expansion of German and Russian peacekeeping forces in the Balkans to try to maintain order, on the heels of a rapid American withdrawal from the region. But mostly, the stories were about the dismantling of the American military and the American loss of prestige as the protector of world democracy.
Maybe it was good that I’m getting out now, Patrick thought grimly, as he started working on lat pull-downs. The U.S. military looked as if it was in the midst of a complete cultural and ideological meltdown — thanks to the new hippie president and his eighteenth-century ideas. They just had no place in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, the United States was about to find this out the hard way.
More folks were looking at him again, and Patrick realized he was pumping away at the weight machines like a maniac. The more he watched the rapid, shocking dismantling and denigration of the military in which he had spent most of his adult life, the angrier he became. The workout was supposed to relax him before he went on to his Pentagon appointments, but they were unfortunately having the opposite effect. It was time to go and face his future.