“Yes.”
“I’ll give you fifteen minutes,” Big told the three generals, who were now convinced by the official’s use of “2100” that he was a military man. “We’ll be down in the foyer,” Big added, getting up and gathering his jacket and the tin of Sobranies. “It’s either yes or no.”
The three generals went out into Orsk’s polluted air to talk it over. The road’s badly cracked surface was an apt symbol, Mikhail Abramov thought, of the state of Russia. It was the beginning of the end.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Big had told Abramov, the commander of the grossly understaffed Siberian Sixth Armored Division. It was a phrase that had been quoted many times by the officer corps in the turmoil since the collapse. He himself had had to cannibalize half his tanks just to keep the other half going.
“So?” said Viktor Beria, looking at the leaner Abramov and the taller, gray-haired Cherkashin, the air defense general. “Are you two in? I know I’m sick of constantly scrabbling around to make ends meet.”
Abramov had been conjuring up the glory days of the Siberian Sixth; at least the days had been glorious until the humiliating defeat that he, as a young lieutenant, and other tank platoon commanders had suffered in a trap wherein American M1A1 Abrams tanks had duped the famed Sixth Armored Corps during a winter battle between it and the U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping force in Siberia.
“A hundred thousand dollars a month!” said Beria with a whistle.
“But what is this equipment, this capability, he talks about?” said Abramov.
“I don’t care!” said Beria. “I’m broke.”
“I want to know,” said Abramov, as the three of them made their way back into the hotel, “whether this capability is real or not. I at least want to ask him if it’s in place, ready to go, or are we expected to start from scratch? I need to know that much if I’m to decide.”
Abramov posed the questions quietly but without preamble as they met the two officials in the foyer. “What capability are we talking about? At least give us a rough idea.”
The two officials looked at each other and decided that a little more bait was necessary to hook the generals.
“A capability,” Big answered him, “that is staggering, General, and which will be ready for full production in two months if our acquisition of the data is successful. But beyond that I will discuss it in detail only if you wish to join our team.”
“Whose team is that?”
Little, who had spoken nary a word since the three generals had returned from outside, suddenly leaned forward, his suit’s crease crumpling as he did so. “The old team,” he told Abramov, as if the tank general was a student who’d forgotten his most important lesson, a lesson which governed all others, “the team which the stupid Americans think is washed up but is just waiting, as their George Washington did, to cross the Delaware, to regain what has been stolen, stolen from our party’s grip because some generals didn’t have the balls to overturn all these ridiculous democratic reforms. Are you with us or not? Do you want to slave away for kopecks in this so-called new democratic Russia or be able to hold your head up again, armed with some real weapons for a change, with something our clients can hit the Americans with, so fast, so utterly, that they’ll be pissing themselves in the streets. And which, if successful, if organized correctly, will act as a nucleus to attract more of our comrades to reinvigorate the party. Now, are you with us or not?
Abramov thought for a second. His final humiliation had been having to tell his daughter that she’d have to stop taking her beloved studies in ballet because of the money. He’d stopped her dream. “Da!” he told Little. “I’m with you.”
And so were Beria and Cherkashin, the air force general asking gleefully, “Now we’re in. Tell us, how do we get the Americans pissing their pants?”
Looking at the three generals in turn, Big asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Flow-In-Flight’ data?”
None of them had.
CHAPTER FIVE
His recurring dream evicted from consciousness upon his arrival at Fairchild. Aussie, with Freeman and the other six members of the team, was now aboard an oily-smelling Chinook helo heading for the lower, southernmost, end of northwest Idaho’s ninety-thousand-acre Lake Pend Oreille. To Choir Williams’s extreme discomfort, the team encountered a gut-rolling turbulence as a low-pressure weather system rushing in from the Pacific coast hit a Canadian Express, a stream of freezing air pouring down from the Arctic through British Columbia, a little more than sixty miles to the north of the lake.
As the general studied his Tactical Pilotage map of the rugged 48-mile-wide, 75-mile-long Idaho panhandle that contained both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake, thirty miles north-northwest of Pend Oreille, he shook his head.
“What’s up, General?” Aussie shouted over the roar of the Chinook’s engines.
Freeman’s face was creased by what his team had come to call his George C. Scott look, one of concern and hard focus. It wasn’t worry, however. Douglas Freeman tried to spend as little time as he could worrying, a devotee of the man Muslims saw as a holy prophet, and Christians, the Messiah: “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well. So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own.”
Even so, Freeman had to think ahead and Sal, seeing the general’s frown of concentration, asked, “Problem?” It was a question that an enlisted man would hardly be expected to ask a general, at least not so casually, but this SpecFor team, with the exception of Tony Ruth, had been in action together before. Besides, the easy familiarity between officers and enlisted men came naturally to such small groups of men who’d been in combat and who’d bivouacked in close quarters.
Freeman’s voice thundered over the Chinook’s combined rotor slap and engine noise. “No problem, gentlemen. No problem at all.” He looked down at Prince, the five-year-old black spaniel whose floppy ears were covered by earmuffs that Choir Williams had made especially for him, and who seemed to perk up as if reading the general’s mind.
“The first thing we need to know,” the general continued, “is which way those bastards headed off from the DARPA installation at the end of the lake. And for that answer—” He leaned forward and scratched Prince affectionately behind his ears, the dog immediately half closing his eyes in canine ecstasy. “—we need to get Prince here a scent from those terrorist creeps, if we can. That right, fella?” The general’s right hand moved from Prince’s ears to beneath his chin. Panting happily, Prince eagerly thrust his head forward, asking for more.
From the helo’s open door, the slipstream roaring like rushing water against his goggles, Freeman caught a glimpse of the densely forested mountain fastness of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area that flanked Lake Pend Oreille to the east beyond the Idaho-Montana border. To his left, northwest, he could see the six-thousand-foot-high summit of Bald Mountain, and, south of the lake, Cedar Mountain. On the long, ear-shaped lake, which looked to him more like an elongated question mark than an ear, lay several rectangular shapes: DARPA’s barge out from the shore, designated DARPA ALPHA on his map; the data hut on the shoreline; and several other storage buildings scattered around the small settlement of Bayview on the ear’s lobe, with Coeur d’Alene another twenty miles to the south. Freeman also saw there was only one road leading out from the DARPA installation to Interstate 95, eight miles west of the lake. Prince’s nose was at his side, the spaniel’s eyes watering from the icy-cold wind that swept over the misty blue mass of the Cabinet Mountains and the Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge beyond the lake where rivulets, born in snowcapped peaks, fed both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake to the northwest.