The motel was actually a truck stop of sorts that catered both to private cars and to interstate freight carriers. The dining room served a hearty breakfast, wolfed down by a lot of rugged-looking independent men, and a few similarly minded women. Breakfast conversation was predictable.
"Gotta be rag-head sunzabitches," opined a big-bellied trucker with tattoos on his beefy forearms.
"Think so?" Ernie Brown asked from down the counter, hoping to get a feel for how these kindred souls felt about things.
"Who else would go after younguns? Sunzabitches." The driver returned to his blueberry pancakes. "If the TV has it right, those two cops got it done," a milk hauler announced. "Five head shots. Whoa!"
"What about the one guy who went down hard, standing up like that against six riflemen! With a pistol. Dropped three of them, maybe four. There died a real American lawman." He looked up from his pancakes again. This one had a load of cattle. "He's earned his place in Valhalla, and that's for damn sure."
"Hey, they were feds, man," Holbrook said, chewing on his toast. "They ain't heroes. What about—"
"You can stick that one, good buddy," the milk hauler warned. "I don't wanna hear it. There was twenty, thirty children in that place." Another driver chimed in. "And that black kid, rollin' on in with his -16. Damn, like when I was in the Cav for the Second of Happy Valley. I wouldn't mind buying that boy a beer, maybe shake his hand."
"You were AirCav?" the cattle hauler asked, turning away from his breakfast. "Charlie, First of the Seventh." He turned to show the oversized patch of the First Air Cavalry Division on his leather jacket.
"Gary Owen, bro'! Delta, Second/Seventh." He stood up from the counter and walked over to take the man's hand. "Where you outa?"
"Seattle. That's mine out there with the machine parts. Heading for St. Louis. Gary Owen. Jesus, nice to hear that one again."
"Every time I drive through here…"
"You bet. We got brothers buried out yonder at Little Big Horn. Always say a little prayer for 'em when I come through."
"Shit." The two men shook hands again.
"Mike Fallen."
"Tim Yeager." The two Mountain Men had not just come into the room for breakfast. These were their kind of people. Supposed to be, anyway. Rugged individualists. Federal cops as heroes? What the hell was that all about?
"Boy, we find out who bankrolled this job, I hope that Ryan fella knows what to do 'bout it," machine parts said.
"Ex-Marine," cattle replied. "He ain't one of them. He's one of us. Finally."
"You may be right. Somebody's gotta pay for this one, and I hope we get the right people to do the collectin'."
"Damn right." the milk hauler agreed from his spot on the counter.
"Well." Ernie Brown stood. "Time for us to boogie on down the road."
The others nearby took a cursory look, and that was all, as the truckers returned to their informal opinion poll.
"IF YOU DON'T feel better by tomorrow, you're going to the doctor, and that's final!" she said.
"Oh, I'll be all right." But that protestation came out as a groan. He wondered if this was Hong Kong flu or something else. Not that he knew the difference. Few people did, and in a real sense that included docs—and he did know that. What would they tell him? Rest, liquids, aspirin, which he was already doing. He felt as though he'd been placed in a bag and beaten with baseball bats, and all the traveling didn't help. Nobody liked traveling. Everyone liked being somewhere else, but getting there was always a pain in the… everywhere, he grumped. He allowed himself to fade back off to sleep, hoping his wife wouldn't worry too much. He'd feel better by tomorrow. These things always went away. He had a comfortable bed, and a TV controller. As long as he didn't move around it didn't hurt… much. It couldn't get any worse. Then it would get better. It always did.
WHEN PEOPLE GOT to a certain point, their work never really stopped. They could go away, but then the work came to them, found them wherever they might be, and the only issue, really, was how expensive it was to bring the work to them. That was a problem for both Jack Ryan and Robby Jackson.
For Jack it was the speeches Gallic Weston had prepared for him—he'd be flying tomorrow, to Tennessee, then to Kansas, then to Colorado, then to California, and finally back to Washington, arriving at three in the morning on what was going to be the biggest special-election day in American history. Just over a third of the House seats vacated by that Sato guy would be selected, with the remainder to be done over the following two weeks. Then he'd have a full Congress to work with, and maybe, just maybe, he could get some real work done. Pure politics loomed in his immediate future. This coming week he'd be going over the detailed plans to streamline two of the government's most powerful bureaucracies, Defense and Treasury. The rest were in the works, too.
Since he was here with the President, Admiral Jackson was also getting everything developed by the office of J-2, the Pentagon's chief of intelligence, so that he could conduct the daily around-the-world brief. It took him an hour just to go over the materials.
"What's happening, Rob?" Jack asked, and instead of a friendly inquiry into how a guy's week was going, the President was asking the state of the entire planet. The J-3's eyebrows jerked up.
"Where do you want me to start?"
"Pick a spot," the President suggested.
"Okay, Mike Dubro and the Ike group are still heading north to China, making good time. Good weather and calm seas, they're averaging twenty-five knots. That advances their ETA by a few hours. Exercises continue on the Formosa Strait, but both sides are hugging their coasts now. Looks like maybe the shoot-downs got everybody to calm down a bit. Secretary Adler is supposed to be in there right now, talking to them about things.
"Middle East. We're watching the UIR military run exercises, too. Six heavy divisions, plus attachments and tactical air. Our people on the scene have Predators up and watching pretty closely—"
"Who authorized that?" the President asked.
"I did," Jackson replied.
"Invading another country's airspace?"
"J-2 and I are running this. You want us to know what they're up to and what their capabilities are, don't you?"
"Yes, I need that."
"Good, you tell me what to do, and let me worry about how, all right? It's a stealthy platform. It self-destructs if it goes out of control or the guys directing it don't like something, and it gives us very good real-time data we can't get from satellites, or even from J-STARS, and we don't have one of those over there at the moment. Any other questions, Mr. President?"
"louche, Admiral. What's the take look like?"
"They're looking better than our initial intelligence assessment led us to expect. Nobody's panicking yet, but this is starting to get our attention."
"What about Turkestan?" Ryan asked.
"They're evidently trying to get elections going, but that's old information, and that's all we know on the political side. The overall situation there is quiet at the moment. Satellites show increased cross-border traffic— mainly trade, the overhead-intelligence guys think, nothing more than that."