"That's exactly what I'm doing, Patrick," Thorn said gently. "Tell me: What do you believe in? You are out there in' Egypt or Israel planning more death and destructiontell me, General, what is it you believe in now?"
"Go to hell, Thorn!"
"General, I want you to come home-right now."
"Why do you keep on calling me 'General,' Thorn? You fired me, remember? You involuntarily retired me."
"Take care of the proper things first," Thorn patiently went on. "Bring your soldiers home-they're tired, you're tired, and the situation there is far too desperate for you to continue. Hold your son, bury your brother, mourn your wife, console your mother and your sisters, and try to explain to them what's going on. Then come to the White House, and we'll talk."
"Trouble, Patrick," Hal Briggs called out.
Patrick turned and saw a rising cloud of dust on the horizon to the east-heavy vehicles, quickly heading their way. The Egyptian border patrols had finally caught up to them. "We're pressing on," Patrick said aloud, not to Briggs but to Thorn, and he cut the connection. This time Thorn did not override it.
What were they doing here? Patrick asked himself for at least the hundredth time in the past three days. What was the objective? Spy on the Libyans, find out if they had any designs against the Egyptian oil fields-well, that question was answered now, wasn't it? Did Paul sacrifice his life for nothing? So what if they found out that Libya had chemical, biological, or even nuclear surface-to-surface missiles ready to launch? Any smart defense planner in Egypt, Israel, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Algeria, Greece, or Italy would already assume that and be planning a counterstrike or retaliatory strike.
Just closing his eyes seemed to take away some of the pain. Paul was dead-and he was not even buried yet, still on his way back home to Sacramento for burial beside their father. Wendy was missing, probably dead. How was he going to tell her family? How in hell was he supposed to explain it to their son? Your mother won't be coming home, son. Should he tell her she was in heaven watching over him? Should he tell him about war, about fighting, about death? How do you tell a four-year-old about something like that?
He watched a vision of his life with Wendy Tork play in his mind's eye, from the time he first met her at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana during the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command Bomb Competition Symposium over twenty years earlier. She was a young and talented electronics engineer; he was a young hotshot B-52G Stratofortress bombardier who had just helped his unit win the coveted Fairchild Trophy for the second year in a row, along with a long string of other trophies and awards. The old saying "opposites attract" was true only with magnets-Patrick and Wendy were as alike as could be, and they became almost inseparable from that moment on.
They had been shot at, shot up, shot down, and they did their fair share of shooting. They had flown all over the world together, sharing adventures as well as themselves. Of all the dangers they had faced together, having a baby was their most dangerous-and most joyous-moment. But even after young Bradley James McLanahan arrived in the world and Patrick was unceremoniously, involuntarily retired from the U.S. Air Force, Wendy would notcould not-leave her husband's side when he went off to battle.
Now, that dedication may have destroyed her.
The vision playing in Patrick's mind shifted from past memories to possible futures, and none of them were pleasant. Patrick believed that reality was nothing more than a state of consciousness: Reality was whatever he decided it would be. But as hard as he tried, his mind couldn't play an image of a successful rescue or escape. He saw Wendy first being manhandled, isolated, imprisoned, even tortured; then he saw her incinerated in the fireball at Mersa Matriih. It was too horrible to comprehend.
"Patrick?"
His focus snapped back to the present. His armor's sensors were inoperative-he visually estimated their range at around two miles, well within main gun range. "Any contact with Headbanger?" Patrick asked.
"No," Dave Luger replied. "EMP still has all communications shut down."
"Won't the crew see the Egyptians coming after us and launch the Wolverines?" Hal Briggs asked.
"They should-if their gear survived the blast, if our datalink is still active, and if the Wolverines can fly through the EMP," Patrick said. "It should all work, but it's not. I just spoke with President Thorn, but we can't raise the Megafortress-the EMP is really screwing up transmissions."
"What did Thorn want?"
"For us to come home and bury our dead," Patrick said. Unfortunately, they might be among the dead soon. "Master Sergeant, any advice?"
"We first send the men out as fast as possible away from the area," Chris Wohl said. "Then we take out as many of the big tanks as we can and engage the other threats as best we can."
"Do it," Patrick said. Wohl immediately ordered the Night Stalkers to retreat west. But no sooner had they started off than someone yelled, "Sir! Tanks behind us, coming in fast!"
Patrick turned, and his blood ran cold-another line of heavy armor, this one smaller than the line to the east but coming on twice as fast, had appeared as if from nowhere. A company-sized force must have managed to speed across the desert and surround them. Before he could react, some of the small tanks to the west opened fire with their main guns.
"Take cover!" he shouted. "Chris, Hal, take the tanks to the east! I'll take the ones to the west!" But even as he swung his electromagnetic rail gun west to attack the newcomers, he knew he was too late-he could hear the shells whistling closer and closer..
… but they didn't hit their position-instead, the shells started impacting near the Egyptian tanks. Their accuracy wasn't that great, but it didn't seem to matter: The Egyptian tanks took immediate evasive action, and Patrick could see the gun barrels elevating and turning, changing targets to the oncoming, unidentified vehicles to the west.
Whoever they are, Patrick thought, they're on our side, at least for the moment. He swung his rail gun back to the east. The targeting sensors weren't operable, but at this close range it didn't seem to matter. The newcomers created lots of smoke and confusion; Chris, Hal, and Patrick hit a few of them with the hypervelocity projectiles, and that's all it took. The remaining Egyptian tanks reversed direction and scattered. The Night Stalkers immediately turned their attention to the newcomers from the west.
With the threat from the Egyptian tanks over for now, the newcomers raised a large flag from the lead vehicle. It was a green banner trimmed in gold with a strange and unidentifiable crest on it, with crowns on top and a crown atop a circle ringed with nine stars with a crescent and star inside. "Who are they?" Hal Briggs asked. 'Turks? Algerians?"
The newcomers moved in swiftly. They had a collection of all sorts of vehicles, from aged M60 tanks to Russian BMPs to Humvees to Jeeps, armed with an even wider variety of weapons: heavy cannons, machine guns of all sizes, even older ex-Soviet antitank rockets and antiaircraft missiles. Their uniforms didn't help identification either: They wore everything from Bedouin robes to World War II-era Nazi-style desert uniforms to American "chocolate chip" desert cammos.
"What do you want to do, sir?" Chris Wohl asked.
Patrick hesitated, but only for a moment: "Lower your weapons."
"Are you absolutely sure, sir?" Wohl hated the idea of lowering his weapon while anyone, especially unidentified hostiles, had theirs aimed at him or his men.
"Do it, Master Sergeant," Patrick said. Patrick lowered his rail gun to port arms but did not shut it down. The others did likewise.
The scene looked like something from a bad remake of the TV show The Rat Patrol. As soon as the convoy of vehicles reached the oil wells, several of them jumped off their vehicles and motioned for them to drop their weapons and raise their hands. Their personal weapons were a mix of hardware from half the world's arms manufacturers spanning four or five decades. "I'm not surrendering to these guys, sir," Wohl warned Patrick in a low voice. "Do something, or I will."