Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (45 page)

 
          
“And
you think Kevin Martindale is your leader?”

 
          
Patrick
had to close his eyes against the pain of the dart thrust through his heart.
“Damn you,
Thom!” he cried against
clenched teeth. The other Night Stalkers turned toward him, but no one
approached—they seemed to instantly know whom he was talking with. Patrick knew
that, again, Thomas Thom the hippie-dippie president had cut right to the heart
of the matter.

 
          
Patrick
didn’t believe in this fight. They were fighting for money, and that was not a
reason to kill and die. Worse, he had accepted the assignment, even though he
had not only the power but the
responsibility
to refuse it. Even worse than that—he had allowed his wife and his younger
brother to follow him. Now one was dead, and the other was missing and probably
dead in the nuclear explosion at Mersa Matruh. He would bum in hell for all
eternity for what he had done—and he knew it, and Thom knew it too.

 
          
“I’m
sorry, Patrick.”

 
          
“You
have access to the same information we do!” Patrick cried out. “You know what’s
going on out here! And yet you decided to do nothing! I did it because there’s
a battle that needs to be fought over here, Thom! What are you waiting for?”

 
          
“I
hope one day you’ll understand why,” Thom replied. “I’m still not going to do
anything, not unless the people of
Egypt
want our help.”

 
          
“What
about leadership, Thom?” Patrick retorted angrily. “What about justice and
freedom and the strong protecting the weak? Basic stuff we both learned in
kindergarten! How about believing in something and standing up for it?”

 
          
“That’s
exactly what I’m doing, Patrick,” Thom said gently. “Tell me: What do you
believe in? You are out there in
Egypt
or
Israel
planning more death and destruction— tell
me, General, what is it you believe in now?”

           
“Go to hell, Thom!”

 
          
“General,
I want you to come home—right now.”

 
          
“Why
do you keep on calling me ‘General,’ Thom? You fired me, remember? You
involuntarily retired me.”

 
          
“Take
care of the proper things first,” Thom 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 Thom, and he cut the connection. This time Thom 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 not—
could
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 Matruh. 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 Thom, but we can’t raise the
Megafortress—the EMP is really screwing up transmissions.”

 
          
“What
did Thom 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.”

 
          
“You
Americans?” one of the men who stepped out of the lead Humvee said. He had an
Egyptian accent, but it was very slight—he could’ve been an Arab convenience-
store clerk from
Boston
. “Who are you guys?”

 
          
“We’re
escapees,” David Luger said. “We were detainees at Mersa Matruh.”

 
          
“You’re
very well armed for escapees,” the stranger said. He looked over at Patrick and
the others in their Tin Man battle armor. “Very well equipped—more like
attackers than escapees.” He motioned to Patrick. “If I didn’t know better, I’d
say those were electromagnetic weapons that fire hypervelocity projectiles.”

 
          
“What?”
Luger was completely surprised, and he showed it. “How do you know about
hypervelocity weapons?”