2320.

THE ROMANIANS SCRAMBLED TWO HELICOPTERS IN AN ATTEMPT to mount a recovery option on the one that had gone down over the border in Moldova, but as soon as the radar aboard the Bennett showed that the Moldovans had trucks at the site, they aborted it. From the Romanian point of view, the loss of the colonel and the soldiers who'd been with him were a regrettable but acceptable trade-off for smashing the rebel strongholds and carrying away important data about the guerrilla operations.

With the mission scratched, fatigue mixed with an unspoken malaise aboard the Megafortress. Dog's crew did their jobs dutifully, but they were clearly disappointed in the outcome of the mission.

And with the decision not to attack over the border to support the Romanians.

"Romanians are shutting down," said Sullivan. "All troops are back over the border. Except for those in the helicopter."

"Thanks," said Dog. "Set a course for Iasi."

Sullivan worked quickly and without his usual wisecracks. They landed a short time later, and after securing the plane, headed to the Dreamland Command trailer for a postflight debriefing.

Though he'd already informed Jed Barclay at the NSC about the MiGs and helicopter, Dog retreated to the com room to give a written brief. He knocked out a few sentences, inserted the location of the helicopter as well as the MiGs, then joined the others to review what had happened.

Ordinarily, the debrief would devolve into a bit of a bull session after fifteen or twenty minutes, with Sullivan making jokes and cracking everyone up. But tonight no one joked at all. Each of the men typed quietly on laptops, recapping the mission from their perspective.

Sullivan was usually the last to leave-he was a notoriously poor speller and could puzzle for hours over his punctuation-but he was done in five minutes, his report the barest of bare prose. As soon as he was finished typing his summary into the laptop computer, he rose and asked to be excused.

"You can go, Sully, if you're done," Dog told him. "You don't have to ask for permission."

The normally cheerful Sullivan nodded, rubbed his eyes, and left Dog and Zen alone in the front of the trailer.

As Zen hunt-and-pecked his report on the laptop's flat keyboard, Dog cracked open the small refrigerator.

"Beer?" he asked.

Zen didn't answer.

"Zen?"

The pilot pretended he was absorbed in his work. Dog popped the top on his beer, closed the refrigerator and sat down in the seat farthest from the one where Zen was working. Though still angry at the way the major had snapped at him during the flight, Dog decided it was a product of fatigue and anger at losing Stoner, and that it wasn't worth making an issue of it, especially given the fact that his stay with Dreamland was coming to an end.

Dog leaned back in the seat, gazing at the trailer ceiling and the wall of cabinets at the side. It was a silly place to grow nostalgic over, yet he felt the pangs growing. He'd spent a lot of time here-difficult time, mostly, but in the end what he and his people had accomplished had been worth the effort.

"How's it coming?" he asked Zen after a while.

"What do you care?" snapped Zen, without looking up.

"What's wrong with you, Zen?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what the h.e.l.l is wrong with you? You're not like that."

"Like what?"

"A jerk."

Zen put his hands on the wheels of his chair and spun to the side to confront Dog. His face was shaded red.

"Maybe I think you did the wrong thing," Zen said. "Maybe I know you did the wrong thing."

"By not disobeying an order from the President?"

"Sometimes..."

"Sometimes what, Jeff? It was a lawful order."

"It was a stupid order. It killed two dozen men, one of them a friend of ours. A guy that saved your daughter, my wife, a year ago. You don't remember that?"

"We have to do our duty," said Dog softly.

"Our duty is saving people, especially our people. You could have. A month ago, you would have."

"I have never disobeyed a direct order," said Dog.

Zen smirked.

"I have never disobeyed a direct, lawful order," repeated Dog. He felt his own anger starting to rise.

"You were always d.a.m.n good at finding a way around them, then," said Zen. He spun back to his computer.

Dog didn't want to let him have the last word. He wanted to say something, anything, in response. But his tongue wouldn't work.

Maybe Zen was right. Maybe, with Samson taking over, he'd lost a bit of his initiative.

Or maybe heroes started to fade the moment they were called heroes.

Dog couldn't think what to say. That the country's needs were greater than the individual's? Honor and duty were important, but there were situations where fulfilling your duty and maintaining your honor were not the same-were, in fact, mutually exclusive.

Zen finished his report, closed the program and the laptop, then backed away from the table.

"Good night," Dog told him as he rolled past.

Zen didn't answer.

When he was gone, Dog sighed heavily, then took a sip of his beer.

It tasted bitter in his mouth.

"Hey, Colonel, something's going on with the Romanian command," yelled Sergeant Liu from the communications shack at the back of the Command trailer. "They're issuing all sorts of orders, and units are moving all over the country."

Dog emptied the beer in the sink and went back to see what was going on.

"Some of Locusta's units are moving toward Stulpicani, way up in the mountains," Liu told him. "They're talking about guerrillas."

Liu brought a map up on the screen. Stulpicani was a quiet town in the Suceava area of Romania, about eighty-five miles northwest of Iasi. There had been no guerrilla attacks that far north or west, as far as Dog knew.

"They're talking about a presidential retreat," said Liu. "A villa or something."

"Call the NSC right away. Tell them something big is going on. I'll go wake up General Samson."

White House Situation Room

1325 (2325 Romania)

BY NOW THE NSC STAFF HAD ARRANGED A LIVE FEED FROM two Romanian news organizations via their satellites. One feed showed a news program in progress, and since it had not yet been translated, wasn't of immediate use. The other was a frequency used by reporters in the field and at stations around the country to upload raw video and reports to their national headquarters in Bucharest. Jed watched as one feed showed at least a dozen troop trucks moving out of the capital.

The NSC's Romanian translator was sitting at a nearby station, scribbling notes from the video. Jed went over and took a peek at them. The reporter was talking about unexplained troop movements near Bacau.

When the transmission ended, Jed tapped the translator on the shoulder. The woman, a Romanian-American in her thirties, pulled her headphones back behind her raven black hair and turned toward him.

"Have they said anything about guerrilla attacks or the president?" Jed asked.

"No."

"They report on the operation in Moldova?"

She shook her head.

"Watch some of the live broadcast and see if that comes up," he told her. "As soon as the CIA transcripts come in, give them to me, OK?"

Then he went back to his desk and called the National Reconnaissance Office-the Air Force department that supervised satellite surveillance-to see how long it would be before a satellite was available. He was still on the phone with them when Freeman called in.

"The president of Romania thinks the army is staging a coup," Jed told him. "Our amba.s.sador is in contact with him. The Dreamland people just heard that there was a guerrilla attack near the president's house in the mountains. There are reports that the Romanian army is moving in the capital. Big movements, enough to get the attention of the media."

"Is it the guerrillas or the army that's moving against Voda?"

"We don't know. We haven't monitored any official reports of an attack on the president's house and the Dreamland units were not notified."

"What does the defense minister say?"

"We're still trying to get in touch with him."

"You think it's a coup?" Freeman asked.

"Um, I wouldn't, um," Jed stumbled, his stutter returning. "It's too early to say what I think. But it, uh, has that feel. Like in Libya last year."

Jed ran down some of the other developments. Freeman listened without interrupting, then told him to have Dreamland get a plane aloft to monitor the troop movements on the ground and see if they could find out what was going on.

"CIA director was trying to set up a phone conference for 1330," added Jed. "White House chief of staff already knows some of what's going on."

"Where's the President?"

"A reception at the Smithsonian," said Jed. "Secretary Hartman's there too. Due to end at three. Are you going to call him?"

"We'll wait until after the phone conference. I may break away. Alert the chief of staff that we'll need to talk."

Iasi Airfield, Romania

2325.

WHEN HE HAD DECIDED TO COME TO ROMANIA, GENERAL Samson had somehow forgotten that the troops were sleeping on cots in a large hangar. Clearly this was not going to be a workable arrangement in his case.

For this one night, however, there was no other choice.

Good for esprit de corps, he reasoned, though his back muscles might never be the same. Worse, he had trouble falling asleep, even though he was dead tired. He'd had one of the bomb handlers rope off a little section for him, stringing blankets as a temporary barrier for privacy, but they did nothing to shut out the noise. The hangar's metal walls and ceiling amplified every creak and cough.

Samson lay awake for hours, staring at the bluish black ceiling high above his head, breathing the stale air that smelled vaguely of exhaust, trying to fall asleep.

And now that he had finally drifted off, some jacka.s.s was shaking him awake.

Who?

"Who the h.e.l.l is it?" he grumbled, trying to unstick his eyes.

"It's Dog."

Bastian! It figured.

"What the h.e.l.l, Colonel?"

"General, something's up," Dog told him. "Troops are mobilizing. There's a report of a guerrilla attack on the Romanian president's house about a hundred miles east of here."

It took Samson a second to process the words. Then he sprang up.

"An attack on the president? By the guerrillas?"