Out of the Dark (13 page)

“In the meantime, we need to find out if our allies did get hit, or if it was just us. I’ll personally call the British and Canadian prime ministers and the French president, tell them what’s happened, and ask them frankly if the same thing’s happened to one or more of them. General Sutcliffe, I’ll want you and your people available to talk to their people about the technical aspects, but if this is a prelude to Sunflower, we might not be the only targets, and that means we have to bring the others onboard about this ASAP, for their own protection as well as our own.

“For obvious reasons, though, we’ll operate on the assumption that we’re the target—or at least the
primary
target—and act accordingly. In
addition to our Homeland Security exercises, I want all CONUS air defenses on high alert, too. And I want our air defense plans modified on the assumption that the people coming after us have now gained access to our existing plans. I know there’s a limit to how they can be adjusted, but I can’t believe anyone would go after this kind of information without some plan to use it. From what your tech experts seem to be saying, the people who launched this attack have to have been pretty damned confident they’d get through—that they’d take us by surprise, the first time at least—but they have to have realized we’ll beef up our defenses to keep them from doing it again. So if this is the first step in an active attack on one of our cities, they wouldn’t have gone after our computers any sooner than they figured they had to. They wouldn’t want to give us any more time to react and adjust than they absolutely had to.”

Heads nodded around the table and she drew a deep, deep breath.

“All right. Get started. I want a progress report in two hours.”

It was unfortunate that international restrictions on the treatment of POWs didn’t also apply to what could be done to someone’s own personnel, Stephen Buchevsky reflected as he failed—again—to find a comfortable way to sit in the mil-spec “seat” in the big C-17 Globemaster’s spartan belly. The hell with waterboarding! If
he’d
been a jihadi, he’d have spilled his guts within an hour if they strapped him into one of these!

Actually, he supposed a lot of the problem stemmed from his six feet and four inches of height and the fact that he was built more like an offensive lineman than a basketball player. Nothing short of a first-class commercial seat was really going to fit someone his size, and expecting the US military to fly an E-8 commercial first-class would have been about as realistic as his expecting to be drafted as a presidential nominee. Or perhaps even a bit
less
realistic. And if he wanted to be honest (which he didn’t), he should also admit that what he disliked even more was the absence of windows. There was something about spending hours sealed in an alloy tube while it vibrated its noisy way through the sky that made him feel not just enclosed, but trapped.

Well, Stevie,
he told himself,
if you’re
that
unhappy, you could always ask the pilot to let you off to
swim
the rest of the way!

The thought made him chuckle, and he checked his watch. Kandahar to Aviano, Italy, was roughly three thousand miles, which exceeded the C-17’s normal range by a couple of hundred miles. Fortunately—although that might not be
exactly
the right word for it—he’d caught a rare flight returning to the States almost empty. The Air Force needed the big bird badly somewhere, so they wanted it home in the shortest possible time, and with additional fuel and a payload of only thirty or forty people, it could make the entire Kandahar-to-Aviano leg without refueling. Which meant he could look forward to a six-hour flight, assuming they didn’t hit any unfavorable winds.

He would have preferred to make the trip with the rest of his people, but he’d ended up dealing with the final paperwork for the return of Bravo Company’s equipment. Just another of those happy little chores that fell the way of its senior noncom. On the other hand, and despite the less than luxurious accommodations aboard his aerial chariot, his total transit time would be considerably shorter thanks to this flight’s fortuitous availability. And one thing he’d learned to do during his years of service was to sleep anywhere, anytime.

Even here,
he thought, squirming into what he could convince himself was a marginally more comfortable position and closing his eyes.
Even here
.

•  •  •  •  •

“Daddy!”
four-year-old Shania held out her arms, smiling hugely, as she flung herself from five steps up the staircase into her father’s arms with the absolutely fearless confidence that Daddy would catch her. “You’re home—
you’re home!
”

“Of course I am, Punkin!”

Buchevsky’s voice sounded odd to his own ears, somehow, but he laughed as he scooped the small, hurtling body out of the air. He hugged the sturdy yet delicate little girl to his chest, tucking one arm under her bottom for her to sit on while the other arm went around her back so he could tickle her. She squealed in delight, ducking her head, trying to squeeze her arms against her sides and capture his tickling fingers. Her small hands caught his single big one, one fist clenching around his thumb, another around his index finger, and her feet drummed against his rib cage.

“Stop that!” she laughed. “
Stop
that, Daddy!”

“Oh, sure, that’s what you
say!
” he chuckled, pressing his lips against the nape of her neck and blowing hard. She squealed again at the fluttering sound, and he straightened enough to press a kiss to the top of her head, instead.

“Me, too, Daddy!” another voice demanded indignantly. “Me, too!”

He looked down, and when he saw a five-year-old Yvonne, he realized why his own voice had sounded a little odd. Shania was three years older than Yvonne, so the only way they could both be four—which he knew had been his favorite age for both of them—was in a dream. He was hearing his own voice, as if it had been recorded and played back to him, and everyone knew that always sounded just a little “off.”

His sleeping mind recognized the dream, and some small corner of him realized he was probably dreaming it because of the divorce. Because he
knew he was going to see even less of his girls, no matter how hard Trish and he both tried. Because he loved them so much that no matter where he was, his arms still ached for those slender, agile, wigglesome little bodies and the feel of those small, loving arms around his own neck.

And because he knew those things, because he longed for them with such aching intensity, his mind turned away from the awareness that he was dreaming. Turned away from the noise and vibration of the transport plane and burrowed deep, deep into that loving memory of a moment in time which could not ever really have occurred.

“Of course you, too, Honey Bug!” the dream Stephen Buchevsky laughed, bending and sweeping one arm around Yvonne, lifting her up into his embrace. He held both of his little girls—one in the crook of his right arm, one in the crook of his left—and smothered them with daddy kisses.

•  •  •  •  •

The sudden, violent turn to starboard yanked Buchevsky up out of the dream, and he started to shove himself upright in his uncomfortable seat as the turn turned even steeper. The redoubled, rumbling whine from the big transport’s engines told him the pilot had increased power radically, as well, and every one of his instincts told him he wouldn’t have liked the reason for all of that if he’d known what it was.

Which didn’t keep him from wanting to know anyway. In fact—

“Listen up, everybody!” a harsh, strain-flattened voice rasped over the aircraft’s intercom. “We’ve got a little problem, and we’re diverting from Aviano, ’cause Aviano isn’t
there
anymore.”

Buchevsky’s eyes widened. Surely whoever it was on the other end of the intercom had to be joking, his mind tried to insist. But he knew better. There was too much stark shock—and fear—in that voice.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” the pilot continued. “We’ve lost our long-ranged comms, but we’re getting reports on the civilian bands about low-yield nukes going off all over the goddamned place. From what we’re picking up, someone’s kicking the shit out of Italy, Austria, Spain, and every NATO base in the entire Med, and—”

The voice broke off for a moment, and Buchevsky heard the harsh sound of an explosively cleared throat. Then—

“And we’ve got an unconfirmed report that Washington is gone, people. Just fucking
gone
.”

Someone kicked Buchevsky in the belly and his hand automatically
sought the hard-edged shape under his shirt. Not Washington. Washington
couldn’t
be gone. Not with Trish and—

“I don’t have a goddamned clue who’s doing this, or why,” the pilot said, “but we need someplace to set down, fast. We’re about eighty miles north-northwest of Podgorica in Montenegro, so I’m diverting inland. Let’s hope to hell I can find someplace to put this bird down in one piece . . . and that nobody on the ground thinks
we
had anything to do with this shit!”

“One more cannonball while I’m trying to cook here, and
someone
isn’t getting any hamburgers!” Dave Dvorak said ominously, turning to look over his shoulder at the water-plastered head of dark hair which had just bobbed back to the surface of the swimming pool.

His outsized stainless-steel gas grill was parked on the wooden deck at the deep end of the pool. The deck was separated from the pool itself by a four-foot flagstoned surround, and one wouldn’t normally have thought a slender, nine-year-old female could have produced sufficient spray to reach him. His daughter, however, had risen to new heights—not to mention new elevations off the diving board—and the brisk breeze sweeping across the pool had carried him a hefty dollop of chlorine-scented rain.

“Sorry, Daddy!”

Morgana Dvorak’s contrition didn’t sound especially sincere, her male parental unit noted. She was the smaller of the twins—although there wasn’t a lot to choose, height-wise, between her and her sister Maighread—which seemed to have imbued her with an automatic need to test the limits more than either of her two siblings. Maighread was just as capable of working her way towards a desired objective by any means necessary, but she preferred indirection (not to say sneakiness) rather than head-on confrontation. Their younger brother, Malachai, was even more . . . straightforward than Morgana, of course. He didn’t so much “test the limits” as charge straight at them. Morgana undoubtedly pushed
more
rules than he did, but nobody could have pushed the ones he did any harder. Probably because he shared his mother’s red hair. That was Dvorak’s explanation, at any rate. Sharon, on the other hand, was fonder of the explanation which had been offered by one of their friends who also happened to be a child psychologist. Malachai, she’d said, was physically a clone of his mother . . . but
psychologically
he was his father in miniature.

An explanation which was patent nonsense in Dvorak’s considered
opinion, thank you. And one which made him contemplate a thirteen-year-old Malachai with a distinct sense of dread.

“Yeah,
sure
you’re sorry!” he told his errant daughter as she trod water, and she giggled. Unmistakably, she giggled. “You just bear in mind what I said, young lady.” He shook his spatula in her direction. “And if you’re not careful, I’ll cook your burger all the way through, too—turn it into one of those hockey pucks your uncle likes!”

“Hey, now!” Rob Wilson objected from where he reclined, beer in hand, in a folding chaise lounge strategically located upwind of the grill. “Cooking is good. Just because
you
like your food raw doesn’t mean
smart
people do.”

“There’s a difference between cooked and charcoal, you Philistine,” Dvorak retorted. “I’m just grateful I managed to rescue my children from your unnatural fascination with things that go crunch.”

“Rescue them? Is that what you call brainwashing them into eating sushi?” Wilson demanded.

“Sushi? Did someone say sushi?
Yum!
” Maighread Dvorak put in. She’d just come out of the house, carrying a platter of buns. Her younger brother and her cousin Keelan came behind her, carrying potato salad, pickles, lettuce, and sliced tomatoes and onion rings. Morgana had deposited the mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup on the picnic table before launching herself into the pool, and Sharon and Veronica Wilson brought up the rear with iced tea, soft drinks, and what looked like a wheelbarrow load of potato chips.

“Unnatural, that’s what it is,” Wilson said, smiling at his niece. “Fish isn’t food to begin with, even when it’s cooked. But
raw?
” He shook his head. “Next thing, you’ll be expecting me to eat
vegetables!
”

“
Potatoes
are vegetables,” Dvorak pointed out, “and you eat—what? nine or ten pounds? twenty?—of them a week!”

“While I always hate coming to Rob’s defense, potatoes
aren’t
vegetables,” his wife corrected him. He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. “Potatoes,” she explained, “are a traditional Irish delicacy whose ancient pedigree and lineage place them in a unique category, transcending the limitation of mere ‘vegetables.’ Besides, they have very little of that chlorophyll stuff that gives all those other vegetables such a strange taste. Or that’s what I’ve been told causes it, anyway. I don’t eat enough of them to know, myself.”

“You shouldn’t encourage him, you know,” Dvorak said. “Vegetables are good for you.”