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  “Is that so?” The President paused for a moment, then shook his head. “General Bain, you’re telling me that you thought it was proper that McLanahan attack a target knowing that so many civilian noncombatants were nearby, and that such an attack is within the letter and spirit of my executive order authorizing a hunt for insurgents in Iran?” he retorted. “I think you have grossly misinterpreted my orders. I thought I was being very plain and specific: I don’t want any noncombatant casualties. Was that not clear to you, General Bain?”

  “It was, sir,” Bain responded, his jaw hardening and his eyes narrowing under the scolding, “but with the information General McLanahan had at the time, and with the threat posed by these insurgent rockets, I felt he was fully justified in making the decision to—”

  “Let’s get this straight right here and now, General Bain: I am the commander-in-chief, and I make the decisions,” the President said. “Your job is to carry out my orders, and my orders were no civilian casualties. The only proper order in this instance was to withhold because of the numbers of civilians around that launcher. Even if they had been told to leave the immediate area, you should have anticipated that they would be near enough to be hurt or killed by the explosion. They—”

  “Sir, there was no explosion, at least not one caused by us,” Bain protested. “The SkySTREAK missile is a kinetic-energy weapon only—it was designed to—”

  “I don’t care what it was designed to do, General—McLanahan knew there were civilians in the immediate area, and according to General Huffman, you were briefed that some rockets might have chemical weapons on them, so he obviously should have withheld. End of discussion. Now what is this about McLanahan firing a missile at the Russian fighter? McLanahan’s bombers have air-to-air missiles on them?”

  “That’s standard defensive armament for the EB-1D Vampire aircraft, sir, but McLanahan didn’t—”

  “So why did you fire on that Russian reconnaissance plane, General McLanahan?”

  “We did not fire any missiles, sir,” McLanahan responded as firmly as he could, nodding to Lukas that he was all right, “and it was not a reconnaissance plane: it was a MiG-29 tactical fighter.”

  “What was it doing up there, McLanahan?”

  “Shadowing our bomber over the Caspian Sea, sir.”

  “I see. Shadowing…as in, performing reconnaissance? Am I interpreting this correctly, General?” Patrick rubbed his eyes and swallowed hard, licking dry lips. “We’re not keeping you up, are we, General?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So the Russian aircraft was just performing reconnaissance after all, correct?”

  “Not in my judgment, sir. It was—”

  “So you fired a missile at it, and it returned fire, and you then hit it with a radioactive beam of some sort, correct?”

  “No, sir.” But something was wrong. Patrick looked at the camera, but seemed to be having trouble focusing. “It…we didn’t…”

  “So what happened?”

  “Mr. President, the MiG fired on us first,” Boomer interjected. “The Vampire just defended itself, nothing more.”

  “Who is that?” the President asked the National Security Adviser. He turned to the camera, his eyes bulging in anger. “Who are you? Identify yourself!”

  “I’m Captain Hunter Noble,” Boomer said, getting to his feet, staring in shock at the image of Patrick being helped by Lukas, “and why the hell don’t you stop badgering us? We’re only doing our jobs!”

  “What did you say to me?” the President thundered. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? General Bain, I want him fired! I want him discharged!”

  “Master Sergeant, what’s going on?” Bain shouted, ignoring the President. “What’s happening to Patrick?”

  “He’s having trouble breathing, sir.” She found a nearby intercom switch: “Medical detail to the command module! Emergency!” And then she terminated the videoconference with a keypress on the communications control keyboard.

  “McLanahan is having a heart attack?” the President exclaimed after the video images from the space station cut off. “I knew he shouldn’t be up in that thing! General Bain, what kind of medical facilities do they have up there?”

  “Basic, sir: just a medically trained technician and first aid equipment. We’ve never had anyone have a heart attack on an American military spacecraft.”

  “Great. Just fucking great.” The President passed a hand through his hair in sheer frustration. “Can you get a doctor and some medicine and equipment up there right away?”

  “Yes, sir. The Black Stallion spaceplane can rendezvous with the space station in a couple hours.”

  “Get on it. And terminate those bomber missions over Iran. No more cruise missile shots until I know for sure what happened.”

  “Yes, sir.” Bain’s videoconference link cut off.

  The President sat back in his chair, loosened his tie, and lit up a cigarette. “What a clusterfuck,” he breathed. “We kill a bunch of innocent civilians in Tehran with a hypersonic missile fired from an unmanned bomber controlled from a military space station; Russia is screaming mad at us; and now the hero of the American Holocaust has a damned heart attack in space! What’s next?”

  “McLanahan’s situation might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, Joe,” Chief of Staff Walter Kordus said. He and Carlyle had known Joseph Gardner since their years in college and Kordus was one of the few allowed to ever address the President by his first name. “We’ve been looking for ways to cut funding for the space station despite its popularity in the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, and this might be it.”

  “But it has to be done delicately—McLanahan is too popular with the people to be used as an excuse to cut his favorite program, especially since he’s been touting it all over the world as the next big thing, the impregnable fortress, the ultimate watchtower, yada yada yada,” the President said. “We have to get some congressmen to raise the question of safety on that space station, and if it needs to be manned at all in the first place. We’ll have to ‘leak’ this incident to Senator Barbeau, the Armed Services Committee, and a few others.”

  “That won’t be hard,” Kordus said. “Barbeau will know how to stir things up without slamming McLanahan.”

  “Good. After it comes out in the press, I want to meet with Barbeau privately to discuss strategy.” Kordus tried hard to control his discomfort at that order. The President noted his friend and chief political adviser’s warning tenseness and added quickly, “Everyone’s going to have their hand out for the money once we start the idea of killing that space station, and I want to control the begging, whining, and arm-twisting.”

  “Okay, Joe,” Kordus said, not convinced by the President’s hasty explanation, but not wanting to press the issue. “I’ll set it up.”

  “You do that.” He took a deep drag of his cigarette, crushed it out, then added, “And we need to get our ducks in a row soon, just in case McLanahan kicks the bucket and Congress kills his program before we can divvy up his budget.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  One does what one is; one becomes what one does.

  —ROBERT VON MUSIL

  AZADI SQUARE, OUTSIDE MEHRABAD INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, TEHRAN, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF PERSIA

  DAYS LATER

  “No bread, no peace! No bread, no peace!” the protesters chanted over and over again. It seemed the crowd, now numbering around two or three hundred, was growing bigger and exponentially louder by the minute.

  “If they have no bread, where do they get all the energy to stand out here and protest?” Colonel Mostafa Rahmati, commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade, muttered as he studied the security barriers and observed the crowds getting ever closer. Just two weeks earlier, Rahmati, a short, rather round man with bushy dark hair that seemed to grow thickly across every inch of his body except the top of his head, was executive officer of a transportation battalion, but the way commanding officers were disappearing—presumably killed by
insurgents, although no one could rule out desertion—promotions came quickly and urgently in the army of the presumptive Democratic Republic of Persia.

  “More smoke,” one of Rahmati’s lookouts reported. “Tear gas, not an explosion.” Seconds later, they heard a loud bang! strong enough to rattle the windows of the airport office building he and his senior staff members were seated in. The lookout sheepishly glanced at his commanding officer. “A small explosion, sir.”

  “So I gather,” Rahmati said. He didn’t want to show any displeasure or exasperation—two weeks ago he wouldn’t have been able to tell a grenade explosion from a loud fart. “Watch the lines carefully—it could be a diversion.”

  Rahmati and his staff were on the upper floor of an office building that once belonged to the Iranian Ministry of Transportation at Mehrabad International Airport. Since the military coup and the start of the Islamist insurgency against the military government in Iran, the coup leaders had decided to take over Mehrabad Airport and had established a tight security perimeter around the entire area. Although most of the city east of Tehran University had been left to the insurgents, taking over the airport turned out to be a wise decision. The airport was already highly secure; the open spaces around the field were easy to patrol and defend; and the airport could be kept open to receive and send supplies by air.

  Besides, it was often pointed out, if the insurgents ever got the upper hand—which could be any day now—it would be that much easier to get the hell out of the country.

  The windows rattled again, and heads turned farther southeast along Me’raj Avenue northeast toward Azadi Square, about two kilometers away, where another billow of smoke, this one topped with a crown of orange fire, suddenly rose. Bombings, arson, intentional accidents, mayhem, and frequent suicide bombings were commonplace in Tehran, and none more common than the area between Mehrabad Airport, Azadi Square, and the famous Freedom Tower, the erstwhile “Gateway to Iran.” Freedom Tower, first called Shahyad Tower, or the King’s Tower, commemorating the two thousand five hundredth anniversary of the Persian Empire, was built in 1971 by Shah Reza Pahlavi as a symbol of the new, modern Iran. The tower was renamed after the Islamic Revolution and, like the U.S. Embassy, was seen more as a symbol of the decadent monarchy and a warning to the people not to embrace the Western enemies of Islam. The square became a popular area for anti-Western demonstrations and speeches and so became a symbol of the Islamic revolution, which was probably why the marble-clad monument to Iran’s last monarchy was never torn down.

  Because the entire area was heavily fortified and well patrolled by the military, trade and commerce had started to revive here, and even some luxuries like restaurants, cafés, and movie theaters had reopened. Unfortunately these were frequent targets by Islamist insurgents. A few brave pro-theocratic protesters would organize a rally occasionally in Azadi Square. To their credit, the military did not crack down on these rallies and even took steps to protect them against counterprotesters that threatened to get too violent. Buzhazi and most of his officers knew that they had to do everything possible to demonstrate to the people of Persia, and to the world, that they were not going to replace one brand of oppression with another.

  “What’s happening over there?” Rahmati asked as he continued to scan the avenue for more signs of an organized insurgent offensive. Every insurgent attack of late had been preceded by a smaller innocuous-looking one nearby, which diverted the attention of police and military patrols just enough to allow the insurgents to create even more havoc somewhere else.

  “Looks like that new ExxonMobil gasoline station off the Sai-di Highway, across from Meda Azadi Park, sir,” a lookout reported. “A large crowd running toward Azadi Avenue. The smoke is getting thicker—perhaps the underground tanks are on fire.”

  “Damn it all, I thought we had enough security around there,” Rahmati cursed. The station was the government’s first experiment into allowing foreign investment and part ownership in businesses in Persia. With the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, petroleum companies around the world were eager to move into the newly freed country and tap its wealth, almost untouched for decades since the Western embargoes against the theocratic Iranian government following the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. It was much, much more than a simple gasoline station—it was a symbol of a reborn, twenty-first-century Persia.

  Everyone understood that, even soldiers like Rahmati, whose main goal in life was to look out for number one—himself. He came from a privileged family and joined the military because of its prestige and benefits after it was apparent that he wasn’t smart enough to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution, he saved his skin by swearing fealty to the theocrats, informing on his fellow officers and friends to the Pasdaran i-Engelab, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and by giving up much of his family’s hard-earned riches in bribes and tributes. Although he hated the theocracy for taking everything he had, he didn’t join the coup until it was obvious that it was going to succeed. “I want a reserve platoon to go in with the firefighters to put out those fires,” he went on, “and if any protesters get near, they are to push them back north of Azadi Avenue and northwest of the square, even if they have to crack some skulls. I don’t want—”

  “If you were going to say, ‘I don’t want to let this get out of control,’ Colonel, cracking skulls is not the way to accomplish that,” a voice said behind him. Rahmati turned, then snapped to and called the room to attention as the leader of the military coup, General Hesarak al-Kan Buzhazi, entered the room.

  The struggle to free his country from the grip of the theocrats and Islamists had aged Buzhazi well beyond his sixty-two years. Tall and always slender, he now struggled to take time to eat enough to maintain a healthy weight amidst his twenty-hour-a-day duties, infrequent and sparse meals, and the necessity of staying on the move to confuse his enemies—inside his cadre as well as outside—that were relentlessly hunting him. He still wore a closely cropped beard and mustache, but had shaved his head so he didn’t have to take the time to keep his former flowing gray locks looking good. Although he had traded his military uniform for a suit and French-styled Gatsby shirt, he did carry a military-style greatcoat without decorations and wore spit-shined paratrooper’s boots under his slacks, and he wore a PC9 nine-millimeter automatic pistol in a shoulder rig under his jacket. “As you were,” he ordered. The others in the room relaxed. “Report, Colonel.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rahmati quickly ran down the most serious events of the past few hours; then: “Sorry for that outburst, sir. I’m just a little frustrated, that’s all. I put extra men on that station just to prevent such an occurrence.”

  “Your frustration sounded like an order to retaliate against anti-government protesters, Colonel, and that won’t help the situation,” Buzhazi said. “We’ll deal harshly with the perpetrators, not the protesters. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Buzhazi looked carefully at his brigade commander. “Looks like you need some rest, Mostafa.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  Buzhazi nodded, then looked around the room. “Well, you can’t run your brigade from here all the time, can you? Let’s go see what happened out there.” Rahmati gulped, then nodded, reluctantly following the general out the door, wishing he had agreed to take a nap. Traveling the streets of Tehran—even in broad daylight, within the portion of the city Buzhazi controlled, and with a full platoon of battle-hardened security forces—was never a safe or advisable move.

  Every block of the two kilometers from the airport to Meda Azari Park was a maze of concrete and steel chicanes designed to slow the heaviest vehicles down; there was a new checkpoint every three blocks, and even Buzhazi’s motorcade had to stop and be searched each time. Buzhazi didn’t seem to mind one bit, using the opportunity to greet his soldiers and the few citizens out on the street. Rahmati didn’t want to get that close to anyone, choosing instead to keep his AK-74 assault r
ifle at the ready. As they got closer to the park and the crowds got larger, Buzhazi strode down the street, shaking hands with those who offered their hand, waving to others, and shouting a few words of encouragement. His bodyguards had to step lively to keep up with him.

  Rahmati had to hand it to the guy: the old warhorse knew how to work a crowd. He waded into the crowds fearlessly, shook hands with those who might just as well be holding a gun or trigger for a bomb vest, spoke to reporters and gave statements in front of TV cameras, had his picture taken with civilians and military men, kissed babies and old toothless women, and even acted as a traffic officer when fire trucks tried to enter the area, urging the crowds back and directing confused motorists away. But now they were just a few blocks from the gas station fire, and the crowds were getting thicker and much more restive. “Sir, I suggest we interview the security patrols and find out if any witnesses saw what happened or if any security cameras were operating,” Rahmati said, making it clear that here would be a good place to do that.

  Buzhazi didn’t seem to hear him. Instead of stopping he kept on walking, heading right for the largest and noisiest gaggle gathering on the northwest side of the park. Rahmati had no choice but to stay with him, rifle at the ready.

  Buzhazi didn’t turn around, but seemed to sense the brigade commander’s anxiety. “Put the weapon away, Mostafa,” Buzhazi said.

  “But sir—”

  “If they wanted a shot at me they could have done it two blocks ago, before we were looking at each other eye to eye,” Buzhazi said. “Tell the security detail to shoulder their weapons as well.” The team leader, an impossibly young air force major by the name of Haddad, must have heard him, because the bodyguards’ weapons had already disappeared by the time Rahmati turned to relay the order.