“One thing you want to watch out for, Captain,” he added when he had exhausted his official brief, “is Admiral Woods. He seems to have a stick up his ass. He takes it out and beats me with it at every opportunity. He blamed us for the contact with the Chinese interceptors.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have buzzed Beijing,” said Breanna.
“Stay clear of the carrier air screen if at all possible,” Dog told her, not particularly appreciating the joke.
“That’s kind of up to them, isn’t it? If the subs keep going the way they’re going, it’ll only take another two hours or so before we’re in their patrol area,” said Bree. “Sooner or later they’re going to see us.”
“Understood,” said Dog.
“Anything else, Daddy?”
“Captain, I’d appreciate it—”
“Bag the Daddy stuff. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
He longed to ask to speak to Jennifer—she was on board Quicksilver, helping Zen—but it was too much of an indulgence.
“All right, Quicksilver. See you later.”
“Roger that.”
Dog broke the Megafortress out of her figure-eight track and found his bearings for the Philippine base. They were just climbing through twenty-five thousand feet when the computer buzzed with an interruption on the Whiplash command link. The words INCOMING TRANSMISSION. PRIORITY: DOG EARS appeared on the HUD screen.
Danny Freah’s voice, but no image, came through after Dog authorized the feed.
“Colonel Bastian?”
“Daniel. How we doing?”
“Not good, sir. We’ve lost one of our men. Sergeant Talcom. Powder.”
Dog listened as Captain Freah described the operation in cold, sober tones.
“I understand,” he said when the captain was finished. “I’ll notify Admiral Woods. Where are you now?”
“We’re still at the site, waiting for the Osprey to return from transporting Sergeant Liu.”
Dog listened as Danny told him what they’d found—not much actually. They still had the mission tapes to analyze. The dead enemy soldiers who hadn’t been charred beyond seemed to be Chinese; they figured the atoll had been a spy site.
“We think there’s a whole chain of them, running north,” said Danny. “Stoner thinks that, but they’re not using known Chinese codes; or Indian codes for that matter. CIA’s pretty interested.”
“I’m assuming you don’t require my assistance,” said Dog.
“Affirmative. We’re ready to bug out.”
“I’ll see you back at the FOA.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hang in there, Danny.” The words were trite, way too automatice—he had to say something but couldn’t come up with anything profound. “Iowa out.”
He killed the connection, then went through the plane’s status with Rosen. He checked on the other members of the crew, talked to Delaford about the way Zen had handled Piranha, asked Ensign English what it was like a hundred meters below the ocean during a storm—all delaying actions before telling the rest of the Dreamland team their friend was dead.
He punched through the circuit that connected back to Dreamland, bringing the command center on-line in what amounted to a conference call with the other Megafortresses and the mobile base back at the Philippines.
“I have some very sad news. Today, Technical Sergeant Perse ‘Powder’ Talcom lost his life to an enemy mine in a reconnaissance mission in the South China Sea. Powder was an exceptional man, an important member of the Whiplash action team, a cutup at times, and a ferocious fighter.”
Dog stopped abruptly. He couldn’t sum up a man in a sentence, and there was no need to. The people listening knew him pretty well, most of them probably better than Dog did.
“Colonel Bastian out.”
Aboard Quicksilver
2012
“God, Sergeant Powder,” said Jennifer. Tears started to slip from her eyes. “He was so sweet—he was one of the people who helped deliver that baby in Turkey. God.”
She started sobbing, then brought her hand up to clear her eyes so she could see the display. The communication algorithms didn’t require any tweaking—the Piranha system as a whole was probably the least bug-ridden project she’d ever worked on—but she ran a test on the signal strength anyway.
“You okay, Jen?” asked Zen. He was sitting a short distance away on the Flighthawk control deck.
“Oh, yeah, I’m all right.”
“It sucks. Powder.”
“Yeah.”
The sobs bubbled up again. She pushed back her teeth together, trying to force them away. She barely knew the sergeant, barely knew most of the enlisted men in Whiplash and at Dreamland.
What if Colonel Bastian were killed? What if his plane went down? It was not impossible—the EB-52’s weren’t invincible. A mechanical problem, a screwup in the computer system that helped run the plane…
She’d worked on that system. Maybe she hadn’t tested it properly, maybe there was something she’d messed up. God, she’d worked so hard she must have forgotten a million things, screwed up in a million ways.