Eagle Station

Farrell’s other visitor, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, had played his own vital part in Scion’s successes — both on and off the battlefield. Unfortunately, the terrible price he had paid for those victories was immediately apparent. Years ago, he’d been critically injured on a mission over the People’s Republic of China. He was alive now only thanks to a remarkably advanced piece of medical hardware, the LEAF, or Life Enhancing Assistive Facility. Without its carbon-fiber-and-metal exoskeleton, life-support backpack, and clear, spacesuit-like helmet, he would die within hours — killed by wounds that were far beyond the ability of modern medicine to heal.

“Maybe we’d better move on expeditiously through our business today, Mr. President,” Patrick suggested, with a crooked smile visible through his helmet. “Yon dragon lady out there is right about the value of your time… and I’d sure hate to piss her off. For one thing, there’s no way I can outrun her in this Mechanical Man rig.” Servo motors whined softly when he shrugged his shoulders.

Farrell laughed. “It does make you wonder who’s running this outfit, doesn’t it? Me or Maisie?”

“Well, ‘you’ve gotta dance with those that brung ya,’” Martindale quoted Ronald Reagan with a thin smile of his own.

Farrell nodded. Of course, the classic reminder to stay loyal to your supporters applied just as much to the two men seated before him as it did to Maisie Harrigan. Together with the general’s son Brad, Nadia Rozek, and a handful of others, they’d risked their lives to save his miserable hide. Now they were among his most trusted national security and intelligence policy advisers — a fact that he knew irritated many in Washington, D.C.’s status-conscious establishment. The fact that neither man held an official position in his administration made their obvious preeminence even more galling to some in the Pentagon and at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters.

Which said more about their critics than anything else, he decided. Washington was full of “experts” who’d failed upward, attaining higher and higher government positions despite repeated mistakes and blunders. To people like that, Kevin Martindale and Patrick McLanahan — and Farrell himself, he knew — were a threat, because they cared more about results than prestige.

He waved the two men into chairs and then leaned back against the corner of his desk. “Okay, shoot. What’s first on the agenda?”

“The Paracel Island freedom-of-navigation exercise,” Martindale told him.

Farrell snorted. “More like the Paracel Island turkey shoot, at least from what I’ve read.”

“Not the most diplomatic way of putting it,” Patrick said with a quick laugh. “But accurate nonetheless. We pulled in a treasure trove of intel on some of the PRC’s most advanced ballistic missiles—”

“And gave Comrade Li Jun a well-deserved black eye,” Martindale finished, with intense satisfaction. “With luck, our little show of nonlethal force should discourage Beijing from further escalating tensions in the South China Sea for some time to come.”

Farrell nodded somberly. “Amen to that.” China’s expansionist and aggressive moves among the reefs and islands that dotted the South China Sea had already sparked a number of international crises and even open naval and air clashes with its neighbors and the United States. Puncturing Beijing’s confidence that its armed forces could take on America’s military and win had been one of the primary objectives of last week’s combined Navy and Scion operation.

And the very fact that it had been a successful combined operation should achieve another of his objectives — demonstrating the value of using Sky Masters and Scion weapons, aircraft, and electronic warfare systems as a force multiplier for America’s regular armed forces. Like most bureaucracies, the Defense Department had a serious case of “not invented here” syndrome. For too many generals and admirals, weapons, equipment, and software that didn’t emerge from the Pentagon’s labyrinthine procurement processes were automatically suspect. But after they studied the awestruck after-action reports from McCampbell’s captain and her officers, Farrell was willing to bet that a lot of folks in both the Navy and the Air Force would be desperate to get their hands on ALQ-293 SPEAR systems of their own and the Sky Masters — designed MQ-77 Ghost Wolf unmanned attack aircraft.

The same thing went for the S-29B Shadow… but he’d already allocated control over all armed spaceplanes to the newly formed U.S. Space Force. After last year’s battles with the Russians in low Earth orbit, his push to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces had sailed through Congress. Fully uniting the separate space-related programs and commands previously split between the Air Force, Navy, and even the Army was a long-overdue reform.