Rogue Forces

“McLanahan?” Stacy Barbeau exploded, partially rising out of her seat. “Patrick McLanahan is a defense contractor in Iraq?”

“Nice to see you, too, Miss Secretary of State,” Patrick said. “I assumed Secretary Turner had briefed you on Scion’s management.”

He suppressed a smile as he saw Barbeau struggling for control of her senses and voluntary muscles. The last time he had seen her was less than two years earlier when she was still the senior senator from Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Patrick, who had surreptitiously returned from Armstrong Space Station, where he was under virtual house arrest, supervised loading Barbeau aboard an XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane to fly her from Elliott Air Force Base in Nevada to Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland—a flight that took less than two hours.

Of course, Barbeau remembered none of this, because Patrick had had Hunter “Boomer” Noble seduce and then sedate her in a luxury hotel-casino suite in Las Vegas to prepare for her brief flight into space.

Patrick’s armored Tin Men and Cybernetic Infantry Device commandos then spirited her to the presidential retreat at Camp David, subdued the Secret Service and U.S. Navy security forces, and set up a confrontation between her and President Joseph Gardner over the future of the men and women who made up the U.S. Space Defense Force, which the president was ready to sacrifice in order to make peace with Russia. In exchange for not revealing Gardner’s secret dealings with the Russians, the president had agreed to allow anyone under McLanahan’s command who didn’t want to serve under Gardner to honorably retire from military service…

…and Patrick ensured the president’s continued cooperation by taking the entire remaining force of six Tin Men and two Cybernetic Infantry Device combat systems with him, along with spare parts, weapon packs, and the plans to make more of them. The advanced armored infantry performance enhancement systems had already proven they could defeat the Russian and Iranian armies as well as the U.S. Navy SEALs, and infiltrate the most highly guarded presidential retreats in the world—Patrick knew he had a lot of backup just in case the president tried to relieve himself of his McLanahan issue.

“Is there a problem here, Miss Secretary?” Vice President Phoenix asked. “I know you’ve met General McLanahan before.”

“I assure you, we made all the proper notifications and filings—I did them myself through the Air Force Civil Augmentee Agency,” Patrick said. “There’s been no conflict of—”

“Can we please get on with this?” Stacy Anne Barbeau suddenly blurted perturbedly. Patrick smiled to himself: he knew that a seasoned political pro like Barbeau knew how to pull herself into the here and now, no matter how utterly shocked she became. “General, it’s nice to see you hale and hearty. I should have known that retirement would never mean a rocking chair on the porch to someone like you.”

“I think you know me too well, Miss Secretary.”

“And I also know that you are not shy about stepping right on, and sometimes sneaking a foot or two across, the boundaries in your eagerness to get a job done,” Barbeau went on directly. “We received complaints from the Turks about stealthy aircraft, perhaps unmanned, overflying Turkish airspace without permission. Pardon me for saying so, sir, but this has your fingerprints all over it. What exactly did you do?”

“Scion’s contract is to provide integrated surveillance, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and data communications relay support services on the Iraq-Turkey border,” Patrick said. “Our primary platform for this function is the XC-57 multipurpose airlift aircraft, which is a turbofan-powered manned or unmanned aircraft that can be fitted with a variety of mission modules to change its function. We also employ smaller unmanned aircraft that—”

“Get to the bottom line, General,” Barbeau snapped. “Did you or did you not cross the Iraq-Turkey border?”

“No, ma’am, we did not—at least, not with any of our aircraft.”

“What in hell does that mean?”

“The Turks fired at a false target we inserted into their Patriot acquisition and tracking computers via their phased-array radar,” he said.

“I knew it! You did provoke the Turks into launching their missiles!”

“Part of our contracted reconnaissance mission is to analyze and categorize all threats in this area of responsibility,” Patrick explained. “After the attack on Second Regiment in Zakhu, I consider the Turkish army and border guards a threat.”