True Allegiance

Brett didn’t have time to think about what he did next—he just did it. He rolled toward the opposite edge of the roof, away from the enemy soldiers, and fell off the roof forty feet toward the ground.

Time slowed as he fell, the wind brushing his blood-smeared cheeks. He had time to think that he’d fallen in the wrong position, that his arm was awkwardly stretched behind him. Then he hit the earth, and the searing pain in his arm told him that he’d broken it. Worse, the smashing noise from his waist told him his comms were dead. Above, he heard the Taliban men running toward his side of the building.

He struggled to his feet, his nerves shrieking in excruciating agony, and staggered toward a nearby alley. He didn’t even hear the bullet coming—when it hit him in his broken arm, he didn’t even feel it.

It had been three hours. Brett sat in another alley in the slums of the town, separated from his men—if any of them were still alive—listening to the silence of a city at peace. A city in the enemy’s hands.

He gripped the empty pistol tighter.

President Prescott

Washington, DC

“WE SIMPLY CAN’T PAY FOR it, sir.”

White House chief of staff Tommy Bradley was standing over the president’s desk in the Oval Office, a sheaf of budget papers in his hand. Crumbled, wrinkled papers covered in red notes. The numbers just didn’t add up.

And President Mark Prescott didn’t care.

“Listen to me, Tommy,” said the president. “My reelection relies on our ability to secure funding for this action. You know that. I know that. The polls show it. We don’t have a choice in the matter.”

Tommy gritted his teeth. He knew Prescott was right. The president had been dropping precipitously in the polls—his critics blamed his policies for widespread inflation and unemployment. Prescott was deathly afraid of becoming Jimmy Carter, and he was right on the precipice of having his worst fears realized.

When Mark Prescott ran for president, he didn’t know what he’d be inheriting. He was no babe in the woods—he was a hardened ideologue, a product of the Chicago machine, the handpicked protégé of the power brokers—but he hadn’t quite contemplated the nature of the country he’d be handed once elected. He campaigned on great blustering clouds of rhetoric, his boyish good looks, and a record obscured by a complacent media. He came out of nowhere, they said, an inspirational figure unlike any candidate since John F. Kennedy. He answered no difficult questions, evaded all the exposés about his early political career, his rocky marriage, his connections to some of the more shady characters in town. He brushed off all the attacks on him as the cynical manipulations of a tired opposition.

It didn’t hurt that his opponent, General Hart, had been a militant and boring old man; it also didn’t hurt that his presidential predecessor had been an unpopular member of Hart’s party. Prescott linked Hart to the president, and the country bought into it.

Once Prescott entered office, however, he soon realized that the stock market crash had been a mere symptom of the nation’s economic ills. The country was running a massive national debt and a trade deficit beyond reckoning. The unemployment rate had climbed beyond 10 percent and was headed toward the 15 percent mark—if you counted those who had stopped looking for a job, the real unemployment rate was closer to 25 percent.

So Prescott did what Prescott knew how to do: he survived.

The easiest way to survive: end his predecessors’ wars, no matter what the cost, then pump up the spending at home. There was no glory to be won on the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Everlasting glory didn’t come in the form of military victory in this day and age—it came in the form of everlasting social programs that grew and inured to the benefit of all Americans. FDR was worshipped not because of World War II, but because of Social Security; LBJ had lost Vietnam, but he’d won the Great Society.

Big men, Prescott knew, required big governments. And big governments required big spending.

So Prescott spent. He spent on green technologies, on education programs, on food stamps and highways and medical mandates. He spent on vacations and dinners and public works projects. Every dollar spent, he told the American public, created five dollars—no, ten!—in commerce. The money could either be hidden in the mattresses of the rich, or it could be shared with everyone.

His poll numbers went up initially. He waited for the inevitable economic bump that would enshrine his legacy and assure his reelection.

And nothing happened. The economy sputtered and spluttered along, not quite collapsing, but certainly not booming. Even members of his own party wondered whether Prescott would win a second term.

Then, a miracle.

In the middle of the night, Prescott woke up with a phrase ringing in his brain. Over and over. It was as though a higher power had placed them in his mind. He grabbed a pen from his bedside drawer and wrote it down: Work Freedom.