5

Dreamland

TODAY WAS GOING TO BE A GREAT DAY, TURK MAKO decided as he rolled out of bed. Or at least as great a day as you could have without flying.

Heck, he might get some flying in. His only officially scheduled duty was to sit through a boring engineering session on the nano-UAVs. Then he was officially off-duty, free, liberated, unchained, for seventy-two hours, which would be spent in the delicious company of Li Pike, his girlfriend.

She was flying in this evening. Li, an Air Force A-10 pilot attached to a unit Turk had hooked up with in Africa, had managed to wangle leave from her own unit so they could be together.

Which reminded him—he had to check on the hotel reservation. And the car.

He couldn’t cruise Vegas with the Office of Special Technology Malibu he’d been assigned as personal transportation. A vintage Mustang convertible would be much more like it.

Dinner reservations. He needed to make dinner reservations. A quiet place, not too far from the hotel, but not in the hotel. He didn’t want to seem too anxious.

Turk turned the coffeemaker on and headed for the shower. The “single occupancy/officer/temp duty” apartments at Dreamland dating from the late 1990s were drab and boring. Worse, they had paper thin walls. Not appropriate for how he hoped the night would go.

Turk’s good mood was threatened a bit when he emerged from the shower to find that the coffee machine had malfunctioned, sending a spray of liquid and grinds around the counter area. He managed to salvage a single cup, which he downed while cleaning up. No big loss, he decided: there was always better coffee in the engineering bunkers. The geeks might not be much to look at, but they brewed mean java.

Turk’s spirits remained high as he approached the guards to the Whiplash building. He waved his credentials at them, then submitted to the mandatory fingerprint and retina scan set up just inside the door. Cleared, he sauntered down the long ramp to the main floor, pausing at the small coffee station near the elevator. He’d just finished helping himself to an extra-large cup when Breanna Stockard called to him from down the hall.

“Turk? Can we talk for a minute? In my office?”

“Sure boss, but, uh, I got a meeting downstairs.”

“This won’t take long.” Breanna ducked back inside the doorway to her office.

Turk topped off his coffee and went on down the hall. While Breanna was generally at Dreamland at least once a month, her office there had a temporary feel to it, and was radically different from the high-tech command center she used on the CIA campus. Even her Pentagon office, which was modest by command standards, seemed spacious if not quite opulent compared to the Dreamland space.

“You’re not going to make me pay for Old Girl, are you?” said Turk, plopping down into one of the two stiff-backed wooden chairs in front of her desk.

“Pay?” Breanna asked as she closed the door.

“Just a little joke.”

“You did a great job. The admiral wants to give you a medal.”

“Really? The tight-ass admiral?”

“Turk.”

“I didn’t call him that to his face.” Turk retreated quickly. Blackheart actually had one of his aides buy him a drink, so he wasn’t all bad. For an admiral.

“I need you to be serious, Captain.” Breanna was sitting ramrod straight.

“Yes, ma’am.” Turk took a sip of coffee and copied her posture.

BREANNA HAD AN ENTIRE MENTAL SCRIPT MEMORIZED and rehearsed, but for some reason couldn’t seem to get it started. She looked into his face, found his eyes, and forced herself to talk.

“We . . . have a special assignment. It’s very dangerous,” she started. “It involves . . . flying the nano-UAVs.”

“Flying them?”

“Directing them. As a backup, actually. But as you saw yesterday, we still need someone in the loop in an absolute emergency.”

“Yup.”

“I need a volunteer. I— You’re probably the only one qualified.”

Probably the only one? Breanna silently scolded herself: she hadn’t planned on saying that at all.

“Where is this assignment?” he asked.

“I have to tell you—it’s very dangerous.”

“Great. I’m in.”

“Uh—”

“It’s combat, right? I want in. Definitely.”

“It’s . . . it is a combat operation,” said Breanna, surprised by his enthusiasm, though she realized now she should have expected it. “I can’t give you many details until—unless—you decide to do it.”

“I already decided. Where am I going?”

“It’s in Iran,” she said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Iran? Hell, yes. Hell, yes.”

“You’d have to start training right away. It’ll be intense.”

“Right away when?”

“We have a site in Arizona. We’d need you there as soon as possible. Tonight, preferably.”

“Tonight?”

Finally, she thought, he was listening with his brain rather than his heart.

“You can still back out,” she told him.

“No, no. It’s just, I kinda had plans for this weekend.”

“It’s not a question of being brave,” said Breanna, not quite parsing what he said. “This is voluntary. I mean that. Walk out of my office and I’ll have forgotten the whole thing.”

“No, I’m doing it. It’s tonight, though. That’s all I need. The night. I’ll report first thing in the morning.”

Breanna recognized the furrowed eyebrows and locked mouth—Turk had dug in, afraid that in some bizarre way his manhood was being questioned. She’d seen that look on the face of practically every male pilot she’d ever dealt with, including her husband’s. Once set, there was no way for them to back down.

But he did genuinely want to do it. She could read that as well.

“You can report tomorrow?” she asked gently.

“Deal.” He jumped to his feet and held out his hand to shake. “Thanks, boss.”

Breanna rose. His handshake was firm and enthusiastic.

“I’ll have Lisa make the arrangements,” she told him. “You’ll have a civilian flight to Arizona—the tickets will be in your e-mail queue by this evening.”

“Thanks.”

Oh God, she thought as she watched him leave. Did I do the right thing?

TURK KICKED HIMSELF ALL THE WAY DOWN THE HALL. He could have gotten the entire seventy-two hours off if he’d been smart about it.

But he wanted to get back into the swing of things. Feel the adrenaline he’d felt over Libya. He wanted to get back into combat.

Li wasn’t going to be happy about the timing, though. They’d planned this for weeks—months, since they’d met.

But he’d be back in the thick of things, flying. Controlling the nano-UAVs meant he’d be in the air close to them.

And Iran—this was going be something real.

TURK MET LI AT THE BAGGAGE CLAIM. HER LIPS WERE softer than he remembered, her hug more delicious. Oblivious to the crowd passing on both sides, they wrapped themselves together, merging their bodies in long delayed desire.

By the time their lips parted, Turk felt more than a little giddy. He was tempted to blow off the dinner reservations and go directly to the hotel, but Li’s appetite prevailed. Halfway through dinner at the fancy rooftop restaurant the glow on her face convinced him he’d made the right choice.

But it also made it hard to tell her that he had to leave in the morning.

It got harder with every minute that passed. Turk ordered himself another beer, then a glass of rye whiskey when she ordered dessert.

“It’s a beautiful view,” said Li, glancing toward the window. With the sun down, the rooftop patio was no longer oppressively hot, and when she suggested they have a nightcap at the bar there, Turk readily agreed. Words were growing sparser and sparser, and yet he knew he had to talk—had to tell her what was up. But he felt paralyzed.

Every day at work, testing planes or in combat, he made dozens of decisions, immediately and without hesitation. His life, and often those of others, depended on it. He’d learned long ago that worrying too much about whether a decision was right or wrong was worse than making no decision at all. You were always going to do something somewhere sometime that might be wrong; you did your best to keep those numbers down, but you didn’t obsess. Otherwise you did nothing.