Carney’s berth and Ildeva’s should’ve been occupied by more experienced Rangers. Maybe this would be Carney’s chance to prove himself. General Carney—in charge of the SubOrbital Drop-Heavy program—had wedged his son into the assignment. Burkett had to admit to himself that he had a prejudice against the young officer.

  “How’s it look, Art?” Captain Mayweather asked, joining him at the bottom of the ramp. Neither man had rucks or weapons—orderlies from ground crew had already loaded in the officers' gear.

  “Good team, mostly. But Carney? Really?”

  Mayweather sighed. “He seems to have gotten through most of his commando training…”

  Burkett grimaced. “Most of it?” Even after army commando school, Carney couldn’t be half as qualified as the others. He’d never been a Ranger.

  Ranger training was famously rigorous. An average of only forty-five percent of trainees made it through. Some died in training—of hypothermia or hyperthermia, of snakebite, of drowning, of heart attack. Ranger training was designed to push soldiers close to death, because combat would take them there later. Having Carney plugged into a squad of Rangers was like a spoiled terrier yipping behind a pack of attack Dobermans.

  General Carney wouldn’t understand—he’d never been a Ranger either.

  “Can’t we find a reason to scrub him from the mission?”

  “He was added to the list last minute—probably so we couldn’t do that,” Mayweather replied. “I suspect Hassner was transferred out to S-9 so Lieutenant Carney could be dropped on us.” He grimaced. “Maybe Rod could say Carney’s got flu symptoms, but the General would know what was up. So—naw.” He rubbed his nose. “And the General wants him in the action, told me that on the phone. ‘Don’t leave him at the orbcraft.’”

  Burkett nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on him. Maybe he’s better than he looks. You said something else about new ordnance, Captain?”

  “Yeah, it’s another one of those half-tested jobs,” Mayweather said. “Talos III, based on the Talos combat suit.”

  “Talos power armor? They finally get one to work?”

  “This one’s supposed to.”

  “They always say that.”

  “It hasn’t been tested in combat, but Corporal Dabiri used to be a tester for Talos prototypes, so he’s got familiarity. He’s going to test this model on the mission.”

  “Without having tried it before today.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Mayweather shook his head and gave a sour grin. “It’s the General’s way.”

  “Why does he do that?” Burkett said. “Has he got some kind of investment in the company that makes ’em?” This was talking trash to a superior officer about an even more superior officer, but Burkett and Mayweather were tight—they’d each saved the other’s life more than once. Mayweather treated him like a man of equal rank.

  “Not legally.” The captain shrugged. “But people have ways.” Mayweather clomped up the titanium ramp and Burkett followed him into the S-7’s fuselage.

  Thirty seconds later the ramp whirred up and locked firmly into place. A few minutes more, and the S-7 began atmosphere control as the mothership began rumbling onto the runway.

  THREE

  MONASTERY OF ST. BASIL

  MOLDOVA

  Frederic Dupon was certain he wouldn’t be able to bear it. He was already in pain with his broken nose, and he was endlessly terrified. Worse was coming. Today, they would begin the torture.

  “In the natural course of things,” Lutzoff had said carelessly.

  As Dupon contemplated impending torture, the non-disclosure oath he had signed with the European Union seemed to wither in his mind. It now seemed absurd. Lying on his bunk—heart pounding, belly rippling with nausea—he remembered what Lutzoff had told him, just two nights before.

  “You know, Frederic,” the oily, balding Russian said, Adam’s apple bobbing on his long neck, “this monastery was built by monks devoted to St. Basil, who was a true fanatic. They came from Russia to build it, all because Basil had a vision. It took many years to complete it, and much determination. Look at it now! Crumbling at the edges, abandoned but for us! Their precious chapel used to store dried meat and toilet paper.

  “Things are built, and they fall apart, Frederic. The European Union crushes national identity a little more each year. Nothing lasts, nothing matters. Loyalty is for family and friends and oneself. I myself do not waste it on anything else. I am—” He shrugged ruefully, and adjusted his white coat. “—just a well-paid hireling. They employ me because I work carefully. I have a special method. Please understand, however, I do not stop till it is finished, Frederic. However—if you choose to help us, we will move you and your mother and father to a safe place.

  “We know where your parents are, of course…”

  Lutzoff’s sinuous rhetoric made sense when nothing else seemed to. Dupon had been transported to the medieval world; dragged into an underground cell, damp and unheated, smelling of rat droppings and mold and shit. They had to use buckets here.

  As well, the company of the other surviving prisoners was increasingly odious. Dupon had grown to dislike them intensely. Johansen—the one he’d respected most and the first to be tortured—had died, much to Lutzoff’s surprise, it seemed. A weak heart.

  Even if Dupon cooperated wholeheartedly, he couldn’t trust these men to let him go. Most were Bulgarian mobsters, but their interrogator was asking questions specifically useful to Russian military intelligence, and Lutzoff was a Russian. They might let him live, but in some remote location, and only until his usefulness came to an end.

  Then he would be shot, buried in an unmarked grave.

  Of that, Dupon was certain.

  The door to the cell clanked open and Keruyn, a towering slab of a man with long blond hair and tattoos swarming his thick neck, was there with a cattle prod in one hand. Just behind him was Lutzoff.

  “Come along, Frederic,” the Russian said, his voice dripping with faux sympathy. “I have something new to try. It will help you make up your mind.” Looking theatrically sad, Lutzoff lifted a heavy-duty shop vise into the light. “You see what you force us to do? We start low on your feet and tighten it and crack, and crack a little more, and we move upward six or eight inches, and we do it again. Then another six inches. Decisiveness grows and grows, as this simple instrument marches up your body. It doesn’t make a bloody mess, either. I like that.”

  Heart hammering, Dupon stood, wobbling with terror—then tried to rush past Keruyn. The cattle prod flashed and Dupon fell to his knees, twitching spasmodically.

  Keruyn grabbed Dupon around the throat and dragged him by the neck into the dimly lit corridor, along the musty flagstones, and through the door that led to Hell.

  * * *

  Everyone was in a flight seat except Captain Mayweather. They were buckled in, and the body-conformable smart-netting, used to deal with extreme gravitational conditions, was clasped around each of them. Oxygen masks waited on the seats next to the headrests.

  Mayweather held onto the side of the open hatch that led into the flight deck, facing the team.

  “It’s ten hours later in Moldova,” the Captain told them over the rumbling of the mothership leaving the hangar. “When we get there, in a little over an hour, it’ll be dark. No moon. Cloudy, weather moderate. Optimum conditions.” He paused, then added, “After Mommy Dearest hits the air, we’ve got about twenty minutes before we reach thirty-five thousand feet. There we detach.”

  Most of them were familiar with the routine, so Burkett figured he was laying this part out for Ken Carney and Des Andrews.

  “Six seconds after dropping from the mothership,” Mayweather went on, “we’ll burn methane and shoot up into lower Earth orbit. A little over an hour after that we’ll be in Drop-Heavy position over Moldova. It’ll be about one-thirty in the morning when we touch down. Cloudy night, no moon, good time for an assault. We’ll move toward the target with maximum pronto. You should have the infil tactics on your hand-screens by now—let’s go over it…”

  * * *

  Minutes later the mothership was racing down the strip for takeoff. Mayweather was in his seat up front. Burkett was seated behind Tafir and Lem Dorman, Carney in front of them.

  Cpl. Tafir Dabiri, from Queens New York, seemed restless, adjusting his seat unnecessarily. He was an experienced SubOrbital hand. Reliable and smart. A Sunni Muslim, speaking Farsi but also fluent in Arabic. A believer without being outwardly religious. An engineer and experienced combat soldier, he was physically ripped, and maybe a little too proud of it. All too lively a sense of humor.

  Tafir liked to haze SubOrbital newbies.

  By contrast, PFC Dorman was relaxed. Curly black hair, heavy eyebrows, slightly crooked smile. Born in Israel, grew up in Philadelphia. His dad was former Mossad. Lemuel was a specialist in quiet kills, earning numerous commendations and two silver stars. He could’ve been promoted several times but seemed to dodge it.

  “I like it better down here,” he told Burkett. “Get more action.”

  Normally a squad would have more PFCs and Specialists, but the necessary skillset and clearances for SubOrbital meant the team was top-heavy with commissioned and non-com officers. They had learned to be tacitly flexible where rank was concerned, at least up to Burkett, who was the XO.

  Waiting for takeoff, Burkett watched as Lem calmly tinkered with a setting on his night-vision goggles. Dorman chuckled to himself at some private joke and Burkett wondered what he was thinking about.

  “Hey, Lieutenant Carney,” Tafir said in a carefully modulated tone. He leaned forward. “Have you been on a combat-ready orbcraft before?”

  “I went up on the trainer,” Carney said a little defensively—and loudly — over the rising noise of the engines. There was everything from deep bass-tone roars to a falsetto shriek, with metallic rattling mixed in as the mothership took off. “And I visited USOS 7. Had my weightlessness training.”

  “Yes sir,” Tafir said. “Course, the trainer’s not combat-ready—it’s not as big and it hasn’t been fired on. Two missions ago we were fired on, caught two RPG rounds as we came to the infil. Armor held, ’cept in a couple of places, but sometimes it’s like we never quite got it repaired. Hey Lemuel, you hear that rattling?”

  Dorman nodded solemnly. “Now you mention it… Whoa—you hear that?”

  “What?” Carney said, looking around quickly.

  “Probably nothing,” Tafir said. “You see, Lieutenant, the problem’s gonna be when we hit the hard acceleration. You know, sir, once Mommy Dearest lets her baby go and we start to burn fuel, this big ol’ orbcraft kicks us up to seven gees. That’s intense shit. Blacked out one time. I always think the g-force’ll snap something in the ship, breach the hull, and we’ll suddenly lose air pressure and I’ll feel my eyes pop out of my skull…”

  Burkett leaned out a little to check on Carney. The second lieutenant’s knuckles were white on the armrests. Burkett had wanted to see how Carney would react, but it was time to nip this in the bud.

  “Tafir, Lem—zip it!”

  “Yes sir!” they said together, barely keeping their faces deadpan.

  “Carney—ignore those two scared little girls,” Burkett said. “They get worked up at the beginning of every takeoff. Some weird paranoid ritual. There’s nothing wrong with this craft.”

  Carney let out a long breath. “Oh, well, I thought so…” His fingers relaxed on the armrests. “I mean, I wasn’t…”

  Burkett smiled. Being first lieutenant, he outranked Carney—maybe he should give him hell for being suggestible. But it was the guy’s first Drop-Heavy flight.

  * * *

  They soared to the altitude where the S-7 would separate from the mothership. Less than fifteen minutes passed, then one of the mothership pilots could be heard over the radio.

  “Ready for release… launching S-7… good luck and see you at Wyatt’s when you get back,” the pilot said. Then he added, “We’re buying.”

  “Roger that,” Mayweather said.

  There was a metallic screech, a ker-chunk-chunk sound, and the bottom fell out of Burkett’s stomach as the S-7 was dropped from the mothership. The orbcraft jarred with teeth-rattling force as full windage hit them. At 35,000 feet—10,668 meters—the S-7 used no engine power for six seconds. It shot forward, carried by momentum, to give the mothership time to ascend and veer away.

  Six seconds—and then came the thunder of the orbcraft’s big engines as it started its burn of cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The stage-combustion engine accelerated to three gees in under a minute, going quickly from Mach 1, Mach 2, Mach 3, and up. Supersonic, hypersonic, high-hypersonic, hyper velocity—

  The vibrations running through the S-7 changed, becoming fine-tuned, more of a buzzing as they arced up toward the Kármán Line—the edge of space. It was rough for a while, but Burkett loved it, because he identified with the roaring engines and the embodied power of the rising orbcraft forcing its way from the atmosphere—penetrating space, overpowering gravity itself.

  It was always badass.

  The g-force increased, to four, then five, pushing relentlessly on Burkett, seeming to try to push his face off his skull. As Tafir once said, “It’s wrapping my cheeks around my damn ears.” Instead of a fighter pilot’s pressure suit they relied on the automatic compression of the smart-netting, tightening around them to keep their blood flowing to the brain. Even with the netting, it was harder to breathe because of the invisible giant’s hand pressing on his chest.

  Then his training kicked in and he used the Hook maneuver, controlling his glottis while breathing slowly, deeply, and firmly, and compressing his abdomen to press blood up into his brain. Still the g-force mounted, until Burkett’s vision blurred. Too much of this and they’d all hit G-LOC and black out, despite the circulatory assistance from the netting.

  Ike leveled off the S-7 and the pressure eased dramatically. Heavy gravitation dropped away second by second.

  Soon, they’d be in microgravity.

  Directional rockets snapped into burn and they tilted twenty degrees upward, so that they hit LEO—low Earth orbit—following the curve of the planet as they rocketed northeast, skating along the Kármán Line. Burkett always imagined this part of the flight as surfing on the upper atmosphere.

  Glancing out a port, he saw the curve of the Earth swelling, the luminescent blue of the atmosphere showing an indigo band where the air thinned. There were glimpses of cobalt sea and craggy mountain ranges looking brown and purple. There was a wave of nausea as the last of the detectable gravity fell away, like a steep plunge in a roller coaster.

  Burkett hoped Carney hadn’t eaten anything in a while.

  All gear was supposed to be secured before flight, but there was always something that got loose. Someone’s hand-screen went floating up toward the ceiling, and Des Andrews cursed softly. It drifted back through the cabin, turning end over end before Burkett caught it. The motion made him slightly dizzy, though. He felt a bit sleepy, too — the first effects of microgravity. His body would adapt, but it helped to move around.

  “Keep your seats!” he called out, unbuckling from his own. The smart netting folded back and he drifted upward. He and Mayweather had the privilege of going up to the flight deck and Burkett always took advantage of it, partly for the practice in weightless motion.

  Still carrying the screen, he placed his free hand on the back of Carney’s chair to push himself into the aisle and then forward, drifting like Superman out for a leisurely flight. From time to time, he used his hand on the bulkhead or grabbed an overhead ring to keep him on course.

  “Hey, Andrews!” Burkett sent the all-purpose comm device spinning through the air. It moved in slow-mo through the air to Des, who caught it.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant!”

  “Hold onto your gear next time, Sergeant. Not gonna tell you again!”

  “You’re not, sir?” Des asked, as if skeptical.

  “No, next time you’ll get that thing stuck an inch into the back of your head!”

  Des grinned. “Roger that, sir.”

  Burkett drifted past Corporal Rodriguez. The medic was leaning back in his seat staring at the ceiling, probably trying to control a little nausea. A medic who knew as much as any emergency room doctor, Rodriguez had close-clipped black hair, dark eyes, a wide mouth. Thirty-six years old, he’d been recommended for the Medal of Honor for repeatedly risking his life under deadly fire to save the wounded. Endlessly compassionate, but unhesitating when it was necessary to neutralize an enemy combatant.

  Burkett reached the big flight deck—the cockpit of the S-7—and found Mayweather already inside, floating upright and hunkered a little behind the pilots. He was peering through the front viewport, where it looked as if they were about to plunge from day into darkness. An eerie twilight zone of dusk swept along with the turn of the planet.

  As the S-7 crossed the border into the night side, darkness draped over the flight deck and the lights of civilization appeared below, bright gleaming spots competing with those on the instrument panel. The moon was just visible, a gray orb hanging over the Earth’s horizon against the blackness of space.

  Their engines were silent now, since the orbcraft only needed them for course correction. It had reached its orbital maintenance speed of 18,000 MPH—29,000 kilometers per hour. At this rate they would circumnavigate the Earth in under an hour and a half.

  “How’s the Roman candle, Ike?” Burkett asked.

  “Flying straight and true, Lieutenant. We’re coming up on DH ZP in about forty-two.”

  Burkett nodded. Twenty klicks to the Zero Point, Drop-Heavy terminology for an orbital position directly overhead of the target. Somewhere in Nevada there were landing pods being tested that could drop directly down from Zero Point—they’d be faster, with only the briefest radar-lidar footprint.

  But the S-7 had to risk a period of semi-horizontal trajectory as it came down. Still, it came down steeply and accomplished a fast insert.