Sherrie recognized the familiar face of Sergeant Evans waiting for them at the door. “What’s up?”

“There have been a number of targeted assassinations of general officers, starting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Sean Williams, also Lieutenant General Homer Shoemaker, commander in Afghanistan who was at home in Kansas; a Major General Seamus McHenry, of the Command and General Staff College and about a dozen of his students; they tried for Brigadier General Len Keller, but missed him but got the rest of his family. With the exception of General Keller and his aide, it was a clean sweep. All of the generals, their aides, and families. General Keller and his aide were eating Christmas dinner with his troops. The weapon of choice was a large truck bomb.

“It is SOP, there are a number of plans in place for when senior members of the government or the military are killed. A strategic alert is called, the President goes to NEACAP, the Veep to Mt. Thunder, and the Cabinet and Congress are dispersed.”

Something buzzed, and he said, “Wait one.” He turned to the equipment and spoke only in grunts of “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” Eventually, he turned around. “Sergeant Conejo, the President himself has authorized me to convey a message to you and to offer you a week’s permission to return to Columbia. Early this morning, at Christmas Eve mass, where there were a lot of children singing carols, Juan Tomas was assassinated by a truck bomb along with over five hundred innocents, more than half children.”

“You can use my Gulfstream,” Weaver said.

“Stop!” Sherrie interrupted. “Bombs seem to be the spider’s favorite weapon. You will ensure a new crew of mechanics go over your bird from nose to tail, not to mention bomb-sniffing dogs, bomb-sniffing robots, and maybe a psychic or two, before anyone flies in it.”

“Major Richardson, it’s General Keller,” Sergeant Evans said.

Sherrie took his seat and put on the earphones. “Major Richardson, General. I don’t know what to say.”

“I am holding back, Major. You need to do so as well. I have orders for you, direct from the President. ‘You are to prosecute unrestricted war against the sums-of-bitches. You are to do whatever it takes, go wherever you have to in order to kill every last one of these people, from this spider on down. You are authorized to draw on any unit of the American armed forces, wherever situated, in order to accomplish your mission. They will obey you, because I just retired fifty-two general officers who said we had six months to a year before we’d hear from that crazy person again. General Williams paid in full measure for his arrogance. Oh, and please, if you can ... do it before more innocents are killed. I’m sending you Mad Mike, a former Green Beret turned CIA agent. He’s your liaison with the FBI and other agencies. They hate him.”

General Keller spoke one last time. “I lost my wife of forty years, two daughters, my son, their spouses, and four grandkids. My aide lost his wife and unborn daughter. You go and fuck these guys!”

“Sir, I heard a suggestion from Colonel Morrison that we should start playing cowboys and Indians. Seems like a good idea.”

“You do that. Right now, I have to go and stop twelve thousand four hundred and seven men and women from getting some righteous payback.”

Sherrie thought for a moment. “Do we have a link to Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, and Colonel Morrison?”

“I’ll try to raise them, Major.”

A few minutes later, the door to their improvised comm center opened. The base commander, a brigadier general, and the hospital commander, a full colonel, were there. “There have been incidents at the main gate. A UPS delivery truck was stopped at the gate, and the driver ordered out so it could be searched, the base then being in a state of lockdown. The driver detonated the truck. This is a strategic command base; there are people who monitor that gate 24/7/365. There is a secondary barrier, concrete pillars that can be lifted up on command. No sooner than they had been lifted when a god-damn cement truck impaled itself on it, and it too detonated.”

“We never heard anything,” Sherrie said, stunned.

“We have very good soundproofing,” the hospital commander said with a dry voice. “Dr. Palmer, most of my docs are away from base, and while more than thirty airmen are missing and presumed dead, a dozen are wounded. I need to send everyone I’ve got. You are training as an ER doc...”

“Of course, sir.”

“There are two EMT-qualified men and a woman outside your door. They are authorized an ambulance. Please.”

“Absolutely, I helped in LA after the attack there,” Phyllis said.

“Phyllis, they get a real hard-on killing first responders. If you see anything unusual, get very, very small, really, really fast.”

“Warn our EMTs as well, Dr. Palmer,” the base commander interjected.

After Phyllis and the other doctor had left, the base commander turned to Sherrie. “I’ve hated you since you arrived here; actually, as soon as I knew you were coming. Then I watched a half dozen senior officers throw their careers away, and I bit my tongue. Miami Beach? I told myself it was a one-off attack, and you were paranoid about who it was directed against.”

“Then came LA. I have never been more humbled in my life ... right up to today. I never dreamed they would be brave or bold enough to attack a strategic base. I have half of the 101st Airborne en route to guard my perimeter, and they will not be carrying unloaded weapons like my people were today.”

“Sir, I once had the chance to strangle the person behind this with my bare hands. I’m told that the reason I didn’t was because I’m civilized. It is getting harder and harder to retain that.”

“Amen. I understand that there is a long message coming in at my comm center, detailing the new rules of engagement and other changes in policy. I’ve heard back channel comments that a seriously large percentage of the general officers in the army have been retired today. Whatever you need, whatever assistance I can give you, is yours.”

Sherrie chuckled. “I realize it’s not that funny, but Weaver Gold houses his Gulfstream here. I want a crew of mechanics to go over every square inch of that aircraft. I want bomb sniffing dogs, robots, whatever it takes to clear it for takeoff. He has his own crew, but today I need two new pilots. They are going to Columbia in South America for a week or so. No one who has ever worked on that aircraft and has the highest level security clearances you have.”

“A good exercise! I’ll order it at once.”

“It’s as real as it gets, not an exercise,” she corrected the general who commanded the base. “This was a coordinated bomb plot, taking out all sorts of people. You had better get ready to do the same thing with all of your aircraft.”

“Like the worst days of the Cold War?” he asked.

“Exactly. The person we are hunting’s MO is to show you candid photos of your family and then start stacking money in front of you. Take the money and keep you and your family alive; refuse, and you all die. Damn few people can resist. Please note that the assassinations today included families, down to infants.”

“My God! How do you stop enemies like that?”

“Since World War II, we have been playing at war, not fighting them. We must make it very clear to everyone, everywhere, that we will do whatever it takes to defend ourselves. If that includes fully mobilizing, reinstating the draft, declarations of war, the whole nine yards ... we will do what we must do. And in the end, we will go into every country that is supporting terrorism and pacify them like we did Germany and Japan. Anything else means our grandkids will be fighting this slime. I will not bequeath a world like that to them. We’ll finish this now.”