True Allegiance

Like some sort of horrible snake, the bridge responded to the tower. It tilted and keeled over, the road peeling away before Jennifer as it leapt up and to the side. Jennifer saw thousands of cars turn on their sides, rotate like clothes in a washing machine.

Jennifer heard the awful roar, the unnatural screaming of thousands of voices, as the stream of red lights before her began to disappear.

There was nowhere for her to go. She turned to Julie, her eyes round with terror. She grabbed her hand.

“It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. Julie nodded slowly. Jennifer clasped her by the face and looked into her eyes. “I promise you,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. Now, just close your eyes, darling.”

Julie closed her eyes. Jennifer didn’t. She looked into the river below her, saw the disappearing taillights of the thousands of cars descending into the depths of the Hudson.

“God,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”

Part 1 BEFORE

Brett

Kabul, Afghanistan

BRIGADIER GENERAL BRETT HAWTHORNE LOOKED at his M9 magazine and cursed to himself. Empty.

He was sat up against a mud-brick hovel in the city’s poor part of town—even in Kabul, there was a large income gap—and felt the sweat trickle down cold between his shoulder blades. He hadn’t been alone for years—generals always had a personal security detail—but things had gone hellishly wrong.

Hawthorne was a bear of a man, six three in his bare feet and two hundred fifteen pounds in his underwear, with a graying blond crew cut and a face carved of granite. But he had plenty of smile lines. He just didn’t like showing those to people unless he knew them.

He looked up at the Hindu Kush. The city was romantically placed in full view of the mountain chain, a bizarre, large cyst at the bottom of the grandiose peaks. The Kabul River, which once passed lazily through the city, slicing it in half and providing it with an anchor, had dried up to a series of puddles, leaving the city afloat on the steppes.

It was freezing, just like every other December day. What wasn’t like every other day was the silence.

It was quiet, except for a few scattered screams and the occasional rapid-fire rounds. Hawthorne sucked in the smell of smoke with every breath; he could see the Kabul Serena Hotel burning. The new coalition government had bragged about the hotel as the standard-bearer for the modernization of the city, with its historically imitative Islamic architecture, satellite TV, and wireless Internet. Now the flames licked at the windows as ashes floated down on the city.

It wasn’t the only building burning. It seemed as though half the city was on fire.

Well, Brett thought to himself, at least I can tell those stupid bastards, “I told you so.”

A few short years ago, Afghanistan had seemed to be on the upswing. The Taliban had been on the run, hiding in the mountains of the Tora Bora region, sallying forth every so often to hit a supply chain, but mainly holing up waiting for the invaders to leave. The coalition forces had been systematically rooting them out from local areas, empowering Afghan forces to hold the areas, and funding local governance in those areas.

Hawthorne knew all of this because he had designed the strategy.

And now that strategy had gone to shit.

Brett Hawthorne was the youngest general in the American military. He’d grown up lower middle class in Chicago, his mother a teacher, his father a salesman for the local phone company. When his dad lost his job, the family moved from the more expensive North Side to the South Side of Chicago—poorer, industrial, and heavily black.

He’d been a shy kid, gentle, quiet, built like a reed. But he learned one skill pretty quickly at Thomas Edison High: how to talk his way out of a bad situation.

That, he learned from Derek.

On the second day of school, Brett was sitting by himself at lunch. He wasn’t one of the Irish kids, and he wasn’t one of the Italian kids, so he couldn’t sit with those cliques. And he’d made the mistake the day before of trying to befriend a couple of the black kids. That hadn’t gone well. He’d ended up with a black eye and a few new vocabulary words to add to his dictionary.

So today, he sat alone. Until he made the mistake of looking up. Standing above him, glaring at him, was a behemoth, a black kid named Yard. Nobody knew his real name—everybody just called him Yard because he played on the school football team, stood six foot five, clocked in at a solid two hundred eighty pounds, and looked like he was headed straight for a lifetime of prison workouts. The coach loved him. Everybody else feared him.

If Brett hadn’t looked up, everything would have worked out just fine. But then again, he didn’t have much choice, given that Yard grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him out of his seat like a rag doll.

Then Yard mumbled something in his face.

“What?” said Brett.