With all the gravity Jack could deliver, he met his mentor’s stare and said with the very meat of his soul, “Please do not mistake my reticence about our odds as reticence about the necessity of our mission, sir. I am absolutely with you, to the end. Believe it, sir. Do not doubt that for a second. The odds may be against us but so be it. Me whining about it won’t improve things one iota. I am here, and I will fight these bastards to the end.”

They looked at each other a moment then both turned to look back out at the evening sky. Jack smiled a bit and then decided to add a little addendum to his last sentence, “… preferably theirs.”

Barrett laughed a little and then shook his head. Good man, he thought, and nodded. Yes, the kind of man you wanted in a situation like this. Barrett took a deep breath. It was surprising how therapeutic it was to talk about it all, even if all they did was come to the same grim conclusion.

He wasn’t sure which cliché applied more: ‘a problem shared’ or ‘misery loves company,’ but either way he did feel less despondent than he usually did these days. He thought about his team. They didn’t have much, but what they had was good. In the end they were probably all royally screwed, but with a bit of luck they would at least make the bastards hurt before it all ended.

Emotional moment over, he coughed a little and they both decided it was time to move on, “Now then, Captain, why don’t we see what Martin and his new team are up to?”

Jack nodded, opening the door, “Very good, sir.”

* * *

“What we have here, Colonel,” said Martin Sobleski inside the lab hangar, “is a deuterium fluoride laser, which I have to say is pretty damn cool. It goes some way to duplicating the type of missile defense system that we think the Chinese are developing.”

Neither the colonel nor the captain nor Dr. Sobleski made eye contact with each other as the doctor cursorily mentioned their cover story for the project. In truth, the colonel did not really need a cover story at this stage. Being one of the primary military research facilities in the world, Hanscom Air Field had several lasers on site that they could use to run their tests and more than enough expertise in that field to fill a conference room.

But if Dr. Sobleski was going to consult with all the field experts he wanted to, he needed a classified project code to work with in order to secure the scientists’ silence. It was either have a code or tell yet more people the real reason for their research, which they had decided to avoid unless absolutely necessary.