Walker perked up at that. He steered toward the new target and saw that the enemy force was primarily infantry without much armored-vehicle strength. This did support Haney’s assessment. Walker launched his last four Hellfire missiles, then set his double-barreled Gatling gun to 1,500 rpm and started shooting. He felt the comfortable vibration of the machine gun through the chassis, watching as it scattered snow and powder like ground white pepper over the enemy skirmish line on the ground. But the intuition of a veteran armed helicopter pilot warned him of danger. He turned, only to see a soldier standing on a jeep fire a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to his left. Walker frantically shot off magnesium heat pellets as lures and swung backward for evasive maneuvers, but too late. The missile, trailing cobwebs of white smoke, had punched into the Comanche right under the nose.

When Walker woke from his brief explosion-induced concussion, he found that the helicopter had crashed in the snow. Walker scrambled desperately from the smoke-filled interior, bracing himself against a tree that had been severed neatly at waist height by the propeller. When he looked back, he could see the remains of Captain Haney in the front seat, blasted into a pulp by the explosion. When he looked forward, he saw a band of soldiers running toward him with submachine guns raised, their Slavic features clear.

Shaking, Walker dug out his handgun and set it on the snow in front of him. He dug out his Russian phrase book and began to clumsily read out his surrender.

“Y-ya postavil svoye oruzhiye. Ya voyennoplennym. V Zhenevskoy konventsii—”

Walker took a gun butt to the back of his head, then a boot to his belly. But as he collapsed into the snow, he was laughing. They might beat him half to death, but only half. He’d seen the eagle insignia of the Polish army on the soldiers’ collars.

JANUARY 7TH, MINSK,
NATO COMBAT OPERATIONS CENTER

“Get that goddamn doctor over here!” General Tony Baker roared.

The gangly military doctor ran over.

“What the hell went wrong?” Baker demanded. “You’ve messed with my dentures twice and they’re still buzzing!”

“I’ve never seen anything like it, General. Maybe it’s your nervous system. How about I give you a shot of local anesthetic?”

“Give me the dentures, sir,” said a major on the staff, walking over. “I know how to fix them.” Baker took out his dentures and set them on the major’s proffered paper towel.

According to the media, the general lost his two front teeth when his tank was hit during the Gulf War. Only Baker himself knew that this wasn’t true. That time he’d broken his lower jaw; he’d lost the teeth earlier.

It had been at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, during the Mount Pinatubo eruption, when the world around seemed to be volcanic ash and nothing else. The sky was ash, the ground was ash, the air was ash, too. Even the C-130 Hercules that he and the last of the base personnel were about to board was coated with a thick layer of white. The dim red of magma glimmered intermittently in the gray distance.