The emergency team were ready. They’d been ready since the first warning that something was wrong on the space shuttle Argos. Now they started to jet, engulfing white foam over the stricken craft, snuffing out flames until the whole thing looked like a children’s toy in a bubble bath. The crew had come from the ground station to watch. There had been six men on board: five Americans and one Briton. Most of them were praying that the Americans, at least, would still be alive. They didn’t really give much thought to the only Briton, Major Michael Dreyfuss. These days, it was strictly a case of looking after number one.

The few small fires were quickly put out. Thankfully, the Argos had little fuel left in its tanks to burn. Nevertheless, the surface metal of the shuttle was too hot to touch, even with asbestos gloves. But they managed at last to wrench open the doors. Inside, they could smell smoke, singed rubber and something less pleasant still. They expected to find corpses, but the last thing anyone expected to find was five of them, one of which had its hands embedded in the neck of the single crew member left alive …

3

General Ben Esterhazy sat in the back of his chauffeur-driven limo and wondered why there was no bourbon left in the drinks cabinet. He hoped there’d be some at the airbase. Not that there was much left of the base. They were dismantling and moving, shipping the boys back to the States. Lousy damned country anyway. He’d spent a few years in Germany just after the war. People starving. A mother really would lie down and open her legs for a tin of beef and some powdered
whatever.

The country didn’t seem to have changed that much. But now Europe had forgotten all about World War Two, had gotten eyes bigger than its belly. All the talk now was of Europe, a Europe that saw no place for the US forces lined up in a thin defensive wall against the East.

‘Well, fuck them.’

‘Sorry, General?’ Esterhazy’s aide, Lieutenant Jerry Bosio, sitting in front beside the driver, had turned his head to catch the words.

‘Never mind,’ growled Esterhazy. He picked up a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky and poured himself an inch. Esterhazy had a jutting, aggressive face ending in a nose like that of Punch. He’d put on weight since they’d given him a desk job, but not much weight. His tits didn’t sag the way some middle-aged men’s did, and he could wrestle marines half his age.