The Command by David Poyer Page A

out and began sifting feed into a trough. The animals slowly congregated, but they didn’t seem eager to eat. The small man glanced his way a couple of times; then walked over.
    â€œKomak bokonam?”
said the Iranian.
    A northern-flavored Farsi. “Your sheep seem tired,” Malik told him, in the same language, though he knew his accent would sound strange.
    â€œThey’ve been that way for some time. The lambs—they don’t grow like they should.”
    â€œYou might consider feeding them something to pep them up. There are such things.”
    â€œAre there? I’ll have to look into that,” the herder said, bending to feel along a lamb’s flank.
    The man went back to the car. He watched for a while longer, listening to the frenzied voices on the radio. Thinking about them, and about the sheep, and about where he was bound next.
    Then only a tracing in the air of dust and smoke marked where he had been.

8

Norfolk, Virginia
    D AN woke on an upper floor of the Omni Hotel to find his wife already up. It was early yet. The windows were still dark, the river beyond a swatch of blackness. The shaded desk lamp was glowing.
    Not moving, not letting her know he was awake, he lay watching her.
    Blair was tapping busily on the notebook computer her aide carried around for her. The half-moon glasses she wouldn’t wear in public were perched on her nose. She worried at her teeth with a pencil eraser as she stared at the screen. The front of her hotel bathrobe was open.
    Blair Titus was as unlike his first wife as it was possible to get. Where Susan had been dark and spare, Blair was tall and pale and blond. Even now, breasts exposed by the unbelted robe, her utter concentration gave her an air of inaccessible professionalism. This, he knew, was a front. She had a passionate, even reckless side. But he’d seen her other persona, too. Fixing a careless witness or pompous general with a pointed query, which every attempt to evade would only widen the wound.
    Her relationship with authority was different from his. Where he both envied and suspected it, neither position nor rank intimidated her. She had a doctorate in operations research, a juris doctor degree from George Mason, and a stepfather who owned six thousand acres in Prince Georges County, Maryland. He could see how insecure men found her threatening and reacted with hatred that was really fear.
    They’d met on the deck of a tanker in a sandstorm, when he was exec of the foredoomed
Turner Van Zandt
and she the defense aide for Bankey Talmadge. And again in Bahrain, where one night had interlocked their lives like enzymes recognizing the molecule that might complete them. Agreeing the odds were against them. Until one day, as he stepped out of an isolation ward, she’d persuaded him they had to try.
    Blair had started as a presidential management intern. From thereshe’d gone to the House as a junior staff member, then to the Senate, tracking political favors and working the military beat. Then to the Armed Services Committee staff when Talmadge had taken over as chairman. She’d briefed the candidate on military issues during the campaign, and Les Aspin had asked for her by name for Defense. When the list came through, her job was manpower and personnel. She’d sailed through her hearings, one of which he’d managed to get down from Newport to catch.
    Taking over her Pentagon office, she’d told him, was harder. Over a hundred military and civilians and five appointees. She worried about being the first woman in the post. How she felt awkward at parades— everyone watching and she couldn’t screw up. He’d been able to give her a couple of tips; how to put military people at ease, and when to take the reins.
    It wasn’t a traditional marriage. They grabbed weekends and holidays together, scheduling meetings around each other’s commitments. Once in a while they had a few days together in