Command Authority Read Free Page A

the space we hadn’t cleared yet, which was the doorway at the end of the hall, but I couldn’t help thinking it would have been nice to have one more man to check six. Any hostiles who entered from the outside would have had an open shot at the back of my head. I kept my head on a swivel, but it’s not the same as having another gun in the fight.”
    Clark nodded. “We are a small force.”
    “Smaller now without Jack Junior,” Dom Caruso added.
    Driscoll said, “We might want to think about bringing someone new into the unit.”
    “Jack will be back,” Chavez replied. “You know as well as I do that as soon as we reactivate he won’t be able to stay away.”
    “Maybe so,” said Dom. “But who knows when that will happen.”
    Clark said, “Be patient, kid,” but it was clear to the others on the porch that Clark himself was champing at the bit to do something more impactful with his time. He was a warrior, he’d been in the middle of most every conflict the United States had been involved in for more than forty years, and although he’d retired from active operations with The Campus, he was clearly ready to do more than train.
    Clark looked out off the porch at the Bronco now; its doors were wide open, and the storm had only increased in intensity. By now the floorboards would have an inch of standing water, and the torn fabric upholstery would be waterlogged. “Glad I told you to use the farm truck.”
    Ding said, “It needed a good interior detailing.”
    The men laughed.
    “All right. Back to work,” Clark said. “You guys head back up the road, wait twenty minutes, and then try again. That will give me time to rehang the front door and move the configuration around. Dom, your grouping on the second target in the bedroom could have been a little tighter.”
    “Roger that,” Dom said. He’d fired his MP5 three times at target two, and all three rounds had struck the target’s head within two and a half inches of one another, but he wasn’t going to argue the point with Clark. Especially since all of Driscoll’s and Chavez’s targets had sub-two-inch groupings.
    “And Sam,” Clark said. “I’d like to see you breach the door a little lower. If you can get your head down another three inches as you enter, it could mean the difference between catching a round to the forehead and just getting a haircut.”
    “Will do, Mr. C.”
    Dom started to head off the porch, but he looked out at the weather. “No chance we are going to wait for the rain to stop before trying this again?”
    Ding walked straight out into the mud and stood under the heavy downpour. “I had a drill instructor back at Fort Ord, an Alabama redneck but a hell of a DI, who liked to say, ‘If it ain’t rainin’, you ain’t trainin’.’”
    Clark and Dom laughed, and even Sam Driscoll, the quietest of the bunch, cracked a smile.

2
    T he Russian Federation invaded its sovereign neighbor on the first moonless night of spring. By dawn their tanks ground westward along highways and back roads as if the countryside belonged to them, as if the quarter-century thaw from the Cold War had been a dream.
    This was not supposed to happen here. This was Estonia, after all, and Estonia was a NATO member state. The politicians in Tallinn had promised their people that Russia would never attack them now that they had joined the alliance.
    But so far, NATO was a no-show in this war.
    The Russian ground invasion was led by T-90s—fully modernized fifty-ton tanks with a 125-millimeter main gun and two heavy machine guns, explosive-reactive armor, and a state-of-the-art automated countermeasure system that detected inbound missiles and then launched missiles of its own to kill them in midair. And behind the T-90 warhorses, BTR-80 armored transporters carried troops in their bellies, disgorging them when necessary to provide cover for the tanks, and then retrieving them when all threats had been neutralized.
    So far, the land war was