Orphan's Alliance (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner Page A

than you to make them right. But if you don’t like the window you’re looking into, your eyes wander.”
    General Cobb slapped his palms on his knees and sighed. “Alright. Assuming, which you shouldn’t for one minute, that I might let you break your pick attempting a job that fits you like garters fit a goat, tell me why you want to try.”
    I squirmed in my chair. “You know Sharia Munshara Metzger and I served together.”
    He turned his face to the ceiling. “The Munchkin. Shorter than her machine gun, but that gal could shoot the ass off a flea at six hundred yards.”
    I smiled. Nat Cobb was a GI’s general, who remembered every soldier he ever commanded, or so the story went. Of course, it was easier for a general to remember a soldier who now held a seat on the House Armed Services Committee.
    “Munchkin’s son is my godson. His father was my best friend.”
    Nat Cobb nodded. “Jude’s had his problems. Most ex-POWs do.”
    “I’m getting too old to call the Army my only family. I’ve spent most of my career overseas or Extra-T. I’d like to spend some time around my godson.”
    “Separation from family comes with this job, Jason.” He walked around his desk, then rested a hand on my shoulder. He stood still for ten heartbeats, then nodded. “But maybe we can squash two toads with the same rock. When we get to the Tank this afternoon—”
    “The Tank?” Hair stood on my neck. The Tank was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Conference Room. In two prior Pentagon tours, I’d spent nine whole minutes in the Tank.
    “You think I’m the only person in Washington who read your report? Anyway, after you finish your presentation, just behave out of character for once.” He wagged his finger in my direction. “Meaning you shut your pie hole, except to follow my lead.”
    Nat Cobb fumbled behind himself until he found the edge of his desk, then leaned back against it. I sighed. I was back in Washington. Where there was nothing odd about following the lead of a blind man.
TWELVE
    PEOPLE EXPECT THETank to be some subterranean Batcave, with 360-degree flatscreen animated wall maps, and battalions of field-grade officers pointing at holos of every trouble spot on Earth, and, lately, off it.
    Actually, the Tank in 2061 was what it had been, on and off, for a century: a large, soundproofed conference room on the first floor of the Pentagon, just inside the Potomac River entrance. In the Tank’s center stood a mahogany conference table that dated back one hundred years, now with a holo gen carpentered into its center. Military-subject oil paintings, which got changed out to suit the taste of the current chairman, hung on the walls. By tradition, one, a rendering of Eisenhower being knighted at Westminster Abbey, never changed.
    Batcave or not, with all the brass in the room, the armpits of my uniform shirt were damp by the time the chairman finished introducing the other Vh as whose elbows touched the mahogany. On my prior visit to the Tank, I had occupied a horse holder’s chair along the wall.
    Much in the room would have surprised Eisenhower. The holo gen, of course. And the addition to the Joint Chiefs of the Admiral commanding the United Nations Space Force, which was for practical purposes a branch-level U.S. outfit eye-to-eye with the Air Force and Navy. But Ike, who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex,” would have understood the makeup of the table’s placeholders for this meeting. The chief of each service branch got a seat, and the chairman, of course.
    A Defense undersecretary, who had been a lobbyist for Lockheed, the Kodiaks’ manufacturer, filled one seat.
    In another seat sat an undersecretary from the State Department, who had dreamed up the Kodiaks-for-Peace scheme in the first place. State had then negotiated with the United Nations to borrow the U.N. name for the mission. In return for which the U.S. would quietly bear the entire cost, and would take all the