Revolution by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Bacau, Romania

2320

WITH THE DETAILS WORKED OUT, STONER STAYED NORTH, waiting for word from Washington on whether his plan would be approved. A small part of him—an insignificant, tiny slice—hoped it wouldn’t be, at least not immediately. He wanted a few more days with Sorina Viorica.

He wanted more than that.

As soon as Fairchild relayed the OK—and the conditions—Stoner shut that part of himself away and called General Locusta at his corps headquarters. Locusta’s aide was reluctant to even bother getting the general—until Stoner said he had definitive information on the location of the guerrilla camps in Moldova.

“Where are they?” Locusta snapped when he came on the line.

“I’ll be at your headquarters in an hour. We’ll talk,” said Stoner. He killed the transmission, giving Locusta no time to respond.

Stoner had read everything the Agency had on General Locusta, but like most CIA briefs on military officers in Eastern Europe, it offered little beyond his résumé, lacking insight into the man. Locusta was an infantryman by training; among his military honors was a marksmanship badge, earned as a lieutenant. He was well-regarded as a general officer, though considered abrasive by the defense minister and the president.

Locusta seemed to have been marked for greater things from the time he joined the army as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant, fresh out of university. He’d received training in Russia as a young man and had been posted there for about a year in the early 1980s. He’d also toured Great Britain, Spain, and Italy as part of Romania’s initiative to join NATO.

His family had connections to Ceausescu, the former dictator. That had hurt them in the years following Ceausescu’s fall, but not so severely that the family wasn’t well off now. Locusta himself had some property, though not great wealth.

Nothing in the report told Stoner what he wanted to know: the odds that Locusta would put a knife in his back just for the fun of it.

They were about fifty-fifty, Stoner guessed, after he finished telling the general about the guerrilla camps in Moldova. Average.

Locusta sat silently for nearly a minute after Stoner finished. Most of his aides had left for home hours ago; it was so quiet in the corps HQ that Stoner could hear the clock ticking on Locusta’s desk.

“How did you find this information out?” said the general finally.

“I can’t get into the exact methods we use,” replied Stoner. He pulled over one of the seats—a metal folding chair—and sat down.

“Then how can I judge how accurate the information is?”

Stoner shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to find out together.”

“Together?”

“I want to go on the raid.”

“Why?”

“I think the Russians are helping the guerrillas. I think they may have been responsible for killing some of our people, and this will help me find out.”

Another man might have asked if Stoner didn’t trust him, but the general accepted the explanation without comment. That told Stoner that the general understood the value of seeing things for yourself, that he was a man who liked to act, rather than have others act for him.

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