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ditched from Armstrong Space Station and hightailed it for home? Four? Five? More?”
    On the other hand, Brad thought coldly, he did need a good reason for leaving Sky Masters before his internship was up. Maybe this was his chance to create one. He looked hard at Carson. “I strongly suggest you shut up, Deke,” he said.
    â€œOr what?” Carson asked, still sneering.
    â€œOr I will kick your sorry Hangar Queen ass,” Brad told him. “And right in front of your little friends, too.”
    For a second, he thought the other man would play it smart and back down. That would be . . . disappointing. But then he saw Carson’s nostrils flare and knew he’d jabbed the right nerve with that Hangar Queen crack. Maybe it wasn’t fair to rub Deke’s face in the fact that his beloved Air Force had treated him like a broken-down bird useful only for spare parts, but this wasn’t exactly a time to be fair.
    Carson shoved his shoulder hard. “Screw you,” he snarled.
    One, Brad thought. He just smiled.
    Furious now, Carson started to shove him again.
    Now .
    Brad slid to the left, deflecting the other man’s arm up and away with a right fan block.
    Off balance, Carson stumbled forward.
    Moving swiftly and fluidly, Brad swung in behind him, sliding his left hand under and around the other man’s jaw to bring Carson’s throat into the crook of his elbow. At the same time, he brought his right hand over to grip the back of the former Air Force pilot’s head and pushed forward, exponentially increasing the force on his carotid arteries.
    Within seconds, deprived of any blood flow to his brain, Carson sagged, unconscious. Brad dropped him to the hangar floor. The self-defense training he had received from Chris Wohl and his countersurveillance operatives of Scion, even though long discontinued, still stuck with him.
    â€œWho’s next?” he asked, stepping over the other man’s limp body. He grinned. “I’ll be nice. You can both come at me at the same time.”
    But Carson’s two cronies were already backing away. One of them had his cell phone out. “Sky Masters Security?” he stammered. “We’ve got a big problem in the Simulator Building. We need help, right now!”
    The other looked at Brad with an odd mix of fear and curiosity in his eyes. “You know you’re totally fucked, McLanahan, don’t you?”
    Brad shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess I probably am.”

OSCE A RMS C ONTROL S TATION,
    NEAR S TAROVOITOVE,
    U RKAINIAN- P OLISH B ORDER
    T HAT SAME TIME
    Lieutenant General Mikhail Voronov, commander of Russia’s 20th Guards Army, leaned forward in the Kazan Ansat-U helicopter’s left-hand seat, studying the ground flashing below at 250 kilometers per hour. This part of western Ukraine was covered in tiny lakes, narrow rivers, and marshland. Patches of pine and oak forest alternated with small fields sown in rye, potatoes, and oats. There were relatively few roads, most of them running east toward Kiev and west toward the Polish frontier.
    A poor countryside, Voronov thought. But a useful place to keep a choke hold on the Ukrainians.
    â€œWe are five minutes out, sir,” the pilot told him. “Captains Covaci and Yurevich report they are ready for your inspection.”
    â€œVery good,” Voronov said.
    Stefan Covaci, a Romanian military police officer, and Vitalyi Yurevich, a member of Belarus’s border guards, jointly commanded one of the OSCE arms control posts sited at every border crossing into Ukraine. Since Romania was friendly to Ukraine and Belarus favored Russia, the dual command arrangement kept each national contingent reasonably honest and efficient.
    In theory, under the cease-fire agreement between Ukraine’s government and the separatists allied with Moscow, these stations were supposed to stem the flow of weapons and military technology that might trigger a new