Edward Briggs always knew Hansen was a dreamer, but this time he was going too far. He did not like the idea of America scrapping its nuclear arsenal, even if everybody else did the same. "That's going to mean a lot of wheeling and dealing, Mr. President. It's going to be a hard sell in some quarters."
Right, Hansen thought. And the hardest sell of all was going to be the Pentagon. "Well, dammit, nothing in this world is easy. But this is one move toward sanity that may have just gotten easier, thanks to that idiot on the island. I'm going to rework that speech I've got scheduled for the General Assembly. We lined up the Security Council, including the Permanent Members, for the right reasons once before. I'm going to see if we can't do it again. This time I think we've got an even better reason."
"All right, we can evacuate them on a Huey," Eric Nichols was saying. “They'll take care of them on the Kennedy, courtesy of the U.S. government. But just who the hell are you?"
He was in the upper level of the SatCom living quarters, talking to a man in a black pullover who was packing a pile of Greek balaclavas into a crate. What in blazes had gone on? He had arrived in the lead Huey, to find one of the Apaches crash-landed, only one SatCom space vehicle left, and the Deltas on the ground, futilely searching for terrorists. But instead of terrorists, they had only come across this group of men in black pullovers, who had surrendered en masse. Turned out they were friendlies. And now this guy had just asked for a Huey to take out a couple of their ranks who had been shot up, one pretty badly.
"My name is Pierre Armont," replied the man. He seemed to be the one in charge, and he had a French accent.
"I mean, who the hell are you? And all these guys? CIA?" Nichols couldn't figure any of it. Two minutes after he landed, a shock wave pounded the island. Then when he tried to radio the Kennedy, to find out what in good Christ had happened, he couldn't get through. There was no radio traffic, anywhere. He had a sinking feeling he knew what that meant. And now, these clowns. They didn't look like regular military, but there was something about the way they moved. . . .
"We're civilians," Armont said cryptically. "And we're not here. You don't see us."
'The hell I don't. What in blazes do you mean?" Nichols didn't like wiseacres who played games. The problem was, these guys clearly weren't desk jockeys, the one type he really despised. No, they seemed more like a private antiterrorist unit, and he didn't have a ready-made emotion for that.