Call to Treason Read Online Free Page B

asked him to come to his office. He had come in early. Colahan knew their current fiscal year gave them another six weeks of business as usual. He wanted to be ready for whatever the CIOC decided.
        Hood knew he would not be ready for this.
        The question Hood had to address was whether to cut personnel from most or all of their ten divisions or whether to eliminate one or two departments entirely. He knew the answer even without looking at the figures. He also knew which departments would get him close to twenty percent. One of them would cost him efficiency.
        The other would cost him a friend.

----

    FOUR
        
        Washington, B.C. Monday, 8:20 a.m.
        When Don Orr was a little boy, he used to look forward to June 22, the day Miss Clarion's twenty-two-student school closed down for the summer. He did not dislike school. Just the opposite. He loved learning new things. But the first day of summer vacation was special.
        He would get up at sunrise. With an olive green baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, he filled his father's canteen and slung it across a small shoulder. He made three or four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and pushed them into a knapsack, along with a package of oatmeal cookies and a compass. Then he took a shovel from the tool shed. That was for beheading rattlesnakes if he encountered any.
        Holding the shovel like a prophet's staff, he walked out from the family's cattle ranch in Kingsville, Texas. He walked into the hot, windless plain to think about everything he had learned that year.
        Being alone like that for a day helped to burn the important things into his brain. He had learned in Bible class that this was what Jesus had done, and Moses before Him. The young boy felt that the walk would help to make him a stronger, better man.
        He was right. Don Orr did that for ten years running, from the time he was eight. What he did not know, until years later, was that for the first two years, his father had one of the ranch hands follow him. The tradition ended in 1967, when Orr turned eighteen and joined the air force. Orr knew what it was like to walk and ride. Now he wanted to fly. But the air force had other ideas. They wanted him to work with his hands, like he did on the ranch. Just two years earlier, the air force had established RED HORSE units: Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron, Engineering. These were divided into two squadrons: the 555th Triple Nickel and the 554th Penny Short. They assigned Orr to one of these. After nine weeks of training at Cannon Air Base in New Mexico, the young man was sent with the 554th to Phan Rang Air Base in Vietnam. There, his specialty was drilling wells to obtain drinking water, a skill he had learned on the ranch.
        Orr did one tour in Vietnam and a second in Thailand. He was sorry he never saw combat. Like breaking a horse, herding cattle, or hauling yourself into the baking summertime wilderness, war was the kind of intense challenge that burned things into a man's head, muscles, and heart. That was one reason Senator Orr had always gotten along with combat veterans like Admiral Link. Risk-taking had been hardwired into the systems of those men.
        It was not risk-taking but a sense of duty that had inspired Senator Orr to found the United States First Party six months before. Each of the two major parties was like a Third World country, a collection of ideological warlords with only one thing in common: an overwhelming dislike for the other party. There was no singular, driving philosophy. It was discouraging. Orr's idea was simple. The United States needed to become what the Orr Ranch was, a powerful spread run by men of vision. The nation should not be run by parties that burned up their energies playing a tug-of-war for inches. National growth should not be determined by an international consensus or by despots who bullied us with goods, from