Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  Dixon nodded. “Okay. And?”

  “If you look closely, and we are working to clean up the video on this, the men killed on the waterfront were heavily armed and firing into the water. They were not environmentalists, but appear to have been affiliated with a Serbian paramilitary group, who attacked us in revenge for the NATO bombing of Serbia. They had been alerted to the approach of the Navy SEALs, and ambushed them. Three SEALs died during the ambush. The terrorists were killed in turn when a member of the civilian oversight team, himself a former elite soldier, took them by surprise in an amphibious assault vehicle.”

  Dixon stared at him. “And you can confirm this? The cleaned up video will bear all of it out?”

  Stark nodded. “We are confident of that, yes sir. Also, the men who committed the massacre inside the oil rig were wearing counterfeit uniforms based on US Army combat fatigues. Insignia on the uniforms identify those men as members of 1st Special Forces. No members of 1st Special Forces, or of any US Army unit, were involved in this operation. It was carried out entirely by the United States Navy, in combination with officers from Joint Special Operations Command, and agents from the FBI Special Response Team. We believe that the Serbians simply put on fake American uniforms to carry out the massacre, and filmed it.”

  “Jesus,” Thomas Hayes said. “The cold-bloodedness…”

  The general nodded. “Yes sir.”

  “And the man in the final scene?” Clement Dixon said. “Who is he?”

  General Stark shrugged. “Well sir, he was part of your civilian oversight. As far as we can tell, he’s Agent Luke Stone, who was the officer in command of the Special Response Team contingent. By all accounts, the man who was shot had a grenade or a bomb attached to his coat, and was reaching for it. He had been told to keep his hands in the air. That isn’t clear in the video. And the agent in question may have laughed in relief. What many people don’t always understand is that men and women who have seen a great deal of combat often respond to death differently from civilians.”

  “Has the man seen a great deal of combat?”

  “Sir, he is a former member of Delta Force, with multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other, classified theaters.”

  “Would you say he’s expendable?” a voice said.

  Everyone turned to look. It was Allen Forbes again. He was standing at the edge of the circle. He wore tan dress pants, a white shirt open at the throat and rolled to the forearms, and frameless glasses.

  Forbes shrugged at the fact that everyone was staring at him.

  “The damage is done. There are a lot of people in this world, even in this country, who aren’t going to believe what we say, even if we give them incontrovertible proof. But if a head rolls… say, a commando who did something inappropriate… that’s a beginning. And if certain nameless members of Congress who pulled strings to allow drilling in a wildlife preserve are outed and censured by their peers… Maybe you see where I’m going. Right now, it looks like anything goes. I don’t think we can afford to give that impression.”

  There was nothing Clement Dixon would like more than to see Edward Graves’s head rolling down the center aisle of the Senate Chamber. But that was unlikely to happen. Graves was too powerful. He had too many friends.

  Not that anyone had mentioned it, but war with Serbia was probably off the table, too. The US had already won that war. And when push came to shove, these terrorists were likely to be well-camouflaged and isolated from the decision makers. Even so…

  “I’d like to see us pursue ties between the terrorists and anyone in the government in Belgrade,” Dixon said. “I don’t want to write that off. I also want to see if they had ties to Russian intelligence. And I want it publicized, beginning as soon as this meeting is over, that US troops had nothing to do with that massacre, and that it happened before any of our men appeared on the scene.”

  “And the commando?” Forbes said. For some reason, he was bent on seeing someone swing from the neck. “Agent Stone?”

  “As a sacrificial lamb?” Dixon said.

  “Yes. The people are going to want one. A disaster like this cries out for blood. An excision, of sorts. A pound of flesh.”

  Dixon looked at General Stark. Stark raised his hands.

  “It’s a difficult judgment call. Personally, I like Agent Stone.”

  “Someone should talk to his boss,” Thomas Hayes said. “And get a look at his military record. With that amount of combat, there may be a record of PTSD or other troubles. The man in those images seems unstable, at best. Maybe what he needs is a long vacation.”

  Dixon looked around the room. The faces stared back at him. Nothing about those faces suggested that he was the boss and they were the underlings.

  Every single one of them reminded him of a voracious meat-eating predator. They were looking at the President of the United States as though he was an aging antelope, unable to outrun them any longer.

  “Okay, good,” Dixon said. “I like that. It’s what this man Stone needs. Give him a nice long vacation. Call it a suspension, and say the decision came down from the highest levels of government. It’ll make it look like we’re actually doing something around here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  10:05 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (2:05 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge

  Near the Kremlin and Red Square

  Moscow, Russia

  “How is the work progressing?”

  Oleg Marmilov stood on the sidewalk at the center of the old concrete bridge over the Moskva River. It was a stately bridge, finished in pink granite slabs that gave the illusion the bridge was a feat of stonework. But that part was impossible to see at the moment.

  Marmilov had already put the events of the day behind him. Results of the operation in Alaska were mixed, as far as he was concerned. He would have greatly preferred a massacre of elite American commandos, but he had settled for one of hapless civilians instead. The fiction that Serbian environmentalists had seized the oil rig would not last, but events were moving quickly and soon it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  Best to focus on the present.

  It was a strange evening. A type of smog obscured everything. For one, the weather had changed since yesterday, and now it was unseasonably warm, foggy, and damp. For another, wildfires in the ancient forests outside of Moscow had raged again all summer, and the smoke had settled on the city like a blanket.

  The fires were Putin’s fault. Was the climate changing? Marmilov supposed so. Did this make wildfires larger, more intense, and more dangerous? Marmilov was willing to accept this possibility.

  But you couldn’t blame the fires for not putting themselves out. You couldn’t blame the climate for mismanaging the budgets and handing over important revenue bases to criminals and cronies.

  There were no firemen to fight the fires because there was no money to pay them. There was also no equipment for the nonexistent firemen. There were no modern firefighting trucks. There were no airplanes carrying flame retardant. There were no spotter planes or advanced computer mapping of the fires (as they had in the West), determining the places where fires were most likely to start, the direction in which the wind was likely to push them, and the speed with which it would happen.

  It was a joke, and it had reached this sorry state of affairs under Putin’s watch. Now they faced the humiliating spectacle of people strolling in the evening hours in Moscow, with masks covering their faces because the air was so difficult to breathe. And that was only the most visible part.

  People with asthma and lung conditions were trapped inside their homes. And people in the rural areas—thousands of people, if you could believe the confidential reports coming across Marmilov’s desk—were being burned out of their homes. It aggravated him, not least because at the current rate, his own country estate, where his wife lived, would one day find itself in the crosshairs of these fires.

  He looked downriver toward Central Moscow, bu
t there wasn’t much to see. A few dim lights shone in the gloom, but most everything was shrouded in mystery. Saint Basil’s Cathedral, close to the bridge on the Red Square side, was completely invisible. Behind Marmilov, a bus rumbled by on the bridge, nearly unseen.

  For many years, Marmilov had used this bridge, and others like it, as an office of sorts. It was a good place for meetings, especially at night. It would be difficult for anyone to record a conversation taking place on this bridge. There would be no paper or computer record of it, and no call log.

  If information from a private, intimate discussion were to somehow leak out, then Marmilov would immediately know the source of the leak—the person with whom he had been sharing privileged information. This had happened a few times over the decades, with unfortunate consequences for the leakers.

  Marmilov enjoyed his bridge chats, as he thought of them, and he liked to play them for theatrical effect. After the military, he had begun his professional life as a spy, and he missed those days. His bridge chats reminded him of nighttime meetings with people in East Berlin. Friends? Foes? A little bit of both? Sometimes it was impossible to say.

  This accursed smog carried him back to those days like woodland mists in a children’s fantasy story. One moment, the child is walking through a small copse of trees near an industrial park, the next, he is in a time of knights and dragons.

  And magic.

  “The work is coming along,” said the man standing next to him at the rail. Marmilov could barely see the man, but he knew well who he was. His name was Tomasz Chevsky. He was very tall and slim. He wore a long coat and a bowler hat that obscured his face. He carried a knobby walking stick, like an English gentleman might do when out for a stroll in London. He couldn’t know how much these affectations pleased Marmilov.

  “Are we playing riddles?” Marmilov said. “I ask you how the work is coming along, and you tell me the work is coming along? Have you heard that I am renowned for my sense of humor?”

  “I haven’t heard that,” Chevsky said. Chevsky was a bright young man, well educated, and with a day job at the Academy of Sciences.

  At night, however, he worked for Marmilov. In fact, his dreary office work at the Academy was the least of his responsibilities. There were quite a few Moskviches who moonlighted in this manner.

  “That’s because it isn’t true,” Marmilov said. “I’m renowned for the shortness of my temper, and my unwillingness to suffer fools. So tell me, please, without my having to beg, what is happening with the important work I’ve entrusted to you.”

  “It is going well,” Chevsky said. “I’m pleased to report that it’s almost operational. As you know, there were a number of challenges to solve, in terms of location of the work, water depth and pressure, functionality in cold weather, transport…”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Marmilov said. “I know all that.”

  Of course Marmilov well knew the challenges. It had been his idea to devise a nuclear bomb that could be detonated beneath the ice of the Arctic. He had talked to the engineers at the very beginning, years ago, and he knew that building such a bomb, one that could resist freezing water, submerged deep in the ocean, which could be transported there secretly, and which could be detonated and at the same time be plausibly denied… it was a tall order. This young man was the third liaison to the project Marmilov had assigned. The work had taken a long time.

  “It appears the final challenges have been overcome,” Chevsky said.

  “So the project is ready for deployment?”

  The man seemed hesitant. “Yes.”

  Marmilov did not like hesitancy. You might say he had a policy against hesitancy. A thing was a thing. A was not B. Say clearly what a thing was. Say it unequivocally. The Americans had a phrase that fit the philosophy well: Say it like you mean it.

  “Is it ready, or isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  That was more like it.

  Even so, Marmilov almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was a project years in the making, with countless delays, a boondoggle even. A white whale of a project, and Marmilov sometimes seemed like its obsessed Ahab, following it to the bottom of the sea.

  “When will it be ready?”

  “It’s ready now.”

  “It’s ready to be deployed? At this moment?”

  The young man Chevsky chose his words carefully. “As I indicated, all of the engineering challenges have been overcome. The weapon has never been deployed, and circumstances make an overall test impossible. So something unforeseen could still happen. There are no one hundred percent guarantees, which I believe you must already know.”

  Chevsky paused again.

  “All aspects of the weapon have been tested separately, with complete success. Detonation potential has been proven, and digital and analog mechanisms have withstood Arctic environmental demands in laboratory settings, as have all moving parts. Items of similar size and weight, giving off similar radiological signals, have been transported by both air and sea to the target area and submerged without being detected by the military or intelligence agencies of any world power, including our own.”

  “Sum it up for me in one short sentence,” Marmilov said.

  As he waited for the man’s answer, it seemed almost as if Marmilov’s breath caught in his throat.

  “The weapon is ready,” Chevsky said.

  Marmilov nodded. He had been at this a long time, but the job still had the ability to excite him, and in some cases, delight him. This was one of those cases. He was a very lucky man. He smiled.

  “Then what are we waiting for?” he said. “Let’s deploy it, shall we?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  3:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Queen Anne’s County, Maryland

  Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay

  “Stone!”

  Luke’s eyes popped open. For a moment, he had trouble focusing. It was daytime. He was sprawled sideways on the couch. He took a deep breath. It seemed like someone had just spoken his name. He pushed himself to a sitting position.

  Wow. He was tired.

  “Okay. Nobody said anything.”

  He looked out the window at a lovely late summer day fading into a cloudy afternoon. The old cabin—in Becca’s family for over a hundred years—stood on a bluff overlooking Chesapeake Bay. There was plenty of wind out there today. Luke could count probably a dozen sailboats across the broad sweep of water.

  He sighed. The surroundings here were beautiful.

  The place was two floors, wooden everything, with creaks and squeaks everywhere you stepped. The kitchen door was spring-loaded, and tended to slam itself shut with enthusiasm. There was a screened-in porch facing the water, and a newer stone patio with commanding views right on the bluff.

  He and Becca had lived here for more than six months when he started the job, while she was pregnant, and after the baby was born. They had only just moved out a few weeks ago. Luke would almost take this rustic place, with all its quirks, over their new house. He missed this cabin, he missed the views, he missed the expansive wide-openness of the property and the bay. He just didn’t miss the commute to work.

  If he wasn’t working, though…

  It was a moot point. He was working. And they were living in Fairfax now, a ten-minute drive from SRT headquarters.

  True enough, except that he was out here right now. He wasn’t in Fairfax because Becca didn’t want him. And that was because in her mind he was a cold-blooded killer. He had tried to call her when he arrived here at the cabin. She had picked up on the third ring, heard his voice, and immediately hung up again.

  He should really go upstairs to bed, just sleep the whole thing off, the mission, the videotape, everything. It was all going to blow over. The truth was going to come out. The world was going to realize the Serbians were terrorists and not environmentalists. Becca was going to get over this and invite him home.

  Maybe.

  The cordless telephone w
as on the table in front of him. He picked it up and dialed a number from memory.

  On the third ring, she answered.

  “Trudy Wellington.” Her voice was businesslike, professional. Luke still hadn’t figured out how to put that office worker tone into his own voice when he answered his work telephone.

  “Trudy, it’s Luke. What are you still doing there?”

  “I slept on the plane ride,” she said. “Luke, I was going to call you, but Don said you would be asleep, probably until tomorrow.”

  Luke shook his head. “I can’t sleep. Or, you know, I fell asleep, but then…”

  “I get it,” she said. “Listen, Swann put that laptop through a workout. Here’s the short version. He thinks he managed to pinpoint an IP address where the video footage ended up. He says it’s not a hundred percent, but…”

  “How did he manage to do that?”

  “He’s got friends, apparently. He doesn’t share that kind of information with me. He just says, ‘I have friends.’ After that I don’t ask.”

  This was something. It was a breakthrough. If they could figure out who got the footage first, maybe they could figure out who edited it. Maybe the people who received the footage, and the people who edited it, were the same people.

  “Where?” Luke said.

  “Guess.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Trudy…”

  “The IP address is in Russia. Moscow, to be precise.”

  Luke gritted his teeth. “The Russians. I knew it!”

  Did he really know it? He wasn’t sure. Certainly, he suspected it. Where there were Serbs, there were often Russians loitering somewhere nearby.

  “The computer the video went to was in the offices of an internet media company called the New Times.”

  “Who is that?” Luke said.

  “It’s nobody. As far as we can tell, the New Times doesn’t publish anything, and never has. It’s housed in offices that also house media companies like New World Marketing, Public Interest Research, Public Opinion Limited, New World Times, Fast Forward Fashion, and about a dozen others.”