Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  Five missing—that number seemed to stick in his craw. Where were they? Were they drifting south on prevailing ocean currents? Had they run out for sandwiches? Where did the missing go?

  Of course they were dead. He knew that. Everybody knew that. If they were alive, they would have turned up by now.

  In his mind, Dixon could already see the families of the dead—the widows, the aging parents, the children.

  It was going to take an immense effort to keep his composure. The oil industry was not his favorite American industry. That much was true. But these were workingmen. They were not part of any fight. They hadn’t asked for this. Their families hadn’t asked for it, either.

  Dixon sighed heavily. That was only the beginning.

  In the Arctic, every country with any sort of claim to anything, no matter how paltry, was racing to prepare for war. It was absurd on its face.

  Iceland, a country of 300,000 people—less than the number of people waiting in line for ice cream on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach any summer afternoon—had sent its one naval destroyer on patrol to protect its interests 200 miles into the Arctic Circle.

  Iceland! Iceland was a nice place to visit, but it didn’t have “interests.” It couldn’t afford them. A gang of thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquents from Baltimore would make short work of the entire Icelandic military.

  The Canadian government had just released an advisory, complete with aerial maps, demonstrating that the Northwest Passage was their sovereign territory, in case anyone needed reminding of that.

  Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were all issuing random threats, designed to intimidate whom, exactly? Each other? Finland was a little more cautious—they shared a common border with Russia, and knew better than to stir up trouble.

  But none of that was the worst. The worst was Russia. The situation there was like a forty-ton tractor trailer, rumbling downhill with no brakes. Right now, Russia was all over the news.

  On the Oval Office’s flat-screen TV, a handsome young news reporter Dixon had never seen before was reading from the teleprompter. His short hair was blond, his eyes were blue, and his face was broad and angular and perfectly symmetrical. You could draw a vertical line down the middle of his face, and each side would be a mirror image of the other.

  The newscaster’s expression tried to suggest he was knowledgeable and serious, but Dixon wasn’t buying any of it. He would bet a dollar the man couldn’t point to Russia on a map of the world.

  Dixon shook his head. Everyone on TV seemed to be thirty years old nowadays. What had happened to all the deep-voiced, stoic men from Dixon’s generation? Could they not see the print anymore? Were the home health aides feeding them pureed carrots?

  Frankly, it would give him a profound sense of reassurance if Walter Cronkite suddenly rose from his nursing home bed (or wherever the hell he was), tottered into a news studio somewhere, and started reading from a stack of papers in his hand. Seeing these kids on TV made Dixon feel as if all the adults were gone, and no one was in charge anymore. The fact that Dixon himself was supposedly the one in charge made the feeling even worse. He was manifestly, unequivocally, not in charge.

  The young newsman spoke:

  “While American intelligence and defense agencies are analyzing the videotape to determine if it’s a forgery or not, President Putin was hit with more bad news. Moments after the video surfaced of him seeming to celebrate the Serbian terrorist attack in Alaska, there was an intelligence leak, apparently from within the Kremlin itself.

  “We are told that the leak suggests the order for the attack on American oil infrastructure was given at the highest levels of Russian government, possibly from within the office of the President himself. Further, that the attack was carried out at the behest of Russian oligarchs who control the former Soviet oil monopoly, now privatized under the name Yukos, and the former Soviet natural gas monopoly, operated as a public, shareholder-controlled company under the name Gazprom. Gazprom is now the largest oil and gas producing company in the world, and the majority of its shares are thought to be in the hands of six individuals, or their proxies.

  “Already, a dozen members of the Russian state Duma, and two members of the Federation Council, have called for an investigation into these allegations of corruption. At this time, CNN does not have access to the documents in the intelligence leak, though the network has made Freedom of Information Act requests to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Each of those organizations has officially claimed to have no access to the documents, or knowledge of their contents.”

  The man stared directly into the camera. He put a hand to one ear.

  “Yes? Yes. We have more information coming in now. Apparently, some sort of event is taking place in Red Square, outside the Kremlin, which houses both President Putin’s offices and his official address. It is late at night there, after midnight, and the Square is filling up with police, as well as crowds of people. There are rumors of military troop transports entering the Square as well. I’m told we have live footage of the events taking place.”

  The image on the screen changed to an outdoor night shot. It was hard to make out what was happening. There were people milling around, and red sirens flashing. Someone picked up a smoke canister and threw it at a line of cops.

  “Why are we watching this on the news?” Dixon said. “Don’t we have experts who can tell us what’s going on? Couldn’t we have known yesterday that this was coming? I’m the President, and I’m seeing this at the same time as everyone else on Earth. Does that seem right to you?”

  He looked around the room at the faces gathered there. They all seemed blank-eyed, like young, confused deer standing astride a railroad track, about to be crushed by a slow-moving, but immensely heavy freight train.

  He noticed that there were no military men or women in the room. Why was that? General Richard Stark seemed to be a permanent fixture around here, but now that the President of the United States needed clarity on an issue of importance, he was somewhere else.

  Right now, the clever monkeys in the Pentagon were probably drawing up plans for a nuclear first strike which Stark would then come here and pitch (with 100% confidence and not a hint of irony) as a way to wipe out the Russians, cause a toxic radiological cloud to settle in the Chinese heartland, and leave Uncle Sam astride the world as an unchallenged global colossus.

  “Let me put it another way,” Dixon said. “Did Putin authorize the attack, or didn’t he? Obviously, we’re not morons, so we can’t go by what we see on the television. And hopefully, we don’t have to put in a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA or the Pentagon ourselves. But if Putin did authorize the attack, I need to know that.”

  A young woman’s voice spoke, light and musical. “Why don’t we let the Russian investigation into his actions play itself out?” she said.

  Clement Dixon stared at her. She was pretty, and dressed smartly in a gray skirt suit. Her hair was short, cut in a conservative but perky bob. Her eyes showed a bright self-assuredness all out of proportion to her apparent intelligence. She held her hand up as though she was in school.

  “What’s your name?” Dixon said.

  “Tracey Reynolds,” she said. She said it eagerly and proudly, as though President Clement Dixon would remember it five minutes from now. Clement Dixon couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast this morning.

  But here was something he could remember:

  “Ms. Reynolds, the Russians lie about almost everything. Almost every official word that comes from their government, and reaches our shores, is a lie. This has been true for at least sixty years. Are you aware of that?”

  Her confidence faltered the tiniest amount. A look of uncertainty crossed her face, but then quickly disappeared.

  She nodded and smiled. “Yes.”

  Boy, these kids were raised on a steady diet of self-esteem, weren’t they? They seemed to belie
ve in the inherent rightness of everything they did and said. She was being admonished by the President of the United States, and somehow she didn’t realize that yet.

  “So then, if we know that all they’re going to do is lie, why would we wait for the outcome of their investigation?”

  Her big eyes looked up toward the ceiling. Amazingly, Tracey Reynolds was trying to think of an answer. If she could, she would continue pursuing this doomed line of reasoning, out loud, in front of a room full of White House staffers, supposedly the best and brightest that the country could muster.

  Behind her, an older woman reached out, put a hand on her shoulder, and whispered something into her ear. Tracey Reynolds nodded and clammed up. Her mouth closed with such a snap it was audible from where Clement Dixon was sitting. A flush crept up from her neckline and turned her face red.

  “Anyone else?” Dixon said.

  Another hand went up. This one belonged to a man, maybe in his late twenties, maybe in his early thirties. His hand was soft and somewhat bulbous, like the hand of the Pillsbury dough boy. Dixon recognized him—he was an aide to… someone. He had something to do with intelligence sharing between the White House and the spy agencies. He was blonde with thinning hair, overweight, in a suit that did not fit his pear shape well. It was too big at the shoulders and too small around the midsection.

  The man’s eyes were large and earnest. He could be a baby seal about to be struck down by a heavy club.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Yes, Mr.…”

  “Jepsum, sir.”

  “Yes, Jepsum. Of course. Okay, give it to me straight, Jepsum. I can take it.”

  Jepsum was hesitant. He was older than Tracey Reynolds, and given his body type and his face, he probably hadn’t been nearly as popular in high school. His parents probably hadn’t loved him as unconditionally. All of these things were good. At least he knew enough to be cautious about sticking his neck out.

  “Well, sir…”

  Dixon made a spinning wheel motion with his hand.

  “Out with it. I’m an old man. I could be dead before morning.”

  Jepsum cleared his throat. “Okay. I was thinking that after the smoke clears, it might be a good idea if you publicly embrace the next person who comes out on top over there. Not right away, but soon after. If Putin goes down, the intelligence my office has gathered suggests the winner is likely to be Dmitri Gagarin, the current Prime Minister. He’s less bellicose than Putin, and he’s not as smart. He’s a political operator, a bit of a team player and not anything like tyrant material. He could be much easier to deal with in the long run.”

  Dixon wasn’t sure how he felt about that. But at least this man was thinking.

  “And if it turns out that the Russians really were behind the attack?”

  Jepsum shrugged. It was an awkward gesture. His small shoulders nearly touched his ears on either side of his head. Dixon liked him already. Jepsum was clearly an underdog.

  “That’s Putin,” Jepsum said. “Putin and his people. He has a close-knit circle, and he keeps a tight grip on information. Since the action was carried out by a Serbian paramilitary, it’s possible this was a Putin in-house operation. The Russian military, intelligence agencies, and the larger government might not have been involved at all.”

  “It would be nice to think that, Jepsum.”

  “Yes, sir. And potentially a helpful way to look at it. As tragic as it was, the attack in Alaska could be an opportunity for us. It’s an idea for bigger brains than mine to think about, sir, but if Gagarin comes in, and we support his ascension, we might be able to help him purge Putin’s people right out of the government. It might be nice to go back to the kind of friendly relations with Russia that we enjoyed in the 1990s.”

  “You mean when Boris Yeltsin was our lap dog?” Clement Dixon said.

  Jepsum raised his hands in the don’t shoot gesture. “You said it, sir. Not me.”

  Dixon looked at Allen Forbes, the press secretary. Forbes was busy trying to blend in with the crowd.

  “Allen, what do you think of that?”

  Forbes appeared to give it some thought, and then deftly avoided answering the question. “Well, Mr. President, I think we would need to get a group of foreign policy experts together and brainstorm the pros and cons of taking an action like that. It might have a lot of upside, but it also might leave us exposed.”

  Dixon looked back at Jepsum.

  “We do things by committee around here, Jepsum. But keep plugging away. I like your initiative, and it doesn’t hurt to have at least one person on board with measurable electrical activity in their brain.”

  Jepsum stifled a smile. “Yes sir.”

  Dixon looked around the office again.

  “Any more?”

  Now everyone just stared. No one said a word. Dixon realized his sarcasm was starting to hurt him with these people.

  “All right, then let’s break this thing up. Thanks, everybody.”

  They hated him. He could tell. He had been around long enough to know when he was buying someone’s back, but not their heart.

  They hated him, for sure.

  But you know what? He hated them, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  12:45 a.m. Moscow Daylight Time (4:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Special Ministries Annex

  Red Square

  Moscow, Russia

  Red Square was filling with people, more coming all the time.

  Luke and Ed stayed to the far edge of the gathering. The growing masses were held back by lines of police. Large armored vehicles, similar to American SWAT Bearcats, were parked nearly nose to tail, like a fence. The Kremlin building itself was in the distance, more than a quarter of a mile away.

  There was a commotion going on over there.

  Lights flashed. Choppers passed overhead, including the heavy WHUMP of helicopter gunships. News trucks from at least a dozen countries were parked fifty meters from the armored vehicles. Reporters stood with cameramen, surveying the scene, and broadcasting to their legions back home. Whatever was going on, at least there hadn’t been a crackdown on freedom of expression.

  Yet.

  Luke and Ed detached from the crowd, and walked away across empty paving stones toward the Special Ministries Annex. The building was a bleak Soviet-era box, gray, three stories high and a city block long, tucked away behind Saint Basil’s Cathedral, in a distant corner of the Square.

  A distant corner was a good place for it, as far as Luke was concerned. It was quiet over here. There didn’t seem to be anybody around.

  “I hope this key card works,” he said.

  Ed nodded. “Amen, brother.”

  “In and out, just that easy,” Luke said.

  He felt a trickle of something—it wasn’t fear. He didn’t like what was happening behind them. Gatherings of chanting people became riots sometimes, and riots got ugly. Governments cracked down on rioting. Movement became restricted.

  Two dead men were floating in the Moskva River. They were important men, involved in a terrorist attack against the United States, but also something else, something that was still coming, something that few people knew about. Those bodies were going to turn up at some point, and when they did…

  Luke wanted to get out of the country before that happened.

  The Special Ministries Annex was close enough to their hotel that they could easily leave the office building, sprint through Red Square, cross the river and then a wide boulevard, run down the block, and straight into the lobby. But it would never do. There was too much surveillance. They were going to have to walk out of the office building, through the crowds, across the footbridge, and then find Albert waiting in the car.

  Then he was going to have to drive them out around the city and back to the hotel. During that time they would transform themselves from spies out stealing secrets and dumping bodies in the river, into rich American tourists coming home from a night of drinking in the famou
s Moscow bars. All of this assumed they didn’t get caught inside the building, or get videotaped in the street and turn up on some advanced facial recognition database that no one knew the Russians had.

  “What have we learned so far?” Luke said.

  “Oleg Marmilov,” Ed said.

  “The puppet master. GRU, probably.”

  “Right,” Ed said. “He organized the attack on the oil rig. It was either his call to kill the hostages, or somebody went crazy and it just happened. Either way, he had Zelazny edit the videotape to make it look like we did it, and send it out to the world. Zelazny used to meet in secret with Tomasz Chevsky to get his marching orders.”

  “Chevsky was an engineer for the Ministry of Sciences,” Luke said.

  Ed nodded “But he really worked for Marmilov.”

  “The attack was the start of something bigger that they’re planning.”

  “And so here we are,” Ed said.

  They approached the building. Ed wore the engineer’s long coat and bowler hat. He also carried the engineer’s walking stick. Ed was black. The engineer was white. Ed was as broad as a mountain range. The engineer was as thin as a wraith.

  They were both tall. That’s where the similarities ended. If Ed kept his head tilted down, there was the barest chance that someone looking at a security camera would mistake him for the engineer.

  Luke came as he was. No one was going to mistake him for anything. Maybe an invited guest coming in to… what? Go over some files late at night?

  They skirted the double glass doors of the wide front entrance and went around to the right side of the building. There was a single door here, made of heavy steel with reinforced glass. There was a black electronic lockbox mounted at its side.

  Ed took the ID card tethered around his thick neck and swiped it at the box.

  The LED light went from red to green. Luke heard an audible click as the door unlocked. And just like that, they were in.