by D S Kane
Chin reset the door’s visual technology. Almost a minute passed. Then the image of the street outside his home appeared and he saw the three intruders getting into a taxi cab. But the image was too grainy to record an image of the cab’s plate as it drove away.
Chin called his superior in the National Party Center and told him what had happened. His superior said, “I’ll have security personnel sent to the airport, bus, and train stations. It might take a while. For the last several days, CSIS has been quite busy. Whatever they are working on is above my clearance level.”
Chin wondered what was happening, or about to happen.
* * *
William faced Jon as they sat three-across in the back seat of a taxi. “I think it’s a mistake to head for the airport. We’ll be sitting ducks.”
Jon shook his head. “We’ll have the same situation most anywhere else. We need to put some distance between us and that sniper. The train station. Let’s leave immediately. Once we’re there, we’ll take the first train going anywhere. ”
Betsy joined in. “So where are our best choices of destination? Which city?”
“Anywhere the first train goes,” both men said in unison.
In a few minutes, they reached the train station. They ran through the station to the ticketing booth and read the board of departures.
The first train was headed to Guilin in fourteen minutes. They ran through the station to meet the train on the platform before its doors could close. They found no seats and stood as it lurched into motion, headed north.
Jon watched the platform as the train glided away from the station. “We weren’t followed here.”
Betsy said, “Good. Let’s go home.”
William frowned. He still had a problem with the data breach the hacker had unleashed. “I’m no better off now than before we came here.”
Betsy threw her arms around his neck. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
CHAPTER 4
Top Floor, Kremlin, Moscow, Russia
February 11, 10:43 a.m.
Vladimir Pushkin sat at the antique table, wearing an oversized white Turkish bathrobe. He spooned a final bite of caviar onto a salted cracker. Snow fell outside one of the ancient windows of the Kremlin.
Having plans for the American and Chinese power grids was a major accomplishment. But there was still so much to prepare, and so many loose ends. The Russian president chewed, savoring the saltiness. He scratched his balding head while he thought.
He studied today’s issue of Izvestia, the largest Russian newspaper. Its headline glowered at him: “American Congress Refuses to Raise Debt Ceiling.” The story that followed detailed how America had repudiated all of its foreign debt and devalued its currency to just above absolute zero. The devaluation would keep any foreign goods from penetrating the borders of the United States.
The right-wing renegade American government had laid off over half of the national government’s work force and there was rioting in the streets. It sounded to Pushkin like the United States was experiencing its own version of the days preceding the fall of the Soviet empire.
The United States was in tatters. He grinned. A little push and it would fall. And he was planning America’s final push into oblivion.
The massive economic potential of the United States was being squandered by the idiots battling each other in Washington. It was just a matter of time.
He believed that any dictatorship would have worked more efficiently, and the citizens would have reaped greater benefits. Now, political scandals and backbiting by the American Congress over which party was responsible for the failures had brought the government’s approval rating to less than 1% from its own citizens. Paradoxically, over 90% of the elected government was returned term after term. Even Pakistan’s government, with all its baksheesh and pishkesh, performed better.
An invasion and an occupation force would be welcomed if it could claim it yielded economic benefits for the country’s people.
His own country, in stark contrast, was faring so much better. Oil had become Russia’s source of world power. Only China was comparable in its ability to survive the economic crisis and economic inequality that capitalistic greed in the United States had caused. But China was owed so much capital by America. Now, China was finally being squeezed. And China was following the same path the United States had, long ago, using deficit spending to prop up its growth rate. Recently, the Chinese had discovered that there was too much to control.
He suspected that China was desperate to disengage their future potential from that of the United States but their government leaders couldn’t see how they might manage it. To Pushkin, the irony was that China had a legal claim on the actual land and all the assets within the United States: collateral for the debt the US government had borrowed from China.
With its government in turmoil, it would be easy to invade and overthrow the weakened government of the United States.
But he knew Russia couldn’t withstand nuclear retaliation. He’d need an ally, one with the tools to neutralize the ability of America to launch its missiles. China’s hackers were acknowledged to be the best. Moreover, they were the only other country with designs on the United States. China had sometimes been an enemy to Russia, and sometimes their ally.
He knew that China had planted logic bombs in America’s electric grid.
He remembered the old cliché, politics makes strange bedfellows. His face twisted into a smirk.
He picked up the secure phone from his desk and punched in a number. “It is Vlad Pushkin. Get me Lin Chow Chang.” He waited for several seconds before spooning caviar onto another cracker and popping it into his mouth.
The voice on the other end was covered with a slight hiss of static. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” Pushkin discerned Chairman Lin’s sarcastic tone.
“We need to discuss the status of the project I proposed last month. To refresh your memory, what if you could reclaim the money the United States refuses to pay you? What if you owned half the productive assets of the country? I want to talk to you again about invading the United States.”
He could hear Lin’s breathing but no words.
Pushkin waited a few seconds. Nothing. “I assume you’re still on the line. Let me remind you. The United States owes your country almost thirty percent of one year of its annual gross national product, and yet they refuse to repay you anything. I propose another way to recover your investment.”
“I still don’t understand what’s in it for you.” Lin’s breathing was a bit faster, his voice a notch higher.
“We invade and split the country. China gets everything east of the Mississippi and Russia gets everything west of it. Russia has a long history of colonizing and reaping spoils.”
“You’ve been drinking too much vodka. Americans would fight any invasion. They still have a nuclear arsenal.”
Pushkin smiled. “I know your capabilities and you know mine. You have computer viruses in their electric grid. Logic bombs. Without electric power, they can’t communicate within the country’s borders. Without electricity, they can’t fire any missiles. They could not coordinate their ground defenses.”
“They have backup generators. We’d all be dead—you, me, and all of them. Computer systems would take over and within minutes, it would be an automated global nuclear holocaust.”
“First, you cut off their communications networks. They’d be totally disconnected from the computer systems. Their phone systems work off specific computer systems, MAE-West and MAE-East servers. Russian government hackers have logic bombs in those machines. Think of it. We could walk in without any coordinated resistance. We could occupy them, divide them at the Mississippi, and use their country as a set of slave states. Their citizens would produce what we want them to, work the hours we set for them. Both our countries would reap a vast bounty. And, the citizens of the occupied countries would be better off than they are now. We’d be greeted as liberators.”
Lin was silent for a while. “Let me think about it. I’ll call you back.”
Pushkin smiled as he terminated the call. He hummed the melody from the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony while he looked out the window at the falling snow. A funeral dirge. The sky outside, pure and white, perfect accompaniment to Tchaikovsky’s suicide song.
He remembered how his parents had starved to death in the brutal winter that followed the fall of the Soviet empire. There had been no electricity, no food, no fuel, and no police. Over twenty million had either starved or been frozen. When the mobs had looked for those responsible, they sought to punish the KGB’s senior officers and the fallen government’s ministers. Vladimir, a KGB spymaster then, had changed his name from Tobelov to Pushkin and disappeared. His brother, Nikita, had retained the family surname of Tobelov and fled to Vladivostok to work for the mafiya.
It had taken almost a decade for Vladimir to regain power within the SVR, the KGB’s replacement. He counted himself among the lucky. The new government was mostly former KGB, and most of the remaining former KGB officers were now siloviki: mafiya, SVR, and FSB agents. Only the most devious and vicious criminals had made the transition. Even then, they weren’t safe. For several decades, the survivors whittled themselves down to a scant few through power grabs and infighting. In the last decade, Pushkin had consolidated his power and things had settled down. Then, the border war with China had put both countries on a war footing. It had remained so, but after Pushkin discovered that the border war was a proxy war precipitated by the Mossad, he’d reached out to China. Even though neither country trusted the other, the violence between them had been smothered.
But the Mossad hadn’t stopped toying with Russia. His eyes flashed anger as he remembered how his brother was captured, tortured, and executed last year by the Mossad.
A mole working in Israel had relayed the story. All the secrets his brother held, all were probably known now by the Mossad’s partners, the intelligence agencies of the United States. He’d heard the story of how Cassandra Sashakovich, who had worked in Washington and now ran an independent intelligence agency, was responsible. The Swiftshadow Group.
He called his assistant. “Has Major Dmitri Sokol arrived yet?”
“Da. He came straight from the airport. He’s been waiting for twenty minutes.”
“Send him in.” Pushkin chewed on the final cracker and washed it down with straight up vodka.
When the heavy oak door opened, a tall, well-built man with a black crew cut walked in. The face of the forty-year-old assassin was lined and pitted from overexposure to the Russian winters. He appeared drawn and tired as he saluted.
“Sit, Dmitri. I have two assignments for you. First, go to Istanbul. I have heard from one of our SVR operatives in Turkey that the loose end you failed to terminate has landed there. He’s about to transfer a copy of the files that you collected for me to someone else. Whoever your target is, they sent a message to the United States. To someone in The Swiftshadow Group, and they are sending a courier. I need both your original target and the Swiftshadow courier terminated before the courier can accept the intel and deliver it.”
Pushkin handed Sokol a single sheet of paper.
Sokol nodded. “The second assignment?”
Pushkin shrugged. “Find Cassandra Sashakovich and terminate her. She lives in the Washington suburbs.”
Pushkin passed Sokol a folder. “Read it and leave it. Make her death look like a ‘message.’ Dismember her and leave the pieces in a public place.”
Sokol scanned the pages and gave the folder back. “Why the mess?”
“Just do it.” He thought about how the things she knew continued to present a danger to his country. How her revelations in the past had hurt him personally.
Dmitri Sokol saluted again, turned, and marched from the room.
If the Chinese partnered with Pushkin, they could mount an invasion within two months at the longest, and quite possibly much sooner. His military was ready. Then, Sashakovich’s death would happen during a state of war. No one would think twice about it. He reached for another cracker, but he’d eaten them all.
* * *
Three hours later, Russian President Pushkin opened the envelope handed him by the Director of the SVR. “You are sure we need nothing more? This is everything?”
“Da, my leader. Now we just need to finalize the plans against the United States, and the timeline for toppling China after the United States has been subdued.”
“And our ally to the south will be sufficiently overextended?”
“Da, but my concern is that so will we.”
“What if we keep China as our ally for long enough to be able to mount enough force to subdue them?”
“Then they will have had enough time to grow stronger and we would both lose our grasp on the United States.”
Pushkin thought for a while, tapping his hand against the desk. His plan to grow Russia into China’s lands and also hold all of the United States was impractical. Owning half of the United States would have to be enough of a prize to satisfy him for now. He smiled at the Director. “Thanks. You can go now.”
He scanned the documents. He didn’t understand the plans of the Internet hubs in Washington, DC, and San Jose, California—MAE-East and MAE-West—but that wasn’t his job. He examined the plans of the electric grids, over twenty in the United States and more in China, and then placed the documents back in the envelope. His copy was just for reference. The primary copies were much larger, printed on pages three feet by five feet across, and currently held by his war-planning group.
Soon the war-planning group would have a new document, containing the attack plans for both the kinetic and cyber units. Then his generals would advise him when the invasion troops were ready and when his hackers had a firm grasp on the internal systems of MAE-East and MAE-West. He took a deep breath. Soon he could wage war on a global scale. A short, victorious war.
When Dmitri Sokol had completed his assignment, the Asian hacker would be dead and so would all who could divulge any advance notice of his plans to someone in the West. Once the attacks started, he was sure he could swiftly eliminate all those in the West who might offer opposition. The bureaucrats of the United States would be in chains. Their military would be fenced into POW camps with their leaders dead.
He grinned. Soon.
CHAPTER 5
Oak Street, Raleigh, North Carolina
February 6, 7:11 a.m.
Robert Gault scanned the snowscape of Raleigh, North Carolina, from his rental car window. The house down the street hunkered silent as dawn bloomed pink against a gray-and-white world. He’d parked the car under a copse of naked oak trees.
Bob had worked for an unnamed government intelligence service, one so secret that even those who knew its handle dared not say it. But several years ago its existence had become first a fact and then a Beltway joke, and Bob had lost his job. He’d since become a mercenary covert operative for The Swiftshadow Group, a paramilitary and hacker organization. He was forty-three years old, and his only marriage had lasted less than three years, his wife complaining constantly that he was never really there. After she left him, he’d eaten his way to a pear-shaped body, and his career as a covert operative shifted to managing small teams. But now, he was once again working as a field operative. It was drudge work, not what he’d hoped it would be.
Snow was falling and blowing, and Bob saw it as a bad omen.
He’d turned the engine off because the car’s exhaust was becoming visible, and he was certain it would give him away. He shivered. It had been well over a day since he’d last slept, almost two days since he’d eaten anything besides candy bars. But as a trained surveillance and tracking operative, he was expected to do his job: track these dissident students, and when he was sure all three were in the house on the corner, dial the only number preprogrammed into his cell. A squad of operatives would arrive and he’d be told to leave. The trained ass
assins wouldn’t want him there during their phase of the operation. Fewer witnesses to the massacre.
Bob drifted into an unwanted sleep. A knock on the window brought him back. He saw a smiling female face standing in the snow.
She moved so close to the window that her snorkel parka hid her hands from anyone passing. The Beretta she held was pointed at him, its nozzle against the window. Point blank. “Open or die.”
It suddenly felt much colder.
He moved slowly, not wanting to give her reason to murder him. He unlocked the door, and it creaked open.
She motioned with the handgun. “Out.”
He could feel snowflakes drifting onto his face as he left the car. She thrust the gun’s barrel into his back as she pointed with her other arm to the house. “Don’t even think about trying anything.”
When they reached the porch, the front door opened. Two young, blond American men stood on either side of Bob as the woman pushed him into a metal folding chair.
Now he was sure he’d die today.
He scanned the room for a something he could use as a weapon and saw nothing useful.
One of the men sneered at him and said, “I’m Bill. This here’s Wally. And you’ve already met Gloria. Your name?”
“I’m Tom.” Bob smiled. “Why the gun?”
“Well, Tom, you look dangerous. We all have guns. It’s America. Why have you been watching this house?”
They turned on a spotlight and dragged it near, blinding him. Bob blinked, then shut his eyes. “I wasn’t watching this house. I’m homeless and this seemed as good a place as any to park my car for the night. I was asleep when you dragged me here.” Not entirely lies. He yawned and closed his eyes.
“That’s a crock. We watched you from the upstairs window. You turned off the engine and sat there freezing for hours. Let’s try this again. First, we’ll motivate you.” Bill’s voice.
Bob opened his eyes, just in time to catch the swing of a hammer as it pounded into his left hand. He screamed even before the wall of pain registered.
