The Nuclear Option

by Allan Leverone

  June 15, 1988

  2:01 a.m.

  Kirov, Russia, USSR

  Or maybe it wasn’t accurate to say she knew the code. It would be impossible to say for sure whether she’d sussed it out without dialing the numbers and then flipping the switch.

  And if she’d guessed wrong she would never know, because she would be vaporized instantly.

  But the closer the numerals came to reaching 00:00:00, the less she had to lose. By now there was almost nothing to lose, because she gazed at the screen and saw her life had ticked down to its final twenty seconds. If she did nothing, she would be dead in less than half a minute.

  So she had to do something. She had to go down fighting.

  She couldn’t imagine why her hands hadn’t resumed shaking, but they were still rock-steady, as was her mind—clear and sharp, a miracle in itself, given the almost inconceivable stress she was working under and how little sleep she’d gotten over the last two days.

  Maybe the prospect of imminent death had clarified things to a degree not otherwise possible, focusing her on the next eighteen seconds like she’d never focused on anything before and would never be able to manage again. But she calmly twisted the four dials, one after the other, not concerned in the least about finishing before the electronic signal was transmitted to the nuke in the back of the pickup.

  Eighteen seconds might as well have been a lifetime.

  Four dials took no more than five seconds to turn in total, entering the code she was becoming more and more convinced was correct.

  To Tracie’s way of thinking it almost couldn’t be anything else.

  1 – 9 – 1 – 7.

  1917.

  The year of the “People’s Revolution” that deposed the Tsar and resulted in what eventually became the Soviet government, the most hardline version of which Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda had been committed to re-establishing.

  The only reasonable alternative to Navsegda using the four digits Tracie had settled on was if they had simply chosen four random numbers. But doing so wouldn’t make sense, because in the event something went wrong and the Navsegda operative was forced to enter the code at the last moment, he would be under the most extreme pressure, likely to forget the random code, even after committing it to memory in the days and weeks leading up to tonight.

  No, they would have selected a code that had a special meaning for all of their members.

  They would have selected 1 – 9 – 1 – 7.

  Tracie finished spinning the last dial, double-checking her work, conscious of time ticking away but aware that this moment, more than any other in her life, required precision. Working too quickly and locking in an incorrect digit would be as bad as not doing anything at all.

  It would be worse.

  She glanced at the countdown screen.

  Eight seconds left.

  Glanced back at the four dials.

  All were in order.

  Five seconds left.

  She breathed deeply, a tickle of nervousness running through her but nothing as extreme as what she thought she probably should be feeling.

  She held her breath, reached for the toggle switch with her still-heavily-bleeding right hand, and closed her eyes.

  She was confident she would survive beyond the next three seconds but ready for the end should she be wrong.

  Then she flipped the switch.

  46

  June 15, 1988

  2:02 a.m.

  Kirov, Russia, USSR

  Nothing happened.

  It was the best possible result.

  Instantly, a sense of exhaustion unlike anything she’d ever experienced washed over her. Tracie thought it entirely possible that at this moment she was more fatigued than she’d ever been. She’d been operating on adrenaline for most of the past two days, and there was a limit to how far adrenaline could take a body.

  She thought she’d just reached that limit.

  And now, with the realization she had somehow—against all odds—prevented the nuclear blast that would have leveled most of a mid-sized Russian city and in all probability signaled the beginning of World War III, she felt not the elation she’d expected to feel.

  Not even relief.

  Just an overriding, bone-deep exhaustion.

  But there was no time to rest, not yet and maybe not for a while. She was still an American covert operative sitting inside an American-made truck with the corpse of a Russian citizen slumped in the seat next to her. And a live nuclear bomb in the cargo bed. Sure, she had prevented detonation, but the device still had the two uranium rods buried inside its steel shell, which meant it remained capable of inflicting death, illness and destruction on thousands of innocents.

  She reached under the seat and fished around for the gun she’d taken off the Navsegda operative. Leaving it where any passerby could find it would be a bad call on her part. After a moment she found it and lifted it out from under the seat. In her left hand she balanced both the gun and the nuke’s remote detonator.

  Then she opened the passenger side door with her right hand, suddenly and acutely aware of the pain knifing through it from the many cuts and abrasions she’d suffered smashing the Ford’s window. The sting was white-hot and intense, firing through her hand, new waves of blood pulsing out with every beat of her heart. Her brain had managed to block out the extreme discomfort while she dealt with the higher priority of a live nuke, but now it seemed to have decided to make up for lost time.

  Tracie ignored the insistent throbbing as best she could and slid across the bench seat. She plucked the F-150’s key out of the ignition, then reached up and grasped the dead man by his shoulders and pulled him toward her, shifting back toward the passenger door as she did so, lying his body across the seat. There was nothing she could do about the blood splattered all over the interior of the cab, but she could at least ensure the corpse would not be visible to anyone without walking straight up to the truck and peering inside.

  That distasteful chore complete, Tracie slipped out her door and slammed it closed. Locking the truck would be pointless with a smashed out window. She turned and stumbled ahead to the car meant for use by the Navsegda operative to escape the bomb blast, yanking open the door and dropping heavily behind the wheel. Then she leaned into the passenger seat and placed the remote detonator and the operative’s weapon carefully onto the floor. She tossed the truck’s key onto the floor as well.

  She pushed herself upright and checked the ignition, certain she would either have to waste valuable time hotwiring the car or waste even more valuable time going back to the F-150 and rifling through a dead man’s pockets.

  But for what felt like the first time in years, something actually went her way. The key was buried in the ignition, just waiting to be turned.

  Tracie fired up the engine, thankful for her good fortune and for the fact that Navsegda had chosen a relatively new and fairly reliable vehicle in which their man had been supposed to escape. She hit the headlights and pulled away from the curb, cradling her injured right hand as much as possible in her dirty sweatshirt, dripping blood all over the shifter every time she had to change gears.

  She’d no sooner begun accelerating away from the scene than a police cruiser eased to a stop at the cross street ahead. Tracie’s pulse spiked, pain flashing once again in her hand. She willed the patrol car to turn right, away from the Ford with the blood-splattered cab and the cadaver lying prone in the front seat, but her streak of good fortune ended at one as the cop pulled through the intersection and turned left, motoring toward Tracie and the F-150.

  Keeping her eyes straight ahead, she picked up speed, staying below the posted limit but wanting to put every foot possible between herself and the truck before the cop reached it. The cruiser passed Tracie and continued moving slowly toward the F-150, and then its brake lights flashed as she watched in the rear view mirror.

  The cop was clearly slowing in order to scope out the truck.

  He would have to be
either blind or mind-numbingly stupid to miss the devastation inside the cab, even on an inky-black night like this. Tracie knew exactly what was going to happen and was unsurprised to see the cruiser swing wide and then approach the F-150 from behind, its hazard lights blinking on as it stopped on the street next to the truck.

  Goddammit.

  Tracie maintained her speed and turned at the first intersection, the street the cop had just exited. She did it not because she needed to make the turn but because the sooner she put the big church building between herself and the cop, the sooner she could jam the accelerator to the floor without drawing attention to herself.

  She didn’t know whether the cop had seen her pull away from the curb in front of the F-150 but guessed he had. If so, he would sprint to his cruiser and come after her the moment he checked on the truck driver’s welfare and discovered him dead, with a significant portion of his head blown off.

  A moment later the cruiser’s flashing lights disappeared behind the church and Tracie hit the gas, forsaking caution for speed. Then she heard the wail of a siren start up and knew the chase was on.

  This was the last thing she needed. The nuke would remain a threat until the Red Army had recovered it, and now she was being forced to play hide-and-seek with another Russian cop. She’d been operating in and around Soviet states for nearly ten years and until yesterday had never had a single run-in with the Russian Militsiya.

  Now she was working on her second in twenty-four hours.

  She slowed slightly and turned left at the next intersection, taking the corner as fast as she dared, praying to get out of sight before the cruiser turned the corner behind her.

  And she almost made it.

  But not quite.

  She had to assume the cop had seen her taillights make the turn, so she jammed the accelerator to the floor again, coaxing every last bit of horsepower out of the overtaxed vehicle, knowing the current course of action was unsustainable. The cruiser’s engine was undoubtedly larger than hers, and the cop would have intimate knowledge of the Kirov area, whereas she did not.

  The fact of the matter was that she was lost, operating on instinct and desperation.

  If she didn’t do something to flip the odds in her favor the cop would run her down, and sooner rather than later.

  This area formed the outskirts of Kirov, meaning the buildings were less densely packed together than they would be closer to the center of town, and cross streets were spread relatively far apart. It was precisely the opposite of what Tracie needed.

  But she was rocketing toward downtown and she hoped things would change soon, the area becoming more densely populated and giving her a greater number of city streets on which to lose the pursuing cop.

  The other issue she had to take into consideration was that the officer would have called for backup the moment he spotted the dead man inside the pickup truck. A law enforcement noose would soon begin to tighten around Tracie. It was probably already beginning to close, even though it was at the moment still invisible.

  Things had better change in a hurry, or I’m screwed.

  The cop began closing the gap as Tracie raced along the straightaway, but finally she reached another cross street and yanked the wheel left, easing off the gas at the last moment and barely tapping the brakes, allowing the car’s momentum to take it through a wide turn as she cut the corner and prayed she wouldn’t smash head-on into an oncoming vehicle.

  The tires screeched, the sound long and low and somehow desolate in the quiet of the deserted city. She mashed the accelerator to the floor again as the car completed the turn, its rear end fishtailing for a long second and then gaining purchase on the pavement.

  Another right, followed by an almost immediate left and a right, and Tracie had finally put enough of the cityscape between herself and her pursuer to consider her next steps.

  She killed her headlights and continued through the streets of Kirov in the dark, driving much too fast, running nearly blind thanks to the lack of streetlights. If a pedestrian were to step in front of her she would have no chance of avoiding a deadly collision. She raced on anyway.

  When she’d made three straight turns without seeing the cruiser’s hazard lights in her rear view, she began to ease off the gas, gradually slowing to a saner speed.

  Two more turns without pursuit and she flicked her headlights back on.

  The sound of more wailing sirens began to fill the air, or maybe Tracie was only now hearing them because the immediate danger from the first cop had passed. One cruiser was coming from behind her, one from somewhere off her left, another from the right rear.

  It occurred to Tracie that any chance she had of completing her escape was probably due to the time of night and the fact the city would be operating a skeleton crew of law enforcement at two a.m. on a weeknight. Had more officers been on duty she would probably already be in handcuffs or locked in a life-and-death standoff with police.

  But she wasn’t out of Kirov yet, meaning she wasn’t out of danger yet. She continued to drive, completely lost, knowing eventually she would find the A113 highway that would take her back toward Moscow. The problem was, even though she’d lost the police pursuit for now, she was at risk of being apprehended at any moment if the cop had gotten a good look at her vehicle’s tags.

  She needed to change cars.

  And she needed to find a telephone booth.

  47

  June 15, 1988

  2:20 a.m.

  Kirov, Russia, USSR

  High-rise Soviet apartment buildings had been Tracie’s go-to choice for years when she needed to acquire a vehicle in a hurry, and tonight was no exception. Her current location was still inside a heavily populated portion of the city, and she took advantage of that by turning into the first apartment parking lot she could find.

  This would give her the opportunity to change cars, but also provided the advantage of getting her off the streets for a few minutes while the Kirov Militsiya combed the area for the person who’d murdered the man in the bright red pickup truck.

  Her right hand continued to bleed, and her clothing was covered not just with her own blood but with the Navsegda operative’s as well. So no matter what car she was driving, if she were to be stopped she would probably have to disable or even kill multiple cops to complete her escape, and that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.

  There was no point worrying about that possibility now, though. All she could do was take things one step at a time. She nosed her current vehicle into a parking space as close to the rear of the lot as possible, and then stepped out, locking the doors and pocketing the key. Eventually the car would be found and Tracie could think of no good reason to make the job of the police any easier than necessary by leaving the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition.

  Within minutes she had selected a new vehicle, as ubiquitous and anonymous a Lada as she could find without wasting too much time. It was compact and gray, several years old but not suffering from too much damage or body rot.

  Tracie broke in and reached under the dash, pulling the ignition and battery wires out of the wiring harness with her bleeding hand and hot-wiring the engine in seconds. Then she climbed out of the driver’s seat and left the car idling. One of her hard and fast rules was to always switch license plates after stealing a vehicle. This made it much easier to escape detection by police. But tonight time was of the essence, with the city of Kirov crawling with cops on the lookout for her, and virtually no automobile traffic on the roads with which to camouflage herself.

  Time was her enemy, and even the few short minutes it would take to swap plates seemed like too big a risk. The Lada’s owner was likely fast asleep somewhere in the apartment building next to her, and would not report his or her car stolen until morning.

  By then Tracie should be long gone.

  She decided she would use the car just long enough to escape Kirov and hit the highway, and then she would take the next exit and swap vehicles ag
ain, protecting herself properly for the long drive back to Moscow and the CIA safe house by swapping plates at that time.

  But before she could even try to complete her escape, there was one more thing she needed to do. It would take valuable time but it was critical, more important even than escaping the city undetected.

  It had to be done immediately.

  Tracie sprinted to the street, peering in both directions, cursing when she didn’t see what she needed. Telephone booths in the United States were easy to find, particularly in cities the size of Kirov, but that wasn’t always the case in Russia.

  She turned left, choosing that direction at random, and began trotting along the sidewalk. Two blocks later she found what she was looking for and stepped up to the telephone. She fished around in her pocket and withdrew the change she needed to make a call, and the slip of paper she’d taken off Detective Kuznetsov. Both items were bloody and Tracie felt a moment of panic, fearing the blood had soaked the paper enough to obscure the writing on it.

  She brought it to her face and breathed a sigh of relief. Kuznetsov’s handwritten telephone number was still legible. She dropped her rubles into the coin slot and dialed the phone and then waited impatiently while it began to ring. The sirens had faded into the distance for now, but Tracie felt exposed and vulnerable standing on a street corner in the middle of the night in blood-soaked clothing and with a hand dripping her own blood steadily onto the sidewalk.

  The tone continued to buzz in her ear. Tracie began to fear the telephone wasn’t located anywhere near General Gregorovich’s bed and her call would go unanswered until morning. She could not afford to stand out here for anything close to that length of time. If she tried, she would definitely end up in police custody.

  She was preparing to give up and try calling Gregorovich again at the next exit along the highway when the buzzing stopped as the line was answered.

  A groggy-sounding voice said, “Hello?” in Russian.

  “General Gregorovich?” Tracie said.