Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  Carreño is down there. She knew it as surely as she knew Jon was beside her. His operation had been compromised in the worst way he could have imagined. He wouldn’t leave the cleanup to subordinates.

  “There,” Jon said, pointing at the valley. There was a line of five-ton cargo trucks by the chemical plant, engines idling, she judged by the exhaust rolling out of their stacks. “They’re loading up. Looks like they’re cleaning house,” he said.

  “You think Langley knows?”

  “Probably.”

  “Maybe we should hold this position,” Kyra suggested. “If they’re cleaning out, we might see something worth a call.”

  “Any chance we can do that the easy way?” he asked.

  Kyra pulled the smartphone from her cargo pants and checked the screen. “Still no signal,” she muttered.

  Without a word, Kyra pushed forward and ran from the trees toward the spot where she had built her blind. She kept low, her head down, her hands brushing against the low clover and weeds as she ran. She heard Jon moving behind her, surprisingly quiet, more than she could manage. It was thirty yards to the site.

  The blind was demolished. A stab of regret shot through her, coming from someplace inside she couldn’t identify. The little tent of brush and branches had been her protection, however feeble, for a night and she felt violated by its destruction.

  No time for that, she thought, and pushed the feelings away. “The antenna is gone.”

  “I threw it in the woods after I pulled the cable,” Jon said. “I’ll look for it but I’ll be surprised if it’s still there.”

  Jon went for the tree line and Kyra began moving through the brush again. The flat rock was . . . there. She scrambled to it. The brush was still in place. Perhaps the soldiers hadn’t been thorough in their search, or had come at night and hadn’t been able to see well enough in the dark. She pulled the brush and netting away, then grabbed the flat rock under the lip and slid it to one side. It was all there, the HK where she had left it, the radio unmoved. “At least we have the transceiver,” she said into her headset.

  “Antenna’s gone. We’ll have to find another one,” Jon replied.

  “Yeah, they’re just lying around all over the place.” Kyra pulled the LST-5 radio out of the hole and set it on the rock, its cables falling over the edge into the dirt.

  CIA Director’s Office

  “What can I do for you, Kathy?” the SecDef asked. She’d tracked him down in the Tank, the conference room in the National Military Command Center of the Pentagon. He couldn’t recall ever having talked with the CIA director on the secure phone before. They’d shared some small talk at social functions since he’d assumed the office a few months earlier, but nothing official. She’d been professionally close to his predecessor, who’d retired at the end of President Stuart’s term. Lance Showalter was now fly-fishing in Montana somewhere, maybe drafting his memoirs, and the current secretary of defense could only hope that his own tenure would end so well. Current events weren’t promoting his faith in that particular future.

  “I have two officers on the ground in Venezuela. They had to shelter in place out in the field when the embassy got surrounded. I need you to authorize a personnel recovery mission,” the CIA director replied.

  “The president has approved?”

  “Not yet. He will.”

  The SecDef grunted in response. “We’ve got enough air- and sea-lift assets in theater to spare some units. Where are they?”

  “We’re not exactly sure at the moment, but somewhere around Puerto Cabello,” Cooke admitted.

  “Near the CAVIM plant?” The SecDef’s voice took on a worried tone that sent a shiver down Cooke’s spine.

  “I don’t know. At one point they were conducting surveillance in the hills around the facility.”

  “If they’re anywhere close, you have to pull them back.”

  A dark feeling invaded Cooke’s chest. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “The White House hasn’t told you?”

  “I haven’t heard anything—”

  “Kathy, I don’t know why POTUS didn’t invite you to the meeting. He didn’t invite Marshall either.” The SecDef paused, and Cooke could hear him assembling his thoughts. “There’s an air strike under way on the CAVIM site . . . B-2 bomber with a Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The president wants to kill the nuke before Avila moves it.”

  “How long?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. She had no idea where Jon was, but the man’s way with misfortune didn’t give her much hope.

  “I cut the orders and the plane took off from Whiteman two hours ago. It’s twenty-five hundred miles to the target.” The SecDef was thinking out loud now. “B-2’s max cruising speed is a hair over six hundred miles an hour. It’s like flying from D.C. to Vegas. So a little over two hours at most, depending on weather,” he said, finishing the calculation. “I hope your people are nowhere near there, Kathy. There’s no way I can authorize a personnel recovery mission anywhere inside that box until after the strike.”

  “I understand,” Cooke said. “I’ll call you back when we have a better idea where our people are.”

  “If they’re still near Puerto Cabello, Vicksburg is the closest ship. I’ll give Captain Riley a heads-up.”

  “Thank you.”

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  “Batteries are dead,” Kyra said. She realized that she should have expected it. She’d left the unit powered on before she’d entered the base, needing it to be active to handle her radio communications during the incursion, and Jon hadn’t known where it was to turn it off when he’d abandoned the hilltop. Without being connected to the small solar panel that charged them, the batteries had simply run out. Kyra pulled out the solar panel, set it on the rock, and aimed it toward the sun. “We’re charging again.”

  “It’ll take a few hours before it’s charged enough to make a long distance call,” Jon told her. He was staring down at the idling convoy through his rifle scope again.

  “Before they roll out?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t matter without an antenna.” Jon shrugged. “No way to know how close they are to leaving.” He lowered the rifle and offered it to her. “Take a look.”

  Kyra took the Barrett from Jon’s hands, noticing that he seemed relieved to let it go. She shouldered the Barrett and put her eye to the scope.

  One of the trucks was backed up to the loading dock. A small forklift was nudging forward, a metal cylinder strapped onto its teeth, technicians surrounding the operation. “What is that?” Kyra asked.

  “My guess is a nuclear transport container. That’s probably what those pirates cracked open on the Markarid. Your buddy Carreño sent in that team of dockworkers you found to close it back up and they got cooked doing the job.”

  “Marvelous,” Kyra muttered, deadpan. “Where’s the warhead?”

  Jon just shrugged.

  Kyra shifted the rifle gently to the right. She could see into the open beds of the other trucks. Some had small stacks of boxes, files and papers, she thought. Others were loaded with larger metal crates, but none seemed the right size for a warhead.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “Any word?” Cooke asked as she came through the door.

  “Not exactly,” Drescher replied. “We know where they are. We just can’t talk to them.” He pointed at the flat-panel display mounted on the front wall.

  Cooke walked around the table and stood in front of the monitor. Her task force had kept the overhead imagery of the CAVIM site on the screen since the revelation that a nuclear weapon was inside. Drescher zoomed the picture out until the chemical factory was a small square in the upper left, then pointed. “Here.” He panned the picture, switched to infrared, and zoomed it back in.

  Cooke gasped. Two bodies were lying side by side on the hill
top, moving slightly, the smaller of the pair clearly aiming a weapon. “Why did they go back?” she asked, incredulous. Run, Jon! she wanted to scream at the television, make him hear her by force of will. Her sense of duty took hold. She could not lose her composure in front of the troops.

  “Good question,” Drescher replied. “Our best guess is that they left some gear on the hill and went back for it. If that’s the case, we’re not sure why we still can’t contact them. Our other theory is that they learned about the Venezuelan bug-out and went to run surveillance. But we’ve got no way to know until they call us. The cellular network is down countrywide and they’re not answering on the LST-5.”

  “We have to reach them,” Cooke said, panic creeping into her voice.

  Drescher heard it. “What’s up?” he asked quietly.

  Cooke looked sideways at her friend, leaned in close to him, and spoke, her voice as low as she could make it. “POTUS has ordered an air strike. They’re going to put a MOP down on the site in less than two hours.”

  Drescher’s eyes went wide, the first time she could recall ever seeing the old curmudgeon surprised. He’d worked the Ops Center long enough to see it all. “I’ll call the assistant director for military affairs. He’ll plug us into the National Military Command Center,” Drescher advised. He lowered his own voice a bit. “Ma’am, Jon and Kyra are a half-mile away and up a hillside on high ground—”

  “You think that’s far enough?” Cooke asked, doubtful.

  “I don’t know,” Drescher replied.

  “Any chance they’ll hear the bomber coming and run for it?”

  “What kind of bomber is making the run?” Drescher asked.

  “A B-2.”

  “Then no,” Drescher told her. “I went to an air show at Joint Base Andrews a few years back. A B-2 did a flyover from behind the crowd, just a few hundred feet off the ground. I was looking sideways at one of the helos on the tarmac and saw it coming out of the corner of my eye. But I never heard it coming until it was over us. Northrop Grumman did some kind of crazy acoustical engineering . . . you can’t hear it if you’re in front of it. I thought the beast was gliding in unpowered.” He nodded at the screen. “The first time anyone there will know it’s inbound is when the bomb goes off.”

  Cooke felt her legs starting to go weak. She sat on the edge of the table and clenched her fists.

  “Clear the room,” Drescher ordered the group. They didn’t need to see this. “Report to the Ops Center. Whatever you’re doing, stop, and figure out how to contact those officers on the hill. I want updates every ten minutes. Somebody get the ADCIA for military affairs to call over to DoD and get us a live feed to the bomber. You have two hours.”

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  “There it is,” Jon said. The SEBIN soldiers had backed a new truck up to the loading dock and dropped the tailgate. The forklift was carrying a large metal crate and inching forward, like the driver was afraid he would go too fast and the crate would slide off the front if he braked. The worker bees were standing back and all other action around the area had stopped as everyone watched.

  “No way for headquarters to see that,” Kyra said. There was a roof over the loading dock that would prevent satellites from seeing the cargo.

  She took the rifle from him and watched the scene. “They’re terrified of the thing.”

  Jon grunted. He’d missed that detail. “They probably are. After seeing those roasted dockworkers, they probably think the nuke would do the same thing to them if they stood too close,” Jon suggested. “How long before the radio’s got a decent charge?”

  Kyra looked over. “We’re up to one percent on the battery.”

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  The minutes were crawling and racing at the same time and Cooke couldn’t keep her eyes from moving between the monitor and the digital clock on the far wall above it. “I should have pulled them out,” she muttered. “Screw that, I should never have sent them.”

  “Based on the information you had at the time, you made the right decisions,” Drescher told her. He picked up the remote control to the monitor and adjusted the volume on the feed from the B-2.

  “Feet dry,” one of the pilots announced. The B-2 had just slipped across the northern coast.

  “They’re not going to make it, are they?” Cooke asked. I’m sorry, Jon. The tears were swimming in the corners of her eyes and she fought to keep them from streaming out, refusing to lift her hands.

  Drescher just stared at her, then picked up the phone and dialed the task force downstairs. “This is Drescher. Give me some good news.” Cooke looked at him, hopeful. His expression didn’t change.

  40,000 feet above the CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The CAVIM site was less than five minutes from the coast. The plane was automated to the point that it was practically a drone, so there was little for the pilots to do. The computers noted that the bomber had reached the appropriate coordinates and the bomb-bay doors rolled open, breaking up the aircraft’s silhouette and degrading its stealth capabilities enough that the Venezuela air-defense radars finally were able to see it for the first time. It wasn’t going to matter. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator slipped out of its cradle into the sky and the doors closed up again, having been open for less than five seconds. Its stealth profile restored, the B-2 disappeared from the Venezuelans’ screens without warning and the plane banked left, beginning the turn that would put it back on the landing strip at Whiteman before nightfall.

  The MOP had its own GPS guidance system. Free of the plane, the bomb took stock of its location, calculated the optimal path to its target, and began shifting its tail fins, adjusting its trajectory as the high Venezuelan winds tried to push it away from its destination. It would have taken a hurricane to move it. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator weighed over fifteen tons.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The last of the SEBIN soldiers clambered aboard the cargo trucks and closed the tailgate. Satisfied, Carreño walked to the waiting town car and climbed in, seating himself in the front passenger seat. Ahmadi and Elham were waiting inside.

  “Everything is secure,” he told the others. Carreño picked up the Motorola radio sitting on the dash. “Move the convoy out,” he ordered. “Stop for nothing. I want to be in Caracas before dark.”

  “Sí, señor,” the lead driver replied. Carreño saw dark smoke spew from the trucks’ exhaust stacks and the first of the five-ton transports began to roll forward.

  • • •

  “There they go,” Kyra said. “I hope somebody up there is watching.” She waved at the sky, then saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up. “Jon?”

  He saw her staring up and scanned the sky until he saw it.

  GBU? It had to be. A Tomahawk cruise missile wouldn’t be arcing down in a vertical line and the object was moving too slowly to be any kind of ballistic missile. That meant a bomber had deployed it within the last minute. Jon stared beyond the falling weapon but couldn’t discern the plane that had loosed it. Too high to make it out, he thought. B-2 and B-52s both could reach fifty thousand feet, ten miles up, but he’d heard B-52s flying at altitude and now he’d heard nothing—a B-2, then.

  The only question was what kind of ordnance the U.S. Air Force had just chosen to put on target. He’d seen smart bombs used in Iraq when his unit had called in air strikes on the occasional building filled with stubborn insurgents determined not to come outside. This one seemed larger than any Jon was familiar with, given the size and distance, and B-2s could carry anything in the U.S. arsenal, including nuclear weapons. He doubted it was one of those . . . hoped, really. They were done if it was nuclear.

  It would hit in fifteen seconds or so by his estimate, and it was going to hit close. He wasn’t surprised. There was only one target worth hitting. He stared at the weapon as it hurtled downward, seeming to come stra
ight toward them.

  Five seconds later, he finally figured out the weapon type. “Get down!” he yelled. Jon turned and heaved himself toward Kyra.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  Drescher zoomed the picture out. The image of Jon and Kyra on the hilltop was overlaid in a separate box on the lower right. The entire convoy had moved out of the picture now.

  Cooke stared at the monitor, hands over her face, her eyes fixed on the separate feed of Jon and Kyra. She saw one of the thermal figures lunge toward the other. I’m sorry, Jon, I’m sorry, I’m—

  The image of the CAVIM building went completely white.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The trip to the ground took a little over fifty seconds. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator ripped into the chemical factory’s roof at terminal velocity.

  As big as a large van, the MOP was designed to penetrate two hundred feet into hardened concrete bunkers. The CAVIM plant didn’t offer nearly so much resistance and the bomb smashed through every floor in less than a tenth of a second, crushing more than one technician on its way to the subbasement. The falling weapon cratered through the building’s foundation, then burrowed into the earth and traveled almost two hundred feet farther through the dirt and rock before its onboard computer decided it had gone far enough.

  The MOP’s payload detonated, fifty-three hundred pounds of high explosive igniting in a fraction of a second. The shock wave went supersonic, compressing everything in its path to the density of steel, and traveling back up through the solid earth around it.

  The entire building came off the ground as the earth rose up underneath it, rippling outward in a circle like an earthquake driving upward and out from a fault line. The shock wave broke through and the building pancaked from bottom up, smashing it all to gravel, the walls disintegrating into particles small enough to vaporize in the fireball that followed an instant later. Smaller outbuildings around the plant disappeared, crushed between the writhing earth, the solid wall of air hardened by the shock wave, and the fireball that trailed behind. A mushroom cloud erupted out of the earth where the MOP had burrowed, sucking air and dirt into the sky higher than the foothills.