by Saul Herzog
“So they’re safe?”
“Sir,” Schlesinger said, interrupting, “there’s nothing on the planet with the war fighting capability of these carrier strike groups. Believe me when I say that.”
“Because we only have eleven of them, right?”
“Sir, these ships are the most difficult craft in the history of human navigation to bring down. This is the type of scenario they were built for.”
Roth was watching the screen of the Bol’shaya Plaza and could see Lance entering the General Staff Building’s main west wing entrance next to the triumphal arch. He was in the uniform of a Russian officer, and most likely carried some of the credentials of the man who’d owned the uniform.
However, the Russians knew Lance was in Saint Petersburg. They’d be expecting him.
“He’s in,” Roth said, as Lance disappeared into the building.
“What now?” the president said.
“Now, sir, we wait.”
92
Lance entered the lobby of the General Staff Building and quickly scanned for security cameras. He knew they’d be searching for him using facial recognition algorithms and at this proximity, he had little chance of staying off their radar for more than a few minutes.
It was clear that it was an important day for the Western Military District. There were all sorts of people in the lobby. Most of them in their formal uniforms, active duty personnel who’d been told something big was going down.
Lance couldn’t have asked for a more perfect arrangement to inflict maximum damage. Everyone who was anyone was in the building.
The lobby was a large, open atrium, surprisingly spacious for a building so old. In front of him was an array of security equipment, metal detectors and x-ray scanners, and beyond those, facial recognition scanners.
To the right, a wide staircase curved up to the second floor. To his left was the main security desk, where two soldiers were sitting at computers, monitoring the feeds from the cameras and sending anything suspicious upstairs for analysis.
One of the soldiers rose from his seat and walked over to a door marked “Security Personnel Only.”
Below the lobby were three basement levels. The first two contained offices and meeting rooms, and the third was the service level.
That was where Lance needed to get.
This building, he knew, was one of the locations the Russians would be expecting him to attack, and after the stunt he’d pulled with Kirov and the chopper, they certainly knew he was close by.
It was only a matter of time before they sealed off the entire district.
His face would be matched by the facial recognition system and an entire division would be sent in to surround the building.
There’d be no possible way for him to make it out of there alive.
But that was all right, because he had no intention of trying to get back out.
This was a one way trip, and he was resigned to that fact.
“Can I help you, sir?” one of the guards said.
“I’m looking for corridor fifty,” Lance said. “It’s in the third basement level.”
The guard gave Lance a curious look, he wasn’t used to people requesting sections of the building by their blueprint designations, but Lance didn’t have time to come up with a plausible cover story.
He needed to get to that basement, and he needed to get to it fast.
Outside the building, in the distance but growing closer, he heard the distinct wailing of Saint Petersburg city police sirens.
He wondered if they were for him.
Had the facial recognition system already identified him and set off the alarm?
The lobby would be filling with soldiers any second if it had.
The soldier standing next to Lance hadn’t noticed the police sirens, but his radio beeped and he put his hand to his ear. He listened to a message for about five seconds, then turned toward Lance and looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.
Lance waited for him to reach for the assault rifle slung across his chest, then drew his Glock and pressed it against the soldier’s stomach. He pulled the trigger twice, and two silenced pulses sank into the man. Lance let go of him and he slumped to the ground.
Lance bent down and picked up his gun, an AK-12 assault rifle chambered with live 5.45x39 enhanced penetration rounds, and opened fire on the lobby, spraying the entire place with bullets.
There were two guards at the main security desk, twelve others operating the security screening equipment, and besides them, every single other person who happened to be in the lobby, about twenty people in all, were armed, active service military personnel.
Behind Lance, outside on the street, police cruisers were screeching to a halt and armed police officers were getting out of their cars, their guns trained on the entrance of the building.
Lance ran forward and dove for cover behind one of the security scanners, just as bullets began to come at him from every direction. The building’s alarm system went off, and Lance could see from the lights above the elevators that they’d been disabled.
There were two armed soldiers firing at him from the direction of the entrance, and he took them both out with shots to their torsos. Then he rose up from behind the scanner and took out two more guards on the stairs.
He ran across the lobby, keeping low, as guards and soldiers opened fire from all directions. He gave himself blind covering fire and had to slide across the polished floor to the wooden doors leading out to the service staircase.
He descended the stairs, leaping down entire flights, and was at the bottom of the third level when more gunfire came from above.
He gave a few shots in return, then slammed through a set of steel doors into the service level.
Assuming the building’s layout hadn’t changed in the eighty years since the Nazis acquired the blueprints, Lance knew exactly where he needed to go. The building was heated by natural gas, and there was a twelve-inch, municipal-grade gas transmission pipeline, laid over a hundred years ago, and operating at a pressure of four-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch.
That was an extremely high pressure for a single building, even one as large as this, and had been identified by both the Nazis, and later by the CIA, as a potential flaw in the buiding’s design that could be exploited.
Lance rushed past a dozen thick steel doors, like the doors on ships, and turned right into a side corridor, then immediately left into another. Behind him, he could hear soldiers running around, searching for him. At the end of the corridor was a door unlike the others. It was heavy and steel, but round, like the door of a bank vault.
Lance ran up to it and began desperately turning the handle. It unlocked with a loud, ratcheting clank that the soldiers definitely would have heard, and Lance swung it open.
It’s hinges were well-oiled and it moved smoothly, despite its weight.
As it opened, a soldier appeared at the end of the corridor behind him.
“Halt,” he cried, and fired two shots.
Lance fired back and the man fell to the ground.
More men were coming, and Lance went through the door and swung it shut behind him, just as the soldiers appeared at the corner and opened fire. Their bullets struck the steel door and bounced off it, and Lance spun the locking mechanism from the inside until he heard the loud clank of the lock creating its airtight seal.
Through a small window, filled with twenty-inch thick, bullet-proof perspex, Lance could see dozens of soldiers appearing in the corridor outside the door.
There was an emergency deadbolt system that was only operable from Lance’s side of the door, and he locked it, then jammed the barrel of the Glock into the mechanism that controlled it, making it impossible for it to be opened from the other side.
Lance could see the soldiers outside the door, and they could see him, but there was nothing they could do now to stop him. The only way through that steel door was with explosives, which they were already gathering, but by
the time they were ready to blast the door, it would be too late.
Lance looked around. He was in a small service room, deep underground, and it didn’t look like the layout had been altered at all during the eight decades since the blueprints had been captured.
There was a light switch next to the door and he turned it on. A single, incandescent bulb lit the room from its wire cage on the ceiling. The room was about fifteen by fifteen feet, a solid, concrete box, and the walls were wet to the touch.
In front of him, in the center of the room, was the municipal-grade natural gas intake. Behind it were valves for controlling the flow and shutting it off, and from the top were a series of smaller-gauge pipes leading to the various boilers and furnaces scattered throughout the building.
In the ground was a small metal grate for drainage, and from the grate, Lance could hear the distinctive sound of squeaking rats.
Outstide the door, a loud clanging noise began. The soldiers were trying to break their way in. Lance knew how long it would take for them to get explosives brought down from the armory and he got to work.
He went to the gas intake, found the pressure release valve located next to the mainline, and placed both hands on the valve handles.
He knew it was going to be difficult. Decades of rust and neglect had sealed every bolt and screw, but he heaved against the handles and began trying to open the valve with all his might.
He couldn’t get it to budge.
He removed the jacket of his uniform and tied it around two opposing handles to provide himself with some leverage, then heaved again.
He pulled, harder and harder, until he thought he was going to dislocate his shoulders, and eventually, just as he was growing faint from the effort and was afraid he’d pass out, the valve, ever so slightly, began to budge.
At first, he could barely hear the sound of it, but as he continued to open the valve, the slight hiss gave way to a deafening gush, as hundreds of pounds of gas filled the small room at high pressure.
It took about ten seconds for the room to be turned from an empty cube, into an enormous bomb.
Lance knew he had about ninety seconds before he ran out of air.
That was all the time he needed.
He set up the EPX-1 explosive next to the valve, attaching it to the body of the intake, then fitted a detonator to the explosive.
The detonators had the ability to be activated remotely. There was a radio transmitter, a small, black plastic device that looked like the remote control for an old television set, but Lance had no where to go.
There was no way out of the room.
He set the timer on the detonator to three-hundred seconds, the time it was pre-programmed for, and then slumped to the ground. As more and more gas entered the room, he found it difficult to keep his balance and his vision blurred.
He wasn’t worried about anything the soldiers could do. Even if they came back with their explosives now, anything they did would ignire the gas and set off the explosion.
There was nothing they could do to stop him.
He lay down on the ground and squinted up at the light bulb. He could see a green halo around it.
This was it, he thought.
The end of the road.
He’d always known it would come down to something like this. Trapped in an underground bunker.
About to be vaporized by an enormous explosion.
It wasn’t such a bad ending.
He was a soldier, and he’d seen a lot of better men than him come to worse endings.
This was no better and no worse than he deserved.
The end was coming for him quickly, and he welcomed it.
He couldn’t breathe, and the gas had grown so thick that even the rats in the grate by his feet had stopped screaming.
There was silence.
93
Roth, the president, and the other cabinet members watched in awe as an enormous explosion lit up their screen. The explosion was so large, and so powerful, it actually caused the satellite feed to flicker for a moment.
The explosion began beneath the triumphal arch, right where the two wings of the building met, and was followed rapidly by a series of follow up explosions as a chain reaction was set off, and the furnaces distributed around the building were ignited by the fuel in the gas lines.
“No one’s walking out of that,” the president said, his eyes fixed on the screen as fires engulfed the entirety of the enormoius building.
“If that doesn’t stop them,” Schlesinger said, “I don’t know what will.”
Roth nodded.
The entire command of Russia’s Western Military District had just gone up in smoke. This action, combined with the airstrikes already being launched, would make it impossible for the Russians to continue with the invasion.
“Well done, Levi,” the president said. “I think your man made the right call.”
Roth nodded.
Lance had calibrated this attack so as to be devastating enough to stop the Russian invasion in its tracks, but contained enough not to set off a general war.
“I think you’re right, sir.”
“I hope so, Levi.”
Roth hoped so too.
Because if a general war did break out between Russia and the United States, the consequences were unthinkable.
It could be game over for everyone on the planet.
The outbreak of World War Three.
“I think the Russians will stand down now, sir,” Roth said. “The Russians didn’t want a general war. Everything they did suggested they wanted a quick, limited engagement.”
Roth didn’t say what everyone in the room was thinking.
That the Russians had been testing the president for weeks, testing his resolve, measuring his responses as they gradually ratcheted up the stakes.
They’d also lain the groundwork for their false flag operation so carefully, ensuring that all communications in Latvia were down, and even taking out US satellite surveillance, so tht they’d have a pretext for the invasion.
They’d wanted to hide their intentions.
They’d wanted the world to believe they had a legitimate reason to be in Latvia.
And only after they’d given themselves that intricately planned pretext, did they dare cross the border into Latvian territory.
The Russians didn’t want all-out war.
Why would they?
They couldn’t possbly win.
They’d bet that the United States, and the rest of NATO, wouldn’t be willing to go to war over a country as small as Latvia.
And maybe they’d been correct in that bet.
Because Roth still wasn’t sure that President Montgomery, not to mention his counterparts across western Europe, would have been ready to engage in all-out war for Latvia’s sake.
Latvia was, after all, a country of just two million people that could fit handily inside the shores of Lake Superior.
Luckily, thanks to what Lance had managed to do, the president didn’t have to make that decision.
The Russian command had been wiped out.
The US air strikes were a proportional response to the missile attacks Russia had already made against targets inside Latvia.
War was averted.
Roth was confident of that.
What scared him was how narrow the victory had been.
How close the Russian president had come to calling NATO’s bluff.
On the screen, the entire General Staff Building, both wings, were engulfed in flames. No one would ever be able to prove for certain who’d been behind the attack. Lance would have been vaporized the instant the gas ignited.
This crisis was over.
And so, it appeared, was Lance Spector.
Champagne had been ordered and glasses were being distributed. Someone handed one to Roth.
“Gentlemen,” the president said, stepping up onto a chair to get a view of everyone present. “I’d like to propose a toast to the man wh
o just delivered us from the jaws of this crisis. He is a man whose name the world will never hear, but what he did just prevented a war that could have gotten unimaginably ugly.”
“Hear, hear,” some of the cabinet members cheered.
The president turned to Roth and said, “To Lance Spector.”
“To Lance Spector,” everyone in the room echoed.
And then they drained their glasses.
Roth smiled thinly.
It didn’t feel right to be toasting victory while the man responsible for it was being burnt to a crust on the screen in front of them.
Roth watched the screen. He saw clearly as the roof of the building collapsed in on the top floor, raising a cloud of dust and ash as the flames continued to spread around Palace Square and along the stores and shops of the Bol’shaya Plaza.
“All right, gentlemen,” the president said, “We’re not out of the woods yet. No one is to leave this building. I want reports every fifteen minutes on the progress of our air strikes, and if there’s any sign whatsoever that the Russians are not backing down, I want to know.”
As the president and cabinet members filed out of the room, Roth slumped back into his seat at the table.
He waited until everyone was gone, then reached for the controller of the satellite and zoomed in on the burning building. He knew it was futile.
In the first minutes after the explosion, people had staggered out of the building, into the Palace Square at the front, or the Bol’shaya Plaza at the rear, where ambulances and paramedics were waiting for them.
But Lance wasn’t going to come out.
There would be no such miracle.
He was in the basement, in a sealed concrete box, and the only one way in and out would have been blocked by soldiers.
He was at ground zero of the explosion, at the very source of a fireball as hot as the surface of the sun when it first ignited.
Survival was impossible.
There was a rap on the door and Roth looked up to see the president.
“I thought you might still be here,” he said.
