Dark Winter

by Anthony J. Tata

  Another way of saying live in the moment, he assumed, but he was a complicated man. “Where did you have in mind?”

  “Your airplane. Get your goon and let’s go.” Her lips brushed his ear.

  He felt the flicker of a tongue against his lobe. His heart raced. Slid a hand around her back, pulled her close. She pressed into him. He didn’t care if anyone was watching. The beautiful woman, the combat, the relentless pace all combined to create desire within him.

  “Let’s live while others are dying, Ian. Be with me,” she said.

  “Where should I tell the pilots?”

  “Samjiyon. Where you built our Manaslu facility . . . or what you might call your spy station.”

  Gorham pulled away and looked in her eyes. Who was this person? Dare he question her?

  Instead, he went to that room in his mind that dealt with probabilities. “All the reports I’m getting on my iPad are that China is shooting down everything that flies in their airspace. Anything that even gets close.”

  “We can get into Russian airspace from here. Iran has Syria and then it’s about a ten hour flight in your jet to the North Korean border without crossing into China. You can operate from there.”

  Gorham nodded.

  He broke away, found Stasovich, and soon they were in the air, flying north over Damascus and airspace protected by the Russians.

  Her idea was brilliant. He could ride out the remaining hours of the war and bide his time bunkered up with the beautiful Kal.

  Whose name meant knife.

  CHAPTER 17

  MAHEGAN HUDDLED WITH GENERAL SAVAGE, OWENS, AND O’MALLEY in the Farah command and control facility, be that what it was. The Russian wolfhound lay quietly in the corner, a gauze bandage wrapped around its left rear leg. Mahegan had put some concentrated milk and water in a bowl. Apparently, the wolfhound thought the same of the milk as did the troops because she stopped lapping at it after a few lashes with her tongue. He dumped the milk and poured a bottle of water into the bowl, which she drank as one of the nurses took her time stitching the dog’s wounds. The army nurse had affectionately rubbed her head and named her, “Ranger.”

  White boards and pin up maps hung from the walls in haphazard fashion. A digital map that O’Malley had transposed onto a 55-inch monitor showed the European and Asian continents. Red symbols reflected the progress of the North Korean Army about midway through the Korean Peninsula; the Russian Army’s blitzkrieg through Belarus and into Poland; and the Iranian Army rapid advance into Jordan.

  “As bad as all that is,” Mahegan said, pointing at the monitor, “it gets much worse. But first, just so I’m clear with everyone, getting Cassie back is central to anything we do next. I’ll go in by myself if I have to.”

  “No need, Jake. We all get that,” Savage said.

  The phone rang. He answered and said, “Roger that, sir.” He punched the SPEAKER button and placed the handset in the cradle. “Mister Secretary, you’re live with me, Jake Mahegan, Sean O’Malley, and Patch Owens. We’ve got a missing soldier, Captain Cassandra Bagwell. She was captured in Iran. We have two prisoners and were just getting ready to debrief.”

  “Bart Bagwell’s daughter?” Secretary of Defense Thad Trapp asked.

  “Roger, that, sir,” Savage said.

  Cassie’s parents had been kidnapped and killed by Syrian terrorists seeking revenge for a bombing mission that General Bagwell, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had approved.

  “Need to get her back,” Trapp said.

  “Understand, sir.”

  Mahegan thought the defense secretary sounded as if he wanted to avoid the public relations nightmare of having to deal with Cassie’s disappearance, which was nonsensical because the world was on fire and about to melt down.

  “Why don’t you proceed with your update. I’ll listen and then tell you what we’re doing. I’ve got about ten staffers in here listening and taking notes. I update the president in an hour. Things are . . . bad.”

  Savage nodded at Mahegan and said, “Jake.”

  Mahegan turned so that his voice could better be heard by the team listening in the Pentagon. “Sean, can you share our screen with the command center in the Pentagon?”

  After a minute of typing and chatting with some anonymous JWICS operator in Washington, DC, O’Malley said, “Shared.”

  “We’ve got it,” Trapp said.

  “Good. Here’s what we’ve got. There are three low earth orbit nanosatellite systems that support the three attacks. They move and geo-locate with the center of the convoys moving through South Korea, Jordan, and now Poland. These satellites can do everything that little briefcase did at the bar. Shut off power, cut digital links, disable Wi-Fi networks, and fry everything with directed energy. They are synchronized electronic, digital, and energetic warfare platforms that communicate with similarly optimized ground-based stations.”

  “Briefcase at the bar?” Trapp interrupted.

  Mahegan paused, bit his tongue, and said, “Roger that. We had a tip that a major operation was happening domestically in Detroit. We went there, disrupted that attack, captured one of our prisoners, and have been following the intel ever since. That intel took us to Iran, where all of the leaders met to enable a nuclear strike on America.” He deliberately left out the mention of the original three RINK captives from the Detroit bar.

  “Nuclear strike on America?” Trapp interrupted again.

  “Sir, if you let me finish, I think we will all have a better understanding of exactly what is happening. I just interrogated our prisoners and we are piecing this together on the fly.”

  Despite some murmuring in the background of the Pentagon command post, Mahegan continued. “Sir, I’d appreciate it if you’d mute on your end unless someone there has something to add. We think the prisoner called Spartak is of Russian descent, but we believe she was the chief financial officer for the tech company, Manaslu. A woman named Nancy Langevin. She defected from Manaslu knowing what Ian Gorham had in mind. She knows the plan and says that Gorham has been able to infect our weapons systems with viruses over the last couple of years, thus making our smart bombs dumb, our radars misread, and our intelligence systems report inaccurate information. Everything we’re shooting at or receiving as information is a degree or two off. Most everything is missing.”

  The phone clicked and Trapp said, “First, we’re sure about Gorham? He’s on the President’s technology Blue Ribbon Commission.”

  “Positive,” Mahegan said.

  “Okay, second, yes, your information confirms what all of our field commanders are telling us. Everything is inaccurate,” Trapp said.

  “Roger. That’s because Gorham used a guy named Shayne to infiltrate the research and development and manufacturing facilities of every major defense company in the West. He opened hackable portals where Manaslu could either go in through the wires, so to speak, or do over the air penetrations. Then placed remote access Trojans that only activate when the weapon is fired. This combination of digital bomb, directed energy, electromagnetic pulse, and disabling our weapons and intelligence systems has led to major conventional success on behalf of the RINK alliance. The first task, Mister Secretary, is to have CyberCom find a quick patch for all of this so it can be deployed and we can be more accurate, fight back, and survive.”

  The phone clicked again. “Roger,” Trapp said.

  Mahegan continued when the phone went silent again. “The bad news is that all this conventional action—save what happened in Tokyo—is a prelude to planned nuclear annihilation of the United States. Gorham wants to destroy the United States so he can rebuild it in his Utopian image of a borderless land that has no rule of law, or whatever those pinheads believe.”

  “My God,” Trapp said.

  “The key is that we have to assume that what they have done to the conventional forces, they’ve also been able to do to the nuclear arsenal.”

  The phone had not been muted and there was a rustling in
the background until a voice said, “That’s impossible! Mister . . . Mister Mohican, or whatever your name is. This is General Fred Turner with the United States Air Force Strategic Command. Our nuclear arsenal is pure. We are prepared to defend.”

  Mahegan looked at Savage, who rolled his eyes and waved his flat hand across his neck. He mouthed Don’t do it.

  “Do you hear me, mister!”

  At that point, Savage shrugged.

  Mahegan’s eyes bored into the phone. “Mister Secretary, we’ve got very little time so if you have a pistol handy I recommend you shoot that guy. We just wasted a minute when we have less than forty-eight hours to solve this thing. We’ve got a missing soldier and three wars raging. We don’t have time for egos or bullshit. I can punch the OFF button here or we can continue.”

  The phone went silent briefly then came back alive.

  “Proceed,” Trapp said.

  Mahegan hoped the phone had been muted so that they would not hear the pistol shot.

  He continued. “We need someone competent and humble to conduct a thorough inspection of our nuclear arsenal from our bombs, to our boomers, to our ICBMs. Everything. We have to assume that we have been neutered from a nuclear standpoint just as every commander in the conventional force has been.”

  “Roger,” Trapp said.

  “So, two key tasks and we may be able to turn this thing around. One, CyberCom patches the bugs that make us miss when we shoot. Two, inspect the nukes and when we find what they’ve done, fix them. Without the assurance of mutual assured destruction, we will be destroyed. With it, we can bargain. That’s the task. Get our nukes back on line.”

  “Could take days, even months,” Trapp balked.

  O’Malley leaned over and whispered in Mahegan’s ear.

  Mahegan nodded and turned toward the speaker phone. “Just a second. Let’s make this easy. You guys kill the satellites and ground stations and we’ll find the biometric keys for the nukes. So, all you need to do is find three RIM-161 missiles that haven’t been bugged—or debug three—and put them on airburst to destroy the low earth nanosats Gorham has in circulation. Those are the backup systems to the mobile command posts the RINK are using to advance so quickly. They have full electronic, network, and digital warfare comms suites. And then find the mobile command posts and destroy them with JDAM bombs. So that’s six weapons. You can prioritize that and have Cyber Command working the over-the-air patch of the rest of our systems.”

  A RIM-161 was an ASAT, or antisatellite missile in the U.S. inventory. Typically used for ballistic intercept, it could also penetrate and destroy low earth-orbit satellites. Better at kinetic impact kills than airburst, the ASAT might be able to disable an array of satellites, not just one. It wasn’t a sure thing by any measure. Gorham had built in redundancy and Mahegan believed that more than one satellite would be capable of continuing operations, if not all of them. Like a bowling ball, those ASATs needed to score perfect strikes on three different constellations of nanosats. The JDAMs needed to precisely target and disable the ground-based cyber platforms within the command centers that were commanding and controlling the forces. Mahegan and team needed to capture the biometric keys and unlock the newly impenetrable nuclear arsenal launch codes so that the arsenals could be hacked and shut down.

  Three major problems. No good solutions. Everything took time.

  “Okay, what about Ian Gorham? Why not bring him in?”

  “Like I said, that’s our mission. High value targets. As we’re recovering Captain Bagwell, we will also snatch Gorham in the next twenty four hours. One prisoner tells me Gorham is the key to overriding the system and another tells me that Gorham’s number two is the key. Of course, they both could be bullshitting. Either way, we’ve got Shayne and we also have a solid shot at capturing Gorham. He’s starting to be careless.”

  Mahegan wasn’t sure if he believed that Spartak/Langevin had the access she purported or if they could get her in the facility to do what needed to be done.

  Savage interrupted the conversation. “Mister Secretary, as Jake said, there are three fixed facilities and three satellite constellations that need destruction. Jake’s plan is a good one. More troubling is that there is one person per country that has the biometric identifiers to shut down what may have already been launched. In the event that we do not capture Ian Gorham, we need a backup plan executed right now to find the three biometric keys.”

  “Okay.” The secretary paused and then said, “You’re going to tell me that we have no idea who these people are.”

  “Exactly,” Savage said. “I’d start with anyone who is in the doppelganger program for each of those countries. My guess is that the actual leadership may not have been scanned.”

  “Those are some pretty thin databases, General. Human intelligence isn’t so hot in Iran and North Korea. Now, Russia’s a different story, but even there, stuff’s changing all the time,” Trapp said.

  “Work with what you’ve got. When we get positive identification, I’m sending in Patch Owens on the first one we identify, wherever that person may be. I’ll need a Delta or SEAL team to go with him and so a few hours ago I ordered the SEALs from Coronado to head our way. It would be good to know what we’ve got going on conventionally.”

  After a long pause, a voice said, “This is General Tim Barrett, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the moment, we have every army and marine division preparing to deploy. Every aircraft carrier group is either remaining on station where they are, turning around to be where we need them to be, or deploying. There will be nothing left. All the boomers are doing the same. Every air force wing is repositioning to support the threat theaters of war. Rangers are on the way to secure airfields in Korea. As you know we’ve got two eighty second airborne brigades in Korea and now two in Estonia. They should be closing in on those combat zones pretty quickly. Plus they’re securing multiple airfields throughout the region for follow on forces to deploy.”

  The Chairman paused and Secretary Trapp said, “Out of time.”

  Savage said, “Roger,” and hung up.

  Mahegan thought If the United States pushed every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine into combat, along with all their equipment, besides the Coast Guard, who would protect the homeland? Was this a possible ploy? He thought not, but anything was possible right now. They needed to stay focused on capturing three random people, and getting them to the Manaslu facilities in those countries while the Pentagon focused on destroying the satellites and with it the conventional ComWar capabilities.

  As Mahegan was thinking through the possibilities and visualizing the American military mobilizing and responding, his satellite phone buzzed. Only four people had that phone number, three of whom were in the room.

  He retrieved the phone from his outer tactical vest and checked the screen.

  Jake it’s Cassie. The Jordanians rescued me. They captured Iran Key.

  Mahegan: What is tat on my right arm?

  Cassie: Teammates ;) It’s me

  Mahegan: How do you know about Keys?

  Cassie: Mossad working with Jordan. Mossad knows everything that Sean is tracking. Also have NoKo Key destination. Not there yet, but OTW.

  Mahegan: Send it.

  Cassie typed in a latitude and longitude, which O’Malley immediately put into his satellite function. He turned the screen, which showed the earth image spinning and zeroing in on a location labeled SAMJIYON.

  Cassie: Got it?

  Mahegan: Yes. Are you okay? That question had been the first he wanted to ask.

  She never answered. He lowered his head. His heart leapt. Unaccustomed to the emotions surging through him, he put his hand to his eyes. Pinched them. Took a deep breath. Blew it out, like steam escaping from a valve. Relief washed over him. She was safe, but still. Nothing was a sure thing. She was with Mossad, Israeli intelligence, and Jordanian Special Forces. They were some of the best. He sighed with relief.

  Mahegan turned to see everyone loo
king at him.

  This was what love did.

  “You okay, bro?” Owens asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m good. What do we have?” Mahegan asked. Cassie was okay. He regained his composure despite his heart and stomach doing flips. Steadfast normally, Mahegan wanted to shout.

  “Cassie was rescued by the Jordians and some Mossad. She’s saying that the North Korean Key is going to this airfield here. It’s about seven miles from the Chinese border in the northern reaches of North Korea. The satellite shows that Manaslu recently built a factory there. There’s an intel folder on this thing. Just reading it sounds like the deal was brokered by the Chinese and necessitated that it be built within a twelve-mile zone of China for trade and labor purposes. Chinese workers come through the border every day, evidently.”

  “What do you want to do, Jake?” Savage asked.

  “We have two missions, right? One is to have Cyber Command fix whatever Gorham and Manaslu did to the weapons and systems that we and our allies use.”

  “Roger. Nothing we can do there except tell them what we’re seeing,” Owens said.

  “Second, our mission has to be to prevent nuclear war everywhere, and most important against the United States. If we are naked right now, Russia could attack without fear of retaliation.”

  “Roger,” Owens said again.

  “What’s going on in Russia? How do we deal with the fact that the Russian Key is dead?” Mahegan asked. “We can shut down a part of the nuclear option if Cassie and the Jordanians have the Iranian Key and we can get someone on top of the North Korean Key. But Shayne says the Russian key is dead.”

  “A lot of assumptions built into that assessment, but I agree,” Savage said.

  “Yes. We must keep the Iranian and North Korean keys alive and make them walk through whatever the device is—and wherever it is—and have all their biometrics checked out. I get that. But without them, we know we’re screwed. So we have to find the key and a facility. The right person and the right facility. Regarding the Russian key, if Gorham in fact stole the biometric data, Spartak/Langevin says the Manaslu facility in Idaho is our best bet,” Mahegan said.