by Scott McEwen
Speed held the folded T-shirts against his belly as Crosswhite wrapped him tightly around with the duct tape to hold them in place.
“It’s not the aorta. I’ll make it.”
“We’re dropping you off at a hospital,” Crosswhite said.
“Like hell. I ain’t doin’ time in Canada. I ain’t doin’ time no place. You all are takin’ me back to the fuckin’ boat.”
“Dude, you won’t fucking make it! We’re half an hour from NAS Grosse, and there ain’t even a goddamn hospital over there.”
“Doc’s over there.”
“Doc’s a fucking medic. You need a surgeon.”
Speed shrugged. “He’s gonna have to learn, cuz I ain’t doin’ time.”
Crosswhite got to his feet. “Stubborn motherfucker, we already lost Conman.”
Speed glanced down at the Arab on the floor, lying on his belly and looking back at him, wild eyed. “What part of ‘I ain’t doin’ time’ didja not understand?”
Trigg came into the room, jingling a key ring. “There’s a black Lexus with tinted windows in the garage.”
“Excellent! Let’s go.” Crosswhite lifted the terrified woman from the bed and tossed her over his shoulder. “Little Miss Screams a Lot is coming with us. They can both ride in the trunk.”
A few minutes later, they were backing down the drive, and Crosswhite took a sat phone from the pouch, calling Gil over on Grosse Ile and giving a grim situation report. “Yeah,” he said. “Another goddamn belly wound. So make sure Doc is ready with the whole blood.”
46
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA,
Edwards Air Force Base
General Couture leaned back in his chair in Operations, where everyone was in limbo waiting for the UAV to arrive at Grosse Ile so they could determine whether Pope had obeyed the president’s order to stand down. He secretly wanted to kill the White House chief of staff for talking the president into delaying his call to the Canadian prime minister. He could see by the smug look on the deviant little fucker’s face that Hagen had cooked up some kind of scheme, and he suspected it probably had something to do with sticking it to Shannon and Pope.
He checked his watch. The UAV was due over Grosse Ile in ten minutes.
Colonel Bradshaw came into the room and looked at Couture, arching his eyebrows for only him to see, and then moved toward the back of the room. The general watched him for a moment, the gears slow to mesh, as Bradshaw gave him another look, stepping around to the far side of the computer console.
“Excuse me a moment, Mr. President?”
“Certainly,” the president said.
Couture crossed to the far side of the room, standing with his back to the president as he looked over the top of the console where an air force major sat monitoring one of the data streams. “What is it, Gene?”
Bradshaw stood behind the major and placed his hands over the major’s ears; if the major even noticed this, you wouldn’t have known it to see his face. “Bob Pope’s on the line in my office. He’s asking to speak with you out of earshot of the president.” Bradshaw took his hands from the major’s ears and patted his shoulders.
Couture felt his hackles rise. A glance over his own shoulder, and he saw Hagen leaning close to the president, the two of them talking in hushed voices. “Be right back,” he said, and slipped from the room.
He picked up the phone on Bradshaw’s desk. “This is General Couture.”
“Bill? Bop Pope.”
“What can I do for you, Robert?”
“Bill, I need you to locate the nearest Life Flight helo and get it to Grosse Ile Municipal Airport as soon as humanly possible. Make sure they bring plenty of O-negative blood.”
“What’s happened?”
“I’ll wait on the line while you arrange the helo, Bill. There won’t be a moment to spare.”
Couture released an annoyed sigh, setting down the phone as Bradshaw was stepping into the office. “Gene, Pope needs a Life Flight with plenty of O-negative blood to rendezvous with him on Grosse Ile. Please make that happen ASAP—without POTUS hearing you.”
“Yes, sir.” Bradshaw disappeared and Couture picked the phone back up.
“Okay, Robert. What have you gotten us all into?”
Pope told him about the incursion into Amherstburg, Ontario, and that the Zodiac was due back at NAS Grosse within twenty minutes.
Couture bit back the obscene comment that came to his lips, instead going with “Robert, are you insane?”
“Bill, I know the president is set to double-cross me, but I need you to change his mind—to convince him to let us continue with our mission.”
“Robert, I’m not even about to try to do that.”
“I know you’ve been against ST6/B from its inception, Bill—conceptually, so have I—but you’re an old enough soldier to know that you don’t change horses midstream. Especially if the second horse can’t swim.”
Couture knew the reasons for Pope’s bias against the FBI were mostly hyperbole, but he also knew the CIA man was right about switching horses midstream. It would take the FBI hours to get caught up and organized if it was suddenly put in charge of an operation it so far knew nothing about—and those hours could prove to make all the difference.
“How do you know POTUS is set to double-cross you?”
“Has he called the Canadian PM yet?”
“No.”
“And is the FBI en route to take us into custody?”
“Yes.” The general did not volunteer that involving the FBI had been his idea.
“And why do you think that is, Bill?”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Robert.” Why do we keep calling each other by name? Mutual respect? Or contempt?
“Of course it’s dangerous,” Pope retorted. “We’re looking for a loose nuke in the hands of madmen.”
“Suppose I talk the president into it. What’s your next move?”
“I won’t know until after I’ve had time to interrogate al-Rashid.”
“Interrogate him? Muhammad Faisal claims you stabbed him in the face with an ice pick! The surgeon says you could have killed him.”
“I don’t even begin to understand the relevancy of that,” Pope replied. “Faisal told us about the al-Rashids. They may know where to find the bomb. We’re following a very definite trail here, with no time to spare.”
“Never mind,” Couture said. “How do you plan to get off Grosse Ile and continue the mission? It’ll take an entire day to JATO equip the C-5 for short runway takeoff . . . if it can even be done.” JATO stood for jet-assisted takeoff.
“I’m finished with the C-5,” Pope said. “My Gulfstream is due to land here in half an hour. We’ll use that. Which reminds me . . . I’ll need you to authorize a refuel for it ASAP. This is a civilian airfield, and I don’t carry that kind of cash.”
Couture shook his head. “Anything else, Robert?”
“Yes. Call off the FBI, and tell the president there’s no need to contact the PM. Our people left no witnesses or bodies behind—just some blood from our wounded man.”
“I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”
“Thanks, Bill. I’ll wait to hear from you.”
Couture put down the phone and returned to Operations, where he retook his seat across from the president. “Mr. President, sir . . . I’ve just been informed that ST6/B has already taken one of the al-Rashid brothers into custody. He’ll be ashore on Grosse Ile within thirty minutes, so there won’t be a need to contact the prime minister after all. In light of this new development, it is now my professional opinion, Mr. President, that—purely in the interest of time—our wisest course of action might be to allow ST6/B to continue their mission.”
The president blinked once and sat gaping at him.
47
MICHIGAN,
; Grosse Ile
The Montana Air Guard F-15 landed on Grosse Ile a few minutes before sun-up, just as Speed was being loaded aboard the Life Flight helo. Doc, the team’s Mexican American corpsman, was more concerned over the fact that Speed had gone into shock than he was by the loss of blood.
“It’s gonna be close,” he said to Gil. “Shock can be a bitch.”
Gil had seen men in worse condition pull through many times, and Speed was as tough as they came. He looked at Pope. “I think you probably saved his life, Bob. Thank you.”
“It’s Couture we need to thank,” Pope said. “He expedited the helo.”
“Be right back,” Gil said. He trotted out to the F-15, where the pilot stood waiting on the wing beside the cockpit.
The pilot handed down the laptop. “The passport’s under the lid.”
Gil opened the laptop and stuck the passport into his back pocket. “Much obliged.”
“You bet,” the pilot said, gesturing at the mammoth C-5 Galaxy. “How the hell they gonna get that thing back into the air?”
Gil shrugged. “Beats the hell outta me, Captain. Safe flight back!”
“You bet,” the pilot said again, climbing back into the cockpit of the F-15.
Pope met Gil at the edge of the tarmac, and Gil gave him the passport. Pope examined the passport photo for a long moment, searching his memory to place the face. “Jesus . . . this is Nikolai Kashkin.”
“That’s the guy Faisal told us to look for.”
“Damn,” Pope muttered, still studying the face. “It’s too bad your wife had to kill him. He’s very likely the mastermind of this entire operation.” He looked up at Gil. “Kashkin’s father was a colonel in the Soviet tank corps. He fought under his father in the Panjshir Valley, where he was taken prisoner by Mujahedeen. He was rumored to be connected to the KGB through an old-school Georgian assassin. His name was . . . Mulinkov. Daniel Mulinkov.”
Gil shook his head. “How do you remember all that shit?”
“Partial photographic memory—inherited from my father. He worked in the Magic intelligence program during the Second World War; personally deciphered the Japanese code that lead to the shoot-down of Admiral Yamamoto. Anyhow, my memory’s not like his, but it’s similar.”
A Gulfstream V with USAF stenciled on the fuselage touched down on the runway and rolled past them.
Pope smiled. “It’s a fine, well-oiled machine, the US military. Gather your men and their personal weapons. We won’t have room aboard for much else. We’re leaving for Langley immediately. I need to execute a brute-force attack on the laptop.”
A brute-force attack on a computer was an exhaustive key search used against encrypted data that could—in theory, depending on the size of the bit encryption—require a supercomputer capable of generating an amount of energy equivalent to thirty gigawatts of electricity for an entire year.
Gil put the laptop under his arm. “Shouldn’t we have a go at interrogating al-Rashid first?”
“We’ll get to him,” Pope said. “But now I’m sure he doesn’t have the slightest idea where to find the bomb.” He gestured with the passport. “Kashkin masterminded this operation. He was the linchpin, and we needed him alive. If his laptop’s been encrypted with a two-hundred-fifty-six-bit encryption key, we’ll never crack it. So get your team to bring the prisoners aboard the plane. We’re leaving.”
Langley was the last place Gil thought they should be. “Hold up a second.”
Pope stopped midstride. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you telling me this was a waste of time? The al-Rashids are a dead end?”
“The al-Rashids were the money, Gil. That’s what Kashkin was doing at your ranch—returning their favor.” He pointed at the laptop. “That thing’s our last chance. So if we manage to crack it, Marie really will deserve the Medal of Freedom.”
Gil rolled his eyes. “She’ll be thrilled.”
48
LANGLEY
By noon, Pope had established that Kashkin’s computer was encrypted with a 180-bit encryption key. He looked across the lab, where Gil sat on a desk waiting with Crosswhite. The rest of the team was still aboard the plane in a CIA hangar watching over Haroun al-Rashid and his sister-in-law Melonie.
“I won’t be able to break into this computer,” he said. “It could take a year or more. You’d better have a go at al-Rashid.”
Gil got up from the table, the frustration evident on his face. “I wish you’d cleared me to do that before.”
“He doesn’t know where the bomb is, Gil. I’m clearing you now only because there’s no other hope.”
Midori Kagawa, a Japanese American woman of thirty-five with short black hair, pushed back from her desk on the far side of the lab. “What about asking Lijuan?” she suggested in perfect English, having been born in Sacramento, California. “Encryption is her field of expertise, after all.”
Pope had told Midori of Lijuan’s arrest by the NSA shortly after his arrival. “You know that’s not possible.”
“It’s possible if the president orders it,” Midori replied. “And given the circumstances, he doesn’t have any other choice. It’s worth a call, Robert. She might think of something you haven’t.”
“There’s nothing to think of. A one-hundred-eighty-bit encryption is virtually uncrackable.”
“Virtually,” Midori said, turning back to her desk. “And under normal circumstances, you’d take that as a challenge. I think you’re just afraid to talk to her after what you did to her.”
Gil knew nothing about Lijuan or what Pope had done to her—nor did he care. “I’ll go have a talk with al-Rashid. I’ll call you if we learn anything useful.”
When he was gone, Pope got on the phone to Edwards AFB. “I need to speak with the president.”
The president was on the line a few moments later. This would be Pope’s second conversation with the commander in chief since ST6/B’s incursion into Canada—though the first conversation had actually been more of a presidential ass chewing.
“Have you broken into the computer, Robert?” The president sounded very worried.
“No, Mr. President. I’m afraid we’ve reached a dead end. Unless there’s something I’ve missed, I won’t be able to beat its security. Shannon is questioning al-Rashid now, but I’m certain he has no idea where to find the bomb.”
“So that’s it then,” the president said wearily. “All that’s left to do is sit and wait for the damn thing to go off.”
“Neither the FBI or NSA have come up with anything, sir?”
“They claim to be chasing leads.”
“There is one last thing I should check, Mr. President—just to be absolutely sure.”
“Which is?”
“By now, sir, I’m sure NSA has informed you that my assistant Lijuan Chow has been arrested for espionage. Code encryption is her specialty, Mr. President. I would like for you to arrange for me to speak with her by phone. It’s a long shot, but she may be able to think of something I haven’t.”
There was a long enough pause at the other end that Pope thought he may have lost the connection. “Mr. President?”
“Why would she help us?”
“She wouldn’t be helping us, Mr. President. She would be helping me.”
“Hold on a minute.”
The president put Pope on hold, looking at Couture, Bradshaw, and Hagen. The four of them were eating lunch in the officers’ lounge. “He says he can’t break the encryption. He wants to talk to his girlfriend the spy; claims she might be able to think of something he hasn’t. Is there a reason I should refuse?”
Hagen cleared his throat. “Mr. President, it may be a ruse, sir. An attempt to pass her some kind of code phrase.”
“Telling her to do what?” General Couture said testily.
“How do I know?” Hagen said.
“The man’s a genius—so is the girl! There’s no telling what they might have preplanned.”
Couture didn’t honor Hagen with a direct response. “Mr. President, it’s my recommendation you allow the call. If Chow tunnels under the wall, I’ll accept full responsibility.”
The president failed to stifle a sardonic snort. He reached and pressed the speaker button. “Stand by, Robert. I’ll arrange for her to call you there. And since we’re talking about her, how do you know NSA has taken into her custody?”
“I’ve been planning her arrest for a number of years now, Mr. President.”
The president’s gaze shot immediately in Hagen’s direction.
Hagen looked back at him like a deer in the headlights.
“Would you mind explaining that, Robert?”
“Over the phone, sir?”
“This is a secure line.”
“Well, Mr. President, to make a long story short . . . I’ve used her to gain access to the Guojia Anquan Bu database.”
The president gave Couture a searching look.
“The Chinese Ministry of State Security,” Couture said softly, noting the vapid look on Hagen’s face. Well, whattaya know? The whiz kid’s weak on China. “China’s version of the CIA.”
“How the hell did you manage that, Robert?”
“I think we’d better save that conversation for another time, Mr. President. There are still one or two stones left to look under for the RA-115. I’ll wait in my office for the call from Lijuan.”
“Very well. Stand by.” The president broke the connection and turned to Hagen. “Go make that call happen, Tim.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he was gone, the president leaned back in his chair. “What the hell am I going to do with that son of a bitch?”
“Pope or Hagen?”
Colonel Bradshaw chortled softly, and the president was hard pressed to hide his own amusement.
“You know, General, I didn’t think so much of you at first. I thought you were a self-promoting showboat, parading around with that damn bodyguard of yours: the major and his dual pistols.”
