by Jack Mars
“I’m not going to Cheyenne,” Susan said.
Kat stopped. She glanced around the room.
“You know Kurt, Haley, and I drew straws for the job of talking to you about this, right? I drew the short straw. You’re being unreasonable, and there isn’t a lot of time. The plane is gassed and ready to go. The helicopter is on the pad. I’ve already scheduled a press conference for twelve noon eastern time, at Cheyenne. Please don’t fight me.”
“Kat…”
Susan shook her head. How had this gone so wrong? One moment they were looking for stolen nukes, the next moment Vladimir Putin was announcing that the world was about to end. It really seemed to have happened that way.
“Susan, please. I’m making all the necessary arrangements to get you out of here. We are moving quickly. If it comes to it, the Secret Service is going to drag you onto that plane kicking and screaming. Please don’t make me do that.”
“Are you coming?” Susan said.
Kat rolled her eyes. “Of course. I want to live, don’t I?”
CLAP, CLAP, CLAP.
Susan was startled by the telltale sound of Kurt Kimball calling the room to order. She was overtired, not thinking straight, moving in slow motion. She glanced at Kurt, and when she turned to look at Kat again, Kat was already gone.
“Madam President, we’re ready,” Kurt said.
Susan noted that he had changed to addressing her formally. She liked it better when he called her Susan. She slid into her customary seat at the head of the conference table.
“Order, everyone. Quiet, please.”
Behind Kurt, maps began to appear on the video screens. A map of the vastness of Russia, with red and blue dots for missile silos. A map of the Middle East. A close-up map of Turkey, and one of Syria. A map showing the border between India and Pakistan.
“Madam President, you know General Robert Coates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, don’t you?”
Susan nodded. The general was a broad man in his sixties. He wore his dress green uniform, his chest covered with his many medals and commendations. His flattop haircut was white. His face was as sharp and chiseled as the face of a cliff.
“General, good to see you.”
The general nodded in return. “Madam President. I wish the circumstances were kinder.”
“As do I,” Susan said.
“I want to move through this as rapidly as possible,” Kurt said. “Everyone here is at least familiar with the broad outlines of what has happened. Since President Putin made his announcement just over two hours ago, we’ve been dealing with a blizzard of data. It’s difficult to keep up with all of it, so I’m going to share with you a few salient points, then we’ll hear from General Coates.
“Military readiness is at levels I’ve never seen, all over the globe. The Russians have ramped up their bombing runs on ISIS at al-Raqqa, in what appears to be an attempt to collapse the Islamic State regime once and for all. Indications are that as many as seven hundred Spetsnaz paratroopers are boarding flights bound for al-Raqqa.”
“Al-Raqqa is where we believe Agent Luke Stone was heading, wasn’t it?” Susan said.
Kurt shrugged his shoulders and gently shook his head. “I don’t know where Agent Stone was headed. If he’s still alive, and he goes to al-Raqqa, he will be very lucky to survive there. The bombardment is becoming intense. In any event, Agent Stone’s whereabouts are the least of our worries right now.”
A hand raised in the crowd. “Kurt?”
“Please let me finish,” Kurt said. “I don’t want to get bogged down in the small stuff. We can assume the Russians hope they’re going to find the missing warheads in al-Raqqa. Whether they will or not is anyone’s guess, but I doubt it. Meanwhile, we’ve been picking up chatter from inside the Russian strategic command. More than one hundred missile silos across the Russian heartland and the far reaches of Siberia are reporting combat readiness. These include launch silos for nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting the United States.”
Kurt paused, letting that sink in.
“I’ll repeat that. As far as we can tell, Russian nuclear silos are combat ready.”
“What the hell are they doing?” Susan said.
Kurt’s shoulders slumped. “I think it’s easy enough to understand, if you unpack it. We’ve had years of low trust and zero trust between our two countries. Our nuclear capabilities are more robust than theirs, and our missile defense system is more modern. They believe we lost those stolen warheads on purpose, and that we’re encouraging Islamic terrorists to launch a nuclear attack against them. They know we’re listening, so they’re rattling the sabers for our benefit.”
He looked around the room. “That’s what I hope is happening. The danger is what if that’s not it? Putin told us one thing when we talked to him on the phone last night, then told the world something different an hour later. Given the disparity between our capabilities and theirs, what if they think their only hope is to launch first? What if his four-hour ultimatum was a cover for a preemptive strike to take place well before then?”
Susan didn’t like to hear that kind of talk coming from Kurt. Kurt was most often a voice of reason, and not one to raise unnecessary alarms.
“General?” Kurt said.
General Coates was conferring with one of his aides. He looked up when Kurt said his name. Then he turned and looked directly at Susan.
“Madam President, I came here to offer what I think might be a solution to a dangerous state of affairs. It isn’t for the faint of heart, and I’d invite you to hear me out completely before you judge it.”
“Okay, General,” Susan said. “Say your piece.”
The aide handed the general a slim volume in a plastic ring binder. It had a glassy plastic cover on it. The general held it up.
“Last year, we commissioned a study. This is its summary. In the most basic terms, the study is a comparison of Russian and American conventional and nuclear capabilities across a range of possible scenarios and theaters of combat. What the study confirmed again and again is that the dominance we enjoy over the Russians has diminishing returns. Despite our superiority, and the likelihood of an eventual victory in almost any limited conventional war scenario, if nuclear weapons come into play our advantages quickly dissipate. A tit for tat nuclear exchange would be a disaster for them and a disaster for us in equal measure.”
He raised a finger. “That’s true in every circumstance but one. A massive preemptive first strike on the Russian mainland, with simultaneous launches from our ballistic missile silos as well as our nuclear equipped submarines and destroyers, would overwhelm their aging missile defense system. It would likely result in the destruction of between eighty and ninety percent of their offensive capability, and lay waste to the vast majority of their civilian, military and communications infrastructure. Whatever response they managed to mount would be decentralized, badly damaged and uncoordinated. And our own missile shield would bat down much of what they sent our way.”
Susan stared at the general. Was this a joke?
“Follow up bombing runs from the Strategic Air Command would likely finish off what remained of their conventional weaponry, and any nukes we missed in the first go round.”
“Do you have a casualty assessment?” Kurt said.
The general nodded. “We do.” An aide handed him a piece of paper. He slid a pair of reading glasses to the tip of his nose.
“We estimate more than a hundred million Russian casualties in the initial bombardments. On our side, between ten and twenty million.”
Susan sat back.
Kurt was staring at her.
“Susan? Thoughts?”
It took her a moment to find her voice.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said. “How about this: has everyone here gone insane? General, how can you even bring this plan to me? The policy of the United States for the past seventy years has been that we do not engage in nuclear first
strikes. I’m not going to be the one to break that policy. I’m not going to be the one who orders the mass murder of tens of millions of people. I’m not even going to consider this idea.”
“I think you’re being very foolish,” the general said.
“You know what?” Susan said. “You’re the second man who’s told me that in the past twenty minutes. And that’s how I know I’m onto something.”
She looked around the room. Dozens of blank faces stared back at her. These were the best and brightest, weren’t they? What was going on inside their minds? Maybe they’d like to share.
“Does anyone have any other ideas?” she said. “If so, I’m all ears.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
1:15 p.m. Mediterranean Time (7:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
al-Raqqa, Syria
“The answer is yes,” Mika said. “A three-letter password, all lowercase, y-e-s.”
Luke shook his head. He wasn’t sure he was in the mood for humorous passwords from Trudy Wellington, if it really had been her.
They were parked in an alleyway between two squat utility buildings on the edge of the city. This was not going to be a good place to park for much longer. They were driving a machine-gun-mounted Toyota pickup truck that practically screamed ISIS. Meanwhile, the skies were filled with super-fast Russian bombers, Tupolev TU-60s, shrieking over the city and reducing it to dust.
The ISIS air defenses, such as they had been, were gone now. The Russians were bombing with impunity. The ground shook constantly from the impacts—it was like one long, never-ending earthquake.
Luke stood in the alleyway with the phone. He was dressed in clothes taken from the ISIS fighters on the highway—black mask and hood, flak vest, combat fatigues. Ed and Nigel sat in the bed of the pickup, dressed in the same way as Luke.
Luke and Ed had cut the Canadian reporters loose. The two men had reattached their tire at warp speed, turned the news truck around, and hightailed it back toward civilization.
“What did you find on there?” Luke said.
“Two files,” Mika said. “The first is a dossier on a man named Mustafa Zarqawi, also known as Jamal, also known as the Phantom, along with a dozen other aliases. Thirty-seven-year-old Pakistani national, four years in the Pakistani army, with combat experience along the Kashmir border with India, including high-altitude combat.
“After four years in the army proper, he joined an elite paratrooper unit. Listed as killed in action during an attempted clearing action against the Taliban in northwestern Pakistan. Reappeared an unknown time later as an agent of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.”
“Okay, Mika,” Luke said. “This guy is probably one of the planners of the nuclear theft. But how is this helping me? I’m under Russian bombardment at this moment.”
“Luke, I’m doing the best I can, okay? I’m above ground right now so I can talk to you, and I’m supposed to be in the bomb shelter. We are under missile attack from outside the base. The rumor right now is that the flight wing is loading the B-61 nuclear warheads—the kind that didn’t get stolen—on bombers as we speak. They are preparing for a nuclear war and I’m stuck here with no way out. So can I please finish?”
Luke almost smiled. He stared up at the sky—maybe the heavens would help him. But the only thing up there was Russians.
“Please,” he said. “Continue.”
“Here’s where it gets interesting. There are redacted CIA and NSA memos concerning this guy. If what I can make out is true, he’s been an American intelligence asset for at least the past ten years, possibly a double or triple agent working for several agencies and countries at once. There is a Paris address for him. There are also bank transfers to a numbered account in something called Royal Heritage Bank, located in Grand Cayman.”
Luke stared at the phone. “Did I hear that right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Royal Heritage Bank is controlled by a Ukrainian sometime CIA agent. Various American intelligence agencies find it convenient to—”
“I know.”
Could that be right? This thing was an American intelligence operation? Why would they do it? Why would they bring the world to the brink of nuclear war? Because they didn’t think it would happen this way? Because they thought Russia would get hit with small tactical nukes and strike back at ISIS? Because they made a terrible miscalculation?
He let that sink in for a long moment.
But how would Trudy know about this? It was a softball question, and the answer hit him immediately: Don.
No. Not Don, but his friends, the ones who were still out in the world, the ones who were protecting Trudy, keeping her free and alive.
“Luke?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got more.”
“What is it?”
“The second file. It’s basically a series of maps to the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, with possible vehicle routes highlighted leaving Adana, traveling overland across Turkey, and crossing the border into Georgia. I suppose I should have thought of that.”
Luke was still processing the idea of the Phantom being an American agent.
A Russian bomber streaked overhead, blotting out the sun, much too close. This truck was going to be a target as soon as they finished taking down the buildings. The Russians were doing something quintessentially Russian—scorching the earth, destroying absolutely everything.
He looked at the pickup again. They’d better get moving—try to find Swann before this town didn’t exist anymore.
“Thought of what?” he said.
“Pankisi Gorge in Georgia is a remote area in the mountains, and home to people of Chechen ethnicity. Over the years, the Georgian government has allowed Islamic extremists to recruit there, and use the area as a safe haven. There’s a very good chance that’s where the warheads went.”
“Our prisoner said the warheads went to Russia.”
“I’m going to guess that your prisoner is confused. Georgia used to be part of the Soviet Union. He probably thinks it still is. Does he seem that bright to you?”
Luke looked at Nigel in the truck bed with Ed. He was doped to the gills on painkillers from the Canadian news truck’s first aid kit. He looked a wreck, but he was chatting with Ed about something as if they were in a pub back in Manchester. Sports, probably.
What the hell was he doing here?
“I don’t know,” Luke said.
“There is a location in Pankisi Gorge pinned on the map. I can give you those coordinates.”
“Mika? I’m about six hundred miles from Pankisi Gorge.”
“Yes?”
“Call your contacts in Washington. Give them the coordinates.”
“Okay, Luke. I’ll call them right now.”
Luke hung up. He walked back to the pickup truck. Nigel and Ed watched him as he came.
“All right, Nigel,” he said. “Where did you say they hold those prisoners?”
Nigel’s voice had become strangely childlike from the missing teeth and the swelling. He made the lisping, spitting sound of a child with a very fat face.
“Very close. Ten blocks from here. They used to do the executions in the desert south of town. So it was just easier to keep them right here.”
Luke gestured at the big M-60 machine gun.
“You ever feed one of these?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Luke nodded. “Good. We need you. I’ll drive. You’ll feed the gun while Ed acts as shooter. If you do anything stupid, Ed will kill you without hesitating, or I will. I’m sure you already know this.”
Nigel shook his head. “No. You can’t ask me to do that. I won’t have a hand in killing my own people.”
“These aren’t your people, man,” Ed said. “Your people are in England.”
“These aren’t anybody’s people,” Luke said. “They’re a bunch of lunatics. You joined them because you were bored playing video games in your mom’s spare bedroom, and you thought it would be exciting, an advent
ure. Believe me, Nigel, I’ve seen guys like you before. You don’t belong here. You’re lucky you stayed alive this long.”
Luke pulled a gun from his shoulder holster, a black Glock. He pointed it nonchalantly at Nigel’s head. “At this point, your life has come down to two choices. You can help us rescue our friend, or I can kill you right now. I’ve lost count how many people I’ve killed in the past twenty-four hours. One more won’t mean anything.”
Nigel stared down the barrel of the gun.
“Since you put it that way…”
Luke looked at Ed. “You ready, man?”
Ed was chewing on a toothpick he had gotten from somewhere. “Born ready.”
“Then let’s do this.”
* * *
It was snowing Russians.
Luke drove slowly through the streets, picking his way around piles of rubble and giant impact craters. To the west, just outside the city, he could see Russian paratroopers falling out of airplanes. Mostly the remaining buildings blocked his view, but at intersections, he would look over there and spot them. The sky was thick with them, like a dense flock of blackbirds.
Already, he could hear the gun battles starting on that side of town.
He’d better get this done.
The front windshield of the truck was shattered, just gone. So was the window between the cab and the truck bed. Nigel kneeled behind Luke’s head, giving him the directions.
“Okay, left up ahead. The building will be halfway down the street, on your right. It’s a low brick building with a small staircase, maybe three steps. The prisoners are held in the basement.”
Luke saw it up ahead, maybe a hundred yards away. The building was sandbagged, and half a dozen fighters stood outside with AK-47s, staring at the sky to the west, watching the Russians come down.
“Ed?”
“Got it,” Ed said. “How you want to play it?”
