Tsar

by Ted Bell

  “Get the fuck down!” he yelled, advancing with his M8 at head level. “Get the fuck away from that hostage! Now!”

  Brock was now edging his way along the wall behind the bound hostage and her two captors. The Russians were wide-eyed with indecision and fear, knowing that if they shot their captive, they were dead men standing, also knowing that if they turned their guns on the huge black man…Stoke’s concentration was so intense at that moment that he could actually see their fingers squeezing the triggers as Brock stepped silently forward and shot each man from one foot behind, two split-second double taps that literally took the tops of their heads off.

  Stoke launched himself forward, grabbed the hostage under the arms, and got her out of that room in a hurry. Nobody needed to see and smell the kind of carnage that filled that room any longer than they had to. He carried her straight across the hall to an open room they’d previously cleared, sat her gently down on the bed, and quickly sliced the plastic cuffs off with his knife.

  “You okay? You need a doctor? We got a medical corpsman with us.”

  She looked at him blankly, her eyes welling with tears.

  He turned and shouted toward the open door, “Harry! Get the corpsman up here, pronto!”

  “Happening as we speak, boss!” Brock said, sticking his smiling face inside the door.

  “No, no, wait,” the shaken woman said. “I’m all right. Get your corpsman to help those poor people in the ballroom. Some of them are terribly ill and afraid. Especially the elderly. Please, don’t waste any more time on me. I’m fine. Perhaps some water, and if I might just lie down for a moment?”

  “Here’s water,” Brock said, tossing a bottle to Stoke. “I’ll dispatch the corpsman to the ballroom right away.”

  Harry bolted.

  “Ma’am, let me help you with that pillow. That man’s name is Harry Brock, Mrs. McCloskey. He’s a CIA field agent. He’s going to see that you get home to Washington safe and sound. There’s a Navy plane waiting at Bermuda. I’ll have you there in less than an hour.”

  “So, it’s-over?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it’s just about over.”

  “Thank you,” she said, looking up at Stoke, and then the big tears started rolling, and she collapsed against the pillow. “Thank you so very much.”

  “You’re most welcome,” Stoke said, not letting go of her hand.

  “Those poor people down there. All that shooting. Can you possibly save them?”

  “We are certainly trying, ma’am. We’ve got the best hostage-rescue team on the planet down there right now. I think it’s going to be all right.”

  HAWKE, EYES BURNING red from flashbang smoke, barely saw the lone tango trying to escape the carnage. It was another muscle-bound brute with close-cropped blond hair, using the smoke screen to try to slip through the curtains at the back of the stage. Hawke caught a bit of profile as the guy disappeared and recognized him instantly. It was the barbarian who’d gunned down the four elderly hostages in cold blood, the very same bastard he’d lost in the smoke a while earlier.

  Yeah, this had to be the guy from Miami, all right, the one Stoke had told him all about. An OMON officer named Yurin who’d specialized in killing small children in Chechnya after the carpet-bombing of the Chechen capital at Grozny. In wardroom briefing, Stoke had referred to him as the baby killer. This was Yurin’s operation, Hawke knew, and if you kill the head, you kill the snake. He wiped his stinging eyes, moving rapidly through the smoke toward the stage.

  Hawke mounted the stage and pushed through the heavy velvet curtains. It was pitch-black backstage, but he heard gunfire above and saw flashes of light beneath a door at the top of a metal stairway. It had to be the projection booth. Most, if not all, of the Russian operators had been taken out by Bravo by now. But the effect of Yurin’s fire on the dance floor below would be murderous: firing into the panic, killing indiscriminately, the elderly people filled with hope now, running madly for the exits, only to be cruelly cut down as they tried to escape.

  Hawke mounted the steps three at a time.

  The door was slightly ajar, and he kicked it open with his boot. He tried to bring himself to shoot the bastard in the back but just couldn’t do it.

  “Hey, baby killer!” Hawke shouted, his M8 trained on the Russian’s broad back as the OMON commander slammed a fresh mag into his subgun and squeezed the trigger, the explosive chatter deafening in the tiny room.

  “What did you say?” the guy said, rapidly pulling away from the little window and bringing his gun around to bear on Hawke.

  “I said baby killer. That’s you, right?” Hawke’s finger was already applying pressure to the M8’s trigger when the Russian looked up into his stone-cold eyes.

  “Hawke?”

  “That’s me,” Alex said, and cut him to ribbons with a sustained burst from his very lethal weapon.

  63

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Sit down, Tom,” the president told his vice president. The poor man was a walking train wreck, pale and trembling, two days’ worth of stubble on his haggard face. He’d been pacing the hallway outside the White House Situation Room for hours, chain-smoking Marlboros and drinking countless pots of coffee. The McCloskey children were upstairs in the Residence, waiting for any word on their mother’s fate, trying to console their father whenever he came upstairs to console them.

  “Damn it, we should have heard something by now,” McCloskey said from the doorway. The big man crossed the room and took his customary seat at the table beside President McAtee. Looking forlornly at the large digital clock on the opposite wall, he added, “The assault commenced nearly an hour ago. It’s a blimp, for God’s sake. How long can that take?”

  He pushed a soggy box of half-eaten pizza away from him, knocking over a water glass.

  The president reached over and squeezed his forearm in what was a likely futile effort to reassure his friend.

  “Tom, we’ve got the toughest, most professional team in the world on that airship right now. If anyone can save Bonnie and all those poor people, it’s Alex Hawke and the Navy’s Team Six boys. You know that as well as I do, Tom.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry, Mr. President. It’s just-”

  “Totally understandable is what it is,” the president said, rubbing his own fatigue-reddened eyes and nodding at the Joint Chiefs chairman, General Moore. “Charlie, please continue. NATO troop redeployment in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics. Where are we on that?”

  It was well after midnight, Washington time, an hour later in Bermuda. The wan and drawn faces of the men and women in the room bore mute witness to the unbearable stress the entire White House staff was under. It had been a hellish week.

  The boyishly handsome FBI director, Mike Reiter, in particular, looked like unadulterated hell. He looked like a man who was about to give the president of the United States some really, really bad news. And in fact, that was precisely why he was there.

  Now, less than a week before Christmas, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had assumed a bunker mentality. This despite the cheery tree just put up in the Blue Room, the red, green, and gold Christmas decorations throughout the residence, and the huge lighted tree standing on the fresh blanket of snow covering the South Lawn.

  There was little cause for cheer this Christmas. A megalomaniacal ruler had seized power in Russia and was threatening world war. A Russian death squad was holding four hundred terrified and exhausted hostages at gunpoint on an airship over the North Atlantic, including, just to spice things up, the lovely wife of his own vice president. Merry bleeping Christmas, Jack McAtee thought, scribbling the three words on his pad and drawing some scraggly holly leaves around them as General Moore wound up his report on NATO redeployment. Moore turned, looked solemnly at Reiter, and spoke to the president.

  “Mr. President, Director Reiter is here to give you a report on what the FBI has learned during its ongoing investigation into the recent bombing at Salina. Mike?”

 
Reiter got to his feet.

  “Mr. President, I’m afraid what we’ve learned at Salina indicates that we confront a threat that is far more serious, far worse than anything we could have ever imagined. The potential exists for a catastrophe of enormous, worldwide magnitude here. I’ve got a few slides here on PowerPoint, and I’d like to use them to demonstrate what we’re-”

  “Mr. President?” a naval orderly said, striding rapidly into the room. “Sorry to interrupt, sir. Urgent call for you coming in from Moscow.”

  “Korsakov.” The president scowled, picking up the phone directly in front of him. “Wonder what the crazy bastard is up to now.”

  Reiter and Moore just looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “Yes?” McAtee barked into the phone. “This is the president.”

  “Ah, Mr. President. Good. Thank you for taking my call. Our negotiations with your embassy personnel have been most unsatisfactory. I have terminated discussions. As you know, we are at an important crossroads in the relationship of our two nations, and cool heads must prevail.”

  “There is nothing cool-headed about invading sovereign nations and expecting the civilized world to sit back and do nothing, Mr. Korsakov. Listen to me very carefully. You are treading on very dangerous ground. Extraordinarily dangerous ground.”

  “And do you think that moving ten divisions of NATO troops onto my country’s borders is cool-headed? As you know from our last conversation, I am currently trying to negotiate the release of four hundred innocent hostages, including the wife of your Vice President McCloskey. We are at a delicate stage in these negotiations with the Chechen Sunni Muslim terrorists aboard my airship. Your threats will do little to aid these discussions, I assure you.”

  “Don’t insult me further. We both know damn well the terrorists who hijacked that ship are not Chechen Muslims. They are OMON special forces operating explicitly at the Kremlin’s direction. And if any harm should befall those poor people, I shall hold you personally responsible.”

  “Think what you wish,” Korsakov said. “Let their blood be on your hands. I wash my own of the matter. But I will tell you this, Mr. President. What happened in Kansas can and will happen elsewhere. I will give you twenty-four hours. In that time, I expect to see NATO and U.S. troop withdrawals, a stand-down of naval forces in the Black Sea, and your own personal guarantee, in writing, that the Western allies will not interfere with my country’s desire to reestablish the unity of all Russian citizens within Russia’s naturally ordained borders.”

  “Naturally ordained?” McAtee said. “What the hell does that mean besides illegal? Can you cite some legal precedent for that phrase?”

  “This conversation is terminated, President McAtee. Look at your watch. Unless my demands are met, exactly twenty-four hours from this moment, I will shut off the flow of energy through the Ukraine to Europe. They’re having an especially cold December, and it’s about to get a lot colder. Twelve hours after that, an unnamed Western city with a population in excess of one million souls will cease to exist. Then we move to five million population twelve hours later, then ten, and so on. Until you decide to be more cooperative. Do we fully understand each other?”

  McAtee slammed the phone down.

  “Christ,” McAtee said. “The man is absolutely insane! He’s threatening to shut off the gas pipelines to Europe and blow up the whole damn world one city at a time unless we pull back. Khrushchev was a bully and a thug, but at least Jack Kennedy didn’t have a deranged psychopath on his hands. Blow up a city of one million? Five million? How the hell can he do that, Brick? Dirty nukes?”

  Kelly looked at the president until the anger had subsided and he was certain of his complete attention. “No, sir. Something far more insidious than dirty nukes. As Mike was saying, the FBI has been looking into how the Russians took out Salina. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. In fact, it’s extraordinarily bad news. Mike, would you continue?”

  “The frightening thing is, sir, these are not idle threats. For decades, we’ve all been focused on big bombs, nuclear devices in the ten-to-twenty-megaton range. But Korsakov, over a period of many years, has been using countless millions of small, innocent-appearing devices to basically hardwire the whole world with inordinately powerful small bombs, preposterous as that may sound. At first, we found it hard to believe ourselves. These Zeta machines are-”

  “Sorry, Mike. Zeta machines? Help me out here.”

  “Computers, Mr. President. You probably know them as Wizards. Low-cost Russian computers, designed and built by Korsakov’s company, TSAR, that have been sold by the tens of millions everywhere on the planet. And inside every single Zeta is a bomb. Each computer contains eight ounces of a nonnuclear explosive called Hexagon, plus GPS transmitters that continuously broadcast the machine’s location. Each one capable of remote detonation. And-”

  The president had a stunned look on his face. “How many of these things are out there, did you say? Millions?”

  A young female orderly entered the room, mouthing the word urgent at the president, and silently handed him a single sheet of paper folded in half. The president quickly read the message while Reiter continued.

  He folded the note, placed it under his water glass, then looked across the room and found Tom McCloskey’s desperate eyes. He gave the man a silent thumbs-up and mouthed the words Bonnie’s okay.

  McCloskey dropped his head into his hands, his shoulders heaving. “Tens of millions of these weapons, Mr. President, in every city and town on the planet. Perhaps hundreds of millions. In homes, schools, office and government buildings, airports, churches, literally everywhere. The Pentagon, for God’s sake. Millions and millions of bombs. In every city and country on earth. At the push of a button, Korsakov can take out a city, a country, a continent, a-”

  “Good Lord,” the president said, sinking back in his chair as the enormity of what he’d just heard began to sink in. All of the blood had drained from his face, and Kelly began to fear he was on the verge of a stroke.

  A few moments later, he recovered a bit, leaned forward, and placed both hands on the table.

  “He needs to be stopped, Brick. You, too, Mike. Now.”

  “We’re working on that, Mr. President, believe me.”

  “I want hourly updates. We do whatever it takes. State believes an invasion of Estonia is imminent. If one goddamn Russian soldier plants a foot where it’s not supposed to be, I’m going to Congress. I’m going to ask for an immediate declaration of war on the Russian Federation. I mean, we are going to the wall, you understand me? Does everyone in this room understand me?”

  “A preemptive strike against Russian cities?” Moore said.

  “You’re goddamn right, Charlie. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Heavy silence followed, everyone rearranging pencils and papers as they saw the whole world going up in flames before their very eyes. They understood, all right.

  The end of the world was in plain sight.

  “That note, Mr. President,” an obviously relieved Tom McCloskey said, still unable to tear his eyes away from the folded white paper beneath the president’s water glass. “Any more news in there about the hostage situation?”

  For the first time in days, the president smiled.

  “Yes, there is, Tom. Very good news. Bonnie is safe. Distraught but physically unharmed. At this very moment, she is en route to Bermuda. A Navy plane there is warming up its engines, and she will be on it and headed home to Bethesda in less than an hour. She wishes you and the kids Merry Christmas and can’t wait to see you.”

  “And the rest of the hostages, Mr. President?” McCloskey asked, his eyes shining.

  “All of the hostages have been rescued, Tom. The airship itself is now under the control of the U.S. Navy, having been taken in tow by one of our submarines en route to Bermuda. There were some hostage casualties. Minimal, considering the extreme nature of the situation. But still, an intolerable loss of innocent lives.”

 
“Oh,” McCloskey said, bowing his head. “Oh, my God. Those poor people. Thank you for that message, Mr. President. I didn’t think I could-”

  “Tom. I think you should go upstairs to the Residence and tell the children their mother’s coming home in time for Christmas.”

  McCloskey rose unsteadily from his seat and headed for the door.

  “Merry Christmas, everyone,” the vice president said in a strangled voice as he left the room.

  ALONE IN THE Oval Office, snow falling gently beyond the windows, McAtee quietly sat at his desk staring at the phone. He’d done all he could do. If the Russians were determined to have a war, by God, they’d get one. But there was something he was missing here. A critical piece of the Russian puzzle buried deep within his brain years ago, during the Cold War, back in the days when he’d chaired the Senate Arms Committee.

  He stared at his phone until his eyes lost focus. It wouldn’t come.

  And then it did.

  The Brits had once had a mole deep inside the Kremlin. Not a high-level mole but a very effective one, as McAtee remembered. He was military originally, a colonel or perhaps even a general. Then, later, KGB. What the hell was his name? He’d been very helpful during the Korean Airlines incident, and that was the last McAtee had ever heard of him. He’d gone off the screen. But if he was still alive, and still an insider…

  He picked up the phone and called Sir David Trulove’s home number. It was almost seven in the morning, U.K. time. Surely he’d be up and about, even though it was Sunday.

  “Hello?” said a sleepy voice at the other end.

  “David, it’s Jack McAtee.”

  “Good morning.”

  “You’ve heard the good news about the airship?”

  “Yes. I received a call from Bermuda a few moments ago. The sub and all of the survivors are en route there now. Good show, I daresay. My heartfelt congratulations.”