October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Notify PMTC,” CINCNORAD ordered. The tracking radars supporting the Pacific Missile Test Center, headquartered at Point Mugu in California, normally watched launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, just miles from Mugu, or from White Sands in New Mexico. It took a few minutes for the radars to be slewed in the proper direction to cover the launch from the Northeast.

  “PMTC is ready,” the major reported. “Red Bird, Alternate is ready.”

  “Hotel One reports launch ready.” Strategic Command was relaying word from the launch control center of Hotel Flight’s ten missiles that number six was ready to fly. All that remained was for the two officers buried deep underground in the LCC to concurrently turn their keys jointly to the “enable” position.

  “Colonel, on your word,” the major said.

  Colonel Belyayev focused his attention on the informational readout printed next to the number-six silo on the display. “Launch.”

  The order went through the open channel to the LCC. Miles from the underground control center, the heavy concrete blast lid was propelled away from Hotel Six, exposing the silo. Immediately the Minuteman III missile bolted upward from the silo using the cold-launch technique, which allowed the undamaged silo to be reloaded (in theory). Its first-stage solid-rocket engine ignited fifty feet above the prairie and rapidly accelerated the former weapon, now little more than a big radar target, toward the Pacific Missile Range in the Southwest.

  “I verify launch,” Belyayev stated. The notations on his display changed as the missile left its silo. He looked away for the phone he was supposed to use.

  “This one,” the major prompted. “Just pick it up. It’s pre-dialed.”

  The colonel lifted the black handset to his ear and was immediately connected with the headquarters of Voyska PVO, the Russian Air Defense Forces. “This is Colonel Belyayev,” he said in Russian. “Have you detected a launch?”

  “Yes,” the male voice answered in its native tongue. “Warren Air Force Base. Missile number six, Hotel Flight. We show a thermal launch signature.” Several minutes of silence followed as they waited for the still-operating Russian BMEWS to pick up the missile as it rose above the radar horizon. “We show a missile track, southwest course, high to low aspect. Confirm launch and flight, predicted target is in Pacific Ocea n.”

  Marshal Kurchatov turned back to General Walker. “Very fine. Very fine.”

  “You now have as much access to the monitoring systems for our strategic forces as I do.” And more than I would have given you... “If a missile is launched, it will be registered right here. If a bomber as much as taxis, you’ll know it. And the subs, well, you’ve seen it.”

  “Except for the Pennsylvania,” Colonel Belyayev said, his eyes locked with CINCNORAD’s.

  “That will not be a problem,” Kurchatov said. “Colonel?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Good,” General Walker said. “Major, the duty officer is from this point forward to report any occurrences directly to Marshal Kurchatov and Colonel Belyayev. They will be in the VIP quarters.” CINCNORAD looked back to the Russians. “Right through those doors. You’ll be twenty feet away, and you are welcome to monitor the console with the duty officer at any time.”

  “Very fine. Yes.” Kurchatov thanked the major and stood. “The colonel will remain here, General Walker. I must now inform my government to proceed.”

  Maybe this was good, Walker thought. If the Russians were willing to trust them with one boomer still out there, then they might not just be blowing smoke. He sure as hell wouldn’t have trusted them had the situation been reversed. Things really were changing. He’d waited more than thirty years to believe it, and the feeling wasn’t all that bad.

  “I’ll show you to the com center, Marshal,” General Walker offered. “Then maybe we can talk about those Siberian reindeer you’re so boastful about.”

  * * *

  He sat ramrod-straight in the chair, his hands loose at his side. Bad guys were on both sides and behind in the darkened room. A window was to his left, behind the reflective surface of which were the witnesses to his fate.

  The beeper on his watch sounded, and he closed his eyes behind the polycarbonate glasses.

  Boom!

  The door was directly to the front of Major Sean Graber, ten feet away. It folded downward under the force of the entry charge. From both sides forms in black entered, four in all, their faces hidden by ungainly-looking devices that covered their eyes and protruded in a single Cyclops-like lens. Two went high, two low. Three fired in rapid succession, quick double taps on their pistols, long, oversized weapons that emitted little sound.

  Sean kept his eyes closed until the shooting ended. Twelve shots, four for each bad guy. “Exercise over!”

  The lights came up in the hostage room, and in the observation room behind the thick bulletproof glass. Sean stood and turned to the left. The five visitors were exchanging amazed looks and words of wonder at the display they had just seen. The major motioned to Captain Chris Buxton, squad leader of the unit that had just “rescued” the number-two man in command of Delta from three cardboard cutouts.

  “Unbelievable!” the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee commented as he entered from the observation room. The smell of gunpowder was heavy in the room but was purged by exhaust fans a few seconds after the entourage, all members of the congressman’s staff, entered.

  “Glad you enjoyed it,” Sean responded. He wasn’t really, but selling the capabilities of Delta to what his superior, Colonel William Cadler, called “the briefcase brigades” had become part of his duties. That meant occasional shows for whomever the secretary of defense deemed in need of convincing. Budgets! Now they were quibbling over how many rounds of ammunition Delta should be burning in their training!

  “AN/PVS-7?” the lone female member of the group wondered aloud, looking at the monocular goggles flipped up on the four troopers’ heads. She was the congressman’s resident expert on the technology side of things.

  “Antonelli.”

  The big Italian lieutenant stepped forward at the behest of the man he had rescued a minute before. “No, ma’am. Our own modification. Well, our idea, but the EO lab at Belvoir put it together. You see, ma’am, the standard ‘seven’ is best for image intensification—taking what light is there and amplifying it. The IR capability—that’s infrared—was limited in a zero light environment. Not quite up to snuff to use with our new toys.”

  “That toy,” the staffer said, pointing to the ungainly weapon at the lieutenant’s side.

  Antonelli held up his unloaded weapon. “This is the OHWS: Offensive Handgun Weapon System. Basically it’s a specially designed HK pistol chambered to fire forty-five-caliber rounds.” The weapon was quite ordinary-looking from the grip to just before the trigger housing. There forward it jumped into the twenty-first century in appearance. “This thing under the barrel is an IR Laser Aiming Module, or LAM. It paints the area you’re aiming at with IR light that lets us see through our new goggles damn good in the dark. That was why we needed the new ones, ‘cause they are primarily tuned to the IR spectrum. We gave up some I2—that’s image intensification—capability for it. Trading some ‘low’ light for better ‘no’ light capability, you might say. So we can see what the LAM paints, and it also puts a focused aim point where our shots are going to hit. We have the same capability on our other weapons now, also.”

  “Well, that explains some of the precision,” another member of the group commented.

  “Some of it,” Captain Buxton observed. There was more to it than gadgets.

  “And this long box coming off the barrel?” the lady asked, pointing to the device that lengthened the weapon considerably.

  “Sound and flash suppressor, ma’am. We not only like to be accurate, but invisible and quiet also.” He smiled as his presentation ended.

  “Look at this,” one of the aides said to the congressman, pointing to the four holes punched in the cardboard cut
out. They were all within an imaginary two-inch circle above the nose.

  “That’s called turning off the switch,” Captain Buxton explained. “Bad guys don’t pull triggers with four bullets in their brains.”

  “My son’s a cop, Major Graber,” the Honorable Richard Vorhees began, turning to Sean. “They train them to go for center-mass hits. The bigger target, you know. Upper torso.”

  “That’s correct, sir. But we can’t do that. We have to make sure the bad guys don’t get to pull the trigger. Our job is to make them dead fast, before they make some innocents dead.”

  The congressman shook his head in some disbelief at the skill exhibited. He was not unfamiliar with things military, as evidenced by his slight limp. A Cuban mine had taken his leg off at the knee in the Grenada invasion, ending a planned military career with just a pair of oak leaf clusters on his collar. But that had led to a career in Congress, which he was now enjoying after a meteoric rise to one of the governing body’s most powerful positions. “That’s a pretty tall order, Major. The chance for a miss has got to be much greater.”

  Sean smiled agreement at the analysis. “That is right, sir, which is why we have to be that much better. Our business functions on a zero-defect basis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No mistakes. We hit everything we want to every time we try. Period.”

  Vorhees’s eyebrows went up at that. “Come now, Major. Isn’t that a bit overstated?” He ended the question with a chuckle.

  Sean’s expression went dead serious, something the visitors immediately picked up on. “Do you think I would sit inches from these targets and let my men shoot at them if I doubted their ability one bit?”

  That hit home to the congressman. The men he was among were not just soldiers, as he had once been—they were technicians. The term “professional” did not do them justice. Their job, and their skill, were unique. And must remain so, he had just been convinced.

  “Major, I think I can assure that you will get your full budget request. And I doubt Congress will quibble over it.” Vorhees offered his hand, which Sean gladly took.

  “Then I can assure you, we’ll be ready if we’re needed.”

  The entourage followed Captain Buxton and the four men from his squad outside to answer any questions about the tactics and equipment they had just seen employed.

  Sean went into the observation room and sat down, removing the glasses that had protected his eyes from powder discharges during the exercise. Chalk another one up for being shot at, and for being able to display it. The new facility that housed Delta at Fort Bragg was known as Wally World, an homage to the mythical amusement park in one of the National Lampoon movies, and the moniker was appropriate. All kinds of wonderful “rides and attractions” were theirs to practice on. The hostage room with its viewing area was one of them. No such capability had existed at the Stockade, Delta’s former home at Bragg. Without it Sean wondered if he would have been able to demonstrate the unit’s-need for the millions of rounds of ammunition it used each year. Miss with a thousand to hit with one when it counts.

  The phone in the observation room rang. “Graber here.”

  “Major Graber.” It was Colonel Cadler, Ground Forces Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). “How did our little pre-sentation go?”

  Sean marveled at how his boss, a Texas native, could make any word sound like someone in Waco had invented it. “We’ll get our ammunition.”

  “Hot damn,” the colonel exclaimed. “Good work. Now that you’re done giving tours, we’ve got some real work to do. I want you to get a squad ready for deployment ASAP. Clear, Major?”

  “Yes sir,” Sean replied. “What kind of job, Colonel?”

  “Baby-sitting.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DISCOVERY

  The offices of the Los Angeles Times are located in an externally beautiful facility in what is known as Times Mirror Square. It is a visual oasis of sorts in an area of downtown Los Angeles that is reminiscent more of the urban centers of the former East Germany than of the perceived ideal associated with great American cities. The usual gathering of denizens and the down-and-out abounded in the area, mixing with the workday crowd of suits and blueshirts to create a patchwork representation of social standing that existed on a nine-to-five schedule, five days a week.

  “Depressing,” Art commented as he pulled the Bureau Chevy into a space marked with a familiar No Parking placard.

  Frankie stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk. “Things sure have changed.”

  The senior agent nodded at the observation as he came around the rounded nose of the shiny blue Caprice. As much as he loved the feel of Los Angeles and its architectural mix of old and new, the city was becoming something he’d never dreamed it could. “Let the social theorists come hang out down here for a week.”

  Francine Aguirre, product of the Pico Aliso housing projects in what had become one of the city’s worst areas, knew firsthand just how much things had changed. She had seen her community begin a slow downward spiral over the years. People she had grown up with were now more likely residents of Sybil Brand Institute for Women or the men’s central jail than the old stomping grounds they had shared. Times were simpler then. Funerals came when cancer, old age, or a car accident took one of the neighbors whom everybody knew. Now they happened weekly, and the young were passing at a pace that had surpassed the mortality rate of the community’s elders. The place of her youth was dying, and the disease that caused it had spread to envelop areas once thought untouchable. And people, she thought.

  “Quite a bed we made,” she said, walking past a man covered in the tattered remnants of what had once been a coat. His hand was out, reaching up from where he sat against the building, his eyes locking with Frankie’s in a plea for spare change. She remembered the “we” in her last statement and continued into the building without acknowledging his presence, much less his existence.

  The agents showed their shields to the guard in the lobby, who called up to the city desk to announce their presence and directed them to an elevator. They stepped off on the sixth floor a minute later and were immediately set upon by a giant of a man.

  “Art, you old rascal,” Managing Editor Bill Sturgess bellowed, his hands coming down on the six-foot-two agent’s shoulders.

  “Bill, damn good to see you again.” Art gestured to his partner. “Frankie Aguirre.”

  Sturgess offered his hand in a much gentler greeting. “Hell of a lot prettier than Toronassi. How is he doing, by the way?”

  “Working his way up at the Academy,” Art explained. “He’s supervising the OC Section there now.”

  “That old mob stuff of yours rubbed off on him, huh? Come on, my office doesn’t smell as bad as this place.”

  A chorus of mock protests erupted from the newsroom near the elevator. Bill Sturgess, all six foot nine of him, was an editor from the old school of journalism, where facts superseded conjecture and glitz. It was a code he lived by, and one he insisted his people adhere to, though his reach extended only as far as the borders of the city. The national and international correspondents were run by another group of men and women, people whose education had stressed business and sales above ethics and accuracy, resulting in a slant that not all observers and critics agreed with. Sturgess was an internal critic with a loud voice, one booming enough to keep his people from stumbling over their own desire for the story. Find it, check it, confirm it, write it, confirm it, edit it, confirm it, print it. Those were his instructions, and God help the reporter who was foolish enough not to follow them.

  “Sorry about your loss yesterday.”

  “Thanks,” Art said. “Good kid. Anyway, I’m sure you guessed why we’re here.”

  “What can I do for you?” Sturgess asked, closing the door to his glass-walled office and taking a half-sitting position against his desk.

  “The hit on Melrose yesterday,” Art began, knowing that his friend of more than ten
years hated preliminaries when there was a main event to be seen. “The victim had a card on him with the city desk’s number penciled on the back. Did you have anybody set to meet with someone in that area?”

  The managing editor’s eyes looked briefly at the floor before meeting Art’s again. “You have an I.D. on him?”

  Art knew there was no reason to hide that fact. “Portero, Francisco. But you can’t print that just yet.”

  “No problem. Yeah, I had a guy who was supposed to meet with him. Good reporter, lots of potential, but he has a problem with his mouth.”

  “His mouth?” Frankie asked.

  “Yeah. It tends to open too frequently when there’s a bottle around. Too bad. It looks like he might have had a story out of this one.” Sturgess shook his head with true regret at the loss, and at his reporter’s bleak future. “Wasted talent.”

  “Is he here?” Art inquired.

  “Haven’t seen him since yesterday before it all went down. Told me he had an eleven-forty-five lunch set up with this Portero.”

  “I’m a little surprised he gave you his name,” Art admitted.

  “I told him we’d have to confirm his background before I committed someone to listen to him. He claimed to be a translator at the UN and said he was an assistant to Castro’s Russian-language translator in the early sixties. I verified the first claim, but the stuff in the sixties was pretty much a wash.”

  Well, CNN had proved that the media was sometimes the preferred method of gathering and presenting intelligence quickly. Art figured print shouldn’t be much different on the gathering end of it. “We knew about the UN stuff, but I’ll admit that the other is news to us. Interesting.”

  “I presume he didn’t give up this story or whatever he had to you,” Frankie surmised.

  “If he had, I couldn’t tell you, but, off the record, he didn’t give us anything but enough bait to keep me interested. Sullivan was supposed to get the whole spiel from him yesterday.”

  Frankie took out her notebook. “Sullivan...two L’s.”