Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  And as the fifty-nine-year-old swung his Escalade into an unmarked parking space at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at Fort Belvoir in Springfield, Virginia, he acknowledged something else with that smile: each year marked a very real passage of time. He was not morose about it; on the contrary. The fewer springs that remained, the more he cherished them.

  Challenges, too, he admitted as he eased his six-foot frame from the car. Those challenges were as grave as they had ever been. There had been the Great War in the teens and rampant gang crime in the twenties. Then a Great Depression in the thirties, from which the world saw no possible exit. A World War broke that fever but started another: an escalating fear of Communism. There had been the heavy shadow of nuclear war in the fifties, civil unrest in the sixties, and drug epidemics were always with us like a toxic cloud that moved from city to city, group to group, without the abundant patience of the Devil himself.

  But the retired Navy four-star, former combatant commander for both Pacific Command and Central Command had seen enough, experienced enough in his thirty-five years of active duty to believe that right prevailed and that good systems worked. The older he got, the more comfort he took from that belief, too. As the head of Op-Center, the nation’s leanest and most effective rapid-response security agency, he was in a position to make sure that American values were preserved in accordance with our greatest traditions. While that spared him the impotent fear that a lot of people felt, it was also a burden: when he made a mistake, even a small one, people died.

  Williams leaned into the backseat to grab his backpack. In it was a laptop and his lunch; right now, the latter was what he needed. The president served a decent cup of coffee in the meeting room adjacent to the Oval Office, but the croissants were as buttery as Midkiff’s rhetoric. He preferred to hold out for apples covered with organic peanut butter.

  The smell of history, fuel, and asphalt swiftly replaced what was left of the scent of rose blossoms. Williams moved easily through the lot heavy with SUVs and Humvees. His dark-blue suit was sharply tailored but conservative, a look as close to a uniform as he could get without it actually being his old, familiar attire. A crisp white handkerchief tucked carefully into the coat pocket was the only concession to civilian style as he headed toward the facility that many on the base didn’t even know was there. The parking lot had been expanded when the location for the revived Op-Center was installed in the basement levels of the NGA. The lot still had reserved parking spaces that were emphatically marked for senior NGA staffers. But Williams had insisted that there should be no stenciled names for Op-Center personnel, or any Op-Center logo displayed on the building’s façade or directory of tenant commands. One of the most accomplished military officers in a generation and a consensus choice to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had been passed over for that post—and for other essential, good-fit jobs like defense secretary, national-security adviser, and director of National Intelligence, in favor of political appointees by a politically insecure commander-in-chief. Though he was aggressively courted by industry, think tanks, and academia—all very high-paying, high-prestige jobs—Williams had accepted this command because he was, above all else, a patriot.

  But he had his demands, and one of them was being guaranteed a high level of autonomy for himself and his carefully picked team. The president had agreed, since Op-Center was autonomous by charter. They moved to action only when the normal levers of U.S. national security—the military, the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and the numerous organizations that made up the nation’s security bureaucracy—couldn’t act quickly enough or were compelled by statute or oversight to function within strict legal protocols. Besides, what President Wyatt Midkiff bestowed with a handshake, Congress could undo with the stroke of a budgetary delete key. But with a budget of less than half of one percent of the NSA, the president could afford to take a chance on the man and his vision.

  A cornerstone of that was anonymity, not just from other agencies and career bureaucrats but also from other agencies competing for intelligence—and, thus, funding—and from the press. As Williams told Roger McCord, his intelligence director, in their first interview, “Only in the movies does an operative stroll into a bar, announce his name and affiliation, and survive the evening. Not in my world.”

  In Williams’s world, just letting someone know you held an American passport could be a death sentence. That was the reason Op-Center’s presence at Fort Belvoir was kept secret, and why it was housed in a sub-basement of the NGA instead of in its own building—which the secretary of Homeland Security had pushed for, since that would have added to the annual budget and to his own power base.

  Williams hadn’t cared about any of that during his military career, and he didn’t care about it now. Only the mission mattered, and, right behind that, the people.

  He passed through the double glass doors, showed his NGA badge to the guard at the counter—a young woman who always seemed uncomfortable returning the smile of a man who was just a name and a face—and continued to the leftmost elevator in a bank of elevators. Officers emerging from an adjoining elevator acknowledged him with tight nods. Williams nodded back as he opened an app on his smartphone—doing so notified the staff that the chief was on his way down. Williams held the device to the scanner at the right of the elevator and the door opened. The code was a signal and it changed daily, sent only to Williams’s secure, government-issued phone. A swift, quiet three-level descent later, he was in a small antechamber. After submitting to a retinal scan beside the single door, he was admitted to the subterranean bunker that was Op-Center’s main compound.

  Anne Sullivan was waiting for him just inside the door. The fifty-seven-year-old deputy director was dressed in a red blazer with black trim on the collar and red slacks. She wore a locket with a photo inside that she never shared but which was a source of much discussion throughout the ranks. The current consensus was “girlfriend,” though no one knew for sure what Sullivan’s sexual orientation was. She had never been married, but that meant nothing to a woman who came of age in an era when a woman couldn’t always have a successful home life and a career.

  Anne held a tablet cradled to her bosom with one hand, her smartphone in the other. “How was the meeting, Chase?” she asked with just the hint of an Irish brogue and a much larger dose of irony.

  “It was polite,” he replied as they walked side by side around the circle of cubicles toward their adjoining offices. “They like to make sure the tight suit isn’t all that’s holding me together. Though this is the first time they asked about you by name.”

  Anne grinned. “My review isn’t for another four months. Am I being considered for something?”

  “Not after what I told them.” Williams laughed. “You think I can afford to lose you?”

  It was a statement, not a question. Anne Sullivan was a former General Services Administration official, a Washington insider who navigated inside the Beltway with a balance of hard work, organizational skill, and a healthy dose of intimidation. She was personally acquainted with everyone who had a skeleton buried somewhere between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, and also at the Pentagon. That last was particularly useful, since Op-Center had enemies there, officials who knew what a smart high-ranking officer could do with both direct access to the president and to top security secrets. Their acquired paranoia didn’t factor into the character of the man they feared, the ally they had—only into his strength as a potential adversary.

  They reached Williams’s office, and he threw an informal, habitual salute at a framed color photo on the wall, showing General Douglas MacArthur in Manila, in 1945, smoking a corncob pipe. It was signed crisply in fountain pen—not to him, but the great man’s hand had been laid upon the photo, and that was enough.

  “What did I miss?” Williams asked.

  “The lunch with Brian,” Anne informed him.

  “No, no,” Williams replied, shaking his head. “
I texted him from the West Wing. Didn’t he get it?”

  “Not if you sent it from the Oval Office.”

  He shot her a perplexed look.

  “They have the new Closed Whisper Sec System,” she said. “Nothing flies without a code. I sent you the alert.”

  “When?”

  “About two months ago,” she replied.

  “Didn’t see that update,” Williams said as he sat behind his desk. “There are so many damn alerts.”

  “There are so many damn crises,” Anne replied. “I let Brian know where you were, though he’s still at Texters Barbeque. Met an old girlfriend.”

  The way she had said it—Williams shot her a look. “Carolina?”

  Anne nodded knowingly.

  “He’s gonna need a drinking buddy or a crisis,” Williams said.

  Brian Dawson was the forty-year-old operations director and a bit of a loose cannon—which was what Williams liked about him. What the former Army man lacked in discipline he made up for with impulsive surges tempered by instinctive good judgment. He also possessed bagfuls of charm, a fact that stood him in good stead with the three-to-one ratio of single women to eligible men in the district.

  “We did just pick up one interesting item from the NYPD,” she said, looking at her tablet and resuming the briefing. “They found a female murder victim identified as Galina Petrenko, a Ukrainian operative who worked at the embassy there. Her throat was cut, and only her phone was taken.”

  “Operational specialty?”

  “Not known,” Anne replied. “But she used to work for our ambassador in Kiev and had been on a KGB watch list since 2011. She was dismissed, charge of espionage.”

  “Prosecuted?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “Intimate with the ambassador?”

  “Unknown,” Anne said.

  “Who was she spying for?”

  “On the books, Kiev,” she said. “They were gathering intel on Russia. Fairly well-known dance they do out of the U.N.”

  “Anything off the books? They don’t suddenly start killing embassy employees, even spies.”

  “Not that we were aware of,” she replied. “But you’re right, something like that seems likely. Done in daylight, on a morning run—sends a signal.”

  Williams shook his head slowly. It was hell having enemies, but worse when you didn’t trust your allies. “What was the name of our ambassador there?”

  “Douglas Flannery,” Anne informed him.

  “Name’s familiar.”

  “He works for the York group in Manhattan now,” Anne said. “It was in the—”

  “HUMINT resource update, yes,” Williams said. “I do read some of what you send around.”

  “Their offices are a half mile from where the woman was killed,” Anne continued. “Tenuous connection, but the NYPD’s counterterrorism task force is checking security footage along that route.”

  “Let’s get Paul on this, see what he can come up with,” Williams said.

  “Starting with Quantico and the usual channels or—?”

  “His call,” Williams decided. He liked delegating, not because he was lazy but because the alternative was to become a micromanager. He had selected his staff based on competence first, self-reliance second, and team-playing third. As former military, he could get any personnel to mesh as long as each member had the fundamental skill set.

  Anne acknowledged with a nod and texted the new international crisis manager. Paul Bankole was recruited after the previous ICM, Hector Rodriquez, was killed in an assault on an ISIS compound in Mosul. Raised in poverty in Atlanta, Bankole was a former senior chief with the Navy SEALs who had served under Williams early in his military career. The young man had left a strong impression as a confident individualist who was also a team player. Wounded in a firefight, Bankole spent a year recuperating, during which time he became a computer specialist. He had a natural genius for all things technical, and after going to work for the ROTC program at the University of San Diego he came back on Williams’s radar. He was the only candidate the Op-Center director considered to replace Rodriquez.

  “Where’s McCord?” Williams asked as he unzipped his backpack.

  “At his weekly lunch with Allen Kim,” she said.

  “Right, right.” Kim ran an FBI division out of Quantico that served as Op-Center’s domestic wing. Ordinarily, the research into the murder of Galina Petrenko would have begun with his team. That’s where Williams would have started. But the director also wanted to see what the new man came up with. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  “Fasting today,” Anne said. “Annual physical after work.”

  Williams frowned. “Sorry. Could I have talked about lunches more?”

  “I can take it,” she said. “The rest of the briefing is on file—nothing exceptional in it, though you might want to think about the reports from Crimea, given this morning’s developments. I’m going to review the West Coast files, see what’s up in Asia.”

  Williams thanked her and waited until she had shut the door before setting two apples on his desk and going to the mini fridge to get the jar of peanut butter. He sat down and went right to the joint CIA Crimea Report while he ate. The comprehensive report on Russian and Ukrainian troop strength, deployment, communications, and forecasts was refreshed each morning with HUMINT, ELINT, and satellite surveillance.

  The news was all on the factions opposing Russia. NATO was beginning a buildup that had previously been announced by SACEUR, the supreme allied commander in Europe, who was nearing the end of his three-year term.

  Legacy move, Williams thought as he saw where the four battalion-size groups were being sent, a total of four thousand troops. They were reinforcing existing positions well within Romania and Poland, put in place to show that NATO took its self-defense responsibilities seriously if Russia moved first. The key word was “if.” The orders linked to the deployment were what the DOD was now describing as “resistance-postured.” The two words, compounded, was a forceful way of saying they were strictly peacekeepers.

  Naturally, Russia was opening new installations near the border for its own “peacekeepers” and their ordnance.

  Of more concern was the Polish defense minister’s approval of an additional two thousand paramilitary personnel to join the four thousand already stationed in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The designation meant the troops had received a total of thirty days’ military training. The numbers were bad, and the map itself seemed absurd on the surface: between NATO and the Polish paramilitaries, the new array looked like fingers pinching the tip of the nose of the Russian bear. It was even worse when the latest response from Moscow was factored in: in addition to the new bases and the existing thirty thousand troops, the Russians were mobilizing three motorized rifle formations of ten thousand troops each and had another two thousand paratroopers based in Ivanovo. The latter were apparently earmarked to bolster the forces that were manning the Iskander-M nuclear-capable missiles long entrenched in the region. Fortunately, there was no indication of warheads being moved to any of those locations.

  “This is why the old days will not be returning,” Williams said to himself as he crunched an apple slice. Not that he was nostalgic: classic trench-style warfare would result in widespread destruction, even if NATO’s F-16 were a match for the Russian Su-27 fighter jets. The planes were; Williams wasn’t so sure about the pilots. Aerial supremacy would lead to a Russian rout and decades of geographical ruin if the situation went all to hell. In addition, the U.S. would be pulled in, responsible for far more than the six hundred troops already on the ground there with NATO. The physical cost would be compounded by a financial cost that was untenable for both sides.

  “Special Ops,” he said softly. “Surgical strikes.”

  Remove the hardware, pluck the screws from the hardware, and men and materiel could go nowhere.

  Williams closed the file and was just about to start on his second apple when the phone rang. It was Aar
on Bleich, the intelligence director’s networks leader.

  “Go,” Williams said.

  “Sir, I just picked up something you should see,” the thirty-two-year-old Bleich told him. “A game. Well, maybe not. It’s a virtual-reality program. And not all of it, just pieces.”

  “You got it in the tank?” Williams asked, referring to the Geek Tank where the tech genius worked.

  “I do.”

  “Be right there,” Williams said, wiping his mouth as he strode toward the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  New York, New York

  June 2, 12:40 PM

  In one hand Vladimir Eisenstein held a plate of uneaten cherry pie à la mode, ice cream melting over the sides. In the other, the young journalist held a smartphone, which he jabbed at Douglas Flannery.

  “Surely, Mr. Ambassador, the Russians’ claim to Crimea is no less legitimate than the Muslims’ claim to Mecca or the Italians’ to Rome.”

  “Muhammad is now on the same footing as Remus and Romulus, then?” Flannery asked.

  “Roots are roots, sir, are they not?”

  Flannery took a moment to stab a fork into the plate of melon he had taken from the buffet table. He had expected an earful from Eisenstein. Thirtysomething Putin-era journalists had suckled on nationalism. It was pure oxygen to them. Eisenstein himself had coined the “Make Russia Soviet Again” slogan and social media-ed the hell out of it.

  “Mr. Eisenstein, I heard the ‘Outstanding Forebear’ argument many times while I was in Kiev,” Flannery said. “I addressed it on the occasion of—”

  “My first roundtable, and a solid but flawed position statement,” Eisenstein interrupted. “Crimea is not your state of Texas. Local reverence for the heroes of the Alamo is a historical usurpation, an emotional starting point, not a historic claim. San Antonio is not the ancient city of Chersonesus, where Grand Prince Vladimir, my namesake, was baptized in AD 988.”