He tried to force even a weak, reassuring smile, but it wouldn’t come.
“My son?”
It was his father. Chingis turned back to the phone. “Sir?”
“This man—he wore a mask, came in as I was about to leave for court,” the man said. “He struck me … there was nothing I could do.”
“No one is blaming you,” Chingis heard his mother say.
“Son, say nothing of this for now,” his father cautioned. “Not even to your friends, to Pride. No one.”
“I understand,” he said.
“I’m going now … I will call later.”
The call ended, and Chingis stood there. Pride took a step forward, but no more.
“What happened?” she asked with quiet concern.
Chingis turned to her. “I mustn’t say,” he told her. “We should leave, go back north. I’m sorry.”
Pride touched his arm as he walked past, to the car, to a once ordered world and a promising future that had suddenly been turned chaotic.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,
Springfield, Virginia
June 2, 8:44 PM
Chase Williams sent everyone home, though Anne stayed. She usually did, except when she went to Tai Chi, even when Williams left. Keeping track of incoming intelligence from all the other agencies—not just U.S. but around the globe—was not a nine-to-five occupation. And this was the only secure location where she could do that.
They were together so much, in fact, that it surprised those around him that they seemed to have no sexual chemistry. Part of that was Anne’s own business-only approach to everyone at Op-Center, along with her very private personal life. But that had always been true for Williams, here and in the military. He had been long and, as he put it, “rapturously” married to a woman who died young. He suspected that his subsequent mourning and immersion in work had calcified into a kind of permanent withdrawal from dating. He was sociable at parties, pleasant to women, and interested and charmed by them. But he didn’t seek more, and his reserve was clearly palpable. Women certainly didn’t gravitate to him the way they did to Dawson and Wright. To hear them talk when they occasionally went out for drinks, every military unit or workplace they had ever been in was a potential smorgasbord of not so innocent nights, broken hearts, and women requesting transfers. Listening to his co-workers, Williams was amazed that the world functioned at all.
As soon as the rest of the team had gone home—Aaron was still playing with the virtual program in the Geek Tank, looking for more of its secrets—Williams poured himself an orange juice and phoned the president’s deputy chief of staff, Matt Berry, on his mobile phone.
“Chase!” the Houston native drawled. “How about our hero!”
“We should buy him a white hat,” Williams suggested.
“Whoa, is that cynicism?”
“No,” Williams said. “Exhaustion.”
“Hold on—I’m at a bar. Let me go outside.”
And there, to Williams’s point, some natural, communal gene was obviously dormant in him but was alive and active in others.
“Sorry about that,” Berry said. “Spring in the nation’s capital. So, anything POTUS needs to know about now?”
Both men were aware that they were on an open line.
“Not right this minute, but it could get very hot very quickly,” Williams answered. “And it’s too much to text.”
“Okay. I’ll make a call and get back to you,” Berry said. “Office?”
“Office,” Williams replied.
He hung up and sipped the orange juice he’d already forgotten about.
“Maybe you should go home, too?”
Williams looked over, saw Anne in the doorway.
“I will,” he said. “Just waiting to hear back about whether I’m briefing Midkiff.”
“Your idea, or did someone else get wind of this?”
Williams pointed a thumb at himself.
“What do you hope he says?” Anne asked.
“Good question,” he replied. “Every time one of these pops up—it’s always an inner conflict, too, isn’t it? Do I want another big challenge on the international stage, something that’s going to test every part of me—or do I want to go home and watch TV?”
“No conflict here,” she said. “I like managing peace more than war. That’s probably why I was drawn to General Services Administration for a career. When we left Belfast, I was old enough to remember the tension that filled the streets and shops and schools. I feel it here now, too, despite Midkiff’s big, bold war.”
She was referring to a string of domestic terror attacks at football stadiums and malls, all of which were linked to Tehran. That triggered a brief but effective war with Iran that knocked the hostile state back on its heels. The price tag also set back President Midkiff’s expansive domestic agenda, something that had discouraged him from taking on other costly foreign adventures. That had benefitted Op-Center directly, if having more work managing international and domestic crises could be described as a benefit.
Williams sipped more juice. “The world is mad, yet here we are, an Irish Protestant working side by side with a California-born Catholic.”
“We are not full of hate,” she said, “but we are also Americans first. I don’t think of myself as any of the hyphenates that could apply to me, like Irish-American. As soon as you start identifying by clan, taking on their vitriol, that’s when things go south. Which is why I prefer managing peace.”
“I should feel like you do,” Williams said thoughtfully. “I do, about the tribal stuff. But the truth is, I miss the Navy. I miss the four stars, the big combat command. I even look back fondly, if you can believe it, on the long climb up that ladder. The missteps, the learning curve, the superior officers who had too much politician, too little patriot in their bones. Do you know that earlier today, when I had to decide whether to withhold information until I could talk to Irene Young or give it to her grabby subordinate, I chose not to tell him?”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” She smiled. “This job is about judgment and intuition as much as it’s about rules, which is why you’re so good at it.”
“Thanks, but my point is I liked making that call. I liked crunching down someone with rotten morality. There aren’t enough of those crossroad moments. I like this job. I like knowing everyone I work with. I like liking everyone I work with. But I actually wish this thing were my call. Ultimately, we end up enacting policy, for the most part. A crisis happens, we manage it to fit the vision of the administration.”
Anne shrugged. “Then run for president.”
Williams smiled crookedly. “Do you know how many problems that would create right out of the gate?”
She gave him a puzzled look.
“Just handling the Joint Chiefs would be hell,” he said. “The Navy would expect me to favor them and the Army, Air Force, and Marines would join forces to make sure that didn’t happen. I appoint a chairman who isn’t Navy? The Navy thinks I’m a traitor. I appoint one who is? The others plot like something out of Shakespeare.”
“You seem to have actively thought about this,” Anne said, grinning.
“One can only watch so much TV,” he replied as his private line trumpeted “Anchors Aweigh.” He glanced at the caller ID. “Good evening, Mr. President.”
“Twice in one day,” Midkiff said. “Either the world is in trouble or you’re the guy keeping it safe.”
“Once every year or so I win the lottery, too, sir,” he said.
Anne entered quietly and shut the door behind her. Williams put the call on speaker.
“Is this about Ukraine?” Midkiff asked.
Williams was impressed.
“Yes, sir. Have any other channels been in—”
“Not yet,” the president interrupted. “Abe sent me a link to your men in New York with the former ambassador. They weren’t there by accident?”
Abe was Sec
retary Abraham Hewlett of Homeland Security. He was a vigilante official, though Wright said that his endless updates to the president were in large part “his brown nose sniffing for power.”
“No, sir,” Williams admitted. “We have a possible rogue military operation being planned against Russia, probably a ground-forces attack on the new base in Sudzha, near the border.”
“Do we know who’s running it?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Does Kiev know?”
“There has been no indication of that,” Williams informed him. “But Moscow seems to be up to something as well. Those killings in New York were all against Ukrainian agents.”
“Bloody Putin,” Midkiff said. “Does he know about the plot?”
“Possibly,” Williams said. “A training video was made, leaked.”
“By?”
“Apparently, whoever is behind this operation,” Williams told him.
“Jesus,” Midkiff said. “There are a half-dozen ways this can ignite. What’s your recommendation?”
“I would have to defer to you and State on that, sir. We have to decide whether or not to go to Kiev with this.”
The president’s response was immediate. “No. Boyko’s government is too volatile. This could cause it to become even more partisan. It’s also damned porous. We help, Putin hears it. He turns that into ‘NATO helped’ and uses that as an excuse to lob shells into another former Soviet Republic. Then NATO’s forced to reply.”
“In which case, sir, there’s only one course of action,” Williams told him. “The plot has to be undone.”
Even as he said it, the director knew where this was headed. So did Anne, from her grim expression.
“We need HUMINT,” Midkiff said. “I know what that means—”
“It’s all right, sir,” Williams said. “That’s why we’re here.”
The president was referring to the fact that Op-Center was still mourning the loss of Hector Rodriguez, command sergeant major at Third Group and the Joint Special Operations command, who had been killed in an assault on an ISIS compound in Mosul.
“I’m giving this one to Matt Berry, so he’s your point man,” the president said. “Good night, and good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Williams ended the call and looked at Anne. Her expression had softened just a little.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I didn’t know you won the lottery.”
He smiled. “DC 3, never the big money.”
“I suggest you take his advice and go home,” Anne said. She nodded toward the phone. “Matt won’t call with ‘vision of the administration’ guidelines until morning, and Michael won’t be back until early morning. He and Mike are flying back commercial, five-forty-five AM departure.”
“Who okayed the hotel?”
“Irene Young, actually,” she said. “Brian says it will be good to network with her and her people.”
Williams hmmed, aware that by “people” he meant women, probably under thirty, especially those excited by his celebrity. He couldn’t begrudge Dawson that; at the moment, he envied the man’s ability to unwind.
The director thanked Anne. She said she wouldn’t leave until he did, and, raising his hands in surrender, he pocketed his cell phone, finished his juice, and followed her out.
As he left, Williams mentally tried to enumerate the ramifications of having put just a two-man team on the ground in New York. The benefits had been enormous. The gains from human intelligence gathering, from boots on the ground, were always considerable.
You’ve got the authority, he thought. Use it.
They knew a fair amount about this situation, but not enough. The region was a tinderbox, but so was the location of every military incursion he’d ever made.
You lost a man last time.…
That happens sometimes. It became the headline. But the main body of the story was: the mission was a success.
“You need eyes-on at ground level,” he told himself. “You need ears-on, too.”
He had already decided by the time he reached his car: he had the assets, he had what the military called “reasonable concern” about enemy action, and he had just enough time, he believed, to put his people in place.
Volner and JSOC—along with the untested Paul Bankole—had to go to the region.
CHAPTER TWENTY
St. Petersburg, Russia
June 3, 4:33 AM
If Colonel General Anatoly Yershov had been asleep, the phone call would have awakened him.
Yershov had grown up in Derbent, on the Caspian Sea. Not only was the city among the most ancient in Russia—over fifty-five hundred years old—it had what his Derbent-born wife jokingly referred to as “normal hours.”
In June, the sun rose at around 3:30 AM and set shortly before 11:00 PM. The blackout shade on the bedroom window of their charming dacha at 12 Bolshaya Alleya kept out the sun … but it didn’t keep out that ineffable feeling that the day was begun. Birds came to life in the surrounding trees, the tall green grasses of the lawn blew with the wakening breeze, the dew that collected on the window began to heat and spread its warmth before evaporating.
Yershov had adjusted better than his wife, Lelya, who was a painter and felt that she must be in the atelier to use the morning light. In the winter, of course, she was depressed that she had to wait hours for the sun to arrive. She was good-natured enough about it all, but she always hoped that “our friend Maksim,” as she called him—less good-naturedly—would see fit to transfer them somewhere else.
She got her wish, though Yershov had told her the night before that he didn’t want her to join him in Sudzha.
“You know that Russian bases aren’t built for comfort,” he had said as he packed a trunk for the journey.
To which she had replied, trying to pull a suitcase from a packed closet, “But I am an officer’s wife.”
To which he had answered, “One whom I will not have in a potential war zone.”
And then she had stopped tugging the handle and grew very quiet as the reality of the danger he’d be in took hold.
They spoke little before retiring, holding each other in a way they had done not for many years.
Yershov spent most of the rest of the night thinking. The afterglow of Putin was still upon him, despite his wish that it weren’t. It had been so long since he had been impressed with one of his superiors that he couldn’t think clearly. His joy over late-night coffee had actually encompassed Lelya—until he brought up the transfer.
He lay there, looking into the absolute darkness, feeling the gentle brush of a fan they kept running when the window was closed. He wrestled with the challenge the post presented: not tactically—he could handle that—but politically. That region, and one skirmish in it, had been the downfall of General Novikov. A wrong move—either heeding Putin’s admonition not to fight but to preen or shaming Putin by preening when judgment told him to fight—could cost them everything. For himself, Yershov could bear that. But not for Lelya.
So he had held her close, as if in that proximity he would find a gentler energy, an artist’s soul instead of that of a warrior, an empathic mind instead of a logical, tactical brain. The melding did not happen. This was war, not a walk through the Hermitage.
And then Maksim called.
“Anatoly, I have news,” he said, sounding groggy or drunk—probably both. “We have confirmation of a plot. I will tell you more when you are en route, on a secure line, but an attack of some kind is apparently being readied.”
“Are there new orders?” he asked carefully. Both men knew what he meant: did Putin’s mandate stand or had the president himself changed it.
“No,” the minister replied. “But I wanted you to know that drills must be conducted as if you were on a war footing. Make sure everyone knows what they are doing before they go out.”
“Understood,” Yershov replied.
What he meant was that any spotters
in the sky or on the ground must see something precise, large, and threatening. Second thoughts must be given before going in.
“Was that Maksim?” Lelya asked from under his arm.
“Yes,” her husband said. “Go back to sleep.”
“He is very loud when he has been drinking.”
“Most officials are,” Yershov replied.
“Not you,” she said. “You get quiet.”
“I am like the Caspian,” he joked.
“Big and deep and ready to bear whatever man or the elements places upon you,” she teased.
Lelya snuggled deeper, and as he lay there Yershov saw the vast blue expanse of his youth, the largest enclosed body of water on the planet. He smiled as he pictured the majestic gulls and terns, the turtles, the large sturgeon. Vivid, variegated life, coexisting. Maybe that, and not just the balance between night and day, was why he found himself romanticizing more and more the days of his youth.
But this is now, and “now” must be addressed, he thought with fresh resolve. If it was a show Minister Timoshenko wanted, then he would have one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Washington, D.C.
June 3, 5:35 AM
Brian Dawson slept on the Delta flight that left New York’s LaGuardia Airport promptly at 5:45 AM. It wasn’t a long nap—the plane touched down at Reagan National a little over an hour later—but it was irresistible and it took the edge off.
While Mike Volner had gone over to the W Hotel on Albany Street, Dawson ended up there only after accepting an invitation to drinks from a deputy mayor, who wound up leaving the hotel only after Volner called to tell Dawson that the NYPD escort to the airport was already downstairs. He had just enough time to shower and throw on fresh clothes from his go-bag.
Volner was quiet as Dawson got into the sedan provided by the mayor’s office. He immediately recognized his companion’s expression. He’d seen it dozens of times.
“You did the only thing you could have,” Dawson told him.
“Sure, same as other times,” Volner said. “I’ve never liked it, though. It never bothered you?”
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