The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2)

by Bob Mayer

  As the massive chopper settled down and the blades slowed, Ducharme could see civilian markings on the side of the aircraft.

  “Does lifting work for the oil fields,” Cane explained. “You don’t want to know how much it’s costing us to rent it and the pilots for this little excursion. Triple cost, plus hazard pay, plus a guarantee of full cost of replacement if the chopper is lost. Of course, if the chopper goes down, you and I probably won’t have to worry about that, will we?” He turned to Ducharme. “I assume you want to be with me on the assault team fast-roping in off the Blackhawk.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Now that it’s here, we can set a definite time for wheels up. We need to refuel it and load up.” Cane checked his watch. “Forty-five minutes.” He looked over his shoulder. “Forty-five minutes, Top! And remove all insignia.”

  A tough looking older man gave a thumbs up and began shouting orders.

  Cane emphasized the last point by tearing the Velcro patch off his fatigues and tossing it on the table.

  “You expect that to help if you get captured?” Ducharme asked.

  “There is no getting captured,” Cane said. “We come back or we die. Surrendering isn’t an option. This part of the world, people like us don’t get taken prisoners. We get a bullet in the brain. That’s why we get paid the big bucks.”

  Cane turned back to Ducharme. “Do you know what it is we’re getting, besides this guy Haney?”

  Ducharme hadn’t known Turnbull’s agent’s name. “Yes. Some abandoned nuclear warheads.”

  “Oh, nice,” Cane said. “That’s just fucking great. The men are just going to be ever so thrilled. Whose nukes?”

  “Ours.”

  “What, some bomber crash?”

  “No,” Ducharme said. “They’ve been there for over fifty years.”

  *****

  Haney had his back against his pack and was watching the way south, from where the next wave of attackers would come. He hoped they would hold off until dawn, but the potential of what was in the hangar might outweigh an assault in the dark. The question was: how long before the Kurds in the village realized their initial assault wasn’t coming back?

  His Satcom crackled. “Haney?”

  “Yes?”

  “Assault force is going wheels up in forty minutes. Expect them on target an hour and thirty minutes from then. Got that?”

  “Roger.” Haney breathed a sigh of relief now that there was a definite timetable.

  “All right,” Turnbull said. “I’ve got the guy with the information you need. You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a moment of silence, then a new voice came over the radio. “First thing you need to understand is that your Geiger counter detects radiation but it doesn’t differentiate between types. The louder and faster it chirps, the more radiation. You also have the readout on the gauge. So far, you’ve been well under any danger level based on the reports you sent back. You’re dealing with Pu-239 in those warheads. I haven’t been able to draw up the specifications for the type of weapon you’re dealing with, so I don’t know how the plutonium is shielded, but I can assure you if it’s still in the warhead, it is. Let me give you an overview so you can figure it out. We’ll get you specific information as soon as we dig it up.

  “You’ve got three types of radiation when dealing with plutonium: Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Alpha, which is a particle, is dangerous to living cells but easily blocked. A piece of metal foil can do the job. Beta’s also a particle. It’s smaller than Alpha so its harder to shield. A half-inch of aluminum or an inch of plastic can do the job.

  “The most powerful type of radiation is Gamma. A high-energy photo. Like an X-ray you get at the dentist’s office, but with much higher energy levels. Maybe six inches of lead shielding should do it. A foot definitely.”

  Haney cut in. “There’s this large safe-like thing on a truck here. Made of lead with a large door.”

  “Sounds like they were ready to pull the plutonium if need be and put it in the safe. But it’s best to just get the warheads intact and get them out that way. You don’t want to be tampering with those cores. You get exposed, it’ll kill you pretty quickly. You’re safe with the warheads as long as they’re intact. Naval personnel in submarines go on extended deployments living with a nuclear reactor and nuclear warheads in close proximity and they’re fine.”

  Haney looked up at the stars overhead. “How long will the incoming party spend on the ground? Will they be able to help me gather the warheads?”

  Turnbull’s voice came over the radio. “They’ll stay as long as needed to get that plutonium out of there, but we need you to do as much as possible before they arrive. We want them to spend as little time on the ground as possible.”

  No shit, Haney thought.

  “At the very least, can you open up the nosecones to expose the warheads?” Turnbull asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Do it,” Turnbull said.

  The other voice came back on. “Push comes to shove, and you have to remove the cores and put them in that vault, shield yourself. Body armor, extra layers of clothing. Whatever is at hand. Look around. They might have left some gear. Wear gloves. Goggles. Move it as quickly as possible.”

  “Right,” Haney said, having his second no shit moment.

  Turnbull must have caught something in his tone. “Listen, son. We can’t let the Kurds—or anyone else for that matter—get their hands on this material. Do you understand?”

  A phrase ran through Haney’s head, from his time in Fallujah, the company commander passing through, shouting orders: Hold this position at all costs. Of course, he’d been passing through, so it was an easy order to give to the men holding the position while he scuttled back to the company command post.

  “I understand, sir. I’ll hold at all costs.”

  *****

  Iran had a strong military presence in the northwest corner of its country, where it abutted Turkey. They didn’t exactly fear that the Turks would invade. Of more concern was an air assault by the United States, or Israel, striking at their nuclear facilities. It was a threat that had been on the table for years, and growing likelier the more Iran rattled its saber and claimed to be closer to actually having developed a nuclear weapon.

  Thus the alert from the interception facility to a unit that could react went relatively quickly. The problem was, the Iranians had a limited amount of capability to project force beyond their borders. Despite the Iran-Iraq War being over for twenty-five years, the country had never really recovered from its devastation.

  Reliant on imports for most of its weaponry and military equipment, it was thus an irony of the world’s arms trade that while Ducharme and his team were using a Russian Halo helicopter, two US designed CH-47 Chinooks took off from an Iranian airbase fifty miles from the Turkish border and headed toward Ararat. Even more ironic was that the US had supplied Iraq during that war while the Soviets had supplied Iran. But it was the twists of the diplomatic dance and the requirements to keep feeding the military-industrial complex that Chinooks, based on a US patent, and built by an Italian company, ended up in the Iranian Air Force. While a Halo, built in Russia, was for hire to the highest bidder in Iraq, and rented to recover downed US Chinooks in Afghanistan. A country that had absorbed much American and Russian blood alike.

  The Iranians were going to violate Turkey’s sovereignty, but the lure was irresistible based on the intercepted cell phone calls from the Kurds: weapons grade plutonium was sitting there for the taking.

  On board each chopper were forty-five commandos. Within eight minutes of being alerted, the two helicopters lifted off and began flying west.

  *****

  At the same time, one UH-6o Blackhawk and the MI-26 Halo took off from Al Asad and began their much longer journey toward Mount Ararat and the hidden Jupiter missiles.

  Inside the Blackhawk, Ducharme settled back, almost comforted by the familiar roar of the helicopter’s tu
rbine engines and the blades chopping air overhead. The dark figures seated all around him, geared for combat and wearing night vision goggles, could have been any Special Team he’d been a member of.

  Except for the minor detail they were infiltrating a foreign country and heading toward nuclear warheads.

  There was a fly in every ointment.

  27 October 1961

  The wall was now becoming a true Wall. Section by section, the barbwire was removed, and a wall consisting of concrete sections twelve-feet high and four-feet wide, was being built in its place. Access between East and West Berlin was restricted to a limited number of places, the most notable being the infamous Checkpoint Charlie.

  Kennedy had responded to the Wall by rattling his saber, but not unsheathing it. He activated over one hundred thousand National Guard and Reserves. He forward deployed over two hundred combat aircraft to Europe.

  And in Berlin, General Clay, who’d supervised the successful Airlift in 1948 and 1949, wasn’t one to be cowed by the Soviets, and especially not the East Germans when they began restricting the travel of diplomats from the West to the East, clearly violating the 1945 Potsdam Treaty.

  He started having diplomats escorted by military police in Jeeps to the checkpoints. For a while this cowed the East Germans into letting the diplomats through. But only for so long. The harassment resumed.

  Fed up, Clay then raised the ante, throwing M-48 Patton tanks on the table, a move the General for which they were named would have greatly approved of. The next time a diplomat was denied crossing, Clay had a battalion of M-48 tanks make their way into position, with ten of them crowded in place seventy meters from Checkpoint Charlie.

  Khrushchev didn’t hesitate in responding. Thirty-three Russian T-55 tanks rumbled into position the exact same distance on the other side of the Checkpoint. Main guns were pointed directly at each other, live ammunition was loaded in the breeches, and the world was one twitchy finger away from the start of World War III.

  For sixteen hours the two militaries who’d been allies in World War II, faced each other over the city they’d both helped defeat.

  *****

  “Why should we trust you?” Robert F. Kennedy asked the Russian journalist, whom Scotty Reston had just introduced him to, in a private room at an out of the way restaurant in Georgetown.

  “You know I am not a journalist, correct?” Georgi Bolshakov asked.

  “You’re GRU,” Kennedy said. “And a spy. Which makes me ask again: why should we trust you?”

  “I have a direct link to the Kremlin,” Bolshakov asserted. “The words I convey come from Comrade Khrushchev’s lips.”

  “Why should my brother trust Khrushchev?” Kennedy asked.

  Bolshakov smiled. He held up a bottle of vodka. “Perhaps a drink might be in order?”

  Kennedy didn’t acknowledge the offer, but Bolshakov poured three shots, holding two of them out. Kennedy reluctantly took one and Reston took the other.

  “To peace between our great countries,” Bolshakov toasted.

  They downed the shots.

  “I do not ask you to trust me,” Bolshakov said as he slammed the glass down on the table. “I ask you to relay Comrade Khrushchev’s words to your brother, the President. It is his decision whether to trust the words. Although, I am sure, your consul means a great deal to him. Which is why I implore you to listen.

  “Comrade Khrushchev believes your brother to be a man of honor and, as one who has seen war firsthand, a man of peace.” Bolshakov leaned forward, ignoring Reston and focusing on the Attorney General. “You must remember, we are only sixteen years removed from your country being the only one to have utilized atomic weapons. Twice. And you did not bomb military targets, but rather two cities. We make no quarrel with the method used to pursue peace.” Bolshakov sat back. “Indeed, it might have been better for Berlin if we ourselves had had the bomb then and put the city out of its misery instead of leveling it with conventional forces.

  “But now,” Bolshakov said, raising a finger. “My Soviet Union also has nuclear weapons. We have tanks facing each other down in Berlin, inches away from firing at each other. Would it end there in Berlin? Would it stop in Europe? Or would the entire world be consumed? Neither of our countries has shown a willingness to back off in the face of war. Nothing but complete victory. Except what is victory now? What would we win? A useless planet? Where no one could live?”

  Bolshakov fell silent.

  “Is there an offer to solve this problem in Berlin?” Kennedy asked. “Because we do not have one. Your country began this problem. Your country must solve this problem. And don’t give me that public bull your Ambassador is putting out that it’s a German problem. Ulbricht wouldn’t take a piss unless Khrushchev okayed it. ”

  “I am not here to spread ‘bull,’ as you call it. Comrade Khrushchev wants to be up front,” Bolshakov said. “But your brother invited this by his words and actions in Vienna. My Premier had to act. He had to appease the generals just as your brother has to appease your generals. So. Here is the offer:

  “If you leave the Wall in place and do not attempt to destroy it, we will move one of our tanks back. You can then mirror your own withdrawal from Checkpoint Charlie. Neither side will lose face.”

  “You’ll back down first?”

  “Yes,” Bolshakov said. “But it must be one move, then the other move.”

  “Is that all?” Kennedy asked.

  “That is enough for now, Mister Attorney General.”

  Kennedy tapped a finger against his upper lip, considering the Russian. “Why you and not your Ambassador? Why send a spy?”

  “If the Ambassador presented this, then it would be official. Read officially, it looks like the Soviet Union would be ordering the Americans to give up on Berlin while also retreating. A lose-lose. With that public, you would not be able to do it without your President losing respect nor without the Berliners claiming he is abandoning them. Doing this informally, we give peace a chance.”

  “My brother cares very much about West Berlin.”

  “My Premier understands that,” Bolshakov said. “Perhaps after, as you say, the smoke clears, your brother, the President, can make some sort of gesture to the Berliners.” He shrugged. “Perhaps a visit. Some day.”

  “Perhaps,” Kennedy said, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “It is a good solution,” Bolshakov pressed.

  Kennedy focused on the man across from him. “Yes, but you blew your cover by telling me your real job. You know the FBI works for me.”

  Bolshakov smiled. “Yes, I know the FBI works for you. But do they really? Or do they work for Hoover? That is another issue. And another reason to do this informally. As in Moscow, you have much intrigue going on here in Washington. We have had glimpses of a deeper power struggle. A group called the Cincinnatians? Am I pronouncing that correctly?”

  Robert Kennedy’s face tightened at the mention of Hoover and the Cincinnatians. “Where did you hear that?”

  “One hears the echoes of whispers in the halls of Washington,” Bolshakov said vaguely. “Comrade Khrushchev would like to keep an informal line of communications with the President.”

  “And that line will be you?”

  “I fear not for much longer,” Bolshakov said. “As you note, my cover has been blown by meeting you. But there will be someone to replace me, rest assured.”

  “I wasn’t particularly worried,” Robert Kennedy said.

  28 October 1961

  The message from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to General Clay was to the point and like a dagger in the heart of the man who’d defended West Berlin for so long: We had long since decided that Berlin is not a vital interest which would warrant determined recourse to protect and sustain.

  Clay had been moving up engineering forces, positioning bulldozers to rip down sections of the wall; to look the Russians in the eye and see if they were bluffing. Clay was certain the Russians would back down. Despite their bluste
r, Clay knew in his heart that American military might could destroy the Russians, and he believed they knew it, too. Clay knew the real numbers of American nuclear weapons, and he didn’t believe for a moment the numbers the CIA was throwing about for Russian nuclear capability. They could barely feed their own people, never mind match the United States in nuclear capability.

  Finding out that Washington had folded infuriated the General. He went forward to Checkpoint Charlie to see if the rest of the message would unfold as Washington had predicted.

  Sixteen hours after moving into position, a Russian tank, spewing black smoke and with that unmistakable high pitched squeal of tread, backed up five meters.

  Clay nodded at his adjutant. Much like Longstreet relaying his order to Pickett at Gettysburg before that fateful charge that Longstreet completely disagreed with, unable to voice the words, the order was relayed nonverbally.

  The lead American tank clattered back five meters. Then another Russian tank retreated. And so on.

  In an hour all the tanks were out of sight of each other, and the closest the world had come to World War III since the end of the Second World War was defused.

  For the time being.

  An even darker and more dangerous confrontation was rapidly approaching.

  Chapter Seven

  The Present

  “Where are Hoover’s files on Kennedy?” Burns demanded of Turnbull.