The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there’s an Air Force tradition,’ the woman said, ‘that if you put a coin on the bar and the other person can’t match it with a coin of their own, then that person has to buy the drinks for everyone who can.’

  ‘And what if I did have one?’ Ben asked, intrigued, looking at the thick medallion-sized coin beside his glass.

  ‘Then I’d have to buy you a drink.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  ‘So, sorry if I startled you.’ She flicked her hair behind a tan shoulder. ‘I just lost the game and had to buy those two boys over there a drink. You were staring so hard at that photo, I couldn’t help but interrupt. This is a coin from my dad’s squadron. He flew gunships—still does.’ She picked it up and handed it to him.

  It was heavy, made of brass. On one side were the words 4th Special Operations Squadron above a hooded, ghost-like character, lightning bolts shooting down from its hands. On the flip side was a four-engined airplane banking in a steep turn, gunfire spitting from its side. There was a caption: The AC-130—the real reason to fear the night.

  ‘Ben,’ he said.

  ‘Lana,’ she replied and smiled, giving him a firm handshake. ‘You know, I’m told I’m usually the reserved, stuck-up type who gives men she doesn’t know the brush-off. But I’m wearing my vacation face at the moment.’

  ‘This place has that effect on people. So, what are you drinking?’ he asked.

  ‘Forget it. I’m not sure what the rules say about coining someone who doesn’t have a clue about the rules.’

  One of the fishermen ambled up to her. ‘Excuse me, miss, are you still . . . er . . .’ He motioned toward the pool table.

  ‘Oh, okay, just one second,’ she told him, and turned to Ben, ‘Look, my brother had to split to meet his girlfriend and—’

  ‘That was your brother?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Yeah. And he’s probably the world’s worst pool player. I’d really like to beat these guys. Do you play?’

  He considered the offer, then said, ‘That table has a lean to the right and a dead cushion at this end.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she beamed. ‘Local knowledge.’ She gave a hoot. ‘I feel like my luck’s about to turn.’ She counted out some quarters with which to feed the pool table.

  Ben turned toward the bar and caught Marsha’s attention.

  ‘What can I get you guys?’ she said, coming over. ‘Same again?’

  ‘I’m good,’ Ben replied, ‘but I think—’

  ‘Can I please have two Sunsets—make that three,’ said Lana pointing at Ben’s glass, butting in. ‘And a white wine.’

  Marsha raised a knowing eyebrow at Ben, then disappeared to fill the order.

  ‘So what do you do when you’re not on vacation?’ he asked.

  ‘I go—or rather, I went—to UCLA. I just finished.’

  ‘I’ve met people from LA. Should I run away now?’ Ben said.

  Marsha assembled the drinks on the counter. Ben reached for his wallet, but Lana beat him to it and handed Marsha a note.

  ‘Keep the change,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Marsha replied, giving Ben a quick flash of approval.

  ‘I’m not from LA,’ she said. ‘Being an Air Force brat means I’m from all over. Even spent a couple of years in Qatar.’

  ‘What did you study?’

  ‘Political science.’

  The fisherman Ben had taken out to the Gulf Stream approached them. ‘It’s Ben, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. And Jim, right?’ Ben replied.

  The guy nodded. ‘So, you teamin’ up with this pool shark here?’ he said, gesturing at Lana. ‘I reckon she’s setting us up for the kill.’ He turned to her. ‘It’s your break, honey, by the way.’

  Lana took the triangle from his outstretched hand and passed it to Ben. ‘You know these two fellas?’ she asked as Ben hopped off his stool and went over to corral the balls.

  ‘Just the one called Jim. I took him out to the reef a couple days ago.’

  ‘Oh—you own a boat or something?’

  ‘A seaplane.’

  ‘A pilot? Why didn’t you say so? I knew there was a reason I was attracted to you.’

  They won the first game, but things fell apart after that.

  ‘Hey,’ Lana said after Ben lost them their third straight game, sinking the black ball too early on both occasions, ‘I hope you fly better than you play pool.’

  Across the bar a group of older men launched into a sing-along.

  ‘C’mon, let’s go eat,’ Ben shouted. ‘It’s getting rowdy in here. I know a place.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ said Lana over the noise.

  Twenty minutes later they were eating jumbo shrimp at Alonzo & Berlin’s Lobster House over at the Key West Bight, Lana telling Ben about life growing up with an Air Force dad, the boats at the nearby marina slapping gently at their berths.

  After that, it was a short walk to a couple of late-night margaritas at Ben’s other favorite bar, The Green Parrot, which was smaller, a little quieter, but every bit as authentic as Captain Tony’s.

  As they walked arm in arm back toward the main street, Lana stopped and said, ‘If you’re heading straight ahead, this is where I get off. My hotel’s up that way.’ She motioned off to the left.

  ‘Actually, there’s one more place you should see on the real Key West tour.’

  ‘Let me guess—that would be a real Key West bedroom? Now why do I get the feeling there’s a beaten path to that attraction?’

  ‘All right, I do have an ulterior motive, but it’s not the one you’re thinking.’

  She folded her arms, skeptical.

  ‘There’s something I’d like to show you. An Air Force brat might know what the ribbons mean on the blouse of a uniform, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Blouse? Since when are they teaching military dress vocabulary to seaplane pilots?’

  ‘Since my father—the guy in the photo—died and left me his service dress.’

  ‘Really? Wow, that’s pretty cool.’

  A few minutes later, Ben stopped at a small wood cottage painted green. ‘My castle,’ he said as he opened the door.

  Lana walked in and her eyes swept the tatty open-plan living room/ dining room.

  ‘All my good furniture is in storage,’ he told her.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Nope. Drink? I’ve got red wine, white wine, a Sunset, or rum.’

  ‘White, thanks.’

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ Ben said as he walked toward the galley kitchen.

  ‘This place yours?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I rent. Everything I’ve got is tied up in the Otter.’

  A large framed air-to-air photo of a seaplane dominated one pale blue and white striped-wallpapered wall.

  ‘The one in the photo?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Lana took a stroll around the room, taking it in. There were gaps here and there in the old wooden floorboards, mismatched rugs scattered around. A circular wooden table with maps and papers scattered across it occupied the middle of the room. An old cupboard with a base for a remote phone was the only other furniture, aside from a television and a couch.

  She sat on the couch, the color worn off the black leather cushions in patches.

  ‘Here you go,’ said Ben, handing her the wine.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, looking up at him.

  He put a glass of red on the table and retrieved the uniform from the back of the front door, lifting the plastic cover over the coat hanger.

  ‘So you weren’t lying about this to get me here after all.’

  He gave her a grin.

  ‘Hey,’ she exclaimed when she focused on the blouse’s ribbons. ‘Your old man must have been some warrior.’ Ben laid the uniform across her lap. ‘This one’s the Airman’s Medal.’ She touched it gently with a fingertip. ‘You don’t see too many of these. He must have done something unbelievably and conspic
uously heroic to earn it. And this,’ she continued, ‘is the Air Medal, awarded for exceptional airmanship under pressure. Let me see . . . the Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Force Commendation Medal, and this is the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award. He also has the Combat Readiness Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Air Force Longevity Ribbon. This last one is the Small Arms Marksmanship Ribbon. My dad’s got some of these too, but your father has oak leaves on several of his, which means he got them more than once. No question, I’m impressed.’

  Lana turned toward him, her arm sweeping away the sheet, breathing slow and steady with sleep. Her breasts were deeply tan—almost black in the moonlight streaming through the window—except for small pale triangle shapes around her nipples that showed the brevity of her bikini top. Lower down and hidden beneath the sheet was a small cornflower-blue butterfly tattooed just above and to the left of her pubic hair, as if it was about to alight there. Lana was definitely a girl worth getting to know.

  They had talked for some time about Curtis. She’d seemed genuinely interested in him. He’d told her about the money left to him—without saying how much. And he’d showed her the 007 safe deposit key on his keyring, but wouldn’t elaborate on what he’d found inside the box—teasing her. They fought for the keyring on the couch. She’d climbed up his outstretched arm to get at it. And that’s when Ben kissed her. The rest was a blur of breasts and butterflies and Lana’s athleticism.

  Ben locked feet with her and drifted back off to sleep.

  He woke again just after dawn, with a slight headache and an empty feeling he couldn’t explain. He rolled over and saw that Lana wasn’t there. He called her name, but there was no response. He got up, showered, and tried not to let it bother him. He didn’t even have her damn phone number. Then he picked up his keyring and saw that the safe deposit box key was gone.

  September 1, 1983

  Somewhere over the Bering Sea. Major Curtis Foxx gave his instruments a cursory scan. His mind was elsewhere and the whole crew knew it. ‘Hey, Tex,’ he asked over his shoulder, ‘where are we exactly?’

  ‘Fifty-seven seventeen thirty-three north, and one sixty-five seventeen thirty-three east,’ replied the navigator. ‘In short, we’re eighty-six miles from the nearest Soviet anti-aircraft battery on the Kamchatka Peninsula, give or take.’

  Curtis nodded. So, seventy-six miles beyond airspace recognized as Soviet, but close enough to be making Ivan jumpy, mostly because they were also closing in on the coast of the USSR at seven miles per minute.

  He looked through the window at the sky above—a palette of frozen blacks and grays. Beneath the wings of Cobra Ball Arctic 16, a blanket of ice-gray altostratus topped out at 17,000 feet. Occasional black holes of liquid cold opened up in it here and there, revealing the empty expanse of the frigid Bering Sea below. Overhead, wisps of cirrus clouds bore the faint luminescence of dim silver and, above it all, the solid black-ice dome of space pricked with needle-points of chilled starlight.

  Curtis cradled his mug of coffee between both hands, feeling the warmth of it radiate through the Nomex gloves into his palms. He checked the outside air temperature: minus fifty-two degrees Celsius. Brisk, for sure, but not especially so, and mostly just a factor of the altitude. When winter weather patterns forced the Siberian storms south and east off the plains, the sea-level temperatures in this part of the world often dropped to around the same numbers. How many nights had these super-refrigerated tempests grounded their converted Boeing 707 on Shemya Island, out on the whip end of the Aleutian Islands chain? Too many. As far as Curtis was concerned, hell wasn’t a place of fire and brimstone. It was the numbing, relentless ferocity of black sub-zero cold.

  ‘You’re looking nervous, Curtis,’ observed the navigator, Captain Dallas ‘Tex’ Mitchell, leaning on the back of Curtis’s seat.

  ‘Y’know, there’s no need to be,’ Captain Eli Grogan piped up from the co-pilot’s seat. ‘I’ve had two monsters myself. Really, Nikki will be fine.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Two? Show us your stretch marks,’ said Tex.

  A grin flashed across Curtis’s face. This was the core of a good crew; two more were at the back of the flight deck, getting some shuteye. They were close-knit, which was essential on these long cold deployments. And they were damn good at their jobs. ‘What’s the time?’ he asked yet again.

  ‘According to my watch,’ said Tex with a sigh, ‘Nikki’s been in labor fourteen hours, twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds—that’s five minutes and ten seconds more than the last time you asked.’

  ‘And that’s normal, right?’

  ‘What?’ asked Eli. ‘Your nerves or the labor?’

  ‘If it’s the labor, it ain’t abnormal,’ Tex reassured him. ‘Like I keep telling you, man, everything’s gonna be fine, just fine.’

  ‘So what are you going to call it?’ Eli asked. ‘Not something weird like Aardvark, I hope.’

  ‘We’ve got a few names up our sleeve. Nothing strange on the shortlist.’

  ‘So, returning to the business at hand,’ Eli said, scanning the banks of temperature and pressure gauges for their four Pratt & Whitney turbofans. ‘Have the boys down the back of this bus deigned to tell us where we’re going tonight?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Tex replied. ‘But my guess is it’s going to be the typical profile, even though we’re a little further south than usual. No doubt the buzzards will just set us up to loiter in the general vicinity of the most likely patch of sky, once they get word from Fort Meade.’

  The ‘buzzards’ were more officially known as Ravens—NSA spooks—and twenty-five of them were on board tonight. Curtis Foxx and his USAF crew flew the plane and got it to where the Ravens wanted it to be. When they arrived there, the Ravens would scan the area with their top secret and highly sophisticated suite of measurements and signals intelligence apparatus, designed to detect and evaluate the performance of Soviet missiles, like the SS-20, and their multiple re-entry vehicles as they burned through the upper atmosphere. Telemetry collection and evaluation was a mission that the USAF had flown countless times over the years, and would no doubt continue to perform countless years into the future. Indeed, the mission was deemed so important that there was a Cobra Ball in the sky around the clock, always on station in these skies in the event that intelligence manna—an SS-20 MRV—would literally fall from heaven.

  Keeping the Soviets honest—letting them know that they couldn’t hide—was a significant plank in the strategy to secure those Hammer and Sickle missiles on their mobile launchers. And soon Curtis would have a very special and more deeply personal reason to help maintain the peace between the world’s superpowers. He glanced at his wristwatch and said, ‘So, how long has it been now?’

  Tex announced over the intercom, ‘We’ve got some new vectors from the buzzards.’

  ‘Let’s have ’em,’ Curtis replied, instantly back in the groove.

  ‘A revised flight level of three one zero, heading zero six five, speed zero point six six Mach.’

  While Eli annotated the log, Curtis gave a readback on the information then thumbed the mike key: ‘Anchorage Centre, Arctic 16 request higher . . .’ A minute later the Boeing was trimmed for the climb, and on the revised heading.

  ‘A new patch of sky,’ observed Eli.

  ‘Just like the old patch of sky,’ Tex replied.

  Curtis visualized the course change. The Ravens were directing them away from the Soviet coastline, which always settled the butterflies somewhat. In this part of the world, Russian defenses—radars and SAMs and anti-aircraft batteries—were the air defense equivalent of a porcupine with a nasty temper. It was always good to be flying away from those quills rather than into the thick of them.

  Des had some serious clout. Or maybe a few words from Clark’s mouth had done the trick. Garret wasn’t sure how the impossible had been achieved, but channels had been cleared, assets reallocated, programs reassigned. Someone upstairs had seen to it that he had the resources an
d the bandwidth to put the Bering Sea and the Soviet Far East under the microscope—all from the armchair comfort of Situation Room A, NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland.

  Eric Hamilton was sitting beside him, wearing a headset plugged into the console. As yet there was nothing to hear, only the usual backscatter interference. But any moment now that would change as the assets came online.

  ‘There’s something we need to consider that hasn’t been discussed,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘And that would be . . . ?’ Garret asked, distracted, checking through the console’s systems.

  ‘There’ll be an investigation afterward. Once it starts, it had better be with the right body or we’ll have no chance at all of guiding it.’

  ‘Who don’t we want?’

  ‘The National Transportation Safety Board.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ll leave no stone unturned and they have the power of subpoena.’

  ‘Why would they get involved? It’s not going to come down on US soil.’

  ‘Gray area. 007 originated from US territory—the NTSB could make a case.’

  ‘Then who would we want on the job?’

  ‘Something ineffective that the public would nonetheless have confidence in. A body like the International Civil Aviation Organization, for example.’

  ‘The ICAO? They’re UN.’

  ‘And toothless,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘Okay. I’ll manage it,’ said Garret.

  The minute clicked over on the digital clock between the banks of monitors. The time was 15:58 GMT, coming up to midnight over the Bering Sea, and noon in DC—lunchtime.

  ‘We are now inside the envelope,’ Hamilton announced.

  Garret knew his way around the console as well as any operator. He tapped a number of commands into the keyboard. Somewhere unseen a Cray Supercomputer reviewed its memory banks and data boards and obeyed his commands. The light in the room softened the way it did at the cinema. The monitors on the wall blinked on, fed with signals harvested by the giant dishes behind the Fort Meade facility. One monitor presented outlines of the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea. The screen below it captured a wider view taking in Alaska, the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and the radar sweep provided by the Regional Operations Control Centre at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Anchorage. Lines on this screen showed the actual course of KAL 007 through Elmendorf AFB’s radars, a dotted line indicating where things got a little speculative beyond Elmendorf’s range, and the projected track of an RC-135 over the Bering Sea. The two lines were now intersecting, as planned. Four screens to the right collectively showed the world from the Arctic Circle to the islands of Japan. Also highlighted was the US facility at Shemya Island and the Cobra Dane phased-array radar, the US air base at Misawa, Japan, as well as the Japanese Defense Force radar facility at Wakkanai. In addition, Garret could see a radar ship—the USS Observation Island—cruising in international waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Overlaying all of this was the projected snake-like track of a US ‘ferret’ spy satellite, which would cover the operation in its critical phases over the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island.