Arc Light (9 page)

He was in his own private world, cut off from the others by the straps holding him to his seat and the noise filling the speeding aircraft. For the first time in days, he found himself idle. His mind wandered, and he let it drift.

Jane. Images of her floated before the dark and dimly reflective porthole like lilies in a pond. Though they were both now thirty-eight years old, Jane was almost unchanged from their days at Georgetown, her freshly scrubbed face still looking made up even when it wasn't. They were the kind of couple who gets greedily snatched up by the social circles of Washington—he, tall, blond, blue-eyed, a rising star; she, petite, auburn-haired, demure.

They had met their freshman year at Georgetown. He was at a shoot-around meeting his new teammates and coaches when a number of women had filed in for gymnastics tryouts. The girl on the end
nearest him was Jane. He'd asked her to marry him their senior year, but she had refused. He had been accepted to Harvard Law School and had been drafted in the third round by the New Jersey Nets. Jane had replied she didn't think he was ready to make a decision like marriage with so much up in the air. He smiled, remembering. He had taken a wild guess that she was bluffing, insecure about his possible sports stardom, and wanted him to beg her, which he did. They were married in June.

His pre-NBA summer camp had been disheartening. A lowly seventh rounder at his position was the surprise star of the Nets' rookie review. Greg had declined the “invitation” to try out in the fall. “What would you think if I joined the army?” he had asked Jane on the plane to Maine after camp. She had laughed, not realizing he was serious.

Four years later, at age twenty-five, Greg had graduated Harvard with a law degree and a Masters in government. During the spring of his final year he had been approached by the CIA after a professor had anonymously recommended him. Greg had politely declined to interview for a job in Operations—for work in the field. He had asked, however, if there might be an opening in Intelligence. A few weeks later he had gotten a letter responding to his “inquiry” about a position with the
Defense
Intelligence Agency. He had never even heard of it before.

And so they had returned to Washington.
Thirteen years ago,
he thought in amazement at how quickly time had passed. His first job at DIA had been excruciatingly boring—academic papers on the Soviet economy. His only excitement at work had come from his few trips to “The Farm,” the CIA training facility in West Virginia. Every Friday the DIA had posted a list of weekend courses at The Farm that had open slots, and he had enrolled in the few that seemed somewhat exciting and dangerous.

Success at DIA had come quickly and unexpectedly. Having studied Russian at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, he had been assigned the tedious job of compiling the increasingly dismal Soviet economic data from the late eighties. At the end of his reports, he had always thrown in unsolicited opinions about the Soviet Union. Unwittingly, he had chronicled the demise of the U.S.S.R.

In 1991 the intelligence community had still been reeling from its failure to predict Iraq's invasion of Kuwait the year before. As the Soviet Union's impending collapse became more and more apparent, his reports had been dusted off and he'd been trotted out as having predicted it years in advance. Quotes from his reports had been taken out of context. He had been put forward by the DIA to give testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Insiders” at
cocktail parties were abuzz with paraphrased “predictions” he had supposedly made. He'd quickly become known as the guy who first “called” the decline and fall of the U.S.S.R., and it was the call of the century. His fifteen minutes of fame.

Two months after the collapse, an engraved invitation had arrived. A private dinner with George and Barbara Bush. The conversation had turned to calls for a “peace dividend” that were just beginning to circulate. The President had been concerned they would cut defense only to wake up one morning to find hard-liners at the other end of the hot line. He had been fishing for an opinion, for a call.

The wine had left Greg at ease, and his opinions had come freely. Jane had kicked him repeatedly under the table, but he had plunged into an area, strategic military affairs, for which he had no formal preparation. Russia was going to hell in a handbasket, he had opined. Their military would suffer right along with everything else. “Just stay one step ahead of them, Mr. President. Let them collapse faster than we reduce. Defer the cuts a little bit. Stay ahead of the game.”

“You seem sure of yourself, Greg,” Bush had said as he refilled Greg's wineglass.

“A peace dividend now is too fast, too soon,” he'd said, enamored of the position he had developed only moments before. “I'd slow-play the cuts. Let the bottom drop out from under the Russians first.” Jane had kicked him so hard that the water glass on the table shook. Barbara Bush had laughed and then taken Jane on a tour of the White House while Greg looked over the preliminary force reduction plans in the Oval Office.

He had said the right things, and from that evening he'd been on the fast track. He had learned military affairs on the job. Even though administrations changed and the bureaucracy forgot why it was that he was a star, the lights on his career path had remained green. Greg was moved from one Crisis Action Team to another, spending more and more of his time in the White House—actually 100 feet beneath the White House, in the Situation Room.

When President-elect Livingston's transition team had requested a national security briefing, the DIA had sent Lambert. Two weeks later Jane's mother had telephoned. Greg's name and picture had been in
U.S. News & World Report
under a list of candidates for national security adviser in the new White House. He and Jane had run out in the rain to buy a copy. The issue, crumpled and fat from having been soaked, still sat in their nightstand. Jane had refused to throw it out. She never threw anything out; the closets were full of
old cheerleader uniforms, basketball trophies, and her wedding dress, of course.

“You know we'll have to clean all this stuff out when we have a baby,” he'd said the weekend before last. From the look—the smile—on her face he had said the right thing. He had a knack for saying the right things. They had started trying for a baby that afternoon.

Greg closed his eyes as the helicopter now rose and fell over the dark country roads below. Jane was on one of them. He said a silent prayer, hoping the words he used were the right ones.

“Oh, it's Zorin all right!” Air Force General Mishin's voice came angrily over General Razov's speakerphone in the hardened wartime bunker deep under his headquarters building. “His fingerprints are all over this, and the Taman Division—
your
people—are out of their barracks and taking up positions around the Kremlin.”

“Is that where Zorin is headed?” Razov asked. “The Kremlin?”

“Well, of course!” Mishin yelled. “The man believes all that hard-line messianic crap, and he's the Messiah!”

“I'll talk to the commander of the Taman Division,” Razov said. “I know him well. Those men your people have seen are bound to be renegade units.”

“Whatever,” Mishin said. “What do you want to do now? Do you want to consider postponing your strikes?”

“Absolutely impossible!” Razov said. “The strategic weapons are all on automated launches at the designated times so that their phasing over targets will be timed correctly. Plus I've got an entire army group on the move right now toward holes in the Chinese lines that had damn well better be there when the lead echelon hits the line of departure. Those lead echelons are going to be close to ground zero as it is, in some cases less than a kilometer away. The timing is crucial.”

“You could just be a little less precise with your timing and use more weapons.”

“We don't have releases on more weapons, and Zorin has the damn nuclear communicators!”

“We could seize the silos and rewire the locks to bypass his communicators.”

“That would take time—maybe even days—and I can't wait. For God's sake, I've already told the Americans, who are busy, I'm sure, telling other NATO governments. Pretty soon, word is going to slip around to the Chinese. No! We've got to go as planned. We go now.”

“What about the Americans' alert orders? I still say we should follow our programs and send out our own alert orders in response.”

“General Thomas is only doing what I expected him to do,” Razov replied.

“But
DEFCON
3! It bothers me, Yuri. I have to admit, it bothers me that we're not reacting.”

“You just worry about Zorin.”

“I'll take care of him,” the air force general responded. “I'm assuming he'll set up shop like
Der Führer
down in the Deep-Underground Command Post, and I'm having my men cut off the Deep-Underground Subways to the Ramenki Facility near the university, and the Ex-Urban NCA and
STAVKA
facilities a hundred kilometers south of the city. We're also deploying troops at the exits at Vnukovo Airfield. That leaves only the connection here and the air vent and utility access shafts, all of which we'll have guarded.”

“Can you sever his unhardened communications?”

“We can cut everything but direct broadcast satellite and the deep-underground fiber optic emergency communications system—the nuclear command and control system wired into the two communicators. I hate to tip him off too soon, but we'll go ahead and start the process of cutting everything else. His logistics command has had a liaison officer right here at PVO-Strany who has been spying on us and surreptitiously telephoning Zorin on a dedicated line, and we might lay off him for a while to try to lull Zorin into a false sense of security.”

“Just don't let him sit on those nuclear communicators too long, for God's sake!” Razov said, hanging up.

In the silence that followed in the concrete-enclosed bunker, words of warning spoken in English crept into Razov's mind.
“Something will go wrong. Something always goes wrong!”
“Murphy's Law,” General Thomas had called it. As the words echoed in Razov's head, the first twinge of anxiety rushed through his veins. Razov looked up at the duty officer. “Get Zorin on the line.”

As the Humvee slowed, Captain Chris Stuart awoke from his doze to see two air policemen with M-16s slung over their shoulders peering down into a silo. A single man with a blue hard hat protruded half out of the concrete mound into the brilliant lights of a trailer rolled up to the side of the silo's opening. The Humvee pulled to a stop just outside the open gate of the twelve-foot chain link fence, and the two technicians in the rear seat squeezed by Captain Scott Langford, Stuart's co-launch officer, and headed for the silo, donning their own hard hats in their vehicle's headlights.

“They got the blast door open on Number Eight,” Langford said, staring at the silo. “Let's go take a look.”

“Oh, man,” Stuart said, wanting to get down to the center and resume his nap. “We got an alert order. The shift begins in ten minutes.”
The “graveyard” shift again,
Stuart thought as he yawned.

“We got time. Come on,” Langford said as he opened the door.

Stuart followed him out into the darkness and put on his “pee-cutter” air force cap. They returned the salute of the air policeman—standing under the single light at the gate with his M-16 and attached grenade launcher slung over his shoulder—and entered the secure area around the hardened silo. Seeing the officers approach, the two air policeman at the silo opening walked down to the ground toward the gate, saluting as they passed.