JET V - Legacy (7 page)

“How long until we’re over the Gulf of Aden?” he asked Henri, moving to the front of the plane, grabbing the seats for support as the craft bounced through a patch of turbulent air.

“No more than half an hour and we’ll be over water. Why?”

Sol retrieved a slip of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to him. “Change of plans. Head to this point. We’re going to make a little detour on the way to Yemen. My boys and I will be saying goodbye before we get over land again.”

Henri nodded warily and entered the coordinates into his GPS. “That’s northwest of our flight route.”

“Correct. Just fly the plane. Drop down to a few hundred feet above the terrain so we don’t get picked up by any of the longer-range radars.”

“You’re the boss. But there aren’t any in these parts – at least not around here.”

“Humor me. Hug the ground until we’re over the water. Once we get closer to the coordinates, we’ll ascend to where we can safely do a low-altitude jump. Have you ever done this before?”

The pilot grinned humorlessly. “There’s not much I haven’t done.”

“That’s what we were told. What’s our time till we’re in position?”

Henri consulted the GPS and performed a quick mental calculation. “Hour and a half, maybe an hour forty-five.”

“Good.” Sol reached over and jerked the headset cable out of the radio. “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon not have any communication.”

“What about if we’re pinged by one of the naval vessels?”

The passenger took the seat behind Henri as they began their descent.

“Let’s hope we aren’t.”

~ ~ ~

An aide pushed through the doors of the conference room and cleared his throat, staring at the balding man seated at the head of the table. As chief of the Middle East division of the CIA, he wasn’t unaccustomed to being pulled out of meetings for one crisis or another, but by the look on the underling’s face, whatever had happened warranted serious and immediate attention.

“Gentlemen, would you excuse me for a minute? I’ll be right back,” he said to the assembled men, rising and making his way for the door before anyone had a chance to comment.

“What is it, Jackson?” he barked once the door had closed behind him.

“This is big, sir. NSA just informed me that a nuclear detonation occurred on the coast of Somalia twenty minutes ago.”

“What? Are you serious? Jesus. Somalia? What the hell…”

“Exactly, sir. It got picked up on satellite, and there’s no mistake. The signature is definitive.”

“Who the hell would nuke Somalia?” he asked, almost to himself.

“Unknown at this time, sir. What’s odd is the size of the blast. Preliminary estimates are that it’s in the five kiloton range.”

“That’s…that’s small. I mean, really small…”

“Yes, sir.” The aide was waiting for instructions.

“Call a crisis meeting in conference room C. I want everything we can get on the explosion, real-time feeds, the works. See if they can reposition a satellite so we can get visual. Do we know anything else besides it was a small nuke? Where in Somalia did it go off?”

“That’s the weirdest part, sir. It’s the middle of nowhere, on the coast. There’s literally nothing there. Closest town, if you can call it that, is eleven miles away – far outside the blast zone. Although there could be small amounts of fallout depending on the wind direction. But there’s nothing strategic there. Not that there is anywhere in Somalia. But still. It’s the ass end of the planet, literally.”

“So you’re saying that someone nuked a bunch of goats and scrub…?”

“I know. It doesn’t make much sense, sir. Unless it was some kind of a test…”

“Get everyone into the conference room. I’ll be in shortly.”

~ ~ ~

News of the explosion reverberated through the world’s intelligence communities, including those most proximate to the blast in the Middle East. Reaction was immediate as regimes in the region raised their alert levels to high, but after a few hours more questions remained than answers. Why had the first use of a nuclear weapon outside of a known test and those dropped on Japan during the Second World War been on a remote stretch of African coast – and who had detonated it?

~ ~ ~

Sol patted his two companions on the head and swung the door of the Cessna open, the plane having slowed to nearly stall speed, barely sixty miles per hour. It was holding level at a thousand feet, flying toward Yemen, and there was nothing in plain view other than a dot in the water in the distance – a super-yacht steaming toward the Red Sea.

“All right, gentlemen. Bombs away,” he yelled, and the two waiting men hurled themselves out into space, their parachute packs securely cinched for the low-level drop. Sol returned to the front of the plane and flipped the toggle on the explosive pack sitting by Henri, his head lolling to the side at an impossible angle, and after a final glance at the autopilot and the bomb timer, he edged to the open door and pushed himself out into the open sky. He waited two seconds before pulling the ripcord; the chute deployed and the harness bit into his thighs and chest, and then he got his canopy under control and steered himself toward the others, already well on their way to the waiting yacht that had slowed for their rendezvous.

Chapter 8

Present day, Moscow, Russian Federation

The contingent of soldiers stiffened to ramrod attention as two uniformed officers strode down the long hall to the ornate wooden double doors; both men bore insignia identifying them as generals in the Russian army. The taller of the two stopped and knocked, rapping twice, and the pair waited silently as footsteps sounded against the polished granite floor in the interior chamber.

The right-hand door swung wide and a thin man with severely cropped silver hair, wearing a dark gray suit and round steel-rimmed spectacles, offered them a permanent expression of a man who’d just swallowed something repellent as he stared at them for several seconds before motioning for them to enter.

“Generals. Right this way. The minister will see you now,” he said in a sandpaper voice, nodding to another doorway at the far end of the reception area. Moments later they were marching into the office of the second most powerful man in the Russian Federation – Alek Sureyev – who was sitting behind a desk the size of an aircraft carrier, with two morose-looking men seated in front of it.

“Generals Esina, Malerov. You know our colleague from the GRU – Tomkin, and from the FSB…Grigorovich?” Sureyev asked, not so much a question as a statement. Both generals understood that the presence of both the FSB, the
Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii
– the successor agency to the KGB, and the GRU, the
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye
– the military intelligence agency, spelled huge trouble. To see the heads of the two rival groups sitting in the same office was more than disconcerting – it was unprecedented.

“Yes, of course,” confirmed Malerov, the older of the two generals.

“Good. Then, please. Take a seat. We have much ground we need to cover.” Sureyev paused, waiting for the officers to take the proffered chairs, and then resumed the ongoing discussion he’d been having with the GRU and FSB men.

“The implications of the explosion are not good. Already questions are being raised about where the device could have come from. I don’t need to remind everyone of the possible consequences, do I?”

“No. Which is why this has always been a concern. It does not take a genius to figure out that whoever got their hands on the devices did not do so because they wanted to collect hazardous waste. We have followed up on every lead to surface since the invasion, but they have all turned into dead ends,” Grigorovich said. “There were rumors that the Iraqi regime had acquired them from the black market, but this was pure speculation. I think it is safe to say that if there were any WMDs in Iraq, we would have heard about it by now. God knows the Americans turned over every cursed rock in the place.”

“May I point out that there is nothing implicating the Army in any wrongdoing here?” General Esina interrupted. “It’s not as if we sold suitcase nukes to anybody.”

“Nobody is pointing fingers. We are trying to understand how two nuclear weapons can disappear without a trace, so we know what we are up against. Because make no mistake – if the Somali detonation was one of ours, it will eventually come out. And, heaven forbid, if it was a Russian-manufactured device, and there is another one floating around to be used in some sort of a terrorist attack, it
will
ultimately
be traced back to us, and then, regardless of what explanation we offer, there will be a backlash like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Sureyev warned with a scowl.

“Are we sure about how many are…unaccounted for?” Malerov asked.

“Two. There can be no doubt,” Sureyev snapped.

The GRU man nodded assent. “We hoped that by now they wouldn’t be usable. The devices needed to be kept under power, and the components used and the battery backups were…primitive. All our experts assured us that at this point they were no longer a threat. I think it is safe to say, based on yesterday’s detonation, that assessment was, mmm, overly optimistic, at best.”

“Just how long have we known about this?” Esina asked.

“We have been aware of the missing units for two decades. But that is not the issue at this point. What matters is that we are finally sure – after the Army, the GRU, and the FSB wasted massive amounts of time pointing fingers and stating categorically that the danger was long past – that one of the devices was used, albeit for unknown purposes,” Sureyev said, glaring at all four men. “But now that one has exploded, there can be no higher priority than locating the final missing device. We can run for cover and insist that we are not behind this, and considering the strange detonation site, that point is plausible; but further denials will not be accepted if the other one is used on a populated target. All that anyone will care about is that the bomb originally came from Russia. Which makes it your problem. All of you. Let us not forget that we are still living down the Litvinenko poisoning. The world does not trust us, and this would give it every reason to justify that stance.”

“My people tell me that all of the units have been inoperable for years. The batteries dead, beyond salvaging, and many of the parts degraded to the point of obsolescence,” Grigorovich said.

“True,” Tomkin said, speaking for the first time. “But with the right kind of expertise, alternatives have obviously been found. Technology has come a long way since the mid-eighties. In light of yesterday’s event, we have to assume that someone was able to fashion a workaround.”

“How difficult would it be to retrofit one?” Esina asked.

“That is debatable,” Tomkin said. “Let’s just say that it is more than achievable. I think we can agree that this isn’t theoretical any longer. A skilled technician with the right equipment and expertise could arm one. Fundamentally, the technology is not really so complicated. It is a relatively straightforward device.”

“But limited, correct? Five kilotons?” Malerov asked.

“A third of the size of Hiroshima,” Tomkin said.

“Not so large, then,” Esina observed. “More effective to achieve shock and awe than total destruction.”

“Depends on who you ask, I would say,” Sureyev remarked, his tone icy. “Imagine one being detonated in Vatican City. Or downtown London. Or Moscow. Never mind the initial fireball and blast damage – consider the radiation and psychological effect as well. Does anyone want to argue that would not be an unparalleled disaster?”

“No question it would be…problematic,” General Esina conceded.

Everyone fell silent.

Eventually, Tomkin shook his head. “It would be big enough,” the GRU man said quietly.

Sureyev shifted and then leaned forward, glaring across the desk. “We need to track it down. You are here to tell me where and how we must begin. It is not as though we can just shrug our shoulders and wait for the other one to go off. What steps can be implemented, immediately, to locate it?” he demanded.

Twenty minutes later the only thing the gathering had agreed on was that the situation was potentially catastrophic, and could not only bring down the regime, but cause global chaos.

Suitcase nukes – portable tactical nuclear weapons – had been dismissed by the western media as a non-issue, a red herring, the stuff of overactive imaginations, largely due to a sustained public relations campaign by the Russian government stemming from the discovery of the missing devices in the early nineties. But now that one had exploded, all that expensive spin would quickly count for nothing, and the first country everyone would suspect would be Russia – for very good reason.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had built dozens of the portable nuclear devices and shipped them into the field, so-called “suitcase nukes” because they were compact and weighed only sixty pounds. The instructions had been clear – if war broke out, the devices were to be detonated near strategic targets, the obliteration of which would materially disrupt the U.S.’s ability to fight. The same had been done with a variety of biological warfare agents, to be dumped into the nation’s rivers and reservoirs.

When the Soviet Union had started coming apart in the late 1980s, the units were recalled from not only Europe and the U.S., but also the satellite countries where they had been deployed for use against the civilian populations in the case of widespread rebellion. But two had failed to materialize – the pair that had been in the Ukraine. The base where they had been stored had been presumed impenetrable, but as the regime lost its grip on the region, larceny had resulted in a security breach the likes of which had never been encountered before.

When the smoke cleared, the devices were deemed missing without a trace, leaving the deteriorating Soviet administration without a clue as to who might have taken them. Originally, it was suspected that the new Ukrainian government had secreted them away to be used as a bargaining chip; but after a multi-year investigation, that was deemed a dead end. For Russia, it was every nuclear-equipped government’s worst-case scenario, but one that had faded over time as the usable life expectancy had expired. Until now.