Retribution (16 page)

Breanna was still unconscious inside. He put his head next to her face, close enough to feel her breath on his cheek. He thought she was breathing better, more deeply.

“Hey, Bree. You awake?” he whispered.

She didn’t answer.

Zen laid the wood out near them. It was wet from having been in the water, and he was too tired anyway to try and start a fire; he’d do it in the morning. He made a broadcast on the radio but got no response. He repeated it again and again, but still no one answered.

It was amazing how long it had taken him to get the wood. He thought about it, trying to analyze what he might have done faster and better. Exhausted, he tried another broadcast, then crawled under the shelter, curled himself around his wife, and fell asleep.

Southeastern Iran,
near the coast
1800 (1900, Karachi)

“T
HE
U
NITED
S
TATES AND SEVERAL OTHER MEMBERS OF
the United Nations have launched a massive diplomatic effort aimed at both sides, trying to convince them the futility of war—”

General Mansour Sattari flipped off the television. Somehow, the Americans had actually succeeded. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons had not exploded. The Americans had vaporized them without a trace!

The end of war—or so the idiotic news commentator said.

“It is good that you turn that drivel off,” said someone behind him.

Surprised, Sattari turned and found Jaamsheed Pevars standing in the doorway. Pevars’s face was ashen.

“I don’t trust the western media,” Sattari said. “It is full of lies.”

Pevars waved his hand, as if warning the general away from something. Then he turned and walked from the room. Sattari followed.

Jaamsheed Pevars was the country’s oil minister, and usually a most happy fellow—but then who wouldn’t be if he could divert a portion of Iran’s oil revenue to his own accounts? While he served the black-robed imams who ran the country, Pevars was enough of a maverick to back several alternatives, including Sattari.

The fact that the two men had gone to school in England together was, to Sattari’s way of thinking, more a coincidence than a help, but it had made a certain level of intimacy possible between them.

“The American super weapon will change everything,” said Pevars when they reached the small but luxuriously furnished office he kept near the front of the building. “The black robes are quaking in their shoes.”

“What?”

“How does one go to war with a nation that can pulverize your weapons in midair?” Pevars shook his head. “One of the imams has already asked if you were involved.”

“Me?”

Pevars shrugged. “Perhaps word of your son’s operation leaked.”

Sattari knew there was only one possible source of the information—Pevars himself. Undoubtedly, he had leaked word out when things looked to be going well, hoping to capitalize on the connection. Now his braggadocio and conniving meant trouble.

Not for Pevars, though. He was able to slither out of everything.

“How did the black robes find out about this?” demanded
the general. “What do they know? The submarines? The aircraft?”

“Who knows what they knew? They seem to have heard…rumors.”

Sattari felt his anger growing. Rumors? Pevars was the only possible source.

“If the Americans have a weapon like this,” Pevars continued, “the balance of power will shift again. The Chinese—
pffft
, they are nothing now.”

“I would rather die than join an alliance with the Americans,” said Sattari.

“Who said anything about an alliance? An alliance? No, that is not possible. Peace, though—that is a different story.”

Sattari choked back his anger, trying to consider what Pevars had said. Peace with America—what did that imply? An oil agreement possibly, the sale of petroleum at some guaranteed rate.

Pevars would not be concerned about that.

Did the black robes intend to offer someone up as a chip for a new business agreement?

“I have information from the fisherman,” added Pevars.

“Finally,” said Sattari. The “fisherman” was one of their spies. “But why did he not send word directly to me?”

Pevars grimaced. “The submarine was captured. Two men were taken prisoner. All the others perished.”

“Which others?”

Pevars did not answer.

“The fisherman said all this?”

Pevars nodded.

Was that possible? The fisherman worked for him, not Pevars.

“You’re lying,” said Sattari.

“No. He was afraid to tell you because it involved your son.”

“You’re working with the Americans, aren’t you?”

“General, take hold of yourself. I know the loss of your son is a great blow. But surely he is in paradise now.”

General Sattari had realized this as soon as Pevars mentioned the submarine, but the words severed the last threads of restraint on his emotions. He threw himself at Pevars, launching his body at the other man as if it were a missile.

Pevars was slight, barely over 120 pounds, and much of that weight was concentrated in a potbelly. The general weighed twice what he did, and while no longer young, his daily regimen of exercise, along with the hardships he’d endured with his soldiers over the past decade, had kept his body tough and fit. He began pummeling the oil minister, smashing his head against the thick rug and lashing it again and again with his fists. If Pevars offered any resistance, it had little impact on Sattari. He punched the oil minister over and over, beating him as a hurricane beats the shore.

Blackness filled the room. It was not darkness but the opposite—a light so harsh that it blinded Sattari. He continued to flail at Pevars, emptying decades worth of rage from his body.

When the rage lifted, Sattari found himself sitting in the hallway, his hands and clothes covered with red blood.

“The Americans did this to me.” Sattari’s words echoed through the marble hall. “The Americans.”

He would find them, and take his revenge.

Dreamland
1600, 16 January 1998

E
VEN FOR A MAJOR GENERAL, GETTING TO
D
REAMLAND WAS
not an easy task. General Samson had to first fly to Nellis Air Base, and from there arrange for a helicopter to ferry him several miles to the north. A pair of Dolphin helicopters—Americanized versions of the Aerospatiale Dauphin—were tasked as Dreamland “ferries” and used regularly by personnel trekking to the base. But Samson couldn’t make the trip with the assortment of engineers and other riffraff who used the Dolphins. So a helicopter had to be found for him and the three staff members traveling with him. The chopper, in turn, needed a crew. Much to Samson’s surprise, it turned out that not just any crew could be used to fly to the base; Dreamland’s security arrangements were so tight that only personnel with a code-word clearance were allowed to land at the base’s “dock.”

The official reason for this was that planes had to cross two highly classified testing areas to get to the dock. But since clearance came from the colonel’s office at Dreamland, Samson was convinced that the actual reason had to do with a personal power play on Lieutenant Colonel Bastian’s part. He simmered while a crew with the proper clearance and training were found.

The idea that a lieutenant colonel—a
mere
lieutenant colonel—could effectively hold up a major general fried Samson’s gizzard. He knew Bastian wasn’t at the base, of course, but that was irrelevant. The lieutenant colonel undoubtedly knew
that he had a good thing going here and had instituted a series of bureaucratic hurdles and practices to keep anyone from getting too close a look.

Samson’s mood deepened when the helicopter ferrying him to the base was ordered to halt about fifty meters over the perimeter. And halt meant halt, not hover—the helo pilot was told to put his chopper down on the desert floor and await further instructions.

“What the
hell
is going on?” demanded Samson as the old Huey touched down.

“Orders, sir.”

Samson was about to express his opinion concerning the validity of the order with several expletives when he spotted a jet making what looked like a bombing run in the distance. At first he thought the aircraft was very far away. Then he realized it was actually a miniature aircraft. It carried diminutive bombs—125-pound so-called “mini-munis” being developed to help ground soldiers in urban settings where larger bombs might cause civilian casualties.

The attack aircraft was a sleek, wedge-shaped affair, with air intakes on the top of the body and what looked like fangs at the front. These were apparently some sort of forward wing or control surface, and Samson guessed that they accounted for the airplane’s twisting maneuver after the bombs were dropped—the jet veered almost straight up, dropped suddenly, and ended up backtracking on the path it had taken to the target area.

Remarkably, it seemed to do this without a noticeable loss of speed. Samson knew this was probably mostly an optical illusion—the laws of physics and aerodynamics made it impossible to completely change direction like that without losing speed—but even allowing for that, the airplane was several times more nimble than anything he had ever seen.

“General?”

Samson turned his attention back to the front of the Huey just as a mechanical voice broke into the helicopter’s interphone system.

“Huey 39, you are ordered to follow Whiplash Osprey 5. No deviation from your flight path will be tolerated.”

“What the hell?” said Samson. “I thought we were cleared.”

“We were, but it’s the way they do things,” said the pilot. “Security is tight.”

“Tight security is one thing—” Samson began, but before he could say anything else, a shadow descended over the front of the aircraft and their path was blocked by a black Osprey.

This was Whiplash Osprey 5, which differed from standard-issue Ospreys in several respects. Besides the black paint scheme, most noteworthy were the twin cannons mounted under the rear of the fuselage, pointed ominously at the Huey’s cockpit.

A second Osprey zipped in from the rear, pulling alongside the Huey just long enough for Samson to see that it had heat-seeking missiles on its wing rails.

“Follow him,” snapped Samson, folding his arms angrily.

Base Camp One,
Great Indian Desert
0600, 17 January 1998

D
ANNY
F
REAH PUSHED BACK THE SOFT CAMPAIGN CAP THE
Marines had loaned him and surveyed the base area. In less than twenty-four hours the makeshift camp had swelled from a few tents in the rocky hills to a small city. Six Ospreys sat in formation on the nearby plain. Across from them, three sideless tents housed the fifteen warheads that had been recovered thus far. Two different teams of scientists and military experts were going over the weapons, examining them before crating them for transport to the USS
Poughkeepsie.
The ship was still a good distance away, but making decent speed. Present plans were to start shipping the warheads around midnight, though there were contingencies for an earlier evac if necessary.

The nuclear devices represented a variety of technologies. Pakistan’s eight were all of similar design; according to the experts, they were relatively straightforward and not large, as nukes went, though fully capable of leveling a city.

The rest of the weapons were Indian, with warheads ranging in yield from five kilotons—very small, as nukes went—to 160 kilotons, roughly the same class of explosive power as the W62 on the U.S. Minuteman III ICBM. The discovery of the latter surprised the experts; until then, it was believed that India’s biggest warhead was in the fifty to sixty kiloton range.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Lieutenant Dancer as Danny contemplated how many lives the warheads would have claimed had they gone off.

“I usually get a whole dollar,” he told her.

“Have to wait for payday for that.” Dancer smiled at him, then shaded her eyes from the sun. Her skin looked as soft as a rose petal’s. “We have the last two Pakistani warheads secured. The Ospreys are en route. Any sign of activity to the south?”

“Negative,” said Danny. “Radio traffic is picking up, though.”

“Mmmmm,” said Dancer. She gazed toward the coast, probably thinking it would be a good thing to get the warheads out as soon as possible.

He was thinking about other things—none of which were military.

Dancer unfolded a small sketch map with an
X
drawn at each of the verified warhead locations. Four more warheads, all Indian, had been spotted; Dancer reviewed their locations, pointing to two at the very northern edge of her map. Six more missiles had to be found.

“The warheads at I-6 and I-8 are going to be much harder to retrieve,” she told Danny. “I wonder if you’d lead that team.”

“Be glad to.”

The warheads she’d referred to had crashed about two hundred miles to the east in Pakistani territory. The Pakistani army had a decent-sized military post less then thirty
miles away, and the Indians had an unmanned listening post ten miles south. The electronic surveillance equipment there was thought to have been fried by the T waves, but a truck was spotted in the area, and it was suspected that the Indians were working hard to get it back on line.

“You coming with us?” asked Danny.

“I have my work cut out for me here,” Dancer told him. “And hopefully we’ll be launching another mission as soon as the other warheads are found.”

“Shame,” said Danny, feeling as if he’d been turned down for a date.

White House Situation Room
2010, 16 January 1998
(0610, 17 January, Karachi)

M
OST OF THOSE IN THE
S
ITUATION
R
OOM REGARDED
Robert Van Houton as little more than a political hack, and so eyes glazed over when he warned that China would be extremely interested in the nuclear warheads the U.S. had punched out of the sky. It didn’t help that his monotone voice made it sound as if he was simply repeating vague concerns others had voiced earlier in the meeting. Even Jed Barclay, not a dynamic speaker himself, realized Van Houton wasn’t coming across very well as he briefed the cabinet members on the latest developments.

“We’re not going to attack the Chinese,” said Defense Secretary Chastain finally.

“I’m not suggesting that,” said Van Houton defensively. “What I’m saying—”

“I’ve spoken to Tex Woods,” said Admiral Balboa. “He concurs that there’s no need to get into a conflict with the Chinese. The aircraft carrier
Khan
is out of it—they can’t even launch aircraft. Of course, if they attack our people, we’ll defend ourselves.”

“Um, it’s not the
Khan
we h-h-have to worry about,” said
Jed. “The Ch-Ch-Chinese may be helping terror groups.”

“Not that old bugaboo,” said the Secretary of State. “With all due respect, Jed, every time there’s a conflict somewhere, you guys bring up terrorists. Thank you, but the Pakistanis and Indians are quite capable of blowing up the world on their own.”

“There have been interceptions from the NSA,” said Jed’s boss, National Security Advisor Philip Freeman. “There is talk going on between some of the radical Sunni groups and the Chinese. Some of this involves the bin Laden group.”

“Nonsense,” said Balboa. “Navy intelligence says that’s impossible. The Pakistanis think the weapons were destroyed. The terrorists take their lead from them.”

“Not entirely.”

“Iran is the country we have to worry about when it comes to terrorism,” said Balboa. “Tell the NSA to find some evidence from that direction, and we’ll bomb Tehran back to the stone age.”

Vice President Ellen Christine Whiting rolled her eyes. She was chairing the meeting while the President flew to New York to address the UN.

“Anything else, gentlemen?” she asked, looking around. “The warhead removal mission is continuing, and we should have most of the warheads out by noon our time tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Jed and Balboa simultaneously.

Jed felt his face turn red. Balboa’s scowl made it clear that he resented him even being here; there were no other aides at the session.

“I’m sure the President will be very pleased with this update,” said Whiting. “Gentlemen, thank you for your time.”

Diego Garcia
0630

I
N SOME WAYS,
D
IEGO
G
ARCIA WAS A HAVEN FROM THE
world at large, a beautiful gem dropped in an azure sea. Palm trees swayed ever so slightly on a soft breeze, and the
sand and sky made the place look more idyllic than Tahiti.

Of course, if she was going to be on an island paradise, Jennifer Gleason thought, she would have preferred being alone with her lover, rather than sharing him with a force that now topped two hundred. She also would have greatly preferred that he paid more than scant attention to her.

Her C-17 had beaten Dog’s Megafortress to the island by several hours, which made it possible for her to greet him when he arrived. But instead of the joyful hug she’d envisioned—or even a lousy peck on the cheek—Dog merely grunted a hello and went off to bed.

Alone.

Now, roughly twelve hours later, he seemed more irritable than ever. He was holding court in his room, growling rather than speaking to the crews of Dreamland
Bennett
and the
Cheli
, the recently arrived EB-52.

“We don’t know how long their defenses are going to be knocked out, so we have to make the most of the time we’ve got,” said Dog. He looked up and saw her at the door. “Ms. Gleason, can we help you?”

“I brought you some coffee, Colonel.”

“Thanks, I already have some.”

Dog turned his attention abruptly to the others. Jennifer felt as if she’d been slapped in the face.

“I have a lot to do,” she said. She squatted down and placed the cup on the floor, then walked away.

E
VEN THOUGH HE HAD SLEPT FOR MORE THAN TEN HOURS
after getting back to Diego Garcia, Dog felt anything but rested. He certainly had more energy, but it was an unsettled energy, vibrating wildly inside him. At the same time, his body felt as if it were a heavy winter coat wrapped tightly around him, making it harder to move.

“The rest of the missile sites are believed to be in the east,” he told the others. “We’ll have two missions. Number one, attempt to verify the remaining sites using the Flighthawks for low-level reconnaissance. And number two, we’ll be providing
air cover for the teams operating to the west of Base Camp One. The Navy planes can back us up, but they’re a little too far from the
Lincoln
to stay on station around the clock. Everybody got it?”

The pilots and crewmen nodded.

“Sparks, brief us on the Anacondas,” Dog said, turning the floor over to Captain Brad Sparks. The Megafortress pilot had worked extensively with the missiles during their development and testing.

“Hardest thing about using them,” said Sparks, “is pressing the button.”

Everyone laughed. Sparks was a bit of a cowboy and an occasional ham, but he was playing to a friendly audience.

As the briefing continued, Dog found his thoughts drifting to Breanna and Zen. They still hadn’t been found. Given how much time had passed since they went out, things didn’t look good.

No debris from the wreck of the plane had been found, but the Navy had investigated two slicks on the waves in the search areas. It was possible that the stricken EB-52 went straight under. But it was also possible that the plane crashed farther west of the search sites. If so, Breanna and Zen might still be alive. Dog knew that all he could do was hope for the best.

“All right,” he said as the briefing broke up. “Let’s get dressed and do a preflight at the hangar. We want to be in the air very quickly,” he added. “So come ready to roll.”

He got up from his chair, signaling the end of the meeting. As the others were filing out, he asked Lieutenant Englehardt to stay behind.

“What’s up, Colonel?”