Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  Everyone in the cabin was staring at him.

  “Any questions before I begin?”

  Murphy raised a hand.

  “Yes, Agent…”

  “Murphy.”

  “Yes, Agent Murphy. Shoot.”

  Murphy glanced at the ginger beer can on the table. He scowled, just a little bit. Murphy was an Irishman from the Bronx. It wasn’t clear to Luke what Murphy’s exact thoughts were about that ginger beer, but it sure seemed like he didn’t approve.

  “What are we talking about here?”

  Donaldson seemed confused. “What are we talking about?”

  Murphy nodded. He gestured at the orange wetsuit. “Yeah. That. Why are you telling us about it? We’re not SEALs. We’re not really water people at all. Newsam, Stone, and I are all former Delta Force. Airborne assault. I was 75th Rangers before Delta, Stone was 75th Rangers, Newsam was…”

  He paused and looked at Ed. Ed was slumped very low in his chair. Any lower, and he would ooze out onto the floor.

  “82nd Airborne,” Ed said.

  “Airborne,” Murphy said. “There’s that word again. You can show us that suit from now until we land, and all next week, but that’s not going to suddenly make us into divers.”

  “I’ve done some diving,” Ed said.

  Murphy stared at him. Luke wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen someone stare at Ed that way. Murphy was a vehicle that didn’t have reverse.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You diving wrecks in Aruba really helps my argument.”

  Ed smiled and shrugged.

  The SEAL nodded. “I get your point. But this is an underwater operation. We will drop into the water at a temporary camp being constructed right now on a floating ice sheet about a mile and a half from the oil rig. I thought you knew that.”

  Luke shook his head. “This is the first we’re hearing of it.”

  “There’s no way to go in there by boat,” Donaldson said. “We have to assume that our opponents will have all the approach points covered. They appear to have heavy weaponry available to them. Any boat slogging its way through the ice to that oil rig is going to get hit, and hit hard.”

  “Can we come in from the sky?” Luke said.

  Donaldson shook his head. “Even worse. They’re expecting a storm to pass through that area in the next few hours. You do not want to be falling from the sky during an Arctic storm, I promise you that. And even if things clear, then they have a clean shot at you as you come down. It’ll be like shooting ducks. There’s only one way in, and that’s to come out from under the ice and take them by surprise.”

  He paused. “And we’re going to need all the surprise we can get. As much as we’re going in hard, we need to keep at least one of the attackers alive.”

  “Why’s that?” Ed said.

  Donaldson shrugged. “We need to know what these men wanted, what their plan was, and whether they acted alone. We want to know everything about them. Assuming they don’t leave us some kind of manifesto, and since no one has claimed responsibility for the attack so far, we have to assume the only way to get that information is to capture at least one of them, and preferably more than one.”

  Now Luke really didn’t like it. They were going in under the ice, and when they came up, they were supposed to capture someone. What if they were jihadis who didn’t give up? What if they fought until their last breath?

  The whole operation seemed hastily organized and poorly thought through. But of course it was. How could it not be when the plan was to take back the oil rig the same night it was attacked, and in fact, mere hours later?

  They had no intel on the attackers. There had been no communication. They didn’t know where they were from, what they wanted, what weapons they had, or what other skills. They didn’t know what the attackers would do if they themselves were attacked. Would they kill all the hostages? Commit suicide by blowing up the rig? No one knew.

  So instead, the whole group was going in blind. Worse, Luke’s team was supposed to be the civilian oversight, but they were participating in a mission that was underwater—ice water—something they had no training for. Precious few American soldiers had training for ice water immersion.

  “This whole thing,” Murphy said, “strikes me as FUBAR.”

  Luke wasn’t sure if he agreed completely. But he was sensitive to the fact that Murphy still probably thought Luke’s poor decisions had led to the deaths of their entire assault team in Afghanistan.

  If Murphy, or Ed, or even Swann or Trudy decided they wanted out of this mission, it was fine with Luke. People had to make their own decisions—he couldn’t decide for them.

  Suddenly, he wished he had talked to Becca before leaving on this trip. Now it was too late.

  “We’ve got less than two hours until our ETA,” the older man said, glancing at his watch. He looked at Donaldson, who was still holding the thick orange bodysuit. Then he made a spinning motion with his hand, like the arms on a clock moving rapidly.

  “I suggest you get this demonstration underway.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  9:15 a.m. Moscow Daylight Time (10:15 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time, September 4)

  The “Aquarium”

  Headquarters of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)

  Khodynka Airfield

  Moscow, Russia

  Blue smoke rose toward the ceiling.

  “There is a great deal of movement,” the latest visitor, a pot-bellied man in the uniform of the Interior Ministry, said. His voice belied a certain anxiety. It was nothing in the timbre of the voice. It didn’t tremble or crack. You had to have the right ears to hear it. The man was afraid.

  “Yes,” Marmilov said. “Would you expect anything less from them?”

  Although the office had no windows, the light had changed as the morning progressed. Marmilov’s swooping, hardened hair now resembled a type of dark plastic helmet. The overhead lights seemed so bright it was as if Marmilov and his guest were sitting in the desert at midday, the sun casting deep shadows into the fissures carved into the ancient stone of Marmilov’s face.

  People sometimes wondered why a man with such influence chose to run his empire from this tomb, underneath this bleak, crumbling, run-down building well outside Central Moscow. Marmilov knew about this wonder because men, especially powerful men, or those aspiring to be powerful, often asked him this very question.

  “Why not a corner office upstairs, Marmilov? Or a man like yourself, whose mandate far surpasses just the GRU, why not get yourself transferred to the Kremlin, with a wide view of Red Square and the opportunity to contemplate the deeds of our history, and the great men who have come before? Or perhaps just watch the pretty girls passing by? Or at the very least, a chance to see the sun?”

  Marmilov would smile and say, “I do not like the sun.”

  “And pretty girls?” his friendly tormentors might say.

  To this Marmilov would shake his head. “I’m an old man. My wife is good enough for me.”

  None of this was true. Marmilov’s wife lived fifty kilometers outside the city, in a country estate dating to before the Revolution. He barely ever saw her and neither she nor he had a problem with this arrangement. Instead of spending time with his wife, he stayed in a modern hotel suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, and he feasted on a steady diet of young women brought directly to his door. He ordered them up like room service.

  He had heard that the girls, and for all he knew, their pimps as well, referred to him as Count Dracula. The nickname made him smile. He couldn’t have chosen a more fitting one himself.

  The reason he stayed in the basement of this building, and didn’t move to the Kremlin, was because he didn’t want to see Red Square. Although he loved Russian culture more than anything, during his workday, he didn’t want his actions tainted by dreams of the past. And he especially didn’t want them handicapped by the unfortunate realities and half-measures of the present.

  Marmilov’s focus was on
the future. He was hell bent on it.

  There was greatness in the future. There was glory in the future. The Russian future would surpass, and then dwarf, the pathetic disasters of the present, and perhaps even the victories of the past.

  The future was coming, and he was its creator. He was its father, and also its midwife. To imagine it fully, he couldn’t allow himself to become distracted by conflicting messages and ideas. He needed a pure vision, and to achieve this, it was better to stare at a blank wall than out the window.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” the fat man, Viktor Ulyanov, said. “But I believe there are some in our circle who are concerned by the activity.”

  Marmilov shrugged. “Of course.”

  There were always those who were more concerned about the skin on their own necks than on leading the people to a brighter day.

  “And there are some who believe that when the President…”

  The President!

  Marmilov nearly laughed. The President was a speed bump on this country’s path to greatness. He was an impediment, and a minor one at that. Ever since this President had taken the reins from his alcoholic mentor Yelstin, Russia’s comedy of errors had worsened, not improved.

  President of what? President of garbage!

  The President needed to watch his back, as the saying went. Or he might soon find a knife protruding from it.

  “Yes?” Marmilov said. “Concerned that when the President… what?”

  “Finds out,” Ulyanov said.

  Marmilov nodded and smiled. “Yes? Finds out… What will happen then?”

  “There will be a purge,” Ulyanov said.

  Marmilov squinted at Ulyanov in the haze of smoke. Could the man be joking? The jest wouldn’t be that Putin finding out would lead to a purge. If handled incorrectly, of course it would. The jest would be that at this late date in the preparations, Ulyanov and unnamed others would suddenly be thinking about such a thing.

  “The President will find out after it is too late,” Marmilov declared simply. “The President himself will be the one who is purged.” Ulyanov, and any others he was speaking for, must know this. It had been the plan all along.

  “There is concern that we are arranging a bloodbath,” Ulyanov said.

  Marmilov blew smoke into the air. “My dear friend, we are not arranging anything. The bloodbath is already arranged. It was arranged years ago.”

  Here in Marmilov’s lair, a laptop computer had sprouted like a mushroom next to the small TV screen on his desk. The TV still showed closed circuit footage from security cameras at the oil rig. The laptop showed transcripts of intercepted American communications translated into Russian.

  The Americans were tightening a noose around the captured oil rig. A ring of temporary forward bases were appearing on floating ice within a few miles of the rig. Black operations teams were on high alert, preparing to strike. An experimental supersonic jet had received clearance, and landed at Deadhorse perhaps thirty minutes ago.

  The Americans were set to strike.

  “It was never the intention to hold the rig for very long,” Marmilov said. “This is why we used a proxy. We knew that the Americans would take back their property.”

  “Yes,” Ulyanov said. “But the very same night?”

  Marmilov shrugged. “Sooner than we expected, but the result will be the same. Their initial assault teams will meet with disaster. A bloodbath, as you say. The bigger, the better. Their hypocrisy regarding the environment will be exposed. And the world will have occasion to remember their war crimes of the not too distant past.”

  “And how much of this will blow back to us?” Ulyanov said.

  Marmilov took another deep inhale from his cigarette. It was like the breath of life itself. Yes, even here in Russia, even here in Marmilov’s inner sanctum, you could no longer hide from the facts. Cigarettes were bad for you. Vodka was bad for you. Whiskey was bad for you. But if so, why had God made them all so pleasurable?

  He breathed out.

  “It remains to be seen, of course. And it will depend on the media outlets covering it in each country. But the first dispatches will of course be in our favor. In general, I suspect that events will reflect rather poorly on the Americans, and then, a bit later, they will reflect poorly on our beloved President.”

  He paused, and thought about it just a bit more. “The truth, and events will confirm this as they unfold, is the worse the disaster, the better our position.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  11:05 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time (September 4)

  US Navy Ice Camp ReadyGo

  Six Miles North of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

  Two Miles West of the Martin Frobisher Oil Platform

  The Beaufort Sea

  The Arctic Ocean

  “No way, man. I can’t do this.”

  The night was black. Outside the small modular dome, the wind howled. A frozen rain was falling out there. Visibility was deteriorating. In a little while, it was going to be near zero.

  Luke was tired. He had taken a Dexie when the plane landed, and another a few moments ago, but neither one had kicked in.

  The whole thing seemed like a mistake. They had traveled across the continent in a mad dash, at supersonic speeds, the mission was about to get underway, and now one of his men was backing out.

  “This does not look right at all.”

  It was Murphy talking. Of course it was.

  Murphy did not want to go on this thrill ride.

  The temporary ice camp, basically a dozen modular weatherproof domes on a floating ice sheet, had sprung up like so many mushrooms after a spring rain, apparently in the past two hours. It was one of several camps just like it, ringing the oil rig a safe distance away. The establishment of several camps out here on the periphery was in case the terrorists were watching. The activity was designed to make it hard for them to know where the counterattack was coming from.

  Inside each of the domes, a rectangular hole had been cut through the ice, roughly the size and shape of a coffin. The ice here was two or three feet thick. A deck made of some wood-like synthetic material had been snapped into place around each hole. Diving lights had been affixed underwater, giving the hole an eerie blue color. New ice was already forming on the surface of the water.

  Luke and Ed were in their neoprene dry suits, sitting in chairs near the hole. Brooks Donaldson was doing the same. Each man was being worked on by two assistants, men in US Navy fleece jackets, who busied themselves putting on the men’s equipment. Luke sat still as a man mounted his buoyancy compensator around his torso.

  “How’s it feel?” the guy said.

  “Bulky, to be honest.”

  “Good. It is bulky.”

  Luke’s hands weren’t in his gloves yet. They kept straying to the waterproof zipper across his chest. It was tight and hard to pull. As it should be. It was cold water down there. The zipper made a firm seal. But that meant it was going to be hard to open when they reached the destination.

  “How am I supposed to open this thing?” he said.

  “Adrenaline,” one of the assistants said. “When the shit starts flying, guys practically rip these suits off with their bare hands.”

  Ed laughed. He looked at Luke. His eyes said it wasn’t that funny.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  Murphy wasn’t laughing at all. He had come here with them from Deadhorse, but he never even began the process of suiting up.

  “This is a death trap, Stone,” he said. “Just like last time.”

  “You have nothing to prove to me,” Luke said. “Or anyone. No one has to go. It’s not like last time at all.”

  Last time.

  The time when they were both in Delta, back in eastern Afghanistan. Luke was the squad leader, and he had failed to overrule a glory hound lieutenant colonel who had led everyone—everyone except Luke and Murphy—to their deaths.

  It was true. He could have aborted the mission. Those were his guys—they had n
o allegiance to the lieutenant colonel at all. If Luke had said stop, the mission would have stopped. But he would have risked a court martial for insubordination. He would have risked his entire military career—a career, oddly enough, which ended that night anyway.

  Murphy looked at Ed. “Why are you going?”

  Ed shrugged. “I like excitement.”

  Murphy shook his head. “Look at that hole, man. It’s like someone dug your grave. Drop a coffin in there and you’re all set.”

  Murphy wasn’t a coward. Luke knew that. Luke had been in at least a dozen firefights with him in Delta. He’d been in the shootout with him in Montreal, the one that saved Lawrence Keller’s life and brought President David Barrett’s killers to justice. He’d even had a fistfight with Murphy on top of John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame. Murphy was a tough customer.

  But Murphy didn’t want to go. Luke could see he was scared. That might be because Murphy didn’t have the training for this. But it just might be because…

  “Okay, guys, listen up!”

  A burly man in a Navy fleece had come into the dome. For a split second, as he pushed through the heavy vinyl drapes that formed the airlock to the outside, the wind shrieked. The man’s face was bright red from the cold.

  “As I understand it, you were all briefed in Deadhorse.”

  The guy stopped. He looked at the empty seat where Murphy should be sitting. Then he looked at Murphy.