Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  “Stone and Newsam are going on vacation to Rome?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Together?”

  He could almost hear her smiling. “Yes.”

  “And they want me to come with them?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Someone else wants me to go with them? On vacation?”

  Her voice sounded the slightest bit peevish. “Murph, you don’t have to question every little thing, do you? You’re not even a full employee here, and yet the SRT wants to give you a trip to Europe. Don thought it would be a nice gesture, after the operation you guys just went on. Call it a team-building trip. Can you live with that?”

  This was no vacation. It was a clandestine mission, right on the heels of one that nearly ended in disaster.

  Murphy scanned the money and the passports again. There was no way he was going to Rome with Stone and Newsam, or wherever they were really going. He was done. He was going to Grand Cayman, and then he was going wherever the winds, and his whimsy, took him. Stone and Newsam would have to live or die on their own.

  “Do I have to go?” he said.

  “Of course not. It’s a vacation.”

  “Then I think I’m going to pass this time. It’s a generous offer, but I’m completely wiped out. I think I’m going to just chill out here at my apartment, and sleep for the next three days.”

  He smiled to himself as the next thought occurred to him.

  “You’re welcome to come over here and help me, if you’re tired. I have a very big, very comfortable bed. California king-sized.”

  “Murphy!”

  A long moment passed. Was she thinking about it? If she was, Murphy might turn around and go back for that.

  “Call me if you change your mind in the next half an hour. They’re leaving tonight.”

  Then she hung up.

  Murphy stared at the room around him. It was growing later in the day, the shadows were growing longer, and the place seemed a little bleaker than when he arrived. But that was the exhaustion talking. In a little while, he would be sound asleep, and it wasn’t going to matter what the place looked like.

  “They think of me as part of the team,” he said out loud.

  He wasn’t expecting to say that. But of course it was true. Why wouldn’t it be? He was a cynical bastard, and he always had been. But he’d also been on the team.

  He’d been a starting wide receiver for the football team in high school. He’d been part of the elite United States Army Rangers—Rangers Lead The Way—and he’d been all the way on the team then. He’d even gotten RLTW tattooed on his right bicep.

  In Delta, he’d been on the team, but things had gone sideways. And when he was on loan to JSOC and the CIA, he had started to work solo. The strange experiences began to pile up. He started to feel alone, like he was different, like there was no way he could explain any of this to anyone. Then Afghanistan happened, he was out of the military, and he was all the way out there on the edge by himself.

  Stone had sensed this, and thrown him a lifeline. Come back onto the team. But now the Montreal Score had happened. And this new team—the Special Response Team… Murphy wasn’t sure about it.

  Maybe he was better off alone. Maybe the best thing to do was to fall asleep on this big hotel bed and forget all about Luke Stone and the SRT. Then wake up in the morning and put as much distance between himself and them as possible.

  He lay down on the bed, put his head on the pillows, and closed his eyes. Within seconds, he had already started to drift.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  10:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  The Situation Room

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  The meeting was running long.

  “Just a few more things to address, Mr. President.”

  It was crowded in here, so crowded that it was hard to tell the shape of the room anymore. Clement Dixon knew that it was an oblong egg shape, but only from memory. And its space-age features were obscured by the press of bodies.

  The sheer number of breathers in here was robbing the room of oxygen. The body heat had raised the room temperature to an uncomfortable place. Dixon, hale and hearty for so many years, a firebrand for so long, almost felt like he was gasping for air. Would he pass out?

  That would make for some headlines. None that he might want to read.

  This was not a classified meeting, hence the throngs. This was a meeting to let the President know about all the things that he wasn’t currently dealing with.

  “Okay,” he said. “But let’s try to move it along. It’s getting late.”

  He paused.

  “I don’t like to miss Letterman.”

  The joke went flat. There were a few snickers here and there. They were embarrassed for him—he could see it in their eyes. Was Letterman even still on the air? It didn’t matter. No one in here believed that an old man like Clement Dixon stayed up late to watch David Letterman on TV.

  No. The people in this room pictured their President in slippers and jammies at 11 p.m., enjoying a nice cup of warm milk before taking his teeth out and calling it a night.

  He wanted to pound the conference table and scream at them all.

  “It isn’t true!”

  He looked around the room. No one was even looking at him. Everyone was going through their own paperwork, whispering to aides and assistants, the young people typing with one flying finger into their infernal Crackberries.

  There were a lot of military men here tonight. They were all the same. They were clones of one another. Men in their forties and fifties, thin, very fit, impeccably clean shaven even though it was the middle of the night, with buzz cuts and dress greens without a single wrinkle. Did they notice they were all the same, or were they so indoctrinated into a way of thinking and being that something like that was invisible to them?

  Did wildebeests know they were all the same? What about goldfish? He should commission a study on this. He was the President, after all.

  “So let’s do it, Richard.”

  At the other end of the room, General Richard Stark nodded.

  “As we all know, there’s some ongoing fallout from the events in the Arctic. Protests are being held in at least a dozen cities about the drilling in the ANWR. None of these protestors seem to realize that what was being done was not illegal. It was a case of horizontal drilling from out at sea, which was having no impact on animals in the refuge. Would you say that’s accurate, Allen?”

  Allen Forbes, the press secretary and alleged media wizard, was here, sitting at the table. Dixon was almost relieved to look at him. Nothing much was disciplined or upright about Allen Forbes. He looked tired, slouched over, and had a pronounced five o’clock shadow. His suit jacket was hanging on the chair behind him, and his tie was loosened. Allen wanted to go home.

  “That’s correct, General. It’s a technical issue, and one that a certain segment of the public isn’t likely to embrace. We can try to educate on it going forward, but at the moment, a lot of people are not buying it. A better tack might be a hard wrist slap on the offenders, along with messaging from our environmentalist President that he’s as shocked as we are, and we all need to do better.”

  The general shrugged. “The law’s the law. But I’ll leave that to civilian minds to grapple with. In any event, protests against the drilling are happening, as well as candlelight vigils for the murdered oil workers. In several places, the two groups have come into contact with each other, and there have been clashes at a result. We’ve learned that about an hour ago, a twenty-four-year-old woman died during one such clash in Seattle.”

  “A twenty-four-year-old woman?” Dixon said.

  The general nodded. “Yes sir. Nowadays women take part in these street battles along with the men. It’s a time of liberation.”

  “How did she die?” Dixon said.

  “She was hit by a car, sir. It may have been intentional, and the driver may have been u
sing the car as a weapon.”

  Dixon was tired. Tragedy was piling on top of tragedy. What in God’s name were people doing out there, and how did he become the ineffectual ringmaster of this 900-ring circus?

  He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. In his day, young women were out in the streets with the men, fighting for the things they believed in.

  He ran a hand through his hair and sighed heavily.

  “Allen?”

  Allen Forbes’s eyes came alive. For a split second, he looked like a deer caught in the high beams of an onrushing Mack truck.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What am I doing about the dead girl? And the unrest in general?”

  “Well sir, we could do an early morning taping, just yourself in the Oval Office, calling for calm until all the facts are in, and offering condolences to the family of the young woman. Something we can release to the early morning shows. It’ll probably play all day. I wouldn’t want you to face the press on it, though. There are just too many uncomfortable questions floating around right now.”

  Dixon nodded. “Sounds good. Set up the taping. I’ll be in the office by seven a.m.”

  A military man at the table, a colonel, raised his hand. Dixon had no idea who he was and didn’t really care. The guy had eyes like laser beams. He was smiling and confident, glad to be here.

  General Stark acknowledged him. “Mike?”

  “Excuse me, sir. But if you offer condolences about the dead girl, won’t that appear you’re taking sides on this issue?”

  Dixon stared at him. “I am taking sides, Colonel. I’m on the side of young women who care so much about the state of their world, who feel so strongly about it, they go out and get themselves killed. And I’m on the side of families bereft at that loss.”

  The colonel’s smile died on the vine. His eyes became downcast, no longer sharp. He regretted speaking. That much was clear. The guy had gone from a silverback gorilla to an organ grinder monkey in seconds flat.

  Dixon liked to see that sort of thing. There should be more of it.

  On the screen behind General Stark, an image of the world appeared. It was round, a globe, but from a perspective Dixon was not used to seeing.

  “Mr. President,” Stark said. “With your permission, I’d like to steer this meeting back to the elephant in the room.”

  “What is that elephant, General?”

  “Sir, the elephant is the relative states of preparedness in the Arctic between ourselves and the Russians. I imagine I’m beginning to sound like a broken record to you, but something needs to be done, and this incident points at that need.”

  “The attack was committed by Serbians, General.”

  Stark looked at another military man at the table. “Jeff, can you illuminate this situation for us?”

  The man had papers in front of him. He nodded.

  Stark looked at Dixon. “Sir, Colonel Woods and his people have…”

  Dixon nodded and waved his hand. These Pentagon guys with their papers and their reports and their people. Holy moly. “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  “Sir,” the colonel said. “The Serbian government has denied any ties to, and any knowledge of the activities of, the men involved in the oil rig attack. NSA data confirm that there was no apparent contact between the men and any agency of the Serbian government during the crisis. CIA has been slow to declassify its data on this. But what we have so far from them suggests there was no discussion of an impending attack within Serbian military, government, or elite circles in the weeks leading up to the attack. They seem to have been as surprised as we were.”

  “So who were the attackers?” Dixon said.

  “By working with Interpol and Scotland Yard, we’ve used fingerprints, DNA, and body markings such as scars and tattoos to identify eight of the men involved so far. Five of the men were legitimately members of disbanded Serbian paramilitary organizations, and veterans of the Yugoslav Civil Wars. All eight of the men had ties to Eastern European criminal networks, including mafias operating in Russia and Ukraine, but also with tentacles in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the United Kingdom. Taken together, the eight men have a record of over ninety arrests in various countries, and have spent a total of forty-six years in jail. We suspect at least two of the men were assets of the Russian FSB or GRU, or both, but details of that have not yet been declassified.”

  Dixon nodded. “So they were Serbians, but they weren’t the Serbians.”

  “Correct, sir. We believe it was the Russians. As you know, Russian intelligence makes widespread use of criminal networks to do their dirty work.”

  Dixon nodded again. He bit his tongue. There was no sense getting started on…

  “We’ve never been known to do that, have we?”

  Vice President Thomas Hayes had just spoken. Dixon glanced at him. Thomas was still fresh, his eyes alert and aware. He was eating from a plastic yogurt cup. Dixon was either going to have to put a muzzle on Thomas, or send him on a baby-kissing tour of American Samoa.

  He looked at Richard Stark. “I get it. Russians. Please continue.”

  “Sir, if you look behind me, you will see a map of the top of the world. There is no land at the top of the world. There is the Arctic Ocean, and the countries ringing it. Now, throughout recorded human history, the Arctic Ocean has been frozen nearly solid. It has long been one of the most impassable, forbidding places on earth. But a joint study by Swedish and German climate scientists, due to be released next week, strongly suggests that within twenty-five years, 2030, many parts of the Arctic will be wide open for shipping and resource exploitation. Indeed, based on computer modeling, in one scenario, by that time there will be no summer ice in the Arctic left at all.”

  Clement Dixon didn’t say a word. He grunted. Of course he had known this was coming. He had known it for a long time. But it was a shocking assessment, and one that he didn’t enjoy hearing spoken out loud.

  Hopefully, the world was not ending. But it was definitely changing, and very rapidly. And apparently, the natural Pentagon response to this was not, “How do we stop it?” Instead, it was, “How do we take advantage of it?”

  The general went on.

  “Sir, Russian preparedness in the Arctic dwarfs ours, to put it mildly. I’m afraid the Soviets anticipated this thawing, and if we don’t act quickly, the Russians are going to reap the benefits of that foresight.”

  He used a wooden pointer to indicate a long, swirling mark on the map.

  “They have good reason to be ahead of us, because they will be the major beneficiary of a warming Arctic. Within the next several years, the so-called Northeast Passage, which skirts Russian territory in Siberia, is going to be passable for shipping. Once fully open, it will be the shortest, least expensive ocean route between manufacturers in Asia and markets in Western Europe. Less than half the distance for ships circumnavigating the globe, and about one-third shorter for ships taking the Suez Canal. And the Russians will control it. They are already plowing billions of dollars into upgrading seven old Cold War military bases along the route, with advanced radar and missile systems designed to withstand extreme cold. They are planning to become the world’s wealthiest tolling authority.”

  He paused.

  “That doesn’t even take into account… well sir, it doesn’t take into account anything at all. The Arctic is thought to harbor thirteen percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, thirty percent of its undiscovered natural gas, an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped natural resources, including fisheries galore. By controlling vast regions of the Arctic, the Russians are planning to catapult themselves back into relevance again. It’s clear they are going to challenge us for dominance of the Arctic, and if they win, they’re going to be challenging us everywhere.”

  Clement Dixon could see where this was going. He’d been around Washington long enough to know when the pitch was coming. And the generals were always making the pitch. Dixon h
ad heard it said that some companies out there trained their sales forces in the somewhat unscrupulous ABC rule—Always Be Closing.

  He was beginning to wonder if the Pentagon did the same.

  “I’m not the Congress, General. I’m not even in Congress anymore. What you’re saying makes sense, but I don’t hold the purse strings around here, and you know that.”

  Stark raised a hand. A new image appeared. It was of a red and white ship in drydock—the size of the ship compared to the buildings and vehicles around it made the thing seem enormous.

  “Mr. President, just one example should make this clear to you. The Russians have more than forty icebreaker ships deployed in the Arctic, not including three new Ural class icebreakers due to come online in the next two years. The Ural class ships are gigantic, the largest, most powerful ships to ever operate in that region, and are each powered by two small onboard nuclear reactors. The Russians are not going to wait to let nature take its course. They are going to force the issue and clear the ice themselves.”

  Dixon stared at him. He had no reason to disbelieve the general. The military was not Clement Dixon’s favorite organization. If Stark were to come in here and lie to him, there would be a new Stark the next day. Stark knew that.

  It was clearly madness, what the Russians were doing.

  Stark went on: “Sir, the United States Navy currently has zero icebreaker ship. The Coast Guard has three icebreakers, two of which were built in the late 1970s. One of these, the USCGC Polar Sea, is out of commission because three of its six engines have failed. There is no firm date for redeployment. Both of these ships are nearing the end of their effective thirty-year lifespan. Soon, we will have one icebreaker available, USCGC Healey, which was completed in 1999. The state of readiness aboard this ship became clear last year when two Coast Guard divers died in a mishap during a routine cold-water training mission, after which the captain was relieved of his duties.”