Chuck took a deep breath. “Yeah. Right where we left him, down by the stream. His family comes up, stays at the guest cottage sometimes. We made a nice headstone. It’s a beautiful spot.”
“It is.”
“What about the Borodins?” Chuck asked. “The old Russian couple? When Irena, she came into the room with that rifle…” He laughed.
“Aleksandr died,” I said.
He stopped laughing.
“It’s okay. The guy was almost a hundred. Irena went to live with her family in Florida. That’s the last I heard before we moved out of the apartment.”
“And Gorby? Their dog?”
“He went with Irena. Luke’s always wanted one.”
“That kid. You know he saved those hikers’ lives. You should be proud.”
I was. More than proud.
We turned the TV on when we got back inside.
The satellite service wasn’t working, but Chuck had his fiber-optic cable, so we streamed Fox News and CNN. The debris field from the shattered satellites was still spreading, but the authorities were also trying to track the thousands of rogue SatCom satellites now controlled by the Chechen attackers.
And it was as the senator had said.
Russia was reported to be moving tanks into Ukraine in response to the threat. They were offering their help with geopositioning data, as well as sending aid into Western Europe. China was offering to help as well. They didn’t seem as badly hit by this as the United States.
America was in spasms as supply lines shut down. Power blackouts.
A full week into the event now.
Conflicting and heated debates online about the global situation. There were civil disturbances, rioting, but coverage was spotty. Only China had part of its positioning network operational, which left most of the world’s militaries blind, and fueled even more speculation who might really be behind all of this.
On top of that, there was an almost total loss of emergency services across the globe, as we had suspected. Massive fires and tornadoes in America, a cyclone battering islands in the Pacific, the tail end of brutal heat wave in Europe, and an earthquake in Peru. Mobile comms wiped out; satellite imaging gone. The death toll mounted with grim statistics.
Nobody talked about the farms, though. Not one word on the TV channels about that. Not yet.
It was a hidden danger that nobody seemed to get, that a big part of the food production in America would be shut down. Countries that were less automated wouldn’t have this problem. We’d gone with full automation to optimize yields and save money, but when the machines stopped working, where did that leave our American farmers?
I couldn’t worry about all that. I went back outside with Chuck.
It was surreal, knowing all that was happening out there. In the mountains, it was quiet and calm. The lights of DC glittered in silence.
Something tickled my cheek.
A light rain began.
I said, “It’s almost midnight. We should be able to get there in an hour, right?” It sounded too good to be true. Too easy. The last time we’d ventured into Washington from here, it had almost killed me.
Chuck seemed able to read my thoughts. “Don’t worry. This time we’re driving in a bulletproof tank. And we’re not going all the way to DC.”
CHAPTER 32
THE DRIVE FROM Chuck’s cabin to the senator’s compound in McLean, Virginia took us less than fifty minutes. After everything we’d been through so far, it seemed like one skip of a heartbeat from the moment I stepped into Chuck’s gleaming new stainless-steel machine to when we turned onto the leafy suburban end of Potomac River Road.
We found our way with more hand-drawn maps. Carefully double-checked the street names in the driving downpour.
When we pulled up to the ten-foot-tall brick walls and hedges, we weren’t even sure we were at the right place—but the wrought iron front gates slid open when I spoke into the intercom on the wall outside.
Chuck pulled through and navigated his BullyBoy around the circular cobblestoned driveway.
“Who’s my baby girl?”
Olivia raced at me with a My Little Pony held high in one hand.
She didn’t waddle anymore, not in the cute way I’d gotten used to when she was two and three. Now she was five, her baby fat melted away. Green pajamas with white leggings. Her brown hair done in pigtails. Her legs pumped up and down like a soccer player heading for a score. She leapt into my arms.
I wrapped mine all the way around her and squeezed.
She smelled like syrup and hay, the same way she always did, even after bath time. I buried my face into the top of her head and took in another lungful of sweet goodness.
I wondered what I smelled like to her? Daddy, I guessed. She squealed with delight. Pure joy.
“Livia!” Luke yelled and pulled at his little sister.
She jumped down from my arms and hugged her brother as hard as her little arms would let her.
We stood in the entranceway of Senator Seymour’s house. Or was it a portico? Two sets of neo-gothic columns rose on either side of the raised brick platform before the two massive wooden doors that stood open.
Damon and Chuck stood behind me, while Terek and Irena were still getting out of the BullyBoy’s third row.
Through the doors, I saw Senator Seymour coming down a curved oak staircase with wrought iron bannisters. He was wearing a visibly rumpled blue suit and half-done-up red tie. His hair was full and white, his eyes blue.
“Mike,” he said. “Thank God. Come in, come in.”
“Excuse me, sir.” This was addressed to me by a thick-set man in a perfectly pressed black suit and tie as I walked in through the door.
He seemed to have materialized from the humid Virginian air to stand between me and the senator, who’d made it to the bottom of the stairs. “I’ll need to see some identification.”
“Secret Service,” the senator apologized. “I’m president pro tem of the Senate now, so technically, third in line for the throne.”
I fumbled for my wallet and held it out for the man to inspect. I guessed he knew who I was and was following the rules, but then times like this demanded a little of that.
I had met Lauren’s uncle very briefly only twice before, and I’d forgotten he’d been awarded this position. What was the proper way to talk to him? I wasn’t big on protocol. Lauren always elbowed me at fancy dinners when I used the wrong fork.
“Senator.” I extended my hand.
“Please, call me Leo.” He shook it firmly, almost crushing my fingers.
His features seemed chiseled from a block of Potomac bluestone, hewn of the official rock of DC, like he was part of the same foundation rock of the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Washington Monument.
Mrs. Seymour—Susan—was halfway down the sweeping staircase behind him. Usually I saw her done up for an evening out, in a gown and coiffed, but now she was in velour sweatpants and a matching top. She looked ashen. She hadn’t been the same since her husband, Lauren’s father, had passed from a heart attack two years before. She stayed with her brother quite a lot these days.
Susan stopped where she was.
I shook my head, as though asking, nothing yet? She shook hers in response, almost imperceptibly. Her face creased. Lower lip trembled.
Chuck and the senator shook hands warmly. They had met once before, back in New York.
I walked past Leo and the Secret Service guy and took three steps up. Susan took one down. She wrapped her arms around me. She smelled of strong soap, but under that were faint hints of mothballs and sweat. Her body felt frail, her bones thin and her skin loose under the voluminous sweatshirt.
She let out a sob.
I hugged her gently and whispered, “I’m going to find her. Don’t you worry.”
“They don’t know where she is,” she said. “They came back without her.”
“I promise you, I won’t come back without her. No matter what.”
> “Sir, sir, I need to see some identification,” I heard in a stern voice behind me.
I turned to see the Secret Service agent facing Damon. Olivia had wrapped herself around one of his legs and was trying to crawl up him. Luke shook hands with the senator.
Terek and Irena stood awkwardly to one side in the polished marble foyer, their hair soaked and their clothing leaving drips on the floor. It was pouring cats and dogs and chickens and every other animal out there.
Two more Secret Service agents appeared from the darkness outside and approached our group. These guys weren’t taking any chances.
“I don’t have any ID,” Damon said to the Secret Service agent. “We got stuck in a st—”
“Benjamin, Ben.” The senator intervened and stood beside Damon. “This is the young man I awarded a Congressional Medal to not two years ago. Don’t you recognize him?”
“That’s not the point, sir, I—”
“I’m vouching for him,” the senator said.
“Thank you, Senat—”
“Leo.” He turned and took Damon’s hand. “Please, everyone, call me Leo.”
The two other Secret Service agents were busy looking at Terek and Irena’s passports. Chuck had already provided his ID.
Leo said to Damon, “These people are with you? You trust them?” He pointed at Terek and Irena.
“With my life.”
“Boys, it’s fine. Let them in. Come on, let’s dry you all off and get something warm into you. Maybe something with bourbon?”
The marble countertop in the kitchen was laid out with sandwiches and snacks, as if they expected two dozen people for a party. A full bar service was to one side, and a woman—Leo introduced her as Barbara, the housekeeper—offered to make us something.
Chuck took a Bulleit Bourbon old fashioned, while I asked for a glass of water and picked up a ham sandwich. The kids each got a pop and took a platter of snacks to the TV room in the basement, where Olivia promised Luke they had the coolest-ever gaming system.
One of the Secret Service agents went with them.
The rest of us retired to a sitting room adjoining the kitchen, a thirty-by-thirty room with a polished oak floor, twelve-foot ceilings, and wall-to-wall windows that provided a view of floodlit trees. It smelled of pine cleaner and new leather.
“No trouble getting in?” Leo sat in the middle of a twelve-foot black leather couch.
“The pass you gave us worked like magic.” I sat opposite him on a matching sofa.
Between us was a ten-foot glass table with swivel chairs at either end in the same leather as the couches. Damon sat on one side of me, Terek on the other. Susan and Chuck sat next to Leo. The two agents remained standing and at attention. One beside us, and another out of sight.
Irena stood next to the one near us.
“When I saw that steel truck coming up the driveway, I thought we were being invaded.” Leo laughed. “Makes sense it’s you, Chuck.”
“Makes sense?” Chuck took a sip of his drink. “Mike, what have you been saying about me?” He sat up straight and seemed buoyed by the idea of a senator having an opinion about him.
“Only good things.”
“Ben,” Leo said to the Secret Service agent standing beside us. “I want to get government ID documents, congressional staffers, for everyone here. Can you get on that?”
The agent hesitated, but then nodded. He stepped back a pace and spoke into his wrist.
“Will be easier to get you through checkpoints if I say you’re on a congressional fact-finding mission, and you’ll need ID.” He glanced at Damon, then stood to lean over the table and slap his knee. “Especially for this kid.” The senator’s well-practiced smile was warm enough to reveal he had a soft spot for Damon. Leo sat back down.
Our tech wunderkind, smiling at the compliment, opened up his laptop. He had already plugged into the house’s Wi-Fi, and he snapped another black cable into the back of his computer. He brought up an online map of the Virginia Beach area and magically projected it on the wall of the room. I looked up at a projector in the ceiling by the chandelier.
“Chuck, you want to make notes?” Damon said.
“There are sixteen airports on the Virginia Beach peninsula. Hampton Roads Executive, Chesapeake Regional, Virginia Beach local, Norfolk Airport, and Norfolk International. And then there are three air force bases, each with three runway complexes, and finally the Armada-Hoffler and Lynnhaven heliports. When the GPS went down and the borders were closed, the Virginia Beach area was designated as a collecting zone.”
Leo said, “Two hundred and twenty-six flights coming into the US were diverted there. The US Naval Air Stations operate three NDBs—”
“NDBs?”
Damon explained, “Non-directional beacons. They emit a wavelength that reflects off the atmosphere so it can be detected at long distances.”
Leo continued, “Any planes coming over the ocean out of radar contact were redirected to military NDBs to make sure they stayed on courses that got them home. Lauren’s 777 was directed to the Naval Air Station Oceana, and the civilians were held in the air passenger terminal and gymnasium there. Ben, Agent Coleman, why don’t you tell them what happened?”
“We went there two days ago to retrieve her,” Agent Coleman said. He’d finished relaying his instructions to whoever he’d been speaking to. “The morning of September 11th, however, to speak bluntly…”
“Go ahead,” said Leo.
“All heck broke loose that morning, when the Islamic Brigade announced that it had attacked us.”
“Us?” I said. “They attacked pretty much the entire planet. They wrecked the Russian satellites first.”
“The decision to use September 11th to make such an announcement indicates a certain directed intent,” Agent Coleman said in a deadpan voice. “In all cases, the biggest holding areas are at the Norfolk International airport and the Naval Air Station Oceana. When we arrived at Oceana, we found that Mrs. Mitchell had been removed from the holding area by military transport.”
“How did you know this?”
“There was a written entry in a log book.” He held up his phone. “I took a picture of the entry.”
“Where was she moved?”
“It did not say. She may have been taken to one of the other two civilian holding areas—”
“There are still people being held there?”
“Not many. Almost all civilians have been released at this point. We stayed for the day and into the night, but given the level of alert, and that DEFCON 2 had been instituted, we were recalled to our duties here.”
“So where should we go?” Chuck asked.
“Start with the Norfolk Airport and Naval Air Station.”
Terek was now busy on his laptop. “Mike,” he said, “could you send me a few pictures of Lauren?”
I didn’t ask why. I’d already connected to the Wi-Fi, so I went through my photos and selected a few.
“And these new IDs you’re giving us, they’ll get us onto an air force base? Don’t they require background checks?”
“These are your background checks.”
I squeezed Susan’s hand. She squeezed back. “Mike, you need to go back out there and find her. Please, you—”
“I’m going, don’t worry.”
“I am worried.”
Wind whipped rain against the ten-foot windows. It howled.
“I’m going with him,” Chuck said. “In that steel truck outside. We’ll be okay.”
“I’ll go with you,” Irena offered.
“What about Terek’s wife?”
“She’s fine. She’s with friends in Georgetown.”
I had heard Terek on the Seymour’s landline right after we got in. It was nice of Terek and Irena to come with us from Vanceburg and trust the Kentucky militia boys to return her Range Rover to Chuck’s cabin. They could have waited a day or two for the fires to pass, but there was an urgency there, for Terek to get to his new wife. They h
ad only been married a few months, he’d said. I heard Senator Seymour offering one of his cars, but Terek said no, they would stay here.
Something else was bothering me.
I wandered off from the group and opened my phone, then looked up the name Irena. To me it sounded about as Russian as the Bolshoi Ballet and Red Square rolled up into one shining Red Star. It was actually more of a Slavic name in origin—Polish, Czech, Slovak—but then Russians were ethnically Slavic, as far as I understood it. It was a common name in Ukraine.
My fingers hovered. I paused for a beat.
Then I typed in Terek’s name. The search popped up: Places in (1) China (2) Kyrgyzstan (3) Russia. A red line drew an image of the Terek River, a major river in the northern Caucasus that ran from Georgia through Russia and into the Caspian Sea. I zoomed in. A name popped up on the screen: Chechnya. Part of the Terek River ran right through Chechnya. Then again, it was a place in China, too.
CHAPTER 33
I WALKED BACK into the war room in time to hear Damon say, “Senator, there’s a chance we might be able to hack this Chechen group.”
“Please. Call me Leo.”
“We could have a way to get into the SatCom network. If not, maybe some new SIGINT.”
Signals intelligence. I’d watched enough movies to know the term.
The senator’s mouth opened as he processed. “Every egghead from the Hill and down through Langley is working that. If you weren’t who you are, I’d stop you there. A lot of bull-poop circling right now.”
“All I need is to talk to someone at GenCorp. Top level. I’ve met Tyrell. Get me a line in.”
The senator’s face went blank in a practiced way.
I asked Damon, “But don’t you have friends there?”
He nodded. “There’s one guy, Gunther, who I know pretty well. I’ve emailed him the past week, but I get these really short responses. I figured he was busy. Soon as we got here, I checked my mail again. One message from him. He said they have everything under control now, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I’m beginning to suspect…”
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 22