“Of course,” he said. “I would need only flip the switch on my detonator from the up position to the down position.”
“Then do it.” Tracie had lowered her gun slightly as the man spoke, but now she raised it and placed the barrel flush against the side of his skull. “Do it right now.”
He shook his head. “I cannot. I will not. I am committed to this course of action.”
“Then I’ll do it. I can flip a switch just as well as you can.”
For the third time the operative smiled. This one was just as brief and just as wistful as the first two had been. “I am sure you can,” he said. “But if you do, the device will detonate immediately, killing everyone,” he looked at the countdown clock, “twenty-two minutes before they would otherwise have to die.”
“What are you talking about? You just said flipping the switch would disarm the bomb.”
“And that is true,” he answered, “as far as it goes.”
“But there’s more that must be done to complete the disarming procedure.”
“Da. If you do not enter the proper sequence of numbers via the four dials located above the switch on the transmitter, the device will detonate when the switch is flipped. And only I know that sequence.”
“Then you will enter the numerical sequence first. Once you have done so, you will flip the switch. Or you will die.”
“We are talking in circles. I have already accepted that I am going to die. And now so are you. Have you not been paying attention?”
“Enter the goddamned code into the goddamned transmitter.”
“I will not.”
“Oh, yes you will. Or I am going to shoot you in the kneecap. If you still do not do as I ask, I will shoot your other kneecap. And then I will start on your feet. And then your arms. I will keep shooting you in various body parts until you come around to my way of thinking.”
“Do not fool yourself,” the operative said. “I served in KGB covert operations for many years and am intimately familiar with pain. I have been tortured on more than one occasion.”
“Then you know everyone can be broken.”
“Oh, yes, I know that very well. But I also know I can hold out against any amount of pain for more than,” another glance at the digital display, “nineteen minutes and a few dozen seconds.”
Tracie tried to swallow and felt nothing but a dry click in her throat. She realized the man was probably telling the truth about resisting torture, for the simple reason she knew she could do the same if she were sufficiently motivated. And this fanatic struck her as more than sufficiently motivated.
He turned and looked her straight in the eye.
“There is no way around it,” he said calmly, one more smile sliding onto his face. “We are both going to die.”
43
June 15, 1988
1:49 a.m.
Kirov, Russia, USSR
“You first,” Tracie said, and squeezed the trigger.
Her Beretta roared and fire licked out the barrel as blood, tissue and bits of bone fragment rained down on the interior of the truck. The terrorist’s head snapped back and then slumped almost gently against the driver’s side window, a corona of blood outlining it, appearing as black as coal in the darkness.
Her hands were shaking and she was breathing heavily, and she was sickened by what she’d done but knew in her heart it was the right move. This Navsegda operative was committed to dying for his beliefs, a commitment that was demonstrated by his presence not eight feet away from a bomb that would vaporize him a millisecond after it detonated.
Once Tracie realized there was no action she could take that would force him to give up the code and shut down the bomb, it became clear what she needed to do. Debating him any longer would be pointless. In fact it would be worse than pointless, eating up valuable time she needed to use to her advantage if she were to have any chance of figuring a way out of this mess.
Was there a way?
She realized she was clutching her gun so tightly the blood had begun flowing heavily out of the lacerations on her hand. It had slowed to a painful ooze shortly after smashing the window but was now cascading down her wrist and onto her forearm, waves of warm liquid that made her gun slick and hard to hold.
Not that it mattered now. It wasn’t like this Navsegda fanatic was going to spring back to life and attack her with half his head a misshapen, cratered mess.
She dropped the gun into her lap and wiped her hands on her pant legs, succeeding only in smearing the blood everywhere. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, knowing if she were to stand any chance of surviving—and of saving thousands of lives in the process—she had to get her shattered nerves under control.
This area of Kirov had remained silent and dark during the entire time she’d been sitting inside the F-150. No pedestrians, no vehicles motoring past, no police patrols. Its utter stillness was probably one reason Navsegda had chosen this area as their attack point.
But she knew the lack of activity would not last forever, and even in the two a.m. darkness, any passerby who spared so much as a glance in the truck’s direction would see the blood splattered all over its interior and immediately call police.
And that would seal the city’s doom, because police would surround Tracie and force her out of the truck at gunpoint and begin the process of arresting her for the murder of her traveling companion, and at some point while all of that was going on, the nuke would detonate and they would all cease to exist.
Tracie Tanner had seen and done far too much, including in the last few minutes, to have much of a belief in a higher power. But now she muttered a prayer, not really knowing what to say, deciding on, “God, if you’re up there, please help me. I don’t know what to do, and if you have an ounce of fairness in you, surely you recognize it’s not right for so many innocent people to die because of my failings.”
She was out of the truck and into the cargo bed before she’d finished her makeshift prayer, or plea, or whatever the hell it was. Examining the tarp covering the device was complicated by the fact that the moon was new and the skies were virtually overcast, ensuring a blackness that was exactly the opposite of what she needed.
On the bright side, if the situation could be said to have a bright side, was that with the exception of the fraction of a second when fire licked from her weapon as she was executing the Navsegda operative—and she’d squeezed her eyes closed for that fraction of a second—she’d been sitting in the inky blackness for plenty long enough for her vision to have adjusted.
She dropped to her knees and saw that the terrorists had anchored the tarp by securing it along its bottom edges to a series of two-by-fours. This allowed them to expose the device for their photographs by lifting the tarp. Once they’d taken their pictures they simply lowered it again, the weight of the lumber preventing the heavy plastic from being blown upward by the breeze and revealing the bomb to any prying eyes.
She gripped the tarp by the two-by-fours and lifted it, folding it back and setting it on the top of the device. Then she did the same thing along the other three sides, until it was exposed all the way around inside its wooden frame. The bomb was large, wedged inside the F-150’s cargo bed by only the slimmest of margins, its edges flush against the truck’s wheel wells.
This made for a tight squeeze as Tracie examined the nuke, but afforded her an up-close-and-very-personal view of the inanimate object that would soon—very soon—bring to an end her own life and the lives of so many more. It was constructed in a tubular steel shape that had the look of a large canister, smooth on all sides except the portion closest the truck’s cab, where what appeared to be a metal box had been welded to the main body of the tube. An antenna sprouted from the box.
Tracie had had precious little training on nuclear devices, particularly small, tactical nukes like this one. But from what she’d learned, she thought she knew more or less what she would see if she could look inside the protective metal surface covering th
e bomb’s innards.
There might be degrees of variations, but small tactical nukes typically consisted of a tube filled with two uranium rods. When rammed together, the uranium would react and cause the explosion. There would be a firing unit to ram the rods together, a device that was wired to the antenna to receive the electrical signal from the transmitter currently clutched in the hands of the dead terrorist inside the cab of the F-150.
It was a relatively simple setup, considering the amount of damage the blast could cause. Tracie guessed the initial explosion would have a yield of anywhere from three to possibly as much as seven or eight kilotons.
The destruction caused by the explosion would be dramatic, vaporizing the truck—and Tracie along with it—and leveling everything within a certain defined radius, the size of which would of course depend upon the bomb’s yield. But the destruction would be extreme and devastating.
Even worse, if less immediate, would be the pain and suffering caused by the radiation plume. Following detonation, it would drift along with the breeze, enveloping the city and causing illness and death over the next few months and years along its track for miles before eventually dispersing into the atmosphere.
The number of innocent people to die over time would be staggering.
This was the sum total of her knowledge regarding the device she was examining.
In the dark.
With no backup.
And a head injury, and a hand bleeding heavily all over the cargo bed.
Even if she could access the bomb’s innards, Tracie knew her lack of expertise in its operation would doom her efforts at disarming it. And accessing it would require a torch to cut through the metal, a tool she didn’t have and one whose use might well detonate the damned thing even if she did.
She cursed in English.
Then again in Russian for good measure.
Pushed herself to her feet and quickly lowered the tarp into place on all sides, recognizing the pointlessness of her actions but taking them anyway. Maybe somewhere in the back of her desperate mind she thought using the tarp as a curtain might somehow limit the damage the blast would cause.
It was a ridiculous notion and she shook her head at her foolishness.
She vaulted over the closed tailgate and hurried back to the cab, sliding into the passenger seat amid the broken glass and the blood and pulverized brain tissue. She pulled the door closed and turned to face the corpse of the Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda operatoive, her hands shaking every bit as badly as they’d been doing in the immediate aftermath of the man’s execution.
Even as she’d hurried out of the cab to examine the bomb in the back, she thought she’d known it would come to this. Valuable minutes had ticked away as she checked out a bomb she should have known all along she could not disarm.
Now push was coming to shove.
And time was almost up.
44
June 15, 1988
1:59 a.m.
Kirov, Russia, USSR
Even in death, the Navsegda operative continued to clutch the remote detonator, as if making one final demonstration of his commitment to his cause. It lay in his lap, covered in blood, his fingers curled around its handle.
Tracie yanked it from his grasp, unable to read the numerals as they counted down to her death because the screen was covered in the corpse’s blood. She wiped the majority of it away with the meat of her left hand and then used the hem of her hooded sweatshirt to clear the rest so she could see how much time she had.
A little over two minutes.
Two minutes to decipher the code a homicidal Russian maniac would have chosen to program into a device with which he would slaughter thousands in a misguided attempt to change the course of his country’s—and by extension, the world’s—history.
It was a fool’s errand.
A literal impossibility.
She’d been a Linguistics major in college, but had always been fascinated by mathematics and statistics and had taken several courses on those subjects during her four years at Brown University. Even now, well over a decade after graduation, she clearly recalled studying the subject of random numerals and their possible combinations.
With four dials on the detonator, each having ten numerals—zero through nine—Tracie knew exactly how many possible combinations there were.
Ten thousand.
Theoretically, it could take her up to ten thousand tries before settling on the correct combination of numbers that would disarm the nuke.
But of course the situation was more dire even than that. Before she killed him, the Navsegda operative had told her that should she make even one incorrect attempt, the bomb would detonate the moment she flipped the switch.
This meant that even if she had the time to spin the dials ten thousand times—which, of course, she didn’t—it wouldn’t matter unless she guessed the correct combination on her very first try.
Impossible.
She stared at the screen, the digital display almost mesmerizing as it changed its shape every second.
Less than two minutes to go.
A flash of inspiration caused a spike in her adrenaline level, hard to believe because it was already sky-high. The operative had never expected to be intercepted before completing his mission, so maybe he’d left the dials set on the required code as a fail-safe in the event he changed his mind at the last second about blowing himself up.
She blew out a breath and squinted in the darkness, trying to read the numbers etched into the four plastic dials.
All zeroes.
Could that be the code?
It was always possible, of course. There was a one in ten-thousand chance that all Tracie needed to do was flip the switch to the down position and the nuke would become nothing more than a big, bulky paperweight in the back of the truck.
But how likely was it that Navsegda would have chosen four zeroes as the failsafe?
Not likely at all, Tracie decided. A much more likely possibility was that the terrorist had been so committed to his course of action he’d zeroed out all four dials because he’d known he would never use a failsafe.
Less than a minute-and-a-half left.
Tracie resigned herself to dying. She stared at her hands, shocked to see they were no longer shaking after being almost uncontrollable over the last few minutes. Her mind was clear and her thoughts calm.
She supposed she’d always known it would end like this. Maybe not being vaporized in the blast from a tactical nuclear device—who could have seen that one coming?—but to the extent she ever visualized the end of her life, it seemed fitting that her death would come on a covert mission in a foreign country, doing the only job she’d ever known or wanted.
The only job she’d ever loved.
Her thoughts wandered to her father as she gazed at the numbers still ticking down on the blood-covered radio transmitter that was about to end her life. Tracie was an only child, close to both of her parents and she loved her mother dearly, but she’d always been a daddy’s girl.
Some of her earliest memories were of following her father around the house, pretending to do whatever he was doing. It didn’t have to be anything important. If he sat on the couch reading the newspaper, she would crawl up next to him with a piece of scrap paper and pretend to read it, too, long before she even had a clue what it meant to read.
She had idolized him, taken his values as her own at a time in her life when her contemporaries were rebelling against their parents’ views. She’d never considered dong the same. Why would she, when honor and commitment and service to one’s country seemed so obviously the proper things to value?
For ten years Tracie Tanner had lived those values, even as they caused her physical pain and mental anguish. She suffered dozens of injuries, some severe.
She suffered agonizing mental torment at things she had done, nightmares over lives she had ended and people she’d tortured.
She lost Shane Rowley, the only man she’d ever allo
wed herself to love in a romantic way.
And then she lost her father, the only man she’d ever idolized.
In a strange way the end of her life—now little more than one minute away—would come as a relief. She couldn’t claim to know what would follow. In all probability it would just be…nothing.
But just maybe there was something after this life. Maybe whatever came next would include a reunion with Shane and with her father. Maybe whatever came next would quell the constant sensation she’d learned to live with, a sensation that screamed inside her head that she wasn’t doing enough, that she wasn’t good enough, that she couldn’t possibly live up to the example of her dad, especially now that he’d died because of her.
But she knew he died proud of her, knew with all her heart that he would never have blamed her for the way his life ended, even if Piotr Speransky had made him aware before killing him that she was the cause of his suffering and pain and death.
And that was something Speransky would certainly have done.
But it wouldn’t have mattered, not to Jake Tanner. Because he knew Tracie had lived her life as he had lived his: in defense of freedom, in tireless pursuit of a world absent the menace the Soviet Union had become in the seven-plus decades since the Russian Revolution.
Even in the last few years, with perestroika and the gradual loosening of the Soviet government’s grip on the lives of its citizens, the communist way of life had loomed over not just the United States but the rest of the world as the greatest threat to freedom and individual liberty ever conceived, with the death toll directly attributable to communism standing in the millions.
So many people lost to a supposedly utopian system of government, all stemming from one “People’s Revolution” more than seventy years ago.
So many dead.
Such a brutal, repressive regime, particularly in decades past.
And just like that, Tracie knew the code.
45
The Nuclear Option Page 22