Shakedown

by Newt Gingrich

  She raised her left finger and ran it down her neck to illustrate. “You would have noticed it.”

  “You’d have to ask Corpsman Peters. I just got here and read the log. He actually treated them.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Maybe the mess hall. He wasn’t here when I came on duty.”

  “Has that helicopter taken off?”

  The corpsman shrugged. Mayberry turned to Marcus. “We need to know. See if anyone on that helicopter has a scar.”

  Marcus used a wall phone in the sick bay to connect with the communications center. Had it patch him through to the helicopter, which was lifting off.

  “None of the passengers have scars,” Marcus reported.

  “The dead man,” Mayberry said. “Did they check the body bag after they loaded it on the helicopter?”

  Marcus spoke into the phone. “Check the body bag. That’s right, the body bag—open it up!”

  After a short pause, a horrified look appeared on his face.

  “Corpsman Peters is in the body bag!”

  “The Roc!” Mayberry said. “He’s taken his place. Must have caused the boating accident to get on board and then killed Peters. What’s between here and the back of this ship?” she asked Marcus.

  “The aft?”

  “Whatever it’s called.”

  “Mostly the crew berthing.”

  “That’s too public, too open.”

  “A supply office, laundry, and ship repair shop.”

  Mayberry hurried from sick bay, with Marcus chasing after her. They entered the crew berthing area.

  “Hey, you,” she said, stopping the first sailor she encountered. “Did you see anyone dressed like a corpsman coming this way?”

  “The dude still wearing a surgical mask and cap?”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Aft—toward the repair shop, port side.”

  “Marcus,” she said, turning to him. “We need to be armed.”

  “It will take time for them to reach us.”

  “No time. C’mon.”

  Marcus broke into a run, darting through the crew berthing. He slowed when he reached the repair-shop entrance. With Mayberry standing directly behind him, he pulled open its door and stepped inside.

  “You!” Marcus yelled.

  The Roc, less than six feet away, snatched a Glock 26 handgun from the counter, where he had placed it next to his portable computer. Marcus began to step back, but couldn’t because Mayberry was behind him, blocking the doorway. She backpedaled just as the Roc fired.

  The sound was deafening inside the tiny shop. Two rounds, both striking Marcus in his upper chest. Near his heart. He fell out the door, landing at Mayberry’s feet.

  She dropped to her knees as he gasped for air.

  “Get help!” she screamed, but there was no one close to them.

  Marcus stopped breathing.

  Mayberry scanned the area for a weapon. She spotted a bright red fire extinguisher on the wall, next to a blueprint of the deck. She wrestled it down with her good left hand and glanced at the schematic. The shop was about eight feet long and five feet wide. Mayberry looped the extinguisher’s hose around her lame right arm, positioning its nozzle between her thumb and damaged fingers. With her left arm, she lifted the extinguisher and readied herself. One, two, three.

  She stuck the extinguisher’s nozzle into the shop and unleased the pressurized container’s potassium bicarbonate spray. The Purple-K powder quickly spread a whitish fog.

  Blam! Blam! The Roc fired at the doorway as she stayed safely outside, only the nozzle turning the corner. One of the rounds smacked into the solid steel wall inside the chamber where it splintered into fragments, like a rock struck by a sledgehammer. The other round shattered a glass container filled with liquid on a shelf. Pieces of ricocheting metal and slivers of glass burst through the small room. Although Mayberry was squatting outside the doorway, a glass shard struck her face. She felt a splash of liquid burning her cheek. Some sort of acid-based fluid, which explained its glass receptacle. Inside the room, she heard the Roc yelp in pain.

  Sucking in a deep breath, Mayberry lunged inside, staying low and aiming the spray upward to where the Roc was standing. Targeting his eyes, knowing the dry chemical spray caused instant irritation and watering.

  The Roc’s face had been peppered with bullet fragments, along with liquid and glass.

  She aimed the last of the Purple-K powder at his eyes, and instinctively he raised both hands to protect them. Mayberry swung the now-empty extinguisher with her left hand at his skull, but he blocked it with his gun hand. The blow knocked the Glock free, sending it clattering onto the metal floor as he reared backward against the waist-high counter where he’d been typing on a portable computer.

  The Roc grabbed a mallet hanging on the wall near him and swung its hard rubber tip at Mayberry, striking her near her ear. She collapsed at his feet, momentarily blacking out.

  She awoke seconds later, feeling pain and tremendous pressure on her good left wrist. She was lying prone on her back, looking up at the Roc, whose foot was pinning her left arm to the floor. He was facing the counter, typing, too busy and frantic to worry about her.

  She tried to free herself. He noticed and ground his foot harder against her left wrist. She screamed in pain.

  “Almost,” he declared, eager for her to know that he was about to detonate the bomb.

  “You’ll die too!” she screamed. “Don’t do this! You are a doctor, a surgeon. It’s wrong!”

  He ignored her, focusing on his keyboard.

  She bent her legs at her knees and again tried to tug her good left wrist from under his foot, but it was useless. Then she spotted the Glock. Reaching out with her crippled right hand, she swatted the handgun back against her thigh. She forced her thumb into the trigger guard and managed to twist the pistol so it was aimed upward at the Roc. She pressed her thumb against the trigger.

  Nothing. The gun didn’t discharge. The Glock’s safe-action trigger—a blade in its center—had to be squeezed simultaneously with the trigger to fire. Try as she might, she couldn’t perform the feat with only her thumb.

  “I’m in,” the Roc announced, without looking down at her. “Through the firewall. Now the code.”

  Mayberry ordered her crippled fingers to respond. Cursing herself, she concentrated harder. Her index finger bent slightly, followed by her third finger, wrapping itself around the trigger.

  The Glock fired.

  The first round punctured his inner thigh, punching into his intestines and lodging itself in his stomach. Caught completely by surprise, he looked bewildered. A second shot aimed higher, entering his left lung and then ripping into his heart.

  The Roc stared down at her. Their eyes met. He collapsed, landing hard on top of Mayberry, his face inches from her chin. Dead.

  Garrett was the first to arrive, followed by Esther and Major Grant. He pulled the Roc from her.

  “I’ve heard stories about people lifting cars during accidents,” Esther said. “You made your crippled fingers work.”

  “The bomb?” she asked.

  Garrett grinned. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  A visit to sick bay confirmed that Mayberry’s left wrist had been broken by the Roc standing on it. Two hours later, they said goodbye to Captain Reynolds and Major Grant. The sea was dead calm. A cloudless sky.

  “Now I have two damaged hands,” Mayberry commented as they crossed the deck toward a waiting helicopter.

  Someone was running toward them, hoping to catch them before they boarded. Robert Calhoun had broken free from the other pool reporters and their naval escort.

  “Garrett, I heard there were gunshots.”

  Garrett stopped so Esther, Kim, and Mayberry could move ahead and avoid the newsman.

  “I’m talking to you, Garrett!” Calhoun declared as he neared him.

  Garrett turned his back.

  “Don’t you dare walk away from me.” Cal
houn reached out and grabbed Garrett’s shoulder. “The public has a right to—”

  The reporter had given Garrett exactly what he wanted. Garrett spun and clutched Calhoun by his throat with such force that the reporter’s feet were momentarily lifted from the deck. He pushed him away. Calhoun tumbled backward. His legs went out from under him, and he fell awkwardly onto the deck.

  “You attacked me!” Calhoun screamed. He coughed, struggling to catch a breath. “Everyone saw it. You can’t assault a member of the press!”

  “I didn’t,” Garrett said. “You’re not a reporter. You’re a liar.”

  “You attacked me first. Everyone saw it.”

  “You were definitely defending yourself,” a nearby sailor hollered at Garrett. Several others standing on the deck agreed, and began to applaud. Their applause became cheers. Calhoun looked at the crew members, and then noticed they were not the only ones celebrating.

  The other reporters in the pool were also clapping.

  Epilogue

  In a rare public appearance, Iran’s Supreme Leader denied that his country had developed nuclear capabilities, claimed that the bomb retrieved from the submarine and displayed in the media was part of a CIA plot to frame Iran, and refuted accusations that Iran had assisted Aziz and the Jihad Brigade in threatening America. He accused the United States of tricking Quds Force general Firouz Kardar into coming to Virginia on a mission to peacefully resolve the crisis, only to be murdered by the CIA. The Americans and Zionists were now falsely accusing the general of participating in a “fantastical” plot conjured to justify further sanctions against the Iranian people.

  Two days after the Supreme Leader’s public declaration, the Israeli Air Force bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facility in Natanz. The attack revealed the previously unknown existence of an Israeli-made bunker-busting bomb capable of penetrating the multiple concrete barriers that the Iranians had believed made their base safe. That same day, President Fitzgerald announced that additional punitive sanctions were being imposed by the United States and its allies on Iran to paralyze its economy and further isolate it.

  In Moscow, Russian president Vyachesian Kalugin falsely announced that the Kremlin had discovered that oligarch Taras Zharkov had stolen billions of dollars from the Russian government with help from opposition party leaders. Three critics of Kalugin were tried and given lengthy prison terms. Zharkov’s wife, Britt Bjorge-Zharkov, was stripped of her Russian citizenship and deported to her native Norway. Her husband’s wealth, property, and businesses were confiscated by Kalugin on behalf of the state, as payment for his theft. Most went directly into the kleptocrat’s personal accounts.

  CIA Director Connor Whittington was forced to resign by the president after a whistle-blower revealed that Whittington had leaked information to Washington Interceptor reporter Robert Calhoun intended to defame Garrett and Mayberry. He retired to his Texas ranch and began work on a memoir defending himself.

  Reporter Calhoun submitted his own name for a Pulitzer Prize, based on his exclusive stories, but the committee rejected his application once it was revealed that he’d allowed the CIA to edit them. He was fired and then immediately hired as a political commentator for a left-leaning cable news network.

  In a private Mossad ceremony in Tel Aviv, Esther was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Distinction. She left the next morning to track down a radical jihadist operating in Syria.

  When Garrett returned to his condo, he telephoned the Arlington Community Services Board and requested housing and mental health services for Jacob, the homeless veteran. He was assured that Jacob’s name would be added to a list, with an average wait time of five years. Garrett called the White House. The next morning Jacob was contacted by a social worker, who helped him move into a one-bedroom apartment.

  Garrett insisted on driving Mayberry to her first medical checkup. He appeared outside her Reston condo on his Norton motorcycle, which she refused to ride. Reluctantly, she offered him the key fob to her Jaguar.

  “I’m driving,” he said, “so you don’t have much choice but to have lunch with me after your appointment. I know a place in Clifton, Virginia. It’s a former Texaco gas station that now serves beer and burgers.”

  “No expense spared, huh?”

  “They make a great steak and cheese too, my favorite, served with fresh-cut fries. Can’t beat it with a cold one.”

  “I don’t really like beer.”

  “I’m planning on drinking yours.”

  “I heard the agency is considering taking you back,” she said as they entered the orthopedist’s waiting room. “What division?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill—”

  “Really?” she said, cutting him off. “That old joke is your answer? Not too original.”

  “I was told you resigned from the FBI,” he said. “Why did you do that? You loved being an agent.”

  She raised both hands. “Would you want me as a partner backing you up? I’ve been offered a job as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief investigator.”

  “Hunting a different kind of wolf.”

  She lowered her voice. Two other patients were sitting nearby in the waiting area, under a Georgia O’Keeffe knockoff painting of large flowers hanging by a rack of dog-eared magazines.

  “The last time I was injured,” she said, “you visited me once and then disappeared. Is this a rerun? Are you going to vanish after buying me lunch?”

  Garrett stared down at his feet. “I’m embarrassed about that, Valerie. I don’t want to disappear, but that’s really up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Me? What exactly do you mean?”

  “Don’t make this harder for me than it is.” He raised his head and looked into her eyes. “I’d like to keep seeing you. You know, on a regular basis.”

  “Are you saying you want to date me?”

  “I think we’re beyond dating.”

  “Garrett,” she said, “you know my first husband was killed in Afghanistan, and I’ve not been with anyone since then. He wasn’t the sit-at-home kind. He had to be chasing the action. Putting himself in danger. His death was devastating. You’re not a sit-at-home kind of guy either.”

  “I’m not him,” he said, slowly raising his arm and placing it around her shoulders in the waiting-room chair. “I’m not running off. We’re a team. We work best together. I’ve already spoken to the agency.”

  “About me?”

  “How’s an assignment in Budapest sound?”

  “For both of us? You serious?”

  “Yes. The agency thinks we’re a hell of a team, and yes, I’ve never been more serious.”

  “Have you checked to see if they serve steak and cheese sandwiches there?”

  “If you go with me, I’ll damn sure find a place that does.”

  A nurse appeared, holding a chart.

  “Valerie Mayberry, the doctor can see you now.”

  A Note about Our Tsunami Plot

  While Shakedown is a work of fiction, using a bomb to create a killer tsunami is a prospect that both the United States and Soviet Union have investigated. During World War II, the US military engaged in Project Seal, a top secret program formed to determine if a tsunami could be created and aimed at an enemy. At the time, US and British scientists considered their research as important as that being done to create a nuclear bomb. After seven months of testing between 1944 and 1945, scientists decided that a single TNT blast could not generate waves strong enough to cause significant damage, and Project Seal was abandoned.

  In 1961 the New York Times revealed that the Soviet Union had undertaken its own secret program called Lavina (“Avalanche”). It called for attacking both US coasts with 100-million-ton TNT bombs. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Andrei Sakharov acknowledged working on Lavina in his 1990 autobiography Memoirs. After the 1961 test of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever produced, with a blast yield of fifty-eight megatons of TNT, the Soviets began looking for alternative ways
of deploying nuclear bombs other than dropping them from a bomber. Sakharov wrote of Lavina that “the destruction of ports—caused by the above- and underwater explosions as a 100-megaton torpedo ‘jumped’ out of the water—would have resulted in mass casualties.”

  In a July 2019 article entitled “The Soviet Union Planned to Wipe Out the United States with a Huge Tsunami,” journalist Yekaterina Sinelschikova wrote that some Soviet scientists predicted that if the Tsar Bomba were strategically detonated in the Pacific Ocean, it would create a tsunami so powerful it would flood all of California and continue roaring across the country until it reached the Rockies. Such a flood would have been pointless from a military point of view. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev scuttled the project, choosing instead to focus on equipping submarines with hydrogen bombs.

  Shakedown coauthor Pete Earley first learned about Lavina from Sergei Tretyakov, a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the United States in 2000 and was the subject of Earley’s bestselling book Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America after the End of the Cold War.

  Acknowledgments

  The authors wish to thank Joe DeSantis, who played a key role in thinking through and critiquing Shakedown; and Eric Nelson, our editor at Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. Their insights were invaluable.

  In addition, Newt Gingrich wishes to acknowledge Herman Pirchner, an extraordinary student of both Russian and Chinese behavior whose American Foreign Policy Council also publishes a remarkable almanac of terrorism. The trips he has taken Callista and me on to both Russia and China have been eye opening. My daughter Kathy Lubbers, who has been my agent for over twenty years and helps think through the ideas that become books. My daughter Jackie Cushman, who is becoming quite a writer in her own right.

  Vince Haley, Ross Worthington, and Louie Brogdon, who have all helped make me a better writer; Ambassador Randy Evans whose shrewd analysis of events constantly inspires me to think new thoughts; Bess Kelly, who has simply made everything more doable; Woody Hales, who schedules everything; Audrey Bird, who is becoming a book-launching expert par excellence; Taylor Swindle, whose money management keeps everything on track; Debbie Myers, who stepped in to grow a new and ever more interesting Gingrich 360, freeing up the time for me to think and write; Rachel Peterson, maybe the best researcher I have ever worked with; and, of course, the toughest editor I ever write with, my wife, Callista, who also makes every day worthwhile.