by Ben Coes
“Hey, it ain’t free.”
Dewey’s head turned. A man in a wheelchair was looking at him.
“You wanna watch, fine, but it ain’t free.”
“How much?”
“Ten bucks.”
“How much for one of the rings?”
The man in the wheelchair looked Dewey up and down.
“What do you want it for?” he asked. “You gonna do some Pilates?”
Dewey looked at him, ignoring his taunt.
“How much to fight?”
“Spar?”
“Fight.”
The man grinned.
“What’d you watch some UFC on TV? This ain’t the place for amateur white guys from Alexandria to learn how to fight.”
Dewey scanned him with his eyes.
“How much for a fight?”
The man reached for Dewey’s right arm, grabbing him by the wrist, tugging it down toward him. He lifted Dewey’s T-shirt, revealing a long, nasty-looking purple-and-pink scar, which ran from his shoulder blade down the front of his biceps.
“What the fuck is that from?”
Dewey ignored the question.
“Tough guy. Okay, you want a fight, I’ll get you a fight.”
The man took a whistle from around his neck. He blew it. A moment later, a tall black man approached.
“Daryl,” he said, nodding at Dewey, “get Chico or one of the other young guys. Put ’em in the big ring. Pretty boy here wants to relive his youth.”
The man in the wheelchair turned back to Dewey.
“Fifty bucks, up front.”
* * *
In a small locker room off the main gym, Dewey removed his shoes, jeans, and T-shirt. Beneath, he had on cutoff khaki shorts, covered in paint stains. They were the only shorts he could find at the town house.
He walked back inside the gymnasium. The smaller rings were empty now. The crowd had gathered around the center ring. Dewey pushed his way through.
Daryl was standing in the middle of the ring, there to officiate. Behind him was a short, stocky Hispanic kid who wore a bright yellow Lycra body suit. His arms, neck, and legs were covered in colorful tattoos. He had short-cropped black hair. A tattoo of a large tear was painted below his left eye. He was stacked with muscle, punching the air in place and bouncing on his bare feet as Dewey climbed into the ring.
Daryl looked at Dewey’s shorts, then at his scar, then at him. He walked to Dewey, leaning toward him.
“Hey, man, no shame if you wanna bail now,” he whispered, “know what I mean?”
Dewey didn’t respond.
The truth is, he barely heard the words.
Maybe it was the smell of the gym. Or the eyes, filled with doubt, now upon him. Maybe it was the sight of the fight before, in the sparring ring, the kick, the blood spilling onto the mat. Whatever it was, he started to feel the warmth that for too long had gone missing. The warmth that should’ve found him in Mexico. Adrenaline. It was only the faintest hint of it, and yet it was unmistakable. He glanced down at his right arm. He saw the small black tattoo of a lightning bolt. And then whatever warmth was there flamed into fire.
Daryl motioned for the two to come to the center of the ring.
“Three-minute rounds. Only rule is, when I say stop, you stop. Other than that, feel free to kick the shit out of each other.”
The Hispanic looked at Dewey from head to toe.
“Voy a matar a ti, viejo.”
I’m going to kill you, old man.
Dewey didn’t even look at his opponent. He said nothing.
Each fighter returned to his corner.
The crowd was getting hyped. A few catcalls to the other fighter got him to smile as he bounced on his bare feet.
“Chico! Kill the fucker!”
Daryl nodded to someone seated next to the ring. He slammed a hammer into the bell.
Dewey stepped slowly into the center of the ring as Chico danced left. Dewey glanced left; the man in the wheelchair was positioned next to the ring, watching. They made eye contact. Then Chico started his charge. He sprinted toward Dewey, swinging wildly, left right, almost too fast to see, his fists swinging for Dewey’s head as he lurched across the ring.
Dewey waited, guard down, calmly poised, his knees bent slightly. As the swings came closer, he heard the roar of the crowd anticipating the fight, wanting a rapid, brutal ending to the spectacle.
Chico charged into Dewey’s range. Dewey sensed a left hook slashing the air, and ducked. Chico lurched past him, whiffing completely, his momentum thrusting him forward. In one fluid motion, like a cocked spring, Dewey crouched, spun clockwise, and coiled his right foot skyward in a brutal roundhouse strike. His foot smashed into Chico’s face, hitting his jaw like a hammer, crushing it, breaking it in several places. Chico went flying sideways, tumbling awkwardly to the mat, unconscious. Blood gushed from his mouth and nose.
The kick silenced the crowd.
Dewey stepped to the center of the ring. His chest, torso, arms, and legs were red from adrenaline and the momentary exertion. He was ripped, his muscles hard and toned. He circled the ring, looking at the crowd. A few started clapping politely, then stopped.
Dewey stepped in front of the man in the wheelchair as a pair of gym workers carried the unconscious fighter out of the ring.
“You ready to stop fucking around?” asked Dewey.
9
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (DIA)
JOINT BASE ANACOSTIA-BOLLING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Will Parizeau sat in front of a pair of brightly lit plasma screens arrayed in a slight concave atop a long steel desk. Parizeau’s bespectacled eyes darted back and forth between the two screens. A look of concern adorned his youthful, ruddy face as his eyes raced between the screens. Then came a look of fear. His mouth opened slightly. His eyes bulged.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said aloud.
On the left screen was a grid displaying four satellite images. On the right was a wall of numbers plotted against a spreadsheet.
Parizeau was a senior-level analyst within the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate for Science and Technology. Employing radar intelligence, acoustic intelligence, nuclear intelligence, and chemical and biological intelligence, the DIA detected and tracked fixed or dynamic target sources, such as nuclear weapons. If the National Security Agency was about scouring e-mails, phone calls, Internet traffic, and other signals intelligence, looking for bad people who might do harm to the United States, DIA was about scouring the earth for the objects those bad people might use in those efforts.
Parizeau’s desk sat in a cavernous, windowless, dimly lit room two floors belowground, in a respectable if unspectacular-looking brick building. It was one of several old, well-maintained buildings, built in the 1920s, on a 905-acre military base in southwest Washington, D.C., called Fort Bolling. Parizeau was one of more than a hundred analysts, all surrounded by visual media, and all of it related to nuclear weapons deemed vulnerable to theft or purchase by terrorists.
Parizeau’s job was to keep track of all suspected nuclear weapons inside the former Soviet republic and now sovereign nation Ukraine. DIA believed that four nuclear devices still were hidden in Ukraine, their existence denied by both the Ukrainian and Russian governments, and yet their telltale chemical signatures were like beacons to the highly purposed satellites that hovered in geostationary orbit looking down.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were at risk all over the newly independent breakaway republics. Due to geography, these small countries now owned nuclear weapons. Impoverished regional governments, often run by peasants and farmers, suddenly possessed a variety of valuable objects; nuclear weapons were at the top of the list. Indeed, they were the list.
Several years of negotiations between Russia and the West ensured that all Soviet nuclear weapons were accounted for and in safe storage. So concerned with the chaotic approach of the Russian government to
its nuclear arsenal, America decided that it would be prudent to “invest” more than $300 billion in an effort to help Russia secure its own nukes. But even with the massive bribe, a few weapons went missing.
Behind the complex negotiations between the United States and Russia to safeguard the rogue bombs, there lurked a more alarming set of negotiations between Russia and its former republics. On the one hand, Russia wanted the United States to think they had the power to bring all of the weapons back into the fold. On the other hand, Russia had a smorgasbord of newly created republics, independent of Russia, that wanted a cut of the U.S. bribe. In the end, America bought—for Russia—its own weapons back from the republics. It was inevitable that some bad characters, in places like the Ukraine, would keep a few for themselves.
Ukraine had officially handed over all nineteen hundred of its nuclear weapons in 1994, giving them to the Russian Federation in exchange for its sovereignty and a variety of economic concessions, forgiveness of debts, and cash. A discrepancy of four out of the nineteen hundred had never been fully explained by either the Ukrainian government or Russia. It had taken technology and nearly two years to pinpoint the telltale tritium emissions and locate the four rogue weapons. Ever since then, it was Parizeau’s full-time job to monitor the supposedly nonexistent Ukrainian-domiciled nukes.
Parizeau relied on an advanced communications satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force, one of five that hovered in geostationary orbit above the earth. Parizeau spent his time tracking a variety of telltale chemical and biological symptoms, including plutonium depletion, keeping an eye on the nuclear devices.
It was a scan fewer than twenty-four hours old that Parizeau now stared at, transfixed. What the numbers showed was that one of the nuclear bombs in the Ukraine had been moved. In fact, it had disappeared.
Parizeau picked up his phone.
“Get me Mark Raditz over at the Pentagon.”
* * *
Mark Raditz, the deputy secretary of defense, sat behind his desk on the second floor of the Pentagon. His phone buzzed.
“Mark,” said Raditz’s assistant, Beth. “Will Parizeau is on one.”
“Who?”
“Will Parizeau. Ukraine desk at DIA.”
“Put him through.”
Raditz flipped on a tan plastic device that looked like a large radio. It was an air filtration machine. He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a pack of Camel Lights. He stuffed a cigarette between his lips, then lit it. He sat down on his large red leather desk chair, leaned back, and put his cowboy boots up on the desk.
“What is it, Will?” asked Raditz, crossing his legs, yawning slightly. “How’s the Ukraine these days?”
“We have a rover,” said Parizeau.
Raditz was still for a brief instant, then lurched up and leaned over the phone console on his desk.
“Come again?” Raditz said.
“There’s a nuclear bomb missing. This is one of four devices we believe Ukraine still possesses.”
“Where and when were the last hard readings made?”
“As of four days ago, the two bombs we believe to be housed at a warehouse south of Kiev were both present and accounted for. Plutonium depletion levels have dropped by fifty percent as of two this morning. One of the bombs is gone, sir.”
Raditz took a last puff on his cigarette. He lifted his left foot and stubbed the cigarette out on the bottom of his boot.
“Will, I’m about to walk into Harry Black’s office across the hall from mine,” said Raditz, referring to the secretary of defense. “In turn, Secretary Black will call the president of the United States. Are you one hundred percent goddam motherfucking absolutely sure your math is correct?”
“Yes, I am.”
Raditz took a deep breath.
“Stay on the line,” he said. “I want to patch in interagency.”
Raditz hit another button on the phone.
“Get me Josh Brubaker over at the White House,” Raditz told his assistant. “Then get Torey Krug at EUCOM. I also need Hector Calibrisi, Piper Redgrave, and Arden Mason. Better get Sarah Greene at 4th Space Operations Squadron too. Hurry.”
“Is everything okay, Mark?” Beth asked, fear in her voice.
Raditz paused and stared at the phone.
“No. Everything is not okay.”
* * *
Within eight minutes, a dedicated, highly secure communications link had been established among the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Langley, the National Security Agency, Joint Special Operations Command Eurasia Directorate, 4th Space Operations Squadron, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House.
Raditz and Parizeau were joined by Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Greene at Schriever Air Force Base. Greene was in charge of all Milstar satellites, commanding the hardware group from a highly secure facility located inside a mountain a few miles outside Colorado Springs. They were joined by General Torey Krug, commander of the United States European Command, one of nine Unified Combatant Commands of the U.S. military. Piper Redgrave, the director of the National Security Agency, hopped on a moment later. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Arden Mason, called in from the border of Mexico. Last on was Calibrisi, who was joined by Bill Polk, who ran National Clandestine Services for the CIA.
A variety of other senior-level staffers from the different agencies were on as well. Finally, Josh Brubaker, White House national security advisor, came on the line from the West Wing.
“Hi, everyone,” said Brubaker. “What do we got, Mark?”
“Ukraine,” answered Raditz. “We have a nuclear device that’s on the move. Will, give everyone the details.”
“Milstar night scans picked up material geographic displacement,” said Parizeau, “signifying the movement of a nuclear device. This is an RDS-4, one of the so-called Tatyana bombs, made in 1953, approximately thirty kilotons. It’s an old bomb, relatively small and light, originally designed to drop from a plane and take out a submarine. It would, if detonated, destroy a big area. Most of Manhattan. All of Boston. This is not a tactical weapon; we’re talking about the real deal here.”
“How long ago did the scans degrade?” asked Brubaker.
“The last hard reading from Milstar was three days ago,” said Parizeau. “It could’ve been moved at any point during that time.”
“Is this one of the devices controlled by former Ukrainian military?” asked Calibrisi.
“That’s right. General Vladimir Bokolov.”
“Piper, get Bruckheimer on that immediately,” said Calibrisi, referring to Jim Bruckheimer, who ran the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate. “We need to find Bokolov.”
“I’m on it,” said Redgrave.
“Will, how long to break down the bomb and harvest the physics package?” asked Polk.
“Why is that relevant?” asked Brubaker.
“It’ll determine how they’re moving it,” said Polk. “If they can pit it in a few hours, the bomb will be light enough to stick in a pickup truck. If that’s the case, then trying to find it is a waste of time.”
“It would take at least forty-eight hours to execute a clean removal of the physics package,” said Parizeau.
“So what does that mean?” asked Brubaker.
“It means they’re going to get it to water as quickly as possible,” said Polk. “The alternative is going inland in a semitruck that will be Geigered at the border. They’re not going to risk doing that.”
Raditz moved to the wall, where a large plasma screen lay dark.
“Will, can you live-wire what you’re looking at? Put it on IAB thirty-three. Put it on everyone’s screen.”
A moment later, a strikingly colorful three-dimensional horizontal map of Ukraine splashed onto Raditz’s plasma screen, along with the screens of everyone on the call.
“That’s Kiev,” said Parizeau, narrating, focusing in on a line of lights.
Near the top of the screen, just above a red digital line
representing the atmosphere, was a flashing red, white, and blue object, which represented the U.S. Milstar satellite.
“Are we watching this in real time?” asked Polk.
“Yes,” said Parizeau.
“Spotlight the routes on every road to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov,” said Polk.
Suddenly, a spiderweb of yellow lines branched southeast from Kiev. These were the roads leading to the coast. There were at least a dozen different roads heading to the water.
“Will, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re able to focus in on these devices because of radioactive emissions, right?” asked Raditz.
“Plutonium, uranium, or tritium.”
“Can you look at a moving truck and get an accurate enough reading to detect it?” asked Raditz.
“It would take a decent amount of luck, to be honest,” said Parizeau.
“What’s a decent amount?”
“One in a thousand. The movement of the truck dissipates the strength of the radioactive emissions. We readjust to try and compensate by looking for a lower reading, but we don’t know how fast or slow the driver is going. So we’re probably going to be wrong.”
“Not to mention any sort of cloaking measures they might employ to hide the imprint,” added Calibrisi.
“If their only option is getting it out of the country by water, let’s send everything to the coast,” said Raditz. “I want every satellite we have close to the theater focused on finding that nuke. Repurpose any assets we have in the sky over Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. Immediately. Blanket the ports, especially Sevastopol and Odessa.”
“Should we inform Russia?” asked Brubaker.
Silence took over the call. It was a tricky question.
On the one hand, the Russian Federation might be able to help stop the people who had the bomb. Russia would have a deeper knowledge of the players in the area to draw on.
On the other hand, a deep mistrust inhabited the upper echelons of America’s military and intelligence infrastructure. After all, Russia had spent decades denying the existence of the four nuclear devices inside Ukraine. In addition, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was a former top-level assassin within the KGB. Deep down, beyond all the diplomatic words, all the summits and state dinners, the United States and Russia hated each other. For many in Russia, the loss of the Cold War stung every bit as much today as it did then, perhaps more so.