Frank sat down and looked at them despairingly. “I’ve been racking my brain ever since the database answer hit me. I just can’t figure out a way to stop them from targeting those missiles.”
“Then figure out a way you must to make them stop themselves,” his father said quietly.
“It’s too late,” Frank said miserably, slumped in his chair. “Somebody in the Air Force could be opening up the database right now to access the targeting information and send it to the missiles, and there’s no way to stop them.”
But then he reconsidered what his father had just said; what could he do to the Web pages that might make the military think twice before uploading the target coordinates to the missiles?
Suddenly, Frank’s eyes widened. He yanked the chain off his neck with one hand and grabbed his laptop with the other. A moment later, he had inserted the thumb drive into its slot in the side of the laptop.
* * *
“Two minutes till expected launch capability.”
Chaseman looked up sharply when the unsettling robotic voice spoke from the speakers mounted around the War Room.
“Sir, have you made your targeting decisions?” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff inquired.
Who should he choose to destroy? Chaseman thought desperately. Another city of starving, innocent North Koreans? Of course not. But what of Pyongyang and its three and a quarter million inhabitants? He had already committed to obliterating them. Could he let the North Koreans and the Iranis and, hell, the Russians, too, know that he had only been bluffing?
Steady yourself, he thought. The missiles hadn’t been launched yet. They couldn’t really be that.... But his thoughts were interrupted by the unfeeling voice from the speakers.
“Missile one is away.”
Hayes thought that he saw Chaseman flinch. Everyone else in the War Room seemed to freeze; those around the table looked intently at Chaseman, while those at the terminals strained to hear what he might say.
“Missile two is away.”
“Sir, we must have your targeting decision immediately.”
Chaseman made up his mind. “The second target will be your first priority military target.”
“Target two is military one,” an officer standing behind the General repeated into his headset.
“And target one, sir?”
Chaseman gave the only answer he could, and then realized that no one had been able to hear him. He took a deep breath, and tried again.
“Pyongyang.”
Hayes watched the ashen-faced Acting President turn away from the table to look at the display screens, locking on the one tracking the North Korean missiles as they moved across a glowing map. The two flashing blips were already well outside the outline of North Korea.
“Second stage separation successfully completed for both missiles.”
Hayes noticed that a cluster of technicians had gathered around one of the terminals that lined the walls of the room, underneath the huge display screens. Something must be wrong. But what? One of the technicians broke away and summoned the officer who had relayed the targeting command.
But Chaseman was oblivious to everything that was happening on the floor of the War Room. His eyes were pinned to the missile trajectory map and the inexorable progress of the cold, white blips, hoping that one or both missiles would malfunction as so many had before. The missiles had traveled far enough now that their trajectories to target could be projected with thin, glowing lines. He saw that those lines ended at Washington and New York.
“Time to targets: eighteen minutes.”
“Issue Civil Defense alerts for Washington and New York,” the General barked, looking for the officer who had been at his side just a few minutes before.
“Send the alerts, damn it!” he yelled when he spotted him across the room, huddled over a terminal with the technicians.
It would be bedlam up above, Hayes thought. There hadn’t been a civil defense drill in decades; how many cities even had air raid sirens anymore? What could anyone do, anyway?
“One minute to anti-missile launch.”
Chaseman was standing now, hunched forward with his hands gripping the back of his chair as he stared at the tracking screen. The resolution on the tracking screen abruptly increased a hundred fold, and he could see that the two North Korean missiles, their trajectories now more widely separated, were traveling along what must be the coast of Siberia.
“Third stage separation successfully completed for both missiles.”
Suddenly, the image of first one missile, and then the second, began to shimmer.
“What’s that?” Chaseman called over his shoulder.
“Camouflage, sir. When they blew the bolts for third stage separation, they must have expelled additional material – probably metallic chaff – to confuse the radar on our interceptors.”
“Time to interception: three minutes. Time to targets: twelve minutes.”
A new blip appeared now, this one at the opposite edge of the screen. And then another, higher up. Soon the trajectories of eleven anti-missile rockets were splayed across the screen, each intersecting at a different point along the tracks of the North Korean missiles. All were converging rapidly on their targets.
But even as Chaseman watched, the blips representing the North Korean missiles began to expand until they became glowing clouds of light. And the lines indicating their trajectories were now spreading cones of light projecting forward.
“What’s going on?” Chaseman demanded.
“We’re seeing what our missiles are ‘seeing,’” the General replied. “The clouds of light represent the perimeter of the field of camouflage, and the cones indicate the range of possibilities for the trajectory of the actual missile.”
Chaseman clenched the back of his chair back as the first defensive missile blip entered the glowing circle one of the North Korean rockets.
“Anti-missile one has missed target.”
Except for the cold, robotic voice from the speakers, the War Room was silent as the same, fruitless pas-de-deux played out over and over again in real life over the Bering Sea, and symbolically on the wall above them. One by one, the U.S. missiles entered the glowing clouds, either disappearing for good, or reemerging on the other side, only to be destroyed by their controllers. All the while, the shimmering clouds of the Korean missiles moved inexorably onwards, eventually coalescing once more into blips as their clouds of chaff became too diffuse to register on radar.
Why should he be surprised? Chaseman asked himself bitterly. We always knew they wouldn’t work.
“Missiles have entered U.S. airspace.”
This was it, then, he asked himself. Did he have the guts to make good on his threats? If so, he had no choice but to give the order to fire, before even knowing whether the North Korean missiles would find their targets or not. It was time to face up to the hideous historical role he had assigned himself to play.
“Sir!”
Chaseman turned blankly and looked to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He realized the General had already been speaking earnestly to him for some time.
“Sir, we are unable to obtain the targeting information to program the ICBMs!”
Distraught as he was, Chaseman couldn’t believe his ears. “Well, then enter the coordinates manually, damn it! Don’t we keep an atlas in the War Room?”
“We can’t, sir. For security reasons, we can’t program the missiles directly. All we can do is instruct the database to transmit the encrypted target codes directly to the missile.”
“Well, then do it, man!” Chaseman roared.
“We can’t, sir. It’s been hacked. We can’t get through to the administrative functions of the database to start the targeting sequence.”
“Time to targets: six minutes.”
Now Chaseman’s fears had been replaced with rage – how could he allow two American cities to be destroyed without retaliating?
“I want to see what you’re lookin
g at!” Chaseman roared. “Put it up on a screen!”
A harried technician bent over his terminal and typed furiously while Chaseman fidgeted. Suddenly, one of the huge LED screens lit up with a new image.
Chaseman’s eyes widened. It seemed as if he was looking at flames. But the fire soon began to die away. As it did, a new image began to emerge. As he watched in growing confusion, the image resolved itself into a tall building, perhaps some sort of lighthouse. Underneath, there was a line of text, but in characters he couldn’t read.
“What’s it say?” He asked in amazement.
For the first time, the Director of the CIA spoke up.
“It says, ‘Thank you for your contribution to the Alexandria Project,’ sir.”
With a sudden sense of relief, the Acting President wondered whether perhaps he was in fact in some insane dream. Something like this couldn’t really be happening when the world was on the verge of Armageddon. The relentless robotic voice jolted him back to reality.
“Time to targets: four minutes.”
What now? he wondered. Had he just been spared from committing genocide? Or was he about to allow millions of Americans to die without raising a finger in response? He decided he couldn’t sit idly by.
“General, how soon can one of the B-1s with a nuclear weapon be over Pyongyang?”
“Missile two is no longer tracked.”
Chaseman whirled around. One of the two trajectories lines on the screen had come to an end over Ontario.
“Missile one is no longer tracked.”
As he watched, the last blip blinked for the final time over Lake Superior.
The War Room erupted into cheers. Chaseman extended a shaking arm behind him and groped for his chair. Finding it, he slowly sat down, still gazing at the brightly gleaming, and now still, map on the giant screen. He thought that he had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life.
* * *
Epilogue
President Rawlings looked up from his breakfast of indigestible hospital food and broke into a smile. Standing in the doorway of his room was the old friend he had appointed as his Director of National Intelligence.
“Harry! Great to see you! Come in and sit down. Better yet, wrap some of this crap up in your handkerchief and smuggle it out so I can pretend I ate my breakfast.”
Adlai Stevenson Harrison walked in and pulled a seat up to the President’s bedside.
“Wonderful to see you looking like your old self again, sir. I hope you know you gave us all quite a scare there for a while.”
“Oh really! And for how long was that?”
“From the moment you passed out until,” Harrison looked down at his watch, “exactly eighteen minutes ago. That’s when your Presidential powers were restored.”
Rawlings chuckled. “Yes, I understand that Henry made the most of his little adventure in the Oval Office.”
“You have no idea. We survived the experience, but it turns out it was much closer than we expected at the time.”
“Indeed. But first, tell me – what’s the latest on the North Koreans?”
“It’s the damnedest thing, sir. After everyone got done high-fiving each other in the War Room when the missiles fell short, someone remembered to check in on the situation on the ground. We expected to find that the North had already sent a million men across the DMZ but none of them had moved an inch.
“It was eerie – and it’s stayed eerie. Nobody budged all day that day, or the next, either. Last night, the Red Guards started to just melt away, and today regular army units have been leaving their positions in what seems like a totally random fashion. It’s as if suddenly there’s nobody in charge. As you might expect, there are all kinds of wild rumors flying around in the intelligence community.”
“Do we know anything more about the missiles they launched?”
“Yes, and that’s just as strange. We’ve located the wreckage of one of them, and there was no warhead – not even conventional explosives! We’ve had planes with sensors criss-crossing Canadian airspace ever since the missiles disappeared from radar, and they haven’t found a trace of radiation anywhere. The North Koreans must have been trying to keep weight to a minimum – putting all their money on getting as close as possible to their targets in order to make sure we would launch our own rockets.”
“Well I’ll be damned. So it was nothing but a ruse the whole time. But if they never crossed the DMZ, what was the ruse for?”
“We still think it was an attempt to keep us from supporting South Korea when the North invaded, but assume that something must have gone wrong at the last minute. We’re just guessing, but our current hypothesis is that there was some sort of shakeup at the top. Maybe some new power group used the failure of the missile ploy as an excuse to finally toss Kim-Lo and his son over the side while they had the opportunity. Or maybe when we didn’t blow up Washington and Moscow, they lost their nerve. We may never know for sure.”
“Whatever happened, though, we think the in-fighting must still be continuing. Bach Choy hasn’t been seen in days, and no one new has spoken yet for the regime. But there has been one interesting development.”
“What’s that?”
“We received a feeler from the Chinese through our embassy in Beijing. It seems that they were as unnerved by this whole escapade as we were. They want to broker some sort of final settlement between the North, the South, and the U.S. They’re signaling that they’ll even support us on taking away the North’s nukes.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” a Secret Service agent said. “Mr. Chaseman to see you, sir. Should I ask him to wait?”
Harrison looked to see how his friend would react. To his surprise, Rawlings was looking down at his hands, brow furrowed and a wry smile on his face.
“I should be leaving anyway, sir,” Harrison said. “I expect that you’ll have a lot to say to Henry.”
“Perhaps not as much as you’d think, Harry. Would things have turned out any better if I’d been sitting in the Oval Office that day? Maybe not. Given how well things ended up, perhaps nobody should be sorry I didn’t have to find out. I know I’m not! There but for the grace of God, Harry. There but for the grace of God!”
Rawlings turned to the agent. “Please send Mr. Chaseman in.”
Harrison stepped aside as the agent ushered a worried looking (once again) Vice President into Rawlings’ hospital room. He could only try to imagine the feeling of relief that Chaseman must be feeling as the President gave him a warm welcome.
* * *
CIA Director John Foster Baldwin smiled smugly as he read the report on his desk. It told how the CIA, acting through his direct report, George Marchand, had provided safe haven to Frank Adversego, Jr., thus preventing the FBI, acting on the direct orders of Francis X. McInnerney, from capturing him in the nation’s hour of greatest need for his unfettered assistance. Had the CIA not thwarted the FBI’s incompetent plans, the report concluded, “the results would have been too horrifying to imagine.” He would be sure that a copy was hand-delivered to Congressman Steele.
Baldwin’s intercom buzzed. “Yes, Gwen.”
“A letter I think you should see, Mr. Baldwin. May I bring it in?”
“Fine, fine,” he said, leaning back in his chair and savoring the closing lines of the report one more time.
His administrative assistant came through the door with a strange look on her face, and handed him a letter. “This arrived this morning, addressed to you in your personal, rather than your official, capacity. It’s from an attorney in Las Vegas.”
Las Vegas? When had he last been in Las Vegas? He began to read:
LAW OFFICES OF ARNOLD PORTER, ESQ.
322 Freemont Street, Las Vegas, NV
June 23, 2012
Mr. John Foster Baldwin
CIA Headquarters
McLean, Virginia 22101
Dear Mr. Baldwin,
I represent Mr. Earl Juke
s, until recently the owner of a MountainTamer XV-BS four wheel drive expedition vehicle. It is my understanding that Mr. Jukes’ vehicle was destroyed by a Predator-launched Hellfire missile, in direct violation of multiple Federal laws relating to the use of such ordinance on U.S. soil other than on government-owned training and test ranges.
It is also my understanding that Mr. Jukes’ property was destroyed on your personal orders, in clear violation of restrictions imposed by Congress on the powers of the CIA.
Finally, it is my understanding that Mr. Juke’s had invested more than $400,000 in the camper. This amount comprises the original purchase price of the MountainTamer and the costs of the extensive modifications made to the vehicle by my client. Due to its one of a kind nature, the value of Mr. Jukes’ unique vehicle was of course higher. Far, far higher, in Mr. Jukes’ opinion.
Please be informed that Mr. Jukes intends to bring suit in Federal Court in Las Vegas against you personally for full restitution. He also intends to contact his Congressman, the Hon. Titus Steele, to request a full investigation into your conduct.
However, should you wish to make immediate and full restitution, my client would be willing to settle this matter privately. I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience....
* * *
Chad Derwent put down his newspaper and turned to Sanjay. “You know, it’s just like the old days – the two of us sharing an office.”
The Alexandria Project: A Tale of Treachery and Technology (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 1) Page 30