by Brad Taylor
Software in the tablet translated the movements of the lips into words, or so the Israelis said. Internally, I figured it would work, since teaching someone to read lips couldn’t be any more difficult than programming a computer to do the same. It was a pretty unique twist on facial recognition software, and eliminated the problems of distance or ambient noise encountered with acoustic microphones—like being separated from the target through glass—but it did have the one drawback that you had to see the subject’s face.
I said, “Can this thing recognize different languages? Lipreading is going to be based on the language they’re speaking.”
“No. Well, yes, but not mobile. You have to set it to a language. It’s set for Yiddish right now, for a real-time read. If it encounters another language, we just need to ship the digits back to headquarters and they can manipulate the algorithm.”
“What does Mikhail speak?”
“Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish, and German.”
“Jesus. He speaks all those languages?”
“Yes. He is very smart.”
She spat the words out as if they were causing her mouth to burn. I didn’t want her to get all fired up, so I changed the subject. “Seems simple enough. How much memory?”
“Enough for thirty minutes of filming. But don’t try stopping and starting to conserve space. It’ll just screw up the algorithm as the computer tries to make sense of what is being said.”
“What’s the other box for?”
At her feet was a small Pelican case of about ten inches. She said, “It’s part of the system, but it’s not something we’ll use here. I don’t have time to train you on that.”
I didn’t press. Instead, I said, “Let me test it on you.”
“I don’t speak Yiddish.”
My mouth dropped and she laughed, saying, “You are so gullible. We’re too close together for it to work, I think.”
“Let’s try.” I pulled back as far as I could, then got a focus on her lips. I said, “Okay,” and hit record. She spoke a couple of sentences, then quit. I stopped the recording, letting the computer do its little dance, and then, like magic, the video played with what looked like closed captioning from a television sports show.
I’m sorry about what happened to your president. I hope you and Jexxxixer can stay and help, but I suppose that is selfish. You’ll be called to fight but I wish you wouldn’t. Too much death. I don’t want to fight anymore.
I noticed that it hadn’t recognized Jennifer’s name as a word, then saw what she’d said. I glanced up, a little embarrassed, as if I’d heard a secret I wasn’t supposed to.
She said, “Did it work?”
“Uhh . . . yes.”
She had a bemused smile on her face and said, “It’s true.”
“We aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. If I had to bet, my government’s probably too busy fighting themselves right now.”
29
It was closing in on three in the morning, and Philip Hannister still had not taken a seat behind the Resolute desk inside the Oval Office, preferring to pace or use the couches as he had as vice president.
In a hurried ceremony reminiscent of President Johnson’s in 1963, Hannister had been sworn in to the highest office in the land with zero pomp and circumstance. Unlike President Johnson, he was immediately confronted with debilitating decisions that could lead to total war. An analogy with Johnson would only be accurate if JFK had been assassinated during the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kurt Hale had been with him since that first awful phone call, and Hannister seemed to want it that way, using him as a touchstone to President Warren, as if Kurt was the only man he trusted in the room. At first, Kurt had tried to break contact and return to his comfortable world of covert action, but Hannister had insisted that he remain, and so he’d sat in the back while the initial investigation occurred, barely uttering a word. Now, after hearing some of the crazy ideas being spouted by the supposed experts in world affairs, he was more than willing to provide advice and assistance.
Hannister was preparing to address his national security team for the first time, and he seemed lost. Kurt wanted to provide what strength he could, feeling an oppressive, unwarranted responsibility for the future of the country. He couldn’t imagine what was going through President Hannister’s mind.
Looking out the window at the darkness, Hannister said, “They’re going to tell me to go to war.”
“Sir, if Putin did this—even by omission—it’s unavoidable. War was his choice, and he needs to be crushed for that . . .”
Kurt let his voice trail off, not finishing the other side of the coin. Not wanting to be the advisor Hannister believed he was. Craving the safe lane he’d been in for his entire military career, where he simply executed policy, not determined it.
Hannister turned and said, “But?”
Kurt took a breath and let it out, taking the first step into terrain he despised. A world of spin and half statements designed to make the masses happy, but having little to do with true security.
He was now in the game, whether he wished it or not.
He said, “But we don’t know Putin did it. You don’t want to start World War Three based on faulty assumptions. You don’t want President Warren to be the catalyst for a war that could have been avoided.”
“I also don’t want to be the president who did nothing while Putin rolls into Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic states. And the drumbeat for war in Congress is going to be almost unstoppable.”
“Fuck the politics.” Hannister’s head whipped around at the curse word. “Sorry, sir, but having the legacy of possibly destroying the earth as we know it is what you’re looking at. Ignore what the damn politicians say. You’re the president now. Not a member of a political party.”
Hannister took in the words and nodded. He put on his coat, saying, “Let’s go see the national security team.”
Surprised, Kurt said, “You want me in there?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
“No, no, that’s fine. Nobody’s going to listen to me, so before we go in, remember that every action has consequences, and what we do could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You worry about Russia and the Baltic states, and rightly so, but play it from both sides: If Putin didn’t have anything to do with this assassination, but he assumes that we believe he did, he’ll be watching our response. Right now, he’s not in Belarus, but if we react like we’re going to war, he’ll do what he thinks he must to protect himself. In other words, we might drive him into Belarus. And then into the Baltic states. This game isn’t one-sided.”
Hannister sighed, the weight of his decisions hitting home. He said, “Let’s go see what they have to say.”
—
The White House situation room was in chaos. Empty coffee mugs, trays of half-eaten finger sandwiches, and reams of reports that nobody was reading were scattered around. Instead, Kurt could hear the president’s national security team shouting at each other from the open door.
Spittle flying from his face, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, “Christ almighty, I cannot believe you people at State are still holding out for more evidence. We have the reports from the escort pilots. They were attacked by a Russian missile system. You think we’re really going to find a broken ball bearing at the crash site that led to the downing?”
Beth, the beleaguered place holder for the deceased secretary of state, held her ground. “I don’t know what we’re going to find, and neither do you.”
“Putin wanted into Belarus, and President Warren was going to tell him to back off. He was the only thing stopping that maniac. Now he’s dealing with President Hannister. Which one works out best for him?”
President Hannister entered the room at those words,
staring full on at General Durham. The CJCS, caught short, stammered, “Sir . . . that’s not how I meant it. . . .”
Hannister waited a beat, not uttering a word. When he was sure that the rest of the room was focused on him, he said, “Well, how did you mean it?”
“Putin’s trying to retake what the Soviets lost back when he was a nobody KGB agent, and killing President Warren helps him in that goal precisely because of the chaos left behind.”
Hannister turned to the director of national intelligence. “What are we seeing in Belarus?”
“He hasn’t entered yet. Russia has stopped all movement to the border, but they’re still saying they’re going in, and all intercepts we have point in that direction.”
General Durham said, “He’s going to cover this up as some sort of misfire, then he’s rolling in. If we don’t get on war footing right now, we’ll be too late.”
“But if I do, I might push him into undertaking exactly what we don’t want.”
General Durham took a controlled breath and said, “Sir, you can what-if this to death, looking for the easy out, but the bottom line is that we’re an ocean away. We have to start mobilizing now. We’ve already wasted the entire day.”
Alexander Palmer said, “What about options short of full-scale war?”
Hannister said, “Such as?”
Palmer turned to the secretary of defense and said, “Can’t we surgically retaliate?”
“You mean kill Putin with a missile?”
“Well, yeah. Tit for tat.”
“Yes, we could do that. It won’t be a drone strike. It’ll be more like a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, but it can be done.”
General Durham looked at Hannister and said, “Sir, you’d have to rescind executive order 12333, because it forbids assassinations.”
Kurt finally spoke. “Have you people lost your minds? You’re actually talking about assassinating a head of state? And you think that’ll stop a war?”
General Durham said, “Who the hell are you?”
The few in the room who were read on to the Taskforce shifted uncomfortably. Hannister spoke. “He’s my advisor. And he asked a good question.”
Palmer said, “Well, maybe we don’t kill him, but react with enough force to show him we mean business.”
Hannister said, “So we shower him with cruise missiles and you think he’ll simply back off? Or will he be driven to go to war by a population that’s incensed we just attacked them?”
General Durham said, “Christ, sir, he murdered our president! That’s the attack we should be talking about. Our entire country is screaming for blood. We have to do something.”
Hannister said, “I agree, but that something had better not end with him or us crossing a nuclear threshold. I’ve found that pride is viewed as much more important before an action than after. After, it’s usually seen as a mistake.”
He tapped his fingers on the table then said, “Go ahead and mobilize. Do whatever you need to prepare to defend NATO.”
Durham said, “Yes, sir.”
“But only mobilize. Nobody crosses the Rubicon until I give the word. Is that understood?”
The secretary of defense nodded, saying, “Yes, sir, of course. What about the crash site? Right now they’re still saying we can’t get in.”
With a steel Kurt hadn’t heard before, Hannister said, “We’re moving to the crash site whether they like it or not. Immediately. Who can do that? And don’t tell me it’ll take forty-eight hours to figure it out.”
“Sir, we have units deployed to the Black Sea Rotation Force in Bulgaria. Right now we have a contingent of the 2nd Marine Division training in Latvia. They have armor. They can do it.”
“Get them rolling, and this is from me: Nobody will stand in the way of us getting to the crash site. Nobody.”
For the first time, General Durham smiled. President Hannister caught the look and said, “But that is the only offensive action right now. Is that understood?”
Chastened, General Durham said, “Yes, sir.”
Hannister took a slow look around the table, then said, “Do not forget who the commander in chief is in this room. I will defend this nation if warranted, but I’m not going to war just to do something.”
He left the room without another word, Kurt stepping quickly to catch up. Kurt said, “That was pretty good, sir.”
Retracing his steps to his office, Hannister said, “You really think so? Because I felt completely out of my depth.”
Kurt chuckled and said, “Yeah. You laid down enough priorities, but more important, you took control. That’ll be crucial in the future.”
They passed the Oval Office and Kurt did a double take. “Sir?”
Hannister saw what he’d done and smiled. “I guess I still want to be vice president.”
He stopped and said, “You should go home and get some sleep. I might need you tomorrow. I appreciate you stepping in back there. It seems we’re not as smart at the executive level as we appear.”
Kurt smiled and said, “It’s not that hard, sir. When I was a brand-new second lieutenant, my commander told me something that’s served me well in many ambiguous situations. He said, ‘I know you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, and you’ll have to listen to others for advice, but remember, at the end of the day, if you don’t think it’s right, it’s probably not.’ Sure as shit, he was correct. Many a time I’ve been in a room where the smartest guy was advocating something stupid. They mean well, but that’s why you have the hat that says ‘commander in chief’ and they don’t.”
Hannister nodded and said, “Unfortunately, being right might not matter here. Forget proving Russia was behind it. I fear we must prove they positively weren’t involved. Anything less than that—any ambivalence or loose threads—and we’re going to war.”
30
With one phone call from the situation room, an invisible tidal wave was set in motion. A massive beast built for the Cold War, but rusting from continuous deployments to hot spots around the world, the US Department of Defense began the impossible task of preparing for World War III.
—
In the Pentagon, poor colonels and majors flailed about, trying to reorient on a threat they hadn’t studied in twenty years—and, for some of the up-and-comers who’d been promoted below the zone, never. Raised on combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, they began studying OPLANS that hadn’t been dusted off since 1989. The Fulda Gap of old West Germany was switched for the Suwalki Gap of Poland, a small sliver of terrain that connected Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Orders were sent, some that made no sense, and the beast began to awaken. Nobody inside the puzzle palace knew where it would lead, but all knew it was serious business.
—
At Fort Bragg, home of the acclaimed 82nd Airborne, the duty officer of the 18th Airborne Corps received a flash message. The first real-world one he’d ever seen. He had the duty NCO read it to make sure he wasn’t about to make a mistake in waking up the entire chain of command. He was not. He immediately pulled down his duty book and began working the specific instructions included within. Down the road, the duty officer for the DRF Alert Battalion of the 82nd Airborne picked up the phone, sure the message was a mistake. They had no emergency deployment readiness exercises planned, he was positive, as it was a special requirement for young duty officers to penetrate the higher headquarters like Soviet spies.
Any lieutenant taking on the mantle of duty officer immediately leveraged what was known as the E-4 Mafia—enlisted drivers, cooks, aides, and anyone else—to determine what was in store on his watch. No lieutenant wanted to be caught short with an EDRE while acting as the duty officer, and any EDRE that came down—supposedly a complete surprise—never were to the men filling the billet. This one was. He initiated the procedures, noticing that it wasn’t just the DRF-1 Battalion, but the e
ntire brigade. In fact, the DRB-2 Brigade was being alerted as well. And it sank home. This wasn’t an exercise.
—
There was very little in Minot, North Dakota, that would interest any enemy of the United States, with the exception of the two legs of the nuclear triad that were located on the windswept prairie. One, the 5th Bomb Wing, comprised the anachronistic B-52 Stratofortress. Anachronistic in name only. Since its creation, the mighty B-52 had been written off time and time again, and yet it was still the most potent weapon in the US Air Force. Used in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the aging airframes had outlived just about any other aircraft, with the last B-52 rolling off the line in the 1960s. At the heart of their creation was the unimaginable: nuclear war.
When the missiles began to fly, one of the enemy goals was to prevent the 5th from leaving the ground with their deadly payload, and because of it, the Air Force had developed Minimum Interval Takeoff procedures, or MITO, where the entire trundling beast would elephant walk to the flight line and take off at intervals that were so close they were nearly suicidal, all in an effort to get the fleet into the air before Armageddon struck. At the height of the Cold War, the wing had been tested over and over again, proving that if the worst occurred, they could be airborne with their payload before the holocaust destroyed the base. But it had never happened for real, until tonight. In one of the many miscommunications from a system decayed from constant small wars, the 5th Bomb Wing duty officer read the worst message he had ever seen. Missiles were inbound, and he had to initiate a real-world MITO. For a unit that had long ago forgotten about the nuclear threat.
—
At Fort Hood, Texas, the alert went a different way. It wasn’t the warfighter jerked out of bed at four in the morning. It was the logistician and mechanic. Home of the 1st Cavalry Division, its heart was armor. Its soul was heavy steel and uncompromising firepower. Something that couldn’t be deployed in the amount of time necessary, but, having foreseen that very dilemma during the Cold War, giant stockpiles of equipment had been stored in what was then West Germany and other countries, waiting—as they said back in the day—for the balloon to go up. For the first time in history, it now had, and the first into the fight would be the men and women who would break out the stockpiles of the weapons of war. M1A1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley fighting vehicles that had been stored for decades, the initial deployment would be spent clearing out the dry rot and getting them mission capable from a warehouse that nobody thought would be utilized after the wall fell. At Fort Hood, the command would spend its brief amount of time perfecting the skills on the combat systems they owned, using the sprawling terrain of Texas, preparing for a war in Europe with equipment they had never seen. They would fall in on war stocks that had rarely been used, and most certainly not to the extent that was being contemplated here. The REFORGER exercises were a thing of the past, the last having taken place in 1993, when NATO habitually tested its muscle against the Warsaw Pact. When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, so did the exercises. Except now, REFORGER was happening for real.