Seven Day Hero

by J. T. Brannan

  The subjects that were discussed at the meeting therefore led more to the aftermath of the event – how aid should be given to the US; how ERA should play the story to the media; how advantage in trade and commerce could be taken immediately, and to what extent; how ERA should address China and India, with what precise mix of threats and promises; and – to the delight of Gregory – how the future superpower of CUSER was going to take shape, so that it could lead the new world order that was going to open up in front of them.

  A similar conversation was going on in the subterranean chambers of Offutt Air Base.

  President Abrams was still championing the hope of a diplomatic outcome – he refused to believe that millions of people would die due to the plans of a single madman. But other voices wanted to prepare for what would happen if they did have to attack ERA, and Abrams knew that however unpalatable, it was the only sensible thing to do.

  The last of Hansard’s agents had been arrested, and the whole nuclear network had been checked – there was no visible physical disruption, no tampering with access codes or electronics, and the entire system seemed shipshape and fit for purpose. Which was at the same time both reassuring and very scary indeed, the President thought.

  And so they started making their plans for a world in which Europe would play a much smaller role.

  19

  The bomb doors were lowered and Cole found himself looking down through his tinted visor to the cloud layer miles below him. He checked the coordinates on his wrist computer, and knew the bomb mechanism would soon release him.

  The suit he wore was somewhat akin to an astronaut’s, but he still felt a chill as the wind whipped past him at incredible speed, although the Aurora had now slowed its approach to a relatively modest Mach 1.

  Cole could see both the sun and the moon across the horizon, and the incredible curve of the planet, and then he was released. The immediate drop knocked the wind out of him, his stomach seemingly left behind in the bomb bay, and then he was caught by the slip stream and found himself tumbling and twisting wildly through the thin air thirty miles above the world.

  Severin was called to the radar centre as an emergency.

  ‘It came out of nowhere,’ said the young Spanish lieutenant monitoring the main radar images from the immediately surrounding area. ‘First nothing, and then it just appeared – whoosh! It’s only small, but it’s there all the same.’

  Severin did not have to look long to realize what the small blip meant. Twenty feet across, appearing at a height of twenty thousand feet and dropping more or less straight down; it was a parachute, no doubt about it. The question was whether it carried a human or a weapon.

  ‘Scramble Field Team A!’ Severin ordered. ‘Immediately!’

  The freefall had lasted an incredible seven minutes, during which time Cole truly wondered whether he would live. Falling though the upper atmosphere in the limited air, his streamlined body had broken the sound barrier, although he had not heard anything through his helmet.

  But he had seen the world around him as he first fell, the curve of the earth flattening out as he reached the cloud layer, and then he was shooting through those clouds and out the other side before he even had a chance to realize, through and travelling to the earth at over seven hundred miles per hour.

  He had performed countless parachute jumps in the past, both in training and on operations; high altitude jumps, low altitude jumps, he had done them all. But he had never done anything like this, freefalling from the edge of space out of the bomb doors of a secret stealth aircraft. A normal high-altitude jump was done from 35,000 feet; Cole was jumping from 120,000 feet, which was why he needed the helmet and the special suit – without them, the pressure and lack of oxygen at such a height would kill him within seconds. Such a high altitude jump had certainly not been done before in quite the same way, and it was unlikely to ever be done again.

  He had managed to control the tumbling effect soon after he had been released, forcing his body into the right shape to attack the atmosphere, flying straight down, head first like a human arrow.

  It was pitch black, and he just had to rely on his instruments. Moving his hands from their position at his sides at this speed would have radically compromised his stability however, and he was glad to have a secondary set of instruments on his chest, angled upwards so that he could see them.

  He still couldn’t see the ground, but saw that his coordinates were good. His altimeter read one hundred thousand feet, and he started to angle his body, flattening it out until he was spread out, his speed decreasing slightly in relation to the increase in surface area he now presented. He stabilized in that position, and then checked the altimeter again. Twenty thousand feet.

  He opened the chute, and immediately felt the shock of the huge braking effect generated by the billowing canopy, pulling him seemingly back up into the sky.

  Moments later he was in a gentle descent, on track to land at a point not too far from the lake. He knew that the chute would have been picked up on the base radar, and could have opened it lower to give himself more chance of evading detection. But his plan depended upon him being caught, and he found himself praying that someone was monitoring the equipment closely. He didn’t want to be out in the freezing Arctic conditions any longer than absolutely necessary.

  20

  ‘We’ve got the chute in our sights,’ Severin heard over his radio. ‘Shall we shoot it down?’

  ‘Is it a person or an object?’ Severin asked.

  ‘A person, wearing some sort of space suit. Scanner shows no explosives.’ The team was using extremely high-precision bomb-detection equipment, designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  ‘Just one man?’ Severin asked for confirmation. ‘You see nothing else in the area?’

  There was a pause. ‘Yes sir, just one man, nothing else visible, and just one heat signature.’

  ‘Arrest him the second he lands. Proceed with caution, remember the scanners might not get an accurate reading in this temperature. If the person shows any kind of resistance or sign of aggression, shoot them immediately.’

  What would a lone parachutist be doing here? Severin couldn’t help but wonder.

  The team leader directed the driver of the lumbering, tractor-like Snow Cat towards the drop zone. The figure of the parachutist had landed just moments before, behind a snowy ridge. The heavy metal unit clanked and ground its way slowly forwards.

  ‘Weapons hot,’ he ordered his men, and they all racked back the cocking levers of their cold weather-modified assault rifles.

  As the Snow Cat rumbled over the hill, the eight armed men swarmed out of the vehicle, weapons raised.

  Cole’s hands were already raised in surrender in preparation for them. He knew the base’s security force would be on high-alert and geared up for action, and would therefore be in a state of mind where they would react with force to any slight movement.

  The landing had been soft despite the speed of his descent, his fall broken by the deep layer of snow that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  He had detached his parachute upon landing, but had kept on his jump suit and helmet in order to help insulate himself from the biting Arctic winds.

  ‘Take the helmet off!’ the man at the front shouted. ‘Now!’

  Cole could see the nervous, gloved trigger fingers tight on their weapons, and slowly – very slowly – he complied with the order.

  The security troops watched as the strange astronaut clicked the seal of the pressurized helmet, removing it from the rigid neckpiece.

  The cold air assaulted Cole’s head and face, which was now protected only by an insubstantial balaclava.

  ‘Strip,’ the team leader now ordered. Cole knew they wanted to check for explosives, but was reluctant – the cold could potentially kill him within a minute. When he saw the guns press forwards towards him ever so slightly in response to his delay though, he complied; first taking off his gloves, then his boots and then his
thick jump suit, the evidence box still securely attached.

  Cole’s breath caught in his throat as he stood there in his underclothes, his body already starting to react. Then the leaders nodded, and four men rushed forwards and grabbed hold of him, dragging him through the snow back towards the big all-terrain vehicle.

  Once inside the heated compartment, the men cuffed his hands and then covered him in a thermal blanket. He was already shivering uncontrollably, unable to breathe properly.

  Inside his near-frozen brain, he started to get a mental grip on himself, forcing himself to relax, to breathe, to allow the warmth to re-enter his body. Soon he was calm again, his breathing regular.

  His eyes focussed in time to see his clothing and equipment being loaded into the back of the Snow Cat, and moments later the vehicle was moving again, the roar of its big diesel engine competing loudly with the crash of its rotating tracks.

  ‘Sir,’ he heard the team leader announce into his radio, ‘it’s Team A. We’re on our way back.’

  21

  ‘I say we launch now!’ demanded the Secretary of Defence, and he was joined in his judgement by most of the Joint Chiefs.

  ‘Waiting is not worth the risk, Mr President,’ General Michael Roy, Air Force Chief of Staff said plainly. ‘We know they’re going to launch in just over two hours, their weapons are ready to go. What if they launch early?’

  ‘According to Hansard, British nuclear subs won’t be in position until oh-nine-hundred,’ the Secretary of Homeland Security explained. ‘So that time is a given – the whole attack has been co-ordinated for then.’

  ‘But the fact is that the current time frame is just too short – our launch time of 0800 GMT only gives us enough time for our missiles to get on target just before the ERA launch!’ complained Vice Admiral David Burton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘We’ve simply left ourselves no margin for error!’

  Other arguments flared up throughout the command room, before a technician came over, carrying a sheet of paper. ‘It’s from the Super Wing, sir,’ she said, addressing the President. ‘The package has been successfully delivered,’ she read from the sheet.

  Abrams nodded. ‘What time was that sent?’

  ‘Oh-seven-hundred, sir.’

  Abrams nodded again. The other people in the room were still unaware of the plan, but Abrams would let Cole have his chance. The lives of millions of people were at stake, and he had given the man his word.

  ‘We wait until oh-eight-hundred,’ he announced with finality.

  The ERA leaders had transferred themselves to the main operations room, where they positioned themselves in banks of seats, all with an individual computer monitor in front of them.

  For the launch to go ahead, they would all need to input their individual access codes. The submarine-based British system was, however, still controlled solely by Gregory. Due to the logistical difficulties in sending signals to a submerged vehicle, the system had not yet been upgraded to receive multiple inputs, as the land-based missile groups had been. Nobody had expected a nuclear confrontation to flare up quite so quickly, and the communications systems weren’t due to be overhauled until the next time the Trident submarines were in dock, which wasn’t scheduled until early the next year.

  But the sequence of actions was clear in the minds of all present – at oh-nine-hundred, all thirty-one leaders of the Euro Russian Alliance would enter their access codes and give authorization for the launch of the first wave of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Gregory would then order the release of the Trident missile group, and then a second wave of ICBMs would be launched against the secondary target list.

  Gregory took a sip of water as he sat down in front of his monitor, a second machine to initiate the Trident launch also by his side.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  22

  The man was dragged in, carried by four soldiers outfitted in winter camouflage.

  Severin gestured to a small room off to one side of the main security operations room, and the soldiers carried him there, handcuffing him to a chair. The men left the room and Severin entered, closing the door behind him.

  Cole opened his mouth to speak, but Severin held up a hand and said ‘My name is Alexei Severin, personal assistant to President Vasilev Danko and chief of security for this facility. What is your name?’

  ‘Mark Cole,’ he answered truthfully. ‘Now you’ve got to listen to me, this is a big mistake, I’ve got evidence you’ve got to get to –’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Severin shouted at him. ‘This is not how it works. I ask questions and you answer them. End of story.’

  ‘We don’t have time!’ Cole shouted back. His plan had been to get picked up on radar and brought inside the facility, and that much had worked. But he now had to somehow get somebody to look at the evidence and get it to the ERA leadership, and he was desperately running out of time.

  A radio cackled on the small desk set between the two men. ‘Sir, we’ve found a sealed box attached to the suit. What do you want us to do with it?’

  ‘Could be a weapon,’ Severin said immediately. ‘If not explosives, then perhaps something chemical or biological. Destroy it.’

  ‘No!’ Cole demanded. ‘Don’t do it, that’s what I came here to show you,

  don’t –’

  Severin gestured out of the room’s window, pointing at the man carrying the box to the incinerator. ‘It is already done.’

  Cole moved his body slightly, checking the chair; it wasn’t bolted to the floor. In the blink of an eye, Cole lifted his legs and kicked out at the table, the edge catching Severin in the belly and pitching him backwards out of his chair.

  Cole, his wrists secured to the arms of the chair, stood up in a stooped crouch and swung himself near to the window. He compressed his legs even further and then sprang up in the air, turning both himself and the chair in a sideways barrel roll that took him straight through the glass window onto the concrete floor of the corridor outside.

  The shattered glass embedded itself in Cole’s face and body, but he ignored the pain, and security staff looked on in astonishment as he got to his feet and ran backwards towards the man carrying the box. Nobody had time to react before the chair, still attached to Cole and propelled by his body, slammed into the man and pinned him up against the wall. The man groaned and collapsed, dropping the evidence box to the floor.

  The surrounding men finally came to their senses and grabbed their rifles, pulling them up into position, aimed at Cole, and then Severin was right by his side, pistol jammed into the back of Cole’s head.

  ‘Just look in the box.’ Cole asked. ‘Just look!’

  Severin paused. Maybe it would be prudent to see what this strange man was willing to risk his life over.

  Severin had made Cole open the box himself, shut away inside a decompression chamber that would contain any potential biological or chemical weapon.

  What he saw in the box wasn’t any kind of weapon, however – there were papers, disks and electronic storage devices, but nothing that resembled a weapon.

  ‘Okay,’ Severin said finally. ‘Show me.’

  23

  ‘Mr President?’ asked Vice Admiral Burton. ‘It’s nearly time. We need to start the authentification sequence.’

  President Stephen Abrams looked around the room. All faces were turned to him, waiting for his decision. The ballistic missile defence shield was fully operational, and America’s nuclear strike force was primed, just waiting for the command order. The United States had arrived at DEFCON I.

  Abrams considered the ramifications of his actions. If he gave the go-ahead, the best calculations estimated that somewhere in excess of twenty-two million people would be wiped out instantly, and the toll would only go up when the after-effects were felt – illness, disease and toxicity of epidemic proportions. It was thought that, even with the targeting of purely military targets, the eventual fall-out would result in a final death toll of over sixty
million.

  But if he didn’t act? Then ERA – whether unwittingly manipulated by an English madman or not – would attack the US, with up to two hundred million American citizens killed. As President, the man most directly responsible for the safety of those citizens, the decision was unpalatable but unavoidable.

  Slowly, finally, Abrams nodded. ‘Let’s get started.’

  Gregory was pleased. Hansard’s plans had worked brilliantly, and Britain was now on the verge of re-establishing its global dominance, with Adam Gregory himself at the helm. It was perfect.

  He took his glass of water and put it to his lips, then choked as he saw the monitor in front of him come to life, Hansard staring at him. At first he thought he had been drugged, was hallucinating, but then he felt the room grow quiet, and when he looked around, he realized that everyone else was looking at their own monitors. Even the JNCC technicians had stopped work, and were looking at the room’s main bank of monitors. There was no mistake – Hansard was everywhere. What did it mean?

  And then the recording started, and the meaning became all too obvious.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ asked President Danko in a booming, powerful, enraged voice, as the impact of Hansard’s filmed confession started to sink in around the room.

  ‘This is a British plot?’ Chalois asked incredulously.

  ‘Arrest him!’ Tomasz Kandinsky shouted, rising out of his chair and pointing his finger sharply at Gregory.

  Gregory stood himself, turning to face the other ERA leaders whilst leaving one of his hands leaning casually by the monitor. ‘Please everyone, just calm down,’ he intoned smoothly. ‘This is obviously a ploy by the Americans, they’ve just digitally doctored some footage of Noel and somehow fed it here, and –’