‘Nonsense!’ cried the Cypriot Prime Minister. ‘We should have seen it before! Where’s security?’ he yelled more loudly. ‘Get them in here!’
‘Look,’ Gregory continued, checking the entrance doors for signs of security, ‘even if it is true, does it really matter?’ He saw the look of incredulity on the faces of the surrounding men and women, but ploughed on anyway. ‘We still win anyway, don’t we? I mean, with America gone, the Confederation will have power we could never otherwise dream of! Can nobody see that?’
‘You’re insane!’ the German Chancellor spat out. ‘It is mass murder! Mass murder! You’re a madman!’
Gregory was about to reply, when he saw the entrance doors opening, security operatives flooding into the room. He noticed that Danko’s bodyguard was leading them, with another man right by his side, holding what looked to be a small metal box.
He knew his time had almost come. Almost – but not quite.
Cole saw it first, as he entered the main operations room of the JNCC, right by the side of Alexei Severin; who, upon seeing the recording, had immediately had it relayed to the main command centre, and then led his security team there at full speed
Adam Gregory was standing by his seat, standing calmly as everyone shouted and raged around him, but his right hand was moving – where?
‘No!’ Cole called out, his own right hand moving rapidly through the air in a wide, rapid arc.
The metal box thrown by Cole struck Gregory hard in the head, knocking the man unconscious to the ground, but it was too late.
The second monitor by his chair bleeped merrily, the display reading ‘AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED. LAUNCH INITIATED.’
24
The authorization sequence that was occurring in the underground bowels of Offutt Air Base was completed.
The President had entered his own codes, along with those of the Vice President and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The order to launch would be transmitted instantly to several points around the globe – nuclear bomber aircraft, nuclear missile-carrying submarines and ICBM bases, all of which would now go through their own authentification procedures before initiating the strike.
Abrams put his head in his hands, rubbing his brow. ‘God forgive us,’ he intoned. ‘Please.’
After a few moments, he looked up. ‘I need a drink.’
There were rumblings of agreement, and then the tension was broken by the piercing ringing of a telephone.
Abrams looked over at the secure red telephone ringing on his desk, then leapt across, picking it up. ‘This is the President.’
‘Mr Abrams,’ Danko said at the other end of the line, ‘we have seen the evidence and have called off our launch. We are immediately decommissioning our strike force, I am sure your intelligence services will be able to verify this in due course.’
The ERA heads of state were all out of their chairs now, gathered around Danko as he spoke to Abrams, although Cole and Severin were in the position of honour right by his side.
Adam Gregory had been put in handcuffs and carted off to an isolation cell, where he would stay until being brought to trial for crimes against humanity.
‘Please call off your own strike,’ Danko continued, as Cole had told them of the American plans, ‘and please feed the following co-ordinates immediately to your NMD bases.’
President Abrams listened with horror as Danko told him about Gregory’s launching of the UK Trident missiles. He could now see the JNCC on live video-feed, as he simultaneously appeared to the Europeans on their own screens.
Abrams barked orders at his men, who immediately set about cancelling the American launch order. The relief that spread through the command centres on both sides of the Atlantic was palpable, but everyone was aware that the threat was far from over, at least for the United States.
Watching the monitor at the JNCC, Cole hoped and prayed that the US missile defences would be good enough. With the co-ordinates of the missiles being fed to them, he knew that there was a chance, but the ramifications of failure were great.
The targets of the British missiles were the ten biggest American cities, from coast to coast. If even one missile got through, there would still be devastating losses of life.
He watched Severin and the ERA leadership as the main, huge screen of the operations room came up with a radar image of the American continent. He saw the large blips of missiles as they entered US airspace, racing at incredible speed towards their unsuspecting targets.
There were uncontrolled cheers as the first of the blips was deluged with smaller blips, vanishing off the screen. Cole could almost see the smaller defensive missiles streaking through the sky, aimed directly at the large, heavy nuclear-tipped weapon, and the tremendous explosion that would have resulted when they finally intercepted it.
But there were more large blips, and they were slowly but surely converging on the huge metropolitan targets.
Cole felt the sweat running down his face as he watched one blip destroyed, followed by another, and then another.
Then there were just three left, and then two, and then incredibly just one – just one Trident missile shooting through the air at three thousand miles per hour, on its mission to kill and annihilate.
The Americans and the Europeans watched in their respective operations rooms as the final missile got closer and closer to its target of Detroit, a teeming urban mass of almost one million people. There was silence on both sides of the world as the smaller blips of the defence missiles converged on the larger, offensive missile.
No-one could breathe, let alone speak, as they waited for what would happen – would it be the destruction of five hundred kilos of steel and uranium, or of an entire city?
And then the large blip on the huge radar screens was subsumed by the smaller blips as the US NMD missiles successfully made contact with the Trident nuclear warhead, blowing it out of the sky.
The noise made by the gathered leaders of America and the Euro Russian Alliance could almost have been heard above ground, Cole thought, but it didn’t stop him joining in, shouts of pure joy coming unbidden from his mouth as tears of relief streamed down his cheeks. Moments later, he even found himself in the strong embrace of Severin, and then Danko was there too.
They had done it.
EPILOGUE
Akamas Peninsula, Cyprus
1 May 2019
1
Cole sat staring out at the azure blue of the Mediterranean, as he did every day.
It was here that he had married Sarah, and although it was hard the first time he had come, it got easier and easier as the days went by. Now he mainly remembered the happiness he had felt with his family, rather than the emptiness, guilt and horror associated with their death.
The peninsula was a protected area, and hardly anyone ever came here, which was why Cole liked it so much. It was almost untouched by the hands of man, and had therefore retained its stunning natural beauty. He sat on a rocky outcrop above the pure white sand of a small cove, basking in the sunshine.
Once there had been a full reduction of alert status on both sides of the Atlantic, independently verified, a full combined investigation had been launched into the matter.
Cole, due to his efforts in remedying the situation, had been granted a full pardon by both ERA and the USA, and had then immediately left for southern Cyprus before they changed their minds.
There had been much soul searching amongst the governments of both powers, but it was decided that the truth of the situation should never come out. The world would never know how close it had come to annihilation.
The problem of Adam Gregory was solved in much the same way – it was decided that it would be best if the world never knew about the role he and Hansard had played in the proceedings. Hansard was already dead, of course, but Adam Gregory was embarrassingly alive.
A public trial would have been a dangerous thing, but the man had to be punished. It was therefore unanimously agreed that he would be kept ind
efinitely in the subterranean isolation cell, a quarter of a mile under the ice of the great Siberian lake, never again to see the light of day. His death was reported in a plane crash on his way to an ERA meeting in Moscow, and his ‘remains’ were gathered together for a state funeral back in the UK.
The Euro Russian Alliance remained as an entity, although the creation of the proposed Confederation had suffered a great crisis of confidence, and had been temporarily shelved.
To help relations between ERA and the United States, a new organization was in the process of being established. It was suggested that its name would be the ‘Global Security Organization’, and would fill the transatlantic void that had been left by Nato.
Cole had followed these events in the first days after the crisis, but once he had arrived in Cyprus, he had tried to forget about politics and world affairs. He just wanted peace and quiet, to mend his broken soul.
2
This peace and quiet was suddenly broken by the sound of a distant 4x4, approaching at speed.
Besides hiking, a sturdy 4x4 was the only way to get access to this cove – there were no roads that lead here.
Cole himself had walked the five miles from the nearest road, having driven there from the small house he was renting in the nearby village of Dhrousha. He didn’t have anything with him – no weapon, and no means of escape, except for climbing down the rock face to the beach and swimming out to sea.
He was through running though, Cole had decided. Whoever it was, Cole would simply wait and face them directly. They could do nothing worse than had already been done.
Cole was surprised when the light dune buggy came into view, bouncing violently up and down on the craggy landscape.
He knew both the driver and the passenger of the vehicle. The short man in the driving seat was Charles Arnold, and the tall man was undoubtedly Ted Moses.
Cole almost had to laugh; dressed in suits as they were in the twenty-eight degree heat of the midday sun, looking completely incongruous against the basic utilitarianism of the dune buggy.
The vehicle came to a stop right next to Cole, and both men got out, grinning at Cole.
‘It’s good to see you,’ Arnold said, extending a hand.
Cole shook hands with both men, wondering what had brought them here. ‘You too,’ Cole agreed. ‘But what do you want with me?’
‘Well, first of all we’d like to thank you for what you did,’ Moses said earnestly.
Cole looked doubtful, but Arnold continued. ‘It’s true. What you did was above and beyond. Really.’
‘Anyway,’ Cole said, going off the subject, ‘what else do you want?’
Arnold and Moses looked at each other, deciding who was going to talk. Arnold took the reins. ‘You’ve heard about the creation of the Global Security Organization?’ he asked.
Cole just nodded his head.
‘Well, it’s going ahead for sure,’ Arnold continued, ‘and it has been decided to incorporate an intelligence element. A new intelligence agency if you will, a real multinational agency with cooperation between America and Europe. It’s going to be powerful, with more clout than CIA and SIS and all the other services combined.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘We’ve been working on the proposals, Dorrell wants us there as the CIA liaison after our work on our last investigation. And it just so happens that the proposed Director of the GSO Intelligence Agency has asked for you personally. He wants you in on the ground level, to help set up the operations division.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Alexei Severin,’ Arnold answered. ‘Danko made sure he got the job, and I’ve got to tell you, we’ve got no problem with it at all. The man’s damned good. Honest and down to earth, a real operator. That’s why he wants you. He thinks you’re the best.’
Cole looked back out to sea, considering what they had told him. ‘No,’ he said with finality. ‘I’m finished with it all. I just want to be here, in the peace and quiet, to sort my head out. I’ve seen too much death. Enough is enough.’
Arnold searched the man’s eyes, but it seemed that he was genuine.
Moses then spoke, his deep voice soft, probing. ‘You know, it was really hard to find you.’
‘I told you, I’m out of it. I don’t want to be found.’
Moses nodded his head. ‘Yes, and if you didn’t want to be found, you wouldn’t be. We know that. And yet it was only hard to find you, not impossible. Why is that?’
Cole turned away, looking out to the sea once more, fearing he knew the answer.
He wasn’t out of it – the life – at all.
And as he turned back to the two men, he knew it wasn’t over.
It never would be.
The End
. . . but the original Mark Cole returns in
PLEDGE OF HONOR, out September 2015!
Seven Day Hero Page 44