by Jack Mars
“What is the status of Luke Stone’s mission to Belgium?” Susan said. “He should be there by now, shouldn’t he? Have we gotten any kind of communication or report from him? It would be nice to know, in the context of everything else happening, if he thinks Kleine Brogel is vulnerable.”
Kurt looked at one of his aides. “Amy, can you contact the Secret Service plane that went to Belgium earlier today? If the pilots are still at Kleine Brogel, ask them to put Agent Stone in touch with us.”
The young woman nodded and headed out the door, already on her telephone.
Almost as soon as she left, a young man along the wall with a headset on raised his hand. “Kurt?”
“Yes?”
“I’m getting a report right now, relayed to me from Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon. In the past ten minutes, an attack at Incirlik has broken through the defenses on the Turkish side of the base. I repeat, an attack has broken through. A hostile unit of unknown size and origin is on the base, inside the perimeter, fighting against Turkish forces there. The attack was a surprise and may represent a mutiny of units garrisoned at the base.”
Kurt looked at another aide. “Can you bring us up some real-time satellite footage of what it happening there? Also, get us on the phone with our base commander.”
“Will do.”
The young woman named Amy came back into the room. She held her smartphone out to Kurt. “I have Agent Stone on my telephone. He says he’s stuck on the tarmac at Kleine Brogel—the Belgians won’t let him get off the plane.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
4:39 a.m. Eastern European Time (10:39 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Incirlik Air Base
Adana, Turkey
“Don’t slow down,” Jamal shouted into the radio. “Go! Go! Go!”
The heavy construction vehicle was just ahead of them, bare feet away. The driver had slowed as they approached the gates. A squad of soldiers was massed there to hold the gates against invaders. They were facing the wrong way.
To his right, Jamal saw the silhouettes of two mujahideen in the darkness. One held a rocket launcher on his shoulder. The other prepared the launcher for firing. A stream of bright light ripped from the launcher, streaking on a flat plane across the night. WHOOOOSH.
“Go faster,” Jamal said to his own driver. “Push them if you have to.”
The rocket hit the guard station. BOOOM.
The sound was low, like the rumble of an earthquake—it went on and on, and reminded Jamal of heavy paper being crunched into a ball. The squat building exploded outward, shards of it flying. Troops ran in all directions. A man stumbled out of the ruins of the building, his body in flames, like a torch doused in gasoline.
The construction vehicle slowed down again. Who was that driver? He was putting the whole line of trucks at risk.
“Go!” Jamal screamed into the radio. “Do your job!”
Finally, some bit of courage must have risen up within him. The construction truck accelerated, gathering speed for the run at the gate. There was a slight curve in the road just before the gates. The big truck took the curve, leaning dangerously. The payload arm swung wildly at the end of its tether.
The truck skidded, but didn’t slow down. The driver was committed now. He had probably said his prayers. He was going for it.
Machine gun fire came from either side. Bullet holes ripped up the hood of Jamal’s truck. His driver grunted in fear, like an animal.
“Steady,” Jamal said.
A rocket sizzled out from the right, from behind the burning wreck of the guard house. It hit the construction vehicle dead in the front. A direct hit. The cab blew up in a giant fireball, glass and steel and the bodies of the two men inside flying up into the darkness.
The truck kept going, driverless, barely losing momentum. It crashed into the heavy front gates at full speed, blasting through them, a rolling, burning twenty-ton juggernaut. The steel gates shrieked from the impact.
The rear of the truck flew into the air, a backwards wheelie, and for an instant Jamal thought the truck would stall right at the gate, leaving them sitting ducks for the gunfire of the guards. But no. The truck barreled through, sliding sideways now, pulling fifty meters of fencing with it on either side. The top weight became too much, and the ruined truck tumbled onto its side, sliding to a flaming halt on the road just outside the gates.
Jamal’s truck rolled past the fiery carnage of the guardhouse, seconds behind the wrecked construction vehicle. There was just enough room outside the gate to make a sharp right and escape along the edge of the base.
A burst of automatic fire came from their left. Jamal ducked as the driver’s window shattered inward, spraying the inside of the cab with glass. The driver made another animal noise and grabbed the side of his neck. This time the sound he made was little more than an exhalation, hardly louder than a whisper.
“Unh.”
He looked at Jamal. Blood jetted from under the left side of his chin, pulsing out and streaming down his neck to his shirt. His shirt became spattered, then soaked. His eyes were bright, alert and terrified.
As Jamal watched, the color seemed to drain from the man’s face. An instant later, his eyes became calm, then vacant and dazed. He was bleeding out. His jaw hung slack. He didn’t speak again.
The truck was still rolling. Jamal reached across the driver, opened his door, and pushed him out. The man was still alive, but offered no resistance. He tumbled backwards out onto the roadway.
Jamal slid into the driver’s seat, wrenched the steering wheel to the right, and slammed on the brakes. The truck sideswiped the burning construction vehicle and skidded to a halt. Gunfire strafed the trailer, where the warheads were stored.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk thunk, as bullets punched through the metal.
Another truck roared through the gates, turned hard to the right, and rolled onto its side. Jamal flinched as the giant truck slid across the road toward him.
He braced.
CRUNCH. The impact jostled him hard, nearly tossing him through the open driver’s side door. He clung to the steering wheel.
He had to get moving. If the trucks piled up here, all the plans, months of preparation, were for nothing.
He yanked the door closed. He shoved the truck into gear and stomped on the gas pedal, tires spinning on pavement for several seconds, squealing as rubber was laid down, acrid black smoke rising behind him. The truck wouldn’t move—it was wedged between the two others.
He whispered feverishly, not even sure what he was saying, begging the Prophet to intervene. No. Demanding it.
“Come on! Help me!”
A rocket hit the undercarriage of the truck that had fallen over. That truck was carrying nuclear weapons! Not good. The explosion was deafening, so loud it was like a wall of sound. It blew out the bottom of that truck, sending debris flying away from Jamal, back toward the front gates of the base. Flames engulfed the trailer.
If he stayed here much longer, he was going to die.
Suddenly, his truck wrenched free. He fought with the steering wheel as the trailer jackknifed behind him.
Now, the third truck in line barreled through the gates, its headlights blinding him. It turned a sharp right and collided with Jamal’s truck. The two trucks scraped each other’s sides as they plunged together down the roadway.
The new truck roared ahead of Jamal, and he let it go. He glanced back. The fourth truck in line was on fire. That was the last one. It had rolled to a stop just short of the gates. Armed men were spraying it with machine gun fire.
Behind there, a massive explosion ripped open the dark night. A huge red fireball flew on a straight line into the air.
The mujahideen were attacking.
Jamal turned to face the blackened roadway again. The other truck had raced far ahead. That was good. It was important that they separate.
Two trucks had escaped the base. Two out of four.
Eight warheads.
Jamal turned left at the next road, away from the dwindling lights of the other truck. In a few moments, he had entered an empty highway. There were no lights on anywhere. He was not being pursued. The truck’s radiator was steaming, but otherwise it seemed to be functioning normally.
On the horizon, he could still see the orange flames of the firefight against the night sky. A large helicopter gunship roared by just overhead, rushing to the battle—Jamal felt it more than saw it.
He drove directly south, bringing the truck first to the rendezvous point.
And then, Syria.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
6:05 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (1:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Kleine Brogel Air Base
Kleine Brogel, Belgium
“As you can see, there is nothing to worry about.”
Luke could see that.
The base commander, Colonel Wenders, had been yanked from his bed in the middle of the night by a call from the Belgian prime minister. The President of the United States had directly requested a tour of the facilities for her agent. It could not wait until after the waffles were served in the morning.
Now Wenders stood with Luke, his team, and Major Dwight in a cavernous hangar with a rounded ceiling three stories above their heads. In front of them were three B61 nuclear bombs—long and sleek, they looked like they could be launched from the ground. Luke knew they were designed to be carried aboard fighter craft traveling very fast—they were air to surface weapons.
Wenders had walked them through all of the hardened concrete bunkers that housed the B61 nuclear missiles. There were twenty-one missiles in all, stored in groups of three, in seven different bunkers.
The bunkers were situated in clusters—one group of four and one group of three. Each bunker had double-steel bay doors with digital locks that required a key card to be swiped. Once swiped, the locking mechanism became activated and required an eight-digit code in order to continue. Once the correct code was input, the doors then required a physical key to open the lock.
Personnel were not allowed to carry both the digital swipe card and the physical key—in essence, it took two men to open the door to the bunker. Further, each bunker required a different key card, a different code, and a different physical key. And when the key card was swiped, it sounded an alarm in the night watch station, where the guards could then monitor the progress of the personnel accessing the bunkers. Gaining entry to the bunkers was, all by itself, a monstrously cumbersome process.
Once inside, the bombs were stored in bays that were under the floor of the bunker. To bring them to the surface required yet another key card, yet another code, and yet another physical key. The kicker here was that there were three different lock mechanisms at a command module inside the bunker. If the person trying to reach the nukes happened to use the wrong lock mechanism, the system would shut itself off, an another alarm would sound, and the bunker would lock from the outside. The thieves who made the mistake would have nothing to do except wait for the Belgian airmen to arrive, likely sometime after brunch.
Once the correct lock mechanism was accessed in the correct way, it would activate a hydraulic lift—the floor would slide away and the bombs would creak slowly to the surface. Swann timed how long it took from turning the physical key in the lock to the nukes parked on the floor of the bunker, and no longer moving—fourteen minutes. No terrorists who had made it this far would be likely to have that kind of time to spare.
“Is there any way to short-circuit this process?” Luke said.
Wenders—stiff, tall, and straight as a ram—made an exaggerated face designed to convey confusion, or perhaps disgust. “Short-circuit? What is this, please?”
“Go around it,” Luke said.
“Break it,” Ed Newsam offered. “Blow up that door. Hot-wire this lift. Steal the bombs.”
The colonel laughed. “Impossible. If the doors are tampered with, the lift deactivates. The code and the keys will not even start it. You could detonate the doors, then stand here waiting to be apprehended.”
“Can anyone at the guard station open these locks?” Luke said.
Wenders shook his head. “They can remotely shut down the electronic system here in this building, but they cannot access the locks or the hydraulic. Those are on a local network inside the bunker, making them impossible to hack from the guard station or from the larger world.”
“So it would really take an inside job to steal the bombs,” Swann said. “Someone on the base, who has access to the keys and the codes, and who has a friend at the guard station willing to look the other way.”
Luke nearly laughed. Swann was not known for his charm, or his tact. The colonel gave a pained smile.
“I assure you,” he said, “nothing like this is possible here. And even if it were, even if there were several people interested in taking the bombs, and they were all stationed at this base at the same time, keen to help each other… even then, it still wouldn’t work. As you must know, these bombs are useless without the codes that arm and activate them. Those codes are not stored on this base. I am the commander, and I don’t have access to them. Even if we needed these bombs, and we mounted them on our fighter planes, we could not get them to work because we do not have the codes.”
“Who has the codes?” Mika said.
The colonel shrugged. “The Americans, perhaps. Maybe the prime minister, or someone else in government. All I know is I don’t have them.”
“So why have the bombs,” Ed Newsam said, “if you can’t use them?”
Colonel Wenders shook his head. “Maybe that is a better question for the politicians.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Luke said.
By 8 a.m., they were back at the boutique hotel in Kleine Brogel that Major Dwight had warned them about. It seemed that even after the nuclear war tour, they were still not welcome at the base.
That was fine with Luke. He was tired. He was wrung out. He would be happy to take a shower and go to sleep on a large bed in a private room, rather than a cot in a barracks, or even an officer’s cabin. The four of them sat in the guest living room of the hotel, doing a quick postmortem before Luke dismissed them all until this afternoon.
Their jobs here were done, as far as he was concerned.
“Looks pretty hard to me,” Ed said. “The base seems tight enough, and getting to the bombs is a pain. Maybe some disgruntled ex-soldiers could make a play for them, but I doubt they’d get very far.”
“The colonel told me they randomly generate new access codes every day,” Swann said. “If that’s really true, then a code that a thief stole yesterday is already no good. You’d have to have some way to steal the access codes on the fly, for both the outside door and the hydraulic lift, assuming you’d been able to steal the key card and the keys. Then you’d have to go straight to the bunker and get the bombs. If you took any time for extra planning at all, by the next time you arrived, the codes would have been changed.”
“And the bombs themselves are useless without the permissive action link codes,” Mika said. “Which the colonel said he doesn’t have.”
“And what would you do if you did manage to steal a bomb?” Swann said. “Would you then steal a supersonic jet? Which, by the way, is located in a different hangar on the other side of the base. And that’s assuming you got on the base in the first place. He also told me they changed the fences—they’re twenty feet high and topped with razor wire all the way around.”
“This looks like a bust, man,” Ed said. “We came out here to look at their security measures, and they look pretty good. I don’t think anyone is going to get these bombs.”
Luke nodded. “I feel the same way. Okay, let’s call that good news. We can all get some shut-eye. We’ll call it free time today, and in the evening, maybe we’ll go in to Brussels for some chow on the President’s dime. Tomorrow morning, we can head back to the States. We’ll call it a thirty-six-hour working vacation. Sound okay?”
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Around the table, the group nodded.
Luke’s satellite phone started to ring. He glanced at it, hoping it wasn’t Becca. It wasn’t. Just the President calling him, probably to ask for his report. He would try to wrap it up quickly with her.
He held the phone to his ear.
“Hold for the President of the United States.”
He waited. In another moment, she came on.
“Luke?”
“Susan. Hi. Are you guys waiting for my report? We just finished up with the colonel, ah”—Luke glanced at his watch—“ten minutes ago.”
Ed shook his head and smiled.
“What’s the status?” she said.
“Here? Good. Everyone on the team is in agreement. There is a negligible chance that terrorists could infiltrate this base and get to the bombs. The base itself is secure, and the process to access the bombs is positively Byzantine.”
“Okay,” Susan said. “I have you on speaker. We all heard that, and it’s duly noted.”
Luke caught the note of strain in her voice.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said.
Luke’s team were staring at him now. He shrugged, his ear pressed to the phone. “Tell me.”
“Luke, this is Kurt Kimball. There is an ongoing attempt to overthrow the government in Turkey. It’s happening now. As part of that, someone attacked Incirlik Air Base in Turkey last night and early this morning. It was an infiltration, an inside job. A group of irregular fighters, possibly jihadis, launched from inside the base. That unit has either been entirely destroyed, or a few may have escaped in the confusion and darkness. But that isn’t the issue. The entire offensive appears to have been a cover. During the battle, another group of men infiltrated the base and attempted to steal at least sixteen W84 nuclear warheads stored there.”
The words washed over Luke in a blur. He couldn’t seem to organize his thoughts. He’d gone without a real night’s sleep now for several days—he wasn’t even sure when the last time was. And when you were tired like this, your sharpness began to blunt.