by Mike Maden
“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”
62
Jack jumped into Emir’s Renault. He set the open laptop on the passenger seat, then took an extra minute and synched his phone with the Renault’s Bluetooth audio so that conversation with Gavin would come through the car’s audio speakers. He then set his smartphone on the dash so he could more easily follow the GPS signal from Aida’s Volkswagen.
Jack punched the gas and headed out of the compound, Emir’s Colt in his lap.
Jack followed the blue GPS arrow on his phone generated by the signal coming from Aida’s Volkswagen. For the most part, he was just following the two-lane E73 north and west as through the contour of the mountains. She was ten minutes ahead of him and making good time, heading higher into the pine-covered hills. They seemed to be the only two vehicles on the road.
“Jack? I found something,” Gavin’s voice said over the car’s audio system. “It’s a video scheduled to go out to social media at ten-sixteen a.m. local—that’s just thirty-five minutes from now. Some guy named Commander Brkić issued a fatwa against all nonbelievers and Crusaders.”
“Is that the guy with the blind eye?”
“Yeah. Says he launched the thermobaric missiles that killed thousands—past tense, because the video hasn’t gone out yet.”
“Thermobarics. Holy shit. What’s the delivery system?”
“Can’t be sure. But there’s footage of masked fighters standing in front of a Soviet-era BM-21 Grad rocket launch system flashing victory signs and waving a black flag. It’s basically a six-by-six truck with a box launcher on back. According to Google, it holds forty 122-millimeter ballistic missiles.”
“You think it’s possible he has one in his arsenal?”
“The BM-21 is the most deployed missile-launch system in the world, and the Bosnian Army has had them since Tito’s days. So yeah, it’s credible. Only thing is, something doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“That launch system isn’t known for being real accurate. I did a quick check of the stadium measurements. There’s a good chance a lot of those missiles won’t land inside it.”
“But a lot of people will still get hurt.”
“Still not the kind of casualties he’s promising on that video. He obviously thinks his system is more accurate.”
“How?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“Maybe he’s bluffing.”
“This guy doesn’t look like a bluffer to me,” Gavin said. “And why brag about it if it didn’t, or doesn’t, happen? Then he looks like an idiot.”
“Good point. Let’s assume he’s telling the truth. We need to figure out how he plans to pull it off.”
“Can I tell Gerry what’s going on now? He’s been breathing down my neck.”
“He’s at the office? At this hour?”
“Just arrived ten minutes ago. He’s been after me to try and reach you.”
“I’ll call him right now.”
“Good luck with that, Jack. You’re not exactly his favorite person at the moment.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
* * *
—
Jack rang off, then dialed Gerry’s phone. He picked up after the first ring.
“I’ve got a funny feeling you’re not at the airport,” the ex-senator growled.
“Worse than that, we’ve got a situation.”
Jack read him in on the video and possible missile strike.
“Good God Almighty, Jack. This is a nightmare scenario. We need to start an immediate evacuation.”
“Bad idea. Whatever asshole is watching the video feed will see it and order an immediate launch. Besides, the city is jammed. You couldn’t empty that place out if you tried.”
“Damn it, you’re right.”
“I’m on the way now to shut it down—if I can locate it.”
“I don’t know how you managed to step in front of this stampede, Jack, but you’ve got to find a way to stop it.”
“With only thirty-five minutes left until the launch, I can’t promise you I’ll get it done.”
“I’m calling Mary Pat Foley now to fill her in. Keep me posted. And for the love of God, watch your six, will you?”
63
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The dreaded three a.m. phone call had been a talking point in nearly every presidential campaign for the past twenty years, a metaphor for the gut-wrenching, unexpected national emergencies that usually cropped up at the most inconvenient moments.
The clock read 3:41 a.m. when President Ryan’s cell phone rang. He picked it up from the nightstand, yawning. His wife stirred. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, hon. Go back to sleep.”
But Dr. Cathy Ryan knew better, having received a few early-morning emergency eye surgery phone calls herself over the years. Nobody called at this time of the morning for either of them unless it was a blood-soaked catastrophe in the making.
“I’ll put on a pot of coffee.” She dragged a comforting hand across his shoulder as she shuffled past him toward the kitchen, yawning.
Ryan smiled, grateful for the amazing woman sharing his crazy life.
“How bad is it, Mary Pat?”
“As bad as it gets.”
DNI Foley filled him in on the events of the last twenty-four hours as relayed to her by Gerry, and the ticking clock winding down toward Armageddon with the Russians. The civilian aircraft had been blown out of the sky just a few hours before, but because no Americans were on board, the President wasn’t notified, even though his son apparently had been the target.
“Mr. President, if Jack can’t find those rockets and take them out . . .”
“Yeah, I know. We need to get the Russians in on this ASAP.”
“We don’t have a lot of options right now.”
“Hell, we don’t have any, since we don’t even have a target at this point. Right now, it’s all up to Jack.”
* * *
—
The first call President Ryan made was to his chief of staff, Arnie Van Damm. Arnie was a veteran of as many three a.m. phone calls as he was, because Arnie was the first person Ryan always called at a time like this.
“Arnie, you’ve got five minutes to organize a conference call with Scott, Bob, and Mary Pat. And patch it over to the Situation Room.”
“What’s this about?”
“No time to explain.” Ryan checked his watch. Shit. He’d already burned four minutes. “And now we’ve got just thirty minutes to go.”
“It’ll take at least twenty.”
“You’ve got five.”
“On it, boss.”
Ryan stood in the kitchen in a pair of faded Levi’s, a threadbare USMC sweatshirt, and a battered pair of Saucony running shoes, calling on the landline to the overnight White House operator.
“Get me Admiral Dean, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, head of the Sixth Fleet, based in Naples, Italy. I don’t care if he’s on the crapper reading Marcus Aurelius, I need him on the phone now. And patch it through to my personal cell. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
“And then get me General Colgan, 31st Fighter Wing in Aviano, Italy. Same drill.”
“Right away, sir.”
Two options, maybe, he thought, as Cathy handed him a sealed thermal cup of steaming black coffee and a kiss on the cheek. He bolted for the door, shoving his Bluetooth into his ear, searching his mind for more options, trying to remember distances and maps and borders in a part of the world he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
Some men panicked when a crisis hit, but Ryan’s mind cleared and focused like a sniper’s scope drawing a bead on a distant target. That ability made him a good marine officer and a first-rate CIA analyst when he was younger, but
it served him best now that he was commander in chief. He stood on the edge of a perfect storm of bad actors, bad intentions, and bad timing.
Everything hung on his next decision, but he didn’t want to make it until he heard back from his son, racing into the eye of that same perfect storm. As President, he was grateful a man like Jack was on the scene.
As a father, he was scared to death.
64
The bleary-eyed communications tech working the video teleconferencing (VTC) cameras and audio in the Situation Room yawned violently behind the control room glass.
Ryan thought she looked like she had just graduated from high school, but she must have been in her early twenties. She was damn good, patching in the live video feed from Aida’s laptop onto one of the big wall monitors, as well as video teleconferencing with Arnie Van Damm, DNI Foley, and SecDef Burgess, all scattered across the country. She also patched in Jack on his phone, along with Gerry and Gavin, who were at the Hendley Associates office in Alexandria, before the first tray of coffee had arrived.
The countdown clock from the laptop displayed on the main monitor. Just twenty-five minutes until the rocket strike at the soccer stadium.
President Ryan stood at the head of the long table, leaning on it, his eyes fixed on one of the wall monitors.
“According to Gavin’s brief, our best guess is that the launch platform is a BM-21 Grad MRLS like the one playing on your screens from the Brkić video. It’s mobile as hell, and we don’t know where it is at the moment.
“That box launcher holds forty 122-millimeter thermobaric missiles, with a maximum operational range of twenty-four miles. Let’s assume half that distance, because these jokers don’t want to push their luck. That means there’s over four hundred and fifty miles of territory to search, much of it tree-covered mountains. How in the hell do we find it in the next twenty-five minutes?”
“USA-224 isn’t due over that area for another eighteen minutes,” Foley said. She was referring to the NRO’s KH-11 Keyhole orbiting optical satellite. “Not that it would do much good in that terrain, if they’re trying to hide it. SBIRS is geostationary, but that’s only going to tell us when the rockets are launched.”
“Assuming we do find it, our options for taking it out are limited, to put it mildly,” Ryan said.
“F-16s out of Aviano would be my choice,” Burgess said.
Ryan shook his head. “General Colgan says it will take thirty-two minutes before his Falcons can scramble and deliver a payload. That’s seven minutes too late if I give him the go order right now. And the nearest carrier is currently on a NATO training exercise off the coast of Portugal, so naval aviation is out of the question. But according to Admiral Dean, we have a guided missile destroyer steaming approximately twenty miles off the coast of Croatia at this very moment.”
“Tomahawks,” Mary Pat Foley said.
“Precisely. From the destroyer’s position to Sarajevo, the Tomahawk flight time is just under fifteen minutes.”
“But we still don’t have a target location,” Arnie said. “We’ll have to get it within the next ten—check that—nine minutes if we hope to prevent the attack.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “There is one other option.”
ON BOARD THE USS GARZA (DDG-116), ADRIATIC SEA, TWENTY MILES SOUTHWEST OF DUBROVNIK, CROATIA
The Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer sat in the choppy waters of the blue Adriatic, its launch alarm klaxon blaring like an ambulance siren, warning sailors to clear the foredeck where the thirty-two cells of the vertical launch system (VLS) were located behind the five-inch gun.
One of the cell hatches burst open in a gush of blinding orange fire as the solid-fuel rocket booster of a GM/UGM-109E (TLAM-Block IV) Tomahawk cruise missile roared from beneath the deck. When it reached its cruising altitude of one thousand feet seconds later, the rocket booster fell away and the eighteen-foot cruise missile dipped perpendicular to the water’s surface as its turbofan engine fired.
The Tomahawk—essentially a pilotless airplane—veered northeast, trailing white smoke in its 550-mile-per-hour flight toward the Croatian coastline.
The Tomahawk’s terrain-hugging, object-avoidance navigation was possible because of its TERCOM (terrain contour matching) and DSMAC (digitized scene-mapping correlator), aided by GPS and INS guidance systems.
During terminal phase on target approach, the Tomahawk’s onboard radar homing systems would take over.
Three seconds later, a second Tomahawk launched from another VLS cell, following in the wake of the first, but taking a slightly different course, programmed to arrive at the same time. Redundancy was key for a mission as critical as this one.
The only problem was, neither missile had a target.
65
Jack glanced at the GPS marker on his phone. Aida’s blue arrow had stopped moving. Thanks to the Renault’s thrumming V6 engine, he made much better time than she did. He was close.
A few minutes later he pulled to the side of the road, where he couldn’t be seen. According to the GPS map, the Volkswagen van was parked in front of a house set back from the main road. Beyond the house, toward the back of the property near a steep hill, was a newly constructed warehouse-style steel building. The whole compound was set in a clearing surrounded by trees.
Jack checked for passing traffic as he slipped his phone’s Bluetooth earpiece on. No vehicles were on the road, so Jack grabbed Emir’s chromed pistol, jumped out of the car, and dashed for the tree line.
* * *
—
Jack stood in the trees scanning the compound for movement but saw none. No Aida, no Brkić, and sure as hell no rocket launcher. Only the house with Aida’s van parked in front, about a hundred feet away, and the big steel storage shed a thousand feet back.
He figured Aida must be in the house, but was anybody in the shed?
Come to think of it, that shed was big enough to hold one of the really big Happy Times! tour buses. Or an eighteen-wheeler.
Or a Grad rocket launcher.
If he went for the shed, Aida might slip away. But if he went for Aida, he might be sentencing thousands to their deaths if the rocket launcher was located in that shed and started firing.
He started to run toward the shed but stopped, his mind racing. Something about that live video feed had been nagging at him for the last ten minutes. He called Gavin.
“Jack, it’s Gavin. I’ve patched you in on a conference call with Gerry and—”
“Jack, it’s me,” President Ryan said. “And a few others on VTC. What did you find?”
“I found the van, but no Aida, no Brkić, no rockets, and no launcher—at least not yet. But I’ve got an idea. Gavin, do you still have the live feed on your end?”
“Of course.”
“I can see it on my end, too,” the President said.
“That live feed,” Jack said. “Doesn’t it keep the exact same center point? Like the drone is circling around the stadium, but the center point never moves?”
“Yeah. Looks like a preprogrammed flight pattern,” Gavin said.
“Sure. But maybe it’s not just a video feed, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said that Brkić thought he had a way to make those rockets more accurate. If they were somehow laser-guided by that drone, that would do the job, wouldn’t it?”
“Dang it! Why didn’t I think of that?” Gavin blurted. “That drone probably is shooting a laser guidance beam, along with the video image.”
“The Bosnians need to shoot that thing down,” the SecDef said over Jack’s phone.
“No!” Jack said. “Just the opposite. That drone is a link between the stadium and the launcher.”
“Which means I can find the launch site by tracing the launch computer uplink to the drone, or the drone’s video signal. Well, unless they�
�re encrypted.”
“Do it, Gav.”
“Good work, son. Gavin will take it from here,” President Ryan said.
Jack hung up, relieved that the launcher and rockets were taken off his plate. Now he could focus on finding Aida and Brkić and make them pay for their crimes.
* * *
—
Jack sped over to the front of the house and climbed the porch as quietly as possible, the big chromed Colt in his hand. He listened again. Thought he heard some noise inside, but he couldn’t tell what. No voices, though. If it was Aida, she was likely by herself.
Jack carefully turned the unlocked door handle and gently pushed the door open, trying not to make a sound as he slipped inside.
He stood in a living room. There were two doors on the left, both open. One was an empty bedroom with bunk beds, the other a bathroom.
To his right was a staircase leading to the second story.
A closed, swinging door was on the wall opposite him. A kitchen, he guessed.
The living room was strangely familiar. He’d seen it before in the video Gavin had pulled of Brkić. A giant black AQAB flag was nailed to a wall, and the video camera Brkić used to record himself was still on its tripod in front of the folding chair he was sitting in when he made it. The only thing that was missing was the rifle—and Brkić.
The noise was louder now, coming from the other side of the swinging door in front of him.
Thumping. Zipping. Footsteps.
Jack stepped forward as softly as possible.
Right onto a squeaking board.
Shit.
Jack froze. Listened. Nothing.
Wait. In the distance. A sound, muffled. Music. Singing? He wasn’t sure. Not in the house. Where? The shed, maybe? If so, it must have been loud as hell for him to hear it all the way in here.
A loose floorboard creaked on the other side of the swinging door.