Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  OLYMPUS SECURITY OFFICES

  36 EAST 74TH STREET

  NEW YORK CITY

  Sergey Rogozin loved the tree-lined blocks of the Upper East Side. He had insisted that their New York offices be in twin town houses on a leafy street. Also, he did not trust high-rise buildings, too many other tenants, too much shared telecommunications equipment.

  With his own building, he could install the satellite dish that would connect directly with the Express-AM7 satellite of the Russian Satellite Company. His encrypted link to that bird would be safe, as would the satellite itself. There was no other way he would connect, certainly not over the Internet. This gave him a dedicated link to his Moscow office and from there he had a virtual private network to Kuznetzov in Yakutsk.

  The data rate was slow, but he could still do voice and exchange short documents. Today he began by downloading the daily briefing his team had been sending out to him and the board members throughout the operation, beginning in August. As it slowly opened on his laptop, he could see the map of Antarctica. Each of the five research stations was shown, along with the position of the two ships, Rothera and Nunatak. Four of the five sites indicated red, armed. The fifth, Wilkes Basin, would be armed today.

  The ships’ captains were told to take up positions at a safe distance and monitor the explosions and the aftermath, to see how fast the ice melt happened, to measure the sea level rise. Only the captains and a handful of the Olympus men on each ship were read into the operation and knew what would happen. Or thought they did. What none of them knew was that the ships would explode at the same time that the bombs did, from hidden conventional explosives on board.

  Sergey did not like loose ends. That’s why he had killed all the Trustees after they sold the bombs. Everyone, except Potgeiter, of course. He had been useful. It was he whom Rogozin had originally contacted with the proposal to buy the bombs, he who had persuaded the others that it was all right to sell them to Taiwan. Of course, Taiwan had been a false flag for the Trustees to see, just as al Qaeda and Hezbollah had been false flags raised once the Americans and Israelis learned about the bomb theft. Sergey liked false flags.

  Ray Bowman was a loose end, Sergey thought, he and his South African friend. They had been getting too close. They had somehow managed to trace the bombs to Madagascar and then to Comoros. But they had been stopped there, he was sure. There was no way that they would figure out that the bombs were bought by the Purpose Fund, no way that they could learn that the Purpose Fund owned Polis Holdings and Olympus Security, no way that they would ever connect anything back to the Czar. In any event, Bowman would be eliminated, this time successfully, as would the South African woman.

  When the detonations take place, Sergey knew, there would be a major investigation. Time for more false flags, but soon enough every nation would be diverted to dealing with the effects of the bombs. If not, if they did somehow find a trail, it would maybe mean that Kinder or Sir Clive were at risk. If that happened, they would disappear before the authorities could arrest them. No one would ever get near Kuznetzov and himself, not in the middle of Russia.

  COMPUTER CONTROL CENTER

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

  “You said you would be gone by now,” Professor McFarland said, as his normally pallid face turned red. “I am taking it back. The computer center is mine now. I have an important project for the President’s Science Advisor.”

  “Yes, you do,” Dugout replied. “In fact, I have the Science Advisor waiting by the secure telephone to personally tell you all about it. Seems the National Security Advisor asked him to get you to run your model on a specific scenario, one in which there is rapid and significant sea level rise. We want to see what the climatic effects are.

  “We also want to see how that theoretical possibility would effect certain real estate and other investments. It’s all set up on the network for you.”

  McFarland looked confused, but then Dugout handed him the phone. “Yes, this is Professor McFarland,” the professor said into the phone. “Yes, sir, I can run that model right away. Oh, probably no more than a few hours now that I have the world’s fastest processor back under my control. No, sir, thank you.”

  The professor was smiling as he handed the phone back to Dugout. He then wandered off to begin applying his model to the data set Dugout had set up for him.

  Dugout reconnected the videoconference with USUN, where Ray and Mbali had been poring over the partial list of Purpose Fund holdings that Dugout had found.

  “Between the Fund itself and the five board members, they have almost six hundred billion dollars in assets,” Mbali observed. “And these boys have been busy lately buying up land in strange places.”

  “Well, I don’t need the professor’s model to tell me that when that much fresh water hits the ocean, the climate patterns will change. Dry places may become wet and vice versa. Frozen places may become warm. Certainly some inland places will become coastal. A lot of cities will be abandoned and inland cities or cities on higher elevations will grow,” Dugout said.

  “So they used Victoria’s model to figure out all of that and buy up what will become important,” Ray Bowman added. “And now they are going to create the biggest flood since Noah, using nuclear bombs to melt the glaciers, playing God on a global scale.”

  “And the bombs are already in place,” Dugout said.

  “How do you know that?” Ray asked.

  “I tracked down the two ships, Rothera and Nunatak. They both arrived in Port-aux-Français in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands a week ago. That would have been en route from Comoros to where they are now, off Ross Island in East Antarctica.”

  “But how do you know they have put the bombs ashore?” Mbali asked.

  “Because I just read Sergey Rogozin’s mail. I knew he had to connect to a real network at some point so I hacked into the satellite dish on the roof of his office in New York and then down the wire to his laptop, where the traffic is decrypted. I know where all five bombs are, all on glaciers.”

  “Maybe sixty hours until they go off?” Bowman asked Dugout.

  “If that timeline is right, yeah, but maybe less.”

  On the small television screen on the side wall of the conference room, the news channel was showing the President-elect meeting with the President in the Oval Office before having a one-on-one lunch together in the Private Dining Room off the Oval.

  “I think Winston Burrell has a lunch he has to crash,” Ray said as he picked up the secure phone.

  45

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16

  FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA

  Despite what armchair generals on Capitol Hill might think, even the U.S. military cannot appear magically anywhere in the world at any time. Indeed, no U.S. military unit wants to conduct an operation without weeks of preparation and rehearsal, but there are a handful of units on alert for immediate mobilization. Most of them are Army, and most of them are in the sprawling campus that is Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  In the hour after midnight, those units were alerted. The 82nd Airborne Division always has one brigade assigned to an unspecified global mission. This time it was the 3rd Brigade. Its ready battalion was the 505th. They had equipment and uniforms for almost every climate, but that did not include the white overalls used by the units designated to fight in the snow.

  Across the base, in the fenced-in command run by Special Operations Command, the 1st Special Force Group’s Operational Detachment Delta had a ready group that included operators who had been trained on nuclear weapons seizure and disablement. They were activated just after midnight.

  At Hunter Airfield, outside of Savannah, Georgia, a ready company of the 1st Battalion of the Army’s Ranger Regiment was called up, at 0200.

  Throughout the country at Air Force bases, C-17 pilots and crews were also getting calls. So were the KC-10 and KC-135 aerial refueling tanker crews, many of them members of the Air
National Guard.

  At Dam Neck in Virginia, a SEAL unit trained in ship seizure was notified to be ready to fly. It would be a long flight.

  There were no aircraft carriers, no submarines, no drones, or bombers anywhere near Antarctica, but off the coast of the southern continent was a ship of the U.S. Coast Guard. The captain of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, the largest U.S. ice breaker, was woken to receive a highly unusual message for that ship. It was top secret and flash precedence. The thrust of the message from the Commandant of the Coast Guard was that there would be a U.S. Navy SEAL unit coming on board and then Healy would be ordered to intercept two nearby research ships flying the flag of Iceland. He was instructed to tell no one on board until further authorized, which he thought was a good thing, since no one on board would believe him if he had told them.

  Antarctica did not fall into the Area of Operations of any of the U.S. Combatant commanders, who divided up the world into exclusive zones for their forces. So the Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization in the Pentagon took control, supported by Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Every operation needed a name and there was a list available to choose from, meaningless code words. This one was designated Operation Ready Anvil. Ignoring that, the team in the Pentagon started calling it Ice Station Zebra.

  The President signed the “execute” order for the operation at 0500 Washington time. The Global Hawk surveillance aircraft were the first to take off from California and head south. They would soon be followed by a wave of other southbound aircraft.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Ray and Mbali left USUN a little after midnight. They had spent the night sharing a pizza and fielding questions over the secure video from a variety of agencies in Washington. It had taken a while to convince the bureaucracy that they were not mad, but had actually succeeded in finding the missing South African bombs in the most unlikely place on earth.

  Dugout had continued working all day documenting the leads, the evidence, the connections, the timeline. And working with the now-cooperative and friendly Professor McFarland, he had demonstrated to the Washington team that the effects of the almost immeasurable heat of tritium boosted nuclear explosions would melt vast amounts of centuries’ old ice, sending a sea of fresh water into the world’s oceans. In the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream would cease its circulation and the climate everywhere would change, some places becoming arid, others frozen, some very, very wet.

  There was no disputing that if all five bombs detonated, the likely global sea rise would be nineteen meters from the East Antarctic ice alone. The only differences the experts had was over how quickly the flood would occur. The longest period anyone projected was thirty months.

  Some island nations like the Maldives and others in the Pacific and Caribbean would cease to exist. Others, like Bangladesh, would see land now occupied by eighty million people washed away. In the United States, fourteen major metropolitan areas would see their urban centers destroyed in ways worse than Hurricane Katrina had done in New Orleans, and that was just on the East and Gulf Coasts. Florida would disappear as far north as Jacksonville.

  Some nations might be better off comparatively to the rest of the world when it was all over, among them perhaps Canada and Russia, both of whom would have new, year-round ports and vast stretches of newly arable land, but the world’s economy would be devastated.

  At the end of a long day filled with such depressing images, Mbali and Ray walked out of the U.S. Mission on to First Avenue. She had booked them rooms at the Harvard Club on West 44th Street, using some reciprocal privilege. The FBI office had left a team of two agents and a Suburban waiting for them. They hopped in.

  Traffic was light for Manhattan. Even the city that never sleeps thins out in the early morning hours on a weekday. As they passed Grand Central Terminal and pulled into 44th Street, a motorbike passed them, almost brushing up against the Suburban. The agent riding in the front passenger seat saw the sticky bomb being attached to his door and yelled the warning, “Get out—bomb!” The agent also opened the door, so the blast went down to the side of the vehicle, rather than directly into it. Nonetheless, the agent died seconds later.

  Those seconds seemed like minutes to Ray, who was seated behind the agent on the right of the vehicle. In those long seconds, he leaped across the vehicle, opened the driver’s side passenger door, and pushed himself and Mbali out of the moving vehicle onto the street. He was halfway out when the sticky bomb went off.

  He later learned that it was what the bomb technicians considered a small charge. It had been lethal to both the driver and to the other agent. Had the agent on the right not opened his door in time, it would have been lethal to Ray and likely to Mbali.

  Afterward, Ray did not remember how he got out of the vehicle. His first memory was of the fire to his left. He was laying on the street and there were flames and an intense overpowering heat to his left. He forced himself to crawl away from it. That’s when he realized he was bleeding, blood running from his scalp down the back of his neck. He could not hear and he was having trouble focusing his eyes. Mbali was dragging him farther away from the fire in the street. There were people around. And then there was a paramedic. He remembered being in an ambulance and he could recall the doctor and the nurses in the ER. He woke in a private hospital room. He had bandages on his left arm and leg. There was a large bandage on the back of his head and it felt like he had been given a haircut back there. His whole body ached and his ears were ringing. He saw his suit and shirt on a hanger. He found the bathroom, looked in the mirror at the back of his head, and washed up. Then he got dressed and walked out of the room to find Mbali. The FBI agents on the door went with him.

  EAST 34TH STREET

  NEW YORK CITY

  McKenna was a professional in Ray’s mind. The FBI man had come to the hospital in the middle of the night to check up on Bowman and bumped into him, sneaking out through the Emergency Room. Rather than telling Ray to go back upstairs and recover in a bed from the sticky bomb attack on the car, McKenna had taken him to an all-night diner and briefed him on the latest intelligence they had learned from monitoring Olympus Security. One team of Olympus men would be escorting Vicki Kinder in midmorning from the UN to a nearby heliport. From there, they would chopper her to Teterboro airfield where a second team would be taking her father, then the Kinders would get out of New York for points west.

  Bowman did not want to see the Kinders leave town quite yet and McKenna had agreed, then made a few calls. Then they both had the fried eggs and grits, which were not bad for a greasy spoon in a northern city at three in the morning.

  At ten thirty, a Chevrolet Suburban had turned into 34th Street, sped under the Roosevelt Highway, and pulled up to the heliport dock on the East River. Vicky Kinder jumped down from the Suburban, stylish in a mauve business suit, and moved quickly across the dock to the Kinder Industries helicopter. Her two Olympus bodyguards scurried to catch up with her, while a third went for her bags in the back of the vehicle. She did not notice behind her as the Olympus men were quietly and quickly detained by armed men, McKenna’s men, who had been posing as the heliport crew.

  Bowman slid open the passenger door to the helicopter from inside and hopped out onto the dock. In his right hand was a Glock that he had insisted McKenna provide him, just in case. The look on Victoria Kinder’s face said she knew who he was. She looked behind her and saw her men being hauled off. Rather than running, she simply stopped and smiled. “I see you’re not dead yet, Mr. Bowman. Do you plan on using that thing on me?”

  “I always liked that Monty Python routine. ‘I’m not dead yet.’ But a lot of people are, Professor Kinder, and a hell of a lot more will be if your plans go ahead,” Ray replied. “How do you live with that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to, of course, but after all, death is a part of the cycle of life,” she said. “The question is not if we will die. We will. The question is what one will do while alive that will m
ake a difference, changes the future.”

  “And you think the future will be better if this city and a lot like it are under water?” Ray asked as two FBI agents moved in on either side of her. “You had better tell me now how to stop it.”

  “That is the future. I can’t stop it. Neither can anyone else. It’s just a question of when it happens and how fast. If it takes a long time, if it is a slow death, then those death throes will take civilization down, too. By trying in vain to hold back the waters we will deplete the treasury, destroy government, wreck the economy, everything will collapse into a new Dark Age. If it happens quickly, we can adjust, survive, some of us will even flourish. Trust me, I know. I have run all the models.”

  “Maybe you will get to watch the waters rise from your prison window,” Bill McKenna said as he signaled for his men to take her. He turned to Bowman. “Are you sure you are in shape for a helicopter ride with an FBI pilot?”

  TETERBORO EXECUTIVE JET AIRPORT

  TETERBORO, NEW JERSEY

  “I may not see you for a long time. At least, not in person,” Jonathan Kinder said, as he stood with Sergey Rogozin in front of the Russian’s Boeing Business Jet. “I can’t tell you how much I am in your debt, how we all are, the entire board. From the day Konny proposed this idea right up to this week, we could not have done it without you. You know that.”

  “It was, it is, a bold idea. Historic. It will change history, change the world,” Rogozin said. “It has been my honor to be part of it, to watch you and the others decide on where to move billions of dollars to be ready for the new world. Amazing. We, I, would never have figured it out.”