FOREWORD

by Ten To Midnight--Free(Lit)

  The success of this mission is his responsibility, she realized with a start. He’s using his sense of responsibility as an excuse not to confront his feelings. Everybody reacts differently under stress. This is just his way. I never thought I would be the one to let it get to me.

  “Nothing,” she said, realizing that she didn’t really know him any better than she knew herself.

  ANDREWS AFB, MARYLAND

  Marine Onetouched down barely fifty meters away from the E-4B National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a converted 747 better known by the acronym KNEECAP. As the chopper made its descent, the President was surprised to see that the base was swarming with Marines, just as it had been when Lewis and Bishop had arrived here a couple of hours earlier. The Marines looked deadly serious. If anybody was in any doubt that this crisis was for real, they would have only to study their eyes, he thought. It occurred to him that Andrews was a likely target in any nuclear exchange, and these Marines were bound to know that they would be caught right in the epicenter. He frowned, thinking that theirs was perhaps a far more desirable predicament than his own. It was his responsibility to ensure that there was no epicenter in which for them to be caught.

  No sooner had the chopper touched the ground than the Secret Service began shepherding the President and other VIPs across an expanse of asphalt towards KNEECAP, whose engines were already roaring. Mitchell could feel his heart racing, and was perspiring heavily. One member of his protective detail held the base of his neck to keep his head low.

  In the group behind Edward and Margaret Mitchell were Lewis, Nielsen, Copeland, Bishop and General Westwood. Behind them came Reynolds and Admiral James Dunster, Secretary of the Navy. Bringing up the rear was the Marine warrant officer who carried a briefcase - affectionately known as ‘The Football’ - that contained the nuclear launch codes. The officer wasn’t alone in hoping that he wouldn’t be asked to open it tonight.

  Once the Presidential entourage was safely on board KNEECAP, the pressurized door was shut and sealed and word passed to the pilot to commence take-off.

  Outpost Missionwas precisely nine minutes old.

  The President and First Lady were met by a short, stocky Air Force officer with spiky silver hair and piercing blue eyes. “Good evening, Mr. President. Ma’am. My name is Brigadier General Eugene Shelley. I’m in charge of KNEECAP operations. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for a grand tour at the moment. If you’d like to come with me, sir, I believe the attack conference is about to get underway.”

  Shelley led the entourage aft, past several closed doors. Lewis wondered what lay behind them.

  “Why are the blinds shut?” Copeland asked, gesturing at the portholes.

  “To protect against retinal burns from a nuclear blast,” Shelley stated matter-of-factly, not slowing his brisk stride. “They’re lined with aluminum.”

  “What about the pilots?” Margaret inquired. “Are they afforded protection?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then how can they see where to fly?” she pressed him, an edge of concern in her voice.

  “They’ve got a television monitor in the cockpit, Ma’am,” he explained. “They can see exactly what they need to see. Until recently, the only protection they had was an eyepatch, so that they could still use one eye if the other was blinded.” He stopped dead in his tracks and gestured the President into a conference room. “Right in here, sir.”

  It was a conference room just like any other, dominated by a long mahogany table, in the center of which sat a black communications console. In front of each seat at the table was a private telephone. At least the leather chairs looked more comfortable than those in the White House Situation Room, Mitchell thought, realizing that this was the first time he’d ever seen KNEECAP’s interior.

  He took his place at the head of the table. The First Lady and General Westwood sat either side of him. Lewis was located furthest away, opposite Copeland. He still felt that this whole situation had a somewhat sublime quality, as if it were a dream from which he was going to wake at any moment. This time twenty-four hours ago, he had been getting shit-faced in a downtown Hartford bar. And eight hours ago, he had been back in his Connecticut apartment, sleeping off one drinking session in preparation for another. Now, here he was, on a military jet with the President of the United States, with the world on the verge of nuclear annihilation.

  Why the hell did I let Tony talk me into this? I don’t want this!

  As the E-4 began taxiing for take-off, Lewis began to feel claustrophobic and had an urge to run away as fast as he could; even if that involved jumping off the plane. In his heart, he was still a soldier; a doer rather than a talker. He had been so since the day when, shortly after graduating from Cambridge with a Masters in History and not knowing what to do with it, he’d walked into an Army recruitment office in London. Until that moment, the idea of a military career had never occurred to him. Most of his peers from University had followed the predictable career paths; banking, the civil service, law and academia. But Lewis had never been one to follow the herd, and insofar, he had always been something of an outsider, even at University.

  After basic officer training, he attended Sandhurst, where he discovered the fierce camaraderie and sense of belonging he had sought ever since the age of eleven, when he’d found himself outcast as a product of one of the roughest parts of London’s East End, attending an elite private school on an assisted place scholarship (which was a way of allowing gifted working-class British kids the opportunity to attend the country’s best schools). But, even now after so many years, his voice still carried a trace of the Cockney accent he had developed in the East End. Although he would never be too ashamed to admit to his roots, the fact that Lewis - unlike most of his childhood friends - had managed to transcend the class barriers that still existed in England was the only reason he was here now.

  Lewis had graduated from Sandhurst with flying colors, having been top of his class in hand-to-hand combat and tactical planning. That led to a commission with Britain’s elite Parachute Regiment, with whom he served in the Gulf War and in three tours of Northern Ireland.

  It was during the first of those visits to Ulster that he met Sandra Quinnan, a pretty Catholic girl who lived in Catholic West Belfast. Of course, it was generally prohibited for soldiers to engage in romantic entanglements with civilians - especially in Northern Ireland - but love is one of those things that cares little for rules. And so it had been with Lewis and Sandra. Other than the customary series of one-night stands at University, she was his first serious girlfriend. Reticent about breaking the rules, he duly informed his CO of the relationship and, although it was frowned upon by the military hierarchy, he was given grudging permission to carry on seeing her.

  Six months after they met, Lewis came to a decision. He would resign his commission in order that he could marry Sandra and take her back to the mainland, where she would have been able to live comfortably without having to worry about her affair with a British soldier being discovered by some of Ulster’s more extremist elements.

  Sadly, it wasn’t to be. During his third and final tour of the province, Sandra was shot dead by a sniper, just feet away from Lewis, who was off duty and hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. To this day, he still had nightmares about holding her in his arms while the last breaths of life escaped her, and screaming at the Gods until he was hoarse. She had been executed in cold blood purely for the cardinal crime of falling in love with a British soldier -the enemy!

  Shortly afterwards, Lewis indeed resigned his commission, just as he had intended. For the next few months, he attempted to readjust to civilian life, but succeeded only in finding his way into a bottle (funny how history so often repeats itself, he sometimes thought). That period of his life came to an end when, through a combination of fortuitous timing and circumstance, he fell into the employ of the British intelligence services, who had been impressed by his education, military record, combat experience and
fluency in Russian and Arabic. The basis of his employment was to be strictly adhoc, which was a polite way of saying that he would be paid on a job-by-job basis without the security services having to take any responsibility for his actions. This had both positive and negative aspects. The up side was that he could take only what jobs appealed to him, and he didn’t have a CO as such. The down side was that he was effectively a mercenary, employed to carry out perilous tasks that were, by definition, too sensitive for official military or intelligence assets to perform. This meant that if he were to land in trouble in some far-flung corner of the planet, the British Government would be able to deny all knowledge of his existence or actions. Lewis didn’t mind this. The money was excellent, and he had come to think of his own life as expendable in any case. It also allowed him the license to hunt down Sandra’s killer; an experience that, although cathartic in many ways, left him feeling singularly unpleasant once he had taken the sniper’s life. It was as though a chapter of Lewis’s life had truly concluded, with the only consequence being the deaths of two people.

  It was during his employ with the SIS that he met his future wife, then a junior surgeon training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He hadn’t expected to fall in love again, not quite so soon after losing Sandra, but within a year of meeting, Lewis Stein and Jo Miller were married.

  Their first two years together had been some of the happiest times of Lewis’s life. But the demands of his career soon began to place a strain on their marriage.

  Lewis conducted several missions in Russia and the Middle East during the nineties. One such operation had involved rescuing from Russia a CIA paramilitary field officer whose cover was about to be blown. That operative was Anthony Bishop, a so-called ‘illegal’ who had been in Moscow using the cover of an Italian journalist. It had been one of the most dangerous and terrifying missions of Lewis’s career, and to this day, he still had nightmares about that surreal chase through the streets of Moscow, he and Bishop being pursued by the Russian police. The fact that both men were still alive owed more to luck and the ineptitude of Russia’s law enforcers than it did to any particular skill on Lewis’s part, a fact that he frequently reminded himself of.

  That particular operation led to an invitation from Bishop’s grateful superiors for Lewis to emigrate to the United States and work for the CIA as a full time field officer with additional responsibility for training new recruits at the Agency’s Virginia training camp, known as ‘The Farm’. He gave the offer considerable thought and discussed it with Jo. They finally agreed that a fresh start might benefit both of them. Lewis had just turned thirty and knew that he couldn’t remain a mercenary (he’d always preferred the termfreelancer ) forever. Emigration offered him the chance to make a fresh start and restore some stability in his life. Jo hoped that the transition would give their marriage a fresh boost. They had been together for two years, and her husband was already showing the first signs of burnout.

  Whilst in the CIA’s employ, Lewis earned a Doctorate in Strategic Affairs from Princeton under the tutorship of the now First Lady, Margaret Mitchell. Bishop, meanwhile, became Deputy Director of Operations, reporting to DCI Paul Nielsen. Nominally, Lewis had the rank of training officer at Langley, but he was also carving himself a reputation as a brilliant analyst, particularly in Russian and Eastern European affairs. He was still occasionally assigned to field operations, although not as often as had once been the case.

  But it was a field operation in the Chechen capital Grosny that was to change his life again. After returning from that fateful mission, where he had unwittingly killed two innocent children, Lewis again turned to alcohol. He resigned from the CIA and took a job at the University of Connecticut, teaching International Affairs. As time passed, he and Jo drifted further apart. Partly because they had been seeing increasingly less of each other due to their respective occupations. But mostly because of Lewis’s alcoholism.

  Eight years after they had married, Lewis and Jo were divorced. The separation had been amicable, but had left both parties distraught and remorseful. Lewis conceded the marital home in Maryland and all its contents to Jo, since she had always been the main breadwinner. He moved permanently into the Connecticut apartment that he had leased after accepting the job at UConn.

  There was not a day that passed when he didn’t regret throwing away the one thing in his life that had really meant something. But he had resolved not to call her until he had found the courage to make some changes in his life. He wondered where she was now. If he knew her as well as he thought he did, she would be at Johns Hopkins, preparing for the likely intake of casualties following a possible nuclear attack. That was presuming that the hospital itself wasn’t destroyed in such an attack. Dedicated to the end. That’s my Jo.

  He systematically checked the faces of the other men around the conference table who – after a fashion – held the fate of an entire planet in their hands. He wondered if they were also considering their loved ones’ chances of surviving this crisis. In a situation like this, he knew, even politicians were human. Perhaps it was their humanity that would prevent any of them from acting irresponsibly. That was something to be optimistic about in an otherwise grave situation. Nuclear war sure is a great leveler, isn’t it?

  “… and your daughter is being flown to the Special Facility at Raven Rock as we speak,” Shelley was telling the First Couple.

  “It may bespecial ,” Margaret noted, “but is it safe?”

  “As safe as anywhere else right now,” he promised. Margaret didn’t look convinced. Shelley quickly changed the subject. “Also, the PSESP is being implemented, and…”

  The President cut him off. “The what?” He was becoming tired of all these acronyms he was having to learn. Why can’t military types speak plain English just like everybody else?

  “Sorry, sir. That’s the Presidential Successor Emergency Support Plan. It means that, in the event that… well, if this was to…” Shelley fidgeted, trying to explain in the most diplomatic terms possible.

  “For Chrissakes,” Mitchell barked. “Get to the point.”

  Shelly was clearly becoming flustered. “It means, Mr. President, that if anything was to happen to you, there has to be a line of succession. That requires the dispersion of your constitutional successors.”

  “So where are they?” he snapped.

  “Well, as you know, the Vice President was staying at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Moscow for President Godonov’s funeral. We haven’t been able to establish communications with either the Vice President’s helicopter or the Embassy Signals Office since the attack on Moscow, and therefore have to presume that he didn’t make it.”

  I sent him there, was the unbidden thought that occurred to the President. It was immediately followed by: That could have been me.

  “The Speaker of the House is at the Mount Weather facility on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. The Secretary of the Treasury is out of location in Geneva, and the Secretary of the Interior was in LA last we knew. Once the Secret Service find him, he’ll be flown to Nellis Air Force Base.”

  “If this flying fortress is as safe as you claim,” Copeland objected, fear creeping into his voice, “then why all this talk about succession?”

  “These are just precautionary measures,” Shelley assured the Secretary of State as the E-4 lifted into the air. “KNEECAP is about as safe as any aircraft in the world. Although we don’t have any weapons systems of our own, we’re flying with a detachment of four well-armed F-16s. Also, this jet has been retrofitted with highly advanced anti-missile systems.”

  “What about EMP effects?” Lewis asked. Much of what was known about the effects of the electromagnetic pulse that would emanate from a high altitude nuclear detonation was still theoretical. That worried him more than the effects of the blast itself, for EMP could potentially wreck communication systems and any other equipment that contained sensitive components. Including aircraft, he thought darkly.

  �
��All the components on KNEECAP have been EMP hardened, sir,” came the response. Of course, they’ve never been tested in a nuclear conflict, he didn’t add.

  The President waved a dismissive hand. “Okay, General. Let’s proceed with the conference, shall we?”

  “Of course, sir.” Shelley stretched over the table, between Lewis and Copeland, to activate the speakerphone. “Night Lightis five by five,” he reported. Lowering his voice, he explained to the President, “Night Lightis our designation.”

  “Good to hear you,Night Light, ” came the response. “This isLooking Glass . We’re five by five.”

  “That’s StratCom’s C&C alert aircraft,” Shelley told the President, who was scribbling the designations on a piece of paper.

  “Storm Rock, five by five.”

  “NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “Rain Flower, five by five.”

  “STRATCOM at Offutt, Nebraska,” Shelley announced. Lewis noticed that Westwood was making ticks on a checklist as each command reported in.

  “Big Bird, five by five,” crackled a voice that sounded as if it were being spoken from the end of a long tunnel.

  “That’s Air Combat Command at Langley.”

  “Smoke Finger, five by five.”

  “Atlantic Command.”

  “Earth Digger, five by five.”

  “That’sthe National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.”

  “Star Stalker, five by five, sir.” The voice sounded youthful and frightened.

  “Space Command at NASA.”

  “Okay, that’s everybody,” Westwood said, having ticked off all the participants on his list.