FOREWORD

by Ten To Midnight--Free(Lit)

  Suronev and Grizov stood motionless and impassive in the doorway, their eyes transfixed by the grisly spectacle. But, behind their masks of shock, the two political veterans were beginning to appreciate that the balance of power in Russia had just shifted once again.

  And soon, the political maneuvering would recommence.

  XXIV

  LOOSE ENDS

  Nothing in his life

  Became him like the leaving of it.

  (William Shakespeare: Macbeth, 1606)

  FEMA SPECIAL FACILITY, OLNEY, MARYLAND

  “Close him up,” Jo instructed Levy, who presently began to seal the incision on Mitchell’s chest. She left the sterile operating room, stripping her latex gloves and removing her surgical mask as she did so.

  Although Jo had been subconsciously aware that the world might end at any moment during the procedure, she had remained the consummate professional throughout and completed the operation. If nothing else, it had offered a distraction from the horrors taking place outside the room.

  Now she was left with the knowledge that, in spite of everything, she’d done her best. There was no point wondering whether she could have done better. What would have been a complex operation at the best of times had been made all the more difficult by the extreme circumstances in which she’d found herself. Operating under the scrutiny of two impassive Secret Service agents for one thing.

  She ran a hand through her tangled, greasy black hair, craving a hot shower but knowing that hot showers might be an extremely rare luxury for a while. Straightening her cramped spine, she took a deep breath before heading for the waiting room.

  She found Margaret sitting on a molded plastic chair with her head bowed. The First Lady was exactly where Jo had left her prior to the operation. With her were her two Secret Service bodyguards plus Jefferson and McGuire. Jo hadn’t seen the last two individuals before, but thought nothing much of the fact. Just another two faceless staffers hanging on the President’s fate.

  Margaret looked up as Jo entered the room, her eyes both hopeful and afraid.

  “Mrs. Mitchell,” Jo intoned evenly. “I have some news for you…”

  GCN STUDIOS, ATLANTA

  Sullivan hadn’t slept for well over twenty-four hours. He had been on the air when the crisis started late on the previous evening. Other than occasional dashes to the men’s room, he hadn’t taken a break since. And for the most part, he’d been adlibbing in lieu of a prepared script. That was not easy at the best of times, but in the middle of a nuclear war…

  Well, now the accumulated effects of all this were beginning to show. His speech was becoming mildly incoherent, peppered with long pauses and half-finished sentences. His heavy lidded eyes conveyed the exhaustion he felt. And he was running out of reassuring platitudes for his audience. After all, how many ways could you prepare your viewers for the end of the world?

  “We’re still waiting for news from Russia, still waiting for Russia’s response,” he was saying. “Waiting is perhaps worse than the event itself, although nobody can know how bad the event itself… itself… well… might be.”

  As he spoke, viewers saw a harried production assistant appear behind him and slap a sheet of paper on the anchorman’s desk. Sullivan picked it up and read it. He started to cry. But they were tears of joy, not of misery. Little did he know it, but it was an image that would become engrained in the national consciousness for years to come.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen.” The words struggled to penetrate a wall of emotion that had overwhelmed him. “The war… is… is over…”

  B-2A BOMBER – SPIRIT SIXTEEN – OVER NORTHERN RUSSIA

  The first indication Logan had that anything was wrong was by the looping alarm tone in his headset. It told him that a SAM battery had achieved lock-on. McCann received the warning simultaneously. That was when professionalism and training took over.

  It didn’t matter that the war was supposedly over. Neither did it matter that the B-2’s low radar profile supposedly made them undetectable. The only fact that counted at this stage was that somebody on the ground had somehow locked onto them. SAMs are every pilot’s worst enemy. Logan and McCann were no exception. And both of them had heard the rumors of a Russian radar system capable of detecting stealth aircraft. Now they knew it to be true.

  McCann immediately took evasive action, taking the B-2 into a steep decline, so as to lower its radar profile. At the same time, she broke right, towards the source of the Doppler signal. That was not as crazy as it sounded. Because Doppler signals fan out from their source, they are often less effective at detecting targets at close range.

  Logan felt his G-suit inflate against his chest to protect him against the force of the turn. He watched the altimeter drop below 5,000 feet. Meanwhile, the looping tone turned into a shrill, constant hum. The reason for that was made obvious by the graphic representation on his HUD.

  “SAM in the air,” he told McCann. She already knew.

  “Releasing countermeasures,” she reported calmly, switching to the ECM panel on her HUD and selecting chaff. As she turned the plane away from the countermeasures, two more SAMs were launched. The second one achieved instant lock-on.

  “SAM Three,” Logan shouted. “Five degrees south, ten miles.” Even as he said it, he knew that was too close. Far too close. The evasive maneuvers McCann was taking had already sacrificed whatever stealthiness they had. The B-2 wasn’t a fighter jet, and it lacked the maneuverability of one. It was designed to sneak up on a target, drop its payload and get out; not to evade SAMs or engage in aerial dogfights.

  Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to give up on this baby until all was lost. The first SAM went after the chaff and was more than two miles aft of the B-2 when it detonated. The second was confused by the thermal signature of the explosion, and did what any self-respecting missile would do under the circumstances and headed straight for the maelstrom. Unfortunately for SAM 2, it failed to distinguish between the heat generated by an explosive warhead and that of a jet engine. By the time it had realized its mistake and attempted to reacquire its original target, it had burned out of fuel. It exploded harmlessly in its bewilderment.

  The third SAM, however, was unlikely to make the same mistake. Its turning angle was much sharper than that of the relatively cumbersome B-2, and its optical guidance system wasn’t likely to lose its target once it had achieved lock-on. The rate of closure was now more than six hundred miles per hour. At that rate, it would catch them in less than ten seconds.

  Upon performing that instant mental calculation, Logan understood the futility of carrying on. The B-2 was one of the more fragile bombers ever built. A 1000lb explosive warhead would rip it to shreds. He didn’t intend to be around when that happened.

  “That’s it,” he shouted above the myriad warning tones now filling the cockpit. “Eject Eject Eject…”

  “No, one more…”

  “That’s an order, McCann!” Without another word, he pulled the eject lever. A small explosive charge beneath his seat triggered a mechanism that launched him through the ceiling of the cockpit at tremendous velocity. He heard - rather than felt - the crack of his helmet smashing through the thin layer of cockpit separating him from the cold air outside. Within five seconds, he reached the peak of his ascent and began to fall.

  He scanned the sky around him for McCann’s chute, but it was nowhere to be seen. In the same instant as he realized she hadn’t ejected, he saw a streak of white smoke merge with the doomed stealth bomber. The missile slammed into the fuselage, effectively slicing the plane in half. A split second later, the fuel line ignited, creating a fireball that blew the B-2 into tiny fragments of shrapnel.

  McCann was vaporized instantly by the intense heat of the explosion.

  “Noooo!” Logan cried into the eerily silent sky. Why had she stayed with the plane? Why hadn’t she known when to quit?

  He wasn’t to know that she had in fact attempted to bail out, but the eject mechanism on her seat had
failed for reasons that would never be known. Even if he had known, it would have been small consolation for the loss of his friend and partner.

  Logan saw the icy wastelands of Northern Russia emerge through puffy white clouds. Despite his overwhelming sense of anger and helplessness, he tried to reconcile what had happened. Why had the Russians fired without warning when the war was over? His only conclusion was that there were elements of the Russian military that didn’t yet know about the ceasefire. Or maybe they did know, he thought, but just didn’t care.

  The answers would soon become clear enough. His parachute opened at 3,000 feet. As the ground raced towards him, he could see dozens of soldiers and several military vehicles in his drop zone. They were waiting for him to land. He was now an easy target. Logan squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the bullet that would end his life. He hoped Beth wouldn’t mind him not coming home. If she was still alive, that was.

  But the bullet didn’t come, and he felt an inexplicable resentment for that. Why had they killed McCann and not him? Why couldn’t the bastards just put him out of his misery?

  “Shoot me, you Russian sons-of-bitches!” he cried, his voice echoing through the Arctic skies. “Come on, I dare you! Your mothers are whores! Your children are animals!” And you don’t understand a fucking word of English, do you?he thought.

  After a descent that seemed to last forever, Logan landed hard in a field and rolled for more than ten yards, precisely as he had been trained. In the abstract, he had always feared bailing out more than the instant death of being blown up by a missile. But when it had come to the crunch, his instinct for survival had overwhelmed all fears. He was relieved to still be in one piece. His relief, however, was tempered somewhat by the sense of grief he felt for McCann. Somebody, somewhere was going to pay for this. Big Time.

  He spent a few moments trying to untangle himself from the chute. As he did so, he became aware of foreign voices around him. Russian voices. What a surprise.

  When he finally relieved himself of the chute, he found himself laying on his back looking up at three soldiers. They all wore Russian Air Force uniforms. All of them carried assault rifles.

  A grim-faced Colonel stepped forward. He was pointing a pistol at Logan’s head.

  “You are quite correct,” the Russian said in heavily accented English. “My motherwas a whore.” His deeply recessed eyes were dark with the promise of death, and the thin smile that flickered across his lips chilled Logan to the bone. The Colonel inspected the nametag on Logan’s flight suit. And in that moment, Logan knew he was going to die.

  “Welcome to Russia, Major Logan.”

  U.S. CONSULATE, FRANKFURT

  Sharp slammed a magazine into a pistol and glanced up at Gellis, whose terrified eyes were fixed on the weapon. They were in the lobby. Around them, the Consulate’s Marine guards prepared their firearms and assumed defensive positions for the assault that everybody appeared to be expecting.

  The commotion outside the compound was clearly audible as German troops continued their preparations.

  “Ever used one of these?” the CIA agent asked, squinting down the barrel as he checked his aim.

  “Squeezed off a few rounds on a firing range once,” Gellis admitted. “But on a live target?” He shook his head. “Jesus, you don’t think it’ll really come to that, do you? I mean, they’re just trying to scare us, right?”

  “Right,” Sharp sneered acidly. “If I’ve learned one thing in the field, it’s never to take the enemy’s actions or motivations for granted. ‘Specially when they’ve got guns. Here, take this.” He handed the pistol to the reporter.

  “What about you?”

  With a sly grin, Sharp produced another pistol that had been tucked against the small of his back. “I prefer the Baretta nine mil myself. The professional’s chosen instrument of extremely ugly death.”

  Gellis held his weapon delicately, feeling its smooth, cold metal casing. He didn’t know whether he could actually pull a trigger on a live target, but figured that he’d find out soon enough. Until now, he’d only ever written about such events, never participated in them.

  The CIA agent sensed what was going through Gellis’s mind. “Hell,” he said, “you’ll be fine. Believe me, if it’s you or the other guy, you’ll find it in yourself to pull that trigger. If not…” He gave a nonchalant shrug. “Then I’ll see you in Hell, buddy.”

  “Perhaps,” Gellis admitted, checking his aim just as Sharp had moments earlier, trying to look as if he knew what he was doing. He realized that his hands were shaking. “But could I live with myself afterwards?”

  That remark elicited a bitter laugh. “Who cares? To live with guilt, you have to be alive in the first place. Doc Stein taught me that one.” His brow furrowed with anxiety. Gellis knew what Sharp was thinking.

  “Do you think he pulled it off? Stopped the attack, I mean.”

  Sharp frowned. “I feel better knowing that he’s on the case. He’s a stubborn, single-minded son-of-a-bitch. If anybody could stop this thing happening…” His voice trailed off, leaving the rest unsaid.

  Both men looked up as the Consul-General came running down the staircase into the lobby. His face was alight with a huge smile. He raised his hands to get everybody’s attention, not caring that the only people in the lobby were armed men preparing for battle.

  “We’ve just received notification that the war is over,” he enthused. “American and Russian forces have ceased hostilities.”

  An excited murmur emanated from the Marine guards, but it was muted somewhat by the knowledge that they were likely to be killed anyway by the German Army.

  Sharp shook his head in wry disbelief. “As I was saying,” he remarked to Gellis. “They’ll probably make the Doc King of the World for this.”

  Before Gellis could reply, one of the Marine guards at the front of the lobby called out. “Hey!” He was pointing through the one-way windows that looked out onto Siesmayerstrasse.

  Tentatively, the other Marine guards moved forward to see what had attracted their comrade’s attention. Gellis and Sharp were at the back of the lobby, and couldn’t see what was going on. But they heard somebody laugh. And somebody else made a whooping sound. The excitement became infectious, quickly escalating into something like a jubilant cheer.

  And then they heard somebody yell.

  “They’re falling back! The Kraut sons-of-bitches are falling back!”

  Sharp smirked crookedly at Gellis. “I guess they saw you with that gun and got scared.”

  DISPLACED PERSONS CAMP 404, GILSON CITY, MISSOURI

  Word quickly swept the camp that the war was over. But there was no joy, no jubilation, and certainly no sense of triumph. Just the sound, sight and smell of human misery at its apex. Yes, the war was over, but for many of the dead and dying Americans in Camp 404, it hadn’t ended soon enough. Nearly everybody here had lost homes, loved ones, body parts and, in many cases, their sanity. Beth could now imagine what the Dark Ages must have been like; although in the Dark Ages, phenomena such as radiation sickness and flashburns hadn’t existed, had they?

  Nevertheless, Beth couldn’t help feeling mildly optimistic about the future. She had an unwavering faith in the human spirit. Mankind had survived the Dark Ages, after all, and had gone on to thrive and prosper. It would survive this ordeal also, she knew. She suspected her optimism was partly fuelled by the slim hope that she might see Martin again. That was assuming he hadn’t been shot down over Russia, of course. Momentarily, she considered how they might begin to rebuild their lives, but she reproached herself for the thought. There was no point getting her hopes up until she knew for certain whether he had survived. For all she knew, his body could be scattered all over the Siberian lowlands now. She tried not to think about it, instead distracting herself with the task at hand.

  Until today, her experience of medical care had been restricted to attending cuts and bruises. But the range of injuries that she was now being forced to deal with exc
eeded anything in her wildest imagination, never mind her experience. Some of the injured were so horribly disfigured, they were barely recognizable as humans. In fact, she was astonished that the human body could sustain so much damage and yet still live. She was also astonished that she hadn’t felt the urge to vomit in the face of such horrors. As the years passed, she would come to realize that she had merely adapted to her environment. The ordinarily horrific had rapidly become normal.

  Most of the officers running the camp were employed by FEMA, the American Red Cross or the Army. But there were also dozens of volunteers such as herself whose only qualifications for the role were that they were healthy and sane. She had heard that there were now more than three hundred staff at Gilman City, attending more than 7,000 ‘displaced persons’. That number was steadily climbing by the hour, but the increase was tempered somewhat by the death rate. More than 5,000 had died in the camp so far, and many more would join them within the next twenty-four hours. Mass graves were urgently being prepared, in order to limit the risk of Typhoid and Cholera outbreaks. Despite the fervent efforts of the Red Cross, medical supplies were running low and the few fully qualified doctors in the camp were being forced to operate in almost medieval conditions.

  Although nobody discussed it openly, euthanasia was becoming an increasingly common practice. Normally, this concept would have been abhorrent to Beth, but even she accepted that the morality of normal times had been distorted somewhat by the conditions of a post-nuclear world. Nevertheless, she was still unable to take a patient’s life herself. She didn’t think her sanity would survive that.

  As she made her way through the ever expanding camp, stepping over human forms and debris, she felt an overwhelming urge to remove her protective helmet. Sure, she knew that she might be exposing herself to radiation by doing so, but surely just a couple of minutes wouldn’t hurt. Besides, she was dosed up on Iodine. That should afford her some protection, shouldn’t it?