FOREWORD
Page 67
Beaten.
As the two men faced each other, a few inches separating them, the cameras began flashing so rapidly that the flashes blurred into an almost constant white light. This was the kind of rare, dramatic moment about which newspaper editors had wet dreams.
Without saying a word, Lewis allowed a self-satisfied sneer to flicker across his thin lips. Then he turned his back and walked away. He sat beside his lawyer, who gave him a quizzical look before turning his attention to the mountain of legal documents before him.
After a few moments, the Chief Justice used his gavel to bring the court to order.
“All rise,” he intoned, his voice echoing in the cavernous room.
Lewis stood. The next voice he heard was that of a clerk, who held a copy of the Torah before him. Lewis placed his left hand upon it and raised his right.
“Doctor Lewis Jacob Stein. Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.”
“Please be seated,” the Chairman ordered. “Dr Stein, please be advised that you are now under oath.”
Lewis nodded solemnly.
He glanced up at Jo.
She smiled.
And so it began.
CENTRAL ASIA
The complex had always escaped the attentions of orbital satellites. That was no accident. Apart from being blown deep into the granite of a mountain, its sole entrance was located in a deep, narrow valley that afforded both protection and anonymity from satellite reconnaissance. It was from territory such as this that the Mujahedeen had waged its successful campaign against the Soviet Army during the 1980’s.
Boasting a sophisticated array of communications equipment and a fearsome arsenal of weaponry, it was nothing short of a fortress. Over two hundred men worked and lived here, all of them unquestioningly devoted to a single cause. More specifically, the cause of a single man, for it was his money that had financed the project for the past decade.
He had made his money in the oil business, dealing with western investors who had treated him as though he were an imbecile peasant. For years, he had smiled politely while they patronized him and insulted his culture. Yet the smile had concealed a simmering rage that had only been contained by the satisfaction derived from taking the westerners’ money. It had been a means to an end. And the end was now in sight. In little more than two decades, he had risen from a mere oil billionaire to possibly the world’s most feared man. Oh, how the Americans and their vaunted CIA had tried to find him, toneutralize him. And how he had taken pleasure in deceiving them time and time again. Who were the imbeciles now?
They had tried, of course, to freeze his assets. Having anticipated this tactic, he had deliberately left some of his financial links exposed, to fool the westerners into thinking that they were actually doing something to hurt him. But in fact, the vast bulk of his assets were invested globally, through an intricate network of dummy corporations and investment schemes so complex that all the financial acumen in the world couldn’t unravel it. The few millions of dollars actually seized by western authorities were as significant to him as an ant to an elephant.
Despite his vast wealth, his living quarters within the mountain hideaway were amazingly sparse, for he didn’t crave material possessions. From here, he could monitor any cable channel or radio station on Earth. Although he had teams of translators working for him, sifting through the mass of extraneous information they received every day, he was quite capable of monitoring the world’s media himself, fluent as he was in six languages. That was one benefit, he supposed, of an English classical education. He also had allies in the upper echelons of some of the world’s most powerful governments. That was another advantage of wealth. His spies were often greedy infidels, but in the final analysis, even infidels served a higher purpose.
For the past three months, he had been carefully monitoring events in America as they unfolded. So. The Great Satan had come to realize the true meaning of suffering. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. A nation built on excess and extravagance was having to come to terms with the brutal reality of the world. He derived some satisfaction from that, but not too much. Unlike many of those who had preceded him, he respected the fortitude and determination of the Americans. Fools like Saddam Hussein and some of Iran’s hardline clerics had condemned America as a dying, corrupt power. Yet neither Iran nor Iraq had ever been capable of really hurting America when it counted. Eventually, they had always been forced to settle for aquid pro quo with the Great Satan. In general, those nations who condemned America as weak were usually the weak ones themselves.
He was not like the others, for he had something they had always lacked.
Patience.
And it was that God-given quality that had allowed him the luxury of choosing his moment. When he struck, it would be ruthless and final. He had foreseen that America would suffer a body blow such as it had. And he knew precisely how the next act would play out also.
For Sadek Rahman, it was just a matter of when.
TO BE CONCLUDED…
The story will continue in “Chaos Theory” – the sequel to Ten To Midnight.
THE LAST WORD
In the foreword at the beginning of this book, I discussed the political aspect of this issue, primarily to set the scene for the story, but also to raise some of my anxieties about the general complacency demonstrated by western leaders where matters of nuclear defense are concerned.
Shortly after completion of the first draft of Ten To Midnight, I launched a website on the World Wide Web (http://tentomidnight.jumpbooks.com)previewing the first seven chapters. I was quite overwhelmed by the response. Many people e-mailed me with questions about the characters featured in this story. Some wanted to know from where the creative inspiration derived. And just a few wanted to offer congratulatory superlatives. As I have promised these correspondents already, they would get their answers in due course.
Now the story has been told, I would like to keep my promise to these folks and take some time to discuss the inspiration for some of the ideas and subplots within this book.
The concept behind TTM originated, believe it or not, from an inebriated conversation in 1992 between myself and a work colleague of mine, Craig Rosenthal. It was the type of conversation that began with “what if?” and quickly snowballed into an alcohol-fired intellectual exercise. At that point in my life, I was beginning many books that would never be completed and would result only in a host of files on my hard drive named “Chapter1.txt” and the like. But one thing that did derive from those scribbles was a life-weary character called Lucas Goldstein; one day to become Ten To Midnight’s cynical protagonist Lewis Stein.
For five years, I toyed with the idea of writing a story about nuclear conflict, but I lacked both the inclination and the desire to take on the vast amounts of research required.
It wasn’t until the Spring of 1997 when I was signed off work for several weeks with illness that I once again began to contemplate the scenario of nuclear conflict. I storyboarded a plot involving a conflict between the United States and China, and duly threw Lewis Stein into the maelstrom. The story – then called Balance of Power – worked, but the politics sadly did not. Once I returned to work, the manuscript was shelved -
- until a year later when I met Lee, the woman who was to become my wife. Herself an avid writer, she read a formative draft of Balance of Power and insisted that it was too good a story not to pursue. After much nagging and cajoling (the kind of stuff at which wives are so adept), I returned to the word processor and got serious with my research. For several months, while I was still living in the UK awaiting my INS approval and she was in Connecticut, we engaged in long, daily transatlantic brainstorming sessions, throwing plot concepts into the mix (and often straight into the bin). In many respects, Lee was my worst critic, particularly since she has never been a particular fan of what one might term the ‘technothriller’ genre. Yet it is for this rea
son that I owe her so much. She showed me how to humanize an otherwise severe topic without falling into the trap of concentrating on technical and political abstractions. She also has an extremely graphic imagination. Hence, the horrific vignette in chapter sixteen – in which we see the post-apocalyptic landscape through the eyes of a priest – is largely the product of her skewed imagination (cue screams of indignation from Herself). This was one of the last scenes to be written, and is one of my favorite scenes in the book.
In November 1999, I completed what I facetiously refer to as the first draft of the final version of the second form of the manuscript, and to some extent I was sad that this long and winding road had led straight into a cul-de-sac. Which is precisely why Ten To Midnight is to be the first installment of a trilogy. At the time of writing, I have already begun work on the first sequel, Chaos Theory. This story is set five years after the nuclear conflict, with America reduced to the status of a Third World nation and various bad guys around the world hungrily eyeing the fallen giant. Elsewhere, a constitutional crisis is brewing in the UK and a revolution is taking place in Iran. All of these elements are linked in a story that will, of course, reunite such characters as Lewis Stein, Marion Westwood, David Sharp and Richie Gellis. Chaos Theory is to be followed by a final installment, set fifteen years before the beginning of Ten To Midnight. Tentatively called Shades of Gray, this is to be the epic story of Lewis Stein, taking us from his graduation right up to the point where he and Jo separated, in the process answering all the questions about Northern Ireland and Grozny, as well as revealing a few other secrets that I am keeping up my sleeve for now.
Lewis is a composite of various folks I have encountered over the years. My own relationship with him is a strange one. In many ways, he is everything I would like to be, but in others he is everything I am afraid of becoming. It will be difficult to imagine writing a novel without him, although I know that day will surely come. Jo provides the perfect counterbalance to his cynicism. Where he is passionate, she is clinical. Where he is impulsive, she is practical. Where he is weak, she is encouraging. Yet they are hugely interdependent on each other, as we learned in the first third of this story, and that is an element I would like to further explore in subsequent books.
Several people have asked me whether Lewis is based in any way on Tom Clancy’s protagonist Jack Ryan. Admittedly, there are similarities. Both are learned academics. Both have served in uniform. Both have a background in intelligence. But that is where the similarities end. Whereas Ryan is a true-blue believer in human faith, Lewis is a life-weary cynic. Ryan is happily married; Lewis’s marriage failed due to his alcoholism and depression. Ryan appears to feel comfortable around people from all backgrounds and cultures, whereas Lewis is quite happy to remain a loner, trusting nobody and relying on none.
Unfortunately, the tight chronology and rapid pace of Ten To Midnight’s plot did not afford as much license as I would have liked to fully flesh out some of my characters, particularly Richie Gellis, Marion Westwood and Tony Bishop. This is going to be noticeably different in Chaos Theory, which takes place over a nine-month period. Unfortunately, there will be no return for Betsy and Hilary, who served their purpose of providing a comic aspect to an otherwise grim scenario. Actually, they were based on my grandmother Grace and Great Aunt Gladys. Don’t we all have relatives such as these?
One of the aspects I so wanted to explore in Ten To Midnight was the effect of an extraordinary situation such as nuclear war on the human psyche and, more specifically, the natural ability of human beings to adapt to a violently altered environment. One of the unforeseen consequences of my fictional universe was that I imagined characters such as Lewis rediscovering their humanity while others lost touch with it. This led me to the conclusion that, in dramatic circumstances such as those surrounding a nuclear war, the strongest characteristics of a human being would become, if anything, more pronounced. In the story, we found that Jo distracted herself from the escalating crisis by becoming even more clinical and professional than usual, focusing on her medical duties and the needs of those around her. Lewis rediscovered who he truly was; a warrior rather than a self-pitying drunk. Nielsen teetered on the brink of insanity as his egotistical quest for glory intensified. Sharp became increasingly facetious. Each of these characters dealt with the terrible situation unfolding around them by reverting further to type and casting aside any social or intellectual barriers that might have restrained them from doing so in normal times.
At the beginning of this story, I set out to convince the reader that the world is as dangerous now, if not more so, than ever. To that extent, only the reader can judge how successful I have been in painting an authentic future history of a war that will hopefully never happen.
There is one final point that I wanted to discuss, and that is the climax to the story. There are three ways that a tale such as this can end. The first involves everybody dying. The second involves everybody living, and then dying anyway. The third, however, is the one for which I finally opted. I opted for a climax that offers hope. I truly believe that, were such a terrible conflict to occur, mankind would pull through in one way or another. It wouldn’t be pretty and it wouldn’t be pleasant. But I still maintain that there isn’t a weapon in existence strong enough to break the spirit of man, nuclear weapons included. Ten To Midnight left its core characters facing an uncertain future in a world very much different from the one to which they had become accustomed. It is for you to imagine what happens to them next.
At least until the sequel spoils your illusions.
Thanks for sticking with the story. Hope it was worth it.
Toby Murray,
Simsbury, Connecticut,
April 19th, 2000