Fallout

by James W. Huston

  “It looks flat,” Luke said.

  “For the most part,” Prekash said. “There is no real good place to hide, which makes an intercept easier. And that is assuming they don’t stage out of one of their forward air bases. A real possibility.”

  Luke studied the chart. “Where are those?”

  “Here, and here, and here,” Prekash showed.

  “A lot of angles to worry about.”

  “Precisely.”

  “How’s your radar? Any chance of an early-warning hit on them coming across the border?”

  Prekash thought for a moment and stared at the identified air bases and how close they were to the Indian border. “I’d say a one-in-two or one-in-three chance of picking them up. Depending on where they cross the border and how high.”

  “We told them to attack a target from several directions at once to ensure that some go through.” He looked at the chart where Prekash was staring. “I’m sure they know where the radar coverage is the weakest.”

  “There are some valleys.”

  “Could you do it without detection?”

  “Not with a large flight.”

  Vlad shook his head. “It won’t be a large flight. I’d expect four airplanes at the most. A surgical strike with laser-guided bombs. It’s what we recommended.”

  Prekash and the other Indian pilots studied Vlad and Luke. They still weren’t sure what to make of them. They had been ordered to cooperate but didn’t feel comfortable yielding. “You make it sound like we will never stop him. What do you suggest?”

  “We need to have a complete understanding of your radar system, your early-warning system, and any airborne radar platforms you have available. We also need to devise a plan to get them airborne covering the right places without alerting anyone to increased activity.”

  “We have some old early-warning airplanes, but they are not very reliable.”

  Luke stood up straight. “You need to get everything that can detect a low-flying airplane airborne. Even if it looks like provocation, you can argue that it can’t be provocation to turn on your own radars. We’ll have to have fighters airborne from now until we think the threat is over. And since Vlad and I are to be the first to engage, we need to be in a five-minute alert at the airfield along the most likely threat vector.”

  “I think you’ll see that we have no airfield on the threat vectors. We are as close as there is, and we’re a hundred miles away from their most likely route.”

  Luke and Vlad frowned. Luke spoke first. “That won’t do it. With the 29’s limited range, we won’t be able to get them from here.”

  “What do you suggest?” Prekash asked, slightly peeved.

  “I don’t know,” Luke said.

  A Major spoke. “We might be able to pre-position you at one of our unimproved wartime locations.”

  “Would it put us on the threat vector?” Vlad asked.

  He looked at the chart again. “Yes, it would.”

  Prekash began to say something, then stopped. He had seen somebody come into the room from behind Luke and Vlad. Luke felt the gaze of the intruder on the back of his head and turned to look. The man was impeccably dressed. He wore expensive casual clothes. He nodded at Prekash, who quickly gave a very subtle and slight bow and left the room with his other officers. Luke and Vlad were suddenly alone with him.

  The man came over to Luke and extended his hand. “I am Sunil.”

  Luke was puzzled. “Luke Henry, and this is—”

  “Yes, I know. Hello, Vlad.”

  “Sunil,” Vlad said, surprised.

  “Who exactly are you?” Luke asked, perplexed by Prekash’s leaving in the middle of their conversation.

  “As I said, my name is Sunil.”

  “Sunil who?”

  “Just Sunil.”

  “So what can we do for you?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about what you’ll be doing and against whom you will be doing it,” he said. His accent was slightly less obvious than the others’. It had a more British, clipped sound to it, as if he’d been educated at Oxford.

  Luke nodded without comment. He wanted to get on with their planning.

  “We have some very good information that your enemy will be launching his attack either tonight or early in the morning.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “As I said, we have very good information.”

  “Okay,” Luke said. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “We will pre-position your two fighters at a forward strip which is actually a highway. The rest of the squadron will be behind you, in front of the nuclear plant as a barrier. It will be up to you to try to stop them, but if you fail, the others—”

  “We won’t fail,” Luke replied.

  “I understand that you do not intend to fail, but failure has a way of sneaking up on you.”

  “I don’t let failure sneak up on me.”

  “Yes, well, who intends to?”

  “Do you know how many airplanes there will be?”

  “I don’t think many.”

  “You sure seem calm,” Luke said. “Everyone else around here is on pins and needles. You look like you just got a massage.”

  Sunil smiled. His teeth were perfect and bright against his dark face and slicked-back jet black hair. “No massage, I’m just confident.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know our adversary.”

  “What do you mean, you know him?”

  “I’ve been following him and his group for years. He has been planning this event for a long time, including taking his leave of absence from the Air Force so he could reappear as another pilot with new records.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know almost everything there is to know about Mr. Riaz Khan, as you know him.”

  Luke winced at the mention of the name.

  “The man who came to your school, killed your security guards, bombed your nuclear power plant, and now has come here to do the same to us.”

  Luke put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Why?” Luke demanded. “If his target is India, why go after us first? Why put a big, sharp stick in the eye of the one country that might actually help him win a war with India? I mean, we’ve given them a lot of their military gear. I just don’t get it.”

  “Your mistake is understandable. You continue to think that he is working on behalf of Pakistan and that they simply refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, he is working on behalf of an elusive group whose goal is to see one Islamic country in South Asia, including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, possibly Iran, possibly Bangladesh, and, of course, Kashmir. Attacking the U.S. undermines Pakistan and will almost certainly topple the current regime, which refuses to go to war over Kashmir and stands in the way of his great Islamic state.”

  “You must have known all this when he came to the States,” Luke asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about him?” Luke demanded.

  Sunil took an Indian cigarette from the pocket of his sharply pressed wool slacks, lit it, and inhaled deeply. His gold Rolex watch moved with each hand gesture. “What makes you think I didn’t?” he asked.

  “You told them what you know about Khan?”

  “I told them everything I could tell them without compromising my sources.”

  “Before he attacked San Onofre?”

  “Of course. I told them everything they needed to know. But frankly, I anticipated no danger. I had no idea he would do something to the United States. I always thought Pakistan and India were his targets.” He sucked on the cigarette and raised his eyebrows. “I assumed he was in Nevada for training. That is all.”

  “What did they say?”

  He smiled as he exhaled through his nose. “Your intelligence people did not believe me. But finally they believed your courageous agent, who sneaked onto the military base and identified him. She is, of course, now—and will be for a long time�
�in a Pakistani prison for her efforts.”

  “What?” Luke said, horrified.

  “It doesn’t matter. You must get on with your mission. It is up to you to stop Khan.”

  Luke’s head was spinning. “You’ve been following this guy for years?”

  “Frankly, even I did not anticipate the boldness of his moves.”

  “You are with Indian intelligence, I take it.”

  Sunil breathed in deeply from his cigarette. “Of course.”

  “Do we have his target right?”

  “I suppose we are about to find out. But I think almost without a doubt that is his target.”

  “And it’s tonight?” Vlad interrupted.

  “The airplanes are already loaded with bombs. I do not know what time they will take off, but I am virtually certain it will be tonight.”

  Luke needed to plan. “Thanks for your help.”

  “We are grateful that you came here to help us. You did not have to do that.” He stepped on the butt of his cigarette with his expensive loafers. He looked at Luke and Vlad. “If there’s anything I can do for you—anything at all—let me know. He must be stopped.”

  “He will be.”

  27

  Luke and Vlad walked out of the hangar with Prekash, toward the squadron’s jets. They wore Indian flight suits and boots. Luke thought the Archers squadron patch on his flight suit was worthy of a MiG squadron, but he would have preferred to die with his NFWS flight suit and patch on, and the black star painted on the tail of his airplane.

  The Indian MiG-29s were lined up on the tarmac in the bright sunshine. They were in beautiful shape, painted in a green-and-tan camouflage with Indian markings.

  Vlad’s eyes took in the airplanes and the minutiae that only those who fly them can see. He spoke to Luke, who was walking beside him. “C models. Not much difference. All the latest electronic countermeasures. We should have no problem.”

  “Sure hope you’re right.” Luke was too busy having an out-of-body experience, looking at himself walking toward an Indian MiG, wearing an Indian flight suit and boots, being led by an Indian Colonel and assisted by a Russian pilot. All to fly into combat in a Russian fighter in a soon-to-be war he didn’t care much about, to stop a lunatic Pakistani pilot. It was one of the more surreal moments in his life. Things were usually clear in Luke’s mind, but he found himself unable to recount how he’d gotten to where he now found himself. He could certainly trace the chronology well enough, but that didn’t seem to explain it. It was an inadequate way of looking at it. He was more in search of a “why” answer. He felt as Ulysses must have felt in his journey back from Troy to Penelope, when every event surpassed the previous in oddity or difficulty, every monster was bigger and meaner than the last, all calculated by the gods to prevent him from reaching his destination. All Luke had wanted was to fly fighters and start a family. Was that so much to ask? Had he been too greedy? Was there a God so mean-spirited that such a desire was to be met with destruction and death?

  All around the base there was a hum of activity. It was clear to anyone watching that combat was imminent. Luke hoped that no such activity would be obvious to someone with a good vantage point to observe it and an inclination to tell Pakistan. He also hoped that if there was such a person, he didn’t have Raymond-size binoculars sufficient to identify Vlad and him. But it might not make much difference; Luke was convinced that Riaz Khan would go on his mission regardless of who was waiting for him. He was just afraid that knowing what they were up to might make Khan change something.

  Luke stood at the top of the ladder and peered into the cockpit.

  Vlad spoke to him from the bottom of the ladder, already having viewed the cockpit. “No problem, right? Just like we’re used to.”

  Prekash walked over to them. “We have decided where you should base your airplanes.”

  Luke was put out. “What’s the plan?”

  “We think you should go now. We don’t know when he might launch. We should be ready.”

  “I thought we were going to do a FAM hop first. Get used to your airplanes.”

  “We don’t have time for a familiarization hop. We think you should be in place in case he goes now.”

  “Okay,” Luke said, his uneasiness increasing. He hopped down the last step from the ladder. “When?”

  “As soon as you can be ready.”

  “Anything going on?”

  Prekash nodded. “We have some signals intelligence. We have intercepted some communications from the ground.”

  “I don’t see Khan talking on the radio before a strike.”

  “Not him, others. Fuel trucks and other ground personnel.”

  Luke nodded. “Where are you going to put us?”

  “On a highway.”

  * * *

  Luke sat in his Indian MiG-29 beneath a large tree on the side of a two-lane highway. Vlad’s MiG was across the highway inside a large barn. There were a dozen Indian maintenance men around them to ensure that they got their jets started and that their takeoff was uneventful. They waited only for some word, some indication that Khan was actually going to try it.

  Luke was uncomfortable with the idea of taking off from a dusty, poorly maintained highway. He’d never done anything even close to that, let alone in a jet. Vlad claimed to have done it several times, but Luke was beginning to wonder how many of Vlad’s amazing claims of experience were true. He’d never received any level of comfort on Vlad’s probably doctored flight records from Russia. But Luke had been impressed by Vlad’s tenacity against Khan at San Onofre. The man had nearly given his life to save an American nuclear plant. Still.

  Luke had been sitting in the MiG cockpit so long his muscles ached. The afternoon had passed full of anticipation and excitement. Everyone was ready to launch, but nothing had happened. A telephone had been set up on a portable table for the critical communication. An order to launch would come through the phone, a landline that could not be intercepted by Pakistan’s signals intelligence. The plain black telephone looked stark against the high-tech gear all around—the testing equipment, a few spare parts, the hydraulic line charger, and the electric cart that provided nonstop power to the MiGs. Vlad had an identical setup across the road and down a hundred yards. The airplanes had been dispersed in case of attack. One attack couldn’t get more than one airplane at a time.

  The night had brought strange noises and frustrated traffic from the closed road. The Indian ground crew had gone from unbounded enthusiasm to bored waiting. The hours passed slowly, punctuated only by the activity of Luke and Vlad unstrapping and climbing out of their jets every so often to relieve themselves behind the nearest structure.

  Luke found himself fighting unconsciousness. He was exhausted, but he didn’t want to be found sleeping when the big call came. It was hard enough to get a jet ready for takeoff from an unimproved roadway. But the problem was magnified infinitely when one tried to get airborne while fighting the fog of recent, deep, satisfying sleep. The result was a fitful, restless existence for Luke, strapped into the confines of a Russian cockpit battling sleep every minute of the night. He would find himself drifting off and shake his head to just short of a headache. He would pinch himself just short of a bruise. Anything to stay awake.

  Without any warning, the telephone rang.

  * * *

  Morrissey sat in his office with the NSA specialists, numerous transcripts of telephone conversations spread out in front of him. “What do we have?” Morrissey demanded impatiently.

  “Several calls. Some from Russia, and a couple to Russia. The most interesting are from this man he identifies as Gorgov.”

  “Who is he?”

  The Russian linguist who had translated them and listened to the originals answered. “We’re not sure. He behaves like someone with a lot of power—the kind that comes from holding a gun to your head. He has some control over this Vladimir.”

  “What about the others?”

  “There is a call to a
Colonel to apparently take care of this Gorgov. To get him off his back. The Colonel apparently is intending to take Gorgov out.”

  “And?”

  “And then there’s a call from Gorgov, telling Vlad his Colonel friend had failed in his attempt to kill Gorgov. He tells Vlad he’d better come through this time, basically. I think he was supposed to make sure the Pakistanis pulled off the attack on San Onofre. Turned out they got there too late to stop them anyway. But there’s some other event that’s going to happen, and Vladimir is supposed to be in a place to make sure it comes off. It is very unclear.”

  Morrissey put his head in his hands as he realized what was happening. “Khan is going to strike India. We just sent an American pilot and Vladimir to India to stop them. And the request originated with Vladimir’s suggestion to the Russians, who passed it on . . . We are screwed,” Morrissey declared as he jumped up and grabbed the phone. He looked at a list and dialed a number, then waited for the international connection. Finally someone answered. “Sunil, please.”

  “I’m sorry, he is not available.”

  “Find him.”

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “Bill Morrissey. This is an emergency. Put him on right away,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll put you through.”

  Morrissey heard an unusual set of clicks that sounded as if he was being forwarded through innumerable switchboards. Then the unmistakable voice of Sunil came on through what sounded like a digital cell phone. “Yes?” he said.

  “Are you secure?”

  “Yes,” Sunil replied. “Bill Morrissey?”

  “Yes. Look, two pilots are on their way there. Luke Henry and a Russian—”

  “Yes, I have met them.”

  “We have reason to believe that the Russian is under the control of Khan, or the Russian Mafia who are helping Khan. He’s going to help the strike succeed, not stop it. We’ve got a lot of other things to do to confirm it, but he shouldn’t be on that mission. We can’t rely on him.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “We’ve got some phone conversations that are pretty clear.”

  Sunil sounded distressed. “It may be too late. They are already in place at a remote road location.”