State of the Union

by Brad Thor

  “We have no idea, only suspicions at this point.”

  “Based on what?”

  “As far as we’re concerned,” said the secretary, “the integrity of our nuclear weapons has not been compromised. Every one of them, whether they’re in a silo, on board a submarine, in a secure Air Force depot, or someplace else, all check out as fully operational.”

  “So where do your suspicions come from?” asked Harvath.

  “Over the last eight months, the Defense Intelligence Agency has been investigating what the air force believed to be random guidance system control problems in some of its patrol flights over the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “It only happened a few times, but pilots reported hitting what they referred to as an invisible wall when they were a specific number of nautical miles out into the strait. Their otherwise perfectly functioning electronic systems all began to fail and they lost control of their aircraft. The only thing that saved those planes was turning around and coming back. Since the problem could never be duplicated, we began looking into all sorts of natural phenomenon from sunspots to magnetic interference from the North Pole. Then, quite by accident we heard that the Finnish Air Force had experienced a similar problem. In fact they even lost one of their F-18 Hornets to it.”

  “Where did they experience their problem?” asked Harvath.

  “At different spots along their border with Russia. We asked the Signal Intelligence division of the NSA to get involved and they began monitoring electromagnetic radiation, in particular radar emissions, around Russia. At the same time, we began to quietly look around for any other similar invisible walls around the former Soviet Union that either military or civilian aircraft may have come up against.”

  “And?”

  “Apparently the Chinese, the Poles, and the Ukrainians have all encountered similar problems. When we compared the pilot accounts to the intelligence the NSA had gathered, we discovered that at the same time the pilots reported losing significant control of their aircraft, certain portions of the Russian Air Defense system were operating unusually.”

  “Unusually?” asked Harvath. “How?”

  “The electromagnetic signature emitted by all of the radar installations within range of the incident was somehow different. The NSA people couldn’t explain it. All they could say was that the anomaly was present in all confirmed cases of pilots who reported losing control of their aircraft near Russian airspace.”

  “My God,” breathed Harvath, “if this is some sort of new technology and it could be applied to missiles as well, the Russians would be virtually—”

  “Impervious to attack,” said the president, finishing his sentence for him.

  “What if it doesn’t guard against missiles?”

  “Based on the sophistication that we’ve seen,” replied Hilliman, “we’re assuming that it does. The only way to be completely sure would be to launch a strike of our own and at this point, we can’t justify that.”

  “But they’re holding a nuclear knife to our throats.”

  “That’s where this gets tricky,” said Hilliman. “Everything points to Russia, but it’s all circumstantial. The Russian government claims they know nothing about a plot to plant enhanced suitcase nukes in different locations around the United States. Yet, when asked about one of the devices specifically, the Russian president gave us a bullshit response. The letter President Rutledge received calling for America to step off the world stage was slipped in between his briefing papers, which suggests that whoever is behind this has the ability to control someone in a not-so-insignificant position within our government. Then we add another ingredient—a number of pilots who claim to have lost control of their aircraft near Russian airspace. It’s still not enough to make a case for striking first.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re not convinced?” asked Harvath.

  “No, the president and I are very much convinced.”

  “But if we can’t launch our missiles, then we’re dead in the water.”

  “Maybe not completely,” replied the secretary. “Twenty years ago it was decided that we needed a backup for our backup. If the Russians were ever able to somehow take away our ability to launch missiles, we needed a way to rebalance the chessboard; if not entirely in our favor, then at least enough to help put us back on equal footing and reestablish the reality of mutually assured destruction. We did that by creating an operation codenamed,Dark Night —a team of twelve Army Intelligence operatives who could sneak man-portable nukes into Russia underneath their radar so to speak, and hold them hostage from within. Much in the same way we are being held hostage now.”

  The pictures of the men Harvath had seen in Secretary Driehaus’s conference room suddenly reappeared before his eyes and though he was afraid of the answer, he asked the question anyway, “Have you activated them?”

  “We have.”

  “And?”

  “They’re all dead. All except for two of them.”

  Chapter 16

  Y ou’ve heard of the tip of the spear? Well, these guys were the bolt on the door—our absolute final line of defense,” said Secretary Hilliman.

  Harvath listened intently, taking in every piece of information.

  “During the eighties, we had a lot of assets forward deployed in Europe. There was no point in having teams stateside that could lift off in under two hours if it was going to take at least six more to cross the Atlantic. The Dark Night operation evolved from a group of Army Intelligence operatives based in Berlin. They could not only quickly respond to terrorist incidents on the continent, but they had also been trained to blend in with the locals and organize resistance if the Soviets ever overran the wall and they found themselves behind enemy lines. They were expert marksmen, possessed exceptional language abilities, and were highly skilled in their tradecraft. In fact, the CIA used them to help train many of their own people. In short, they were not only highly trained counterterrorism operatives, but also some of the best intelligence agents the United States has ever produced. And the man in charge of them all was Gary Lawlor.”

  Harvath raised his eyebrows and looked as if he was about to speak, when Hilliman held up his hand and continued. “After Vietnam, Gary remained attached to Army Intelligence. He retained his rank and received four promotions as he worked his way through the FBI. As far as they’re concerned it was because of his Russian skills that the government borrowed him to recruit foreign intelligence agents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. In reality, he had been called upon by the Defense Department to assemble and coordinate the Dark Night team.”

  “What about Heide, his wife?” asked Harvath. “I heard a lot of things in my debriefing with Secretary Driehaus.”

  “She was a bona fide recruiter of foreign intelligence agents.”

  “So that’s why she was sanctioned and not Gary?”

  “Correct. But the reason she was sanctioned in the first place was because she was so good at what she did,” replied the secretary.

  “What about what Driehaus said about her suspicions of Gary toward the end?”

  “Like I said, she was good at what she did. That also made her a good student of human behavior. In the weeks before her death, there had been a lot of suspicious activity in some of the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. The Russians were moving nuclear missiles into places like Prague and Budapest. Gary and his team were sent in to investigate. Something he did had obviously made Heide suspicious and she looked into it. She spoke with her handler, and he came back and told her he couldn’t support any of what Gary had been telling her. Shortly thereafter, she was killed in the hit and run. We needed to develop a cover for Gary’s actions because other U.S. agencies that had no idea what he was really up to started looking into his life. The Dark Night operation had to remain out of their reach and totally classified.”

  “Hence the alternate codename the president is using right now?”
>
  “Yes.”

  “And this facility?”

  “Was created several administrations ago in case any of our established command centers were ever compromised. It was all part of the overall plan. The need for secrecy overrode all else. Though he fought it in the beginning, Gary eventually relented and agreed to let us put together the story about Heide being on medication and fighting severe paranoia and depression to throw off the pending CIA investigation. We used one of our doctors, backdated some files, records of office visits, prescriptions, and that was that. Heide’s people bought it and though Gary wasn’t too happy about sullying his wife’s reputation, he could see the bigger picture and went along with it.”

  “He has always put his country first,” said Harvath.

  “As did Heide, which I think was his one consolation. Somehow he knew she would understand why he had to do what he did. There was no choice. After the wall came down and Russia began to fold in on itself, we put the whole Dark Night operation out to pasture. In fact, all of the guys, except for Gary, eventually retired from the military.”

  “You never replaced them?” asked Harvath. “You didn’t update the team with active operatives?”

  “As far as the Defense Department was concerned, we had won the Cold War and the need for the team had passed.”

  “But you left the nukes in place.”

  “They were hidden well enough and it was easier to leave them there than to try and smuggle them back out. We looked at it as sort of an insurance policy. If the need ever arose, we’d have them on the continent ready to move.”

  “But not the men to move them.”

  “That,” said the secretary, “was a possibility we hadn’t fully considered.”

  “You’ll have to find replacements for the Dark Night team.”

  “We have to tread very carefully,” said Hilliman. “If this is the greatest Trojan horse in history, the Russians will be throwing everything they have into it. We know the Soviets probably have planted long-term sleepers in the U.S., but obviously we don’t know where. They may be in the government, the military, or possibly even in the administration. There are very few people we can trust. Even as the FBI and CIA are looking for Gary and trying to get to the bottom of who killed those ten Army Intelligence operatives, they still don’t have the full picture. We have to assume that the Russians essentially have eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “There’s got to be some people you can trust.”

  “There are—to greater or lesser degrees. I have a core contingent of operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency and if need be, I can pull from a handful of Diplomatic Security Service personnel in the countries where the nukes are and let them carry out the assignments, but we’ve got two pretty big problems.”

  “What are they?” replied Harvath.

  “With the State of the Union address only a week away, we don’t have very much time to train a replacement team and get them in place. And, probably the biggest problem, though we know where the nukes were hidden, we have no idea how Gary’s guys planned to get them in place.”

  Harvath was dumfounded. “What do you mean you have no idea?”

  “Operation Dark Night was established as an independent covert action team. Everything was highly compartmentalized. In fact, the word team is somewhat of a misnomer. Once activated, the operatives were to go their own separate ways and they only thing they would have in common was a shared point of contact—Gary Lawlor.

  “The men had access to money, safe houses, and weapons caches secreted in both western and eastern Europe. We have general knowledge of how the men were going to go about achieving their objectives and what their targets in Russia were, but not the nuts and bolts of their plans. Gary encouraged all of them to be highly creative in their assignments.”

  “So you have to coordinate with Gary.”

  “And he’s disappeared,” responded the president.

  Harvath wanted to hope for the best. “Just like he was supposed to do when you activated him, correct?”

  “I wish it was that simple,” said the president. “A strict protocol was developed for the Dark Night operation that would allow us to maintain some semblance of control back here in Washington. Part of that protocol involved communication, and Gary has failed to check in since leaving the U.S.”

  “Do you think they may have gotten to him?”

  “Anything’s possible. No matter how you look at it, he’s gone far too long without contacting us. Until we get a better handle on things, we’re playing this very carefully. Especially until we figure out why would they take out everyone on the Dark Night team except for Lawlor and Leighton.”

  There was only one answer that seemed to make any sense to Harvath and he offered it. “Obviously the two of them must be more useful to the Russians alive than dead. But why did you place an intercept team at Leighton’s house?”

  “Gary was the lead member of the Dark Night team. He knows more than anybody, so we can understand why the Russians would want to take him alive, but ignoring Leighton doesn’t make any sense. We were toying with the idea that maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to him yet, and with the FBI sitting only a two man team on his house until they compiled enough evidence for a warrant, we decided to deploy some of our own, more sophisticated assets there as well on the off chance we might get lucky. That’s how they found you.”

  “Great,” replied Harvath, as he rubbed his ribs and tried to change the subject. “If this was classified above top secret, how did the Russians get a hold of the names and whereabouts of the Dark Night operatives in the first place? In fact, considering that the entire operation had been deactivated, why did they even bother going to all that trouble to take those men out?”

  “Our best guess is that they were covering their bases. The Russian assassins were given their targets, and they carried out the sanctions,” replied Hilliman.

  “But how did they get the names?”

  “We don’t know, and at this point we don’t have the resources to investigate. Our goal is to protect the American people from an impending attack and maintain the sovereignty of the United States.”

  “As it should be,” replied Harvath. “So let’s try another tack. How were the Dark Night operatives to be activated?”

  “The Army maintains a database of personnel it believes possess useful skills and abilities, long after said personnel leave the army. For example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, all Special Operations personnel, especially those with Arabic language skills were contacted just to make sure the army knew where they were in case it needed to reach them. Taking into account the considerable amount of time and money used to train these personnel, you can appreciate why we keep tabs on them even after they leave the service.

  “We scrubbed the records of all the Dark Night team members clean. There was not only no mention of Dark Night involvement in their files, but there was no valid current contact information in the Army’s general management system. Besides their participation in the Dark Night program, they had been involved in many other international interdictions, which made them a lot of enemies. Suffice it to say, that the United States Government thought it better to conceal their whereabouts than to allow them to become public through some freedom of information error.”

  “So how could someone have found them?” asked Harvath.

  “The president and I were made aware of the Dark Night team by our predecessors. We were told that no one else knew and that it was to remain that way.”

  “Well, somebody obviously found out.”

  “Right, which means either someone on the team talked—”

  “Which is highly unlikely,” interjected Harvath.

  “Or, there was some other sort of breach.”

  “How were the men contacted?”

  “To facilitate some of its more clandestine operations, the Defense Department maintains a front company out of a townhouse in Foggy Bottom called th
e Capstone Corporation. Capstone owns several safe houses and apartments throughout Europe, including Gary’s in Berlin, which different teams have used over the years. In the basement of the townhouse is a secure computer network.

  “The computer was programmed so that upon being given the command by the president, it could simultaneously contact each of the twelve Dark Night operatives via telephone. They’d be prompted to enter an authentication code, and once their identities were verified they would be activated.

  “Could anyone have eavesdropped on these calls?” asked Harvath.

  “No. The computer was able to detect any taps, and even if someone had found a way around it, most of the process sounded like a personal computer conducting a handshake with a server,” replied Hilliman.

  “Or a high pitched fax machine on full volume?”

  “Yes, but how’d you know?”

  “I’m guessing Gary Lawlor placed a call to your computer in Georgetown. When I hit the redial button on his phone, I received those same tones. But you said the computer would have called him, not vice versa.”

  “No, our records show that Gary did call back into the system to check on the status of the other team members. As the team leader, that would have been his responsibility—to know who had been contacted and activated.”

  “Now I understand why Leighton called Gary’s house,” said Harvath. “If I had been activated after all these years, I would probably call my old team leader too before flying halfway around the world to nuke an old enemy we all thought was dead. But what about the other operatives? Does Gary know they’re dead?”

  “No. They were all killed before they were activated. We put out the call to activate the team, but only Leighton and Gary were alive to receive it. Based on when Gary called back into the system, all he would have known was that the rest of the team hadn’t been reached yet.”

  “And yet whoever killed them missed Gary and Frank Leighton,” mused Harvath.

  Hilliman nodded his head. “Taking out ten highly trained American operatives, all of whom were scattered around the country, is no small feat. I don’t care if those men were retired. They were not easy marks. Whoever did this spent a lot of time planning.”