by Joe Buff
Harley sputtered. “Would we give those sons of bitches an amnesty after all this? Let them walk, after starting a premeditated tactical nuclear war?”
Jeffrey smiled sweetly. “Oh, I suppose the amnesty might be broken eventually, maybe by hit squads from Israel’s Mossad.”
“I like that part,” Meltzer said.
“For one stage I’ll need to go to a base in Siberia, as a back-door emissary to convey America’s extreme displeasure by making certain deadly threats, and also pretend to test Russia’s good faith, since most of Moscow will be knocked out of the loop by the EMP, including our somewhat ineffective diplomats stationed there. By then the President will be on the Hot Line to Russia’s president, assuming the Hot Line isn’t knocked out too. And if it is still working, Washington will cause temporary outages at crucial times, for ‘technical reasons,’ to help underscore my discussions and suitably tweak and tune the psychological chaos likely in the Kremlin by then. Part of my job will also be to quickly get inside Moscow’s reaction and decision time scale, to keep them from doing something precipitate, something irrevocably disastrous for the world.”
“And if you can’t?” Harley demanded.
“If things backfire? If Kurzin’s team can’t sneak and fight their way into a highly restricted area, then bypass booby traps and override software safeguards properly, or their and our strike group’s subterfuges are seen through or my bluffs are called, or we get sunk and identified, then Russia will surely become a wholehearted member of the Axis. Our commandos might even by accident nuke a few U.S. or Russian cities for real.”
“But—” Bell tried to object.
“Then the only way out of apocalypse isn’t even a negotiated armistice, it’s fast and abject Allied surrender. We kiss good-bye to the American way of life, confront enslavement instead, and learn to speak German or Russian or Afrikaans. That’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, the missiles Kurzin launches are only the first of many, and then more, and more, from Russia, the U.S., and other places. You could call that outcome, the worst-case mission failure result, Apocalypse Now.”
Jeffrey knew how his subordinates felt, because his own head was swirling with unanswered questions and troubling what-ifs. “Captain Harley, I think we ought to be getting to the briefing session.” Bell stood, and Meltzer let his seniors precede him.
Harley, not so crisp and detached as when Jeffrey first met him, led the way, around sharp corners and down steep ladders, then through a long, straight corridor. He said, with pride, that this was the wasp waist in Carter’s Multi-Mission Platform. The pressure hull narrowed to eighteen feet, creating ample garage space inside the forty-two-foot-diameter outer hull.
They came to the full-width aft part of this specially added pressure hull section. Some doors here held security warnings, and were protected by electronic and mechanical combination locks. They went up a ladder and came to another door, open. Inside was a briefing room. Jeffrey did a double take.
Except for officers and chiefs from Challenger and Carter, who wore khakis or jumpsuit blue, several dozen men were dressed in Russian Army uniforms—mostly urban- or forest-pattern camouflage fatigues—and they talked in small groups in fluent Russian. Their short haircuts, the set of their features, the ways they moved, were subtly foreign, not American. Some had shirtsleeves rolled above elbows, and even their forearm tattoos—the motifs, the colors, the alphabet used for the words—bore an alien look. Jeffrey also saw battle scars, from shrapnel, bayonets, or bullets.
Their mean and emotionless faces gave the appearance of street gang members, ones who’d had the individuality beaten out of them by a merciless mental and physical thrashing that left these, the survivors, tougher and more ruthless for it. What distinguished each were their ethnic features, body types, and hair color, blond or brown or frizzy red or glossy jet black.
One man at the front of the room stood up. Jeffrey thought he bore a close resemblance, in bearing and attitude as well as in his build and appearance, to a youngish Leonid Brezhnev, the reactionary Communist Party General Secretary who led the USSR during its violent repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
“Sergey Kurzin,” this strange apparition said to Jeffrey, shaking his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Commodore.” His English was unaccented. He said he grew up in Chicago.
Jeffrey glanced around the briefing room. “You have quite an outfit here, Colonel.” Then Jeffrey saw Commander Nyurba approaching. He too looked different, like he really was a serving officer in the Russian Federation’s armed forces.
“Don’t mind us, Commodore,” Nyurba said. “We need to stay in character.”
“Where are the rest of your team?”
“I decided to send them by squads to eat,” Kurzin stated, “or to use our exercise equipment, since you were even
longer than I expected reading your orders.”
“Can we get started now?”
“After I talk to you and Commander Nyurba in private.”
Jeffrey eyed Bell, Harley, and Meltzer. “Introduce yourselves around to . . . to our new friends in the meantime.”
“Boy, this is weird,” Meltzer said under his breath.
“I know it,” Bell responded. “These guys look like Spetsnaz or something.” Spetsnaz were Soviet-era special forces sabotage and assassination troops, which continued to exist under the Russian Federation with different roles. “Like they’d slit our throats if we gave them half a chance.”
“They would do so quickly and silently, I assure you,” Kurzin said. He wasn’t smiling.
He led Jeffrey and Nyurba past the battle management center, full of mission-planning and communications consoles, some of them manned, and over to a compartment whose watertight hatch said “SMALL ARMS LOCKER. CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES AND PYROTECHNICS.” Kurzin undogged the heavy hatch and flipped on a light switch, and they went inside. A narrow aisle led down the center. The compartment was filled with safes, locked storage cabinets, and racks on both sides of the aisle holding many dozens of wicked-looking Russian assault rifles—each shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. Kurzin shut the hatch behind them.
He saw Jeffrey’s curiosity. “Nikonov AN-Ninety-fours. Nicknamed Abakans. Successor to the AK-Forty-sevens and AK-Seventy-fours. Russian elite units use them. Beside the usual one-shot and full-auto selector modes, they fire special two-round bursts at a cyclic rate of eighteen hundred rounds per minute. That’s almost three times as fast as an M-Sixteen. More accurate, too, trust me. These have time-shifted recoil action, so the user doesn’t even feel the gun go off until after the pair of bullets leave the barrel. Both slugs hit the same spot at a hundred yards or more, one a thirtieth of a second behind the other. Great way to tear through body armor. Extreme lethality.”
“These are real? I mean, made in Russia?” They were all a solid gun-metal gray, including the fiberglass-polymer folding stock and fore-grip—Jeffrey saw none of the wooden or brown-colored plastic parts as on the venerable AK-47.
“We have ways of obtaining the genuine article.”
“What about ammo?”
“Caliber is five-point-four-five millimeters, slightly narrower than the NATO standard five-point-five-six bullet. They take sixty-round box magazines, short but thick, rounds stacked four in a row. Those, we have foreign-made.”
“Won’t that be a giveaway?”
“A metallurgical analysis will show that the bullets and shells were produced at a munitions plant in Germany.”
“So that the raiders will seem to have come from there. Okay, I follow that, but how did you get the ammunition from Germany?”
“You don’t need to know. You don’t want to.”
Kurzin switched into rapid-fire Russian, bombarding Jeffrey with it, catching him off guard.
Jeffrey tried to keep up, stammering.
Kurzin cursed in Russian, then turned, enraged, to Nyurba.
“ ’Vy skazaki chto on byl gotovy!” You
said he was ready!
“Grazhdanin, ya dumal chto on byl gotovy.” Sir, I thought he was ready.
Kurzin reverted to English. “Forget it. This is hopeless. You’ll need to go back to Challenger until the next rendezvous, and work with Commodore Fuller much more.”
“Yes, sir,” Nyurba said.
“What’s the problem here?” Jeffrey asked, trying to reassert his authority.
“Commodore, don’t pull rank on me,” Kurzin said in a sharp, nasty way. His eyes showed cold fury. “Have you any idea what you’ll be up against?” He didn’t let Jeffrey answer. “For purposes of this mission, Commander Nyurba and I are your training officers. Your rank means nothing. Nothing. Your readiness is all that matters. All. Your Russian stinks, you’ll have to do a lot better than that. And I saw you blink, you were flustered. Unacceptable!”
“But—”
“Do not talk back to me. If you let on just once during this mission about what you really think inside, how you really feel, you’ve screwed the pooch big-time. My men will have risked their lives, given their lives, for nothing.”
“Now wait a minute, Colonel.”
“No, you wait a minute.” Kurzin moved in close and loomed over Jeffrey. “What did I just tell you?” he said in a loud, angry voice.
“That I’m in training.”
“Christ Almighty, don’t you realize the Russians will be recording every word you say? Running it through stress analyzers? They’ll have hidden video cameras everywhere. Every facial inflection, the way you inhale, the way you fidget, they’ll be watched again and again by a team of the FSB’s best experts!”
“Why can’t I just bring a translator?”
“Because the whole act hinges on your personal command presence, your prestige, your image as Axis nemesis, your tactical nuclear warrior’s worldwide fame. An aide, an assistant, a translator, in this context they’d dilute your impact. You must go alone. The President made that decision.”
“Won’t the Russians have translators?”
“Of course, you fool! Do you think that for one moment you can trust them? Who will they be loyal to?”
“The Russians.”
“Whom you’re supposed to confront as an enemy, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Whom you’re supposed to think have just tried to nuke the United States, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Role-play it out. You’re nowhere there yet. Thank God you’ve got ten days more to work on your part.”
“All right,” Jeffrey conceded. “Lay it on as thick as you need to.”
“Don’t worry, I will, and I don’t need your permission.”
Jeffrey was starting to think that he was in boot camp, lower than dirt—in some bizarre through-the-looking-glass netherworld of lies embedded in other lies. That’s an accurate summary.
The rows of AN-94s all around him gave the compartment, and the discussion, a surreal quality. Added to the browbeating by this Kurzin-cum-Brezhnev persona confronting him, Jeffrey started to feel disoriented.
Kurzin came so close that Jeffrey smelled the onions lingering on his breath. “Be glad, be very glad, that it’ll probably be the Russians who feel defensive, conciliatory. Your job is to convey wrath and resolve, not merely your own but your nation’s, and your nation’s commander in chief’s. A commander in chief who by then will have full power to push the button. Use that.”
“Uh, right.”
“And leave your moral qualms out of it altogether. Deception and bluff in a war situation aren’t lies, they’re necessary tools, and part of your duty!” Kurzin jabbed Jeffrey in the chest with his index finger, so forcefully it hurt. “Have you ever not done your duty?”
“No.”
“Then don’t start botching.”
Jeffrey decided it was time for a counterattack—he had to get in the spirit of things as much as Kurzin was. “Let me know when you’re finished, Colonel. Or should I say, Podpolkovnik.” Lieutenant Colonel in Russian. “Your histrionics grow tiresome to me.” Jeffrey faked a yawn as best he could.
Kurzin didn’t react in the least. “Good, I’m getting through to you.”
“Speaking of moral qualms, I have some questions about how this whole thing is supposed to work.”
“Upstairs. Now. It’s undignified to stand in a closet.”
Jeffrey didn’t point out that this cozy chat in the closet was Kurzin’s idea to begin with.
Kurzin stroked one of the AN-94s lovingly, as if he looked forward to using it soon against live, human targets. He undogged the door and stalked out.
Jeffrey turned to Nyurba. “Is he always like that?”
“You haven’t seen him in combat.”
Chapter 12
The assembled strike group’s first mission briefing began. After a while Kurzin announced a pause for questions. Everyone deferred to Jeffrey.
“I’ll ask what I think are my easier questions first and save the toughest one of all for last.”
“Please proceed,” Kurzin told him with supreme confidence.
“The easiest one, I believe I’ve answered for myself, but I want to make sure.”
“Yes?”
“Why aren’t you aiming the ICBMs at Germany?”
“A natural query. What do you think is the reason?”
“Given Berlin’s mentality these days, it’d immediately provoke a nuclear exchange between them and Russia. Which could spread. Armageddon could break out.”
“It could. An undesirable outcome.”
Kurzin’s talent for deadpan understatements is remarkable. “Aiming the missiles away from Germany,” Jeffrey said, “toward the U.S. instead, in a much more sophisticated gambit, is as effective for us in the end but safer . . . at least in theory.”
“Correct. We hurt Berlin by indirection, deal them what we hope is a staggering geopolitical blow, by the total ruination of their friendly terms with Russia. But we must not tempt them to escalate, to retaliate against the Kremlin, or against Washington, in an irrational fit of rage when they already have tactical nuclear weapons in play. Rather, in actual real life, Washington as the imaginary supposed target understands why the missiles took off, and knows from the start that they were programmed to explode outside the atmosphere. These factors lead to moderation in U.S. behavior, and this visible moderation from the very first moments will be greatly calming to Moscow. Berlin, though angered by a purely statecraft defeat, will see the same moderation and calm and thus be dissuaded from acting so rashly as to launch an atomic first strike against anyone’s homeland—which if they did would mean their own instant and utter destruction at Russian or American hands. There’s vastly more to it that we’ll walk through step by step. Next question?”
“You’re supposed to be German commandos of Russian ancestry, disguised as Russian Federation extremists—”
“Ethnic Russian Kampfschwimmer as loyal to their adoptive country as we are to America!” Kampfschwimmer were German Navy combat swimmers, the equivalent of U.S. Navy SEALs.
“Okay. Okay. What if the Russians don’t see through the disguise, and they think the raid and the missile launch were done by their own people? Chechens, or ultra-hard-line neocommies, or anarchists, or whomever?”
Nyurba answered; Jeffrey had thought him a hard-to-read sort, but that was before he met Kurzin. In comparison to the colonel, Nyurba seemed like a really nice guy.
“Commodore,” Nyurba said, “the people who planned this out had a number of Blue Teams and Red Teams go through all the possible permutations of partial success, partial or total failure, and potential misunderstandings, with a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law. The U.S. view, the Russian view and response, they even had a Tiger Team behaving as the Germans might, both as planners of the raid and as the party later accused of it while knowing their lack of involvement. . . . If the Russians don’t see through the disguise, then most likely two things would happen. First, our mission will fail because there’d be no
rancor created between Russia and Germany. The Kremlin would be very apologetic to Washington, sure, and would make some token concessions, but it’s unlikely their logistical support of Germany would be swayed. Second, there’d be a brutal crackdown against whichever faction Russia concludes was responsible.”
“Which means you’re setting up an innocent group for a pogrom, a purge. Persecution and extermination.”
“We’ll leave enough hard evidence so the Russians quickly figure out that the team did come from Germany.”
“Such as the metallurgy in the ammo expended?”
“And our flesh and blood. We expect to take losses. Getting into a Russian missile silo field will not be a cakewalk, even with all of our cleverest preparations. Wounded men will bleed. Men killed in action will be left behind, of necessity, as abhorrent as that sounds.”
“How would that help?”
“For some time, all the medications we’ve been taking, to protect us as much as possible against diseases and toxins in the areas we’ll cross, are of German manufacture.”
“Prewar?”
“No. They’ve developed some interesting pharmaceuticals since the start of the war. We have an adequate supply for our purposes. Don’t ask me how we got them. You don’t need to know.”
“American-manufactured copies?”
“The original German formularies.”
Kurzin broke in. “The key was to plan and execute this mission the way the Germans would. They’d rely a lot on technology. Their mistakes would be very subtle. But they would make mistakes.”
“What if they didn’t? Don’t?”
“Hah!” Kurzin pounced. “You’re getting so caught up in this, you’re thinking the Germans are doing the raid!”
“Woops. I did have myself going for a minute there.”
“Good. Get as deep into this as you can. And stay deep.”