“What else do you know?” he asked.
“Not much,” she confessed. “Just a couple of names. Alexandr Skarov and Pavel Ivanov.”
It meant nothing to Slim Jim and he looked at her like a slow child, unable to figure out a simple math problem.
“Sounds like a shitty Russian Punch and Judy.”
“Skarov is a personal fixer for Stalin. Pavel Ivanov is on our side, a freelancer,” she explained, taking a chair across the table from him. “Ivanov’s uptime. Former Russian Spetsnaz operator. Did a lot of work inside the USSR during the war, and a bit afterwards until it got too hot for him. So he freelances now, mostly for the smaller, independent shops working out of London and on the continent. He has a base here in Paris too. We use him sometimes.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded.
“He’s got great contacts in Turkey and the subcontinent. That pipeline deal we got in Central Asia, we got because of him.”
Slim Jim was genuinely impressed. Not with this Russian asshole but with the scope of his own business. His empire was so vast now, so far-flung and downright fucking weird in so many ways that he had long ago stopped bothering with the details. He had people like O’Brien to worry about that.
“So what’s this Ivan guy… This…”
“Ivanov.”
“Yeah him. What’s his part of the story?”
“Don’t know,” Maria conceded. “I couldn’t shake that out of the trees. But he is plugged into this one way or another, and he really, really has a hard-on for Skarov.”
“He’s a fag?” Slim Jim asked.
She shook her head as if pitying him.
“No. Sorry. Poor choice of words. Skarov put the zap on some of Ivanov’s people during the war. Killed them, tortured them, some Bond villain henchmen shit. But, far as I can tell, their feud’s got nothing to do with the NRO losing its satellites or whatever the Sovs are up to that needs hiding from those birds.”
Slim Jim drummed his fingers on the table. He was engaged now. This wasn’t like playing poker for cigarettes. This shit was for real.
“If there’s gonna be a war I guess we should buy some bomb factories or something,” he said. “And go short on consumer goods. What do you think?”
O’Brien shook her head.
“It’s a bit early for that, Jimbo. And to be frank your portfolio is so diverse now that it’s neither here nor there. But we do have exposure we have to worry about, especially if the Russians are raking birds out of the sky.”
“My satellites, you mean?”
“Yes,” O’Brien said. “They’re part of the reason you’re so big.”
He grinned, and she gave him a warning look, wiping the smile from his face.
“I’m serious. You own the planet’s largest private comms network, and all that traffic routes through your satellites at one point or another. If you lose them, you lose the real-time decision-making advantage you have over all of your competitors. Right now, nobody can get inside your decision loop. It’s literally like the 1950s competing with the 21st century. It’s not even a contest. But if you lose that, especially in the context of the Cold War turning hot, you’re fucked.”
He picked up another sandwich, but it was just a reflex action, something to do with his hands. He wasn’t hungry. He was actually feeling a little sick. He put the dainty triangle of bread down again.
“So what should I do?” he asked.
“First thing, I think we should lay hands on Ivanov. Try to find out what he knows.”
“Do you know where he is?”
O’Brien smiled.
“Of course. He’s in Paris. Been here for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t trace his movements for a month before that, which means he was probably on a job, probably somewhere he shouldn’t have been.”
“Taking a dump on the sly in old Joe Stalin’s hot tub, eh? Good for him,” grinned Davidson. “Let’s send someone to grab him. And a really big bag full of money. Five minutes ago. Get him in here for sandwiches and shenanigans. I love me some fucking shenanigans, especially when there’s a payday at the end of it.”
She nodded.
“He’s on his way. I already sent a guy, as soon as I located him. I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to waste any time.”
Slim Jim waved off the very idea that he might give a shit about her getting ahead of herself.
“This is why I pay you so much, baby. To make me look as if I’m always three moves ahead of the game.”
“You actually are three moves ahead of the game now.”
“Great. Give yourself a pay raise, doll. Buy something pretty with it.” He clapped his hands together. Satisfied that they were in the game, even if he didn’t know exactly what they were playing for. “So we get him in here and get what we can from him. Whatever it costs. Whatever he knows, we need to know.”
“Already happening,” she said. “But…”
He looked at her, not knowing what she might say next.
She said nothing, merely looking at him, as if inviting Slim Jim to fill in the blanks.
“But?” he said, at last.
“But that’s not the only option you have. You can take direct action to protect your investments. Your satellite network.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure what she meant, and then he remembered.
“Oh shit yeah, that’s right,” he said. And then…
“Fuck. You really think I can do that?”
“Yes,” said the woman from the future. “I do.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kolhammer was sleeping when the war began. He hadn’t gone to bed. He had been waiting to hear back from Karen Halabi and had dozed off in an armchair. His phone rang at the same time as the Secret Service detail burst in through the big double doors of his hotel suite. They didn’t bother knocking. The agents didn’t yell at him, but they weren’t gentle.
“We have to get moving, Mr Vice President. This location is no longer secure.”
His attention moved blearily between the phone vibrating and ringing in his hand, and the two Secret Service men bustling across the room towards him. He had a moment of vertiginous confusion, with no idea of where he was, what time it was, or what the hell was happening. He was able to get to his feet before suffering the indignity of being hauled from his chair and hustled out of the suite by his personal security detail.
He was about to demand they tell him what was going on, but he saw the incoming call was from Mike Judge. He had been expecting Mike’s wife, Karen Halabi. It was well after midnight. Karen had left a couple of hours earlier, and had no doubt been doing as she promised: banging heads together at Boeing to get him his satellite cover. The call from her husband, Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, could not be coincidence. And it would not be good news. Not at this time of night.
As the Secret Service hurried him out the doors—not giving him time to pack or collect any personal items—he took the call.
“Mike, it’s me. What’s going on? I’m getting railroaded out of my hotel room like it’s the end of the world.”
“Mr Vice President,” said Judge, his tone formal, his voice strained, no time for pleasantries with an old friend, “We just got hit. Fifth Army has been targeted by an orbital weapons platform—at least that’s what it looks like. It wasn’t a nuclear attack, but it might as well have been. The Soviet Eighth Guards Army is rolling. Right now. The Second and Third Shock Armies in southern Europe are on one-hour standby to move. We believe it is a pre-emptive attack, sir.”
No shit, thought Kolhammer. It explained the phalanx of Secret Service agents which had solidified around him as he exited the hotel room. There had to be a dozen of them now, the full detail. They formed a flying wedge that drove down the long, wide corridor of the hotel, pushing aside any resistance they met.
“Have you spoken to Karen?” Kolhammer asked. “She was organizing—”
<
br /> Judge rode in over the top of him, time too short for protocol.
“She called me right after she left you earlier this evening. She was going to put those Combat Optics birds into the game for you, but she had to check all the boxes back stateside first. I haven’t heard from her since, but I don’t doubt she’s kicking ass to get it done. Especially now.”
Kolhammer’s Secret Service pack reached the end of the corridor and hit the fire escape, rejecting the elevators. He moved with them, hurrying down the stairwell as quickly as he could. It was difficult to hear Mike over so many pairs of shoes scuffing and slapping on bare concrete in the enclosed space.
“I’m on the move, Mike. But you would have guessed that. Where do we stand right now?”
“DEFCON 2 back home. Defense Readiness Condition One here, for what it’s worth, which isn’t much. All of the ready reaction forces just got their asses vaporized. The best of the rest are probably on two or three days standby.”
Kolhammer almost missed his footing as the fast-moving, dark-suited pod of Secret Service agents swept him around another landing.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Okay, I’ll do what I can to get everything jumpstarted straightaway. I’ll call the White House, but that won’t do much good. They’ve probably already got Ike scrambled out of there. Joint chiefs and NatSec will be online, but they don’t need me getting up in their grill. You know my role in all of this.”
“Designated survivor,” Judge said grimly.
“Well, let’s see if I can be a little more useful than that. You will have your own clusterfuck to sort out, let me chase down Karen and see what she’s got for us, if anything.”
“Thanks, man,” said Mike Judge, his voice finally sounding more like the man with whom Kolhammer had been friends through so many years. Across so much time.
They signed off the call as the security wedge hit the basement carpark. There was no signal down here, not even hotel wi-fi. There was a convoy waiting, however. Five black SUVs. Contemporary copies of uptime models fitted out with the best augmented technology and a smattering of original uptime kit, mostly the communications suite. His head clearer, his footing more certain, he hauled ass into the back of the vehicle indicated by the lead agent, Mulhearn, that potato-headed Irishman.
The burly Mick and another agent, an even burlier African-American, climbed in after him, communicating the whole time with the rest of the team via their earpieces. Kolhammer barely had his seatbelt on before the driver stepped on the gas and they were away, heading for the streets of Paris. He had no idea where they were taking him, but it was a fair chance to be outside the city and not at a major military base. They wouldn’t want him getting atomized in a counterforce strike.
The streets of the French capital showed no sign that anybody knew the apocalypse was upon them. Bars and restaurants traded late into the night. The footpaths were thronged with strolling couples and groups of friends and revelers. The rain had cleared, leaving the streets slicked with moisture, which reflected back a brightly colored riot of neon and electric light.
He wondered how long it would take.
Maybe the city authorities would sound air-raid sirens. More likely they would begin by pushing out alerts on all of the local and national radio stations. Radio—old fashioned AM radio—was still vastly more powerful than the nascent Internet here. However it happened, he had no doubt there would be panic. His motorcade was already contributing to the first emergence of chaos on the streets by accelerating through every intersection it hit. They had an escort of six police officers on motorcycles, their sirens blaring and lights turning, but Paris did not enjoy the advanced traffic management systems which would have shot his convoy through the city like a bullet up in the 21st century.
“You have communications clearance, Mr Vice President,” Mulhearn told him.
“Thank you,” said Kolhammer, taking a thick, military-grade data pad from the Secret Service man, and plugging a set of Sennheisers into the headphone port.
They still made the old-fashioned ports and plugs here. It was one of the few things about the past he genuinely liked. The fingerprint reader identified him as the only person authorized to use this device. The pad’s onboard systems sought out and made a secure connection to a military communications satellite hundreds of miles overhead—a link he hadn’t been entirely sure he would be able to make. And Vice President Philip Kolhammer was able to access the encrypted real-time broadband network which had evolved out of Fleetnet.
His personal alert cache lit up with hundreds of messages, all of them sent within the last hour. He ordered the onboard Intelligence to filter the messages, reducing the tsunami to a smaller, more manageable flood.
Priority one was an email from the president.
Phil, looks like you were right. I will apologize now for not heeding your counsel, and then move on to dealing with this mess. You are in Europe, in the middle of this thing. I’m going to use you there, rather than bringing you home to hide behind the couch. The National Signals Agency will be in contact presently about a secure, real-time channel, me to you, we two only. You will speak with my voice there, and I will have from you your unvarnished reading of whatever develops on the continent over the next days and weeks. Assuming we have that long. Get to the safehold. Will talk soon.
He had initialed the quick note, “DE”. The next message under it was from the deputy director of the National Signals Agency with instructions and attachments for creating a secure point-to-point connection with the president. Kolhammer skipped over that for now. There would be time to deal with it later.
There were two secure messages from Karen Halabi, the first simply informing him that she had taken action to transfer temporary operational control of Boeing’s two experimental Combat Optics platforms directly to the joint chiefs. The second, which was only fifteen minutes old, was flagged as high priority flash traffic. It had been routed into his official system from a private network, an unusual pathway. His network was designed to be impermeable to outside communications. But of course it was based on the original Fleetnet architecture, to which Karen Halabi had enjoyed top-level access. In her role at Boeing she had also hired some of Fleetnet’s best systems operators and administrators. Kolhammer wasn’t surprised to see her message at the top of his inbox.
It was terse.
Civilian comm system compromised. Confirm Soviet malware intrusion.
That explained why she hadn’t simply rung him.
Authorized transfer of CO assets to JCS. Both platforms attacked and disabled within thirty minutes. Some data collected. Package attached. Can confirm mobilization of Soviet-only high readiness forces, theatres north and south. Warsaw Pact forces now mobilizing but only Soviet elements deployed so far. Seeking detachment of further company assets to JCS. Your invoice for my satellites is in the mail.
He smiled at that. In spite of the horror, Karen had found it within herself to make a joke. Just a small one, but enough to promise that maybe, just maybe, they would survive this. He quickly recapped what he knew now.
She had effected the transfer of Boeing’s experimental Combat Optics satellites to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They had almost certainly detailed either NSA or NRO to throw the birds into the breach as quickly as possible. As soon as the Soviets had detected the satellites on that orbital track, they took them down too. But not before Boeing’s advanced sensor packages had sucked up a significant store of data confirming the pre-emptive attack. He had no idea what Karen had loaded on to those birds, but he presumed it was super-augmented signals intercept gear and advanced optics technologies. It was probably all just debris now, plunging back down the gravity well, burning up on re-entry. But it had afforded them a quick peek into the enemy’s capabilities and probable intentions.
The city around him fell away as he dialed down into the data. It looked like a two-pronged attack, the main spearhead pushing
in through the Fulda Gap—the nightmare scenario of the mid-20th century; and for now a largely airborne assault out of the Soviet-controlled areas of southern Europe. If you projected the lines of advance forward, they met in Paris.
In his own time he might have wasted a few minutes checking social media at this point, just to see whether or not knowledge of the invasion had reached the public yet. But although some of the infrastructure for a rudimentary Internet had been built out in the last few years, much of it was still privately owned by companies like Boeing or Davidson. It reminded him of the earliest days of the web, with most of the action confined inside walled gardens like CompuServe or that terrible Apple one: E-world or iWorld or something.
People would not be tweeting the end of the world here.
He fired off a quick reply to Eisenhower. A thank you note to Karen, and a request that she get in contact with him via a secure real-time conference link as soon as possible.
There was a lot to get done and he didn’t know how long he had.
“What’s our first ETA,” he asked Mulhearn.
Now that they were safely in transit, the Secret Service agent felt comfortable sharing the information.
“The Office of Strategic Services runs a small airfield about thirty miles northeast of the city,” he said. “We should be there in forty minutes, depending on traffic. From there you’re crossing the channel.”
“London?”
“No, sir. We evaluate that as a high risk site. There is a Ministry of Defence facility in Scotland. A mountain bunker. It has full communications links, it’s deep underground and it’s off the map.”
Kolhammer knew it was pointless arguing. And as long as he had access to communications he could make do.
But how long would he have that?
As they blew through another intersection, sirens blaring, his pad chimed with an incoming message. An alert from the National Signals Agency. They had lost three more satellites.
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