The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  “Not at all, General. Our nations share many mutual interests these days. Consultation between our governments is always welcome.”

  Or at least necessary, Castilla added silently.

  The new non-Soviet Russia provided the United States with almost as many challenges as had the old USSR, just in different ways. Corruption-racked, politically unstable, and with its economy still struggling back from the ruins of Communism, the fledgling Russian democracy was perpetually threatening either to backslide into totalitarianism or to collapse altogether. Neither outcome would be favorable for the United States, and Castilla had sworn neither would happen on his watch.

  Over considerable resistance from some of the old-school Cold Warriors and congressional budget-cutters, Castilla had rammed a series of thinly disguised foreign aid bills through Congress, working with Federation President Potrenko to plug some of the more critical leaks in the Russian ship of state. Another such bill was undergoing debate at this time, with the issue still very much in doubt.

  The last thing the Castilla administration needed was a new Russian complication. However, on the previous evening, a Russian diplomatic aircraft had touched down at Andrews Air Force Base. Baranov had been aboard, bearing a sealed letter from President Potrenko, naming the general as his personal representative and authorizing him to negotiate with President Castilla on “an urgent point of mutual national concern.”

  Castilla feared this scenario could mean nothing but trouble. Baranov confirmed his fears.

  “I regret the information I bear may not be so very welcome, Mr. President.” The general’s eyes flicked downward for a moment to the locked briefcase he carried.

  “I see, General. If you would care to accompany me, at least we can be comfortable as we discuss it.”

  The Secret Service teams unobtrusively shifted their observation positions as Castilla led his guest around the rock-lined fishpond to Aspen Lodge, the presidential residence at Camp David.

  A few minutes later the two men were seated at an Adirondack-style table on the lodge’s broad porch, a quietly efficient navy steward serving hot tea, Russian style, in tall silver-filigreed glasses.

  Baranov took a polite, disinterested sip. “I thank you for your hospitality, Mr. President.”

  Castilla, who on a warm fall day probably would have preferred a cold Coors, nodded an acknowledgment. “I gather, General, this matter is rather time critical. How may we assist you and the Federation?”

  Baranov removed a small key from the pocket of his vest. Placing the briefcase on the table, he unlocked the latches and removed a folder. Deliberately he laid a series of photographic prints on the tabletop. “I believe, Mr. President, that you might recognize these.”

  Castilla took up one of the prints. Frowning, he adjusted his titanium-framed glasses and studied it.

  It was a grainy black-and-white blowup from a video frame, showing a stark, ice-sheathed backdrop, possibly a glacier’s surface. The wreck of a large four-engined aircraft lay centered in the image, essentially intact but with one long, straight wing twisted and buckled back from the crash impact. Castilla was enough of an aviation expert to recognize the wreck as that of a Boeing B-29 heavy bomber, the same kind of aircraft that had been used to bombard Imperial Japan in the closing days of the Second World War and that had delivered the first nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Or so it appeared to be.

  “The mystery plane,” some media outlets were calling it. Others were referring to it as “the Polar Lady-Be-Good.” A scientific expedition on an isolated island in the Canadian Arctic had spotted the wreck on a mountain above their base, and these long-range telephoto images had been flashed around the world by the Internet and the global news networks.

  It was the hot feature story of the day, and speculation about the aircraft and the aircrew that had flown it were rife.

  “I recognize the picture,” Castilla said carefully. “But I am curious as to how this antique aircraft might be a matter of concern for our two nations.”

  Castilla already knew that the mystery plane was a point of concern for the Russians. It had been mentioned in his recent national security briefings as a peculiar blip on the scope of the National Security Agency.

  Over the past few days the Russian government had become frantic over the so-called mystery plane. NSA Internet monitors had noted a massive spike of activity on the part of certain known Russian Federation intelligence nodes, producing hundreds of hits on global info news sites covering the crash. Hundreds more hits were being generated on sites involving the multinational science expedition that had discovered the wreck, the historic tables of organization of the U.S. Air Force and its record of arctic operations.

  Castilla would let the Russians provide their own explanation, although both he and his intelligence advisors had their suspicions.

  The Russian kept his eyes fixed on the photographs covering the table. “Before I answer that, Mr. President, I must first ask you a question.”

  Castilla took up his own filigreed glass. “Please feel free.”

  Baranov tapped one of the photo prints. “What has the United States government learned about this airplane?”

  “We have learned, rather remarkably, that this was not an American Superfortress,” Castilla replied, taking a drink of his tea. “The archives of both the U.S. Army Air Force and U.S. Air Force have been carefully examined. While we did lose a small number of B-29 aircraft and their B-50 derivative over the Arctic, all of those downed bombers have been located. In fact, all Boeing B-29s known to have served in the U.S. inventory have been accounted for.”

  Castilla set his tea glass down. “Some eighty-seven Superfortresses were also provided to Great Britain in 1950. The Royal Air Force called them the Washington. The British Air Ministry has been consulted, and none of their Washingtons were ever lost or even flown over the Canadian Arctic, and all of the aircraft were eventually returned to the United States.”

  Castilla looked levelly across the table. “Does that answer your question, General?”

  Baranov didn’t look up for a long moment. “I regret that it does, Mr. President. I must also now, regretfully, inform you that this aircraft may very well belong to us. It could be Russian. And if this is so, it could possibly represent a definite threat to both of our nations and to the world as a whole.”

  “How so, General?”

  “This aircraft may be a Tupolev Tu-4 heavy bomber, code-named by NATO ‘the Bull.’ It is an aircraft very…similar to your B-29. They were used by our Long Range Aviation Forces, or rather by the Long Range Aviation Forces of the Soviet Union, during the early years of the Cold War. On March fifth of 1953, one such aircraft, radio call sign Misha 124, disappeared on a training exercise over the North Pole. The fate of this aircraft was unknown to us. All radio and radar contact with the bomber was lost, and the wreck was never located.”

  Baranov took a deep, deliberate breath. “We fear this mystery plane may be the Misha 124.”

  Castilla frowned. “And why should a Soviet bomber lost on a training exercise over fifty years ago be considered anything more than a relic of the Cold War?”

  “Because the Misha 124 was not a simple bombing plane; it was a strategic biological weapons platform, and at the time of its disappearance, it was fully armed.”

  In spite of the warmth of the afternoon and the hot tea he had consumed, Castilla felt a chill ripple down his spine. “What was the agent?” he demanded.

  “Anthrax, Mr. President. Weaponized anthrax. Given your nation’s recent concerns in these matters, I’m sure you recognize the disastrous potential.”

  “All too well, General.” Castilla scowled. The megalomaniac with an elementary biological laboratory and delusions of godhood; the whiff of powder sifting from an opened envelope-those were images to haunt a President’s mind.

  “The Misha 124 was equipped with a dry aerosol dispersal system,” Baranov continued. “The bioagent
was carried in a sealed stainless steel reservoir mounted in the aircraft’s forward bomb bay. Should an in-flight emergency take place, the standard operating procedure would have been for this reservoir to be jettisoned over the open sea or, in this instance, the polar ice pack. But, from the photographs available to us, it is impossible to tell if this procedure was successfully carried out. The reservoir and the agent it contained could still be in the wreck.”

  “And still dangerous?”

  Baranov lifted his hands in frustration. “Very possibly, Mr. President. Given the subfreezing polar environment, the spores could conceivably be as deadly today as they were when first loaded aboard the aircraft.”

  “Good God.”

  “We urgently desire the assistance of the United States in this matter, Mr. President. Firstly, to ascertain if this…problem actually exists, and then to deal with it if it does.”

  The Russian’s hands wandered amid the photographs on the table. “I trust, Mr. President, you can understand why my government feels secrecy in this matter is imperative. The revelation that an active and dangerous biological-weapons system of the former Soviet Union has been found on the North American continent could further strain relations between the current Russian Federation and the United States at this critical hour.”

  “To say the least,” Castilla mused grimly. “The Joint Russian-American Counterterrorism Act would go right out the door. Beyond that, any terrorist group or rogue nation on the planet who learned of the Misha crash would leap at the chance to acquire a biological-warfare arsenal simply by picking it up off the ground. And by the way, General, how much active agent are we talking about here? How many pounds, or rather, kilograms?”

  “Tons, Mr. President.” The Russian’s expression was stony. “The Misha 124 was carrying two metric tons of weaponized anthrax.”

  The Marine Merlin growled away over the treetops, returning General Baranov to Washington, DC, and the Russian embassy while Samuel Adams Castilla walked slowly back to Aspen Lodge. His Secret Service guard held distant cover. It was obvious to the team leader that the POTUS desired only the company of his own thoughts.

  A new figure was seated at the table on the lodge porch: a smallish, graying, slope-shouldered man in his sixties. An anonymous kind of individual who worked hard at his anonymity, Nathaniel Frederic Klein did not at all resemble the classic image of a spymaster. At best, he could manage retired businessman or schoolteacher. Yet he was both a service-hardened veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and the director of the single most secret intelligence-gathering and covert-action force in the western hemisphere.

  Early in his first term, President Castilla had been confronted by what had become known as the Hades Program, a ruthless bioterrorism campaign that had caused the deaths of thousands around the world and that had come within a hairsbreadth of killing millions. In his postcrisis assessment of the incident, Castilla had come to certain ominous conclusions about America’s capacity to deal with such threats.

  The American intelligence and counterintelligence communities, by their sheer size and breadth of responsibility, were becoming clumsy and bureaucratically overburdened. Critical information was being “stovepiped” and was failing to reach its needed destinations. Petty interdepartmental jealousies created unnecessary friction, and a growing number of professional political ass-coverers strangled operational initiative, crippling America’s capacity to react to a rapidly changing global situation.

  Castilla’s had always been an unconventional administration, and his response to the Hades incident had been unconventional as well. He had chosen Fred Klein, an old and trusted family friend, to create an entirely new agency built around a small, handpicked cadre of specialists, military and civilian, from outside the regular national intelligence community.

  These “mobile cipher” agents were carefully chosen both for their exceptional and unusual skills and capabilities and for their lack of personal commitments and attachments. They answered only to Klein and Castilla. Financed from national “black” assets outside the conventional congressional budgetary loop, Covert One was the personal action arm of the President of the United States.

  That was why Castilla had Klein standing by during his conference with the Russian general.

  A beverage cart had been wheeled out beside the table, and a pair of shot glasses, one filled with an amber fluid and the other with water, sat at each place.

  “Bourbon and branch, Sam,” Klein said, lifting his own drink. “It’s a little early in the day, but I thought you might need one.”

  “I appreciate the thought,” Castilla said, sinking into his chair. “You heard it all?”

  Klein nodded. “I had a clear pickup on the shotgun mike.”

  “What do you think?”

  Klein smiled without humor. “You’re the National Command Authority, Mr. President. You tell me.”

  Castilla grimaced and lifted his drink. “As it stands, it’s a mess. And if we aren’t exceedingly careful and extremely lucky, it’s going to grow into a vastly larger mess. For certain, if Senator Grenbower gets his hands on this, the Joint Counterterrorism Act is as dead as fair play. Damn it, Fred, the Russians need our help, and we need to give it to them.”

  Klein lifted an eyebrow. “In essence we’re talking about American military aid to the former Soviet Union, monetary and advisory. That still doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.”

  “A Balkanized Russia wouldn’t sit well, either! If the Russian Federation disintegrates, as it is threatening to do, we could find ourselves facing Yugoslavia squared!”

  Klein took a sip of whisky. “You’re preaching to the choir, Sam. The Russian devil we do know is better than the several dozen we don’t. The question, again, is, how do you want to proceed?”

  Castilla shrugged. “I know how I wish we could proceed: with a squadron of Strike Eagles armed with precision-guided thermite bombs. We incinerate the damn thing where it sits, along with anything it might be carrying. But it’s too late for that. The global media knows the aircraft exists. If we simply destroy the plane outright and without a viable explanation, every foreign affairs reporter on the planet will start digging. Before we know it we’ll be facing a congressional investigation-just what we and the Russians don’t want.”

  Klein alternated a taste of whisky with a sip of branch water. “I think an investigation may be the first step, Sam. At least our investigation. Everyone could be getting ahead of themselves here-you, me, the Russians. There may not be a problem at all.”

  Castilla lifted an eyebrow. “How do you figure that?”

  “The emergency procedure the Soviet aircrew was supposed to follow: the jettisoning of the bioagent reservoir. For all we actually know, that load of anthrax may have been rotting on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean for the past half century.

  “The discovery of the wreck of a fifty-year-old Soviet bomber on an arctic island, even if it had been outfitted as a biowarfare platform, would not be an insurmountable difficulty. As you pointed out, the plane itself would be just a Cold War anecdote. What supplies the ‘flash’ to the problem, what makes it politically indigestible, is the possible presence of the anthrax. We have to find out if it’s still aboard the aircraft. We have to find out fast and we have to find out first, before some war-bird enthusiast or extreme tourist decides to have a look inside that wreck. If the bioagent isn’t aboard the plane, then everyone can relax and we can turn the entire question over to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.”

  “What’s your proposal, Director?” Sam Castilla was not Sam Castilla now. He was the President of the United States.

  Klein opened a thin file folder that had been resting on the table beside him. It contained hard-copy printouts downloaded from the Covert One database in the few minutes following Baronov’s departure. “According to the information available from the leader of the scientific expedition on the island, no one has yet actually reached the crash site. They’ve only photogr
aphed it from long range. This could prove exceedingly fortunate both for them and for us.

  “Mr. President, I propose that we insert a small Covert One action group equipped for mountain and arctic operations. We include a biowarfare specialist, an expert on Soviet-era weapons systems, and the appropriate support personnel. We have them assess the situation and advise us on what we’re actually facing. Once we have some solid intelligence to work with we can develop a valid response scenario.”

  Castilla nodded. “It makes sense to me. When do we bring Ottawa into the loop? This island-Wednesday, I think it’s called-is in the Canadian Arctic. It’s their territory. They have a right to know what’s going on.”

  Klein pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You know the old saying, Sam. ‘Two men can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead.’ If we want to be serious about security in this matter, we have got to limit dispersion.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to treat a neighbor, Fred. We’ve had our disagreements with the gentlemen up north, but they are still an old and valuable ally. I don’t want to risk further damage to that relationship.”

  “Then let’s try this,” Klein replied. “We advise Ottawa that we’ve been approached by the Russians about the possibility that this downed mystery plane might be Soviet. We say that we aren’t sure about this. There’s a chance that it still could be one of ours and that we want to insert a joint U.S.-Russian investigation team to establish just who the aircraft belongs to. We’ll keep them advised as to what we discover.”

  Klein lifted another sheet of hard copy from the file. “According to this, NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard are supplying logistical support for the multinational science expedition on the island. The team leader is Canadian, and he’s already acting as the on-site representative for the Canadian government. We can suggest using him as our designated liaison as well. We can also ask for the expedition leader to keep his people well away from the downed aircraft until the arrival of our team, to prevent the disturbance of…say…historic relics and forensic evidence.”