Karen sighed. “OK, so this guy wants to scapegoat Russia, right? That’s how he plans to start his war?”
“As far as I can tell, yeah. All of the ships he used have links back to Moscow. It's a pretty safe bet that he's hoping we make the connection.”
“But people will see through it, right? Surely it’s not enough to point to a stack of ship registrations and expect people to just accept that the Russians did it. That’s… that’s like the first half of a Scooby Doo cartoon. We’d have to be dumb as rocks not to pull off the fake Stalin mustache and see that it was old man Bailey all along.”
“It sounds dumb to us, yeah,” Krasinski agreed, “but if you don’t think that’ll be enough you don’t know people. Public opinion isn’t a courtroom. Bailey doesn’t need to present an airtight case. All he has to do is form the right narrative. It’s about writing a story that makes sense to people, not selling them on every detail. Hell, pretty much every work of fiction ever written would fall apart if you pull on the wrong thread.”
“But this is—”
“Trust me, Karen” Krasinski interrupted. “That will be enough. You get some anchorman to flash a couple of documents with Cyrillic writing on Joe Sixpack’s TV and he’s sold, even if the rest of the evidence is paper thin. Even if the Russians scream at the top of their voice that they had nothing to do with it, Joe Sixpack will still believe they did it. In fact he’ll believe it even more.”
“Why?”
“Because the easiest lie you'll ever tell is that lie people already want to believe, and Americans have never had a problem believing that Russians are the bad guys. It’s in our DNA. On some level we’ve always seen them as the enemy. That’s the narrative we recognize. It’s something we’ve always wanted to believe, and we only need the slightest push to turn that belief into unimpeachable truth.”
So what, you think we’ll really go to war over this?”
“I really, honestly do. Right now in Washington the phones will be ringing off the hook with people demanding that we hit back at someone, anyone. We have to, because it’s not in our nature to be victims. The country simply won’t tolerate us not getting our righteous revenge. The Japanese hit Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. Do you remember the date we declared war on them?” He paused for a beat. “It was December 8th, and there were probably more than a few people asking why we dragged our feet for so long.”
He sighed. “So yeah, I’m guessing that people will already be following the breadcrumb trail. The name of the Nakharov has been public for a whole day now, and right about now some shiny haired news anchor will be talking about how it was owned by a shady Moscow shell. Soon enough everyone in the US will know that this was the fault of the Russians, and then that’s it. That's the ball game. We’ll have to strike back. God willing it won’t be nuclear, but we’ll have no choice but to do something, and once we do there’ll be no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once the first shot has been fired it won’t even matter if we finally figure out that Bailey was behind it, because events will have overtaken us.”
“OK, so how do we stop it?”
“The only way is to stop that first shot.” He reached inside his torn corduroy jacket and withdrew a manila envelope. “It sounded like Colonel MacAuliffe already knows the truth, or at least suspects it, but he’s still in the satellite blackout zone so we can’t rely on him to get his information back to Washington. We need to expose Bailey ourselves. We need every man, woman and child in the country to know right now that this has nothing to do with any foreign power.”
“And how can we do that from up here? Does anyone on the ground have the evidence?”
Krasinski shook his head. “No. I filed my report on the Reagan Wilkes account a few days ago, but it’ll be months before anyone bothers to read it. By then it won’t matter.”
“So what can we do?”
Krasinski frowned, holding up the envelope. “We have to get this to the ground. We need to get it somewhere that has a direct line to the White House.”
Karen took a deep breath. “OK. OK... so what, we just wait for this thing to land and then try to sneak off before anyone sees us?”
“No.” Krasinski shook his head. He pulled himself to his feet, turned and looked down at the nuclear warhead in the crate. “First we need to do something about this.”
΅
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SCARED OF HEIGHTS
JACK HELD ON for dear life to the plastic seats that lined each wall of the Chinook, staring wide eyed out the rear door at the ground that – somehow – was directly beneath them. He felt as if he’d tumble out of the helicopter if he loosened his grip for so much as a second.
“Are they gonna close that?” he yelled, pointing to the ramp that opened out over clear space.
“What?” Colonel MacAuliffe turned to him impatiently, annoyed by the distraction.
“I said are they gonna—”
MacAuliffe shook his head and reached over Jack’s shoulder, pulling a set of ear protectors from a hook on the side wall. He leaned in and raised his voice “Speak into the mic, Jack. We don’t wear these things to keep our ears warm.”
Jack pulled on the headset, and immediately the deafening thud of the rotor was muffled to near silence. He pulled the mic close to his mouth and yelled again. “The door! Will they close the door?”
MacAuliffe looked back at the open bay door and smiled. Far below the buildings of the airbase looked like some kind of toy town. “You scared of heights or something, Jack?” The voice sounded mocking in his ears.
“No, I’m not scared of…” He stopped, realizing it was stupid to lie for the sake of dumb pride. “Oh, screw it. Yes, I’m scared of heights. I had to jump out of a plane yesterday, colonel. Could you please ask someone to close the door?”
MacAuliffe laughed, reaching through to the cockpit to tap the pilot on the shoulder. A few moments later the bay door began to ascend, and Jack let out a sigh of relief when it finally closed with a heavy thud. “I hope your wife has bigger balls than you, Jack.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’re relying on her and her accountant buddy to get us out of this mess. The Chinook tops out at around two hundred miles per hour, but the Hercules can cruise at more than three hundred. If Bailey isn’t planning to set her down there’s no way we’re catching up to him, and our Eagles won’t be in the air for another hour or so. It’s up to your girl to stop that bastard from dropping his last nuke, and when the moment comes to act I hope she doesn’t clam up and complain about the damned view.”
Jack leaned in, ignoring the insult. “So what are we doing in the air if we can’t catch them? Why bother chasing?”
“We’re not chasing the plane, Jack,” the colonel replied. “If I’m reading the radar screen right, Bailey’s headed on a direct course to Vegas. Bastard probably wants to see the Bellagio go up in a mushroom cloud, but we’re not gonna let him. Unless your girl and her buddy manage to take control of that plane, the moment we’re in range I’m going to order it shot down.”
“In range of what?” Jack was confused. “I thought you said you couldn’t catch up with them.”
“We can’t, but Nellis can take them out with a surface to air missile.”
Jack’s heart sank. He'd thought Karen was safe from this. “Nellis?”
“Nellis Air Force Base, Jack. Outside of Vegas. We’ll be in radio range in about a half hour, and as soon as we make contact I’m ordering them to use a Patriot missile to knock that bastard out of the sky. I just pray that we manage to make contact before they reach the city.”
“With all due respect, colonel,” Jack growled, “I hope we don’t.”
MacAuliffe studied Jack, taking in the crooked nose, the purple bruises forming around his eyes and the dried blood crusted on his upper lip, and he sighed. “Look, I’m sorry about hitting you, Jack. I understand why you’d wanna take a swing at me. I’d do exactly the same if I were i
n your position, but that doesn’t change anything. That plane has to come down before it reaches the city. I don’t expect it to make you feel any better, but there are lots of wives and daughters sitting in Vegas right now.”
“Yeah,” Jack conceded with an angry sigh, leaning back in his seat, “but they’re not mine.”
MacAuliffe set a comforting hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Well, like I said, I hope your wife has a set of balls. If she can take that plane we can all go home heroes. I’ll pin the medal on her myself.”
“Take the plane?” Jack shook his head, incredulous. “She’s got courage, colonel, much more than I do, but she’s an office supply manager and a mom. She’s not John Rambo. What exactly do you expect her to do?”
MacAuliffe shrugged. “I don’t know, Jack, but like you said, she’s a mom. I’ve fought in honest to God wars, and I can tell you that I’d rather be airdropped naked in the middle of a Kandahar firefight than stand between a mom and her daughter. People don’t know what they’re capable of until their kids are in danger. I’m guessing you know that better than most, right?”
Jack scowled. He hated to admit it, but he knew MacAuliffe was right. In the last couple of days Jack had done things he could barely believe, all in the name of getting back to his little girl. Hell, he’d jumped out of a plane. He’d buried two people, and not ten minutes ago he’d taken a swing at a damned Air Force colonel.
If he could do all that then maybe… maybe it wasn’t beyond hope. Maybe Karen could find some way to take control of the plane.
He turned away from MacAuliffe and looked out the circular window in the side of the Chinook. Far below them the pine forests of the Sierra Nevadas were giving way to the arid badlands of Nevada, green shifting into red, orange and brown. Somewhere far ahead of them the Hercules was widening the gap, moving towards Vegas a mile a minute faster than the Chinook, and he knew that whatever happened from here that plane would be on the ground in about a half hour, either blown apart by a Patriot missile, vaporized in a massive mushroom cloud or maybe, just maybe, sitting on a runway with Karen and Emily safe.
He looked up to the sky, closed his eyes and began to whisper a prayer.
΅
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE LOADMASTER'S CHUTE
KAREN LEANED WARILY over the crate, peering down at the nuclear warhead within. She’d expected to be gripped by an unspeakable terror at the sight of the bomb just inches from her face. She’d expected to be frozen, panicked and struck dumb, but instead she felt… well, a little underwhelmed.
She was looking at an object with a destructive force capable of leveling a city. This thing, detonated in just the right spot, could kill millions in the blink of an eye. It was a bomb with the capacity to change the course of human history at the push of a button, but now she got a good look at it she realized it was just a plain cylinder of dull gray steel, around two feet long and a foot across. It looked like nothing so much as an old milk churn. A thousand people could walk by it at an antique fair, and none of them would be any the wiser.
“I thought it’d be bigger.” Even as she spoke she was surprised at the hint of disappointment in her own voice. Almost offense, as if it were somehow disrespectful that she might be killed by something so unassuming.
Krasinski leaned over the crate, and despite the worry plastered across his face he managed to flash a grin. “If I had a dollar for every time a woman said that to me…”
“Read the room, Ted,” Karen sighed. “This is no time for jokes.” She reached into the crate and plucked away a handful of packing material. “Are we absolutely certain this is a nuclear weapon? I thought they were enormous missiles or something.”
“Yeah, that's the picture that was in my head. But no, I’m pretty sure this is it. I think this is just the warhead. It’s designed to be mounted on the tip of a missile.”
“So…” Karen puffed out her cheeks.
“So...?”
“So, do you have any idea how to disarm this thing?”
Krasinski let out a sharp guffaw. “Seriously?” He ran his fingers through his hair and swore under his breath. “I don’t even know if this thing is armed. Do you? All I know about bombs I got from the movies, and unless I see a digital timer with a red and blue wire coming from it I have no clue. And even if I did see that stuff there’d be a fifty fifty chance I’d cut the wrong wire and blow all three of us to kingdom come.”
“What about that panel there?” Karen pointed towards a steel plate around five by four inches, screwed into the body of the warhead. “Maybe we can unscrew it and take a look inside.”
“Do you have a screwdriver handy? I don’t.” Krasinski snapped.
“OK, settle down. I’m just trying to come up with a solution. There’s no need to get all pissy.”
Krasinski sighed contritely. “Sorry, sorry. You’re right. It’s just… well, I’d kinda made my peace with dying when I thought there were jets on the way to shoot us down. I knew it was out of my hands, know what I mean? Now, though… well, I guess you could say I’m feeling the pressure.” He slumped over the crate, his balding head glistening with sweat.
Karen frowned at the bomb, hoping against hope that a solution might magically present itself. “OK,” she said, pushing herself away from the crate, “let’s look at our options here. It’s probably safe to say that Bailey plans to use this, right? Whether he plans to land or just drop it from the plane we don’t know, but we can be pretty certain he has a target in mind. Agreed?”
Krasinski nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a safe bet.”
“OK. If they plan to drop it from the plane then we’re dead. There’s nowhere to hide if they come back to the truck, and I’m guessing they’d have no problem killing us.”
“After dropping nukes on a half dozen cities? No, I’m pretty sure they’d feel comfortable shooting us in the head.”
“And if we land we’re also dead. You said that cargo bay door won’t open when the plane’s on the ground, right? While it’s moving, anyway?”
“That’s right,” Krasinski confirmed. “As far as I know it’s locked in place while the landing gear are extended, and it won’t unlock unless the pilot flips a switch in the cockpit.”
“And there’s definitely no other way out of here?”
“From the cargo bay? Not with those doors welded shut, no. One way in, one way out.”
Karen felt her heart sink as the realization hit her. She looked down at Emily, oblivious to the danger, quietly humming to herself as she played with a bundle of straw from one of the crates.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
Krasinski nodded. There didn’t seem to be any point denying it.
Karen felt the first warnings of another panic attack coming on. She'd tried to take deep, measured breaths to ward off the fear, but she didn't know a breathing exercise or meditation technique in the world that could win out over the stress of staring down at a nuclear weapon that might go off at any second.
She walked back to the tailgate of the truck, hopped down to the ground and stared at the floor, wishing they’d jumped with Ramos and Valerie. If they'd only had the guts to throw themselves off the back of the truck they could have been walking back towards Beale right now, back towards Jack, instead of being trapped in this damned plane.
She turned back to the truck and leaned on the tailgate. “Come here, pumpkin,” she said, holding out her arms for Emily. “Mommy needs a hug.”
Emily beamed, grateful for the attention after an eternity of watching the grownups talk about things she didn’t understand. She tossed aside the straw, picked herself up and ran to the tailgate, hopping down into her mother’s arms. “I don’t like it here, mommy. Can we go home?”
“Soon, pumpkin, soon.” Karen pulled Emily close, thanking God that she didn’t understand what was happening. That was the only silver lining she could see, that when the end came Emily might not notice it. If she was lucky she might—
Karen froze, her eyes fixed on the side wall of the plane. There were only three small windows in the fuselage and the cold blue strip lighting only served to cast a ghostly glow, but in the eerie half light she could see a misshapen lump dangling from a hook on the wall.
“Ted? You said there was a parachute, right?”
“On the wall? Yeah.”
“How come there’s only one of them?”
Krasinski lowered himself down from the tailgate with a grunt. “There’s not. The Hercules crews five. There should be one chute for each of them, but the other four will be up in the cockpit. They keep them close by their stations in case they have to bail out in an emergency.” He pointed at the wall. “This one's for the loadmaster. He’s the guy who works in the cargo bay during flight.”
“Do you think there might be any backups? Y’know, like in a storage locker or something.”
“Nuh uh. They don’t keep parachutes hidden away. If there were any more here they’d be right there on the wall.”
“Damn it,” Karen grumbled, walking over to the chute and lifting it from its hook. That put paid to the idea of all three of them leaping out to safety, unless they wanted to take their chances storming the cockpit and overpowering a bunch of highly trained soldiers.
She set Emily down and inspected the pack for damage, running her fingers along the seams for signs of damage. Only God knew how long the chute had been sitting there. The colonel had said this was a decommissioned plane, so this pack could have been hanging from its hook for years without an inspection, ready to fall apart at the lightest touch.
Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero Page 16