The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  She repeated his instructions. Both men reluctantly tripped the release for their shoulder and lap restraints.

  Ben glanced at the main door for the aft cabin. Keeping the gun pointed at the temple of the co-pilot, he said, ‘I want the other guy to open the door. And tell him that if he doesn’t do it nicely, I’ll blow his friend’s head off.’

  Akiko let the man know.

  Marat whistled from the higher ground above the helicopter. Ben glanced up toward him. He’d stepped out from the tree line, the dogs and sleds hidden, and was frantically gesturing at something going on in the village. Ben turned and saw three police 4x4s and a quad bike roll out of the trees 500 meters below them.

  ‘Akiko, I want them out of the chopper one at a time. And tell them to keep their hands above their heads. First one to drop them will regret it.’

  She snapped at the pilots in Russian.

  ‘Come over here and stand behind me,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want these guys getting clever and taking you hostage.’

  Akiko moved several paces to her right so that Ben was between her and the pilots. She looked down at the village and saw the police vehicles motor into the square near the building in which they’d been imprisoned.

  ‘Ben,’ she said urgently.

  ‘I know.’

  He kept his focus on the two Russians as they jumped down from the belly of the chopper onto the snow.

  ‘Helmets off,’ he said, gesturing at them with the Makarov. ‘Put ’em in the chopper. Slowly . . .’

  They understood without having to get it translated.

  Akiko watched as the two big Mongols who had locked them up ran toward the police. A hurried conference ensued as the two parties met, and then the police vehicles and the quad took off, racing out of the square.

  ‘Akiko, get them to walk down toward the village.’

  The two Russians were grumbling. One of them put his hands down and took a step toward Ben. Ben fired off two shots at the man’s feet. Phut. Phut. The rounds missed the man’s toes by less than an inch, kicking up the snow. The shots stampeded them. They turned and fled down the hill before Akiko had opened her mouth.

  ‘Get in—hurry,’ Ben said. ‘Take the right-hand seat.’

  Akiko ran to the open door and stepped up into the chopper, Ben just behind her. He shoved the Makarov in the front of his parka and grabbed the helmets on the way through. He stepped over the center console and squeezed himself into the left-hand seat, his eyes taking in the instrument panel, overhead and center consoles. He handed Akiko a helmet and donned the other. He’d never flown a Bell 412 before, but how different could it be from a JetRanger?

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. Very different, when all the instruments and switches were captioned in Russian.

  He flicked the switch on the overhead panel and the BATT indicator for engine one jumped into the green. Plenty of juice there, and the fuel load stood at more than three quarters. Ben bypassed the normal pre-flight checks and went into what he hoped would be the starting procedure. Noting that the three switches for fuel transfer, boost and valve were already in the on position for engine one, he stabbed the button for engine start. He was gratified by a deep whine that ground up through the airframe and the foot pedals as the Pratt & Whitney turbofan spooled up. A blade of the main rotor swung by overhead, and the spinning masses began to make themselves felt, rocking the aircraft gently from side to side in the familiar manner. Fuel pressures, normal; engine and transmission pressures, normal. Ben hoped he was doing this right. It might be rash taking shortcuts, especially with unfamiliar machinery, but it was even more dangerous hanging around here. So, with seventy percent turbine speed showing, Ben switched over to generator power and repeated the start-up procedure for engine two. He held his breath. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds, but then the whine from engine number two made itself heard. Relieved, he took a moment to glance over the instrument panel and down towards the village. The quad was occasionally getting bogged in the thicker snow around the outskirts of the settlement, but it was still making ground, climbing steadily. The rifle slung around the driver’s shoulder was now clearly visible, and the police 4x4s were clawing up the hill toward them. The pilots were running and falling down the slope, making good headway, waving their arms.

  The engine and transmission temperatures weren’t within their normal operating limits, but Ben had no choice. He gave Akiko what he hoped was a reassuring smile. The altimeter told him that they were at 1900 feet, a couple of knots of breeze coming from the left. There were power and transmission settings he should know before attempting to fly this aircraft, but there simply wasn’t time to check the performance charts in the flight manual, which was probably in Russian anyway. It was seat-of-the-pants time. Ben selected 100 percent power and pulled up on the collective, which steepened the angle of attack of the main rotor blades, causing them to bite into the airflow. The 412, a medium-lift chopper, workhorse of mining, emergency rescue, coast guard, hospital and firefighters, leapt off the snow. Ben caught it as the nose reared up, and adjusted collective, stick and tail rotor pedals to keep it in a hover.

  A neat hole appeared in the plexiglass windshield in front of Akiko, the round exiting through the quilted vinyl-covered metal above Ben’s head. He didn’t need any more prompting and thrust the stick forward. The nose dropped and the chopper surged ahead. Ben lowered the nose further as the ground fell away, so that the chopper accelerated faster, gravity giving it a kick along. With eighty knots showing on the air speed indicator, he pulled back on the stick. The 412 climbed and banked sharply, the main rotors flogging the dense cold air, the jet engines snarling. Within moments, the roofs of the black huts shooting by beneath the chopper’s skids gave way to the tops of snow-laden trees.

  Ben took them up to 3000 feet, 1000 feet of clearance above the higher peaks, and headed due west. He showed Akiko where to plug the jacks for the headset in her helmet into the aircraft’s radio/intercom. She then leaned forward and put her gloved finger against the hole in the windshield directly in front of her.

  The round had penetrated the fuselage just above Ben’s head on its way out. There were probably other shots fired. Ben hoped none of them had hit anything important. He surveyed the gauges; they all showed normal settings.

  ‘Have a look for any maps,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a pocket in the door, or they’ll be jammed down beside your seat.’

  The problem was this: where to now? They were wanted by the police and were deep inside what had become enemy territory. Mongolia was south, but then so was Ulan-Ude. Ben checked the navigation suite. The aircraft wasn’t a recent model, but it had been fitted with some new avionics. He found what he was hoping for in the center floor console—a GPS navigation system. Firing it up, he adjusted its option settings and changed the display language to English.

  ‘Lake Baikal,’ he said. ‘Remember that from the briefing before we left? You can see it on the horizon directly ahead. There were camps on its foreshore.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘What? Who’s dead? Nami?’

  ‘The Korean back there, the old man I was saying goodbye to, he believes he killed a foreign national by the name of Nami.’

  Ben looked at her, incredulous. ‘Couldn’t that be a coincidence? Is Nami a common name?’

  ‘In Japan, yes. He said I reminded him of her. She had survived a crash. He thought it could have been a plane crash. There are too many coincidences.’

  Ben recalled the odd manner in which the man had pointed at Akiko. It was as if he was seeing a ghost. ‘And he’s sure he killed her?’

  ‘There was an accident. He said it was his fault. They took her to hospital and he never saw her again. She lost an arm. There were rumors that she died of her injuries.’

  Ben wondered whether knowing what had happened to her mother would help Akiko come to terms with her loss.

  ‘The old man told me that now he had met Nami’s daughter, her soul would sto
p tormenting him.’

  Ben knew what the old guy meant. ‘What do you want to do, Akiko?’

  ‘Go to Mongolia. We are finished here.’

  Ben took a deep breath. He felt relieved and yet defeated at the same time. They had found Akiko’s mother, but the one place they couldn’t bring her back from was the grave.

  ‘You’re sure?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes. Marat was going to take us to a place called Ulaanbataar in Mongolia.’

  Ben found the city on the GPS. It was around 300 miles south of their current position. The 412 had a healthy range and there was more than enough fuel.

  ‘Any luck with those maps?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do you need maps? You have that.’ She nodded at the GPS.

  ‘I’m hoping a map will show us if there’s any military airspace around here.’ It would be worth avoiding, he thought, given that they were a couple of murder suspects in a stolen chopper with its transponder turned off.

  Akiko went back to her search while Ben turned on the VHF radio and checked the preset frequencies. There was a brief, distant exchange between Russian voices in his headset. He dialed in the international emergency frequency of 121.5 MHz.

  The sharply defined shoreline of Lake Baikal was fast approaching, its wintry surface a flat expanse of snow-covered ice that glowed pink in the afternoon sunlight. He took the chopper down to within 200 feet of the lake’s elevation and maintained their course due west. The skies were clear and there was nothing coming through his headset other than the sound of his own breathing. Flying felt reassuring, a constant, a few minutes of Zen-like peace. He looked at Akiko. Her face was green. A solid row of hills rising 1500 feet above the lake’s shoreline approached. Ben climbed, the main rotor chopping at the frozen air.

  A burst of chatter came through the headsets. It was close. Ben looked around at the empty sky. A Russian fighter suddenly appeared from nowhere off the right-hand side of the chopper. Missiles hung from the pylons beneath its wings.

  ‘Shit,’ Ben said. Where the hell did that come from?

  The fighter was a big aircraft with twin fins and a blue camouflage scheme. Ben didn’t know anything about Russian fighters, but it looked like an F-15. It was a MiG, perhaps, or a Sukhoi. The pilot was clearly visible in the bubble canopy, signaling at him aggressively, pointing down. The fighter had its flaps and gear down, and the nose was riding high, close to stalling. The pilot was fighting to keep it in the air at this low speed. It accelerated ahead of them and rocked its wings, then broke to the right. The instruction was clear: they had been intercepted.

  ‘What does he want?’ Akiko asked, fear in her voice. ‘Is he going to shoot us down?’

  ‘He wants us to follow. If we don’t, then he’ll shoot us down.’

  He didn’t have to remind her about KAL 007. If he was thinking about it, Akiko would be, too.

  ‘Then we should follow.’

  ‘And what happens when we land?’

  As Ben saw it, they really had only one answer.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said.

  He pulled back on the stick, pushed the collective to the floor and the chopper dropped out of the sky like an anvil pushed off a cliff. The rotors thrashed at the air and a sickening shudder hammered up through the helicopter’s airframe. They sped nose first for a jumble of smashed rocks and broken scree at the base of the cliff. The vertical face shot past in a shuddering blur. Just when it seemed that death was imminent, Ben hauled up on the collective and pulled back on the stick. Akiko dry-retched as the 412 clawed out of the dive and scribed a tight, banked turn away from the vertical cliff face and headed back toward the ice of Lake Baikal. Ben kept the turn going, straightening out only when the towering hills that edged the lake’s shoreline lay directly in their path, and headed for a narrow, wooded ravine. He had no time to reassure Akiko that the uncomfortable feeling of being turned inside out by the G-forces was quite normal.

  A thousand feet above them, and half a mile away, the fighter executed a tight turn and bled off height. Its pilot knew exactly where they were. The Russian was coming back for them, his voice loud in the headset.

  Ben kept to the ravine and watched the fighter until he lost it somewhere behind them. By his calculation, they had probably five seconds to live if the pilot’s ground controller had given him the order to fire one of those missiles. He counted them off in his head. Five, four, three, two, one . . . But there was no explosion, no fireball, no final moments of falling. A jet roar filled the chopper’s interior and the fighter ambled slowly overhead, the pilot rocking its wings. And then its afterburners lit with a blue-white fire, the sharp nose came up and the plane accelerated vertically, shrinking within seconds to a black dot that became lost in the wisps of high-altitude early evening cloud.

  ‘Why didn’t the pilot fire on us? What did he say?’ Ben asked Akiko. Her face was turned away from him. ‘Akiko . . .’

  She held out her hand toward him, palm open, as if to say, ‘Leave me alone . . .’. Her body shuddered, racked by another heave. Airsickness. Ben knew she’d be next to useless for a while, even after they landed.

  He set the chopper on a gentle climb until they had the altitude to clear the ridge, and then doubled back to the edge of the lake. They were still faced with their original problem: where to go? The GPS gave their position as being about 35 kilometers northeast of a small town called Listvyanka on the lake’s southwestern foreshore. A cluster of lights off to his right caught his attention. According to the GPS, there were no other towns on this side of the lake, and yet here was a small settlement tucked into a narrow valley a kilometer back from the lake’s foreshore. The village solved their immediate problem. Night flying was out of the question. It was too risky. Ben banked the 412 toward the light. A few minutes later, he’d landed without incident on the only available open ground, the solid ice of a frozen river, a hundred meters from a collection of black huts.

  Ben completed the helicopter’s shutdown and gave Akiko a few moments to catch her breath. She nodded at him when she was ready and he helped her into the aircraft’s back seats where there was more room.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked, her voice weak.

  ‘Good question. According to the map, this place doesn’t exist.’

  Akiko groaned, her eyes closed.

  Ben looked out through the plexiglass. No movement on the embankments on either side of the chopper. Night was falling. He found a torch and several spare parkas in a locker.

  ‘Lie down,’ he told Akiko. ‘We’re going to stay put for the night.’

  Akiko gladly slumped sideways, exhausted from the airsickness, and stretched out along the row of seats. Ben covered her with the parkas. He checked the embankments again. No movement. Strange. The village was obviously occupied, but no one had come to investigate their noisy arrival.

  February 16, 2012

  NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland. Lana had to admit it—Garret was good. His papers were succinct, intuitive and, given the benefit of hindsight, accurate. The unclassified material that predated 1985 had yet to be digitized and was only available on microfiche, which made it difficult to access in the sense that it couldn’t be removed from the NSA reference center, but at least it was freely available. And even though the censor’s black pen was active throughout the papers, the clarity of Garret’s strategic thinking was impressive.

  Lana yawned. She’d been reading since 4 a.m. If the material wasn’t so riveting, revealing a world no longer in existence, she’d have given it up by now and gone down to the cafeteria for breakfast. She moved the display to an overview with Garret’s name on it, penned in June 1983, about a Soviet operation called RYAN, which suggested Yuri Andropov believed the US was on the verge of launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. Lana had had no idea that the world had come so close at that time to being obliterated in a thermonuclear firestorm. The ailing Russian Premier was obviously paranoid and desperate, and out-maneuvered by the Reagan administration
on many fronts. The one place where Moscow seemed to have the ascendancy over the United States was in its relationship with the general populace of Europe. Garret had written a number of papers on this in general, and on the flourishing European anti-US peace movement. Fueling the fire was the imbalance of missiles in the region. The Soviets had intermediate-range missiles aimed at Western Europe and NATO’s answer—the deployment of Pershings and cruise missiles in West Germany, England and Italy—was being strongly resisted by the peaceniks.

  A clock on the wall told Lana that it was almost time to call it quits. She checked the catalog and skipped forward to September 1983 and a piece Garret had written on the collapse of the Western European peace movement, which he attributed in no small part to the shooting down of KAL 007, the only paper Garret had written where the Korean airliner had been specifically noted. The tone of this analysis was gloating, almost self-congratulatory, and unlike his other papers. In several places throughout, Garret quoted an earlier paper he’d authored. Its first mention was in a footnote, where it was referenced as ‘“Engineering the Collapse of West European Opposition to US IRBMs”: Roy Garret/European–Soviet Relations/12.22.82’, and thereafter as ‘ECWEOUSIRBM:RG/ESR/12.22.82’. Interesting title, thought Lana. She didn’t remember seeing this paper indexed, which was confirmed when she went back through the catalog. Cross-checking the NSA’s general reference, she found that the analysis ECWEOUSIRBM:RG/ ESR/12.22.82 was still classified top secret. So, before closing down, she sent Kradich a request asking him whether it was possible to dig this paper up from another source. She then packed up and headed to her office via a quick breakfast of coffee and a slice of raisin toast.

  Her cell phone rang as she sat down behind her keyboard with the remains of the toast on a napkin. The number wasn’t familiar, but she answered it anyway.

  ‘Englese,’ she said.

  ‘Since when did the NSA engage in murder?’ said the male voice, full of disgust. ‘This is going to blow up in your face, Englese.’