The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  ‘Tex!’ she said, not quite believing her eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t get over here any faster.’

  He got his hands under Sherwood’s armpits and shifted his body to the side, freeing Lana.

  The sound of police sirens drawing close penetrated the hull.

  Tex helped Lana up, and then he cut away the lock-ties from Nikki’s and Frank’s hands and feet and helped Nikki up into a seated position.

  ‘Hey, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’ he said to her.

  ‘Tex . . .’

  ‘Let’s have a look at your husband.’

  He focused the beam on Frank’s head. There was a nasty wound on the crown of his head, and he grunted as Lana and Tex sat him up.

  ‘Frank,’ Nikki said, embracing him. She turned toward Lana. ‘I don’t know who you are, but . . .’ The words choked in her throat. ‘I’m so sorry about your partner. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He gave his life for us. He was a brave man.’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘I want to see everyone’s hands,’ yelled a young female voice above them. The local PD had arrived. ‘Put ’em where I can see ’em. Into the light! Now!’

  ‘This is NSA Investigator Englese,’ Lana called back, waving her ID where it would be seen. ‘We have an officer down and a freed hostage who requires medical assistance. We need an ambulance. Now!’

  She threw her ID holder up onto the deck.

  A few minutes later, they were topside in the sunshine. Frank was still semiconscious and being attended to by paramedics. Agents from the Norfolk FBI FO were also on hand, their casual attitude evaporated as they secured the crime scene and paid their respects to their fallen colleague.

  ‘Do you know who this is?’ Tex asked as he lifted the towel away from the dead killer’s face. The man was in his sixties and hadn’t carried an ID.

  ‘No. It’s not who I thought it would be,’ said Lana.

  ‘And who did you think it would be?’

  ‘A former CIA spook by the name of Henry Buck.’

  February 16, 2012

  Lake Baikal, Siberia. Frozen condensation on the chopper’s plexiglass windows made them as transparent as steel plate. It was gray outside, half an hour before sunrise. Ben woke Akiko, who moved stiffly under his hand. The aircraft’s interior was as cold as a tomb.

  ‘Sleep well?’ he asked her.

  She raised herself up on an elbow, her hair squashed into an awkward shape.

  ‘Let’s see if we can rustle up some breakfast out there.’

  Ben opened a door and climbed down onto a thick ice sheet that was a river eight months of the year. The air was cold, dry and still. Something caught his attention up on the embankment. Three pink shapes—children dressed for the chill in puffy parkas. He waved at them and they turned and ran away. A couple of stocky old women armed with lit hurricane lanterns stepped forward to take their place. They wore frowns to go with their black and gray shawls and black ushankas. They stared at Ben and the helicopter from the embankment as if about to pronounce punishment. Ben waved and gave them his best smile before showing Akiko how to climb down. He held her hand, taking her weight.

  ‘You might have to reassure these people about our intentions,’ he said. ‘They don’t seem that friendly. Maybe European Lumber and Soft-wood has a bad reputation around here.’

  ‘What are our intentions?’ Akiko leaned against the side of the helicopter, sleepy and cold.

  ‘I don’t know . . . a few shots of vodka, some lard. The usual.’

  ‘Then what?’ Akiko asked, her eyes closed.

  ‘The nearest town is twenty kilometers that way,’ he said, hooking a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘We can’t stay here long. The fighter pilot will have given the authorities our location. We can wait here for the inevitable police vehicles, or we can give it a go.’

  ‘Give what a go?’

  ‘Mongolia, in the chopper. We’ve got the fuel. We stay low, avoid population centers . . .’

  ‘You don’t sound confident.’

  ‘More confident about that than I am about taking our chances on the ground. Which reminds me. What did the pilot in that fighter say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t catch it. I was being sick. What shall I tell them about why we’re here?’

  ‘Tell them the truth if you like—that we’d have been shot out of the sky if we hadn’t landed.’

  Ben and Akiko made their way up the embankment toward the old women. More people had joined them.

  ‘What do you want here?’ said a thin white man in Russian. He was dressed in shades of black and had a weeping red nose and blue veins in his temples.

  ‘We’ve had problems,’ Akiko told him. ‘Can we get some food? We have money.’

  The man turned away from them and conducted a hurried conference with the people gathered, looking for a consensus.

  ‘Yes. You can go to the church,’ he said. ‘I am the priest here, but you must leave as soon as you can. The authorities do not like strangers.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Ben asked.

  ‘We can stay,’ Akiko told him.

  ‘Good.’ Ben smiled at the unwelcoming committee.

  ‘What’s the name of your village?’ Akiko asked.

  ‘We don’t have a name,’ the priest said. ‘We have a number: TS17170.’

  ‘You’re a camp?’

  The priest had said as much as he was going to. ‘Go with Rozalina. She works for me.’

  Rozalina was wide and squat with cruelly bowed legs. She beckoned at Akiko and Ben to follow her.

  ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Ben asked as they fell into line behind her.

  Akiko gave him an overview of the arrangements as the crowd parted to let them through. Rozalina trudged slowly uphill through the snow, toward the small black homes. The sun was up but it would be several hours before it climbed above the hills behind the village. Every hut seemed to have a fire going, blue smoke streaming from many chimneys. The village was small—no more than 100 or so huts—and most were no bigger than a single room. There were no vehicles of any kind in evidence and no overhead electrical wires or satellite dishes. Like all of the small settlements they’d visited, this one was positioned on the side of a hill, facing away from the prevailing weather, protected from the worst of it by the hills and the trees, which had been cleared right back from the settlement’s perimeter.

  Ben stopped to look at a young boy sitting on a doorstep, mucus running from his nose and down his top lip. He was gnawing at something yellow in his hands.

  ‘What’s he eating?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Smoked fish.’

  ‘I think I’ve lost my appetite.’

  The boy smiled up at them as the door behind him opened and a woman came out, carrying a tub. She ignored Ben, Akiko and Rozalina and walked with a pronounced limp to a neat stack of chopped wood in what was the backyard, a small enclosure that also held assorted nondescript scrap metal. The woman set the tub on the snow beside the chopped wood, bundled some logs into it and then hoisted the weight back onto her hip. It was only then that she glanced up at the strangers stopped by her fence.

  Akiko stared at her and the woman stared straight back. And then she dropped the tub in the snow and hobbled inside, dragging the child with her and slamming the door behind them.

  ‘Friendly,’ said Ben.

  Akiko rushed to the door and pounded on it. ‘Okaasan! Okaasan!’

  ‘Hey, Akiko,’ Ben called out. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Okaasan!’

  He walked over to her, the Russian woman shouting behind them, and grabbed her shoulders. ‘What is it?’ She was shaking. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s her . . . Okaasan,’ Akiko said, the sobs catching in her throat.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Okaasan—my mother!’

  ‘That was Nami?’ Ben asked, stunned.

  The door opened again and the older
woman stood framed by the darkness behind her, tears streaking her face, the cold burning red circles on her cheeks. Her mouth was down-turned with anguish. The woman sure looked familiar, Ben thought. Akiko took a step forward and the two women held each other in a gentle embrace, crying on each other’s shoulders.

  Ben stood open-mouthed, the realization dawning on him. They’d found Nami. She was alive. Fate had brought them to the woman’s doorstep in the middle of this bitter emptiness.

  He sat down on a rusting fuel drum, overcome by the enormity of their discovery. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it now. KAL 007 was a sham. A survivor had been found when there weren’t supposed to be any. And that meant 269 innocent people had lost their lives, not through death but through abandonment, sacrificed for reasons he couldn’t fathom. They had simply been left for dead, buried by lies.

  He glanced up in time to see Nami push Akiko back beyond the doorstep and slam the door shut between them.

  February 17, 2012

  NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland. ‘Who is he?’ Lana asked, cradling the receiver under her chin as she tapped away at the report.

  ‘His name is, or, I should say, was Arlo Locke. He was sixty-four,’ said Saul Kradich.

  ‘A little old to be a contract killer, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t believe those guys have the usual retirement plans. There was a tattoo on his upper arm—arrows crossed over a dagger. He was a Green Beret. I checked him out thoroughly. Army specialist Arlo Locke was a CIA recruit for an operation called Phoenix. Heard of it?’

  ‘An assassination program during the Vietnam War targeting suspected VC sympathizers.’

  ‘You got it. He was recruited from a unit whose ranking NCO was your buddy Hank Buck.’

  ‘You’re kidding . . .’

  ‘That’s where the trail to Buck’s military history begins and ends, which tells me he was also probably in Phoenix, but someone had every vestige of his records pulled.’

  ‘Someone with plenty of elevation in the Company who also knew his way around NSA, perhaps?’

  ‘If you mean someone like Roy Garret—yes, that’s how I’d read it. It’s pretty weird. I can’t find anything about Buck’s military service aside from what I just told you. It’s like the guy never existed. I’ve got something else for you. Guess.’

  ‘I’ve got no time to play twenty questions, Saul.’

  ‘Okay, okay . . . You know that paper you asked me to trace? The one titled “Engineering the Collapse of West European Opposition to US IRBMs” et cetera and so forth?’

  ‘You found it?’ she asked, her fingers poised over the computer keys.

  ‘I found it, but can you at least feed my ego a little by asking me how I found it?’

  Lana sighed, playing along for the sake of cooperation. ‘How’d you find it, Saul?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t easy. You’re lucky I want to sleep with you, otherwise I’d have given up.’

  ‘Kradich . . .’

  ‘I couldn’t find it anywhere, not by the usual means. And then I got a call from the medical examiner about Locke and I found a lead about Buck through a back door. That got me thinking. Many of the other analyzes Garret wrote all had Ed Meese, William Casey, Bill Clark and Des Bilson on the circular. Turns out Bilson donated his archives to the Library of Congress when he died. Guess what I found among his records.’

  ‘You are a genius. I mean that.’

  ‘But will it get me laid? Never mind, I think I know the answer. I’m sending the hard copy down to you.’

  ‘And it’s worth reading?’

  ‘In a word, fuckyeah.’

  Nami lay awake and listened to her husband in the darkness, every breath causing his chest to rattle like old bones hanging in the breeze. The day she had dared not think about for years had arrived.

  At first, survival had depended on keeping alive a connection with her old life. She had dreamed of Akiko and Hatsuto and the cherry blossoms. But as the years slipped by, she had given away hope, cut it loose, and accepted her fate.

  She remembered Akiko as the little girl at the airport. Now her daughter had come to find her. And somehow, among the vastness of this twilight life, she had succeeded.

  Nami’s husband’s breath caught in his chest. He would be dead soon, she knew. And there were many others she cared for in this village. Too many to leave behind. Little Kimba would find it difficult to understand.

  Akiko had spent the day camped in front of Nami’s house. Her mother wouldn’t come out and so Akiko had refused to leave. She couldn’t, not now. She had to speak with Nami. The priest had relented, allowing them to stay overnight. Then, he said, if they refused to leave, he would make a formal protest to the authorities in Listvyanka.

  Once the shadows had lengthened and night had marched down the hills, Akiko had had no choice but to retreat to the church.

  She sat on the edge of the cot in the dark and rocked back and forth, her arms around her drawn-up knees, trying to recall every smell, every memory, every story connected with Nami. The holes in her memory made her both angry and sad. The sheer loss she felt was like a black and empty sea in the center of her being. How dare they! Her mother was now an old woman. The years had been ripped from her and she was old. But there was strength within her. Nami had survived. And, from the embrace and the shared tears, Akiko knew that during all the lost years Nami had not forgotten her.

  February 18, 2012

  Resettlement community TS17170, Siberia. It was still dark when Akiko lit a candle and went looking for Ben. Rozalina had made him a bed on the floor at the back of the church, where the frozen air rushed up through the cracks in the worn boards. He was already dressed when she found him, sitting on one of the prayer benches, his head in his hands, his teeth chattering.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Cold. Be surprised. How about you?’

  ‘We need to get Nami and leave here.’

  ‘I know, but you don’t think it’s a bit early?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘That would be a “no” then.’

  Akiko opened the door and the frozen inrush of air blew out the candle. There was a lightening in the eastern sky, while overhead the stars were still shimmering with cold. Occasional people-shaped smudges of darkness could be seen moving about against the ghost-white backdrop of the snow.

  ‘So, what’s the plan?’ Ben enquired. ‘Just knock on the door and ask Nami if she’d like to go back home to Japan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The morning was thick with a freezing white mist that sucked the sound out of the air, deadening their footfalls in the powdered snow. Akiko walked fast, with purpose.

  When they arrived at Nami’s home, Ben stopped at the back fence while Akiko kept going to the door. She hesitated, and then tapped on the door with a block of wood. She knocked again. And again. Finally, the door opened and Nami came out with the familiar tub and walked past her to the stacked firewood.

  ‘We came here to Russia to find you,’ said Akiko behind her.

  ‘Please, can you speak Russian? I cannot remember Japanese.’

  ‘Of course, yes.’

  ‘I don’t have time,’ Nami said, looking back at the closed door. ‘My husband wants his hot water.’

  ‘You are married?’

  ‘A woman can’t survive here without a man. My husband has been a good provider and protector. I’ve had three children, but they are grown up.’

  ‘What about the boy I saw?’

  ‘A grandchild.’ Nami dropped some small logs into the tub.

  ‘I have thought about you every day,’ said Akiko.

  ‘Yes, me too, little Kimba.’

  Akiko’s chin dented at the mention of her childhood pet name.

  ‘Can you tell me . . . How is Hatsuto?’ Nami asked.

  ‘He died some years ago. When he lost you, it broke his spirit.’

  Nami stopped what she was doing and lowered her head. The mist was no
w suffused by the gray pre-dawn light, providing enough illumination for Akiko to see that Nami’s lips were trembling.

  ‘We met a man in another camp who said you were killed in an accident,’ Akiko continued. ‘He told me that you had lost an arm.’

  ‘No, it was a leg,’ said Nami. ‘I was close to death. Afterwards, I was sent here. I have to go now.’

  ‘Leave with us,’ Akiko said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My life is here now.’

  ‘But you have to come.’

  ‘Why?’

  Akiko couldn’t get the words out. This was an outcome she hadn’t expected.

  ‘You are grown up,’ said Nami. ‘You have a husband. And he is very handsome.’ She looked past Akiko toward Ben, who was idly dusting snow from the top of the fence post, beyond earshot.

  ‘He is not my husband. His name is Benjamin. His father was also a victim of 007.’

  ‘A passenger? Perhaps I knew him.’

  ‘No, not a passenger. There were many more victims besides those who were aboard.’

  ‘It happened so long ago. Everyone has forgotten.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. The authorities said your plane crashed into the sea and everyone was killed. But they searched and found nothing.’

  ‘And people believed this?’ She snorted. ‘I wondered why no one came to look for us.’

  ‘The Russians, the Americans, our own people—they all lied. We came to Russia to find the truth.’

  ‘You can’t change what has happened. You can’t make it right.’

  ‘But if you come back with us, the truth will win.’

  ‘Truth?’ Nami said, shaking her head. ‘There are only perspectives.’ She removed the glove from her hand and put it on her daughter’s cheek. ‘My place is here. I belong here.’

  Akiko saw her cracked and broken nails, felt the warmth of her mother’s fingers against her skin, and the tears again welled into her eyes.

  ‘Don’t cry, little Kimba. I have made a life. It just wasn’t the one I expected.’