The Zero Option

by David Rollins

  The evening’s press conference at Radio City had been canceled by him. He’d given Felix Ackerman no reason for the cancelation. The man would find out soon enough. And when he did, Ackerman would be gone. Why hang around when the game was lost?

  Garret sank into a chair and poured himself another glass of the fine scotch, spilling some over his hand. The bottle slipped from his grasp and fell beside the chair onto the carpet, its contents escaping with a glug, glug, glug.

  The noise coming from the adjoining room told him that the secret service types were watching television. Had the story hit CNN yet? It would, and before the night was over, because two hours earlier an excited contact from his CIA days working in the US embassy in Moscow had called him with an astonishing story. The Japanese embassy had just informed the US mission that a man with no identification papers had walked in claiming to be Congressman Larry McDonald, a man who had supposedly been lost when the former Soviet Union had shot down the Korean 747 he was a passenger on nearly thirty years ago. It was the one that went down off Sakhalin Island. The news, when he heard it, had caused Garret to take a seat. The man claiming to be this congressman was accompanied by a female Japanese national and a US citizen who both backed this assertion. The Russians were also holding a man traveling on a US diplomatic passport, arrested for the attempted murder of the aforementioned US citizen and Japanese national. That man’s name was Henry Buck.

  Garret stared unseeing out the window at the lights of Seventh Avenue as a creeping headache swept over his brain like a fast-approaching storm front. The tumbler on his belly tipped and poured scotch all over his shirt.

  The front door to the suite opened and Felix Ackerman burst past the secret service agent holding the knob. Garret saw the man’s reflection in the window in front of him. He didn’t need to see the color of Ackerman’s face to know that he was livid.

  ‘What the fuck is all this shit about Buck trying to shoot people with a fucking sniper’s rifle in the middle of goddamn Siberia?’ his campaign manager wanted to know.

  Garret tried to raise his hand, but it remained in his lap, oddly heavy. It was the strangest sensation.

  ‘And what the hell has it got to do with this looney tune who claims to be a long-lost fucking congressman? And how are you personally involved in this bullshit?’

  Panic flashed through Garret’s mind. He couldn’t swallow, or blink. What in God’s name was going on? He screamed, but all that came out of his throat was a dry croak.

  ‘Governor? Are you okay?’ Ackerman was suddenly on his haunches, peering into his face.

  Garret tried to move his head, but couldn’t. Oh, shit, he thought.

  Ackerman waved his hand in front of Garret’s bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Boss, what’s the matter?’

  Garret managed to twitch a finger. Aside from breathing, which was becoming increasingly shallow, that was all the movement he could manage. He also realized that he could feel nothing at all and that his body weighed a hundred tons or more.

  ‘Help!’ Ackerman cried out. ‘Help! Call an ambulance.’

  Garret heard noises he associated with others racing into the room, but he couldn’t turn his head to look.

  Epilogue

  Chena Lake, Fairbanks, Alaska. ‘You made it,’ said Ben, taking Lana’s hand and kissing her on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks for asking me.’

  ‘You deserve to be here. He would have wanted it.’

  Lana hoped that Ben hadn’t observed that she was blushing. It was the kiss, his closeness. There was something about this guy . . .

  She cleared her throat and said, by way of diversion, ‘You might like to read this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something Governor Garret wrote a long time ago, about how to win public support for government strategic interests. You’re not supposed to know it exists, but the cat’s well and truly out of the bag on this one, so, you know . . . It’ll explain a lot.’

  ‘Thanks, I will. You didn’t send a copy to the media?’

  Ben resisted the temptation to tear the envelope open and read it on the spot. Instead, he folded it in half and stuffed the paper down the front of his backpack. According to various media, Garret was lying in a hospital bed attached to tubes and various machines as the result of a massive stroke, which, by coincidence, struck him around the time the revelations about what really happened to KAL 007 and its passengers were breaking. His frontal lobes were apparently mostly unaffected. The New York Times had described his state as like being ‘held prisoner within a body cast from solid lead’. As far as Ben was concerned, a hell like that couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

  ‘No,’ said Lana, ‘but I thought about it. They need to work for it. Perhaps there’s another copy out there somewhere. Or maybe they’ll convince someone that it’s in the national interest to open the NSA’s compartment on KAL 007. I’m sure they’d find that document in there, along with a lot of other interesting stuff.’

  ‘What’ll you do now?’ Ben asked. ‘I heard you were gonna pack it in with the feds.’

  ‘Yeah. I was thinking about horticulture. Plant trees, do something really useful.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I am—kidding.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Gonna head for the front lines. I was thinking FBI—anti-terror maybe. Get out of the back room.’

  ‘Were you close to your ex-partner?’

  ‘We had an understanding, but “close” isn’t a word I’d have used. We got along fine sometimes, and other times we didn’t. But his heart was in the right place. You couldn’t fault Sherwood’s commitment. He was the kind of guy who’d have been first out of the trenches knowing there was a machine gun zeroed on his position. I don’t think he ever believed that he’d be killed in the line of duty, right up to the moment he died.’

  ‘He have a wife, kids?’

  ‘No. He had a home gym.’

  A flight of birds flew overhead, squawking, fighting for something in midair that one of them had pulled from the lake’s foreshore.

  ‘What about you?’ Lana asked as she looked right and then left, judging a break in the minimal traffic.

  ‘Going back to Key West. My airplane’s missing me.’

  Lana smiled.

  Across the road, in a park with swings, Akiko and Tex were waiting. They waved, and Ben returned it.

  ‘How do you think it’s all going to play out?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Now that the media’s got its hooks in the story, things are going to move fast. There’s a lot of pressure on Washington to lean on Russia and make them cough up as many of the passengers who might still be alive. There were very young children on that plane. I imagine there are Russians out there who are going to find out they’re American, or Japanese, or one of a dozen other nationalities.’

  ‘How about Garret? What’s going to happen to him?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but even if he wasn’t on life support, I doubt that he’d win his party’s nomination. And, of course, the Republicans are already claiming that it was all a Russian plot and their predecessors in the Reagan administration had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘They’ll never get away with it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There are people out there who’ll tell you the holocaust was cooked up.’

  Various experts had been called upon to claim that Lawrence McDonald was an impostor, but a simple DNA test comparing his genetic profile with that of his surviving children had cleared up the issue. Paternity was unequivocal. A lot of work had also gone into the discrediting of Yuudai’s Wakkanai radar tape, which dissolved when McDonald’s identity was confirmed. Ben had turned the tape over to CNN. He did it, he said, to honor the memory of Lucas Watts and Jerome Grundy. With the tape’s authenticity established beyond doubt, they would have approved.

  The governments of the thirteen nations other than the US who had lost citizens in the
conspiracy of KAL 007 were all demanding that the records of the old KGB, and the newer FSB, be scoured for evidence of the whereabouts of their missing citizens. Litigation was under way and class actions had been launched against the incumbent governments of both the United States and Russia.

  ‘Hey,’ said Ben as they met the others.

  ‘Hey yourself,’ said Tex.

  Akiko, Ben, Tex and Lana all exchanged hugs.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ben. ‘We ready to do this?’

  Akiko nodded. ‘How are your mother and father?’

  ‘Staying indoors. There are at least thirty news cameras and I don’t know how many journalists camped outside their front door.’

  ‘But they’re alright?’

  ‘They’re fine, all things considered, though Frank’s wearing a bandage on his head the size of a turban.’

  ‘I had a bit of a scout around,’ said Tex. ‘There’s a good place down here, where the grass ends. Or we could hire a boat.’

  The sun was out, but the breeze was icy.

  ‘No, this is good,’ Ben decided.

  They all walked down to the water’s edge. Ben placed his backpack on the ground and pulled out the urn.

  ‘Here you are, Curtis. Last stop, Chena Lake.’

  He removed the top from the stainless-steel container. He didn’t know what to say. Something religious wasn’t on the cards. Curtis had been plain about that. Ben had been hoping that the right words would just occur to him. But now that the moment had arrived, his mind was a blank. And then, suddenly, he knew. It was a short speech, but it said everything that needed to be said.

  ‘I embraced the truth, Dad. And I hope . . . I hope you’re as proud of me as I am of you.’

  Ben tipped up the urn and the falling ashes, caught by the breeze, scattered across the cold lake waters.

  Author’s note

  Fact: In the early morning hours of September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 flew more than 200 miles off course and headed for prohibited, heavily defended Soviet airspace.

  Fact: Before this happened, a US RC-135 reconnaissance plane maneuvered so close to the 747 in the Soviet buffer zone over the Bering Sea that Russian air defense radar operators saw the blips of the two aircraft merge on their screens, confusing their identities.

  Fact: After overflying some of the most sensitive military regions in Russia, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was intercepted by a Soviet SU-15 over the Sea of Japan off Sakhalin Island. The fighter fired two missiles at the airliner and reported that at least one of the missiles had struck home.

  Fact: A commercial airliner weighing close to half a million pounds hitting the water will leave a slick of floating debris a couple of miles wide. Yet despite a concerted air and sea search conducted by the navies of several nations—the biggest in history up to that time—no significant wreckage of KAL 007 was found. Two bodies, unidentifiable, were eventually recovered.

  Fact: The Japanese Defense Agency first began searching the seas southeast of the island of Hokkaido because a report made by KAL 007 moments after the missile strikes positioned the airliner out along Romeo 20, 200 miles south of where experts believe it really was.

  Fact: Within hours of the downing, a report attributed to the CIA claimed the aircraft had landed safely on Sakhalin Island. The CIA soon after denied that it had made the report.

  Fact: Congressman Lawrence Patton McDonald was aboard KAL 007.

  Fact: After years of denial by the Russians that they had the plane’s black boxes, in 1992, Boris Yeltsin turned up with the plane’s black boxes at a press conference, but they contained no tapes. He produced the tapes themselves at a press conference a year later. Subsequent examination of the tapes by a range of experts raised more issues than they resolved.

  Was KAL 007 on a CIA mission? Why didn’t the RC-135 send a warning to the 747’s flight crew that it was headed for serious grief? What happened to the bodies? And the wreckage? If the plane landed on Sakhalin Island or, as another theory postulates, ditched safely in the Tartar Strait, where are the passengers today?

  These and so many other questions require answers. What really happened to KAL 007? It’s time we knew.

  Writing The Zero Option required a tonne of research. I had intended to supply a bibliography and webography for readers interested in checking my facts or doing a little research of their own. However, there has recently been a lot of good work put into the Wikipedia entry on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and much of the source material I used you’ll find a reference to there.

  Another great overall resource containing a wealth of relevant material on the fate of KAL 007 is www.rescue007.com. Bert Schlossberg, whose father-in-law was a passenger aboard the Korean airliner on the night it was lost, manages this site.

  There are many people I’d like to thank for helping me out with what became, I have to admit, something of an obsession. First on the list is Lieutenant Colonel Mike ‘Panda’ Pandolfo, USAF, who provided support of the technical and moral variety and almost on a daily basis.

  I’d also like to thank Colonel ‘Woody’ Woodward, USAF (Ret.) for the many discussions we had sorting through what might and might not have happened to KAL 007.

  Thanks also to my agent, Kathleen Anderson, who went above and beyond with editing and creative direction.

  Thanks to Trisha, Mike, Richard, Andrew, Joe and Ed Elbert, all of whom read earlier drafts and provided notes and comments.

  I’d like to thank Rob Mac for living the writer’s dream and for giving me the courage to do a little of the same.

  I’d also like to thank all the dedicated folks at Pan Macmillan, but especially my new publisher, Rod Morrison, for believing in the book, my new senior editor, Emma Rafferty, for doing such a sensitive job on the manuscript, and my new copy editor, Nicola O’Shea, for loving this story.

  And finally, I’d like to thank my wife Sam, who suffered through endless recountings of the facts surrounding 007 over the two and a half years it took to research, plan and write this book. No doubt she counted herself among the victims.

  David Rollins

  April, 2009