Gridlock
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IN THE WHITE House Situation Room it was four in the morning, and President Thompson, along with his closest advisers including Secretary of State Mortenson and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force General Blake were sitting on the edge of their seats, their eyes glued to the large-screen monitor.
The aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush and her entire Strike Group of Los Angeles–Class submarines, surface ships, and AWACS aircraft had threaded their way through the Antilles and were presently just over the horizon from Bonaire and Curacao, well within striking range of Caracas less than two hundred miles to the south. Real-time images were being transmitted from the carrier’s Combat Information Center as well as from a Keyhole satellite that provided infrared images of Venezuela’s north coast.
Until just a minute ago the city of Caracas had been lit up like a million jewels sparkling on a black backdrop. Most of the city was in darkness now. When the lights went out Thompson was breathless for just a moment.
“They know we’re there,” CIA director Walt Page had said. “But there’s been no response.”
The carrier group commander, Rear Admiral Horace Butler, came on screen. He was an unremarkable-looking man, a little rumpled this morning, but he was an extremely capable officer who never blinked. When he was pointed in some direction, he charged. He was Thompson’s Sherman. “Mr. President, we’re ready at this point. Do you have an order for me?”
“Are your targets set?” Thompson asked. He and Butler had spoken at length over the past twenty-four hours about the exact nature of the mission and the three main objectives.
“Yes, sir. We have six cruise missiles dialed up for Caracas—two on the Miraflores Palace, where because of the hour there should be a minimum loss of life, two on SEBIN’s headquarters which under the circumstances may be fully staffed, and two on the Ministry of Defense which also should be well staffed. We have an additional four missiles which are targeted on four primary oil-loading sites in Lake Maracaibo. That will be our first wave.”
“Any sign of their Navy or Air Force?”
“No, sir. But they’re aware of us. We believe that they may be receiving real-time satellite information from the Russians.”
“Have your aircraft or surface vessels been illuminated by radar?” General Blake asked.
“No, sir. Which makes us believe that they are getting satellite imagery.”
“To this point you’ve encountered no resistance, nor have you come under any threat, real or implied,” Thompson asked. He was wound up, as was everyone else in the room.
He’d draped a Medal of Honor around the neck of a SEAL, and afterward when they were talking the young man had jokingly told him one of the ten Murphy’s Laws for combat soldiers: “If everything is going according to plan, you’re probably running into a trap.” He had not forgotten it.
“They have not yet fully recovered from Balboa, so we didn’t expect much. The field is ours, sir. I just need the launch order.”
“Standby,” Thompson said and he cut the audio. “Discussion?” he asked his advisers.
“Our allies will look on this as an act of war,” Mortenson said.
Thompson had hired the secretary of state precisely because he was a dove. “A measured response,” he said.
“We accomplished Balboa.”
“In retaliation for the attacks on the Initiative, with the loss of many lives. This morning is in response to the attacks on our grid and on the transformers in Texas. Perhaps they’ll get the message that if they unleash the virus against us, I will order a nuclear strike on Caracas. Americans would demand nothing less of me.”
Mortenson looked around at the others and he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I cannot in all good conscience be a part of this.” He started to rise.
“Are you resigning, Irving?” Thompson asked sharply.
Mortenson hesitated for a beat. “No, sir.”
“Then sit down. This is still a democracy, and you’ve cast your vote.”
Mortenson sat.
“Any other objections?”
“To a possible nuclear strike, yes, sir, I have objections,” General Blake said. “But no, I am not resigning.”
“The nuclear option is down the road, and very unlikely,” Thompson said. “I’m talking about this morning. Diplomacy has failed, and sanctions have never worked, not even against North Korea. If our national grid goes down this country will face the most serious problem it’s ever faced since the Civil War. The loss of lives and property would be staggering. You’ve all seen the reports.”
No one said a thing.
“Discussion,” Thompson prompted.
“What about the hacker in Amsterdam?” Nicholas Trilling asked. He was the secretary of defense and although unlike Mortenson he was no dove, neither was he a knee-jerk hawk. His philosophy was the same as Teddy Roosevelt’s: Speak softly and carry a big stick.
“One of my people who accompanied Nate Osborne over there had heard nothing as of two hours ago. Osborne was disarmed, and a Dutch intelligence officer was to accompany him to where Barend Dekker was possibly barricaded.”
“Which means unless Dekker is directed to stand down, he could be making ready at this moment to unleash the virus,” Thompson said. “We need to give him pause.”
Madeline Bible, the director of national intelligence, looked around the table, then back to Thompson. “I don’t think we have any other choice this morning, Mr. President,” she said.
The others all nodded their assent, and Thompson switched on the audio.
“What is the time to the various targets?” he asked Admiral Butler.
“We’ll fire AGM-158s, which are medium-range subsonic JASSMs—Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles—which fly at eight hundred kilometers per hour. Time to target is in the thirty-minute range.”
“Proceed on my orders, Admiral.”
“Yes, sir,” the admiral said. He turned and said something to the ship’s captain, and moments later a camera view of the carrier’s deck suddenly blossomed into bright white as the first missiles were launched.
“God help the poor bastards,” Fenniger said half under his breath.
Less than two minutes later the admiral turned back. “All are away, and flying hot and normal.”
An incoming call on the console was for Walt Page. The president motioned for him to pick it up.
“Page,” the DCI said. He listened for several long moments. “Are you sure it’s him? No possibility it was someone else?” He listened again. He hung up. “It’s the computer hacker. He’s dead. And Osborne has the thumb drive with the virus.”
“Thank God,” Mortenson said.
The relief in the room was palpable and Thompson sat back. “Any casualties?” he asked.
“Several, but none of ours. Osborne and the officer I sent with him are fine. They’ll be leaving Amsterdam within the hour.”
Thompson nodded. “The man has done it for us again. He’d needs to be here in Washington, with the Bureau.”
“We’ve tried. He won’t leave North Dakota,” FBI Director Edward Rogers said.
“Try harder,” Thompson said with an edge to his voice.
“Yes, sir.”
Admiral Butler was privy to the conversation. “Shall we stand down, Mr. President?”
“The missiles can be self-destructed before they hit their targets?”
“Yes, sir. We can give the order now.”
“Thirty minutes before they reach their targets?”
“Yes, sir.”
Thompson smiled with satisfaction. “Send the self-destruct signal in twenty minutes,” he said. “I want Chavez to swing in the wind to see what it feels like.”
Epilogue
Fourteen days later
The White House
WHEN OSBORNE AND Ashley arrived in Washington a limousine was waiting to take them to the White House. General Forester was in the backseat. Ashley kissed her father on the cheek
and they headed away from Reagan National, the day sunny and beautiful.
“I don’t like this very much,” Osborne said. He was dressed in a suit and tie, the first he’d worn since Kas’s funeral, and he was uncomfortable. He didn’t belong here, especially not now.
“When a president wants to give you the Medal of Freedom, with Distinction, you don’t turn it down,” Forester said.
“I don’t deserve it.”
“That’s not for you to say. Anyway I don’t agree. Without you this country would be in trouble. So like it or not your face is going to be on every network tonight and every newspaper tomorrow morning.”
“Makarov is still out there someplace,” Ashley said.
“He already knows what Nate looks like,” Forester said. “And the chances are slim that he’d try to come after him. There’d be nothing in it for him. And from what I’ve been led to understand, the man is a professional, and doesn’t need revenge.”
Osborne let their conversation swirl around him. In a way it seemed to him that Ash and her father were talking about someone else; someone who was a complete stranger to him, a admirable man, a hero, but someone else.
Ashley took his hand. “It’s over, Nate. They failed. And in a couple of weeks we’re going to get married and you can go back to being a small-town sheriff.”
He smiled, and wished with everything that the attacks against them were truly over with, but he couldn’t. The same issues that had faced the Initiative were still on the table. Big oil, a multitrillion-dollar business was at stake. And like Whitney Lipton at her lab in Atlanta, he was about to become the poster boy in the struggle. The point man. His image front and center.
It wasn’t about his personal safety, it was about Ashley’s and the people around him who were in danger, and he felt as if he were helpless to do anything to protect them, and it was frustrating. Gun battles were easy by comparison, because they were almost always over in a couple of minutes. But for this now there was no end in sight.
They stopped at the east gate and when the guard saw it was Forester in the backseat, waved them through. They were met at the entrance by Mark Young, who shook Osborne’s hand.
“The president is looking forward to this,” he said. “Ms. Borden, welcome to the White House.”
“Any possibility of me getting out of it?” Osborne asked.
“Nope. But you’ve been here before, you know the drill, only this time instead of a ceremony in the Oval Office we’ll be using the Blue Room.”
It was one of three formal parlors, this one on the first floor, and was normally used for receiving lines, receptions, and sometimes important state dinners.
“Why’s that?” Ashley asked.
“The Oval Office isn’t large enough,” Young said and he led them upstairs to the Cross Hall, and to Blue Room, itself an oval about thirty feet wide and forty long, which this afternoon was filled nearly to capacity with media people, plus much of the president’s staff, along with the secretary of state and others.
Osborne almost shrank back, but Ashley had a firm hold of his arm. “Easy,” she said.
Inside they passed a reception line of well-wishers who shook his hand, and others who applauded. Whitney was near the head of the line and she kissed him on the cheek.
“This has to be better than being shot at, don’t you think?” she whispered in his ear.
“No.”
“Well, it’ll be over in less than a half-hour and we can go have a drink,” Forester said. “FORECON, hoorah.”
Osborne had to grin. He was being an idiot, but there was more to come. He could feel it in his bones.
Young left them, and moments later at the door, he announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”
Majorca
Makarov and Ilke lay in each other’s arms after making love. It was early evening and a soft Mediterranean breeze ruffled the gauze drapes at the open balcony door of their royal suite in the Hotel Villa Italia.
After Stockholm they’d stayed here for nearly two weeks, sailing, walking the beaches, dinners in Palma, and right here at a small trattoria at Puerto de Andratx. They’d rented motor scooters and toured the island, and for the last two days they had looked at villas and houses with a German real estate agent, whose English was better than Makarov’s.
“Is it really true, you’re going to retire?” Ilke asked, stroking his chest with the tip of a finger. She was a slender woman, thirty years old, with short blond hair cut in a pixie style, and very wide, startlingly blue eyes. She was almost always smiling about something, but now she was practically bubbling over. She reminded him of a teenage girl he once knew a very long time ago.
“I’ve already turned over the business to Brant. He’ll run it, and whenever possible he’ll buy it from me.” Brant Van DeHoef, a former South African Special Forces operator, had been in the company almost from the beginning. He knew the business well, and had developed many of his own contacts.
“Then what?” she asked.
“For starts, we’ll buy a place here, and then travel.”
“I meant about your secret life?”
Something very hard and painful clutched at his gut, but he didn’t let his reaction show. Instead he smiled. “What are you talking about?”
“I know that you didn’t go to Amsterdam on business.”
“What then?”
“For that other thing. Another costume ball or something.”
“You’re making no sense whatsoever,” Makarov said.
“Sometimes when you go away I know that it’s for business. But other times you come back and your hair is different. Or sometimes your face looks as if you’d been out in a hot desert sun for weeks, cracked, red, and a little wrinkled. But by the next morning you look like you look now. Handsome.”
“Sometimes I have to go in disguise.”
“Why is that?”
“I do arms deals, and some of the people are less than honorable. I’ve never wanted to lead them back to Stockholm. To us.”
“They know your business address,” Ilke insisted.
“But not my home.” His tradecraft had been sloppy, because all along he figured that he would have to kill her and move on. So it didn’t really matter what she knew. But now it was different for him.
She looked into his eyes. “Then some of it was sometimes less than legal.”
“Sometimes.”
“And it’s truly over?” she asked.
“Truly over.”
“Because you love me, though you’ve never once said it.”
Makarov pulled her down and kissed her lips. “Because I truly love you,” he said.
“Then I don’t care whatever has happened in the past, only the now and the tomorrows.”
NOVELS BY DAVID HAGBERG
Twister
The Capsule
Last Come the Children
Heartland
Heroes
Without Honor*
Countdown*
Crossfire*
Critical Mass*
Desert Fire
High Flight*
Assassin*
White House*
Joshua’s Hammer*
Eden’s Gate
The Kill Zone*
By Dawn’s Early Light
Soldier of God*
Allah’s Scorpion*
Dance with the Dragon*
The Expediter*
The Cabal*
Abyss*
Castro’s Daughter*
NONFICTION BY DAVID HAGBERG AND BORIS GINDIN
Mutiny
NONFICTION BY BYRON L. DORGAN
Take This Job and Ship It
Reckless!
FICTION BY BYRON L. DORGAN AND DAVID HAGBERG
Blowout
Gridlock
*Kirk McGarvey Adventures
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
SENATOR BYRON L. DORGAN served as a U.S. congressman and senator for North Dakota for thir
ty years before retiring in January 2011. He was chairman of Senate committees and subcommittees on the issues of energy, aviation, appropriations, water policy, and Indian affairs. Senator Dorgan is the author of the New York Times bestseller Take This Job and Ship It.
DAVID HAGBERG is a former U.S. Air Force cryptographer who has traveled extensively in Europe, the Arctic, and the Caribbean. He has published more than seventy novels of suspense, including the bestselling Allah’s Scorpion, The Expediter, and Abyss. He makes his home in Sarasota, Florida.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
GRIDLOCK
Copyright © 2013 by Byron L. Dorgan and David Hagberg
All rights reserved.
Cover photographs by Getty Images
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Dorgan, Byron L.
Gridlock / Byron L. Dorgan and David Hagberg.—First Edition.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2738-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4942-2 (e-book)
1. Energy security—United States—Fiction. 2. Energy industries—Political aspects—United States—Fiction. 3. Energy industries—Government policy—United States—Fiction. 4. Terrorism—Prevention—United States—Fiction. I. Hagberg, David. II. Title.
PS3604.O7365G75 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013003645
e-ISBN 9781429949422
First Edition: July 2013