Читать книгу Capital Offensive - Don Pendleton - Страница 6

Washington, D.C.

Dawn was just breaking over the capital city, and the White House, normally a beehive of activity at that early hour, was strangely quiet. Government aides rushed about without talking, telephone conversations were hushed and the Secret Service agents stationed at every door were grimly silent, their hard eyes constantly checking every identification badge. There were absolutely no tourists or news reporters anywhere in sight.

To the stoic people inside the Oval Office, the atmosphere was cool in both temperature and demeanor. The anxious members of the senior staff were perched on the two couches set in front of the fireplace, looking as if they were racehorses poised at the starting gate. Across the room, the President was sitting behind a massive hardwood desk, his fist clenched around a red telephone receiver. Ten years ago that would have been the hotline to Moscow. Now the secure line went directly to Beijing.

Openly cradling assault rifles, Secret Service agents stood in every corner, barely a ripple in their jackets from the body armor underneath. Outside the tall windows, armed helicopter gunships swept low around the capital building in a standard defensive pattern, then there came the low rumble of a full squadron of jet fighters streaking across the city. Through the glass panes of the door leading to the promenade, Marine One could be seen sitting on the manicured lawn between the Jefferson Mounds, the turbo props of the armored helicopter slowly turning as it stayed ready to fly the President to safety at a moment’s notice.

The members of the senior staff knew that the vice president was already in the underground bunker at Camp David, and the Joint Chiefs were en route to Cheyenne Mountain, the headquarters for NORAD.

“No, Mr. Premier, the United States of America is not, repeat, not at war with China, or with anybody else for that matter,” the President said in strained patience. The man’s hair was tousled and his necktie was askew, as if he hadn’t been to sleep in days. Yet he had only been awake for a few hours.

“Yes, I agree,” the President continued after a short pause. “We do have to keep the incident from the general public…. Yes, rioting in the streets is a distinct possibility, I agree.”

Frowning slightly, the President listened to the man on the other end of the receiver as he wearily poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from a steaming urn.

“No, that is not quite correct, Mr. Premier…. Look, Lu-Chan, I have absolutely no explanation about the missile misfiring.” The President leaned back in his chair with a white china cup balanced in his hand. “We did help you shoot them down, after all. A dozen of our new ICBMs went wild, but we were able to self-destruct nine. Only three got away from us, and all of them were destroyed in-flight. We suspect a computer malfunction…. Yes, I agree, Lu-Chan. Machines are useful servants, but very poor masters.”

The senior staff looked up sharply at the colossal lie, but said nothing. Nine missiles? Only three of the new ICBMs had been launched the previous night. But the careful distortion of the truth made the U.S. seem heroic and less like incompetent fools.

“I understand that hundreds of Chinese civilians were killed when the missiles came crashing down on that factory complex,” the President stated, setting down the untouched cup. His voice was calm, but the tendons in his neck revealed the tension he was actually feeling. Red China was the last serious enemy to freedom in the world, but the gigantic nation was slowly becoming a valuable business partner with America. Soon enough, Communist China would crumble under the economic pressure to buy washing machines, DVD players and tractors, exactly as the Soviet Union had done several years ago. However, at the moment, the Chinese were still the only nation truly capable of nuking America off the map and their overly suspicious commander had to be treated with all due respect.

“This would have been much worse if the warheads hadn’t been dummies,” the President said, then abruptly stopped. There was an awkward pause. “Nonnuclear models,” he explained patiently.

The Premier of Red China boasted of his excellent English and considered it a mark of distinction that he didn’t need a translator like the American President. However, American slang sometimes confused the man terribly.

“I agree…we…yes, thank you, Lu-Chan.” The President sighed deeply, his muscles finally relaxing. “I only wish that if the situation were reversed, I could also show such wisdom and restraint as yourself, my old friend…. Yes, absolutely. We shall talk again on this soon. Goodbye.” Gently, the exhausted man hung up the red phone as if it were made of glass and a hurried gesture would shatter it into a million pieces.

“Well, sir?” Daniel Thursby nervously asked, wringing his hands. The senior domestic policy adviser had recently shaved and was neatly dressed. He looked almost too young to work in the government, yet in the halls of Congress, he was one of the most feared men in the nation.

“China has agreed to step down from Red Flag Five, their version of DefCon Five, and will no longer be preparing to launch missiles at us,” the President stated, taking a sip from the tepid cup of coffee.

With audible sighs, everybody in the room eased their stance at the good news.

“Even if they did, sir, we could have stopped their missiles,” Virgil McPherson stated confidently. Wearing a badly rumpled suit, the foreign policy adviser looked perpetually angry.

“All of them?” the President demanded pointedly, placing aside the empty cup.

“Greater than ninety-five percent.”

The President tried not to frown. Which would mean only twenty or thirty million dead civilians.

“What was the breakage, sir?” Brent Morgan, the head of Homeland Security asked, easing his grip on a black cell phone. The entire White House was shielded against radio signals, but cell phones could be used inside the structure for relaying commands to staff while on the move.

“The estimated death toll is five thousand men, women and children,” the President replied sternly, his displeasure at the cavalier euphemism patently obvious. “Although I’m sure that a lot of things—” he stressed the word “—were also smashed and destroyed. Our ambassador in Beijing will be receiving a bill within the day for the damages. Massively overinflated I’m sure, but we’ll have to pay without complaining to maintain international goodwill.”

“The one bright spot is that the Paris missile impacted on an empty apartment complex set to open next month,” George Calvert, the secretary of the interior added, throwing his arms wide across the back of the sofa. “Not a soul was hurt. But the blaze from the crash spread to a nearby park and started a damn forest fire. The blaze is out of control and heading for civilian areas and oil refineries.”

“Can we help?” Morgan asked. “Send some humanitarian assistance, try to earn some goodwill?”

Waving a dismissal, the other man snorted. “Hell, no! The Red Cross has already sent in disaster relief,” he replied. “NATO, as well. But all American assistance has been flatly refused. The French are beyond furious, and are squealing like stuck pigs.”

“Can we put any spin on this?” Thursby asked without much hope.

“Not a chance,” Amanda Freeman said, shaking her head. The press secretary was wearing a neatly tailored dress suit sans jewelry. She wore polish, but the nails were kept short from her constant work on computers. “We have to take this hit politically.” She frowned. “The Internet is burning with the tale, the bloggers are going nuts and the news cycle has already sunk its teeth into the story. The whole world thinks that we had a massive failure in our missile defense systems. We look like damn idiots, but at least nobody thinks we tried to start World War Three and failed miserably. Good thing the last missile hit the ocean.”

Which was a lot better than letting them know the truth, the President added mentally. The stealth capabilities of those missiles was being tested, not their accuracy. They should have been able to hit a phone booth on the other side of the globe! The very idea that three of them failed at the same time was beyond ludicrous.

“How are things at the United Nations?” Virgil McPherson asked pointedly. “I understand the Security Council has called a special meeting just to discuss limiting our—”

There was a knock at the door, then it opened and the President’s secretary appeared. “Sir, the sandwiches have arrived,” the elderly woman said quietly.

The dour expression on the President’s face eased somewhat at the news. “Excellent. Send them right in.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied. She left the Oval Office at a brisk walk.

“Sandwiches?” asked the senior policy adviser, glancing at the sideboard along the wall. It was stacked with enough food to feed a platoon of Marines for a week.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you all for your diligent efforts,” the President said, sitting straighter in his chair. “But now I need a few minutes alone to consider the matter.”

“Leave? With so much on the table?” a junior speech writer asked in surprise, looking up from his laptop.

“Yes, thank you,” the President said with a touch of impatience in his voice. “I’ll confer with you again in an hour. Good day.”

“Of course, sir, absolutely,” Calvert said, rising from the couch. He shot the younger man a disapproving look. “We’ll be in the Blue Room with the Cabinet discussing the matter.”

Gathering their reports and files, the senior policy staff left the office, with the Secret Service agents following close behind. They also knew the difference between the President wanting to be alone and when he needed privacy.

When the office was empty, the President pressed a button on the intercom. Immediately the door opened and in walked Hal Brognola. Short, powerful, middle-aged, he looked like a Mafia capo or the CEO of a multinational corporation, instead of the director of the Sensitive Operations Group.

“By God, I have never wanted to see you less, but needed you more, old friend,” the President said, standing and offering a hand.

“Sorry I took so long, sir, but traffic is a mess around DuPont Circle,” Brognola replied, shaking hands, then taking a chair. “I heard about the missiles. What’s the real story?”

The man was always two steps ahead of any conversation.

“I’ll be brief.” The President grimaced unhappily, starting to pour himself another cup of coffee. But the urn proved to be empty. “Last night at around 2:00 a.m., there was a test firing of three of our new StarDagger ICBMs. Absolutely state-of-the-art missiles theoretically capable of penetrating the defense grid of any enemy nation without their even knowing it occurred. The targets were located far at sea, a long distance from any foreign powers, and a safe distance from the commercial shipping lines…just in case anything went wrong.”

“Which it obviously did,” Brognola stated, templing his fingers. He didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“Sadly, yes.” The President started to speak, paused, then took a deep breath. “Almost immediately after launching, the missiles went wildly off course and hit Paris and Beijing. One landed in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Where was that again?” Brognola asked, stunned. The news had talked about trouble overseas, but nothing like this. “Were the birds hot?”

“Thankfully, no.” The President sighed, rubbing his face. “The missiles were only equipped with marker warheads, just a half ton of M-2 plastique.”

Brognola knew that was enough high explosive to throw out a plume of water a hundred feet high, but not enough to do any significant damage to a major city. Maybe destroy a city block or two, but not much more than that. “How many people are dead?” he demanded gruffly.

“Hundreds. However, it could have been much worse.”

“Not by much,” Brognola replied curtly, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Racking his memory, the man recalled that modern-day ICBMs didn’t have a self-destruct and that their flight paths couldn’t change from the primary target. It was a failsafe procedure to prevent an enemy from seizing control and turning the missiles back against America. Once launched, the warbirds were totally autonomous. “How far off course did they go?”

“The original targets were the Fifth Fleet in the North Atlantic, the third Carrier Group in the Sea of Japan and the Second Submarine Assault Group in the South Pacific.”

The big Fed grunted in reply. Obviously the missiles hadn’t veered slightly off course, but had completely changed direction and flown halfway around the planet in new directions. That smacked of outside control, not a malfunction. “Any idea what went wrong, sir?” he demanded gruffly.

“To be honest I have no idea,” the President replied, spreading his hands. “Nor does anybody else. Only a wild guess. Every telltale was green, all telemetry was nominal, and yet…”

“Sabotage is the obvious answer, but how could anybody get to all three of them?” Brognola mused out loud, massaging his jaw. “Were they launched from the same base?”

“No.”

“Then we either have a network of traitors scattered through the launch silos…”

“Not completely out of the question.”

“Agreed. But if that’s not the case, then logically, somebody has found a way to manipulate our long-range weapons systems.”

“Sadly, that’s also my conclusion.” The President growled as if the notion put an unpleasant taste in his mouth. “Which means that until this matter is rectified, the nation is virtually defenseless. If we launch another ICBM, or even a long-range stealth bomb, it could go anywhere. Hit anybody from Manhattan to Melbourne. And the next time we may not be so lucky, and the civilian death tolls could be catastrophic.”

“And if these saboteurs can also alter the course of other nations’ missiles…” Brognola added grimly. The implications were staggering. “India fires at Pakistan, but hits London. The British launch at New Delhi and hit Moscow, and then they hit…” The man made an endlessly circular gesture. One wrong move by the U.S. could start a domino reaction that would bring about the long-feared apocalypse of the old cold war.

“I see that you’ve also come to the same conclusions as myself,” the President said. “At the moment, every antimissile we have has been taken offline. We can’t trust them anymore. Which leaves us with rail guns and lasers of questionable accuracy in the first place.”

“Artillery would be better.”

“Agreed. The Pentagon has all of our jet fighters on patrol around the continent watching for incoming missiles. But we can’t keep them up forever.”

“Especially if whatever is sending our missiles off course can also affect our jets, making them fly in the wrong directions to violate international airspace, crash into each other over populated cities…”

“…Or leave a wide-open breach for an incoming missile to fly through without hindrance,” the President finished grimly. “We have the best combat pilots in the world, but men get tired, and when they need to rely upon their navigational systems…” There was no need to finish the sentence.

“What can my people do to help, sir?” Brognola asked bluntly, leaning forward in the chair.

“Find out what happen to those ICBMs and stop whoever is responsible from doing it again,” the President stated, passing over a clear plastic jewel box containing a computer disk.

The shiny disk was marked with a brown stripe of high explosive. Open the jewel box incorrectly and the disk would violently be rendered useless. “This has the full technical readouts on the new missiles. Maybe your people at the Farm can find something useful. However, it is paramount that this remain top secret. If the public got wind of what was actually happening, there could be a national panic. Terrorists would attack U.S. bases overseas knowing that we can’t properly defend ourselves. The stock market might crash, financially crippling the nation for decades, hundreds of companies could go bankrupt, closing down factories and sending thousands of people out of work.” He grimaced. “It’s a nightmare waiting to happen.”

“Don’t worry, sir, we won’t let you down,” Brognola declared, rising from the chair.

“You never have before,” the President said, and started to add something more when telephone on the desk gave a soft buzz. The man glared at the device as if it were a live bomb, then lifted the receiver.

“Yes?” the President asked. He listened for a minute, then replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Well, it just happened,” he stated. “Two of our F-18 SuperHornets patrolling the oil fields of eastern Iraq got lost and accidentally crossed the boundary into western Iran. The mullahs are screaming violation of sovereign airspace and demanding punitive measures from the United Nations for our quote, ‘rampaging aggression,’ end quote.”

“The enemy is escalating their attacks already?” Brognola asked uneasily. “We can expect a lot more of this, and soon.”

The President opened a drawer and pulled out a folder marked with Top Secret seals and an explosive security tab. “Then stop wasting time talking to me and get moving,” he commanded, sliding on a pair of reading glasses and opening the file to start skimming the pages.

With a nod, Brognola turned and left the Oval Office, his mind already working on the complex matter. A lot of people hated America for various reasons. However, he knew there were few groups who had access to the sort of highly advanced technology needed to pull off this sort of cybernetic attack.

Departing from the building, Brognola headed for the parking lot behind the Old Executive Building. Heavily armed Park Rangers were on patrol everywhere inside enclosure, while D.C. police officers patrolled the sidewalks outside.

The key to the matter was how somebody had seized control of an ICBM in flight. And sent a military jet a hundred miles off course, the big Fed noted. There were a hundred safeguards and multiple backups on both guidance systems. Yet it had been done. There had to be some sort of common denominator; a computer chip or software program.

Stopping at his car, Brognola looked skyward at the dark storm clouds gathering high overhead. In the distance, thunder softly rumbled. Unfortunately there was only one thing he knew of that they both used as a navigational aid, and if that was compromised, the entire world was in more trouble than he could even contemplate.