And then he thought how he had asked for some time to think about it and how Kylee had said ‘whatever’ and things had just gone more and more wrong after that and now he found himself in Moscow, still with the NSA, and with no Kylee.
And he couldn’t help thinking how, when you sat here at what might just be the end of the civilization, you realized how freaking dumb you were.
He was still sitting there beating himself up about it when he saw an embassy marine security guard stick his head around his door, “Carl Williams? That you?”
He stuck up a finger, “Present.”
“Can you come with me sir?”, the guard asked.
Carl levered himself up, and followed the marine’s back through a maze of Annex corridors and then up some stairs, leading him into an empty office, “Can you wait here sir?” the man said. The marine was young, maybe 20. Carl found himself hoping the man made it to 21.
“What’s this about?” Carl asked him. “Just curious.”
“I don’t know sir,” the man said, and left him standing there. Carl looked around the office. He was in the commercial section, that much he could guess. Someone’s office, family photos on the wall, a few pictures from European holidays. Brochures from US companies sitting on a small coffee table. OK, no clues here.
A minute later, Devlin McCarthy walked in.
“Hi Carl,” she said simply.
“Hi ma’am,” Carl said. He always felt like he was in the presence of one of his old school teachers when he was with her, and he’d gone to a very strict school.
From the pocket of her jacket, she fished a telephone and held the screen out to face him, “What is this?”
Carl looked and could see it was the list of contact numbers for Yevgeny Bondarev that HOLMES had sent to McCarthy before the lockdown.
“It was just an idea,” Carl admitted. “I thought you might…”
“You seem to know everything before I do, so I guess you know how freaking busy I am right now,” Devlin said. “I can’t even call my own daughter. Why would I call this guy?”
“I didn’t really think,” Carl said, shrugging. “But the guy is leading the Russian air offensive over Alaska. I was thinking what if someone were to call him and warn him that if he doesn’t pull his planes back to the other side of the Bering Strait before three o’clock, we’re going to nuke Kaliningrad?”
“A call from his enemy? If he even picked up, which I doubt, he would hang up in a flash,” Devlin said. “Besides, we’re not going to nuke Kaliningrad,” Devlin said, frowning. She worked on the assumption now that she could share any intelligence she had with Carl, because he had clearances she didn’t even know existed. “But we are going to conduct an above ground nuclear detonation in the Pacific off the Kirin Islands.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“It’s what I’ve been told.”
“And State wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Why would they lie to me?” she asked.
“Oh I don’t know, maybe because if they told you the truth you would tell everyone in the Embassy to take the rest of their lives off, call their mothers or see their priest before the world ended?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Carl laid out HOLMES’ analysis of nuclear submarine movements and signals traffic for her. “It adds up to more than just a test. We are getting ready in case Russia wants to take this all the way. All it would take is a tiny miscalculation.”
She realized he was right. “Dammit Carl!” she said, “What do you think I can do about it?!”
“Call Bondarev, tell him unless he pulls his aircraft back, he’s courting Armageddon.”
“And he’ll take my call because why?”
“Duh. You’re Ambassador to the Russian Federation and grandmother to his child?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. It would be treason.”
“Is there still a death penalty for that?”
“I assume so.”
“Vasily Arkhipov,” Carl replied.
“What?”
“Commander of a Russian missile sub flotilla. Risked a death penalty but single-handedly prevented one of his Captains from firing a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis when he refused to authorize the launch. Saved the world, faced a court martial.”
“Is this supposed to encourage me? Because it isn’t working.”
“He was found not guilty, returned to service and eventually received a medal. Posthumous.”
“Still not helping,” Devlin said.
“It’s a phone call! You call the guy, you tell him who you are, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Best case, it does, and you go to court. Worst case, global thermonuclear Armageddon!”
“I’m going to call an officer of the Russian Air Force currently on frontline duty and somehow sweet talk him into surrendering because of some fling he had with my daughter two years ago and a child he probably doesn’t even know he has,” she said.
“No, of course not, but it might mean he’d take your call. And if you tell him the consequences are global thermonuclear Armageddon?” Carl pointed out. “Maybe he’s another Arkhipov.”
She thought about it.
“Every word I say on my phone, anything on any Embassy line, is monitored. Can you set it up through HOLMES? If we do this I can’t waste time leaving messages on his cell or with his damn secretary. I need to know I’ll get through.”
“If he’s contactable, we can get the guy on the line,” he said.
She paused, “I can’t believe I’m about to give our war plan to our enemy,” she said.
“If it helps,” he said. “Blame me later. I’ll blame it on HOLMES.”
She was still holding up her phone and a tinny British voice interrupted them, “I heard that Carl.”
The smell hit Perri before he saw the first body. He’d seen dead Russian soldiers through the scope of his rifle lying on the streets of Gambell after the attack there, but not decomposed like this. It wasn’t actually a body, it was a leg, buried under some rubble, that he assumed belonged to a body somewhere. This body must have been too hard for the surviving soldiers to recover, so they had been forced to leave it there and had just covered it with a tarpaulin. In the middle of the compound they found what looked like a mass grave, with smaller graves beside it. The smaller graves had small wooden crosses with a double horizontal bar on them and Russian names written in the middle. Most of these had small metal dog tags with rounded corners and Dave cupped one in his hand, reading it. It had a bunch of letters across the top, and numbers underneath. He dropped it and looked across the burial site.
“If these smaller ones are military graves, what are those big ones?” he asked, pointing to two long scars in the earth, each about a hundred feet long, with soil two feet high heaped on top.
“I have a bad feeling those are… non-military,” Perri said, unable to say what he was really thinking.
“It’s like they were dug with an earth mover,” Dave said, looking up and down the rows of earth. “They just piled the bodies in there, and pushed the dirt on top?” He started walking along the grave, and saw a sneaker toe sticking out. He pulled at it, and it came free. It looked like a child’s size. A bit further down, he bent down and picked up a telephone with a busted screen. He tried to turn it on, but it was dead. All along the graves were other small items — a plastic bead necklace, a single walrus ivory earring, a man’s jacket turned inside out, a bloodied shirt. “Who did this?” Dave asked.