Sean went back to his place on the rear-facing bench seat and put the thoughts of the people who might be below away for the moment. His mind had to focus on what was just four hours away, and on keeping the men surrounding him alive.
“We will have to deal with the Hundred and Sixth,” Colonel Belyayev said in Russian. The American air-defense commander, standing just behind, did not need to hear.
“Of course we will,” Kurchatov said without surprise. The husband of Natalie Shergin, sister of the Voyska PVO commander, would not wish to disappoint his brother-in-law. He owed his job to the man, after all.
“They are the closest to Moscow,” Belyayev pointed out grimly. “No one is between them and the city.”
“How long?”
“Three more hours,” Belyayev answered after a quick calculation.
Before the sun would rise. The thought of Moscow waking to another test of leadership made his stomach want to turn. There had to be a way to stop this. “Why couldn’t his damned division be based in Irkutsk?”
“That would matter little. They could simply do as trained and float from the sky.”
“Yes,” Kurchatov responded. There was not much one could do to keep paratroopers from their objective. Not much at all. Not much indeed, he thought, a smile of discovery coming to his lips. “Yes.”
Belyayev heard the difference between the marshal’s twin uses of the word. One was spoken with resignation, the other with hope. “Marshal?”
Kurchatov smiled fully at his aide, then looked up to a bemused CINCNORAD. “How do you say, General Walker? We shall fight fire with fire.”
CINCNORAD hadn’t the slightest idea what the Defense Minister meant by the remark, but it obviously had pleased both him and the colonel. That, he could tell plainly as the marshal picked up the phone and was connected immediately, via an amazingly rerouted series of switches, with the Russian Army’s main communications center just outside Moscow.
At another communications center, five thousand miles from its dissimilar cousin in the Russian capital, the captain in charge of the Miami Coast Guard Station was wrestling with his own dilemma of force.
“Navy says no, sir,” the bosun’s mate reported as he hung up the phone.
“For Christ’s sake, what do they expect us to do our job with?” The captain noticed his grease-pencil-marked status board. They couldn’t even give him the simplest of computers to keep track of his meager forces. And then they took those! “Looking for God knows what!”
“That’s the Navy, sir.”
The captain snarled at the reminder from his subordinate. They might have the bigger boats — those ugly gray things — but that did not give them the right to appropriate his entire SAR force. Except when his boss, a full admiral, said to do so. “What the fuck are they looking for that’s so important that they need all our ships and our birds? Can’t they do a search on their own?”
The bosun’s mate glanced at the heavily marked status board. The captain wasn’t exaggerating. Everything was gone. Cutters, choppers, and the 2 C-130s. All heading north to the Atlantic off Virginia, and leaving them nothing with which to check out the report relayed to them via the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. One of their special-ops planes returning from a training mission had flown over a possible crash site northeast of the Bahamas but was unable to remain on station because of their fuel status. So it was up to the Coast Guard to take a closer look. But with what?
“Damn,” the captain swore, allowing himself a final spurt of disgust before turning to the business of finding a solution to the problem. “All right, what commercial ships are out there?”
The bosun’s mate looked at his log, which carried notations from radio traffic and from the last pass of a Coast Guard plane five hours earlier. “A Japanese bulk carrier, a hundred and fifty miles north.”
“At fifteen knots — if the bastard would waste the extra fuel — it’d be tomorrow before they get there,” the captain observed, discounting option one. “Next.”
Next was nothing. That was the closest commercial ship. Well, the closest truly commercial. “Just a Russian trawler loitering about sixty miles east.”
“Waiting for bluefin, no doubt.”
“Right,” the bosun’s mate agreed sarcastically. “They just call ‘em in with those antennas.”
The Russians obviously hadn’t lost interest in the launches from the Cape, one of which, a fully military one, was set for the following week. “Well, he’s out there, and as a commercial vessel, he has a responsibility to respond to a ship or aircraft in trouble.”
“It’ll piss him off,” the bosun’s mate observed.
“Reason number two to do it.” Reason number one was the seaman’s code. “Get word to him.”
“Aye, sir.”
Art pulled through the intersection of Twelfth and Vermont and stopped at the motel with more control than he had the last time he’d approached the place. The car used at that time was just being pulled, flat tire, bent rim, and all, onto the back of a tow truck. He walked right past it to his partner.
“How are you?”
Frankie had seen him coming and had noticed that kind of walk he was using. It was his “We gotta do something” stride. “I’m fine.”
“We’re just about done, Art,” Omar said. The narrative portion of the report was several pages thick already.
“Well, it’ll have to wait. Frankie and I gotta do something.”
Frankie smiled slightly. Getting to know how Art Jefferson operated hadn’t taken long. He wasn’t a complicated person, really. That was sort of nice in a man and made working with him as a partner an enjoyable, bullshit-free experience.
Omar reacted with surprise. “Art, this is required procedure when this happens.”
“I know, but required can wait in this case.”
“What’s going on?” Lou Hidalgo asked as he walked up. The rise in Omar’s tone had alerted him.
“Lou, Frankie and I have to do something. I can’t tell you what, but it’s”—Art hushed his voice a bit—“on orders from the White House. And the director knows about it.”
The White House? Hidalgo saw Art’s steadiness. It didn’t surprise him anymore, but it did merit notice. “When did you become so fucking important?”
Art snickered. “This old pavement pounder? Get outta here, Lou.”
The group of four agents looked up and to the north as an Aerospatiale helicopter of the LAPD approached, preceded as always by the rapid chopping pulse of its rotors. It descended and landed a half-block north on Vermont, which had already been closed for its arrival by the police.
“Our ride,” Art said.
The Aerospatiale’s rotor continued to turn at speed after setting down. Its crew had been told that this trip had to be made fast, and sitting there didn’t take any time off the journey. “Let’s go,” the pilot said over the external loudspeaker.
Lou reached out and gripped Art’s shoulder. “Whatever you’re doing, be careful.”
“Piece of cake, Lou,” Art assured him above the noise. “Come on.”
The pair trotted off to the helicopter, instinctively ducking lower as they passed under the main rotor. They climbed in the passenger compartment and were handed headsets by the police-department observer, which they slid on, pulling the boom microphones close to their mouths.