Jeffrey smiled sweetly. “Oh, I suppose the amnesty might be broken eventually, maybe by hit squads from Israel’s Mossad.”
“I like that part,” Meltzer said.
“For one stage I’ll need to go to a base in Siberia, as a back-door emissary to convey America’s extreme displeasure by making certain deadly threats, and also pretend to test Russia’s good faith, since most of Moscow will be knocked out of the loop by the EMP, including our somewhat ineffective diplomats stationed there. By then the President will be on the Hot Line to Russia’s president, assuming the Hot Line isn’t knocked out too. And if it is still working, Washington will cause temporary outages at crucial times, for ‘technical reasons,’ to help underscore my discussions and suitably tweak and tune the psychological chaos likely in the Kremlin by then. Part of my job will also be to quickly get inside Moscow’s reaction and decision time scale, to keep them from doing something precipitate, something irrevocably disastrous for the world.”
“And if you can’t?” Harley demanded.
“If things backfire? If Kurzin’s team can’t sneak and fight their way into a highly restricted area, then bypass booby traps and override software safeguards properly, or their and our strike group’s subterfuges are seen through or my bluffs are called, or we get sunk and identified, then Russia will surely become a wholehearted member of the Axis. Our commandos might even by accident nuke a few U.S. or Russian cities for real.”
“But—” Bell tried to object.
“Then the only way out of apocalypse isn’t even a negotiated armistice, it’s fast and abject Allied surrender. We kiss good-bye to the American way of life, confront enslavement instead, and learn to speak German or Russian or Afrikaans. That’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, the missiles Kurzin launches are only the first of many, and then more, and more, from Russia, the U.S., and other places. You could call that outcome, the worst-case mission failure result, Apocalypse Now.”
Jeffrey knew how his subordinates felt, because his own head was swirling with unanswered questions and troubling what-ifs. “Captain Harley, I think we ought to be getting to the briefing session.” Bell stood, and Meltzer let his seniors precede him.
Harley, not so crisp and detached as when Jeffrey first met him, led the way, around sharp corners and down steep ladders, then through a long, straight corridor. He said, with pride, that this was the wasp waist in Carter’s Multi-Mission Platform. The pressure hull narrowed to eighteen feet, creating ample garage space inside the forty-two-foot-diameter outer hull.
They came to the full-width aft part of this specially added pressure hull section. Some doors here held security warnings, and were protected by electronic and mechanical combination locks. They went up a ladder and came to another door, open. Inside was a briefing room. Jeffrey did a double take.
Except for officers and chiefs from Challenger and Carter, who wore khakis or jumpsuit blue, several dozen men were dressed in Russian Army uniforms — mostly urban- or forest-pattern camouflage fatigues — and they talked in small groups in fluent Russian. Their short haircuts, the set of their features, the ways they moved, were subtly foreign, not American. Some had shirtsleeves rolled above elbows, and even their forearm tattoos — the motifs, the colors, the alphabet used for the words — bore an alien look. Jeffrey also saw battle scars, from shrapnel, bayonets, or bullets.
Their mean and emotionless faces gave the appearance of street gang members, ones who’d had the individuality beaten out of them by a merciless mental and physical thrashing that left these, the survivors, tougher and more ruthless for it. What distinguished each were their ethnic features, body types, and hair color, blond or brown or frizzy red or glossy jet black.
One man at the front of the room stood up. Jeffrey thought he bore a close resemblance, in bearing and attitude as well as in his build and appearance, to a youngish Leonid Brezhnev, the reactionary Communist Party General Secretary who led the USSR during its violent repression of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
“Sergey Kurzin,” this strange apparition said to Jeffrey, shaking his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Commodore.” His English was unaccented. He said he grew up in Chicago.
Jeffrey glanced around the briefing room. “You have quite an outfit here, Colonel.” Then Jeffrey saw Commander Nyurba approaching. He too looked different, like he really was a serving officer in the Russian Federation’s armed forces.
“Don’t mind us, Commodore,” Nyurba said. “We need to stay in character.”
“Where are the rest of your team?”
“I decided to send them by squads to eat,” Kurzin stated, “or to use our exercise equipment, since you were even longer than I expected reading your orders.”
“Can we get started now?”
“After I talk to you and Commander Nyurba in private.”
Jeffrey eyed Bell, Harley, and Meltzer. “Introduce yourselves around to… to our new friends in the meantime.”
“Boy, this is weird,” Meltzer said under his breath.
“I know it,” Bell responded. “These guys look like Spetsnaz or something.” Spetsnaz were Soviet-era special forces sabotage and assassination troops, which continued to exist under the Russian Federation with different roles. “Like they’d slit our throats if we gave them half a chance.”
“They would do so quickly and silently, I assure you,” Kurzin said. He wasn’t smiling.
He led Jeffrey and Nyurba past the battle management center, full of mission-planning and communications consoles, some of them manned, and over to a compartment whose watertight hatch said “SMALL ARMS LOCKER. CAUTION: EXPLOSIVES AND PYROTECHNICS.” Kurzin undogged the heavy hatch and flipped on a light switch, and they went inside. A narrow aisle led down the center. The compartment was filled with safes, locked storage cabinets, and racks on both sides of the aisle holding many dozens of wicked-looking Russian assault rifles — each shrink-wrapped in clear plastic. Kurzin shut the hatch behind them.
He saw Jeffrey’s curiosity. “Nikonov AN-Ninety-fours. Nicknamed Abakans. Successor to the AK-Forty-sevens and AK-Seventy-fours. Russian elite units use them. Beside the usual one-shot and full-auto selector modes, they fire special two-round bursts at a cyclic rate of eighteen hundred rounds per minute. That’s almost three times as fast as an M-Sixteen. More accurate, too, trust me. These have time-shifted recoil action, so the user doesn’t even feel the gun go off until after the pair of bullets leave the barrel. Both slugs hit the same spot at a hundred yards or more, one a thirtieth of a second behind the other. Great way to tear through body armor. Extreme lethality.”
“These are real? I mean, made in Russia?” They were all a solid gun-metal gray, including the fiberglass-polymer folding stock and fore-grip — Jeffrey saw none of the wooden or brown-colored plastic parts as on the venerable AK-47.
“We have ways of obtaining the genuine article.”
“What about ammo?”
“Caliber is five-point-four-five millimeters, slightly narrower than the NATO standard five-point-five-six bullet. They take sixty-round box magazines, short but thick, rounds stacked four in a row. Those, we have foreign-made.”
“Won’t that be a giveaway?”
“A metallurgical analysis will show that the bullets and shells were produced at a munitions plant in Germany.”
“So that the raiders will seem to have come from there. Okay, I follow that, but how did you get the ammunition from Germany?”
“You don’t need to know. You don’t want to.”