The Secretary slammed his fist on the table. “How on earth am I going to explain this? And what is going on? Three days ago, we shoot down a Russian Blackjack bomber! But you claim our pilots never fired off a single shot! Now one of our bombers — with nuclear weapons — has been stolen and was last seen heading south!” The secretary cursed and raged again.
Then, suddenly, Wallet stopped and passed his hands over his face as he tried to think. He needed to calm himself down. He could crucify these officers later. For now, he needed to attend to the matter at hand. He needed to get a firm handle on the situation. And there were some things he didn’t understand.
“Okay,” he said. “So, why didn’t you send another B-1 after the renegade? They were right there! Why didn’t they go bring him down?”
The Air Force Chief of Staff quickly rolled his eyes in his head. He sometimes forgot that the SecDef had spent thirty years in the academic profession and zero time in a uniform of any kind. Besides, he was still new to his job. And he had a huge amount still to learn, as was evident by this stupid question.
“Sir,” the general said, trying his best to be patient. “The B-1s are not fighters. They carry no missiles or guns. They are bombers, sir. They drop bombs. They kill things on the ground. They don’t go after other airplanes. There was nothing the other B-1s could do.”
“Okay. Okay. I understand that.” Wallet said “okay” a lot when he was under stress. “The other B-1s are out. So, what do we have to bring him down with? What fighters do we have in the area? This should be no big deal, right? We have the entire Air Force. Let’s just go find the traitor and shoot him down!”
“Sir.” It was the Chief of Staff once again. “We will do that. I’m certain we will. But I don’t want to pretend to you that it will be easy. The fact is, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has maintained only a handful of fighters to protect our entire East and West coasts. So, it’s not like we have a hundred fighters out there on alert and waiting to intercept the stolen bomber. In numbers, I would say there are only eight aircraft available and standing by that could fly this mission. Four on each coast. So you see, we are spread very, very thin.
“And the bomber will not be easy to find. The B-1 is one of the stealthiest aircraft ever built, so I won’t pretend to you that we won’t have trouble bringing her down.”
“But isn’t there some type of beacon?” Wallet wondered. “Some kind of tracking device on the bomber that we can use to find out where it is?”
The general shrugged his shoulders. “Sir, this was never supposed to have happened. We never thought… We never dreamed… a violation could ever get so far. The security measures around the B-1s are the best in the world. Better than any security on the earth. So, no. We don’t have any internal tracking mechanism. We never thought such a device would ever be required.”
Walking from behind his desk, the SecDef positioned himself directly in front of his generals, looking them square in the eye. He swallowed hard and produced a fresh handkerchief to wipe the sweat from around his lips. He stared at the men for a long moment, then gave them his final instructions.
“Gentlemen, we don’t know what this pilot’s intentions are. Perhaps he wants the bomber for money. Ransom it for what he can get. Maybe he intends to sock it to the Russians. Finish the war by himself. Or far worse, perhaps he’s some kind of insane traitor and he plans to use the weapons against one of his own!
“But either way, whatever his motives, I don’t care. We will deal with this problem all the same.
“Down the bomber. Blow it out of the sky. Find it. Kill it. Gut it. Smash it. Wherever it is going, track it and scatter its wreckage for a million miles across the earth. Do whatever it takes, take any measure or step, but do not allow the aircraft to escape.”
The Secretary paused to swallow.
“Gentlemen, I want you to end this Shattered Bone,” were his final words. “Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Every man in the room had a very clear understanding of what the SecDef wanted them to do.
The Secretary nodded his head toward the door, dismissing the men with a nod. They turned and began to make their exit, anxious to get out of the office and down to the business at hand. The last man to leave the room was the Air Force Chief of Staff. He paused at the doorway, then turned back to face the SecDef and said, “Mr. Secretary, do you want me to alert the President?” His voice was strained, but calm.
“Let me worry about the President. You go find your stolen bomber. I want him dead within the next hour. Now get going. You know what to do.”
The general turned and slipped from the room.
For a long moment, the SecDef stared at the door as it swung closed on its massive hinges, then, reaching down, he picked up the secure telephone and punched in the number to Milton Blake’s office over at the NSA.
“Blake, its me, Chad Wallet. Yeah, listen, I need to see the President. And you better meet with us, too. No, it can’t wait. I need to see him now. We got ourselves a little problem over here.”
Inside his office, Milton Blake checked his watch. 0942. Exactly on time.
“Okay, Chad,” he replied in a calm and knowing tone. “I’ll set it up. Meet us in the basement as soon as you can.”
THIRTY
Sgt Sergei Motyl smiled, his crooked teeth and spoiled gums poking through his chapped lips. He tasted the bile at the back of his throat and suppressed a deep urge to cough. The Russian soldier concentrated, listening to the wind, smelling the air, feeling the night breeze as it blew against his neck. The moon had drawn itself behind a thick bank of dark winter clouds. Soon it would be snowing. That was good. The snow would help cover his trail.
Glancing around, Motyl found his pack were he had left it, leaning against a small tree. He hoisted the pack onto his back, then turned and walked away from his camp, leaving his fellow soldiers behind him.
Inside Motyl’s pack were eight warheads for the SA-18, the Russian’s newest hand-held, shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missile. The SA-18 was an exceptional piece of equipment, capable of bringing down virtually any aircraft that was unfortunate enough to get in its sight. It contained technologies that were years ahead of anything developed by the West. So it came as no surprise that certain parties were very anxious to get their hands on a launcher. To tear one down and look it over. To study it and see what it really could do.
If Motyl could deliver an SA-18 launcher to the right people, it was worth an enormous amount of money. 270,000 rubles to be exact, seven years’ worth of army pay. Then, for an extra 200,000 rubles, Motyl had agreed to bring eight warheads for the launcher as well. One launcher, eight missile warheads for 470,000 rubles.
From where his squad was camped, it was only 17 kilometers to the Ukrainian border. If he left right now, when there were no guards posted, he wouldn’t be missed until morning. By then he would be across the border. Motyl planned to hike almost due south, cutting over the tops of the tree-covered hills where he knew it would be easy to evade the thin line of Ukrainian troops, then on toward the Ukrainian city of Khar’kov. There his friends would be waiting.
In eighteen hours, Sergei Motyl, formerly of the Russian Fourth Army, would be a very wealthy man.
He hiked silently down the trail for thirty meters before stopping by a low growth of dead brush and leaves. Bending over, he rummaged through the debris and pulled an SA-18 launcher from its hiding place under the dry thistles and dead leaves. With a huff, he hoisted the five-foot launcher onto his back. Motyl then turned and put the moon to his back as he left the trail and set off through the trees.