He sighed. “Do we have some idea of who’s actually launching the missiles?”
“I think its Russia,” a Marine said. His face was very pale, but his eyes were bright. “NORAD tracked at least a thousand missiles coming out of European Russia, others coming out of Serbia and Algeria, Russia’s closest allies. Others were launched from submarines and aircraft and only we or the Russians have that kind of capability.”
Luong nodded. The Chinese had tried to build it, but Chinese ambitions had firmly sunk after the attempt to seize Taiwan had failed so badly, destroying most of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Luong thought that it would have made the Chinese feel better if American ships and submarines had been directly involved; the proof that the Taiwanese were determined to avoid reunification had proven the downfall of the Communist Government. The Chinese Civil War still raged on.
Margery caught his arm. She was terrified, he realised; she hadn’t signed up for being trapped in a bunker. They weren’t trapped, it wasn’t as if they couldn’t get out onto the streets, but he knew that they were probably safer in the bunker until the situation on the ground clarified itself. It shouldn’t take long; Britain might have been in the dumps, but it was far from a Third World country.
Her voice was thin and reedy. “What do we do?”
“It’s a cliché, but we have no choice, but to wait,” Luong said. He held her hand for a long moment until she calmed down. “The Russians seem to have just ignored us completely.”
He wished he could say that he was surprised. The Russians had been growing more and more powerful, ever since they had recovered from the post-Cold War depression and started to rebuild their country. They had sold arms to everyone who was interested, much to American outrage; Russian weapons had killed Americans in Iran and the Middle East. They had also sold weapons to Latin and South America — he remembered, his blood running cold, the British task force that had been dispatched to shore up the defences of the Falkland Islands — and, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine, even started a long-term process of upgrading the Latin and Southern American militaries. They had even invited the Central Asian states back to the fold… and many of them had actually rejoined the Russians. They no longer trusted America either.
America hadn’t wanted to become involved in the Ukraine situation and had been more than happy to leave it to the Europeans; it was in their backyard, after all. Luong had been more alarmed, however, by the rise in Russian preparations for outright violence; the Russians had said, quite clearly, ‘this far and no further.’ They had wanted to keep the Ukraine within their sphere of influence and that had meant, as far as they were concerned, no foreigners allowed. They already dominated Belarus; the CIA had been privately warning that the Russians intended to support various factions in Ukraine to take control and evict the pesky Europeans. It had surprised them that the Russians had even allowed a EUROFOR unit into the Ukraine…
Outright missile attacks across the United Kingdom? Luong had a feeling that he knew what had happened to the European forces in the Ukraine. The CIA had warned repeatedly about some of the methods the Russians were using to rebuild their country, including the use of forced labour and the genocide of thousands of Chechens. The Russians had just started World War Three.
Luong sat down on a sofa and glanced around. He hadn’t spent much time in the bunker and the drab utility of its design surprised him. The embassy itself was very luxurious, but the bunker was cold, if not dark; a line of weapons were mounted against one wall, just in case a final last stand was required. It was how he imagined a missile launch room in a nuclear silo to look; the pistols so that the crew could take their own lives, rather than die slowly under the rubble.
“I just heard from Vince, on the roof,” Rolf Lommerde said. The CIA spook, the main intelligence operative for London, looked grim. “He says that there’s fires everywhere and even some gunfire; no sign of an official reaction as yet. There’s a great deal of jamming on the British military, police and civilian bands; it looks as if Britain just took one hell of a hammering.”
“I think I worked that out,” Luong snapped. He didn’t like Lommerde; the man was just too slick, even if sending one of his people to the roof was actually a good idea. He glared at the CIA officer with all the disdain a professional diplomat and former National Guardsman could muster. The National Guard had a low opinion of the CIA after a unit had walked into a firefight where the CIA had absolutely, positively, sworn blind that there was no chance of an enemy presence. “Was there any clue at all as to what was going to happen?”
“No, Mr Ambassador,” Lommerde said. He sat down next to Luong without being asked. “We tracked a lot of Russian military movement, but we believed that it was intended to convince the Poles that the Russians would act if they were to do anything stupid, such as calling for European intervention if the Ukraine actually boiled over into civil war. Other movements were in the same field; one of the most active units was right on Ukraine’s eastern border, well out of range to threaten Poland or Europe.”
For a moment, the mask slipped and Luong saw the desperation under Lommerde’s glib tongue. “He saw one of the places that are burning,” Lommerde said. “It was the Regent’s Park Mosque, one of the places that we maintain some covert — very covert — surveillance on, nothing that the British would have to take official notice of and prevent us from carrying on. The British Anti-Terrorist Unit knows about it and says nothing; we believe that the British Government knows nothing about it.”
He sighed, loudly. “But… that place has always had cells of radicals nearby; the Mosque was taken over by radicals several times. The British cleared them out, from time to time, but they always came back; Mustapha has been known to speak there and — God knows — we’ve actually tried to have him assassinated while he’s been in England. It would be worth it, even if we failed to find a criminal to subcontract the job out to, to trade one of our people for him.”
Luong ground his teeth. Mustapha was wanted in the United States for connections with the attack that had devastated Oakland. The evidence against him, however, had been gained by ‘special means,’ or torture, as more-enlightened people called it. The British Government might have let him be taken off the streets, but the Americans had made the mistake of asking the Prime Minister directly… and he had refused. Mustapha continued to spread havoc through Europe… untouched, unmolested; Luong wasn't even sure if the British maintained their own surveillance on him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Mustapha haven’t been watched at all.
“I see,” he said. “I don’t suppose that Mustapha is dead?”
“There’s no information,” Lommerde said. “Mr Ambassador; if someone wanted to start a civil war in London’s streets, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”
“My God,” Luong said. The sheer scale of the operation impressed and terrified him. “What the hell is going on?”
McDonald came over and saluted, exchanging a brief glare with Lommerde. “I have managed to talk directly to my superiors,” he said. Luong rolled his eyes; in an emergency, the superiors were the officers at the Pentagon who supervised the close protection of American representatives around the world. “There are no further missiles heading towards Britain and they have provisionally decided to leave us here, unless the situation changes.”