For several minutes the room was silent, and from Oleg’s vantage point quite tense, while the men absorbed the plan and considered the implications for the nation and for themselves. The chief of the army was the first to raise his hand, and the president actually looked pleased to take the general’s question.
“Mr. President, just to be certain I understand: you are asking us to seize Tallinn and Riga in sixty hours?” he asked.
The question made it clear to Oleg that this was the first time the army’s most senior and experienced commander was hearing of the plan.
“Yes,” Luganov confirmed. “And Vilnius within another forty-eight hours.”
“You are asking us to capture and occupy three NATO capitals?”
“And secure their annexation so that they might be rightfully reintegrated into Mother Russia,” the president said.
“But not Kiev.”
“Not right now.”
“Would it not be in our interest to seize all of Ukraine instead?” asked the general. “The Ukrainians are very patriotic, and they’re able fighters, but they are not members of NATO. Washington and Brussels will huff and puff, but in the end they will do nothing if we take Ukraine. I have war-gamed this with my staff. I’m convinced we could get it done in a month to six weeks.”
“But we can have the Baltics in four days,” Luganov replied with a rare but telling smile.
Again the room was quiet. Then the army chief of staff pressed forward. “How is it in Russia’s interest, if I may ask, to provoke such a confrontation with NATO when Ukraine is ours for the taking with no risk of triggering Article 5?”
Oleg saw the smile disappear instantly from the president’s face.
The general was speaking of the mutual-defense pact that lay at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s charter. Article 5 stated that each member of NATO would consider an attack against one member state to be an attack against all. Any hostile action against any NATO member would, therefore, obligate the entire alliance to bring its combined political, economic, and military power to bear to repulse such an attack. No state was alone to fend off the Bear by itself. It was all for one and one for all. During the Soviet era, Oleg knew, it was this very alliance that had stopped Russian leaders from invading any part of Europe, lest they trigger war with the West that could all too easily go nuclear. Now Luganov was proposing to invade three NATO countries simultaneously.
“General, are you afraid of NATO?” Luganov fumed, his face growing red as he leaned forward in his chair. “I am not. Just the opposite. I believe they are afraid of me, and rightly so. They are fat and lazy. They are weak and divided. Their day is over. Our day has come. We are strong and getting stronger. We have modernized our strategic forces. We have rebuilt our conventional forces, all while they have downsized their own. So we will storm into the Baltics with such speed and force that the leaders in the White House and at SHAPE headquarters and around the globe will shake in fear. They will not know what has just hit them. They won’t dare threaten us with nuclear war, for they know I am willing to unleash our nuclear power upon them. And when this simple truth dawns on them—that I am a man of action and they are cowards—they will surrender the Baltics without a fight, and that, gentlemen, will be the end of NATO. If they do not trigger Article 5—and I guarantee you they will not—then I will have won a great victory for our people. We will be the world’s only superpower, the only nation on the planet that has a great military and the courage to use it. I alone will have the power to dictate economic and political terms to the West, and we will see riches and glory unparalleled since the days of the czars.”
48
WASHINGTON, D.C.—17 SEPTEMBER
The day started just like any other.
Marcus Ryker woke before dawn and ran his usual five miles. Returning to his apartment in Eastern Market, he showered, threw on a pair of ripped jeans, a denim work shirt, and steel-toed boots, and walked to a diner a few blocks from Capitol Hill. There he sat alone in a booth in the back and ordered scrambled eggs, dry toast, and black coffee. He read the Post from cover to cover, then, unable to take any more bad news, trudged over to Lincoln Park Baptist Church.
For the last few weeks, he’d been helping put a much-needed new roof on the 137-year-old building. By noon the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky, and Marcus was drenched with sweat. He took a swig from his water bottle, checked his watch, and decided he could still get another twenty to thirty minutes of work in before stopping to wash up for his weekly lunch with Carter Emerson and some vets who attended the church. They didn’t talk about war. They didn’t talk about loss. They certainly didn’t talk about politics or women. Most of the conversations were about whether the Nats were still in contention for the play-offs and whether the Redskins—or in Marcus’s case, the Broncos—had any shot at all at a winning season, to say nothing of going to the Super Bowl.
Marcus was bending over to retrieve his hammer when Nan Warren shouted to him and asked if he could come down a few minutes early. Nan was Carter Emerson’s secretary. She was the one whose name Marcus had blanked on the day of the memorial service. Yet for at least three months after Elena and Lars’s deaths, she had faithfully brought him a home-cooked meal, usually meat loaf, always on Mondays. Her husband, Jim, was one of the vets Marcus had lunch with on Wednesdays. They had all become friends.
“Be right there,” Marcus called back. He assumed Carter wanted to see him before the lunch meeting.
Though he’d never let on, he felt a pang of annoyance at being summoned early. There were already forecasts of big thunderstorms rolling in over the next few days. If he was ever going to get this roof done, he needed fewer breaks and more focus. Yet that wasn’t the way Carter and his team rolled. “Jesus wasn’t about projects; he was about people,” Carter would say with a hearty laugh whenever Marcus mentioned his concern about the roof’s progress. “Love your neighbor, not your work.”
Marcus didn’t care much for such platitudes. A big part of the reason he was working on the roof was to avoid people. Then again, he was pretty sure Carter was onto him and was intentionally trying to get him engaged with as many people as possible. That had to be why he’d asked Marcus to do odd jobs around the church in the first place, starting on the very day Marcus had turned in his letter of resignation to the Secret Service. It also had to be why Carter was always calling him down from the roof to “have some lemonade together” or “meet a brother” or fix a clogged toilet or listen to and critique the latest draft of his next sermon or have a slice of Maya’s “crazy-good key lime pie.” As annoying as it was sometimes, Marcus was also grateful. This man and his dear wife loved him and were doing their best to keep him from hitting rock bottom.
After descending the ladder and taking a few minutes to wash his hands and face, Marcus exited the lavatory in the church basement and went to the third floor, where Nan was sitting at her desk.
“Go right on in, young man,” she said with a warm smile. “He’s waiting for you.”
When Marcus rapped on the door, heard a hearty “Come in,” and stepped into Carter’s cluttered office, he was caught off guard to find they were not alone. Sitting on the couch along the back wall near the windows was Robert Dayton, the senior senator from Iowa, wearing a seersucker suit and a pale-blue bow tie that made Marcus think of his father-in-law. Sitting in a wooden chair to his right was Annie Stewart, wearing a black-and-white-striped sweater jacket over a white blouse, black slacks, and black flats. The last time he’d seen them was at the memorial service.