Barbeau nodded, satisfied by this news. Not even those Iron Wolf CIDs could fight their way through two full companies of armor mounting 120mm guns. Sharply, she rapped her knuckles on the table. “Enough chitchat, people. I need answers, and I need them now.”
The assembly of high-ranking civilian and military officials she’d summoned to this gathering abruptly fell silent. Apart from Luke Cohen and Ed Rauch and Admiral Firestone, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, most of them were ranking deputies and senior staffers in the various federal agencies and departments essential to national security — the CIA, NSA, FBI, the Defense Department, Homeland Security, State, and the Department of Justice. These were the men and women who could make things happen.
Luke Cohen hunched forward in his seat. He’d changed into fresh clothes flown out from D.C. on the same plane that ferried Rauch and the others to Wright-Patterson. Only the dark circles under his eyes showed the ordeal he’d been through. He cleared his throat nervously. “Uh, Madam President? We’re getting some pretty pointed queries from Congress. Both the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader are asking when you plan to return to the White House.”
Barbeau’s lips thinned. “Not anytime soon. The White House is too vulnerable, too exposed to attack. We’d have to evacuate half the city to set up a defensive perimeter solid enough to stop an attack like the one that smashed Barksdale. And it doesn’t make sense to tie down the huge numbers of troops and combat aircraft a defense of that magnitude would require.”
She saw Admiral Firestone and some of the other Defense Department types nodding sagely in agreement. How nice, she thought tartly. It was always an added plus when concern for her own personal safety meshed so closely with military common sense.
Cohen looked even unhappier. “We could take some serious political damage if you stay off the public stage much longer,” he warned. “People get kind of nervous when they start thinking that the nation’s commander in chief is running scared.”
“Maybe so,” Barbeau snapped, feeling her temper flare. “But I’d sure as hell rather be a lame duck than a dead duck!” Angrily, she glared at her chief of staff. “And it’s your job, Luke, honey, to convince the American people that I’m acting in the interests of national security… and not to save my own skin. So you do your goddamned job, or I’ll find someone else who can. Do you understand me?”
Miserably, he nodded.
She swung her icy gaze toward Rauch. To his credit, her national security adviser didn’t flinch. Working for her administration must be toughening the little man up. She’d put him in charge of coordinating the federal investigation into what they were still calling a terrorist attack on Barksdale Air Force Base. “What have you got for me, Ed?”
“Info on one of the cruise missiles used to hit us,” he said quietly. “We think either the engine or the guidance package failed, which is why it crashed into a bayou about two miles east of the runway.”
“Let’s see it.”
Rauch tapped the screen of his laptop, opening a file and sending the images it contained to one of the briefing room’s video screens. Photos blossomed on the LED display, showing the mud-smeared, crumpled gray fuselage and fins of what was unmistakably a missile. Shots showing the wreckage being loaded into a sling beneath one of the Air Force’s Pave Hawk helicopters gave a sense of scale.
“Have our people been able to identify this weapon?” Barbeau asked.
“Yes, Madam President,” Rauch said carefully. “The wreckage has been examined by specialists from both the Air Force and the intelligence community. There’s no question that what you’re looking at is a Kh-35UE short-range, subsonic cruise missile.” He brought up another image, this one a file photo showing an intact version of the same missile. “It’s a Russian design, comparable to our own Navy’s Harpoons. And like the Harpoon, these missiles can be fired by a wide range of platforms — by fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, ships, and ground-based launchers. In fact, some analysts have nicknamed the Kh-35 the ‘Harpoonski’ because they’re so similar.”
Barbeau narrowed her eyes in annoyance. “Dr. Rauch, are you telling me this was a Russian attack after all?”
He shook his head. “Not with any certainty.” Seeing her confusion, he explained. “The Russians have been selling export versions of the Kh-35 around the world for decades. Plus, several countries — some of them with governments that are extremely unstable and corrupt — build their own copies under license.”
“Which means there’s no way to tell how many of these missiles have made their way onto the black market,” she realized.
“Correct,” Rauch agreed. “And since we can’t find the usual serial numbers on any of the components in this missile, that’s probably what we’re looking at. Certainly, there’s no doubt that whoever sold these weapons doesn’t want them traced back to the source.”
Admiral Firestone stirred in his seat. “That applies to the Russians, too,” he pointed out. “They’d have just as much interest in sanitizing any Kh-35s transferred from their own arsenals.”
“Yes, sir,” Rauch agreed. “Which is why I want our interagency scientific groups to examine different methods we might use to narrow down the provenance of these weapons — perhaps by analyzing the kerosene fuel blend we found in that wrecked missile’s engine or by studying the precise chemical composition of its warhead.”
“That’s a hell of a tall order, Ed,” one of the CIA officers objected. “Without other intact Kh-35s from known sources to use as controls, how can we possibly draw any reliable conclusions from—”
Barbeau felt her eyes glazing over as the discussion spiraled off into a long and highly technical debate. Instead, while her advisers wrangled, she sat wrapped in her own thoughts, wrestling with an array of contradictory evidence and wild speculation. It would be a typical Martindale move to use Russian-designed missiles to muddy the waters, she fumed. Was the raid on Barksdale his doing after all — part of some insane scheme to lure the U.S. into an open confrontation with Gennadiy Gryzlov? If so, it might explain why he’d opted for an all-out deadly attack instead of simply trying to embarrass her politically by sabotaging the B-21 Raider prototype.
But if Martindale was trying to spark a war between the U.S. and Russia, why use a weapons system, the CIDs, that pointed the finger right back at himself?
Unless, Barbeau thought, the Poles were right after all. If the Russians had their own combat robots—
Impatiently, she dismissed that thought as even crazier than all the others. Top U.S. government weapons labs had repeatedly failed to replicate the cybernetics and engineering breakthroughs needed to build new CIDs. How could the Russians, who were so far behind the U.S. in those same technologies, have suddenly leapfrogged past them? The idea that Moscow could achieve so many separate technological breakthroughs by simply scooping up a few broken and burned-out pieces off a battlefield was ludicrous.
If that weren’t enough, the idea that this was a Russian operation didn’t square with any diplomatic or political reality Barbeau could see. Why would Gennadiy Gryzlov order an attack that could easily have killed her? She certainly wasn’t his ally, but she also worked hard to avoid any unnecessary confrontation with Russia… and she’d paid a significant political price for her restraint. Why on earth would the Russian leader risk handing the presidency to John Dalton Farrell? The Texan was another unreconstructed cold warrior, a would-be Ronald Reagan. For crying out loud, he was already colluding with two of Moscow’s most determined enemies, Piotr Wilk and Kevin Martindale. How could Gryzlov possibly see clearing Farrell’s path to the Oval Office as being in his country’s best interest?