“On the contrary, that is exactly what is likely to happen again. But this time to a major population center and without benefit of advance warning.”
“Mr. Korsakov, think extremely hard about what I am about to say. You yourself are not nearly so immune to certain actions as you seem to think. Reprisals could be swift and overwhelming.”
“You are in no position to threaten me, I assure you.”
“I’m not?”
“No. Trust me, as you will soon learn, you are not.”
McAtee searched the faces of his team before replying. Each one of them made a slashing motion across the neck.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Korsakov. I am unable to continue this conversation any longer. Our ambassador will be in touch.”
He hung up.
“Play that back on speaker, will you, Betsey?” he said after a moment.
The team stood around the desk and listened as both sides of the conversation were played. Jaws dropped, eyes rolled, but no one spoke when it was over. The implications of what they’d just heard were too profound to be assimilated in an instant. The world had just shifted on its axis, and the floor beneath their feet felt as if it might give way at any moment.
“Well?” the president said. “Welcome to the parallel universe. We’ve fallen through a wormhole. I always wondered if things could get any crazier. Now I know.”
“Good Lord,” the vice president said, managing a grim smile. “We’re back to October 1962. Maybe worse.”
“Definitely worse. This man is insane. A genius, perhaps, but a raving megalomaniac. Khrushchev was merely a Commie thug with a grade-school education,” Mike Reiter said. The good-looking young director had only been on the job a few years. But he was a major history buff and had taught Russian studies at Georgetown before joining the FBI.
Consuelo de los Reyes felt her cell phone vibrate and stepped a few paces toward the Rose Garden windows to take the call. She listened for a few moments, then turned back to face the group, shaking her head, her face drained of all color.
“And the vice president’s wife? Is she all right?” they heard her say. She listened and then looked at McCloskey, nodding, giving him a brief smile that said she was okay.
“Tell us what’s happened, Conch,” the president said when she’d ended the call.
“The airship Pushkin, en route from Miami to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony, has just been taken over by Russian terrorists. One of the hostages managed to get to a satellite phone and call her fiancé in Miami. A man named Stokely Jones who does contract work for the Pentagon.”
“Friend of Hawke’s,” Brick Kelly said. “Ex-Navy SEAL. Hostage-rescue specialist.”
“My God, poor Bonnie,” the vice president said, wandering dazedly over to a sofa and collapsing into it. “She’s okay?”
“Yes. That’s what the hostage told Mr. Jones. She had seen her, and she was okay.”
The president stood up, staring at Charlie Moore.
“Everyone, listen carefully. I want you and your teams to initiate the following measures immediately. Lock down all Russian assets in this country. Everything. Seize all bank and real estate assets, detain and arrest the crews of every Russian ship in every U.S. harbor. Euro Command in Germany needs to crank up, now, General Moore. I need you to ascertain our offensive strike capability as of right this minute. Have the chief of naval operations send a flash message to the fleets, putting them all on high alert worldwide. Tell the CNO we need to know where all of our subs are, in the North Sea, around Kiel and St. Petersburg, also on the other side, Vladivostok. Tell him to get our carriers out of harm’s way immediately. With me so far?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Next. A flash message to the Air Force. We need to know exactly what our immediate bomber and fighter capabilities are and where. And we need to activate the capacity to jam the Russians’ low-level combat satellites, and do it now. Yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, that’s all I can think of at the moment. I’m sure you people will have more ideas as the situation develops. Let’s get moving.”
Moore, already headed for the door, paused and said, “One more thing, Mr. President. I’m going to get the SEAL hostage-rescue team working on this hijacking immediately. They’ll come up with something if anyone can.”
“Good idea. Now, Brick, you and Mike listen up,” the president said. “SEAL HRT needs every bit of information you guys can get on that airship hostage situation. How the hell do you deal with something like that? It’s not like a plane. Something that runs out of fuel and has to land sometime. Something SWAT hostage-rescue teams can board and overwhelm. A damn zeppelin can stay aloft indefinitely. So, what the hell do we do?”
Mike Reiter said, “I’ve just been thinking about that, Mr. President. And I don’t have a goddamn clue.”
52
Hawke awoke to a scream. A terrible, masculine scream that stretched on forever. It started high and went low, as if the dying author had jumped off a cliff. It was a death scream. Whoever he was, the poor bastard was now among the departed. And he’d gone out the hard way. The man hadn’t been far away, somewhere to Hawke’s right, maybe only fifty yards or so. What had happened to him?
The windows of the darkened machine Hawke found himself in were coated with a thick rime of frost. It was bloody freezing inside the military helicopter. He could see his breath in pale blue lights that shone down as if from high walls looming up beside the chopper. Groggy, he tried to raise his hand to wipe clear a porthole on the glass beside his head and found he could not lift it. His wrists were bound with plastic flex cuffs and lay helplessly in his lap.
He looked down. His wrists were connected by a thin steel chain to cuffs around his ankles. How long had he been out? He could feel the drugs still coursing through his veins, but the effects seemed to be wearing off. He observed himself to be all alone, abandoned by his captors. This was his fate? To freeze to death in the back of a Russian helicopter? It hardly seemed fitting or even fair.
Where was he?
On the ground. Certainly not Lubyanka. He had no sense of being in Moscow or any city, for that matter. Outside, the wind was howling, and he could smell the sea nearby, hear waves crashing against rock. He’d been drugged and flown here in a helicopter. But where the hell was here? He leaned his injured head, now bandaged, back against the metal bulkhead behind him and tried to get his brain rebooted.
As the fog inside his head gradually lifted, he dimly recalled the last conscious moments outside the Bolshoi. He’d been arrested. Dragged away from Anastasia. Before he’d blacked out, he’d been sure they were taking him to Moscow’s most notorious prison, the KGB’s private gateway to hell. But no, he was sitting all alone in the back of a helicopter freezing to death. And outside, not too far away, a man had just died in agony.
There came the sound of heavy boots crunching on snow outside. And wavering fuzzy discs of lights, flashlights in the hands of four or five men, laughing drunkenly as they neared the chopper. One of them, the pilot, yanked the forward left door open and clambered up into his seat. Frigid wind blew through the cockpit. Instantly, Hawke heard the whine of the turbo engine spooling up. The pilot yelled something in slurry Russian to the men outside.
The right rear door was pulled open, and a flashlight was shoved into his face, a foot from his nose. This was cause for further hysteria among the men outside.
A red-faced man leaned inside and shouted something incomprehensible in Russian. Hawke ignored him, finally interrupting his tirade to say, “Get somebody who speaks English, for God’s sake.”
There was more shouting, and now someone else was yelling at him.