Countdown to Midnight

Thirty-One

Viktor Skoblin hit the power button on the satellite phone to turn it off. When the screen went dark, he handed it back to Yvgeny Kvyat. The former GRU officer got to work stowing its separate components away out of sight. It was vital to keep their Iranian “allies” unaware that the Raven Syndicate team had its own line of communication to Russia.

“Well? What’s the news from Moscow?” another of his subordinates, Dmitri Fadeyev, demanded.

Skoblin heard the tension in the other man’s voice. It mirrored his own. During the oil tanker’s seemingly endless voyage south through the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, and now west into the South Atlantic — day after day without sighting land or any other ships — frictions had risen steadily between his small unit and the larger Iranian crew. Apart from their mission, the two sides had nothing in common. To Captain Heidari and the other Revolutionary Guard sailors and soldiers, the Russians were “godless mercenaries,” not true believers. The more fanatical among them clearly regarded the very presence of Skoblin and his men aboard as something that contaminated their ship’s holy purpose. So far, they’d limited themselves to muttered insults and sullen looks, but the Raven Syndicate’s ex-soldiers and spies were now being very careful never to go anywhere aboard the tanker on their own or unarmed.

He looked around the circle of anxious faces. “Mother Wolf is in position,” he told them quietly. “She will stay with us all the way to the launch point.”

The news that the Russian Navy submarine Podmoskovye was now covertly trailing this ship triggered several small, relieved smiles. They were no longer alone in the middle of the ocean.

Nick Flynn stood on the covered porch of the ranch house he’d rented for his Dragon assault team. Together with Laura Van Horn, he was watching a severe spring thunderstorm roll across the Central Texas Hill Country.

Dozens of flashes of lightning slashed down in dazzling, split-second bursts that split the night sky apart. Their eerie ionized glow illuminated towering masses of clouds scudding eastward on the wind. Moments after each separate strike, thunderclaps boomed across the neighboring hills and woods. They were powerful enough to rattle the windows behind them.

Over the noise of the thunder, Flynn heard a loud, rushing roar drawing closer. “Here it comes,” he said quietly. Seconds later, a wall of driving rain swept across the ranch house, hammering down on its metal roof with an ear-splitting, near-continuous clatter.

“You know, falling snow’s a hell of a lot quieter,” Van Horn yelled in his ear. “Maybe Alaska’s not so bad after all.”

He grinned. “I’ll take a little noise, so long as I’m not freezing to death,” he shouted back.

Wryly, she pointed out to where torrents of rain were pounding the lightning-lit pasture. “Don’t look now, but I think our simulated oil tanker just sank.”

Flynn nodded. After the storm passed, the limestone soils here would dry quickly, but they’d definitely need to have a ground crew re-chalk the outline they’d been using for jump practice… and repair the scaffolding erected to make the fake obstacles on its deck more realistic. All told, his team would probably lose close to a full day of training time — at a time when every hour was precious. He frowned. “It’d sure be nice if the real Gulf Venture was just as easy to put under.”

“A category-five hurricane would come in handy right about now,” Van Horn agreed. “Too bad that evil SOB Voronin wasn’t dumb enough to set his operation in motion during hurricane season.”

Suddenly, the lights inside the ranch house went out. A minute later, Shannon Cooke came outside to join them. The ex-Special Forces soldier’s face was illuminated by his smartphone’s screen. “The electricity’s out across the whole area,” he reported. “Looks like all this lightning blew a bunch of transformers almost simultaneously. The local cooperative says it’ll take several hours to restore power.”

“Just swell,” Van Horn said. She turned to Flynn with a playful grin on her face. “Well, darn, I guess this’ll be an early night after all. And yet here I am still feeling wide awake—”

But Flynn failed to take the bait offered by her not-so-subtle hint. Instead, he stood motionless, gripped by the insights cascading through his mind with all the intensity and speed of the lightning flashes still tearing across the sky above them. Suddenly, everything about what Moscow and Tehran really had planned fell into place with terrifying certainty.

“Son of a bitch,” he said at last in stunned realization. “Those bastards aboard the Gulf Venture aren’t aiming to destroy just one city. They’re going after dozens.” He saw their puzzled looks and said tightly. “We need to see Fox. Pronto.”

Flynn knocked on the door of Fox’s hotel room and waited. The chief of the Quartet Directorate’s American station had come in from Orlando late the night before aboard a red-eye flight. There was no sound from inside.

He glanced at Van Horn. “Think he’s asleep?”

“Br’er Fox?” she said with some amusement. “I doubt it. Only humans need sleep.” She fought down a yawn. “Like me.”

Flynn restrained himself from asking why, if she was that tired now, she’d seemed so painfully cheerful while flying the BushCat down to Austin with the sun just poking above the horizon. She had sharp elbows, and his ribs could only take so much. He raised his hand to knock again. But before he could even make contact, the door swung open.

“Nick. Laura. Please come in,” Fox said quietly, waving them inside. He swiped at his chin with a hand towel, removing the last traces of shaving cream, and then stepped inside the small bathroom to hang it neatly on the rack. As usual, every motion was controlled and precise and neat. Only the shadows under his eyes suggested that he was as tired as they were.

Politely, he ushered them into chairs set around a little round table. Then he pulled a seat of his own over from the room’s tiny desk and waited while they poured out cups of room service coffee from a carafe. “Very well,” he said finally. “You have my full attention.”

“We’ve all been banging our heads trying to figure out what Voronin and his backers in Moscow and Tehran have up their sleeves,” Flynn said. “Right?”

Fox nodded. His mouth tightened. “So far, unfortunately, Four’s best analysts have all come up empty-handed,” he admitted.

“Me, too,” Flynn told him. “Until last night.” He pulled out his smartphone and brought up an image on the screen. It showed a nighttime picture from space of the continental United States. Glowing patches of light showed the presence of major metropolitan areas — New York, Boston, D.C., Miami, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of others. Bright rings were superimposed on this image, radiating out from a single point over the Midwest marked with a radiation symbol. “It’s this.”

Fox studied it for a moment in silence. He looked up. “Go on.”

“Moscow and Tehran plan to carry out a nuclear EMP, an electromagnetic pulse attack against us,” Flynn explained. “A high-altitude nuclear detonation designed to simultaneously knock out electric power grids, cars, trucks, trains, river barges, and aircraft, water purification plants, and computer systems across a huge stretch of the United States.”

The image on his smartphone screen showed different areas of effect for an EMP attack, depending on the altitude of the initial nuclear burst. A warhead detonated thirty miles up could fry electronics out to a radius of 480 miles. The damage caused by the same size bomb going off 120 miles over the earth would spread a thousand miles beyond the blast point. The worst-case scenario indicated that a nuclear blast 300 miles above the surface would destroy computers and other electronics up to fifteen hundred miles away — across the entire continental United States, most of Canada, and the northern regions of Mexico.

“A massive EMP pulse would destroy every affected system beyond any possibility of repair,” Flynn continued grimly. “Producing replacements and installing them could take months, maybe years in some cases. And in the meantime, deprived of fuel, food, clean water, and electricity, millions of people in our major metro areas will die — either from starvation or disease.”

No American city or its surrounding suburbs had more than a few days’ worth of fuel, food, and purified water available at any given time. They were entirely dependent on a continuous flow of supplies brought in by road, rail, and river. And without working transportation systems and power grids, there would be no way to ship in the needed goods. Shelves would empty in a matter of hours, followed by looting and the complete breakdown of law and order. The margin between a modern high-tech civilization and Dark Ages barbarism was breathtakingly slim.

Fox frowned when Flynn finished laying out the terrifying scenario he saw developing. “My understanding is that the threat of an EMP attack is somewhat overblown,” he said carefully. “Our ICBMs and other nuclear forces are already hardened against electromagnetic pulse effects, so they’d be completely unaffected by any surprise strike. As a result, a major power like Moscow or Beijing has to know that crossing the nuclear threshold like that would automatically trigger massive retaliation — probably leading directly to an all-out and unwinnable war. The same thing goes double for a regional power like Iran, with the exception that we could smash them back to the Stone Age without taking further damage.” Tiredly, he took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. With a sigh, he put them back on. “And as far the threat of a terrorist-conducted EMP strike goes, that seems even less likely, according to the experts. Developing the specialized warheads needed to pull off an effective attack would be far beyond the capability of any known terrorist group — as would calculating the optimum missile trajectories and detonation points.”

Flynn nodded. “All of that is true. Which is precisely why Zhdanov is working through Voronin’s Raven Syndicate and the Iranians. It lets him hide Russia’s involvement. And without solid evidence that Moscow is directly responsible, would an American president be willing to unleash a nuclear Armageddon that might end all of human civilization?”

“Probably not,” Fox agreed slowly. “And even if he was, I’m not sure the rest of the chain of command would go along with him.”

“Well, one more thing’s for damned sure,” Flynn said bluntly. “The Russians definitely have the nuclear weapons technology and expertise needed to build EMP warheads… and the supercomputing power required to plan the most destructive attack.” He leaned forward, intent on making his point. “Remember how none of us could see what strategic advantage the Russians and the Iranians hoped to gain by destroying a single city? Because the huge risks of sparking a total war never seemed to match up with any possible gain? This is the answer, Br’er Fox,” he argued. “A successful EMP attack carried out by hidden intermediaries lets Zhdanov and the nutcases in Tehran cripple us without giving themselves away. With millions dead or dying and our whole civilian economy in ruins, we’d have to turn inward — dedicating every ounce of our remaining resources trying to cope with the avalanche of disaster unfolding here at home.” His jaw tightened. “Sure, all our missiles, bombers, warships, tanks, and artillery would be untouched… but so what? They’d be rendered effectively useless by the sheer magnitude of the domestic catastrophe we’d be facing. It’d take us decades to recover — decades with the Russians and their allies consolidating power in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America… hell, wherever they want to.”

Finished, he sat back, feeling suddenly exhausted. Even though he didn’t have any hard facts to back up his speculation, he was still as sure of this as he’d ever been about anything. And he absolutely needed the higher-ups in the Quartet Directorate to understand the magnitude of the threat they now faced. Four no longer had time to play it safe or to try to conserve scarce resources.

Laura Van Horn broke the uneasy silence. “Nick’s right,” she said flatly. “His hypothesis is the only one that fits all the data.”

Somberly, Fox nodded. “I agree.” He sighed. “Which makes our need to seize the Gulf Venture and that nuclear-armed missile it’s carrying that much more urgent.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Unfortunately, none of our leased satellite reconnaissance sweeps of the world’s oceans have turned up the tanker yet. We’re as much in the dark now as we were when we started looking.”

“It has to be heading for either the North Atlantic or the Caribbean,” Flynn said abruptly.

Fox stared at him. “Why there, and not the Pacific?”

“Because we have anti-ballistic missile interceptors based in Alaska and California,” Flynn explained, feeling more and more certain that he was right about this. “With just one shot in their quiver, the bad guys can’t risk watching their warhead blown out of space before it reaches its intended detonation point.” His fingers drummed on the table. “They have to launch their attack from where we’re most vulnerable. And that’s off the eastern seaboard.”

“The Navy’s Second Fleet has destroyers and cruisers armed with SM-3 interceptors,” Van Horn pointed out. In combination with powerful AN/SPY-1 Aegis Combat System radars, RIM-161 Standard Missile 3’s were designed to shoot down short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Flynn nodded. “Yep. And if those ships were deployed on a picket line with their radars energized and the crews on alert, they’d have a chance at making an intercept.” He shrugged. “But my bet is that most of them are swinging idly at anchor right now at Norfolk, or deployed somewhere else.”

“You’d win that bet,” Fox told him. “The Russians started a major fleet exercise in the Barents Sea about three weeks ago. The Navy responded by sortieing a large task force of our carriers and other warships into the Norwegian Sea for joint maneuvers with other NATO countries.”

“Man, those assholes Voronin and Zhdanov aren’t taking any chances, are they?” Flynn said bleakly. “They wave the red cape and off our admirals charge… in exactly the wrong direction.”

Fox grimaced. “So it appears.” He looked across the table at them. “Suggestions?”

“We have to gamble,” Van Horn told him. “We need to concentrate all of the Pléiades imaging satellite searches on the approaches to the Atlantic and the Caribbean.”

Flynn nodded. “Laura’s right. Focusing our satellite passes should roughly double our odds of spotting that oil tanker before it reaches its planned launch point.”

“If your guess is wrong, and the Gulf Venture is actually steaming toward the West Coast, re-tasking the satellites that way guarantees certain failure,” Fox warned.

“That’s so, and I wish like hell we had more options,” Flynn conceded. “But I’ve got an itchy feeling at the back of my neck that tells me we’re running out of time fast. So we can’t hold anything back in reserve,” he said forcefully. “We can’t split our limited resources trying to cover all the possible bases. Our only choice is to go all in… and we have to do that now.”