Countdown to Midnight

Epilogue

Nervously, President Piotr Zhdanov lit another cigarette. He took a single deep drag and then, viciously, ground the cigarette to ash on the polished table in front of him. For a time, he stared down at his hands before looking up again to glower at the group of senior military officers and government officials arrayed around the conference table. “Well?” he grated out. “What the devil is going on?”

Now there was a foolish question, Pavel Voronin thought with carefully concealed contempt from his place beside the older man. Zhdanov knew full well that no one in this subterranean room had any more information than he did at this instant. Fragmentary signals from the Podmoskovye had indicated that something had gone badly wrong in the final stages of MIDNIGHT. But for long minutes now, there had been only silence from the submarine. And so far, all efforts to reestablish contact with Nakhimov and his crew through Russia’s network of military communications satellites had failed.

A secure phone buzzed sharply next to Gennadiy Kokorin, the elderly minister of defense. He picked up. “Yes?” Slowly, his face turned pale. “I see,” he said at last. “I’ll relay the news to the president.” He hung up and looked at Zhdanov. “Piotr, our EKS missile warning satellites have just detected an underwater nuclear detonation in the Atlantic Ocean.”

“Show me!” Zhdanov snapped.

Kokorin murmured to one of his aides. The younger officer input commands on his computer. In response, an icon appeared on the large digital map displayed on the wall screen. It matched the last known location of both their strangely silent nuclear submarine and the Gulf Venture.

For a long, almost unbearable moment there was absolute silence in the room as Zhdanov and Voronin absorbed the catastrophic news. Somehow, their carefully laid and intricate plan to cripple the United States and permanently alter the balance of power in both the Middle East and the world itself had been wrecked.

At last, the president turned his baleful gaze toward Kokorin. “Signal the Forty-Second Rocket Division to stand its missiles down,” he snarled. “There will be no ‘retaliatory’ nuclear attack against Iran.”

Kokorin nodded gravely. “Yes, Piotr.” He cleared his throat. “Do you have any other orders for us tonight?”

Zhdanov turned pale with barely suppressed rage. “Only one.” He gestured curtly toward the exit. “Get out. All of you. Now.” He swung his head to Voronin. “Except you, Pavel. You will stay.”

Ah, Voronin thought calmly. The moment of maximum risk. The moment of truth. He kept his countenance while all the rest of them filed out the room.

When they were alone, Zhdanov stared icily at him. “Well?” he demanded. “What now?”

Aware that he was now on very dangerous ground, Voronin projected an air of complete confidence. “True, the destruction of the Podmoskovye is a blow, but our navy has more such submarines in its arsenal, does it not? And wars, after all, cannot be fought and won without casualties.” He looked straight at the older man. “Today, we may have lost a hand,” he continued coolly. “However, the great game goes on. Our enemies were lucky this time. But they have to be lucky every time. We do not.”

Slowly, Zhdanov nodded. MIDNIGHT was not the only aggressive scheme Voronin had proposed. In the undeclared shadow war that he and the younger man’s Raven Syndicate were now waging against the United States and its allies, the side on offense had the edge. Sooner or later, one of their deadly covert operations was bound to penetrate the West’s defenses. His mood shift was apparent.

Privately, though, despite his outwardly calm demeanor, Voronin felt a wave of cold rage welling up deep inside. The failure of MIDNIGHT had cost him dearly — in money, in the loss of many of his most experienced and best trained agents, and, most bitterly of all, in prestige. His enemies in Zhdanov’s inner circle would undoubtedly try to use this setback in a bid to discredit him. For now, he was confident of his ability to retain the president’s trust, but he knew only too well that Russia’s ruler had limited patience with those whose promises went unfulfilled. Before that day came, it was vital that he hunt down whoever was responsible for inflicting this unexpected defeat on him. He would hunt them down, he vowed… and then he would destroy them utterly.

Close beside the Spanish-style mansion used as a headquarters for the Quartet Directorate’s American station, a simple stone column rose at the center of an elegant, carefully maintained garden. Loosely modeled on those put up after the Second World War by veterans of the British Special Operations Executive to honor their fallen comrades, the pillar bore only an inscription— “They Gave Their Lives So That Others Might Live”—and a list of names. Two new ones had been engraved: Alain Ricard and Mark Stadler.

Now Nick Flynn, Laura Van Horn, and Gwen Park stood in a solemn line, facing Fox. They each held a glass of whiskey.

“We fight our battles in secret,” Fox said quietly to them. “Without acclaim. Without cheers. Without parades. And without public honors.” He looked somber. “What we accomplish is known to us alone. As are the losses we bear, painful though they are. This is our burden. And a heavy burden it is.”

Flynn nodded and saw the others doing the same.

“But we bear it nonetheless,” the older man continued gently. “Because the inscription this pillar carries is the truth. We risk our lives — and sometimes lose them — not for money or medals, but for the freedoms and lives of others, others we may never even know. We do it, because it must be done.” He raised his glass. “To fallen friends and comrades!”

“To fallen friends and comrades!” Flynn said firmly, echoed by Van Horn and Park.

With one quick motion, they all drained their glasses, to the very bottom, and then hurled them against the base of the pillar, where they shattered. The glittering fragments of other such final toasts, made over the course of many years and decades, gleamed in the sunlight there.

Later, sitting with Flynn and Van Horn on the tiled veranda that ran the length of Avalon House’s lakeside, Fox briefed them on the fallout thus far from their daring raid against the Gulf Venture. “To date,” he said dispassionately, “the news of an underwater nuclear blast in the middle of the Atlantic has been kept from the public and the press.”

Flynn nodded. That wasn’t surprising, in a way. Their battle occurred far outside the normal shipping and air traffic routes, so there were no witnesses to the massive explosion. “What about the sub the Russians lost?”

“Moscow has reported the apparent sinking of its converted ballistic missile submarine, the Podmoskovye,” Fox told him. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “But they’re blaming the loss on a probable torpedo accident during the Northern Fleet’s most recent peacetime naval exercise.” He smiled thinly. “As part of the cover-up, Zhdanov has ordered a massive search and rescue operation in the Arctic waters off Russia’s northern coast… to ‘find Captain Nakhimov and his gallant sailors.’ Naturally, of course, their efforts haven’t succeeded in turning up any trace of the missing submarine.”

“Naturally,” Van Horn said with disgust.

Flynn leaned forward. “What about our own government?” he asked curiously. “They must know that a warhead went off.”

Fox nodded seriously. “They do. And the entire intelligence community and the whole of the defense and political establishments have been scrambling to try to figure out what just happened. Without any success… as yet.”

“Do they have any theories?” Flynn asked.

“A few,” Fox said with a wry smile. “The CIA’s upper echelons are apparently convinced that something must have gone wrong aboard the Gulf Venture—resulting in the premature detonation of the missile the Iranians were smuggling.” He steepled his hands. “In fact, my understanding is that Langley has decided to toot its own horn in administration circles by slyly suggesting one of its own covert operations was actually responsible for thwarting a major terrorist nuclear threat against the United States.”

Flynn and Van Horn stared at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding me,” Flynn growled. “We took all the risks. We suffered all the losses. So that the CIA’s pencil pushers and ass-kissers can claim all the credit? For preventing an attack they ignored from the very beginning?”

Fox nodded. “I told you the truth a few moments ago, when we honored Alain and Mark,” he reminded them quietly. “This is the darker side of our secret war. And it is one we must accept. Four can only be effective — and, in fact, only survive — so long as we operate entirely in the shadows, outside the public square and beyond the control of risk-averse government bureaucrats.”

With a sigh, Flynn pushed away his disgust and anger. For the moment, anyway. One of his mother’s favorite sayings was that life wasn’t fair. That obviously went triple for anything in the world of covert operations. He sighed. “Well, if we’re skipping the medal ceremony for this mission, I guess I’ll take some leave instead.”

“In the civilian world, we call it vacation,” Laura Van Horn reminded him dryly.

He grinned back at her. “Leave. Vacation. Time off. I don’t care what it’s called as long as it involves lots of doing nothing much. Preferably on a sunny beach… with tall, iced, strongly alcoholic drinks.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Got anywhere in particular in mind right now?”

“Somewhere in the Caribbean,” Flynn told her. “Probably Aruba. I had a hell of a lot of fun there a few years back, when I was a just a kid. I bet it’s even more fun as an adult.”

“An excellent choice,” Van Horn agreed. She looked speculative. “I’ve been meaning to take a break myself. Care for some company?”

Flynn’s grin widened. “I think I could be persuaded.”

Sitting across from them, Fox, they suddenly noticed, had a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, Aruba is only a few miles off the coast of Venezuela,” he commented, almost idly. “And lately, we’ve been hearing some very disturbing rumors coming out of Caracas. Rumors we should probably investigate. So perhaps you could handle that for—?”

“No,” Flynn told him bluntly.

With a smile, Fox turned to Van Horn. “Well, then, how about you, Laura?”

She smiled sweetly at him. “Nick here is a man of very few words, Br’er Fox,” she said. “Personally, I prefer to be a little more eloquent.”

“And?” Fox asked, curious.

“Hell, no,” Van Horn replied.