Fallout

22

Renee had collected a lot of intelligence throughout the country of Pakistan for over three years. Thanks to having grown up with a mother who was half Pakistani she had the ability to appear as a very ordinary Pakistani woman, which made intelligence collection almost easy. But she’d never been on a Pakistani Air Force base. They took security very seriously. If she were caught, she would be charged with espionage. At this point she didn’t care. She was in a country that had chosen to target her homeland for a brutal attack, killing many workers in the nuclear power plant itself and whoever else they might be able to kill, depending on winds and whatever else might affect the spread of the poison they’d unleashed. It was a malicious, horrifying attack. She was prepared to take extraordinary risks to get intelligence on who had done it.

She shuffled into the back entrance of the officers’ mess with the other women who wore burkhas. Renee wore hers in the traditional way, with her face completely covered. Her contact lenses bothered her, as they always did. She didn’t wear them frequently enough to become accustomed to them, only to change her eye color.

The women worked quietly in the morning darkness, some washing the few dishes that had been left over from the night before. Others prepared the breakfast Air Force pilots would eat before their early flights, mostly breads and coffee with an occasional fried vegetable or tomato.

As the sun lifted over the horizon, Renee stood behind the serving trays. Her eyes expertly examined every officer who came through. The number of men who came to breakfast was much smaller than she’d expected. Not more than fifty. She would glance at each officer when he first came in, then look away. She would take quick glimpses from different angles. Although it was extremely difficult to identify someone she’d never seen, she was confident she would recognize Khan if he was here. It was the neck. Everyone mentioned the neck. She had the descriptions the FBI had taken from every person in the school in Nevada and the sketch that everyone in Nevada had agreed was a nearly perfect representation of him.

Searching the face of every officer who entered the room was difficult. Pakistani women were not to look directly into the faces of men. Only prostitutes did that. Renee tried to be subtle. She had to look, though, to have any hope of identifying Khan.

Several of the men simply took food and left, while others sat at the table and talked. The tables held eight or ten, and were arranged in long rows on the hard cement floor. As Renee walked among the tables with dirty dishes she had taken from pilots who had finished, she tried to overhear conversations but heard nothing of interest. Several were talking about the attack, but most seemed genuinely amazed at how this Riaz Khan could have done it and how it couldn’t possibly have been sanctioned by the government.

The general feel she got from them was outrage. They’d all known that four pilots had been fortunate enough to get spots in this new American TOPGUN school, and they all hoped one day to be able to go to the school themselves. How their fellow pilots could be lucky enough to go to America and then carry out such a brutal attack left them without explanation. They didn’t speak of it to senior officers for fear of being implicated in a larger conspiracy. There were whispers of the ISI or of other secret government agendas about which they were ignorant, but Renee heard nothing indicating that anyone seriously believed that Pakistan—as a country, as a government—was involved.

There was much talk of this Riaz Khan, this mysterious pilot none of them could remember meeting. They’d all heard of him, but none had met him. They found this puzzling, because the Pakistani F-16 community was not that large. There were always one or two pilots they didn’t know, but for someone of his rank, stature, and reputation, that was simply not possible. They were mystified.

She kept her head down as she moved the plates and cups back to the kitchen for washing, and then she waited for lunch. She stood in the corner of the dining area with a broom sweeping up some dirt, and she waited.

At two in the afternoon the pilots began filtering in from the hot, dusty day, into the cool, dimly lit officers’ dining room. This time nearly all the fliers came. Renee’s eyes darted back and forth; she looked for anyone who might resemble Khan.

Several pilots saw her looking at them and took it as a sign of encouragement. They smiled at her and tried to catch her eye a second or third time, but she was able to dismiss them. Finally one officer handed her his plate and asked for her to serve him. She noticed that his fingers were strong and thick, and she glanced at his barrel chest. She handed him the plate, knowing he would have to look at it to take it. She used that moment to look into his face. She detected a faint difference in the skin color between his upper lip and the rest of his face. She also noticed that he had a close-cropped haircut, which, based on tan lines, was very recent. As her eyes returned to their normal downcast angle, she took in the bull-like neck, larger than any man’s she’d seen while in Pakistan. It had to be him.

She walked over to another of the servingwomen after the rush had died down. She pointed to him, a knowing smile on her face that she knew showed in her eyes, a look implying barely contained lust. “Who is that?” she asked. “That is a true man.”

The woman lifted her head, annoyed. “Forget it. You would have no chance with him. He is one of the best pilots in the area and sought by every woman who has seen him.”

“What is his name?”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s trouble.”

“I just want to know his name.”

“Forget it.”

“Is he married?”

“He’s married to every woman he sees. They all think he’s going to marry them, but he never does. He is a wanderer. He is married to his airplane.”

Renee waited for the officers at his table to finish. They knew she would clear their dishes, but they were not quite done. She stood back a ways, but near enough the table to try to hear the conversation while looking uninterested and distracted. The man glanced over his shoulder at her with some annoyance. He continued eating. Another officer sitting across the table from him was asking him several questions, to which he was responding.

“When?”

“As soon as…” Their conversation was lost in the surrounding din.

She stepped a little closer.

“Three days? Do you have… ready?”

“Yes…”

“… airplanes?”

“… division… laser…”

“What are you doing?” the head of the cleaning group barked at Renee from behind.

The voice was so close and unexpected that it nearly sent Renee out of her skin. She tried to control her racing heart. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I was waiting for them to finish so I could clear their table…” Renee quickly moved away.

She continued to finish her other work nearby. As soon as they got up, she hurried to their table without looking anxious. She cleared their places and carried their dishes to the kitchen.

Then she went to the head of the cleaning group. “Will I be able to work again soon?”

“Who knows? If we need you, we will call you.”

“I would appreciate that. I have enjoyed working here.”

The woman was not impressed. “I would say you have. You have been making eyes at every man who has come in to eat. If you came back, you would have to change your ways. This is not a whorehouse, nor is it the place to find a husband,” she scolded.

“I’m sorry,” Renee said, lowering her eyes. “I just found it all interesting.”

The head of the cleaning crew grunted and turned away. Renee closed her hand around the fork in her apron and slipped it into the slit pocket cut into her dress underneath.

“Vladimir, Vladimir,” Gorgov said in his low voice. He had waited until the middle of the night in Nevada, to get Vlad when he was fatigued and back in his room at Tonopah.

“What?” Vlad replied, his blood racing through his veins. He rested on his side, on his elbow, and reached for the lamp next to his bed.

“It is not possible that you misunderstood me,” Gorgov said, declaring the obvious. “You made me look foolish in front of my good friends who gave us a large sum of money.” Gorgov stopped and let Vlad listen to the line hiss for a few seconds. “But, fortunately for you, they succeeded anyway. Even more fortunately for you, my good friend, is that there may be another chance for you to make a difference. Because we both know that if you don’t… things could get very bad, very uncomfortable for you.”

Vlad sat up and put his feet on the floor, trying to think his way out of his deepening hole. “Leave me alone!” he yelled.

“And for those you left behind in Russia,” Gorgov went on. “Your sister, for example, who is now in Smolensk with her two beautiful young children.”

“What do you want from me?” Vlad growled.

“You see,” Gorgov said, “this fight is not only not over, it is just starting. There are many things left to do, and one piece of it… remains undone. You may be able to make sure it happens.”

“What is it?”

“Your friend suffers, I think, from the typical American hero complex. I believe it is often associated with another of the actors that Americans worship, a John Wayne. Yes? You have heard this term?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Your friend must be led to believe he is going to save the world. And you will have the chance—the obligation—to make sure he does not succeed. Do you understand?”

Vlad closed his eyes. His back felt as if it were broken. The ejection had been much harder on his body than he’d expected. The ejection seat rocket motor had fired so fast and so hard to get him out of his dying airplane that it had compressed his spine in his lower back. He had pain radiating down to his heels. His crotch felt bruised and sore from where the harness he was wearing had held him in the parachute. All he wanted to do was sleep. But he’d not done what Gorgov had expected him to do. He’d knew he would be called to account. He wanted to tell himself he didn’t care. That Gorgov couldn’t touch him in America. But he knew that wasn’t true. He took a deep breath. “I understand.”

“Well, yes.” Gorgov laughed. “There is understanding, and there is understanding. I know you understood the words I have said. You are a smart man. You did not become a Sniper Pilot in the Russian Air Force by being stupid or cowardly. I want you to tell me, Vladimir Petkov, whether you understand that when the time is before you, when you have a choice to intervene to assure the success of the goal that will then be obvious to you, whether you will do what I have asked.”

“How will I know?”

“You will know.”

“How?”

Gorgov’s voice lost its friendly tone. “Will you do what I have asked, or will you not? You are free to tell me that you will not. I will understand completely. But then your sister’s husband will be very sad indeed, and your mother will wonder how you could have met such a horrible end.”

“You are scum, Gorgov. You are a disgrace—”

“Your opinion of me does not matter in the least,” Gorgov interrupted. “I want to know whether you will do what you are told!”

Vlad was cornered. “Yes, I will do what you ask.”

“I knew I could count on you. You are a man of your word. Yes?”

Vlad clenched his teeth. “Yes.”

Luke squinted at the dark brown stain on the concrete in front of the hangar, a dried pool of blood left from one of the guards. He noticed the bullet marks on the hangar door behind the stain, where the jeep had been. Shame washed over him. He’d never even met those guards. Too busy. He’d never even inspected the security in the early-morning hours, as they changed shifts at 0600. Too busy. He hadn’t even given a second’s thought to the security of having Russian missiles on the base, let alone fighters that could do a lot of damage if united with those missiles. It had never occurred to him. Too busy grading his private runway for his biplane fantasy. He hadn’t done his first job first.

Yellow crime-scene tape was draped from one stanchion to another in front of the hangar, around several of the airplanes, and across the doors to the hangar. There were bullet holes in airplanes and in the walls. The FBI had been through the hangar with a fine-tooth comb. They’d searched every computer, every file, every desk, and every residence within twenty-four hours of the attack. According to Katherine, they hadn’t found anything, at least nothing they were talking to her about.

Katherine stood next to him, her hands in the pockets of her maternity jumper. “How could they live here for three weeks when they hated us that much?”

“So no one would suspect them.”

“I’m really sorry, Luke,” she said with deep sadness.

“Like you had anything to do with it.”

“I’m just sorry it happened. We had a great thing going.”

Her use of the past tense sliced through him like a hot knife. He was about to respond when they heard a car. They turned to look and saw two white sedans pulling up. Helen Li got out of one and walked to them. She looked at the scene, then down at the brown stain Luke had been staring at. She’d already seen it. She nodded and looked at Luke and Katherine. “Morning,” she said. “Somewhere we can talk?”

“Hi,” Luke replied. “Sure. In the ready room, topside.” They all followed him as he headed up the stairs. All the decor, all the aviation paraphernalia seemed somehow excessive and superficial under the circumstances. Vlad, Stamp, Crumb, and Brian were sitting aimlessly in the ready room. They appeared beaten. Vlad looked away from Luke as they came into the room.

Helen went to the front of the room. She was glad they were all there. She wanted them all to hear her. The other three special agents stood at the back of the room. “Let’s go over this again,” she said. “Everything Riaz Khan did while he was here.”

“We’ve done this.”

“And we’re going to keep doing it.”

“He started out aggressively and went down from there,” Crumb said. “He was an asshole, which, if he was going to do what he’s now done, you wouldn’t expect. You’d expect him to try to be nice, at least not to rock the boat. He got here and started being an asshole right away.”

“What else?”

“He got us to help him plan his whole strike,” Crumb replied.

Helen raised her eyebrows. “How?”

“He came in here insisting that we teach him more about air-to-ground. Dropping bombs. That’s not really what we’re here for. We’re here to teach air-to-air combat. Shooting down other airplanes. He wouldn’t hear it. He insisted that we do more air-to-ground. So we tried to accommodate him. We even showed him how we do strike planning.”

“What planning? What did you help him plan?” Helen asked with intense interest. “Was it the strike on San Onofre?”

Luke hadn’t even considered the possibility that not only had he and his crew allowed the Pakistanis to prepare right under their noses, but that they had planned the strike for them. Such a thought was intolerable. “I don’t think so. It was in the wrong direction—”

“How do you know?”

“Because we were talking about flying east, or southeast, at sunrise, and the problem of the sun in your face—”

“Go on.”

“And the distance was wrong,” Luke replied, remembering the planning session as if it were yesterday. “And the attack we were planning was a very low-level attack, against a defended target, in enemy territory, like something into India. They flew against San Onofre at midaltitude, as if they were going against an unsuspecting target—which they were—trying to look like routine commercial traffic.”

Helen retreated into a thought she wasn’t sharing. A thick silence enveloped the room, full of pregnant implications and fear. She looked up suddenly. “Draw the route you helped plan,” she said to Luke.

Luke stood, picked up a black marker, and took off its cap. He turned toward the board to start drawing, then turned back to Helen, who had sat down expectantly in the first row of the ready-room chairs. “What exactly is the point of this?”

“I’m interested.”

“All the airplanes crashed. All the pilots but one were killed.”

“But Khan himself wasn’t killed. The other pilots were expendable.”

Luke and the others immediately grasped what she was implying. “You do still think he has something else in mind?”

“Yes, we do.”

“You know where he is,” Luke said, reading her face.

Helen looked at the other FBI agents. “Maybe.”

Crumb asked, “What the hell else could he have in mind? He’s done more damage than any one person has ever done!”

“We’re beginning to believe that San Onofre was part of a much larger plan.”

Crumb asked, “Against the United States?”

“We don’t know. But against somebody.” Helen was fighting with herself about asking them the next question. “What if someone has heard him planning a mission for three days from now that includes carrying laser-guided bombs?”

“What? Where did you get that? You do know where he is!”

“We think so.”

“Where?” Crumb asked, sitting forward.

“Air Force base just outside Karachi.”

“Why don’t you get him?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning anything. Kidnap him. Kill him. Whatever you can do,” Crumb asked. “Hell, I’ll go kill him if you’ll get me onto the base and make me look like a Pakistani for about five damn minutes.”

“He’s not there as Riaz Khan. He’s there as another Major, which is who he probably is.”

“A new identity?”

Helen pondered how much to divulge. “He has resumed his original identity. We think.”

“The whole Riaz Khan thing was fake?”

“Probably.”

“Then how can the Pakistanis say they didn’t know anything about it?”

“The false papers go back several years. Unless they looked into it deeply, they would have no particular way of knowing.”

“But all by—”

“The point is, he is a Major in the Air Force, and is apparently about to do something in the next seventy-two hours with laser-guided bombs. We’re not quite sure what.”

“In Pakistan?” Vlad asked, listening intently.

“We’re not sure.” Helen looked at the chart of the world on the wall next to the board. “Would it be possible to attack an aircraft carrier with laser-guided bombs?”

“Whose?” Luke asked.

“Ours.”

“One of our carriers?” Luke was horrified.

“Yes. Headed toward Pakistan. They were scheduled to conduct a friendly port visit, but now almost certainly won’t—”

“You can hit a carrier with a laser-guided bomb,” Luke said, “but they’d have to be out of their minds to try. They’d never get close enough. If we even suspected they were coming, they wouldn’t have a prayer—”

“Wait a minute,” Vlad said suddenly, jumping up from his chair. He crossed to the back of the room and started looking through a stack of aeronautical charts until he found one of Pakistan. “Where did you say he is right now?” He was practically panting.

“We’re not sure.”

“You said you think you have found him. Where is this person?” Vlad said with a demanding tone.

“At an Air Force base. Near Karachi.”

Vlad unfolded the chart of Pakistan and began searching for Karachi and the surrounding airfields. He brought it to the front of the room and hung it from the special clips over the board.

“What are you thinking?” Luke asked.

“This man is working with big agenda. He did not want to die here because the full mission is not accomplished. Otherwise he would have turned and fought Luke. I have no doubt. It must have killed him to run away. He is going to do something else.”

The others rose to look at the chart over Vlad’s shoulder.

“Like what?” Brian asked, his mind spinning.

“He wanted to demonstrate his anger toward America. You did not support them after we—the Soviet Union—left Afghanistan. They turned to France for submarines and airplanes. But I believe his focus is somewhere else. He is—what do you say?—obsession…”

“Obsessed,” Crumb offered.

“Yes, obsessed with India. We have to look at India.” He grabbed a pen, measured three hundred miles from the Air Force base near Karachi, and drew an arc. His eyes darted across the chart until he recognized one area. “Chort!” he exclaimed. “Right here!” he said, pounding his finger into the chart again and again. “The Kakrapar nuclear plant! Here, in Surat! It is three hundred miles southeast of a forward-deployment airfield east of Karachi.” Vlad looked at the others. “He is trying to start a war between Pakistan and India. There is a large group of people in Pakistan that want a war with India more than anything else. They will do anything to achieve it. It is all about Kashmir. About Islam against Hinduism. Do not forget, there are many hard-line Islam with ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan who have been waiting for this moment for years. This is it!” Vlad exclaimed. “We talked about this all the time in Russia. It was big headache with the countries that border Russia on the south.” He was breathing hard, his face full of satisfaction and fear.

“He may be right,” Brian said, nodding as he scratched his head. “He may be completely right.”

Helen asked, “But how can you know all this?”

“I have flown many times with the Indian Air Force. I was part of the team that delivered the MiG-29s from Russia to India when they bought them. I have spent many days in northwestern India training the Indian Air Force pilots to fly the MiG-29. I heard all the stories of the war that will come between Pakistan and India. They both expect it. It is just a matter of when.”

“I need to pass this on to our intelligence people. They will decide whether to pass it on to India or not,” Helen said.

Vlad was already headed toward the door. “This man must be stopped. If they go to war, it will be terrible. India has publicly promised never to use nuclear weapons first, and Pakistan has refused to make the same promise.

“Believe me,” Vlad said. “The Indian Air Force is no match for the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis have more flight hours, they are better trained, and now Khan has been trained by TOPGUN instructors. They will not be able to stop him.”

“India has more airplanes,” Brian reminded Vlad.

“Yes, and poorly trained pilots. Plus the Pakistanis have F-16s and new Mirage aircraft. The Indians fly some MiG-29s, but mostly older MiG-21s and -23s. They often fly them into the ground because of poor maintenance.”

“So what now?” Stamp asked.

“I don’t know,” Vlad answered, assuming a position of leadership. “There isn’t much time. Seventy-two hours from when?” he asked Helen.

“From yesterday.”

“That means we have forty-eight hours,” Luke said. “If we warn India, and they start moving their Air Force, Pakistan will claim it as provocation.”

“Yes, yes, exactly.” Vlad nodded. “They need something much more clever than that.” He looked at Helen and Luke. “Perhaps I could call some people I know. They have certain contacts within the Indian government. They might be able to suggest something.”

Helen looked at him. She studied his face. “Call them.” She then turned to Luke. “One of our most difficult problems, of course, is confirming his identity. Pakistan continues to be outraged at the conduct of its former Air Force officer. We’re not so sure. But we need to identify him. Can you think of anything that would help us?”

“He wouldn’t let us take any pictures…”

“So you said. We went over his room for fingerprints. There weren’t any. None. Wiped completely clean. Just like the cars we found in the desert.”

“Fingerprints?” Katherine asked suddenly. “Luke, the vase!”

“What vase?”

“The Indian vase at our house!” She looked at Helen. “It’s an ornamental Paiute vase. He was fascinated by it and picked it up—”

“What is it made of?” one of the other FBI agents asked.

“Clay.”

He looked at Helen, who nodded. “We need to dust your house,” he said to Katherine. “Now.”