October's Ghost

CHAPTER ONE EVENTS

“There he is.”

Jorge leaned forward against the van’s dash, looking to the left past Tomás. The man was walking with the crowd in the pedestrian crossing, hands pushed deep in his pockets and his balding head moving from side to side. “Right on time.”

“He looks nervous,” Tomás commented.

“He has reason to,” Jorge said, sitting back.

Tomás scooted forward in the driver’s seat, his slight paunch pressed against the steering wheel, and removed the revolver from his back waistband. He kept it below the window line and slid it between his legs, the barrel pointed bravely backward. He would not do the same with the semiautomatic pistol under his coat. It was cocked and locked, ready to fire, with the safety on, but he trusted safeties as much as he did weathermen. The nice thing about revolvers was that they went off only when one wanted them to, without the risk of jamming, features that still made them popular with many nostalgic American policemen, and equally popular with men in his line of work.

“Going inside,” Jorge reported. He, too, was armed, carrying the identical mix of weaponry, though he left his concealed for the moment. There was no rush. The time would come soon enough.

“One for lunch?” the hostess inquired.

The man’s eyes searched the room. ¿Dónde está? He wasn’t there.

“Sir?”

“Yes. No. I… I am meeting someone.”

The hostess smiled politely, her blue eyes twinkling benignly below the perky blond coiffure. Fucking immigrants. She had to work her ass off just to survive while attending UCLA, and these people came over the border and somehow ended up with all the money they needed. His accent wasn’t Mexican, though. Probably a fucking chiropractor or something trained in Guatemala. Her smile widened as she led him toward a table at the back corner of the restaurant. If I have to work two jobs just to make it through pre-med, you can live with some kitchen noise.

“Will this be all right?”

“Yes,” the man answered. “Very fine.”

He watched the hostess walk away. She was young and might have received closer attention at another time, but his gaze soon shifted outside, through the window on his left. He felt somewhat more comfortable where he sat. The entire dining room was visible, as was the entrance.

“Water, señor?”

“Si. Gracias.” He looked up at the busboy and slipped him a dollar. It was truly the underlings who deserved the tips.

“Gracias,” the young Salvadoran said, his eyes beaming. “Gracias!”

The man lifted the glass to his lips but jumped at the sound of dishes falling behind. A splash of water leaped from the glass and spilled on his trousers, drenching the left side. He quickly grabbed the napkin from the table and set it on his lap.

But it wasn’t the clothing he was concerned with.

“Are you ready?” Jorge asked.

Tomás nodded, straightening himself as much as possible in the seat and tucking the revolver in the front of his waistband. He buttoned the coat next.

“Let’s go.”

He was killing himself. There was no doubt about it. Frankie watched him put the end of it in his mouth. It was only a matter of time.

“Mmmmm.” Art Jefferson bit into the bacon-chili cheese dog with a satisfaction he had avoided for almost six months.

Frankie Aguirre shook her head and sipped her flavored seltzer. “You gonna make me watch you do this? Huh? Is this so I can testify at the probate hearing? ‘Yes, Your Honor, I saw him do it.’ ”

Art heard his partner’s protest but continued anyway, chewing the first bite until swallowing was a necessity. “Ooooh. That is good!”

“Yeah, right.” Frankie drained the bottle and set it down on Pink’s streetfront counter, her fingers picking at her chips.

Special Agent Thom Danbrook nursed his root beer and took in the good-natured exchange as an eager observer. “Does he always eat this stuff?”

“Hey, twice a year,” Art said, explaining before his partner could do his culinary reputation harm. “That’s what I give myself. Kinda like a vacation from boring food.”

“From healthy food,” she corrected him.

He did plenty of that, Art could say, eating healthy and all. Lots of salads and fruits, chicken, pasta, veggies till his mouth tasted like broccoli all day. Bush had it right on that green hunk of nutrients, he believed. It had been just over a year since the heart attack, and he was doing fine. Even his cardiologist said an occasional divergence into cholesterol land was acceptable. The whole idea was moderation, something his partner exhibited little of in the area of overprotectiveness.

But that’s what partners were for, inasmuch as the Bureau had ‘partners’ (the correct term was ‘team’), and Special Agent Francine—‘Don’t call me that’—Aguirre was top-notch. She and Art had been paired since he left desk duty and returned to real work, as he called it. A true Bureau street agent, just the way he began his career in the days of old J. Edgar. It was also the way he wanted it to end. Three more years to a full thirty, and he was damned glad he’d gotten out of the bureaucracy end of things. That would have killed him. The heart attack had been a very clear warning that the stress of command and his screwed-up personal life was too much, and Art had heard it loud and clear.

“I could just shoot you, if you want,” Frankie offered.

Art brought his right elbow down against his side in a reflexive action, the hard grip of the Smith & Wesson right where it should be. “I’ll take the slow way out, if you don’t mind. Okay, pardner?”

“Art, trust me, you’ll never get used to ‘Mother’ here,” Danbrook informed him. He had been teamed with Aguirre for two of his first three years fresh out of the Academy before transferring to the San Francisco field office, giving her up to Art.

“I hear you,” Art said between chews. “So, you think old Barrish will go down this time?”

“That’s why I’m here.” Danbrook was back in his old Bureau stomping grounds in order to testify in the case of United States of America versus some white supremacist asshole. He hated to dignify the man by using his name; ‘the suspect’ would do just fine. “This place have any burgers?”

Art nearly choked on his dog at the remark that bordered on heresy. “At Pink’s? Didn’t Aguirre ever bring you here?” He got a smiling head shake in response. “Frankie!”

“I don’t believe in killing my own partners,” she answered, deadpan. “If they want to do it themselves, well…”

Danbrook laughed fully at that. Frankie was a wiseass if ever there was one, and the number-one wiseass to have on your side when the heat was on. He had learned well from her. “Is there someplace around here I can get something to eat that doesn’t have pig snouts as a main ingredient?”

This time Frankie was the one to laugh, while Art gave Thom a purely devilish look.

“Out the back, across the alley,” Frankie directed. “Clampett’s has what you want.”

“Thanks. Back in a minute.” Danbrook walked through Pink’s and out the back door.

Frankie saw another third of the artery torpedo disappear into Art’s mouth and a look of pure ecstasy come to his face. “Live it up, Arthur.”

“Sure will, Francine.”

He was a reporter, and that meant he had to do things like wear bad blazers, drive a never-new, American-made car of some sort, and, of course, buy lunch for people who had a story to tell. It was all part of the persona, and George Sullivan fit into it with no effort at all.

The three-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times turned his eight-year-old Chrysler left onto Melrose, sneaking a sip from the flask in his coat pocket, a necessity, he believed, to survive the streets of L.A. He was a transplant from New York, a former Gray Lady staffer who had gotten tired of the cold and the crowds and traded them for the smog and the crowds, and he still hadn’t figured just who had taught Californians to drive. Not that they were nuts, but they all drove like old women. They even used turn signals! Hell, he had learned to drive in the city — Manhattan — where you changed lanes if you wanted, and if someone was already there, they would hit the horn, or maybe scream something. It worked, and it was a lot more interesting.

This fine autumn day, when the parts per million of some airborne carcinogen or something equally as horrid had reached the magical level where the weathermen colored the Los Angeles basin orange on their air-quality maps, George was off to meet what was supposed to be a story: some Cuban exile who had a juicy bit of nostalgia to share, it had been alluded to by his boss when he assigned it to him a week earlier. At least Bill had checked the guy out and verified that he might be someone who knew something. But, then, who wasn’t someone? Everybody had something to tell. Or something to sell, he added cynically.

His own conversations with the guy, all over the phone, had been pretty uneventful, a bad signal for a reporter. News, generally, meant something of interest, and to this point there had been no indication of such. But today was supposed to be the day when the guy gave up his secret, the terrible secret he kept referring to in their conversations. The guy had actually been testing him, making sure that he wasn’t a cop or some foreign agent out to steal the wondrous knowledge he possessed. Give me a break, George thought. Just give me the straight poop, and I’ll decide if it’s earth-shattering.

There it was. Clampett’s. Another trendy L.A. eatery that had degenerated into something — surprise! — quite ordinary. They served food there, George thought, not fucking Picassos. Angelenos had a tendency to think themselves somewhat superior in just about anything they attempted, even the mundane. It was amusing, at least, and made for good stories every now and then.

That must be him, George thought, as he waited behind a row of cars to turn left into the alley alongside the restaurant. He could see him sitting in the corner, fiddling with something on the table, his features darkened by the tinting on the restaurant’s large front windows. The description the guy had given of himself was pretty good. Sixtyish, balding, a bit of a gut, though the guy hadn’t put it that way. Sullivan could see his bulk widen at the waist.

The light ahead was red, creating a backup of cars trying to turn left onto La Brea. Sullivan was stuck in it, not yet close enough to the alley to turn. He kept looking back and forth between the light and the man. Then their eyes met. Only about forty feet separated them. George smiled, but the man did not return it. He checked the light again. Green. Good, he thought, and looked back to the… Who are those… Oh, shit!

“Yeah, can I get a burger, plain, to go?” Thom asked the hostess. She smiled almost seductively at the request He was a good-looking guy, attractive to women, something he had been told on numerous occasions, and almost monthly by his mother. Oh, well. At least she accepted it now.

“One burger plain to go.” The hostess walked back toward the kitchen, her day starting to brighten up. Hey. Who were those guys? They didn’t wait to be seat—

“Portero,” Jorge said in a normal voice, waiting for the man to react and turn. His hand unbuttoned his coat and reached behind his back. To his left Tomás was making much the same move.

Francisco Portero turned his head toward the voice, knowing as soon as the word was spoken that something was wrong. His eyes confirmed that fear a second later.

Both Jorge and Tomás pulled their revolvers at the same time and leveled them at their target from a distance of five feet. The caliber meant little at this range. Both men squeezed the triggers twice in even, steady pulls, Jorge using one and Tomás two hands. The four rounds impacted above Portero’s waist, half in his head. Tomás’s doing. He preferred the head shot.

The body, unlike the result of movie murders, fell easily against the chair back and slumped left, the head coming to rest with a thump against the glass.

The first shot surprised Thom more than alarmed him, and he looked up from the menu at Clampett’s front counter to see what was happening. That was when the warning was flashed from his visual sensors to the brain, starting a trained response that was automatic, developed from patterned repetition. His left hand slid his jacket back as he twisted slightly right, the Bureau semi-auto he had been issued a few years before coming out of its hip holster and to his front.

“Federal agent!” he yelled, both hands now on the Smith & Wesson, the right hand wrapped around and on top of the left, his gun hand. It was the grip ingrained in his mind from the endless hours of firearm instruction at Quantico, where he had been trained using the Bureau’s former standard-issue weapon (the Colt .357 revolver), and it was a mistake. A grave mistake.

Tomás began spinning when the first word of the shout from behind reached his ears. He also dropped low, bringing his gun around to find the…there! Jorge had also turned and was aiming at the same target.

Thom knew they were turning to fire, but there were people scrambling all over the place, running in front of him toward the door and toward a window someone had smashed out. He shifted his aim a little to the left, drawing a bead on the one who was closest to firing, and squeezed the trigger. The power of the 10mm kicked his hands back, causing a fiery pain on his right hand that had never happened before. But that was inconsequential. He was in a fight for his life, in a test of speed. His mind directed his finger to squeeze the trigger again….

But nothing happened. It was strange. He could feel his eyes widen at the surprise. He looked at his weapon, still held at eye level. The slide was forward, no obvious jam, but what was that on his thumb? Blood? What was—

The first shot entered Thom Danbrook’s torso just below the sternum and continued through his lean body, exiting out the back with a vital portion of his spine. The muscles below his chest immediately registered the cessation of controlling signals from the brain and began to relax. But before that effect could be manifested, seven more shots were fired, three of them connecting. One shattered his right elbow. A second hit low, doing massive damage to his left hip. The third was a gut shot that punctured intestines and fragmented into several pieces, peppering the liver four times.

Thom fell backward, his weapon still in his gun hand, and crumpled like a rag doll against the counter, his mouth open in surprise and his eyes staring at the floor.

“Get it,” Jorge ordered as he pulled the Browning and stuffed the empty Ruger in his waistband. He centered the pistol on the fallen cop—What did the guy yell? “Something” agent? — to make sure that Tomás could get what they had come for.

Tomás turned back to Portero and spread his coat, checking the inside pockets. Nothing. It had to be…the shirt pocket. There was a rectangular bulge, which he reached in and retrieved. “Got it.”

“Come on.”

Sullivan’s eyes were locked on the scene, his hands holding the Chrysler’s wheel with a death grip. Oh, shit! Oh, shit! I was supposed to be there!

The two men were moving outside, a crowd of terrified lunchtime eaters preceding them. Were they coming for him? He was not about to wait and find out. Traffic ahead was not moving, so he cranked the wheel all the way to the left and floored it, heading across traffic for the alley.

The last of Art’s bacon-chili cheese dog was on its way to his stomach when the distinctive sound of gunfire echoed through from the back of Pink’s. “What the hell?”

Frankie drew her weapon first, followed quickly by Art. “Call nine-one-one,” she said calmly to the cook, her eyes looking through the back windows. Where’s Thom?

“Let’s check it out,” Art said. He led off through the inside of the hot dog stand’s small interior dining room, which opened to a parking lot on the alley at the rear. He stopped at the building’s corner and listened. Screams told him where to go. “Clampett’s.” Oh, my God.

They moved quickly through the lot toward the back of the restaurant across the alley, Art in the lead as he and Frankie—

“Jesus!” Art swore, the right-side tires of a beat-up car almost taking his toes off. “You get the plate?”

“Partial,” Frankie said, her eyes watching the gold sedan speed away from them. It could be whoever did the shooting, or just someone trying to get out of the line of fire.

Art walked quickly along the windowless wall at the building’s east side, his gun to the front. Frankie was behind him, her attention focused to the rear. A good number of people were running east on Melrose, passing the alley entrance in front of Art. That was a sure sign that trouble was to the west. “Where the hell is Danbrook?”

He reached the corner just in time to see two men jogging across Melrose toward a van on the opposite side. One went around the back, out of Art’s view, and the other went for the driver’s door, his free hand holding a…

“FREEZE!” It was an automatic response cops have when a weapon is sighted. Art brought his 10mm up to eye level in a two-handed grip, his knees bending slightly, centering it on the—Damn! Another wave of frenzied pedestrians rushed past, just feet from the barrel of his Smith. He instinctively cleared them, lifting the barrel skyward, waiting for them to—

“COVER!” he screamed at the sight of the gun pointing directly at him from across the street. His body started down as the first shot rang out, sending the world into a weird kind of slow motion that blocks out all things not directly related to one’s survival. Art heard another shot, and he rolled to the right, trying to get closer to the stuccoed wall of the restaurant. And another shot, which he heard impact just above his head.

Then the sound of tires grabbing at asphalt broke the trancelike state, and his head came up. He saw the van, a white windowless model, cross to his front, going east on Melrose. His weapon was pointed at it, but he knew he couldn’t fire at it as it sped away. There were just too many people around, and the thought of sending a two ton vehicle crashing into a crowd was not his idea of a successful felony stop.

“Goddammit!” Art swore, jumping up from prone using his free hand for a push-off of the alley’s rough surface.

“You okay?” Frankie asked from behind.

“Yeah. You?”

“Close one,” she commented, her breath coming in mild heaves. Getting shot at had the tendency to do that to a person.

“I got a good look at it,” Art said as he moved around the corner to Clampett’s front. It was all glass. He looked inside carefully and saw, not two feet through the glass, the recipient of the gunfire. His eyes swept left across the dining room toward the entrance, looking for… No. NO! “Thom’s down!”

They raced to the entrance, keeping their weapons out as they entered the almost-empty restaurant. The only obviously live person they saw was a young blond woman standing less than ten feet from the man slumped against the window, her eyes locked on the body, both hands covering her mouth.

“Thom!” Frankie holstered her weapon and dropped to her knees, easing her former partner’s weapon from his fingers and laying it on the counter above. “Thom. Thom. Can you hear me?” She could see his chest moving, and his eyes didn’t have the far-off look of someone on the edge of death. She had seen that before. Thom didn’t have that. She was sure of it. He couldn’t look that way. She wouldn’t let him. Would not let him!

Art swept the room as his partner did what she could for Thom. He walked to the other victim, passing the obviously catatonic woman standing among the upended tables and chairs. This guy was dead. No question about it. The brain matter that hadn’t been blasted through the back of his head to the wall behind was dropping in tiny, bloody clumps from the exit wound.

The door to the kitchen, on Art’s left, opened slightly. He trained his weapon on it, but only a frightened, weeping busboy was behind it.

“I call… I call the policia.” He buried his head in his hands and stood against the wall.

“Anyone else in the kitchen?”

The young man took several deep, heaving breaths. “No. The men who do this, they run.” He pointed to the front door. “They do this. Why?”

Art patted the young guy’s shoulder and put his weapon away. The kid had probably left his home to get away from stuff like this. “Dammit!”

Frankie had Thom’s head in her arms, his body braced against her legs. He was still alive. “Talk to me, Tommy. Come on.” The tears were streaming down her face. “Talk to me.”

Art stood over the scene, the memory of what had happened a year before to his previous partner bringing past and present together in a collision of emotions that left him numb.

Frankie looked up, her face asking what to do. Art knew the truthful answer would only add to the anguished feeling of helplessness. “Ambulance is coming. Keep talking to him.”

She did just that, encouraging, almost willing, him to answer, but there was no response. The sirens a minute later announced the arrival of the first Los Angeles Police Department officers. The rescue ambulance of the L.A. City Fire Department rolled up right after them, and, after a quick look at the wounded FBI agent that convinced them there was no time to waste trying to stabilize him on scene, loaded him into the R.A. and, with Frankie in the back, headed straight for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center behind a caravan of police cars clearing the way.

Looking down at the carnage remaining where Thom Danbrook had fallen, Art knew that the heroics surely to be attempted once they reached Cedars would be for naught. It was the most painful admission a cop had to make. One of his own was going to die. Art would never say that, just as he hadn’t to Frankie. The living often needed hope more than the dying. He stared down at the blood until the rhythmic wail of the ambulance faded to nothing.

Nothing. It was all that could be done for Special Agent Thom Danbrook. It was all Art had been able to do for his first partner, more of a mentor, right out of the Academy. You couldn’t bring back the dead.

But you could bring those responsible to justice. That was something, despite the hollowness that the concept of ‘justice’ held when compared to the fate just dealt his brother agent. And to the other victim. Art looked to the body of that man. It was the starting point in a very familiar, and a very distasteful, process. Art Jefferson knew that the investigation of a murder had just begun.

He could not imagine where it would lead.

The gleaming white Gulfstream descended from the blue Colorado sky and touched down on runway one-seven at Falcon Air Force Base, a relatively small site that served primarily as a support facility for the North American Aerospace Defense Command located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. It slowed and swung right onto the last taxiway, heading north toward the group of men who had awaited its arrival — some eagerly, some otherwise.

“The Devil is strapping on those ice skates about now, the way I see it,” General Henry Granger, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, theorized, capturing the realized likelihood of the historic event. He looked to the man just behind. “What do you think, Paul?”

“Hmmm,” General Paul Walker, commander in chief, NORAD, grunted, eyeing the approaching jet, which bore the marking of his beloved United States Air Force. He felt no such endearment for the human cargo just delivered to Falcon, and only slightly more for the man who had made this all happen.

“Still not on board, General?” National Security Adviser Bud DiContino asked, looking over his shoulder at CINCNORAD.

“I was never invited.”

“Oh, hell, Paul!” Granger protested. He and Walker went all the way back to the class of sixty at Colorado Springs, a lineage also shared by the NSA, who had paraded past the spires of the United States Air Force Academy Chapel that last time two years later. “This is going to make your job easier in the long run.”

“I suppose.” CINCNORAD really didn’t. He was part of this because he had to be.

“You promised to make nice with our Russian friends, remember,” Granger pointed out for good measure, though he knew Walker would not let his personal feelings mingle with his duty.

“I’ll take them home for dinner to meet the Mrs., if it’s necessary,” CINCNORAD assured his boss and friend. “Sufficient, Mr. DiContino?”

Bud let the cynicism slide. “Just make sure they don’t have any reason not to trust us. The only thing making this possible is trust.” And a whole lot of work.

The twin-engine jet, identical to those in use by many of America’s larger corporations, stopped fifty feet short of where Bud and the two Air Force officers stood, its door folding downward less than a minute later. Its two special passengers emerged behind the Air Force captain who had accompanied them on the entire four-leg journey from Moscow.

“Ugly-ass uniforms,” Walker commented, aware that his opinion of the puke-colored Russian dress greens was shared by many in the service. Ivan never could make anything pretty, weapons or battle dress. Function — what there was of that — came before aesthetics in their world. America had learned to make things bad and beautiful. CINCNORAD defied anyone to watch a Strike Eagle unload a stick of thousand-pounders on a target and dispute the claim.

“What’s that about beauty being skin-deep?” Granger wondered jokingly as the two Russians left their escort at the jet and began to approach. “My guess is that you can strip old Vasiliy there down to his unmentionables, and you’d then see the purpose of those dashing dress greens.”

Bud suppressed a laugh. The guests whose visit he had arranged were too close to risk an errant chuckle escaping. “I’ll have the President bust you down to a junior bird, General, if you make me lose it. Straight faces.”

General Walker pasted on a sweet smile as Marshal Vasiliy Kurchatov and his aide neared. “Two weeks, DiContino?”

“Guaranteed,” Bud affirmed from the side of his mouth. “The Japanese will have the new computers up and running at Voyska PVO in ten days, tops. That’s the promise.”

“My last protest,” CINCNORAD began. “I do not like giving access to our strategic systems just because the Russians couldn’t build a BMEWS worth crap. That and pulling our boomers in just pushes it, DiContino.”

“Trust, General Walker. We can’t very well have our missile boats running around during this. The Russians have to be able to see our strategic platforms. We can’t leave the ICBMs and bombers out for all to see and expect them to overlook the subs. Quid pro quo, General. Theirs are in as a gesture during this, and ours have to be, too. You’ll be glad we were able to work this out once the new warning system is up and running over there,” Bud said with certainty. “That last false alarm their computers gave them left them forty seconds from a launch order.” The NSA swiveled his head a bit toward the general. “That kind of fuckup could ruin everybody’s day… Marshal Kurchatov!”

“Ah, my friend!” The huge Russian, as round as the most reverent artist’s depiction of Saint Nick, pulled the NSA into a hug that ended with kisses to both cheeks. The same gesture was given by both Russians to each of their three hosts. “My English is improved, yes?”

“Very good, Marshal Kurchatov.” Bud gestured to his two companions. “You have met General Henry Granger before, at the Force Reduction Conference in Geneva.”

“Yes. Yes.” Kurchatov dipped his head respectfully toward the chairman.

“And this is General Paul Walker, commander in chief—”

“I am very familiar, Mr. DiContino,” Kurchatov interrupted tactfully. “The general and I share a passion.”

“Oh?” Walker probed passively.

“A fine deer hunter you are, I am told. Your exploits have been chronicled in many sporting journals.” The marshal smiled admiringly. “Those have become more available in my country in recent years. A Boone and Crockett record, I believe.”

Walker’s eyes widened with some astonishment at the Russian’s knowledge of his third love, after the Air Force and his family. “You are a hunter, Marshal?”

Kurchatov stepped closer. “Sometime soon, when the work of the coming days is finished, I will make arrangements to show you the finest hunting on this earth. The Siberian reindeer is a formidable quarry.”

You are good, Walker admitted. “I look forward to it.”

Kurchatov stepped back by his aide. “This is Colonel Mikhail Belyayev. He is an expert on the things that are to be done. I am here just as baggage!” the marshal proclaimed with a laugh that degenerated into a hacking cough. “The air is so clear, so cold. Much different from the thick air of Moscow.”

“Then we should go inside,” Walker suggested. “You can rest here before we go to NORAD.”

Departing words were exchanged, and then Walker led the Russians into Falcon’s old main building. Atop it was the tower that had seen many a busy day during the Cold War, but now it sat almost idle. Days often went by without as much as a T-2 from the 94th Flight Training Squadron out of Colorado Springs dropping in. More important arrivals were even less frequent. Much had changed at Falcon. Much had changed in the world. One needed to look no farther than the trio of men walking through the soundproof steel door to find validation of that truism.

“The Russian Defense Minister and their top missile guy hanging out in Cheyenne for two weeks.” Granger shook his head. “You pulled off something I never thought I’d see.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Bud said, getting a “Yeah, right” look from the general. “Well…

Granger heard the door into the building close with a metallic slap. “Old Vasiliy knows how to sweet-talk, doesn’t he?”

“If he can mellow General Walker, I’m all for it. In any event, this should be done when the Japanese say so.”

Granger’s head shook again, once more in astonishment. “I’m still surprised this hasn’t leaked out on their end. They’re gabby little buggers, you know. Love to brag about their coups, especially of this magnitude.”

“They also respect the almighty buck, and this contract is worth a couple billion dollars to them,” Bud explained. That it was a couple billion American dollars made it all the more lucrative to the contractors, Sony and Panasonic among them. The complete replacement of the signal-processing end of the Soviet-era Ballistic Missile Early Warning System — the huge radar antennae facing north and west from the frozen wastes of the country would be retained — was a monumental undertaking that would bring the Russian system on par with its American counterpart. During the changeover, though, the nation would be half-blind, able to detect launches from its array of early-warning satellites but unable to confirm any threats by radar. That was where Bud had come in, suggesting that high-ranking Russian military personnel could be given access to one of the command centers from which the United States would wage nuclear war to ensure that the weapons slated for such use were sitting benignly in their silos, on their tarmacs, and tied alongside their piers. The latter, pulling the entire U.S. fleet of ballistic-missile subs in from their unknown patrol areas, had been the hardest to achieve. After protests from people like General Walker, the other CINCs, and, initially, Granger himself had been overcome, the first steps in the highly secret operation to upgrade the Russian BMEWS had begun. Japanese contractors — any from the United States had to be ruled out, for obvious reasons — under Russian and American supervision, designed the components and software in record time, and were at this minute awaiting the final word to begin dismantling the old to make room for the new, in figurative ways as well as literal.

“Us, the Russians, the Japanese, and the Chinese,” Granger said, listing the non-European parties who were knowledgeable of the operation. “What did Beijing have to say about all this?”

“Good luck,” Bud answered. “The thought of a nuclear exchange”—“exchange” sounded much more palatable than “war”—“starting by accident thrills them as much as it does anybody. Besides, the system pointing south will be unaffected; it was upgraded in ‘89. This is good for everybody, General.” Bud, old “Colonel DiContino” from his Air Force days, couldn’t bring himself to call a former superior by his first name. “The world will be a safer place when our neighbor can see if we throw rocks over his fence as well as we can see him.”

Granger saw that the Gulfstream, which would take him and the NSA back to Washington, was being refueled from a tank truck — Falcon’s underground pumping system was now out of service and unlikely to be repaired. The Base Closure and Realignment Committee was sure to recommend its demise by the end of the following year. So much that was familiar was disappearing. The general knew it was necessary, but that could not remove the pangs of loss from his gut as he watched the finest fighting force the world had ever known shrink toward a smaller, equally capable — he hoped — force that would continue to protect the nation in perpetuity. The warriors had made the world safe for peace, and they were now fading away.

“Our work here is done,” Granger observed. He started to walk toward the jet

“Back to Disneyland,” Bud said, exhibiting a touch of cynicism himself. “And to the same old same old.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Granger agreed.

It wasn’t.

He was a businessman before all else.

“Soothe my nerves, Gonzalo. Give me the total again,” José-Ramon Alvarez directed. His eyes, aged but still filled with the fire born in his youth, added a silent admonition for his aide to be certain of the figure.

“Sixty-five million dollars,” Gonzalo Parra repeated, sure of his accounting.

Alvarez smiled. “Information is very valuable.”

“The correct term is intelligence,” Parra corrected. He was the only man to hold enough favor with the executive secretary of the Cuban Freedom Society to chance such a seemingly mild rebuff.

“I think still as a businessman,” Alvarez told his trusted aide, a man equal in age to his sixty-one years.

“You must begin to think as the leader of a nation.” The suggestion was delivered with an expression that those who had wielded absolute power would recognize clearly, though this was in anticipation of such power. “Think what we will be able to do once we have the resources of an entire country at our disposal. That sixty-five million will be multiplied by ten times ten. With such money, with such power…”

“Yes.” Power came in many forms, José-Ramon Alvarez knew. In the form of money it could purchase and persuade. In others it could deter and defend. Soon the combination would be in his possession. With it he would see that his people, enslaved by a failed ideology for decades, would prosper, as would he. Strength would be theirs. They, under his guidance, would be seen no longer as the weak. The weak… “I wish I could speak to Avaro once more before we go.”

“It is not wise. Not at this time. He will contact us when the problem is taken care of.” Parra heard the sound of approaching feet outside the door to the CFS inner sanctum, which was innocuously located in a converted mini-mall in Miami’s Little Havana. “He has run the network for months now. This is not much different.”

Alvarez knew that lack of trust or comfort was not his motive for desiring a final call, but his aide was very right. Great, momentous things lay ahead. Sentiment would have to wait.

The door opened after a quick knock. One of Alvarez’s security men stepped in. In the hall stood two men in suits, both Anglos. Their jackets were unbuttoned for quick access to what was undoubtedly on their hips.

“Mr. President,” the CFS security man began, looking directly at Alvarez. “It is time.”

José-Ramon Alvarez smiled at the somewhat early use of the title that would soon be officially his. It would take very little getting used to.

It was the beginning of a catastrophic failure.

The USS Pennsylvania, an Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine, was arguably the most complex platform in the arsenal of the United States for the employment of strategic nuclear weapons. On board she carried a mix of sophisticated sensors, machinery, and weapons, all of which worked in harmony to make the eighteen-thousand ton sub a silent and potent deterrent to aggression against the country she served. Costing more than a billion dollars, the Pennsylvania was a reliable boat but one that required regular maintenance to ensure her effectiveness. Everything that could be done to keep her in tip-top shape was.

But there had been a mistake.

“Cap’n, that harmonic is gettin’ worse,” the chief of the boat reported.

The Pennsylvania’s captain finished his notation and snapped his personal logbook closed. A gift from the crew of his old boat, the last Lafayette-class boomer to be in service, the waterproof box, slightly larger than a clipboard and an inch thick, had the name of his present command stenciled boldly across its front. He sneered at the reminder. The Pennsylvania, despite being the most advanced inhabitant of the aquatic world, had been nothing but a pain in the ass this cruise.

“Still the shaft gears?”

“Aye, sir.”

The Pennsylvania, like all submarines in the U.S. inventory, was powered by a nuclear reactor, a General Electric S8G natural-circulation model in this case. But unlike other submarines, the propeller shaft of the Ohio class had no direct mechanical contact with the steam turbines. These were turned by steam produced when water in the “cold” loop passed through heat exchangers, which transferred thermal energy from the superhot reactor by way of the circulation of coolant through the “hot” loop. This two-loop system isolated the “hot” radioactive coolant. The turbines, instead of transferring their circular motion directly to the shaft by way of lifter rods or gears, turned an electric generator, which powered a quiet electric drive system that drove the propeller shaft. The process, known as turboelectric drive, was highly efficient and exceedingly quiet, a must for survival in the life of a boomer, whose mission was to go to sea and cease to exist.

But it was that search for silence that had begun a series of events the result of which would soon manifest itself.

During the Pennsylvania’s last refit, completed two months earlier, the gear assembly that transferred power from the electric motor to the shaft had been replaced with newly designed ones that had proved less prone to harmonic transmission — the propagation of even the slight machinery sounds from the electric motor through the shaft and into the water. The new gears used a unique sound-dampening system of assembly to cut the sub’s acoustic signature a further 10 percent. The twin cylinders of high-stress alloy into which grooved channels had been machined were basically reengineered into twelve “slices” of gears that fit together over a main connecting core made of a layered combination of titanium, ceramic laminates, and more titanium. Each slice was fit over the core in sequence, and in between each was a gasket made from a carbon-fiber laminate, which was the true trick of the new assembly. Quite literally, they cut the transfer and reflection of sound from gear to gear, and thus helped remove a source of harmonics that had plagued all subs for decades.

Key to the successful use of the new system was its proper installation and maintenance, and the crew of the Pennsylvania had done well following every safety and operations check the assembly required. But there was one thing they could not check, as it was an installation item, designed to be configured during refit and left alone until the sub’s next stay in port.

Holding the twin gear assemblies — one lay on each side of the similarly geared propeller shaft — tightly together as one unit was a single twelve-inch nut at the aft end of each cylinder. This nut was set and torqued during refit according to a very tight tolerance, as even the barest variance could negate the positive effects of the system and actually add to the problem of harmonic transmission. But the nut on the starboard assembly had not been torqued properly — it was recessed inside the aftmost gear by almost six inches. The technician responsible for its installation had added four-and-a-half foot-pounds too much torque when mechanically tightening the fifty-six pound nut. That alone was enough to cause an excess of harmonics because it compressed the composite gaskets too tightly and degraded their sound-dampening qualities. But in combination with another phenomenon, one the crew of the Pennsylvania had no control over, the error was about to prove deadly.

Traveling on a course of three-four-five, skirting the Bahamian Island chain to port on her way to the relatively feature-free Blake Plateau, the Pennsylvania, running at six hundred feet, was in the midst of the Gulf Stream, which flowed northwest along her route to King’s Bay, Georgia. Sixty miles off the island of Eleuthera, in a water depth that exceeded fifteen thousand feet, the warm current was moving at more than five knots, a direct result of the exceedingly hot winter months the Southern Hemisphere was experiencing. This warm water rushed northward, and was, at the moment, giving the Pennsylvania a much appreciated “tailwind” that turned her self-produced twelve knots into a nature-aided seventeen. It was also doing something else.

The huge bronze propeller at the rear of the sub was absorbing tremendous punishment — which it had been designed to accept — from the unstable water it was churning. The five-knot current was acting upon the water propelled aft and away from the sub, creating a doughnut-shaped area of lower than normal water pressure nearer the ends of the propeller’s seven blades. As they turned, they were alternately “sucked out,” away from the sub into the pressure void, then pushed back as they found “clean” water. This fluctuation was not an entirely abnormal phenomenon, but it was very powerful. The motion was transmitted inside the submarine through the shaft to the gear assembly, which rested upon a sound absorbing sheet of high-density voided polymers. The assembly actually moved the few millimeters with the shaft. Back and forth. Back and forth. The motion was barely perceptible to the human eye and raised no alarm with the sensitive instruments that monitored all facets of the sub’s propulsion system.

But it did register on the nut that had been torqued beyond spec. The repetitive motion, driven by tons of force, was transmitted to the nut that had lost much of its ability to absorb such fluctuations. As the geared cylinders spun with the energy of more than thirty thousand shaft horsepower, additional stresses were placed upon the nut that held the twelve slices together. At full speed the effect would have been similar to that of a jackhammer with the shaft snapping in and out in fractions of an inch while the gears absorbed the punishment. This took longer. After an hour in the current the nut developed a tiny hairline fracture on its inner face. Ten minutes later the fissure had spread through the nut. A minute after that it separated in two with a loud snap that caused heads farther forward in the engine room to turn. The pieces came free of the core that ran the length of the gear assembly and spit aft, impacting the bare metal bulkhead. Less than a second after that the aftmost gear slice, following its natural rotation and now free to move, slid off the core, spinning with a force unimaginable.

And with that there was nothing that could be done.

The starboard gear assembly was on the downside of the rotation, meaning the propeller shaft was spinning over its top to starboard. As the gear slice came free, its teeth still enmeshed with those on the shaft, it was pulled under the shaft. But there was not enough room for the foot-diameter slab of metal to make it. With only a four inch clearance between the shaft and the polymer-coated deck, the gear was pulled into the inadequate space like a wedge, the power of thirty thousand horses ensuring an uneven match between force and matter. The sound of the event, louder than the fractured nut ricocheting through the engine room, was transmitted throughout the sub, causing brains to register the fact that something was very wrong. Before any heads could turn, though, another, more horrifying sound radiated from the back of the boat.

The propeller shaft, continuing to turn, had nowhere else to go but upward as the gear was driven between it and the deck. A four-inch clearance expanded instantly to more than twelve as the ten-ton shaft broke free of the bearing rings that held it in place. Its forwardmost end, where the gear assemblies were attached, sprang up like the vaulted end of a fulcrum, lifting the eight-ton electric drive motor upward with it. At the top of the motor were stabilizer bars, looking much like extended shock absorbers, that helped dampen any motion of the machinery and held the unit in place. These bars had three inches of play, which was not enough to absorb the extra eight inches the unit was being forced to move. Their top ends transferred the force of the event, now exceeding a million-and-a-quarter foot-pounds of energy, to the number-eight structural ring, to which they were connected. Seventy-eight of these rings, over which an inch-and-a-half-thick skin of HY-80 steel was welded, formed the structure of the pressure hull. The number-eight ring, like all the others, was designed to withstand tremendous pressures squeezing it from all sides, but not a point impact of the magnitude being delivered. It was as if a mighty scissor jack had thrust upward against the ring. The result was a complete failure of the structural member, which cracked outward, separating the steel skin as it pressed toward the sea. The directional force continued for a millisecond more, expanding the rupture in the pressure hull, tearing the inner and outer skin of the Pennsylvania for a hundred feet along the starboard side of its topdeck as if a can opener had sliced through it.

No emergency drills could have saved the sub or its crew. The seawater, under tremendous pressure at six hundred feet, sprayed through the ruptured hull, flooding all compartments from the missile room aft. The huge electric drive motor, lifted more than a foot off its base, came back down with a violence the deck and supports had never been intended to sustain. They failed completely, sending the unit crashing through to the bulkhead supports below. In the process the propeller shaft, free of any moorings, smashed around the engine room, impacting the steam turbine a few feet to port, knocking it off its supports and separating the steam pipes from their welded flanges that mated them to the reactor room. High pressure steam at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit shot into the flooding compartment. Those who had survived the initial venting of the hull were burned to death without as much as a spark of flame.

One compartment forward, in the reactor room, automatic controls registered the event and began to SCRAM — or rapidly shut down — the nuclear pile, but radiation was not what was to doom the Pennsylvania. The emptied steam pipes that fed the turbines one compartment back quickly overheated. Though they did not enter the reactor vessel, they passed side by side through the heat exchanger with the pipes that transferred the high-temperature coolant from the reactor. When the empty turbine pipes were doused with the ice-cold seawater flooding the reactor room, a vast quantity of steam was instantly generated, more than the confined space could handle. What engineers called an explosive overpressure event occurred. This ripped through the aft part of the sub, buckling the hull more than it already was and punching bulkheads fore and aft. The resultant overpressure blew watertight doors all the way forward through the control room just as the captain ordered the emergency buoy released.

The command was never carried out. A tremendous pop shook everyone in the forward section of the sub, then a strange white wall of fluid poured through the doors facing aft and slammed into every living thing. Men were thrown forward as the water raced toward the nose of the sub.

The entire process, from catastrophic failure to destruction, had taken under ten seconds. The Pennsylvania continued on course another two hundred yards before the weight of the water filling her hull overcame her momentum and stopped the big sub. As most of her weight was closer to the stern, she slid backward and down at an angle that grew ever steeper. She impacted the sea floor at a depth of 15,030 feet, her stern pointed almost straight down. Traveling at forty knots, the mass of the Pennsylvania drove the crumpled hull into the soft ocean bottom and collapsed the sub, bow upon stem, like an accordion.

With that, the USS Pennsylvania had disappeared into the watery depths of the Atlantic for the last time, and the United States of America, which had counted itself lucky for more than three decades, had lost its first fleet ballistic-missile submarine in an accident at sea.