Station Breaker

49 Rally

Tyler is standing to the side of a grilled cheese truck in the parking lot of the University of Texas at Austin stadium. Board shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses, he blends right in with all the alumni at the rally. What strikes me is how much he resembles his father. I already knew this, having met him before, but the likeness is all the more painful because his dad is now dead.

He waves me over to a standing table under the shade of a tree.

"If we have to run, go in different directions," he says under his breath. A police officer walks through the crowd. "That's campus police. Remember the uniform. If you see something different, we quietly go our own separate ways."

"Tyler…" I don't know where to begin.

He shakes his head. "Drop it. There's more important stuff to deal with right now."

More important than the death of his father?

"I don't want to know if you have the square. Just tell me that it's safe."

I just nod my head. I placed it under the spare tire next to a can of mace. It was the best I could think of.

He cautiously looks around. "Okay, I'm going to give you as much of the story as I can, so you understand what's at stake. Got it?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Okay. Right. I'm on an intelligence committee in the senate. It's not the senate intelligence one, but another more obscure committee. The reason it exists is because there are so many leaks in the regular senate intelligence committee that the major agencies asked for some other group to take things they didn't want leaked to congressional staffers and all the way back to Moscow and Beijing.

"You'd be amazed at how idiotic some of the people I work with in the senate are. We had a senior senator giving all of her intelligence briefings to a Chinese foreign exchange student to blow up on a photocopier because she couldn't read the small print. This exchange student's father is a party boss.

"When we confronted the senator about the breach she insisted that her assistant would never actually read the briefings because quote, 'Her people were honor bound to never do something like that.' Stupid things like that happen all the time.

"Anyway. A year ago we get a briefing about a possible mole in the intelligence community. A highly placed one. This comes to us from the NRO, you know them, right? Of course. They're concerned that the DIA and possibly another organization has been compromised."

"I just had a run in with the DIA."

"Really?" Tyler's eyes widen. "And you got away?"

"Barely."

"I need to know more, but hold on to that. So I get this briefing that says there's a Russian agent in the DIA, possibly working with others. Two days later I get a briefing from the DIA telling us that they think the NRO is compromised. Both of them are asking for authority to arrest a senior intelligence official codenamed Silverback.

"Here I am, I've got two agencies pitted against each other, swearing the other has a leak and wanting permission to investigate the other. Imagine that headache."

"Is that what this is about?" I ask, trying to follow along.

"Indirectly. That's what my world looked like before an analyst from the NRO shows up in my office in DC, too afraid to go to his boss, because he's not sure who to trust.

"His job was to monitor Russian satellites for transmissions. One day he's listening to the K1 and realizes they left an onboard intercom open that was leaking part of their communications. Short-range, but we've got some very good tricks for picking that kind of thing up we modified from Naval Intelligence."

"You bounce a laser off the surface and pick the voices out of the vibrations…" I reply.

"Uh, yeah? How did you know?"

"A friend in college worked on that for her masters. Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you."

"It's okay… Anyway, this NRO analyst shows me the transcript of what's being said. Long story short, the senior commanders of the space station were having a secret conversation away from the other crew about a special payload being sent to them from Roscosmos."

"What is it?"

"That's the million-dollar question. The square is the answer. We know what we think it is, but we aren't positive. The analyst was concerned because if he was right and Silverback was real, this would have huge repercussions. The moment word leaked about it, we'd be in a worst case scenario."

"And what's that?"

"Right now there's a power struggle in Moscow. If the current president gets reelected he's going to consolidate his power and remove any opposition. His biggest nemesis is Valentin Zhirov."

"Head of the Russian space agency."

"Correct. Do you know what he did before that? He was Colonel General of the Russian Air Force. I got a report about an audit that was done after he left. Five nuclear warheads went missing. The Russians won't even acknowledge this audit took place."

I feel my stomach tightening as everything comes together. "Wait… is that what this is about?"

"Yes. Essentially. I asked Peterson and my father to risk their lives to find out if it was true."

"If there was a nuclear weapon onboard the K1?"

Tyler stops acting casual and stares at me. "Correct. A weapon the Russian government doesn't even know about."

"Why would he put it there?"

"At first we thought it was some kind of bargaining chip, then we started getting scattered intelligence about something called the Black Curtain. Zhirov's plan is to detonate this thing in orbit and let the blame fall on Radin.

"It's not to attack us, although when that goes off, depending on what part of the world it's over, it'll disrupt communications for billions and potentially kill tens of thousands from the aftermath. And bring us to the brink of World War III."

"Wait… what's the square? Vaughn, the DIA guy, said it was some kind of encryption chip."

"That's partly true. That's what the Russians think you stole. It's actually the trigger for the bomb."

"Holy shit." And it's in my rental car right now. "Good thing we got it."

"Yeah. The problem is they're sending up another."