The Moscow Offensive

Thirty-Five

Suppressing a massive yawn, national security adviser Edward Rauch rubbed hard at his tired eyes. He’d already been up for more than twenty-four hours — ever since the incredible reports that someone had just blown up a private airport in Utah first hit his desk. One of the many downsides of Barbeau’s refusal to delegate her power was the workload she placed on the shoulders of the handful of subordinates she did trust.

Rauch took a sip of the coffee some enlisted man had brought him… when? Hours ago, by the stale, cold taste. Grimacing, he shoved the mostly empty paper cup into his wastebasket. Didn’t the Air Force give its combat pilots and bomber crews stimulants? He vaguely remembered reading an article about something called modafinil. It was supposed to be nonaddictive and incredibly effective. Maybe he should see if the bunker medical staff could find some of the pills for him.

“Jesus, you look like hell, Ed,” Stacy Anne Barbeau said with some relish, barging into his tiny office without knocking. Luke Cohen tagged along behind her. From the dark shadows under his eyes to the way his shoulders sagged, the White House chief of staff didn’t appear to be in much better shape than Rauch was.

Of the three of them, only the president seemed reasonably awake and rested — though she was unnaturally bright-eyed, with a brittle, false smile plastered across her once-attractive face. Ever since she’d learned that Patrick McLanahan was still alive, Barbeau had been teetering on the edge of panic.

She took the chair across from Rauch. “Well?” she demanded. “Brief me. What the hell happened at this Podunk airport out in the middle of nowhere?” Her lips twisted into an even uglier, phonier smile. “I’m guessing this wasn’t some weird Mormon missionary send-off gone wrong.”

“No, ma’am,” Rauch said shortly. “Based on reports from Air Force specialists, there’s no doubt that it was the operating base for those cruise-missile attacks against both Barksdale and San Diego. They’ve already identified dozens of Kh-35 missiles in the wreckage.” He shrugged. “There never was a stealth bomber attacking us. We were hit by what looked like an ordinary commercial jet flying right out in the open.”

Barbeau scowled, clearly unhappy with his dismissive tone. She’d invested considerable time and presidential clout in badgering the Air Force and Navy to deploy their limited numbers of air surveillance aircraft to spot a Scion-piloted stealth plane. “So who was flying that plane, Doctor?” she snapped. “And manning this secret base?”

“We don’t know,” he admitted. “Not yet.”

“Well, why the hell not?” she growled. “I’ve seen the pictures. There are dead bodies scattered all over that damned place. Don’t any of your freaking specialists know how to run a few fingerprints through the FBI database?”

To his surprise, Rauch discovered that he was able to ignore her jab. “Many of the corpses were very badly burned,” he said evenly. “But the site investigation team has been able to run fingerprint checks against a number of federal databases, including the Pentagon and the FBI.”

“And?”

“Well, there’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night, Madam President.”

Barbeau glowered at him. “Spare me the fucking Sherlock Holmes references, Ed,” she said tiredly.

“So far, we haven’t been able to identify any of the bodies,” he explained. “Which is not what I would have expected… if this really was a Scion or Iron Wolf Squadron operation.”

The president’s jaw tightened. “How so?”

“Most of the men and women working for Scion and Iron Wolf are prior-service U.S. military and intelligence agency personnel,” he explained. “Which means their biometric data is on file with the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. So we should have been able to put names to some of those corpses. But whoever these men were, their records aren’t in any of our databases.”

Barbeau nodded grimly. “Well, that makes it obvious. McLanahan must have recruited his own hired guns for this operation. Probably a bunch of right-wing Ukrainian neo-Nazis. And maybe a few Polish ex-special-forces troops and pilots he managed to brainwash.”

Rauch stared at her. “McLanahan?”

“Who else?” she demanded. “Don’t you get it, Ed? That was Patrick McLanahan’s air base.”

Carefully, he asked, “If that was the general’s base, then who destroyed it?”

Barbeau laughed harshly. “That playboy prick Martindale and his Polish piggybank, Piotr Wilk. They know McLanahan and his fanatics are out of control,” she went on. Her voice shook slightly. “By now, Wilk and Martindale must be going frantic trying to stop that lunatic’s crusade for revenge against me before it’s too late.” Beneath her makeup, her face turned pale. “Christ, don’t you get it? These assholes are fighting a civil war against each other… and they’re doing it on our soil, with no concern about who gets killed in the cross fire!”

Rauch forced himself to consider her theory — as wild as it sounded. It did match up with some of the few facts they possessed. Special forces teams dispatched to Moab had found tracks of one of the lethal combat robots in and around the wrecked airport. That strongly suggested the attack had been an Iron Wolf and Scion operation. Unless, of course, the Russians really did have their own war robots after all, as Poland claimed? But he’d tried approaching the Poles through various diplomatic and military back channels… hoping to see their evidence — only to learn that they didn’t have anything solid yet. “Proving any of this may come down to figuring out who really owns Regan Air Freight, Madam President,” he said cautiously.

“What does Murchison say?” Barbeau snapped. Sara Murchison was the former federal prosecutor who headed the FBI. Like Rauch, she was one of those the president viewed as reasonably competent.

“Director Murchison has had agents all over the company’s Indianapolis headquarters ever since we identified that burned-out cargo jet,” Rauch told her. “From their first reports, Regan Air’s management appears as much in the dark about this as we are. Apparently, that converted 737 belonged to the company’s new owners.”

Barbeau pounced. “New owners?”

He nodded. “The founder sold out to some kind of international consortium a few months ago… right before he disappeared. The CIA and the NSA are digging into this syndicate now — trying to sniff out who’s behind the money. Plus, the CIA and the FBI have agents on the way to Zurich to investigate a Swiss investment banker, a man named Willem Daeniker, who seems to have pulled the whole deal together.”

“It’s Martindale,” Barbeau said decisively. “He’s behind this guy Daeniker, mark my words. This is his MO, for God’s sake. He runs his illegal ops through a network of shell companies and dummy corporations. Well, now that penchant for secrecy and double-dealing has come around to bite him in the ass. McLanahan got his fingers into the Regan Air pie and he’s been using the company and its resources for his own whacked-out ends.”

Luke Cohen stirred in his chair. “How much of this can I tell the press, on background?” he asked.

“Not a damn thing!” Barbeau snapped at her chief of staff. “Do you think I want Joe Q. Public to know that all of this death and destruction is part of a madman’s revenge plot aimed at me personally? How the hell is that supposed to help my reelection campaign?”

Sheepishly, Cohen shrugged in a wordless apology. “There’s already all kinds of wild speculation about what happened in Utah,” he pointed out. “If we don’t get out in front of the story somehow, we’re going to look really bad.”

Rauch gazed at him, scarcely able to conceal the contempt he felt. The United States was under continuing attack… and the White House chief of staff’s first concern was how events might affect his boss’s poll numbers? Then again, he decided, seeing the anxiety on Barbeau’s face, Cohen was only reflecting her own deepest priorities — which were her personal safety and her continued hold on political power… and in that very definite order.

“Okay, Luke,” she said finally, “On the record, you deny all the rumors. If any question cuts a little close to the truth, you fall back on the old ‘I cannot comment on ongoing intelligence or military operations’ drill, right?”

Cohen nodded sagely. “And off the record?”

“Off the record, you find some of our go-to people, say from the Times or the Post or the cable news networks,” Barbeau continued. “And then you do a little tap dance for them. Talk about how there’s no possible way you could ever confirm the rumors that a top-secret U.S. Special Operations Force attacked and destroyed some of the ‘terrorists’ at this Moab facility. Get it?”

Cohen nodded. “Nice.”

Barbeau allowed a small smile to cross her lips. “Push any line that feeds the narrative showing me as a tough, active commander in chief tracking down America’s enemies.” Her smile turned feral. “Especially while that macho jackass, J. D. Farrell, is off playing cowboy at his luxury Texas ranch.”

Rauch felt anger bubbling up inside. He understood the ways in which raw power politics drove the president a lot better now than he had when he first joined her administration. But it was an ugly process. And it was getting uglier by the hour. “Maybe we ought to focus more on our real plans to handle this crisis,” he suggested quietly. “As opposed to Mr. Cohen’s schemes to send the media haring off in the wrong direction.”

Barbeau eyed him curiously. “What new plans do you suppose we need, Dr. Rauch? Now that we know what this is really all about — my death or defeat in November — my course of action is obvious. I’m going to stay here and wait for Martindale to finish off his lunatic protégé.” She shrugged. “After all, he has the inside knowledge and the high-tech war machines needed to do the job. Whereas we quite clearly do not.”

“Assuming former president Martindale succeeds, what then?” Rauch asked, hardly able to believe the depth of cynicism and pure self-interest he was hearing. Even if the president’s theory was correct, thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians were dying… killed in what she perceived as a fratricidal struggle between rival groups of Scion and Iron Wolf mercenaries. A commander in chief should have the best interests of the country in mind. Hiding underground and doing nothing while good people were killed should be unthinkable. But it seemed the president could think only of herself.

Barbeau smiled more genuinely this time. “As soon as Patrick McLanahan is dead, really dead this time, we’ll go to the Poles with what we know and give them a choice: Cough up Martindale and his Iron Wolf thugs… or face the full force of an enraged American people demanding revenge. Piotr Wilk may be stubborn, but he’s not suicidal. If it comes down to a choice between his country’s continued survival and the lives and freedom of a few hired killers, he’ll make the smart call.”

An hour later, Rauch passed through a pair of guarded doors at the Strategic Command Bunker’s surface level. Acting far more casual than he felt inside, he strolled across a parking lot toward the neighboring golf course. He blinked back tears against the harsh glare of the sun. The air smelled fresh, free of the faint, acrid traces of chemicals that always seemed to linger in the bunker’s recirculated atmosphere. He was nerving himself up to act on the resolution he’d made earlier.

Morally, there was no real choice at all, Rauch knew. From a career perspective, what he contemplated was suicide. But doing nothing would make him no better than Cohen or the president herself. Sighing, he took out his personal smartphone and entered a number. Obtaining it had required pulling strings with a lot of old think-tank colleagues and former friends.

His finger hovered indecisively over the icon that would initiate a call. Once he pushed that icon, there really was no going back. He’d been forced to leave a trail a mile wide to get to this point. There would be no way to dodge Barbeau’s fury if this leaked out.

Closing his eyes, Rauch tapped the call icon and brought the phone to his ear. It rang twice and then a deep, resonant voice, familiar from a hundred press conferences and speeches answered. “Yes? Who is this?”

“Governor Farrell, my name is Edward Rauch and I’m President Barbeau’s national security adviser,” he said simply. “The reason I’m calling is that we’ve learned certain things that I believe you need to know about—”