Darpa Alpha

capable Marine Expeditionary Unit, of two thousand men to be dispatched, fight a winter battle, win, and withdraw. “That’s hardly enough time to—”

“Well, that’s all the time they’ve given us, Douglas. It’s nonnegotiable. Moscow wants to clean up its backyard terrorists as much as we do ours. But even with all the goodwill we’ve engendered between us since the end of the Cold War, they’re still very prickly about the whole thing. It’s a political minefield for the guys in the Kremlin. We’re damned lucky they’ll let us in. Thank God for the KGB-CIA joint venture against the nuclear scientists trying to hightail it to Iran. At least that’s set a precedent.”

“Well, do we have any HUMINT on the area?”

“We have several agents out of Harbin. Taiwanese sleepers. CIA has asked them to send out burst intel transmits to the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwanese straits. Our MEU attached to the fleet will be going in from the Yorktown.”

“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard so far.” Freeman’s last SpecOp, into North Korea, had gone in from Yorktown. It was a 45,000-ton Wasp-class LHD-26B landing-helicopter-dock ship, part of the U.S. Marines’ “Gator Navy,” so-called because of the potent amphibian force the marines had proved to be in the victorious but bloody landings from Guadalcanal to Saipan. It was complete with forty-five assorted choppers, several of the hybrid Ospreys, two V/STOL–Vertical or Short Takeoff or Landing planes — Joint Strike Fighters, and three LCACs, which were hovercraft landing craft.

“We have another piece of information,” Eleanor told him. “Our military attache in Berlin has received HUMINT from Germany that nanotech high-precision lathes are on the move east. Anyway, the president wanted me to seek your counsel.”

“I don’t know,” mused Freeman. “It’ll be a very tricky operation, any which way you look at it.”

“That’s why,” said Eleanor, “the president wants you to lead it. Will you?”

The moment he hung up, Margaret knew. “Surely you didn’t accept it?” she asked. Freeman said nothing. “Oh, Douglas! I’m no politician, but can’t you see what this is?”

“An honor.”

“Honor? It’s — oh, Douglas—”

“I wish you’d stop saying, ‘Oh, Douglas.’ Anybody’d think I’d robbed a goddamn bank!”

But she wouldn’t be deterred. “I’m no military expert, Lord knows, but I can see a trap when it’s staring me in the face. I haven’t spent all my time going to bridal showers with Linda Rushmein.”

“Margaret!” he said sharply. “It’s obvious why I was chosen. I’m the only goddamned general who’s—”

“Don’t use that language, please!”

“I’m the only general,” he said, looking for all the world like Patton uncaged, “who’s had firsthand experience in the taiga, in the U.N. mission I led. I mean, my whole team has firsthand experience of the terrain, and—”

“Douglas, Douglas, do you honestly believe that you were the first choice?”

He said nothing, but the tension could have been cut with a knife.

“It’s a trap, dear, a political trap. Even I can see that. No one who cares about his career would dare volunteer. Can’t you see they’re using you? What do they care? They’re appealing to your ego, Douglas.”

He gave her a long, hard look and turned sharply about, snatching up the TV remote. “It’s a matter of honor. The president asked. The president of the United States of America has asked me to finish the job that I started. He’s obviously got more confidence in me than—” He strode off into the living room to get the latest update.

Margaret sat, or rather slumped, down in her lounge chair. After a long silence, she asked, very carefully, “Does the president have any idea of how many terrorists are in this wretched camp near—”

“Lake Khanka,” he said quietly. “No, no one knows. It could be a small outfit or a big complex. We’ll have to wait for a recon report from HUMINT.”

“From what?”

“People on the ground. In the area. Spies,” he said irritably. “Informers.”

She had her arms folded tightly below her breasts, the normally soft features of her face hardened in her fear for him. She remembered how Catherine used to pray for him every night he was away. “You could be killed.”

“If their base, if those people, get a chance to tool up for hypersonic weaponry, Margaret, a lot of people, including a lot of Americans, are going to get killed.”

To make matters even worse for Margaret, CNN’s Marte Price, in an exclusive from Washington, D.C., was confirming that the die had been cast. As she spoke a retaliatory U.S. force was being readied for an attack on the terrorists’ camp at some as yet undisclosed location overseas. CNN’s Pentagon correspondent reported that the force would most likely be deployed from one of the United States’ carrier battle groups. Such a group would most likely consist of a carrier, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, four destroyers, a replenishment vessel, and two nuclear attack submarines, all in the service of protecting a Wasp-class helo carrier transport carrying 2,100 combat troops of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of a “full-bird” colonel. It was not known, she told her viewers, who would lead the assault, but it was rumored by confidential sources within the administration and the Pentagon that several of the armed services’ highest-ranking field commanders had strenuously objected to any precipitous action, citing the unmitigated disaster that was President Carter’s attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran in a similar “in-out” lightning strike. It seemed that no one who valued their career prospects wanted anything to do with what Marte Price was characterizing as a “high-risk undertaking.”

“Did you hear that?” Margaret asked her husband.

He pretended not to hear. Closing his eyes, he recalled the last known positions of the U.S. Navy’s carrier battle groups, and deduced that unless there had been a radical shift in their combat patrol areas, it would be Admiral Crowley’s Seventh Fleet CBG which would be closest to Lake Khanka. If this were the case, the MEU he was to lead would be that of Colonel Jack Tibbet aboard the Yorktown, one of Admiral Crowley’s twelve-vessels. Scuttlebutt had it that because the navy, as were the other branches of the American armed forces, was dangerously overextended, it might well be that Crowley, who used to be captain of the carrier McCain as well as overall admiral of the fleet, would have to serve as captain of Yorktown as well as admiral of the fleet for the duration of this mission.

“I mean, Douglas,” Margaret pressed him, “aren’t you getting too old for…” It was the worst possible thing she could have said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

For domestic consumption, the Russian president, in his distinctive baritone, vociferously objected to any “interventionist plan” against Russia by the United States or any other country. The truth, however, was that the Russian president’s dire warning, wildly greeted by crowds from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, was strictly pro forma. For the fact was that within the Kremlin from which Putin and his successors had tried to govern following the collapse of the Soviet Union after the Cold War, there was growing alarm at the rash of rebel commanders who, having been suborned by bagmen into becoming rapacious capitalist arms dealers, viewed Moscow as nothing more than an impediment to their rapidly growing fortunes. In this test of wills, there were those in the Kremlin who harbored a hope that the Americans could be used to help redress the imbalance of power in Russia, wresting control away from Moscow and transferring it to powerful regional rebel groups.

Such a group was the triumvirate in Russia’s far east dubbed by Big and Little, two veteran English-speaking rebel officers of the old KGB’s Thirteenth Directorate, as the “ABC,” a cabal of three generals, Mikhail Abramov of the Siberian Sixth Armored Division, Viktor Beria of the Siberian Third Infantry Division, and Sergei Cherkashin of the Siberian Air Defense Arm. FSB, the Russian security service, the new KGB, knew that ABC, jointly financed by Muscovite gangsters and fundamentalist Arab groups in the Middle East in open defiance of Moscow, had concentrated and arrayed their forces around Lake Khanka and were considered to be amongst the best dug in of any of the breakaway rebel units. ABC had been careful to funnel the initial money provided by their backers into securing the best frontline troops available to defend the Lake Khanka perimeter and the railhead in the town of