The Seventh Angel

Brenthoven closed the door, and stood alone on the heavy wine-colored carpet.

Something was tugging at his mind, a tiny prickle at the fringes of his subconscious. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but knew that he had missed something. Some little detail that had slipped past his conscious mind without making an impression. He didn’t know what it was, but he had a feeling that it was something important.

He walked the length of the table, stopping behind the chair where he usually sat. At the far end of the room, the projection screen was retracted into its recess in the ceiling. The remote control lay in the middle of the table.

Without knowing why, Brenthoven picked up the remote, and pressed the button that raised and lowered the screen. Electric motors whispered, and the screen descended, hanging at the end of the table like a blank tableau.

He pulled his chair out from the table and sat down, his eyes studying the empty display screen. Something in his mind stirred. He almost had something, flickering just out of sight at the edge of his memory.

What was it? Something he had watched on this screen, maybe?

He pressed another button, calling the hidden projector to life. The default image appeared on the screen: the presidential seal, set against a blue background.

Another series of buttons called up a menu of available presentation files. Admiral Casey’s Sea of Okhotsk brief was at the top of the recent files list. Again without knowing why he did so, Brenthoven called up the CNO’s briefing package.

He paged through the images slowly, studying each in turn. The map of the Sea of Okhotsk. The circle representing the launch point. The photograph of the Russian submarine. The map of the Pacific. The curving lines of the incoming warheads. The converging arcs of the interceptor missiles.

He reached the end of the presentation. Nothing

With a sigh, he dropped the remote on the table. The clatter of plastic against wood seemed to echo in the quiet of the empty room.

He’d been hoping that one of the images might jar something in his memory. But nothing was coming to him.

He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes. Nothing. Damn it.

He’d go back to his office. Maybe it would come to him if he stopped thinking about it so much.

Or maybe there was no ‘it.’ Maybe the ‘it’ was nothing more than wishful thinking. Maybe he wanted so badly to find an answer, that his brain was conjuring phantoms.

He didn’t know. He reached for the remote, and pointed the device toward the screen to shut off the projector.

On the screen, the map of the Sea of Okhotsk was showing. In the northeastern corner was the red circle that represented the submarine’s launch position. The adjoining label showed the latitude and longitude of the circle: 58.29N / 155.20E.

Brenthoven’s finger reached toward the power button. It paused, hovering above the button. He studied the numbers … 58.29N / 155.20E.

Why did they seem familiar? Because he’d seen them during the admiral’s brief?

No, that wasn’t it. Now that he thought about it, they’d seemed familiar then too. He’d seen that same sequence of digits somewhere else, in a different context.

He read them aloud. “Five … eight … two … nine … one … five … five … two … zero …”

Damn it! Where had he seen them before? He almost had it now …

The answer hit him, and he sat up straight in the chair. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for his little leather-bound notebook. His fingers fumbled it, and he nearly dropped it.

He rifled through the pages until he found his notes from a recent intelligence brief. There it was. The same sequence of numbers. Five — eight — two — nine — one — five — five— two — zero.

The unidentified numbers that the Russian courier, Oleg Grigoriev, had given to the DIA agents from his hospital bed in Japan. And that had been the day before Zhukov’s submarine had launched the first missile.

Grigoriev had given them the position for the first missile launch, before the launch had occurred. He’d known ahead of time. He might very well know the rest of the planned launch positions as well.

Up to this point, that bastard, Zhukov, had been five steps ahead of them at every turn. If Grigoriev knew the rest of the launch points, they could get ahead of Zhukov for the first time. They could finally move from defense to offense. They could end this thing.

Brenthoven pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed the White House chief of staff. The instant she picked up the phone, Brenthoven said, “I don’t care what he’s doing. I need to speak to the president. Now.”

CHAPTER 36

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

MONDAY; 04 MARCH

2218 hours (10:18 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Ann Roark stumbled climbing the aluminum stairs to the USS Towers wardroom. She would have fallen if Sheldon hadn’t grabbed the sleeve of her jacket and steadied her.

The young Sailor who had led them here from the flight deck looked back down from the head of the stairs. “These ladders are sort of steep, Ma’am. You’ve got to watch your footing.”

Ann rolled her eyes. Like she needed a teenager to tell her how to walk. And they weren’t ladders; they were stairs. Any idiot could see that. Why did the Navy have to use a different word for everything? Why couldn’t they say floors, and walls, instead of decks, and bulkheads? It was like they went out of their way to make things as complicated as possible.

Ann started climbing again. She was so tired that she had trouble lifting her feet enough to make it up the steep incline of the stairs. And the rolling of the ship wasn’t doing anything to steady her.

Even Sheldon, Mr. Perpetual Happy-face, was showing signs of wear and tear. He didn’t look quite as bad as Ann felt, but the fatigue was visible in his face. They’d been travelling for fifteen or sixteen hours since Narita. First the van ride to the Air Force base, and then three helicopter flights, with stops to refuel the aircraft on two ships along the way. They’d probably crossed a couple of time zones in there somewhere, but Ann’s brain was too tired to do the math.

Her ears still felt numb from a very long day spent listening to the shriek of poorly-insulated aircraft engines. Little creature comforts, like soundproofing, were evidently not a priority to the U.S. military.

It was after ten o’clock, and the lighting in the ship’s hallways had been dimmed from bright white, to soft red. In Navy lingo, it was after Taps. Couldn’t they just call it lights out, like everybody else on the planet?

They reached the top of the stairs, and Sailor Boy led them through a short passageway toward a door that Ann recognized as the entrance to the ship’s wardroom.

She stopped, and lowered her bags to the floor. “Wait a second,” she said. “Can’t you take us to our staterooms first? I’d like to drop off my bags.”

What she really wanted was to get a few hours of sleep. Her brain felt like it was stuffed full of cotton. Did the Navy boneheads really think they could drag her out of bed at three in the morning, jerk her all over the Pacific for sixteen hours, and then put her straight to work?

The young Sailor smiled. “Just leave your bags here in the passageway. I’ll take them down to your