Air Battle Force

know I will die before I fail to support them, and I know they will die to support me. That is all you need to remember. I’ll have that execution order on your desk in ten minutes. It had better be back on my desk in twenty minutes, or the next target for my bombers will be the Kremlin!”

Valentin Sen’kov replaced the phone on its cradle. His foreign minister, Ivan Filippov, stared at him in complete amazement. “Was that General Gryzlov shouting on the phone?” he asked. “I could hear it all the way from here!”

“The commandos he sent to Turkmenistan—”

“The ones he sent in to sneak into Mary and reconnoiter the Taliban positions — I remember,” Filippov said. “What about them? Were they successful?” He looked at Sen’kov’s horrified, incredulous expression. “Some of them get hurt?”

“All of them… got dead,” Sen’kov breathed.

“What?” Filippov cried, rising to his feet. “All of them? How many…?”

“Three hundred.”

Filippov was too stunned to speak.

“Gryzlov is shutting down the airspace over Turkmenistan, and he’s going to send in a large bomber force,” Sen’kov went on. “You need to contact the American foreign ministry and the White House right away, notify them what happened, and tell them that for our protection we are imposing a blockade of Turkmen airspace.”

“Sir, we didn’t discuss doing that — not even as a contingency,” Filippov said. “Besides, we can’t legally just close off another country’s airspace. My advice would be to let a bunch of journalists in to see what those Taliban raiders did. Then the world might be more on our side when we’re ready to strike.”

“General Gryzlov is sending over an execution order for me to sign right now,” Sen’kov said. “He’s already issued a warning order to his bomber forces.”

“Well, fuck him until you decide what you want to do first,” Filippov said. “He’s not the—” Filippov stopped and looked at Sen’kov with a perplexed expression that quickly turned to shock. “Wait a minute… Gryzlov was yelling at you on the phone just now? He was telling you what he was going to do, and he ordered you to comply?”

“He threatened me,” Sen’kov said.

Filippov had never seen the president so scared before — in fact, he thought he’d never seen anyone so scared before, even Zhurbenko just before they hauled him away to prison.

“He threatened to kill me, blow up the Kremlin — and he’s serious, Ivan. He’s not crazy — he’s dead serious.”

“He needs to be arrested — no, he needs to be disposed of!” Filippov cried. “Threatening the president of the federation, threatening the lives of government officials — who in hell does he think he is?”

“Who’s going to dispose of him, Ivan? You? Me? He’s threatened to turn every uniformed man and woman against me. And after what happened in the Balkans, I don’t think the Duma or the bureaucrats will stand in his way.”

“Don’t let him bullshit you, sir,” Filippov said. “The MVD Interior Troops and the OMON special-assignments command forces assigned to protect you are not under his command — they’re part of the Interior Ministry.”

“That’s… what? A few thousand troops? Maybe ten thousand? He controls over a million battle-ready troops.”

“He doesn’t command them — he runs the general staff,” Filippov said. “He can’t get on the radio or TV tomorrow and order all those troops to do what he…”

But Filippov’s voice trailed off, and Sen’kov immediately knew why. They both knew that General Anatoliy Gryzlov might just be popular enough to do exactly that: get on TV and the nationwide radio system, address the Russian people, order a coup, and roll his tanks into Red Square to take over the government.

Tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.

“What are you going to do?” Filippov breathed.

“We’re going to do exactly what he told us to do,” Sen’kov said nervously. “We are going to get Gurizev to immediately rescind his invitation for the Americans to visit Ashkhabad, and we’re going to announce an air cordon of Turkmenistan. And then we’re going to let Gryzlov pound the hell out of those Taliban.” Sen’kov thought for a moment, then added, “And we are going to use every opportunity, quietly and publicly, to distance ourselves from this military action.”

“But you’ve got to sign the execution order.”

“I said I would sign it, but Gryzlov said he was going to deploy his troops immediately and attack as soon as they were in place,” Sen’kov said. “I think we could arrange for Gryzlov’s office to think I signed the order….”

“So if the attacks work, you can show you signed on to the plan,” Filippov said. “And if it doesn’t work…”

“I’ll show I didn’t sign the order, which makes Gryzlov look even more like a berserker than he already is.”

“But if Gryzlov finds out that you double-crossed him?”

“We’ll just have to be sure that he’s taken care of before that happens,” Valentin Sen’kov said. “We’ll start building a ‘watch file’ on Gryzlov with the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Bureau.” The Federal Security Bureau was the new name of the old Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnoti, or KGB, the main foreign-and internal-security and intelligence agency in Russia, whose commander reported directly to the president. “I’ll need a copy and transcript of his tirade on the phone to me. That’ll show the world that the man’s insane. Then I won’t be accused of murder — I’ll be praised for ridding the world of yet another mad dog.”

OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

A short time later

Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Isadora Meiling stepped quietly past the sleeping berths occupied by former president Kevin Martindale. Oh, God, she thought. All she could think about was sneaking in there and giving him a kiss — or maybe something more. What was it about that guy anyway? His supernatural silver locks? The tight ass? Or the sheer power that seemed to ooze from every pore of his body?

She knocked twice on a locked door, swiped her passkey on the lock, and went inside to the private cabin in the rear of the Air Force C-32A transport, a modified VIP version of the commercial Boeing 757 airliner. The private VIP cabin had a walkway on the port side of the aircraft, making room for two soundproof sleeping quarters on the starboard side. The cabin then opened up into the main working area. There was a large semicircular desk, a small eight-person conference area in front of the desk with a table and laptop computer hookups, another desk on the starboard side, and electronic and office equipment in glass-enclosed soundproof racks. Two aides were working away at their computers; behind them Deputy Secretary of State Maureen Hershel was also busy typing on her laptop.

She looked up and noticed the worried look on Meiling’s face. “What do you have, Izzy?” she asked.

Meiling glanced around to see who else might be in the room.

“Martindale is finally taking a nap. I’ve never seen people use the phone as much as he and his staff do — he probably had every transponder channel on every satellite in earth orbit tied up. So what do you have?”

“The latest from Turkmenistan,” Meiling replied. She placed a folder on Hershel’s desk. “Late yesterday some Turkmen and Russian military forces attacked those Taliban insurgents.”

“What was the outcome?” Hershel asked, opening the folder and studying the maps. “Anything left of the Taliban?”

“The Turkmen units and their Russian officer corps got slaughtered,” Meiling said.

Hershel’s jaw dropped in surprise.

“Sixty percent casualties in less than half a day. The Taliban insurgents are firmly in control of the city of Mary and the TransCal Petroleum lines.”

“Oh, shit,” Maureen said. “Well, that’s what General McLanahan predicted all along. We can expect the rest of his predictions to come true, too — including the Russians’ counterattack. Anything else?”

“The Russians’ counterattack, ma’am.” She dropped another folder on Hershel’s desk. “Shortly after the battle outside Mary, the Russians tried to insert about three hundred commandos northeast of the city.”