Out of the Ashes Read online

  The men in the room, to a man, sucked in their guts. One hundred and twenty hours to hell.

  “I should have gone to the president when my intelligence people first stumbled onto this . . . treason!” General Saunders said.

  The Air Force colonel laughed. He lit a cigarette. His last one. “Well, General, I’ll salve your conscience a bit. It wouldn’t have made any difference. You couldn’t have stopped us. You didn’t really know what was going down until today. You couldn’t have gone to the Chinese to tell them the Russians were going to launch against them. No proof. Big international stink would be all you could have accomplished. Same if you’d gone to the Russians. It all boils down to this: an American sub will launch the missiles—American missiles. Both countries would have turned on you. And . . . I think most of you know what type of missiles we’re going to fire. Missiles so top secret not even the President knew of their existence. You clever boys got too clever, that’s all. We used your cleverness against you.”

  “What type of missiles are you using?” a master chief asked.

  “Supersnoop missiles,” Admiral Mullens answered the question. “Thunder-strikes. We started building them on the QT when we realized SALT 5 was becoming a reality. Yes, the Russians knew we were going to build them—before SALT was signed. That’s the main reason Russia agreed to SALT 5.”

  “The president and/or congress know of them?” he was asked.

  “No,” he said tersely.

  “The lid is being slowly nailed on our coffins,” a Navy officer said. He looked at the Air Force colonel. “What about him?”

  General Crowe jacked back the hammer on the .38 and shot the colonel between the eyes, knocking him backward, out of the chair.

  “Good shot, Turner,” General Driskill observed.

  THREE

  Saturday—five days to launch

  General C. H. Travee, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat quietly in his office. He sat for a long, speculative time, drumming his fingertips on the polished wood of the desk top.

  Too many rumors being whispered in this city. Entirely too many to ignore. Whispered rumors of a power play. Among the military? Too incredible to believe. Still . . .

  Travee had tried to reach his old friend, Vern Saunders, just that morning—couple of hours ago, after Vern failed to show for their regular Saturday morning golf game. Travee had tried to track down his friend, but had hit a stone wall in every direction he turned.

  Odd.

  Then he heard rumors that General Crowe was seen climbing into the cockpit of a fighter and taking off for parts unknown. Odd. Crowe was entirely too old to go roaring off into the wild blue yonder like a young buck, cutting didos in the sky.

  And General Driskill always worked in his office for a couple of hours on Saturday mornings. But not this Saturday morning.

  Travee punched a button on his desk.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Get me Major Bass from ASA. Tell him I want him in my office in thirty minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Army Security Agency major was standing in front of the general’s desk in exactly twenty-nine minutes. There were questions in his calm eyes.

  “What’s going on, Major?”

  “Sir?”

  “Come on, Major—you’re in the know. You’ve heard the whispers all over the town. Now you tell me.”

  “I ... don’t know, sir. We can’t even pinpoint who gave those low-alert orders.”

  “But yet it came from the Joint Chiefs?”

  “Yes, sir. Sir? We think it was an aide. But the one we have in mind has . . . disappeared.”

  “I won’t ask you who you suspect. Just this: why would he do such a damned fool thing?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Travee nodded, then said, “I want you to do me a personal favor, Major. Find out where Gen. Vern Saunders was this morning. Pronto. And report your findings only to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sunday—four days to launch

  President Fayers looked out the window of his office, wondering why any man would want the thankless job of President of the United States.

  “It’s such a lousy job,” he said to his chief aide and good friend. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The massive responsibility for running a country this size should not be dumped onto the shoulders of one man. It’s too much.”

  “Yes, sir,” the aide agreed, not really knowing what his boss was talking about. The president hadn’t been himself lately. He’d been depressed, complaining of sleeplessness, and the aide was worried the press would discover it and blab it all over the nation. Not that it was any of their goddamned business. No—the president is supposed to be perfect. Can’t ever be sick in private. Can’t be a human being. No, the president has to be superman.

  “Ed,” the aide said, “are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course I am. No, I’m not. Hell, I don’t know. I’m getting old, that’s what.” He sighed heavily. “What is on the agenda for this afternoon?”

  “The meeting with the analytical and statistical chief of the CIA’s overseas intelligence operation.”

  “Hal Brady, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Titles. Everybody has to have a title,” Fayers muttered. “When is the meeting?”

  “Right now.”

  “Send him in.”

  Harold Brady limped into the oval office, carrying a thick briefcase jammed with papers. His limp was the result of his days with the old OSS during World War II; a leg broken during a jump into France and never properly set.

  Brady glanced at the aide. “In private,” he said shortly, as was his manner. Abusive-sounding until one got to know the man.

  The aide left the room.

  “You look exhausted, Mr. President,” Brady said. “I thank you for seeing me on Sunday afternoon. I know you like to rest on this day. Are you feeling well, sir?”

  “As well as could be expected,” Fayers replied, pouring them coffee. “Hilton Logan is privately saying he is unbeatable; he is our next president. God help us all, for he’s probably correct. The unions are bitching and striking—as usual. Every minority group in this nation is complaining—loudly—that I am discriminating against them . . . and my wife has had a headache for three weeks. At night. Calls me a horny old goat.” President Fayers smiled. “And you think you’ve got troubles.”

  Brady laughed along with his boss. “Well, sir, at least you’ve managed to keep your sense of humor.”

  “Only by straining, Hal. And by keeping in mind that in a few months I will be out of this office. Now then, what glad tidings have you to offer?” He lifted his coffee cup to his lips.

  “I believe certain factions within the U.S. are preparing to start a war between Russia and China.”

  Fayers dropped cup and saucer to the carpet. “That’s a rotten joke, Hal!” He knelt to pick up the broken bits of china ware.

  “It isn’t a joke,” the CIA man said, opening his briefcase, spreading papers on the president’s desk. “You’d better sit down, sir.”

  Behind his desk, his face ashen and suddenly shiny with sweat, Fayers asked, “When is ... all this supposed to occur?”

  Brady shrugged. “I don’t really know, but I would guess within a week. Maybe less. I just put together the remaining bits and pieces of evidence and supposition this morning.”

  “Do you want the secretary in on this?”

  “Not just yet. You listen first, sir.”

  A half-hour later, President Fayers told his aide, “I don’t want to be disturbed the rest of the evening. I’m going to Camp David to rest and to spend the night. That’s all anybody needs to know.”

  Sunday evening—Camp David

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. President,” General Travee said, after recovering from his initial shock, “but I ... just can’t believe it.”

  “You’d better believe it, C.H.,” Brady said. “I’ve been working o
n this for months. In total secrecy. I just didn’t know who I could trust—not even you. But when the computers turned out this new evidence, I ... had to come to the President.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me before this, Hal?” Fayers asked.

  “Because . . . I believe your staff—a few of them—are part of this. I don’t know which ones. And the secret service; there again, I don’t know which ones.”

  The secretary of state, Rees, had flown to Camp David with Fayers. The Joint Chiefs had joined them an hour later, arriving by car. Barry Ringold, director of the FBI had driven in, followed by Kelly of the CIA and Hal Brady.

  “I resent the fact you did not come to me with this information, Brady,” Kelly said.

  “There, again, sir,” Brady replied. “Who to trust?”

  The two men glared at each other. But Kelly dropped his gaze after only a few seconds. Kelly was a political appointee; Brady was a career snoop with a lifetime spent in the shadows. Kelly was just a bit afraid of the man.

  “Now, let me get this straight,” Ringold said. “You want us to believe there are some five to six thousand rebels—organized and trained and armed—in the U.S., ready to move against the government?”

  “That is correct,” Brady said.

  “They will be working with certain breakaway units of the armed forces?”

  “That, too, is correct, sir—as far as it goes. But please bear in mind that many of those units—if not all of them—are not traitorous; they have been misinformed. They do not know the full scope of the story. Only bits and pieces. That is my theory.”

  Ringold nodded. “All right. Now, Bull Dean and Colonel Adams are both alive and well, working with the rebels and the maverick units of the military? Goddamn it, Harold! Dean and Adams are buried out there in Arlington. What kind of fairy tale is this? What have you been smoking?”

  Brady flushed, opening his mouth to tell the FBI director to go fuck himself, then thought better of it.

  Ringold said, “And China is going to declare war on Russia . . . you say. But you haven’t, as yet, explained how or why that is going to occur.”

  His composure restored, temper in check, Brady said, “May I do so at this time?”

  “Please do, sir,” Ringold replied, with greatly exaggerated courtesy.

  The two men did not like each other, had never liked each other, and would never, in the time left to them, like each other.

  Brady looked at each man in the room before he replied, “Because I believe agents, posing as Red agents, will assassinate the Chinese premier and every member of his party when they visit the town of Fuchin next week.”

  “And you believe that will prompt a nuclear war between the two countries?” Kelly asked.

  “That will be the start of it. Yes. A missile will then be fired from a submarine lying just off the coast of Russia.” He limped to a huge wall map of the world and thumped a spot. “From right here. The sub will fire its missile, or missiles, probably, from just off the coast of Zapovednyy. I have reason to believe there will be more than one missile, single or multiple-warhead type. I also believe the cities of Harbin, Mutanchiang, and Haokang will be destroyed.”

  “Why would Russia want to launch a nuke attack against China?” Ringold inquired. “Half the world might well be wiped out.”

  “There are many reasons they’d like to,” Brady said. “But just as it will not be Red agents who kill the premier and his party—it will be Americans—it won’t be the Russians who fire the missiles. They will be American missiles fired from an American sub.”

  General Travee had been studying the huge map. He said, “Fired from a Stealth-equipped sub, pulled in so close to the coast it would appear the missiles came from Russian soil.”

  Brady sat down. “Correct.”

  Admiral Divico had been unusually quiet, his eyes studying the map. “We’re in a box,” he said. “We’re in a damned box, unable to do anything about it.”

  “What do you mean, Max?” Secretary Rees asked.

  Ringold looked angrily at the admiral.

  Brady smiled grimly.

  “The small-class experimental sub that supposedly sank last year during a test run,” the admiral said.

  “What about it?” the president asked. “That was one of our best-kept secrets. All civilian personnel on board. High-paid volunteers with no family, picked by ...” he paused. “Who did pick that crew?”

  “We did,” Kelly said glumly.

  “Several members of the agency who,” Brady said, “have quietly and mysteriously left the city over the past thirty-six hours. No answer at their homes.”

  “That doesn’t answer my original question,” Fayers said.

  The admiral locked eyes with Brady. “I believe Mr. Brady is about to tell us that sub didn’t sink.”

  “That is correct, Admiral. It was spotted last month by one of our operatives. He couldn’t be one hundred percent certain; but certain enough to report it to me. I had had strong suspicions about it all along. The agent was killed just hours after making that report. The sub was taking on supplies, from a ship belonging to—quote/unquote—a friendly nation.”

  “Goddamn it!” Ringold said. “What small-class experimental sub?”

  “It was top secret,” the admiral said. “Very few people knew anything about it.”

  “Well ... thanks just a whole hell of a lot!” Ringold blurted.

  The admiral shrugged his total indifference as to what Ringold thought. “You didn’t have a need to know.” The admiral then added, “Shit!” Then he put together a string of expletives that made the Watergate tapes sound like children’s nursery rhymes.

  “Where in the hell could a sub hide for this long?” Ringold asked.

  “This sub could hide anywhere it wanted to hide,” Travee said. “It’s invisible. Sonar can’t detect it. But God, it was expensive to build. Greatest weapon invented in the past fifty years. Came along much faster than its airborne counterpart. For all the good it’s going to do us.”

  “All right,” Secretary Rees said. “Do we or don’t we notify the Russians and the Chinese? Do we tell them what we know—what we suspect? Take a chance?”

  “What do we know we can prove?” General Dowling of the Marine Corps asked.

  “We have nothing we can prove,” Brady said. “No hard evidence to present to them. And,” he said softly, “do we have the time? The Chinese—and this is my personal opinion—would, I think, behave in a decent manner. The Russians I wouldn’t trust as far as I could spit. Their minds would work this way: the sub is American; the missiles are American; the crew is American—the fault is ours. They’d drag us right into a war. We don’t know where the sub is; we can’t stop it. No,”—he sighed—“I think we have to chance this and hope we take minimum casualties. And the American people must not learn of this. The instant we assume a public defensive posture, the sub will fire its missiles. The American people won’t have time to do anything. Besides, we don’t know how many missiles will make it through our screens.”

  “That’s a damned cold-blooded attitude!” Ringold said.

  “But a necessary one.” Brady defended his statements. “Better the people are surprised—if it comes to that—than have several days of pure panic. And”—he held up a finger—“the Russians have a very good civil defense system: bunkers, food, water. The U.S. has shit for CD. Let the Russians get the message the same time our people receive it. More dead Russians and less U.S. casualties.”

  “I’ll go along with that,” Divico said. The other members of the Joint Chiefs nodded in agreement.

  “Let me say this,” Fayers said. “Mr. Brady believes the launch will be made within a week. All right, we’ll stay with that hypothesis. We don’t know where the sub is, but we’ll assume it’s in position to fire. Now, according to Ringold, his bureau has never heard of the rebels. Fine. As far as I’m concerned the rebels—if they exist—are of little concern at this moment. I’m not sure how we would go
about breaking up a group we didn’t know existed—again, if they do—until a couple of hours ago. We don’t know what military units are involved in this, or where they are located. We don’t know what commanders we can trust. For that matter, I don’t know if I can trust any of my staff, and you don’t know if you can trust me. I don’t know if I can trust any of you!”

  Fayers’ gaze swept each man. Words of protestation formed on each tongue, then died before being sounded, each man knowing there was nothing he could do to convince the others of his innocence.

  Fayers continued. “So we have to assume we can trust each other. That is the only way we can possibly deal with this. ”

  “How is the sub armed?” Ringold asked, feeling a bit less left out.

  The admiral sighed, cutting his eyes to General Travee. “With Thunder-strikes,” he said.

  “Oh, hell!” Hyde of the Air Force and Dowling of the Marine Corps spoke in unison.

  “What is a Thunder-strike?” Ringold asked. The feeling of being left out once more struck him.

  “Yes.” The President leaned forward. “I’d like to know that myself. I’ve never heard of anything called Thunder-strike.” He glanced at each of the Joint Chiefs.

  General Hyde said, “The . . . ah ... president before you . . . ah ... authorized them, sir. Before our tenure on the Joint Chiefs, I might add,” he said, a bit defensively. “The code name is ‘Supersnoop.’ It is not a large missile, but it is very powerful . . . and practically unstoppable. Like the sub, it’s Stealth-coated. No one will pick them up until it’s too late. Hugs the ground.”

  “How very interesting,” President Fayers said dryly. “How very informative. I can but assume construction continued even after the latest SALT was signed?”

  Divico cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  “And they are not included in the breakdown of our nuclear arsenal?”

  “That is correct, sir,” Divico admitted.

  “Well, isn’t that marvelous?” the president said. “That sure as hell lets out telling the Russians anything, doesn’t it, gentlemen?”