Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel Read online

  Carlton had made it a practice to arrive a few minutes before scheduled briefings with President Oxley, who was a stickler for punctuality. In those stolen minutes alone with the President, Carlton could make a direct report unheard by the other officials who would soon be sitting around the table.

  Today they would be briefing the President on things that were going to hell fast. The North Koreans were acting up again. China and Japan were in a face-off over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, the name depending on which nation you believed actually owned them. With winter just a few weeks away, the Russians were threatening to cut gas supplies to Europe. A new Islamist group had surfaced in Pakistan, and the Centers for Disease Control had failed to come up with an antidote to the mysterious new viruses spreading across Southeastern Europe.

  But there was something that weighed more heavily on Carlton’s mind. He needed more than ever to have a private moment with Oxley. He had to explain to the President why he had decided to resign from office. He couldn’t wait any longer.…

  10

  President Blake Oxley checked the world clocks arrayed on a wall to his right, then impatiently turned back to Frank Carlton. Oxley recognized the look on Carlton’s face. Crisis. Trouble. Well, what else is new? Although Oxley maintained a cool exterior, his mind operated at an aerobic tempo. He displayed little patience in dealing with slow-talking staff members, however high their rank. And here was Carlton looking as if he didn’t know what to say.

  “What’s going on, Frank? I don’t have much time. Why the private session?”

  “Mr. President, I have some bad news, and I’m afraid that I need to tender my resignation effective immediately.”

  “Jesus, Frank! What now? Pardon my French, but the fucking world’s coming unglued!”

  Oxley was not given to vulgar speech, but the edges of his famed cool personality were starting to fray and unravel. “What can make things any worse?”

  “Mr. President, in the wake of the Snowden scandal and the problems he caused us with our European friends and others, you gave a very specific directive. No more electronic monitoring of foreign leaders. No exceptions.”

  “And I damn well meant it. So?”

  “Well, some of the guys at NSA thought you went too far.”

  “Too far? They’re questioning my decision?” Oxley said with a flare of anger, which until recently, was rarely close to the surface. Lebed had become president of the Russian Federation around the same time that Oxley had begun his second term. Oxley had let it be known that, after tense times with Putin, he wanted a new start with Lebed.

  “Sir, they know that you were trying to strike up a new friendship with Lebed. But they didn’t want—”

  “Not a new friendship, Frank. A new start. I know that Boris Lebed’s looking more like the new Putin. But I don’t want the Cold War to start up again. Well, anyway, what is the new problem?”

  “One of the NSA guys decided to keep on bugging Lebed. We’ve got most of the conversations he’s had in his Kremlin office in the past two months.”

  “I get the picture, Frank,” Oxley said impatiently. “That’s exactly what I wanted stopped.”

  “Yes, sir. But…”

  “Okay. I may have gone too far with that order,” Oxley said. “But that’s my decision to make, not some anonymous Peeping Tom working for us out at NSA. I’m not a leftwing bumpkin, for Christ’s sake! I put a hold on those activities until we can figure whether we’re getting disinformation from Lebed and others. I’m not convinced they’re not feeding us horseshit and we’re thinking it’s filet mignon. I—”

  “Mr. President, I understand,” Carlton said, seeming unaware he was interrupting. “You’re right. You gave me a specific order to shut down NSA’s eavesdropping on heads of state. NSA did obey—except for Lebed. After what happened in Syria, Iraq, and … they thought you should know what … I let it go, thinking maybe they were right given everything that’s going on. I’m responsible, not anybody else. I decided that someone has to be accountable, and it should be me. Maybe everyone will get the message that the ax will come down on them in the future.”

  Carlton paused for an instant. But, before the stunned Oxley could speak, Carlton took a stapled sheaf of papers from his suit coat pocket and lowered his voice. “I was just at NSA. Read the riot act to them. The Lebed intercepts absolutely stopped. But the NSA admits that the shutdown was at the other end.”

  “The Russians found the tap?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Carlton said. “It was a pretty elaborate setup involving the CIA and the NSA. An analyst at NSA put together a package of what she thought were the most important conversations—a sort of highlights reel. I think you need to see what they picked up a couple of days ago, just before the shutdown.”

  He handed the papers to Oxley, saying, “This is from a long transcript. I have extracted what I consider the most significant … most important … dialogue.”

  Scanning them quickly, Oxley saw that it was a translation of a conversation between Lebed and someone identified as Nikita Komov, a name that seemed familiar.

  Komov: It is imperative, sir. Hamilton must remain in Russia.

  Lebed: And why do you dare to say ‘must’ to me, Komov?

  K: You perhaps have heard of Ivan’s Hammer, sir?

  L: Yes, yes. I heard my father mention it. Some scientist of your era having a crazy dream.

  K: With respect, sir. Not a dream.

  L: You have perhaps become a space scientist?

  K: Hamilton controls an asteroid. It can become a weapon. He cannot be allowed to return to America. Not until we know where the asteroid is located. You cannot allow the Americans to take control of that asteroid and allow them to use it as a weapon—as Ivan’s Hammer.…

  Oxley kept reading. “There are some mentions of Basayev,” he said. “Do we know anything new about Basayev?”

  “Nothing since I briefed you on the sinking of Basayev’s yacht, sir. As you know, Basayev was a CIA asset. I’ve looked into his reports. He was not much of an agent. Spent most of his time becoming a billionaire through his connections with Putin and Lebed.”

  “And the yacht?” Oxley asked.

  Carlton shrugged and did not speak. The shrug was enough. The yacht had disappeared without a trace in a world where objects as large as airliners can similarly vanish. The verdict on the sinking—“a boiler explosion”—had come from Turkey. One of its warships had sped to the scene of the sinking after a fisherman reported hearing an explosion and seeing a plume of smoke. When pressed by GNN, a U.S. official had confirmed, on background, that “a boiler exploded.”

  “Komov. I’ve heard that name before,” Oxley said. One CIA briefing officer had called him Putin’s Rasputin; another one had compared Komov to James Jesus Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence during the height of the Cold War.

  “He’s an old KGB officer whose specialty is counterintelligence,” Carlton answered. “And he’s very good at his job. He’s called Comrade X-ray for his ability to see traitorous hearts. Too bad the transcript doesn’t give you the tone of their voices when they mentioned Basayev’s yacht. Lebed ordered the missile that sank it, and Komov knows it.”

  “How sure of this are you?” Oxley asked, pointing to the transcript pages.

  “Authentic, sir. We have multiple assets in Russia, and we’ve known about Komov for a long time. He’s been a confidential adviser to Soviet presidents going back to the seventies. Putin loved him. Lebed knew his value and kept him on.”

  Oxley went back to reading the transcript.

  “So Hamilton was to be on Basayev’s yacht? Close shave. And I assume this is true about that SpaceMine engineer?”

  “Never heard about that, sir.”

  “And Ivan’s Hammer? Ever hear of it, Frank?”

  “Hear of it? No, sir. I plan to have that transcript combed by our best Russian analysis team. I’ll especially task them to dig into it, and whether it would ever be po
ssible for Russian cosmonauts to take control of an asteroid.”

  “Hold up on that, Frank,” Oxley said, turning his gaze again to the clocks. “I don’t want ‘Ivan’s Hammer’ to get any circulation. It must be tightly held.” He paused and added, “How long have we had this … capability? I mean right into his office.”

  “About two months, sir.”

  “I assume that you drew on some of the conversations for use in your daily brief,” Oxley said.

  “Yes, sir. NSA, as usual, kept everything in their data mountains but sent me, by special courier, translated, non-verbatim digests. It sometimes was golden stuff.”

  “So good, it was worth defying my order to stop the Lebed eavesdropping?”

  “In fact, sir, most of the conversations were tedious, even mind-numbing.”

  “Sounds like the conversations in this office,” Oxley said, laughing.

  Carlton did not respond, but went on as if he had not heard; he never believed that anything about his job was amusing.

  “And then came this one,” Oxley continued.

  “Yes, sir. It was so jarring I felt I had to show you portions of the verbatim transcript.”

  “What was so jarring?”

  “Hamilton, sir. The idea that the Russians are holding an—”

  “And not ‘Ivan’s Hammer’?”

  “No, sir. That could be more fiction than science. I’m not convinced. But Hamilton is a Silicon Valley icon, and if word…”

  “You trust those sources? Absolutely trust them?” Oxley asked, speeding up the pace of his questioning.

  “Yes, sir. The source is a fine asset.”

  “I know spy talk a bit, Frank. This kind of ‘asset’ usually is someone we recruited.”

  Oxley turned, sitting face-to-face with Carlton, who answered by nodding.

  “Okay, Frank. Don’t turn your analysts onto this yet. I want this narrowly known. Keep it in your pocket for a while.” He handed the transcript back to Carlton. “You can forget about that resignation. And tell those eavesdroppers to keep on eavesdropping.”

  “Sir? I thought—”

  “There’s more here—much more—than you know, Frank.”

  Carlton, looking puzzled, went to his regular seat next to Oxley in preparation for the daily intelligence briefing.

  “Better get started. Can’t keep the others waiting,” Oxley said. Standing outside were Secretary of Defense George Winthrop and other members of the national security team, including the secretary of state, the CIA director, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

  11

  “Little chilly in here,” Oxley said, nodding to the Army major who sat at a small desk near the entrance to the Situation Room. Here it was December and there still was the feeling of filtered air stirred by air conditioning. Oxley never liked the place. No windows. A lot of faces of people who never took their eyes off him. Grim news, carefully parsed talk, nods of approval. How I miss Sean Falcone, Oxley thought. Once in a while, at least, he’d crack a joke in here.

  Oxley turned to Carlton and said, “Okay, Frank, what’s the situation?” That was how Oxley always opened the meeting, ever since the first time he sat at the head of the long table six long years ago. He now remembered that at one particularly tortuous session, Falcone had answered, “SNAFU, sir, as we used to say in the army.”

  “Meaning?” Oxley asked.

  “Situation normal, all fucked up,” Falcone had said, smiling at the trace of embarrassment that passed over the President’s face.

  “The situation is … complicated, sir,” Carlton answered, puzzled by the quick smile the President flashed.

  “In other words, Frank, SNAFU’d.”

  Carlton looked startled. Then he glanced at the red folder before him and delivered the situation: “North Korea has started taking advantage of the unrest caused by China’s occupation of Uotsuri-shima in the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands,” he began. “The Korean People’s Army has begun methodical shelling—a clockwork twelve artillery shells an hour, eight hours a day—with most of the shells landing on the Yellow Sea island of Daeyeonpyeongdo—”

  “Where?” Oxley asked. As usual, he was taking notes on a yellow lined pad.

  “Daeyeonpyeongdo,” Carlton repeated. “It’s—”

  “How do you spell it?” Oxley interrupted. Carlton smiled, as did others around the table.

  Carlton spelled it out and continued, “It’s the main island of a group of islands. A familiar target for North Korea when Kim Jong-un decides to stir things up. There was a shelling like this in 2010. South Korea returned fire, shell for shell, but most of them landed in the sea.”

  Oxley leaned forward, as if to interrupt again. But instead he slumped back, thinking of the folded transcript in his pocket. If only those bastards knew. If only they knew, he thought.

  “China,” Carlton continued, “has named the occupied island ‘People’s Liberation Army Island’ and has begun what appears to be a steady resupply operation, following up its initial landing of about forty People’s Liberation Army marines. Analysis of satellite photographs shows no increase in that force or their weaponry. The largest weapons are 120-millimeter mortars. But the amounts and items of resupply—food, water, cooking fuel—is consistent with long-term occupation.”

  “But still only forty men?”

  “Yes, sir. But, to Japan, occupation by even that small a force is highly provocative. And President Zhang Xing himself, rather than a spokesperson, announced a few hours ago that quote ‘China affirms its right to control its own territory and warns that violations of its Air Defense Identification Zone will be dealt with severely and without remorse’ unquote.”

  “‘Without remorse,’” Oxley repeated. “What’s the meaning of that? As ominous as it sounds?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s another provocative step. Like hacking into our databases. Like building artificial islands … sorry, artificial edifices, on atolls and reefs in the South China Sea, raising alarm in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brunei.”

  “What’s the military significance?”

  Before Secretary of Defense George Winthrop could answer, Carlton did: “One of the edifices, by our analysis, has a runway long enough for Chinese military aircraft, bombers as well as fighters. And the Chinese are also creating a harbor deep enough to dock their growing fleet of warships.”

  But Zhang Xing knows. He knows. How can he be doing this? Oxley thought, almost saying the words aloud. He nodded for Carlton to go on.

  “Taiwan, which might have been expected to protest, has kept quiet—probably because it takes the Chinese moves seriously. We know from communications intercepts that Taiwan has already secretly notified China that it’s going along with the occupation. Japan is treating ‘without remorse’ as a serious threat and we believe it is about to declare SIASJ.”

  That sounds like a drunk trying to say size-ass, Oxley thought, memories of Falcone again flitting through his mind. He had to keep a straight face while he remembered the acronym stood for Situations in Areas Surrounding Japan. SIASJ, Oxley thought, was like a smoke alarm: you hear it and you wonder if it’s a false alarm. Under the U.S.-Japan Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, a SIASJ declaration called for a stepping up of American defense activities in Japan. The treaty, Oxley knew, included the tiny bits of rock under Japan’s administrative control. If China decided to militarily take the island away from Japan, the United States would have to come to Japan’s aid.

  “And there’s also some economic activity,” Carlton continued. “I briefed Rita on what we know, and her folks got some intelligence on their own.” Carlton leaned back and Oxley raised his right hand toward Rita Oliphant, Secretary of the Treasury, who rarely found herself in the Situation Room. She was a tall, patrician woman wearing a green jacket over a white silk blouse.

  She put on black-framed glasses and spoke in a voice still touched by her British birth and childhood: “Thank you, Frank. Starting five weeks ago, Mr. Pres
ident, China started selling U.S. debt, as secretly as its brokers could, and my China watchers started to see trend lines begin to change. We thought at first it was a short-term move to build up a sudden increase in liquidity, maybe for a sudden need to finance its rapid development of urban centers. But Frank tipped me off that NSA is picking up Chinese requests for bids going to Russian and French armaments companies.”

  Secretary of State Benjamin Hale was on his way to China to protest the territorial claims and the building of islands. And Oxley was holding off further reaction until Hale returned. There was no point in bringing up the sell-off of debt or the arms purchases, Oxley decided. The stock market was not so bullish these days about Chinese investments. No need to upset the stock market any further, he thought. And then he thought of the asteroid. And what will Wall Street do when the world finds out about that?

  Oxley looked down the table at Winthrop, a former senator from Oklahoma. He was in his mid-sixties, rotund and balding. He looked soft, but he was as tough as he was on the day when, as a deputy sheriff, he had faced a gunman who had just killed two shoppers in a Walmart. Winthrop took a 38 round in the shoulder and, still standing, shot the man twice in the forehead. A few months later he began his political career and was often introduced as 2-shot Winthrop.

  “With the concurrence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander of the Pacific Command, sir,” Winthrop solemnly said, “I recommend a DEFCON 3 level, restricted to that command.”

  “I agree,” Oxley said, just as solemnly. “Please notify Admiral Gerhan.”

  Winthrop and Oxley, after a conference call with Gerhan, had already agreed on the restricted rise to a Pacific Command DEFCON 3, knowing that it would become public knowledge, alerting China to how serious the United States viewed Chinese actions. A rise from DEFCON 4, a fairly mild increase in readiness, to DEFCON 3 indicated a tense military and geopolitical situation. Aircraft carriers and Air Force units in the region would be kept ready to launch within fifteen minutes of orders, and all military communications went to a high level of encryption.