Ghosts of War (16 page)

W
ith one phone call from the situation room, an invisible tidal wave was set in motion. A massive beast built for the Cold War, but rusting from continuous deployments to hot spots around the world, the US Department of Defense began the impossible task of preparing for World War III.

—

In the Pentagon, poor colonels and majors flailed about, trying to reorient on a threat they hadn't studied in twenty years—and, for some of the up-and-comers who'd been promoted below the zone, never. Raised on combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, they began studying OPLANS that hadn't been dusted off since 1989. The Fulda Gap of old West Germany was switched for the Suwalki Gap of Poland, a small sliver of terrain that connected Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Orders were sent, some that made no sense, and the beast began to awaken. Nobody inside the puzzle palace knew where it would lead, but all knew it was serious business.

—

At Fort Bragg, home of the acclaimed 82nd Airborne, the duty officer of the 18th Airborne Corps received a flash message. The first real-world one he'd ever seen. He had the duty NCO read it to make sure he wasn't about to make a mistake in waking up the entire chain of command. He was not. He immediately pulled down his duty book and began working the specific instructions included within. Down
the road, the duty officer for the DRF Alert Battalion of the 82nd Airborne picked up the phone, sure the message was a mistake. They had no emergency deployment readiness exercises planned, he was positive, as it was a special requirement for young duty officers to penetrate the higher headquarters like Soviet spies.

Any lieutenant taking on the mantle of duty officer immediately leveraged what was known as the E-4 Mafia—enlisted drivers, cooks, aides, and anyone else—to determine what was in store on his watch. No lieutenant wanted to be caught short with an EDRE while acting as the duty officer, and any EDRE that came down—supposedly a complete surprise—never were to the men filling the billet. This one was. He initiated the procedures, noticing that it wasn't just the DRF-1 Battalion, but the entire brigade. In fact, the DRB-2 Brigade was being alerted as well. And it sank home. This wasn't an exercise.

—

There was very little in Minot, North Dakota, that would interest any enemy of the United States, with the exception of the two legs of the nuclear triad that were located on the windswept prairie. One, the 5th Bomb Wing, comprised the anachronistic B-52 Stratofortress. Anachronistic in name only. Since its creation, the mighty B-52 had been written off time and time again, and yet it was still the most potent weapon in the US Air Force. Used in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the aging airframes had outlived just about any other aircraft, with the last B-52 rolling off the line in the 1960s. At the heart of their creation was the unimaginable: nuclear war.

When the missiles began to fly, one of the enemy goals was to prevent the 5th from leaving the ground with their deadly payload, and because of it, the Air Force had developed Minimum Interval Takeoff procedures, or MITO, where the entire trundling beast would elephant walk to the flight line and take off at intervals that were so close they were nearly suicidal, all in an effort to get the fleet into the air
before Armageddon struck. At the height of the Cold War, the wing had been tested over and over again, proving that if the worst occurred, they could be airborne with their payload before the holocaust destroyed the base. But it had never happened for real, until tonight. In one of the many miscommunications from a system decayed from constant small wars, the 5th Bomb Wing duty officer read the worst message he had ever seen. Missiles were inbound, and he had to initiate a real-world MITO. For a unit that had long ago forgotten about the nuclear threat.

—

At Fort Hood, Texas, the alert went a different way. It wasn't the warfighter jerked out of bed at four in the morning. It was the logistician and mechanic. Home of the 1st Cavalry Division, its heart was armor. Its soul was heavy steel and uncompromising firepower. Something that couldn't be deployed in the amount of time necessary, but, having foreseen that very dilemma during the Cold War, giant stockpiles of equipment had been stored in what was then West Germany and other countries, waiting—as they said back in the day—for the balloon to go up. For the first time in history, it now had, and the first into the fight would be the men and women who would break out the stockpiles of the weapons of war. M1A1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley fighting vehicles that had been stored for decades, the initial deployment would be spent clearing out the dry rot and getting them mission capable from a warehouse that nobody thought would be utilized after the wall fell. At Fort Hood, the command would spend its brief amount of time perfecting the skills on the combat systems they owned, using the sprawling terrain of Texas, preparing for a war in Europe with equipment they had never seen. They would fall in on war stocks that had rarely been used, and most certainly not to the extent that was being contemplated here. The REFORGER exercises were a thing of the past, the last having taken place in 1993, when
NATO habitually tested its muscle against the Warsaw Pact. When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, so did the exercises. Except now, REFORGER was happening for real.

—

In any mobilization of this size, the scope itself took on a special meaning. President Hannister may have ordered nobody to cross the Rubicon, but there has always been a critical mass in war. Whenever enough forces were deployed, regardless of the reason, the question of defense or offense became moot. The units themselves, commanded by well-meaning men and women who only wanted to ensure survival in a fight, became a driving force in the fight itself.

The planning and training for the eventual clash became a precursor, like leading a racehorse to the stall, with everyone from the lowliest lieutenant to the division commander pressing for the order to attack, all knowing what happens when the gate opens.

President Hannister didn't understand the complexities of the deployment, but Colonel Kurt Hale should have realized that the Rubicon had been crossed when the president issued the order for mobilization.

It would be very, very hard to put the horse back in the barn after it had been primed for a race. When fully formed on the European continent, it would want to run, as it had been trained to do, and the men in the saddles would advocate for the gate to open. Begging to be let go.

The opposition understood this, watching warily and matching the mobilization step for step.

Sitting in his estate in Slovakia, Simon Migunov saw none of this, but he was about to accomplish his end goal: slaughtering untold hundreds of thousands so he could walk free.

I
looked at the screen again, seeing the words from the translation on the small tablet and wondering if I was about to step onto thin ice. I decided it was worth it. I said, “What do you mean, you don't want to fight anymore? Are you talking about not fighting with me? Because I'd love that, trust me.”

Shoshana floated her weird glow on me and I realized I didn't want to go where we were headed. But it was too late. She said, “No. I don't want to fight, period. I want what you have. I want to do something like you do with Jennifer. Where I can use my skills for something else.”

“With who?”

She dropped her eyes and put her hand on the door handle, saying, “I need to get out of here before you guys get committed.”

I grabbed her arm, preventing the door from swinging open. I said, “Hey, come on. Nobody's here with us. You want to start a business doing something else? Away from Aaron? Does he know?”

She looked up at me, and I saw I'd missed the entire thing. She wanted
Aaron
to leave their life, with her. And she had no idea how to make that happen.

She quit pushing the door and said, “You and Jennifer have found something together. I yearn for the same thing. I don't want to kill people anymore. I crave a normal life.”

I wanted to tell her the truth, because I knew who she was, but I couldn't. I settled for reality. “Do you even know what normal is? Trust me, for people like you and me, it's not that great. You'll be sick of it in a month.”

She closed the door and sat for a second, not saying a word. And I realized she'd picked me for the camera instruction for a reason. She wanted to talk, and of all the people she'd ever met, I was the one who was most like her.

She thought for a moment, then shook her head violently, saying, “No, no, no. I don't want to hear that. I've watched you two. You and Jennifer are connected like Aaron and me. I see it. I feel it. I want to do something like that. I want to be happy.”

I said, “You're not now?”

She leaned her head back and said, “I'm not sure. I'm not sure I even know what happiness is.” She looked at me and said, “Am I happy? Is this it?”

I chose my words carefully. At the end of the day, I really did care for her, and I didn't want her to feel the pain I had felt in the past. “Look, you have a particular set of skills, and they're useful, but you don't need to toss them away because of what happened to you. You can still use them for good. With Aaron.”

She said, “This mission is good, but good missions are few and far between. That asshole we're chasing, Mikhail, is an example of that. He and all the others wanted my skill at killing, but not my skill at preventing death. Aaron is the only one who saw beyond what I had become. I know what I am, and it's evil.”

Shoshana was about the most lethal killing machine I'd ever met, yet she was analyzing herself in a way I never could have. And she did deserve happiness, but she'd never have it, as long as she didn't understand the skills she owned were God-given, and were neither good nor bad. They were just skills. Some people could sink a basketball from forty feet time after time. Some could survive in chaos, completing the mission no matter the obstacles. Different abilities, but still, just skills.

The conversation triggered a realization for me. Something from a ridiculous movie I'd watched as a young man. I said, “You're the Pumpkin King. I can't believe I haven't seen that before.”

She looked at me with suspicion and said, “What is that? Some American insult?”

“No, no. It's from an American animated film called
The Nightmare Before Christmas
. The Pumpkin King is in charge of Halloween, but wants to be Santa Claus. He wants to be in charge of Christmas, but he's a badass. That's you.”

Confused, she said, “So what's that mean? I can't change?”

I realized I was saying exactly that. “No. Wait. In the movie, the Pumpkin King is a good person. He's just trapped in his world. He realizes he can change his world without taking someone else's. That's all I meant.”

She looked at me with slitted eyes and I said, “Shit. I don't know what I meant. I do know that you have skills that are good. That you
use
for good. You shouldn't toss them aside. Using them doesn't make you evil. Only the outcome is potentially bad, and
you
determine that. Like what we're doing here.”

“I don't want to kill anymore. And I'm not. No matter what this mission brings. I'm done killing.”

I said, “You can't call that. We might get into a situation where it's inevitable. You
know
that.”

She looked at me with conviction and said, “No. I'm
not
the Pumpkin King. I want to be something else. I won't use my skills for death anymore.”

I had no idea where the little demon was going with this. It was the strangest epiphany I'd ever witnessed, and I was wondering why she was telling me and not Aaron.

She shifted tack yet again and said, “Do you love Jennifer?”

That caused a small explosion of air from my lungs. “What the fuck? Are you kidding me with this? Why do you Israelis always ask that?”

“It's a serious question.”

“Do you love Aaron?”

She said, “Yes. I do. He doesn't know it, but I do, and I want to be his Jennifer.”

I leaned my skull on the headrest, buying time, then said, “Well, maybe you should tell him, dumbass. You can't be Jennifer and keep that shit bottled up.”

She said, “I don't want to be the Pumpkin King.”

The words were so sad I had no answer. Like a handicapped child dreaming of playing in the NFL, she would never be Jennifer. Ever.

Our earpieces squelched and I heard Knuckles say, “Got movement in the foyer. It's Mikhail.”

Shoshana opened the door to leave and said, “Maybe you should tell Jennifer how you feel. She would appreciate it as well.”

She exited the car slowly, then turned and looked at me in her weird way. I felt the spear of her gaze and wondered how much of the exchange had been me helping her. The conversation left two competing thought streams going through my mind, but only one required my immediate attention.

“What do you have?”

“Mikhail's talking to Simon. Got them both, and Mikhail's about to leave. Looks like they're shouting at each other.”

The call made me wish we'd equipped Knuckles with a lipreading camera, but he was hidden on a bench in some sort of memorial park and couldn't get close enough for it to matter.

Hearing the radio, half out of the vehicle, Shoshana turned around, now all business. She said, “You good?”

“Yeah. Get staged in your car. Bet you dinner it'll be me leaving.”

She said, “Nope. I got a feeling I'll be doing the surveillance on this one.”

She exited the vehicle and I tossed the Pelican case housing the extra equipment in the rear, under a blanket. Knuckles came back. “We got a problem. Mikhail just left the house, but he didn't go to a car. He's crossing the street and headed right at me. On foot.”

Shit
.

“Intentions?”

“He's walking into the memorial. Pike, it's wide-open in here. If he gets up top and conducts a meeting, you aren't getting close.”

I knew what he meant from my recce the day before. Just across the street from the target house was a memorial park for the fallen Russian soldiers who had liberated Bratislava during World War II. Built on a hill, it was crisscrossed with paths and benches, with a monument at the crest, a forty-foot obelisk on top of a pillared square of granite. All told, the park was probably ten acres of open terrain. A perfect spot to conduct a meeting because it would require absolutely no countersurveillance. Anybody trying to penetrate would be spotted. Jennifer and I could wander through once or twice, since there were others in the park, but no way would we be able to focus on a meeting for any length of time.

I said, “What's your recommendation?”

“Forget it. I'll remain in place and pick him up again when he leaves. You won't get any useful intel if you attempt a penetration, and if you get burned here, you're no good for anything else.”

I started to respond when my door swung open and Shoshana climbed in like she was being chased. She frantically looked around and said, “Where is the Pelican case?”

I pointed to the backseat. She grabbed the case and ripped it open. She pulled out a tan box connected to a thick computer tablet by a wire. She opened the box. Inside were what looked like a toy helicopter, maybe six or seven inches long, and a folding joystick.

“What the hell is that?”

“Something from
Get Smart
.”

She grinned at me, and I thought,
How in the hell did she know?