The War Cloud Read online

  “That may not be such a bad thing at this point, Captain.” Koz looked at the presidential seal on the door dividing them from Sachs. “What the hell is she doing in there?”

  “Maybe she’s dancing to Britney Spears. Or praying. Or bawling her eyes out. Who besides God needs to know?”

  “I do, Captain. I need to know. I have no idea what Sachs is thinking. Only that she is. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “A woman who thinks for herself?”

  Koz stared at Li’s black, penetrating eyes. “Of course not,” he said, and then he held up the small action figure USB drive Sachs had given him at his request and handed it to Li. “This belongs to Jennifer Sachs. It’s her school USB drive. She’s probably got files on her that might give us a clue to her friends and where she may have gone.”

  “Wow, Fembot Fiona,” Li remarked as she took it. “I’ll check her Facebook texts, too. If she’s not talking to her mom, she might be talking to friends.”

  30

  1437 Hours

  Bedford Hills

  Jennifer crouched beneath the kitchen window of her Aunt Dina’s house for almost ten minutes in terror, staring at Carla’s body, aware of the red lasersights probing through the dark.

  She crawled into the adjoining laundry room and rummaged through Carla’s purse and found her cellphone. It was a simple Nokia candy bar phone. She dialed her mom’s number. Then she heard a crash in the kitchen and froze.

  They were in the house.

  She could hear the soft, quick shuffles of their shoes fan out looking for her. She held her breath and looked around. Her only way out was through the dog’s door.

  She glanced back in time to see a red laser target beam probe the kitchen. She pushed her body through the narrow door, wishing Aunt Dina’s dog Admiral were here right now and not at the kennel. She was halfway out the or when her foot caught on the other side. She tried to shake it loose when she felt a gloved hand grab it and she screamed.

  She began kicking furiously and succeeded in shaking the hand loose, but she lost her boot. She scrambled to her feet and crashed through the outdoor patio furniture, all covered for the winter, and ran for the barn out back. But her stocking foot slipped in the snow and she fell to her knees, cell phone in hand.

  She started to cry as the Green Beret kicked out the laundry room door and stood there in the doorway, starting straight at her with his glowing night vision goggles. He thought he was so cool with his M-16 with the attached laser site and grenade launcher. She knew what he was packing from her hundreds of hours playing the War Cloud game, and the one place he was now vulnerable. She jumped up and snapped his picture with Carla’s cell phone camera, the flash blinding him in his overexposed goggles for a few seconds. Then she ran like hell toward the barn.

  She rounded the back of the barn, opened the small side door and ran inside and opened the big double doors. Then she grabbed her saddle off the stake in the wall and ran to Punk’s stall. She strapped the saddle on his back, her freezing hands fumbling with the buckles, trying to get it tight. She slipped her socked foot into the stirrup and hoisted herself up. Punk stamped his hooves and coughed. He didn’t want to go out into the cold.

  “Please, Punk. Please.”

  She kicked him again with the heel of her boot and Punk bolted out of the barn and knocked over the goon with the M-16, and it went off with a loud crack into the dark skies. She looked back and saw him slip onto his back on the ice while his partner rounded the house and raised his M-16.

  She slapped Punk’s neck with the reins, and the horse leaped onto the adjoining trail.

  Punk slipped on the snow and for a moment Jennifer thought he was going to fall on top of her. But he regained his balance and quickly galloped through the two feet of powder along the neighbor’s wooden fence.

  Suddenly the fence seemed to move and Jennifer heard a loud crash. A black Suburban crashed through the wooden rails onto the trail behind her.

  “Oh, God!”

  Jennifer kicked Punk as hard as she could, almost breaking the horse’s skin with her boot. She screamed in frustration.

  The Suburban, its high beams on, was only a yard or so away, its engine groaning loudly.

  Punk picked up his pace with a new surge of momentum.

  Jennifer looked back to see the Suburban fall behind momentarily. Then with a grunt and a spin of its wheels, it dug into the snow and zoomed up toward her with no intention of stopping.

  Jennifer rode Punk along the narrow trail, the Suburban closing the gap as Punk started to tire, his powerful neck bulging with the strain. Just a little more, she thought, steering him toward the old McAllister place near the country club.

  “You know where we’re going, boy,” she told him as he galloped. “We placed second in the Fall Hunter Pace, remember?”

  They were riding along Guard Hill Road now, following a low stone wall, the Piney Woods Preserve on the other side, familiar territory to both her and Punk.

  But the Suburban was moving up faster from behind.

  Jennifer counted her paces. There was a break in the wall coming up. But it was hidden by the piled-up snow. Punk could leap through the gap and break through the snow, but he couldn’t clear the wall if she misjudged the distance.

  She kicked Punk and they picked up speed, the break coming up fast.

  “Jump, Punk!”

  She turned into the wall, gave Punk the right tug on the reins, and closed her eyes. She felt the horse leap into the air and crash through the snow. The ice stung her face, but when she blinked her eyes open, they were into the trees of the preserve, Punk

  digging through the snow, his legs working furiously.

  Behind her the Suburban tried to stop but slid past the break in the wall on the trail. She heard a crash of metal. But she didn’t dare look back, and galloped on into the woods.

  31

  1444 Hours

  Air Force One

  Koz was sitting on the gold sofa when Sachs emerged from the bathroom into the NCA commander’s compartment occupied by first-class passengers on a commercial 747. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and he had to admit she did more for the flightsuit that Captain Li had given her than Captain Li herself. Then he was ashamed for even thinking about his commander-in-chief in that way and pushed the thought out of his mind.

  “Feeling better?” he asked her. He was sure he had heard her throw up in the bathroom. It was a natural reaction to her stress-inducing meeting with the National Command Authority, although he wasn’t sure she’d admit to something seemingly unpresidential.

  “Much.” She sat down in the high-back leather chair at the desk and warily eyed the stack of executive orders he had brought her to sign, along with a steaming mug of hot tea. “Did you make this, Colonel? Or did Doctor Nordquist?”

  It was almost funny, but he didn’t dare crack a smile. “Captain Li did, ma’am.”

  “OK, I guess I have to trust her now — and you.” Sachs took a sip, exhaled and looked around the compartment. “I just noticed there are no windows in here.”

  “Flash effects from nukes, ma’am. They can burn your eyes out. What windows we do have on the plane are made from the same stuff you’ll find in your home microwave door.”

  “Of course,” she said with a frown.

  At first Koz thought she felt embarrassed by her technical ignorance. Or maybe she thought his microwave remark was as patronizing as Marshall’s coffee order options. But then he decided she was simply sad.

  She asked, “Where are we going?”

  “We’re following a pre-designated route to avoid enemy detection. We should be out of U.S. airspace shortly.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want us straying from U.S. airspace. We can’t leave.”

  Koz muffled his real reaction, namely to lecture her on the realities of airspace and nuclear cloud bursts. But she would probably le soon enough.

  Sachs leaned forward and looked at the stack of Presidential Emerge
ncy Action Documents on her desk. “More proclamations?”

  “You gotta sign them while you can,” Koz said.

  Sachs stared at the first one, an order freezing wages, prices and rent. Then she signed with a flourish and said, “And I thought you were all Republicans,” she quipped.

  Koz cracked a smile. He was beginning to enjoy having her around, especially when everything else about the world right now felt so rotten.

  “This one,” he said, “is guaranteed to warm a liberal’s heart.”

  He pushed another classified document across the desk for her to sign. It was a draft bill authorizing the IRS to collect money via a national sales tax of 30 percent. It even waived interest penalties against taxpayers who filed late returns “due to reasonable cause and not due to willful neglect.”

  “I’m not a liberal or conservative, Colonel, I’m an American,” she said, signing the order. “And nuclear war seems as reasonable a cause as any for these extreme — and temporary — measures. Anything else?”

  Koz slid a thick binder across the desk to her. “The latest National Strategic Target List,” he explained. “It ranks more than forty thousand places and things in China, the Far East and elsewhere deemed worthy of destruction.”

  He watched as Sachs tentatively ran her finger down the list, pausing at a target and moving on. He could tell she couldn’t do it, couldn’t let her finger rest on any single item, knowing thousands of human beings would die if she did.

  She said, “I guess I had forgotten that the United States has considered China its No. 1 enemy since the end of the Cold War.”

  “Until 9/11,” Koz said. “General Marshall made his career at the Pentagon with his quadrennial reports stating that the war on terror in the Middle East had distracted America from containing the real threat in China. By the way, for every target you don’t pick, you might as well put your finger on a map of the United States, because that’s who will suffer instead.”

  “Thanks for the information, Colonel.”

  “You wanted presidential authority,” he reminded her, and pushed a second operations manual at her, this one thicker than the first. “Now you have it.”

  “And what’s this?” Sachs asked, looking overwhelmed.

  “The Single Integrated Operational Plan,” he explained. “The plan for destroying the places and things on the target list.”

  Sachs thumbed through the pages slowly. “This says that even after we and our enemies exhaust all our nuclear warheads and destroy the planet, America still has a secret reserve of nukes for after Armageddon.”

  “That’s right,” said Koz. “The winner will be the one who can continue the fighting and inflict still more damage.”

  “But there will be nothing left to destroy! There will be no America left for our bombers or subs to return to.”

  Koz said, “They could land or dock at foreign airstrips and ports. As you’ll see, secret treaties with foreign allies would enable our government to political entity even if the United States itself were destroyed.”

  “Sure, it just wouldn’t have any people,” Sachs said. “Doesn’t thinking about this all day drive Marshall insane?”

  “You have to be a little insane to dream up these nightmares in the first place.”

  “So why do we do it?”

  “It’s an insane planet.”

  She picked up her mug of tea and curiously looked at the decal on the side, which depicted an F-16 fighter jet and the tag line: Air Force: When it Absolutely, Positively Has to be Destroyed Overnight.

  Koz asked, “Something wrong?”

  “It’s just that nothing today is playing out like the likeliest scenario detailed in this report.” She tapped her finger for emphasis on a graphic of the Taiwan Strait, the 112-mile strait of water between China and the island of Taiwan. “This says the Chinese would attack Taiwan before they ever risked attacking a U.S. target, let alone our seat of government. It also says with 99-percent probability that such an attack would take the form of a thousand land-based cruise and ballistic missiles in China blasting over the strait to knock out Taiwan’s defense shields, followed by invasion before our fighter jets and carrier groups could arrive on the scene. Even then, China wouldn’t strike the United States itself.”

  She was good, Koz thought. He tested her further. “So what exactly are the Chinese supposed to be doing?”

  “According to Brad Marshall?” She didn’t even have to glance at the report. “First, they’re supposed to be hitting us at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, hoping to strike before our F-15E fighters get in the air and knock out our best staging area for combat patrols. Second, they’re supposed to blind us in the theater of war by knocking out our overhead communication and imaging satellites. Third, if necessary, they might launch their new anti-ship ballistic missiles at our carrier groups plowing toward Taiwan. But they’ve done none of those things yet.”

  “No, they haven’t, Madame President,” he told her. “But General Zhang has proven to be irrational in the past, and it sure looks like the Chinese hit D.C. and accomplished an unimaginable regime change in the United States. A regime change that put you in charge, Madame President, and your actions or lack thereof can only stoke speculation.”

  “Meaning I’m a Chinese sleeper of some kind?” she asked him.

  He knew the idea was ridiculous, but had to push. She had enough doubters already in the ranks of the military, and she couldn’t afford having her authority questioned. “It was you, after all, and not the Central Locator that found a way for you to get out of Washington before the blast, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

  “I am not an agent of any foreign power, Colonel,” she said firmly, her brown eyes on fire with rage. “How can I prove it to any of you?”

  “With this, actually.” He reached into his pocket and removed an authenticator card with the presidential seal on it. “This secret code card will establish your identity as president to military commanders if you’re ever caught away from secure communications facilities.” He paused, and then gave her his warmest smile. “I know you’re not a plant. But you might have to prove it to others. That card will help.”

  “Thank you,” she said and slipped the card inside her flight suit’s outside pocket.

  Koz wasn’t satisfied. “Not a secure location.”

  Sachs started to unzip the top of her flight suit.

  Koz tried to keep a straight face as he watched her stuff it inside her flight suit. It was certainly the first time he was aware of an authenticator card occupying that kind of space, except maybe for the time when former President Bill Clinton lost his while in office and the worry was that one of his women stole off with it.

  She asked, “How’s this?”

  “Better,” he nodded when Captain Li opened the door in time to see Sachs adjust her bosoms.

  Koz leaped to his feet in embarrassment, as if he had been caught in some sordid act. “Captain.”

  “Excuse me,” said Li without batting an eyelash. The iron-rod discipline of the USAF had taken over. “NORAD reports a massive wave of Chinese missiles heading our way.”

  “Trajectory?” Koz demanded.

  Li was grim. “They’re silo killers.”

  32

  1445 Hours

  Northern Command

  “Use ‘em or lose ‘em?”

  General Block watched President Sachs make a face on the big screen from his office perch overlooking the underground Northern Command. But he was more concerned with the two big screens in the operations center below. The left screen displayed TOT MISL 50 — total number of Chinese DF-5 ICBMs launched. The right screen displayed TTG -34.07.12 — time to go before detonation. Meanwhile, six other screens providing real-time data from the USAF Space Command’s early warning radar sites at Clear AFS in Alaska and Beale AFB in California projected their trajectory toward Minutemen III missile fields in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado.

  “That’s what I’m saying, ma’am,” Block t
old her along with Generals Marshall and Carver on the split screen. “These Chinese DF-5s are silo-killers. We either launch our M-III’s or lose them, along with the ability to retaliate.”

  He could see Sachs flinch at the either-or scenario, and sure enough she said, “Two options are a dilemma, General Block. Three options is at least a choice. What about our satellites? Do we have any visuals from space? Or even our forward-deployed fleet in the South China Sea?”

  Block paused. “Our satellites over China were blinded minutes before the DF-5s launched, and neither our air base at Kadena in Japan nor the 7th Fleet has a visual confirmation.”

  “Then maybe they haven’t launched, General Block,” Sachs said. “Maybe this is a phantom missile strike generated by the War Cloud cyberweapon. Isn’t it convenient that we’re denied visual verification at the same time our radars are registering incoming missiles? General Marshall?”

  Marshall was visibly taken aback. “You’re probably half right, Madame President. The Chinese technically could have used the War Cloud to blind our satellites, but in political and military terms it would make no sense for them to fake a missile launch and prompt a massive U.S. nuclear retaliation.”

  “Not for the Chinese,” Sachs said. “But maybe for another party.”

  There she goes again, Block thought, refusing to accept the obvious for some shadowy conspiracy.

  Sachs addressed Brad Marshall again, and said, “General Marshall, do you agree with General Block?”

  Block could only hope the kid could make Sachs see straight. Or use his baby blues to hypnotize her or something. Anything.

  “I have to, Madame President,” he told her. “Right now we have the advantage of not only firepower but accuracy in striking Chinese military targets. We would spare most of the civilian Chinese population while degrading their military’s ability to destroy ours.”