“I welcome our esteemed guest, Lana Elkins,” the man said with a brightening of his otherwise dark eyes. He spoke with no discernible accent — Western-educated, she guessed. “I can see that you are shocked to meet me. I, on the other hand, am only pleased to finally have your alluring company.”
Don’t flirt with me, she thought, staring him down.
“And I trust that you will remain comfortable in the coming days.”
“Days? You mean even after my country is destroyed?”
“Please, do not think of it as destruction. Think of it as salvation. A new world is coming, and the U.S. has brought so much destruction and terror, not just to Asia but to the whole world, that Earth will be a much better place without its predatory ways. You will see that this is true.”
Where are they? Ruhi, Ahmed, the man named Omar, and Agent Anders, whom she hadn’t even had a chance to meet. And all the others. There were armed guards down here, too. She tried to count them casually. At least fifteen, maybe twenty.
“And North Korea is going to usher in the grand millennium?” She wanted to see if he would deny his nationality. It could help to know. She’d hacked North Korean codes numerous times and monitored them as a matter of course.
“Not North Korea.” He shook his head, as if he pitied her inability to grasp his real plans. “I have no sympathy for my brother’s kingdom.”
Kang-dee Rang, she realized, the brother of the Supreme Leader of North Korea. Only three years ago, Kang-dee, though older, had been passed over by his father for the leadership of that bizarre country, leading to a scathing sibling rivalry after the aging dictator’s death.
Giving us this catastrophe.
“The ‘Supreme Leader,’”—Kang-dee’s voice dripped with sarcasm—“is already defeated. We shut down his pathetic rule a few hours ago. But the kingdom’s infrastructure is so poor it might take days for the rest of the world to recognize that even its elementary level of functioning has stopped. Our kingdom is here, and soon it will be everywhere.”
Lana wanted to hurl herself at him, but restrained herself, for the tang of real terror hung in the air, and she had no choice but to play a waiting game. Still, she could not keep from shaking her head, appalled to understand the brute mechanics behind his presence and all that it explained and portended: After being snubbed, Kang-dee had decided to grab a much greater prize than the ruined state of North Korea. He had gone after the entire planet.
“I don’t think Yemen is going to love hosting you and the plans you’re hatching down here,” Lana challenged, mostly to keep him talking but also to garner any bit of information that might prove helpful if she ever got her hands on his console.
“Yemen, at the end of the day, as you Americans like to say, is an arm of Iran, even more than Iraq has turned out to be. And the Iranians and I have provided for each other in vital ways. Through their control of Yemen’s highly effective Political Security Organization, my Shiite friends have strong influence in the Ministry of the Interior, which has accorded me great assistance and freedom in building my army. Look at them.” He gestured at the rows of cyberwarriors. “I took only my country’s and Iran’s most elite fighters. They have promised me their allegiance, and I have promised them the world.”
“And what did you promise Tehran?” Though Lana had no doubt about the answer to her question. She questioned only whether he felt cocky enough down there to respond honestly. He did not keep her in suspense:
“We have promised them nothing. We have given them all they need to build their nuclear weapons. It is ironic, isn’t it? Your country and Israel attacked the Iranians with the computer virus Stuxnet to destroy their centrifuges, which were so vital to their nuclear ambitions. But that made them ever so willing to work with us. I saw the opportunity and took it. I will forever be grateful to the short-term thinking of the United States.”
He glanced at his watch. “The last of the nuclear silos is opening. In less than fifteen minutes the U.S. will be destroyed. There is already much wailing in the streets. Show her.”
One of the three large screens came alive. It was only feet from where the would-be emperor sat. What Lana noticed on the video, even more than the prayer vigils and people weeping on their knees or screaming imprecations at the sky, was the trash scattered everywhere. That was the one constant as the big screen changed with video from city after city, disaster after disaster. Each clip showed a country defeated militarily, economically, and socially — but the endless mounds of uncollected, uncontained garbage spoke most revealingly of the deepening desperation of her homeland.
The last clip showed the opening of a nuclear missile silo somewhere in the American desert. She heard a humming sound from the screen, like an idling dentist’s drill.
“You should be grateful,” Kang-dee said to her. “You are alive, and you will remain alive. The world belongs to the likes of us.”
She looked around. The mujahideen appeared grim. She wondered whether that was because those jihadists wanted to kill the only Western woman in their midst. Or had they recognized that they were also expendable to Kang-dee, that real victory might accrue only to this creature with his sickly smile and those who plied cyberwar on his behalf? His minions would never include her, she vowed silently, solemnly. No matter what happens.
He glanced at the screen with the missile silo and resumed his work as if she were not present. With the absence of talk, she again heard the hum of the silo opening.
At any other time, Kang-dee would have been considered delusional, and rightly so. But she knew this was not any other time. This was a new age with the most lethal means of warfare ever devised, one that could bend even nuclear arsenals, fighter jets, and long-range bombers to its own designs. And she had the grinding misfortune of finding herself perched on the very precipice of its wholesale slaughter.
Holmes hadn’t slept in thirty hours, and for days before that had only catnapped, yet he remained intensely alert and fully engaged as the minutes ticked away, his thoughts always circling back to words that played in his mind like a song you can’t shake:
Ruhi Mancur, lost somewhere in Yemen.
Lana Elkins, lost somewhere in Yemen.
Fourteen SEALs, lost forever in Yemen.
And now, in a curious twist, the last of the mighty weapon silos of his own country was opening on a screen only a few feet from him. He thought about how he and his fellows in the intelligence service — and a number of women as well, back in the day — had faced down the Russians, the growing threat from “Red” China, then terrorists of all stripes with their plastic explosives and box cutter conspiracies; but the computer, which arose largely from the most creative minds of his country, had turned war upside down and, in a purely demonic sense, democratized it to the point where an invisible enemy could bring Holmes’s powerful nation to its knees. Just as the terrorists had claimed in one of their communications to the American people.
He had strong suspicions about the attackers, of course, and would have chiseled those thoughts into stone if he thought they would have survived the imminent nuclear blasts.
Teresa McGivern looked at him. “What do you think? Do we have any hope?”
“The only hope is that we haven’t heard from them.”