This dissatisfaction was significant for one very simple reason. The 12th GUMO was the organization responsible for the administration, storage, security, and safety of Russia ’s nuclear weapons. When its people became angry and resentful, they were in a position to cause serious trouble. And for Lev Yusov, anger and resentment were his default states of mind.
A lifetime spent in the service of the Motherland had left him little more than a glorified filing clerk, sitting behind a counter in a provincial depot, checking papers in and out, taking orders from officers no better than him, or-which was even worse-their stuck-up personal secretaries. He knew he was just an anonymous old drudge in their eyes, an insignificant functionary whose only means of exercising power lay in his ability to be unhelpful. Yusov exercised that power to the full.
Woe betide the request that was not made exactly as the regulations required, or the form that was incorrectly filled in. His capacity for nit-picking, obstruction, and sheer bloody-mindedness, honed by decades of experience, had become legendary. No one went down to Yusov’s grim, windowless basement kingdom if they could possibly avoid it. No one socialized with him or passed the time of day. And so, when Alexander Lebed went on American TV, talking about missing nukes, and set off a frenzy of backside-covering within the 12th GUMO, as senior officers desperately strove to find out whether these bombs existed and, if so, what had actually happened to them (before passing the buck as far and as fast as they possibly could), no one thought to ask Lev Yusov whether he had any files on the subject, tucked away on the rows of shelves that stretched into the darkness behind him.
This exclusion was just one more drop in the acidic lake of Yusov ’s bitterness. The more he was ignored, the more he sat and pondered about all the documents that had passed before his eyes, documents that he cherished as his most precious, meticulously cared-for possessions. Something was nagging at the corner of his mind, an uncertain memory of a computer printout handed to him many years before, when half the ambitious young whippersnappers who now bossed him around were still in short trousers. It had contained a stream of numbers, and had been folded up and put in a cardboard envelope. This file had no name, just a reference number. Nor had there been any description of its contents. The man who had handed it to him had insisted he had no idea what it might be-just another piece of bureaucratic flotsam that had washed up in his department.
Four months of furtive but infinitely patient rummaging passed by before Yusov found the envelope. It was marked TOP SECRET and date-stamped with the 12th GUMO insignia.
He took out the computer printout. The paper was flimsy, the dot-matrix printer ink fading to pale gray, but he could still make out 127 entries arranged vertically over six pages. Each entry consisted of three number groups. The first two groups contained either ten or eleven digits, divided into three subgroups, of degrees, minutes, and seconds. The third group contained eight digits in a single sequence. One complete entry read: 49°24’29.0160”94°21’31.047”99875495.
Lev Yusov had spent his entire working life in the 12th GUMO. The first two number groups were easily understood: He knew a set of map coordinates when he saw them. Normally, such coordinates would describe a weapon’s target: either the location at which it was aimed or the one it had actually hit. But what if these numbers referred not to targets, but locations? The missing weapons described by Alexander Lebed were portable. They must have been taken somewhere. Perhaps these numbers revealed where.
As for the last eight digits, Yusov assumed they referred to some sort of arming code. He knew that no nuclear weapon, be it an intercontinental missile or a single artillery shell, could be detonated without specific instructions. These numbers would provide the correct combination for each individual bomb.
Late at night, his hand clutching a half-empty bottle, Yusov considered the significance of what he had found. If he was right about the meaning of those numbers, then they were his way out of his shit flat and his shit job, and the shits he had to work with.
Someone, somewhere would pay a fortune for that list. For anyone who possessed it and the means to get at the bombs would have the whole world at his mercy.
7
War in the desert was supposed to be all about heat, sweat, and choking clouds of dust. But that was when the sun was up. This was a winter’s night. Carver felt deep-frozen, colder than he had ever been, and the chattering of his teeth drowned out the scrabble of steel against dirt from the spades of the men digging down into the earth.
From where Carver stood, the holes were simply patches of blackness in the blue-gray expanse of the starlit desert.
There were seven of them, the size and depth of open graves awaiting their coffins. Or maybe this was what a goldfield looked like when the first prospectors arrived and started burrowing down for their fortunes. Carver and his men were prospecting, too, searching for the fiber-optic cable, buried somewhere beneath their feet, that kept the Iraqi dictator in touch with his troops.
Carver’s team from the Special Boat Service had been allotted two hours on the ground to break that link. There were fifteen minutes left. And still no sign of any cable.
Carver shook his head in helpless frustration. There was just time to dig one more hole. He was trying to work out where to put it when there was an explosion of deafening white noise, hissing, and crackling in his ear. He could just make out a voice, almost buried beneath the distortion: “We’ve got company, boss. Couple of companies of mechanized infantry, heading directly at us.”
“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Carver asked.
He was already on the run toward the perimeter, needing to see for himself, but the ground seemed to have softened, sucking at his feet like quicksand. His progress was way too slow. He wasn’t going to get there in time. Meanwhile the noise in his ear was getting louder. He wanted to tear off his headphones, but now the lookout’s voice was bursting into life again. “They’ve got mortars. Here we go…”
The desert silence was broken by a series of distant percussive crumps, followed by whooshes, like fireworks streaking into the sky. A few seconds later, magnesium parachute flares burst over the landing zone, scorching Carver’s eyes and leaving the fifty-foot-long Chinooks as exposed in their burning white light as a pair of naked lovers surprised by an angry husband.
Now there were mortar rounds falling all across the landing zone and cannon fire cracking through the night air. Carver could hear a new voice now, one of the chopper pilots, his voice tightening as adrenaline flooded his nervous system: “We’re like coconuts in a shy here. I’m starting up the rotors. You’d better get your men aboard sharpish.”
Carver started issuing orders. He was shouting into his intercom, but he must not have made himself heard because the men weren’t moving and even though the chopper rotors were turning at top speed, they didn’t seem able to lift off the ground, and suddenly the whole landing zone was filled with Iraqis. He couldn’t work out how they’d got there so fast, or why they were speaking Russian at him. He thought he recognized their faces, but they kept blurring out of focus. He pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, but no bullets came out, even though the magazine was full.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The Chinooks were meant to take off with all his men aboard. Then the explosives would blow and cut the cable, turning an imminent fiasco into a last-minute triumph. But that wasn’t happening at all, because now his men had all disappeared and he was alone with the Russians, and they were taking him through a door into a room where there was a log fire burning in an open grate. And he didn’t have his combat gear on anymore, in fact he was stark naked except for a black nylon belt strapped around his waist.