“Hello, Thad. I’m pulling you out of STRATCOM. You’re taking over for Ray Smythe. You need to get your butt to Washington.”
Surprisingly, he wasn’t stunned by the announcement. Not even a little. “Understand, sir. We’re airborne over Ohio right now. We’ll divert to Andrews AFB immediately.”
“See me when you get on the ground, General.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” He paused. “And sir, let me pass my condolences on to you regarding General Smythe. He was a fine man. I know he was a personal friend of yours.”
“Thank you, General. I agree — he was a fine man.”
“Yes, sir. STRATCOM out.” The video link was broken.
The president turned to Tank Stone. “Tank, get him up to speed as quickly as you can.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And get those aerial sprayers ready to go. Yesterday.”
“Copy that, sir.”
Inside, Jessie was beaming. Generations of effort, years of endless waiting and personal sacrifice to perform a mission once abandoned by those who’d originally launched it, had all come down to this moment… And in the end, it’d been surprisingly easy. First, she’d conquered the president of the United States — the most powerful man on the planet. And then she’d ensured one of her own — a person much like her — had been placed in a position of enormous power as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The suicide of General Smythe had been a blessing in disguise — completely unexpected, but completely welcome. Her clandestine calls to her counterparts in foreign lands were also beginning to pay off. The Chinese. The Russians. Soon, she knew the intelligence agencies would be reporting on troublesome events in North Korea. Great Britain. France. Germany. A worldwide network of those who shared her vision was alive with advice whispered into the ears of other powerful men, just as she had done. No, was doing.
The events of the last two days had been completely unexpected — the whole situation had caught her off guard. She didn’t know if the chaotic, fast-moving situation could be managed effectively yet, but chaos was never frowned upon by her and those like her. It opened doors to opportunity. Her time, their time, was now. As Vladimir Ilyich himself had once said, It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. Lenin was right. Mysteries were at work here, and the laws were in their favor.
She gently stroked the president’s thigh, and was delighted to notice that he made no effort to remove her hand. She had him.
Even in the situation room, in front of his war cabinet, she had him.
It was a delightful thing.
The president was in a weakened state. His wife’s death, which had been a beautiful example of planning on her part, had set the most powerful man on the planet on a course straight into her loving arms. Soon, he would be speaking her words, ordering her desires, and the world would be finally be prepared for the moment for which she’d lived her life.
She silently thanked the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti visionaries for designing such a useful tool as Spetsial’naya Podgotovka 117. If they’d known a derivative of their psychotropic SP-117 was to one day be given to the president of the United States himself… No one in the old KGB would’ve dreamt such a thing were possible. God knows they’d tried to do it before.
The KGB had passed into history.
But others, like her, had not.
For decades, her kind had sat dormant — sleeping, as it were — always scheming, awaiting the order to awake and strike.
The villages built in remote parts of the Soviet Union — crafted to resemble an American or British town, where agents would lose their Soviet identities and immerse themselves in the culture of their target country — now sat abandoned. Children, selected for their racial or physical characteristics, had been raised from birth in these villages, given their lives to the great cause, and when ready, traveled abroad with new foreign identities provided by the KGB. New York, London, Washington, even Beijing blindly welcomed the newcomers, the secret soldiers of the Soviet dream.
Her grandfather had been one such child. He lived his life waiting for an order. His son — her father — grew to accept the cause, as well, and he waited.
Jessie was American by birth, but a follower of the cause. Her father had taught her well… and she, too, waited.
The order never came from her true homeland, the land of her forefathers. The KGB’s tentacles had once reached far and deep, much more than anyone ever imagined, into nearly every government across the globe. They were so close to realizing their dream…
But those tentacles withered and died along with the Union. Thousands of willing soldiers — the sleepers — were abandoned in place, left to fend for themselves, their mission no longer important. For some, though — for many — the cause was too great to abandon. All their sacrifices would not be in vain.
The fight would go on.
From father to son to grandson — and granddaughter — the cause was kept alive. In London, Tokyo, Paris, and Washington, the fight would go on. In Berlin, Beijing, and even Moscow itself, the fight would go on. The old ones in the Kremlin had passed on, and the new leaders — the bastards who’d allowed decades of glory to fade away and then greedily embraced the corruption and excesses of Western society — had abandoned them, and for that, they would suffer the same fate. The descendants of the coward Gorbachev and the drunkard Yeltsin, and the string of fools that followed them in the Kremlin, would feel the sting of their sins.
The entire world would tremble when they made their move, and the new world, the one envisioned by the Fathers of the Revolution, would rise from the ashes.
Her father, and his father before him, would be proud of what she’d accomplished… and of what she was prepared to do.
A tiny dose on the skin was all it took. For weeks, small amounts of the drug had drawn Andrew closer. A larger dose — a risk she was prepared to take — helped prod him to use the soman, something he never would’ve done on his own. With larger, more frequent doses, the president would be hers to use as she wished, clay to mold with her hands. In his hands lay the keys to America’s nuclear arsenal.
For without fire, there can be no ashes.
CHAPTER 49
“When did that happen?”
“Just a little while ago, Derek. He was on the phone with his daughter. She was stuck in traffic just outside Lincoln when they released the gas.” Admiral Don Burns didn’t have to explain any further. The tone of his voice said it all.
General Rammes was shocked to hear of Ray Smythe’s suicide, but he was even more shocked to hear the soman gas had already been used. “Don, are you telling me they used the soman?”
“Yes. Dropped it on the Lincoln wave, and the other waves as well. Looks like it’s working. The things are dropping like flies.”
“Those fucking idiots! Why didn’t they wait for our analysis?”
Burns was confused. “What is it, Derek?”
“The soman doesn’t work, Don. We exposed it to one of the live creatures, and it adapted to it. It dropped dead — at least we thought it was dead — and then it just came back to life. That’s why I was calling Ray. So he could tell the president.”
“Dear God.”
“No shit. And there’s more. The thing bit one of my troopers, and transformed him into a… into a thing. When it bit him, it passed its immunity to the soman on to him. We flooded the compartment with enough soman to kill a few cities, and it stood there and took it. No effect whatsoever. It doesn’t work.”