Then he pushed the yoke forward and began a brutally steep dive. It took mere seconds to plunge from forty-three thousand feet to only twenty thousand feet, and Marcus found his stomach in his throat. The g-forces threatened to knock him out. But he hadn’t lost the MiGs. They were screaming in from every direction, and as he leveled out the G4—now around eighteen thousand feet—he knew they were going to be fired on at any moment.
Marcus decreased speed and once again turned on the autopilot. Then he unbuckled himself and left the cockpit.
“You ready?” he asked.
They both nodded.
“As we’ll ever be,” Morris managed to say, brave to the last.
Bill McDermott sat in the Situation Room, next to the president.
Like his colleagues and Clarke himself, he had tried to hold out hope for his friend and the team he had with him, though he knew it was futile. Now that they’d been found—now that both the Kremlin and the White House were tracking the G4 in real time—there was no way Marcus, Morris, and the Raven were ever going to shake the MiGs. To the contrary, they were about to be blown to kingdom come. McDermott’s eyes were glued to the flat-screen monitors, and he couldn’t look away.
The largest monitor—the one mounted on the far wall, directly across from the commander in chief—showed the live radar tracking of six fighter planes converging on the Gulfstream. Various digital displays along the bottom of the screen provided rapidly changing data from each of the seven aircraft—altitude, airspeed, direction, and so forth. McDermott had been stunned by the G4’s harrowing twenty-five-thousand-foot plunge, but he was even more disturbed by the bizarre decision to level off at eighteen thousand feet and slow down. Yes, the plane was smack-dab in the middle of a thick band of clouds. But it wasn’t going to matter. It wasn’t going to hide them or make them any less vulnerable. Marcus and Morris certainly knew that, so why weren’t they still diving?
The Gulfstream wasn’t a fighter jet. It wasn’t built to withstand the extreme pressures of dogfighting. But by diving for St. Petersburg, not banking away from it, and flying low across the deck, they might buy enough time to figure out a way to get out into neutral territory over the Gulf of Finland. However crazy the Russians were, they certainly weren’t going to shoot a G4 out of the sky over one of their most populous cities. Yet the radar track showed none of the moves McDermott would have made in Marcus’s place. Then again, McDermott knew Marcus had never flown a jet. He’d flown Piper Cubs in his twenties. So he was at the mercy of the CIA’s Moscow station chief.
Jennifer Morris was brilliant and highly respected throughout the intelligence community. And she’d helped Marcus pull off one of the greatest intelligence coups in the history of the Agency. Still, maybe she hadn’t been ready for what came next. He couldn’t say for sure, but one thing he knew: Jenny Morris was about to get his friend—and the best Marine he’d ever had the honor to command—killed.
The Situation Room was silent. The Pentagon wasn’t feeding them live audio of the Russian pilots. Nor were they getting any communications from the G4. No one gathered around the conference table and staring at the screens spellbound was saying anything. Not the president. Not the generals. What was there to say?
Then McDermott saw it. He grabbed one of the remotes off the table in front of him and zoomed in on the image. American radar was picking up an air-to-air missile being fired by the lead MiG-29, followed almost instantaneously by a second one. It took only the blink of an eye, and the G4 disappeared from the screen.
Everyone knew what had happened. Yet McDermott couldn’t believe it. He kept staring at the screen in silence as the MiGs turned in pairs, presumably returning to their base.
Then, out of nowhere, the Pentagon patched through the intercepted audio of the Russian pilots after all. They were whooping and hollering and congratulating one another, as were their base controllers and surely their superiors in Moscow.
And Bill McDermott just sat there, staring at the flickering screen, aghast.
The missiles had come quick.
The resulting fireball had been as blinding as it had been enormous. But as Marcus hurtled downward through the thick clouds and frigid night sky—free-falling at terminal velocity with an unopened parachute strapped to his back, Jenny Morris strapped to his front, and Oleg in a separate parachute a few yards to his right—he didn’t feel scared. He wasn’t thinking about the rest of the escape or the aftermath of the tensions between Russia and the West. Nor was he thinking about Elena or Lars, or about his mother or the Garcias or any of his Marine buddies, much less the rest of his life. There’d be plenty of time to think about such things soon enough.
Right now, in the silence, save the steady hiss of the oxygen flowing into his helmet, a single thought kept echoing in his brain. It wasn’t from Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. It wasn’t from his mom or even from the Scriptures. It was from Churchill, and for Marcus it captured the moment perfectly.
There truly was nothing more exhilarating than being shot at with no result.
EPILOGUE
THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.—29 SEPTEMBER
McDermott’s phone rang.
He instantly recognized the number. It was Nick Vinetti in Moscow. He took a deep breath and answered in a hushed tone so as not to distract the president, who was huddled in the corner with the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs, discussing their next moves.
Nick was calling from the operations center underneath the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. “You with the president?” he asked, his voice more stressed than sad.
“Yeah,” McDermott said. “You calling about Marcus?”
“No, actually.”
“No?”
“There’s something else, something bigger,” Vinetti said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Bill, something’s about to break here, and you need to let the president know before he hears it from anyone else.”
“Then spit it out,” McDermott ordered. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s President Luganov.”
“What about him?”
“He’s been assassinated.”
“What?”
“And not just him—Dmitri Nimkov, too.”
“That’s not possible,” McDermott said.
“It’s true, and there’s more,” Vinetti said.
“I’m listening.”
“The guy you just put on that plane to whisk out of Moscow—the Raven—that’s the guy the Russians say pulled the trigger.”
McDermott felt the blood drain from his face. He didn’t know if this meant the war was still coming or not. What he did know was that the world had just changed. Again. And he had to tell the president.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After nearly sixteen years of writing thrillers about worst-case scenarios in the Middle East, it was time to shift gears and focus on new threats.
I am deeply grateful, therefore, to these and other experts on Russia, NATO, Europe, and U.S. national security and foreign policy who helped me make this pivot. They were exceedingly generous with their time, and while they may or may not agree with everything (or perhaps anything) in the finished novel, the book is far better for their insights.
• Hon. Stephen Harper, former prime minister of Canada