Petrevich soon reached the P180 highway and turned south. He drove through the night and well into the next gloomy afternoon, stopping only for fuel and food and eating at the wheel. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror where the occasional car, following for too long, raised his awareness but in every case it sooner or later turned off on another route or went past him. Nevertheless he’d survived this far by being paranoid and he wasn’t going to relax his senses now. By nightfall he found an obscure spot to park the car and slept for an hour.
Petrevich felt himself tensing up as he drew closer to the checkpoint at the Georgia border but he was waved through with hardly any delay. The drive through the small country was short. The mountainous Turkey terrain slowed him down but he didn’t mind. He was far from Sarov.
The road sign said the Iraq border was one mile ahead. Petrevich pulled off the road at the first fuel station he’d seen in hours, thinking it might be the last one before he entered Iraq. Seth had promised Habur would be an uneventful checkpoint. Petrevich would soon find out.
Back in Sarov, a young Russian Army officer walked into the office of her commanding general. “Sir, we have a possible motive for the murder of the two guards at the checkpoint four days ago. A significant amount of nuclear material is missing from the secure area.”
President Garrison Cross finished a White House meeting with House and Senate leaders from both sides of the aisle, including those from the intelligence committees, and now nurtured a blinding headache both literally and figuratively. How could so many lawmakers in Congress believe that attacks stemming from 9/11 were in America’s rear-view mirror now? He’d made little progress that morning in convincing them to act on his demand for the list of aggressive new security measures he’d proposed. But Cross had the advantage, or was it the disadvantage, he thought, of the intel briefings, classified as Sensitive Compartmented Information, brought to him every morning at eight o’clock by a top-level officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It wasn’t enough for Cross to scan the reports or to have them summarized for him. He read through them while rapid-firing questions at the CIA officer, who had long ago learned to come prepared. The reports had become increasingly ominous in recent months, in part due to ever-advancing detection capabilities but Cross knew the Al-Qaeda mentality had proliferated among independent operators. The looming consensus of those in Cross’s intelligence team was that a major nuclear event on the mainland was a good bet within the next year. It was no secret that the terrorist groups were just one buy of bomb-ready nuclear material away from such an attempt. Acquiring enough for a “dirty” bomb — something to cause local destruction, however devastating — was no longer their aim: They wanted a world-class disaster, something on the order of the bombings that ended the war with Japan more than six decades ago. It was not only Al-Qaeda he worried about. Many other rogue states and movements frequently made statements to remind the United States and its friends of their hate-filled intentions. Still, Congress wouldn’t budge, citing constituency opposition.
But there had been two signal events that ultimately brought President Cross to the decision he was about to implement. Russia recently announced that it would no longer cooperate with the United States and other Western nations to secure and effectively manage the former Soviet nuclear stockpile, saying that Russia could manage it alone. Cross and his national security apparatus were dubious of the claim and believed that opened the door for dramatic expansion of the black market for weapons-grade nuclear materials, for which there certainly were customers. The second factor was the recent apprehension of one Harvey Joplan, an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, believed to be a mole on the inside of the secretive organization playing against American interests. And Cross knew from his own term at the CIA that the Agency maintained a database not only of locations where the old Soviet nuke stockpile was secured but also the names of actors believed to pose a risk of smuggling nuclear materials out of Russia. U.S. intelligence knew that many of the nuclear scientists at Kremlyov were essentially abandoned by the broken system and even now remained unemployed — some of them likely ripe for using their privileged knowledge and access for illicit purposes. Kremlyov was the former secret government compound where Russian nuclear war systems were designed and manufactured — and still stored. All of this added up to potential for the most dire of outcomes. The identity of the Russian scientists was among the CIA’s carefully guarded secrets.
Cross had been CIA Director before winning the White House, and ensuring the safety of the American people had been his signature presidential campaign theme. It was unknown at this point whether the mole had already delivered compromising intelligence to Iran or other supporters of terrorism but it was irresponsible to assume otherwise. Although the CIA and the FBI had scored many successes in the war on terror, Cross knew the U.S. was fighting with one hand behind its back because of bureaucratic hoops and counterproductive laws and regulations — not to mention the press and the ACLU — that often made necessary security measures impossible. And now the Washington Post had reported the deliberate exposure by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of a highly secretive National Security Agency operation known as PRISM. Cross knew the leak rendered the program, which the FBI had said prevented numerous terrorist operations, a liability rather than an effective prevention tool.
Now it was time for Cross to find a way to do what Congress wouldn’t do and the intel agencies couldn’t do.
The Pentagon delivered Cameron Warfield’s military records to the Oval Office and President Garrison Cross spent the next forty minutes going through them. Once finished, he told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed, leaned back in his chair, and propped his feet on the corner of the grand Resolute desk that had served a number of presidents before him.
Cross gazed out into the Rose Garden thinking over his plan one more time, then thumped Warfield’s thick folder, confirmed in his belief that Warfield was the choice candidate for the job he was about to throw at him. If not Cam Warfield for this job, then who?
Cross frankly was skeptical that Warfield would accept the assignment. For one thing, Warfield was dedicated to Lone Elm, the counterterrorism camp he built from scratch as an army officer and later took over as a private contractor. Warfield conceived the Lone Elm Counterintelligence Center when he was a full colonel in the army, and sold the idea up the chain of command. He received support for its creation from the secretary of defense, and Congress approved the facility following secret hearings in which Warfield’s successful record in counterespionage carried weight. But it had been a fight. The CIA and FBI opposed it, which Cross knew was simple rivalry.