Trevor Scott
Vital Force
For my siblings
Chuck, Sue, Deb, Jeff, Gina, Greg, Jill and Steph
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all of the readers who have taken a chance and purchased one of my books. A special thanks to those who have passed the word and recommended one of my titles to a friend or relative. I am indebted to the kind people of China who always had a smile for me and my family. I hope to return there soon. Thanks also to all of the dedicated Air Force personnel and the defense contractors who are working on the airborne and ground-based laser systems that will soon protect our country from rogue state ICBMs.
Prologue
The metal bar smashed against the side of his head, knocking Jake Adams to his knees, the wooden chair still lashed to his naked back. His face landed with a thud on the wet, moldy pavement, his eyelashes fluttering in a puddle of his own blood as his eyeballs swirled around trying to focus on anything. Anything that would let Jake know he was still alive.
“We can stop any time, Adams,” came the harsh, Slavic voice that Jake had learned to hate over the past two weeks. “Just tell us what we need to know.”
Jake shifted his shoulders and tried to lift his head from the cold floor. The taste of iron from his blood seeped through his teeth as he swallowed. He couldn’t last much longer like this. He had eaten only stale bread and drank only filthy water during his stay along the Volga River-captured and brought to this dungeon-like basement after only two days in the city that had, until twenty-some years before, been known as Stalingrad. Over fourteen days he had thought he was losing his mind, envisioning ghosts of some three million people who had died during the Nazi siege and eventual surrender. Apparitions of his mind, he was sure, but in that dank cell he currently called home, he could almost hear the screams of horror and cries of pain from those killed in that war. Maybe the screams were his own, echoing off the thick stone walls.
The Soviet GRU officer, dressed in civilian clothes, shoved the metal bar under Jake’s chin and pressed down against his wind pipe, bringing instant pain and cutting off his air.
Jake’s mind spun as he gasped for breath. He had to hold out. He couldn’t tell them anything. His cover story placed him in Volgograd promoting a communications company that did not exist. At least not in any real sense. Sure the Company had offices in Baltimore and Munich, where Jake reportedly worked. But it was all a front set up by the CIA. That’s what his captors suspected and what Jake had to never confirm. Yet, he knew that at this very moment the offices in both cities would be wiped clean and cleared out like a speakeasy one step ahead of the Feds. Only a few knew Jake’s real mission in Volgograd, and all would deny any knowledge of the same.
Struggling against the bar at his throat, Jake lifted his chin. His brutal captor let up on the metal bar. Jake coughed and spit up blood. Recovering, he said, “You know, Ivan, you need to work a little on your people skills.” He coughed again, trying to catch his breath and waiting for the next blow. His ribs were broken, his shoulder separated, and he was sure he had a fractured skull. He wished they would get it over with and kill him. The pain would end. Another part of him, that with a desire to beat these bastards at their own game, wanted nothing more than to last until their hands were blistered.
Suddenly, the heavy metal door burst open and Jake could see a couple sets of legs. Uniforms. Then muffled Russian. If his left ear drum hadn’t burst from a blow two days ago, he could have understood what they were saying.
Hands grasped under Jake’s arms and pulled him to a sitting position on his chair. His eyes focused on the man he had called Ivan for the past two weeks standing at the door about to leave. “Have a nice day,” Jake mumbled.
Disgusted, the GRU officer left and slammed the door in his wake.
Shifting his head to his left, Jake’s eyes finally settled on a man in a Soviet uniform. Something wasn’t right, though. The man was wearing the uniform of the Soviet Missile Forces. A captain.
Jake looked closer at the man’s face. “Yuri?” He barely got the name out before he felt himself sliding forward, his mind reeling.
Then came the blackness.
1
Isolated in the taiga of the Russian Far East, among the thick pines and rolling hills, the mobile SS-27 missile sat atop the transporter erector launcher, camouflaged in forest green and brown that made it blend into its surroundings. The launcher slowly rose into firing position.
Back in the snowy forest some hundred meters, the darkness of night did not allow a view of the launcher by the forty heavily-armed soldiers huddled in fox holes.
The crew inside the mobile launch facility had only the view on their video monitors from cameras strapped to trees, and even those were grainy and obscured somewhat by the green from the night vision optics.
Jake Adams watched as each crewman prepared for the launch. He was the only American in the box, sent to observe the launch as part of a cooperative exchange. And he was still wondering why he was there, since he was no longer with the Air Force or the old Central Intelligence Agency. He had also never officially worked for this new Agency, which combined most of the alphabet groups and military intelligence under one bloated organization. But he had been called back on occasion to help the old and new Agency. This assignment had come about by request from an old Soviet officer, Yuri Pushkina, whom he had met in the Ukraine while verifying the destruction of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the late ‘80s. And again in Volgograd.
Now, Jake watched his old friend, a colonel in the Russian Missile Forces, pace nervously from station to station while he awaited the launch command from the central command authority outside of Moscow, some three thousand miles to the west. The colonel’s plodding gate brought images in Jake’s mind of a bull stamping back and forth, hoping to catch a bullfighter off guard.
The facility itself was stuffed beyond capacity. Normally there would have been a man at each end of the box-like control room that resembled a small European truck trailer lined with communications equipment. Each of the launch officers was separated by distance, just like the American crews, to make it nearly impossible to fire the missiles without at least the collusion of two dedicated officers simultaneously turning their launch keys. Beyond them, a half a dozen enlisted men manned other consoles. All were dressed in forest camouflage jump suits.
The extra observers, like Jake and a couple of other dignitaries, made the walls seem to close in on them. The red lights and glow from the green luminescent static-free floor gave the small room an eerie atmosphere.
“Why so nervous?” Jake asked the colonel.
Yuri shrugged his broad shoulders, the boards on his impeccable dress uniform rising. “I don’t know.” He put his arm around Jake’s shoulder and pulled him aside. “You remember outside Kiev, before the hoist dropped and nearly broke the case on that nuke? I had a feeling inside my stomach. Something was wrong. I have same feeling.”
It was strange for Jake to hear this dedicated and highly-decorated Cold Warrior admit that he had gut feelings about anything, and especially something this important. “Sounds like you just want everything to go right, Yuri. Nothing wrong with that. What’ll they do, send you to Siberia?”
That got a laugh from Yuri, who had grown up in central Siberia, and any assignment east or west of his homeland would have been considered cushy.