But then, midflight, the pilot, in broken English, announced something disturbing and cryptic in his deep Slavic accent. “Sorry so much … but headquarters say that there is big trouble in Israel … you now all have to go to my homeland, Georgia. Maybe then fly to Berlin. Maybe then from there to United of States.”
Joshua asked, “What kind of big trouble?”
“War breaking out … some kind big trouble war. Dunno anymore.”
That was all that Joshua needed to hear. “My daughter’s back there. I need to go to Israel. We’ve got to stick to the plan, the drop-off point … the original plan … up on the Golan Heights, just like we planned. Do you understand? There’s an Israeli helicopter that’s supposed to be waiting for me there. You said so yourself, Grigori.”
“Yes, but, oh, I dunno … can’t do that maybe.”
Cannon joined in with Joshua. “Oh, yes, you definitely can ‘do that maybe.’ You’re going to stick to the plan, Grigori, like our friend says. We all go with the original plan. Savvy?”
So Grigori called his superiors. When he was done with his long radio call he half turned to his passengers. “Okay, here it is going to
be … I got the okay to take Mr. Jordan to drop-off point but has to be real quick.”
Joshua gave a satisfied nod.
“But rest of you, no … can’t do. You commandos have to go to Georgia with me. Then fly to Berlin like I say before.”
“Unacceptable,” Jack shouted out. “Totally unacceptable. We stick with Josh the whole way.”
“Look,” Grigori shouted back, “I have orders. You don’t want it this way, then you get it no way. When I stop in Turkey to refuel, I kick you all out. You want that? I don’t think Turks will be happy with you.”
Cannon turned to his team. He whispered, “Any of you guys know how to fly a helicopter?”
They all shook their heads no.
The ex-Ranger chuckled and muttered, “Gee, what kind of special-ops team are you guys anyway? Well, I was hoping.” He lowered his voice and added, “We could sort of disable our friend and his copilot and fly to Israel according to plan. I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
Joshua said in a low voice, “I was trained on a Blackhawk, but man, that was a long time ago. Look, let’s stand down for a second on that idea. Let me talk to the pilot.”
Then Joshua shouted up to the pilot. “Hey, Grigori, what’s the problem with
all
of us being dropped at the Golan Heights, just like we planned?”
“Headquarters says … you four guys there … you are commandos, right?”
Joshua still didn’t get it. “Yeah, these guys are commandos. So what?”
“Headquarters says that if I drop commandos while war is about to start big time, that’s bad idea … not going to happen. Then someone says that Georgia is part of war …”
The dawn was breaking. “Okay,” Joshua said to the team. “I see what he’s saying. Look, when we get to the checkpoint, there should be an Israeli helicopter waiting. If there is, I jump out. Job done. Mission accomplished.”
Cannon smiled. “Or we get to the rendezvous point and we all jump out together. What’s Grigori going to do. Shoot us?”
“Yes!” Grigori said over the two-way intercom that had been left on. “I will shoot you.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “We’ve been had.”
The copilot had unbuckled his seat belt and was in the aisle, pointing his handgun at the Americans.
Grigori ordered them to hand all of their weapons to the copilot. “You be good boys. Don’t want blood all over my nice helicopter.”
The team reluctantly disarmed themselves.
Cannon was unhappy. “Like I’ve been saying, this is starting to stink.”
But Joshua didn’t see the problem. “You don’t have to hold my hand, guys. You’ve saved my life. I’ll never forget it. But once I’m in the Golan, I can take it from there. Okay?”
Jack said, “But what about this ‘big trouble war’ that Grigori’s talking about?”
Joshua tried to dismiss it. “What’s new about that? Israel’s always got some shooting match going on with one of its Arab neighbors. Look, like we already heard from the CDCI rebels, Israel has already kicked Iran back over the goalposts with the nukes they turned around. Game over. So how bad can things be?”
On board the
Kiev,
Russian Vice Admiral Sergei Trishnipov had just conferred with his invasion chiefs. In thirty minutes he would give the flight order for his jet fighters, in squadrons of fifty each, to head toward the Israeli air bases. Early intelligence indicated that the ships’ electronic radar-masking systems had worked, that they had become invisible to Israeli radar. The IDF had been successfully tricked about where the first wave of the naval invasion would take place and believed it would be much farther south.
At the same time, a dozen bombers, with fifty MiGs protecting them, would soon begin battering Haifa, with a similar formation bombing Tel Aviv.
In the north, near the Syrian border, General Viktor Oragoff, who would lead the Russian troops, and General Izmet, commander of the Turkish army, were meeting in a makeshift command center in a farmhouse. The map of Israel was laid out on the table.
General Oragoff was making sure the Turks were on the same page. He leaned over the table and pointed to the northern tip of Israel. “We enter here, between Nimrod’s Castle and Tel Dan. We secure entrance onto Highway 99, and then our fastest mechanized units must race south to Highway 90 and then take 90 south. Our tanks will be right behind to clean up the resistance. We blast down 90, and in the first five hours I want to take the Hula Valley and enter Galilee. Along the way we should be able to pick up support from the local Hamas groups embedded in Nazareth and farther south at Nablus. They will start liquidating the Jewish resistance for us. Understood?”
Izmet nodded.
Oragoff straightened up. “Then we push south to Jerusalem, followed by the dirty business of mopping up pockets of resistance, burning down houses, shooting any Jews that are left … that sort of thing. I would like to be able to begin a slow pullout in a few weeks. I’d like to see my home in St. Petersburg in two or three months. We’ll leave an occupying force, of course … two hundred thousand from Russia, another hundred thousand from the rest of the coalition. That should do it.”
The Israeli Air Force was now about to break radio silence.
“This is blue leader one. Blue leader one. Maintain elevation and flight pattern.”
The sixty other pilots of the Israeli F-16s and the F-15s guarding them acknowledged. They were flying low to avoid radar detection. It was still dark, but a sliver of red was starting to appear on the horizon.
The captain in the lead fighter was expecting to see landing ships at any moment or some sign of a massive naval flotilla arriving at Port Said. Presumably the enemy would then construct a launching platform for an invasion from the south. It didn’t make sense to the captain; it seemed too far south, but HQ had ordered it as a first strike. He figured their intel was on target.
This first sortie was to deal a devastating blow to the invading navy.
Something showed up on the captain’s radar. Two ships, three miles ahead. Maybe it was just the tip of the spear. The captain wondered out loud, “There have to be more than this. Where’s the invasion?”
Then suddenly he saw more blips on his screen. Ten ships. No, twenty-five … thirty ships. This was it.
He gave the order, and the jets closed in for bombing formation. Two miles. One mile. One thousand feet.
The first wave thumbed the release buttons, as the first two ships came into their guidance screens, and sent their missiles into the vessels.
They could see the two frigates burst into flames.
But there was nothing else they could pick up on visual. Suddenly the other blips on their screen disappeared. The IAF fighters, as well as IDF headquarters, had been fooled. One of the two ships had been a recon vessel equipped with radar imaging that was designed to send phantom signals of multiple ships that didn’t exist.
“Save your missiles,” the captain shouted.
“Where’s the rest of them?” one of the pilots asked.
But he wouldn’t get an answer. Seventy MiGs flown by Libyan pilots swooped in on them from their flank, sent from their air base in Qantara, Egypt.
Then the antiaircraft defenses set up around Port Said opened fire, sending flack out to the Mediterranean, side pinning the IAF formation in.
The Libyan fighter pilots, though specially trained by the Russians, were still no match for the Israelis. In the first fifteen minutes of the dogfight, twenty-seven MiGs had been shot down. Only six Israeli jets had been downed. For the next twenty minutes the air battle would continue. Four more IAF fighters would be lost.
But the primary aim of Israel’s enemies had been achieved.
Sixty-one out of Israel’s three-hundred-fighter-jet fleet had been waylaid to the extreme south, distracting them from the main thrust of the invasion, keeping them far away from the path of the incoming Russian-Islamic forces — where the real killing was about to begin.
“Where is the United States in all this? Our government refuses to rescue my husband, and now this.” Abigail sat in the great room of Hawk’s Nest in front of the wide-screen Internet television. The screen was divided into six quadrants, each with a separate broadcast. She paged from one to the other. On the right-hand column, a news ticker scrolled through the headlines. “Who’s going to help Israel? My daughter’s over there!” Abby said.
Cal, sitting next to her with his laptop on the coffee table, looked up. “They still haven’t given us anything new, right?”
“Just that there’s some kind of fighter-jet skirmish over Egypt. Nothing else.”
“Mom, I keep trying to get Debbie on her Allfone …”
“Don’t bother. They’ve said Israel has blocked international calls.” Then she added, almost to herself, “Deb, honey, where are you? Are you safe?”
Cal waited a few minutes before broaching the next subject. “Mom, we need to talk. You’ve got a court appearance in two days in federal court in Manhattan.”
“Yes,” she said. “In the same courtroom where years ago they tried the blind sheik for the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and other terrorists after that.” She looked at her son, who was glued to the computer screen. “So, is your mother a terrorist too?”
Cal went snake-eyed. “Absolutely not. There’s something very wrong going on in this country. When patriots try to stop catastrophes
because their government won’t, and then they get treated like the enemy.”
“Where is your father at this point? Rocky Bridger doesn’t know, Washington won’t tell me, and Israel is being invaded.”
“Mom …”
Abigail broke out of her thoughts and looked at her son. Cal was managing a half smile.
“You know what Dad would say if he were here?”
Abigail’s eyes softened. “Tell me.”
“He’d say, ‘Execute the flight plan unless you have a better one.’ How many times have we heard that? He went to Israel for his part of the plan. You stayed here for yours. Defending against this unjust criminal case is just part of what we have to do here. And one more thing, something my mother always says …”
Now she let go with a smile herself. “What’s that?”
“God is always in control, even when life isn’t.”
She studied her son. “Your dad would be proud of the way you’ve helped me.”
Cal’s eyes darted away for an instant, then he broke into a grin. “That’s our specialty in this family, isn’t it? Rescuing each other from disasters?”
They both let out a nervous laugh. It was a welcome relief, if only for a few moments.
“So,” Cal went on, “I’ve been looking at the criminal indictment that Harry emailed us, the one against you, Dad, and the Roundtable. First, they name every member of the Roundtable, even though you said some of them didn’t participate in the plan to stop the nuke.”
“I think I know why. The prosecutor’s trying to split us up, divide and conquer. There’s an old saying in criminal defense work: Last to plead, first to bleed. The key is to get members of the group to rush forward and cut favorable plea deals with the government in return for information that can be used against the other defendants. The last holdouts are the ones who get hammered in court. So they’ll put pressure on people like Fort Rice and others — agreeing to dismiss in return for their cooperation. But you know who the real target is.”
“Dad?”
“Exactly. I’ve talked to each member of the Roundtable. They’re scared, of course. Leander is the worst. But so far, they’re hanging tight, willing to fight this thing. No deals.”
“Mom, I’ve looked at this seditious-criminal charge they’ve filed. Here’s the bottom line. The Indictment reads, ‘The defendants conspired to oppose by force the authority of the United States by creating a vigilante paramilitary group purportedly to stop a nuclear attack, but instead provoked the detonation of a nuclear device causing widespread death, serious injury, and property destruction.”
“What’s your thought?”
“Doesn’t something jump out?”
“Let me guess … one phrase?”
Cal nodded.
Abigail finished the thought. “The phrase is ‘oppose by force the authority of the United States,’ that we somehow used our special-ops guys — courageous men who died trying to stop that nuke, who saved hundreds of thousands of lives if that truck had made it to New York City — that we used them to ‘oppose the authority’ of the government.”
“So somehow we need to show,” Cal said with his eyes closed and the muscles in his face tensed, “that we did not
oppose
the lawful authority of the federal government.”
“Which we do,” Abigail said, “by showing that our government refused to honor its sacred duty to protect American citizens, disregarding our many pleas, those of John Gallagher and Pack McHenry, that a nuclear catastrophe was on its way.”
“In other words,” Cal said summing up, “if the government abandons its authority, we can’t be guilty of opposing it.”
Abigail leaned back and lifted an open hand toward Cal. “Well done, Mr. Jordan. Let me urge you to think seriously about going to law school!”
After that, they disappeared into their own thoughts. Abigail knew that her defense would mean uncovering the seamy underbelly of Washington politics, and there was no tougher game of hardball anywhere.
Cal said, “So where do we start?”
Abigail’s answer caused even her to catch her breath. “By doing the very thing that every attorney who has ever lived counsels his client never, ever to do …”