Arc Light (34 page)

The meeting broke up quickly, and Razov arranged his papers, intending to stay behind and use the conference room to read the reports on which he was getting behind. He avoided eye contact with the departing officers, easily mustering a concerned and preoccupied look on his face to ward off the notorious talkers who might dawdle and waste minutes of his valuable time. When the last of the officers and their staff had left, he turned to see that Filipov was still there. Filipov looked like death itself.

“Pavel, have you, uh, heard anything from Irina?” asked Razov.

Pavel looked off into the corner of the empty room, his face growing even more set in a mask of worry and pain. “No.”

Razov had seen the GRU's radiological reports for Washington, D.C. They were dying there. “Pavel,” Razov said, waiting an inordinately long time for his aide's head to swivel to return Razov's gaze, “have you tried making contact with her? Is there anybody there you could call who might know where she is? What about your
friend, this man Lambert? You could use military channels.”

Pavel stared with eyes focusing ever more intently on empty space across the room. The bags under his eyes, like his mood, were dark. He shook his head, and then shook it again. “I have no friends in America.”

After the great destructions,

Everyone will prove that he was innocent.

—G
ÜNTER
E
ICH
Think of This
1955

The plain black government car followed the twists and turns of County Route 601 past Berryville, Virginia. Lambert sat in back by himself, looking out through his reflection into the dark, remembering. The trees floated past his window like ghosts, and all that Jane had been, all the things about her that he had loved, came back to him one by one. The tears flowed silently, unseen.

Just past Heart Trouble Lane, the driver slowed at a flashing yellow light and a ten-miles-per-hour sign. Around the next bend in the empty road Lambert saw a gate opening into a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with six strands of barbed wire. Half a dozen men, some soldiers clad in full battle dress, others in uniforms and hats like those of county sheriffs—all with M-16s—stood around the gate. They came up to the car and checked the IDs of both men carefully, shining the flashlight in Lambert's hastily wiped face for nearly a minute before admitting the car.

Inside the compound, they passed manicured lawns and a dozen or so white cinder block buildings, many bristling with antennas and microwave relay stations. The helipads were all full, and crews and soldiers armed with rifles milled about beside the aircraft. A small control tower stood amid the fleet of choppers, dim light emanating from the panes of angled glass. The car pulled into a parking lot, and the driver slipped into an empty visitors space. It was pitch-dark when Lambert got out. The night was still.

“This way, sir,” the driver said, ushering him toward a concrete ramp angling down from the edge of the parking lot. The ramp descended into a massive cut in the earth, and the concrete wall dimly visible at the bottom looked like a dam erected to hold back the dirt. In the center of the wall was a round tunnel. More guards
checked their IDs at a gate at the top of the ramp. One picked up a telephone and said, “Mr. Lambert is here.” They motioned him down alone. He heard the sound of his shoes scuffing the pavement as he looked up into the blackness of space overhead. The stars shone brightly on the warm summer night. Slowly his view of the night sky was eclipsed by the massive edifice before him.

“This way, Mr. Lambert,” a voice said when he reached the dark tunnel entrance. A red light was switched on to illuminate the massive blast door—like the door of a bank vault but large enough to close off a tunnel down which ran a two-lane road—which was slightly ajar. Lambert followed the man clad in a blue jumpsuit into the well-lit shaft. The road descended into the rough-hewn stone of the solid mountain, its gentle curve defying any estimate as to its length, as to the depth to which it descended. The man pinned a badge to the pocket of Lambert's jacket before they boarded a four-seat electric cart for the ride down into the bowels of the earth.

“Have you ever been to Mount Weather, sir?” the man asked cheerily. He was wearing the seal of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the left breast of his coveralls.

Lambert shook his head.

As the electric motor wound up to full whine for the ride downhill, his guide said, “Blasted it right outa the greenstone back in the fifties. Used to be an experimental drilling location for the Bureau of Mines. They wanted to try out their drill bits on the hardest rock they could find.” Lambert looked at the raw stone walls, patched in some places with concrete and punctured by an occasional bolt of some sort. His ears popped, and he felt the chill of the increasing depth.

“We got a power chamber with diesel generators, refrigerators for food storage, a cafeteria, a hospital, radio and TV studios, everything. There are about a thousand people down here now.” Lambert felt the man's gaze shift to him. “They say we could take one, we could take one right on the chin, and it still wouldn't blast through that greenstone. Greenstone is some tough rock. You see that door we came through up top?”

Lambert nodded as he cleared his ears once again. The slight breeze caused him to cross his arms and hug them to his body.

“One hint of a flash and down comes the ‘Guillotine Gate.' It's five feet thick and twenty feet across. Solid steel. Drops straight down.”

The cart pulled out into a slightly larger opening as the roadway leveled off. The floor of the opening was flat and paved, roads leading off in two directions. It was the rough stone walls that reminded you that you were in a cavern. Lambert cleared his ears one
last time as they turned a corner and stopped in front of a one-story building nestled into a side tunnel cut out of the stone. Lambert and his escort got out of the cart just as another cart rushed by, this one with two officers, one man and one woman, whom Lambert recognized from years at the Defense Intelligence Agency. One nodded, the other gave a halfhearted salute.

“So,” the FEMA employee said, “you know, you don't need to worry or anything.” Lambert looked at him without saying a word. “You know. They say it could take a hit. Straight on—a bull's-eye—and we'd be fine down here.” The man stared straight into Lambert's eyes, and Lambert focused on him, remembering that he was there. “I mean, not like what happened at Cheyenne Mountain.”

Lambert nodded and turned to enter the building.

It was busy inside. The building appeared to consist of one long room that was a warren of partitioned offices, and Lambert wandered aimlessly back through the maze taking in the hectic pace. It was the stuff of most offices. Telephone calls, men or women in front of computers, a coffee bar with people seated at the counter-top shooting the bull.

“Hello, sir,” a woman said as she squeezed past. Lambert could not recall her name.

In an open space toward the center of the large main room were row after row of folding metal chairs facing a large bulletin board on which were posted a variety of maps of different sizes, various lists, and some computer printouts, displayed seemingly in random order.

“Evening, Mr. Lambert,” a young man in air force uniform—a lieutenant—said as he skirted the area.

Lambert walked over to the message board. One map showed the latest radiological levels of various sites around the country. Another showed the levels of radiation being carried by streams or dropping straight into the Atlantic to be swept north along the coast by the Gulf Stream. A multipage report was pinned with thumbtacks along the top. It listed various emergency facilities around the country still operational, with telephone numbers and contact persons. “The White House” jumped out at him. Underneath he saw “Situation Room” and a telephone number. “Rogers, Lawrence, Maj., USAF” was the contact person. The only other number listed was “Main Switchboard,” but handwritten alongside was, “Went off line 2015 EST—6/11.”
Over nineteen hours after the attack,
Lambert thought.

Lambert pictured the gray-haired women at the switchboard, whom he had visited many times to inquire as to the whereabouts of various high officials. They usually had better information than the
Central Locater Service, and they were conveniently situated right there in the White House. Their jobs were important.
They sat there till they died,
he realized.

“Oh, there you are, sir.” Lambert turned to see one of the junior aides on the staff of the National Security Council. He walked up to Lambert and stood there awkwardly before saying, “I'm sorry. We heard. We're all so sorry.” He shook his head.

“What's that?” Lambert asked, nodding at the papers the man held in his hand.

“Oh,” he said, clearly relieved as was Lambert to get on with business. “It's a report on foreign governments' responses to our proposal to threaten use of nuclear weapons against North Korea to force their withdrawal across the DMZ.”

Lambert knit his brow, and the man said, “I guess you missed that. Well, while you were . . . earlier today, the President authorized the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the North Koreans.”

“You're kidding.”

He made a face mimicking Lambert's surprise and shook his head. “We'll warn them first. Then a high-altitude demonstration burst over Pyongyang. Anyway, these are summaries of the responses from some back-channel security establishment contacts we've been making to allied governments.”

“Why us? Why not State?”

“State's non-op. They're a shambles. Secretary Moore was killed at Raven Rock, you know, and half of their under and assistant secretaries are still unaccounted for. They haven't gotten their shit together yet, so we made the calls ourselves.”

“All right,” Lambert said, “I'll read it and brief the President. Where is he?”