Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4) (21 page)

“Three kilometers out,” Aslan reported.

Deckard smiled. Through his scope, he saw the ship trailing a
plume of black smoke. The enemy just had their shit pushed in, and it
was about goddamn time. Setting down the Barrett, he walked back
inside the bridge. Picking up his laptop, he set it down on the table
and typed a message to the mage, who was still standing there waiting
for him.

“Is it getting hot in there?”

The mage was silent for a long moment.

“Well played.”

Waving his hands, the mage cast a spell. Yellow fog
billowed up around the blade master and banished him from the dark
castle.

Chapter 20

The JSOC think tank was deathly silent.

Craig reached for the remote and clicked off the television as
the press conference they had just watched concluded, the president
walking from behind his podium at the White House.

“That’s it,” Gary said solemnly.

“Are you surprised?” Will asked, his words cutting through
the air like a knife.

“America gets hit with the most sophisticated and well-planned
terrorist attack in history, and the administration is not seriously
considering state sponsors? ISIS takes the blame just like that, case
closed?” Craig said.

“They are a convenient scapegoat. Blame a bunch of Arabs with
long beards who nobody likes anyway, drop some bombs, and declare
mission accomplished, all while the real puppet masters get away
clean,” Gary thought aloud.

Will turned to look at him.

“Everything is going according to the enemy’s plan,” Will
told him. “ISIS has had some state-sponsored support since shortly
after they rose to power. Their propaganda campaign is slick, like
something straight out of Madison Avenue, showing a deep awareness of
American cultural motifs and norms.”

“What are you alluding to, Will?”

“It is called reflexive control, a form of information
operation the Russians have been studying for over forty years.
Essentially, how it works is that you insert socially loaded
information into the enemy’s decision-making process in order to
elicit a response that favors your strategy. For example, the
Russians consider our so-called Star Wars program in the 1980s to
have been a reflexive control information operation.”

“We knew that the Russians would seek to counter any type of
horizontal weapons proliferation, so we invented a fake weapons
program we knew would bankrupt their economy when they tried to match
it?” Joshua offered.

“Correct. ISIS has used a propaganda campaign against the West
for years now, one which uses our own media outlets to disseminate
information they want our public to see. The main images and video
they want us to see are the destruction of ancient antiquities across
Syria and Iraq, the execution of homosexuals, their use of young
girls for sexual slavery, and the mass executions of Christians and
Western hostages. These images are peddled to us knowing they will
provoke a reflexive response from the West. It was only a matter of
time; they just let the pressure build. And the Russians, Chinese,
and Iranians behind the terrorist attacks have spent years preparing
the West psychologically for this. We are emotionally committed to
blaming ISIS. All it took were a few false leads for the enemy to lay
out for us to find,” Will finished.

“You are so sure of this simply because ISIS uses a propaganda
strategy the Russians have studied in the past?” Craig asked.

“Yes, partially. But you can also look at the Russians,
Chechens, Georgians, and others who traveled to Syria to join ISIS.
Many of them openly fought as GRU proxy forces in Dagestan, Georgia,
and Nagorno-Karabakh. Then they suddenly flip the switch and become
committed jihadis in Syria? I think not. They were deployed to Syria.
Deployed by the Russian security services.”

Gary’s chair creaked as he sat back and rubbed his temples.

“Good god.”

“He has nothing to do with it,” Will said. “Think about it.
In 2011, JSOC was trying to vet rebel forces in Syria who we could
sponsor and support with arms against the Assad regime. By sending
Chechens and others to Syria, the Russian intelligence services used
jihadis as a spoiler force, knowing that we could never arm
Islamists. They effectively re-contextualized the conflict from being
about Syrian nationalism to being about international jihad. This was
the same technique they used for their second war in Chechnya.

“And if Deckard can’t capture or kill these guys in the
Arctic, then the enemy will get away with the entire scheme. Not only
will they walk away clean with a geological weapon that can never be
traced back to them after it is used against us, but we’ll also be
committed to fighting another useless bushfire war in the Middle
East.”

* * *

“Take a look at this, Deckard,” Otter’s first mate
said with a smile.

“Good news, I take it?” Deckard asked as he walked over to
the sea charts Squirrel had been looking at.

“Yeah, finally. We’re moving deeper into Canada’s
Arctic archipelago, which would give the bad guys more places to
hide, but the Canadians are stepping up in a big way. They take any
violation of Canadian sovereignty very seriously, especially in light
of what has happened over the last week. The Louis S. St. Laurent and
the Des Groseilliers are moving toward us to cut off several key
escape routes through the northwest passage.”

Deckard looked down at the charts. The archipelago of islands
created a kind of maritime labyrinth in the Arctic Ocean. There were
also key choke points that could be cut off by friendly Canadian
forces. Squirrel was pointing out several such choke points that
would soon be locked down by the Canadian Coast Guard. The Des
Groseilliers was moving up the M'Clintock Channel, which separates
Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island. Farther east, the Louis
S. St. Laurent was chugging up the Prince Regent Inlet.

Soon, both icebreakers would enter into the Barrow Strait,
blocking the enemy from moving any farther east.

“That will force them to head north,” Deckard commented.

“Right, straight into the perma-ice of the polar ice cap. We
have them trapped.”

Deckard frowned, knowing it was never that simple.

“If we keep the pressure on, they will have to keep moving.
That means running aground somewhere in the Queen Elizabeth Islands
or Ellesmere Island.”

“They will probably try to hide out in one of the fjords and
hold out for some alternate form of transportation, maybe even try to
hijack one of the commercial ships sailing through the northwest
passage, but you’re right; if we’re still on their ass, they will
have to abandon ship and move into the interior of one of these
islands.”

Deckard cracked his knuckles.

Doing some quick math, he estimated that it would be about
another 12 hours of navigating through the Arctic archipelago before
the enemy ran into a dead end and had to abandon ship.

It was time to get the boys ready for the ground war.

* * *

“The
shi
is moving quickly.”

“
Shi
?” The blade master shook his head.

“Yes,” the mage lectured him. “This is hard to explain for
your ears. You might describe it as the strategic momentum of an
event or an alignment of forces.”

“So
shi
is tactical patience?”

“No, but a cunning leader uses long-term strategic patience to
wait for
shi
to fall into his favor. Many, many years ago, the
emperor would employ a sage who could divine such information. The
sage would know exactly when to strike, when the situation had been
properly shaped, when the balance of power was in the emperor’s
court.”

“And now?”

The mage turned to face the blade master, his eyes sunken like
bottomless pits.

“I am probably the closest thing to the emperor’s
sage, but we also use computers today for the raw calculations. I
wait patiently, sometimes shaping the
shi
as I see fit. We
call it
fighting with a borrowed sword.
”

“Information operations. Proxy soldiers. Black operations.”

“These are military terms, but your people have only just
discovered these concepts. We have been doing this for over a
thousand years. Use the strength of another to do your fighting for
you. More recently, we used the Russians to this end; they helped us
modernize and industrialize our nation.”

The blade master smiled. The mage was not even trying to
hide it anymore. He was speaking of the People’s Republic of China
and their eventual ideological split from the Soviets in the 1950s.

“And after the Russians, it was us. America gave you
favored-nation status, entry into key economic summits, and shared
our military technology.”

“
Wai ru, nei fa
. It means, ‘On the outside, be
benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless.’ This would be obvious to
anyone who was properly educated. Americans simply do not learn how
to think.”

“I got a crash course in your methodology back in Cairo,” the
blade master said casually.

“Cairo?”

“Major Shen Banggen of the General Staff Development’s Third
Department.”

The mage looked away.

“Yes, I knew him.”

“I put a bullet between his eyes as he was in the process of
purchasing a very sensitive piece of American technology used during
Egypt’s Arab Spring.”

“I did not know that you were involved. Banggen was very
useful to us. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to procure
American military equipment that had been captured or lost. Without
his help, we would not be able to jam your communications or defeat
your defensive systems as easily as we have.”

“You have been planning this for a very long time.
Waiting for the
shi
to align with various other forces?”

“Correct. To engage in a large military build-up, to take
overly aggressive military actions, or to announce to the world that
we seek unipolar dominance over the United States would have been to
invite a catastrophe. We cannot meet America jet for jet or ship for
ship, so we have sought out other strategies. But now we are nearly
ready to emerge from the shadows and challenge the hegemony of your
country. America is in decline and it is now our time. The
shi
is in our favor.”

“It seems that your plans are currently unraveling.”

“You are attempting a strategy of encirclement against my
forces in the Arctic,” the mage said. “Very typical of Americans.
It will not succeed. We have reached the point of maximum
opportunity; the situation has been shaped for this success.”

“Setting the conditions for success?”

“Ah, yes, this is the American military expression? I like it.
We still have great freedom of maneuver, thanks to your Islamic
bogeymen in the Middle East. Your president’s advisors are very
easy to manipulate. They do not want to see the truth. Even if they
did, I wonder if they could.”

“Our
shi
is speeding up as well.”

“Yes, our little corner of
wei qi
.”

“
Wei qi
?”

“A game. Translated, it means encirclement board.”

“I think I’ve played this game before.”

“Shall we play another round?”

Chapter 21

Tampa, Florida

“This is most irregular to say the least,” the nuclear
seismologist said.

“Irregular is about the most polite word you could have
used,” Deckard replied.

The JSOC think tank in Tampa had brought in one of their
consultants, Dr. David Flynn. He was one of the leading seismologists
in the country. His speciality was monitoring for potential nuclear
detonations around the world, his work mostly focused on North Korea
and their alleged nuclear test detonations below ground.

“Simply put, tectonic weapons are not even supposed to exist.
Such a thing would violate several scientific principles. There has
been speculation, of course, by people like Aleksey Vsevolovidich
Nikolayev at the Russian Academy of Sciences. We have done some
feasibility studies, but the math doesn’t add up.”

“What is your best guess, then?”

Dr. Flynn squinted on Deckard’s computer screen. The bearded
scientist was hesitant.

“Between us girls,” Deckard urged him. “I’m not quoting
you in a scientific journal here.”

“The Soviets were rumored to have a class of weapons called
energetics. Action-at-distance, directed energy, even a sub class
called psytronics that involves things like telekinesis and mind
reading. Personally, I always felt that it was bunk, but the Russians
apparently took it seriously, which led to some of our scientists
taking it seriously as well during the Cold War. Secretary of Defense
Cohen was even briefed on the threat in 1997.”

“On tectonic weapons?”

“And weather weapons as well. The technology that would be used
to induce an earthquake would be a scalar interferometer. Again, this
is not my hypothesis. Using this type of device, theoretically
speaking, electromagnetic energy could be introduced into the fault
lines. This could increase stress and cause the tectonic plates to
eventually slip.”

“Worst-case scenario, what kind of damage could be done
with a tectonic weapon?”

“Well, they would have to use it to trigger an earthquake where
there is already natural geophysical pressures present. I think the
worst damage they could do is if they were able to push along the
caldera under Yellowstone National Park. It is a supervolcano with a
magma chamber 50 miles long and 12 miles wide. Eruptions have
occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago.”

“A tectonic weapon could also trigger a volcano?”

“If such a thing exists, then yes. Electromagnetic energy could
be introduced into the volcano’s magma chamber, building up
internal pressures until it finally erupts.”