Primary Command. Джек Марс

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СКАЧАТЬ to shut up. But now? He just allowed the whole mess of them to ramble, the noise from the chattering coming to him like a form of nonsensical music. He let it wash over him.

      Barrett had been back on the job for five weeks already, and the time had passed in a blur. He had fired his chief of staff, Lawrence Keller, in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Keller was another short stack—five foot ten at best—and Barrett had come to suspect that Keller was disloyal to him. He had no evidence of this, and couldn’t even quite remember why he believed it, but he thought it best to get rid of Keller anyway.

      Except now, Barrett was without Keller’s smooth gray calm and ruthless efficiency. With Keller gone, Barrett felt unmoored, at loose ends, unable to make sense of the onslaught of crises and mini-disasters and just plain information he was bombarded with on a daily basis.

      David Barrett was beginning to think he was having another breakdown. He had trouble sleeping. Trouble? He could barely sleep at all. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would start hyperventilating. A few times, late at night, he had found himself locked in his private bathroom, silently weeping.

      He thought he might like to enter therapy, but when you were president of the United States, engaging with a shrink was not an option. If the newspapers got hold of it, and the cable talk shows… he didn’t want to think about that.

      It would be the end, to put it mildly.

      The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. It was modern, like the flight deck of a TV spaceship. It was designed for maximum use of space—large screens embedded in the walls every couple of feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table.

      Except for Barrett’s own seat, every plush leather seat at the table was already occupied—overweight men in suits, thin and ramrod-straight military men in uniform. A tall man in a dress uniform stood at the far head of the table.

      Height. It was reassuring somehow. David Barrett was tall, and for most of his life he had been supremely confident. This man preparing to run the meeting would also be confident. In fact, he exuded confidence, and command. This man, this four-star general…

      Richard Stark.

      Barrett remembered that he didn’t care much for Richard Stark. But right now, he didn’t care much for anyone. And Stark worked at the Pentagon. Maybe the general could shed some light on this latest mysterious setback.

      “Settle down,” Stark said, as the crowd the elevator had just expelled moved toward their seats.

      “People! Settle down. The president is here.”

      The room went quiet. A few people continued to murmur, but even that died out quickly.

      David Barrett sat down in his high-backed chair.

      “Okay, Richard,” he said. “Never mind the preliminaries. Never mind the history lesson. We’ve heard it all before. Just tell me what in God’s name is going on.”

      Stark slipped a pair of black reading glasses onto his face and looked down at the sheets of paper in his hand. He took a deep breath and sighed.

      On screens around the room, a body of water appeared.

      “What you’re seeing on the screens is the Black Sea,” the general said. “As far as we can tell, about two hours ago, a small, three-man submersible owned by an American company called Poseidon Research was operating deep below the surface, in international waters more than one hundred miles southeast of the Crimean resort of Yalta. It appears to have been intercepted and seized by elements of the Russian Navy. The stated mission of the sub was to find and mark the location of an ancient Greek trading vessel believed to have gone down in those waters nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.”

      President Barrett stared at the general. He took a breath. That didn’t seem bad at all. What was all the hubbub about?

      A civilian submarine was doing archaeological exploration in international waters. The Russians were rebuilding their strength after a disastrous fifteen years or so, and they wanted the Black Sea to be their own private lake again. So they got irritated and overstepped. All right. Lodge a complaint with the embassy and get the scientists back. Maybe even get the sub back, too. It was all a misunderstanding.

      “Forgive me, General, but this sounds like something for the diplomats to work out. I appreciate being kept informed of developments like this, but it seems like it’s going to be easy to skip the crisis on this one. Can’t we just have the ambassador—”

      “Sir,” Stark said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

      It instantly annoyed Barrett that Stark would interrupt him in front of a room full of people. “Okay,” he said. “But this better be good.”

      Stark shook his head and sighed again. “Mr. President, Poseidon Research International is a company funded and run by the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s a front operation. The submersible in question, Nereus, was masquerading as a civilian research vessel. In fact, it was on a classified mission under the aegis of both the CIA Special Operations Group and the Joint Special Operations Command. The three men captured include a civilian with high-level security clearances, a CIA special agent, and a Navy SEAL.”

      For the first time in more than a month, David Barrett felt an old familiar sensation rising within him. Anger. It was a feeling he enjoyed. They sent a submarine on a spy mission in the Black Sea? Barrett didn’t need the map on the screen to know the geopolitics involved.

      “Richard, pardon my French, but what in the hell were we doing with a spy submarine in the Black Sea? Do we want to have a war with the Russians? The Black Sea is their backyard.”

      “Sir, with all respect intended, those are international waters open to navigation, and we intend to keep them that way.”

      Barrett shook his head. Of course we did. “What was the sub doing there?”

      The general coughed. “It was on a mission to tap into Russian communications cables at the bottom of the Black Sea. As you know, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians lease the old Soviet naval port at Sebastopol from the Ukrainians. That port was the mainstay of the Soviet fleet in the region, and serves the same purpose for the Russian Navy. As you can imagine, the arrangement is an awkward one.

      “Russian telephone lines and computer-based communications cables run across Ukrainian territory in Crimea to the border with Russia. Meanwhile, tensions have been rising between Russia and Georgia, just to the south of there. We are concerned a war could break out, if not now, then in the near future.

      “Georgia is very friendly with us, and we’d like for both them and Ukraine to join the NATO alliance one day. Until they do join NATO, they are vulnerable to a Russian attack. Recently, the Russians laid communications cables along the sea floor from Sebastopol to Sochi, completely circumventing the cables that run across Crimea.

      “The mission of the Nereus was to find the location of those cables, and if possible, tap into them. If the Russians decide to attack Georgia, the fleet at Sebastopol is going to know in advance. We’re going to want to know that, too.”

      Stark paused.

      “And the mission was a total failure,” David Barrett said.

      General Stark didn’t fight it.

      “Yes, sir. It was.”

      Barrett СКАЧАТЬ