Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero Page 11

  “I’m fine,” Valerie insisted, a sharp edge in her voice, “but I think we may have a problem here.”

  Karen pulled herself up from the tailgate, lifting Emily in her arms, and she followed Ramos back into the depths of the truck. “What is it?”

  “I was sitting on this crate, and I broke through the lid.” She raised a warning finger at Ramos. “If you make a joke about my ass I swear to God I’ll throw you out the back, Cesar Ramos.”

  Ramos paused, his mouth open, and then thought better of it. “Are you hurt?”

  Valerie shook her head. “No, I’m fine, but look at this.” She’d pulled aside the splintered wooden slats from the top of the crate, revealing a glimpse of its contents. “This ain’t good, right?”

  Karen and Ramos looked down into the crate.

  “Ted?” Karen turned back to the tailgate. “Can you come take a look at this?”

  Krasinski hauled himself up from the floor with difficulty, and on unsteady legs he made his way into the darkness. When he reached the crate Ramos moved aside to allow him through, and he peered down at the gap in the crate.

  “This truck’s supposed to be carrying just medical supplies, right?” Ramos asked.

  Krasinski’s face had lost all of its color. “Can I… can I please have the pry bar?”

  “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is,” Ramos demanded, passing Krasinski the bar they’d used to lever open the other crates.

  “Just a second.” His voice was wobbly and strained as he drove the bar into the gap beneath the lid, With a little effort he rocked it back and forth until the lid popped free.

  “Ted, tell me!”

  Krasinski stared down into the open crate, his eyes wide and his face an ashen white.

  “No, doctor, it’s exactly what you think it is.” He let the pry bar slip from his hand, and it hit the ground with a loud clang. “This is a nuclear warhead.”

  ΅

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE INCIRLIK ARSENAL

  JACK LEANED FORWARD on the edge of his seat, listening intently as Colonel MacAuliffe struggled to connect with the convoy leading back to Beale from the destroyed safe zone. From the sound of the signal he guessed they were at the very limits of the radio’s range.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” a voice crackled across the airwaves, so faint it was almost inaudible over the static hiss. “Could you please repeat your last? I’m not certain I’m reading you.”

  MacAuliffe swore under his breath before raising the radio once more to his lips. “I say again: I need to know the name of the person who located the warhead. Shouldn’t be a difficult question, son. I just need to know who found the truck.”

  There was a long silence before the voice returned. “Yes sir, I understand. I’m just waiting for… hold on, please.” The sound of several mumbling voices drifted from the radio before the speaker returned. “I’m told it was Staff Sergeant Danvers, sir.”

  “Danvers?” MacAuliffe frowned, scratching his head. “Can’t say I recognize the name. He’s not one of mine, is he?”

  “From Beale? No sir, he’s National Guard. He came in on a transport from Camp Roberts early this morning, sir.”

  “Now Lieutenant,” MacAuliffe replied, “this is very important. Was Danvers alone when he found the bomb? What was he doing when he found it? Did he have a good reason to be there?”

  “Umm… yes sir, I believe he was alone.” The Lieutenant sounded confused about the line of questioning. “I… well, I couldn’t tell you if he had a good reason to be there. The enlisted men from Roberts were assigned to construction duties on the far side of the camp, so I’m not sure what he was doing in the vehicle bay. All I know is that he reported the discovery to Captain Standish, and the Captain took it to General Bailey.”

  For a moment MacAuliffe stared out at the road ahead, tapping the antenna of the radio against his teeth, deep in thought. Finally he clicked the transmit button once more. “Lieutenant,” he sighed, “I need you to take Staff Sergeant Danvers into custody immediately.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me, Lieutenant. I’m ordering you to have Danvers placed under arrest. I want him isolated and under guard right away, you understand? We’ll be back at Beale in…” he glanced at his watch, “about fifteen minutes. Bring him directly to me when you arrive. Is that understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Good man. Out.”

  MacAuliffe dropped the radio into his lap and turned to Jack. “I damn sure hope you’re wrong, Jack,” he said. “It’s a crying shame to have to place one of your own men under arrest, but I think you might be onto something.”

  “Well, hold on a second,” Jack protested. “That was just… y’know, just brainstorming. I was just tossing out ideas. I didn’t mean to get a sergeant arrested!”

  “Better safe than sorry, Jack,” MacAuliffe assured him. “And besides, it was my call. You don’t need to feel guilty about it.”

  Jack couldn’t believe how quickly this was moving. Just a minute ago he’d been idly joking that the attacks could have been an inside job, and now… now a sergeant he’d never even met was on his way to a set of handcuffs. “This is insane, colonel. It’s just crazy! Why on earth would you listen to me about this? It’s not like there’s any evidence to support it, is there? It’s just speculation!”

  MacAuliffe looked away awkwardly, his chin tucked in to his neck as he peered down at the papers in his hands.

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “It is just speculation, right? Colonel?”

  “Don’t worry about it,”MacAuliffe scowled. He looked into Jack’s eyes and saw nothing but questions. “There are some things that have to remain classified.”

  “Are there? It’s like you said yourself, there’s no way any of this will stay secret for long. You might as well just tell me what’s going on.” He waited for MacAuliffe to start talking, but the colonel remained stubbornly silent. The tension in the Humvee seemed to grow with each passing second, and just as it felt the silence might take on physical form and beat him over the head a thought occurred to Jack.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, waving a finger in the air. “You never answered my question.”

  MacAuliffe coughed and turned to look out the window, his mood clearly turning defensive. “And which question was that?”

  “I asked you, back when I saw the nuke list. I asked you how you knew how many bombs were out there, and you never answered.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jack,” MacAuliffe groaned, “you’re killing me here.”

  Jack pressed on, undeterred. “Captain Standish said something about the serial number matching some itinerary. He said something about an arsenal, didn’t he? Insilit? Interlink?”

  The colonel seemed to visibly shrink before Jack’s eyes. He slumped in his seat and sighed, his resolve broken. “Hell, if you can figure out this much after overhearing a single conversation I dread to think what a journalist might be able to glean.” He lowered his voice, glancing over Jack’s shoulder to ensure Cathy and Garside couldn’t hear him.

  “Alright, Jack, I’m gonna level with you, but this conversation doesn’t leave this truck, understand?”

  Jack nodded. “Understood.”

  “The word you heard was Incirlik,” MacAuliffe whispered. “Standish was talking about the Incirlik arsenal.”

  “Incirlik?” The word meant nothing to him. “Is that an acronym for something?”

  MacAuliffe shook his head. “No, son, it’s not an acronym. Incirlik is the name of a Turkish air base in Adana, a city in southern Turkey.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes before speaking again. “And it’s from Incirlik that nine nuclear weapons were stolen in 2016.”

  Jack reeled back in shock. He didn’t know how to respond. For years he’d heard conspiracy theories about lost and stolen nuclear weapons, most of them delivered by foaming at the mouth nut jobs on talk radio shows, but here was an Air Force colonel confirming matter-of-factuall
y that it had actually happened. It was real. There were nukes out there in the hands of God knew who, just waiting to be dropped on an unsuspecting country.

  “Stolen? Are you serious?” He shook his head, struggling to believe it could be true, and then a question occurred to him. “Wait, did you say a Turkish air base? Since when was Turkey a nuclear power?”

  MacAuliffe chewed at his lower lip, clearly unhappy to be divulging these secrets, but eventually he continued. “You don’t understand, Jack,” he said, lowering his voice until it was little higher than a whisper. “I’m not talking about Turkish weapons. Incirlik Air Base is controlled by the Turkish Air Force, but it’s a joint base. We’ve been using it as a hub for air missions over Russia and the Middle East ever since the Cold War.”

  “No.” Jack couldn’t bring himself to believe it. “Don’t tell me these weapons are American.”

  MacAuliffe nodded solemnly. “I’m afraid they are.”

  “You’re seriously telling me that the US had nine nukes just sitting at an air base in Turkey? You’re telling me that somebody stole them and nobody ever found out about it?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” MacAuliffe confirmed. “In fact, I’m telling you that we had fifty nukes sitting at Incirlik, but only nine were stolen. They’ve been there for years, and as far as anyone outside the US knows all fifty are still safely tucked in their bunker to this day.”

  “Nobody knows? You didn’t even tell the Turkish government?”

  MacAuliffe let out an incredulous laugh. “Of course not. When you have an empty quiver incident you don’t just blurt it out to—”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack interrupted. “Empty quiver?”

  “Yeah, it’s the term we use for an incident involving the theft of a functioning nuclear weapon.”

  “Jesus,” Jack whispered. “It’s scary that we even have a term for that.”

  “Well, anyway, you don’t go public when you lose a nuke. You don’t say anything until you absolutely have to. Can you imagine what kind of world we’d be living in if people knew there were loose nukes just floating around? Hell, the panic alone could be enough to push us all to the brink of nuclear war. It’d be the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, with every nuclear state just hovering over the button, waiting for someone to blink. So no, we didn’t tell the Turkish government. We decided to deal with it in house.”

  Jack nodded back towards the remains of the mushroom cloud. “Well it looks like you guys didn’t do a great job of it.”

  MacAuliffe glared at Jack. “Hey, don’t look at me. The Incirlik theft triggered one of the largest covert investigations in US history, but I wasn’t involved. I spent 2016 sitting in a baking hot office in Bagram directing drone missions.”

  “So who was in charge?”

  MacAuliffe shrugged. “Every agency with an acronym had skin in the game. CIA, NSA, DIA, INSCOM… they brought in everyone who could be trusted to get the job done and keep their mouth shut, but a year later they had the square root of jack shit to show for it. Whoever stole those weapons were ghosts. No obvious motive, no clear affiliation. Not even any whispers along the usual terrorist networks. That’s… that’s impossible. Outside of a James Bond movie you just don’t get to be a super villain without someone knowing about it. You can’t pull off a heist like this without someone somewhere letting something slip. You can’t even recruit for a job this big without the intelligence agencies picking up at least a hint that something’s going down.”

  “Why not? Terrorists can’t keep secrets?”

  “It’s not about keeping secrets. Something on this scale leaves its mark. It has… it’s hard to explain, but something like this has its own gravity. It distorts everything around it in a way that any seasoned agent should be able to recognize. High profile figures vanish and leave a vacuum. Low level henchmen show up where they’re not supposed to be. Money gets moved from place to place. A nuclear heist should have left a breadcrumb trail right across the world, but there was nothing.”

  “So they never figured out who did it?”

  MacAuliffe shook his head. “They didn’t even have a working theory. However these guys operated it was entirely outside of the known terror and criminal networks, and it damned sure wasn’t state sponsored. It was almost as if a random bunch of people with clean records and no prior connections just got together over coffee one morning and decided to lift a bunch of nukes. It was just baffling.”

  MacAuliffe leaned back in his seat and sighed. “Anyway, we spent the last three years waiting for the other shoe to drop. We knew the nukes would eventually pop up on the radar somewhere on the planet. I just never expected it would be here.”

  Jack stared at the colonel, waiting for him to break into a grin and tell him he was just pulling his leg, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in his expression. “What… when… how could…” he trailed off, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. “Even if you don’t know who did this, how is it possible for anyone to steal a bunch of nuclear weapons from a military base? Aren’t these things stored deep underground and surrounded by about a million armed guards? You can’t just walk in and grab them off the shelf, right?”

  “Of course not. It’s easier to get into the damned Oval Office than it is to get within a hundred yards of a nuke. There’s nothing in the world more closely guarded. You’d almost need to use a nuke against a base just to cause enough panic and confusion to get close enough to the nukes.” He let out a dry, humorless chuckle. “Or, if you decided that brute force wasn’t the answer, you could just wait for a coup to destabilize the country surrounding the base, and then piggyback on the chaos. You remember the 2016 Turkish coup, right?”

  Once again Jack searched for signs of humor, and once again he came up wanting. “No… you can’t be serious. You’re telling me that they just sat around waiting for a coup to magically happen, and then took the opportunity to swoop in?”

  “Not exactly, no. Look, I don’t know what you know about the inner workings of Turkey, but this wasn’t just luck. The coup was always going to happen sooner or later. There were so many people who despised President Erdogan – including many at the highest levels of the Turkish military – that it was only a matter of time before someone decided to try to bring down his government. What’s more, the commander of Incirlik Air Base was a man named Brigadier General Bekir Ercan Van. His hostility to the President were well known, and when the coup finally began it was no surprise that the general came down on the side of the putschists.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened was he allowed the putschists to use the base to launch bombing missions on government buildings. He was arrested for it, of course. In fact later he applied for political asylum here in the US, but what matters is what happened the night of the coup.”

  Jack sat on the edge of his seat, enthralled. “Yeah?”

  “The folks who lifted the nukes knew the Turkish playbook. They knew that the first thing the government would do is cut power to the base. We begged them for years to stop using this dumbass strategy, and we were begging specifically because it made it more difficult to protect the nukes we kept on site. In fact, that’s always been the strongest argument for removing our weapons from Turkey. We’ve never been able to trust their government not to do something achingly dumb.”

  “Why didn't they just set up generators to keep the power running?”

  “They did, but they weren’t nearly as well guarded as the nuclear storage facility, so I’m sure you can guess what was targeted first. Once the generators were down… well, that was game over.”

  “Why? They still had to get past the guards, right?”

  “Sure they did, but the folks running the heist had a huge tactical advantage. For one thing, comms were down. The Turks were flooding the frequencies used by our helmet-mounted radios, because they were trying to flush out the general and his men, so the Americans on base were on their own. Second, our boys had orders to sit
back and let the Turks do their thing. Remember, this is a joint base controlled by the Turkish. The last thing we wanted to do was insert ourselves between the government and the putschists. We didn’t want to accidentally shoot anyone on either side, so the American guards were ordered to stop their general patrols and withdraw to tactical locations. Their orders were to defend themselves only if someone tried to enter a US-run building, but otherwise to hold fire and let this thing play out. As a result of that order the folks running the heist faced very little resistance until they reached the nuclear storage bunker.”

  “And what happened when they got there?”

  “Eleven dead. The theft wasn’t even discovered until about three hours after they cleared out, and any trail there might have been was already stone cold by then.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” MacAuliffe sighed. “That’s about the size of it. It was bad enough that it happened at all, but now… if turns out that Americans were behind this? Hell, I just don’t know what to do with that. I can’t imagine how—”

  “Sorry, sir,” the driver interrupted. “We’re three minutes out.”

  MacAuliffe coughed and tugged on his jacket, straightening out his uniform. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Take us straight to the vehicle bay. I want to look this sonofabitch in the eye.” He turned back to Jack, suddenly awkward. “Umm… I trust you understand that everything we’ve talked about should stay on the QT? I’m sure it’ll be made public soon enough, but until then you didn’t hear a word, OK?”

  Jack nodded. “Understood. I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone.”

  “Explain what, Jack?” MacAuliffe gave him a wink. “We were just sitting here talking about the weather, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack smiled, turning to gaze out the window. In the distance, from the direction of the now collapsing mushroom cloud, he could see a column of dust climb above the road for miles. From this far away the vehicles themselves were still just dark dots, but one stood out. It looked like it was a good mile ahead of the slow moving convoy, kicking up its own dust as it raced towards the base that lay ahead.