The Book Of Schemes. Marcus Calvert
and planning.
The Bismarck’s maneuvering thrusters suddenly flared to life. Vermes watched the ship move closer, well within easy firing range of his entire fleet, and then halt. Odds were that Urlich was merely flexing his muscles. Vermes listened intently as one of his communications officers sent a surrender signal, via one of the portable communications units.
“Signal acknowledged and surrender accepted,” the officer replied.
Vermes breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, he thought that Urlich was actually going to open fire –
A half-second later, the Bismark’s four massive ion turrets turned The Rasputin into a ball of fiery debris. On the bridge of the Bismark, Urlich drank out of a plastic beer can, with five other unopened cans laid out on a tactical console. Captain Yemti’s corpse was respectfully re-positioned in his command chair, where the marine figured he belonged. The sergeant paced around the bridge, deep in thought. In the background, Paint It Black, by the Rolling Stones, was playing.
“There are regulations against killing prisoners, Sgt. Urlich,” the AI noted. “Even in these circumstances.”
“Yeah,” Urlich agreed as he tossed the empty can aside. “Lucky for me I’m going AWOL before they can court-martial me.”
“You’re deserting because of brain-enhancing virus?”
Urlich smiled. If the AI could put it together, so could the docs at U.N. Command. He could never go home again.
“That’s right,” Urlich replied. “Once the brass figured out what it could do, they’d snatch me out of my prison cell and stick me in a lab. I’d spend the rest of my short, short life being vivisected. While I’m sure they’d figure out how to replicate it, the virus would just end up as one more weapon that the bad guys could steal.”
“What is your plan?”
“We’ll think of something. But for now, would you kindly kill each and every last one of these mother fuckers?” Urlich asked, as he grabbed another beer can and popped it open. “They’re blocking my view of the cosmos.”
“Affirmative,” the AI replied.
The massive warship’s missile batteries and ion turrets leisurely targeted the rest of Vermes’ helpless fleet and opened fire.
THE PUPPET
They had me dead-to-rights on a moonlit night.
Six plain-clothed Iranian Special Forces troops surrounded me with assault rifles aimed at my head. Disguised as oil workers, they were so close that I could smell their collective, sweaty stench. I dropped my digital recorder, raised my hands, and slowly moved to a kneeling position. One of them ripped off my Ghillie suit, which covered my desert fatigues with a layer of fake foliage. Since I had been lying prone in a patch of real bushes all night, they shouldn’t have spotted me.
I slipped into the valley sixteen hours ago and uploaded damned nice footage of six well-camouflaged missile silos in the middle of a small, fake oil field. Disguised as oversized oil derricks, the missile silos were surrounded by dozens of real derricks. While the remote facility had been logged since its construction in the early 90’s, no one had figured out it was fake until just last week. Some bored NSA egghead had been testing spy satellite upgrades and needed a map reference to focus on.
This location was picked out of a proverbial hat and the upgrades were tested. But instead of finding an oil deposit, said upgrades picked up something else. There were six well-shielded nuclear emissions, each some two hundred feet below the surface. They also had an underground pipeline that fed oil from another (real) oil field some ten miles to the southwest. Higher-ups were notified and I ended up skydiving out of a modified stealth bomber two days ago. I hunkered down by day and hiked by night. Then, I reached the target zone last night, dug myself in, and broke out my recorder/directional microphone.
As luck would have it, I picked up verbal chatter from two of the “oil workers” (which was streamed to Langley in real-time). Basically, a middle-aged guy (a major) was getting the tour of the place from a guy in his late-50’s, who he once referred to as “general.” Through my camera, I could see that both men were packing pistols under their work clothes. They also weren’t afraid to speak freely.
What they said scared the shit out of me.
During the early 70’s, a rogue group of Russian generals and high-level KGB officials came up with the insane idea of stashing thirty-five nukes throughout Iran. The smallest ones were in the six-kiloton range. The largest were in the twenty-megaton range. Some were stashed in hidden silos. Others were stored in secret bunkers near Iran’s borders, where they could be trucked into other countries and detonated near key strategic sites. These Russians – idiots that they were – figured that, should World War III start, it might be necessary to indirectly attack American allies and/or military bases in the Middle East. They recruited equally rogue elements within the Iranian military, who kept this secret from their civilian leadership.
The Iranian general expressed his utter amazement that the secret survived the fall of the Iron Curtain. Scarier still was the fact that the same Russians had all but given Iran the detailed breakdown for making nuclear weapons. If they wanted to, the Iranians could mass-produce nukes in a matter of months. Instead, their nuclear facilities were actually being used for peaceful energy production … and to prompt Israel into a pre-emptive strike.
Unfortunately, the Israelis didn’t take the bait. Also, claimed the general, their intelligence suggested that the Israelis didn’t know about these nukes. I had to agree. Otherwise, the Israelis would’ve gone after them by now. There’s no way in hell they’d go about the logistical nightmare of finding/dismantling dozens of nukes, stashed all over Iran, on their own. They would’ve come to us for help. And with my background, I’d have been tasked to one of those operations.
Apparently, continued the general, his superiors had grown tired of this military-diplomatic shell game. More radical than their predecessors, they opted to simply take out Israel with some of their 70’s-era stockpile. When the major voiced his concerns about Israeli’s ability to counter-launch, the general grinned and explained that the nukes wouldn’t be launched from Iran. Oh no, explained the general, seven low-yield nukes were already inside Israeli territory.
They were strategically placed during the 80’s.
Each nuke could be armed and rigged to detonate simultaneously by their operatives in Israel. Once the bombs went off, the Jewish state would cease to be. Since the nukes would have a Russian blast signature, Iran could not be blamed. The Russians would probably conclude that some aging nuclear stockpile had been stolen by terrorists. After all, the current regime didn’t know about this conspiracy either.
While Iran’s political leaders would publicly deny involvement, they’d privately wonder what the hell happened. Western intelligence services would monitor their communiqués and absolve them of any blame, simply because they weren’t in the loop.
The two praised Allah and continued the orientation tour.
I was about to radio Langley for instructions when my motion sensor went off. Six blips were closing in on my position. They must’ve spotted me somehow. While I was armed and not too averse to a quick shoot-out, I knew that I couldn’t kill them all and get away. So I instead chose to press the button on a time-delayed charge that I had strapped to my chest harness.
Roughly the diameter of a dinner plate and four inches thick, the metal construct functioned much like a suicide vest. It was packed with a Semtex charge that would turn me – and this pack of shitheads – into a smoking crater. The blast would happen in about thirty more seconds. I forced myself to pretend to be surprised and wished Langley the best of luck. Hopefully, they’d figure out how to stop these fucks without a global Armageddon.
Then the six bastards caught me.
Now, I was face-down in the dirt with my wrists being flex-cuffed behind me. One of the soldiers spotted my bomb, guessed what it was,