The fact that the president was not only willing but eager to go back to the Kremlin meant this war plan—as dangerous as it was—had become a top priority. So Oleg forced himself to his feet and headed to the chopper, and soon they were off the ground and banking eastward for the capital.
When they landed inside the walls of the Kremlin, they headed straight for the conference room adjacent to Luganov’s office. The war cabinet was already assembled and waiting. They all stood when the president entered the room and sat only when he took his seat at the head of the table. In the past, Oleg had sat in a chair behind the president and to the left of the chief of staff. But ever since his promotion to chief counselor, he sat at the main table with the principals, at the end directly opposite his father-in-law.
“Gentlemen, the time has come to restore the true glory of Mother Russia,” Luganov began. “This means bringing ethnic Russians outside our fold back under our care, retaking lands that are rightfully ours, humiliating the West, and proving that the U.S. and NATO are paper tigers and that Russia is the sole and dominant power on the earth.”
Luganov had their attention now.
Everyone grunted approval. Yet as Luganov explained his plan, Oleg saw many of the expressions change ever so discreetly.
What the president was proposing was a full invasion and occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, followed by formal annexation of each. Immediately afterward, snap elections would be held whereby the populations of the Baltic states would vote to rejoin the Russian Federation—voluntarily, Luganov insisted—so they could “enjoy all the rights and privileges of being full Russian citizens.”
Luganov said he wanted to launch his blitzkrieg using twenty-seven battalions—roughly twenty-one thousand soldiers—to seize Estonia and Latvia. Based on his calculations, he believed they could reach and capture the capitals of Tallinn and Riga in just sixty hours. He said another fifteen battalions—nearly twelve thousand troops—would be needed to wrest control of Lithuania. He proposed attacking through Belarus and from the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, west of Lithuania and north of Poland. He believed they’d need another two days to capture and adequately control the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.
At this point the president opened a leather binder and handed out copies of a ten-page war plan he had drafted himself. He walked his team through the document. The first few pages laid out specific tactical objectives such as roads, power plants, and cities that needed to be taken, by which battalions, and by what specific dates and times. It also laid out a time frame that nearly made Oleg’s jaw drop. The president wanted to launch the attack no later than the end of October. That was just four months away.
The next few pages included maps and suggested routes of attack. The last two pages raised specific questions to which the president said he expected detailed answers by their next meeting, set for the following day. Luganov wanted to know from his foreign minister whether he believed the president of Belarus would agree to a snap joint military exercise inside his territory and what kind of sweeteners might be needed to get Minsk on board. He wanted to know how quickly the defense minister could put together exercises for a hundred thousand or more troops on the border of Ukraine in order to divert attention and make it seem like he might actually go for a full invasion not of the Baltics but rather Ukraine in the hopes of seizing Kiev, which he had recently and very publicly called “the mother of all Russian cities.”
From the chief of the air force he wanted to know how many squadrons of bombers and fighter jets he could safely move from the Eastern Military District near China to the Western MD without creating a significant vulnerability on the eastern front, how quickly this could be accomplished, and whether it could be done discreetly enough not to immediately draw the attention of the Pentagon. From his FSB chief he wanted to know what kind of progress had been made in surreptitiously providing automatic weapons, ammunition, and explosives to Russian loyalists in each of the Baltic republics and whether they had the proper communications equipment to be mobilized when the time was right.
For several minutes the room was silent, and from Oleg’s vantage point quite tense, while the men absorbed the plan and considered the implications for the nation and for themselves. The chief of the army was the first to raise his hand, and the president actually looked pleased to take the general’s question.
“Mr. President, just to be certain I understand: you are asking us to seize Tallinn and Riga in sixty hours?” he asked.
The question made it clear to Oleg that this was the first time the army’s most senior and experienced commander was hearing of the plan.
“Yes,” Luganov confirmed. “And Vilnius within another forty-eight hours.”
“You are asking us to capture and occupy three NATO capitals?”
“And secure their annexation so that they might be rightfully reintegrated into Mother Russia,” the president said.
“But not Kiev.”
“Not right now.”
“Would it not be in our interest to seize all of Ukraine instead?” asked the general. “The Ukrainians are very patriotic, and they’re able fighters, but they are not members of NATO. Washington and Brussels will huff and puff, but in the end they will do nothing if we take Ukraine. I have war-gamed this with my staff. I’m convinced we could get it done in a month to six weeks.”
“But we can have the Baltics in four days,” Luganov replied with a rare but telling smile.
Again the room was quiet. Then the army chief of staff pressed forward. “How is it in Russia’s interest, if I may ask, to provoke such a confrontation with NATO when Ukraine is ours for the taking with no risk of triggering Article 5?”
Oleg saw the smile disappear instantly from the president’s face.
The general was speaking of the mutual-defense pact that lay at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s charter. Article 5 stated that each member of NATO would consider an attack against one member state to be an attack against all. Any hostile action against any NATO member would, therefore, obligate the entire alliance to bring its combined political, economic, and military power to bear to repulse such an attack. No state was alone to fend off the Bear by itself. It was all for one and one for all. During the Soviet era, Oleg knew, it was this very alliance that had stopped Russian leaders from invading any part of Europe, lest they trigger war with the West that could all too easily go nuclear. Now Luganov was proposing to invade three NATO countries simultaneously.
“General, are you afraid of NATO?” Luganov fumed, his face growing red as he leaned forward in his chair. “I am not. Just the opposite. I believe they are afraid of me, and rightly so. They are fat and lazy. They are weak and divided. Their day is over. Our day has come. We are strong and getting stronger. We have modernized our strategic forces. We have rebuilt our conventional forces, all while they have downsized their own. So we will storm into the Baltics with such speed and force that the leaders in the White House and at SHAPE headquarters and around the globe will shake in fear. They will not know what has just hit them. They won’t dare threaten us with nuclear war, for they know I am willing to unleash our nuclear power upon them. And when this simple truth dawns on them—that I am a man of action and they are cowards—they will surrender the Baltics without a fight, and that, gentlemen, will be the end of NATO. If they do not trigger Article 5—and I guarantee you they will not—then I will have won a great victory for our people. We will be the world’s only superpower, the only nation on the planet that has a great military and the courage to use it. I alone will have the power to dictate economic and political terms to the West, and we will see riches and glory unparalleled since the days of the czars.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.—17 SEPTEMBER
The day started just like any other.
Marcus Ryker woke before dawn and ran his usual five miles. Returning to his apartment in Eastern Market, he showered, threw on a pair of ripped jeans, a denim work shirt, and stee
l-toed boots, and walked to a diner a few blocks from Capitol Hill. There he sat alone in a booth in the back and ordered scrambled eggs, dry toast, and black coffee. He read the Post from cover to cover, then, unable to take any more bad news, trudged over to Lincoln Park Baptist Church.
For the last few weeks, he’d been helping put a much-needed new roof on the 137-year-old building. By noon the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky, and Marcus was drenched with sweat. He took a swig from his water bottle, checked his watch, and decided he could still get another twenty to thirty minutes of work in before stopping to wash up for his weekly lunch with Carter Emerson and some vets who attended the church. They didn’t talk about war. They didn’t talk about loss. They certainly didn’t talk about politics or women. Most of the conversations were about whether the Nats were still in contention for the play-offs and whether the Redskins—or in Marcus’s case, the Broncos—had any shot at all at a winning season, to say nothing of going to the Super Bowl.
Marcus was bending over to retrieve his hammer when Nan Warren shouted to him and asked if he could come down a few minutes early. Nan was Carter Emerson’s secretary. She was the one whose name Marcus had blanked on the day of the memorial service. Yet for at least three months after Elena and Lars’s deaths, she had faithfully brought him a home-cooked meal, usually meat loaf, always on Mondays. Her husband, Jim, was one of the vets Marcus had lunch with on Wednesdays. They had all become friends.
“Be right there,” Marcus called back. He assumed Carter wanted to see him before the lunch meeting.
Though he’d never let on, he felt a pang of annoyance at being summoned early. There were already forecasts of big thunderstorms rolling in over the next few days. If he was ever going to get this roof done, he needed fewer breaks and more focus. Yet that wasn’t the way Carter and his team rolled. “Jesus wasn’t about projects; he was about people,” Carter would say with a hearty laugh whenever Marcus mentioned his concern about the roof’s progress. “Love your neighbor, not your work.”
Marcus didn’t care much for such platitudes. A big part of the reason he was working on the roof was to avoid people. Then again, he was pretty sure Carter was onto him and was intentionally trying to get him engaged with as many people as possible. That had to be why he’d asked Marcus to do odd jobs around the church in the first place, starting on the very day Marcus had turned in his letter of resignation to the Secret Service. It also had to be why Carter was always calling him down from the roof to “have some lemonade together” or “meet a brother” or fix a clogged toilet or listen to and critique the latest draft of his next sermon or have a slice of Maya’s “crazy-good key lime pie.” As annoying as it was sometimes, Marcus was also grateful. This man and his dear wife loved him and were doing their best to keep him from hitting rock bottom.
After descending the ladder and taking a few minutes to wash his hands and face, Marcus exited the lavatory in the church basement and went to the third floor, where Nan was sitting at her desk.
“Go right on in, young man,” she said with a warm smile. “He’s waiting for you.”
When Marcus rapped on the door, heard a hearty “Come in,” and stepped into Carter’s cluttered office, he was caught off guard to find they were not alone. Sitting on the couch along the back wall near the windows was Robert Dayton, the senior senator from Iowa, wearing a seersucker suit and a pale-blue bow tie that made Marcus think of his father-in-law. Sitting in a wooden chair to his right was Annie Stewart, wearing a black-and-white-striped sweater jacket over a white blouse, black slacks, and black flats. The last time he’d seen them was at the memorial service.
“Marcus,” said the senator, standing and putting out his hand.
“Senator,” Marcus replied, shaking it and then the woman’s. “Miss Stewart.”
“Please call me Annie,” she said.
Marcus nodded and they stood for a moment in an awkward silence. Everyone was looking at Marcus, but he had no intention of saying more. He was being ambushed. Everyone in the room knew it, and he wasn’t exactly happy about it. Then Carter piped up and encouraged them all to sit.
“Annie called me this morning,” the pastor began. “Said she’d been trying to reach you but to no avail. Everything okay, Marcus? Phone working properly?”
It was true. She’d left three voice messages and sent two emails and a text. Marcus had responded to none of them.
“Everything’s fine, sir,” Marcus replied. “And, Miss Stewart—Annie—please forgive me. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I simply wasn’t interested in meeting with the senator. But clearly we’ve now passed that point.”
Annie leaned forward to say something, but the senator took the lead. “Marcus, I know you’ve been out of the game for some time, and I respect your reasons,” he explained. “But I’m heading for Europe in a few days, and I’d like you to come with me.”
“That’s very kind, but I need to pass.”
“Come on, son,” Carter said. “Don’t be so quick to say no. We’re all friends here. You’ve known the senator for years. Hear the man out.”
Marcus looked at his pastor, then back at the senator.
“You’re running for president,” he said. It wasn’t a question but a statement.
“Perhaps,” Dayton replied.
“You are. You’ve formed a PAC and socked away over eight million dollars.”
Dayton raised an eyebrow, clearly surprised he knew such things or cared. “Seven and change, but yes, we’ll be at eight by the end of the month.”
“Not hard to do when you’re a member of the Senate Finance Committee and the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee,” Marcus noted. “You just happen to hail from the state that holds the nation’s first caucuses, and you’re rising in the early polls, though they hardly mean much. It’s all about name recognition at this stage.”
Dayton was too smooth to take the bait. “Look, Marcus, I’m heading to Europe because I’m worried about Aleksandr Luganov,” he countered. “More people in this town ought to be, President Clarke among them.”
Marcus said nothing.
“America’s next president needs to understand that as troubled as the Middle East is and as volatile as North Korea remains, the most serious threat facing the United States—the truly existential threat—comes from Russia,” Dayton continued. “It’s the Russians who actually have enough nuclear warheads to annihilate 330 million Americans. It’s the Russians who actually have the ICBMs to deliver those warheads to our cities. And it’s the Russians who are being led by a man who will stop at nothing to rebuild the glory of Mother Russia—hack computers, buy politicians, engage in elaborate disinformation campaigns, arm our worst enemies, even invade small nations in order to intimidate great ones.”
“And?” Marcus asked, wondering why any of this should matter to him.
“And the man who is sitting in the White House right now either doesn’t get it or—how shall I put this delicately?—demonstrates insufficient concern.”
“And?”
“And I think it’s time to go over and meet some of our friends in London, Brussels, and Berlin and take a firsthand look at how ready NATO would be to confront Luganov if there were a new leader in the White House, someone who took the Russian threat a tad more seriously,” Dayton said. “I’m leaving Friday afternoon with some of my senior staff, and I’d very much like you to come with me.”
“Why?”
“You’ve worked on plenty of high-level delegations abroad. You know the protocol, and you know the security needs and the logistics.”
“With all due respect, sir, plenty of people in this town have done that and more. As you say, I’m out of the game, and honestly I have no interest in getting back in.”
The senator looked to Annie.
“Peter Hwang recommended you,” she said.
The mention of his old Marine buddy blindsided him. “Pete? What does he have to do with anything?”
Annie looked b
ack at the senator.
“Dr. Hwang has joined my staff as a senior policy advisor.”
“On foreign policy?”
“No, that’s Annie’s portfolio,” Dayton said. “Dr. Hwang is helping me develop a health care plan and a strategy for reforming the VA, along with several other matters. He started with me a couple of months ago. When I told him about this trip, he urged me to take you along.”
“Senator, I’m flattered, but you can find someone younger to carry your bags.”
“I don’t need someone to carry my bags; I need someone to watch my back,” the senator said.
“No one in Washington has been more outspoken against Luganov than the senator,” Annie interjected. “He’s called him out on the invasion of Georgia and Crimea, plus everything the Russians have been doing in Syria and with Iran, not to mention hacking our elections, throwing dissidents in jail, making reporters disappear . . .”
Still Marcus didn’t bite.
“Look, Marcus, everyone knows I’m seriously looking at running for president,” Dayton said. “Everyone knows foreign policy will be a major component of my campaign, and when I run—if I run—I’ll be running directly against Luganov. The man is not just a menace. He poses a clear and present danger to the security of the United States, NATO, and the free world, and that danger is growing. Now, at present I don’t have a security team. Pete is insisting that I start to build one. He wants me to start with you, and I agree. I’d very much like you to come on this trip. Keep us all safe, and give me your take on the security situation in Europe while you’re at it. That’s it. I’m not asking you to join my team full-time. No long-term commitment. Just a robust retainer along with first-class airfare and first-class accommodations. As you rightly note, we have some money in the PAC. Let me use some of it on you, and then you can be back fixing roofs in no time. What do you say?”