SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

She looked at him quizzically. “Five what, Major?”

“Five miles, Miss Wei-Liu, five long, freezing, windy, oxygen-deprived, dangerous miles.”

Ritzik’s words were followed by a long silence. Wei-Liu panned slowly, noting Rockman’s impassive face and Wirth’s tacitly encouraging expression. “It would seem the major’s made me an offer I can’t refuse,” she finally said.

The Second Forty Hours: TARFU

8

20 Kilometers Northeast of Almaty, Kazakhstan.

0210 Hours Local Time.

“Assalamu alaykim, my brother.” Talgat Umarov wrapped Mike Ritzik in a tight bear hug and kissed him thrice on the cheek, heedless that he was blocking the bottom of the Lufthansa stairway and unmindful of the scant dozen disembarking passengers and the knot of ground personnel waiting to service the aircraft.

“Assalamu alaykim, Talgat.” Ritzik replied, happy to be breathing the cool, jet-fuel-tinged air after the nine-hour flight. “It’s great to see you again.”

“No — the pleasure is mine, I assure you.” The Kazakh officer beamed.

Ritzik stepped aside. “Allow me to introduce Miss Tracy Wei-Liu. Miss Wei-Liu is traveling with me.”

Umarov cocked his head at Ritzik’s obscure introduction. Then he bent slightly at the waist, pressed Wei-Liu’s right hand between his own two hands, and pumped it once, up and down, formally. “Assalamu alaykim, honorable Miss Wei-Liu. I welcome you to Almaty in the name of Kazakhstan Republikasy.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

The back of Umarov’s palm slapped air. “It is nothing.” He was an uncommonly big man for a Kazakh, barrel-chested, round-faced, and sloe-eyed, with a wispy, drooping mustache, an obvious direct descendant of Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors. He towered over the two Americans in his starched Russian camouflage fatigues, scuffed jump boots, and pistol belt and Tokarev in its flapped holster.

Umarov snatched Wei-Liu’s carry-on out of her grasp and tucked it securely under his arm. “You have your baggage receipts?” he asked her.

“I do.” Wei-Liu pulled a ticket folder from her handbag.

Umarov took the document, turned, handed it off to a jug-eared teenager of a soldier, and machine-gunned five seconds of rapid-fire Kazakh. “Taken care of,” he said. “Now you will follow me, my friends.” Without waiting for a reply, the Kazakh led the way across the floodlit apron toward a squat, dented olive-drab 4x4 with Cyrillic military markings.

Wei-Liu followed self-consciously, thinking she probably looked like some tourist. Which she wasn’t. In fact, she was a veteran. She’d been a member of more than a dozen U.S. delegations. She’d visited Moscow and Beijing, Paris, London, and Brussels in her capacity as a top-ranking American nuclear nonproliferation official. Before that, as a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, she had attended more than two dozen scientific conferences in places as varied as Budapest, Kiev, Oslo, and Tel Aviv. In the winter of 1998, as a consultant to CBS’s 60 Minutes II news magazine, she’d been the first American scientist allowed inside Krasnoyarsk-26, the former Soviet Union’s gargantuan secret underground nuclear city. There, buried deep beneath central Siberia, Moscow had, from 1950 on, manufactured tons of weapons-grade plutonium.

But from her undergraduate days at Princeton to her graduate work at MIT, her tenure at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, RAND, and even DOE, all of Wei-Liu’s work had been … abstract. Until now.

That was the difference. Until twenty-six hours ago, she’d always lived in an academic universe, examining galaxies of conjecturals, theoreticals, and hypotheticals. But twenty-six hours ago, she’d been dropped into a frightening parallel universe, where all the what-ifs became jarringly, terrifyingly, real. People would die. She might, too. She’d always been able to deal intellectually with the consequences of thermonuclear war because the scenarios were abstract and the numbers surreal. She could calculate radiation exposure and ground-blast effects coolly on a spreadsheet because that’s what they were: numbers on a spreadsheet.

This was different. She was about to experience warfare on an intensely personal basis, and she wondered whether or not she could handle it, and how it would affect the rest of her life. She was already experiencing the consequences. Time, suddenly, had become a blur. Memory had become selective. Wei-Liu had gotten drunk — once — as a teenager. Over the past twenty-six hours she felt as if she’d experienced many of the same symptoms. She didn’t remember being driven to her home so she could pack a few items. But Talgat Umarov had her baggage-claim check, so she must have packed. She didn’t remember being photographed for a new passport, either. But there it was, in her purse, with visas for Germany, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan stamped in it.