“We hand over the quantum codes, and they do what, dump the nukes in the ocean?”

  “We can’t hand over the codes, ma’am,” Bertrand said.

  “I know that, Koby. I’m speaking hypothetically. I’m trying to understand their endgame.”

  “Their endgame is total domination, and they’re prepared to deliver total violence to achieve total empire. They have more of these hypersonic weapons. Dozens that they can launch from any number of locations around China. They could release these now on the country and may very well with the understanding that the accuracy matters less than the demonstration of capability. This is not something we can do or defend against. It’s a new era in game theory. Hypersonic capability changes the calculus.”

  “Why would my secretaries of defense and state be involved in establishing the Dakhla Accords to help China?”

  “Maybe they didn’t originally see it that way? You have many members of your team that don’t believe in the concept of America anymore. To them, borders are irrelevant. Globalization is the way ahead. There’s some talk of a global corporate governance structure taking shape with China and the usual cast of characters. Like Bilderberg, but different, more controlling. The sketches we’ve seen from what Sinclair turned over to you are plans for a massive, controlled ecosystem in the Mauritanian and Moroccan governments run by a microgrid with a new United Nations–like entity developed in Dakhla called the Tongzhi or Tongyi. They’ve used both. One means ‘unity’ and the other means ‘domination.’ Our analysts have seen documents using both. Perhaps, generously speaking, your cabinet officials saw the one that said unity and have bought into that.”

  “And you?”

  “If we don’t turn over our quantum supercomputing materials by midnight, they say they’ll launch a hypersonic missile every day until we do.”

  “Jesus. We seriously have two options? Turn over our most classified technology or get nuked until we do?”

  “Well, you do have a suboptimal course of action,” Bertrand said. “Which is to see if Sinclair can get in there and disrupt this thing until we catch up with our own technology to reestablish mutual assured destruction.”

  “Our current array of nukes can destroy China, right?”

  “Yes, but our focus has been on destroying their nuclear launch sites to deny them the ability to launch ICBMs at us. They’ve got at least twenty more of these hypersonic missiles staged on rockets and ready to take off. I think some on your team are trying to lead you to see the benefits of Tongzhi or Tongyi, whichever it is. We’re in a new era where people feel empowered by their own information control and access. Government structures are far less important other than as a means to power and control. There are no more ramifications for breaking the law, committing treason as it were. We’re in a post-legal environment. Some call it post-truth. Whatever it is, it’s not a republic, and it’s not democratic.”

  Bertrand was leaning back in his chair, waxing philosophic with the president, who seemed to be listening intently.

  “You’re certainly motivational, Koby,” Campbell said. She offered the same thin smile she had begun the conversation with. “If I try to exercise my authority through my cabinet, they could very well leave Garrett hanging out to dry … and to die. Him and his team.”

  “They may very well meet that fate no matter what you do, ma’am, but since everyone is rolling their own, you have to ask yourself what you can live with. If you still believe in the America that existed in your childhood and want to steer us toward a future that is at least tethered to that concept, then give Sinclair resources. If you see a future with Chinese unity or domination as the key, then get him out of there. Let him live to fight another day. What we’ve authorized him to do is highly irregular and dangerous. I can tell you this, though: the American spirit is anathema to China and communism. That’s why I believe the virus was the first wave. Maybe intentional or unintentional. It doesn’t matter. Socialists here used the opportunity to get the Great Reset in motion. It’s happening as we speak. China sees this, and they are the master of opportunity. They’ve got a huge opportunity in front of them, which they are exploiting.”

  “My childhood, Koby, was spent catching fireflies and sand crabs at Figure Eight Island in North Carolina. It was magical, but it will still be there no matter what I do. My parents had a decent income and could afford us vacationing on a private island with its own gated access. My concerns are for the middle class, always have been. What happens to our country if we give in to the brainwashing, the cult that is being developed where we are targeting people just because they think differently from the government? Parents expressing frustration at the school board is about as timeless and American as it gets. America was born out of revolution and resistance to tyranny, and here we are advocating for the very oppression we claim to oppose not only on a local but also on a global scale?”

  Bertrand shrugged. “It sounds like you’ve figured out where you stand. The question is can you succeed—can we succeed—in stopping the Chinese and, by the way, the French, who are every bit involved in this present scenario as the Chinese are? They’re the ones running interference with Morocco and Mauritania. They’ve got Henri Sanson on the ground. Our intel shows that Command Sergeant Major Morgan discovered the Rosetta stone to their plan during the Dakhla meeting where McHenry, Blankenship, the Mauritanians, the French, the Moroccans, and the Chinese all signed the Dakhla Accords.”

  “Did we know he was there? Sylvester Morgan?” Campbell sipped from a cup of coffee she had left untouched for fifteen minutes.

  “Before he was killed, he was there twice. He found a treasure of information that has led to all my deductions here. He found documents tying Blankenship and McHenry to major deals with the biggest tech firms and the Chinese Communist Party. I’m an old intel analyst, and I’ve given this to no one.”

  “He was decapitated, you know,” Campbell said.

  “Yes. The Sanson family business was execution by the blade. Perhaps its genetic with him, but he also had good reason, in his view, to kill Command Sergeant Major Morgan.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Defense Minister Gambeau is allied with the Chinese just as are McHenry and Blankenship. Sanson is paid handsomely by both Gambeau and the Chinese government to ensure the project succeeds. Morgan was a threat to all that.”

  “He’s not an explorer? He’s a defense contractor?” Campbell said.

  “Exactly.”

  “No one else in DNI knows about this?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, shaking his head.

  She looked out the porthole window again.

  “Thank you, Koby, that will be all.”

  Bertrand nodded, gathered his papers, and left as Campbell reached for a cell phone again, punched a number, and slammed it into the seat cushion after it presumably went to voice mail.

  On the television in her office, CNN showed images of a mushroom cloud over a vast suburban area.

  Unknown Explosion Decimates Dulles Airport and Loudoun County Suburbs

  The first of the Chinese hypersonic missiles had impacted in Virginia, no doubt a warning shot.

  * * *

  “BOSS, IT’S STARTED,” Van Dreeves said as he held the tablet for all to see.

  32

  “ONE DOWN, FOUR TO go,” Hobart said.

  We were all numb for a minute, speechless.

  Van Dreeves broke the silence when he said, “Feed from Air Force One indicates we have six hours to shut this thing down.”

  There was no time to waste on eloquent sermons, but I had to acknowledge the enormity of what had just happened.

  “Team, this is unprecedented. Thousands of our countrymen have already perished, and thousands more will. 9/11 was a rogue band of terrorists that found a seam and exploited it. This nuclear strike by China is the start of a global war. Their intentions are clear—to force the United States into a global regime or risk at least four more nuclear strikes. Whether our leadership has the wherewithal to strike back, to escalate this into an all-out nuclear Armageddon, I don’t know. None of us knows. But what we can do is our part, as we have always done, to protect our nation and our countrymen.”

  “Well put, boss,” Van Dreeves said. Everyone else nodded.

  “Okay, let’s move,” I said.

  We departed the cave on the Mole with Hobart and Van Dreeves heading north off the backside of the terrain feature and McCool and me walking a few meters to Farouk’s position. We had fully refreshed batteries for our communications systems and IVAS night vision devices.

  We were prepared to begin infiltration into the Chinese laser station nearing completion. The sun began sliding beneath the horizon somewhere over Dakhla two hundred miles to the west.

  I knelt next to Farouk and said, “Doing okay?”

  “Am always okay. Better than that guy.” He eyed a dead, decapitated horned viper ten feet away.

  “Sanson in the making,” I said.

  “Bitch tried to bite me.”

  “Where there’s one, there’s more.”

  “Maybe, but usually with these guys, they’re territorial. But you’re right, this place is ripe terrain for the vipers. There’s water on the east side.”

  He looked down and continued observing from behind the powerful scope atop his sniper rifle.

  “Thank you for everything you’ve done,” I said.

  “Joe told me about the mission. It’s important to my people, too.”

  “To everyone. This is the new fascism. If China and Big Tech get control, the world will be one giant techno military-industrial complex, and the people will be its subjects.”

  He nodded.

  “Can you do what we’re talking about?” I asked.

  “It’s a bit crazy, but it might work,” he said. “It has to work.”

  To my right, Hobart and Van Dreeves wound down the trail to the bottom of this terrain feature. We were maybe one hundred meters above the desert floor. I watched as they moved stealthily to the southeast. Zoey knelt next to me and placed her hand on my shoulder.

  “I feel better. I’m ready to do my part,” she said.

  “You’ve done your part. You found Sanson. Sanson led us to the rail. The rail led us to the operation. You’ve got the external drive that shows the dummy sites. Your only mission is to get home safely with the rest of us. Stay here with Farouk, and we will rally after the mission.”

  “So boring,” she whispered. I imagined that Hobart had forbade her from going forward to the objective area and she was seeking my permission to do so. The reality was that neither of us could stop her.

  McCool had taken up a position on my left. We were all hovering over Farouk, because he had staked out the perfect parapet from which to watch Hobart and Van Dreeves’s ingress. There were six of us, not including Champollion. They were the very best people I knew. As Van Dreeves and Hobart disappeared into the enveloping darkness, I wondered at the time if I would ever see them again. I didn’t recall ever having that thought and was surprised that it had crept into my mind. From where, I didn’t know.

  The presence of my goddaughter and my most trusted pilot on either side of me comforted me as I watched two men I considered sons snake their way into a deep ravine that would lead to the Chinese terminal guidance construction site. Somewhere in the distance, a camel sounded off with its distinctive bark.

  “You ready?” I said, looking at McCool.

  “You know the answer to that, General,” she said.

  I nodded and said to Farouk and Zoey, “No singletons ever anywhere for any reason. I need to hear it from both of you.”

  Zoey looked at me and then looked away as she had done in Vass after her father’s funeral.

  “Yes,” she muttered unhappily.

  “Oui,” Farouk said. No issues either way for him. I wanted him to make sure Zoey was safe. Our mission was dangerous enough as it was.

  “Shoot the video feed from the drones into my IVAS,” I directed Farouk.

  “Just don’t go underground. The network gets weaker.”

  I nodded and turned to find Champollion’s lean figure standing behind me.

  “You favor your grandfather. He was a good man. He led the Second Ranger Battalion against all odds during the D-day invasion. While I don’t necessarily agree with your tactics here—you’re a general, by God—I do support the concept of doing what must be done, regardless of one’s station in life.”

  “As you are doing,” I said. “Instead of a comfortable life living off your family’s fortunes from interpreting the Rosetta stone and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, you joined the DGSE at a young age and lived parallel lives in French social circles as well as dueling it out on the front lines of French intelligence, be that what it is.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “Don’t forget I’m an expert at Chinese characters, also.”

  “You explained your DGSE missions as absences due to grand Egyptian excavations and conferences. Because Henri Champollion, your great-great-something-or-other interpreted the Egyptian artifacts, you are a cult hero in Egypt and North Africa.”

  “Someone has been doing their homework,” she said.

  Van Dreeves had downloaded a classified biography we maintained in our JSOC database within our virtual private network, to which we maintained access until General Luckey remembered we had our own network and satellite. We maintained hundreds of names germane to North African operations so we could more rapidly exploit intelligence and identify friend or foe. Evelyn Champollion had been decorated four times with the French Cross for gallantry in Afghanistan, Iraq, Senegal, and Morocco. She was heralded for bringing hostages home, stopping terrorist attacks, and helping French citizens safely escape during the Afghanistan exodus.

  “Your reputation is a good one, madam. I trust you to stay here with my goddaughter and Farouk so that we may all rendezvous in twelve hours and return to a securer future than one that includes the Chinese military directing lasers off satellite mirrors to guide nuclear hypersonic weapons to precise locations.”

  “If you can stop that, General, I suspect there’s nothing you can’t do,” she said. She nodded at me, her eyes glistening in the sunset. I was curious what she hadn’t told me about my grandfather. He had been secretive about his World War II battles, having lost over 90 percent of his men from D-day to Cherbourg, but I had found a journal he’d kept in combat after we had buried him in Arlington and cleaned up his Fayetteville home. I read through his musings, some laced with wry humor but most expressing concern for his troops. Johnny Jackson got winged by a Kraut today … Looks like he’ll be okay … One of nineteen left after climbing the cliff … Harlan Ziegler came back from a farm with two chickens … We ate well tonight, though stray arty hit, and one of them got away before we could butcher it … Met the nicest people in Cherbourg on a risky mission … I miss home, but this is my new family … I’m losing so many men, a part of me feels like I should be next … We’re down to just nine men, and we have big missions coming up … I imagine we’ll all be gone by the time this is over.

  He often wondered why he had survived and others had not been so lucky. By the time he had returned from Germany, he had five men left from his original fifty. If my grandfather could lead five men across Europe to do his part in saving the world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, then I could certainly lead my crew of seven here to a very specific objective to accomplish a mission of similar import. It was a testament to the power of technology that China could achieve essentially the same effect today with its emerging systems and a couple of infantry battalions as it took Germany four years and millions of troops to achieve.

  “Stay here with my team. You’ll be safe with them,” I said.

  She nodded again, and I turned to McCool and said, “Let’s go.”

  I led McCool off the backside of the Mole and moved to the west and then south, angling toward the railroad. Chinese attack helicopters buzzed in the distance. The train rumbled along the tracks, its frequency every hour ferrying supplies to the construction site. Darkness enveloped us quickly. Soon, the night chill filtered in, cooling us as we walked. The desert air carried the faint smell of eucalyptus and diesel fumes wafting in from the Chinese build location.

  As instructed, Farouk connected the drone video feed to my IVAS so that I could see Van Dreeves and Hobart infiltrate. Our drones had shown us a potential ingress location along a small wadi that curved in from the southwest. The basic outline for the plan was for Van Dreeves and Hobart to work their way in from the northeast and set up a support-by-fire position. They would guide us into location to engage the Chinese infantry that was digging fighting positions along the rail, road, and major wadi ingress/egress locations.

  We would make contact as they watched, and then we would support by fire as they moved with the entire base focused on the southern flank. Van Dreeves was the communications expert, and Hobart was the demolition expert. Van Dreeves carried the tools necessary to take control of the laser guidance system while Hobart carried the C4 explosives to destroy it. Having both options were necessary because we weren’t certain about the total system design and where the limited resources we had available might need to be placed to achieve maximum effect and defeat the laser capabilities. We had discussed the pros and cons of destroying the optical system versus the command-and-control nerve center. Sly’s captured photographs and blueprints showed a complex system with lots of artificial intelligence powering the brains. If we destroyed the lasers, assuming that was possible, would the missiles simply fly to their last computed target, or would they veer wildly off course? The same held true for the command center. If the lasers still worked, would it matter that the brain wasn’t communicating to the missiles anymore?