State Of The Union

“Alexandra, help me! I can’t hold onto you.”

It was Harvath.

Alexandra opened her eyes and looked up. Harvath was leaning over the edge of the ship. He was holding onto her wrist with his left hand.

The pain of suspending her in subzero temperatures several stories above the White Sea was emblazoned like bright red neon across his features. “Alexandra!” he yelled again. “Reach up with your other hand!”

Alexandra tried, but she couldn’t. She opened her mouth to speak, but try as she might, no sound would come out. She could feel Harvath’s grip slipping and was paralyzed with fear.

“I’m losing my grip,” groaned Harvath, his arms feeling as if they were going to tear away from his body at any moment. Summoning every last ounce of strength he had, Harvath roared and gave one final tug, which succeeded in hauling Alexandra the rest of the way back onto the icy deck, where he lay in a heap next to her, totally spent.

Harvath never noticed the two Spetsnaz soldiers until they were standing right over him and by then, it was too late. Harvath went to grab for his gun, but one of the men put his boot down on his hand.

“Easy,” said Morrell. “It’s us.”

Morrell helped Harvath up while Avigliano assisted Alexandra.

Rejoining DeWolfe and Carlson, Morrell gave Harvath and Alexandra the pick of Spetsnaz bodies and told them to get out of their clothes and into the Spetsnaz uniforms as quickly as possible, before more of the troops showed up. As it turned out, more soldiers were not what they had to worry about, as the Mi-17-1V helicopter, which had been hovering off the aft deck, turned and came back in with its 23-mm gun pods blazing.

“Incoming!” yelled Morrell as the team dove for cover.

The helicopter peppered not only the aft deck, but also half of its housing, showering them with broken glass, splintered wood, and twisted metal.

As the helicopter swung out and prepared to make another run, Harvath reached for his gun, but something else caught his eye. Leaning against a pile of coiled rope was Alexandra’s Pit Bull.

The helicopter was fifty meters out and closing fast when Morrell and the rest of the team took aim and began firing. The Mi-17-1V answered with its own deadly barrage of fire, but when it got within spitting distance and Harvath could see it as well as he could through the blinding curtains of snow, he began firing.

One then two, followed by a third of the armor-piercing rounds found their mark and the assault helicopter exploded in an enormous ball of fire.

“That was for Gary, asshole,” said Harvath as he watched the burning chopper crash into the sea.

As the team regrouped, Carlson commented on how their primary means of escape was now charred and sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

Ever the tactician, Morrell quickly sifted through the possibilities for escape and said, “We’ve got options,” he said, “We’ll figure something out.”

“Whatever it is,” said Carlson, “we’d better do it fast.”

Alexandra cleared her throat and suggested, “How about theVyesna?”

“What’s theVyesna?” asked Avigliano.

“It’s one of the nuclear icebreakers,” she said, pointing over the side of theGagarin through the snow. “The large red one off the port bow.”

“You think the Russian Navy is just going to let us sail right out of here with it?” asked DeWolfe.

“First of all, they don’t have to know we’re on it,” replied Alexandra, “and secondly, the Russian Navy doesn’t have much to say about it. Especially if they believe that theVyesna is having a problem with its reactor.”

DeWolfe was starting to see what she had in mind. “But they’ll want to put one of their people on it to check it out.”

“I doubt it. The icebreakers aren’t part of the Russian Navy. They’re all privately owned by a Russian conglomerate called the Murmansk Shipping Company. TheVyesna is one of the oldest in their fleet. It should have been retired a long time ago. My guess is that if there’s an accident onboard, complete with the threat of a radiation leak, the Russian Navy won’t want to get anywhere near that boat. They’ll want it out of the area right away.”

“They’ll expect it to return to port though,” said Carlson.

“That’s what I’m counting on. The service base for the Murmansk Shipping Company is on the Kola Peninsula only a hundred kilometers south of the Norwegian border. Once we are on land, we can find a car, a truck, or whatever is available and go. Up there, it is still the two months of constant darkness known as Polar night, so we’ll have added cover.”

With the fire alarm still blaring and Morrell expecting more soldiers to show up at any moment, he looked at Harvath, then studied the team and said, “I vote we grab the nearest lifeboat and get the hell out of here. If anyone’s got any better ideas, now’s the time.” When no one offered an alternative, he shouldered one of the AK-105s and instructed the team to watch their backs as they moved out.

Fifteen minutes later, once they were a safe distance away in one of theGagarin ’s lifeboats, Harvath and the rest of the team looked back together and watched as the giant ship rolled completely onto its starboard side and began to slide beneath the icy water.

While his teammates congratulated each other on sinking the air defense system that the Soviet Union had created to blackmail the United States and pointed the lifeboat toward the nuclear icebreaker known as theVyesna, Harvath was uncharacteristically quiet. Something, he didn’t know what, told him that America wasn’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

Chapter 50

With its nineteen-inch-thick armor-plated steel hull and twin steam turbine engines, the nuclear icebreakerVyesna made the four hundred and fifty kilometer trip to Murmansk in just under seventeen hours. The dummy charges Carlson rigged in the reactor room and at other strategic points throughout the vessel, which he threatened to detonate via remote if there was any trouble, were enough to ensure the crew’s complete cooperation. The men were professional sailors, not soldiers and had no desire to die.

Via encrypted messages transmitted back and forth to Washington, Harvath learned that the threat of a pending Russian attack was already begi

Now that Harvath had succeeded in disabling Russia’s previously envisioned impregnable air defense system, hawks in Rutledge’s cabinet were calling for a full-on first strike to neutralize the Russians and calm fears at home. The president, though, was still concerned about the Soviet nukes secreted on American soil and urged Harvath to get back to DC as quickly as possible. There was less than two days until the State of the Union address.

By the time theVyesna crashed its way into the Kola Inlet, General Paul Venrick of the American Joint Special Operations Command had established a rendezvous point just across the border with a Norwegian Special Forces Team.

After DeWolfe had disabled the ship’s communication equipment and Carlson, with Alexandra translating, warned that he could still detonate his explosives from up to twenty kilometers away if the crew did anything stupid, the team lowered one of the icebreaker’s rigid inflatable boats over the side and headed for land.

They beached just down from a small town called Platonovka, where Avigliano located an old UAZ-brand cross-country vehicle and, seeing no one around, promptly “commandeered” it. Stopping at two gas stations, Alexandra and Harvath went inside where they allowed the attendants to hear them speaking English. Alexandra then asked for directions in Russian to a village on the Fi