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“We’ll tell the hackers to scatter, at least for now. To hide out. We figure the Russians will be pissed for a while.”
“If you collect the names, we’ll give them NSA cover. We’ll watch over them twenty-four hours a day. If we see Russians trying to trace them, the FBI will be all over them.”
“Good, I guess. Some of the hacks might not like the NSA watching over them... might not think it’d be a good thing. Anyway, I’ll send the names along,” Letty said. “But: we think the Russians may know where we’re at, right now, so we don’t want our people to scatter until daylight. Overnight, if there’s trouble... there could be more bodies.”
“Try your best to avoid that. We’d hesitate to send in police protection or the FBI, since the incident at the SkyPort. They get all fussy,” Nowak said. “It would be best to handle it informally, as you’ve been doing.”
“All right, but tomorrow... the survivors are coming back to Washington.”
“We’ll give you a parade,” Nowak said. “Seriously, this is going to be a feather in some caps, including Senator Colles and you and me. We thank you. And really, try not to shoot anyone else.”
Before going back down the driveway, Letty stopped at the candy machine to see if anything was left that she could eat quietly. She got the last pack of Peanut M&M’s, emptied the pack into a pocket, and threw the package into a trash can. Sovern came down the hall and asked, “Any chips left?”
“Corn chips,” Letty said. “Barbeque.”
“Ah, man, that barbeque grease fucks up a keyboard.”
Letty asked about signs that the rail attack had been effective, and Sovern gave her a quick summary: the answer wasyes. Military logistics cars, Sovern said, were beginning to stray away from the front. As they walked together toward the door, Melody burst out of the yoga room and shouted, “Cell phones just went down. All of them. Nobody can call out.”
Letty looked at her phone: no service. She called Cartwright and Kaiser on the radio and with Sovern listening in, said, “Cell phones are down.”
Cartwright came back, speaking in a near whisper: “We’re being jammed. Maybe. Or a crow just shit on the Verizon antenna. How’s the Internet?”
“It was fine, the last time I looked,” Letty told her. “Craig says we’re monitoring the attack on Gomel and it’s looking good, and so is Voronezh. They’ve scrambled the manifests in both places and turned around a lot of cars that were carrying army rations and diesel, so...”
Jack stuck his head into the hallway and called, “Hey: The Net just went down. Everywhere.”
Letty passed that along.
Kaiser, quietly: “They’re here and they’ll be coming in. We’ve got to get the computer people ready to move. Probably want to put them in the hallways... mattresses on the floor. Tables peoplecan get under and stay lower than the brick walls. We need to find all available fire extinguishers.”
“You better get up here and organize that,” Letty said. “I’ll be coming down the driveway right now.”
Letty went back down the driveway, trying to sneak up on Kaiser, who said, “I saw you coming when you stepped out of the motel door.”
“Liar.”
“It was like watching a dump truck back over empty soda cans,” Kaiser said.
“We’ll discuss this at a later time,” Letty said. “Along with your other misrepresentations, deceptions, and distortions.”
“We’ll need to reserve a good block of time, then,” Kaiser said. “Listen, my littleFucking Fabulousturtle dove... They’re not here yet, but they’re coming. Keep your head down. And your ass.”
And he disappeared up the dark driveway.
They weren’t there yet,but they were close.
Volkov was in a sandy turnoff that went a few car lengths back into the brush along the highway into Santa Ynez. Why the turnoff was there, he didn’t know. The site had been spotted that afternoon by the scouts and selected and marked on satellite photos as a good place for a command post, out of sight of the highway, but very close to it.
He’d backed the car into the turnoff to make it easier to get out in a hurry; Step was with him, worried by the planned night attack on the motel. He’d shared his view with Volkov that killing was almost always bad for business. Volkov had dismissed the suggestion with an impolite fart noise.
“We are at war and not only with the stupid Ukrainians. Withthe stupid Americans, also. And the Balts and the Poles and the Hungarians. There will be a lot more dead than two or three here.”
“Maybe... maybe,” Step said. Still bad for business. Not just his business. He’d been reading theWall Street Journal, which was reporting that with the Western boycotts, Russian businesses, all of them, were about to go down the toilet.
After two of his three men had been killed at the SkyPort, Volkov, enraged, had asked for, and had gotten, six more operators. Four of them had flown in from New York and Washington on a private jet, so that weapons and other eyebrow-raising gear, like combat night-vision goggles, were not a problem. Two more had come from San Diego, by car, also with guns and gear. With the surviving man of Volkov’s original three, the lucky driver at the SkyPort, they had a force of seven, not counting Volkov or Step.
Volkov had reluctantly agreed that Step’s men, who’d been employed as loaders and drivers of contraband merchandise, were not gunmen; they were, however, perfectly good drivers who would drop the gunmen along the highway and pick them up at a prearranged rendezvous after the attacks. The drop-offs included spots a half mile up and down the hill on either side of the motel driveway, from where the operators would walk in. They were all linked to each other, and to Volkov, by radio, with earbuds.
