AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not 100 percent, sir. The launcher is stationed in occupied territory, and it’s a region of forest the Russians are known to operate from. But we don’t have eyes on for a visual confirmation.”
Which means the Russians could false-flag this. Rather than admitting to downing an American fighter jet, which would bring the full fury of the United States down in a hammer strike, they could try to point the finger at insurgents. Claim this wasn’t them.
“First things first: we have to rescue Captain Wilkes. Options?”
Brennan goes back and forth with Liu and Shannon, and McClintock joins in after he slams down the phone. Marshall is badged into the Situation Room, Sheridan with him.
Sheridan is filling in on the vice president’s detail, taking command of a few swing shifts while the detail lead is on extended leave. This is not a transfer. In fact, it’s the opposite. I’m working him up to be a team lead on Brennan’s detail. If Henry is my right hand, I want Sheridan to be my left. We have lunch twice a week. I still go to his three-on-three games. In fact, I’m his loudest cheerleader.
We’ve never spoken about what we said on the half court.
Sheridan joins me in the shadows at the back. It’s his first time in the Situation Room during a crisis, and he’s wide-eyed and pale as he tries to take everything in.
The door opens again, and this time, Henry escorts the secretary of defense in. The secretary joins the growing team around the conference table, and the tension in the room ratchets higher. Henry doesn’t need to be here, but he stays, sliding alongside Sheridan and me.
Marshall leans into the narrow ring of light on the table. “Mr. President, we have a platoon of Navy SEALs on ready status in Poland. We can move them across the border and to Captain Wilkes’s position before dawn for an extraction.”
“American boots on the ground in Ukraine has been the Russians’ red line for going to war—” Shannon starts.
“They’ve all but declared war on us, haven’t they?” McClintock’s Texas twang is rising. “They just shot one of our jets out of the sky!”
“And they could be trying to pull us into a broader engagement with that shoot-down,” Brennan says. “Since the last round of sanctions, Russia has plunged into turmoil.”
Brennan made a lot of promises at the UN, and he’s delivered on all of them. Humanitarian corridors are patrolled. Arms and aid continue to flow into Ukraine.
And Brennan successfully united the West in sanctioning more than just a handful of top figureheads or oligarchs, the men and women who already had their wealth squirreled away in untouchable vaults. He went after the real power behind Kirilov: the generals, the colonels, the battlefield commanders. The division heads of the FSB. The people up to their eyeballs in blood and corruption. The ones running the war, the secret police, the prisons. The people on the front lines pulling triggers.
The idea of sanctioning thousands of middle-class Russians was laughed at when Brennan first brought it up at the roundtable after his state dinner. Sanctioning individuals would not put pressure on a nation, he was told. You couldn’t cripple a country’s economy that way.
Brennan has personally driven aid convoys through minefields. He’s dodged artillery strikes to deliver generator fuel and medicine to hospitals holding lives together with nothing but Band-Aids and string. He’s helped field surgeons operating in forests and hidden beneath camouflage tarps, washing IV tubing and plastic gloves so they can be reused again. He’s dug graves with his bare hands. He’s lived behind enemy lines.
“Bring real consequences to the people with their fingers on the trigger,” he’d told everyone, “and you’ll force change to happen.”
Marshall’s eyes are like black diamonds sucking in the light as he listens to Brennan.
“Dragging the US into a shooting war would shift the narrative in Moscow from the campaign in Ukraine being a deadly misdirection to it being a war of self-preservation against Western aggression. That’s how they’re likely to spin this shoot-down. That we are on the brink of invasion. If we give them any fuel for that fire, we’ve just escalated this into no-man’s-land.”
Silence, until McClintock speaks. “Then you aren’t going to respond Mr. President?”
“There are many ways to respond. I don’t want to give Kirilov exactly what he might be looking for: an excuse for escalation that will inflate his own position at home. War with us might be the only thing that can save him at this point.”
“Mr. President, Russia has shot down one of our jets—”
“And you’re allowing Kirilov to dictate how and when this conflict escalates, Dean!” Brennan barks. “You’re reacting, reacting, reacting to his every move. He’s trying to force our hand, and you’re walking right into it.”
Brittle silence fills the Situation Room.
Brennan flicks his gaze to his secretary of defense. “Bob, talk to me about rescuing our pilot. Can it be done quietly, without the Russians knowing?”
“It will be tight, Mr. President, but it’s doable. The SEALs have the best chance of getting across the border undetected. If they’re caught, Russia will most likely take their presence in Ukraine as an act of war. You’re right, they might be laying a trap. Shoot down our pilot, drag us into a rescue that goes sideways. Shots are fired, and then we’re in World War III.”
Brennan leans back and watches the live satellite feed high over Ukraine. It’s the dead of night on the other side of the world, and the sky looks like spilled ink. Smoke rises from a crater the size of a smudge. A thermal overlay on a separate screen shows fires burning in the forest. Tiny dots of heat miles away are moving, heading for the crash.
His eyes close, and he dips his chin to his chest.
This is the paradox of the presidency, and it can break those who sit in that chair.
The burden of the world rests on Brennan’s shoulders, everything from nuclear war to the life of one American pilot, lost and alone behind enemy lines. It would be easy to strike back, easy to wound as we have been wounded. Tit for tat.
