SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

His apprehension was contagious, and she began to pace behind one of the two facing Empire couches — four nervous steps followed by a quick reverse of course. “Tomorrow, sometime. They’re scheduled to implant the devices today. Then it’s a three-hundred-kilometer trip south on that new connector road, followed by another hundred on the main east-west road. And of course they have to stop and shoot video from time to time.”

“Video,” he repeated absently, and cracked the ring finger on his left hand.

The president had been anxious about this operation from the very start. Not that he’d ever wavered. The mission was critical to the nation’s immediate national security interests. Immediate because in just over six weeks he was scheduled to sign a nuclear treaty at a summit in Beijing. But there was no way Pete Forrest was going to affix his signature to the document unless there was a way to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Chinese weren’t cheating by setting off ultra-low-level tests deep within the hundreds of miles of tunnels they’d dug over the last half century in the sandy flats around the Lop Nur test site’s prehistoric dry lake bed.

For maddening reasons Pete Forrest couldn’t begin to fathom, none of the National Reconnaissance Office’s current generation of satellites had the capability to distinguish an explosion that measured less than half a kiloton from a seismic anomaly. The president had a hard time with that, because a half-kiloton explosion is the equivalent of blowing a million pounds of TNT all at once. Which, as he had complained loudly to the director of central intelligence, who’d presented him with the bad news, makes for one hell of a seismic anomaly.

Worse, he’d been told there was no way NRO would be able to get an ultra-low-range-capable bird launched in less than three years. The existing ground sensors, which were located on the high mountain ranges of the Kazakh-Chinese border, had been designed to record the twenty-to eighty-kiloton underground tests the Chinese had performed in the mid-and late 1990s — tests that all measured 4.5 or above on the Richter seismic scale.

But according to the latest analysis, the current Chinese nuclear program was being directed more toward mini-yield tactical weapons than multi-megaton warheads. Which meant that the United States was essentially blind if Beijing decided to secretly test tactical nukes of a half kiloton or less. The president had concluded the only way to guarantee the Chinese weren’t cheating was to insert new ground sensors close enough to the tunnels to pick up the faintest of seismic readings emanating from the Lop Nur test site.

Which required a human element to infiltrate across China’s border and place the devices covertly. And so, a little over two months ago, he’d signed the finding that set the operation in motion, even though he knew he’d be risking a confrontation with the Chinese, as well as putting American lives in danger. It was his job as commander in chief, and he didn’t have to like it — he just had to order it done.

Still, commonsense, straight-ahead grit was characteristic of the man. Unlike the great majority of future politicians of his generation, Peter DeWitt Forrest had volunteered straight out of Yale to serve in the Army — one of only eight from his class who would serve in the military. He’d qualified for jump wings and seen combat as a platoon commander in Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. And he had returned from that mishandled war with deeply rooted beliefs about the use of force, and — just as important — about the quality of leadership.

Pete Forrest came away from Vietnam convinced the only difference between good leadership and poor leadership is whether the lives that leadership spends are well spent or squandered. In Vietnam, he saw too many squandered lives. It was those ghosts that shaped, tempered, and focused his modus vivendi.

As a banker and credit-card entrepreneur who’d once ranked sixty-seventh in the Forbes 500, he’d always demanded that those who worked for him be tough but fair. The hallways of Pete Forrest’s corporate headquarters were filled with posters promoting character and integrity. He demonstrated loyalty to his employees just as he demanded loyalty from them by sharing the company’s considerable wealth based on their performance, just as his remuneration was based on his own. Later, as governor of Virginia, he’d always tried (and most of the time succeeded) to be guided by a moral compass, as opposed to the amoral political pragmatism fashionable in the 1990s.

Perhaps most important, he never forgot the lessons he’d learned from his brothers-in-arms on the battlefield. Which was why Pete Forrest had taken a silent vow in the same breath with which he’d boldly affirmed the presidential oath. His hand on the family Bible, he swore to himself that as the nation’s commander in chief he would try never to squander a single American life.