Ghost Force by Patrick Robinson Page A

as they did in 1982.”
    “You really think so?” said the PM. “The Royal Navy all over again, bombing and blasting the islands all over again. British troops, fighting and dying in the frozen hills of that awful, weird little place?”
    “Yes, Comrade. I think they might,” said the President. “But this time they would most certainly lose. And there would be absolutely nothing they could do about it. Everyone involved in our military knows it. Great Britain’s Labour governments have weakened their war-fighting capability to a truly stupendous degree.
    “They do not have the troops, they have savagely cut out some of their best regiments, merging them, closing them. They have cut back their Navy, selling many ships and scrapping others. They’ve reducedtheir air combat force to virtually nothing. The Brits would be a pushover.
    “And, since they don’t have Margaret Thatcher anymore, the Argentines would crush them. Especially with a little help from us. If I was their Defense Minister I would not even think about trying to recapture the Falkland Islands, should Argentina decide to claim them.”
     
    The Russian press release was issued by the Russian Air Force in Moscow at midnight, too late for the television news channels, and very late for the morning newspapers, which are inclined to print earlier on Friday nights because of various weekend supplements and magazines.
    The release, scarcely changed from the precise wording written by hand by the Russian President that morning, reached the international wire agencies shortly before one a.m. on Saturday.
    It was still Friday afternoon in Washington, around five p.m., and there was plenty of time to develop the story. However, East Coast newsrooms had much more on their minds than an obscure military air crash in northern Siberia, where a few oil execs may have perished.
    And it was greeted, generally, with a thunderclap of disinterest. The Washington Post and the New York Times carried a single column, a two-inch-long mention of the accident in their foreign news roundup, well inside the paper. No one thought it worth a follow-up. The CNN twenty-four-hour news channel never mentioned it; neither did the main newspapers in Philadelphia or Boston.
    On the other hand, over on the eighth floor of the National Security Agency, Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe took one glance at the release from Moscow and damn near rammed the ceiling with the top of his head as he blew directly upward out of his office chair.
    “H-o-o-o-o-l-e-e shit!” he breathed. And the words on the sheet of copy paper jumped straight out at him… Siberia…oil…death…air crash…no trace…no details…Whoa!
    Having almost walked into the wall with excitement, he reeled around and hit the buttons to the former assassin in the CIA, Lenny Suchov.
    “I know, I know, Jimmy, I just got it. How about that? Something’s going on right here. I am certain of that.”
    “Hey, that’s a pretty sharp deduction—for a bloody spook,” said Jimmy, once more sounding like Crocodile Dundee.
    “Oh, you mean I was clever enough to work out there may be a connection between the death in the White House and those deaths in the Siberian tundra?”
    “I should bloody say so, old mate. The Ruskies obviously wiped out a top Siberian oil exec in the State Dining Room right here in Washington. And now they might have done a whole bloody planeload of ’em somewhere northeast of the Urals.”
    “My thoughts completely,” said Lenny. “Crudely but effectively stated. However, it’s still very much a Russian affair—nothing to do with us. But I think it’s our duty—mine at least—to take a look at something as sinister as this. We ought to know what’s happening.”
    “I agree, Lenny. But I’m not sure where to start. I suppose I could get U.S. Air Force Intelligence to find out precisely which aircraft from which base somehow took off and never returned. I could have someone get inside the rescue