Engaging Rachel by E.W. Farnsworth

Author:E.W. Farnsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: agents, thriller, crime, contemporary romance, undercover spies
Publisher: Zimbell House Publishing

Rachel’s History Lesson

Rachel was having second thoughts about the persons behind the planning for the terrorist action against the U.S. The Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden was dead, but his vision had not been expansive enough to encompass a plot that involved simultaneous weapons of mass destruction attacks on a half dozen of the largest U.S. ports, including New York-New Jersey, LA-Long Beach and Chicago. Yes, the scope of the attack seemed geopolitically to be on a level with the old USSR, and many of the old war horses of the USSR were still in power in Russia. Still, she was bothered by the thought that the plan was the brainchild of the current regime. She also had doubts that the current regime had the guts and determination to execute such a plan, even through cutouts, when its failure meant exposure.

I had to interject a thought at this point. The main outline of the plan would mean nothing significant if many pieces of the plan were to be interdicted before execution. Already the plan had been exposed by the Agency’s activities, and the government was bolstering its surveillance, defense, and infrastructure to deal with the aftermath of a weapons of mass destruction attack at locations where the materials had not yet been found. Rachel said she abhorred the idea that the plan had been foiled.

“What if everything that we have interdicted so far is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg?” she asked.

I asked her to elaborate on a scenario that still worked without the simultaneous attacks on the ports. She answered that everyone knew that delivery of a nuclear weapon by missile and cyber attacks could, by themselves, bring the nation’s economy and defense to their knees within thirty minutes. Even the Director of the National Security Agency, the NSA, has admitted in a public forum that there is no adequate defense against a cyber attack.

“Besides,” she continued, “Look at how much we depend on our satellites for communication and weather prediction and whatnot else. Anti-satellite weapons of Russia and China are sufficient to wipe those assets out in the same thirty minutes that it will take an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile to fly from Russia to the U.S.”

I had to agree with her, but I maintained that we in the Agency could do nothing about our defense capabilities other than analyze foreign capabilities and perform net assessments. Our defense capabilities would be ready or not in the event of a general war, period. I said that we should look at the situation not from the standpoint of what we could not do, but from the standpoint of what we could do. It was all about the art of the possible. Our advantage might be in coming up with a countermeasure that could work in plenty of time to render the threat defunct. Given what we had said about the current regime in Russia, it would not matter if we could cause regime change. The plan would be executed even if the Russian government was annihilated.

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