SEAL Team Seven #03 - Nucflash by Keith Douglass

Author:Keith Douglass [Douglass, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Action & Adventure, Men's Adventure, War & Military, Nuclear Weapons, Paperback Collection
ISBN: 9780425148815
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 1995-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

Wednesday, May 2

0915 hours EST

Situation Room Support Facility

Executive Office Building

Washington, D.C.

“The announcement was put out over the BBC on their noon news,” Phillip Buchalter said. He looked down at his Rolex, tugging back the cuff of his Saville Row jacket to reveal its face. “That was just over two hours ago. There have been no further communications from this Adler person since.”

“He can’t be serious,” Frank Clayton said, shaking his head. “God, he can’t be fucking serious!”

Gloom and worry permeated the room, as heavy as the ornate, nineteenth-century decor so carefully restored over the past decade. Nine men sat at one end of a long, polished oak table large enough for sixty. Together, they were facing a nightmare long expected.

Each had hoped it would be a nightmare deferred. With the BBC broadcast of two hours before, that hope had just been dashed. After years of being the stuff of fiction, spy thrillers and the like, nuclear blackmail by terrorists had just become reality.

Buchalter was the current President’s advisor on national security, and as such was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the National Security Council. Most of the men present were members of the NSC Principals Committee, one of the three subgroups of the Council formed during President Bush’s reorganization of the group in 1989. Among them were Frank Clayton, the new White House Chief of Staff; Secretary of State James A. Schellenberg; General Amos C. Caldwell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Ronald Hemminger; and, rumpled as always in his tweed jacket, Victor Marlowe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Normally, each of these singularly powerful men was attended by a small army of aides and staff members, but this afternoon the foot soldiers were restricted to a half-dozen or so men and women who waited, standing, at the far end of the room until they might be needed. This meeting of the Principals Committee was both secret and urgent. A special brief was being prepared for the President, a man not known either for his expert grasp of foreign affairs or for his patience, and there was no time to be lost on preliminary meetings or group discussions.

Three of the men at the table were not members of the NSC but had been brought in to assist with the brief’s preparation. The white-haired, professorial-looking man at Marlowe’s side was a second spook, Brian Hadley, the head of the CIA’s Office of Global Issues. Next to him, dapper and trim as always, was Sir George Mallory, the British ambassador to the United States.

The ninth man at the table wore one of the two military uniforms in the room, but his was the blue and gold of a Navy rear admiral, as opposed to the khaki of General Caldwell’s Army uniform. Admiral Bainbridge was the commanding officer of Navy Special Warfare Group Two, a simple enough name that was generally reduced in true Navy acronymic fashion to the jawbreaking mouthful NAVSPECWARGRU-2. The unit included the East-Coast based SEAL teams: Two, Four, Seven, and Eight, plus Helicopter Attack Squadron Light Four.

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