The Nuclear Option by Allan Leverone

Author:Allan Leverone [Leverone, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rock Bottom Books
Published: 2020-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

23

Date unknown

Time unknown

Location unknown

The sunlight was blinding. Tracie had never been one to spend a lot of time catching rays on the beach, and this relentless glare was one reason why.

And her head felt like someone was hitting it with a sledgehammer. Once, years ago during her freshman year at Brown University, she had gone out bar-hopping with some of her new friends shortly after moving into her dorm, drinking far too much and getting as sick as she could ever recall.

The headache portion of her hangover the next day had felt exactly like this.

The problem was she couldn’t remember taking a trip to the beach, and she sure as hell couldn’t remember drinking heavily. Or drinking at all, for that matter.

But the evidence of her debauchery was impossible to ignore. Her temples throbbed, sending lightning bolts of pain reverberating around the inside of her skull like pinballs in an arcade machine. The throbbing in her head caused her stomach to pitch and roll sickeningly.

She thought if she could get the hell off this beach, away from the damned sunshine, her system might start to calm down, but there was another problem: she didn’t think she could move. Her right ankle was killing her and pretty much all of her joints hurt damned near as much as her head. It was as though a nuclear bomb had gone off inside her body, and—

Wait a minute.

That one thought jump-started her brain and the memories came rushing back in an instant:

Dimitri Kozlov and Sovetskiy Soyuz Navsegda.

The stolen tactical nuke sitting on pallets inside the abandoned service station in Yaroslavl.

Her mad dash to get back to the CIA safe house and contact Aaron Stallings.

And the impossibly large headlights on the Russian truck as it slid straight at her stolen VAZ.

She didn’t know where she was or how long she’d been here, but one thing she did know was that she was most certainly not lying on some beach, hung over from too much partying.

Another thing she knew was that she had to get out of here, regardless of where “here” was. Her mission hadn’t changed because of any car wreck, assuming of course she hadn’t been lying comatose for a week or more and the nuke had already been detonated, and World War Three had already begun.

That thought sent a ripple of dread fluttering through her belly and suddenly she felt sick for an entirely different reason.

She forced her eyes open and immediately the lightning bolts bouncing around inside her skull ratcheted up in intensity. The pinballs became bowling balls. The nausea increased and she swallowed heavily, focusing hard on keeping the contents of her stomach where it belonged.

What she’d thought was the sun’s glare was actually the harsh radiance of high-wattage fluorescent lighting, a triple strip of which was located in the ceiling directly above her bed. Her eyes wanted to close, to tamp down on the relentless pounding in her skull and yawing of her stomach, but she fought against the urge.

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