Tyler held his breath as Anya waited for a response. When the radio crackled, and the Wall’s voice replied, “Hello? Why are you calling me over the radio?” He released the breath and pumped his fist in excitement.
Anya sighed with equal relief and said, “It’s a long story. I’ll give you the short version, but I have critical information to give you first.”
The Wall was not one to allow curiosity to get in the way of business. In a clipped tone, he said, “Go ahead.”
“There are six modified R-1 missiles with enough range to strike Washington, D.C. These missiles are under the command of Ivan Mikhailovich.”
“This is the same man who tried to assassinate Truman?” the Wall asked.
“The same,” Anya confirmed.
“Okay. Continue.”
The Wall’s calm in the face of this news was truly admirable. Tyler didn’t always like his boss, but damn if he didn’t respect him.
“We believe we have the coordinates for the launch site. I will read them to you now.” She looked at Tyler, and Tyler realized the coordinates were still in the kitchen.
“One second.”
He dashed from the room, overhearing Anya say drily, “I will read them to you when Tyler returns.”
He grabbed the paper from the table and dashed up the ladder. “Okay, sir. Here we go.”
He read the coordinates, and when he finished, the Wall said. “Okay. Let’s see. That looks like it’s about eighteen miles west of your signal.”
“Wow. How did you find it so fast?”
“I’m looking at a map of Cuba right now. Where are you two?”
The two agents shared a look. Anya cleared her throat and said, “We’re in an MGB bunker near the base we infiltrated.”
“The MGB has bunkers in Cuba?”
“It seems so.”
“Wait, you didn’t know about it? How did you find it?”
Anya looked at Tyler and hesitated a moment. Tyler would advise her to be honest with the Wall, but he wanted to leave that choice up to her.
She made the right choice. “My father led us here.”
The Wall was silent for long enough that Anya asked, “Are you still there, sir?”
“I’m still here.” He fell silent for another long moment, then said, “Clearly, I have questions, but upon reflection, I will elect to save them for later. The priority right now is to stop Ivan at all costs. If one of those costs is sharing a bed with the enemy, then we’ll do what we have to do.”
Anya reddened slightly at that comment, and Tyler felt his heartbeat quicken. God, what the hell was wrong with him?
Not a damned thing, the voice in his head replied. Not one single thing.
“Understood, sir,” Anya replied. “My thoughts exactly.”
“You’re in the bunker. Can you get out?”
Anya pressed her lips together. “We don’t know yet, sir. Our priority was to contact you with this information.”
“Yes, it was. Now you’ve contacted me, and it goes without saying, I’m going to be getting a lot of big guns together to respond to this situation on my end. You two need to find a way out of that bunker and onto that missile site. I’ll work out help on my end. See if you can find Blue Jay. I’ll reach out to him and coordinate the op so he can pass info along to you when you reconnect with him.”
That reminded Tyler. “Sir, have you heard from him recently?”
“If I had, Wolf, I would be telling you where to find him instead of telling you to find him.”
Tyler frowned. “Sir, he was part of the operation to infiltrate the base. We were made, and we had to split up to try to escape. That’s how we ended up in this bunker. I told Blue Jay to contact you as soon as possible. If he hasn’t yet, then…”
His voice trailed off. A moment later, the Wall said, “Let’s not give up on him yet. Jack’s a good officer. He’s been with the CIA since the CIA was the OSS, and he’s been in tougher situations and pulled through. We have a job to do, and he’d want us to do it. By the way, you’re not cleared to know his real name, so I didn’t say it.”
Tyler blinked. “Um… all right, sir.” It didn’t really upset him that he wasn’t cleared to know Blue Jay’s real name, but it did surprise him. There were more layers to the CIA than he thought.
Anya pulled them back to the task at hand. “We need to travel eighteen miles west of here. That’s too far to walk through these mountains. It could take two days in perfect conditions. With terrorists hunting us, it could take far longer.”
“If we even make it at all,” Tyler added.
Anya frowned at him, and Tyler lifted his hands apologetically.
“Yes,” the Wall agreed. “Damn it. See if you can locate Blue Jay first. At the least, see if you can determine his status if at all possible. The priority is, of course, the missile site, but if you two are on your own, it’s going to be damned hard to get you somewhere you can impact that.”
“You can’t have the Air Force bomb the base?” Anya asked.
The Wall sighed. “Believe me, Anya, if I could, I would fly the Superfortress personally. But there are two very good reasons why that’s a bad idea. The first is that even if it’s just Cuba, the United States frowns on risking war with another nation in response to a terrorist action that isn’t officially sanctioned by that foreign government. The second is that if you drop a bomb on a bunch of nuclear bombs, you get a very big nuclear boom. Bye bye, Cuba, and a ton of fallout makes the American South uninhabitable, not to mention every other nation in the Caribbean and a good chunk of South America and Mexico. There will be a military response, but it will be a ground invasion, and it won’t come fast enough. I’m afraid I’ll need the two of you—the three of you, actually—to perform another miracle.”
Anya paused a moment before replying, “Yes, Sir.”
Anya's voice didn't sound exactly clipped, but Tyler heard something there. He couldn't place it. It didn't sound right, though.
“If we can’t locate Blue Jay, we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.”
“Get to it. Good luck. Over and out.”
Tyler stared at the radio for a moment. He turned his attention to Anya. “Is something wrong?”
“Other than nuclear missiles pointed at Washington?”
Tyler smiled thinly but remained undeterred. “Your tone of voice was off. Talking to the Wolf.”
“You’re imagining it.”
“I’m not.”
Her eyebrows raised slightly while her mouth relaxed into that frustrating look of long-suffering patience that always made him feel like a child. “Shall we talk about my tone of voice, or shall we save the world? You choose.”
The dismissal irritated him, but regardless of that, she had a point. "Eighteen miles west," she continued. "We need to narrow that down. Determine the most likely places for silos."
“Shouldn’t we look for Blue Jay?”
“Unless Blue Jay is inside this bunker, I don’t see us finding him anytime soon,” she said drily.
He frowned. “You’re not going to follow the Wall’s instructions, are you?”
She stiffened a little. “I hope that Blue Jay is alive. I hope he is able to help us. But we don’t have time to look for him. We need to do this quickly.”
“That’s the whole point of finding Blue Jay. He can facilitate that for us.”
“Perhaps he could have before last night, but he can’t now.”
“You yourself said that eighteen miles is too far for us to walk.”
“I thought that the Wall would be able to send the Air Force to handle this problem for us.”
Tyler sighed. “Yeah. Me too. Look, until we figure out a way out of this bunker, we’re stuck here, so can I at least try his radio? Maybe he can come here with a bolt cutter and let us out.”
Anya pushed back her chair. “Be my guest.”
Tyler adjusted the frequency to the channel they had used to communicate via walkie the night before and pressed the call button. "Blue Jay? Blue Jay, are you there? This is Tyler Wolf. Can you hear us?"
No response. He tried one more time, and when there was still no response, he said, “All right. Well, I think that counts as trying to determine his status.”
“So you’re satisfied?”
“Not the word I would use. But I’ll stop bothering you about it.”
“Well, then I am satisfied,” she said drily. “Now we must think of a way to reach the launch silo.”
“Does it have to come from a silo? Can the launch site be mobile?”
Anya cocked her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The terrain is too forested and mountainous. Moving the missiles would be incredibly dangerous.”
“They got them to the base.”
“They almost certainly shipped the warheads separately from the rockets.”
“The warheads might still be separate.”
“Yes, but assembling them is not a simple task. It requires more tools than could be carried by a Katyusha.”
“A Katyusha?”
"The Katyusha. BM 8. BM 13. BM 31. Missile launchers used for saturation bombardment during the war. Artillery forces hated them because they took too long to reload, but they worked." She shook her head. "Not for something like this, though. No, these missiles are going to be launched from a silo."
Tyler nodded. “Okay. So we have the coordinates for the launch silo. Now, we need to figure out how to get there. Starting with how to get out of here."
“No,” Anya said, “Starting with checking the armory and supply room. If we are to be on our own, we will need to be prepared.”
Tyler resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Obviously, they were going to take whatever they needed with them. "Anya, I'm a little concerned that you’re not concerned with finding a way out of here.”
“There are ways out of here other than the front door,” Anya said, “but we can’t leave until we have a plan. A good plan.”
Tyler frowned. “You knew the way out of here the whole time?”
“Yes. There is a back way that will lead to a far smaller exit.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because if I had, you would have insisted we rush straight for it, and that would be the wrong decision. We must not make the same mistake we made last night. We must hurry, but not so much that we make poor decisions and end up failing. We can’t risk another failure.”
Tyler took a moment to allow the emotion that roiled inside him to subside slightly. Then he said, “Anya, I absolutely agree with what you just said. And I would have agreed with it had you told me in the first place. You and I work much better together now than we did at first, but you still have a tendency to treat me like I’m not capable of thinking things through. You still hide things from me. We’ve talked about why you can’t do that. I understand that this is stressful for you, but—”
“Do you?” she snapped. “Do you understand why the destruction of my people might be a little troublesome to me?”
“Those missiles are pointed at my people, Anya,” Tyler said quietly.
Anya flinched a little. Then she lowered her eyes. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I… I promised that I would be able to keep my emotions under control, and I haven’t.”
Tyler wanted to say a lot of things, but none of them seemed appropriate. He couldn’t tell her that it was all right because it wasn’t. He couldn’t snap at her again because that would be kicking her while she was down.
Besides, it wasn’t like his emotions were in the best place right now either.
He looked up at the ceiling of the bunker. Above that ceiling, he imagined the sky lit up with flashes of light as nuclear weapons vaporized the nation he called home.
He decided he didn’t blame Anya for her emotions at all. “Let’s just focus on putting an end to this before the world gets blown to pieces.”