Chapter 32

From Cherkasy, the two guards had procured a Jeep to get Kostya to the silo site. It had snowed the night before, but the main roads were more or less clear. The remote areas toward the silo would not be, however, so taking the Jeep was a good idea. Kostya cooperated with the guards while moving out of the train and into the Jeep and planned to sit quietly on the bench seat in the back as they drove to the silo. By being a compliant hostage, he was getting access to the silo, and he wouldn’t have to go in covertly and disable the missile.

How he was going to disable it while being watched every moment, he didn’t know.

One thing was for certain, Meredith would be safe for the next two days. There was no way that Vlasenko would risk losing the leverage she represented before the nuclear missile could be launched on the twenty-first. She may be a hostage, but she would be kept safe until then.

But after the twenty-first, all bets were off.

Vlasenko said he would kill her if Kostya didn’t comply and fix the controls to allow a launch, and Kostya had no doubt Vlasenko would kill Meredith if the launch failed. At that point, there would be nothing to lose. The U.N. would rush in and destroy the other silo sites, and he would be arrested and tried in an international court for attempted mass murder of innocent populations. The power of Fire of Dawn would be sucked up in the vacuum of history, and they would be just one of the many rebel groups ruined fighting over the eastern Ukraine. Meredith would be sacrificed as a pawn in Vlasenko’s quest for power.

Yet, success was not a better option in his mind. Kostya could hook up the encoder, use the algorithm to predict the missile code, switch on the butterfly valves, and enable the launch. And thirty minutes after the missile was launched, ten nuclear warheads, with the power of ten Hiroshimas each, would drop on cities within the seven-thousand-mile range. Vlasenko would take power with the threat of future missile strikes, and the country of Novorossiya would be carved out of the Ukraine.

Kostya’s compliance would save Meredith at first, but her safety would not be guaranteed, especially under the threat of Vlasenko’s government.

He needed a work-around. He needed to make Vlasenko think he was winning, when he was actually losing. And he needed help from the people he could not communicate with—TRUST.

Soon after he made his call to Serhiy, the guards got instructions to take anything that could be used to communicate. His cell phone, credit cards, and laptop were taken. One of the guards even commented that it was a good thing he had already called his friend. Kostya had just smiled. If only he knew.

Going down in the silo, he entered an environment of 1960’s machinery. Working on the components he had reverse engineered was like rebuilding an old car. Recreating each part to fit into the whole required a lot of patience and understanding of the technology of the time. A restorer wouldn’t put a modern engine into a Model T Ford unless they expected to change how the entire machine worked. The control center components were the same. He needed to work within the originally engineered parts. And back in the day, communication was done by radio.

Was it possible that TRUST would monitor radio transmissions from the devices in the control center of the missile? If they did, he could send a message to appear as if the missile codes were being tested back and forth from the missile. It would look like a message from the missile itself, but TRUST would know he was the hand behind the message once it was decoded. TRUST had the algorithm from the chip, and they could plug what he transmitted into the algorithm. It was a long shot, but it was his only hope.

Leaning his head against the roll bar of the Jeep, Kostya settled in for the drive, silently designing the solution. Once he got to the missile, he would need to be ready.