Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

Forty-two years old, with short red hair and dark green eyes, Kate Parsons was as hard and efficient as the Peloton bike she rode every morning. She was in the middle of her live forty-five-minute HIIT ride when he approached her, his eyes warm and welcoming. But a single icy glance from her sent him slinking back to the bedroom to grab his stuff and leave without a shower or even a cup of coffee.

Parsons didn’t care. She’d met Ted—or was it Tad?—on a run yesterday afternoon on the dirt service road in the rolling hills just beyond the Spallation Neutron Source facility. He was testing titanium jet engine parts at the SNS, the head of his own company, the name of which escaped her. Their eyes locked as she ran by. That was enough for the shirtless man to turn around. He finally caught up to her, his six-pack abs glistening with sweat and his eyes full of longing. Thirty minutes later they were in her bed, where she taught him her favorite form of high-intensity interval training.

Finally spent, he passed out.

This morning, she left him sleeping and got up to ride. The RAPTURE project was on her mind as it had been constantly for the last three years. It was her baby, and the only one she would ever have. Perhaps it was even her only true love. She didn’t need a husband or an infant to care for; her ambitions were loftier than dirty diapers and forgotten anniversaries.

When loneliness struck, men like Ted always appeared. Her momentary despair seemingly exuded musky pheromones in her wake, drawing the nearest stallion to her loins when she most needed him.

She began toweling off in the cooldown part of the ride, still turning the crank on her Peloton. She was deeply satisfied that she had ranked number one on the leaderboard of 2,948 other riders who had finished the same harrowing workout. Not unusual. She almost always finished on top. She flipped through her history screen. She ranked number one in a dozen other recent rides, and never lower than number three in five more. Not bad for a woman who worked an average of eighty hours per week.

Number one was important in Parsons’s world. Always had been, in everything, including physics as she clawed her way up in what was largely a man’s world. She took after her late father, also a physicist, and was less like her mother, also dead and gone. The dowdy homemaker, mother of seven, and church organist had given up a full ride to Berklee College of Music to marry her dad.

Parsons’s kitchen was white marble and stainless steel, spotless and organized like the rest of her house and her life. No art hung on the walls because the only beauty she cared about was the invisible quantum particles she manipulated, or the chiseled obliques she’d carved out of her own torso. She had no pets and no friends ever came to call, nor had she any need to visit or be visited by her siblings or their children.

Still only a quarter to six, Parsons fired up her Vitamix with her premeasured containers of organic coconut milk, protein powder, and micronutrient supplements. The machine roared and whirred like a particle accelerator. She didn’t hear her phone vibrate on the snow-white Carrara marble countertop but the light from the text window caught her eye. The contact info read “RHODES,” her boss at ORNL. EMERGENCY MEETING MY OFFICE AT 8AM TOMORROW. PLEASE CONFIRM.

She did. It wasn’t like it was a request. But that didn’t matter to her at all. There was an emergency and she was needed. There was no one else who could fix it because that’s what she did. There were a lot of emergencies and a lot of emergency meetings, especially of late. This was nothing new. That was the nature of government projects with evolving mandates, shortened deadlines, and oversight committees chaired by people who thought quarks were the sounds that ducks made while they were fucking.

Just another emergency that really wasn’t an emergency, unless you were Dr. David Rhodes, the RAPTURE project manager, a position she’d once held in function if not title before he arrived on the scene.

She’d fix this emergency, too.

The Vitamix stopped roaring and whirring and she poured her protein shake. Food was only fuel to her. She was a machine, a well-conditioned, efficient, and, she daresay, an attractive one.

She picked up her phone again to text Tad, asking if he was free tonight.

Or was it Ted?

37

WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE WHITE HOUSE

President Ryan stood in front of the Oval Office fireplace with a portrait of an austere George Washington hanging over the mantel.

Ryan had a smile plastered on his face, a look his wife, Cathy, characterized as “sincerely phony.” It was the smile he flashed with practiced perfection at every important state function including this one, the receiving of Ambassador Christyakov’s credentials.

The two men both stood facing the flashing cameras, right hands held in a firm handshake, left hands holding the exchanged documents, putting the official and historical act on digital record. The official White House press photographer had already taken several good shots, then quit the room. It was the Russian state photographers that were still grinding away.

The event was a bit of a coup for the new ambassador. Maksim Christyakov was only thirty-nine years old and stood half a head taller than Ryan, with thick blond hair and dark blue eyes. He looked more like a Viking than the squat Soviet diplomats Ryan had known as a young analyst. But of course, Christyakov was Nordic. The Rus people were formally known as the Viking Rus, Scandinavians who raided the Black and Baltic Seas during the Middle Ages, settling along the Volga. Russians and Belarussians derived their very name from them.

It was quite a physical contrast. Such optics mattered these days, unfortunately. Perhaps they always did. But Ryan knew the Russian state Internet bots would push this image out into the ether with relentless enthusiasm. Score one for the Russians in the beauty department, Ryan supposed.

In truth, Christyakov’s appointment to the position was a remarkable achievement for a man without prior diplomatic experience. The well-connected Russian was part of the New Wave reforms that President Nikita Yermilov had recently instituted in his pro-democracy and anti-corruption drive. A joke, if there ever was one, Ryan thought, as the LED flashes fired.

“I think that should do it,” Scott Adler said gently, as he stepped between the two camera operators and the President.

Ryan scanned the room. It was crowded with Christyakov’s fawning retinue, along with a few of the SecState’s senior executives and staff. The President flashed a look at Adler he knew all too well.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending our brief ceremony.” Adler pointed at the door. “There are refreshments waiting for you in the Diplomatic Reception Room, if you’ll follow me.”

Ryan watched the parade of people file out behind Adler and waited for the Secret Service agent to close the door behind them before he spoke with the ambassador.

Today’s meeting was a real challenge.

Buck Logan thought the Russians were behind the piracy crisis, and right now, that was the best hypothesis. Admiral Pike’s carrier strike group would arrive on scene in a few days and put eyes on the situation. Ryan wanted answers sooner, if possible.

There was nothing Ryan wouldn’t do to protect the nation and to serve its best interests, including war, if it came to that. Too often it had come to war for other men who sat behind his desk and even for him in the recent past.

Whoever was sinking these ships in the South Pacific had to be stopped. Action was necessary. War was an option.

Today’s meeting could lead to the latter.