Steve Abbott - Devil's Gambit

Ever since she had been a small girl, Gayle had loved two things: speed and mathematics. A career in the Air Force had given her a good dose of both. Unfortunately, it was still mostly a man’s game. The USAF still chose to ignore documented fact that women were just as suited to fly aircraft in a combat environment as men. Gayle quickly tired of the bull in Flight Ops and moved into her second field of interest.

Theoretical mathematics valued intelligence over testosterone. In the civilian scientific world of applied quantum mechanics, she would have been well-received. Her ability was respected enough, even in the realm of the bullish Air Force, to attach her to one of the elite Nuclear Emergency Search Teams based out at Los Alamos. Getting her Doctorate had been an exercise in stamina and guile. As a NEST member, all of the work she did was classified. In the academic world of publish or perish, getting recognition for work you couldn’t show anybody below a Top Secret clearance made things difficult but not impossible.

Gayle reached into her purse to check her phone for messages. It looked like any other high-end Smartphone, but you’d have be hard-pressed to tell who made it. And while it worked fine over any cell network (free of charge), it could access the Defense Communications Satellite network whenever needed. There were no texts or emails; she was still a free woman. NEST members were on call twenty-four hours a day. Personal free time was the only problem with her new position. Gayle had never felt the need to be married to her job. She took everything in stride and when it called for her to let herself have a good time, she did. When she was on the job though, she was all business. God help any who stood in her way when she was at work. Thankfully, emergencies of the type she trained for weren’t a regular occurrences. Because she spoke Russian, all of her nuclear weapons experience so far, had been technical assistance in warhead disposal in the Communist Independent States. Gayle knew it was only a matter of time before she’d be faced with a real crisis, and it would be a hot unit wired and ready to go under her hands instead of advising from the safety of a blockhouse in some ex-Soviet arsenal. Her close contact with the problems of disposal in Russia led her to harbor a deep suspicion. It would be all too easy to misplace a nuke or two in the existing morass of bureaucratic red tape. Add to this the regular flow of weapons and weapon systems of obvious Soviet origin on the world market and you had a real recipe for mayhem.

One of the comforting benefits of the new world order was that they had been able to secure plans for every warhead and detonator type the Russians produced. The data proved the obvious. The physics behind yield and production were easy to duplicate. To combat this new threat, the United States had signed a secret treaty with Russia to share knowledge in high-energy physics and to pool their resources. Even with the crudity of the Russian scientific instruments, some of their advances were stunning.

There were rumors of a “Global Shield” anti-ballistic missile program. From what Gayle had witnessed of life for scientists in Russia right now, she would discount it, but there had been a recent flood of ex-Soviet scientists hired to work on American projects of interest, which were based on the original Russian models and experiments. Also in Los Alamos and other nuclear design facilities around the US, joint NEST teams were being formed. When you added two and two, it always equaled four.

Gayle was training with one of those joint teams right now at Los Alamos. The curriculum was grinding, to say the least. She enjoyed the Russians’ company and their obvious respect for her intellect, but it was nice to be around people who spoke English with an American accent for a change.

Dawn had started to break over the mountains. Gayle checked herself in the rear view mirror. Nothing a shower and a change of clothes wouldn’t fix. As she drove down the coast highway to her hotel in Montecito, she ticked off the hours left in her leave. Plenty of time to get into trouble before returning to the grind, she decided with a smile.

She was only half right.

Sean Addison stood alone at the edge of the sandstone bluff. His white UN inspector armbands and back flash across his protective vest blazed in the desert sun. Below him lay the remains of what had been a storage site for 122mm rocket motors. The rest of the UN inspection team had decided to use a safer path to get down to the valley floor. The inside of his Chemical Defense suit was nearly unbearable in the desert heat. Sweat ran down the bridge of his nose and pooled under his chin. Sean itched to wipe it away, but that would require removing his hood and gas mask and the possible consequence of exposure to whatever the rocket warheads had once or still contained. They were assessing the site for the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW for short. The Syrians had been anything but cooperative and this site was close to the edge of a very hot and very active civil war.

Charred rocket body tubes and black twisted steel were all that remained of the storage depot. Syria had a long and active past in the creation of weapons which represented the ultimate in the Pandora’s Box of nasty shit humans concoct to kill each other with. Sean’s breath sounded hollow in the close confines of the gas mask. If a terrorist group ever got its hands on a canister of this stuff, the end result would be catastrophic. A car or suicide bomb was one thing – at least you had a chance to survive – but a pinprick’s touch of this stuff would cause instant agony, followed by death.

The voice of Paul Shute, the Inspection team leader, an Australian chemical and nuclear weapons specialist working for the United Nations, crackled to life in his ears. “Okay people, that’s enough sightseeing. Time to get down to business before these bastards hold us up again.”

Sean chuckled under his breath. The Syrians were not keen on their presence, a sure sign they were up to no good. Their last stand-off had ended up with a few uncomfortable days and nights stuck in a factory, sleeping on concrete floors and relieving themselves in a bucket. An experience Sean could do without repeating. He suspected the delays were merely a shallow ploy to give the Syrians enough time to move more sensitive materials to other locations. Even with this reluctance, material slated for disposal was still making its way to the Chemical Disposal Ship MV Cape Ray as she sat in port at Tartus.

This was a lot different than his usual operations with 22 SAS. As an operator, Sean was undercover with the UN Inspection Team; even the team didn’t know his real background and MI6 had provided him with a foolproof identity. His mission? To assess the risk of Syrian chemical weapons falling into the hands of international terrorist organizations. You didn’t need to be boots on the ground to see that chances of them already being in the wrong hands was a pretty sure bet. The real question was, would they make their way out of this regional conflict to the rest of the world?

Sean made his way down the bluff face. The sandstone debris was extremely loose underfoot; it made a safe descent almost impossible. After a difficult ten minutes, he made it to the bottom drenched in sweat and covered in orange red grit. He wiped at the dust on the outside of his faceplate. Even in the new charcoal-lined NATO suits, heat prostration was a dangerous possibility. A cut or breach of the suit in any way could have dire consequence. The voice of his drill sergeant, a dry old Glaswegian, echoed in his head. “There are old soldiers and there are bold soldiers, but there are no old, bold soldiers.”