Page 2 of Enemy Within

So close he could taste it.

“Excellent, Captain.” Madigan clapped Cook on the shoulder. “And our last little problem?”

Days before, a rogue MiG had overflown their base camp in the Kara Sea and the Russian destroyerVeduschiy, which General Moroshkin had so graciously gifted them. Madigan’s men had fired on the pilot, andVeduschiygot off two missiles. One burst apart in the pilot’s flares, but the other had chased the MiG down, destroying the jet over the empty taiga, the seemingly endless boreal forest that stretched across northern Siberia. Somehow, the pilot had managed to eject just before the missile’s impact.Veduschiypicked up his distress signal after his ejection.

Whoever the pilot was, and whoever he was working with, he had to be eliminated. While Madigan would have preferred the pilot to be killed in the shoot down of his MiG, his ejection wouldn’t save him. Thousands of miles of snow-packed forest stretched around him, a prison of ice and snow and unforgiving wilderness.

Frowning, Cook glared into the snow haze and the flickering light that might have been the sun. “TheSpetsnazunit you dispatched after the downed pilot hasn’t found him yet, just his landing site. His rig and parachute. He ditched the radio and made off on foot. They’re tracking him.”

“Give them time. Siberia is a large place.”

“You trust these men, General?” Cook’s eyes narrowed as he turned back to Madigan. “They’re Russians. We’re supposed to be using the Russians. Not trusting them.”

“Trust? No. Buttheseones are useful. They’re hunters. Predators. They’ll find this pilot and they’ll kill him. Of this, I have no doubt.”

The unit loaned to him by General Moroshkin was a SiberianSpetsnazunit, made up of men forged in the dark heart of the frozen taiga. Hardened warriors, already fierce due to the land of their making, and refined by their training into something even darker. Moroshkin had handpicked the men and gifted them to Madigan. A thank you present, of sorts, for his assistance in Moroshkin’s coup against President Sergey Puchkov.

To a man, the SiberianSpetsnaztroops were cut from the same black depths as Cook. In place of a heart, they had been born instead with bottomless wells of emptiness and rage, wells from which brutality and viciousness could be honed and sharpened. They were weapons as much as men, and utterly lacking in compassion or the trifles of morality.

No surprise that Cook’s hackles rose around them. Like recognized like, and fought back.

Cook’s glower pierced Madigan.

He smiled at the younger man, squeezing both his shoulders as he faced him. “Focus on our mission, Captain. This pilot is already dead. He simply doesn’t know it.” Madigan hesitated, and his grin turned wry. “I promise, you will have plenty of opportunities to hunt on your own when we are through. You are not missing anything. And—” With another squeeze, he let go. “I need you here. At my side. You are my right hand.”

Cook visibly relaxed, the tension snaking out of his spine and his shoulders. He nodded once.

“Excellent. Now, show me the updates from our dive team. I want to see their progress.”

Together, Madigan and Cook headed into the base, leaving behind the Arctic wasteland and the frozen, howling wind.

Nation Rocked By Revelation of Langley Bomber’s Identity

The nation continues to reel following revelations from the White House regarding the identity of the Langley Bomber being a clone of Captain Leslie Spiers. Captain Leslie Spiers, President Jack Spiers’s deceased wife, was supposedly rescued in Russia in the midst of the coup against former Russian President Sergey Puchkov. She had reportedly been held captive for sixteen years by former General Porter Madigan.

However, the White House now says that the woman recovered in Russia was not Leslie Spiers, but was a clone of Mrs. Spiers, created by Madigan as a Trojan Horse against President Spiers and the United States government. The White House credits swift, decisive, “on the ground” intelligence collection for the discovery of the clone’s true identity.

The night of the bombing, the clone had been arrested in the White House Residence and taken to Langley for interrogation. President Spiers was observing his cloned wife’s interrogation when she detonated her bomb, concealed within her disfigured limb in an “extremely advanced manner”, preventing security personnel from discovering its existence.

Senator Stephen Allen, famously hostile to the Spiers’s administration, has called for an investigation into the bombing, and the events that led to the clone’s arrest. “What transpired between Sochi and the Russian coup and the night of the blast?” he asked, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill. “How did President Spiers allow such a dangerous lapse in security to occur?”

President Spiers remains on life support at Bethesda Naval Hospital and is not expected to recover.

Tributes, flowers, candles, and pride flags have blanketed Pennsylvania Avenue, and a crowd of mourners continues to grow, even days after the attack.

First Gentleman Ethan Reichenbach, who did not return to the White House following Mrs. Spiers’s seeming return from Russia, has not been seen since the Langley blast.

2

Southern Siberia

ABRANCH SNAPPED NEARBY, in the gloomy, pre-dawn darkness.

Ethan’s eyes flew open.

He sat in the back seat of his and Jack’s jeep, leaning against the frost-crusted window while Jack slept between his legs. Jack’s back rested on Ethan’s chest, his legs stretched out on the bench seat. One of Ethan’s legs was tucked around Jack’s, and his other foot braced on the floorboards.

Two stuffed quilts covered them both, pulled up to Jack’s chin. Russian-made, they were thick, filled with feathers and lined with fur. Ethan had grabbed both when they passed through yet another desolate Russian ghost town two days before. Like the other villages they’d passed, it was deserted and bore the hallmarks of recent savagery.