Page 49 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander.

Monday

Seine River, France

Xander had their captain heading them to a town that was on the road to Sainte-Mère-église.

As Elyssa curled up to nap with Radar, Xander went up on the deck to get an encrypted satellite connection back to his team.

“Who’s there?” he asked Hiro.

“White, Finley, and me.”

“I think I have it figured out,” Xander said. “I’m sending you a map.”

He waited for White to say, “Received. What are we looking at here? It’s like a wishbone.”

“The point at the tip of the angle is the chateau outside of Sainte-Mère-église.”

“Normandy. You didn’t make it to London yet,” Finley said.

“I’m not going to London. I’m going to that vertex. Let me explain what Elyssa came up with and see if you agree with my theory. First, though, we’re out of electricity in France. Where has it spread?”

“Along the Baltic. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Poland,” Hiro said. “But only along the Baltic and North Sea shores.”

“The outages are not country-wide in those nations, right? And they’re all west of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave?”

“That’s correct,” White’s voice was tight. “Russia’s moving something up the Baltic, do you think?”

“The Russians could take advantage of the blackout by cutting communications cables in the Baltic. I wouldn’t rule it out.

But I don’t think that’s their goal.” Xander thought for the first time in a long time that there was a glimmer of hope.

He had committed to finding and destroying the Zoric machine.

If he did that, then he was going off on his own, doing his own thing.

With his inheritance from all four of his grandparents that he’d split with his brother Adam, along with his military retirement, Xander was set to live a comfortable life, figuring out what made him happy for happy’s sake.

He felt like he'd done enough; he could move on.

Tink had done it.

Scott had done it.

Unless the whole damned family went down, Anna would never be done. Never. She knew that when she signed up, but she signed up before she fell in love with Finley. And now she was trapped in her decisions.

Xander wondered if she had regrets.

Granted, without The Family, she and Finley may never have crossed paths.

Just like he would never have found Elyssa except for the evils of Orest Kalinsky.

“What was that?” White asked.

“What?” Xander looked around him, then back at the screen.

“That look on your face. It looked like you had a hopeful thought, but you let it slide into a scoff.”

“I did. Didn’t I? I remembered I was getting out over my skis.

Let me tell you what I have. Let’s call the left side ray 1.

If you follow ray 1 from the vertex of Sainte-Mère-église, you pass through five points in France and Portsmouth in England to arrive at Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde in Faslane, Scotland.”

“That’s the only European dock where US nuclear submarines are regularly stationed,” Hiro said.

“If you follow ray 2 from the vertex with five boxes—or points—in France and one in London, you land on—”

“Faroe Islands,’ Hiro said. “We need to escalate this. We need to get to the president and get into the situation room. Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

“What’s on Faroe Islands?” Finley asked.

“We had a Virginia-class submarine up there,” White said. “It bounces between Faroe and Iceland, it’s up there for fears of Russian subs getting into the Atlantic Ocean because they can get situated off American shores and threaten cities like D.C. and N.Y. “

“Right,” Xander said. “When we were at Iniquus, Adele mentioned that Orest was doing research into how the warming temperatures of the oceans were making it harder to hunt subs. That’s been tumbling over in my mind.

Last year, the waters off Florida hit record highs.

Those waters curved up the East Coast making those waters warmer, too.

It would take some time to move the subs from the Baltic across the Atlantic.

Once the water warmed in summer, they could position, undetected, very close to shore. Strike range.”

“Subs,” White said flatly.

“Subs,” Finley exhaled.

“Subs can communicate with satellites if they put up an antenna at periscope level,” Xander said.

“We know from back when they attacked Strike Force at Iniquus that the Zorics had the capacity to interrupt satellite communications.

And we know that they can do that for whole regions.

We also know that the Zorics just launched a communications satellite under the Iranian flag, put in place by Russia.

I checked back in Paris. That satellite will be over the same area affected by the electrical outage starting at zero hundred Zulu time.

It could well be that the Zorics have the capacity to stun—for lack of a better word—the other areas' satellites to make it look like an EMP while leaving their own satellite unaffected and able to guide Russian subs out of the Baltic.”

“I’m following the reasoning,” Finley said. “That all lines up.”

Hiro was back in the picture. “I have a car coming to get me. They’re putting everyone on alert. Give me what you’ve got. I’m headed in to talk to the joint chiefs, we need to be in motion, and I need to take them everything available.”

“Bottom line, Xander, what do you see as the end goal?” White asked.

“Worst case in my imagination is that they sneak into the Atlantic undiscovered. There, they could position themselves off of D.C. or N.Y.C., where they could hold the United States hostage. Our administration would flinch. Of course they would. What choice would they have with millions of lives at risk?”

“We’ve had this dance before in Cuba,” Hiro said.

“The devastation of a nuclear bomb,” White said, “especially if multiple urban centers along the coast were targeted—not just D.C., what about Norfolk? What about Atlanta? Yes, our nation would be held hostage. I don’t know how it works from there. But surely, it could change the world order.”

“What if they weren’t negotiating?” Hiro asked.

“What if they just pulled up, launched the missile at close range, the bomb went boom, and the United States was facing its Hiroshima? And like Japan, terrified of who else might pop up and not knowing who sent the bombs and what could come next, what if not just the U.S. but the entire world capitulated?”

***

After Victor left them off at a village wharf, renting a car wasn’t as complicated as Xander thought it would be.

There was a mother who was willing to drive them to the chateau at Sainte-Mère-église for a hundred euros.

He didn’t know she was going to bring her baby in the car seat, but at that point, the decision had been made.

When they arrived, Elyssa went to talk to Colette, the concierge who managed the chateau, explaining that she’d beaten her uncle in and didn’t have the key to his apartment.

Elyssa said she needed to retrieve a photograph from the turret room.

Colette had no problems at all loaning her the master key until Orest arrived.

Xander made a quick dash through Orest's apartment with Radar conducting an electronics search, then they made their way to the side of the castle, entering through the back door and down the dark hall.

“The Gestapo were living here on D-Day. They have a swastika in the laundry room, and they have bullets in the walls where Americans came in to clear the leadership out of the area.” She slogged her way up the staircase.

It wound and wound up four flights of stairs, which were narrow and dizzying, and Xander understood why she didn’t think Orest could get himself to the top.

Inside the rounded room painted periwinkle with white trim and a golden curtain at the enormous windows, Xander only took a moment to scan the room.

Beside the bed, six metal trunks were stacked in groups of three. So, more than Elyssa had seen go up.

“Radar, find electronics,” Xander commanded.

Radar walked over to the trunks and sat down.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Elyssa said.

There were no locks, and when Xander asked Radar to find explosives, he came up empty. So, Xander opened the first trunk, expecting the acrid smell of acid to fill the room, just as it had in the field in Newark.

It did not.

The trunks were filled with innocuous-looking components.

Xander did what his gut told him to do; he pulled out what he could grab and smashed them under his heel.

Elyssa joined in, but it was such an aerobic action that Xander didn’t want her to do it.

“Elyssa, it would be faster if you could pull pieces out and throw them on the ground.”

The first locker was completed, they hauled it to the side, then started the second.

When they got to the third, a car raced up the long gravel drive under the canopy of trees and screeched to a halt in front of the castle.

Xander was loath to leave his task. He looked around for a safe place for Elyssa to go. He knew that as soon as she heard those tires on the drive, her heart went into overdrive. She was not looking well, and Radar got up and booped her aggressively.

Then booped Xander for good measure.

Xander turned the enormous metal key in its old-fashioned lock.

As the men raced through the bright red castle door, Xander was leaning out the window, doing a head count. Three that he could see. He looked to the side and found one of those ubiquitous roof ladders.

And he hated every second of what came next.

He forced Elyssa out the window onto the ladder. Forced her hands to climb while holding her in place, getting her feet high enough that they were out of view of someone doing a quick look-see from the window.

“Xander, tie my hands together over the rung like when I held onto the snowmobiler, then put your belt around my waist to hold me to another rung if I pass out… I’m going to pass out.”