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  VITAL FORCE

  A Jake Adams International Espionage Thriller #4

  Trevor Scott

  SALVO PRESS

  An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Also by Trevor Scott

  Fractured State (A Novella)

  The Nature of Man

  Discernment

  Way of the Sword

  Drifting Back

  Fatal Network (Jake Adams #1)

  Extreme Faction (Jake Adams #2)

  The Dolomite Solution (Jake Adams #3)

  Vital Force (Jake Adams #4)

  Rise of the Order (Jake Adams #5)

  The Cold Edge (Jake Adams #6)

  Without Options (Jake Adams #7)

  The Stone of Archimedes (Jake Adams #8)

  Boom Town (Tony Caruso #1)

  Burst of Sound (Tony Caruso #2)

  Hypershot (Chad Hunter #1)

  Global Shot (Chad Hunter #2)

  Strong Conviction

  The Dawn of Midnight

  Duluthians: A Collection of Short Stories

  The Hobgoblin of the Redwoods (A Young Adult Mystery)

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and not intended to represent real people or places.

  VITAL FORCE © 2012 by Trevor Scott.

  This edition of VITAL FORCE © 2013 by Salvo Press.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Salvo Press, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  Published by Salvo Press,

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Please visit us on the web at

  www.start-media.com

  Cover iStock Photo by SCM Studios

  ISBN: 978-1-62793-453-4

  Visit the author at: www.trevorscott.com

  For my siblings

  Chuck, Sue, Deb, Jeff, Gina, Greg, Jill and Steph

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all of the readers who have taken a chance and purchased one of my books. A special thanks to those who have passed the word and recommended one of my titles to a friend or relative. I am indebted to the kind people of China who always had a smile for me and my family. I hope to return there soon. Thanks also to all of the dedicated Air Force personnel and the defense contractors who are working on the airborne and ground-based laser systems that will soon protect our country from rogue state ICBMs.

  Prologue

  Volgograd, Soviet Union

  The metal bar smashed against the side of his head, knocking Jake Adams to his knees, the wooden chair still lashed to his naked back. His face landed with a thud on the wet, moldy pavement, his eyelashes fluttering in a puddle of his own blood as his eyeballs swirled around trying to focus on anything. Anything that would let Jake know he was still alive.

  “We can stop any time, Adams,” came the harsh, Slavic voice that Jake had learned to hate over the past two weeks. “Just tell us what we need to know.”

  Jake shifted his shoulders and tried to lift his head from the cold floor. The taste of iron from his blood seeped through his teeth as he swallowed. He couldn’t last much longer like this. He had eaten only stale bread and drank only filthy water during his stay along the Volga River-captured and brought to this dungeon-like basement after only two days in the city that had, until twenty-some years before, been known as Stalingrad. Over fourteen days he had thought he was losing his mind, envisioning ghosts of some three million people who had died during the Nazi siege and eventual surrender. Apparitions of his mind, he was sure, but in that dank cell he currently called home, he could almost hear the screams of horror and cries of pain from those killed in that war. Maybe the screams were his own, echoing off the thick stone walls.

  The Soviet GRU officer, dressed in civilian clothes, shoved the metal bar under Jake’s chin and pressed down against his wind pipe, bringing instant pain and cutting off his air.

  Jake’s mind spun as he gasped for breath. He had to hold out. He couldn’t tell them anything. His cover story placed him in Volgograd promoting a communications company that did not exist. At least not in any real sense. Sure the Company had offices in Baltimore and Munich, where Jake reportedly worked. But it was all a front set up by the CIA. That’s what his captors suspected and what Jake had to never confirm. Yet, he knew that at this very moment the offices in both cities would be wiped clean and cleared out like a speakeasy one step ahead of the Feds. Only a few knew Jake’s real mission in Volgograd, and all would deny any knowledge of the same.

  Struggling against the bar at his throat, Jake lifted his chin. His brutal captor let up on the metal bar. Jake coughed and spit up blood. Recovering, he said, “You know, Ivan, you need to work a little on your people skills.” He coughed again, trying to catch his breath and waiting for the next blow. His ribs were broken, his shoulder separated, and he was sure he had a fractured skull. He wished they would get it over with and kill him. The pain would end. Another part of him, that with a desire to beat these bastards at their own game, wanted nothing more than to last until their hands were blistered.

  Suddenly, the heavy metal door burst open and Jake could see a couple sets of legs. Uniforms. Then muffled Russian. If his left ear drum hadn’t burst from a blow two days ago, he could have understood what they were saying.

  Hands grasped under Jake’s arms and pulled him to a sitting position on his chair. His eyes focused on the man he had called Ivan for the past two weeks standing at the door about to leave. “Have a nice day,” Jake mumbled.

  Disgusted, the GRU officer left and slammed the door in his wake.

  Shifting his head to his left, Jake’s eyes finally settled on a man in a Soviet uniform. Something wasn’t right, though. The man was wearing the uniform of the Soviet Missile Forces. A captain.

  Jake looked closer at the man’s face. “Yuri?” He barely got the name out before he felt himself sliding forward, his mind reeling.

  Then came the blackness.

  1

  Fifteen Years Later

  Khabarovsk Province, Russia

  Isolated in the taiga of the Russian Far East, among the thick pines and rolling hills, the mobile SS-27 missile sat atop the transporter erector launcher, camouflaged in forest green and brown that made it blend into its surroundings. The launcher slowly rose into firing position.

  Back in the snowy forest some hundred meters, the darkness of night did not allow a view of the launcher by the forty heavily-armed soldiers huddled in fox holes.

  The crew inside the mobile launch facility had only the view on their video monitors from cameras strapped to trees, and even those were grainy and obscured somewhat by the green from the night vision optics.

  Jake Adams watched as each crewman prepared for the launch. He was the only American in the box, sent to observe the launch as part of a cooperative exchange. And he was still wondering why he was there, since he was no longer with the Air Force or the old Central Intelligence Agency. He had also never officially worked for this new Agency, which combined most of the alphabet groups and military intelligence under one bloated organization. But he had been called back on occasion to help the old and new Agency. This assignment had come about by request from an old Soviet officer, Yuri Pushkina, whom he had met in the Ukraine while verifying the destruction of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the late ‘80s. And again in Volgograd.

  Now, Jake watched his old friend, a colonel in the Russian Missile Forces, pace nervously from station to station while he awaited the launch command from the central command
authority outside of Moscow, some three thousand miles to the west. The colonel’s plodding gate brought images in Jake’s mind of a bull stamping back and forth, hoping to catch a bullfighter off guard.

  The facility itself was stuffed beyond capacity. Normally there would have been a man at each end of the box-like control room that resembled a small European truck trailer lined with communications equipment. Each of the launch officers was separated by distance, just like the American crews, to make it nearly impossible to fire the missiles without at least the collusion of two dedicated officers simultaneously turning their launch keys. Beyond them, a half a dozen enlisted men manned other consoles. All were dressed in forest camouflage jump suits.

  The extra observers, like Jake and a couple of other dignitaries, made the walls seem to close in on them. The red lights and glow from the green luminescent static-free floor gave the small room an eerie atmosphere.

  “Why so nervous?” Jake asked the colonel.

  Yuri shrugged his broad shoulders, the boards on his impeccable dress uniform rising. “I don’t know.” He put his arm around Jake’s shoulder and pulled him aside. “You remember outside Kiev, before the hoist dropped and nearly broke the case on that nuke? I had a feeling inside my stomach. Something was wrong. I have same feeling.”

  It was strange for Jake to hear this dedicated and highly-decorated Cold Warrior admit that he had gut feelings about anything, and especially something this important. “Sounds like you just want everything to go right, Yuri. Nothing wrong with that. What’ll they do, send you to Siberia?”

  That got a laugh from Yuri, who had grown up in central Siberia, and any assignment east or west of his homeland would have been considered cushy.

  “You see,” Yuri said. “That’s why I wanted you here.” The tall, strong man lifted his square chin and went back to looking over the shoulders of his men.

  Twenty minutes now from the scheduled launch time. Jake checked his watch and hoped his advice was correct. The SS-27 was a newer weapon. This launch had only been scheduled after the last test, two months ago, had resulted in the missile exploding in its launcher. They were testing a new guidance system, using only the SS-27 three-stage rocket. Everything else was new. In fact, if this test went as planned, the Russians would destroy an entire class of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was a modernization of the force that Washington, London and Paris all agreed was necessary, and that Moscow had found money for by oil sales to those three countries. The one stipulation from the Western nations had been an observer at each step of the way. Independent observers with no current affiliation with any government.

  North Pacific, Sea of Okhotsk

  Flying at 36,000 feet, the Boeing 747, painted black as the night, cruised north along the Kamchatka Peninsula, just outside Russian international airspace.

  Monitoring a console in what would have been the upper first class section, Colonel Tim Powers glanced sideways at a major from his new command. Colonel Powers had been a Cold War missile officer, spending twenty-four hour shifts hunkered down deep underground in launch facilities in North Dakota and Wyoming. Later, as he gained rank, he had transferred to Space Command, a post that he thought would bring his first star.

  “How far from the Russian coast?” the colonel asked the flight crew over his mic.

  “Right on our flight plan, Sir,” came the voice of the pilot, Captain Billy Waters, with a strong Georgia accent. “We’re banking west now and will start turning south in exactly ten minutes. Still in international airspace.”

  “Thanks, Billy.” The colonel shifted nervously in his chair and glanced about the compartment at his fellow officers. All of them had been hand-picked by Colonel Powers, not only for their high compartmentalized security clearances, but for their ability to keep their mouth shut at the “O” Club with their fellow officers.

  Although the Russians knew they were there, and, in fact, had encouraged their observing presence, they also had no idea of their true mission. Had they known, they would have scrambled MIGs and shot them from the sky. If they could. The colonel smiled thinking about that possible encounter. Would they be able to counter those air-to-air missiles? They had done it repeatedly with American Sidewinders, so there was no reason to believe their success would be any less effective with inferior Russian missiles.

  “Heading south,” the pilot said.

  The large plane started a slow bank to the left.

  They were close now. Time to test the true capabilities of this bird, the colonel thought.

  “COIL up and ready?” the colonel asked.

  “Check.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “All right, folks. Let’s prepare for the launch.” He checked his watch, which was synchronized to nuclear time down to a hundredth of a second. “Five minutes, twenty two seconds.”

  The colonel checked each of his crew. They were determined, their eyes intense and focused on their screens. They were about to commit a breach of international law, but that didn’t seem to bother any of them. If all went as planned, missiles would become as innocuous as the bow and arrow. He smiled. Welcome to modern warfare.

  ●

  Inside the Russian launch facility, the men made last-minute preparations. Jake knew the trailer was nearly soundproof, but he still considered plugging his ears during the launch. He had observed a number of ground-launched cruise missile launches at Vandenburg Air Force Base, California, in the ‘80s, and they had been a lot louder than he would have thought-especially while outside and a short distance away.

  Watching his old friend and sometime adversary, Jake could sense a high level of angst and uncertainty in the man. Something he would have never guessed possible in Yuri Pushkina.

  Yuri waved Jake over to a console that would show the flight path of the modified SS-27 Topol-M missile.

  “Here we go, my friend,” Yuri said. “Ten seconds.”

  Jake and Yuri watched the computer monitor over the shoulder of a young captain. As the time counted off, the first indication that they had a launch was not on the computer, but the slight shaking felt throughout the compartment and the muffled roar from outside. Then the missile showed progress on the computer screen, climbing to three times the speed of sound toward the northeast in just seconds. Jake knew that the missile would swiftly reach a speed of 24,000 kilometers per hour in a few minutes. At that rate, with a nuclear payload, the missile would be able to strike Seattle in thirty minutes and Los Angeles in less than forty.

  Hell of a deal, Jake thought, watching the computer screen, as the missile reached a trajectory passing over the Tatar Straight and Sakhalin Island. Soon, the missile would reach critical velocity and altitude over the Sea of Okhotsk, pass over the Kamchatka Peninsula before the planned self destruction over the Bering Sea, where a Russian sub would mark the reentry and ensure nothing remained on the surface. Which was unlikely, Jake knew, considering the speed of descent and the destructive charge within the missile.

  Yuri leaned forward toward the screen as the missile started to cross the Sea of Okhotsk.

  Then it happened. The unlikely. The improbable. Suddenly, the computer image that signified the missile disappeared.

  “What the hell?” Yuri yelled in Russian. “What happened, Captain Petrov?”

  The young captain clicked a few keys on his computer, desperately trying to make the missile re-appear. Nothing. He shook his head in disbelief. “It is gone, Colonel Pushkina.”

  The next few minutes were chaos as secure phones rang from superiors and Yuri tried his best to explain that he had no idea what had happened.

  2

  The Asian woman watched the city of Khabarovsk pass by through the passenger window, her mind muddled by nearly twenty-four hours of constant travel. She had read in an on-flight magazine that Khabarovsk was the eastern gateway to Russia, serviced by an international airport and two main rail lines, including the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The city was mostly planted along the eastern
side of the massive Amur River, a major supply route for trade with Japan and a magnet for summer sun worshippers. Now, though, with winter still holding on, the 615,000 citizens of Khabarovsk spent most of their time at work, huddled at home, or in the smoky bars, she guessed.

  The Volkswagen Santana sedan cruised through the darkness along Lenina Street, only a few other cars in sight, and those creeping along like snails.

  She gazed at the driver, who tapped chop sticks on the dash in sync with the Beatles song, Tax Man. Watching the street lights come on, her only thoughts were on the absurd man to her left. The man she only knew as Laughing Dragon. From what she had seen in the last six months, the man lived up to both parts of his moniker. She understood the Dragon part, since she had seen the man turn on enemies with vicious precision without breaking a sweat-the only thing missing was the fire from his mouth. It was the Laughing part that had so baffled her. He would break into an insidious unrestrained titter for no apparent reason, bringing a chill to her skin. Perhaps he was as insane as her former runner had said just before he turned up missing.

  “Tax Man,” the driver sang, his voice much higher than the Beatle, his chop sticks clanking the dash, and his bald head bobbing up and down.

  “There’s Komsomolsk Square,” the woman said, trying to get him back on track to their goal.

  The driver yelled “Tax Man” one more time and then broke into a high-pitched cackle-his version of a laugh.

  “Komsomolsk Square,” the woman repeated, pointing now for emphasis.

  Laughing Dragon pulled the car to the side of the road and shut down the engine. He turned his head toward her and his smile washed away. “You ever interrupt the Beatles again, Li. . . you know what. Zai jian.”

  She knew. Two months ago in Shanghai, outside a warehouse along the shipping docks, a contact had told him to shut his mouth when the Laughing Dragon had erupted into a guffaw at the man for slipping on wet pavement. She had never seen the Dragon escape so quickly. Zai jian. Goodbye to the man.