Die Trying by Lee Child

Lear. Three hours of travel, door to door, which put them down at

Peterson through the gorgeous mountain dawn. It was the kind of sight

people pay money to see, but the four FBI men took no notice at all.

Thursday July third, the fourth day of the crisis, and no proper rest

and no proper nutrition had left them ragged and focused on nothing

except the job in hand.

General Johnson himself was not available to meet them. He was

elsewhere on the giant base, on duty glad-handing the returning night

patrols. His aide saluted Webster, shook hands with the other three,

and walked them all over to a crew room reserved for their use. There

was a huge photograph on the table, black-and-white, crisply focused.

Some kind of a landscape. It looked like the surface of the moon.

That’s Anadyr, in Siberia,” the aide said. “Satellite photograph. Last

week, there was a big air base there. A nuclear bomber base. The

runway was aimed straight at our missile silos in Utah. Arms reduction

treaty required it to be blown up. The Russians complied last week.”

The four agents bent for another look. There was no trace of any

man-made structure in the picture. Just savage craters.

“Complied?” McGrath said. “Looks like they did an enthusiastic job of

work.”

“So?” Webster said.

The aide pulled a map from the portfolio. Unfolded it and stepped

around so that the agents could share his view. It was a slice of the

world, eastern Asia and the western United States, with the mass of

Alaska right in the center and the North Pole right at the top. The

aide stretched his thumb and finger apart and spanned the distance from

Siberia southeast down to Utah.

“Anadyr was here,” he said. “Utah is here. Naturally we knew all

about the bomber base, and we had countermeasures in place, which

included big missile bases in Alaska, here, and then a chain of four

small surface-to-air facilities strung out north to south all the way

underneath Anadyr’s flightpath into Utah, which are here, here, here

and here, straddling the line between Montana and the Idaho

panhandle.”

The agents ignored the red dots in Idaho. But they looked closely at

the locations in Montana.

“What sort of bases are these?” Webster asked.

The aide shrugged.

“They were kind of temporary,” he said. “Thrown together in the

sixties, just sort of survived ever since. Frankly, we didn’t expect

to have to use them. The Alaska missiles were more than adequate.

Nothing would have gotten past them. But you know how it was, right?

Couldn’t be too ready.”

“What sort of weapons?” McGrath asked.

There was a Patriot battery at each facility,” the aide said. “We

pulled those out a while back. Sold them to Israel. All that’s left

is Stingers, you know, shoulder-launch infantry systems.”

Webster looked at the guy.

“Stingers?” he said. “You were going to shoot Soviet bombers down

with infantry systems?”

The aide nodded. Looked definite about it.

“Why not?” he said. “Don’t forget, those bases were basically

window-dressing. Nothing was supposed to get past Alaska. But the

Stingers would have worked. We supplied thousands of them to

Afghanistan. They knocked down hundreds of Soviet planes. Mostly

helicopters, I guess, but the principle is good. A heat-seeker is a

heat-seeker, right? Makes no difference if it gets launched off a

truck or off a GI’s shoulder.”

“So what happens now?” Webster asked him.

“We’re closing the bases down,” the guy said. “That’s why the general

is here, gentlemen. We’re pulling the equipment and the personnel back

here to Peterson, and there’s going to be some ceremonies, you know,

end-of-an-era stuff.”

“Where are these bases?” McGrath asked. “The Montana ones?

Exactly?”

The aide pulled the map closer and checked the references.

“Southernmost one is hidden on some farmland near Missoula,” he said.

“Northern one is hidden in a valley, about forty miles south of Canada,

near a little place called Yorke. Why? Is there a problem?”

ISM

McGrath shrugged.

“We don’t know yet,” he said.

The aide showed them where to get breakfast and left them to wait for

the general. Johnson arrived after the eggs but before the toast, so