Midnight Promises by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

of the nuclear weapons. They could fit into a backpack. He had no idea how Darin could do it, but the end result would be nuclear bombs that were shielded and could be carried in on foot and manually set with a timer. The backpacks were light enough to be easily carried and would pass unnoticed.
    As a KGB officer, Borodin had trained with backpacks heavier than the bombs.
    The KGB plan had been to deploy six man-portable nuclear weapons in America, one for each of the great cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami. All the great military deterrents America could deploy would be useless. They were bombs that had no trajectory, could not be destroyed in midair. The bombs would suddenly, without any warning and with no known source, explode. The President of the United States couldn’t counter attack because no one would claim the bombs.
    Six cities destroyed, radioactive deserts until the end of time. America plunged into another Great Depression or worse. The Soviet Union finally ready to soar after having lost Afghanistan.
    When pressed, Darin could give no deadline for completion of the bombs.
    The KGB was putting enormous pressure on Darin’s team. The Deti were necessary.
    The Soviet Union pulled back from Afghanistan in February, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell in November. In December, Darin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. The evening of the ceremony, he and his wife were killed in a car accident.
    Hearing the news, Borodin and three other KGB officers rushed to Chelyabinsk only to find…nothing. The Deti were not there. Darin’s colleagues swore that the Deti were years from reality.
    Two years after that, the Soviet Union was no more, and the country plunged into chaos. Tanks, weapons, RPGs—gone. Entire missile silos were lost. No one ever mentioned man-portable nukes ever again.
    Borodin and his coconspirators, now that there was no Soviet Union to save, scattered to the winds. Like everyone else, Borodin plundered the state that was falling apart before his very eyes, grabbing rights to natural gas fields in Siberia.
    He made his peace with being on the losing side of history by becoming a very rich man.
    Yet history has a way of bouncing back into the present. Borodin’s world turned upside down.
    The American government had been peppered with spies and moles put there by the KGB for decades. An entire machine had been built for this—children in remote locations trained from a young age to be infiltrated into America. They attended special English-only schools and grew up watching videotaped American TV programs specially airlifted into the Soviet Union. Access to the finest dentists was provided because the one thing the
Amerikanski
did well was dentistry. The program had been a wild success and spies had been seeded everywhere, a battalion of them. The program was code named Operation Yankee.
    But then the Soviet Union fell. Nobody could have predicted that the country they had sworn allegiance to, the country that had given them a lifetime journey to fulfill, would disappear, almost overnight.
    The KGB office running the moles melted away. The KGB itself disappeared and reappeared as the FSB with an entirely different staff.
    The moles aged, rose up through the ranks, and most of them had forgotten the motherland. After all they’d been trained to be Americans from the age of ten onward.
    Borodin had forgotten all about the program, busy building Intergaz into one of the largest corporations in the world.
    And then a report crossed his desk.
    A Russian double agent recruited in 1987 into the FBI under the auspices of Operation Yankee. Career FBI, now retired with a very nice pension. In the early years he’d faithfully filed reports but in the end, with no one to read them or even accept them, he’d simply gone native. Had a great career in three major metropolitan areas, won several commendations and had forgotten a lot of his Russian. Yuri Grigori had permanently become Roy