“Like I said, we have been preparing for the day when we would be able to respond to the threat that is coming our way. Whether we like it or not, today is that day, and we are as ready as we will ever be. Both you and the joint chiefs are about to see irrefutable proof that what we have said is true. What you do with that evidence will, of course, be up to you. But we are here to tell you that we have a plan. And that everything is in place to execute that plan tonight.”

* * *

Agent Mikhail Kovalenko drove at speed to his office in the center of Moscow. It was four o’clock in the morning, and he had already phoned the majority of his department, waking them up and telling them that their senior officer needed them at work immediately.

While he dedicated one subroutine of his machine mind to calling his colleagues, another part of his highly capable mind was focused on driving the car through the still sleeping city. Though the city appeared calm, he knew that all across it hundreds of men and women were responding to the rapidly unfolding events in Pakistan. While senior government officials were busily awaking the premier and his staff, others were activating and arming the country’s powerful defenses.

But even with all their spies and agents, Mikhail still knew more about what was happening than the vast Russian military. Even as Russian, American, European, and Chinese satellites were redirected to fly over Peshawar, Mikhail already knew what they were going to see when they got there.

He knew that they are going to see the site of a brief but bloody battle. That they will see fires raging across the badly damaged base. They will no doubt make out the three burning hulks that had been the Al-Khalid Battle Tanks sent to take out the freedom fighters and they may even see the last of the freedom fighters fleeing back into the mountains. For in the end, those same insurgents who had so boldly attacked the base had been just as shaken by how it had all ended. Even the most bloodthirsty of them had been as surprised when they had seen the six huge HATF-VI missiles thunder up out of their buried bunkers, and upon seeing that terrible sight they had fled. Even their boiling insurgent rage had been blanched clean at the thought of what those missiles would do to whatever target they had been sent to destroy. As a whole, the remaining fighters’ wills had faltered and they had run, leaving the base to shake with the aftereffects of the launch.