Читать книгу Death Dealers - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price stood in the center of the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, looking between the touch-screen tablet device in her hand and the gigantic global map stretched out on the wall. Around her were the computer workstations of the four technological geniuses of the cyber crew: Aaron Kurtzman, Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido.

As mission controller, Price was staying on top of all open correspondence channels and keeping track of her field operations. Currently the cyber team was trying to locate Robert Baxter and Beatrice Chandler, scanning the world for their RFID chips. Given the ferocity of the attack, most people would have considered both scientists dead, but there had been a passive signal as leaving the perimeter of the base.

A global search would be much more difficult. One intruder had been located on the base, a disguised commando, Chinese in ethnicity, with forged identification papers, unit patches and dog tags that, if Stony Man looked really hard, could be traced back to Shanghai and the Ministry of State Security. This would have proved to be convincing evidence, if only for the fact that the intruder had been killed with the same U.S.-issue weapons and ammunition as the attacking commandos had likely carried. Indeed, that the man’s Beretta and rifle were found—and had been traced to stolen American arms lost in the Gulf War—only made Price more suspicious about the red herring dropped in the desert.

That was why Akira Tokaido was currently checking every ounce of digital traffic coming out of the People’s Republic of China, looking for incidents of a similar attack in-country. She didn’t know if there would have been enough coordination for two teams to make concurrent attacks, but there were signs that four days prior to the attack in the American Southwest there had been a similar missile misfire on a base in the Gobi Desert, 275 miles northwest of Beijing, 20 miles north of Hohhot. The detonation of a missile that should have been deactivated was given as the reason for the catastrophe that had left dozens dead and a hundred more injured.

Of course, that was merely the official story out of China. The truth, however, would be much more arcane, and naturally that is what Price assumed happened. Right now, the real facts were sketchy, which was why Tokaido was busy raiding PRC military databases.

Price turned her attention to her tablet, pulling up the information on the missing scientists, Baxter and Chandler. The Stony Man mission controller made careful note that there was evidence of a more than genial relationship between the two, and that it was likely that any effort at taking one might have been a guarantee of capturing the other. Price was well aware of the kind of emotional manipulation the peril to a loved one could hold over a person. Right now, there was an excellent chance of recovering the pair.

Baxter and Chandler were the only two missing from the base; other bodies had been uncovered, accounting for nearly a hundred murdered victims. Most had died at ground zero of one-thousand-kilogram-warhead detonations; others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot through the head while wounded. Even so, the commandos who’d made the attack had been careful not to damage still-operating security cameras, so that the U.S. government would get a good look at what appeared to be PRC soldiers disguised as Americans attacking a base in New Mexico.

Tokaido quickly sent a note to her tablet, the information showing up in a new panel.

Air Force dispatched, seeking out attackers. Searched one-thousand-mile radius utilizing AWACS, found no sign of assaulters’ helicopters. Missiles showed up on radar only moments before attack, again, launched from location unknown.

Price nodded to Tokaido, acknowledging the preliminary information. The youngest member of the cyber crew wouldn’t stop until he could deliver every detail necessary so the skills of the Stony Man action team could be applied with deadly laser focus. Indeed, though the cyber team was merely a support to the commandos in the field, it was with these keyboard rangers that Able Team and Phoenix Force could be deployed to locate and destroy threats to innocent lives and world peace.

It had been three days since the first incident in China, and only by the sheerest of luck had Able Team come across Kevin Reising and his compatriots. They’d been based in Los Angeles awaiting a message and a destination. This was the day before the American incident.

Hunt Wethers fired a report to Price’s tablet. It was from one of the Navy AWACS birds that regularly patrolled just outside Chinese airspace and over international waters. The craft had timed its patrol and observation of the Leizhou Peninsula specifically, knowing there was going to be a test firing of a new genus of the Dong-Feng 21 antiship ballistic missile.

Not coincidentally, the DF-21 variant was purported to possess a maximum velocity of Mach 10. At 35 feet long and 16 tons in weight, not only could it carry enough explosives to kill an aircraft carrier in one shot, it also had nuclear warhead capabilities and a range of 1100 miles.

Of course, the difference between a silo-launched ballistic missile and a more portable option such as the American design was phenomenal. Huge warhead capacities and high speeds were vital ingredients to altering a military balance. The Dong-Feng antiship variants were meant to provide the Chinese navy with utter superiority when it came time to reclaim the island nation of Taiwan. One missile could break an allied carrier apart; its nuclear variant could flash fry an entire carrier group.

Both ways were means of overwhelming any defense against Chinese military expansion.

The American missile system could be mounted on cruisers and fast-attack crafts, land-launched or carried on fighter-bombers. Just because both weapons systems had the ability to break Mach 10 was no reason to try to combine them. DF-2Xs reached Mach 10 because they rode on midrange ballistic missiles, rocket engines that were more than capable of launching satellites into orbit or delivering an MRV warhead. The American design was meant to deliver its warhead at such a high speed, and with such agility and accuracy, that the mass of the missile would provide penetration through even the thickest of hulls.

Of course, with the presence of an auction promising the latest and deadliest hardware, including just the things necessary to take out enemy fleets, Price couldn’t help but feel that more than coincidence was at work here. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

“Quoting Ian Fleming?” Aaron Kurtzman mused.

“Just trying to make certain I did the right thing allotting a Stony Man crew to this auction,” Price said.

“Two separate styles of carrier-killer test programs are attacked, and then someone advertises it?” Kurtzman asked. “You’ve got good instincts on this, Barb.”

She nodded, looking down at the screen of her tablet. So far, Stony Man had been fully capable of gathering all the information they could about the New Mexico attack, if only because the Sensitive Operations Group had many federal connections, both inside and outside conventional channels. China, however, was a very different situation, and tapping into their information had taken effort and penetration of high-security government systems. That Tokaido had located so much thus far was a sign of his skill and the power of the Farm’s cyber systems.

The auction had been confirmed through multiple sources, as well. Not only did Kevin Reising have his invitation, but there had been a rise in digital currency exchanges—peer-to-peer payments that didn’t pass through legitimate banking functions. That data-cash was being funneled to a website called the Arsenal Europa, which had been touting the auction. Discovering the auction had been the combined efforts of Wethers and Delahunt, both of whom utilized their particular, individual instincts to narrow the search to its confirmed presence.

They’d also managed to home in on a large supply of data-cash in storage under Reising’s accounts. The sums were substantial, well over fifty million dollars, allowing for more than a few high-tech, high-impact weapons. What a soldier for the Heathens outlaw motorcycle club would do with such a supply of cash made Price shudder.

Of course, a previous Able Team operation had established links between the Heathens and the Aryan Right Coalition, a white supremacist group that was actually the action arm of an even more shadowed organization that called itself the Arrangement.

The Arrangement had lost scores of men and millions of dollars in that conflict, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to set back the mystery group. Not if they could pony up that amount of funding to rearm and rebuild their shattered army.

“Hunt, do you have any more information about where Reising’s money came from or where it’s sitting right now?” Price asked.

The tall, slender, black professor looked up from his workstation. “Negative. Trying to dig into this data-cash network utilized by Reising is difficult, which is precisely why he chose it.”

“How so?” Price asked.

“Normally, I’d hope to find a centralized store of information, but the network itself is decentralized. It’s a mobile, mercurial entity. You need to have proper keys to locate your own money and allow transfer of funds. However, even going through those particular encryptions, you cannot access anything else. It’s like sticking your head into a disconnected pond and hoping to find a river to the nearest ocean,” Wethers explained.

“So, we’re up against, essentially, the Mississippi River Delta rather than looking for Lake Michigan,” Price said. “Instead of a box, we’re stuck with just a tube, which in itself doesn’t necessarily lead to another tube, even though it’s all one ever-increasing, ever-branching main artery.”

“Correct. This is the capillary system, which is useless without the arteries and veins, but while we can see an individual capillary, there’s no direct link, so we’re not even certain there is a heart. We could be in any organism,” Wethers explained.

Price winced. “Keep trying. This is the best we’ve got. I want to be able to figure out who Reising wanted to pay, but I also want to know where the money came from.”

“You will find no more tireless crusader and seeker of this information than I,” Wethers told Price.

Price looked at the clock in the corner of her tablet display. It was almost time to talk to Hal Brognola, the big Fed who’d helped to assemble the Sensitive Operations Group, alongside Mack Bolan, and who gave the Farm its legitimacy thanks to his high rank at the Department of Justice. Though not a cabinet secretary, Brognola often had the advantage of the President’s ear.

With that knowledge, she gave her cybernetic crew a quick goodbye and exited the Computer Room.

She opened the encryption on her tablet, clearing the rest of the data from both the screen and its random access memory. It was a paranoid habit, sterilizing the device of the full data she’d been accessing just for a telephone call, but the Farm had battled against major intelligence agencies and conspiracies with considerable hacking abilities.

“Barb,” Brognola said as his video call came through on her tablet.

“Hal.... So far, the capsules inside Carl, Gadgets and T.J. are still reporting normal vital signs,” Price informed him right off the bat.

Brognola had known Lyons and Schwarz for a long time, since even before the founding of the Sensitive Operations Group.

“These are the passive sensors, correct?” Brognola asked.

Price nodded. “We’ve got their location, as well. They simply can’t talk to us and we cannot warn them. Other than that—”

“Remember.” Brognola cut her off. “If things go to hell, you just have to remember, that’s Able Team and Phoenix Force already on the ground. To them, being surrounded just means they don’t have to watch their fire.”

Price smirked. “That’s one positive way of looking at it.”

“What about Blancanales and the rest of Phoenix?” Brognola asked.

“They’re currently in Hong Kong, checking in with David’s old girlfriend, Mei Anna,” Price said.

“Which is very iffy, considering China is an enemy state,” Brognola mused. “Though, technically, we’re working alongside them here.”

“The Ministry of State Security doesn’t know that, and even if they did, there’s still going to be a bit of bad blood between our two agencies if they figure out who McCarter and company are,” Price said. “Just a couple of weeks ago, Phoenix intercepted an MSS ‘fund-raising shipment’ of heroin and destroyed it.”

“If the MSS has more than a rumor of Phoenix Force’s existence, that would be bad. Very bad,” Brognola stated. “But there was no evidence of whom and what attacked that shipment, correct?”

“Correct,” Price returned. “It’s my job to see the worst-case scenario, however. So forgive me if I give you these kinds of cues.”

“It’s a shame that both teams are already deployed. I’d have loved to have someone on the ground in New Mexico just to get some hard data on the actual raid,” Brognola said.

Price could imagine Brognola’s jowled face turning into a grim frown. “So far, the Department of Defense investigators seem to be doing quite well on their own. We’re monitoring evidentiary data and field reports, and doing what we can to track down leads based on that data and feeding it back into the investigation. If something requires a ground response, we can always pull Phoenix off the current operation, or we can see if Striker is available.”

“We don’t usually get that opportunity,” Brognola returned. “But it’s worth a try. Anything on the China attacks?”

“The Gobi desert facility that was struck was the same one that test-fired the Dong-Feng-21 variant in 2013,” Price told him. “So we’re currently operating on the idea that the attackers were after the experimental ballistic missile designs. There’s a bit of disjoint, however.”

“The DF-21 and the American engine prototypes are incompatible,” Brognola concluded.

“Right. The DF gets so fast because it is riding atop an engine that can reach low orbit, while the American design is intended for nap-of-the-earth or wave-lapping altitude at Mach 10, necessitating the complex guidance systems,” Price affirmed. “The cybernetic team is currently aware of this disparity and is looking to see what else might have been there.”

Brognola grunted his receipt of the message. “I hope it’s just a missile system.”

“Just a missile system? The Dong-Fengs are nuclear capable,” Price stated.

Brognola’s grumble of worry was deeper now. “It’s not nuclear warheads that concern me. It’s something that sounds like it’s out of a James Bond novel.”

Price narrowed her eyes for a moment, trying to think of what Brognola was referring to. Then it hit her. “The BWMO—Beijing Weather Modification Office? That does sound like something out of the movies.”

“Like it or not, however, they’ve gotten very good at seeding clouds to produce rainfall,” Brognola stated. “All for the purposes of dispelling hailstorms and counteracting the advent of dust storms that affect Beijing itself.”

Price resisted the urge to open the Stony Man databases while on an outside call. What she did recall from the facts she knew, was that the BWMO utilized missile systems and cannons to seed clouds. With those shells and warheads, they’d been able to irrigate miles of arable land and protect it from hail damage utilizing materials such as aluminum oxide, barium or silver iodide.

Barium—that locked in Price’s mind. The material was naturally radioactive and, while it generally was not hazardous in a radiological manner or carcinogenic in water-soluble form, it was potentially poisonous. Its effects on the nervous system and muscle fibers were well documented, but as a serious weapon, the barium in even a concentration of seeder missiles or shells would prove wanting.

Seeded clouds could also be loaded with other hazardous materials, however. Price also couldn’t help but think that much of the concern over man-made climate change had no better source than manipulation of the weather of a half-million-square-mile area, barring pollution and natural volcanic ejecta.

“When I get in touch with David, I’ll have him check on that factor,” Price stated. “Either way, be it a MaRV warhead or weather manipulation, the potential for damage for each can be huge.”

“We’re not sure what was taken in China. Just that they released the cover story of a misfired missile,” Brognola reminded her. “It could have been something akin to what happened in New Mexico, where the inventors were taken. The wreckage is still being sorted through, isn’t it?”

“No assumptions are being made. Just keeping an eye on what could be coming down the pipe.”

“Let me know if anything pops up with Anna,” Brognola reminded her.

Price killed the connection and returned to the Computer Room. “Guys, one of you take a look into the Beijing Weather Modification Office to see what kind of materials and munitions they have on hand. Things might just get a lot more complicated now.”

“Weather modification,” Wethers mused out loud. “No stranger than Frankenstein-like organ hijacking, various forms of zombies and cannibal-psychosis-producing fungi.”

Tokaido cleared his throat. “Remember the time we saved the world from that weird shit?”

Delahunt smirked. “Remember? We call that Wednesday morning.”

“Enough shots from the peanut gallery. Carmen, you got the weird detail,” Kurtzman called out. “Barb, Phoenix is making contact now.”

Price nodded.

Hong Kong appeared on their computer screens. Kurtzman was watching local law-enforcement communications and Tokaido was checking for signal chatter among the more secretive groups. If things went to hell, Stony Man could watch. But only Phoenix Force could fight its own way out.